(5 of 5)
More interesting are the Colonel's new efforts to prove that his isolationist heart is in the right place. He enlisted noisily in the "Smokes for Yanks" campaign, thereby inspiring Col. Frank Knox's Daily News to its best cartoon of the year. Few days later the Colonel sought to undercut a more serious criticism. In a long letter to the London Daily Sketch's Lord Kemsley "on America's place in world affairs" McCormick wrote: "If it were necessary, and I write this after mature consideration, I believe that many Americans would volunteer to aid you in arms to prevent your being conquered, and I am one of them."
For McCormick, the isolationist scream-bomb, this was a remarkable concession. If the U.S. were to enter the war he might well make much bigger concessions in the name of patriotism—as he and his cousin Joe Patterson (now publisher of the even more successful New York Daily News) did in World War I. If the Colonel again begins whipping up fighting spirit as hotly as he now does isolation, his shift will doubtless cut some interventionist ground from under Marshall Field's Chicago Sun. But the real question of how much strength the Colonel can muster for the battle is how much of the Tribune's original cast-iron constitution is still sound after years of arbitrary one-man rule and addiction to partisanship instead of news.
* About three months ago.