34. Hodding Center
Transcript
Hodding Carter (00:00:00): ... are states in which I've lived, two states, Louisiana, Mississippi over these years. I'm reminded of a story about a little monkey on the day when the bombs finally started raining down. He discovered himself behind a molten mass of steel [inaudible 00:00:24] part of New York City. He kept saying over and over again, "I'm so scared. I'm so hungry. I'm so hungry." Around the corner of this molten [inaudible 00:00:37] walked in a feral monkey. She said, "Have an apple. Have an apple." He said, "What? And start that mess over again?" (00:00:48): Well, I disagree with the little monkey. All of my adult life, in particular all of my life as a newspaper man, has been spent in abnormal... If there's such a thing as normal living, but in an abnormal series of circumstances. We started at the very bottom, the Depression, six months. We married and started a little daily paper in Hammond, Louisiana. That of course was the bottom of the Depression, 1932. I'll never forget that. You rarely got any cash, but everybody would be willing to trade anything with you for advertising. They'd give you anything, razor blades or an automobile for the equivalent amount in cash. (00:01:34): Those first years up to about 1940, almost 1940, there was an abnormality of all newspaper men... All people were enduring it... of trying to survive economically in those extremely depressed times. Next after that of course, after a small, short hiatus, we went a new newspaper up in Mississippi. Three years later, four years later, we were at war. Except for that four years, perhaps two years since 1955, we have never known... This country has never known what it was not to be at war with somebody, even though sometimes we didn't describe those conditions as war. Of course, they were war. (00:02:29): I don't know what it is to live as a publisher under normal circumstances. I'm sure I'd feel more peaceful and calm if I was, but not as much excitement. That's sort of the reason we go into this business of ours. I would like to use one example of what I'm going to talk about after these 35 years with my son as editor. We live in this time just short of total war, and we don't know when that might change. I know my son, short of that total war, as the editor of our paper, won't have the excitement or the problems or many other things which we sometimes enjoyed and the rest of the time put up with. (00:03:24): He won't have those things to face short of war because I don't think we'll ever see the kind of depression this country endured and which the newspapers had to cover and denounce, find a scapegoat for Herbert Hoover and the like. I don't think he'll ever know that, and I don't believe my grandchildren are going to know that again short of war, but he too will have his problems. I wish him well on it. It's quite something to have a son grow up and stay in the business with you and want to stay at home instead of going to greener pastures and act as editor of the paper. I was very happy last week, rather than unhappy, when he said he would like to do it. (00:04:11): Now, I want to talk about some of the problems that confront editors, publishers in the South in some respects even today. Common to all of us in this business... This is not in the realm of ideas now. We'll get to that in a minute, but common to all of us in this business, the communications media, I think more than any other occupation or profession, but communications media are having to fight continually rising prices. Prices on news print, for instance, when I went in the army was $50 a ton. News print is about $300 a ton now in like. (00:04:51): We have to meet the competition, who was not present at the beginning of World War II, of a competing medium, television, which does an excellent job and does a lot of things that we can't do. Of course, we can do a lot of things that television can't do today. Another problem that particularly concerns our area, newspaper in the area, is that being still the poorest section of the country economically... Mississippi I'm speaking particularly of now... we find it difficult sometimes to survive financially. Little papers like mine have an easier time by far than the great big papers as we're seeing with the merger or the proposed merger of the New York papers. (00:05:42): There's papers smaller than ours have had a even more difficult time, the little weeklies. You've seen them one after another dry up all over the South. That is another problem. Both of these are as the germane [inaudible 00:05:54] the business office into the editor's chair and another problem that confronts us is how to keep people believing, as we hope they do believe, that we are a hometown paper devoted to the hometown, which my paper is. It's an independent. More and more American newspapers, more and more Southern newspapers are parts of change, are the results of mergers. It's very difficult to maintain that personal contact, which was such a joy even 35 years ago to me with your readers, with your friends and neighbors. (00:06:29): We've become too impersonal these days in many respects and none more so than in the relationship of a reader to a newspaper which is owned in New York. Or both newspapers in many cases in many cases in any given town are owned by people who live elsewhere. Something has gone out of American newspaper life, Southern newspaper life because of these continuing mergers and closures of some papers. It is also today difficult... I'll get to one of the... This is in the realm of the mind... to survive against pressures by people, organized and unorganized, to make you either goosestep in line with them in their thinking. I refer particularly to organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, the Citizens Council... There's any number of it, John Birch Society... who demand that you go along with them or the alternative will be destruction naturally. (00:07:31): Sometimes you get actual threats against your life too. Going back again to the non-journalistic aspect of what's happening to papers. You overlooked one. Along with the difficulty of surviving in small towns and large, and the mergers and the opposition of these people of ill will, another difficulty, and I don't know how this is going to be solved for most little papers, is the difficulty arising from the necessity to replace outmoded obsolescent equipment. Most newspapers, including my own, will use the equipment until it's fallen to pieces and then go out and buy... or try to buy if you can get the credit... other equipment. (00:08:24): Now, let's take the problems in the realm of the mind and of the spirit that confront papers. I'd say that the most difficult problem today is how to survive the economic... again the pressures from these people particularly in the realm of racial adjustments in the South, especially in Mississippi itself. They use strange devices in the North and the South too, bribing. Newspapers are bribed, have been bribed in this state and I guess in every other state. (00:09:07): The second day we put our little Hammond paper, the police raided a gambling joint in a hotel there. We went over and got the story. Within 10 minutes, one of the local really tough boys was in my office and said that Mr. [Syke 00:09:27] didn't want that story in the paper. I said, "Well, I'm sorry. It happened, didn't it?" He said, "Yes, but he doesn't want it in the paper." I'd known him all my life. He was from the same town. I said, "Gabriel, I'm not going to pay any attention to you about this, but I'm just... (00:09:39): He said, "Mr. Syke will make it worth your while." I said, "I ought to throw you out of the office, but before I do, tell me how much he's going to offer me." He said, "He's willing to go to as high as $25," which is about as good a depression story as I know. Later on, it got to be a good deal more than that, but $25 was my first offer. Then a little bit later, from Dudley LeBlanc, $100 to support him. I was in the money from the very beginning of starting out the paper in Hammond. (00:10:10): Now, against that background, in those days, as you all know, Huey Long ruled Louisiana absolutely. The people who were with him... The overwhelming majority of Louisianans were with Huey Long. The reason they were with him is because he was a psychologist as well as anything else, many other things, and he knew what the people of Louisiana wanted in material terms. He promised to give these things to them, and he lived up to those promises. I don't think had he not been killed would he ever have been defeated as long as he remained in public life. (00:10:55): My handwriting in this thing is kind of poor. [inaudible 00:10:56] notes. Huey, knowing what the people wanted, good roads, free school lunches, better hospitals and the like, he gave these things to these people despite... This is interesting in journalism today. It's sort of frightening... despite the opposition of I suppose at least 90% of the newspapers of Louisiana, whom he'd go down on pretty hard himself. In one way, he made the Louisiana newspapers a laughing stock because he proved how far away they were from the average citizen. (00:11:40): Louisiana, in those days, was almost a barony controlled by exceedingly big interests who were not interested in the common man. Huey was in the tradition of the populist movement that swept through the South like wildfire right after the Reconstruction Period. He believed in giving the common man more than he'd ever had before, and he did it. I repeat, he could not have been defeated at all. This is another of the problems that confront the press, how to be convincing and effective when you take out against somebody who needs taking out against, but who is believed in by many, many people. (00:12:27): We did it the wrong way, the anti-Long papers. We would not concede that any idea he ever had was worth anything. Of course, looking back after all these years, I know that we should have supported any number of his proposals. We didn't, and that's the weakness of the newspaper profession. The newspaper publisher would have to be so partisan that he will let partisanship enter the news column, where they have no fair. They don't belong. Newspapers which editorialize, as too many do, on the front page, in the news story itself are not living up to what is ours by virtue of the 5th Amendment. (00:13:11): You asked what were the preoccupations and problems of that time. [inaudible 00:13:19] faced Longism, trying to restore the state to a democratic system. A second and longer lasting one of those preoccupations and problems was the depression itself. I can remember back in those days down in Hammond, Louisiana, seeing farmers break into warehouses in broad daylight and cart out food because their families were hungry. I've seen men with college degrees in those days out with a sickle cutting down grass along the ditches and in the public parks and all that for something like $12 a week. (00:13:56): Huey Long saw this too and he promised these people against that background. We were constantly on the defensive or sometimes on the offensive against Huey Long and constantly aware of these terrific odds against survival, newspaper survival. In those days, we didn't write about Europe, editorials. We didn't write about race problems because people had not yet either become aware of them or organized to change things. It was not until the war that I became almost obsessed with the notion that through the leadership of the press and the man in the pulpit and the man in the teacher's desk, that unless we could assume some kind of leadership that these hungry men who broke into the warehouses would get hungrier and hungrier and more and more violent and we could have, and did have in a portion of this country, anarchy because of hunger, because of the depression. (00:15:03): That won't happen again. Our government is off on a different tack now and we are committed, as we should be... Even if most of the newspapers in the South and elsewhere don't support this notion of a great society, I do. We can do it. Going back to Huey Long, though, when I hear these serious propositions being made that every American adult should be given $3,000 a year, I think when Huey Long proposed is Share The Wealth Plan, which was much more modest than that, we all thought he was crazy. Today, indirectly, you're having lesser subsidies... Not subsidies, compensation to people who no longer can work or are too old to work, have no skills. (00:15:48): That was unthinkable. I don't know of a single newspaper, except possibly the New York World... I exclude the Daily Mirror, the Communist paper... who hammered away at ideas like that. There must be a floor below which no human being should be allowed to drop. That's part of our tradition now, but... And it's not a tradition that was broken by most newspapers, but the change came, I would say, in spite of the newspapers of the South and of America. 95% of them again the president, against every president since then except General Eisenhower. They clobbered... The people who believed, Huey Long and a handful of others, they clobbered us partly, in great part I would say, because of this depression, which was our second preoccupation. (00:16:39): I made a footnote here that no other state leader... This is getting away from generalities, but no other state leader in the history of our country ever paid as much attention to the needs of the common man, and no man ever received in return the devoted following that Huey had in the rank and file of his fellow citizens. I'm sorry about these notes. I wrote them very [inaudible 00:17:15] and very hardly, and I [inaudible 00:17:19] stuck. (00:17:20): Now, the reason the newspapers in Louisiana and elsewhere oppose men like Huey Long is because unfortunately ownership of most of the newspapers... I'm speaking of the dailies. Most of the newspapers of the country are owned by men who are ultra conservative. They object to change. They're afraid of change. They think that change costs money. Change does cost money. I'm afraid too many of them have their hearts and their minds in the counting house rather than in the editor's office. (00:17:57): These people [inaudible 00:17:59] Mississippi. These people were sitting ducks for the bigot who came by. Huey Long was not a bigot in a racial sense. He was, of course, a tyrannical, overbearing, unforgetting boss, but he also was visionary. He saw what was ahead. He was brilliant and he had unbounded energy. Single handed, that man, whom I never supported and whose son I like, but that man single handed beat the newspapers of Louisiana to the ground. That's another problem, another danger that newspapers, particularly small town newspapers, have to face is the economic pressure that politicians can bring on you and [inaudible 00:18:49]. Your reward is that if you go along that the same political leaders are going to give to you. I don't believe one American newspaper today in 100, in 500 would accept bribery, however well it was concealed, but back in the depression, there were a good many all over the country who did that. (00:19:08): Then in the late '40s, we had other preoccupations, particularly one that we could do nothing about. That was the symbolic appearance in the European skies of a small dark object that got bigger and bigger. This was of course Adolf Hitler. So the preoccupation of the newspapers turned to the problem of survival of ourselves as a democratic nation, the problem of defeating an enemy and to let the people know why this was happening and what they could all do about it together. I think the highest service that newspapers of America have ever given to the government was what they did in concert, universally, during World War II. (00:20:04): When the war ended, we thought maybe things would quiet down, get better. Of course, that lasted for approximately four years, and we became journalists which were reporting wars rather than other matters that would have been more happy had we been able to do it to the exclusion of the war. Then the second preoccupation... The first and second preoccupation in these later years was with the rise of the negro militant especially in the South, but increasingly everywhere else. The antagonism of most of the South's press to this change and their shrill denouncement of the federal government for entering the picture didn't help the people who were leaving the status quo. (00:21:06): In fact, I think the opposition from some of the newspapers in this country sped the process of not yet equality of opportunity for first-class citizenship, but at least this nation has turned its head towards the sun and this is happening. I wish I could say that the South's newspapers played a part in this change, but with very few exceptions, the Southern press has done one of two things, remain quiet, don't write anything, don't say anything about what's happening here. "Maybe if we just keep our heads in the sands long enough, this boogie boogie will go away." Of course, it didn't happen that way. (00:21:53): Then the handful that did try to explain and allay fears about what equality for all Americans would do, we played a role, and it was a good role. I'm proud that my newspaper was one of the relative handful in the Deep South which ever had a good word to say about the Supreme Court's decision of what has happened since then or about the presidents who have served this country since then. It's not a pleasant thing to think about one's own profession in those terms. (00:22:37): Again, in the later years, there was a problem that all newspapers, all mass media had to deal with and that was how to meet this threat of loyal communism, not on the field of battle, but in the alleys and behind the scenes, where the communists operate. Just as they operated during the depression among the poverty stricken, they're busy at it again today. It's no exaggeration to say that underground, there's as much communist activity going on in the United States, and especially in the South, as there ever has been. (00:23:17): We've had to cope with that too. One other... I perhaps shouldn't even bring this up, but one other problem we've had to deal with is how to interpret or tell the American people of the lasting menace of the bomb. If you were going to New Orleans or New York or Shreveport anywhere else, from the behavior of the crowd and the people you saw and talked to, you wouldn't think that we were at war. This is the great and very difficult task of newspapers today to try to arouse people to the fact that we are in the gravest peril in our own history. (00:24:13): I think my wife... I'm going to blame it on her... put these notes together here. I can't figure what comes up next. Now, I would like as a newspaper man, who's been interested in his community and his state's and nation's affairs, to take a good deal of the credit of what happened in one little town, what has happened against the background of these problems, the little town in which I live, which I came to 30 years ago in September. It was a good little town. Even then it was an oasis, but then the leaders of that town and I discovered what could be done in concert if the newspaper and the leaders were to get together. (00:24:56): We were blessed I think the highest quality of leadership in Greenville, Mississippi, of any town in the South. So just in random and passing, this is the way one Southern newspaper, my own, tried to help in solving these problems that are national local, regional, as well as those of a newspaper man either through suggestions editorially or meeting with groups to decide these things. All of this I'm going to tell you now has been attained in Greenville long before the Supreme Court intervened or the federal government intervened and the rest. (00:25:34): We were the first town in the Deep South to have negro policemen with the power to arrest anybody. We were the first newspaper that gave a courtesy title to negro men and women. Very few ever do that now, and that was a very radical step to call a negro man mister and print a negro woman missus. This wife of a negro physician came in and told me one day that she was so pleased that this thing had happened, that, "After all, missus only meant married woman and wasn't marriage our right?" (00:26:15): We did that for both. We were the first in Mississippi to meet the specifications for continued federal aid to the schools by abolishing segregation and the like. We were the first town in Mississippi ever to have a negro on a governing board. There never has been... The investigators for the Civil Rights Commission came down and tried to find, disprove that what I told him was true, namely that there'd never been in the 30 years I'd been in Greenville any interference with a negro's right to vote. Up until three years ago, more than half the niggers who voted in Mississippi voted in our single county and town and did not and do not interfere with that right, which is practically the only one that separates the citizens of a democracy from the citizens of a dictatorship. (00:27:20): That, I think, is the challenge, the problem, the responsibility and the duty of every Southern newspaper is to try to keep these changing times peaceful times, to interpret, to tell the frightened leadership that the world's not going to drop to end just because of several hundred negro school children in Greenville High School [inaudible 00:27:48]. We did it, and nothing's happened. We were the first town in Mississippi to voluntarily desegregate the airport, the waiting room that little passenger trains came through and the bus station, all without incident. We are the only town of any consequence in Mississippi that has not had racial violence, men hurting each other. Every other town of any other size in Mississippi has had that, but we haven't had it in Greenville. (00:28:25): I repeat if this particular comment is on responsibility and the problem of those responsibilities can do. Our town is an oasis, a peaceful oasis, and I think it's going the stay that way from all indications and the reason, but, I repeat... And this is not self compliment. It was the action together of the press and the business and professional character leadership of our town that has done that. I know that I couldn't have accomplished any of these things by simply writing an editorial about them and not having the leadership back me up. (00:29:06): On the other hand, I know that the leadership in our town couldn't have stood up, as they do, for right and law-abiding behavior, had they not know that they had the full support of the newspaper. It's a beautiful example of teamwork when it happens. When it doesn't happen, one side or the other won't live up to the responsibility, you have Selma, for instance. You have for a long time a Jackson, Mississippi, where the press was indifferent to human rights or else didn't want to participate in anything because they were afraid of economic retaliation. That, to me, is the greatest problem domestically of our Southern newspapers, how to adjust themselves, or how the publisher adjusts himself and his thinking to these changing times. (00:30:04): I've told many of them time after time, it's like going in cold water. It's going to be miserable at first, but once you get acclimated to that water, you feel a lot better. I certainly think that my fellow citizens in Greenville, the great majority of them feel better because we have got behind us what most of the rest of Mississippi has yet to still face, these adjustments to civil rights legislation and the like. We can go fishing on Saturdays instead of worrying about whether there's going to be picket lines and a mob action and all that in our town. (00:30:42): For no other reason than I don't want to leave that town because we have learned how to live together and the white man has learned that the nigger is as deserving of equal treatment, of equal access to anything. By the way, we're the first town by a long way to integrate our public library and playground. I would say most other Mississippians think Greenville's crazy, but we think it's the other way around. (silence). (00:31:07): [inaudible 00:31:07] then the problems, the basic problems that affect newspapers, and in some instances, only Southern newspapers, the increasing cost of newspapers, the merger of newspapers, the replacement of heavy equipment, the survival against pressures by bigoted groups who want to destroy those papers, which will not go along. They're not going to be able to do it. They haven't even been able to put the very courageous Mississippi weekly newspaper owner, who has fought the Klan, the councils and everything else alone in her town, Lexington, Mississippi, for 12 years. She is still there and I pray God that she'll be there as long as she lives. (00:32:09): She's been an encouragement... I'm sure many of you read about it... to newspaper men everywhere. She proved that... A lot of us were afraid she couldn't prove... that a little poor weekly newspaper can survive despite the pressures brought by the town's leadership, which is not a good leadership. Now, because I realize I'm talking to English teachers and not to novelists, I want to bring in something that does fit in with what I said yesterday and what is happening, writing. Good writing and the stimulus to good writing comes almost always in time of stress turmoil, tragedy and self examination. (00:33:08): We've been going through just that today. The task of a newspaper is over and above racial matters... is to make the people understand better. As I said, the writer comes into his own in these times. I'd like to point out that out of the depression years came Grapes of Wrath. Out of those political years in Louisiana came All The King's Men, Robert Penn Warren's very thinly disguised novel, written about and around the character of Huey Long. Then these latter years, we've had come out of the post-war period novels of writing based on racial consideration. On the one hand, the beautiful novel and others to come by Harper Lee, that young woman in... Alabama isn't it? (00:34:11): That book, To Kill A Mockingbird, is as real, but it's looking at reality from a more pleasant side. It's as real as anything that has ever been written concerning the relationship of white man to black man. On the other hand, come out of these years is the writing of a man I think is pretty vile and bigoted himself, James... Yes, James Baldwin, of course, but those are two examples, one on one side of the street and one on the other, where people are working together. Writers are working with those people too to tell the story of what is happening and what should happen. (00:34:54): Significantly, the other preoccupation I have mentioned, atomic energy has produced no novel or any very significant books at all. It's not likely that we will see people writing against the atomic background unless were to become a survival novel for whoever's left after the bomb did fall, but except for that, except for this area of nuclear fiction, atomic energy and the like, each of these periods that I've mentioned has produced sometimes great literature and many times good literature. That indicates to me that, as we said yesterday, again, that the volcanoes, the earthquakes of life do have as one decent result, and the only decent result that I know of, is better writing a preoccupation with human values and with the need for change in our relationship with each other. (00:36:19): Now, finally, I'd like to tell you all of what I think is the responsibility and the problem because it is so difficult to meet that responsibility that a newspaper editor should think about his profession and himself as the editor. It's one to make men curious, to make men think, to make men ashamed, to make men proud and, lastly, to make men free... to help make them free. We can't do it all my ourselves. In that sense, it makes me think of my profession as almost a holy one. It can't rank with the men in the pulpit, but we certainly can rank with the teacher in the classroom. These are three great forces for change to the good in our nation, the editor's uneasy chair, the classroom and the novel. (00:37:38): I've got a cold coming on. Lastly, [inaudible 00:37:40] quoting one of the noblest men the South has ever produced, William Alexander Percy, who was a poet, philanthropist, had been a hero in World War I and a writer. He wrote this magnificent book that I referred to yesterday and I'd do it again because it is a classic. It is a spiritual classic and sheer poetry besides. William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee. He was my very dear friend. He brought us to Greenville or rather he sponsored us. The paper is ours, but he sponsored and backed us in every kind of way. He died the first year of the war. (00:38:23): I went to tell him goodbye. I was going to service with the Mississippi National Guard. That was about 13 months before Pearl Harbor. I went to tell him goodbye, and both of us were very unhappy over what was ahead. It was obvious by then that the world was going to set about again to try to destroy itself. I said just almost despairingly, "Well, what can we do? What can I do when I get back from the war?" He said, "You and I can't do anything on a grand scale. We can only try to live as men of good will in the community in which we do live because the sum total of the accomplishment in our community and the community like it, which will determine the nature of our government, the survival of democracy itself and a spiritual rebirth." (00:39:24): Because in the little towns, such as ours, you can reach people. I've seen this happen. You can live as a man of good will and help others live as men of good will under the stimulus of men like this... He was one of our great leaders... under the stimulus of the paper, the papers which work hand in glove with men like Will Percy and people who follow him. You get a sense of achievement that I don't believe any newspaper whose owners are thinking only in terms of the cash register or who are bigoted themselves or who are unconcerned or pretend to be unconcerned about social change and who only become dynamic when they're ready to denounce a proposal that a president has made or a senator has made or, back in the old days, Huey Long would have made. (00:40:16): We've got to change. The Southern newspapers have to change these attitudes, and they're doing it. I've seen a good many come around to reality and I'll say again that I'm proud that a newspaper, a small newspaper like mine has contributed to change and thus gone a few steps toward an eventual solution or if not solution, an amelioration of these terrible domestic clashes, differences that beset us today, fascist, differences, hatred that you may well be sure that the over two billion people in the world who are not watching very closely. (00:41:02): You all teach... I was a teacher once for a short time. You teach. Ordinarily, the English classroom is not a place to set people thinking about what's going on today. It makes people think and marvel at what man can do with his mind when we reach as far up as the first course in English literature, but the papers, the classroom, the pulpit, we three, have this responsibility, which cannot be assumed by the newspaper men alone. We have this responsibility to act as men of good will, to persuade others to do it, to endorse every decision, proposal made by a leadership for the public good. (00:41:55): Not enough newspapers do this today. I mentioned the financial instability of so many small papers, the overwhelming threat in small towns of organized antagonists to social change, who walk in and tell a small town merchant, "If you say something good about Medicare, about whatever it may be, we'll stop the advertising. You won't have any advertisement from us. That's that." (00:42:28): I'll end this and then I would like to have some discussion if we can. I apologize for my sore throat that's working up very nicely. But I'd rather live in a little town and try to be a man of good will than to live anywhere else. I'm doing that. I'm proud that my sons became newspaper men too. I'm proud that one of them is a Mississippi newspaper man who is trying to do his dead level best to help. (00:42:59): I think if we would use that slogan for if it's in the classroom or on the roster room or on my newspaper desk... If we try to do that, we can not only be happy, but we can very well change the moral face, the spiritual face of our country. I think newspapers are going to do that. Sorry about my voice. If anybody would like to ask something related to... Speaker 2 (00:43:30): Would you care to comment on your work with PM, the newspaper PM? Hodding Carter (00:43:38): Oh yeah. PM was the result of the meeting of two men at the suggestion of the psychiatrist they were both going to see, Marshall Field III, who was a multi, multimillionaire, and Ralph Ingersoll, a brilliant, fuzzy-thinking, but very persuasive journalist, who had been editor of the New Yorker and also of Life. He talked Marshall Field into putting about $9 million... You could probably take all the newspapers in Mississippi for that $9 million... to put $9 million up for the organization of a new newspaper that would be entirely different. (00:44:19): It would in fact be a daily magazine, no continuations, everything departmentalized, pictures more than text. The gimmick... He thought he was going to succeed. Of course, this broke him. It didn't break Marshall Field, but he'd invested $9 million, for which he got nothing back. The key to this whole thing is this newspaper would be free because it was not going to take advertising. I used to argue with that with him. I went to it after hearing him at Harvard one night... This was way back in 1940... tell about this plan. It entranced every newspaper man. Most of them are pretty romantic anyhow. (00:45:00): We said, "Work on a paper like that that's not fettered by advertisers." I'm glad the Democratic Times is fettered by advertisers. I wish we had more fetters than we do, but he said, "We can do it without advertising. We can be a crusading paper," and all that. In two years, that $9 million was gone, and PM had made no effect on the people of New York or the nation. The reason being... This is the thing if this happens to any newspaper man, that newspaper and himself is nearly dead in the eyes of the profession and in the eyes of democracy. (00:45:44): No newspaper should be allowed to continue to exist as a newspaper, to be allowed to be designated as a newspaper, if the kind of paper PM, which Marshall Fields spent $9 million on because a newspaper which just accepts money, money, money from outside sources, from whichever way it gets it, is a kept newspaper and has no value, has no place in this country. Yet, there's still some newspapers in Mississippi... I don't know about Louisiana anymore... who don't mind being kept. (00:46:22): That is an inner, inside the lodge problem of newspapers today, who try to clean out, weed out some way, through purchase or what not, those newspapers which do not live up to the responsibility of the press men, which does give us a special consideration among all of the enterprises in our nation. The freedom of the press shall not be abridged. You see these people distorting news, accepting subsidies or being influenced without people realizing it by other interests. Those kind of newspapers and the kind of men who edit them are a disgrace to American journalism. I only rejoice that there's so few of them. Speaker 3 (00:47:24): Mr. Carter, is this a [inaudible 00:47:24] of degree, a matter of degree- Hodding Carter (00:47:27): Just a minute. Speaker 3 (00:47:27): If it's a matter of degree, this doesn't stand. By virtue of the fact that both newspapers and magazines are a commercial operation, aren't they a necessity to that extent, depending upon the character of the people with whom they do business? [crosstalk 00:47:49] inhibited. Hodding Carter (00:47:50): Mrs. Roosevelt came up to Harvard when I was up there on this fellowship a long time ago, 25 years ago. I was the only one of the group... They pick 12 each year for a year's study there, whatever you want to do. I was the only one of the group that happened to own a newspaper. She found out very quickly. We had war talk. We had dinner at the house of the president. Of course, she was ribbing me in a way. She said to us all, "And especially you, Mr. Carter, because you're a publisher yourself, aren't you at the mercy of your advertising? Don't they help you out when you need help and aren't you indebted to them in return? Aren't you controlled by the advertisers?" (00:48:37): I said, "Mrs. Roosevelt, I respectfully want to tell you that I've been in this business... By that time it was 16 years. No, 10 years. I said, "I've never had a merchant [inaudible 00:48:53] a line of advertising for my paper. I've never had any of them try to influence me except in casual conversation, "This is what we think." I've never had a merchant come to me with an idea to which I was antagonistic. I've never either had the editorial written in his behalf or who took away his advertising because we didn't go along with him. No, I don't think... (00:49:20): After, on a practical matter, newspapers is three things. The editorial page is one thing that reflects opinion and may have influence on the body politic or whatever. Of course, news, but the third is a medium to bring the buyer and the seller together. Almost never in a large town... I know Greenville's a large town, but Mississippi, I've never had anybody try to pressure me. I've had politicians, but not merchants. I don't think they're going to do it because the merchant is simply looking for a way to offer his ware, you see. That's because we put out a good newspaper and have the circulation that he wants to reach whether he disagrees with every editorial that I write as long as we can bring results to him through our advertising column, he's not going to call that harsh, he couldn't afford to be. Speaker 3 (00:50:27): Isn't this in part, though, the character of Greenville? Isn't it in your knowledge, as it is within mine, somewhat different in many, many others [crosstalk 00:50:35]? Hodding Carter (00:50:35): Oh yeah, sure. Speaker 3 (00:50:35): You were talking about the character of the community. [inaudible 00:50:41] reputation for being different in this respect. Hodding Carter (00:50:46): It is different, but I don't think that in Columbus, Mississippi... Maybe not just Mississippi, a boycott against the paper would work, but I don't think of any other town in Mississippi larger than 35, 40,000 population, where the merchants are really going to try that. That's too patent. One man suggested to me he might take his ads away. I'd forgotten that. My first year in Greenville. He had a competing newspaper then that he took over. [inaudible 00:51:24]. He said he didn't like what I'd written. He said, "Put it this way, but I don't have to advertise with you. I just might do something about it." (00:51:34): It was only threats. I said, "I'll tell you what I will do for you. I'm not going to change this editorial policy in this matter, but I'm willing to give you one more helping hand. I'll give you a front-page space for the last request and threat to me. I'll write a free ad for you denouncing that threat and saying you're sorry." At the end of it, nobody else has ever tried to do it. Speaker 4 (00:51:34): Mr. Carter? Hodding Carter (00:51:34): Yes. Speaker 4 (00:52:15): In the Atlanta Constitution and in the New Orleans Tribune, and I suppose some other newspapers that I read, you occasionally come across the advertisements, [inaudible 00:52:19] in New Orleans and Mr. Maddox in Atlanta, which are editorials in an advertising section. What's your attitude on the ethics of this type of advertising? Hodding Carter (00:52:35): I think you see a lot of it, both supporting ideas that we don't like and others are supporting ideas or concepts that we do like. As long as it's made clear that this is an advertisement, then that advertiser can put anything in his ad he wants within the limits of decency, libel. He could put anything, so if this man wants to come out in an ad in my paper, let's say in favor of John Birch Society, as much as I dislike John Birch Society, I'd say I'd have to give him this space because otherwise, I'd be... For one reason, I would be in effect supporting the wrong kind of monopoly. We're a monopoly in Greenville, and the merchant has no other place to go. To tell him I will or I won't take his advertising on the basis that I do or do not like the copy, the story that you're trying to bring to the public yourself, if I did that, I think it'd be greatly unfair not to accept it. Speaker 5 (00:53:39): [inaudible 00:53:39]. Hodding Carter (00:53:39): Yes. Speaker 5 (00:53:54): What is the [inaudible 00:54:04] as a newspaper? What is the [inaudible 00:54:11] newspaper man that places them above the record [inaudible 00:54:16] leaving out preachers and doctors? Why should they be on the same level as a preacher, a doctor and a lawyer [inaudible 00:54:22]? Hodding Carter (00:54:28): I don't think we're on the same level with most of these. I think we're really above the level of a couple of them. I don't really know how to answer that though. A lot of this stuff we have to play by ear all the time. Somebody else? Yeah. Speaker 6 (00:54:50): How do your compare your particular concerns with those of P.D. East [inaudible 00:54:54] Mississippi? Hodding Carter (00:54:56): Yes. I know P.D. The principle indifference between us, professionally speaking, is PB never has shown a concern with putting out a newspaper. This little tract he would put actually with no ads, no local stories, no nothing. It was just what P.D. East thinks about everything, and he had some very fine thoughts. He was a brilliant writer, but he just didn't put out a newspaper. He could have gotten a great many subscribers scattered all over Mississippi, not in Petal, had he chosen another route, but he didn't. Now, he no longer has the Petal paper. It's closed down I think. Maybe somebody else has bought it. (00:55:37): He is a very brave man and though [inaudible 00:55:43]. I don't see how he survived as long as he did over there before he went to Texas. Sorry about this thing in my throat. It's really tripped me up this morning. I knew it was going to happen when I woke up. I enjoyed being with you again. Tonight, you might be interested to know that my wife is going to attend with me because she does the reading of small-print text. I lost the sight of one eye during the war, and then I had two retinal attachments two years ago. The doctors didn't think I'd ever be able to even get around with a seeing eye dog or a pole. (00:56:32): I can read, but not fine print or small print, so she'll be up there reading some of the letters that William Faulkner in his guise as Citizen wrote to the Oxford Eagle. [inaudible 00:56:47] delightful. It's so much more fascinating to hear what he had to say in respect to these issues that he dwelt on, to see how he wrote them than how an ordinary newspaper man would write them. It's like finding a diamond in 10 tons of slag or something. She will be doing, in case you wonder why before we get up with the... She will be with me. That's the only part of the talk I enjoy because I like to hear her reading. She does it to [inaudible 00:57:17] since I've had this eye difficulty. Speaker 7 (00:57:37): Are there any other questions? Speaker 8 (00:57:38): [inaudible 00:57:38] interpreting [inaudible 00:57:38]? Hodding Carter (00:57:37): Interpreting what he sees? It's a very difficult issue. Newspaper men are talking about it all the time. The news magazines, Time, Life, World Report, they do their own interpreting. Time is especially vulnerable, it seems to me, because Luce, the publisher, owner says very frankly, "This is my newspaper. Wherever it can be done, it's going to reflect my thinking. It's not going to be an objective... Time is something short of being objective in a good many fields. (00:58:12): It's very hard. One device if you have a large enough staff... You get your story about the Geneva Conference. What you get, that it was held, it was a failure and [inaudible 00:58:27]. Then the New York Times will have what they call a side bar. That's just newspaper slang. It'll be an interpretive story. "This is what's going on behind the scenes," or, "This is what it's really all about." I think it was a perfectly legitimate way to handle controversial matters, play them straight in the news column. [inaudible 00:58:49] people want to know what's going on. What's the reason for this? You write then in the side bar to the best of your ability, or to the best of the ability of whatever staff member is doing it, you try to tell the truth. (00:59:08): Huey Long used to call... Once he had a tax pass to get Louisiana newspapers, he called it a sinner lie tax, which would in fact license American newspapers. It wouldn't have stood up in court in any event. In fact, it didn't. It was thrown out by the United States Supreme Court, but that was licensed on the first side and Huey, furious because of [inaudible 00:59:36] articles that were written about him. (00:59:39): I wanted to tell you all one newspaper. Sorry, I'm trying to remember the details of it. Oh, have you got a few minutes just to listen to this story? It's a true one and it's funny in a way. I was editor of Stars and Stripes in Cairo. There's a headquarters in Tel Aviv. I hadn't gotten the staff together because they had to be all military. I hadn't the staff together and almost no place to print it, but a broken down shop in Cairo owned by an Italian, who had leased it to me. I guess we confiscated it. The military did. (01:00:30): The General Command of the American Force was there, General Brereton. Generals are very jealous of each other. He knew that over in North West Africa, General Eisenhower and his men had a Stars and Stripes because they had five times as many men as we had in the Middle East. He said, "I want a Stars and Stripes," just like a little baby asking for some candy or something. He said, "I want a Stars and Stripes. They've got one over in the North African theater." He says, "Put it out." (01:00:59): I said, "It'll take a few days." We did not have a news services, nowhere to get Associated Press, United Press or anything. We had combat correspondents on the staff wandering around on the various fronts, but the soldiers knew all about that and they were sick of war because they were in one. What they want is some news from home, and we didn't have any. The day before we were to go to press, it was going to be a pretty bad newspaper because there was no news. (01:01:28): The Egyptian Daily Mail, which is an English-language newspaper in Cairo, had a front-page story about four lines that said, "San Francisco, Floyd Hamilton, America's public enemy number one, was shot to death in San Francisco Bay in an escape attempt. Two companions were recaptured." I said, "This is what we need. This is what these GIs want to hear." I had two of my yank staffers, who'd just come in from somewhere, whip me... They were both newspaper men in civilian life. I said, "Let's put out a real killer [inaudible 01:02:03] of a news story because it's the only local story we'll have from the United States." (01:02:09): One of the newspaper men had mean... They looked like tiger eyes, and I can snarl like anything you ever saw. So we took his eyes and my snarl, and we put them together. Underneath it... We didn't say this was Floyd Hamilton, but we said... The eyes and the snarl...
Hodding Center speaks with Memories about Newspaper and publishing work.