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The Good Old Days. But such means appear by now to be having some effect on the caliber and morale of the Tribune staff. Since World War II the Colonel's domination of the Tribune has become complete. Until then he was confined more or less successfully to the editorial page. The news columns were largely in the hands of City Editor Robert Morton Lee (now dead) and Managing Editor Edward Scott Beck (now on the shelf). Under them the Tribune staff once included such names as Westbrook Pegler, Percy Hammond, Ring Lardner, Burton Rascoe. Present Managing Editor Pat Maloney, who flew with Rickenbacker and wears a Phi Beta Kappa key from Dartmouth, is a hard worker who got his training under Beck and Lee but lacks their independent thinking.
In the Tribune's "Golden Era," before the Colonel got at the news columns, it produced its only Pulitzer Prizewinner, beloved Cartoonist John T. McCutcheon. But Cartoonist McCutcheon, a sweet-tempered man who could not adapt his pen to McCormick manias, has been pushed aside by Cartoonist Carey Cassius Orr, who is not inhibited by McCormick.
With Roosevelt II the Colonel really hit his stride. Nor was he concerned when he was caught in outright manufacture of anti-Roosevelt shockers. A Tribune story in 1936 showed a ragpicker in a gutter scooping up Roosevelt buttons which Party workers presumably could not persuade anybody to wear. The Colonel did not apologize when the Chicago Times ran a full-page spread in which the Tribune's ragpicker re-enacted the button scene which he claimed a Tribune reporter paid him 25¢ to fake. Nor did the Colonel try to collect a $5,000 reward by the Times for proof of a Tribune headline and story that Moscow had U.S. Reds to back Roosevelt.
The temper of the Tribune's reporting the war & peace issue shows in its streamer page 1 headlines: WAR BLAMED ON U.S. ENVOYS WARN SENATE WARMONGERS WAR AGITATORS HIT BY HOLT HALT WAR DRIVE— WHEELER BARE MORE STEPS TO WAR HALIFAX STEERS F.D.R. BILL HOUSE PASSES DICTATOR BILL DRAFT ARMY 'GOING TO WAR' NEW WAR DEAL WITH CANADA BEAT DRUMS FOR CONVOYS DISCLOSE MORE TALK OF A.E.F. PACT PUSHES U.S. NEAR WAR GEN. JOHNSON: WAR IN 60 DAYS* VOTE NO WAR IN WISCONSIN LET PEOPLE DECIDE ON WAR FIGHT JAPS! BRITONS TO U.S.
Personal Journalism. Tribune reporters call McCormick-ordered stories "policy assignments" or "dirty stories." At least two Tribune reporters are saving clips of such stories against the day when they can write a treatise on the weirdities of the Colonel's nose for news.
The decline of the Tribune's once-excellent foreign service may also be charged directly to the Colonel. When Tribune Correspondent Edmond Taylor (The Strategy of Terror) predicted that the Russian-German Pact would give Russia Bessarabia he got the ax thus:
"Your fantastic Rumanian story, hysterical tone of your recent cables and other vagaries indicate you, along with Knickerbocker, Mowrer and others, are victims of mass psychosis and are hysterically trying to drag U.S. into war. Suggest you join Foreign Legion or else take rest cure in sanitarium in neutral country until you regain control of nerves and recover confidence in yourself. Until then, file no more."