Gannett for Gannett

Last New Year's Day, some 250 employes of Publisher Frank Ernest Gannett's 17 newspapers visited his home at Rochester, N. Y. Along with them was famed Sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had arrived from South Dakota to do a bust of the boss at the employes' expense. A parchment scroll attested that the names thereon were "a permanent record of gratitude toward an enlightened employer.* Not to be outdone, Sculptor Borglum said: "... I have been carving in the mountains the portraits of Jefferson, who invented our government; Washington, who made it a fact; Lincoln, probably the dearest soul in our lives, who saved it ... and now, Mr. Gannett, I am to make a bronze and marble bust of you."

Frank Gannett (accent on the nett) accepted this tribute and proceeded to sit for his bust. Thus began a vast and timely publicity campaign. Printed for national distribution was a slick booklet replete with pictures of the drab frame house where he was born in Bristol, N. Y., in 1876; of Frank Gannett at 12, a lad who even then had been supporting himself for three years; of a mustached Frank Gannett in 1898, when he graduated from Cornell University; of his parents, whose pioneer forbears originated in Dorsetshire, Scotland, The Netherlands. On the cover was the title: YOUR JOB IN 1940, and a picture of the White House inset within a flaring white question mark. Publisher Gannett was out for the Republican nomination for President.

One of his claims to votes is that he knows how to make a business go. The evidence is his Gannett Company, Inc., which is valued at $25,000,000, in 1938 showed a net profit of $1,145,165 (which its 4,000 employes shared). Sound, stolid, rocky as Publisher Gannett himself are the Gannett newspapers. Mostly they are concentrated in upstate New York, with outposts in New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois. Many are Republican (Mr. Gannett let the Democratic Hartford, Conn. Times support Roosevelt in 1936).

When Franklin Roosevelt was Governor of New York, Publisher-Gannett used to befriend his policies. Still a stanch believer in a managed currency keyed to commodity prices, Frank Gannett supported the President on that issue in 1933, but the Roosevelt proposal to win the U. S. Supreme Court by enlarging it turned Frank Gannett into a devoted enemy.

Into being came a National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, which consisted principally of Mr. Gannett and one Dr. Edward A. Rumely, a propagandist who worked for Germany in the U. S. before the U. S. entered World War I. Dr. Rumely composed, and Publisher Gannett distributed, millions of copies of speeches, editorials, statements depicting the President as a coming dictator. More of the same followed the Roosevelt Reorganization Bill in 1938. Against these measures, the 1938 Purge-that-failed, and Spend-Lend last year, Frank Gannett has thrown some 10,000,000 denunciatory documents. For the defeat of all four he deserves no small credit, counts as money well spent the $100,000 which the campaigns cost him. Distributor of thousands of letters plugging Gannett-for-President is 78-year-old Henry Luther Stoddard, who served with Dr. Rumely on the Gannett payroll.

Candidate Gannett proposes to stake his campaign on the proposition that the New Deal should be pretty generally liquidated, that: "The nation cannot live half collectivist and half free." So said he this week at a monster testimonial dinner in Rochester's Powers Hotel, where his candidacy was formally announced. "I ask by means of this letter to be counted in," wrote upstate New York's potent Congressman James W. Wadsworth (see p. 18), whom Publisher Gannett helped turn out of the U. S. Senate in 1926. An interested if distant observer in Washington was Frank Gannett's friend William Edgar Borah of Idaho. Distinctly cool was Herbert Hoover in Manhattan. Coldly observant near by were most New York Republican politicos. They gave Frank Gannett small chance, nevertheless foresaw that by splitting the State delegation he could gravely harm New York's Candidate Tom Dewey at the G. O. P. convention this summer. For years not a loving word has passed between Mississippi Senators Pat Harrison and Theodore Gilmore ("The Man") Bilbo. Since 1936 they have not spoken at all. Last week, leaving a meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee, Pat Harrison stepped into the Senators' private elevator. There stood Senator Bilbo, and no one else but the operator. Turning slowly, old Pat said, "How do you do, Senator? How's your health?" "Fine," said Bilbo.

.Two years ago, opposing factions of the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania thought they saw a chance for compromise if they would get Joseph F. Guffey out of the U. S. Senate. "I need Joe Guffey in the Senate," said President Roosevelt. "I suggest you leave him there." They did. Political war continued to rage in Pennsylvania. Last week, John B. Kelly, chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic Committee, went to the President to suggest a peace formula: get Joe Guffey not to run again for the Senate.

*Newspaper Guildsmen, who were having a row with Mr. Gannett, later protested that signers did not know what was on the scroll, resolved: "The Guild . . . hereby does condemn all efforts to cajole, trick or threaten workers. . . ."

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