Beyond Johnson
After a two-day rest-up at his mother's home in Okmulgee, Okla., NRAdministrator Johnson, accompanied by his ubiquitous secretary, Frances ("Robbie") Robinson, swept into Chicago last week to help settle the Stock Yard strike (see p. 9) and make one of his rip-roaring speeches at the Century of Progress. Neatly stacked in his room at the Drake Hotel upon his arrival were copies of the city's four leading newspapers: Col. William Franklin Knox's Daily News; William Randolph Hearst's American and Herald & Examiner; Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick's Tribune. General Johnson did not have to be told by any Chicagoan that the New Deal in general and NRA in particular had been given the longest and hardest editorial drubbing anywhere in the land by these four dailies. Col. McCormick was also chairman of the Press Freedom Committee of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association and. as such, had taken a loud and leading position against any NRA attempt to silence its critics.
Riffling through the papers in his hotel-room, General Johnson snorted with disgust when his eye fell upon a cartoon by Carey Orr on the Tribune's front page. It depicted a huge Brain Truster brandishing over a minute mother and two children the bludgeon of NRA PROHIBITIONS (see cut). Caption: "New York:--Mrs. Katherine Budd, a mother with two children to support, was informed that President Roosevelt had turned down her plea for permission to work in her home making artificial flowers because 'THE PURPOSES OF THE NRA CODE WOULD BE DEFEATED'."
That night General Johnson rolled to his feet in the Lagoon Theatre at the Century of Progress and, after his usual fiery defense of NRA. plunged wrathfully into the subject of the Freedom of the Press:
"I protest that it is not freedom of the press to suppress or garble important news which happens not to be in accord with some editorial policy or opinion. , . . That is domination of the press and when it is practiced by a great chain of newspapers under one-man control it becomes a public menace.-- ... I wish the newspapers would submit a code containing provisions which would leave elimination of such practices to their own self-governing bodies. They are the only industry that has declined to do so. ...
"In my opinion . . . the NRA retains the bulk of the public support. Why, in such a situation, we do not have an undivided press is beyond me. I have seen news garbled, suppressed and colored and I have seen able young men prostituting their talents in libelous and misleading stories pandered as news at the behest of opinionated bosses.
"The whole vast humanitarian surges for the elimination of the sweatshops and child labor are perverted in such a cartoon as appeared in yesterday's Tribune, which advertises a non-existent situation to become stark propaganda for the return of both sweatshops and child labor.
"It is a weariness of the heart and a grievous ailment of the stomach. If I did not know how little that editorial page has come to mean to the citizens of this district, I might feel desperate about it. As it is, it is a mistake to dignify that stewing pot by mentioning it." ^
* Possibly a reference to Mr. Hearst and his 22 dailies.
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