Robert R. McCormick
Robert Rutherford McCormick (July 30, 1880 - Apr. 1, 1955), newspaper publisher, was born in Chicago, Ill., the son of Robert Sanderson and Katharine Van Etta Medill McCormick. His father, one of three brothers who made fortunes manufacturing the McCormick reaper, was appointed secretary to the American legation in London in 1889, and later became, successively, ambassador to Austria-Hungary, Russia, and France. His mother was the daughter of Joseph Medill, who for forty-four years was editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. She was the dominant parent and constantly pushed the career of her elder son, Joseph Medill McCormick (a journalist and United States senator), to the neglect of her younger son, Robert. Partly as a result of this exclusion, Robert McCormick developed an aloof shyness that always remained characteristic of him. "Medill was brilliant," he once said, adding, "I was never brilliant." From an early age McCormick saw little of his parents. When the family moved to England, McCormick's parents placed Robert and his brother in Ludgrove, a preparatory school, where the boys were left largely to themselves. It was here that young McCormick began, paradoxically, to acquire an English accent and an addiction for English-made clothes and at the same time to develop a passionate, uncritical Americanism. Indeed, a strong suspicion of the English governing class became a determinant in shaping his ultranationalist views.

Returning to the United States around 1895, McCormick entered Groton, the exclusive Massachusetts preparatory school, from which he graduated in 1899. Thus his life continued to be insulated from the mass of the American people, and he was perhaps inculcated during this period with a sense of noblesse oblige. But unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who was also at Groton, McCormick clung to a socioeconomic orthodoxy akin to the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century and therefore was later an uncompromising opponent of the New Deal. These attitudes were further intensified at Yale, from which he graduated in 1903. He once remarked that he had taken a course in economics from William Graham Sumner, "so I was well grounded in that vital topic." McCormick displayed a disdain for what he termed "stupid" subjects like Greek and Latin and a penchant for such practical ones as physics and mathematics, which he said stimulated a bent for mechanical inventiveness inherited from the McCormicks. While in college he continued to embrace a simple patriotism, common at the turn of the century and typified by a chant sung by his fellow students: "For God, for country, and for Yale."

On the advice of his father, who wanted him to settle in Chicago, McCormick entered the law school at Northwestern University in 1904. Although he did not complete the course of study, he was admitted to the bar in 1908. Meanwhile, in 1904, with the backing of an improbable combination of Fred Busse, a practical political boss, and the reformist Municipal Voters' League, he was elected to the city council from a ward on the Near North Side, inhabited by old-stock Americans and secondgeneration Northern Europeans. Reflecting the mood of many in his social class in the progressive period, as well as that of his middle-class constituents, McCormick was a mild reformer on the council, advocating cleansing city politics of corruption and calling for regulation, but not municipal ownership, of private utilities. Six feet, four inches tall, impeccably groomed, and often in polo clothes, the hard-working young aristocrat was a striking figure among the collection of ward heelers.

In 1905 McCormick was elected president of the Chicago Sanitary District. In this post he continued his reformism and also exhibited boldness and independence in administration. The sanitary board was hampered by inefficient political drones and subject to the powerful influences of Samuel Insull's Commonwealth Edison Company; but McCormick promptly employed trained engineers, including a bright young construction boss named Edward J. Kelly, whom he afterwards supported as Democratic mayor of Chicago, to expand the sewage-drainage system for the city and to construct a generating plant at Lockport. The latter project produced cheap electricity to light Chicago's streets, underselling Insull's privately owned utility. (In the 1930's McCormick bitterly denounced the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority for performing essentially the same function.) Still under the influence of progressivism, in 1912 McCormick supported Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign for the presidency. McCormick, like Roosevelt, loved military adventure and hunting wild game in far places. As McCormick expressed it, after undergoing the rigors of the Russian front in 1915, "I was determined to live a great life, an adventurous life, which I have done ever since."

McCormick's short-lived political career ended when he was not reelected to the sanitary board in 1910. He had remained a member of a rising Chicago law firm, but, almost accidentally, he was diverted to journalism, where he made his major imprint on American history. Before his death in 1899, Joseph Medill, McCormick's maternal grandfather, had devised a trust that controlled most of the shares of the Chicago Tribune, naming his sons-in-law, Robert Sanderson McCormick and Robert W. Patterson, as two of the three trustees. McCormick continued his diplomatic career, but Patterson became the editor of the Tribune. In 1910 Patterson died, and the stockholders contemplated selling the paper to Victor Lawson, owner of the successful Chicago Daily News and the less successful Record-Herald. Robert McCormick and his cousin Joseph Medill Patterson (son of Robert Patterson) persuaded the stockholders not to sell, and in 1911 Robert McCormick became president of the Tribune Company. Not until 1914, however, did the two cousins establish active control of the paper; then they boldly added the famous slogan, "The World's Greatest Newspaper," at the publication's masthead.

When McCormick and Patterson took over, the Tribune was declining; it had a circulation of only 188,000, third among Chicago's newspapers. By the time of his death, McCormick had made the paper the premier journal in the Midwest in circulation and, to a large degree, in influence. It sold more than a million papers daily not only in Chicago but also in a wide adjacent region, and its Sunday circulation was a million and a half.

From 1914 to 1919 McCormick and his cousin ran the Tribune together. Their political views were not compatible, but in other respects they made an admirable team. Patterson devised such features as comics--including "Little Orphan Annie" and "The Gumps"--and "advice" columns that helped attract a large readership; and McCormick placed the paper on a sound financial basis, making it in its heyday a vastly profitable enterprise. He acquired cutting rights on a large tract of timberland in eastern Canada and constructed paper mills, thus giving the Tribune a source of cheap newsprint that other journals, dependent upon commercial manufacturers, could not match. A fleet of Tribune-owned lake steamers transported the paper to Chicago. McCormick was also directly responsible for improvements in color presses.

After World War I broke out in 1914, Tribune editorials reflected the isolationist attitudes in the Midwest by opposing American involvement. But in 1915 McCormick indulged his fascination for war by journeying first to England and the western front and then, after his marriage in the same year to Mrs. Amy Irwin Adams, to Russia, where, because of his father's ambassadorship at Petrograd, he was welcomed by the czarist regime. After touring the Russian front, McCormick wrote a book, With the Russian Army, in which he remarked, "I have tasted the wine of death, and its flavor will be forever in my throat."

When he returned to the United States, which was embroiled in controversy with Mexico, McCormick volunteered for duty on the border. He was made a major in the First Illinois Cavalry. Although he had claimed that only eastern "society" people favored entering the war in Europe, he and his Tribune demanded vigorous action against Mexico. Ever the nationalist, McCormick advocated an aggressive policy in the Western Hemisphere. As he remarked concerning the Panama Canal, "Great nations cannot have their existence threatened by little nations that will not allow them to occupy the places indispensable to them. . . ." His purchase of machine guns for the units he commanded gave rise to his later claim that he introduced these and other aspects of mechanization to the American army. So fascinated was McCormick with war that in 1934 he wrote a competent study of the Civil War entitled Ulysses S. Grant: The Great Soldier of America.

Serving on the western front in World War I, McCormick rose from major to colonel and took part in the battle of Cantigny, for which he later named his estate near Wheaton, Ill. Forever after McCormick was known as "the Colonel," a designation he encouraged. Just before McCormick returned from France, he and Patterson agreed to establish the New York Daily News, a tabloid, as an experiment under the aegis of the Medill trust. Under Patterson's editorship the experiment proved a spectacular success; the News came to have the largest circulation in the United States. Thus in 1925 the two men separated, McCormick thereafter having sole charge of the Chicago Tribune, which achieved the largest circulation of a standard-size newspaper in the country.

McCormick made the Tribune a unique newspaper. He was perhaps the last of the great personal editors in the tradition of Pulitzer, Hearst, and Scripps. The Tribune was his personal vehicle for hammering away at figures and issues. His prejudices and preferences were strong, and the news pages and editorials revealed them without hesitancy or (frequently) much pretense to objectivity, often with vitriol and always with vigor. The Tribune appealed especially to a large segment of the Midwest because it defended traditional individualism against big government. In the 1920's it opposed prohibition and later fulminated against almost every aspect of the New Deal. Twenty minutes after Herber Hoover endorsed the "noble experiment" of prohibition in his inaugural address in 1929, the chief of the Tribune's Washington bureau received a telegram: "This Man Won't Do." For days during the 1936 campaign, the Tribune scarcely mentioned Franklin D. Roosevelt on page one while emblazoning Alfred Landon in headlines, news accounts, and cartoons as the man who would save the country.

In foreign policy, the Tribune, like much of the Midwest, condemned attempts by Republican administrations in the 1920's to limit naval armament by treaty. After FDR's "Quarantine Speech" in 1937, which called for collective action against the dictators, the Tribune accused the New Deal of abandoning America's traditional isolationism. Although the paper supported the war following Pearl Harbor, it continued to blame the Roosevelt administration for having brought the nation into the conflict.

After 1945 McCormick became increasingly convinced that Truman's Fair Deal was continuing to lead the United States into an un-American collectivism at home and failing to resist Communism abroad. Occasionally the Tribune's policies carried it, critics charged, to McCarthyist extremes in its unrestrained denunciation of opponents. McCormick came to believe that the eastern wing of the Republican party was following a "me too" policy in endorsing many New Deal reforms. Thus, in 1952, when the party nominated Dwight Eisenhower, McCormick declared on WGN, the paper's radio station, "I will be imposed upon no longer"; thereafter he sought to breathe life into a new "American Party" that would return the country to what he regarded as patriotic policies at home and abroad.

McCormick's journal was also active in state and local affairs. In 1911 it led the drive to remove from office United States Senator William Lorimer on charges of campaign corruption; in the 1920's its exposures were instrumental in bringing about the indictment of Governor Len Small, whose administration was reputedly one of the most venal in Illinois's history. After years of ceaseless effort, the Tribune secured the defeat of similarly corrupt Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson, despite his many forms of harassment.

McCormick took a proprietary interest in "Chicagoland"--the city and the surrounding five-state region served by the Tribune. His benefactions, totaling millions, included gifts to Passavant Memorial Hospital, Northwestern University's medical school, and the Medill School of Journalism. The publisher and his newspaper strove constantly to make Chicago a center of civic and cultural activity by fostering a music festival, the civic opera, and such sports events as the Golden Gloves, the Silver Skates, and all-star football and baseball games. The Tribune was also unremitting in its campaigns to beautify the city and make it a livable place.

McCormick was vigorous in his defense of freedom of the press. His vigilance began when Henry Ford, the auto manufacturer, sued the Tribune for $1 million, charging that an editorial criticizing Ford's stand against preparedness in 1915 constituted libel. Ford eventually won the case, but the jury awarded him only six cents. When Mayor Thompson sued for $10 million, charging that the Tribune's campaign against him was a libel upon the city of Chicago, the court sustained the paper's position on the ground that "the people have the right to discuss their government without fear of being called into account. . . ." On a third occasion the Tribune spent $350,000 supporting a small Minnesota paper's challenge of a state "gag" law prohibiting the press from freely criticizing public officials; in 1931 the United States Supreme Court declared this law invalid. McCormick insisted that a guarantee of freedom of the press be written into the 1933 National Recovery Administration newspaper code.

Occasionally the Tribune's aggressiveness in publishing news got it into trouble. In 1942 an extraordinarily accurate account of the battle of Midway seemed to reveal that the Tribune knew the United States had broken the Japanese code. Angry government authorities briefly contemplated prosecuting the paper for endangering national security, but there was no evidence to indicate that the reporter who wrote the article relied on anything other than unusually shrewd guesswork based on information available to the press. McCormick defended his reporters, as was his practice, which in no small measure accounted for the loyalty of the Tribune staff to its remote employer. McCormick rarely dismissed an employee, and he paid salaries that were among the highest in the profession and provided liberal pensions, bonuses, and other benefits. As one staffer remarked, "Like a benevolent Ebenezer Scrooge he was the author of our feasts, and mighty good eating it was, too." As a result the Tribune staff was "a beautiful team to watch," and "many liberals have longed for a champion as able."

McCormick had no children. His first wife died in 1939; in 1944 he married Mrs. Maryland Mathison Hooper. On his death, in Chicago, most of his holdings went to the Robert R. McCormick Charitable Trust.

text by Julian S. Rammelkamp in "Robert Rutherford McCormick."Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 5: 1951-1955. American Council of Learned Societies, 1977. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC

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