Edward Wyllis Scripps
Edward Wyllis Scripps (June 18, 1854 - Mar. 12, 1926), newspaper publisher, was born on a farm near Rushville, Ill., the youngest of the five children of James Mogg Scripps and his third wife, Julia (Osborn) Scripps. He was a half-brother of James Edmund Scripps and Ellen Browning Scripps [qq.v.]. He attended a district school near his home and a private school conducted by his half-sister Ellen. At eighteen he began his newspaper work as an office boy on the Detroit Tribune, of which his half-brother James was manager. When James in 1873 started the Detroit Evening News, the first cheap, popular evening paper in the United States, Edward helped to build up the circulation of the new paper, and became first a member of the news staff and then city editor. In the fall of 1877 he gave up his position to accompany another half-brother, George H. Scripps, on a year's tour of Europe. During his travels he conceived the idea of establishing a paper of his own, and he succeeded in obtaining a promise of about $10,000 from his two half-brothers and his cousin, John Scripps Sweeney, in support of a one-cent evening paper in Cleveland, Ohio. On Nov. 2, 1878, he brought out the first issue of the Cleveland Penny Press, its business, editorial and printing offices housed in a four-room shack in an alley. Thus at twenty-four he laid the foundation for an impressive career as owner of a chain of daily papers extending from the Middle West to the Pacific.
Pioneers in establishing cheap evening papers in the Mississippi Valley, in 1880 Edward and his brothers bought the two-cent Evening Chronicle of St. Louis, and a year or two later a struggling paper in Cincinnati that they named the Penny Post, later the Cincinnati Post. These two papers with the Detroit Evening News and the Cleveland Penny Press, constituted the first chain of daily newspapers in the United States. Disagreements with James over the management of the papers led Edward to relinquish control of all the papers except the Cincinnati Post. He took Milton Alexander McRae into partnership in 1889, and formed the Scripps-McRae League of Newspapers with McRae and George H. Scripps in 1895. Following the decline of the old United Press in the nineties and the rise of the new Associated Press, organized in Chicago in 1892, as the dominant news-disseminating agency in the United States, Scripps felt the need of an independent means of obtaining telegraph news, and in 1897 he organized the Scripps-McRae Press Association to cover the field west of Pittsburgh. In 1904 this organization purchased the Publishers' Press, a similar independent organization that covered the territory east of Pittsburgh. In 1907 the two agencies were combined into the United Press Associations generally known simply as the United Press, the first press association operated in connection with a chain of daily papers. Out of a column of miscellany, which Ellen Scripps prepared for the Cleveland Press while she was on the staff of the Detroit Evening News, grew the Newspaper Enterprise Association, organized in 1902 by Edward Scripps to supply his papers and others with cartoons, illustrations, and feature articles; this, known as the "NEA," became the first newspaper syndicate connected with a chain of daily papers.
In 1891 Scripps moved to San Diego, Cal., near which he built a villa called "Miramar." Two years later he acquired an interest in the San Diego Sun, the first of the Scripps Coast League of newspapers, a chain that later included papers in Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, Portland, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, and Sacramento. To serve these papers with telegraph news, he organized the Scripps Coast Press Association. In 1908 he and McRae retired in favor of Scripps' eldest son, James. The newspapers built up by Scripps were designed, as he used to say, for the "95 percent.," the common people. Editorially they were independent in politics, sympathetic with union labor, and liberal in their general attitude; in 1912 they supported Theodore Roosevelt for the presidency and in 1924 Robert Marion La Follette. While retaining a controlling interest in all his papers, Scripps sold stock to members of the editorial and business staffs, and at the time of his death approximately two-fifths of the stock of his papers was in the hands of his employees. With his sister Ellen he endowed the Scripps Institution for Biological Research at La Jolla, Cal. (later the Scripps Institution of Oceanography). In 1920 he established the Science Service, an organization designed to furnish the press with the results of research presented in popular form. He also provided for the Scripps Foundation for population research at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He had married on Oct. 5, 1885, Nackie Benson Holtsinger of Westchester, Ohio, by whom he had six children. He died on his yacht in Monrovia Bay, off the coast of Liberia; he was survived by his wife, two daughters, and a son.
text by Williard Grosvenor Bleyer in "Edward Wyllis Scripps."Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
LINKS:
FURTHER READINGS
- J. E. Scripps, A Geneal. Hist. of the Scripps Family (1903); Who's Who in America, 1924-25; N. D. Cochran, E. W. Scripps (1933); Gilson Gardner, Lusty Scripps: the Life of E. W. Scripps (1932); M. A. McRae, Forty Years in Newspaperdom (1924); W. E. Ritter, "The Marine Biological Station of San Diego," Univ. of Cal. Pubs. in Zoology, Mar. 9, 1912; obit. in Detroit News, Mar. 14, 1926.]
- Scripps speaks for himself in two books: one arranged by his family and edited by Charles R. McCabe, Damned Old Crank (1951), the other edited by Oliver Knight, I Protest (1966), a volume of "selected disquisitions." Biographical accounts written by associates are Gilson Gardner, Lusty Scripps: The Life of E. W. Scripps (1932), and Negley O. Cochran, E. W. Scripps (1933). Scripps figures also in Milton A. McRae, Forty Years in Newspaperdom (1924).
- A Celebration of the Legacies of E.W. Scripps: His Life, Works and Heritage. Athens: Ohio University, 1990. 94p. This publication includes addresses delivered at a symposium held at Ohio University, Athens, March 2-3, 1990, to celebrate the donation of the E.W. Scripps Papers to Alden Library, Ohio University, Athens. The publication includes addresses on journalism, E.W. Scripps' personal and professional life, the Scripps Family and Scripps Howard.
- Preece, Charles. Edward Willis and Ellen Browning Scripps: an Unmatched Pair: a Biography. Chelsea, MI: Bookcrafters, 1990.
- Trimble, Vance H., The Astonishing Mr. Scripps: the Turbulent Life of America's Penny Press Lord. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1992.
