Chapter 29 - War Years

Chapter 29 - War Years

DURING THE THIRD-TERM campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, some Tribune readers thought they detected a change in the political policy of the newspaper. Those readers were wrong but there was an understandable reason for their reaction. The Tribune did not change its position but for the first time in thirty years it figuratively took off its editorial gloves and really tried to influence its readers to accept its point of view. The editorials took on a more aggressive tone. While it did not wage the sort of slashing, eye-gouging attack on the opposition which was its trademark in an earlier period, it did carry on a sustained and hard-hitting editorial campaign in behalf of Wendell L. Willkie. The Tribune had given mild support to the Republican candidate in 1936. But in 1940, while simultaneously defending Roosevelt's preparedness program from attacks of the so-called America First isolationists, it argued with old-time fervor for rejection of the third term bid and for the election of Willkie.

The campaign and the reaction of third-term supporters to its editorials provided an occasion for the newspaper to restate its policy on more than just the current campaign.

A few days before the election The Tribune said in a twocolumn editorial:

Primarily, The Tribune is a newspaper with a mission and a reputation for gathering, printing and disseminating all available legitimate and authentic news of interest or advantage to the reading public. Politically, it has advocated national Republican principles since the division on party lines in Utah. It was, therefore, something of a surprise as the present campaign gained momentum, to receive a number of reproachful letters and telephone calls from readers protesting editorials setting forth 100 reasons why Willkie and McNary should be elected president and vice-president of the United States. These angry protests can be regarded as unintended tributes to the uniform fairness of The Salt Lake Tribune, which has not indulged in vituperative attacks. . . .Without depending for its support on any class, element or organization, the aim of this newspaper has been to promote the general welfare, to encourage unity in an era of strife, to curb animosities when hatred is consuming civilization and to present all sides of every controversy, while reserving the right of opinion with that of untrammeled expression.

There followed a resume of The Tribune's reasons for supporting Willkie against Roosevelt and this concluding paragraph:

The Salt Lake Tribune supports Wendell L. Willkie and Charles L. McNary for president and vicepresident of the United States because the country needs a change, the administration needs a vacation, and the federal bureaus need renovation and the public is ready for another deal with a new, unsoiled and unmarked deck of cards.

This was Publisher John F. Fitzpatrick speaking, probably through the pen of Noble Warrum Sr. who always wrote his editorials in long-hand which only a few of the linotype operators could decipher. Warrum, incidentally, was a life-long Democrat.

While The Tribune's editorial page was aggressively pro- Willkie, no one but an unreasonable partisan could detect a political bias in the news columns. The newspaper was running signed articles of columnists and letters of readers who almost worshipfully supported and who bitterly attacked Roosevelt. The newspaper's political editor, on the basis of a voter survey, wrote in a front page article that while Roosevelt's 1936 margin of seventy percent of the Utah vote appeared to be diminishing, he was still so strong that Republicans could have no reasonable expectation of carrying the state for president or for congressional candidates. It suggested that the contest between Herbert B. Maw and former Congressman Don B. Colton for governor would be close but predicted that Maw would win. In the election Roosevelt carried the state by 60,000 and Maw by 12,000.

On the morning after the election, with the count incomplete but the results certain, The Tribune said editorially: "Whoever is elected president of the republic or governor of the state is to be our president and our governor. Let us follow a course that true Americans have followed, with one or two regrettable exceptions through the history of our government." The Tribune proceeded to follow its own advice.

During the period of the 1940 campaign, and thereafter, international events, as reported in The Tribune, made it appear almost certain that the country was heading into direct involvement in World War II. It was already deeply involved as an economic ally of the powers under German attack. The Tribune almost every day carried such headlines as: "Robinson Says Utah Holds Favorable Spot in Defense;" "Auto Industry Chalks Up Best October;" "Private Building Awards Soar to 10-Year Peak;" "Only War Can Stop Japan, Consular Aide Says in Salt Lake;" "Nipponese Mass Troops, New Push Perils Moscow."

In the bitter and nationally divisive conflict which developed during this period over the issue of intervention or nonintervention in the war, The Tribune was outspokenly on the side of the administration it had opposed on some domestic policies. On December 1, 1941 it said in an editorial carrying the caption "Keep 'Em Flying Until the World Gains Peace":

Since the early days of this ruinous European conflict it has been apparent that an invincible air force is as necessary to this nation as a musket was to the early settlers of America. Airplanes and pilots have become real sinews of war and whether America builds planes to be sent abroad to fight Hitler or to equip our own fliers in readiness to repel rash foreign foes, they are recognized as constituting our most effective and indispensable weapon.

The national schism over intervention was suddenly and shockingly closed a week later, on December 7, by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. From that point on until 1945 war news dominated the pages of newspapers all over the world.

It was during these war years that The Tribune experienced its first and only strike. For more than half a century the newspaper had negotiated contracts with the printing craft unions. There had been disputes over terms from time to time but never a work stoppage. But on November 25, 1943, Salt Lake Typographical Union No. 115 called a strike when the negotiators for the publisher rejected a demand that terms as submitted by the union be accepted. The necessarily curtailed edition of The Tribune for the following morning indicated that there was no intention of trying to continue publication. A published announcement from E. F. Baldwin, then circulation manager, requested circulation distributors and carriers to be prepared to deliver their papers the "first day that regular publication is resumed" and informed them that they would be alerted by special radio announcement. Another announcement informed readers that The Tribune and Telegram would provide them with the latest news over the various radio stations until publication could be resumed.

But overnight, Arthur C. Deck, then managing editor of the Telegram, got an idea. The photo-engravers, stereotypers and the pressmen unions had not struck. Why not paste up newspaper pages of typed copy and pictures, photograph the pages and by-pass the typesetting operation? He suggested the plan to Gallivan, who discussed it with Fitzpatrick and A. L. Fish, general manager. By mid-day a decision had been reached to continue publication if the non-striking craftsmen would continue to work. They would, and next morning a strange looking, fourpage Tribune appeared on schedule. For ten days both The Tribune and Telegram were published by this method, thereby keeping intact The Tribune's long record of unbroken publication. The work stoppage ceased on December 5,1943, and normal publication was resumed the following day. The Tribune's ingenuity in avoiding a suspension of publication attracted so much attention within the industry that a detailed description of the emergency operation was prepared and mailed to those who made inquiries. Some years later the Chicago Tribune, caught in the same kind of strike, expanded and elaborated The Tribune's technique and published a virtually full-sized newspaper for months by the same method.

It was something more than coincidence that the idea for continuing publication came from Deck. Educated in engineering, he had an aptitude for newspaper production procedures not common to editorial employes. He started working for the Telegram in 1928 and, except for a year with the United Press, has been associated with The Tribune or the Telegram throughout his working life. He was managing editor of the Telegram when it was absorbed by the Deseret News and then became executive editor of The Tribune, the position he holds as the newspaper enters its centennial year.

A good one-word characterization of Deck as a newspaperman is "competence." He acquired the skills which enabled him to do anything people working under him were called upon to do, and do them all well. Additionally, he was exceptionally knowledgeable, for a news-editorial man, in the areas of newspaper publishing in which he was not directly involved. Flexible and adjustable, he would have been a competent editor on a New York Times, a Christian Science Monitor, a New York Daily News or a Chicago Tribune. He has served as managing editor or executive editor under publishers Fitzpatrick and Gallivan and under general managers A. L. Fish and Eugene MacKinnon of the Tribune-Telegram. MacKinnon came to The Tribune in 1947 from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, where he was assistant general manager, to succeed Fish as general manager of The Tribune-Telegram, continuing in that position until shortly before his death on August 9, 1951.

The fact the Deck could work with four such disparate personalities, holding the confidence and approbation of each one, was a testimonial to his flexibility. For, with the exception of Gallivan, all of them had complex personalities which were sometimes difficult to fathom and to appease.

The war and postwar years of the 1940's posed a new set of problems for The Tribune. During the depression years a major concern was to keep shrinking circulation and advertising volume from pushing the enterprise into deficits. In the succeeding decade the ills of inflation replaced those of deflation. Advertising volume boomed and people had money to subscribe to the newspaper. But production costs closely followed the upward spiral of revenues and The Tribune-Telegram was handicapped in the expansion of its circulation and advertising by a paper shortage which brought about newsprint rationing. In a brief historical sketch of The Tribune written for its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1946 the writer pointed out that under Fitzpatrick's business management and editorial direction The Tribune's circulation had almost doubled to 80,000 daily and 120,000 Sunday by mid-1943. 6 At this point the paper shortage forced an arbitrary reduction in circulation and rationing of advertising. The newspaper went through a painful process of withdrawing from fringe areas which had been cultivated with much effort and cost in expanding its territory. It was confronted with a choice of shrinking its territory at the edges or of diminishing the density of its coverage closer to the center.

A particularly painful part of the circulation curtailment was the discontinuance of subscriptions going to long-time Tribune readers living far outside The Tribune's territory. The newspaper had long prided itself upon the loyalty of readers who, moving to major cities outside the Intermountain area, still wanted The Tribune because it had become part of their daily lives and because it represented to them what a newspaper should be. In California alone more than 700 such subscribers were affected by the forced cuts.

With the termination of the war in Europe in May, 1945, and in the Pacific in September of the same year, The Tribune organization, along with everyone else, could hopefully look forward to a gradual return to normalcy — whatever that might turn out to be. But, for The Tribune the next several years were to be anything but normal; for the newspaper was heading into one of the major crises of its long crises-filled life - a bruising, five-year battle with its old rival, the Deseret News. It was not a revival of the old multi-fanged "irrepressible conflict" but rather a reaction to the economic facts of newspaper publishing which had been pressing with increasing intensity on the industry since the turn of the century. By determined effort, The Tribune's competitor sought to stem mounting monetary losses and the necessity for increasing subsidies from non-newspaper sources. In so doing, the Deseret News hoped to solve an economic problem which subsequent events demonstrated was insolvable without a change in the city's then existing newspaper structure — three papers published from two separate plants. In the restricted area of economic competition the ensuing battle equaled or surpassed in intensity any of the prior confrontations between the two newspapers.