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Our
Motto |
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"Give light and the people
will find their own way" |
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Words are so often turned to such shabby or trivial ends that it's sometimes worth celebrating those with substance and a pedigree. Consider the Scripps motto: Give light and the people will find their own way.
Those words first appeared on a newspaper masthead June 22, 1922. They were placed there by a New Mexico editor who refused to damp down truth even when the mighty threatened to smash the lantern.
As the story goes, Carl Magee first attacked U.S. Sen. Albert B. Fall in his Albuquerque newspaper over the Fall machine's misuse of water rights to wrest the votes of New Mexico farmers. When Fall became interior secretary, he leaned on banks to call-in their loans to the paper.
Magee turned directly to readers, selling bonds in the newspaper. The idea worked; the crusading editor went on probing Fall's shenanigans. Magee later caught his nemesis in a kickback scheme and helped blow open the Teapot Dome scandal in April 1923.
Two months later, Magee was indicted in Las Vegas for criminal libel. He went to jail and was ruined financially. He was attacked by the judge who had hounded him and in defending himself he accidentally killed a man who was seeking to aid him. Then a short time later came a telegram that his son had died in an airplane crash.
One evening during Magee's trial in 1923, Sidney Whipple, editor of Scripps Howard's Denver Express, visited him in his hotel room. Magee tells the rest of the story in the following excerpts from the July 1927 Scripps News.
" 'My bosses want to know how you are fixed financially,' " Whipple said.
" 'They've got me broke,' " I admitted, " 'but I'll keep going until the sheriff nails something to the door.' "
"Weeks later came a wire saying Robert Scripps would like to see me at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco at his expense. If he hadn't added that clause, I couldn't have gone. I was so near broke I had to borrow $1,000 from a personal friend to meet my payroll.
"Present at San Francisco were Robert Scripps, Roy Howard, Bill Colver, Tom Sidlo and C.F. Mosher. Bob Scripps had just returned from a voyage with his father, E. W. Scripps, and a general conference was under way.
"They asked me for a 45-minute talk on conditions in New Mexico, after which they said they would see me the next day. The next day Sildo called me off to one side and asked me terms on which I would come in with them. I told them quickly. Sidlo said, 'Put that in a letter.'
"I wrote the letter and presented it. Roy Howard looked at it, scribbled 'OK' on one corner and I was welcomed into the Scripps organization. They asked me if I needed money badly and I replied that I did. They wired $3,000 to meet current expenses and I went home with editorial control unimpaired and the weight of a certain financial defeat off my mind. That's all there was to it.
"Scripps saw a man in New Mexico making a tough fight for the people of New Mexico, for principles in which the organization believed. They asked him orally about terms. He wrote a letter and Roy Howard scribbled 'OK.' Then they wired money to his paper. Sounds suspiciously like idealism."
Roy Howard liked Carl Magee's quotation and soon all Scripps newspapers carried the motto. Someone thought it needed attribution and though it was believed to have originated with Dante Alighieri, Scripps editors mounted a search for its origin. Eventually, Howard was told by the editors that they could not find the source.
With executive alacrity, Howard remedied the situation. "Keep the line and kill the Dante," he said.
Years later, Dante scholar H.D. Austin from the University of Southern California attributed the line to the following passage in Purgatory XXII67-69: "Facesti come quei che va di notte che porta il lume dietro e.a se non giova ma dopo se fa le persone dott." A literal translation of this would read: "Thou didst as one who passing through the night bears a light behind, that profits not himself but makes those who follow wise."
It is speculated that Carl Magee had read and liked the passage but might have forgotten its source, author and exact wording. Or, being an editor, he may have streamlined it for his editorial purposes.
In any event, the "give light" motto served Carl Magee's purposes and – more than 80 years later – continues to do so today for The E. W. Scripps Company.
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