1,848,320 of Them

Of the four morning and four afternoon newspapers published in Manhattan all but two are conservative: the morning, tabloid Daily News and the evening Post. Last week, after six up-and-down years under Philadelphia Publisher J. David Stern (TIME, June 26), the Post got a new owner: the American Labor Party's City Councilman George Backer, whose liberalism is more profound than J. David Stern's and whose financial resources are greater. Young (36) Publisher Backer's first acts were to pay back, with interest, the 10% of their salaries the Post's staff members had been contributing to the paper since last September and to hire Cartoonist Rollin Kirby, who was dropped by the World-Telegram in March after he had shown himself too pronounced a liberal for the Scrippsless Scripps-Howard newspaper.

Manhattan's liberal News was 20 years old this week. In contrast to its anemic colleague, it is the most successful newspaper ever established in the U. S. The News has a daily circulation of 1,848,320, which is more than half the total circulation of all Manhattan's morning papers put together, the largest daily circulation in the land and third largest in the world (the London Daily Express has 2,466,323, the Herald over 2,000,000). The Sunday News sells 3,464,290 copies, a bare 300,000 less than London's record-holding News of the world.* The News employs 3,500 people, pays them $8,000,000 a year. Its annual profit is usually estimated at around $5,000,000. Its fabulous success is due almost entirely to Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson's unique and highly individualistic application of a saying of Abraham Lincoln's, the last six words of which are chiseled across the front of the $10,700,000 News building: "God must have loved the common people because HE MADE SO MANY OF THEM."

Up From the Manure Pile. The News's touch with the common people is no accident, but the result of self-conscious effort on the part of its publisher, who is famed for his rough-&-ready dress, his brusque manners and his liking for rubbing shoulders with the proletariat in saloons and subways. A rich boy himself, Joe Patterson never got along with other rich boys, had made several sporadic efforts to become a man of the people before he found his chance as a publisher. From 1914 until 1925 he and his cousin, Robert Rutherford McCormick, shared the running of the Chicago Tribune (which their grandfather, Joseph Medill, had founded), and Patterson was as much responsible for the common touch in its news coverage as McCormick was for its conservative editorial bias. The two conceptions did not quite jell in the Tribune and Joe Patterson did not get along with his Cousin Bertie much better than he had with other rich boys. During the War they agreed that the Tribune was too small for them both. The decision to start the News, according to Colonel McCormick's recollection, was reached on a manure pile in France.

Joe Patterson had talked to Lord Northcliffe, whose London Daily Mirror, a half-size picture paper, was selling nearly 1,000,000 copies daily. Northcliffe suggested that he try out the tabloid idea in the U. S. Captain Patterson met Colonel McCormick somewhere behind the lines; they dined with some other officers, then stepped outside and seated themselves on the dung heap.

"Bertie," said Joe, "I want to start a picture paper in New York."

"Good," said Bertie, "I'm with you."

Bertie was with him in backing the paper, but Joe Patterson has always run it. For six years he ran it from Chicago. The first issue of the Daily News appeared on June 26, 1919, and was so bad that other publishers who had played with the tabloid idea promptly canceled their plans. The News went from bad to worse, cut its reportorial staff from four men to two, lost most of its original circulation until it hit a low of 26,625 in August. Soon afterward it began to pick up. New Yorkers were discovering that it was easy to read in subways and the News was discovering those two great circulation-builders, crime and sex.

Future historians of the U. S. press will rank the battle of the tabloids with the great fight between Pulitzer's World and Hearst's Journal at the turn of the century. During the hectic 1920s a procession of unbelievable characters marched through the pages of the News and, after 1924, the even more flamboyant pages of its competitors, Hearst's Mirror and Bernarr Macfadden's Graphic. The tabloids impressed into the mind of a generation such personages as Peaches Browning, Kip Rhinelander, Richard Reese Whittemore, Gerald Chapman, Arnold Rothstein, Fatty Arbuckle and Joyce Hawley. The Mirror revived the Hall-Mills murder story, but the News threw out eight pages of advertising to report the Pig Woman's testimony, and Joe Patterson himself ordered the most sensational newspicture of the decade: the photograph of Murderess Ruth Snyder in the hot seat.

While he was fighting Hearst for bedroom scoops, Joe Patterson was instituting in the News those features which today endear it to the people. From the beginning he tried to match the famed Hearst comic strips. He thought up The Gumps (his mother coined the word), Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner, Dick Tracy; he himself is Mr. Bailey in Smitty and his office boy is Smitty. Best Patterson idea is the letters column called Voice of the People, which draws 46,000 contributions a year.*

Montana's Maury. But the most significant change in the character of the News has been reflected in its editorial page. In 1926 Joe Patterson read an ar ticle in H. L. Mencken's American Mer cury and promptly hired its author to write editorials for him. Dry, near-sighted Reu ben Maury had hung out his lawyer's shingle in Butte, Mont., and while waiting for clients had supported himself by writ ing westerns for Redbook, doing an occa sional article on the side. No prima donna, he was content to write what his new boss told him to write, to submit drafts of his editorials for the careful revision that gave them the idiom of the publisher. At first the editorial page concentrated on loudly damning prohibition. But when Depres sion came and sex grew stale, the team of Patterson & Maury was ready to guide the News from scandal to liberalism.

First indication of the change came soon after the Wall Street Crash, when Pub lisher Patterson walked into the city room and announced: "We're off on the wrong foot. The people's major interest is in how they're going to eat." On March 6, 1933 the News announced: "This newspaper now pledges itself to support the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for a period of at least one year." Not only did the News support the New Deal, but it devoted itself wholeheartedly to selling it to the people. Joe Patterson became a fre quent White House visitor. From then on, the columns of the News became more & more devoted to economics and politics.

News editorials are written in breezy, colloquial style, as Joe Patterson would talk to a friend in the Bowery. The News is usually annoyed about something. Typical annoyances: traffic regulations, other newspapers ("WE'RE ANNOYED WITH THE NEW YORK TIMES"), the Japanese. Almost every Monday since 1934 the News has run an editorial on the theme of "Two Ships for One." When he feels like it Joe Patterson plugs some pet idea of his own. Most recent and most screwy idea: sex determination.

Highest Paid managing editor in the U. S. is the News's Harvey Deuell, who last year drew a salary of $140,000. The managing editor of the News has to com press into one-fourth as much space enough news to keep the paper competitive with the bulky Times and Herald Tribune. News stories, unlike conventional newspaper stories, start at the beginning, move with swift narrative pace to the end. Big, shaggy Harvey Deuell learned this trick while on the city desk of the News, where he used to rewrite nearly every important story. He had a scientist's cold, impersonal approach to tabloid journalism, delighted in thinking up euphemisms to say what the paper could not say in so many words. Constant readers of the News always read erotic for exotic, philanderer for dilettante, lesbianism for bizarre friendship, kept for showered with gifts, sexual intercourse for kiss.

Like all of Publisher Patterson's men, however. Managing Editor Deuell is only an intermediate cog in the machine that transforms Joe Patterson's personality into the medium of a newspaper. It was Patterson who ordered the story of his divorce played on Page Two, who decided his marriage to Mary King, editor of his woman's page, was worth only a Page Four position. Publisher Patterson's formula for success is to give the people what they want, but the reason it works so well on the News is that he knows the people's taste infinitely better than any other newspaper publisher. Since he got out of college he has studied in only one textbook: the People.

Self-Conscious Commoner. He graduated from Yale in 1901 and went to work at $15 a week on the Tribune, where his father, Robert W. Patterson, was Joseph Medill's crown prince. Joe Patterson did not like the fusty Tribune, thought Hearst was the smartest publisher in the land. Unable to get close to the people through his job, Joe Patterson served a term in the Illinois House of Representatives, stumped Chicago for a reform candidate for mayor, Judge Dunne, and was rewarded with the job of Commissioner of Public Works. He tried unsuccessfully to do something about sweated shopgirls, then announced that reform was impossible under the capitalist system and that hereafter he was a Socialist. He wrote a magazine article called Confessions of a Drone, exposing the sins of his class, and knocked off a playlet, Dope, to prove that narcotic addiction grew out of slum conditions. In Dutch with his family, he settled down on an Illinois farm and in four years wrote two proletarian novels (A Little Brother of the Rich, Rebellion) and had three plays produced on Broadway. His father's death in 1910 sent him back to the Tribune.

Since 1925, when the News reached a circulation of 1,000,000 and was assured of whooping success, Captain Patterson has lived in New York and gone his own way. He and Colonel McCormick share equally in the profits of the News and the Tribune (as do his sister Eleanor and Colonel McCormick's sister-in-law, Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms), but the News is Joe Patterson's oyster. He has identified himself with it to an extent matched by few other publishers.

He drinks with his reporters, occasionally accompanies them on out-of-town as signments, makes them walk the city with him. But more often he goes off alone, sloppily dressed, and makes friends with the proletariat on street corners, in bars, at Coney Island. Big, broad-shouldered, square-jawed and truculent, he can take care of himself. From most of his expeditions he returns with new ideas about what the people want, what is good for them and what the News ought to give them.

His liberalism is intrinsic, born of a dislike for, and a distrust of, people of his own caste. A martinet in the office (where only Burns Mantle can call him Joe), he is nevertheless modest about both himself and the News. Last week Editor & Publisher (which devoted 24 columns to the News's anniversary) got only the following characteristic statement from him:

"I have been asked to make a statement as to what the next five or ten years are likely to bring forth in journalism. . . .

"My answer is that I haven't the remotest idea of what the next five or ten months may bring forth. . . .

"My earnest hope is that the next five or ten years will not include for American newspapers the coverage of a great war. (signed) J. M. Patterson."

*But these British papers have national rather than city circulations.

**Sample: "What do you mean, Madelon from Brooklyn, by saying you have enough common sense not to pick a sailor for a boy friend? Oh, well, if you prefer an ape-faced Leatherneck with a doorman's uniform, that's your funeral. The most pleasing and elegant uniform in existence is that worn by the gobs. When I was a sailor, girls mobbed me continually, so that I had to have a bodyguard whenever I went ashore."

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