The Colonel and the Tribune
Mayer, Milton
BOOKS The Colonel and the Tribune by MILTON MAYER T once asked my father why he read the Tribune and he said, "I've always read the Tribune." Then I asked him if his father had always read the...
...One of them, Katrina McCormick Barnes, broke with him soon, when MILTON MAYER, more recently identified with California, Europe, and Massachusetts, calls himself a Chicagoan, and with reason...
...And make no mistake—the genius of the paper's evil was its publisher...
...He never gave me the chance to find out, and for that happy accident I am grateful...
...He was its 24-hour-a-day editor-in-chief...
...There isn't much in Waldrop's book that an old Chicago newspaperman hadn't known before, and there are a few things that he had known that should have been in it and aren't...
...True, life behind the walls of the seraglio was reputedly pleasant, once you had come to terms with it...
...he said yes, and I asked him why, and he said, "We were for Lincoln...
...Maybe there isn't much to be said about them...
...Well, Uncle Bertie," she is said to have said, "I suppose you're crying because you finally ran into somebody who didn't like you and was able to do something about it...
...Prentice-Hall...
...But he seems to have loved no one and to have lived his whole life in that do-it-yourself hell reserved for those who don't love and can't love...
...Colonel McCormick may have thought that he would have surcease from his hatred of Franklin D. Roosevelt by outliving him, but Waldrop assures us that that hatred was his ruling passion to the end...
...I introduced the ROTC into the schools...
...He hated "them all...
...Nothing that he owned or acquired helped him live...
...I find out what he wants and I give it to him...
...Waldrop keeps asking the question, "Was he crazy...
...as, perhaps, any man must be who hasn't the power to cope with his own unanswerable power...
...I introduced automatic rifles...
...He was the end product of a long line, and a large circle, of dominating women...
...and suggests, . with some interesting evidence, that he was...
...He picked up the pen as a military expert and military historian...
...But Robert McCormick's dress-parade to his ruin is clearly delineated —an achievement all the more remarkable in view of Waldrop's own servitude to the man whose lawyer, Weymouth Kirkland, spoke for nearly every last one of the Colonel's "associates" when he said, "People ask me how I have gotten along with McCormick all these years...
...Newspapermen no less than the public were beguiled by its format and its typography...
...Its features were not in the least distinguished, except for its syndicated comics (which were the invention of McCormick's cousin, Joseph Patterson...
...328 pp...
...she did battle for the right to sell her Tribune stock, which she called "blood money...
...But McCormick's writing rose to readable heights only when he was leading the charge of his mercenary bowmen at full gallop against the enemy, firing defamation from his presses...
...McCormick threw the man's advertising out of the paper and printed the story...
...His real ignorance was not of the nature of man and society—that, too —but of living...
...Waldrop's book is curiously cautious here and there, but in the essentials it is a work of unblushing integrity...
...Like all his relatives, his two nieces, the last of his blood line to whom he could have left his property, broke with the childless patriarch soon or late...
...But in the main McCormick is all there, in his stuffed coat-of-mail, his commercial and industrial canniness, and his unslakable thirst for the ichor of other men's blood...
...The book is a handsome contribution to the middle history of American journalism and a useful contribution to what we may hope is the past history of Chicago...
...Mechanically it was by all odds the country's best and most inventive daily...
...It didn't pretend to a newspaper's general coverage, still less to be a newspaper of record...
...One other person succeeded in unstringing McCormick and that was one of his own—that is, one of the Medill-McCormick-Patterson family's—strong women...
...He had to build his own monuments, fix his own plaques, and offer the universally uncorroborated testimony of his greatness...
...His paper was a dishonorable thing...
...His truck with Chicago hoodlums—carried on by intermediaries like Max Annenberg—could have done with some elaboration...
...He showed no comprehension of the vast difference between the two...
...His biography discloses a man without serenity or charm, without humility or forbearance, without friendship or its corollary capacity to forgive and be forgiven...
...And the Communist answer—a press nominally owned by the public—has long since proved to be as deplorable as McCormick's Tribune and much less entertaining...
...A private publisher can murder with impunity and immunity...
...His self-righteousness stood him in the stead of a good man's righteousness...
...Why effete, why effeminate...
...I've always read the Tribune" and "We were for Lincoln"—the unbeatable combo on which Robert R. Mc-Cormick built his blunderbuss tower and his blustering days (and his tortured nights), and, at the last, his mute, unmindful tomb...
...His triumphant laughter was wormwood to the ramrod Colonel...
...Deprived of the sword, after 1918, by the niceties of peacetime society, the Colonel did the next best thing...
...It is not vividly, or even very well, written, and its canvas is too epic for its own good...
...His biographer—thanks to the subject and his prosaic fidelity to it—has given us a cool Greek representation of the tyrant who has no one to tell him the truth as his fury comes into full possession of him...
...Its fascination was that of an outlaw, which, indeed, journalistically, it was...
...He had to be a man, and to be a man was to be a slugger...
...so much the sorrier...
...Some thought that McCormick loved, if not a person, then a thing, and that thing his newspaper...
...Waldrop, who never lived in Chicago, concludes that McCormick was good for the city, as, I suppose, a doctor of sorts might conclude that the needle was good for a jazzband drummer...
...He was helpless to communicate with his kind...
...but neither has many a richer man than McCormick who has taken it...
...I don't know how well I'd have done if, like a friend of mine, I had received a $5,000 bonus from the Colonel's own hand...
...FDR was his match at heaving dead cats and more than his match at slipping in quick stilettos, but he had a deadlier weapon in his arsenal: laughter...
...I introduced mechanization...
...One of the lapses of Waldrop's biography is his omission of McCormick of Chicago: an unconventional portrait of a controversial figure, by Frank C. Waldrop...
...You may say, "Who didn't...
...Give the poor devil his due...
...Then I asked him if his father had always read the Tribune...
...That a city—a city of people—had needs that a city was meant to serve was unthinkable to a man who is said to have looked down on the hunger marchers of the 1930s and muttered, "They ought to be shot...
...To a newspaperman the prospect (insofar as McCormick or Marx reflects it) is dreadful...
...But a man does not debauch what he loves, even if it is only a thing...
...Everything" that happened between McCormick's birth in 1880 and his death in 1955 (and much that happened before and after) comes under the biographer's hand, as it came under his megalomaniac subject's...
...He fought the losing feudal fight against that popular power, abominating "politicians" except for those he despised (like Eisenhower) who stood up neither with him nor to him...
...Except for an occasional hero like Harold Ickes, decent men were indecently afraid of the malevolent Colonel...
...That kind of honorable and courageous he certainly was, and even that modest kind of honor and courage does a city no harm...
...The Tribune was only an extension of his consuming virility...
...His paper could not be used for commercial puffs—¦ except, of course, for the great god Commerce in general...
...I had to draw on all my moral resources to resist corruption when a Hearst city editor gave me a $10 bonus...
...The everyday atrocities that it perpetrated were not fobbed off on a fool by a toady...
...There is no other reported occasion of his having cried or laughed...
...for example, his anti-intellectualism and his ignorance of social forces displayed in his lifelong crusade to save the republic (not the democracy) from the Anarchists and the Communists...
...His mother called him Roberta and kept him in skirts until he was almost seven...
...The poor devil at his most gigantic is enough to make the poorest pigmy say, "I'd rather be I— even I—than he...
...He could afford to be lavish —he inherited a going concern and made a commercial colossus of it...
...And then his power failed him...
...Robert—"Bertie"—McCormick had to be a man, with the Tribune his knee and his knuck...
...He died defeated by popular political power unafraid of the power of a mere newspaper...
...True, he didn't need the money...
...It is really very simple...
...But the larger corruption in which Chicago was trapped McCormick supported, the corruption by his kind of people who used the city for a trough and the pols for errand boys...
...His use of the Joe McCarthys (and their use of each other) in the interest of the Red Menace, of racism, and of labor-baiting is unmentioned...
...McCormick left Chicago at least as rotten as he found it and its people as badly served...
...The devil was a poor devil, filling the role that classic tragedy requires, of a highly placed man, neither very good nor bad, who encompasses his own destruction through pride and pride's pitfall, anger...
...McCormick was angry all his life, and his anger cost him everything a man wants except the fear that men have of men who have power...
...Worst" meant only dishonorable, purposively and persistently dishonorable...
...Waldrop seems to have missed the case of one of the paper's biggest advertisers who, when he got a divorce, had his lawyer call the Tribune to have the story suppressed...
...In my day I saw far better reporters than I (and at least as honest men) disappear into McCormick's maw and never be heard of again...
...After she won, she is said (but not by the reticent Waldrop) to have walked into the Colonel's fortress at the top of the Tribune Tower and found him in tears...
...McCormick's Tribune was, in essence, an organ of rabid, and rancid, opinion from front to back...
...It is the timeless tale of the wretched man whose ingenuity amasses more wretchedness as he goes along...
...Mirroring its publisher, the paper mirrored the brutality of the Chicago of his day...
...Its every report might equally have been true or false...
...There are some aspects of McCormick's history that a Chicagoan might find inadequately emphasized...
...He had to be a soldier, and to be a soldier was to be a hero...
...What the Chicago Tribune wasn't, while McCormick was alive, was a newspaper...
...He was born and educated there and worked for ten years for the Chicago Evening Post, the Associated Press, and the Chicago Evening American before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago...
...Robert Rutherford McCormick equipped his office and his bedroom with all the legendary gimmicks, electronic and pre-electronic, to protect him from the intruder who might want to do him harm...
...Leo Rosten's poll of the Washington press gallery (most of whose members worked for papers of the Tribune's political persuasion...
...The Chicago of McCormick's day was the male city par excellence in the puerile sense that makes masculinity of muscle...
...and so he died...
...Colonel McCormick lived surrounded by the inorganic symbols of the victories he alone esteemed and by the hardly less inorganic persons of his batmen and his bodyguards...
...McCormick was not that kind of fool...
...This month the University of Chicago Press will republish his book, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45...
...Under cover of anonymity, they judged the Tribune the worst newspaper in America...
...His reduction of newspapermen to hatchetmen is indicated, but only indicated...
...But the intruder was already inside, alone with him...
...Its fakes and its hoaxes were barefaced classics, like the picture of the dogtag that every American would be forced to wear under the Social Security "dictatorship" program...
...In his McCormick of Chicago, Frank Waldrop doesn't call any man McCor-mick's friend and says as little as possible about his two marriages (both of which followed the wives' divorces from friends of the aging satrap...
...His Tribune was not the world's, or the country's, or the city's greatest newspaper...
...it even doctored the AP dispatches it printed...
...His subject was Ulysses S. Grant, the civilian misfit who became a great commander and then a civilian misfit again...
...He could not be bought either over or under the counter...
...Among the myriad wonders that were wrought in his behalf (including the disappearance of court records of divorces) was the Distinguished Service Medal for heroism against the enemy in the Cantigny offensive of April-May, 1918—in which he never fought...
...Mc-Cormick's failure with Liberty magazine and the Washington Times-Herald proved his magic parochial...
...but it was bad medicine for a Chicago that had some day to become a city of citizens...
...I introduced machine guns into the army...
...and this man debauched his newspaper to his hatreds, day after day, through the men he made things of to execute the day's debauchery...
...But its appearance was not the whole of the Tribune's success, any more than the virtues which endeared it to my father and grandfather...
...McCormick was really a genius here, and as lavish as he was brilliant...
...It killed as readily as it concocted front-page stories...
...But it is more than that...
...Its Washington and foreign services were distortion and fabrication mills, and even in quantity they could not touch those of many smaller papers, including, notably, the Daily News before Frank Knox bought it...
...Roosevelt, the really happy warrior, symbolized McCormick's failure as a human being...
...It was just the ticket for a Chicago whose butchery of beast and man was its hallmark...
...He laughed at McCormick...
...It, like he, was effective when it was laying savage siege to a savage like Chicago's Mayor William Hale Thompson...
...7.95...
...Sooner or later every man—men like the University of Chicago's Charles E. Merriam—who might have civilized the community, came under McCormick's anathema as effete or effeminate...
...But the youngest of my children has never heard of the man who called himself the Colonel...
...But Roosevelt laughed out loud...
...It was at its weakest when, like a woman, it was trying to cover the depredations of its offspring such as Sanitary Ed Kelly (of whom Waldrop innocently says, "He was a good mayor...
Vol. 30 • May 1966 • No. 5
