Chattanooga's Milton
Last week in Chattanooga, Tennessee's third city, after many a postponement a new daily was born: George Fort Milton's evening Tribune. In Washington the Tribune was news because it brought Publisher Milton, an ardent New Dealer, back from unwilling retirement. In Chattanooga the Tribune was news because it revived a newspaper feud of some 16 years' standing.
When George Fort Milton Sr. died in 1924, Chattanooga had two dailies, both old and prosperous. One was the morning Times,* which the late, great Adolph Ochs used as a steppingstone to the New York Times. The other was Milton's evening News.
Publisher Milton left 31% of the News stock to his son by his first wife, George Fort Milton Jr. To his good friend and longtime associate, General Manager Walter C. Johnson, went 18%, to his second wife and her daughters 51%, part of it in trust. Back to Chattanooga went Son George from Chicago (where he had been handling publicity for William Gibbs McAdoo's Presidential campaign) and took charge of the News.
Neither mute nor inglorious was the Younger Milton. A mountainous figure of a man, with a boy's face and a scholar's brain, he was more interested in politics than in daily journalism. He wrote books (The Age of Hate, The Eve of Conflict), contributed to leftist magazines like The Nation and The New Republic, lectured, presided over round-table discussions, was chairman of a Southern committee to study lynching. Long an admirer of Nebraska's Senator George Norris, Milton plugged for the Tennessee Valley Authority when it was no more than a Utopian gleam in Papa Norris' eye.
Meanwhile Milton found his stepmother a none too congenial partner. In 1928, he bought her out for a fat $335,000, partly in cash. Unable to continue payments during depression in 1936, he gave Widow Milton and her daughters $120,000 in bonds, $100,000 in preferred stock in place of a $160,000 unpaid balance. Not long after that, Publisher Milton turned out 17 of his employes, including his father's old friend, Walter Johnson. Meantime a new menace arose on Publisher Milton's horizon.
Free Press. Grocer McDonald, son of a Knoxville groceryman, built up a chain of 60 stores in Chattanooga. He bought a dairy to supply his stores with milk, a bakery to bake his bread, a laundry, a tire and gasoline company. He saw no use in paying good money to advertise in the papers.
In 1933 Grocer McDonald started giving away a little weekly sheet of his own, the Free Press. Other stores around Chattanooga began to advertise in the Free Press, and McDonald brought it out twice a week. About that time Publisher Milton's News was in the midst of a hot fight against Tennessee Electric Power Co. (subsidiary of Wendell Willkie's mammoth Commonwealth & Southern) in behalf of a municipal power system fed by TVA.
One day in 1936 the Free Press came out as a full-fledged commercial daily, competing with the News in the afternoon, the Times on Sunday. Immediately T.E.P. took most of its advertising out of the News, gave it to the Free Press. A Congressional committee, investigating TVA, later asserted that: 1) T.E.P. lawyer took a $10,000 "fee" from the power company, invested it in the Free Press; 2) T.E.P. paid higher rates for advertising in the Free Press than it had paid the News; 3) the power company granted discounts to the Free Press and the McDonald stores, even after the bills were long overdue.
The Free Press flourished. Publisher McDonald used grocery trucks to distribute his papers. Last year the Free Press, only three years old as a daily, with a circulation of 27,833, had almost overtaken Milton's News.
Meanwhile. Publisher Milton was again in trouble. The News had lost $12,185 in 1937, $44,162 in 1938, rolled up a loss of $39,869 in 1939. By last December, in spite of another reorganization and sale of another $24,000 in stock, the News was $15,000 behind in its payments to Mrs. Milton, its bonds had been in default for nearly six months, entitling the bondholders to take control. Mrs. Milton's attorney, Sam J. McAllester, was secretary of Roy McDonald's grocery chain. One bleak day last December, Lawyer McAllester told Milton that a sale had been arranged for the News and accepted by the bondholders' committee. Purchaser: Roy McDonald.
Publisher Milton, appalled, scurried about town, raised $15,000 (mostly from employes) to meet the defaulted interest. But it was too late. On Dec. 16 Milton ran off his last edition.
"Intrepid Spirit." For the News plant and equipment, its Associated Press franchise and other assets, Grocer McDonald paid $150,000, assumed the burden of its $325,000 bonded debt. Last week George Fort Milton started again from scratch. He had 675 backers, most of them in Chattanooga, a bare $25,000 capital.
Among the Tribune's, stockholders were such New Deal bigwigs as Senator Norris, who put up $100; President George Berry of the Pressmen's Union, who put up $1,000; Francis Biddle, Solicitor General of the U. S.
Publisher Milton got his composing-room machinery from the International Typographical Union, shipped it from an abandoned plant in New York. He bought a secondhand press that once belonged to a paper in Worcester. Mass. For news service he relied on the Chicago Daily News syndicate and Transradio Press.
First issue of the Tribune, subtitled "The People's Paper," ran to 32 pages. Next day it settled down to 16 pages, one afternoon appeared with a scant ten. Inside were plenty of robust comics (Superman, Charlie Chan. Tarzan), such columnists as Eleanor Roosevelt. Raymond Clapper, Hugh Johnson.
On page 1 of his first issue Publisher Milton proudly slapped a. four-column enlargement of a letter: ''I congratulate you upon your determination to continue publication of a newspaper in Chattanooga. This resolution on your part exemplifies . . . courage of the highest order in the face of obstacles which could have crushed a less intrepid spirit. . . . Franklin D. Roosevelt."
* For other news of the Chattanooga Times, see p. 58,
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