Salesman of Death

A plump, well-fed gentleman in steel-rimmed spectacles set out from Iowa last autumn to sell blood & death to the U. S. Press. With his brief case full of fire, smoke, steel, mud, gore, torn limbs and burnt flesh he visited nearly every State in the Union, leaving behind a trail of agony and chaos. Last week he rode into Louisville, and before he rode out again he had left his mark on the Courier-Journal--50th newspaper to buy his photographs of the World War. Sweeping on through Washington, Wheeling, Erie, New Haven, he paused in Manhattan to contemplate the happy facts that 56 major newspapers in the U. S. and Canada were his debtors, and about 13,000,000 men, women & children were gazing spellbound at his grisly wares.

The salesman was Henry Peter Martin Jr., syndicate manager of the Des Moines Register & Tribune. He had been immersed in his usual work of selling comic strips and advice on baby-care one day last summer when Gardner Cowles Jr. (Harvard 1925), son of the paper's owner, called him in. Young Editor Cowles was looking through a copy of The First World War, a photographic history edited by Laurence Stallings and just published by Simon & Schuster (TIME, July 31). It showed recruits in camp, soldiers in battle, soldiers wounded, maimed, dead; crowds at home, prisoners being executed, troop ships sinking. Gardner Cowles, who had been too young to go to War, was awestruck. Said he: "What would you think of this as a Sunday feature?" Manager Martin, who had been in the War, blinked through his spectacles, said "I think it would be great."

Mr. Martin went to Manhattan, persuaded Simon & Schuster to sell him newspaper rights to the 513 pictures. The Register & Tribune started it at home. Circulation zoomed while book sales held up strong. Two months later Salesman Martin sold the Detroit News; next, the Boston Globe. The three papers combined reported an 80,000 increase in circulation, held it after the series ended. The Washington Star, Baltimore Sun, and the Philadelphia Bulletin fell into line. William Randolph Hearst began to feel the pinch, quickly ordered the syndicate series for all his papers in the 13 cities still open. Scripps-Howard rushed in, grabbed the pictures for 19 cities.

The craze was on. Circulation gains (claimed) ranged from 5,000 to 100,000 for Hearst's New York American and Chicago Herald & Examiner. No single feature had ever worked such wonders. Hopping mad because Hearst's Herex had snapped up the franchise for Chicago, Col. William Franklin ("Frank") Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, had his editors whip together what War pictures they could find, splashed out a rotogravure supplement of his own called "Raw War!" In Boston both the Herald and the Advertiser rushed out with their own pictures, because the Globe had the Stallings series.* The Washington Post did likewise. In Manhattan, Hearst's American exhausted the Stallings supply, carried on with an inferior "Floyd Gibbons Collection," stills from the cinema Forgotten Men, finally offered readers $3 apiece for usable prints. Meanwhile the Des Moines Register & Tribune Syndicate raked in the money, and Publishers Simon & Schuster made more on syndicate royalties than on the total sale of the book (30,000 copies at $3.50, 62,000 copies to Book of the Month Club).

The popularity of gruesome War photographs was a phenomenon of journalism hard to explain. The pictures were not new. Readers unable to afford The First World War, or the smaller but gorier The Horror of It (TIME, March 21, 1932) could have seen substantially the same scenes in many a cinema, e. g. The Somme, Behind the German Lines, The Big Drive. Blown up to newspaper size and engraved on coarse screen cuts, the pictures were even less distinct than in the book, and at best very few of the photographs were real stomach-turners.

*But the genteel Boston Transcript dug up and printed a collection of cartoons depicting "the brighter side" of the War, with the title " 'C'est la Guerre!'--That Doughboys Remember with a Smile."

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