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Chapter 26 - A Declaration of Voter Independence
Chapter 26 - A Declaration of Voter Independence
THE GREAT DEPRESSION dominated the 1930's for The Tribune and all other businesses. One of its first casualties which directly affected The Tribune was the Salt Lake Telegram. The Tribune's afternoon offspring was then owned by A. L. Fish, Thomas G. Mullin and Edward E. Jenkins, the latter a Salt Lake City businessman. Mullin, a native of San Francisco and a newspaper associate of Fish in Portland, Oregon, had come to Salt Lake City shortly after Fish took over the management of the Herald to serve as that newspaper's business manager and together they soon acquired control of the Telegram with Jenkins as a partner.
From the time it was launched in 1902 by the owners of The Tribune, the Telegram was beset by economic difficulties. Its deficits were absorbed by Thomas Kearns and David Keith until 1914 when they tired of the financial drain and sold it. Thereafter, under different ownerships, it continued to sink further into debt and by late 1929 the owners found themselves unable to meet demands for payment of overdue notes held, among others, by The Nibley Company of Salt Lake City. Publication was temporarily continued by issuing new bonds, but by September, 1930, with all resources exhausted and the depression tightening its grip on the economy, Fish, Mullin and Jenkins were forced to toss in the towel. In a letter dated September 26, the partners informed attorneys for The Nibley Company, which held the assets of Charles W. Nibley, that they were "unable to meet payment" and therefore surrendered "all claims to the stock of The Telegram Publishing Company to The Nibley Company."
This posed a problem for the owners of both The Tribune and the Deseret News. Obviously, neither wanted a third publisher to enter the field. They had been through that before with everyone losing money. Moreover, it was doubtful that any third party would be foolhardy enough to want to acquire a losing newspaper in a period of deepening depression in a market which had never been sufficient to support three separate daily newspapers. For that would mean renewal of the fight for survival against the competition of an afternoon newspaper backed by the resources of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an adequately financed, deeply entrenched morning and Sunday newspaper.
The alternatives were for the Deseret News or Tribune to buy the Telegram or let it sink. Fitzpatrick had no desire to reacquire the Telegram for The Tribune and was convinced that the best solution was for the Deseret News to purchase it, merge it with the News and establish then and there what he believed would have to be the ultimate solution—one morning and one afternoon newspaper. Heber J. Grant, then president of the Mormon Church, and his advisers were reluctant to acquire another business enterprise. Their position, Fitzpatrick was advised, was that while the church intended to keep the News under any circumstances, they wanted to diminish rather than enlarge the church's competitive business enterprises. The details of just what took place to resolve the impasse are probably unknown to anyone now (1971) alive. The end result of negotiations was the purchase of the Telegram by The Tribune, abandonment of the Sunday Telegram and the merging of operations in The Tribune plant. This at least promised some substantial reductions in production costs.
The financial collapse of the Telegram as a separate enterprise can be attributed to the inexorable pressures of the changing economics of newspaper publishing. These pressures, stemming both from climbing production costs and changing needs of advertisers, had been rising since the turn of the century and were destined to continue to rise in the future. It was not something unique to the Salt Lake market area but a force which was changing the pattern of newspaper publishing throughout the land and which was just beginning rather than finishing its course. The Telegram had competent management, an able staff and a loyal reader following. As a newspaper it deserved to survive, like the defunct morning Herald. But economics had decreed its two-step death unless it could outlast better financed and more solidly entrenched competition. As for management and staff, the re-acquisition of the Telegram gave The Tribune a helpful infusion of experience and newspaper skills. A. L. Fish came to The Tribune with the Telegram and served as general manager of the combined operation until his retirement in 1947. Thomas G. Mullin came to The Tribune in the same manner and served as business manager of the combined papers until his retirement in 1949. Bert Heal, the editor for many years, and Mike Glenn, the backshop superintendent who had reorganized the mechanical operation, were recruited from the Telegram prior to its purchase by The Tribune. So was Harvey Hancock, the managing editor during the early nineteen thirties. Arthur C. Deck, who served successively as managing editor and executive editor (a position he still holds as the paper rounds out its first century), also came to The Tribune with the Telegram, as did Theodore Long, editor of the editorial page. Among the reporters who came into The Tribune organization with the Telegram were A. W. (Al) Ferguson, who started working for the Telegram in 1917 and retired from The Tribune in 1964; and Clarence D. (Scoop) Williams, whose service with both papers dates back to 1922.
With the Telegram back in protective association with The Tribune which had given it birth in 1902, Fitzpatrick's overriding responsibility was to batten down the economic hatches and head into the storm of the century's deepest depression with two newspapers and various other interests to keep afloat. Costs were cut wherever possible. Salaries were reduced but not so drastically as on most major newspapers of the country. One Tribune staff member who started working just before the severity of the depression at the top reporter's salary of $65 per week found himself three years later in the position of city editor with a salary of $49 per week. His experience was not unusual. No one expected during this period to advance in pay. The height of ambition was to advance fast enough in position to avoid a reduction in pay. The psychology of retrenchment was so strong that a week before the 1932 election seven Utah state officials, whose pay could not be legally reduced, announced they were voluntarily imposing a ten percent salary reduction upon themselves by returning to the state that portion of their pay. It was an experience that undoubtedly contributed, in the area of fiscal attitudes, to what became known some thirty years later as a "generation gap.
Through it all, Fitzpatrick struggled determinedly to avert a deterioration in the quality of the newspapers for which he was custodian. They shrank in size, of course, but the large part of the shrinkage was in advertising volume rather than news content. He maintained, and indeed increased, pressures for improving the quality of the product and, viewed retrospectively, it is doubtful that The Tribune was ever more successful in sinking its roots deeper into the territory it served than during the depression years. At the beginning of this period (1930) the newspaper's circulation was 51,280 daily and 69,730 Sunday. By 1935 daily circulation had declined slightly to 50,311. Sunday circulation, aided by the merging of the Sunday Telegram with The Tribune, had risen to 74,008. In 1936 daily circulation rose to 54,582 and Sunday circulation to 81,029. Thereafter the newspaper continued to grow in circulation and gradually began returning to the normal growth pattern in advertising volume and revenues. Through it all Fitzpatrick succeeded in keeping his newspaper operation out of the red except for one year and by the time the pre-war boom started he was in a position to cope with the problems generated by a quick shift from deflation to inflation. Those same inexorable economic pressures which had doomed the Herald and the Telegram as separate publishing enterprises forced yet another change in the Salt Lake newspaper structure twenty years later.
While passing through the economic crisis of the depression years Fitzpatrick kept The Tribune's policy rudder in substantially the same position he had set it when he took over corporate management late in 1918. In the 1932 campaign The Tribune aggressively supported a constitutional amendment to permit first class cities to change their form of government through a home rule procedure. It refrained from endorsing or attacking candidates, thereby continuing a practice it had adopted in 1911. The newspaper's front page columnist, Walter Lippmann, supported the candidacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, more by criticizing Herbert Hoover than by praising Roosevelt. Will Rogers, who was also carried on the front page, apportioned his delightful political jibes to both sides. The Tribune, which had long since stopped complaining that the president of the Mormon Church could dictate election results in Utah, raised no objection when President Heber J. Grant announced in an interview with The Tribune that he was supporting Hoover and that he would again vote for Senator Reed Smoot, as he had always done since Smoot's first candidacy. President Grant made one concession to The Tribune's pre-1911 position, and to the changed political climate in the state, by emphasizing in the interview that he was expressing his own preferences and was not asking anyone else to vote other than personal convictions dictated. The closest The Tribune came to taking a position was in an editorial published on November 6, 1932, the Sunday before the election, in which it pointed out that:
Democrats could, with defensible logic, interpret the editorial as an expression of preference for Hoover and Smoot. Republicans no doubt regarded it "a far cry" from the ringing endorsements that The Tribune once gave to the candidates of its choice. These were probably the precise reactions Fitzpatrick had intended to evoke.
Utah voters were given more attention in the campaign by the presidential candidates than they had been accustomed to receiving. Roosevelt spent a weekend in Salt Lake City and delivered one of his major speeches in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Hoover spoke in the same place the Monday night prior to the eleclon, stopping in Utah en route to his home in California. The Tribune gave both visits elaborate coverage. Then on election day the electorate of Utah demonstrated, if proof were still needed at this point in the state's history, that the political preferences of the president of the Mormon Church, of The Tribune, or of both no longer dictated election results in Utah. The Democrats carried the state by more than 30,000 votes, virtually wiping out Republican office holders at the state level and in all the larger counties. Smoot, whose defeat had been loudly and erroneously predicted on three previous occasions by The Tribune, was overwhelmed by Elbert D. Thomas, a University of Utah political science professor. It was a result which The Tribune would have cheered at the top of its editorial voice prior to 1918, but those who would have led the cheering were no longer around to enjoy the downfall of the apostle-senator which the newspaper had opposed so relentlessly through eighteen of his thirty years in the Senate.
The 1932 election ushered into Utah a Democratic-New Deal political era which gave the Democratic Party a monopoly of Utah state and congressional offices for fourteen years. Henry H. Blood was elected governor and remained in that office for eight years; Thomas remained in the Senate for eighteen years; Abe Murdock was elected to the House and remained in that body or the Senate for fourteen years, and J. W. Robinson was elected to the House where he remained for fourteen years. Undoubtedly the greatest surprise was the defeat of Smoot by Senator Thomas. The veteran senator, no longer involved in feuding with The Tribune, spent the evening in the newspaper's office where he was provided with all the returns from the state as they were reported. When the early returns showed him to be running far behind he suspected that someone was playing a ghastly joke on him. The pattern of the vote on president and other offices soon convinced him that the returns were valid and that his thirtyyear career in the Senate was drawing to an end.
If any of the battle-scarred veterans of the ecclesiasticalpolitical wars of an earlier day suspected that a president of the Mormon Church could dictate the outcome of a Utah election by expressing a party or candidate preference, their suspicions should have been laid to rest by 1932. If any lingering doubts did survive 1932, the 1936 election provided the clincher. In this election The Tribune abandoned the soft-spoken near-neutrality which had characterized its editorial page after 1911 and endorsed without qualification a presidential candidate. In an editorial bearing the heading "We Vote for Landon," the newspaper said:
The concluding sentence declared that The Tribune supported Landon because "we do not trust Roosevelt."
It can be presumed that Fitzpatrick took this editorial position as a matter of conviction. Certainly he had no thought of clambering aboard a bandwagon to back a winner, for The Tribune's own poll indicated that the Roosevelt tide was running much stronger than in 1932 and that he would carry Utah by the widest margin the state had ever given a presidential candidate since statehood.
The Tribune's endorsement of Landon was mild by comparison with the position taken by the Deseret News on behalf of the Mormon Church leadership. In a pre-election editorial occupying four columns at the top of the front page and under the heading "The Constitution," the Deseret News said in part:
No names were used because none were needed. The phrase, "horse and buggy days" identified President Roosevelt as unmistakably as would have the initials F.D.R. It is doubtful that the church leadership had ever taken a stronger stand against one candidate and for another, either publicly or within organizational ranks, than in the 1936 election. The Tribune's editorial opposition to Roosevelt, incidentally, was based primarily on the same constitutional issue which evoked the editorial in the church organ. On election day, however, the Utah electorate resoundingly rejected The Tribune's advice and the Deseret News' counsel by giving Roosevelt the largest percentage of the total vote (70 percent) ever given to a presidential candidate in the state's history.
Soon after this election a young and recent graduate of Notre Dame University started working full-time for The Tribune. His unobtrusive entrance into the newspaper's organization was little noted by staff members and only a few recognized his appearance as a noteworthy event in the history of the institution. But from the outset he was clearly marked by family connection, personality and ability as the eventual successor to Fitzpatrick as publisher.
The new employe, John W. (Jack) Gallivan, was the only son of a half-sister of Mrs. Jennie J. Kearns, Mrs. Francis Wilson Gallivan. The mother died when Jack was five years old and thereafter Mrs. Kearns assumed responsibility for Jack and his two sisters. Under the watchful eye of Mrs. Kearns, Jack received his early education at a grammar school in Oakland, California, a junior high school in Berkeley and at Bellarmine, a preparatory school operated in connection with Santa Clara University. He was then sent to Notre Dame University where he started preparing himself for newspaper work both at the academic and practical experience levels. He served as campus correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and worked part time in the classified advertising department of the South Bend, Indiana, News- Times. While attending Notre Dame he became acquainted with a daughter of a Chicago Tribune executive who, impressed by the young man from the west, offered him a job upon graduation.
Primarily interested at the time in a writing career, Gallivan decided that the offer would provide him with the opportunity he wanted so he called Mrs. Kearns on the telephone to tell her about the job offer and his intention of accepting it. Mrs. Kearns kindly but firmly informed him that she had educated him to work for The Salt Lake Tribune, not the Chicago Tribune, and that she expected him to return to Salt Lake City. He complied with her request and on August 1,1937, became a full-time employe of The Tribune, where he had worked part-time in the circulation department and the editorial library during summer vacations.
If there were any members of the staff who resented his presence because of the element of nepotism in his employment the feeling quickly evaporated. He immediately became a popular, probably the most popular, member of the staff. If there was ever a family member employed by a family corporation who received none of the favors normally suspected in these relationships it was Jack Gallivan on The Tribune. He worked longer hours, and, in addition to regular assignments, did more odd jobs which no one else wanted to do, than anyone else on the staff. His first regular job was that of a bookkeeper, surely an affront to an inspiring writer. After a few weeks in this unwanted post he worked in advertising, circulation, and editorial departments, starting on the copy desk in the latter department. In his spare time he was both manager and staff of the promotion department, wrote a sports column twice a week (a concession to his writing aspirations) and produced merchandising bulletins for advertisers. For years he fed The Tribune-Telegram's carrier pigeons housed on the roof of the Tribune Building. He did not escape from this chore until years after the sometimes useful and sometimes frustrating pigeons had been outmoded by two-way radio and mobile telephone communications. One of his numerous successful promotion ideas was an invitation during World War II for mothers of servicemen to send in their favorite prayer. One was published each day for several weeks before Thanksgiving Day and war savings stamps given for the one selected for publication on Thanksgiving morning. Gallivan not only fathered the idea but carried it out and he naturally acquired the title of "prayer editor."
On a dismal (for Gallivan) Saturday afternoon when his beloved Notre Dame football team was trailing Army's famous Mr. Inside and Outside (Blanchard and Davis) team by about forty points, Gallivan was called from the copy desk, where he was working, to the city desk to take a telephone call. A deep voice inquired: "Is this the prayer editor?" Gallivan, seeking to attune his voice to his title and hide his exasperation over the football game, replied that it was and solemnly asked if there was anything he could do for the caller.
"Why," the muffled voice intoned, "don't you say a prayer for Notre Dame?"
Immediately sensing that his leg was being pulled, Gallivan replied in unctuous tone: "Thou art a sonofabitch." The disguised voice was that of William (Bill) Coltrin, a Tribune sports writer.
During his period of training for the top job, Gallivan was "one of the boys" around The Tribune and he continued in that role without sacrifice of respect even after he moved into Fitzpatrick's office as assistant to the publisher. He had convinced his colleagues around the newspaper that he was marked for success whether he chose to work for the Chicago Tribune or The Salt Lake Tribune and that he was clearly the right choice to succeed Fitzpatrick. It was one of those instances when the staff, had they been given the privilege of electing their publisher, would have made the same choice as the owners.
