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For his loaded news columns, the Colonel invokes the tradition of personal journalism that made the Tribune great under his famed grandfather Joseph Medill, Lincoln's stanch backer and crony ("Take your Goddamned feet off my desk, Abe") and one of the Civil War's fieriest propagandists. Old Medill summed up his news technique in a classic story in 1857 headed A BRUTE. One James Wheeler was fined $5 for maltreating his wife. The Tribune story concluded: "A few months' experience in breaking stones in the Bridewell would do this Wheeler a 'power of good' and he ought to have been sent there." McCormick retains the method.
Military Manners. Admirer of engineers and military life, big (6 ft. 4 in.) McCormick, who still bears himself with parade-ground erectness, is as inelastic in ducal personal routines and crotchets as in his editing. As for years past he still rises regularly not later than 8:30, goes break-fastless to ride or tramp over his 800-acre estate at Wheaton, 45 minutes from Chicago. Having lost a blaring Tribune campaign to put Chicago on Eastern Standard Time the year round, he runs his estate on E.S.T. nevertheless. When his wife Amie, a capable portrait painter, died two years ago, the Colonel gave her a military funeral, with her favorite saddle horse carrying her boots, reversed, three volleys by a squad from Fort Sheridan and taps sounded over her grave.
A major habit-change is the Colonel's Saturday night talk on his Station WGN (World's Greatest Newspaper). Decorated (in 1923) for his part in the Battle of Cantigny, and author of a well-reviewed book on General Grant, the Colonel wished to clarify the military situation. Pronounced he: "If the French had only followed my advice and developed use of 105-mm. guns instead of 753 they would have been able to halt the German attack." Contending until late 1935 that an air force was at best an unimportant adjunct of modern armies, he told his listeners during the Battle of Flanders that Stukas were of small use because infantrymen could be trained to shoot them down like ducks.
Measuring Strength. With the appearance of Marshall Field's Sun the important question will be: How much of the Tribune's past bounce can the Colonel muster for the fight?
Recently the Colonel has mostly warmed over old journalistic dishes in preparation for the arrival of the Marshall Field paper. Month ago the Tribune headlined an exposé of gambling in Cook County — an anti-climactic series which served chiefly to remind Chicagoans how long ago were the Tribune's successful anti-gangster campaigns in the '20s. The Colonel inaugurated a series of articles on points of interest in Chicago—a well-worn reminder that he loves the town in which he has so large a proprietary interest. (The trouble with New York, says the Colonel, is that it has a bigshot complex.) Belatedly the Tribune started a campaign to get more defense work for Chicago. To offset the Field paper's $10,000 name contest the Tribune ran a half-dozen contests—$10,500 for a new U.S. operetta, $10,000 for easy answers to a State-capital contest, $5 to $25 for best recipes, book reviews, horoscopes.