Herbert Bayard Swope

Herbert Bayard Swope (born Jan. 5, 1882, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.—died June 20, 1958, Sands Point, N.Y.) was a journalist who became famous as a war correspondent and editor of the New York World.

After graduation from high school, Swope spent a year in Europe before going to work as a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He later went to the Chicago Tribune, then the New York Herald and the New York Morning Telegraph, with short periods of employment at the New York World, which he finally joined full-time in 1909. He remained with the paper until 1929, with an interruption for service in World War I.

After serving as a crime reporter for the World, Swope became a war correspondent, reporting from Germany early in World War I. He came to be recognized as an authority on Germany. His articles, collected in the book Inside the German Empire (1917), won him a Pulitzer Price in 1917.

Swope came back from Germany in 1915 to become city editor of the World, but he returned to the front in 1916. When the United States entered the war in 1917, he was commissioned in the U.S. Navy and made assistant to Bernard Baruch on the U.S. War Industries Board. He returned to the World in 1920 as executive editor and, in that role, concentrated on building up a page devoted to columnists opposite the editorial page. In that period, ending with his retirement in 1929, the paper won three Pulitzer Prizes.

In retirement Swope served the U.S. government in various advisory roles and was chairman of the New York State Racing Board for 11 years, starting in 1934. During World War II, from 1942 to 1946, he served as a consultant to U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.