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THE DAILY NEBRASKAN
Thursday, March 7, 1940
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The Clue fhcatf Trapped
-he E-3eirs o Huey Long
ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 7, 1939, t hot
tip came in to the city desk of the New
Orleans States, evening newspaper sister of the
famous Times-Picayune.
When a truck drove up before a half-built house
iu the suburbs and began unloading window sash,
the States' photographer was hiding behind a
hedge. The picture he got touched off a string of
giant firecrackers that blew hundreds of Louisiana
politicos out of the public trough.
For the license plate proved that the truck be
longed to Louisiana State University and the half
built house belonged to the wife of a colonel on
the governor's staff. Just a drop in the bucket of
graft that the political heirs of Huey Long had
been passing around for years. But the first case
that could be proved libelproof, airtight.
That night 64-year-old Jim Crown, the States'
fighting editor, sat down on his bed and sobbed
reaction from months without respite in the front
line editorial trenches. "At last we get a break!"
With the fuse once lit, the firecrackers kept pop
ping around the cowering Longs ters. Three men
committed suicide; more than 200 faced federal
and state indictments. It had been a great spree,
but thanks to the battling Picayune papers, it was
all over.
They're in the great American tradition, the dig
nified old Times-Picayune and the rip-roaring,
rough-and-tumble Ncv Orleans States. They have
a line behind them that reaches back to Ben
Franklin and Sam Adams and Tom Paine.
When Jim Crown strides around his office, dic
tating editorials at the top of his leather lungs,
Greeley and Dana keep step with him. Pulitzer and
Nast pound him on the back. And through him
William Lloyd Garrison speaks again: "I am in
earnest. I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I
will not retreat a single inch; and I w ill be heard!"
Courage is probably, next to truth, the greatest
quality that a newspaper can have. For the world
abounds in forces, actions, events, and people be
fore which neither man, nor newspaper, nor the
Newsmagazine, can be coldly objective. Silence,
indifference, genteel or amiable omissions are not
true impartiality they are just what the forces of
corruption or stupidity want, the broth in which
they thrive.
TIME has never believed that icy indifference or
"pure objectivity" is either possible or desirable in
news reporting. Any colorful, humanized story con
tains something of the mental attitudes and judg
ments of the men who wrote and edited it.
But over and above this is the sense of height
ened responsibility that characterizes these times,
as it has other periods of crisis. These days are big
with destiny for our country and the world. And
the Newsmagazine in this era has a deep and pe
culiar responsibility. It is, in
a sense, the national news
paper; it has the same obli
gation to all the people of
the U.S. that the best dailies
feci toward the people of
their cries. That obligation
means more than finding and
condemning the things that
are wrong. It also means
finding and supporting the
things that are right.
The world of right and wrong dresses in shades of
gray. The pepper-and-salt of ordinary human na
ture . . . the protective coloration of the rascal . . .
the unprepossessing garments that can hide a clean
white motive.
Studying that gray crowd-picture, penetrating
its disguises, throwing a searchlight here and an
X-ray there, is part of time's job. TIME queries its
reporters and correspondents again and again:
"What's behind this? Who's behind it? Give us the
background." TIME listens to people all kinds of
people, with all kinds of causes and crusades bal
ances their ideas against events, against knowledge,
horse sense, and plain old American morals.
And sometimes when every possible scrap of
fact, every line of expert and inexpert opinion is
on the table, TIME editors still miss the last train
home, trying to decide what's right, who's right,
and how to let the people know it.
Judgments arrived at this way are not infallible,
for nothing human is. But they are genuinely re
sponsible. Essential to people who share time's
attitudes stimulating to people who don't. And
backed by the courage of conviction.
This il one of a lerie of dvertiiemenra in
which the Editors of time hope to cive all the
readers of this nwspapcr a clearer picture of
the world of newt-gathering, newt-writing, and
newt-reading and the pan TIME playt in help
ing fou to grasp, measure, and use the history
of your lifetime at you live the ttory of your life.
! --THE
It'l not to easy as it sound.
TIME
WEEKLY NEWSMAGAZINE ' I
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