(Being An Account From Authoritative Records Of The Grafti...)
Being An Account From Authoritative Records Of The Grafting In Small And Great Things By Your Senators And Members Of The House Of Representatives And Executives In Public Departments.
Raymond Lewis Clapper was an American newspaper columnist. The New York Times eulogized Clapper as a journalist who produced "what were generally accepted as among the most objective, tolerant and understanding views on national and foreign affairs. "
Background
Raymond Lewis Clapper was born on May 30, 1892 on a farm in Linn County, Kansas, United States. He was the only child of Julia (Crowe) and John William Clapper. He disliked his middle name and did not use it. His father, of Pennsylvania German ancestry, had ventured from Pennsylvania via Indiana to Kansas, where he married a local girl. John Clapper's small acreage proved unrewarding, and soon after Raymond's birth he moved his family to the Armourdale packinghouse section of Kansas City, Kans. , where he worked in a soap factory. The enterprising boy grew up in an unlettered, intensely religious atmosphere, kindly but narrow, that included faithful attendance at Baptist services. By the age of eleven he was delivering groceries and peddling papers. An avid reader who organized an extensive file of clippings, he was drawn by his admiration for the Kansas editor William Allen White to the local print shop as its "devil, " moved up to apprentice, and became a union journeyman.
Education
At seventeen he entered high school, but he did not complete the course.
Career
Clapper worked at odd jobs, edited the college paper, and sent campus news to the Kansas City Star. In 1916 he joined the United Press in Chicago, where he and his wife lived at the Chicago settlement of Graham Taylor. Clapper's employment with the United Press took him in fast succession to Milwaukee, St. Paul, New York, and finally Washington. His first national news scoop came during the Republican National Convention of 1920 when Senator Charles Curtis emerged from the celebrated "smoke-filled room" and told his fellow Kansan that the party leaders were going to try to swing the nomination to Harding. Clapper soaked up national politics as night manager and chief political writer for the United Press in Washington (1923 - 28) and as bureau manager (1929 - 33). He also covered the Scopes "evolution" trial in 1925 and the London naval conference of 1930. Outraged by nepotism, graft, and waste of public funds, he gathered instances in a book, Racketeering in Washington (1933). In September 1934, a year after he had left the United Press to join the Washington Post, he began a daily interpretive column, "Between You and Me. " The feature caught on, and in December he accepted a proposal to write a similar column for the Scripps-Howard chain. Nine years later he was appearing in 176 papers and had an estimated ten million readers. He also wrote magazine articles, took up platform speaking, and entered into lucrative contracts for radio broadcasting, especially on the Mutual network. In 1939 he was elected president of the Gridiron Club, composed of Washington colleagues. Regretting that he had resisted the urge to enlist during World War I, Clapper conscientiously followed the events leading toward World War II. At first an isolationist, he felt after Munich that conflict, with American involvement, was probably inevitable and after the fall of France took the interventionist side. He called Pearl Harbor "the result of our folly" in abandoning the Pacific to Japan. Becoming a traveling war correspondent, he reported the attack on Sicily and the bombing of Rome and late in 1943 headed into the South Pacific to write from New Britain, New Guinea, and Guadalcanal. During the invasion of the Marshall Islands, while he was reporting the devastation of the airfield at Eniwetok, his plane hit another American bomber and crashed in flames in the Eniwetok lagoon, killing all on board. His friends established the Raymond Clapper Memorial Association with an annual award to a Washington correspondent whose writings "have most perfectly embodied the ideals of fair and painstaking reporting and sound craftsmanship that marked Mr. Clapper's work. " The first recipient was Clapper's fellow war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Mrs. Clapper edited a collection of her husband's later work, Watching the World (1944), which reflected his purpose of writing for the "milkman in Omaha" and his basic conviction that a newspaper correspondent "should be careful not to overestimate the information of the readers or to underestimate their intelligence. "
A political independent and an admirer of Emerson, he called himself a progressive Republican and "seventy-five percent New Dealer, " supporting Roosevelt's attack on the economic collapse but opposing a third presidential term. His column, however, was widely respected for its fairness and objectivity.
Membership
Gridiron Club
Personality
Clapper had thick, tousled hair, a beaklike nose, and gray, circled eyes. His head jutted forward from his shortish, slightly stooped body, visually suggesting his inquiring way of life.
Connections
On March 31, 1913, Clapper married Olive Vincent Ewing. They had two children: Janet Ewing, William Raymond (known as Peter).