"Pm" Post-Mortem

by ROBERT LASCH

1

WHEN Marshall Field decided to sell or liquidate PM last spring, newspapermen everywhere felt a sinking of the heart. PM never had a good press among the publishers of fat, established newspapers, and most of the employees of those publishers, watching PM from afar, had long ago become disillusioned with it. Nevertheless the prospect of its death depressed the craft with a feeling of loss. For this was a newspaperman’s newspaper, in the sense that though it was necessarily owned by big money it was wholly controlled by the editors. Seldom had American journalism come so close to the idea of an endowed newspaper. Seldom had anybody had such a chance to publish a newspaper without interference from an ownership primarily interested in profits.

Field managed to save PM by selling a majority interest to Bartley Crum and Joseph Barnes. One must hope that its new career will be more successful than the old. Meanwhile the phase of its history which ended when Field stopped subsidizing it deserves examination. What happened? Was it really independent journalism that failed?

Field himself always regarded the essence of the experiment as the lodging of control in editorial hands. During the seven and one-half years of his angelhood — from October, 1940, to April, 1948 — he scrupulously kept his hands off the day-to-day operations. He wanted the paper to be “a kind of newspaperman’s ideal,” he wrote, in Freedom Is More than a Word. He thought of it as a “crusading, anti-authoritarian, staff-dominated paper . . . challenging many of the sacred cows of the status quo and of journalism.”

As of this writing, the sacred cows still seem to be doing all right.

In his prospectus, Ralph Ingersoll declared that PM would be against people who pushed other people around. It would expose “fraud and deceit and cruelty and greed.” It would pursue the truth with courage, imagination, new methods and talent. Because it took no advertising, it would be independent of any outside influence whatever.

In practice, these high ideals meant simply that, during the crucial first two years of its life, PM was Ingersoll and Ingersoll was PM. As the editors stated when Ingersoll went into the Army in 1942, “PM is, was and always will be a personal organ.” That, as it turned out, was just the trouble. In its flight from the evil influence of advertisers, in its admirable struggle to escape one-man domination by a publisher, PM delivered itself to the one-man domination of Ingersoll.

Had Ingersoll been the kind of editor who could submerge his personality in a corporate identity, this might have worked out. But PM never had a chance to be his lengthened shadow. It became, instead, the stage on which he conducted an intellectual strip-tease.

Ingersoll is said to believe now that the fatal error was inadequate initial capital. When he began raising money, he set his sights at five million dollars. After Field joined up for an initial stake of two hundred thousand dollars, Ingersoll decided to go ahead with a total capital of one and one-half million. Under the impact of costly printing and engraving, a huge staff, and other expenses, that sum melted away fast. Within six months Field had to buy out the other stockholders. From then on, the paper retreated from one retrenchment to another.

There may be some merit in this explanation, but it does not tell the whole story. After all, Field must have spent well over five million dollars on the enterprise. Not so much the amount of capital, but the way in which it was used, seems to have been the difficulty. Ingersoll laid out $350,000 of the initial capital on promotion before the paper ever appeared. PM did not live up to its extravagant billing, and the disappointment probably alienated a great many potential readers.

It is difficult to discuss PM without appearing hypercritical. One is apt to forget its many admirable achievements — the sensitive and thoughtful editorials of Max Lerner, the uniquely brilliant coverage of medical and social subjects by Albert Deutsch, the penetrating if sometimes overeditorialized Washington reporting of Izzy Stone. PM covered the anti-monopoly struggles springing from the TNEC report (especially the insurance fight) as no other paper did. Nathan Robertson’s handling of tax news made income taxes intelligible. Kenneth Stewart wrote memorable analyses of the nation’s leading newspapers in the Sunday PM. Volta Torrey’s distinctive studies of sample Congressmen and their districts were something new in journalism. PM crusaded against Jesse Jones and against the business-as-usual influence in the early war effort with effectiveness and skill.

Such enterprise brought the paper the undying devotion of about 125,000 readers all over the country, and undoubtedly spurred other newspapers to efforts they might have neglected. But Ingersoll’s domination stamped PM with a peculiar personality which dogged it to the end. Reflecting his subjective approach, the early PM became so fascinated with the contemplation of its own navel that the vital problem of interesting readers in news was sometimes overlooked.

There was, for example, the fantastic department entitled “File and Forget,” wherein the bewildered reader was handed half a dozen items under a paragraph which read: “The following news came in, but we did not consider it important enough to give much space.” Most readers probably would have preferred to forget all about it. But PM insisted on being observed in the act of editorship.

PM tried bravely to establish a folksy relationship with the public. Once the labor editor published his exclusive inside dope that John L. Lewis was going to support Roosevelt. When Lewis didn’t, the assistant labor editor ran a piece jovially chiding his boss for a poor guess, and a cartoon was published showing the labor expert in the doghouse. Again, readers would have preferred to forget it.

Louis Kronenberger, in the editorial column, took the readers into his confidence. He wrote: “It’s fun, in a way, to work in a madhouse, so long as you don’t have to think of it as a business serving the public and seeking a profit.” He told about the staff discussions over allocation of editorial space, and confessed that nobody was sure the correct formula had been found. “Right now,” he said, “we like things the way they are,” but he warned that at any moment PM might emulate the housewife who starts moving the furniture around “like mad.”

This was folksy, all right, but scarcely the kind of thing to inspire confidence that the editors of PM knew where they were going and why. Instead of simply publishing an editorial page, PM philosophized about it. Most editorials, the public was told, are pompous and impersonal; they should be “as chummy as an English pub, as scrappy as a down-east town meeting, as informal as the men’s bath houses at Coney Island. That’s what this page is going to work for. That, and a little humor.” Good enough. But a reader might justifiably feel cheated at being given the promise, rather than the fact, of something chummy, scrappy, informal, and humorous.

The notion that PM’s staff and its public were all engaged in a joyous lark somehow got in the way of doing what PM had promised to do. There is no question that the paper performed many honorable and eminently useful journalistic services. It has had on the staff in its time some of the best newspapermen in the country, and they have turned out first-rate work. But in the early days, which were probably decisive, the emphasis on PM’s own curious personality was absurd and childish.

Each department carried a masthead, listing all the staff members. The stories were initialed at the end. To satisfy the curiosity thus aroused, you had to run through the masthead and riddle out the names of the authors. There were occasions when a three-paragraph picture caption, the product of joint effort, carried four sets of initials.

2

SUCH excesses could have been forgiven. Most of them were, in fact, dropped after a few months. But PM seldom got away from the attitude that the reader was interested not in the news but in PM’s relationship to the news. Ingersoll believed that there was no such thing as objective reporting. Everybody, he said, had his bias. But in PM’s case, its bias too often turned into simple disregard of elemental accuracy and honest reporting. The thing was out of balance. When you looked for truth, you saw PM instead, standing in the light.

In the first issue, which came out as France was falling, Ingersoll wrote that the news was too big and too terrible to seem like a break for a new paper (though obviously the evil thought had occurred to him). The news meant, he said, that “we, who wanted time in which to grow up, shall have no youth — shall be gray-haired from birth.” There must have been lots of people who thought the news from France didn’t mean that at all.

The reader got a full dose of this invidious selfconsciousness when it came to advertising. The fact that PM carried no ads was flung in his face day after day, as if this itself guaranteed some miraculous virtue. When PM crusaded against cut-rate poultry dealers, or installment credit houses which were said to be robbing the poor, the stories usually carried a box pointing out that “PM accepts no advertising and prints news other papers won’t.” Yet it was hard to sustain the position that what PM printed the other papers omitted for fear of their advertisers. Some of the PM crusades looked remarkably like the same sort of thing other papers had been doing for years, and had got tired of.

PM failed to turn its lack of advertising into an asset, first because readers do like to read ads, and second because Ingersoll’s underlying theory of advertiser influence was wrong. It is not advertiser influence as such that inhibits most newspapers, but the influence of owners who think like advertisers. Furthermore, PM itself confused the issue. While taking no money from advertising, it did not hesitate to publish two or three pages of “ news ” cribbed from the ads in other papers. What strange alchemy purified an ad once it appeared in PM free of charge was never explained. In the end, of course, the paper resolved the contradiction by accepting advertising, and nobody ever complained that in doing so it fell under malign influence.

There were those who felt, however, that the early PM had not succeeded, by sloughing the shackles of commercial support, in attaining genuine independence. If advertisers were not grinding axes, one suspected that somebody else was.

A newspaper which conscientiously supports the principles of collective bargaining is one thing; a newspaper which wages aggressive campaigns against particular employers in a way calculated to benefit particular labor unions is something else. In the course of one of these campaigns, PM lashed out repetitiously and at great length against an employer whose home was being stink-bombed and stoned by union bully-boys. Incidents like this must have sowed the suspicion that PM did not mind pushing some people around, after all.

Emphasis on labor, PM argued, was necessary to redress the balance against newspapers which had persistently ignored or distorted labor news. But what PM had set out to sell was a newspaper of general circulation, not a union house organ. Too often it seemed that PM was writing for, and not merely about, labor.

In general, PM’s well-advertised love for the common man, during these early years, did not quite come off. The passion had a synthetic quality; it was intellectual, formalized, stereotyped. Perhaps the masses sensed this. Their hearts belonged to Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie anyway; but their allegiance to Hearst and Patterson might conceivably have been weakened had PM achieved a more authentic common touch. One felt that in order to qualify for PM’s interest the plain people had to belong to the right unions and vote the right tickets. Its crusades appeared to follow a pattern more than a conviction. Its reactions to any given situation were uniform and predictable. PM bled for the people’s wrongs, commendably enough; but one feared that it was induced to bleed by having taken a prior political position, and that it hoped to effect a political result.

With its basic independence thus subject to question, PM failed to develop a broad popular appeal. Its friends were passionate and vociferous, but not numerous. Even many of the intellectuals who supplied the readiest market for journalistic experiment must have been simply bored by some of the paper’s preoccupations. Of necessity it had to shoot at a middle-class readership; yet it often behaved like an exclusively proletarian organ, and never seemed to have a clear conception of its typical reader.

And there was a limit to the number of people who would read PM solely because it expressed Ralph Ingersoll’s mind. Ingersoll did some magnificent reporting overseas, and he was a pulsing generator of editorial ideas, some of which were good. But his experience had been confined to magazines, and his knowledge of newspaper techniques was colored by a general contempt for them. After he turned to writing windy editorials (simultaneously moving the opinion page from page 20 to page 2), the identification of the paper with himself became complete.

The pay-off came when Ingersoll used PM to plead his long and tedious argument with Draft Board 44. Some staff members believe that the unfortunate draft case left, a permanent scar.

Nobody can now contend that Ingersoll quarreled with his draft board because he was reluctant to enter military service. He was genuinely convinced that the board, out of mean prejudice, had undertaken to injure PM by depriving the paper of his leadership. Field must have shared his conviction, for it was his appeal — filed without Ingersoll’s knowledge — that made the drafting of his editor a cause célèbre.

Even if Field and Ingersoll were right in estimating the motives of the draft board, however, they were attempting the impossible in trying to convince the public, at a time when thousands were being drafted, that the entire machinery of selective service was mobilized to ruin PM. This was the kind of case where the best argument couldn’t win. And the worst of it was that Ingersoll conducted the argument, with wearisome repetition, in the columns of his newspaper. On three successive days he gave the story three to four pages of space and top play under the line “Ralph Ingersoll vs. Draft Board No. 44.” By the time he became convinced that he couldn’t win, and cheerfully enlisted, the damage had been done. Whatever the merits of his case, the public would only remember that PM for a week or so had strained itself trying to explain why its editor shouldn’t be drafted.

3

WHILE Ingersoll was in the service, PM came under the control of an editorial board headed by John P. Lewis, a competent newspaperman trained in the Scripps-Howard school. Max Lerner left Williams College to write editorials of exceptional quality, and the paper settled down to prove that it could get along without Ingersoll.

As losses continued, stringent economies came into play. The size of the page was trimmed, the number of pages reduced from thirty-two to twentyfour, color printing dropped, the elaborate photography and fine engraving cut down. Gradually the emphasis shifted from magazine-type stunts and experimentation to a more conventional, and sometimes brilliant, news coverage. The slogan “PM Carries No Advertising” gave way to “PM Tells You More News in Less Time.”

For a while it looked as if the modified formula might take hold. A slow, unspectacular gain in circulation set in. From a 1943 average of 144,000 the readership grew to a peak of 164,000 in 1946. For a few months in 1946 the paper was breaking even, and hopes ran high. But then the cost of newsprint and of all other elements of production began shooting up, and the break-even point moved once more outside PM’s circulation range.

Despite the gains of 1944 and 1945, despite the adoration of its 125,000 reliable fans, reader resistance persisted. This was demonstrated in a heartbreaking way when a strike of circulation agents crippled the newsstand sales of all New York newspapers except PM. Because of this fortunate accident, PM laid exclusive access to the stands for several weeks, and sold upwards of 600,000 papers a day. Here was a wonderful chance to change the reader habits of at least a few people who never bought PM. But when the strike ended, virtually every one of the windfall readers disappeared without a trace. The return of competition found PM exactly where it had been before.

This experience convinced Field that PM as an ad-less newspaper could not make the grade. In the fall of 1946 that phase of the experiment ended, and with it ended Ingersoll’s tenure. Ingersoll had come back from the war to launch a circulation drive and a series of editorial reforms. PM carried more crime news now, overdoing that as it had overdone other things. The post-war Ingersoll frowned on the old flaming crusades. Probably his heart wasn’t in it. When Field’s decision to accept advertising crystallized, Ingersoll resigned.

Advertising revenue did something to improve the economic position, but not enough. In 1947 the ads yielded $600,000. Without them, Field would have lost over a million that year. With them, he still lost half a million. Circulation had begun slipping again, thereby impairing the paper’s appeal to advertisers. From 164,000 average in 1946 the readership fell to 140,000 average in 1947. By March, 1948, it had dwindled to the old-faithful minimum of about 125,000.

Why did the public silently slip away? Many factors must have been at work, among them the lingering flavor of PM’s early history. From the standpoint of news enterprise and sound editing, it was a better paper during this period than it had been during the first two years. But it was not a complete newspaper. It was a specialty product which a few people might buy to supplement what they obtained from other papers, but on which few would rely for the full diet of news and entertainment demanded of modern newspapers.

For a time, PM seemed on the way to gaining a healthy national readership. It had a faithful following in Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities. Yet, whether for lack of money or lack of enterprise, it did not exploit this market fully. Out-of-town readers got the same edition as those in New York, and found much of its space wasted (for them) on local news or outdated radio programs. Finally, retrenchment compelled heavy cuts in its outstanding Washington bureau, thus undermining the base of what distinctive national coverage it could claim.

On the other hand, the paper was never quite at home in New York; its metropolitan coverage was spotty and inadequate. It was not a medium of entertainment. It could not offer a glut of columns and commentary. It had few special excellences not to be found elsewhere. In the end, it turned out to be just a pinched, thin little tabloid, trying manfully to do the best it could with limited resources.

As a crowning blow, the paper which had been unjustly smeared as the “uptown edition of the Daily Worker” (which, of course, it never was) now alienated the left wing by its increasingly outspoken opposition to the Communists. The fellow-traveler following may not have been worth keeping, but its departure left a hole in the circulation totals which no other group of readers stepped in to fill.

The economic stringencies of the times must not be overlooked. PM, like Field’s lamented Chicago Sun, was a victim of the post-war inflation. After 1946 its costs mounted while its circulation fell, and every new notch in the deficit required a new tightening of the belt.

One is tempted to wonder how different the story might have been had PM been established, say, in 1934 instead of 1940. In the great depression its New Dealism would have fallen on more receptive ears, and its costs would not have risen so fast so soon. As it was, PM rode the trough of political liberalism and the crest of inflation.

4

THE times, however, had nothing to do with the organizational paralysis which appears to have gripped PM from the beginning. Staff factionalism raged there as in few other shops. There was an active Communist group. Probably as a result of the absence of strong ownership representation, the Newspaper Guild used PM as a guinea pig for its most advanced ideas, exacting contract conditions which made it virtually impossible to fire anybody and even required the payment of a severance bonus to men who resigned. For all of these reasons the effort to pull PM out of the fire was a losing battle for Field.

Newspapermen will go on conducting the postmortems for years. One point of view is expressed by a former PM staff member in these words: —

“PM failed for a lot of reasons. The most important of them were: —

“1. The mechanical facilities were so limited that the paper couldn’t be delivered to its readers while the news was still fresh. This prevented it from competing with the other papers as a newspaper.

“2. The staff was overloaded with amateurs. The first labor editor could not even run a typewriter. Scads of other so-called experts didn’t know the difference between news and peanuts.

“3. Marshall Field himself gave the paper a black eye when he protested the drafting of Ingersoll. That weakened faith in the paper’s sincerity and integrity.

“4. The Communists foiled every intelligent effort to make the paper self-supporting. They milked it, blackmailed it, discredited it, and drove the very people whom it needed most out of the shop.

“Several hundred people went in and out during PM’s lifetime. Some of them lasted only a few days, others stuck it out for years. Nearly every one of them, I suspect, must have caught a little bit of the vision that had inspired the creation of the paper, and must have hoped, at least part of the time, that it would find a way to eliminate some of the faults of American journalism. In other words, for most of the staff, at least some of the time, a job on PM was emotionally satisfying, as well as a means of earning a living. It was pioneering. It was fun.

“The best newspapermen generally felt this way the most strongly. If they had stayed, the mechanical limitations might have been overcome eventually, the amateurs either would have become wallflowers or would have learned a few rudiments of the business, and the ruckus about the drafting of Ingersoll might have been lived down.

“But, with few exceptions, the best newspapermen left PM. Very few of them were lured away by higher salaries, or fancier titles, or greater opportunities. Most of them simply put on their hats and left, without pausing either to tell the managing editor to go to hell, or to buy a round of drinks for their old pals.

“The conditions that made them feel this way were brought about, most of the time, by the Communists and their stooges. There were never very many Commies on PM’s staff, but there were always some, and they were always more powerful than their numbers or their positions would indicate.

“Their victories were won in the good old freeenterprise game of office politics. In most newspaper offices, that game is played with one’s left hand while concentrating one’s attention on something else. It’s about on a par with the Saturday night poker session. The rules are simple and fellows who break them soon wind up in the advertising business.

“The Commies threw the rule book out the window. They played office politics so hard and so constantly that it was sometimes almost impossible to get the paper out. Veteran office politicians from other newspapers and the press associations were so flabbergasted by the Communists’ intensity and tactics that they were unable to defend themselves. They were as befuddled and helpless as a little boy who has learned to box in the YMCA but is suddenly attacked by a gang of ragamuffins in an alley back of a saloon. By the time an anti-Communist had recovered from his bewilderment and embarrassment, he was usually licked.

“The Communists directed and remorselessly fanned the flames of every little bit of strife that appeared within the office. They knew what they wanted, and they had no scruples about how they got it. Their objective, moreover, was so clear and simple that it was often hard for their naïve victims to believe it. That objective was: to rule and/or ruin the paper.

“Of course, they will deny this. They will say, no doubt, that PM failed because of poor management. But I’ve seen less competent men than John P. Lewis run successful newspapers, and I don’t think he or any other executive of PM had a fair chance. Sure, Marshall Field put up plenty of money and refrained from interfering. But it takes more than money to run a newspaper successfully. It takes some freedom of action, and the Communists saw to it that the management never had enough freedom to make PM pay.”

That’s one point of view. Another, from a less ideological PM veteran, follows: —

“The picture is so complicated. PM carried the seeds of its own destruction from the start. It did all the things it said it wasn’t going to do, and didn’t do all the things it said it was going to do.

“By attracting opinionated people it got itself bogged down in factional fights. John P. Lewis was forever trying to find some group or person to serve as a buffer against another group or person, and in turn got frightened by his buffers.

“None of us ever really thought through a longterm program for the paper. It was a day-to-day trial-and-error business, all done in full view of the public.

“The parts were better than the whole. It had good people doing good jobs but the total effect rarely looked good.

“Of course there were outside factors, too — the war, for example, which killed the swell technical plans like color illustration, stapling, inking processes, and so forth, and cut into the staff just as it was getting started. And the general scorn with which PM was greeted by those who wouldn’t have liked it even if it had been good.”

When the journalistic history of the period comes to be written, it will be necessary to record not only the sad story of PM’s failure to live up to its promise, but the venomous fury with which it was greeted by most of the conventional press. The established newspapers reacted with defensive contumely, derision, and, at first, fear. Joe Patterson expressed the apprehension frankly when he told Ingersoll that he intended to fight PM’s newsstand deliveries. There was just a chance that PM might expose the inadequacies of American journalism and force adoption of new standards. When it became clear that the chance had been lost, the satisfaction among the publishers was unconcealed.

But few newspapermen will concede that PM’s failure vindicated other newspapers, or that what failed was the ideal of professional independence. PM never realized the ideal. PM proved that poor journalism on the left doesn’t compensate for poor journalism on the right; that money alone isn’t enough to create a great newspaper; that bias and partiality are not the answers to bias and partiality; that a point of view is not a substitute for a conscientious job of public information. What PM set out to do remains to be done.

It should be added that PM, under new ownership, still has a chance to do it. Bartley Crum and Joseph Barnes took over, with Field retaining a minority interest, on an understanding with the Guild unit that for sixty days the management would have complete right to hire and fire, after which a new contract would be negotiated. In effect, all employees wound up their jobs with the closing out of Field’s PM, and were then given jobs for a sixty-day probationary period on the Crum-Barnes PM. A fresh start thus is possible. It is a safe bet that Crum and Barnes have most of the country’s working newspapermen with them in their effort to make PM what it set out to be.