Harvey Newbranch: standing against "the jungle".

Harvey Newbranch carefully guarded his privacy.

Newbranch, the editor of the Omaha World-Herald most of the first half of the twentieth century, left no known memoir or journal. He customarily declined speaking invitations, explaining that he didn't want to make any public statement that might detract from the message of his editorial page. Late in his career, colleagues attempted to profile him in the newspaper. He got wind of the piece and, it was later reported, "edited the heart out of it"

Even when he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1920, making him the first editorial writer to receive the prize in his own name, the event was barely covered in his own newspaper.

Yet the cloak of secrecy slipped once, providing a glimpse of how his mind worked--a glimpse that Newbranch probably never intended to permit: He left a rough draft, of sorts, of his most distinguished editorial.

Newbranch's masterwork was "Law and the Jungle" a fifteen-hundred-word commentary on a 1919 riot in Omaha. A mob lynched William Brown, an African American who had been accused by a white woman of sexually assaulting her. The rioters burned the courthouse and strung up Mayor Ed Smith when he tried to intervene, though Smith was cut down in time to save his life.

Newbranch, in his summation to "Law and the Jungle," includes a statement that has come to be recognized as the epitome of his trademark prose. Appealing for trust in the rule of law and devotion to it, he wrote:

   When these fail us all things fail. When these
   are lost all will be lost. Should the day ever
   come when the rule that was in Omaha Sunday
   night became the dominant rule, the grasses
   of the jungle would overspread our civilization,
   its wild denizens, human and brute, would
   make their foul feast on the ruins, and the God
   who rules over us would turn His face in sorrow
   from a world given over to bestiality.

The ideas expressed in "Law and the Jungle" didn't just spring into Newbranch's mind the day after the riot. They had been germinating there at for at least a decade. He expressed some of them, in simpler form, in an editorial he published in 1909--a rough draft, in effect, of "Law and the Jungle."

The circumstances were similar, though not identical. [he 1909 mob, with lynching on its mind, went looking for a Greek worker who had been accused of killing a popular policeman in South Omaha, an industrial suburb. When the mob was unable to find the man, it turned its fury toward immigrant workers in general. Many Greeks were driven from the city, never to return.

Newbranch's 1909 editorial, headlined "The South Omaha Riot," includes a condemnation of the violence, criticism of the authorities, a demand that the rioters be brought to justice, and an appeal for respect for the rule of law. Each of these themes was to return ten years later, more fully developed, in "Law aim the Jungle."

A comparison of key passages (see below) illustrates his growing mastery of the editorial writer's tools.

A cautionary note: Our craft has commendably been conditioned by the tradition of Strunk and White, among other positive influences, to strive for the elegance of clear, unadorned expression. But it would be a mistake, I think, to judge the Pulitzer-winning editorial of 1920 by the standards of the post-McNugget era. Simplicity can be elegant but, in unskilled hands, can just as readily be merely unformed.

The converse is equally valid: Ornate writing can be ponderous but, executed skillfully, can reach noble heights of texture, nuance, and power.

Newbranch, when he wrote "The South Omaha Riot," was thirty-four years old and had been at the helm of the editorial page for four years. In 1911, he was to be named editor of the World-Herald, a post he held until his retirement in 1949.

In the decade following publication of "The South Omaha Riot," opportunities were plentiful to hone an editorial writer's analytical and persuasive skills.

Newbranch's political hero, William Jennings Bryan, became the first secretary of state in the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. (Bryan had been editor of the World-Herald from 1894 to 1896, and Newbranch, who graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1896, worked in the Great Commoner's first presidential campaign before going to work for the newspaper in 1898.)

Meanwhile, Newbranch's boss, World-Herald publisher Gilbert Hitchcock, as a U.S. senator and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was at Wilson's side during the League of Nations debate. A friend from the N.U. campus, Willa Cather, was making a name for herself in the literary world. John J. Pershing, who had been Newbranch's military science instructor at the university, was leading U.S. forces in the world war.

Back home, the Easter tornado of 1913 killed one hundred forty people in Omaha and left many others homeless. This also was a stretch during which Newbranch watched and wrote disapprovingly as a gambling kingpin, Tom Dennison, extended his influence into City Hall. (Some historians assert that Boss Dennison orchestrated racial tensions leading to the 1919 riot in order to discredit the reformist Mayor Smith. From this it seems plausible that Newbranch's reference in "Law and the Jungle" to "wild denizens," might have been the editor's way of accusing Dennison via literary device.)

With or without the "denizen" pun, it's clear that Newbranch had gained considerable skill and confidence as a writer in the decade after "The South Omaha Riot." So, no, he may not have left a testament addressed to succeeding generations of editorial writers. He may never have penned a set of principles with which to steer an editorial page.

But the example that shows in his demonstrable growth as a writer is its own strong message: An editorial writer, at his or her best, never stops working to improve as a clear thinker and expressive writer.

All other aspects of the job pale before this.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following quotes are from editorials penned by legendary World Herald editor Harvey Newbranch on the subject that won him his greatest distinction, as a bulwark standing against waves of mob tyranny during some of the darkest moments in Nebraska's history. In addition to demonstrating Newbranch's remarkable command of argumentative language, it also points to the firm consistency of the editorialist's reasoning. The quotes were collected by NCEW member Frank Partsch for this story.

1909: The South Omaha Riot

"The rioting at South Omaha Sunday, with the attendant scenes of violence and brutality, disgraced that thriving community and is a humiliation to Nebraska."

"The South Omaha mob ... ferociously attacked those whose one specific offense was that they were members of the murderer's nationality!"

"The mob did not represent the citizens of South Omaha. It represented only its dregs."

"Every energy of the authorities should be turned to the apprehension and severe punishment of the rioters:'

"It is idle just now to ... discuss whether the Greeks are, or are not, undesirable citizens and a menace to the community."

"The law has been outraged. Its machinery has broken down. Its power and authority did not suffice to protect people guilty of no specific offense from acts of the most detestable violence. The law must be vindicated"

1919: Law and the Jungle

"Omaha was disgraced and humiliated by a monstrous object lesson of what jungle rule means.... It was provided by a few hundred hoodlums, most of them mere boys organized as the wolf-pack is organized, inflamed by the spirit of anarchy and license, of plunder and destruction"

"They not only foully murdered a negro they believed to be guilty. They brutally maltreated and attempted to murder other negroes whom they knew to be innocent"

"... [T]he flare-up was the work--let this fact be emphasized--of a few hundred rioters, some of them incited by an outrageous deed, others of them skulkers in the anarchistic underbrush who urged them on for their own foul purposes of destroying property and paralyzing the arm of the law"

"There is not a one of them who can be apprehended, and whose guilt can be proved, but should be sent for a long term to the state prison. And toward that end every effort of every good citizen, as well as every effort of the public authorities, from the humblest policeman to the presiding judge on the bench, must be directed"

"To the law-abiding negroes of Omaha, who like the law-abiding whites, are the vast majority of their race, it is timely to speak a word of caution as well as a word of sympathy and support.... In the running down and maltreating of unoffending men of their color, merely because they were of that color, they have been done odious wrong. They naturally and properly resent it.... But their duty as good citizens is precisely the same as that of the rest of us, all of whom have been outraged and shamed as citizens:'

"For the first time in many years--and for the last time, let us hope, for many years to come--Omaha has had an experience with lawlessness. We have seen what it is. We have seen how it works. We have felt, however briefly, the fetid breath of anarchy on our cheeks. We have experienced the cold chill of fear which it arouses. We have seen, as in a nightmare, its awful possibilities. We have learned how frail is the barrier which divides civilization from the primal jungle--and we have been given to see clearly what that barrier is.

"It is the Law! It is the might of the Law, wisely and fearlessly administered! It is respect for the obedience to the Law on the part of the members of society!"

Frank Partsch, retired, was editorial page editor of the Omaha WorldHerald for twenty-one years. E-mail fpart/[e-mail]