Robert Rutherford McCormick (July 30, 1880–April 1,
1955) was the iconoclastic publisher, editor, and persona of
the Chicago Tribune for much of the first half of the twentieth century. Known for his staunch conservatism and near
paranoid control of his newspaper, McCormick made the
Tribune into one of the largest circulating newspapers in the
United States and a leader in advertising revenue. Simultaneously, he was attacked for journalistic excesses eclipsed
only by rival press lord William Randolph Hearst.
McCormick was the grandnephew of inventor Cyrus
Hall McCormick and the grandson of Joseph Medill, Tribune editor and publisher from 1874 to 1899. A graduate
of Yale University and the Northwestern University law
school in 1907, McCormick helped found the prestigious
Chicago law firm of Kirkland and Ellis. He served briefly
as a Chicago alderman and sanitary district board member, assuming partial control of the Tribune in 1911 in time
to thwart its sale by other family members to the competing Chicago Daily News. Editor James Keeley almost cost
McCormick and his family the Tribune the following year
in a libel suit by accusing Illinois U. S. Senator William
Lorimer of buying his political office. Evidence discovered by the competing Chicago Inter Ocean exonerated the Tribune and the Tribune’s coverage influenced the passage of
the Seventeenth Amendment permitting direct election of
senators in 1913.
McCormick served as an officer in the American Expeditionary Force in France during World War I. At six feet,
four inches tall, men naturally followed him and he earned
the Distinguished Service Medal for his leadership. Beginning in the 1930s, his rank led many to call him the “Morning Colonel” in contrast to the “Evening Colonel,” Daily
News publisher and Spanish-American War veteran Frank
Knox. McCormick’s suburban Chicago estate in Wheaton was named Cantigny after the French city and site of
American soldiers’ first European offensive. Before his
death, McCormick endowed a museum dedicated to the
U. S. Army’s First Infantry Division, and his name is well
known to military historians.
McCormick shared Tribune managerial duties with his
cousin, Joseph Medill Patterson, from the departure of
Keeley in 1914 until Paterson left to supervise the New York
Daily News in 1925. McCormick bought an AM radio station in 1924 and had it renamed WGN for “World’s Greatest
Newspaper,” the newspaper’s masthead moniker along with
a flag. WGN was first to broadcast major sporting events
such as the World Series and provided live coverage of the
Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 at a cost of $1,000 per day
for telephone lines alone. McCormick provided weekly
commentaries as part of the Saturday-evening “Chicago
Theater of the Air” Mutual Network broadcast from WGN
from 1940 until his death. He purchased or established timberlands, paper mills, and shipping facilities in Canada to
guarantee the Tribune an unfettered supply of newsprint.
McCormick headquartered his various enterprises in Tribune Tower, a 462-foot skyscraper constructed near Lake
Michigan in 1925 in what was described as a “militaryGothic” style. After a visit to his office by gangster Al
Capone, the paranoid McCormick had an escape passage
installed along with hidden inside doors, trapping unsuspecting employees until McCormick freed them with a button at his desk. His limousine was armor plated as well.
McCormick’s Tribune was victorious in two precedentsetting law cases. One involved Chicago Mayor William
Hale Thompson and led to a 1923 Illinois Supreme Court
decision upholding the right of citizens and journalists to
criticize government officials. The second was filed by
automobile manufacturer Henry Ford after the Tribune
called him an anarchist in a 1916 editorial. A jury found for
Ford in 1919 but awarded him only six-cents in damages,
strengthening the right of journalists to state true opinions.
McCormick also helped pay the legal fees of Jay M. Near, a
Minnesota editor whose newspaper was suppressed by state
officials. The 1931 U. S. Supreme Court Near v. Minnesota
decision established specific procedures before government
could exercise prior restraint of the press. McCormick had
a passage from the decision carved into the granite walls of
the Tribune Tower lobby. In gratitude, the American Newspaper Publishers Association named him permanent chairman of its press freedom committee.
A Republican, isolationist, opponent of organized labor,
and anti-communist, McCormick was one of the staunchest
critics of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and
his New Deal even though the two had been fellow preparatory school students. As McCormick came under increasing
pressure from Roosevelt’s supporters, his editorial policy
became so monolithic that writers who ignored his personal
directives found themselves banished to menial duties. To
embarrass Roosevelt indirectly, the Tribune revealed that
American forces knew the position of the Japanese fleet in
advance of the 1942 Battle of Midway, alluding to the breaking of the main Japanese code, one of the greatest military
secrets of World War II. The Justice Department investigated but failed to prosecute the Tribune for the indiscretion, testing the wartime limits of the First Amendment.
McCormick relished confounding his critics, and readers
bought his newspaper even if they did not agree with it.
Anthropologist Robert Ardrey claimed that the secret of
Chicagoans vitality was reading the Tribune at breakfast.
“We hit the ceiling . . . [then] we hit the street on a dead
run.” Tribune drama critic Burton Rascoe labeled McCormick, “the greatest mind of the Fourteenth century.”
The Tribune began losing circulation during McCormick’s final years and he predicted that the paper would
cease within ten years of his death. McCormick opposed
President Harry Truman’s Fair Deal and the post-war Marshall Plan to aid European recovery. However, claiming
to have been asleep at the time, McCormick denied any
involvement in the Tribune’s “Dewey Defeats Truman” 1948
headline debacle. Embittered by Republican Party failures,
McCormick supported a new political party, the “American,” in the 1950s. He purchased the faltering Washington
Times-Herald in 1949 only to sell the paper to the competing Washington Post in 1954, using some of the profits to
buy a personal jet. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s
famed 1950 list of fifty-seven “card-carrying Communists”
was based largely on a series of Tribune articles. Childless
in two marriages, McCormick often brought his dogs to
his office, where they would lick visiting employee’s shoes.
One of the last major practitioner of personal journalism,
McCormick died of heart disease in 1955 and was buried
in his World War I uniform in the garden of his Cantigny
estate.
Beyond Cantigny, which houses his papers, McCormick was survived by the McCormick-Tribune Foundation,
which supports civic, educational, and journalistic causes,
the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, opened as the
first museum dedicated to the First Amendment in 2006,
and the McCormick Convention Center, one of the Colonel’s many personal causes. In true McCormick spirit, the
convention center, located on the Lake Michigan site of the
1933–1934 World’s Fair, violates a covenant dating back to
the 1850s and long advocated by the Tribune that Chicago
keep its lakeshore “forever open, clear and free.”
Further Reading
Chicago Tribune, April 1955, 1, 2; December 1979, G31.
City of Chicago v. Tribune (1923).
Ford v. Chicago Tribune (1919).
Smith, Richard Norton, The Colonel: The Life and Legend of
Robert R. McCormick, 1880–1955. New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997.
Waldrup, Frank C. McCormick of Chicago. New York: PrenticeHall, 1966.
Wendt, Lloyd. Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American
Newspaper. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1979.
Richard Junger