1927 issue of Messenger offers timeless truths and suggestions

By DONNIS BAGGETT

Texas Press Association

One of the greatest attributes of the printed word is its permanence. Thanks to print, sometimes we stumble across the wisdom of the ages when we’re not even searching for it.

That was the case recently when Texas Press Association executive director Mike Hodges came across an 89-year-old edition of the TPA Messenger and Bulletin, which he shared with the staff.

The July 1927 edition of the TPA Messenger and Bulletin was published in perfect-bound book form and printed on 148 almanac-sized pages in pulp paper with a blue craft-paper cover. By 2016 standards, it is an uber-retro publication. But some of the content inside is as relevant today as it was then.

For example, in the “proceedings of the 1927 Forty-Eighth Annual Convention,” beginning on page 47, there’s a presentation by R.L. Scott of the DeLeon Free Press entitled “Making the Country Weekly Solid with Rural Subscribers.” It contained news-you-can-use advice that was relevant not only for country editors in 1927, but for their successors in 2016:

“…(T)he good weekly paper can and does fill a place in a sphere wholly without competition, and with opportunity to render real service.

“In order to hold its place as the most potent of all agencies of education and social control, save perhaps the home and school, the Country Weekly must HELP the rural reader. It must help him solve his problems. It must help him FIND HIMSELF. It must help him MAKE MORE MONEY and thus improve rural living conditions. Until the Country Weekly has come to be regarded in the readers home as somewhat of a HOUSEHOLD NECESSITY, it has not reached the point where it is capable of rendering the most substantial good.”

“…A Country Weekly that would interest our typical American family must, therefore, very nearly become a small encyclopedia.

“It must bring the father community news, township or county news, courthouse news, a brief digest of state news, items of political interest, real estate transfers, markets, editorials on helpful subjects, and perhaps a brief digest of sports.

“It must bring the mother mention of local social affairs, reports of community women’s clubs, school, church and lodge items, household helps, recipes, fashions, and short stories

“It must bring to the boys and girls in school age reports of their literary and athletic activities, school and community social affairs, boys and girls club reports, well selected comic features presenting facts about science, history, biography, people and things.

“If the Country Weekly constantly suggests ways and means of how a farmer can improve his soil, make his home more comfortable and convenient, build labor saving devices to save him money and physical exertion, how to build a better pig pen, hen roost, or how to spray his trees and what to spray them with, or to treat his hogs for cholera, or his cattle for blackleg, it is easing his burdens and rendering him yeoman service.

“If the Country Weekly can help the rural housewife to cook, can and preserve better, if it can point out a way in which she may systematize her work and make it lighter, if it shows her how to economically make her clothes, or how to make over a hundred and one items of wearing apparel and thus get more service from them, it is nearing that happy stage of becoming a household necessity.

“…It is a wise country editor who links his paper up with the work of the rural school. Although the paper should champion the multitude of different rural interests, it has no greater opportunity than the good that may be accomplished by lining up with rural school interests…

“…The Country Weekly is more or less of a personal institution. The country editor who goes out of his way to inaugurate a person or an organization by favorable mention in his paper, makes a friend. But if the editor, on the other hand, is careless and indifferent, he earns the unpopularity that is sure to come his way.”

And then there was the presentation on “Free Government and Free Press” by U.S. Rep. Tom Connally, D-Marlin, the official “orator” for the convention. The address featured jewels of thought that gleam as brightly today as they did in 1927:

“The quest of truth is not always an easy task. The highest form of service that can be rendered to the public by any instrumentality is to learn the truth and then give that truth to other men. That is the lofty mission of the press.

“…But if the press owes a duty to the public, there rests upon the public a very distinct obligation to the press, and that is the obligation to support it…Community life and civic enterprises make many drafts upon its columns for which there is no monetary return…The press should have the financial support of the public which it serves. It ought to be independent in purse as well as in thought. Advertisers and readers are just as necessary as news. The press cannot render the highest service when the editor must constantly fight for financial existence. If the press is to support the cause of the public it must in turn have the support of the public.”

“…(Our constitutional democracy) saved democracy for the world. It must now save democracy for itself. It must be saved from the tyranny of a Lenin and the despotism of a Mussolini. It must be saved from corrupt elections and bribed officials. It must be saved from the indifference of its citizens, and from the perversion of its powers to selfish and sordid ends. Only the people themselves can save it. They can save it only when they are informed as to the state of their government and the influences they must combat. To the press they must look for the truth…(Its) lofty mission is to use its own freedom to secure and to give to the people that truth which shall make them free.”

Connally, by the way, was elected to the Senate a year after his speech to the TPA convention. In 1941 he was photographed standing beside President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he signed the declaration of war against Germany. Connally was holding a watch to mark the exact time that war was declared: 3:05 p.m. EST, Dec. 11, 1941.