Word: swope
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Back in Germany in 1916, Swope gathered material for a series of articles analyzing the nation's war effort that won him the first Pulitzer Prize for reporting. When he was barred from the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, Swope grandly donned top hat and cutaway coat, brushed past deferential guards with the explanation that he was a delegate from Liberia, and came out with the hitherto unpublished League of Nations Covenant. Said he: "All I can say for publication is that I found it lying on a table in the meeting room...
Dictum & Dry Rot. In 1920, with the backing of Ralph Pulitzer, who became the World's publisher on his father's death in 1911, Swope knocked out a few partitions to make himself a suitably imposing office, brought in the first rugs ever seen on the twelfth floor of the World building on Park Row, and hung on the door a brand-new title of his own devising: Executive Editor...
From then on, Editor Frank I. Cobb ran the editorial page and Swope ran the World. Though the great Joseph Pulitzer had been dead for nine years, the World was still shaped to his image: cocky, crusading, colorful. Swope and the World were well matched. A solid six-footer with a thatch of red hair, Swope stalked grandly through the city room swinging his massive walking stick, peering at his staffers through a tiny pince-nez, and driving home his dictum: "Pick out the best story of the day and then hammer the living hell...
...Swope started the World's famous "op. ed.," a page facing the editorials, and made it a showcase for a distinguished set of columnists: Heywood Broun, Franklin P. Adams, Alexander Woollcott, Laurence Stallings, Deems Taylor. He directed the investigations of the Ku-Klux Klan and peonage on Southern plantations that won the World Pulitzer Prizes. He took a proprietary interest in the news: "Who's covering my murder trial? Who's covering my snowstorm?" He told reporters: "Don't forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences...
...World. But as the '20s drew on, both the World and Swope got weary. Under Pulitzer's sons Ralph and Herbert, the World gradually lost ground to the Times and the Herald Tribune. In 1929 Swope finally quit. Two years later, Pulitzer's sons broke their father's will, which stipulated that the World should never be sold, turned over the paper to Scripps-Howard for $5,000,000. (The name survives as the New York World-Telegram...