Chicago Patriot: 'The World's Greatest Newspaper'

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ARCHIBALD MACLEISH told the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April that the American press owed itself a duty to ‘hunt out and expose by every instrument of truth the skulkers in the journalistic ambush — the cowardly, half-hearted publishers and the venal editors of their staffs.’

‘I wish,’said William Allen White, ‘he had named names.’

But it was abundantly clear to Mr. White and to everybody else that Mr. MacLeish, though he named no names, was looking straight at Colonel Robert R. McCormick and the Chicago Tribune. When he spoke of ‘continuing and persistent efforts by a small minority of the press . . . to weaken the American determination to win, to divide the American people from their desperately needed allies and even to corrupt the confidence of the American people in their government and in themselves,’one automatically thought of ‘the world’s greatest newspaper.’ Other papers, such as the Hearst press and the Patterson organs in New York and Washington, might follow much the same editorial line, but they seemed pale echoes of the Chicago thunderer. McCormick’s extravagant personal hatreds and the twisted involutions of his peculiar thinking made the Tribune exhibit A in any discussion of the isolationist press.

Life had bracketed the Tribune with Social Justice as ‘voices of defeat.’ The classification was not wholly accurate. For one thing, the colonel enjoys a superior respectability. His Tribune Tower rises among the skyscrapers of Chicago like a monument to his commercial success. His newspaper, highly solvent and technically excellent, conveys his mood daily to a million readers. Wealth, influence, and public acceptance freight his words with more than ordinary power; they make him seem to speak not only for himself but for middle-class middle America.

And it was inaccurate, or at least lacking in subtlety, to tag the Tribune as ‘defeatist.’ Ever since the war began, the Tribune had been lavishing the art of its color presses on the printing of American flags. Almost daily it had been demanding victory. It had led the country in building a pinnacle for MacArthur. Flag-waving patriotism it had aplenty.

What made the colonel an enemy in Mr. MacLcish’s ‘battle for American opinion ‘ was his consistent distortion of the basic facts about the war, his implacable hatred of the men who were conducting it, and his die-hard determination to persuade this country to fight an isolationist war. The net effect of these attitudes was to present in the columns of the Tribune the picture of an essentially senseless war, an idiotic adventure which should be ended as quickly as possible, without alteration in America’s relationship to the world. Colonel McCormick supported the war, but fought anything which might give it meaning.

President Roosevelt in his April radio address declared that the war effort must not ‘be impeded by a few bogus patriots who use the sacred freedom of the press to echo the sentiments of the propagandists in Tokyo and Berlin.’ The colonel regards himself as the purest of patriots. Last February he wrote the following letter, which was printed in the Chicago Daily News under the caption, ‘ Whatta Man! ‘: —

DEAR MR. SAWYER:
Thank you for your very temperate letter.
What the most powerful propaganda organization in the world has misled you into believing was a campaign of hatred, has really been a constructive campaign without which this country would be lost.
You do not know it, but the fact is that I introduced the R.O.T.C. into the schools; that I introduced machine guns into the army; that I introduced mechanization; I introduced automatic rifles; I was the first ground officer to go up in the air and observe artillery fire. Now I have succeeded in making that the regular practice in the army. I was the first to advocate an alliance with Canada. I forced the acquiring of the bases in the Atlantic Ocean.
On the other hand I was unsuccessful in obtaining the fortification of Guam; in preventing the division of the navy into two oceans. I was unable to persuade the navy and the administration that airplanes could destroy battleships.
I did get the marines out of Shanghai, but was unsuccessful in trying to get the army out of the Philippines.
Campaigns such as I have carried on inevitably meet resistance, and great persistence is necessary to achieve results. The opposition resorts to such tactics as charging me with hatred and so forth, but in view of the accomplishment I can bear up under it.
Yours sincerely,
ROBERT R. MCCORMICK
Mr. J. H. Sawyer, Jr.
333 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois

To all attacks upon him McCormick had a simple answer. ‘MacLeish is a communist,’ he told PM. Of Life’s article he said; ‘ It looks like a conspiracy in which the disreputable papers under Mr. Luce’s direction have joined themselves to the crypto-communists of Greenwich village. It is possible to believe that the leadership in this campaign of slander comes from press agents on the Washington payroll. . . . The job of the press agents is to keep the people of this country contented with defeat.’

As the colonel saw himself, his editorial course since Pearl Harbor had been patriotic and constructive. According to the Tribune, it had merely argued that our State Department follows the lead of the British Foreign Office; that our government had erred in dividing our naval forces, and in failing to take precautions against surprise; that the men responsible for disaster should be ousted from office; that in prosecuting the war we must not scatter our forces; that MacArthur’s brilliance stood in marked contrast to the ‘ blundering of the Washington amateurs.’

Was that all? Unfortunately, no. The full record differs markedly from the colonel’s summary of it.

During the week which preceded Pearl Harbor, the Tribune was assuring its readers that Japan’s invasion of Thailand offered no threat to the security of the United States, ‘which is protected by the Pacific Ocean barrier and an adequate navy.’ Britain was pictured as ‘inciting’ the Roosevelt administration to defend her interests in the Pacific (we having none, the paper implied, worth fighting for), while the Tribune warned that the country ‘would not condone a course that got it into war on two fronts at the same time.’ The implication was that we could have peace with Japan if we wanted it. If war came, the fault would lie with our government, not with Japan’s.

Said Mr. MacLeish to the Society of Editors: ‘When a powerful publisher can publish without criticism from his colleagues a secret document of vital importance to the security of his country, which could not have issued from its place of safekeeping by any but dishonorable means, people of ordinary common sense and common observation are inclined to wonder why.’ Obviously, Mr. MacLeish referred to the Tribune’s scoop of December 4, three days before Pearl Harbor. Its Washington bureau got the top position that day with its ‘exclusive revelation of the Roosevelt administration’s project to expand the army and navy to ten million men and send American expeditionary forces of five million overseas to light Germany, Italy and Japan.’ What the Tribune had got hold of was one of several tentative war plans which army and navy officers had prepared for all eventualities. Most people will thank God that they had done so. Most people would consider the preparation of provisional war plans a principal and vital function of the military command. The Tribune spread the story in the most alarming manner, with a headline: ‘Proof of Betrayal, say Critics.’ It called the document an ‘astounding blueprint for war,’ and hopefully reported that its sensational revelation was expected to inspire strong opposition to the eight-billion-dollar arms bill then before Congress. On December 6 the House passed the arms bill with only five dissenting votes, and on December 7 the Japanese expunged the Tribune’s scoop from everybody’s mind.

Chicagoans found a page one editorial in the Tribune the following morning. It spoke nobly: ‘War has been forced on America by an insane clique of Japanese militarists. . . . Recriminations are useless and we doubt that they will be indulged in. Certainly not by us. . . . All of us from this day forth have but one task. That is to strike with all our might to protect, and preserve the American freedom that we all hold dear.’ During the next few weeks, Tribune readers were told that Japanese perfidy had united the American people: ‘They have sunk all their differences of opinion. They are now firmly united to prosecute the war which the Japanese had begun by a piece of characteristic perfidy.’ The Tribune defined its war policy in these words of the London Daily Mail: ‘To tell the public the truth, fearlessly as possible consistent with the national interests, and to give what leadership we can with one object in view — the successful, victorious and speedy prosecution of the war.’ This attitude prevailed for about a month.

By the middle of January, the colonel was devoting his attention to grand strategy. He decided that attack was impossible from Germany, but hourly imminent from Japan. Therefore ‘our principal war aim must be the crushing of the Japanese.’ When the Atlantic submarine campaign upset the notion that the Nazis could not reach us, the Tribune blamed ‘lack of foresight, ingenuity and resourcefulness in Washington ‘ for the tanker sinkings. ‘The naval bureaucracy didn’t foresee the intensity of the submarine attack and had made no plans.’ Even so, Japan remained the only enemy we could attack ‘in any effective way.’ As the Denver Post had said, it was sheer madness to send American troops to Ireland, where there wasn’t any war, at a time when MacArthur needed them so badly in the Far East. The problem of reinforcing MacArthur seemed to the Tribune no problem at all. The whole trouble, in the colonel’s diagnosis, lay in the fact that President Roosevelt had surrounded himself with ‘amateur strategists’ and was trying to run the war without consulting seasoned military men.

The ‘conduct of the war’—there the colonel found a handy peg on which to hang his basic opposition to the war itself. He accused the administration of conducting it in such fashion as ‘to sacrifice our interests for the foreign princelings who have infested the eastern seaboard and the capital.’ British ‘aristocracy and snobocracy’ were almost as grave an enemy, he implied, as the Axis. And certainly we had to be on guard against Russia. As Hearst called Russia, after ten months of her struggle with Hitler, a ‘semi-Axis partner,’ so McCormick suggested that Stalin may have come to some sort of understanding with Japan, perhaps giving the Japs a free hand in the Pacific in exchange for a clear track to India. ‘ Will India be the price of keeping Russia in the war against Germany?’ asked the Tribune.

Along with the Russians and the British, we had to watch out for our American enemies. Tribune news columns often reflect, as strong an editorial bias as the editorial page itself, and these missed no occasion to suggest that our government harbored in its bosom ‘revolutionary tendencies,’ endeavoring to fasten on us ‘ alien notions of social and political organization,’ and to ‘destroy the republican form of government and with it the freedom for which we are fighting.’ There was here no opposition to certain acts of our elected leaders, but a doctrinaire opposition to the leaders themselves. ‘Uproar on U. S. War Bungling Jolts New Deal,’ the reader was told. Our lack of preparedness was due to extravagant spending and ‘wild Utopian schemes to remake America.’ One read that ‘vital segments of the nation’s war effort are being paralyzed by high government officials scheming to develop a planned state in this country along accepted communist theories’; that the administration revealed ‘a continuing disposition to run the war as a bigger and gaudier WPA project’; that ‘academic nuts and dreamers’ were directing the war.

Thus the colonel made good his pledge of no recriminations and of singleminded devotion to the ‘successful, victorious and speedy prosecution of the war.’ Gradually the war guilt shifted from the Axis to the administration. When a Tribune employee was killed in the Philippines, an editorial fulminated: ‘It is time that those who willed the war were driven from their hiding places and sent to the front where they can share some of the agony they have created.’ What happened on December 7 was merely that ‘our undeclared wars became a reality.’ Hostilities had actually begun in October 1937 when the President’s quarantine speech declared war on the Axis and enabled them to prepare against us. Despite the President’s ‘bellicose utterances,’ nothing effective had been done to prepare our own defenses, and thus ‘America lies stricken.’

The Tribune had waved the flag so long that, like other summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, it could not take defeat. In general its wildest outbursts came after some new reverse. Enclosing its editorial on ‘The Bataan Tragedy’ in a heavy black border to express mourning, the Tribune said: ‘The nation prays that the bureaucrats in Washington whose blundering brought this catastrophe upon us will be replaced before they can repeat their folly.’ Secretary Stimson’s revelation of attempts to supply Bataan was an ‘almost unbelievable commentary on the lack of foresight of the Washington bureaucracy,’ which should have reinforced MacArthur long before December 7.

If other people in the stress of war forgot that congressional elections were on the way, the Tribune never did. Every act of the government thus became subject to criticism on the ground that it was performed by the Tribune’s political enemies. When most people took satisfaction in the mission of Harry Hopkins and General Marshall to London, the Tribune ignored General Marshall and muttered: ‘At such a time, we send an amiable social worker to speak for us in a council of war. No wonder the people of this country are disturbed.’ When the Attorney General barred Social Justice from the mails, the Tribune suspected that the ‘eccentric Biddle’s’ motive was ‘to utter another threat against the freedom of the honest and patriotic press, and thereby to stifle any criticism of incompetence in Washington.’

In his desire to see Republicans elected, McCormick was interested most in a certain kind of Republican — his own kind. Such a man was Senator Wayland ‘Curly’ Brooks, who has faithfully mouthed Tribune doctrine in and out of war. Brooks voted against Lend-Lease, and thirty days before Pearl Harbor voted against revision of the Neutrality Act and arming of merchant ships. Up for renomination against a weak opponent in the April primary, he had the colonel’s enthusiastic support. Tribune staff stories from Washington bore headlines like ‘Brooks Battle Provides Test of Witch Hunt.’ Brooks won an easy renomination with half a million votes to spare, and the Tribune explained: ‘The people of Illinois as of the rest of the country are deeply troubled about the manner in which the war is being conducted. They want to win and to win as quickly as possible. . . . They want representatives in Washington who will not sit with folded hands while bungling continues.’ The success of Brooks and his House colleague, Stephen A. Day, was presented in the news columns as a victory over the ‘warmongers.’

Actually, of course, the Tribune’s major interest in the election was something other than the conduct of the war. Brooks and Day had its support not for any signal contributions to the war effort, since indeed they had made none, but for their isolationism. This became clear when the Republican national committee met in Chicago a week after the primary. Anticipating Wendell Willkie’s drive for a resolution committing the party to collaboration in world affairs, the Tribune read him out of the party: ‘ He deserted the principles of the party that nominated him even before the election, and any advice he may offer can be considered only in the light of the betrayal that that desertion involved. Courtesy may require that any resolutions Mr. Willkie offers be received, but his influence, fortunately, is so slight that they cannot become a source of party dissension.’

Mr. Willkie’s influence proved greater than the Tribune had been willing to admit. Senator Taft wanted the party to sit tight and say nothing. Senator Brooks presented a resolution reading like a Tribune editorial: ‘We pledge ourselves and our resources to the efficient complete and final winning of the war for AMERICA.’ Over the opposition of Taft, Brooks, and the Tribune, the national committee adopted a resolution which abandoned isolationism: ‘We realize that after this war the responsibility of the nation will not be circumscribed within the territorial limits of the United States; that our nation has an obligation to assist in the bringing about of understanding, comity and co-operation among nations. . .'

The Tribune in its frustration denounced this statement as a ‘straddle,’ and denied the committee’s right to ‘break new ground in party policy.’ The colonel still wanted a ‘war for AMERICA.’ Meaning what? The Tribune does not say. A close reader can only note that, while McCormick rages against the Japs, he has been comparatively moderate with our European enemies. Whether or not he would support a negotiated truce with Germany, it is clear that the ‘war for AMERICA’ implies a war without meaning, a war without real victory, a war that will gain for America only the privilege of surviving in an armed camp.

To the nation’s struggle for its life the Tribune has contributed suspicion of our allies and suspicion of our government. It has fought to keep alive the dying embers of isolationism. It has consistently sought to obscure the true nature of this conflict as a world-wide attack upon our freedom and our civilization. It has endeavored to lodge the responsibility for war with ourselves, rather than with our enemies.

Is this the voice of middle-class middle America?