(C) Common Dreams
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Where First an Op-Ed Page Was Seen - The New York Times [1]
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Date: 1990-10-15
To the Editor:
Not to negate your achievement or take away from your celebrated Op-Ed page (''Op-Ed at 20,'' special section, Sept. 23), but some might think you originated the idea. Not so. The idea was first conceived by Herbert Bayard Swope, an editor at The World newspaper in the 1920's, using the name Op. Ed. In ''The World of Swope'' (1965) by E. J. Kahn Jr., he quotes Swope writing to the newspaperman Gene Fowler:
''For a long time while I was on the outside, and later when I was first the City Editor, I would notice, from time to time, that the opinion stories which had crept in, in spite of our hard and fast principle of having little or no opinion in our news columns, had been dominantly interesting. . . . 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 thereupon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.''
Also from the book: ''Swope soon began to round up writers - among them Heywood Broun, Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, Deems Taylor, Laurence Stallings, Samuel Chotzinoff, Harry Hansen and St. John Irvine (celebrated writers of the day) - who converted the page into quite possibly the most refreshing journalistic oasis of its era.'' The only difference, perhaps, was that Swope did not print unsolicited ones from the general public.
CHARLES M. ANTIN
New York, Sept. 30, 1990
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/15/opinion/l-where-first-an-op-ed-page-was-seen-239591.html
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