Arbiter

New Orleans, in hot August, was threatened with a streetcar strike. Workers and operators were deadlocked over a minor absurdity. The strike order was posted. City officials gnawed their lips and wondered warily how a tie-up would affect their political credit. Newspapers printed bulletins and pleaded editorially for a reconciliation; pleaded wisely, impartial and aloof, but without much effect, as is the way with newspapers. Then occurred an episode unusual to modern journalism. Away from his piled-up desk in Union Street strode Editor Marshall Ballard of the New Orleans Item-Tribune. Like any able editor, he had followed the traction situation closely, knew it thoroughly. By telephone he had assembled the streetcar operators, the workers and the city's Commission Council. To them he now marched and with a few crisp words of common sense, a bit of gruff humor and some judicious ejaculations, soon brought concord out of conflict. The strike was off. New Orleans, in hot August, did not walk to its work or play. The carmen adopted a resolution of thanks to Editor Ballard for "injecting" himself into their affairs. It was most unusual for a 20th century editor, in a big city, to do such a thing--to descend from his rostrum, divested of the editorial "we" and its ulterior formality. Most big-city editors would have "played" the streetcar strike to sell their papers, or simply viewed it in irritated detachment with no thought but that every one concerned must "stew in his own juice." The editors of the New York Times and Herald-Tribune and World and Journal and Daily News and Mirror and Post did not march anywhere when Manhattan was suffering a July subway strike. But in the South they have not such formal ideas about who is entitled to do what. In the South minor absurdities are soon laughed, or ejaculated, out of existence. And then, Editor Marshall Ballard of the oldest afternoon paper* in the South is no common editor. He is an intellectual roughneck, of the H. L. Mencken type but with interests more cheerful than Baptist-baiting and with membership in no mutual-admiration societies. His cerebral inheritance is from the stock that bred Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia. He acquired a scientific background at Johns Hopkins. His breadth of literary background is suggested by a monster, high-ceilinged library in his big airy house on Bay St. Louis, far across the bayous on the Mississippi coast. Just as Louisiana is of all States perhaps the most detached and self-concerned, and just as New Orleans concentrates the independent-mindedness that makes this so, just so does Editor Marshall Ballard, with his loose, comfortable clothes, vigorous address and un concerned habits epitomize the talented Southern individualist in an age of "mass circulations" and commercial editorial "we's."

Anniversary

Last week the New York Times gave a synopsis of itself. There was no strut about it, no Watch-Us-Grow or Whoop-Er-Up-For-Ochs. "Thirty Years of the Times" the editorial was called.

"On Aug. 18, 1896, [when Adolph Ochs bought it] the New York Times' daily circulation, which in 1883 was 70,000, had dropped to 9,000. The regular employes numbered 300, and the annual gross income was $500,000. At the present time the New York Times has an average daily circulation of 370,000 and 625,000 on Sundays, has over 3,000 regular employes, and an annual gross income of $25,000,000."

A few loyal Times readers, after reading this statement, took out their pencils and did a bit of arithmetic. The New York Times, they decided, must make from daily sales a gross income of $1,500,000 a year, in addition to its Sabbath income of $30,000 a week (about $1,500,000 a year). Therefore, these inquisitive readers decided, their favorite newspaper's annual civic income is not much above $3,000,000 and the balance of the $25,000,000 must come from advertisers. "And 95 per cent of the total earnings," said the editorial, "have been reinvested in the business. . . ." To put 50 per cent of one's takings back into an enterprise is unusual; 95 per cent is phenomenal. Few men would do it. Yet this has been the policy of Adolph Ochs publisher, executed by Louis Wiley, business manager. Publisher Ochs is a grave, patrician gentleman, with a bland hand and a judicial eye. His name is the only exclamatory thing about him. He presents an assurance of stability, a hint of qualities that take capitals, an implication of old-worldness, of principles, even, that seem oddly exotic in a world where tinsel is the mode. Manager Wiley was inevitably destined by nature to be the associate of Publisher Ochs. Two such opposites could never have kept apart. They would have been an irresistible vaudeville team, courtly, Ochs feeding gag-lines to impish Wiley; they would have made a handy pair of tumblers, big Ochs tossing tiny Wiley through a hoop. If the latter event had ever taken place, Wiley would have landed on his head, a part of him which seems to overweigh, though not to overbalance, his short, active frame. Seen by himself, he looks quite in proportion; seen against a background of other figures he suggests those pictures that cartoonists like to manufacture--a grave, photographed face, under which have been drawn a midget body, arms, and legs. Power often lives most bristlingly in little men. Mr. Wiley gives one immediately a sense of power, poised and acute. He has spent his life, beginning with a three-dollar-a-week job on a Rochester paper, in newspaper offices. He has more social contacts than his associates; he is often seen at smart parties, gravely watching from a portiere, or dancing with a lady larger than himself.

*Published by James M. Thompson, son-in-law of the late Champ Clark of Missouri, eloquent Speaker of the House, who battled Woodrow Wilson for control of the Democratic party in 1912.