The Press: Battle of Newspapers

Homer would have liked to work on the Tribune. . . . So would Horace. . . . So would Balzac, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Hardy, Kipling and Mark Twain—The W.G.N., a handbook on the 75th anniversary (1922) of the Chicago Tribune.

Because a lot of other people, including Marshall Field III, want in a different sense to work on the Tribune, a rival Chicago paper is about to be launched. But when Marshall Field begins working on the Tribune, the Tribune’s towering Colonel Robert Rutherford Mc-Cormick will begin working on the Field paper. That will be the zero hour for a clash between two great Chicago fortunes, one originally made in Chicago’s dominant department store and the other made in Chicago’s dominant newspaper.

The outcome should be a first-rate show for bystanders. For Colonel McCormick at 61 may be the least popular U.S. publisher, as well as the most arrogant, contentious and unpredictable, but he is one of America’s most successful publishers and a hard man to lick. Only two years ago Hearst’s Herald & Examiner folded, just like every other rival Chicago morning paper (13 in all).

The Marshall Field paper—which has just paid $10,000 in a prize contest for its not-so-novel name, the Chicago Sun —may or may not turn out to be an ably run paper. But even those who are most hopeful of the Sun’s success do not expect it to win a quick victory.

The Terrible Tribune. In his 27 years as publisher of the biggest full-size U.S. newspaper (circ. 1,076,866), Colonel McCormick has acquired such titles as “Lord McCormick, the Earl of Wheaton,” the “Duke of Chicago,” the “Midwest Medici.” Once called “the greatest mind of the 14th Century,” he has inspired at least one high-spirited skit:

I’m the celebrated, irritated, isolated gentleman

The Tribune Tower Colonel.

In 1937 Leo Rosten’s poll of Washington correspondents ranked the Tribune next to the Hearst press as “least fair and reliable” of all U.S. newspapers. That poll reflected the Tribune’s savage anti-Roosevelt angling of news. Meantime its isolationist -propaganda -as-news—unsurpassed for furious bias since frontier journalism —has probably qualified the Tribune for first rank in any like poll in 1941. Alone among U.S. newspapers since 1933, the Tribune has got its papers burned in public bonfires, its offices rotten-egged. Also unique is the range of hatred for the Tribune: it cuts across all class lines in Chicago, from stockyard worker to millionaire.

How then explain the Tribune’s success? —its gain of 264,000 circulation in the last five years?—its undeniable influence on isolationist sentiment in the five Midwest States which it calls “Chicagoland?” The late, great Charles Dana prescribed one sure-fire recipe for circulation: get your paper talked about. Of that art Colonel McCormick, with his blatant methods, is a past master. The Tribune’s subtitle (“The World’s Greatest Newspaper”) is an outstanding example.

That a paper which many newsmen rated “the least fair and reliable” should be an outstanding success does not mean that its journalistic sins are profitable. The Tribune’s success can be laid to other factors than its news. It has always had a great and tough circulation department, perfected by that wizard of circulation, the late Max Annenberg, who fought Hearst with almost gangster methods, and carried on by Max’s blasphemous brother-in-law, Louis Rose. No small credit for the Tribune’s fat profit belongs to Business Manager W. E. Macfarlane.

The Tribune also has built its circulation with some good editorial matter outside of news. Its features are of the best and among the most expensive: its comics, its color sections, its rotogravure, its serials, its columnists (notably the late humorist B.L.T.). For Colonel McCormick, although he considers himself an aristocrat, believes, up to a point, in giving the public what it wants.

How to Run a Newspaper. More than ever the Tribune is McCormick’s shadow. In his 24th-floor office in the $18,000,000 Gothic Tribune Tower the Colonel runs the Tribune strictly according to his, and nobody else’s, whims, fancies, prejudices. From his red-&-white marble desk runs a direct wire to Managing Editor J. Loy (“Pat”) Maloney. Over it all day the Colonel feeds his ideas. His story suggestions go forth initialed “R.R.McC.”, meaning that they get into the Tribune for sure, and generally page 1.

At noon, surrounded by editors and cartoonists, the Colonel monologues his angles on the state of the world, the nation and Chicago. Presently his ideas return to his desk patly translated into editorials and cartoons, receive a further polish with McCormick brimstone. Afternoons he confers, or soliloquizes, with heads of advertising, promotion, circulation, mechanical departments.

At lunch, in a private dining room called the Overset Club, the Colonel gathers around him Tribune executives (and an occasional big advertiser or politician), again soliloquizes while the McCormick-dyed listeners await his cue to begin their meal.

Against plain reporters (whose heads are sometimes lopped off with inexplicable suddenness) Publisher McCormick lives as securely insulated as against the noises of the Tribune presses or the people on Michigan Avenue below to whom he supplies the kind of newspaper he thinks they need. (“Of course, the people want this,” McCormick says of majority opinion, “but they don’t know where it is leading them. I do.”)

For services rendered, the Colonel pays well. Editors’ bonuses sometimes amount to several times their salary. All employes get free dental cleaning, free medical examination, cut-rate medical services, may even buy life insurance through the Tribune, or borrow money for homes from its own savings and loan company funds. Tribune newlyweds receive gifts of flat silver. And once a year the Colonel, in cutaway, receives all Tribune employes (3,000) in the main lobby, treats them to coffee and sandwiches. Paternalism on the Tribune, administered with feudal directness by the Colonel himself, has had potent influence on his staff.

The Good Old Days. But such means appear by now to be havingsome effect on the caliber and morale of the Tribune staff. SinceWorld War II the Colonel’s domination of the Tribune has become complete. Until then he was confined more or less successfully to the editorial page. The news columns were largely in the hands of City Editor Robert Morton Lee (now dead) and Managing Editor Edward Scott Beck (now on the shelf). Under them the Tribune staff once included such names as Westbrook Pegler, Percy Hammond, Ring Lardner, Burton Rascoe. Present Managing Editor Pat Maloney, who flew with Rickenbacker and wears a Phi Beta Kappa key from Dartmouth, is a hard worker who got his training under Beck and Lee but lacks their independent thinking.

In the Tribune’s “Golden Era,” before the Colonel got at the news columns, it produced its only Pulitzer Prizewinner, beloved Cartoonist John T. McCutcheon. But Cartoonist McCutcheon, a sweet-tempered man who could not adapt his pen to McCormick manias, has been pushed aside by Cartoonist Carey Cassius Orr, who is not inhibited by McCormick.

With Roosevelt II the Colonel really hit his stride. Nor was he concerned when he was caught in outright manufacture of anti-Roosevelt shockers. A Tribune story in 1936 showed a ragpicker in a gutter scooping up Roosevelt buttons which Party workers presumably could not persuade anybody to wear. The Colonel did not apologize when the Chicago Times ran a full-page spread in which the Tribune’s ragpicker re-enacted the button scene which he claimed a Tribune reporter paid him 25¢ to fake. Nor did the Colonel try to collect a $5,000 reward by the Times for proof of a Tribune headline and story that Moscow had U.S. Reds to back Roosevelt.

The temper of the Tribune’s reporting the war & peace issue shows in its streamer page 1 headlines: WAR BLAMED ON U.S. ENVOYS WARN SENATE WARMONGERS WAR AGITATORS HIT BY HOLT HALT WAR DRIVE— WHEELER BARE MORE STEPS TO WAR HALIFAX STEERS F.D.R. BILL HOUSE PASSES DICTATOR BILL DRAFT ARMY ‘GOING TO WAR’ NEW WAR DEAL WITH CANADA BEAT DRUMS FOR CONVOYS DISCLOSE MORE TALK OF A.E.F. PACT PUSHES U.S. NEAR WAR GEN. JOHNSON: WAR IN 60 DAYS* VOTE NO WAR IN WISCONSIN LET PEOPLE DECIDE ON WAR FIGHT JAPS! BRITONS TO U.S.

Personal Journalism. Tribune reporters call McCormick-ordered stories “policy assignments”or “dirty stories.” At least two Tribune reporters are saving clips of such stories against the day when they can write a treatise on the weirdities of the Colonel’s nose for news.

The decline of the Tribune’s once-excellent foreign service may also be charged directly to the Colonel. When Tribune Correspondent Edmond Taylor (The Strategy of Terror) predicted that the Russian-German Pact would give Russia Bessarabia he got the ax thus:

“Your fantastic Rumanian story, hysterical tone of your recent cables and other vagaries indicate you, along with Knickerbocker, Mowrer and others, are victims of mass psychosis and are hysterically trying to drag U.S. into war. Suggest you join Foreign Legion or else take rest cure in sanitarium in neutral country until you regain control of nerves and recover confidence in yourself. Until then, file no more.”

For his loaded news columns, the Colonel invokes the tradition of personal journalism that made the Tribune great under his famed grandfather Joseph Medill, Lincoln’s stanch backer and crony (“Take your Goddamned feet off my desk, Abe”) and one of the Civil War’s fieriest propagandists. Old Medill summed up his news technique in a classic story in 1857 headed A BRUTE. One James Wheeler was fined $5 for maltreating his wife. The Tribune story concluded: “A few months’ experience in breaking stones in the Bridewell would do this Wheeler a ‘power of good’ and he ought to have been sent there.” McCormick retains the method.

Military Manners. Admirer of engineers and military life, big (6 ft. 4 in.) McCormick, who still bears himself with parade-ground erectness, is as inelastic in ducal personal routines and crotchets as in his editing. As for years past he still rises regularly not later than 8:30, goes break-fastless to ride or tramp over his 800-acre estate at Wheaton, 45 minutes from Chicago. Having lost a blaring Tribune campaign to put Chicago on Eastern Standard Time the year round, he runs his estate on E.S.T. nevertheless. When his wife Amie, a capable portrait painter, died two years ago, the Colonel gave her a military funeral, with her favorite saddle horse carrying her boots, reversed, three volleys by a squad from Fort Sheridan and taps sounded over her grave.

A major habit-change is the Colonel’s Saturday night talk on his Station WGN (World’s Greatest Newspaper). Decorated (in 1923) for his part in the Battle of Cantigny, and author of a well-reviewed book on General Grant, the Colonel wished to clarify the military situation. Pronounced he: “If the French had only followed my advice and developed use of 105-mm. guns instead of 753 they would have been able to halt the German attack.” Contending until late 1935 that an air force was at best an unimportant adjunct of modern armies, he told his listeners during the Battle of Flanders that Stukas were of small use because infantrymen could be trained to shoot them down like ducks.

Measuring Strength. With the appearance of Marshall Field’s Sun the important question will be: How much of the Tribune’s past bounce can the Colonel muster for the fight?

Recently the Colonel has mostly warmed over old journalistic dishes in preparation for the arrival of the Marshall Field paper. Month ago the Tribune headlined an exposé of gambling in Cook County — an anti-climactic series which served chiefly to remind Chicagoans how long ago were the Tribune’s successful anti-gangster campaigns in the ’20s. The Colonel inaugurated a series of articles on points of interest in Chicago—a well-worn reminder that he loves the town in which he has so large a proprietary interest. (The trouble with New York, says the Colonel, is that it has a bigshot complex.) Belatedly the Tribune started a campaign to get more defense work for Chicago. To offset the Field paper’s $10,000 name contest the Tribune ran a half-dozen contests—$10,500 for a new U.S. operetta, $10,000 for easy answers to a State-capital contest, $5 to $25 for best recipes, book reviews, horoscopes.

More interesting are the Colonel’s new efforts to prove that his isolationist heart is in the right place. He enlisted noisily in the “Smokes for Yanks” campaign, thereby inspiring Col. Frank Knox’s Daily News to its best cartoon of the year. Few days later the Colonel sought to undercut a more serious criticism. In a long letter to the London Daily Sketch’s Lord Kemsley “on America’s place in world affairs” McCormick wrote: “If it were necessary, and I write this after mature consideration, I believe that many Americans would volunteer to aid you in arms to prevent your being conquered, and I am one of them.”

For McCormick, the isolationist scream-bomb, this was a remarkable concession. If the U.S. were to enter the war he might well make much bigger concessions in the name of patriotism—as he and his cousin Joe Patterson (now publisher of the even more successful New York Daily News) did in World War I. If the Colonel again begins whipping up fighting spirit as hotly as he now does isolation, his shift will doubtless cut some interventionist ground from under Marshall Field’s Chicago Sun. But the real question of how much strength the Colonel can muster for the battle is how much of the Tribune’s original cast-iron constitution is still sound after years of arbitrary one-man rule and addiction to partisanship instead of news.

* About three months ago.