The late, great Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, suffered all his life from weak eyes, was stone-blind when he died in 1911. But Joseph Pulitzer could see through skulduggery, no matter how dark its hue, could sight a dirty deal a mile away. He made the Post-Dispatch one of the most valiant crusaders of an era rich in righteous journalism.
Like his father, young Joseph Pulitzer has weak eyes. At 55 he can barely read his Post-Dispatch headlines by holding them an inch away, has secretaries who read to him, is resigned to the prospect of complete blindness before his life ends. Young Joseph resembles his father in more ways than one, and particularly wants to resemble Old Joseph as a crusading publisher. For his chief editorial writer he has ruddy, Irish Ralph Coghlan, who would like to be known as a hard-hitting successor to Managing Editor Oliver Kirby ("O.K.") Bovard, who retired two years ago.
As a liberal, progressive paper, the Post-Dispatch approved most New Deal reforms, found few national causes for crusades until last spring. Then Editor Coghlan began to suspect that Franklin Roosevelt was trying to get the U. S. into war. The Post-Dispatch leaped on the barricades, waved an isolationist banner, launched a crusade.
"To the Brink." After the President's warlike speech at the University of Virginia last June, promising all possible aid to crumbling France and beleaguered Britain, the Post-Dispatch cried in an editorial titled How We Are Being Led to the Brink: "President Roosevelt cannot be trusted to keep this country neutral. . . ."
Meanwhile, the St. Louis Star-Times, ardently for Roosevelt and all his works, looked on with increasing wrath. When To the Brink appeared, the Star-Times lashed out with a caustic editorial of its own on page 1. Missouri's New Deal Representative Thomas Carey Hennings Jr. read the Star-Times answer into the Congressional Record, and the Post-Dispatch crusade exploded into a full-fledged editorial war.
"Act of War." Last week President Roosevelt took a step that Editor Coghlan had feared: without consulting Congress he sold 50 overage destroyers to Britain. Without even waiting for Attorney General Jackson's legal opinion to come in over the wire, Ralph Coghlan tore out the lead editorial he had written for that day's editions, substituted another.
Wrote Editor Coghlan: "Mr. Roosevelt today committed an act of war. He also became America's first dictator. . . . Undeterred by law or the most primitive form of common sense, the President is turning over to a warring power a goodly portion of the United States Navy. . . . We get in exchange leases on British possessions in this Hemisphere—but only leases. What good will these leases be if Hitler should acquire title to these islands by right of conquest? ... Of all sucker real-estate deals in history, this is the worst, and the President of the United States is the sucker. ... If Roosevelt gets away with this, we may as well say good-by to our liberties and make up our mind that henceforth we live under a dictatorship."