The Fair Lady of Milwaukee

(See Cover) Out from Miami's palm-lined Biscayne Bay headed the 71-ft. white-hulled motor cruiser High Tide, bound for a day of fishing in the Gulf Stream. At a table on her afterdeck sat the High Tide's owner: Harry J. (for Johnston) Grant, 72, a florid-faced millionaire with china-blue eyes, a mouthful of flashing gold teeth, and the booming voice of a sideshow barker. But energetic, stubby (5 ft. 8 3/4 in., 220 Ibs.) Harry Grant did not act like the run of carefree yachtsmen. When he was not tending the deep-sea fishing line trailing over the stern, he riffled through mountains of papers, pounded out letters and memos on a portable typewriter, talked by ship-to-shore phone.

For two hours of the day, he stopped everything else while he concentrated on an evening newspaper that had been airmailed from 1,268 miles away. The newspaper: the Milwaukee Journal (circ. 339,532). Harry Grant was no ordinary reader --and the Journal is no ordinary paper. Harry Grant is boss of the Journal, which he has made into one of the best newspapers in the U.S. He has also made it one of the most controversial.

The Stamp. From the center of the Midwest, often considered a seedbed for isolationists, the Journal speaks in a ringing, uncompromising, internationalist voice. In Senator McCarthy's home state, the Journal attacks him so fiercely that McCarthy calls it "that left-wing smear newspaper, the Milwaukee edition of the Daily Worker" Other readers, damning its doggedly independent, liberal ways, refer to it as "that damn Journal." (One prominent Milwaukeean pays his newsboy 25-c- a week to tear out the editorial page before delivering the paper.) Isolationist Chicago Tribune Publisher Colonel Robert McCormick, who considers the Journal a radical upstart in the Trib's Chicagoland, calls it a "wood pussy."

Onetime Wisconsin Governor Phil La Follette, still smarting from the long feud between his family and the Journal, has vowed that he would rather have his children grow up "illiterate" than read the Journal. On the other hand, Milwaukee's Socialist Mayor Frank Zeidler, who has been opposed as often as he has been supported by the Journal, has only respect for the paper: "The Journal is almost utterly dominant in the community. It's the intellectual life of Milwaukee. You discuss the issues the Journal raises [and] you hardly know of the existence of any other issues. The Journal's standard of morals, political and social, sets an all-enveloping stamp on the city.

None of this bothers Harry Grant, who talks about the Journal with the purple sweep of a Fourth of July orator and the fervor of an evangelist. Says he: "The Journal must be our Fair Lady. We must have freedom, freedom, freedom--not to be willful, or bigoted, or swell-headed, or to give us delusions of grandeur--but so that the Journal can act entirely as it thinks best for the community. The Journal is above our frailties. The Journal's job is to serve the public. It can't be anything else."

The Milwaukee Journal serves the public by 1) reporting virtually everything that happens in the city of 637,392, even down to the theft of a few chickens; and 2) covering national and world news with meticulous thoroughness. To European visitors, and even Americans from cities much bigger than Milwaukee, the Journal is often a sharp surprise, for it confounds both the mistaken idea that the American Midwest is a wellspring of unrelieved isolationism or that "provincial" journalism must indeed be provincial.

Fifty-One Million. Board Chairman Grant himself lives in Milwaukee only six months of the year. The rest of the time is spent on High Tide or in his home on Biscayne Bay; they are the paper's nerve center and Grant's office. Grant makes "the Journal's decisions whenever I want and wherever I am," and "nobody's ever challenged that." There is little reason for challenge. Under Grant, the Journal's fat (up to 100 pages) weekday and Sunday (up to 400 pages) editions average 1,140 columns of local, national and international news a week. They are brightened by the best newspaper color printing in the U.S., for both news pictures and ads. For the last four years, the Journal has run more advertising than any other paper in the world (51 million lines in 1953). Though it has a monopoly of the afternoon field, its ad rate is the lowest of any major eight-column daily. Its radio-TV station, WTMJ, is one of the top moneymakers in the U.S. For close to half a century, the Journal has earned a handsome profit ($2,000,000 after taxes in 1953), which is shared by many of the 1,337-man staff; the Journal is one of the few U.S. dailies whose employees own the paper they work for.*

The Three Bs. Milwaukeeans (nine out of ten families read it) rate the Journal on their own even scale. They know that the paper's all-encompassing interests have brought the city everything from the Milwaukee Braves (TIME, March 30) to a $327 million expressway, now abuilding. They also know that the Journal's campaigns have helped cut local crime to the lowest rate of any major city in the U.S. Milwaukeeans can thank the Journal for virtually eliminating gambling (it prints no daily horse-racing results), helping to give the city high health and housing standards and a government whose bonded indebtedness is only $30 million, one of the lowest metropolitan debts in the U.S. In this climate of civic rectitude, says Police Chief John W. Polcyn, the Journal "watches officials like a hawk. God help you if you get out of line. They take the flesh right off your bones."

In molding Milwaukee, the Journal has also been molded by it. Milwaukeeans have never taken crime or corruption lightly. Largely the descendants of sturdy Germans and Poles, Milwaukeeans have a healthy respect for civic discipline, orderliness and hard work. While Journal stories may seem too long and stodgy to outsiders, Milwaukeeans like the Journal's Germanic thoroughness, relish its fondness for lengthy details and rich quotation.

Machinery and beer are the city's best-known industries, and it leads the U.S. not only in beer production (13 million bbls. a year) but in consumption (39 gals. per capita). Nightclubs are as hard to find as skyscrapers, although the city has 2,137 taverns. "Milwaukee," observes one longtime resident, "is a big town that's still a village." Milwaukee has had a Socialist mayor for 30 of the last 38 years, because Milwaukeeans have learned to vote on men and issues instead of parties. Says one of the city's leading politicians: "A Milwaukee Socialist is just a good, average guy. About the only thing publicly owned is the waterworks. Mayor Zeidler behaves more like a conservative Republican than a Socialist."

Milwaukeeans pride themselves on having a gemutlich city, where hospitality and friendship bubbles out of every stein of beer. "The three Bs of Milwaukee," says one Milwaukeean, "are not Beethoven, Bach and Brahms but beer, baseball and bowling. We haven't got a city of great culture. We can make any machine in Milwaukee, but we have no first-class theater building or art museum or orchestra--and no real prospect of them." 'For its lack of the outward signs of culture, the Journal has to share the blame. If Harry Grant had resolutely exercised his evangelistic fervor a generation ago in favor of such cultural monuments, Milwaukee would probably have them. "It's very unusual for one man to have all the power I have," says he. "Men tolerate me because they know I don't want a thing for myself. I want it for the Journal" and thereby for Milwaukee. "Hell's bells, the Journal has got to remain a simple, clean thing. Nothing must ever besmirch the Journal.'"

The Journal, as alert and sharp-eyed as a rooster, has a tabloid-moralistic habit of playing up any smirch involving a Milwaukeean. When the wife of a prominent businessman was caught by a pri vate detective in a hotel room with another man, the Journal front-paged the story: FOUND IN HOTEL WITH A FRIEND. Recently, a distraught Milwaukee housewife telephoned the city desk to beg the paper not to print the news that her husband had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly. "Lady," a Journal reporter told her, "I'm going to give you a break. I won't ask his name. If we knew his name we'd have to run it. This way he has a chance of being missed."

The Journal treats its own staff the same. When a top Journal executive was arrested for drunken driving after an auto accident, the Journal's only competitor, Hearst's morning Sentinel (circ. 183,772) offered to keep the story out of the paper. The Journal not only turned down the Sentinel's offer but played the story on Page One. After the story, the executive resigned. The Journal has fought gambling so effectively that a bridge party with a door prize has been a front-page story (although the paper's executives match coins for the lunch check in the executive dining room). When the owner of a taxi company gave each of Milwaukee's 27 aldermen an electric blanket for Christmas, the Journal exposed the "bribe." (Some of the blankets were returned.) The Journal never lets up its effort to instruct its readers in the ways of civic virtue. "It takes a long time to educate a community," explains Grant, "and it can't be done by spellbinders, moneybags, hypnotizers or magicians, by J. Rufus Wallingford or Aladdin's lamp. Character is what matters on a paper."

"Just Julius." In no place in the Journal does the educational effort stir up more of a storm than on the editorial page. The paper calls itself "independent" as many other dailies do, but for the Journal, the term is an understatement. In a single election, the paper once sup ported a Socialist, a Republican, a Democrat and a Wisconsin Progressive. The Journal, which backs losers as often as winners, backed Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, Willkie in 1940 (because of the third-term issue), no one in 1944, Dewey in 1948 and Stevenson in 1952. Politicians have learned that Journal support can easily be turned into opposition. In his two successful campaigns for governor, the paper backed Republican Candidate Julius Heil, who used the slogan "Julius the Just." Next election, when the Journal turned against Heil, it sneered at him as "Just Julius." He lost.

When Joe McCarthy, then a circuit judge, ran against the late Bob La Follette Jr. in the Republican senatorial primary in 1946, the Journal did not support La Follette, and McCarthy squeaked through by little more than 5,000 votes. "One editorial for Bob," recalls a Journal editorial writer ruefully, "would have turned the tide, and McCarthy might never have got to the Senate at all." A month after the primary, the paper realized its mistake. It charged that Judge McCarthy had granted quick divorces to political friends. Later, it found that he had been censured by the Wisconsin Supreme Court for destroying official court records, and had been delinquent in thousands of dollars of state income taxes. The Journal later deflated his "war injury" as a broken foot he suffered in a rough equator-crossing party aboard a Navy transport. His whole record, the Journal pointed out, is "an appalling record of fraud and deceit." "McCarthy," said Chief Editorial Writer Lindsay Hoben, "is a very simple issue for us: integrity and truth, or not."

It was opposition to McCarthy that helped put "the Journal behind Stevenson in 1952. The paper's editors were ready to support General Eisenhower as soon as he was nominated, but Grant stopped it. Said he: "We'll wait for the Democrats, see who they nominate and decide then." But the Journal did not decide until Ike campaigned in the Midwest and met McCarthy. "Ike didn't keep a decent distance," said Hoben, "and we did think he showed insufficient strength in dissociating himself from McCarthy. From then on, it was impossible for us to back Ike." Even the two of the six editorial writers who voted for Ike agreed that "the Journal's traditions made it necessary to back Stevenson."

Since the election, the Journal has often backed the Republican Administration, insisted that Ike's biggest battle is against the "forces inside his own Republican Party," hailed Vice President Nixon for the good job he is doing. The Journal hammers at the Administration for not revising the McCarran Internal Security Act, while it campaigns for free world trade and backs the U.N. and the International Court of Justice as staunchly as it supported the League of Nations. Grant's independent attitude "is to go to the truth wherever you find it, and to hell with left or right."

Society Wedding. The fiber of Harry Grant's independence threads back through his entire life. He was born in Chillicothe, Mo., the son and grandson of stable owners. The family moved to St. Louis, and when Grant was 15, his father killed himself, leaving Grant's mother to make ends meet by teaching dancing. Harry Grant quit high school after his freshman year, went to work as a $5-a-week railway messenger. He was earning $60 a month as a ticket clerk when he quit to make more as a bookkeeper and cattle checker in Swift & Co.'s stockyards. He bought schoolbooks and studied at night, and by the time he was 22, he had saved enough money to enter Harvard as a special student.

In his first year, with his usual energy, Grant took seven courses (four was standard), lived in an attic, wore secondhand clothes and did odd jobs to add to his savings. By the end of the year, his money ran out, so Grant took a job selling roofing in the Southwest until he saved enough for a second try at Harvard. After struggling through the second year, he gave up and moved to a cheap room in Hoboken, having lost his "illusions about what an education could do for me." By limiting himself to 11-c- a day for lunch and not much else, he held out until he found a job he liked, working for N. W. Ayer advertising agency in Manhattan. Grant moved through every department, was so able at whatever he turned his hand to that in three years he was sent to London to represent the agency.

In Europe he met Dorothy Cook, a wealthy American girl, whom he married the same year at what he describes as a "goddamned society wedding." Grant felt that his in-laws wanted him to be "a gentleman of leisure." He had different ideas, and his marriage was unhappy. (Mrs. Grant died in 1923.) Grant went to Chicago to work for O'Mara & Ormsbee, Inc., the Journal's advertising representative. There he quickly rose to vice president and caught the eye of Lucius W. Nieman, owner of the Journal. Nieman hired Grant for $250 a week as business manager, with a promise of stock in the paper if things went well.

"A Public Stench." Nieman, a veteran newsman, had bought the newborn Journal in 1882, when it was barely 22 days old (the Journal considers Nieman its "founder"). Nieman was disgusted with the timidity of the city's half-dozen dailies, which he thought were more interested in pleasing businessmen and politicians than in covering the news. He set the Journal on a different course with his dictum: "Never care about classes, but about people. Get all of the information [;you can] about matters of importance to the public, giving them all sides of the question." When more than 70 people died in a hotel fire and the other papers called it an unavoidable tragedy, the Journal said the hotel was a "known firetrap" and denounced its owners for "greed" and "criminal negligence." The words "liar," "jackass" and "public stench" were familiar epithets in the Journal. By 1915, Lute Nieman was describing Germany as an international menace and urging preparedness for war. In Milwaukee, where German was a second language to thousands of families, the paper was denounced and threatened.

Nieman stuck to his guns. The Journal translated and printed more than 5,000,000 words of pro-German propaganda flooding the U.S. (including stories from German-language Milwaukee papers), to prove that some Americans were more loyal to the Kaiser than to the U.S. Government. Journal reporters smuggled themselves into pro-German meetings, wrote long eye-witness accounts. Many Milwaukeeans were so furious that Nieman posted armed guards outside the paper's doors, barred the windows and gave staffers revolvers to carry. For its campaign, the Journal won a Pulitzer Prize in 1919. The campaign also intensified the Journal's feud with the pro-isolationist Progressive Party, a feud that started when Democrat Lute Nieman had a political falling out with onetime Republican Bob LaFollette.

When Harry Grant arrived in 1916 in the midst of the battle, the Journal was thriving on controversy, with a circulation of 97,598, though still far behind the Sentinel (where Nieman had been managing editor). Three years after Grant joined the staff as business manager, Nieman's health failed and Grant became publisher. Though Nieman lived until 1935, Grant has run the paper since 1919.

With characteristic lack of modesty, Grant says: "The Journal became, through my energy and driving force--God knows I had an abundance of both--a thing worth buying."

What Contract? In the Nieman tradition, Grant runs the Journal on a simple principle: "You've got to have good editorial matter for a paper to get circulation, and you've got to have circulation to get advertising. Editorial matter is the base of it all." Journal advertisers learned early a primary rule of U.S. journalism: the more successful a paper, the less susceptible it is to influence from advertisers. Harry Grant taught the lesson to Milwaukee in a typically forthright manner. When an advertiser asked for special treatment in the news columns because of "my $50,000 ad contract," Grant asked him: "What contract?" "Why, the contract I have with you," answered the advertiser. "You mean the contract you had with the Journal" answered Grant.

To keep free from ties and commitments that might jeopardize the paper's independence, Grant and his staff take little direct part in Milwaukee public life. "I have something everybody else in Milwaukee wants," explains Grant. "They want to use the Journal through me. They'll do the damnedest tricks--throw dinner parties, ply you with liquor, find pretexts to get on your blind side. We're not out to make friends. We stick by principles instead of to individuals."

The Five. When he is in Milwaukee Grant leaves his twelve-room, lakeview apartment on Milwaukee's fashionable Prospect Avenue (he owns the nine-story apartment house) every morning at 9:30. By 10, he is in his richly decorated office in the Journal's five-story building on Fourth and State Street. In meetings with his high command. Grant is as voluble as a Salvation Army brigadier at a mission meeting, acting out each part in the drama he creates. Once, in the middle of such a speech. Grant stopped, then bellowed: "I talk too goddamn much. Kick me in the tail and get me out of here." He seldom sees a piece of copy before it is printed, keeps apart from the staff, rarely making an appearance in the Journal's city room. Some reporters with years of service have never met him.

The staff is nominally responsible to Editor and President J. (for John) Donald Ferguson, 63, a friendly, Missouri-born, white-thatched newsman, who, like Grant and the Journal's managing editor, started out as a railway worker. Like every other staffer, he always calls Grant "Mr. Grant." (Once he addressed him as "Boss," and Grant exploded: "That reminds me of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Simon Legree.") Editor Ferguson leaves the day-to-day operations to Managing Editor Wallace ("Chink") Lomoe, 56, a capable, hard-driving ex-state editor who came to the Journal as a reporter 25 years ago, is president of the Associated Press Managing Editors' Association. Chief Editorial Writer Lindsay Hoben, 51, who joined the paper in 1925, runs the five-man staff of editorial writers. Publisher Irwin Maier, 54, devotes his time to keeping the balance sheet healthy, and Business Manager Donald B. (for Byron) Abert, 46, who ably runs the plant operations, good-naturedly admits that marrying Grant's only child, Barbara, has helped his climb. Says Grant "Some men get s.o.b.s for sons-in-law. I'm lucky.

I got a hard-working son-in-law."

Green & Peach. The Journal, bound by old-fashioned ideas of editorial responsibility, bars syndicated columnists; it aims, says Editor Ferguson, to be able to be "responsible for every word in the paper" and to stand behind what it prints. For its national and international news, it relies on the wire services and the New York Times news service, has only two correspondents of its own outside Wisconsin (in Washington and New York).

The Journal drives home its position on such matters as segregation by its own example. On its society pages, it prints--as very few other papers do--pictures and stones about Negroes. The paper doesn't crusade in the manner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TIME, Dec. 21). It aims to nip corruption before it gets a start, as it covers the city like a vacuum cleaner, picking up any small specks of dirt along with everything else. It also never forgets that it is a home-town daily. Cinemactors Pat O'Brien and Jack Carson are "Milwaukee movie stars." (But when Pianist Liberace, the "latest Mil-waukeean to hit the big time," triumphantly returned to the city, the Journal's critic roasted his playing.)

Readers get their entertainment from the Journal in one neat, lively package: the daily, four-page "Green Sheet," the paper's most popular feature, filled with comics, pictures, a crossword puzzle, bridge column, advice to the lovelorn, crisply written local profiles, etc. Across the "Green Sheet's" front page runs a trademark nonsense banner. Sample: EVER STOP TO THINK THAT YOU COULDN'T GET VERY FAR WITHOUT HOLES IN YOUR HEAD? For late news that misses its last edition, the Journal puts out a two-page "Peach Sheet" every afternoon, gives it away free all over the city.

Employees into Owners. For Grant, his crowning achievement is employee-ownership. The death of iute Nieman, who owned 55% of Journal stock, and that of his wife four months later, rocked the Journal. Mrs. Nieman's estate 1) set up a $1,400,000 fund for Nieman Fellowhips, which, for the past 16 years, has ent 193 newsmen to Harvard for a year's tudy; 2) gave the rest of her interest in he paper to Harvard to dispose of to the ;roup "most likely to carry out the ideals" of the Journal. Grant persuaded Harvard hat the employees. should get the Niemans' stock for $3,850,000.

Grant, who already held 20% of the tock, arranged for the employees to get a $250,000 cash bonus to pay for a quarter interest on 25% more, declared a first-year dividend enabling them to pay another quarter, and got a Milwaukee jank to lend the employees the balance at 3% interest. Since the dividends averaged 10% a year, the employees were able to pay their debts largely out of earnings. Grant's stock is now down t012 1/2 %. Last year he announced that the staff, which now holds 55% of the stock, will in five years own 67 1/2% of the paper (the remainder will be held by heirs of early stockholders). None of the top five executives under Grant, whose salaries average about $40,000 a year, owns more than 3% of the Journal's stock (at $26.27 Der share, Grant says each of the five is worth "from $250,000 to $500,000"). Grant need not fear the employees' power. More than 95% have given him their voting proxies, and they are not allowed to sell stock outside the Journal.

He has been seriously challenged only once. In 1943, the American Newspaper Guild tried to organize the Journal. Grant stopped it in his own way. He met the employees in small groups, announced: "By law [Wagner Act&], I am not allowed to make a statement to you. But the time has come for you to choose my management or the Guild--you can't have both. I'll get out if you want the Guild. Here's my record. You decide." The speech ended the drive, and the Journal still has no Guild.

Do Journal employees really feel they own the paper? Many do, especially those who have worked for the Journal for long (258 employees have more than 25 years' service). But some Journalists argue that the executives really own and run the paper, and that stock ownership is, whether intended or not, a device for keeping staff salaries lower than they should be (the Journal's highest-paid reporter makes $250 a week, most average under $140). However, their dividends ($7,176,000 to date) and the tremendous increase in the value of their holdings ($8,669,100 at present) give them security they might not otherwise have.

As boss, Grant has created around him not only a newspaper tradition but a group of men who know how to carry it out. Thus, Grant's successor is likely to be not an individual but a group of Journalists. For their part, Milwaukeeans will continue to read the Journal, often feeling the same shuttling between love and hate for the paper that children sometimes feel toward their parents.

That's all right with Harry Grant. Says he "We're trying to lead. The only way to lead is to get out ahead. We're not a loved paper. But we're a respected one."

* Others: Cincinnati Enquirer, Kansas City Star.

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