The Press: Isolationists’ Big Days

Last week Colonel R. R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune achieved what many a citizen had deemed next to impossible: It achieved new highs of isolationist frenzy.

The Colonel thundered in a full-page advertisement: THE TRIBUNE ACCEPTS THE CHALLENGE. The “challenge” was such criticism as that voiced at an anti-Tribune indignation meeting in Chicago (TIME, Aug. 11). The ad reproduced four anti-Tribune leaflets and petitions urging a boycott of the Tribune, a new Chicago morning paper, etc. Roared Publisher McCormick: “The Tribune welcomes the attacks of Communists and all others who object to publication of the truth.”

But all this noisy battling in Chicago was byplay compared to what happened last week in Washington. The Tribune’s story of the President’s report to Congressional leaders on his rendezvous with Churchill, written by Correspondent Chesly Manly, said that “the grand strategy of the new Anglo-American-Russian alliance” included “the assistance of a vast American expeditionary force.” When the President read that report he hit the ceiling. Steve Early, in no playful humor, called Senator Barkley, Representative Sol Bloom, other leaders in whom Roosevelt had confided, and accused them of misrepresenting the President’s remarks. Hopping mad, the Congressmen elected Senator Barkley to go after Correspondent Manly.

Next day, in a city famed for denunciations of reporters, Senator Barkley delivered the most blistering denunciation of Correspondent Manly and the Tribune that Washington had heard in many a day. The gist: that Manly’s alleged inside story was “a deliberate, and malicious falsehood out of the whole cloth.” Correspondent Manly stuck to his story. Colonel McCormick backed him up with a scorching anti-Roosevelt editorial running almost a column.

Only threat to Bertie McCormick’s title as No. 1 isolationist publisher of the U.S. was that his cousin Joe Patterson (New York Daily News) threatened to out-McCormick him. Pulling out all the isolationist stops, Cousin Joe and News Chief Editorialist Reuben Maury (who also writes editorials for interventionist Collier’s) vied with the Tribune’s bitterest, Anglophobe, Roosevelt-hating, gallows-dancing, isolationist editorials, cartoons and news. One News editorial played variations on the theme: “[The Administration] is accused of keeping the war scare pumped up to frightful proportions in order that it may quietly and under pretext of wartime emergency transform our democracy into some sort of totalitarian state, before many of us know what is happening.”