The first Pulitzer winner

A legendary journalist retired to his mansion at 46 and played croquet

He invented the Op-Ed page, hired future Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz at $25 a week, and assembled a staff later called “one of the most remarkable gatherings of talent in journalism history.” In The Power Broker Robert Caro described him as a “Roman-nosed journalistic genius with a thatch of bright red hair and a big, swinging stride.” One journalist likened being hired by him to being “lifted bodily from hell into heaven.”

The Algonquin Round Table’s leading lights wrote for him by day and gathered at his poker table by night. His parties attracted everyone from Dorothy Parker and Humphrey Bogart to Harpo Marx and George Gershwin. H.L. Mencken was best man at his wedding. John Barrymore shared a flat with him.

Novels and Broadway shows, film scripts and memoirs, verse and polemic alike poured from his direct reports at the newspaper and the eager guests at his home: Public Opinion and A Preface to Morals, What Price Glory? and Show Boat, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, and, most famously, Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby. His salon was populated, beloved, and long recalled and depicted by a storied generation in American letters.

In his 30s and early 40s he was a leading light of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Then he disappeared into a grand baronage in his Sands Point mansion on Long Island. He said he was done being a hired man, but 30 years of PR work in the city and croquet by the Sound made a once meteoric career look merely unfulfilled. When the White House issued an official statement upon his death in 1958, he was already an increasingly obscure figure from a bygone era.

Much too important a personage
Herbert Bayard Swope was hired as a reporter at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1909 at age 27. When a subsequent generation of playwrights and screenwriters portrayed journalism’s halcyon anything-goes days on stage and screen in works like The Front Page, Libeled Lady, Nothing Sacred, and even Citizen Kane itself, they drew heavily from the most colorful real-life characters and best tall tales of Swope’s era. In his first years on the beat for the World he covered the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the sinking of the Titanic.

Swope in later years.

By the onset of World War I, Pulitzer was dead and the World was run by the press lord’s eldest son Ralph. “I want you to go to Germany,” young Pulitzer wrote Swope in 1914. The World’s correspondent immediately landed an exclusive interview with a U-boat captain who sank three 12,000-ton British cruisers off the coast of Holland in under an hour. Swope’s scoop and a brief but celebrated stint as World city editor raised his profile dramatically. When he prepared to return to Germany in 1916 he was granted an audience with President Wilson.

From Berlin Swope emptied out his notebook in a 19-part series that was instantly published in book form as Inside the German Empire. In June 1917 Swope was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for reporting. The prize came with a check for $1,000. “By the time the World’s special group had returned to New York” in 1919, one colleague later recalled, “it was clear to everybody in the office that Swope was much too important a personage ever to be city editor again.” He was 37.

Opposite the editorial
As the World’s first ever “executive editor,” Swope created the “opposite the editorial” or Op-Ed page. “Nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting,” he reasoned. Swope populated his creation with Algonquin Round Table mainstays like Heywood Broun, Franklin P. Adams, and Alexander Woollcott.

Broun sparked a firestorm with his columns on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. After Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell chaired an advisory committee that recommended carrying out the death penalty as originally sentenced by the court, fellow alumnus Broun wrote: “It is not every person who has a President of Harvard University throw the switch for him.”¹

Adams presided over “The Conning Tower,” a column that doubled as a pioneering content aggregator and featured unpaid contributions from friends of “FPA” like Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner, and E.B. White. Parker’s couplet, “Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses,” made news as a “problematic” answer on “Jeopardy” in 2024 about a century after its debut on the New York World’s Op-Ed page.

White was gracing that same page by his early 20s. His “A Young Advertising Man Writes to the Girl He Loves” included such stanzas as “You are a person of exacting taste — /You want the best there is — and that means ME.” When Harold Ross launched The New Yorker in 1925, a promotional circular for the new weekly voiced an intention to capture some of the spirit of Swope’s World.

Flanking the Op-Ed page each morning were unsigned editorials written or edited by yet another wunderkind, Walter Lippmann. Swope poached the already renowned 31-year-old at the first opportunity. Blending praise, insult, and mentorship in one sentence, Swope told the co-founder of The New Republic bluntly: “You’re too good a writer to stay buried on The New Republic.” Lippmann negotiated with Ralph Pulitzer to delay his start date by six months to complete what became his classic book, Public Opinion.

Crime and the Klan
Beginning in the fall of 1920 Swope’s reporters highlighted the postwar resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. “The old Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction days has been revived,” the newspaper intoned under an Atlanta dateline. When the World was approached by a source inside the Klan, the staff spent months researching a groundbreaking investigative series that ran in the fall of 1921:

SECRETS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN EXPOSED BY THE WORLD;
MENACE OF THIS GROWING LAW-DEFYING ORGANIZATION PROVED BY ITS RITUAL AND THE RECORD OF ITS ACTIVITIES

The World’s series on the Klan won a Pulitzer, as did one the following year on the state of Florida’s practice of hiring out convicts’ labor for profit. Competitors groused about Columbia University’s tendency to award Pulitzer Prizes to Ralph Pulitzer’s World.

Not that journalists competing with the World were averse to being hired there. Three years before he and his friend Henry Luce founded Time magazine, 22-year-old Briton Hadden showed up unannounced in Swope’s office atop the New York World Building. As the editor moved to usher him out the door, Hadden protested: “Mr. Swope, you’re interfering with my destiny.” Swope relented and soon Hadden was on staff.

James M. Cain was also successful on his first trip to the Tower on Park Row. Cain carried a letter of introduction from Mencken and was hired on the spot to work under Lippmann on the editorial page. Lippmann typically wrote on foreign affairs or weighty domestic matters like the Scopes Trial. Cain preferred chronicling the alarming drift of modern society as revealed by the most salacious crimes on the front page. After Ruth Snyder was convicted of murdering her husband in Queens with the help of her lover, Cain was inspired to write both the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice and a magazine serial that became the Billy Wilder film noir Double Indemnity.

Gatsby
Not every literary figure in Swope’s orbit worked at the World. In the early 1920s Swope and his wife Margaret rented a sprawling Long Island house with views of Manhasset Bay on East Shore Road in Great Neck. Margaret Swope later remembered their Great Neck parties as “an absolute seething bordello of interesting people.” Included among the interesting people were Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, fellow residents of the village as of fall 1922.

By the time The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, the Fitzgeralds were living abroad. Famously, the novel earned lukewarm reviews upon its release. The World itself dismissed Gatsby as “a dud” and “another one of the thousands of modern novels which must be approached with the point of view of the average tired person toward the movie around the corner.” When the World interviewed Fitzgerald in 1927 he was identified as “the author of ‘This Side of Paradise.’”

The reception afforded Gatsby makes it all the more curious that Fitzgerald felt compelled to specify the true origins of a not yet commercially successful novel. Nevertheless, at some point in 1938 or 1939 he opened his copy of Andre Malraux’s Man’s Hope and at the back of the book jotted down a chapter by chapter roster of inspirations behind The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald wrote “Swopes” as one of three names guiding Chapter 3, in which Nick Carraway attends his first party at Jay Gatsby’s North Shore estate. When Margaret Swope passed away in 1967, the New York Times obituary duly noted: “The Great Neck house was immortalized as the setting for Fitzgerald’s novel, ‘The Great Gatsby.’”

The end of the World
In the fall of 1928 Swope shocked his own newsroom by announcing he was leaving the World at age 46 with no subsequent professional endeavor in mind. By this time Ralph Pulitzer’s younger brother Herbert was an increasingly frequent and assertive presence on Park Row. Herbert was 17 years Ralph’s junior and owned a controlling share of Pulitzer stock. Swope called it a day.

At that same moment the Swopes paid $400,000 for a 20,000-square-foot white elephant of a house on 13 Long Island acres jutting out into the Sound in Sands Point. Renovations reportedly cost more than twice that amount.

A 19-year career as a salaried employee of the Pulitzer family was apparently quite remunerative for Swope. Colleagues speculated he received stock tips and possibly other considerations from Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch. “I thought [Swope] made a fortune out of his position as a [journalist] through Baruch,” Lippmann later recalled. “Having started…with an ordinary salary, he ended up with about $12 million.”

The $12 million figure recurs in discussions of Swope, as does the legend, quite possibly correct, that the World’s ex-editor then lost it all in the crash of 1929. In 1930 his name showed up in the Times as the defendant in a suit brought by an interior decorator demanding payment past due in the amount of almost $60,000. Yet Swope appeared to emerge from the Great Depression unscathed. The legendary parties continued. No household staff were let go. No Swope children were removed from private schooling.

The Sands Point house in the 1930s.

In this respect Swope fared better than the World, which Herbert Pulitzer sold to Scripps-Howard in 1931. In theory the World “merged” with the New York Telegram (henceforth known as the World-Telegram), but in effect the newspaper Joseph Pulitzer purchased in 1883 disappeared without a trace. The paper’s demise was national news. “End of the World” headlines proliferated, longtime readers were stunned, and the newsroom emptied. Herbert Pulitzer was singled out for particular scorn.²

The World’s death was above all a shock. During Swope’s tenure the paper seemed poised to complete an improbable transition from 19th-century epitome of yellow journalism to 20th-century paper of record. “You did for the World in the postwar period what Joseph Pulitzer did for it twenty-five years ago,” Lippmann wrote Swope upon his departure.

Borne ceaselessly into the past
Swope’s Sands Point house remained standing long enough to coincide with The Great Gatsby’s critical ascendance and popular recognition as an American classic. Scribner sells half a million copies of Gatsby annually.

Now the Fitzgeralds were said to have attended Gatsby-esque parties at the Sands Point mansion despite the fact that the Swopes didn’t move into the house until three years after the novel’s publication. In the swelling literature of Gatsby tourism Swope himself was refashioned as a flamboyant newspaper “publisher” or even “magnate.” After all, how could a newspaper editor, even an executive editor, afford this Hearst-scale estate?

By the 21st century the house was uninhabited and had fallen into disrepair. Seen through the lens of Gatsby it was a Jazz Age ruin available for virtual touring on YouTube: THE MANSION THAT INSPIRED THE GREAT GATSBY. As it happens the mansion did not inspire Gatsby, but it did offer a portal through which the novel’s readers sought to glimpse a long lost Gold Coast. It was torn down in 2011.³

When Herbert Pulitzer put the World on the auction block in 1930, Swope worked frantically to find a friendly buyer who would give him free reign at the paper. He called Baruch and even Hearst himself to no avail. The effort marked Swope’s last venture in journalism. From then on he served on a good many New York State commissions and boards, nourished a reputation as a master of trivia on radio game shows, and advised well-heeled clients on their public relations needs. Today a tidy phalanx of 2010s-vintage gated mansions dot the Point where the Swopes and their guests played croquet by the illumination of car headlights late into the North Shore nights.

1. Broun ignored Ralph Pulitzer’s admonition to move on to other topics and instead wrote continuously on Sacco and Vanzetti. Eventually Pulitzer sacked him. Lowell faced criticism for the rest of his days. Hours before he introduced President Roosevelt as the featured speaker at a commemoration of Harvard’s 300th anniversary in 1936, a pamphlet condemning his role in the case was circulated in Cambridge. “Walled in This Tomb” was signed by an alumni group that included Broun and John Dos Passos.

2. Joseph Pulitzer’s will stated: “I particularly enjoin upon my sons and my descendants the duty of preserving, protecting, and perpetuating the World newspaper….” Herbert Pulitzer fought tenaciously and in the end successfully to circumvent the will in court. Adams referred to Herbert Pulitzer as “the shit heard round the World.”

3. Portions of the 1978 film The Greek Tycoon were filmed at the Sands Point estate.