Hard-rock Journalism: Burt Brewster and the Review

Hard-rock Journalism: Burt Brewster and the Review

BY WILLIAM R. LINDLEY

BURT B. BREWSTER WAS not the kind of man you remember for his tactful remarks, courteous gestures, and his patience. He had none of these qualities in any notable degree. His position in life was not really impressive cither, though—booster that he was—he could almost persuade you that the editor of the Mining and Contracting Review of Salt Lake City was the force behind every ton of ore that was trundled out of the Oquirrh Mountains and down to the mills and smelters which raised their tall stacks near the shore of Great Salt Lake.

And his little publication stepped on some big toes. "An anemic publication," said Harold L. Ickes, while John L. Lewis called the Review "a scurrilous sheet." Brewster carried these quotations proudly in every issue. They were simply replies in kind to some forceful language of the editor's. The titles of some of his editorials alone indicate the tone: "Driveling Nonsense," "Eggheads and Mushmouths," and "Puerile Sophistry."

Tall, white-haired, with a squarish jaw he jutted into everyone's affairs, a man of long stride and longer wind—that was Burt B. Brewster. That jaw worked in criticism of many people, such as the successful businessman who was showing friends at a local club the family coat of arms he had traced down recently. As the group remarked on the significance of the various symbols, Burt, quaffing a drink near by, recalled to himself that the speaker's father had come to Salt Lake City as a stable boy. Leaning into the conversation, Burt pointed to the symbols and asked, "Where's the curry comb, you so and so?" Such comments he later recalled with gusto, evidently not noticing that they often hurt sensitive people.

Burt had the capacity to be exceedingly frank with others. Though the product of a cultivated family, he seemed a throwback in manner and sentiment to the rough and tumble days of the western mining camps. His brash comments, drawled out of the side of his mouth in a sarcastic monotone, would have stood him well in the boom days of Butte or Bidwell's Bar. More significantly, he often told how he had received brusque treatment from his father, once the coal industry's negotiator with John L. Lewis, despite a mutual affection that ran deep. For example, Burt loved baseball, and by achieving an outstanding record as a pitcher had won a tryout with the majors. The contract was ready for signing. Burt wired his father the good news. Back came the reply: "Sign the contract, but never call yourself a son of mine again."

After recovering somewhat from this paternal thunderbolt, Burt concluded that his father, a mining executive, wanted a son to follow him in the business. So it was with a feeling of having done something to satisfy his father that Burt, a new graduate of the Michigan School of Mines, went in to talk over his future with the Old Man. The answer was curt: "Do you think I want any relative of mine on the payroll?"

So Burt went west from the family home in Ohio to Saint Louis and then Salt Lake City. He sold mining equipment, and, from his own account, his eagerness to take a stand involved him in many tussles with the hardy men who blasted silver, copper, lead, and zinc ore from the rich veins of Park, Tintic, and Ophir.

By the time I met him in 1947 he had long ago quit the salesman's rounds for the quaintly cluttered editorial rooms of the Mining and Contracting Review (though he was not its founder). The tussles continued, this time verbally, and many a subscriber opened his copy wondering whether he was going to chuckle over Burt's having got off a good one or feel his temper rise at an editorial crowbar blow.

He was both the mining industry's best friend and severest critic. As a former mining editor recalls: "Burt was wonderful to behold at some meetings of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers, the Colorado Mining Association, or the American Mining Congress before he became advanced in years. He would literally get up and argue with speakers, walk out of a room in a show of disdain, etc. He was a great supporter of the independent miners, and it has always been my belief that this was one of the reasons whyhe became a 'columnist' on mining affairs for the Salt Lake Tribune, the owners of which, in those days, had substantial commitments involving the old Silver King Coalition Mines Company."

Actually, Burt's approach to most subjects was quite predictable— up with private enterprise and down with each and every governmental innovation, starting with the New Deal. Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer and conservative, was Burt's particular hero, though no one could eclipse Daniel C. Jackling, developer of the great open pit copper mines.

In "Eggheads and Mushmouths" (January 1954) he wrote, "It is time that citizens and officeholders stood up and were counted— what they are for—the United States of America or some damphool liberalism which threatens our very existence as a free people?" In "Badly Advised" (May 1954) he said, "The air is thick with cyotic screams and wolfish cries of Egghead Stevenson, Frank Edwards, Elmer Davis (the 'man who dares to think'), the Roosevelt relict, Drew Pearson and their ilk. The clamor consists of half-lies (cowardly use of the lie itself), lies, asinine facetiousness, rabblerousing and slanting the news."

President Eisenhower's internationalist advisers were steering him into policies hurtful for the domestic mining industry, Burt thought. He was a Taft man himself. To the end of his career he was wary of Eisenhower's "eastern financial advisors who, like the house dealer in a poker game, get a cut on international deals—going and coming" (August 1953).

One at a time, Burt swaggered in and stepped on the toes of many leading Salt Lakers. Only once, as I heard it, did anyone get the better of him. A mild-mannered editor of copy on the Salt Lake Tribune grew increasingly unhappy with Burt's columns for the paper signed simply, "Oldtimer." With this nom de plume, Burt assumed the role of senior commentator on all the latter-day innovations of industry and government. One day he stopped by this editor's desk to do some added expounding from the vantage point of his advanced years. Calmly the editor looked up and asked, "Burt, whatever gave you the impression that age was synonymous with wisdom?" It was a remark which stung Oldtimer for months.

It would be wrong, however, to imply that Burt lacked a humane side. When my sister died, he was the first one to extend his hand in sympathy. Indeed, the influence of his gentle mother, whom he genuinely loved, ran strongly in Burt, too. Though he often chided the copy readers at the Tribune as "barbarians," he threw a sumptuous Christmas party for them and their wives and was a gracious host. Unfortunately, some of the "barbarians," not recognizing the underlying good will of Oldtimer after so much invective, did not attend, and missed a grand party. As to his personal morals, he told disapprovingly of an incident in Boise, when convention-going mining men invited him to a girlie party. "When a man loves his wife, such things are repugnant," Burt said seriously. I knew little of his home life, but he recalled when the family attended the play Life with Father one of Burt's daughters, during a pause in dialogue, stood up, pointed at the actor portraying Clarence Day, and said, "Why, that's Daddy!"

The uranium boom which hit Utah with a bang in the middle 1950s offered Burt a chance to reach the big time with his mining gazette, but his principles, which required he support only legitimate mining enterprises, came to the fore.

"The Review has refused to publish the 'quotations' on the endless list of uranium 'stocks,' which have been flooding the Salt Lake City area in increasing volume each day," he wrote. "This of course means passing up considerable revenue for subscriptions tendered on the condition that publishing of these 'quotations' becomes part of the contract. We do not desire to participate, even indirectly, in the miserable mess." Some of the stocks, he said, represented "nothing but doubtful possession of mine claims and still more doubtful presence of ore therein. Those who can least afford it are losing. .. . Teenagers, lucky in this wild speculation, are forgetting that work is the American base for living and success."

Actually a booster for the uranium industry, Burt feared that overemphasis on uranium would tend to obscure the plight of lead, silver, zinc, and copper mines and that wild talk about imminent and cheap atomic power would harm the coal industry.

In his latter days as editor, Burt continued his support of Senator Robert A. Taft, reluctant to accept a more liberal substitute. In his untidy office in the massive Dooly Block he continued his editorial protests to no avail. The sun was setting for the rugged individualist. It really came as no surprise when, on a fall day in 1955, I read that Burt Brewster had died after twenty-one years as editor of the Review. He had simply got old, like the big Dooly Block, with its ornate lobby of hand-carved oak trimming. Most of the mining firms were still housed nearby, but Salt Lake City was excited now about the state's new, big payroll, missile production.

The era of the calm, polite, efficient organization man had begun. The oldtime editor's rolltop desk had suddenly become as out of place as a Wells Fargo stage parked at a jet airport. But it is doubtful if the men of this new era will be as colorful as Burt B. Brewster of the Mining and Contracting Review.

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