"This Little Plea"

"I am 9 year old, have to sister 13 and 15. Our daddy get drunk all the time. We are to move because the lady want her rent and our daddy give it all to the sloon . . . we don't have much to eat and my mamma sick and can't work and she has no clothes. She has to go bair footed . . . Maybe if the sloon man reads my letter he won't sell daddy any more whisky, and then daddy won't come home and beet my mamma and us kids any more . . ."

In a two-column box across its front page, Phoenix' Arizona Republic (circ. 63,016) printed this affecting letter from "just a little boy," supposedly in Miami, Ariz. The morning paper gravely explained that it was breaking its rule against publishing unsigned letters because "this little plea, scrawled and misspelled in pencil on a bit of limp paper, defies routine handling."

The non-routine handling brought a roar of protest from liquor dealers, amazed at the gullibility of Eugene C. Pulliam's* Republic. The letter, they said, was a fake, a rewrite of old prohibitionist propaganda that had been planted in the Republic as part of the drys' campaign to put over a local option law backed, added the wets, by Oklahoma bootleggers anxious to expand their business.

The Arizona Plain Talk, a weekly, shouldered into the barroom argument. Either someone on the paper was working with the drys, said the weekly, or "the paper has been duped by one of the most obvious and oldest frauds in journalism." Another weekly, the Arizona News (circ. 5,217), thought it was mighty peculiar that the Republic ran "hard liquor advertising ($200,000 worth a year) that drives my daddy to hard drinking."

Last week the police of Miami (pop. 15,900) combed the city and found no trace of the booze-haunted family. But Republic Executive Editor Harry Montgomery refused to back down. Said he: "I don't think a human interest story hurts anyone . . . We have no apologies to make." Nevertheless, at week's end the Republic had published none of the scores of letters readers had sent the paper about "Just a Little Boy."

*Pulliam also owns Phoenix' afternoon paper, the Gazette, the Indianapolis Star and News, the Muncie Star and Press, the Vincennes (Ind.) Sun-Commercial, the Huntington Herald-Press.

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