One Hundred Great Years - The Story Of The Times Picayune From Its Founding To 1940 The Story of the Times Picayune from Its Founding to 1940

Sreat The tory of the T imes- Picayune its bunding to 1940 THOMAS EWING DABNEY LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY Baton ouge - PRESS - tyuisiana 1944 COPYRIGHT, 1944, BY LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS DEDICATION There always have been, there always will be editors and writers whose names shed luster on a news paper, and the history of the Times-Picayune con tains many to whom this booJ could be dedicated. But they are only incidental to its life the radiant complexion, so to speajf while the anonymous uforkr ers are its red blood corpuscles, for they are its daily contacts, its careful recorders whose sincerity and truth give enduring and increasing authority to that which must be created anew every day. I therefore inscribe this booJ f not to the stars but to the firma ment which contains the stars, the men and women unknown to fame who have carried the Times-Picayune to greatness during the past hundred years, and are carrying it and will carry it to a still larger service during the next hundred. flUG 4 1944 Preface President Leonard K. Nicholson of the Times-Picayune Publish ing Company in June, 1936, gave me the assignment to compile the editorial matter for a special edition which the Times-Picayune would issue on January 25 of the next year in commemoration of its hundredth anniversary It was an assignment right down my alley, for I had long been a student of Louisiana history. For that 268-page issue I wrote 240 columns, signed and unsigned, and directed the preparation of nearly 300 more columns When I had finished, I realized that I had but outlined the story of the largest and most creative century in the history of my country, my state, and my community. Hence this book, which isan assignment I gave myself in order to bring that hundred years into sharper focus, and to create a con nected narrative with evaluating emphasis on the human impli cations reflected in the papers increasing columns. The work if you wish to call it that first called for a reading of every issue, from the first to the present time. When I had done that I found I had just begun for, how can one tell the history of a newspaper without telling the history of its community and how can one understand the history of a city without knowing the history of the state and how can one comprehend the history of a state without knowing the history of the country and of what value is the history of a country unless it is cogged with the world developments which gave it motivation as well as background The task consumed nearly five years of intensive work reading, making notes, writing, and rewriting to say nothing of the months of revision. The material for my shaping contains some of the most interest vii viii PREFACE ing, most sensational, and most important developments in our countrys history and the growth of the newspaper exemplifies the value of a free press to the human cause. Those who hurriedly scan the headlines do not realize that they are enjoying the privilege of first sources when the present Is evaluated by the future. My study of the daily recordings of a century, revealing as they do the motives and understandings of the men and women who brought forth the eventuations, has given me a larger appreciation of a newspapers value to history, I have, for instance, an entirely different conception of the War Between the States than the school books taught, as a result of the reports in theDaily Picayune. The historian in writing social history should give more attention to newspapers than to state documents and eco nomic summations for the newspaper columns, whatever their errors of fact or conclusion, reflect the beliefs and the interests and the emotional content of the times, and these are the road which humanity has always followed in the long and painful progress up from the primordial ooze...