KNIGHT OF THE AIR
Herbert Bayard Swope was born in St. Louis in 1882, the son of German immigrants Isaac Swope, a watchcase manufacturer, and Ida Cohn. His father’s firm went bankrupt in 1896, and his father died three years later, forcing Swope, at age 17, to find work. Attracted to journalism, he became a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch and soon moved to New York, where he went to work for the Pulitzer-owned New York World. He was a natural in the news business, and when hostilities broke out in Europe in August 1914, the World sent Swope to Germany as a war correspondent. He returned to New York the following year to become the World’s city editor, but by 1916 he was back at the front to cover the war. Soon after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, Swope was commissioned in the U.S. Navy and became an assistant to Bernard Baruch, the Wall Street financier President Woodrow Wilson had tapped to serve as chairman of the U.S. War Industries Board. A series of articles Swope wrote before the United States entered the war—one of which is reprinted, slightly abridged, here—formed the basis for his 1917 book, Inside the German Empire: In the Third Year of the War, which won the first Pulitzer Prize for Reporting.
[Boelcke] let me learn why he was held in such high esteem by friend and foe.
In 1919 Swope was elected head of the U.S. press New York World World
