The Press: Righteousness Unafraid

Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune last week indulged in a field day of self-righteousness:

> In a page-one cartoon, the Tribune dramatized its own nobility. Around a forthright central figure curiously reminiscent of a Johnnie Walker whiskey ad revolved the Tribune’s detractors in their ugliest guise: Spiders H. V. Kaltenborn and Walter Winchell with microphones; Moths Marshall Field and Frank Knox; Skunk Harold Ickes; cigaret-smoking Hen Dorothy Thompson; a lean crow representing the New York Herald Tribune, which dared recently to comment on some of the Chicago Tribune’s antics.

> From the Tribune of Oct. 3, 1861, Colonel McCormick reprinted a vigorous editorial by his famed Grandfather Joseph Medill, who was Lincoln’s crony. Because old Medill’s editorial declared the need to “denounce all who stand in the way of the triumph of the good cause,” the Tribune last week said it expressed current Tribune policy even better than it did 80 years ago. The final paragraph marked a new high in the Colonel’s coupon-clipping from the Tribune’s Lincolnian inheritance. Declared Medill: “We bid our contemporaries, then, who would rather be victorious over THE TRIBUNE than over Jeff Davis, howl on. . . . We go our own way, at our own time, in our own manner, in company of our own choosing, knowing as we do that vindication will be sure to follow. We can afford to be honest, and fearless, and to wait.”