Herbert Bayard Swope Sr. (;
Career
Newspaper career
At the age of 18, Swope worked for St. Louis Post-Dispatch. According to Swope, he was fired for spending too much time coaching football. He then worked for the Chicago Tribune and the New York Herald. In 1908, he joined New York World. The articles formed the basis for a book released in 1917 entitled Inside the German Empire: In the Third Year of the War (), which he co-authored with James W. Gerard. Swope led the official press delegation at the Paris Peace Conference.
Although standard editorial pages have been printed by newspapers for many centuries, Swope established the first modern op-ed page in 1921. When he took over as editor in 1920, he realized that the page opposite the editorials was "a catchall for book reviews, society boilerplate, and obituaries." He wrote:<blockquote>It occurred to me that nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial, which became the most important in America... and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.</blockquote>
He hired the widowed Consuela Sheridan (nee Frewen), the maternal cousin of Winston Churchill, as a roving reporter in Europe, and she landed many scoops including interviews with the negotiating parties for Irish Independence.
Swope served as the editor for New York Worlds 21-day crusade against the Ku Klux Klan in October 1921, which won the newspaper the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1922. As an example of investigative journalism, it was ranked 81st of the top 100 journalism stories of the 20th century by New York University's journalism department.
Swope was called the "best reporter in America" by Lord Northcliffe of the London Daily Mail. He was also a member of a social club, the precursor to the Algonquin Round Table known as the Thanatopsis Inside Straight and Pleasure Club. He was inducted into the Croquet Hall of Fame of the United States Croquet Association in 1979 and his son Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr. in 1981.
Mansion
His home was known as Land's End, Prospect Point, Sands Point, New York. He hosted parties with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx, Winston Churchill, Averell Harriman, Albert Einstein, Alexander Woollcott – as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald. These associations, along with other similarities to the houses and events in The Great Gatsby, helped give rise to unsubstantiated reports that Fitzgerald had had been designed by Stanford White – although most sources dispute the claim.
Personal life
Swope married Margaret. They had a son and daughter, Herbert Jr. and Mrs. Robert Brandt.