In & Out

Owlish, excitable Ralph Coghlan (rhymes with oglin') has a singular facility for making people mad. In ten often-turbulent years as editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's editorial page, he has assailed, annoyed and angered many a judge, politician and businessman. Sometimes his editorial trumpeting was in the best crusading tradition of the Post-Dispatch; at other times, it was shrill and off-key.

When it protested the 1939 acquittal (on extortion charges) of one "Putty Nose" Brady as a "burlesque of justice," the P-was fined $2,000 for contempt of court; Editor Coghlan was sentenced to 20 days in jail and a $200 fine for okaying the editorial. Readers applauded his and the P-D's insistent courage, and the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the convictions in 1941. When F.D.R. traded 50 overage destroyers to Britain, Coghlan lit into him in a hysterically isolationist editorial (Dictator Roosevelt Commits An Act of War). In 1942, during the scrap drive, Coghlan recommended that "some dark night" somebody steal the three ancient cannons in front of the Capitol at Jefferson City; when somebody did, Governor (now Senator) Forrest Donnell ordered Coghlan's arrest for larceny (he was later acquitted).

Dateline: Europe. While Ralph Coghlan headed the editorial page, the P-D won two Pulitzer Prizes: for its 1939 campaign which led to elimination of the St. Louis smoke nuisance, and its 1947 exposure of the political scandal behind the Centralia (Ill.) mine disaster. News staff reporters, whose stories furnished the material for the P-D's hard-hitting editorials, were aware nevertheless that the great prestige of the P-D's editorial page declined under Coghlan, chiefly because of unpredictable shifts in editorial position. Example: for months in 1940, the P-D damned F.D.R. as a dictator, then abruptly came out for his reelection. Last fall, when Joseph Pulitzer, the P-D's editor-publisher, decided to back Dewey, Trumanite Coghlan sat out the election in Florida.

As caustic with his tongue as with his typewriter, impatient, bellicose Ralph Coghlan was frequently at odds with staffers as well as with Pulitzer. He had also made the news columns of the P-D (and the opposition) in a way of which Pulitzer did not approve: he got involved in a drinking brawl. Last week the expected finally happened. After 25 years of writing editorials for the PD, 53-year-old Ralph Coghlan was transferred to Europe.

Dateline: Philadelphia. The new editor was almost his exact opposite as a personality. Sober, earnest Irving Dilliard, 44, an ex-Nieman fellow, has a schoolteacher's manner and a historian's mind. Dilliard is an expert on the U.S. Supreme Court, a pen-pal of several justices, a contributor to the Dictionary of American Biography. The P-D distributed 70,000 reprints of his "news dispatches" (datelined Philadelphia, 1787) on the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Mild-mannered Irving Dilliard can also write hard-hitting editorials. He wrote the celebrated "contempt of court" editorial, pounded out many of the Centralia editorials, was mainly responsible for the P-D campaign to smash the corrupt Illinois machine of Governor Dwight Green. Under Dilliard, the page might not be as lively as under Coghlan; staffers hoped it would be better balanced and sounder.

After 34 years, Editor Douglas Southall Freeman decided last week that it was time to stop his daily 2,000-word stint for the editorial page of the Richmond News Leader (circ. 93,233). At 63 he was not interested in writing editorials in "a drab period of much political contention and little progress." Instead, Pulitzer Prize-winning Biographer Freeman (R. E. Lee) will spend 63 hours a week finishing his six-volume study of George Washington (TIME, Oct. 18), plans other books to keep him busy until his 82nd birthday.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.