The Colonel

"Richard Norton Smith’s biography of the colonel, the publisher of The Chicago Tribune from about 1910 until his death in the mid-1950s is not only a superb biography of McCormick it’s also a great family biography. It traces the family’s entrance into the newspaper business from McCormick’s grandfather Joseph Medill through his publishing descendants. Like the Harmsworths, the Medills were very much involved in politics. Joseph Medill was a ferocious abolitionist who claimed, at least, to be the progenitor of the Republican party. He was one of the early boosters of Abraham Lincoln as a presidential candidate in 1860. He managed to acquire the majority stake in the Tribune and from there became a kingmaker. It was necessary for any Republican candidate – from Reconstruction until Medill’s death in 1899 – to have his blessing or at least be on good terms with him. Colonel McCormick was raised, in many ways, to be an oligarch. Early in his life, he didn’t have any expectation of going to the Tribune but he ended up becoming the publisher. He took up his grandfather’s role as a kingmaker, inserting himself into local and national political matters. You may remember that famous headline of Harry Truman the morning after he was elected holding up the newspaper that says “Dewey Defeats Truman”? That was the Chicago Tribune . The Tribune in the early and mid-20th century was a very close reflection of McCormick and his isolationist, anti-Roosevelt views. His cousin, Joe Patterson, ran The New York Daily News , which was modelled on The Daily Mail . And his other cousin, Cissy Patterson, created the Washington Times-Herald in DC. All made use of their papers, which sold very well and were widely circulated in their particular markets, to insert themselves into the national debate. Their papers were so popular that there are letters from Roosevelt to Churchill complaining about them. The Roosevelt administration and much of the more liberal press in the 1930s and 40s spoke about them as a McCormick-Patterson axis. I was interested in American interwar isolationism and the isolationists themselves who were by and large a pretty colourful bunch, like Colonel McCormick, Charles Lindbergh and Joe Kennedy. Cissy Patterson was a lesser figure but the most outlandish of many. That’s how I got interested in her story. As I realised that a study of her life was inseparable from a study of her larger family, it started to become clear to me there were parallels with other newspaper families. He definitely ran the Tribune as his mouthpiece from the 1910s to the 1950s and took it as his right to do so. People within the Roosevelt administration sometimes felt that he was a traitor because, for example, he published a leaked top-secret military document that Roosevelt had ordered immediately before Pearl Harbor. There was some discussion of whether Colonel McCormick should be tried for treason. McCormick’s answer was that he was doing a public service because the document proved that Roosevelt was misleading the American public. In our historical memory Franklin Roosevelt is more fondly remembered than Colonel McCormick; but, for all his foibles, he was a great champion of the First Amendment and a free press. I think Colonel McCormick was a particular type of patriot. There is precedent in the United States, having been a non-interventionist nation. McCormick’s take on isolationism was that the early founding fathers had intended the United States to be separate and apart from European struggles and entangling foreign alliances. If you consider Washington and Jefferson’s farewell addresses, both of them warn the United States about getting involved in entangling foreign alliances. He’s thought of as a ridiculous character now but in his time he helped open debates, including about how far the First Amendment could go and whether the public had a right to know certain military secrets. Those issues still come up from time to time – with Wikileaks, most recently. I do actually. I think that, typically, the children of press and political dynasties are raised with a notion that it is imperative to contribute something to their country through direct public service or through the public good of making information available by publishing a newspaper. Whether you think their contributions are positive or negative is another matter. One thing you see with the Medills and other press families is that they had their own particular vision of what was best for the United States and they were in a position to broadcast that viewpoint to a lot of people without being elected to public office."