The Press: Bureaucrat’s Laugh

Owlish Elmer Davis last week let out a Hoosier hoot at Editor & Publisher, for reporting that OWI might sell its Overseas Branch to a newspaper after the war. In a 1,000-word letter to the editor, Davis wrote: “When the war is over we liquidate ourselves. [Besides] what could a publisher buy? … It is the tradition of the newspaper business that the slaves go with the plantation. But in this case you can’t sell the plantation and they wouldn’t go with it anyway. . . . Thanks for enabling me to punctuate the grey and gloomy routine of a bureaucrat with a loud laugh.

“I can think of better ones—for instance, that the Navy will be sold, after the war, to the Hudson River Day Line; battleships to be used on the Albany run and carriers for excursions to Coney Island, with dancing on the flight decks.”