Homer would have liked to work on the Tribune. . . . So would Horace. . . . So would Balzac, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Hardy, Kipling and Mark Twain—The W.G.N., a handbook on the 75th anniversary (1922) of the Chicago Tribune.
Because a lot of other people, including Marshall Field III, want in a different sense to work on the Tribune, a rival Chicago paper is about to be launched. But when Marshall Field begins working on the Tribune, the Tribune's towering Colonel Robert Rutherford Mc-Cormick will begin working on the Field paper. That will be the zero hour for a clash between two great Chicago fortunes, one originally made in Chicago's dominant department store and the other made in Chicago's dominant newspaper.
The outcome should be a first-rate show for bystanders. For Colonel McCormick at 61 may be the least popular U.S. publisher, as well as the most arrogant, contentious and unpredictable, but he is one of America's most successful publishers and a hard man to lick. Only two years ago Hearst's Herald & Examiner folded, just like every other rival Chicago morning paper (13 in all).
The Marshall Field paper—which has just paid $10,000 in a prize contest for its not-so-novel name, the Chicago Sun —may or may not turn out to be an ably run paper. But even those who are most hopeful of the Sun's success do not expect it to win a quick victory.
The Terrible Tribune. In his 27 years as publisher of the biggest full-size U.S. newspaper (circ. 1,076,866), Colonel McCormick has acquired such titles as "Lord McCormick, the Earl of Wheaton," the "Duke of Chicago," the "Midwest Medici." Once called "the greatest mind of the 14th Century," he has inspired at least one high-spirited skit:
I'm the celebrated, irritated, isolated gentleman
The Tribune Tower Colonel.
In 1937 Leo Rosten's poll of Washington correspondents ranked the Tribune next to the Hearst press as "least fair and reliable" of all U.S. newspapers. That poll reflected the Tribune's savage anti-Roosevelt angling of news. Meantime its isolationist -propaganda -as-news—unsurpassed for furious bias since frontier journalism —has probably qualified the Tribune for first rank in any like poll in 1941. Alone among U.S. newspapers since 1933, the Tribune has got its papers burned in public bonfires, its offices rotten-egged. Also unique is the range of hatred for the Tribune: it cuts across all class lines in Chicago, from stockyard worker to millionaire.
How then explain the Tribune's success? —its gain of 264,000 circulation in the last five years?—its undeniable influence on isolationist sentiment in the five Midwest States which it calls "Chicagoland?" The late, great Charles Dana prescribed one sure-fire recipe for circulation: get your paper talked about. Of that art Colonel McCormick, with his blatant methods, is a past master. The Tribune's subtitle ("The World's Greatest Newspaper") is an outstanding example.