The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880Ð1955 [Hardcover]

Richard Norton Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 10, 1997

For most of his varied and colorful career, Colonel Robert R. McCormick was the self-proclaimed emperor of "Chicagoland," a Middle America of his own imagination, forever at odds with the alien East and the flaky West. From the 1920s through the mid-1950s, he was editor and owner of the Chicago Tribune, a joyously combative conservative broadsheet that under his leadership grew to become the most widely read full-size daily in the United States. To admirers he was the scourge of bleeding-heart liberals, an emblem of the Old Order in the age of the New Deal. To detractors he was a half-crazed demagogue whose personal exploitation of a powerful news medium was a flagrant abuse of the public trust. In fact, he was all this -- and more. Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the Tribune, The Colonel is the first biography to draw on McCormick's personal papers. Richard Norton Smith has written a vivid, candid, sympathetic life of an American original, a lifelong controversialist whose outspoken views, for better and for worse, shaped the political temper of his times. "I was determined to lead a great life, an exotic life," McCormick wrote, and for once he was guilty of understatement. Patterning himself on his grandfather Joseph Medill, he found fame as a municipal reformer, cleaning up Chicago's water supply. During World War I, he was the sole American correspondent to accompany the Russian Army; later, as an officer of the U.S. First Division, he fought with distinction in the Battle of Cantigny. He was a strident isolationist whose hobby was military strategy, an implacable anglophobe who adored a good fox hunt, a finger-pointing moralist whose private life bordered on the scandalous. As owner-editor of the Tribune, he was a ruthless competitor, yet he was also a First Amendment absolutist who effectively, even heroically, defended the press from government coercion. At the height of his power, he oversaw an empire whose holdings included not only the Tribune but also the New York Daily News, the Washington Times-Herald, a large chunk of Canada, and "the most beautiful office building in the world," Chicago's Tribune Tower. Richard Norton Smith tells McCormick's story with humor, verve, and an eagle eye for revealing detail. Here is McCormick exposing the fiscal crimes of Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson, investigating the gangland murder of a corrupt reporter, and holding Henry Ford up to ridicule in "the trial of the century." Here is McCormick at his most indomitable, at war with his nemesis, FDR, who sought unsuccessfully to indict him for treason. The Colonel is a story by turns amazing, amusing, and appalling. As Smith remarks of McCormick's Tribune, it will provoke its readers "to spasms of outrage punctuated by laughter."

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Robert R. McCormick, longtime owner and editor of the Chicago Tribune during the first half of this century, makes today's media barons seem bland. The likes of Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch could learn a thing or two from this colorful and witty biography by an accomplished biographer/historian and director of the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library. One of McCormick's prep school classmates at Groton was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was to remain a lifelong rival. The characters here represent a crosssection of early 20th-century Americana, including McCormick's newspaper nemesis, William Randolph Hearst (see W.A. Swanberg's Citizen Hearst, LJ 8/61), Henry Ford, and Al Capone. Some of the best moments in the book are Smith's descriptions of Chicago at the turn of the century, when the term newspaper wars could be taken literally. Highly recommended for journalism and Chicago history collections.?Bruce D. Rosenstein, USA Today Lib., Arlington, Va.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

McCormick ruled the roost at the Chicago Tribune for 30 years. Thoroughly using his unlimited access to all of Robert McCormick's personal and corporate papers, Smith portrays a man of eccentric genius and stunning contradictions, who was at once an ardent patriot and a "prototype reactionary," a visionary and an anachronism, a soldier who revered martial virtue while despising martial force. This publication of the first full-scale biography of the patriarch of the "World's Greatest Newspaper" is both balanced and respectful. The sometime foil of contemporaries Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, Henry Ford, and Marshall Field, Colonel McCormick ran his newspaper like an army camp and saw politics as another brand of war. Whether fighting at Cantigny or the White House, whether brilliant or unhinged, the colonel was a fascinating, spontaneously generous, gossip-loving, hard-core conservative whose army-division and newspaper employees were surrogate family. Ironically, the admittedly phobic titan who drove around Chicago in a khaki-colored Rolls Royce most feared being forgotten. Smith's terrific, broad-shouldered book almost guarantees that his fear will never be realized. Patricia Hassler

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 597 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (June 10, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395533791
• ISBN-13: 978-0395533796
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,204,928 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent biography of a fascinating man., May 25, 1998

By 

Mark Klobas (Tempe, AZ, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880Ð1955 (Hardcover)

In this book, Richard Norton Smith does a first-rate job of recounting McCormick's life, going far in seperating the man from the public image that we have of him today. Balanced and judicious, it also makes for excellent reading, as Smith presents McCormick's life in an engaging manner. If there is a flaw in the book, it is in Smith's failure to adequately explain how the view of McCormick as a hidebound reactionary came to overshadow many aspects of his life, such as his early career as a progressive in local politics, or his legal campaigns in support of the First Amendment. This is a must-read book for anybody interested in Chicago's past, the evolution of modern journalism, or the history of twentieth century America.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars good history but the man remains a mystery, May 19, 2005

By 

C. Brown (Evanston, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880Ð1955 (Hardcover)

This is a lengthy book full of interesting historical material. But, as for the man himself, I never got the feeling that I was getting more than a sketch of him. Could any author do better? McM had more than his share of quirks and he didn't suffer fools, or anyone else, gladly, so perhaps there is no way anyone will ever get too deep into the mind of the man. The main thing I took away from the book is that Robert R. McCormick was a good businessman and the oddest duck of his time. The book is not a difficult read but, after reading it, the man remains a cipher. After a detailed accounting the war with FDR, the author seemed to rush to get to the end of RRM's life. Far from being a sympathetic character, pathetic more easily comes to mind. RRM had lots of power and plenty of money but he lived in a very cold world of his own that it appears no one during his life, or readers of this book today, can enter.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Man in the Tower and the World's Greatest Newspaper, April 28, 2008

By 

Borowy26 "Hank" (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880-1955 (Paperback)

This was an interesting book, but not entirely satisfactory. There is a wealth of material to be found here, but one gets the feeling that the historian did not explore numerous topics in great detail. Many of Robert R. McCormick's relatives are mentioned, but seldom are their lives discussed at length. I was left wanting to know much more than what was provided in the biography. I had the feeling that there was more material that could have been added to the text, but the author or publisher wanted to produce a book of a certain length and did not want to exceed a given number of pages. Still, the book whetted my appetite for further reading on the same topic.

My paternal grandfather listened to the Colonel's broadcasts on WGN Radio each Sunday night and laughed out loud at the publisher's pronouncements according to what I was told by my own father. I have visited McCormick estate at Cantigny and live within walking distance of the North Shore Channel that McCormick built while serving as the President of the Metropolitan Sanitary District, but, even after reading this superb biography, the man's character seems elusive.

The only fault that I found in the text is that Smith likes to move the narrative back and forth too often for my liking. A McCormick family member drops out of the proceedings without a solitary mention for several chapters and just as suddenly reappears and then the reader is informed about all of the significant events that took place in the intervening decade concerning this individual. This becomes tedious.

Smith tells you what the Colonel said and did, but seldom suggests why he acted as he did. For example, McCormick was socially ostracized after his first marriage and forced to relocate from the North Shore to DuPage County, but I still cannot see what possessed him to conduct an affair with a relative's spouse (the couple married after the woman's divorce was granted).

Colonel McCormick was an astute businessman and made wise long term investments in Canadian paper mills that benefitted his publication.
As influential as McCormick was in terms of national politics, his antagonism towards local Republican party bosses and his friendly relations with Democratic city officials may have caused irreparable injury to the fortunes of the Republican party in Illinois.

Chicago certainly could use a newspaper publisher of his caliber today. At least when McCormick headed "The Chicago Tribune" it stood for something. Today, it is a weak middle of the road journal with a declining number of subscribers. Earlier this week, it was announced that the Tribune printing plants handling regional editions of the paper would be closed.

A digression:

Richard Norton Smith is currently the curator for the Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois. He formerly headed the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Former US Senator Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois battled to place Smith in his current position when former Governor George H. Ryan (now serving a prison sentence related to official corruption) was attempting to fill the slot with a political hack.