The Press: Mr. Mowrer Remembers

It was because he was so young and gullible-looking, he thought, that sneaky little men in the Paris streets kept trying to sell him dirty postcards. Anyhow, “after studying the matter, I bought a pair of spats and a cane, and started growing a small mustache,” wrote Paul Scott Mowrer, 35 years later. With this protective disguise, he settled down to cover France for the Chicago Daily News. His specific instructions were: look for lively feature stories, and don’t write about European politics unless you absolutely have to.

Last week, Paul Scott Mowrer (rhymes with how were), now a balding, portly, pontifical gentleman whom postcard vendors would not dream of approaching, was again in Paris, this time as editor of the Paris Post, the New York Post’s Paris sister. He had found it quite necessary to write about European politics; and by this time everyone took the necessity for granted. In the U.S., his curiously titled autobiography, The House of Europe (Houghton, Mifflin; $3.75), had just appeared.

The Price of Butter. Beneath his old-fashioned journalist’s prose, readers could trace the change in U.S. attitude toward Europe—a change from Sunday feature stories (with an undertone of the comic strip) to solid, informed reporting about such brass tacks as the EAM in Greece and the price of butter in Britain.

From the first, Mowrer had the feeling —not widely shared by far-off U.S. editors —that Europe was a real and important place. He dutifully interviewed Chicagoans who came to play in Paris, learned to duck when they wanted a French-speaking guide to the brothels. In 1911, he got excited by Italy’s war on Turkey, but when his editors did not share his excitement, “I wrote a furious poem in blank verse, denouncing the peoples of the Western world for [their] complacency. . . . With men killing each other in the desert, I got a request to pick out the best jokes each week from the funny papers.”

Paul Scott Mowrer filed his first stories of World War I from the French side, then dangerously skipped behind German lines and out again. When he reached Paris a U.P. man showed him a wire from the U.P. home office: “WAR INTEREST DIMINISHING. HOLD DOWN. WORLD SERIES BEGINS MONDAY.”

But by now the Chicago Daily News, slowly building a powerhouse foreign staff (Raymond Swing, later Negley Farson, John Gunther), was getting more interested in Europe. Paul pulled his mop-haired, earnest younger brother Edgar out of the Latin Quarter, where Edgar was composing critical essays on French dramatists, sent him off to the front as a correspondent. Edgar occasionally annoyed the home office by leading a battle story with an apt piece of Latin verse, but he did increasingly well.

Fraternizing, Early Style. In the days of peace, Paul Scott Mowrer covered Versailles and wrote a book, Our Foreign Affairs, denouncing it.

He watched five disarmament conferences with a skeptical eye, came to be a journalistic panjandrum. Dwight Morrow and Charles Dawes sought his advice. President Hoover tried to get him fired for a story he cabled about U.S. Navy ambitions (“I wrote the President himself, informing him tersely what I thought of his conduct. I never received a reply.”).

By then, too, a new kind of reporting, by able newsmen who knew how to look hard at politics and finance, was coming from Europe. Brother Edgar’s Germany Puts the Clock Back was one of the first to cry alarm over Hitler. In 1934, the late Frank Knox brought Paul Mowrer back to Chicago, to be editor of the News. “I was tired of Europe,” he wrote, “tired of watching French and British mistakes, and the Germans getting ready for war.” There his autobiography ends.

He left the News when Publisher Frank Knox died. Now back in the Mowrer apartment in Paris’ genteelly shoddy Invalides district, Paul Scott Mowrer is eating poorly, like the French, but happy to be back. Son Richard, also a Postman,* sometimes sends coffee and canned groceries from the States. Then Paul and his wife Hadley (once the first wife of Ernest Hemingway) entertain the opposition: Paris Herald Editor Geoffrey Parsons Jr., who argues with Zenobie, the cook, about De Gaulle, but never about cooking.

*Fourth of the writing Mowrers: Edgar’s wife Lilian (Journalist’s Wife, Arrest and Exile, Rip Tide of Aggression).