Panders

(5 of 7)

It was Tammen who built up for the Post its flamboyant pose as the big brother, sister, father, mother and benevolent uncle of all the inhabitants of "The League of Rocky Mountain and Plains states, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada— Arizona, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Montana and North and South Da-kota" (a favorite cant of the Post's which became clearly reflected in its circulation). It was surely Tammen who caused the Post's new building to be inscribed with this equivocal invitation: "O Justice! When Expelled From All Other Habitations Make This Thy Dwelling Place." It was Tammen who, when a writer in Collier's snickered at the legend, restrained Bonfils, who came in fuming about lawyers and a libel suit, by saying, "It's too late, Fred. I've wired our congratulations."

To the Post's credit it must be said that, whenever there were no upstart heads to bash, it diverted its enormous vigor and blinding red headlines to pushing much municipal, statewide and sectional development. It was as often opposed to as behind corrupt politics. It offered $25,000 for an influenza cure. It let a clergyman command it for a day. Though Mr. Bonfils became involved in oil scandals, nothing damaging has yet been proved against him. Labor has never liked the Post. In 1920 striking carmen wrecked the plant. Through it all, Publishers Tammen and Bonfils so trimmed their ship, so excited the populace —for which purpose they also owned a huge circus (the Sells-Floto)—that not even Publisher Hearst dared step in to try and filch some of their fat circulation, their monopoly-rate advertising.

In 1913, Publisher John C. Shaffer of the pedestrian Chicago Evening Post bought the sturdy but hard-hit Rocky Mountain News. How Bonfils, like Desperate Desmond, and Tammen, like a malicious cherub, must have gloated! It was an honest, quiet, sanctimonious lamb that came to the slaughter and the coyotes of the Post devoted their next 15 years to harrying Publisher Shaffer about his field until he should be ready to trot back to Chicago and leave them the undisputed newspaper overlords of the Colorado plains.

In 1925, H. H. Tammen died, leaving Fred G. Bonfils to fight on alone, Napoleon among the jackrabbits, for unquestioned empire. And in 1926 Publisher Shaffer of the Rocky Mountain News caved in. But his departure did not leave Napoleon all triumphant upon the plains. It merely ushered in a Wellington and an opportunity for Mr. Bonfils to retrieve his relative's classic loss at Waterloo.

The Wellington that appeared in Denver last Thanksgiving was as thoroughly modernized a figure as the Napoleon he had come to fight. Roy W. Howard is no ponderous exemplar of "The Invincibility of Character," but a well-tailored, brisk, sapient, middle-states cityman who has spent the last few years in Manhattan as chief executive of the string of newspapers on which he served an apprenticeship. When he went the rounds of the Denver business district it was to tell the citizens what he proposed to do, not to Bonfils, but for Denver.