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Making Modernism

Letter from C.H. Dennis to Ben Hecht

Feb. 7, 1919 Dear Mr Hecht:-- I am very glad to know that you have arrived at your field of operations in spite of the many obstacles that you encountered. Mr Bell has sent me copies of several of your cables and it is evident that you are finding much of interest to write about. The inclosed cable, showing how it was edited in the London Office, should be studied by you as a valuable lesson in skeletonization. Our rule is, of course, to be careful not to skeletonize so closely that the home office will have merely a blind word puzzle when the dispatch arrives. However, I think Mr Bell has shown good judgment in saving the office from paying cable tolls on ninety-five unnecessary words in your dispatch. On the subject of the word "stop," which unquestionably is used much too freely by most of our correspondents, Mr Bell writes me: "As Mr. Lawson once remarked, the question of 'stops' depends a good deal on the character of the story. The more concrete it is, the less need there is for 'stops'; the more abstract it is, the more need for 'stops,' if the desk man is not to get lost in the mist." Personally I think 'stop' is needed very little and that it is greatly overdone. In this cable your sketch of Scheidemann is excellent in describing him and his surroundings. However, I feel like echoing his reproof, "It is typical of Americans to be interested in little things," since you pass over what the man said of real moment with these words: "Scheidemann then continued to talk of the high aims and noble programme of Germany." Was not here the meat in the cocoanut? Was not this what you went to see him for? Surely the views of its leading men are hungrily desired by the world, which wishes to discover the precise mood of present day Germany. Further, I am wholly at a loss to understand why you should call Scheidemann an "affable combination of Bismarck and Hinky Dink." This is playing leapfrog in the presence of a corpse or whistling in church. I feel that having a great opportunity to get a notable dispatch you first laid out a fine framework, then threw a gob of color on the canvas and went away. The business of interpreting these people is a big, serious business. The world is interested. It is a prodigious opportunity. I trust you will find much good material in Weimar. At this moment I am a little disturbed lest you treat things only for surface effects. Naturally such effects add color and life and interest, yet after all they are merely the settings for the big elements lying below--the subjective side, as Mr Bell would say. This side will have to be studied and interpreted if we are to escape the charge of superficiality, even frivolity. While the world is being made over we cannot simply got about playing hopscotch among the tombs of empires. Thus endth the sermon. Your quick eye for color and movement and epigram is a great asset. Doubtless you will be a valuable acquisition to our foreign news service when you get in mind the full scale of values in informing dispatches interpreting historic characters, incidents, movementys and tendencies. The peace conference just now is in the trough of the sea, but things are moving favorably. I am now planning to sail for America at the end of February. I trust that you and Mrs Hecht are fairly comfortably situated by this time. I shall be glad to hear from you fully and frequently by mail provided you find opportunities to write. Only by and frank correspondence can on come into full understanding respecting correspondents' needs and the office's requirements and points of view, which in some degree at least reflect the public's wishes. Very truly yours, C. H. Dennis (transcribed by Chalcedony Wilding)

This page is referenced by:

Ben Hecht’s WWI Dispatch and Editor’s Reply, 1919
The two documents collected here—Ben Hecht’s Berlin dispatch to the Daily News, February 3, 1919, and assistant editor C. H. Dennis's reply to Hecht, February 7, 1919—highlight an important tension between newspaper eyewitness accounts as personal, essentially provincial ventures, and eyewitness accounts as a collaborative, global enterprise. One of the first American newspapers to employ foreign correspondents to cover the international politics of World War I, the Chicago Daily News boasted firsthand accounts in which information and colorful description coexisted. Correspondents’ insider-outsider positions allowed the News to claim a specifically American viewpoint, meant to interest its Chicago readership.
Ben Hecht served as a war correspondent in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News from 1918-1919, but Chicago was his home base, and his readers could sense it. And in this dispatch, Hecht makes Berlin feel like home by comparing it to Chicago. His move recasts Philipp Scheiemann, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) revolutionary who had recently declared the end of the German imperial government and who would soon be called upon to help found the Weimar Republic, to corrupt Alderman Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, known for buying poorer Chicagoans’ votes. In Dennis’s opinion, however, this Berlin-cum-Chicago perspective is a mistake. Moving too quickly and superficially to Chicago, Hecht neglects to “interpret” Scheidemann for what he is: a powerful leader, partially responsible for “making the world over.” Dennis explicitly increases the responsibility of the eyewitness by referring to the News’ readers not as “Chicago” or “the nation” but as the voracious, curious “world.” Expanding the reading audience also implicitly claims Chicago as an international capitol, a full participant in the circuitous process of newsmaking.
The News never ran Hecht’s account, but even the decision not to publish required an international network. At minimum, Hecht’s dispatch travelled to Amsterdam, London, Paris, and finally back to Berlin, now with Dennis's cover (with embedded quotations from Hecht, Scheidemann, Bell, and Lawson) and Bell’s (lost) re-“skeletonized” cable. Had the story run, it would have passed to the Chicago news desk as well, and finally to the public. In order for this vast array of readers “not to get lost in the mist,” these editors push for brevity and clarity, for concrete, pithy sketches and informational anecdotes.
We do not know which ninety-five words Bell found so expensively superfluous in Hecht’s already spare skeletonized account, but Bell’s and Dennis’'s editing practices clearly influenced Hecht’s later writing and the News’ standards for national reportage. After continuing for a time in Berlin, Hecht returned to the States, where he went on to pen the long-running series “One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago.” These factual accounts and character sketches do the work of “interpreting” the city and its inhabitants by defamiliarizing them, allowing Hecht’s readers to imagine their hometown as a foreign land whose everyday events become news by their own collaborative work of interpretation.
-Chalcey Wilding, University of Chicago