In 25 years of Washington correspondence, drawling, Pulitzer Prizewinner Thomas Lunsford Stokes has built a reputation much like that of his onetime boss and friend, the late Raymond Clapper. Washington knew him to be, like Clapper, a hard digger, a writer whose prose has no wings, a liberal whose roots are not Marxian but native. Stokes is also a man with a merciless conscience: by sympathy a New Dealer from the start, he won his Pulitzer Prize by exposing a WPA vote-getting machine in Senator Alben Barkley's Kentucky.
Last month Tom Stokes's conscience drove him to a remarkable decision: he insisted that his column be dropped by the Scripps-Howard chain, which started to syndicate him two years ago. Like Westbrook Pegler and the late Heywood Broun, Stokes had—or thought he had—an acute case of Scripps-Howard trouble.
In recent months, Roy Howard's New York World-Telegram, key link in the chain, had frequently killed the Stokes column. The days when he was dropped, he noted, were usually days when he and the paper's editorial policy (hard-a-star-board Republican) disagreed.
In November, after a conference of Scripps-Howard editors in French Lick, Ind., the killing of Stokes columns spread. When the tabloid Washington Daily News, in the town he had made his beat, dropped three of his columns in a week, Tom Stokes's Southern blood boiled.
"I made inquiries," said Stokes, "and I learned they had discussed me at this French Lick meeting at considerable length. It seems the point was that I was interfering with editorial policy; one guy made some sort of crack like why should they pay out money for that? Well, I don't want their money. . . . My decision is final, and I want out." He could get along without the money he got from the twelve Scripps-Howard papers which took his column: 97 other U.S. papers print his stuff.
Too Good to Lose. The Pittsburgh Press last week said it would give Stokes his wish, but the New York World-Telegram's answer was to renew its contract for the column. And Editor John O'Rourke of the Washington Daily News wrote Stokes that his column was too "valuable to the News" to be dropped.
Tom Stokes had raised a basic issue, and come up against another one. Thousands of people were obviously interested in what well-advertised columnists like Tom Stokes had to say. It is the editor's job to decide what his paper shall print. But an editor who bought the column but didn't print it, while keeping it from rival editors, was in effect paying Stokes and refusing to let him be heard.