MEDILL, JOSEPH MAHARRY
“Cheer up, Chicago!” the city’s biggest booster said in the
aftermath of a devastating fire that wiped away fifteen city
blocks, killing 250, while leaving 100,000 homeless. “Chicago,” Joseph Medill (April 6, 1823–March 17, 1899)
assured his readers, “shall rise again!” For forty-four years,
Medill oversaw Chicago’s rise from the world’s cholera
capital to the nation’s second city, his Tribune becoming
one of the most important American newspapers west of
the Hudson River.
Joseph Maharry Medill was born on a farm near St.
John, New Brunswick, to William Medill and Margaret
Corbett Medill. When he was nine, his Scotch-Irish parents
moved their family to a cooperative farm community near
Massillon, Ohio. The opening of the Ohio and Erie Canal
in 1832 had made Massillon one of Ohio’s largest wheat
markets, but a fire ruined the family’s fortunes, broke his
father’s health, and forced Medill to abandon plans for college, while looking after three younger brothers and two
sisters. Medill solicited subscriptions for Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune, studied law, and was admitted to the
Ohio Bar in 1846. As a newlywed he drifted into journalism
through his father-in-law’s country weekly, the Tuscarawas
Advocate, in New Philadelphia, Ohio. His wife Katherine
taught him typesetting. Starting in 1849, Medill published
newspapers in Coshocton and Newark, Ohio, bringing his
brothers into the business, while kindly rejecting payments
in chickens and trousers.
Medill was a Free Soil Whig, rejecting extension of
slavery into territories won in the Mexican War. He bitterly opposed the Compromise of 1850 that strengthened
the Fugitive Slave Law, requiring all U.S. citizens to return
runaway slaves. The North should never be “forced to
enforce slavery,” Medill told his readers. “Involuntary servitude,” he wrote, “is inconsistent with all principles civil
or religious.” He changed the name of the Coshocton Whig
to Coshocton Republican and had fist fights with local
Democrats sympathetic to slavery. In 1851 Medill founded
the Daily Forest City in Cleveland and a year later created
the Cleveland Leader after a merger with a Free Soil paper.
He tried to prevent General Winfield Scott from running on
a pro-slavery platform in 1852 when the Whigs decisively
lost the presidency to Democrat Franklin Pierce.
Congressional passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in
January 1854, repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820
and leaving it up to every state whether it would enter the
nation slave or free, mobilized Medill to action. He urged
Whig editors to join him in creating a new political party,
the “National Republican Party,” that would be dedicated to
the gradual suffocation of slavery by preventing its spread
to new states coming into the Union. Greeley was encouraging. “If you can get the name Republican started in the
West,” he wrote, “it will grow in the East.” At a March
1854 meeting in the Leader office the new party’s platform
began to take shape. “No more slave states. No more slave
territory. Slavery is sectional. Liberty is national.”
In April 1855 Medill brought his wife, two daughters,
and three brothers to Chicago after buying an interest in the
Chicago Tribune. Medill thought Chicago had the makings
of “a great city.” By then it had grown to 64,000 settlers,
third in the West behind Cincinnati and St. Louis, but still
it was “a quagmire of mosquito marshes” on the foot of
Lake Michigan. Eight years before only sixteen thousand
people had lived in the city when the Tribune had begun
life as a xenophobic, anti-immigrant paper in a third floor
loft. As managing editor, Medill told his readers that the
paper’s know-nothing days were over. He added prohibition, a protective tariff, and a pro-business sentiment to his
editorial opposition to slavery. “Not one in fifty” Chicagoans, he wrote, had “opened their eyes” to the business and
manufacturing center Chicago would soon be.
Abraham Lincoln introduced himself to Medill in the
fall of 1855, arriving at the Tribune’s downtown office at
51 Clark Street to personally take out a subscription in
the paper. Medill had widely publicized Lincoln’s remark
after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that “slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature, opposition
to it in his love of justice.” Lincoln had considered retiring from politics before becoming a leading orator in the
growing anti-slavery movement. Medill was among those
urging Lincoln, a long-time Whig, to switch to the Republican Party. In advance of the Republican nominating convention in 1856 he finally did, winning 110 ballots in an
unsuccessful bid for vice-president. Two years later, Medill
was among state Republican leaders promoting Lincoln in
his senatorial bid against incumbent Stephen A. Douglas,
author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. On June 17, 1858, the
Tribune reported the beginning of the campaign with Lincoln’s now famous words, “A house divided against itself
cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. It will become all one
thing or all the other.”
Medill urged a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates that
projected Lincoln’s views across the nation. Seven in all
were held. On the eve of the second in Freeport, Illinois,
on August 21, Medill advised “Friend Lincoln” in a private letter to “put a few ugly questions at Douglas.” Hadn’t
Douglas “destroyed the principle of self-government in
the territories and states” by forcing slavery on the North.
Medill urged Lincoln to be “bold, defiant and dogmatic,
fighting the devil with fire,” exposing Douglas as “a brazen and lying rascal” by “giving him hell.” That evening, Lincoln got Douglas to admit that territories and states did have
the right to ban slavery. Douglas would narrowly win the
Illinois Senate race, but his “Freeport Doctrine,” as it came
to be known, split the Democratic Party when he became
their presidential nominee in 1860. Medill puffed Lincoln
for president, getting the Republican Party to schedule its
nominating convention for Chicago. Medill was in charge
of seating arrangements. He packed the gallery with Tribune men who had uncharacteristically been given the day
off with pay. They shouted their support for Lincoln, and on
the third ballot, Lincoln won.
That November, Medill reported that “Honest Old Abe”
had been elected president and that Republicanism had been
“triumphant over fraud, fusion, cotton, disunion and treason.” Before Lincoln could take the oath of office, southern
states had already formed the Confederacy. Two of Medill’s
three brothers would be killed in the four-year Civil War
that followed. Medill championed the Union and the sentiments expressed by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address in
1863. In the November 21 Tribune Medill wrote that “More
than any other single event will this glorious dedication”
encourage “a deeper resolution” for those who fought in the
war and the nation that stood with them.
Medill and the Tribune had a record press run of 53,000
copies on April 10, 1865, announcing Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Confederate Army at the Appomattox Court
House in Virginia. An estimated 20,000 people gathered
before the Tribune office in the streets of Chicago to celebrate. An impromptu parade took four hours to pass the
building. Five days later, the Tribune reported the “terrible news” that President Lincoln had been assassinated
at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.. Medill found it
“almost impossible to comprehend.” Medill would later
write that “Lincoln was so great where men are rarely great,
in his simplicity, his integrity, and his purity of patriotic
purpose.”
The post-war period was difficult for Medill. He saw the
great cause of the Civil War—equal rights for all men—
receding and his grip on the Tribune slipping. He believed
President Andrew Johnson obstructed efforts to secure the
rights of freed slaves and “should be impeached and ejected
from office.” Medill had been turned out of his own his
leadership role at the paper when a well-connected competitor Horace White bought majority control of the Tribune.
Medill’s 20 percent share of the paper encouraged him to
hang tough. Nearly half of Chicago’s 112,172 residents were
reading the Tribune, generating revenues of $400,000, four
times the annual average of the next nearest paper.
By 1870 Chicago’s population soared to three hundred
thousand, but the city had been hastily constructed in pine
and stucco. On October 8, 1871, Medill warned that “There
has been no rain for three weeks. A spark might set a fire
that would sweep from end to end of the city.” That night
it happened. The Great Chicago Fire swept from the city’s
west side through its downtown and near north corridor in
walls of flame more than one hundred feet high. Survivors
fled into Lake Michigan to take cover. Half the city’s population was made homeless. The “fireproof” Tribune was one
of seventeen thousand buildings lost. An emergency press,
shipped from Baltimore, allowed the resourceful Medill to
resume publishing on October 11 with his personal promise “this once beautiful city shall rise again.” Chicago did,
starting the next month, with Medill as its mayor.
Medill insisted on building codes to rationalize reconstruction in the city. It became home to the modern steel
skyscraper. His Chicago Public Library system became a
great source of civic pride. However, when he recommended
Sunday saloon closings, the city’s Irish and German citizens
rebelled. Medill served only one term as mayor, bought out
White, and returned to lead the Tribune to unprecedented
profits in the Gilded Age. Medill and the Tribune were no
friend of organizing labor which helped push the city’s population to half a million in 1880 and more than one million
in 1890. Following the Haymarket Square riot in 1886, the
paper reported in August that “dangling nooses wait for the
dynamite fiends” convicted of setting off a bomb at a labor
rally that killed eight police officers. Medill succeeded in
boosting Chicago into hosting the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. A final triumph was the Tribune’s exclusive
report in May 1898 that America’s “New Navy” under the
command of George Dewey had destroyed the Spanish fleet
in Manila Bay. President William McKinley received the
news by telephone from Tribune editor James Keeley.
When he was near death, Medill apocryphally reported,
“My last words shall be: What is the news.” His daughters
Kate and Elinor had married newspapermen and their sons
Robert McCormick and Joseph Medill Patterson would lead
the Tribune well into the twentieth century. The paper’s
extraordinary influence in municipal affairs and leading
voice in national politics had been the crowning achievement and lasting legacy of Joseph Medill.
Further Reading
Bennett, James O’Donnell. Joseph Medill: A Brief Biography and
an Appreciation. Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1947.
Chicago Tribune. A Century of Tribune Editorials, 1847–1947.
Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1947.
Kinsley, Philip. The Chicago Tribune: Its First Hundred Years,
vols. 1 and 2. Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1943 and 1945.
Papers of Joseph Maharry Medill, Chicago Tribune Archives,
Chicago, Illinois.
Tebbel, John W. An American Dynasty: The Story of the McCormicks, Medills and Pattersons. New York: Doubleday,
1947.
Wendt, Lloyd. Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American
Newspaper. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1979.
Bruce J. Evensen