Passing of a Giant

In the 42nd Street skyscraper that houses the tabloid New York Daily News, the monster presses were still, resting like exhausted giants from the ordeal of grinding out 4,500,000 fat Sunday newspapers. Upstairs in Ihe city room, a handful of early-trick Newshawks dawdled over Sunday-morning chores. They paused as a telephone buzzed, and stared at the deskman who picked it up. A quiet voice on the wire said, "He died at 10:25."

"He," as every Newsman instantly knew, was restless Joseph Medill Patterson, 67, the maverick journalistic genius who sired the slick, expert, irritating, irreverent, gamy newspaper with the biggest circulation in the U.S.

A month ago a special trainload of 400 staffers, alumni and chums had trooped out to Eagle Bay, Joe Patterson's 108-acre estate overlooking the Hudson at Ossining, N.Y. The party was not like the old days. The grave-eyed host lay in his sickbed upstairs, suffering from the liver disorder that took his life this week. He had never fully recovered from a pneumonia attack that laid him low last November.

Who Succeeds Caesar? Behind him Joe Patterson, moody millionaire and reformed Socialist, left an anxious question for his hirelings and rival press lords to ponder. What would happen to the gaudy Daily News, now that its heart had stopped beating? The answer might rest with two other grandchildren of old Joseph Medill, who founded a fabulous dynasty when he bought into the Chicago Tribune six years before the Civil War.

Cousin Robert Rutherford McCormick, publisher of the Tribune (and co-manager of the Medill Trust),* was certain to move in. And Sister Eleanor Medill ("Cissie") Patterson, shrill publisher of the Washington Times-Herald, would replace Brother Joe as a trustee. Neither has Joe's common touch.

Where or why Patterson got his uncanny touch, he himself never knew. Like Cousin Bertie, he was born (in Chicago, Jan. 6, 1879) with a silver spoon in his mouth. After Groton, like his cousin, he went to Yale. A year before his graduation, he traipsed off to China to run messages for correspondents covering the Boxer Rebellion. His father, Robert W. Patterson, was Joseph Medill's crown prince on the Tribune, and gave young Joe his first $15-a-week job. Impatient with the plodding Tribune and full of admiration for Hearst, he quit in disgust, won a seat in the Illinois legislature, stumped Chicago for a reform candidate for mayor, was rewarded with the job of public works commissioner.

After a valiant but fruitless effort to improve the sweatshop lot of working girls, Patterson went all out for Socialism. In 1906 he got in Dutch with his family by writing a bitter magazine piece called Confessions of a Drone. Excerpt: "I have an income of between $10,000 and $20,000 a year. I spend all of it. I produce nothing--am doing no work. I [the type] can keep on doing this all my life unless the present social system is changed. . . ."

After that outburst, he retired to a farm, spent four years pounding out proletarian novels and three plays. In 1910, his father's death sent him back to the Tribune, by family command, to settle down as an unwilling partner of austere Bertie McCormick.

"I'm With You." One night in France, Joe Patterson and his cousin, both A.E.F. officers, sat down on a farmyard dunghill for a heart-to-heart chat.

"Bertie," said Joe, "I want to start a picture paper in New York."

"Good," said Bertie. "I'm with you."

On June 26, 1919, the Illustrated Daily News was born, a child so sickly that other publishers who had been toying with tabloid ideas promptly gave up. It sold out its first issue of 200,000 copies, but by August was down to 26,625, and its reportorial staff of four was cut to two.

But Patterson and his best friend, Max Annenberg, the circulation genius whom the cousins had hired away from Hearst, found a way out and up. They dumped the News on foreign-language newsstands for buyers who could understand its pictures if not its captions, and peddled it to subway riders who seemed to have a boundless appetite for crime and sex stories.

The News, with Hearst's Mirror and Bernarr Macfadden's now defunct Graphic, was the ribald historian of the flapper-speakeasy-whoopee '20s. They competed in a pell-mell rush to give Manhattan gum-chewers the lowdown on Fatty Arbuckle, Peaches Browning, Arnold Rothstein, Kip Rhinelander. The grisliest news-picture of the era--Murderess Ruth Snyder in Sing Sing's electric chair--was run by Patterson's personal order.

The News's headlines crackled; its pictures were good, and masterfully played; its news stories were models of clarity, conciseness and coarse wit. Joe Patterson's journalism owed more to P. T. Barnum than to Adolph Ochs. No story in the News was "important but dull"; if the news was important, there was no need for it to be dull. In world affairs, the News could tell in two columns most of what the New York Times took eight to tell. But the News did best on what the Times aloofly did not consider Fit to Print.

One-Man Poll. Patterson, strapping and sloppily dressed, used to roam the metropolis by night, haunting Bowery bars, El stations, cheap movies and the newsstands, casually asking people what they thought of the News and its boss.

Through such crude but effective polls, Patterson got the inspiration for an amazing assortment of Daily News features, the best of which was his Voice of the People letters column, drawing more than 50,000 letters a year. He thought up comic strips whose casts became national characters: The Gumps (his mother coined the name), Dick Tracy, Winnie Winkle, Terry and the Pirates, Smitty (whose boss, Mr. Bailey, was J.M.P. himself).

After 1925, when he moved to New York, Joe Patterson and Bertie McCormick divided the Medill dynasty into two spheres. Their profits ran as high as $10,000,000 a year. They split the income with Cissie Patterson and Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms. Together they founded Liberty magazine, ran up a $14 million loss in seven years, sold it.

Politically, they were often farther apart than Chicago and New York. While Bertie McCormick loosed isolationist and reactionary thunderbolts from his Midwestern stronghold, Joe Patterson won a reputation as a liberal (liberals were also isolationists then).

Soon after the Wall Street crash, Patterson the scandalmonger strode into the city room and announced: "We're off on the wrong foot. The people's major interest is in how they're going to eat." Next year, his $10,000,000 skyscraper was completed, with six words from Lincoln's famed homily about God loving the common people carved over the door: HE MADE SO MANY OF THEM. On March 6, 1933, the Daily News pledged itself to support President Roosevelt "for a period of at least one year." The support lasted almost up to Term III, and Patterson was a frequent caller at the White House.

With World War II, the Patterson & McCormick lines began to converge. The Daily News's breezy, colloquial editorials began to shout against "intervention," and for America First. (Joe's rebellious daughter Alicia Patterson Guggenheim shouted right back in her interventionist tabloid, the Hempstead, L.I. Newsday.) In 1940 Patterson, who often pecked out his editorials for himself, urged the U.S. to "warm up to Japan." The News stopped its appeasing during the war, but for a year it has been giving F.D.R. a posthumous whipping for getting the U.S. into it.

Three on a Train. A Daily News truck delivered the morning papers each day to Eagle Bay. Publisher Patterson and his regal, grey-haired second wife, the former Mary King,* read them while breakfasting in bed. Daily, they caught a commuters' train to Manhattan, with a bodyguard riding the seat behind them. At the office, where Mrs. Patterson was women's editor and fiction buyer, her husband paid morning calls on the Sunday room, city room, picture department.

Head & Heart. What people thought of Joe Patterson depended largely on whether they agreed with him--a difficult task. Many people liked his paper, but few loved him in a way that public figures are often loved. (Around the News only ex-Theater Critic Burns Mantle, 72, dared call him "Joe.") It was hard to be neutral about Joe Patterson's News. It was widely hated (even by people who could not stop reading it) for its blind prejudices, and the adroit, insidious, vindictive way it advocated them.

Joe Patterson could understand the issue of the nickel subway, and the fact that two battleships were better than one. But larger facts were beyond him: facts like the world's oneness. He resented the spread of Communism but was entirely willing to let the whole of Europe go Communist. The U.S. was the biggest force in the world, but what happened elsewhere was none of our business--until the bombs landed on the U.S. Uncle Sam became Uncle Sap in C.D. Batchelor's News cartoons, and the outside world was a seductive harlot in a tight silk dress and a skull's face, labeled "World War III."

Joe Patterson had a lot in common with Franklin Roosevelt--a rich man's socialism, an appetite for power, a trust in a Big Navy--but from being a fervent supporter, he turned to a bitter enemy when Franklin Roosevelt went international. Joe Patterson was a good hater. His hatred for Roosevelt became almost pathological; and anything went, from cracks about Roosevelt's lameness to Poison Penman John O'Donnell's leers at Roosevelt's Jewish advisers. New York City's millions continued to return landslide votes for Roosevelt--and to read the Daily News.

This week, mourning its publisher, the Daily News for once did not speak with tongue in cheek. Its solemn self-appraisal: ''The most extraordinary exploit in 20th-century journalism."

*Both the Tribune and the Daily News are corporate children of the Tribune Co. The Medill Trust, of which Patterson and McCormick were the sole trustees, controls a bare majority of the shares.

*When Patterson and Wife No. 1, Alice Higinbotham, were divorced in 1938, the story was played in detail on Page 2. His later marriage to Mary King was briefly noted on Page 4.

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