Research Catalog

Title

The Colonel : the life and legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880-1955 / Richard Norton Smith.

Author

Smith, Richard Norton, 1953-

Publication

Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xxiv, 597 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

• For most of his varied and colorful career, Colonel Robert R. McCormick was the self-proclaimed emperor of "Chicagoland," a Middle American of his own imagination, forever at odds with the alien East and the flaky West. From the 1920s through the mid-1950s, he was editor-publisher of the Chicago Tribune, a joyously combative conservative broadsheet that under his leadership grew to become the most widely read full-size daily in the United States.
• To admirers he was the scourge of bleeding-heart liberals, an emblem of the Old Order in the age of the New Deal. To detractors he was a half-crazed demagogue whose personal exploitation of a powerful news medium was a flagrant abuse of the public trust. In fact, he was all this - and more.
• Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the Tribune, The Colonel is the first biography to draw on McCormick's personal papers. Richard Norton Smith has written a vivid, candid, sympathetic life of an American original, a lifelong controversialist whose outspoken views, for better and for worse, shaped the political temper of his times.
• Patterning himself on his grandfather Joseph Medill, Lincoln's ally and Chicago's post-Fire mayor, he found fame as a municipal reformer. During World War I, he was the sole American correspondent to accompany the Russian Army; later, as an officer of the U.S. First Division, he fought with distinction in the Battle of Cantigny.
• Ever a paradox, he was a strident isolationist whose hobby was military strategy, an implacable anglophobe who adored a good fox hunt, a finger-pointing moralist whose private life bordered on the scandalous. As a publisher he was a ruthless competitor, yet he was also a First Amendment absolutist who effectively, even heroically, defended the press from government coercion.
• At the height of his power, he oversaw an empire whose holdings included not only the Tribune but also the New York Daily News, the Washington Times-Herald, a large chunk of Canada, and "the most beautiful office building in the world," Chicago's Tribune Tower.

Subject

• McCormick, Robert R. 1880-1955
• Chicago tribune
• Newspaper editors > United States > Biography

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [574]-579) and index.

ISBN

0395533791 (alk. paper)

LCCN

97005875

OCLC

ocm36430618

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries