Herbert Bayard Swope

• 1. Introduction

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  Herbert Bayard Swope, an American editor and journalist, left behind a line that people still repeat. "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." The man who said it made a career out of having sharp opinions and making other people's opinions worth reading. This documentary follows him through newsrooms, government offices, racetracks and card tables. It asks how one reporter earned praise that reached across the Atlantic. It asks how a single newspaper page he reworked came to shape the way opinion is printed. And it asks why his waterfront home is so often tied to one of the most famous novels in American literature.

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• 2. Newsroom Apprenticeship

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  Herbert Bayard Swope was born on the 5th of January 1882 in St. Louis, Missouri. His parents were German immigrants named Ida Cohn and Isaac Swope, and Isaac made watchcases for a living. Herbert was the youngest of four children. His older brother Gerard became a businessman and rose to the presidency of General Electric.

  At the age of 18, Swope landed a job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. By his own account, he was fired for spending too much time coaching football. He went on to work for the Chicago Tribune and then the New York Herald. In 1908 he joined the New York World, the paper where he would spend most of his working life.

  Within nine years of arriving at the World, he would win a prize that no reporter had ever held before.

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• 3. Pulitzer Years

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  In 1917, Swope became the first person ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting. The award recognized a series of articles titled "Inside the German Empire." That same year the series became a book, Inside the German Empire: In the Third Year of the War, which he co-authored with James W. Gerard. Swope would collect the Reporting prize three times in all.

  After the war, he led the official press delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. Lord Northcliffe of the London Daily Mail summed up the view from abroad, calling Swope the "best reporter in America."

  In October 1921, the New York World ran a crusade against the Ku Klux Klan, and Swope served as its editor. The campaign lasted 21 days. It won the newspaper the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1922. New York University's journalism department later ranked it 81st among the top 100 journalism stories of the 20th century.

  The Klan crusade shared its year with a quieter change that Swope made to the layout of his paper.

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• 4. The Op-Ed Page

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  When Swope took over as editor in 1920, the page opposite the editorials struck him as a dumping ground. He described it as "a catchall for book reviews, society boilerplate, and obituaries." Newspapers had printed ordinary editorial pages for many centuries. In 1921, Swope established the first modern op-ed page.

  His reasoning was simple. As he put it, "nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting." He cleared the page out and filled it with opinion. The result, he claimed, became "the most important in America." He summed up his own plan as printing opinions, "ignoring facts."

  Swope also hired Consuela Sheridan, a widow born Frewen and a maternal cousin of Winston Churchill, as a roving reporter in Europe. She landed many scoops. Among them were interviews with the negotiating parties for Irish independence.

  Swope held the title of executive editor for nine years. A disagreement with the paper's owners led him to resign in 1929. That resignation ended his time at the World, but it did not end his public life.

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• 5. Advisor to the Powerful

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  Bernard Baruch was Swope's friend, and when the United States declared war on Germany, Baruch's War Industries Board gained an assistant in Swope. Decades later, from 1942 to 1946, Swope served as personal consultant to the U.S. Secretary of War. Baruch went on to serve as U.S. delegate to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, and Swope acted as his spokesman.

  Swope is also credited with coining the phrase "Cold War."

  In 1934, Governor Herbert H. Lehman named Swope chairman of New York's state racing commission. Swope held that post for 11 years.

  His reputation at the card table was just as large as his reputation at the racetrack.

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• 6. Games and Family

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  Swope was a legendary poker player. At one point he won more than $470,000 in a single game. His opponents that night were an oil baron, a steel magnate and an entertainer.

  He also belonged to the Thanatopsis Inside Straight and Pleasure Club. This social club was the forerunner of the Algonquin Round Table, and Swope became an intimate of the Round Table itself.

  In 1979, the United States Croquet Association inducted Swope into the Croquet Hall of Fame. His son, Herbert Bayard Swope Jr., followed in 1981.

  Swope married a woman named Margaret. They had a son, Herbert Jr., and a daughter, who became Mrs. Robert Brandt. He underwent surgery on his intestines and died of postoperative pneumonia on the 20th of June 1958, aged 76, at Doctors Hospital.

  The house at Sands Point, New York, outlived him by more than fifty years.

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• 7. The Gatsby Question

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  Land's End, at Prospect Point in Sands Point, New York, was the name of the Swope home, and its guest list reads like a who's who. Swope hosted the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, and Dorothy Parker. Harpo Marx, Winston Churchill, Averell Harriman, Albert Einstein and Alexander Woollcott also came. So did F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Those names, along with other resemblances to the houses and events in The Great Gatsby, gave rise to unsubstantiated reports. The reports claimed that Fitzgerald modeled Daisy Buchanan's home in the 1925 novel on Swope's house.

  The calendar works against that story. Swope did not buy Land's End until late 1928.

  A more likely connection falls in the years 1922-24, when Fitzgerald lived in nearby Great Neck. Since 1919, Swope had been renting a home on East Shore Road in Great Neck, overlooking Manhasset Bay. It stood directly north of 325 East Shore Road, the residence of sportswriter Ring Lardner, and the two men were good friends.

  David O. Selznick and Jock Whitney met at the Swope home many times through the 1920s and 1930s. Meetings at the mansion secured the funding for Gone with the Wind.

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• 8. The Fate of Land's End

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  The clapboard colonial mansion had 15 bedrooms and 14 baths, eleven of them full. Its grounds covered 13.35 acres and held a seven-car garage, a tennis court with a tennis pavilion, a rose garden and a guest house. The waterfront house itself measured 20000 square feet.

  Some reports suggest that Stanford White designed the home, though most sources dispute the claim. Sources also disagree on its age, giving 1902 in one place and 1911 in another. It was first built for clothing merchant John S. Browning Sr. and named Kidd's Rocks. Malcolm D. Sloane bought it in 1921, and his wife renamed the estate "Keewaydin."

  The house kept attracting attention after Swope. It hosted a Vanity Fair photo shoot with Madonna. In 1978 it served as a location for The Greek Tycoon, a film about the life of Aristotle Onassis. Keith Richards' family lived there for a time in the early 1980s.

  Charles Shipman Payson and his wife, Virginia Kraft, bought the house in the 1980s. In 2005 she sold it for $17.5 million to developer Bert Brodsky of Port Washington. Payson later told The Observer, "They misrepresented themselves." He said the house had been in pristine condition when he left. "He let it fall apart," Payson said of the buyer, and he called what followed "sinful."

  In 2011, the home was demolished and the property was subdivided. Only the unproven Gatsby rumor remained to link the lost mansion to Fitzgerald.

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