The tragic death of Godfrey G. Gloom, an uncompromising congressman from Amity, Ind., made the front page of The New York Times on June 28, 1936. While crossing a street in Philadelphia, where the Democratic convention was being held, Mr. Gloom leaped out of the path of an oncoming vehicle carrying a radio commentator, only to be hit by a newspaper photographer on a motorcycle.
It was “entirely fitting,” he told The Times in a long-winded speech uttered in his final moments, “that I should meet my end through the agency of those gadgets of modern progress, the radio and newspaper photography.”
The headline: “Last Jeffersonian Expires With Convention; Godfrey Gloom a Victim of Modern Devices.”
The catch: Mr. Gloom, whose political commentary had been featured in The Times for more than a decade, hadn’t actually died. In fact, he never existed at all.
And The Times was well aware.
Mr. Gloom was the invention of Elmer Davis, a member of The Times’s editorial board and a distinguished reporter and commentator. Mr. Davis had apparently decided to kill the character off.
Following Mr. Davis’s death in 1958, his colleague James Reston reflected on the utility of Mr. Gloom as a literary device: “At national political conventions, Mr. Davis would pass on his own skeptical and wry comments through Congressman Gloom,” Mr. Reston wrote.
The mythical congressman, regarded as one of the last Jeffersonian Democrats, first appeared in The Times ahead of the 1920 Democratic convention and became known for his satirical pontifications on upcoming elections. The articles that featured Mr. Gloom — many of which were written by Mr. Davis himself — ran as straightforward news stories, with the assumption that astute Times readers would be in on the joke, thanks to a few winks in the text.
Mr. Gloom’s back story was elaborate, though spotty. According to his obituary, written by Arthur Krock, Mr. Gloom was “born on the date of the battle of San Jacinto,” which was in 1836, making him 100 at the time of his death. “He always said of himself that he was born in Johnson County, Ind., at Amity, and educated by the Democratic organization. But that could not be proved,” it continued. As a youth, Mr. Gloom “could kill a squirrel at 200 yards with an old-fashioned breech-loading musket.” He was married four times, always to Democrats, naturally.
A collection of articles featuring Mr. Gloom is stored in the Morgue, The Times’s clippings library, which stores physical copies of newspaper articles, photographs and other materials on newsworthy organizations and people. His file folder contains dozens of clipped articles; his file card reads “Gloom, Godfrey G.” then, noted in pencil, “Fictitious character.”
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