Megan McKinney - The Magnificent Medills: Americas Royal Family of Journalism During a Century of Turbulent Splendor

The Magnificent Medills

Americas Royal Family of Journalism During a Century of Turbulent Splendor

Megan McKinney

For Robert Whitfield and our beautiful daughter, Kay

Contents

Printers ink raged in their veins throughout a century and their legacy prevailed for another five decades. If Joseph Medill and his McCormick and Patterson heirs were individually headstrong, quirky and often thoroughly disagreeable, each was brilliantly creative, and together the achievement was immense. Their era of great city newspapers may have entered a period verging on nostalgia, yet we continue to hear echoes of its thunder rumbling in the publishing titles they left behind, trophies that until recently aroused the lust of twenty-first-century billionaires. The New York Daily News was acquired by real estate tycoon Mortimer Zuckerman in 1993, the Chicago Tribune by Chicago buccaneer Sam Zell in 2007, and Newsday by Cablevisions Dolan family in May 2008following a bidding war against both Zuckerman and Rupert Murdoch.

Today these newspapers are archaic relics struggling to survive in a digital age, yet for many decades they reigned as the prime source of information for millions of readers while participating in shaping the opinions of the nations decision makers. And each was created by the publishing dynasty founded by Joseph Medill more than a century and a half ago. No less remarkable were the men and women the dynasty produced, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, Cissy Patterson and Alicia Patterson, among the most vivid American personalities of the past century. With their collective genius for creating, packaging and publishing news, these journalists shared a genetic brilliance that swept across decades, through wars and presidential administrations, bridging periods of prosperity and depression, upheaval and changealways in the forefront of events. The fiery abolitionist Medill was himself a towering figure, a man who personally influenced the political tide that transformed America during the mid-nineteenth centuryfirst as a major force behind the founding of the Republican Party and election of President Abraham Lincoln, then as catalyst for the outbreak of the Civil War. His passion for late-breaking information was so intense that his last words before dying at age seventy-six in 1899 were What is the news this morning? And his tradition for compelling journalism is carried on today in the prestigious Joseph Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Medills extraordinary newspapering DNA was transmitted through two willful red-haired daughters to a trio of grandchildren who inherited his publishing genius and rose to simultaneously lead three of the most successful American newspapers of the mid-twentieth century, and a great-granddaughter who created a fourth. However, the dark edge of the impulse that drove Medills heirs to create and shape their groundbreaking and influential publications was a destructive compulsion that left members of the clan crippled by alienation, alcoholism, drug abuse, and even madness and suicide.

The history of the dynasty is also a powerful chronicle of the gains made by and for women in the past century and a potent reminder of a time when even strong women with forceful personalities could be thwarted, leaving them to live unfulfilled and damaging livesor to exist as shadow performers behind their men. It was within Joseph Medills wife, Katherine Patrick, daughter of the publisher of an early nineteenth-century Whig paper, that the journalistic passion first erupted; she patiently taught the patriarch to set type and encouraged him in his desire to leave law practice to become a newspaper ownera role she could never hope to fill.

The Medill daughters, Katherine and Elinorknown as Kate and Nellieinherited their mothers dynamic personality and possessed characteristics that, had they lived in a later age, might have been channeled into the pioneering careers forged by women of the next generation in two male-dominated fields. Kates daughter-in-law, Ruth Hanna McCormick, joined Nellies daughter, Cissy Patterson, in breaking through glass walls and concrete ceilings to become two of the most outstanding women of their time in politics and journalism. Both Cissy and her niece Alicia Patterson were awesome industry pioneers, who forged dazzling careers as two of the greatest entrepreneursmale or femalein the history of journalism. Alicia refused to accept her fathers estimation of her journalist talents and retaliated by founding the most successful paper of postWorld War II America. While shattering barriers, each of these trailblazers consciously created opportunities for other womentheir contemporaries as well as those who would follow. Within the current extended family, when Madeleine Albright, wife of Alicias nephew, was spurned by her husband after a twenty-three-year marriage, she refocused her energies to becomeas United States secretary of statearguably the most influential woman in the world.

The dynastys century spans a period that began with Joseph Medills agreement to purchase a portion of the Chicago Daily Tribune on a spring morning in 1855 and ends with the death of his last surviving grandchild, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, on the first day of April one hundred years later. There have been excellent biographies of Colonel McCormick and Cissy Patterson through the years, as well as a pair of informative books about the Daily News, a fine study devoted to Newsday, and several massive histories of the Chicago Tribune ; however, there has not been a comprehensive chronicle covering the sweep of the dynasty, concentrating on its riveting, complex and sometimes relatively neglected personalitiesinterweaving the personal daily activities of each and their public achievements against a larger historic canvas.

Essential to an understanding of the individual Medills is a thorough knowledge of interactions within the family as a whole throughout the American epoch so powerfully influenced by the dynastys publishers. The Magnificent Medills has been designed to fill this niche.

Chapter 1
Fertile Soil

T HE city that shaped the great publishing family is more recent even than the dynasty itself. Founder Joseph Medill was a ten-year-old Ohio boy in 1833, when a pastoral fur trading post guarded by the soldiers of Fort Dearborn was incorporated as the town of Chicago. This tiny community at the far edge of civilization consisted of no more than three hundred and fifty hardy souls who resided in the barracks, wigwams and wood cabins near the muddy banks of the Chicago River; among them were soldiers garrisoned at the fort and their families, a few natives of the Potawatomi tribe and assorted traders of John Jacob Astors American Fur Company.

Deer sipped serenely from the river in the early morning, wolves howled in the prairie at night and Indians lurked behind trees of the forest on the rivers north bank, occasionally venturing across to the fort, where they peered in and startled soldiers wives. The only diversion for this heterogeneous population was to travel to Wolf Point at a fork in the river, where Mark Beaubien, a gregarious fiddle-playing Creole, owned the Sauganash Hotel, a tavern that throbbed night and day with vitality. As Beaubien himself said, I plays de fiddle like de debble an I keeps hotel like hell. The Sauganash was a place where all races, ranks and classes gathered for drinking, singing, dancing, card playing and roulette, mixing as equals. And they were there every night.