It was McCormick who built the Tribune Tower, that Gothic skyscraper studded with rocks from exotic places. McCormick who builds Meigs Field to serve as his private airport, McCormick who shapes the Tribune to his Roosevelt hating, Cold Warrior, isolationist agenda.
McCormick came from Chicago's very Rich. His was the kind of alcohol swilling, pill popping, suicide prone lineage that has always signified immense wealth. Chicago's "best" families derive from skeleton closets teeming with dysfunction. The Chicago social register reads like a Who's Who of the wacky and insensate. Consider its origins.
McCormick's mother was a Medill; ambitious daughter to the man who helped found the Republican party; got Lincoln nominated; and made a fortune running the Chicago Tribune. His grandfather was Cyrus McCormick, heir to the McCormick reaper fortune. These were millionaires at a time when a well paid working man made a dollar and thirty cents a day.
McCormick was raised among the Fields, Palmers, Pullmans, Armours, Leiters and Swifts who were to bleed hundreds of millions from the workers they battled over the right to organize and the eight hour day.
McCormick's maternal grandfather (Joseph Medill) allies with his competitor Cyrus McCormick in the 1880's. Together the two newspaper owners plot against people they term "anarchists." Anarchist is the word with which Medill will stigmatize the American labor movement, foreigners, and progressives.
In 1886 McCormick and Medill will be instrumental in engineering a judicial murder which insured that four innocent men were hung to quell worker agitation. Three more men are sentenced to life in prison, and another of the Haymarket defendants is either murdered or commits suicide awaiting trial. Chicago was known to be "hell on earth for the working man." The Tribune helped make it so.
Robert R. McCormick recalled, years after the event, taunting a neighbor who had supported the Haymarket defendants.
Had Orson Welles chosen to tell McCormick's story and not made Citizen Kane, he might have ended his career branded a one picture Surrealist. Welles first wife, Virginia, came from the Chicago gentry, and Welles attended the Woodstock School, an exclusive haven for the sons of rich men.
Welles modeled Citizen Kane on William Randolph Hearst, Robert McCormick's competitor and fellow tycoon. Welles father, a wealthy inventor, knew the McCormick's and mixed with Chicago society.
But McCormick's story often goes beyond what Welles attempted with Citizen Kane. Welles' Charles Foster Kane fails at life and at journalism, and dies muttering "Rosebud.". It was Welles point that Kane is corrupted by his ambition and the America he had idealized. Charles Foster Kane dies having squandered his inheritance. Robert R. McCormick succeeded beyond anyone's expectation, even his own. His profit margins live on long after him.
Like George Bush and the mythical Charles Foster Kane, Robert R. McCormick was raised with a silver spoon and matching foot in his mouth. His father had been ambassador to the Czar of Russia, and to the Austro Hungarian Empire. Educated at private schools in England, McCormick preps at Groton and graduates Yale at the turn of the century. He is born into a world of incredible, amazing, unsurpassed privilege.
McCormick travels after college, as befitted a man of his Class, and then returns to Chicago where his mother schemes to make him editor of the Tribune. McCormick's mother favored his brother Medill, who ends a suicide after a well orchestrated political career that took him to Congress.
McCormick comes to power at the Tribune while still in his twenties. He dabbles in local politics; is made a "colonel" in the Illinois National Guard by a governor who owes the Tribune a favor; raises a Society unit to serve with General Pershing chasing Pancho Villa in Mexico. National Guard companies were part of the social life of Chicago's self described upper crust. They had been organized initially to defend the city from a worker rising. Pershing takes a shine to the young "colonel" with the impeccable social credentials and the hand tailored uniforms. They will meet again in Europe during the First World War.
McCormick returns from his Mexican excursion in his own railway car. Wealthy Chicagoans had been purchasing military commissions for their sons since before the Civil War. McCormick retains a life-long fascination for the pomp and ceremony of military display. He is never happier than when in uniform or brandishing a weapon. He will collect miniature, working order, toy cannons.
The defining event of McCormick's life is the First World War. He and a cousin volunteer. McCormick is assigned to Pershing's staff and participates in the first American assault in France. He will spend the rest of his life creating a heroic past for himself, and spend several fortunes building memorials to his prowess, and to the First Division. For the remainder of his life McCormick insists that he be addressed as Colonel. Tribune employees know better than to disobey.
McCormick returns from the First World War a Lieutenant Colonel. Like Welles' Charles Foster Kane, McCormick sets out to clean up Chicago; writes mission statements for the Tribune; vowing, while breeding horses, founding a polo, hunt and golf club, and erecting a mansion famous for its ostentation, that he will "defend the working man."
In comparison to McCormick Welles megalomaniac Kane appears a rather retiring introvert . McCormick's Cantigny mansion in Wheaton,(named for the site of a wartime exploit) is a Gothic fortress over laid with militarist symbology
The house is staffed with maids and butlers; sits on six hundred acres; and is home to McCormick's expensive hobbying: pocket watch collections, suits of imported armor; militarist memorabilia. The fireplaces in every room are lit each night he is in residence. There are Christmas parties for the staff and townsfolk, fox hunts and hunt clubs are organized among the local gentry, imported Scotch is secreted by the case for fear that Prohibition may endure.
He surrounds himself with sycophant retainers, soldiers of fortune, failed Society boys, all the flotsam and dreck normally reserved for a B movie Balkan floor show. He plays the patrician, squire riding to hounds while ruling the Tribune with his iron whim.
It is as if Chicago's rich had set out to sum all the fatuousness and greed, all the lapses of humanity and bloated inflations of their Class in one rather uncomfortable person. The snobberies and imbecilities of Catigny are beyond anything that caricature can offer.
What is so essential to understanding McCormick is his hair shirted discomfort. His closest associates invariably describe him as lonely, uncomfortable, unloved and solitary. He is forever fanatically attempting to impress. He succeeds no where but among his employees at the Tribune. His world will finally shrink to just the newspaper; the place where he is obeyed, coddled, and feared. "Should McCormick ask for a glass of water," says one obedient employee, " we answer with a fire hose."
McCormick marries the divorced wife of an ex-friend. It costs him his social circle. He is snubbed and snubs back. With that poetic justice which only the moneyed can truly inspire, McCormick and the Armours, Swifts, Pullmans, Palmers and Fields will spend decades cutting each other with a pettiness unsurpassed even among their ilk. Balzac had finally come to the Middle West but only a Proust could begin to fathom the toxic undercurrents at a McCormick gathering.
Everything changes with the Crash of 1929. McCormick and the Tribune flower. In 1934, at the height of the Depression the Tribune clears three million dollars, and another three from ancillary operations. McCormick will lead his Classes attack on the policies and person of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was born an Eastern Brahmin, and like McCormick he is no friend to the unpedigreed. It is difficult now to imagine the rage that Roosevelt inspired among the privileged. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who was to save Capitalism in America, was loathed by his own kind.
The battle which began with Roosevelt pitted against members of his own Class ends with the Reagan led counter attack. The Tribune paved the way in demanding the destruction of the social programs Roosevelt had helped create.
In the Thirties McCormick and the Tribune form alliances with the most ardent of the Isolationists. Charles "Lucky" Lindbergh becomes the mouthpiece for American Isolation, and accepts ( in 1938) the highest honor the German military can bestow on a foreigner. Lindbergh makes friends among the German high command and is personally decorated by Herman Goring.
Anyone pondering the points where patrician Americans begin to espouse a crypto Fascism in the Thirties should consider the relation between men like McCormick and Lindbergh. Both, usually privately, posit the existence of social, intellectual and biological elites which they just happen to represent. Lindbergh researches, in France, a scientific basis for "a master-race." Fascism was not just a German phenomena, America had its Father Coughlins and Senator Bilbo's. They form a long line extending directly to "populist" Pat Buchanan.
The Tribune, ever anxious to condemn those Americans who had gone to Spain to fight Fascism, is impressed that neither Hitler or Mussolini have labor union problems.
In a Tribune editorial in 1939, McCormick will urge that Poland, England and France turn away from a German Fascist attack and unite against their "real enemy, the Soviet Union." On the day Poland is invaded, the Tribune announces :"This Is Not Our War."
McCormick founds WGN radio, and unsurprisingly becomes its star performer. He reads the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson's inaugural address, passages from Lincoln, and provides a stock of political platitude that set Tribune staff writers cringing. In England: "the lower classes, long held down, are revengeful and intent on destroying their superiors."
McCormick will accuse then Secretary of State George Marshall of giving "China away to the Reds." Russians are "asiatics" who had "just come out of the woods."
Early on McCormick and the Tribune stump for what had been Hitlerian dream and will become American post war politic . They preach a holy war against the Soviet Union, and world communism. Roosevelt is vilified as a man leading America down the path to Bolshevism. But it is not until the war is ended, and Roosevelt safely dead that the Tribune wheels into action in support of the man who lent his name to as despicable an episode as exists in American history. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin is a Tribune favorite from the first.
"Every patriot in Wisconsin will vote for Senator Joseph McCarthy," enthuses the paper. Long after McCarthy has been fed the necessary rope , alienated his few remaining supporters and revealed himself a self-destructive alcoholic whose Red baiting career is over, the Tribune is almost worshipful.
McCormick is not slow to reveal his contempt for journalist integrity and the First Amendment. Enamored of a local con man, Harry Jung, he helps set up The Anti Communist Bureau. The Bureau will publicize and name people whose loyalty to the US is suspect. Their offices are in the Tribune Tower.
As McCarthy lies dying, disgraced and excoriated by those who had paved the way for his unspeakable career, the Tribune eulogizes "The Republic has lost a stalwart defender."
It would be impossible to describe what Chomsky has come to call the National Security State without factoring in the careers of Hearst, Luce, and McCormick. The great journalistic empire builders of American jingoism.
As McCormick ages ( he will die in his seventies in 1955) the pronouncements become more strident, more reactionary.. Those who support the UN "sought to rise to international status by betraying their own country." Even MCCormick's hero, General Douglas MacArthur must distance himself from MCCormick's fervent adulations, noting that the Colonel was widely considered a "Right wing Nut."
On the night that the Dewey Defeats Truman headline is printed a guard at the Tribune hears a shot. On entering MCCormick's office he discovers that the Colonel has taken a pistol from his desk and fired it into the ceiling. So skewed is MCCormick's behavior by this time, no one dares interrogate him. McCormick's episodes become inadvertent testimony to the fawning at the Tribune and his growing instability.
Underlings are humiliated for the slightest failing. An executive castigated for sitting in the wrong chair ; sales clerks scolded as McCormick purchases a dozen pair of gloves; the ever present aides left to pay the bill as the Colonel, who carries no money, shops. McCormick, friendless in real life, makes the Tribune his "family," while demanding a fealty of his workforce which would shame a Borgia.
McCormick will die at home, surrounded by paid employees summoned for the event. The Tribune runs a seven and one half page obit. A final genuflection in deference to the man who signed the paychecks and passed out Christmas bonuses.
If you were to go down to the Trib today, past the Nathan Hale statue at the front of the building, you'd discover its all in the grim, grasping hands of Corporate ciphers. Bean counters with Business degrees and labor relations creeps. What prose the paper could once muster has dwindled to the hackery of a Clarence Page.
American political reportage has decayed about as far as it can go. Spun downhill since the Colonels day. Midst today's polit/babble Roosevelt's speeches read like Leninist theory. Whether Reagan's mom and apple pie homilies; Bush's tortured bureaucratese; or Clinton's offend no one, persuade no one cant; the language has been sifted to monotony. Spin doctored to formulaic pap.
Capitalist exploitation hasn't gone away; its been reworked to New Age uplift. McCormick's legacy depended on employees now long dead. The Trib stayed true.
It remains a union busting, militarist-newsletter for the Reaction. But the fun has all dribbled past. Tribune flair stops at the power-tie. Still the Colonels shade is there, just to the rear of the bean counters and Pulitzer prizes, the security camera-filled corridors and the rent a cops.
It was General Douglas MacArthur, writing long after McCormick had failed to get him the nomination for President who wrote: "May your shadow never decrease."