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From then on, Editor Frank I. Cobb ran the editorial page and Swope ran the World. Though the great Joseph Pulitzer had been dead for nine years, the World was still shaped to his image: cocky, crusading, colorful. Swope and the World were well matched. A solid six-footer with a thatch of red hair, Swope stalked grandly through the city room swinging his massive walking stick, peering at his staffers through a tiny pince-nez, and driving home his dictum: "Pick out the best story of the day and then hammer the living hell out of it."
Swope started the World's famous "op. ed.," a page facing the editorials, and made it a showcase for a distinguished set of columnists: Heywood Broun, Franklin P. Adams, Alexander Woollcott, Laurence Stallings, Deems Taylor. He directed the investigations of the Ku-Klux Klan and peonage on Southern plantations that won the World Pulitzer Prizes. He took a proprietary interest in the news: "Who's covering my murder trial? Who's covering my snowstorm?" He told reporters: "Don't forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences. Give them blood in the eye on the first one." He could be coldly disdainful. Sniffed he: "I never fired a man in my life. If I couldn't do anything with a man, I just ignored him until he reformed or died of dry rot."
End of the World. But as the '20s drew on, both the World and Swope got weary. Under Pulitzer's sons Ralph and Herbert, the World gradually lost ground to the Times and the Herald Tribune. In 1929 Swope finally quit. Two years later, Pulitzer's sons broke their father's will, which stipulated that the World should never be sold, turned over the paper to Scripps-Howard for $5,000,000. (The name survives as the New York World-Telegram and Sun.)
After 1929 Herbert Swope's life seemed a kind of wondrously sustained afterglow. He still held court at Manhattan's "21" Club, still darted down to Washington to offer unsolicited but hortatory advice to Presidents—notably Franklin D. Roosevelt. He turned his awesome energy to charities and humanitarianism (Freedom House, National Conference of Christians and Jews), made a pile in the stock market, served as a CBS director, and worked as an unpaid assistant to Bernard Baruch on the U.N.'s Atomic Energy Commission. He was still a conspicuous figure at any major race meeting (disgruntled World staffers had always grumbled that he edited from the track), and when New York State legalized betting in 1934, Swope became chairman of the State Racing Commission.
"Perfect!" In his estate at Sands Point, L,I., Swope fussed over three generations of his family (two children, four grandchildren) and presided grandly at some of the wittiest dinner parties in the nation. No foreign dignitary could say he had been a success in the U.S. until he had been to Sands Point to play a round of big-league croquet against such guests as Averell Harriman, the Marx brothers, William Randolph Hearst Jr. or Swope's late elder brother Gerard, onetime president and board chairman of General Electric. On the croquet court Swope was insufferable: "Now you put your little foot on your ball and drive the other buckety-buckety off into the orchard. Perfect!"