Herbert Bayard Swope

Herbert Bayard Swope Sr. was an American editor and journalist whose career ran through the hard-driving newspaper world of the early twentieth century. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on January 5, 1882, he was the youngest of four children of German immigrants Ida Cohn and Isaac Swope, a watchcase maker. His older brother Gerard Swope became a businessman and president of General Electric. Herbert chose newspapers, public affairs, games of nerve, and a wide social circle that included the people of the Algonquin Round Table.

Swope began early. At 18 he worked for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and, by his own account, was fired for spending too much time coaching football. He went on to the Chicago Tribune and the New York Herald, then joined the New York World in 1908. Most of his career was spent there. Lord Northcliffe of the London Daily Mail called him the “best reporter in America,” a phrase that fits the scale of Swope’s assignments and the force with which he pursued them.

He became the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1917 for “Inside the German Empire,” a series of articles written in the third year of the First World War. The articles became the basis for the book Inside the German Empire: In the Third Year of the War, co-authored with James W. Gerard. Swope later led the official press delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. In 1920, he became executive editor of the New York World, holding the role for nine years before resigning in 1929 after a disagreement with the paper’s owners.

As editor, Swope changed how newspapers presented opinion. In 1921 he established the first modern op-ed page after noticing that the page opposite the editorials had become, in his words, “a catchall for book reviews, society boilerplate, and obituaries.” He decided that “nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting,” and cleared the page for arguments and viewpoints. Under his editorship, the World also ran a 21-day crusade against the Ku Klux Klan in October 1921, work that helped the newspaper win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1922.

Swope’s life moved between journalism, government, and society. After the United States declared war on Germany, he became assistant to his friend Bernard Baruch of the War Industries Board. From 1942 to 1946 he served as personal consultant to the U.S. Secretary of War, and he was Baruch’s spokesman when Baruch was U.S. delegate to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. In 1934, Governor Herbert H. Lehman named him chairman of New York’s state racing commission, a post he held for 11 years. He was also known as a legendary poker player and was later inducted into the Croquet Hall of Fame.

At Land’s End in Sands Point, New York, and earlier in Great Neck, Swope moved among writers, actors, politicians, and public figures, including Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, David O. Selznick, and others. He died on June 20, 1958. His sharpest saying may be the one that sums up his working mind: “I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.” It is plain, unsentimental advice from a newspaperman who built his career on judgment, appetite, and nerve.