Drone's Progress

"I have an income of between $10,000 and $20,000 a year. I spend all of it. I produce nothing--am doing no work. I (the type) can keep on doing this all my life unless the present social system is changed. . . . The work of the working people, and nothing else, produces the wealth which by some hocus-pocus arrangement is transferred to me, leaving them bare. While they support me in splendid style, what do I do for them? . . . I am not aware of doing anything."

That is an excerpt from an essay entitled "Confessions of a Drone," written in 1906. It is included in Pamphlet No. 45 in the Pocket Library of Socialism. It is to be found on most public library shelves, hard by the writings of Karl Marx. The author was Joseph Medill Patterson, grandson of the late great Joseph Medill, founder of the Chicago Tribune. Joseph Patterson was then 27 years old, five years out of Yale, four years married, doing nothing.

Last week Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson, 55, returned to Manhattan from a well-earned vacation in Europe. He could not possibly call himself a drone. His income was many times more than $10,000 a year, but he got it by no hocuspocus. He no longer wrote Socialist tracts, but he was doing more in behalf of the working people than his tracts ever accomplished. All of which was due to the fact that Joseph Patterson was editor & publisher of the newspaper with the largest circulation in the land, the tabloid New York Daily News, which last year earned $3,300,000 profit.

Last week one of Editor Patterson's journalistic enterprises reached a new anecdotal high. It was a new daily feature called "The Doctor Tells The Story." It was Editor Patterson's own product. It came to him last month in a letter from Dr. William Edmund Aughinbaugh. elderly physician, lawyer, author, explorer, who worked on plagues in India, Burma, Arabia, China, Latin America, many another far-flung frontier. Dr. Aughinbaugh proposed that the News print a daily anecdote from his long and adventurous career. Editor Patterson liked the idea, decided to try it. For a month the strip ran along with fairly typical reminiscences of a traveled medical man. Then, last week, it burst out with an extraordinary tale of how Burma's White Elephant was fed, during the rule of King Thebaw. Excerpts:

"Every morning the White Elephant had for his breakfast milk from the breasts of twenty-four women, who knelt naked before him . . . only mothers of recently born children. . . . Dr. O'Malley, surgeon to King Thebaw [was] always required to resuscitate and revive the ones making this sacrifice. The White Elephant walked sedately behind the women and put his trunk over their shoulders. Most of them collapsed after the ordeal, for the White Elephant was very exacting. Beside Dr. O'Malley walked a servant bearing a tray with numerous hypodermics of strychnine, nitroglycerine and other heart stimulants, and the doctor needed them all. When the British captured Burma they stopped this performance."

But titillating the Daily News' 1,480,000 readers with a story of a suckling elephant is by no means the full measure of Editor Patterson's capacity as a newspaper publisher. He can point with pride to a first-rate layout of picture pages, thoroughgoing and breezy coverage of city news, sports and the Broadway scene, an irreducible minimum of foreign news (as few as one or two stories a day), a profusion of spry comics and features, and the strangest boast ever made by a tabloid: "THE MOST TALKED-ABOUT EDITORIAL PAGE IN NEW YORK."

The editorials, sometimes banged out on a typewriter by Editor Patterson, sometimes by his only editorial writer, Reuben Maury, are Mr. Patterson's substitute for his youthful reform pamphlets. Simple, often monosyllabic, strongly liberal, they might well enrage Publisher Patterson's Red-baiting cousin "Bertie" McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. The News was the first newspaper in Manhattan to adopt a five-day week, first to fly the Blue Eagle. It roundly flayed the Press at large for pleading "freedom of the press" as a defense against an NRA newspaper code. It scolded its brothers for resisting Child Labor laws against newsboys and openly stated that it hoped to eliminate all newsboys from its own circulation system. It regularly whangs New York's archaic divorce laws and the breach of promise racket. It promised not to heckle President Roosevelt for one year following his inauguration, has since March 4, 1934 continued to support him by choice.

Especially alert is Editor Patterson to the usefulness of features--love advice, health and beauty hints, dress patterns, quilt patterns, child care, "How He Proposed," "Classroom Boners," "Embarrassing Moments," "Minute Mysteries," etc., etc. A single issue of the News contains about 30 of them. One such is the News' "eminent astrologer," Wynn (Sidney K. Bennett, who rates himself above the late Evangeline Adams), with daily advice such as: ". . . Be sure all your policies are for the good of others in addition to yourself and go ahead definitely toward a worthy goal! Avoid temper." Wynn also offered a free "personal horoscope" to all comers. Last December that offer was discontinued. Readers set up such a howl that the News renewed the offer last month.

Best feature idea Editor Patterson ever had was to fatten the size of the Sunday comic section. Because he felt that the encroachment of comic advertising had made the real funny strips too small, he ordered the section increased from eight to 16 pages last autumn. He reckoned that the addition might bring a 50,000 circulation gain. Instead the Sunday circulation, which then averaged 2,000,000, leaped enormously every Sunday until last month when it hit 2,313,000, a gain of more than 500,000 over last spring. Advertising, daily and Sunday, also gained enormously: for the first three months of the year, 590,000 lines ahead of 1933. The Sunday News, price 5-c-, sometimes runs to 196 pages.

Not only a fat comic section and well-read editorials distinguish the Sunday News. Its book reviews are written by Editor Patterson's attractive, air-minded daughter Alicia who, like her father, is honestly anxious not to be a drone.

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