The Editorial Writer in Depression-Era Politics and Law: The St. Louis Star-Times’ Irving Brant

Abstract

The article examines the career of Irving Brant as editorial page director and writer for the St. Louis Star and its successor in 1932, the Star-Times. Brant's career as a journalist occupied most of the first half of the twentieth century, during which time he sought to revive interest in the newspaper editorial page, from what he and others perceived as the public's growing preference for news and features. Brant found encouragement during the 1930s as Americans, in the wake of the Great Depression, turned to their newspaper for interpretation as well as news. His greatest influence occurred during the constitutional crisis of 1936–37, when he challenged the United States Supreme Court's decisions overturning major parts of the New Deal economic recovery program. In doing so, Brant harnessed the Star-Times’ editorial page in support of a new and robust liberal ideology of national authority.

Notes

John A. Cockerill, “Some Phases of Contemporary Journalism,” Cosmopolitan, October 1892, 695. Other contemporary articles dealing with this theme include Maurice Minton, “How a Great Newspaper Is Made, Part V: The Policy of Newspapers, the Editorial Page, and the Editorial Writers,” The Illustrated America, October 29, 1892, 397; and Frank W. Scott, “Newspapers Since 1860,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 3, Part II, ed. William Peterfield Trent, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman, and Carl Van Doren (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1921), 319.

Will Irwin, “A Study of Journalism in Its Relation to the Public: The Voice of a Generation,” Collier's, July 29, 1911, 23. See also Melville E. Stone, “Gathering the News Events from All Over the World,” New York Times, September 18, 1911.

Richard Kemp, “The American Newspaper: The Policy of the Paper,” The Bookman, December 1904, 314.

Francis E. Leupp, “The Waning Power of the Press,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1910, 151.

Henry Watterson, “‘Marse Henry’: On the Profession of Journalism,” The Fourth Estate, January 21, 1922, 29. The Fourth Estate published the speech in 1911 and republished it in 1922.

Harry Elmer Barnes, review of Storm over the Constitution, by Irving Brant, American Journal of Sociology 42 (May 1937): 942.

Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 275, 368.

Felix Frankfurter, “Mr. Justice Cardozo and Public Law,” Columbia Law Review 39 (1939): 88.

William E. Leuchtenburg, “When the People Spoke, What Did They Say? The Election of 1936 and the Ackerman Thesis,” Yale Law Journal 108 (June 1999): 2077. See also William Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Michael Kazin, “Whatever Happened to the American Left?,” New York Times, September 25, 2011. See also Michael Kazin, American Dreamers, How the Left Changed the Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

Recent studies include James F. Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court and the Epic Battle over the New Deal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012); Jeff Shesol's Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); and John M. Ferren, Salt of the Earth, Conscience of the Court: The Story of Justice Wiley Rutledge (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Jeffrey Lynn Littlejohn, “‘The High Ideals He Always Cherished’: Irving Brant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Origins of the Madison Biography” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arkansas, 2002). Littlejohn's chief focus is on the influences that shaped Brant's monumental, six-volume biography of James Madison. He covers Brant's very early career as a journalist, but not his time with the St. Louis Star and its successor the St. Louis Star-Times. Littlejohn also provides very good coverage of the Court-packing legislation, including considerable attention to Brant's relationship with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Irving Brant to Roy Chapin, January 24, 1969. Irving Brant Papers (hereafter: IBP), Division of Manuscripts, Library of Congress.

“Notable Deaths,” The Annals of Iowa: A Historical Quarterly, 3rd Series, 12 (July 1920), 391. See also “Obituary,” Editor and Publisher, June 12, 1919, 33.

Editorial, “The Passing of David Brant,” Iowa City Republican, June 12, 1919. See also Editor and Publisher, August 14, 1919, 12. Shortly after David Brant's death, Archer Brant, his other son, and Jerry Plumb purchased the Republican, taking all rights of David Brant and Sons.

The Register became the Des Moines Register and Tribune in 1916.

Irving Brant, “Homes for Landless Iowa Farm Boys Is Leigh Hunt's Plan,” Des Moines Register and Leader, October 26, 1915, IBP.

H. C. Schweikert, “Book Reviews in the St. Louis Newspapers,” The Step Ladder, April 1921, 70. The Star appreciated Hazeldean's literary skills and gave her two columns a week when other local papers offered readers only one.

Oswald Garrison Villard, The Disappearing Daily, Chapters in American Newspaper Evolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944), 119–120.

Roberts was the Star's third owner since 1888, when it began daily publication as the St. Louis Star-Sayings. See “The St. Louis Star-Sayings,” Art in Advertising: An Illustrated Monthly for Business Men, May 1894, 104.

Advertisement, “Is the Newspaper Situation Shifting in St. Louis?,” Printers’ Ink, May 13, 1915, 94.

“The St. Louis Star,” Reedy's Mirror, March 22, 1918, 181.

Ira Berkow, Red: A Biography of Red Smith, The Life and Times of a Great American Writer (New York: Times Books, 1986), 35.

Joseph Adams to Joseph Pulitzer Jr., September 23, 1922. Joseph Pulitzer Papers (hereafter: JPP), Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.

Joseph Pulitzer Jr. to F. D. White, May 22, 1922, JPP. Also, A. G. Lincoln to Joseph Pulitzer Jr., August 25, 1931, JPP.

Berkow, Red, 35.

Irving Brant to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, October 1, 1941, IBP. This letter is in the form of a “Memorandum for Captain Roosevelt.”

Frank Taylor Jr., quoted in “Students Hear Star's Editor F. W. Taylor of St. Louis,” Columbian Evening Missourian, October 30, 1922.

Irving Brant, “Snap Judgment, Based on Few Facts, Fault of Many Editors,” Editor and Publisher, July 9, 1921, 9, IBP.

“Brant Writes Weekly War Analysis,” Editor and Publisher, October 5, 1918, 19. This was a feature that Brant began when he was with the Register, and he continued to do so when he arrived at the Star.

“Advertisement,” Hayti Herald, May 23, 1918. The Star advertised that it had “The Greatest War News Service,” noting that it published daily dispatches gathered by battle-hardened correspondents of United Press and International News and relayed by the London Times Cable to newspapers in the United States.

See Star-Chronicle Pub. Co. v. New York Evening Post, Inc., and David Lawrence, 256 Fed. 435 (1919). The case provides an insight into the developing method of newspaper syndication. Suffice it to say that the Evening Post and Lawrence sought to sign an exclusive contract for these reports with the Post-Dispatch, which would have abrogated the Star Company's contract. The Court found in favor of the Star Company.

David Lawrence to Woodrow Wilson, October 13, 1918, Edward Mandell House Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Library, Yale University.

Lawrence pointed out that during September and October 1918, Wilson's political opponents launched clubs to promote a policy toward Germany of unconditional surrender. See David Lawrence, The True Story of Woodrow Wilson (New York: George H. Doran, 1924), 239.

Irving Brant, “Allies, via Italy and Serbia, Can Pour Millions of Soldiers over the German-Bohemian Frontier,” St. Louis Star, October 20, 1918, IBP.

Irving Brant, “The Passing of President Wilson,” St. Louis Star, March 3, 1921, IBP.

Irving Brant, “The People for It: A Western View That Republicans Will Fail if They Oppose League,” New York Times, March 5, 1919.

Littlejohn, “The High Ideals,” 14–16.

Irving Brant, “The Cabinet and Reconstruction,” St. Louis Star, February 24, 1921, IBP.

Brant, “The Passing of President Wilson.”

Irving Brant, “The Flight of the Tax-Dodgers,” St. Louis Star, January 23, 1923, IBP.

Irving Brant, “Gilded Fifth Avenue Seen as Symbol of America's Spending Age,” Editor and Publisher, September 11, 1926, 10, IBP.

Irving Brant, “The Present-Day Editorial Page,” Address, May 1933, IBP.

Brant, “Snap Judgment,” Editor and Publisher. The article was based on a speech Brant delivered at the University of Missouri. “Pays Tribute to Graduate University,” Columbian Evening Missourian, May 27, 1921. Brant urged newspapers with large staffs to assign work according to each writer's “special fitness for the subject.” It was an “absurd idea,” he said, “that the leading editorial should always be written by the chief editorial writer.” Brant considered his suggestions aspirations “toward something more than the mere business of getting out a newspaper for profit.”

Brant, “Snap Judgment.”

Ibid.

Irving Brant to Elzey Roberts, July 6, 1923, IBP; Irving Brant to James Wright Brown, July 23, 1923, IBP.

Elzey Roberts to Irving Brant, July 9, 1923, IBP.

Brant to Roberts, July 6, 1923.

O. K. Bovard to Joseph Pulitzer Jr., August 4, 1927, JPP. The reference is to a conversation Bovard, the Post-Dispatch's editor, had with his copy editor, a former employee of the Star, who remained in touch with employees of the paper.

Several months before Brant left, John C. Roberts, in need of cash to meet operating expenses, sold a half interest in the paper to Frank P. Glass, the distinguished Southern newspaperman and publisher of the Birmingham News. The agreement also called for Glass to take responsibility for the Star's editorial page. “Seven Super Pens,” Everybody's Magazine, March 1916, 360. Brant recognized the change amounted to a demotion. Brant insisted it played no part in his decision to leave the Star. Irving Brant to Elzey Roberts, July 6, 1923, IBP. Glass's experience proved unsatisfactory. By the time Brant returned, Elzey assured Brant of the Star's severed relationship with Glass. Elzey Roberts to Brant, January 6, 1930, IBP.

Irving Brant to Marlen Pew, May 19, 1931, IBP.

Richard H. Waldo to Irving Brant, July 29, 1933, IBP.

Irving Brant, “Q's and A's on Finance,” St. Louis Star-Times, April 22, 1933, IBP.

Irving Brant to Critchell Rimington, Esq., August 1, 1933, IBP.

Irving Brant, Dollars and Sense: Questions and Answers in Finance (New York: John Day, 1933), 165.

Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 US 495 (1935).

Irving Brant to Benjamin Cardozo, November 30, 1935, IBP.

Brant's first contact with Stone came about after he made reference, in an editorial, to Stone's 1934 address on the legal profession at the University of Michigan. Stone thanked Brant and said his was the “only comment he saw of [it] in any newspaper.” Harlan Fiske Stone to Irving Brant, January 7, 1936, IBP. On Stone's Michigan address, and other relations with Brant, see Alpheus Thomas Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (New York: Viking, 1956), 378.

Stone to Brant, January 7, 1936, IBP.

Irving Brant to Felix Frankfurter, June 24, 1935, IBP.

Felix Frankfurter to Irving Brant, June 5, 1937, IBP.

Irving Brant to Edward Corwin, August 6, 1936, IBP.

Irving Brant, “Back to the Constitution,” St. Louis Star-Times, August 31, 1936. This editorial was not part of Brant's Library of Congress manuscript collection. However, since it appeared a few weeks after Brant acknowledged reading Corwin's study, it seems safe to assume he wrote it.

Irving Brant, “Justice Stone's Masterly Dissent,” St. Louis Star-Times, January 8, 1936, IBP.

United States v. Butler, 297 US 1 (1936). The other conservatives who joined in the opinion were the Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and the Associate Justices Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, Pierce Butler, and George Sutherland.

Irving Brant, “A New Dred Scott Decision,” St. Louis Star-Times, January 7, 1936, IBP.

Irving Brant, “No Man's Land,” St. Louis Star-Times, June 4, 1936, IBP.

Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, 298 US 587 (1936).

Brant, “No Man's Land.”

Irving Brant, Storm over the Constitution: Democracy Turns to Federalism (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936), 120–121.

Ibid., 160.

Ibid., 56–57.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Irving Brant to David Laurance Chambers, April 28, 1936, Bobbs-Merrill Manuscripts (hereafter: BMM), Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

David Laurance Chambers to Charles Beard, May 8, 1936, BMM. Chambers thanked Beard for his review of Brant's manuscript, noting that it would be of “great help” in considering his work for publication.

David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows, eds., The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 401.

Brant to Chambers, May 21, 1936, BMM.

Howard Lee McBain, Dean of the Graduate Faculties and Ruggles Professor of Constitutional Law, Columbia University, issued a chilling warning about the Hoosac decision: “The Hoosac Mills case will live to torment the defenders of judicial supremacy long after the issue of farmers’ relief has become a historical episode. It may ultimately have more profound effect upon American institutional development than all of the New Deal experiments rolled into one.” McBain, “The Issue: Court or Congress?,” New York Times Magazine, January 19, 1936.

Brant, “No Man's Land.”

David Chambers to Irving Brant, June 1, 1936, BMM.

Chambers to Brant, June 1, 1936, BMM.

Irving Brant to Angus Cameron, September 15, 1936, BMM.

Brant to Chambers, September 21, 1936, BMM.

Brant to Chambers, April 28, 1936, BMM.

Irving Brant to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, November 18, 1932, IBP.

Henry Wallace, “Introduction,” in Brant, Storm, xv–xvi.

Henry Wallace to Irving Brant, March 14, 1936, IBP. Wallace appended a note identifying Stone as one of the two people who had praised Brant's work. Brant urged Wallace to express his own views of the Constitution. Brant to Wallace, March 17, 1936, IBP. Wallace declined. He said it would defeat the purpose of explaining Brant's position. Wallace to Brant, March 23, 1936, IBP. Wallace was completing his study of the crisis, but coming to it from the broader standpoint of defending the fundamental viability of cooperative planning along the lines of the NRA. Henry Wallace, Whose Constitution: An Inquiry into the General Welfare (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936).

Brant, Storm, 198–207.

David Lawrence, Nine Honest Men (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 85.

Drew Pearson to Irving Brant, June 24, 1936, BMM. See Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, The Nine Old Men (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1936).

Frankfurter to Brant, June 5, 1937.

Fred Rodell, “Storm over the Constitution,” Columbia Law Review 37 (March 1937): 508.

Harlan Fiske Stone to Irving Brant, July 19, 1936, IBP.

Irving Dilliard, “Constitutional Debate Takes No Holiday,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 12, 1936. Brandeis referred to Dilliard as someone he and Frankfurter admired. Louis Brandeis to Elizabeth Brandeis Rauchenbush, January 25, 1937, in Letters of Louis Brandeis, vol. 5 (1921–1941) Elder Statesman, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978), 585.

John Corbin, “The President, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court,” New York Times, July 19, 1936.

Isabel Paterson, “Books and Things,” New York Herald Tribune, July 6, 1936.

Irving Brant to Stephen T. Early, July 3, 1936, IBP. See also Irving Brant to David Chambers, July 3, 1936, BMM.

Irving Brant to Rexford Tugwell, August 13, 1936, IBP.

Brant went so far as to propose that Bobbs-Merrill ask Ohio's conservative Republican Senator Robert A. Taft to attack the book. Irving Brant to Angus Cameron, September 7, 1936, BMM. The assistant editor, Angus Cameron, said he would inquire, but that he knew the young Taft to be “thickheaded.” Cameron to Brant, September 12, 1936, BMM.

Irving Brant to Angus Cameron, August 29, 1936, BMM.

NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 US 1 (1937). Brant cautioned that the decision was not entirely clear about whether the Court would consider the National Labor Relations Board's rulings as binding on the judiciary. He wrote that it might still require an entirely liberal court to recognize the judiciary's responsibility in this regard. Irving Brant, “A Big Day in Court,” St. Louis Star-Times, November 9, 1937, IBP.

A wide literature field is available on the Court-packing controversy. A good account is William Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn.

Shesol, Supreme Power, 330, 406. Shesol portrays Brant as something of an intermediary between Roosevelt and Stone. See also Irving Brant to Thomas Corcoran, April 22, 1937; and Irving Brant to Harlan Fiske Stone, April 15, 1937, IBP.

See Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone, 454.

Brant to Villard, May 5, 1937.

Irving Brant to Thomas Corcoran, February 18, 1937, IBP.

After he left the Star-Times, however, Brant stayed in the business a few years more. He joined the editorial staff of the Chicago Sun, a paper founded by the department store heir Marshall Field II in the early 1940s to provide a liberal alternative to the Chicago Tribune. By this time, Brant was also well into the writing of a multivolume biography of James Madison, a project originally suggested to him by Bobbs-Merrill's David Chambers. Irving Brant to David Chambers, April 22, 1937, IBP. As for the Star-Times, Elzey Roberts remained in touch with Brant periodically during the 1940s in an effort to locate a suitable replacement for him. At the same time, the paper faced mounting labor costs and declining revenues, forcing Roberts in 1951 to sell it to the Post-Dispatch.

Irving Brant to David Chambers, July 1, 1936, BMM.

Brant to Chambers, July 1, 1936. The historian and sociologist Harry Elmer Barnes, who in the 1930s worked in the editorial department of the New York World-Telegram, a Scripps-Howard newspaper, wrote a favorable review of Storm that appeared in an academic journal rather than a Scripps-Howard paper. See note 6.

Irving Brant, “Flop of the Post-Dispatch,” St. Louis Star-Times, October 2, 1936, IBP. Brandeis referred to Brant as a “very intelligent” editor, who “puts [the Post-Dispatch] to shame.” Brandeis to Rauchenbush, January 25, 1937. Letters of Louis Brandeis. Villard told Brant that Joseph Pulitzer's namesake had not abandoned his father's “newspaper ideals” and “liberal tradition” but had simply become more conservative. Villard, Disappearing Daily, 124–125.

Irving Brant to Jay Darling, April 3, 1934, IBP. Darling was a colleague of Brant's when they were on the Des Moines Register and Tribune. Darling was the paper's cartoonist.

Jay Darling to Irving Brant, April 7, 1934, IBP. Brant placed a handwritten note at the bottom of the letter saying that Roberts had a change of mind regarding Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Irving Brant to Oswald Garrison Villard, May 5, 1937, IBP.

Irving Brant, “The Press and Public Affairs: Newspapers Weighed, Found Wanting; with the Nation in a Precarious Period,” Quill, July 1937, 4, IBP.

Oswald Garrison Villard to Irving Brant, July 31, 1943, IBP.

Villard, Disappearing Daily, 8. See also Silas Bent, “Personal Journalists,” Saturday Review of Literature, December 12, 1936, 3.

Silas Bent, “Personal Journalists,” Saturday Review of Literature, December 12, 1936, 3. After the New York World folded in 1931, Walter Lippmann joined the New York Herald Tribune, where he gained public fame with his “Today and Tomorrow” column; Henry Louis Mencken began writing a signed column for the Baltimore Sun around 1910, after having earlier been its reporter and editorial writer; and David Lawrence, who was writing editorials for New York Evening Post during the 1910s, founded United States Daily in 1926. Though it failed, Lawrence tried again in 1933 with United States News, which succeeded and later became US News and World Report.