HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Herbert Bayard Swope Sr. (; January 5, 1882 – June 20, 1958) was an American
editor Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, or ...
,
journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...
and intimate of the
Algonquin Round Table The Algonquin Round Table was a group of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of "The Vicious Circle", as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel ...
. Swope spent most of his career at the ''
New York World The ''New York World'' was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 until 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers. It was a leading national voice of the Democratic Party. From 1883 to 1911 under pub ...
.'' He was the first and three-time recipient of the
Pulitzer Prize for Reporting The Pulitzer Prize for Reporting was awarded from 1917 to 1947. Winners *1917 Pulitzer Prize, 1917: Herbert Bayard Swope, ''New York World'', for articles which appeared October 10, October 15 and from November 4 daily to November 22, 1916, inclu ...
. Swope was called the greatest reporter of his time by
Lord Northcliffe Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (15 July 1865 – 14 August 1922), was a British newspaper and publishing magnate. As owner of the ''Daily Mail'' and the ''Daily Mirror'', he was an early developer of popular journal ...
of the London ''
Daily Mail The ''Daily Mail'' is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper and news websitePeter Wilb"Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail: The man who hates liberal Britain", ''New Statesman'', 19 December 2013 (online version: 2 January 2014) publish ...
''.


Background

Herbert Bayard Swope was born on January 5, 1882, in St. Louis, Missouri, to German immigrants Ida Cohn and Isaac Swope, a watchcase maker. He was the youngest of four children – the younger brother of businessman and
General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable ene ...
president Gerard Swope.


Career

Swope was the first recipient of the
Pulitzer Prize for Reporting The Pulitzer Prize for Reporting was awarded from 1917 to 1947. Winners *1917 Pulitzer Prize, 1917: Herbert Bayard Swope, ''New York World'', for articles which appeared October 10, October 15 and from November 4 daily to November 22, 1916, inclu ...
in 1917 for a series of articles that year entitled "Inside the German Empire" The articles formed the basis for a book released in 1917 entitled ''Inside the German Empire: In the Third Year of the War'' (), which he co-authored with
James W. Gerard James Watson Gerard III (August 25, 1867 – September 6, 1951) was a United States lawyer, diplomat, and justice of the New York Supreme Court. Early life Gerard was born in Geneseo, New York. His father, James Watson Gerard Jr., was a lawy ...
. He is known for saying, "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." He is also credited with coining the phrase "
Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because t ...
". Although standard
editorial page An editorial, or leading article (UK) or leader (UK) is an article written by the senior editorial people or publisher of a newspaper, magazine, or any other written document, often unsigned. Australian and major United States newspapers, such ...
s have been printed by newspapers for many centuries, Swope established the first modern op-ed page in 1921. When he took over as editor in 1920, he realized that the page opposite the editorials was "a catchall for book reviews, society boilerplate, and obituaries." He wrote:
It occurred to me that nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial, which became the most important in America... and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.
Swope served as the editor for ''
New York World The ''New York World'' was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 until 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers. It was a leading national voice of the Democratic Party. From 1883 to 1911 under pub ...
s 21-day crusade against the
Ku Klux Klan The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Cat ...
in October 1921, which won the newspaper the
Pulitzer Prize for Public Service The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service is one of the fourteen American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for journalism. It recognizes a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper or news site through the use of its journalis ...
in 1922. As an example of investigative journalism, it was ranked 81st of the top 100 journalism stories of the 20th century by New York University's journalism department. He was a legendary
poker Poker is a family of comparing card games in which players wager over which hand is best according to that specific game's rules. It is played worldwide, however in some places the rules may vary. While the earliest known form of the game wa ...
player, at one point winning over $470,000 in a game with an oil baron, a steel magnate, and an entertainer.Press, Politics and Poker – Howard Bayard Swope
by Byron Liggett, Poker Player (newspaper). April 4, 2005.
He was also a member of a social club, the precursor to the Algonquin Round Table known as the Thanatopsis Inside Straight and Pleasure Club. He was inducted into the Croquet Hall of Fame of the United States Croquet Association in 1979 and his son Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr. in 1981.


Mansion

Swope died in 1958, aged 76, at his home, known as Land's End, Prospect Point,
Sands Point, New York Sands Point is a village located at the tip of the Cow Neck Peninsula in the Town of North Hempstead, in Nassau County, on the North Shore of Long Island, in New York, United States. It is considered part of the Greater Port Washington area, ...
. He hosted parties with the
Duke Duke is a male title either of a monarch ruling over a duchy, or of a member of royalty, or nobility. As rulers, dukes are ranked below emperors, kings, grand princes, grand dukes, and sovereign princes. As royalty or nobility, they are r ...
and
Duchess of Windsor Wallis, Duchess of Windsor (born Bessie Wallis Warfield, later Simpson; June 19, 1896 – April 24, 1986), was an American socialite and wife of the former King Edward VIII. Their intention to marry and her status as a divorcée caused a ...
,
Vivien Leigh Vivien Leigh ( ; 5 November 1913 – 8 July 1967; born Vivian Mary Hartley), styled as Lady Olivier after 1947, was a British actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for her definitive performances as Scarlett O'Hara in '' Go ...
and
Laurence Olivier Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier (; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor and director who, along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, was one of a trio of male actors who dominated the British stage ...
,
Dorothy Parker Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhap ...
,
Harpo Marx Arthur "Harpo" Marx (born Adolph Marx; November 23, 1888 – September 28, 1964) was an American comedian, actor, mime artist, and harpist, and the second-oldest of the Marx Brothers. In contrast to the mainly verbal comedy of his brothers Grou ...
,
Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from ...
,
Averell Harriman William Averell Harriman (November 15, 1891July 26, 1986), better known as Averell Harriman, was an American Democratic politician, businessman, and diplomat. The son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, he served as Secretary of Commerce un ...
,
Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theor ...
,
Alexander Woollcott Alexander Humphreys Woollcott (January 19, 1887 – January 23, 1943) was an American drama critic and commentator for ''The New Yorker'' magazine, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, an occasional actor and playwright, and a prominent radio p ...
– as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald. These associations, along with other similarities to the houses and events in ''
The Great Gatsby ''The Great Gatsby'' is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby ...
'', helped give rise to unsubstantiated reports that Fitzgerald had modeled Daisy Buchanan's home in the 1925 novel after Swope's home. However, Swope did not buy Land's End until late 1928. The more likely explanation that ties Swope to Fitzgerald is the time period of 1922–24, when Fitzgerald was living in nearby
Great Neck Great Neck is a region on Long Island, New York, that covers a peninsula on the North Shore and includes nine villages, among them Great Neck, Great Neck Estates, Great Neck Plaza, Kings Point, and Russell Gardens, and a number of unincorp ...
. Prior to buying the Sands Point mansion, Swope had been renting a home since 1919 on East Shore Road in Great Neck, overlooking
Manhasset Bay Manhasset Bay, New York, is an embayment in western Long Island off Long Island Sound. Description Manhasset Bay forms the northeastern boundary of the Great Neck Peninsula and the southwestern boundary of Cow Neck (Port Washington Peninsula ...
. The property was directly north of 325 East Shore Road, the residence of sportswriter
Ring Lardner Ringgold Wilmer Lardner (March 6, 1885 – September 25, 1933) was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings on sports, marriage, and the theatre. His contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Wo ...
. The two were good friends.
David O. Selznick David O. Selznick (May 10, 1902June 22, 1965) was an American film producer, screenwriter and film studio executive who produced '' Gone with the Wind'' (1939) and ''Rebecca'' (1940), both of which earned him an Academy Award for Best Picture. ...
and
Jock Whitney John Hay Whitney (August 17, 1904 – February 8, 1982) was U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, publisher of the '' New York Herald Tribune'', and president of the Museum of Modern Art. He was a member of the Whitney family. Early life W ...
met at the home many times throughout the 20s and 30s and held meetings at the mansion that secured funding for '' Gone with the Wind''. Other reports suggest the home, built in 1902, had been designed by
Stanford White Stanford White (November 9, 1853 – June 25, 1906) was an American architect. He was also a partner in the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, one of the most significant Beaux-Arts firms. He designed many houses for the rich, in addition ...
– although most sources dispute the claim. The clapboard colonial mansion included 15 bedrooms and 14 baths (eleven full baths), a seven-car garage, a tennis court with a tennis pavilion, a rose garden and a guest house – on 13.35 acres. The waterfront mansion had originally been built for clothing merchant John S. Browning Sr. in 1911 and originally named Kidd's Rocks. It was purchased in 1921 by Malcolm D. Sloane, whose wife renamed the estate "Keewaydin". The house had been a site for a ''
Vanity Fair Vanity Fair may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Literature * Vanity Fair, a location in '' The Pilgrim's Progress'' (1678), by John Bunyan * ''Vanity Fair'' (novel), 1848, by William Makepeace Thackeray * ''Vanity Fair'' (magazines), the ...
'' photo shoot with
Madonna Madonna Louise Ciccone (; ; born August 16, 1958) is an American singer-songwriter and actress. Widely dubbed the " Queen of Pop", Madonna has been noted for her continual reinvention and versatility in music production, songwriting, a ...
and had been a location for the 1978 shooting of '' The Greek Tycoon'', a film on the life of
Aristotle Onassis Aristotle Socrates Onassis (, ; el, Αριστοτέλης Ωνάσης, Aristotélis Onásis, ; 20 January 1906 – 15 March 1975), was a Greek-Argentinian shipping magnate who amassed the world's largest privately-owned shipping fleet and wa ...
.
Keith Richards Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943), often referred to during the 1960s and 1970s as "Keith Richard", is an English musician and songwriter who has achieved international fame as the co-founder, guitarist, secondary vocalist, and co-princi ...
' family lived there for a time in the early 1980s. Charles Shipman Payson and his wife, Virginia Kraft, purchased the house in the 1980s. In 2005 she sold the house to developer Bert Brodsky of Port Washington for $17.5 million. "They misrepresented themselves", Payson told ''The Observer'', "I would not show it to any developer. He said that his life's ambition was to live in that manor, but it was very clear at the closing that they had no intention of living in it. They are the most awful people I have ever heard of, and that includes terrorists and dictators. They have taken a work of art and permitted it to be totally decimated. It was in pristine condition when I left ... He let it fall apart. He stripped everything out that he could sell, which is sacrilegious. I went by the house perhaps two years after we sold it, and that's when I realized how he was going to get around the town's objections. Broken windows, storming in—it's sinful". In 2011, the home was demolished and the property was subdivided.


References


Further reading

* Kahn, E. J. ''The World of Swope: A Biography of Herbert Bayard Swope'' (1965) * Lewis, Alfred Allan. ''Man of the World: Herbert Bayard Swope, a Charmed Life of Pulitzer Prizes, Poker and Politics'' 1978)


External links


Short biography of Swope's son, Herbert Bayard Swope Jr.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Swope, Herbert Bayard 1882 births 1958 deaths Pulitzer Prize for Reporting winners American male journalists American investigative journalists American newspaper editors Writers from St. Louis People from Sands Point, New York Algonquin Round Table