Press: Milwaukee Muddle

Lucius William Nieman established the Milwaukee Journal in 1882, made it Wisconsin’s first 2¢ daily. Long a crusading editor-publisher, Mr. Nieman received a Pulitzer Prize for trying to stamp out the German language in Milwaukee in 1918. Last October Lucius Nieman died rich at 77, leaving in trust his $5,500,000 Journal holdings. Last February, four days after making a new will bequeathing her residuary estate to Harvard University to “further journalism,” his widow, Mrs. Agnes Wahl Nieman, followed him. Last week three distant relatives popped up to contest the widow’s will, claim this respectable publishing fortune on the ground that Mrs. Nieman was of unsound mind when her testament was drawn.

During her life Mrs. Nieman greatly admired her nephew and closest of kin, an obscure broadway actor named Cyril Gordon Weld, for whom she intended a large legacy. Weld died in New York in January, with Mrs. Nieman at his bedside. Saddened, Mrs. Nieman returned to Milwaukee and there made the instrument which was last week contested by Fred and Bob Wahl and Mrs. Paula Wahl Pierce, half-brothers and half-sister of Mrs. Nieman’s father, the late Christian Wahl.

Preliminary hearings on Mrs. Nieman’s will indicated that the ambitious relatives were hanging their case on Mrs. Mary Morris, a nurse employed as Mrs. Nieman’s companion for the past four years. Mrs. Morris attributed to her late charge melancholia, delusions of poverty, an undue fondness for gin.

First rebuttal came from the Journal’s Promotion Editor Wallace W. (“Brownie”) Rowland, who had worked on the paper 40 years, once had charge of the carrier pigeons used to carry spot news copy. Mr. Rowland, who received $25,000 in Mrs. Nieman’s will, said he had seen Mrs. Nieman do only a “little drinking,” that her extreme household thrift was for the “benefit of the help.” Questioned as to why Mrs. Nieman passed over Wisconsin colleges to make a big gift to Harvard, Mr. Rowland averred that Mrs. Nieman simply “did not like Marquette,” and that she “didn’t like Wisconsin because of Glenn Frank and La Follette.”

The protesting Xieman kin also upset the plan of the Journal’s ruddy Publisher Harry Johnston (“The Chief”‘) Grant to take over, along with Mr. Nieman’s niece Fay McBeath and any Journal employes who could afford to buy in the 1,100 shares of Journal stock which Mr. Nieman left in trust. The Xieman trust represents 55% of the paper’s controlling interest. Of the remaining 900 shares, Mr. Grant already owns 400, while 500 are held by Mrs. Susan Boyd of Wilmington, Del., widow of a onetime Journal business manager. The Grant plan would create a treasury stock pool of 650 shares which only employes would be eligible to buy.

In objecting to this scheme, which in effect would solidly continue the Journal’s present highly successful management, the Wahls and Mrs. Pierce told the Milwaukee court that the suggested price of $3,500 a share was too low, that the same legal firm represents both trustees and prospective purchasers, that the trustees have made no effort to find other buyers for the stock. County appraisers, whose findings are subject to court review, said the stock was worth $5,000 a share.

Biggest Nieman beneficiary, the Harvard Corporation, remained icily calm in the face of the threatened litigation. If the money is awarded to Harvard, no school of journalism will be erected as a Nieman memorial. Harvard’s bespectacled young President James Bryant Conant announced when the Nieman will was made public that the terms of the bequest would permit its being used mostly in the English department to finance “courses providing a background for newspaper work.”