Books, Arts & Manners: The Right Books

When Gene Pulliam died, in 1975, it was noted in many quarters that he had been the last of a breed— by which it seems to have been meant, among other things, that he was the last of the really big newspaper men to love newspapers for their own sake rather than as (or at least as well as) an integral part of some wider financial enterprise or as a means of entrée into the celebrity world of media politics. And yet, in addition to being a newspaper man, Pulliam was also a selfmade American entrepreneur, in which capacity he had belonged perhaps even more stereotypically to another subspecies now practically extinct. In Publisher: Gene Pulliam, Last of the Newspaper Titans (Jameson Books, 722 Columbus Street, Ottawa, Ill. 61350; $16.95), Russell Pulliam—an editorial writer for the Indianapolis News, flagship of his late grandfather’s newspaper properties—presents a well-written, interesting biography that succeeds in being at once objective and affectionate.

To the extent that Eugene C. Pulliam was an apt personification of that broadest class of Americans to whom real liberals point in justification of their despair of meaningful change ever being effected in this country, we may perhaps speak of him as having been a “conservative” of the garden variety. Measured according to less demanding standards, however, Pulliam stands forward as an unambivalent progressive, in this respect by no means untypical of his “breed” and a reminder therefore of the fact that many of our nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century “titans of industry” were not the reactionary monsters of the Marxist imagination but forward-looking, idealistic, and even rather naïve fellows.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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When Gene Pulliam died, in 1975, it was noted in many quarters that he had been the last of a breed— by which it seems to have been meant, among other things, that he was the last of the really big newspaper men to love newspapers for their own sake rather than as (or at least as well as) an integral part of some wider financial enterprise or as a means of entrée into the celebrity world of media politics. And yet, in addition to being a newspaper man, Pulliam was also a selfmade American entrepreneur, in which capacity he had belonged perhaps even more stereotypically to another subspecies now practically extinct. In Publisher: Gene Pulliam, Last of the Newspaper Titans (Jameson Books, 722 Columbus Street, Ottawa, Ill. 61350; $16.95), Russell Pulliam—an editorial writer for the Indianapolis News, flagship of his late grandfather’s newspaper properties—presents a well-written, interesting biography that succeeds in being at once objective and affectionate.

To the extent that Eugene C. Pulliam was an apt personification of that broadest class of Americans to whom real liberals point in justification of their despair of meaningful change ever being effected in this country, we may perhaps speak of him as having been a “conservative” of the garden variety. Measured according to less demanding standards, however, Pulliam stands forward as an unambivalent progressive, in this respect by no means untypical of his “breed” and a reminder therefore of the fact that many of our nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century “titans of industry” were not the reactionary monsters of the Marxist imagination but forward-looking, idealistic, and even rather naïve fellows.