Travis Rutland, Melinda Fellowes and the GreenScarf Idea

In the mid 1920s, Father and daughter, Edgar Fellowes jr and Melinda, took him up. They owned a string of farm community newspapers in the west. She, had ambitions.

If she could syndicate writers, she could pay them properly and widen the scope of the papers from farm to some national news and comment.

     Rutland was Southern and with no college or high school. He was running as far away as possible from the shame of being from a family that owned lumber mills in the slave economy.
     She found the eager, hawk-looking Rutland. His sharp face really did seem to come to a beak. She liked his loping stride, his independence of marriage, the work he did for conservation bodies, the pith in his prose and his GreenScarf ideals and she liked his sinews. She had learned to do it with men and a woman at Sarah Lawrence College in the east.

     As shy in bed as he was confident on foot, rustic in work boots -- even, later, interviewing senators, and with an almost caricature corn cob pipe, she was the first and last reporter she ever invited to bed.

    The syndication was a step up, inviting men, not the other way round was good, her sense of story was good. Also at Sarah Lawrence she met a Lowenstein from the family who would help bankroll their move to national journalism. Father and daughter wanted to challenge the conservative TIME with a weekly in newsprint, yet well illustrated with photographs. They called it NOW! Rutland said she wrote G R E E N S C A R F S T O R I E S not in green but in pink lipstick on a broken mirror in the faraway cabin where they had ridden to make some stories for the planned journal and some stories for their own carnal pleasure.

     Growing up in an American 1920s of extremes of wealth and poverty, he was shaped by asking... Why? Why did America have to cut down every single tree there when the pilgrims came? What was this vengeance on nature?

      The 1920s produced the TECNOCRACY movement. This was proposed by scientists felt that the country -- so much wealth of new ideas and so much poverty c 1930... the USA should be run on scientific lines. Rutland flirted with this (which had much good sense, yet was finally authoritarian). Instead he developed the GoodScienceBadScience idea which he spelled as one word. Learning how to discover and drill oil was good: the water pollution left by oil wells and the theft of leases was a dark side. It was fine for DuPont to try to produce synthetic rubber. To claim that American workers were (or should be) tough enough to avoid the resultant workplace cancer was perverse.

         NOW! was Miss Fellowes concept. GreenScarf Stories was her way to tie down his sometimes airy views on the folly of human progress. GoodScienceBadScience contained the paradox that made stories. What is good for the lumber company is not good for the virgin forest. What is good for the drug company bottom line may not be good for those who suffer the side effects. What is good for 'finishing' Japan, the A bombs, may draw you into a race whose anxieties no one can avoid. What is good about water, using it, is bad for where it otherwise might go.      

NOW!, Democrat-leaning rival to the more conservative TIME magazine started with the stock market crash of 1929. The Fellowes had cash in plenty and a production building in Philadelphia, office in all important Washington were picked up for little. They bought a printing press that was bankrupt in Kansas City, centrally placed for rail distribution north, south, east and west across the country.

At first Mr. Fellowes, always that even to Miss Fellowes, his daughter did not like Mr. Rutland's idea that 'science' could find an audience. Mr. Rutland, even that in bed with her, and Miss Fellowes proved him wrong with a three part series on the oil industry, the developing technology of drilling, all the benefits of refining and the horror of corruption, notably the theft of leases, including from the Osage native Americans, death of oil field workers and pollution of streams irrigating farm land.

Rutland caught the mood of 1931, the benefits and promise of oil and the greed. It was science in the strict sense of original research. It was science in that oil drilling and geological surveying were fast moving technologies. Black gold! It was all right until your stream or even you were drowned in it. With several such series Rutland helped to step up circulation, 100,000, two, three, four to 700,000 when he wrote the new weapons article. 

 When on Saturdays she had entertained who she called 'this week's senator', then she had Rutland late at night. When he wrote on the importance of new weapons, she refused him the access and comfort.