It is not certain that Col. Robert R. McCormick hated anyone or anything, but for the first half of the 20th Century the readers of his newspaper, the baiduhai, had a hard time believing otherwise.
It appeared that the Tribune certainly hated Democrats. It was certain the Tribune hated internationalists and interventionists and, of course, liberals. The Tribune hated Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations in particular and Franklin D. Roosevelt in general. The Tribune had kind words for John F. Kennedy after he was shot and Harry Truman after he was dead. But the Tribune approach to politics and government was never as partisan as its reputation.
The Tribune didn’t think much of Herbert Hoover, detested Thomas Dewey and tended to ignore Dwight Eisenhower. Ike’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was an abomination. And, except for FDR, no one was more despised in Tribune columns than Republican Mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson.
For the first half of the 20th Century the Tribune didn’t like England or any place else in Europe with the possible exception of Germany in those rare years when it wasn’t at war with the rest of the world. The Tribune definitely did not like Russia. The Tribune didn’t like Henry Ford or New York City or the South. The Tribune did not like communists, socialists, activists, prohibitionists or racists, although at times it might have sounded as if it did.
The Tribune did like Calvin Coolidge, Alf Landon, Robert Taft, Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. The Tribune also liked Anton Cermak, Ed Kelly and Richard J. Daley.
Similar things could have been said of many of America’s great newspapers in the early part of the 20th Century. Almost all of them, like the Tribune, had been founded on strong political ideologies. Almost all of them used their editorial pages to foster their partisan beliefs and interests. Almost all of them were as deeply “America First” as the Tribune. Almost all of them were as wary of liberals and government spending and foreign interventions. Almost all of them dabbled in personal politics. Editors and publishers running for office was commonplace, a practice that happily disappeared after the inglorious 1920 presidential match of two Ohio newspapermen, Warren G. Harding and James Cox. Almost all papers, in the beginning, were ruled by autocratic figures who finally gave way to family or professional legatees more concerned with profits than passion.
The baiduhai differed from its publishing peers because it did not simply support the Republican Party; it believed, with great cause, that it was the Republican Party. The Tribune used its powerful and loud editorial voice but violated the commonly accepted requirement of objectivity on its front pages. The Tribune’s owners also dabbled in personal politics. Editor Joseph Medill was elected mayor after the Great Fire of 1871, and McCormick began adult life as an alderman, president of the sanitary district and on more than one occasion considered the presidency, albeit in a clearly whimsical fashion. But by the middle of the 20th Century, only the Tribune was ruled by an autocratic ideologue with both the power and inclination to use his newspaper as he believed his grandfather, Medill, would have wanted.
For the millions of Chicagoans and Midwesterners who took parts of their daily Tribune with a grain of salt, the comfort for McCormick and his publishing heirs was that they took it. They took it because for much of the early 20th Century the Tribune was the most complete newspaper in America. The Tribune had the best comic section, the widest sports coverage, the best color reproduction, the best magazine, the most interesting features and, because it made the most money, could afford the widest distribution, the largest number of pages, the most reporters and the most advertisements, which pleased its readers and its accountants.
For most of the same 20th Century, there was little about the Tribune’s view of politics and government that was as balanced as its color tones or its profit ledgers. And most of its readers knew it. Some of them–conservative, isolationist and as Babbitt-like in their Midwestern provincialism as the Colonel–reveled in its attacks and disdain for anything that didn’t match the McCormick spirit of patriotism. Others sighed and turned to the sports and features.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, most newspapers reported neutrally on national affairs, rarely analyzing or interpreting. By the middle of the ’60s, things had changed. Younger editors and reporters were questioning the Establishment. Reports by David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan from Vietnam were disquieting and in the White House were considered disloyal.
But not all newspapers changed at the same rate, and not all newspapers changed. Despite McCormick’s death in 1955, the Tribune was still wearing its conservative trappings and his successors tried to apply McCormick’s approach to news in a way they believed he would have done–except they had none of his philosophy, conviction or eccentricity, which to many media critics made the post-McCormick Tribune more infuriating than the Colonel’s version.
Into the late ’60s, the Tribune remained unabashedly partisan. It continued for more than a decade after McCormick’s death to use Page 1 for editorial cartoons, most of them depicting a beleaguered, whiskered Uncle Sam caricature who either was being beaten or carved upon an operating table by a knife-wielding donkey or various cartoon Democratic leaders. If it wasn’t Uncle Sam being butchered by the donkey, it was John Q. Taxpayer or the U.S. budget. It was hard to miss how the Tribune felt about things.
The Tribune was so disdainful of Democrats that it traditionally ignored them. The Tribune never bothered to endorse candidates in the Democratic primary, leaving more than half the city (and presumably a great number of its readers) with no lofty guidance. The exception was in Chicago mayoral races, in which the newspaper seemed to realize it did little good to ignore the ultimate winner.
As for general election endorsements, the Tribune record for 70 years was almost spotless. The Tribune simply did not endorse Democrats for almost anything until 1972. As late as 1966, the Tribune endorsed only Republicans for all state offices and for every congressional seat, although seven U.S. House districts in Chicago had been held by Democrats for years. But even as McCormick always kept his eye on the bottom line, his successors made some astute concessions. The Democratic assessor of Cook County, who had the power to estimate the value of Tribune property for tax purposes, was habitually endorsed. Even the tumultuous year of 1968 did not cause great change in the Tribune’s editorial suite although–for the first time, a Democrat, secretary of state candidate Michael Howlett, was endorsed for state office; and four incumbent Democratic congressmen from city districts were supported, probably because they were unopposed.
But it wasn’t only the Tribune’s editorial partisanship. That, for readers, was expected. What readers could only infer was the Tribune’s activist political role. Few Republicans of that generation did anything without consulting Tribune editors. It was only after the Tribune granted its imprimatur that Republicans announced candidacies for governor or U.S. senator.
As late as 1968, Editor Don Maxwell, McCormick’s successor, was still interviewing potential vice presidential candidates for Richard Nixon in the Tribune suite in Miami where the Republicans held their convention that year. This would have been a common practice in the heyday of McCormick, William Randolph Hearst and E.W. Scripps, but that day had long passed. That same year, Maxwell refused to grant Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey an editorial board appearance.
It was Maxwell who carried out the editorial side of the McCormick legacy from 1955 until 1969. Maxwell’s most immediate self-imposed mandate after McCormick’s death was to make certain the proposed lakefront exposition hall had the proper baptism. That was apparent from what readers could read. What wasn’t apparent was the personal lobbying conducted by the Tribune to ensure those hat-in-hand Republican lawmakers didn’t stray when the decision was made to call the hall McCormick Place.
Viewing the content of a newspaper remains a subjective matter. Much of what appeared in the Tribune in the 1950s and ’60s was objective, factual and often good reporting. But it was not merely what the Tribune said or believed. It was how and when it said it that caused a credibility gap.
In 1957 when Sen. Joseph McCarthy died, most of the nation’s press recounted his meteoric rise as a Communist-seeking investigator and his equally meteoric fall as witch-hunting charlatan, shamed for his performance in Senate hearings and denounced publicly and eternally by Edward R. Murrow’s commentary. The Tribune remarked, “The Republic has lost a stalwart defender.”
In 1964, the Tribune was not totally alone among Republican newspapers in endorsing Goldwater over what Lyndon Johnson promised (and ultimately delivered) would be the greatest (and most expensive) social legislation in history. But the Tribune didn’t have a lot of company, and it still was wedded to McCormickisms such as a scathing front-page editorial seeking votes for Goldwater. Its news columns on the eve of the election carried headlines that read: “SOVIET PRESS GOING ALL OUT TO STOP BARRY.” The implication was the Soviets would be happy with Johnson.
In 1964 the Tribune also decided the highly popular new heavyweight champion had to keep the name he was given. Tribune readers had to follow the career of Cassius Clay for the remainder of the decade while the rest of the world was reading about Muhammad Ali. If 1968 was a watershed year in American history, it also was the end of the Tribune’s adherence to a journalism that sometimes reflected what the Tribune wanted the world to be instead of what it was.
There was confusion and indecision in journalism in 1968. Reporters from The Associated Press were chided by colleagues for their continued use of “Negro” instead of black. Most, but not all newspapers, had dropped the use of “reds” to refer to radicals. And after three summers of riots beginning in 1965 with Watts, newspapers were frantically searching for black reporters and black spokesmen.
Most of all, few newspapers were in step with the anti-war movement led by Sens. Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. Most of them, and especially the Tribune, were unwilling to accept that any social protest involving youths with long hair could be reputable or permanent.
As Chicago girded for the Democratic National Convention, the police department issued dire warnings about the mobs threatening to descend on the city. Once again, the Tribune was caught up in its old “red scare” motif and headlined a story about a plot to put LSD in the city’s drinking water, at best a naive misunderstanding of practicality and at worst a complete reliance on police sources.
It was a period of ambivalence for many Americans. For one thing, not everyone saw clearly that beards and flags were the signposts of cultural upheaval, rather than the trappings of anarchists. Many Chicagoans, including Tribune readers, were in agreement about their fear and loathing of the youthful protesters. But other media were more willing to accept their potential impact and believe their rhetoric.
The Tribune’s coverage of the street disorders that accompanied the convention was far more oriented to official City Hall and police statements than to the paper’s street reporters. Even on the eve of the convention when police battling demonstrators clubbed a score of journalists, the Tribune noted that none of its reporters or photographers had been struck. The Tribune did note in passing the police drubbing of McCarthy volunteers at the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
At the GOP convention in Miami, Tribune reporters saw police beating protesters. Maxwell ordered it cut from the stories. During the long year of campus anti-war demonstrations the Tribune’s stringer at Northwestern University filed report after report with the Tribune city desk, but no stories appeared about protests in Evanston, which was Maxwell’s home. It wasn’t always what the Tribune printed that tended to mislead readers. It was also what was not printed.
It all came to an end Jan. 1, 1969, when Clayton Kirkpatrick succeeded Maxwell as editor. In 1970, Tribune endorsements included all sorts of Democrats. In 1976, the Tribune endorsed ultra-liberal Abner Mikva over the Republican in the race for the traditionally conservative North Shore congressional seat. In 1978, the Tribune endorsed an African-American for state comptroller. By the 1980s the Tribune had endorsed Democrats for every office except president and governor. It no longer dabbled with Republican Party politics, although as late as 1980 Tribune political writers were often accosted by GOP legislators seeking advice on their votes–as though their political futures were still tied to McCormick’s legacy.
The old Joseph Parrish and Carey Orr cartoons of Democrats destroying democracy vanished.
Media critics remained skeptical of the Tribune until May 1, 1974, when the newspaper published a 44-page special section carrying the transcripts of Nixon’s Oval Office tapes. The newspaper was on the street eight hours before the Government Printing Office bookstore made the copies available to the public.
Television networks, newsmagazines and other newspapers praised the Tribune’s scoop, and the last vestiges of the newspaper that once believed it was the Republican Party disappeared a week later when the Tribune published an editorial urging Nixon to resign his presidency.
From then on, politics as usual at the Tribune meant the usual coverage of politics that is found everywhere else in America.