Word: coghlan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Owlish, excitable Ralph Coghlan (rhymes with oglin') has a singular facility for making people mad. In ten often-turbulent years as editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's editorial page, he has assailed, annoyed and angered many a judge, politician and businessman. Sometimes his editorial trumpeting was in the best crusading tradition of the Post-Dispatch; at other times, it was shrill...
When it protested the 1939 acquittal (on extortion charges) of one "Putty Nose" Brady as a "burlesque of justice," the P-was fined $2,000 for contempt of court; Editor Coghlan was sentenced to 20 days in jail and a $200 fine for okaying the editorial. Readers applauded his and the P-D's insistent courage, and the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the convictions in 1941. When F.D.R. traded 50 overage destroyers to Britain, Coghlan lit into him in a hysterically isolationist editorial (Dictator Roosevelt Commits An Act of War). In 1942, during the scrap drive, Coghlan recommended that...
Dateline: Europe. While Ralph Coghlan headed the editorial page, the P-D won two Pulitzer Prizes: for its 1939 campaign which led to elimination of the St. Louis smoke nuisance, and its 1947 exposure of the political scandal behind the Centralia (Ill.) mine disaster. News staff reporters, whose stories furnished the material for the P-D's hard-hitting editorials, were aware nevertheless that the great prestige of the P-D's editorial page declined under Coghlan, chiefly because of unpredictable shifts in editorial position. Example: for months in 1940, the P-D damned F.D.R. as a dictator...
...caustic with his tongue as with his typewriter, impatient, bellicose Ralph Coghlan was frequently at odds with staffers as well as with Pulitzer. He had also made the news columns of the P-D (and the opposition) in a way of which Pulitzer did not approve: he got involved in a drinking brawl. Last week the expected finally happened. After 25 years of writing editorials for the PD, 53-year-old Ralph Coghlan was transferred to Europe...
...also write hard-hitting editorials. He wrote the celebrated "contempt of court" editorial, pounded out many of the Centralia editorials, was mainly responsible for the P-D campaign to smash the corrupt Illinois machine of Governor Dwight Green. Under Dilliard, the page might not be as lively as under Coghlan; staffers hoped it would be better balanced and sounder...