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America Observed

From the 1940s to the 1980s

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Other People's ChristmasDecember 24, 1946

Anything you care to write, or to imagine, about an American Christmas is bound to be true about some part of the country. Up from Florida comes a postcard containing the gentle sneer of a friend, naked under a coconut palm. Down from Vermont, the apologies of an invited guest, buried in his farm under thirty inches of snow. From Hollywood we hear the alarmingly modest confession that it would be nice once in a while to see some of God's own snow, as distinct from the usual studio product of sand and limestone with a coating of cornflakes. Only New York, suspended precariously between the American Arctic and the American tropics at about the latitude of Madrid, can keep up its chronic conceit that everything about it, including the climate, is typical of the best and brightest in American life. This, on Christmas Eve, means a temperature in the low forties, 'considerable cloudiness and shifting winds.'

However, New York has at times a flair for civic showmanship. Christmas is one of those times. The plot of green that runs down Park Avenue, dividing northbound from southbound cars, was planted last week with thirty fine firs at two-block intervals. On Sunday their oyster-white bulbs were switched on for the first time and a city sound-truck visited each tree in turn and stopped as long as it takes to broadcast a single carol, sung as it seemed by choirs of invisible angels wired for sound. Outside the churches that touch on Park Avenue, services were held dedicating the trees to the memory of men and women who died in the war.

Half a mile down from my window, skaters bright as beetles are performing in an ice pageant (New York has less trouble manufacturing its own ice than Hollywood making its snow). The 18,000 patients and residents of the city's municipal hospitals were promised a turkey dinner on Christmas Day by the Commission of Hospitals and this morning the New York police began the first of forty-five parties they will give at their stations for the children of Harlem. The Red Cross this year reaches out into Mid-Atlantic with its promise of special presents for the 100 war brides headed here on the Cunard liner John Ericson. To-morrow night the radio networks will perform their annual good deed of rounding up all the leading comedians and calling a closed season on their undying – because very profitable – feuds.

Once again Christmas morn will be heralded four times by frantic studio announcers, as time marches on across the time zones of the country. The time-zone business is mostly a nuisance, but at Christmas and New Year it gives revellers, by the magic of radio, the chance to get drunk four times over.

In Washington, President Truman could look out of his windows and see a line of pickets dressed in convicts' uniforms demanding the release from jail of 300 imprisoned conscientious objectors. The President was reported ready to-day to sign pardons to get the men out of jail and the pickets out of uniforms. Down in the Carolinas, Federal agents were still hunting the hills for moonshiners, one of whom this week, caught working an illicit still on a mountainside, was reported not to have heard that the Prohibition Act had been repealed. 'Wait till President Harding hears about this' is the unconfirmed report of what his brother said.

In Baltimore, where the air is heavy to-night with the harmonies of the traditional German carols, the ageing but incorrigible H. L. Mencken, the bad boy of the Twenties, was preening himself on a Christmas duty well done: he had managed to get out a new book in time to have it banned in Canada and Boston. It is a short tale about a bunch of old-time Baltimore tramps who held a Christmas Eve party on the understanding that no hymns should be sung. However, as Christmas came in, the strong drink was too much for them and they wound up tearful in each other's arms bellowing the whole repertory of Ancient and Modern.

To Americans with friendships in England there was a further last-minute cause for rejoicing, for The New York Times reports that 'Britain rejoiced to-day when a thaw set in after the coldest night of the year.' Sympathetic readers who imagined a temperature matching Minnesota's twenty below zero, or even New York's fourteen above ten days ago, were puzzled by the news that the thermometer was only in the twenties. However, The New York Times charitably explains that 'Britain is always ill-equipped for cold spells because of the lack of steam heating and the faulty construction of windows in most houses.' A murrain on you, British builders, a chattering New Year to you, members of the National Glaziers and Plasterers' Union!

The Colonel and the TribuneJune 10, 1947

To-morrow night Chicago's sky will be redder than at any time since Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over the lamp that burned up the town. The imperial edict has gone out from the Gothic tower of the Chicago Tribune Building that Colonel McCormick summons all the faithful to what his city editor calls 'the damnedest fireworks show anybody ever saw anyplace.' For to-morrow is the hundredth anniversary of the Tribune's birth, and the night will be filled with all the accumulated sound and flaming fury of a century's editorials against the British, the Democrats, the labour unions, the Roosevelts, and the Wall Street agents of the decadent East.

The paper was only eight years old when a young man with a jutting Irish chin bought a third interest in it and became its managing editor. In itself this is a minor historical event, but his name was Joseph Medill. And Joseph begat Katherine and Elinor, who begat Robert Rutherford and Joseph, who begat the Patterson-McCormick axis, which begat America First, Last, and All the Time.

Only a few months after Mr. Medill was settled at his desk a gawky Illinois politician walked into the office, announced his admiration for the paper, and took out a subscription. Six years later Joseph Medill was in on the founding of the Republican party, wangled its convention at Chicago, and had contrived the nomination of the Tribune's same subscriber. The subscriber became President Lincoln. After a hundred years it is the Tribune's most unalloyed deposit on the altar of fame.

Medill was the progenitor of all the Tribune's most tenacious traditions. Starting on the smallest paper in Chicago, he never doubted its coming preeminence. 'The Almighty,' he wrote, 'has ordained it.' He denounced an early enemy, Stephen Douglas, as 'anti-American.' He demonstrated from the start that no idol was too hallowed to turn on, and attacked Lincoln for countermanding an order that would have freed some slaves. Similarly his grandson, who once praised Henry Ford for 'giving the world the day's lesson,' was so maddened by Ford's pacifism as to invite a 10-million-dollar libel suit. 'Get the British out of Canada,' Medill roared in 1863, eighty years before the Colonel confessed his part in helping the United States General Staff to arrange to resist a British invasion from Canada. For forty years Medill's tremendous energy and irreverence battered out the Tribune's mould: anti-slaver, anti-graft, anti-British, anti-big business, anti-labour. His detestation of strikes and the eight-hour day drew from him the advice: 'The simplest plan is to put arsenic in the supplies of food furnished to the unemployed.'

Like any other great city paper that has lasted through a century, it has had its historic scoops, its doldrums, its ecstasies of team spirit. Once, long ago, it nearly went bankrupt. While the windows of its buildings cracked from encroaching flames, its printing crew sweated against time to run off the latest news of the ruinous fire and to rouse Chicago with the slogan 'Cheer up!' The paper was handsomely rehoused, but if the building was fireproof there was no corresponding guarantee about its future owners. For in a single year, between 1879 and 1880, Medill's daughters presented him with two inflammable grandsons: Joseph Patterson and Robert Rutherford McCormick.

Between Medill's decline and the grandsons' rise to omnipotence, the paper only once threatened to slip from the family's hands. By one of the ironies that embarrass the Tribune's fame, Joseph Patterson in his youth was too reckless a Socialist to trust with the paper's fortunes. It was turned over to a solemn, inexhaustible Englishman named James Keeley. Under him the paper kicked a United States senator out of office and deliberately sacrificed $200,000 a year fighting patent medicines. Says one biographer, 'He made the property, if only for a few years, a newspaper.' By another typical irony, Keeley once sat nursing a sick daughter on the Fourth of July, while the rockets zoomed and banged outside. He started a Tribune campaign to have fireworks banned on the Fourth. The restraining laws that stand on many a state statute-book are to his credit. So to-morrow's fireworks display will not only redress this shameful British infringement of the most American of festivals but will symbolise, in a way, the Colonel's crackling repudiation of the best editor the paper ever had.

When the cousins came to power in 1914, the paper had already registered in Washington its patented trademark, 'The World's Greatest Newspaper.' To make it so, Patterson introduced 'Little Orphan Annie' and other comic strips. And Colonel McCormick brought a business acumen to leasing Canadian forest lands against the day when the Tribune would need more paper. In seven years it was the dominant Chicago paper. Its history since then has been a triumph of political scalp-hunts, circulation wars, hordes of features, much mechanical ingenuity, and resounding profits. The British, of course, have a hand in this. For to-day it is Canadian virgins, of spruce and balsa, reared in the 500 square miles of Quebec the Colonel owns, that invade Chicago and turn, every morning, into a million lusty Tribunes, going out to do battle like an army with banner headlines.

Most great newspapers come to fame through the force of a single great character whose descendants signal with diminishing voltage the original impulse that eludes them. Not so with the Medill-Patterson-McCormick dynasty. It has provided the finest demonstration in the history of prejudice of the triumph of the Mendelian theory. 'The offspring,' wrote the learned priest, 'of two hybrid parents, which carry a dominant Medill and recessive McCormick, characteristically exhibit outwardly the dominant character in the ratio of three to one.'

To-day the editorial attitudes that Medill struck in the eighteen-sixties are intensified in the thoroughbred stance of the Colonel, standing now over Chicago like the finest strain of pointer, watching with pen poised for the migrations of all the queer birds – the Easterners, the C.I.O., the British – who might sully the pure Midwestern sky. Only the British is he powerless to keep out. From nowhere is he more hounded and sabotaged by them than in his own instinct. For whenever he relaxes from this patriotic vigilance he finds himself still talking with a tràce of British accent, taking afternoon tea, wearing a wrist watch on each hand, and being forever to his friends known as Bertie. Freud, thou shouldst be living at this hour! Robert Rutherford hath need of thee! Yet it ill behooves any Briton on this great day to point and snicker over this dilemma of character. Better to turn the other cheek and hail the Colonel as a true son of the bulldog breed. Arise, then, ye crooked sons of Albion, and raise your bloodstained glass to your cousin from Chicago, in whom the blood of Blimp flows so strong and free. A toast, gentlemen, to the Chicago Tribune, born 1847, still going crazy.

Harry S. Truman A Study of a Failure November 1, 1948

There is often a heartless contradiction between American ideals and the general willingness to accept them in action. Mr. Truman's biography is the stuff of which all Presidents are supposed to be made. It is the character and the career that party campaign handbooks attribute to their chosen leader. It is on file in every Hollywood studio, heading the category of thoroughly reliable 'characters,' whom not even the House Un-American Activities Committee would question. It is described in the schools as the very root and flower of what is best about the American way of life. Yet it appears uneasily in the White House and is remembered as the object of characteristic jokes. Coolidge's memory is green in the popular recollection for his cracker-barrel cynicism and his opposition to sin. And now we are ready to recall 'To err is Truman' and 'Don't shoot the piano-player, he's doing his best.'

Yet the fame of the Truman Investigating Committee was justly earned: it wrote the most searching and sympathetic record of a war Administration's blunders and successes. Mr. Truman's history in the Senate was that of an alert debater, a practical humanitarian, a courageous New Dealer from a state festering with political corruption which has never tainted his personal history. Many a more pretentious statesman would have quietly forgotten his machine connections when that machine was exposed and punished in the law courts. But to Harry Truman it was a simple courtesy to leave Washington, and his new glory as Vice-President, and go home to Missouri to attend the funeral of the squalid Boss Pendergast, who came out of jail to die. Pendergast had picked Truman as his man for the Senate. And Mr. Truman came from the sort of people who despise a man who forgets favours. Truman had come up the 'folksy,' traditional way of the machine politician – a road overseer, farm-tax collector, a bridge-mender, a drainer of dirt roads after heavy rains; then a postmaster, a club organiser; then tedious nights learning enough law to justify his election as a county court judge. But he knows as well as most that it is also the hard way. At various times he had gone into debt and worked at all sorts of jobs because the convention of going bankrupt was odious to him. 'He ploughed the straightest row of corn in Jackson County,' his mother kept on telling reporters. To Harry Truman the moral implications of that compliment are as binding as the words of a Methodist hymnal. Being present at Pendergast's funeral was an obvious duty.

It is, I think, the acting out of such straightforward maxims in a great office that requires tact, timing, and a goodly gloss of two-facedness which has bewildered Mr. Truman and made his administration in the end admittedly inept. When the late Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, made a speech in Boston and, with Roosevelt's private approval, came out for Atlantic convoys for British shipping, the grateful cries of Englishmen were as loud as the screams of protest over here. Questioned at a press conference, Mr. Roosevelt said surely Mr. Knox had a right to speak for himself. Truman would have told all, as he did over the misbegotten plan to woo Stalin with Chief Justice Fred Vinson. When he was a haberdasher, he bought at boom prices and sold at depression prices. His shop failed, but he is not a despondent man and one can admire the sigh and the plucky grin with which he has, throughout his life, tried to learn by his mistakes. Unfortunately it is too late to learn in the White House, and Americans who admire the hard-luck story in their neighbour will not tolerate it when that neighbour is raised to 'the elective kingship.'

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Excerpted from America Observed by Alistair Cooke. Copyright © 1988 Alistair Cooke. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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