Last week in Chattanooga, Tennessee's third city, after many a postponement a new daily was born: George Fort Milton's evening Tribune. In Washington the Tribune was news because it brought Publisher Milton, an ardent New Dealer, back from unwilling retirement. In Chattanooga the Tribune was news because it revived a newspaper feud of some 16 years' standing.
When George Fort Milton Sr. died in 1924, Chattanooga had two dailies, both old and prosperous. One was the morning Times,* which the late, great Adolph Ochs used as a steppingstone to the New York Times. The other was Milton's evening News.
Publisher Milton left 31% of the News stock to his son by his first wife, George Fort Milton Jr. To his good friend and longtime associate, General Manager Walter C. Johnson, went 18%, to his second wife and her daughters 51%, part of it in trust. Back to Chattanooga went Son George from Chicago (where he had been handling publicity for William Gibbs McAdoo's Presidential campaign) and took charge of the News.
Neither mute nor inglorious was the Younger Milton. A mountainous figure of a man, with a boy's face and a scholar's brain, he was more interested in politics than in daily journalism. He wrote books (The Age of Hate, The Eve of Conflict), contributed to leftist magazines like The Nation and The New Republic, lectured, presided over round-table discussions, was chairman of a Southern committee to study lynching. Long an admirer of Nebraska's Senator George Norris, Milton plugged for the Tennessee Valley Authority when it was no more than a Utopian gleam in Papa Norris' eye.
Meanwhile Milton found his stepmother a none too congenial partner. In 1928, he bought her out for a fat $335,000, partly in cash. Unable to continue payments during depression in 1936, he gave Widow Milton and her daughters $120,000 in bonds, $100,000 in preferred stock in place of a $160,000 unpaid balance. Not long after that, Publisher Milton turned out 17 of his employes, including his father's old friend, Walter Johnson. Meantime a new menace arose on Publisher Milton's horizon.
Free Press. Grocer McDonald, son of a Knoxville groceryman, built up a chain of 60 stores in Chattanooga. He bought a dairy to supply his stores with milk, a bakery to bake his bread, a laundry, a tire and gasoline company. He saw no use in paying good money to advertise in the papers.
In 1933 Grocer McDonald started giving away a little weekly sheet of his own, the Free Press. Other stores around Chattanooga began to advertise in the Free Press, and McDonald brought it out twice a week. About that time Publisher Milton's News was in the midst of a hot fight against Tennessee Electric Power Co. (subsidiary of Wendell Willkie's mammoth Commonwealth & Southern) in behalf of a municipal power system fed by TVA.