Anderson, the committee said, "reported what he saw without fear of consequences; defied the indignant officials whom he charged with criminal neglect of duty; ran the daily risk of assassination, and rendered invaluable public service by his exposures."
Anderson also undertook a successful campaign to release those prisoners who were imprisoned for various alleged offenses in the course of World War I.
"When the Post-Dispatch, in 1923, launched its crusade to get freedom for the political prisoners who had been run into jail by government Cossacks [federal and state prosecutors], it was Anderson who performed the fieldwork.
"[2] In 1923, after two years as an editorial writer, Anderson could not persuade the Post-Dispatch to send him to Washington D.C., so he resigned and went to the capitol as a freelance reporter.
His early work on the Teapot Dome Scandal disclosed that Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall had accepted a bribe of $230,000 to lease oil lands in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, to branches of Standard Oil.
In that same year, he was sent to Chicago to cover the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, both 19, who had abducted and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks.
In 1925, Anderson contributed to an investigation which led to the resignation of Federal Judge George W. English, and in 1926, he debunked an AP story that stated that the socialist government of Mexico was attempting to "establish a "Bolshevik hegemony" between the US and the Panama Canal."
As a result of the ensuing congressional investigation and government prosecutions, Robert W. Stewart, head of Standard Oil of Indiana, was indicted for contempt of the Senate and perjury.
He referred to Herbert Hoover as "The Great White Feather" and expressed admiration for the populism of Louisiana governor Huey Long.
Their babies wither and die, when they have seen their boys turn to thievery and their girls to prostitution, it strikes me as a poor time to play dilettante over the classical ideas of Jeffersonian democracy."
[3] (The following year, she left for The Daily Worker, after which she introduced Soviet spy Hede Massing to American diplomat Noel Field.)
In 1937, Anderson seemed to regain his old touch when he won the Headliners' Club Award for exposing and authenticating the suppressed Paramount newsreel, which showed the killing of ten workers by police patrolling the struck Republic Steel Plant near Chicago.
In October, he took a foray into radio and denounced the conduct of Martin Dies, Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Kenneth went to work in the aerospace industry and became president of a small company that made airplanes fasteners and rivets.
Anderson has been praised as a brilliant reporter and writer, while others have criticized his drinking, "prosecutorial complex," and the bitterness of some of his writing.
Anderson, Broun wrote, had worked "constantly under punishing tension" and had worn "a hair shirt of complete dedication to the things in which he believed," adding: But just about the last person in the world with any right to mention the matter is some little snip sitting with scissors and paste pot in the office of Time piecing out the curious sign language in which that magazine is written for the delectation of commuters and clubwomen.
Paul Y. Anderson, drunk or sober, was by so much the finest journalist of his day that it is not fitting for any moist-eared chit even to touch the hem of his weakness.
Taken in his entirety, he stands up as a man deserving love and homage from every working newspaperman and woman in the United States.