Robert R. McCormick

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Robert Rutherford "Colonel" McCormick (July 30, 1880 – April 1, 1955) was a member of the McCormick family of Chicago who became a lawyer, Republican Chicago alderman, distinguished U.S. Army officer in World War I, and eventually owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper.

A leading Republican and non-interventionist, McCormick opposed the increase in Federal power brought about by the New Deal and later opposed American entry into World War II.

His death also created what is now the McCormick Foundation, known for its philanthropic activities.

Early life and international education

McCormick was born July 30, 1880, in Chicago to Robert Sanderson McCormick (1849–1919) and his wife Katherine Van Etta Medill McCormick (1853–1932). Family members quickly nicknamed him "Bertie" because so many relatives shared the name, including his late paternal great-grandfather Robert McCormick. His maternal grandfather was Tribune editor and former Chicago mayor Joseph Medill, on whose estate McCormick would live for much of his adult life. On his father's side, his great-uncle was inventor and businessman Cyrus McCormick. His elder brother Joseph Medill McCormick (known as "Medill McCormick") was slated to take over the family newspaper business, but was more interested in running for political office, and became a member of the United States House of Representatives (1917–1919) and then the U.S. Senate before losing his bid for a second term and ending his life by suicide in Washington, D.C. in 1925. Meanwhile, from 1889 through 1893, Bertie lived a lonely childhood with his parents in London. His father Robert Sanderson McCormick was Second Secretary of the American Legation in London, serving from 1889 to 1892 under Robert Todd Lincoln. Later, his father served as his nation's ambassador to Austria-Hungary (1901–1902) and Imperial Russia (1902–1905), and replaced Horace Porter as ambassador to France in 1905.

While in London, Bertie attended Ludgrove School. Sent back to the United States, Bertie attended Groton School, as had his brother. In 1899, the year of his maternal grandfather Joseph Medill's death, McCormick matriculated at Yale College, where he was elected to the prestigious secret society Scroll and Key and graduated in 1903 (three years after his brother). Robert McCormick then attended the Northwestern University School of Law and after graduation became a clerk in a Chicago law firm.

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Career

In 1907, Robert McCormick was admitted to the Illinois bar. He co-founded Kirkland & Ellis, the Tribune Company's legal firm, in the following year. Medill McCormick, his elder brother, had been distraught after taking over and expanding the family newspaper business, so he resigned in 1908 and became more involved in the family publishing business, according to psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Despite his corporate involvement, a scandal that culminated in his marriage (see below), and his military service (which led to him being identified as "the Colonel"), McCormick continued as a law firm partner until 1920.

Robert McCormick took over the Chicago Tribune in 1910 and became editor and publisher with his cousin, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, who was the son of a Tribune editor who had wed Joseph Medill's niece. Patterson, a former Illinois representative, moved to New York City in 1919 and founded the tabloid New York Daily News. However, McCormick and McCormick, though often disagreeing, served at both Chicago Tribune and McCormick until 1926, when McCormick took over both jobs at the Tribune and Patterson concentrated on the New York Daily News.

In 1904, a Republican ward leader persuaded McCormick to run for alderman. He served two years on the Chicago City Council before being voted. He was elected president of the Chicago Sanitary District in 1905, which operated the city's massive drainage and sewage disposal system at the age of 25. McCormick was elected to the Chicago Permanent Charter Commission and the Chicago Plan Commission in 1907. However, his political career came to an end abruptly when he took over the Tribune.

In February 1915, McCormick went to Europe as a war correspondent for the Tribune, well before World War I. He spoke to Tsar Nicholas, Prime Minister H. Asquith, and Admiralty Winston Churchill's First Lord. McCormick also visited (and was under fire on) both the Eastern and Western Fronts. McCormick attended formal dinners with Grand Duke Nicholas and Grand Duke Peter, making use of links his father made while ambassador to Russia. McCormick obtained traces of the cathedral in Ypres and Arras' city hall. These pieces were the first of a series of stone blocks that were later embedded in the Tribune Tower's facade. However, they are not on display.

McCormick, who returned to the United States in early 1915, joined the Illinois National Guard on June 21, 1916. In the 1st Cavalry Regiment, his family history, education, and expert horsemanship culminated in his appointment as a major. During General John Joseph Pershing's Punitive Expedition, two days before, Wilson ordered the Illinois National Guard to federal service, as well as those of several other states. McCormick was accompanied by his troops to the Mexican border.

The entire Illinois National Guard was mobilized for federal service in Europe right after the US entered the war. McCormick joined the United States Army on June 13, 1917, and was sent to France as an intelligence officer on the staff of General Pershing.

He was sent to an artillery academy, seeking more active service.

McCormick, a lieutenant colonel, was promoted to a full colonel in field artillery by June 17, 1918, and by September 5, 1918, he had been promoted to a full colonel in the field artillery. He was involved in the capture of Cantigny (hence his later naming his farml estate near Wheaton, Illinois), and in the wars of Soissons, Saint-Mihiel, and the second phase of the Argonne. McCormick was a soldier in the 1st Battalion, 5th Field Artillery Regiment, with the 1st Infantry Division. His service ended on December 31, 1918, though he remained a member of the Officers Reserve Corps from October 8, 1919, to September 30, 1929. He was lauded for prompt action in war, and he was later identified as "Colonel McCormick" and was still identified as "Colonel McCormick" in honor.

McCormick recovered from the war and took over the Tribune in the 1920s. Given the scarcity of journalism education in the midwestern United States at the time, McCormick and Patterson sponsored the Joseph Medill School of Journalism, in honor of their grandfather. Walter Dill Scott revealed it in November 1920 and 1921 classes were first held in 1921.

McCormick, the Tribune's long-serving lawyer, was involved in a number of court fights over the freedom of the press that were handled by McCormick's long-serving lawyer Weymouth Kirkland. Near vs. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931), one of McCormick's most notable of these cases, is Near v. Minnesota, 283 (1931), a case in which McCormick was a sponsor of the American Newspaper Publishers Association's Committee on Free Speech.

McCormick, a centrist, was a critic of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and likened the New Deal to Communism. He protested Rhode Island's Democratic judiciary for a period from 1935, displaying a 47-star flag outside the Tribune building, with the 13th actor (representing Rhode Island) removed; he relented after being advised that the American flag change was unlawful.

He was also an America First non-interventionist who fought World War II "to save the British Empire." He famously unveiled the "Victory Programme," a military initiative that FDR had ordered in the summer of 1941 to prepare the United States for possible entry into World War II. Senator Burton K. Wheeler of the United States had leaked it to him. The journal was published on December 4, 1941, just three days before the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. The uproar around the December 7 attack has died off quickly. The Tribune published an article in June 1942 that stated that the Americans had broken Japanese codes, which was related to the 1942 Chicago Tribune incident.

He was incredibly creative as a publisher. McCormick, a 25 percent owner of the Tribune's 50,000-watt radio station, was purchased in 1924 and dubbed WGN, the Tribune's slogan, the "World's Greatest Newspaper." In 1936, he founded Baie-Comeau, Quebec, and built a paper mill and a hydroelectric power plant there named McCormick Dam to produce electricity for the mill.

McCormick's crusades against various local, state, and national politicians, racketeers, segregation and prohibition, gay activists, Wall Street, pro-Beers, Democrats, the Fair Deal and the UN's Child, Marxism, and communism continued. Mayor William Hale Thompson and Illinois Governor Len Small were among Roosevelt's chief victims. In rival Frank Knox's Chicago Daily News, some of McCormick's personal trajectors were viewed as quixotic (such as his attempts to reform spelling of the English word) and parodied in political cartoons. McCormick's political cartoonists, including Cecil Jensen, referred to him as "Colonel McCosmic," a "pompous, paunchy, didactic individual with a bristling mustache and a superlative ego."

He told an audience in 1943 that he helped plan a defense against a Canada invasion at the end of World War I. He held a 100-year birthday party for the Tribune in June 1947, which also included a fireworks display named "the most colossal show since the Chicago fire." According to other sources, the festival had been described as "the world's greatest." "The Tribune has been turned into a worldwide symbol of reaction, loneliness, and mistrust by a man of real hatred," a Time magazine editorial said.

Following Eleanor Medill's death in 1948, McCormick purchased the Washington Times-Herald newspaper, his first cousin's. The journal was a "isolationist and archconservative" journal known for sensationalism. In 1949, McCormick appointed Ruth "Bazy" McCormick Miller, then known as Ruth "Bazy" McCormick Miller, as the paper's publisher. Bazy wanted Bazy to create "an outpost of American ideals," he said. As the two women reached a point of understanding between Tankersley and the Tribune Company, she asked her to choose between Tankersley and the Tribune Company. As a result, she resigned from the Times-Herald. "I knew when I went to the Times-Herald that I was going to have complete control." That authority was not given to me... Our political convictions are not the same. I have broader Republican convictions than [McCormick] has. I am for the same people as the colonel, but I am not for any more people.

McCormick tried to run the paper himself but failed to fund the venture, and sold the Times-Herald to The Washington Post in 1954. When she announced the auction, McCormick told Bazy that she should buy it, so she gave her 48 hours to match the $10 million asking price. She couldn't have the funds to do so, but she didn't have the means to do so. Following the purchase of the Times-Herald, the Post strengthened its market position by removing the competitor paper.

McCormick married twice, but there were no children from either marriage. Amy Irwin, the ex wife of his father's first cousin, Edward Shields Adams, was his first wife. McCormick spent a long time at Adams' homes in downtown Chicago and Lake Forest, Illinois, beginning in 1904. Amanda McCormick (1822-1981), the youngest daughter of family patriarch Robert McCormick, married Virginian Hugh Adams (1820–1880) before moving to Chicago to begin the McCormick & Adams grain trade company. Edward Shields Adams, an 1859 boy, married Amie de Houle "Amy" Irwin on April 15, 1895. She was born in 1872 and became the granddaughter of decorated soldier Bernard J. D. Irwin.

A tense family feud has existed since 1913, beginning in November 1913. Amy Irwin Adams filed for divorce, claiming Adams was an alcoholic, and the case was dismissed on March 6, 1914, with her husband not appearing in court. Adams brought another lawsuit in September 1914. He sued McCormick for trespass and asked for the divorce case to be heard again. The opposition press made the most out of the scandals. Adams presented McCormick with a bill for eight years of lodging, claiming McCormick had "wickedly and maliciously debauched" as his guest, according to Adams. According to other charges, McCormick had a former chauffeur arrested and interrogated by a private investigator. McCormick denied that he had made loans to Adams, which had to be paid back. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal court judge, heard the complaint in November. McCormick, it was said, had promised to pay the loans if Adams dropped his suit to reopen the divorce. In February 1915, Landis ruled in favour of McCormick.

McCormick married Amy Irwin Adams after the original divorce decree was released by law at the time. The wedding took place in London in the registry office of St George's Hanover Square, with only two people present. The wedding was not mentioned in the Tribune, nor in any of the recent lawsuits.

McCormick, who died in 1939, was a near-social recluse. In the apartment of his cousin Chauncey McCormick's uncle on December 21, 1944, he married Mrs. Maryland Mathison Hooper. At the time, she was 47 and he was 64. She lived until 1985, her first child was born in July 21. McCormick lived at Cantigny, Illinois, in his later years and until his death.

Ruth "Bazy" McCormick Miller (later Tankersley) was the heir to McCormick's publishing empire for a time. He was reported to have "doted" on Bazy. She was 28 years old and was given the honor of Vice President when McCormick naming her as the editor of the Washington Times-Herald in 1949. The two men arrived at a point of the ways when Bazy divorced her husband in 1951 and later eloped with an editor at the newspaper, Garvin "Tank" Tankersley. Tankersley was of unsuitable social status for Bazy, according to McCormick, because "Tank" was from a poor Lynchburg, Virginia, family. McCormick also opposed her divorce in general, which Bazy viewed as hypocritical given McCormick's own complicated personal life. McCormick resigned from the Times-Herald when she ultimatum that she chose between Garvin Tankersley and the paper. Bazy and McCormick reconciled prior to his death, though they had been estranged for many years.

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