Iowa Formula

(See front cover)

When the Cowles family of Des Moines bought the Minneapolis Star last fortnight (TIME, June 24), they acquired the third and weakest newspaper in that community. To them that was no cause for discouragement. Their money-making Des Moines Register & Tribune, which today blankets Iowa like that State's own rich, black topsoil, was also third and weakest when Gardner Cowles Sr. picked it up 32 years ago.

Gardner Cowles was then 42, with six children and not much money. A small-town banker in Algona, in northern Iowa, he had taught school there, married one of the teachers, made a little money as a contractor in rural mail routes. For a while he edited a local weekly called the Advance. His great & good friend was the rival paper's editor. Harvey Ingham. In 1902 Editor Ingham went to Des Moines to edit the down-at-heel Register & Leader, persuaded his friend Cowles to buy the paper. Price: $300,000. What Mr. Cowles thought he was buying was a sheet with $160,000 debts, 33,000 circulation. When he discovered that the debts were $180,000, circulation less than 16,000, he was so disillusioned that he wanted to sell. Failing to find a buyer, he decided to go on, against the competition of the Capital and the Scripps-owned News.

Fetish. Deaf to the hoots of his advertising representatives. Publisher Cowles resolved to give out no circulation figures whatever until the Register had 25,000. Then & there he adopted a publishing formula which was to make him rich: He made Circulation a fetish. Hiring & firing one circulation manager after another, he finally took over the job himself. He found subscription accounts two, three, four years past due, weeded them out, put the paper on a cash-in-advance basis. On the theory that men & women are creatures of habit, he concentrated on the problem of getting the Register to them on time. Helped by his oldtime experience as an overland mail contractor. Publisher Cowles studied maps and railroad timetables, learned the location of every town and hamlet in Iowa, memorized the schedules of every train out of Des Moines. As the Register circulation machine began to work, a Register-habit grew steadily throughout the State. At the end of the first year the paper earned $9,000, has never failed to make money since. Circulation mounted to 25,000 in 1906, 50,000 in 1912.

In 1908 the Register gobbled the newly established Tribune. In 1924 Publisher Roy Wilson Howard (Scripps-Howard) visited Des Moines. asked Gardner Cowles ("G. C.") to call at his hotel. In an hour "G. C." had bought the Scripps-Howard News for $150,000. Three years later the Capital, owned by the late Senator Lafayette Young, gave up the battle and the Register & Tribune remained the only newspaper in Des Moines.

Not only did the Register & Tribune saturate the city circulation (83,000 morning & evening in a population of 142,500), but it pushed its frontiers to the farthest of Iowa's 99 counties, became for all practical purposes Iowa's State newspaper. Its serious competitors are not the Sioux City Journal nor the Cedar Rapids Gazette, but big dailies from outside the State. On the east the invasion of the Chicago Tribune must be--and is--vigilantly resisted; on the west the Omaha World-Herald and Bee-News knock at the Nebraska-Iowa border. But the Register & Tribune has its State--most literate and fourth wealthiest per capita in the U. S.--sewed up tight. Reason: It gets and prints all Iowa news, and knows how to deliver it. Its 254 State correspondents report not only hot news, but every marriage and death in their communities. A single day's edition of the Register & Tribune may be replated as often as 20 times, to front-page news of special interest to this distant town or that remote county. Once printed, the news is rushed to the Register & Tribune's quarter-million subscribers (including 72,000 farm families) by the most elaborate and thoroughgoing carrier system in the U. S. Old "G. C." with his head full of route numbers and train schedules, built an organization of 4,820 carriers who swarm over Iowa. Where train schedules are not adequate, a fleet of motor trucks does the job. On Sundays, when R. F. D. is off duty, carriers cover the farm regions. Fifty-six circulation managers, 90 supervisors--all crack men--keep the machine running. Chief of them all is the Register & Tribune's circulation manager, William A. ("Bill") Cordingley, whose red-topped pate peers over the same roll top desk at which Gardner Cowles first placed him 30 years ago.

Young Blood. Three daughters, three sons has Gardner Cowles. Daughter Helen, who used to edit the Register & Tribune book page, collaborated on four volumes including 7,000 Ways to Please a Husband. Pleased by Daughter Helen is Husband James LeCron. secretary to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace. (Since the Cowleses are traditionally Republican. Son-in-law LeCron's New Dealism is a subject for family jokes.) Son Russell, living in Santa Fe, N. Mex., is a Prix de Rome muralist. an abstractionist who does portraits of himself in a bathtub (TIME, Feb. 11). Daughter Bertha's husband. Sumner Quarton, manages a Cowles radio station at Cedar Rapids. Daughter Florence's husband is in the automobile business. Remaining are two sons who now. with their 74-year-old father's counsel, rule his publishing domain. They are John and Gardner Jr. ("Mike").

John. At 36, with the title of associate publisher, John Cowles is in effect the boss of the Des Moines Register & Tribune. That he is able, is largely due to his intelligent inquisitiveness. Home on holiday from Phillips Exeter 20 years ago small John often would go with his father to the Register & Tribune office, perch himself on the desk of his father's secretary, Agnes ("Mac") MacDonald. spout a stream of questions: "What does so-&-so do? Is he smart? . . . What is that voucher for? Why is there a 2% discount marked on it? . . . How much does newsprint cost? . . . How fast can the presses turn out 1,000 copies? . . ." He was still asking questions when he rushed through Harvard (cum laude) in three years while taking Professor Charles Townsend ("Copey") Copeland's famed English 12 course and working on the editorial staffs of all three campus publications--Crimson, Advocate, Lampoon. He asked questions when he accompanied his father to newspaper conventions, and when, after graduation in 1920, he started on the Register & Tribune as a plain reporter. He still asks questions wherever he goes, on his frequent visits to Manhattan and Washington. No corn-fed bumpkin, no dallying rich-man's-son. inquisitive John Cowles has stored behind his thick-lensed glasses and his moon face a wealth of essential fact. An excellence of perspective on top of a sound judgment makes him one of the most important young newspaper publishers in the land.

Individual accomplishments are difficult to classify in the Register & Tribune plant. But it was during John Cowles's ascendancy that circulation was upped from 114,000 to 280,000; that national features were added until the paper now offers 17, from Walter Lippmann to Waiter Winchell--more headliners than any other newspaper in the U. S.; that three radio stations were established; that profits mounted to a prodigious figure with 48% of revenue coming from circulation. Definitely credited to John Cowles is the Register & Tribune Syndicate, started eleven years ago and now serving some 40 features to clients in every state in the Union.

John now occupies his father's old office on the ground floor of the 13-story building in Des Moines's "Loop" He works hard, loves to play. He will bet on anything, any time, for any amount from a pack of cigarets up. His favorite gambling companion is his young brother "Mike." and when they play golf there are bets on nearly every stroke. John has a duffer's swing but manages to score about 90.

With his vivacious, black-eyed wife, Elizabeth Morley Bates Cowles. sister of Actress Sally Bates, John lives in a big. old red brick house, owned successively by two late Secretaries of Agriculture (Wilson's Meredith, Harding's Wallace). "But," says John Cowles, "I don't want anyone to think my ambition is ever to be secretary of Agriculture." The Cowleses entertain often and well. Their bedded guests within a fortnight included such an assortment as Herbert Hoover. Thomas S. Lamont, Nicholas Roosevelt. Philip Ludwell Jackson, ebullient publisher of the (Portland) Oregon Journal who rarely gets to the office before noon and. having an elderly secretary who cannot take shorthand, never dictates a letter.

When Cowles parties threaten to be dulled by stuffy guests. John, who drinks pleasantly, sometimes produces a large, fiat bowl, places it on the hardwood floor. The unbending guest is persuaded to sit in the bowl, which is then spun for a record number of turns. By the time the guest has won the contest or fallen over from dizziness, the party is considerably enlivened. John Cowles plays bridge everywhere except in Des Moines. where he has not the time to become involved in many local festivities.

The John Cowleses have three children. Daughter Morley, 10. Sally, 8, John. 6.

Gardner Jr., 33. followed his brother four years later to Exeter and Harvard where he was president of the Crimson and where his good friend was his cousin Corliss Lamont. Red son of the Morgan partner. Slow-spoken, deliberate, "Mike" Cowles is called executive editor. From his office on the balcony of the second floor he watches over the news rooms, keeps elbow to elbow with the associate editor and managing editor on either side. He cooks up many a smart feature, directs the three radio stations, which last year netted a profit of about $20,000. Breezier, more imaginative than Brother John, Gardner Jr. is not so invariably right. However, the only office wager he is known to have lost was $1 each to five employes whom he bet that Kansas City was bigger than St. Louis.

Once an enthusiastic airplane pilot. Mike let his license lapse for want of flying time. He introduced squash racquets to Des Moines, helped build the first courts, became one of the town's best players, twice city champion. Popular Mike Cowles's second wife is pretty Lois Thornburg, who was his pupil in a University of Iowa journalism class, later a crack newshawk on his staff. They have a one-year-old daughter. Just before Citizen Hoover arrived to spend the weekend, Gardner Jr. managed to have his hair cut--a necessity which both he and John regularly put off as long as possible.

Conferences. No accident is the Register & Tribune's dominance of Iowa. Besides his perseverance and his insistent emphasis on circulation, "G. C." had the wisdom to hire the best men available, pay them well, and above all, get them to work together. No Register & Tribune editor may look down his nose at a circulation hustler. No mechanical superintendent may harbor a secret contempt for a white-collar advertising manager. The Cowles method: Conferences. Register & Tribune conferences are serious business. Every Monday there is a conference of all departments, at which any man can--and is expected to--speak his mind on any subject, criticize anyone from old "G. C." down.* Fridays at lunch the "planning committee" meets to plot promotion stunts and civic campaigns.

In on the Monday conference sit the owners and such key men as:

Editor Harvey Ingham, now 76, snow-thatched and paunchy, still pegs out a daily editorial column, makes speeches, is supposed to know more Iowans than any other man alive.

William Wesley Waymack, 46, associate editor, has been in charge of the editorial page since Editor Ingham's virtual retirement. Like the Register & Tribune's famed Cartoonist Jay Norwood ("Ding") Darling, now on leave of absence as Chief of U. S. Biological Survey, he was hired from the Sioux City Journal, He is reputed the best amateur candy maker in the Midwest.

Basil L. ("Stuffy") Walters, 39, short, barrel-shaped (100-lb.) and genial, is managing editor of both the Register (morning) and Tribune (evening). Between his two staffs, entirely separate for each paper, has grown a genuine news rivalry, essential in a city where there is no other local competition.

Joyce Swan, beaming promotion manager, sees to such enterprises as giving thousands of Iowa schoolchildren free rides in the newspaper's airplane.

Vernon Pope is in charge of the rotogravure, which, instead of being the usual Sunday dump for left-over news pictures, is used as a sustained circulation getter. A prime factor in the Cowles formula is to develop long picture series which will run for a dozen weeks or more.

And always on hand is Gardner Cowles. He comes to his office, reads the papers or has them read to him, listens to reports, smokes countless cigarets, prods his sons for circulation and more circulation. Two "G. C." maxims: ''Take the subscriptions and let the street sales go." . . . ''A mediocre paper with a good circulation department can put out of business the best newspaper in the land with a poor circulation department."

The Senior Cowles plays bridge at the Des Moines Club every day after lunch. He hates poker, likes popcorn, has his wife read to him in the evenings while he plays solitaire.

To Minneapolis. If the Cowles boys were less ambitious they might easily have been content to remain the No. 1 publishers in Iowa for the rest of their lives. Their Register & Tribune has paid dividends for 30 years to its 60 stockholders, almost all of whom are active workers on the newspapers. And their riches would doubtless multiply. But the Brothers Cowles began to have other ideas three years ago when they decided to expand. Sharing their plans was Brother John's good Harvard friend Davis Merwin, who in Bloomington, Ill. was running his family's 99-year-old Pantograph, and running it well enough to make it top-flight among small-town papers. For their first step, Messrs. Cowles & Merwin sought a community with a high rating of literacy and education, a high percentage of native-born U. S. citizens, preferably of northern European stock, an even distribution of purchasing power with few rich, few poor. The paper they wanted was to be an evening sheet with strong reader loyalty and strong emphasis on home circulation. The specifications led them to Minneapolis and the Star.

Minneapolis is one of the few cities in the Midwest where the newspaper situation has not completely jelled. The farm-booming Tribune and the Journal share leadership and prestige, but neither has anything like the circulation coverage that denotes a dominant paper. The liberal Star (called by its competitors the "Workingman's Paper" because its mechanical departments are completely unionized and because it is shunned in the silk-stocking areas) gained slowly while the leaders stood still. Home-delivered circulation of all Minneapolis papers totaled only 145,000 in a population of 488,000. The field looked ripe for the sort of circulation ability in which the Cowleses are well versed. They bought the Star for $1,000,000, installed Friend Merwin as publisher with full authority to run the paper his way. Working with General Manager John Thompson and Managing Editor George Adams, he will be free of interference from Des Moines.

Slight, handsome Dave Merwin, 35, was something of a wild man, a jolly drinker, an able cartoonist, at Harvard. After college and a round-the-world trip, with tiger-hunting in Indo-China, he quieted down, succeeded his ailing uncle as publisher of the Pantagraph. A licensed transport pilot, he flies about in his orange-colored airplane called Scoop, loves to whisk his small son & daughter 100 miles or so for an ice cream soda. To the Cowles team. Publisher Merwin takes financial wizardry and a profound knowledge of all newspaper mechanical operations which both brothers lack.

To Where? If Cowles & Co. should fail in their Minneapolis venture, they would doubtless retire to their Iowa pasture for a long time. If they succeed, it is a practical certainty that the next year or so will see them buying into another city. They have long been surveying the field, have in their files a complete detailed index about almost every newspaper in the U. S. that might be for sale. With 30 years of active publishing ahead of them, with William Randolph Hearst settling into old age, with Scripps & Howard in their prime, the youthful Brothers Cowles of Iowa may yet step out as one of the great chain newspaper publishers of tomorrow.

*The Register & Tribune is Republican, but not blindly so. It did not support Warren Hardins and it favors many a Democrat for State office. It defended Henry Wallace's AAA reduction program as a temporary measure, flayed NRA. It sponsored the League of Nations, World Court, low tariffs.

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