The Press: Fireless Firebrand

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When a lawyer named Carlton Cole Magee bought the Albuquerque morning Journal from Albert Bacon Fall and friends in 1920, Senator Fall with childish candor told him most of New Mexico's political secrets, incidentally confessed he was broke. With this information Lawyer Magee turned crusader, fought the Fall machine tooth & nail, was jailed for libel and mauled by political thugs, finally forced to sell his paper. It was a Magee telegram to Senator Thomas James Walsh concerning Fall's finances that made Teapot Dome a criminal case. By 1923 another Magee paper, the State Tribune, was foundering and Edward Wyllis Scripps went to his rescue.

Scripps took the State Tribune into his chain, adopted Magee's motto, "Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way," made a lighthouse Scripps-Howard's emblem. Carl Magee, who was kept in charge, typified the crusading Scripps editor of the 19203, when the Scripps newspapers from coast to coast were dedicated to cleaning up corruption. Then one day Magee was knocked down and booted about a hotel lobby by a judge whom he had accused of corruption. Magee drew a revolver, boggled his aim, killed a boy who was trying to help him.

Acquitted of manslaughter, he was transferred to Oklahoma City to edit the Oklahoma News. But the shock of the killing had dimmed some of Crusader Magee's fire, and after the death of old E. W., the Scripps beacon no longer shone so brightly. Editor Magee quit in 1933 to market a parking meter he had invented.

In 1937 a rich Oklahoma City utilitarian named Hubert Hudson sent him into the fertile, feudal Rio Grande Valley to run three newspapers, the Brownsville Herald, Valley Star (at Harlingen) and Monitor (at Me Allen). When he gave nationwide publicity to a King Ranch mystery, the famed Blanton case (TIME, Dec. 7, 1936), South Texas thought Magee would "bust the Valley wide open." But soon he turned to more prosaic crusades in which his backer was interested: stabilization of the $125,000,000 citrus industry, improvement of the water supply. He became a worker for the Methodist Church.

Last week Carl Magee was in Oklahoma City again, having resigned from the three papers and left the Valley for good. He explained that he was looking over his interests in Dual Parking Meter Co., would soon leave for New Mexico to write a book on Teapot Dome. At reports that he would revive the Oklahoma News (which Scripps-Howard let die last month), ex-Firebrand Carl Magee only shook his head.