Just before the Republican Party convention of 1860, Abraham Lincoln came down with a bad case of cold feet, and it was little wonder.
There he was, being touted for president of the United States by the Chicago Press and Tribune, as the Tribune was briefly known, a small newspaper in a frontier town. Indeed, the city had only a temporary meeting hall on the banks of the Chicago River to house its first political convention.
Lincoln, moreover, held no political office at the time, having been defeated two years earlier for U.S. senator. So he went to see one of the paper`s owners.
“See here, you Tribune boys have got me up a peg too high,” Lincoln told Joseph Medill. “How about the vice presidency? Won`t that do?”
But Medill wasn`t about to hear any last-minute misgivings.
“We`re not playing second in this dance to any musician,”
Medill replied. “It`s president or nothing. Else you can count the Tribune out. We`re not fooling away our time and science on the vice presidency.”
Medill must have chosen his words well. Lincoln`s resolve was strengthened, and he went on to win the nomination and the election, profoundly changing the course of history.
There was something wonderfully cheeky in Medill`s lecture, coming as it did from the editor of a paper that had been founded only 13 years earlier.
Right from those modest beginnings, the Tribune`s editors were firmly convinced there was something special about their newspaper and about the city it was founded to serve. Yet when the Tribune printed its inaugural issue on June 10, 1847, a betting man could have gotten good odds by offering to wager that either the paper or the town would still be around 150 years later.
Newspapers came and went with considerable frequency on what was then America`s western frontier. Back East, many people had the same feeling about Chicago`s future-as John S. Wright, a contemporary real estate developer, found when he went to New York seeking investors for his projects.
To his dismay, he discovered that Manhattan`s bankers had “not the least confidence in Chicago, it having been for 10 years a synonym for all that was wild and visionary.”
The problem was that Chicago`s first settlers quickly acquired the habit of vociferous civic boosterism that subsequently gave the town its Windy City nickname. They constantly bragged that their community was foreordained for greatness and, caught up in their own rhetoric, those first Chicagoans had engaged in wild land speculation, the price of lots often shooting up 20 to 25 percent in a day.
When those get-rich-quick schemes failed, much of the city`s first merchant class went bankrupt. Those unlucky enough to be on business trips when the day of reckoning came sometimes found themselves “detained in New York as personal security for their large indebtedness to that city for goods past sold and sunk in speculation,” reported the Chicago magazine of that era.
By 1847, though, a few shrewd heads could see that if fortunes weren`t to be made overnight, Chicago still had the natural setting to become the prime trading center of the nation’s vast interior. Cyrus McCormick came to Chicago the very year of the Tribune’s founding and built a factory on the north bank of the river, just east of the future site of Tribune Tower.
Having invented the reaper that would revolutionize agriculture, McCormick wanted to manufacture it near prospective customers, the farmers who were fanning out across the Midwest.
“You’re just the man we want, and you’ve come to the right place!” said William Ogden, the city’s first mayor, in welcoming McCormick.
The Tribune’s founders held a similar brief for their newspaper. Upon handsetting the type and printing their first issue on a flat-bed press in a one-room office on the third floor of a building at LaSalle and Lake Streets, they announced their journalistic philosophy:
“Our views, in all probability, will sometimes be coincident with the conservatives; sometimes we may be found in the ranks of the radicals,” that editorial declared, “but we shall at all times be faithful to humanity–to the whole of humanity–without regard to race, sectional divisions, party lines, or parallels of latitude or longitude.”
Yet for a while, it was an open question how many of its initial readers would even stick around to see if the Tribune fulfilled that pledge–especially after the discovery of gold in California just a year after the Tribune’s founding.
Also, it could be hard in those early years for Tribune readers to see day-to-day evidence of the noble sentiments of its founding philosophy. The paper’s original owners tended toward a certain quirkiness of thought. Several were Swedenborgians, devotees of a revised form of Christianity not destined to catch on in what would become a largely Catholic, Jewish and Orthodox Christian community. The editorial policy sometimes favored the temperance movement, hardly a salable philosophy in a town where the corner tavern would become a linchpin of neighborhood life. Some election years, the paper supported a violently anti-immigrant party, the Know Nothings–hardly a prescient choice in a city that was to house one of the greatest accumulation of foreign-language communities since the Tower of Babel.
But the Tribune’s period of drift and indecision ended in 1855 when a part interest was bought by Medill, a man who knew exactly what he wanted his newspaper, his city and his country to be. A lawyer by profession, Medill had previously published a paper in Cleveland. He moved to Chicago at the suggestion of Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. Some contemporaries claimed it was to Medill that Greeley first offered his famed advice: “Go west, young man. Go west.”
Medill brought to Chicago a belief that this city, as the focus of the nation’s heartland, was the best place to confront the problem of slavery, which, he was convinced, was eating away at the republic.
Medill had been instrumental in founding the Republican Party. Some said it was he who first used the name Republican for the new political group. In any case, Medill provided it with a simple and succinct platform: “No more slave states; no more slave territory.”
Once he arrived in Chicago, Medill, who was then 32, quickly transformed the Tribune into a leading anti-slavery newspaper. He also soon identified Lincoln as a potential standard-bearer for the new party. As a warmup, he prodded Lincoln in 1858 to challenge Stephen A. Douglas for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Though Lincoln lost, the election brought him national attention, especially through the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates, a campaign device of the Tribune’s invention. Medill even thought to hire a stenographer to trail Lincoln and Douglas around Illinois, thus preserving their words for posterity.
Medill’s Tribune was so passionately abolitionist that even after helping Lincoln win the White House it often ran ahead of him on the issue. For months ahead of time, it editorially prodded the president to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln finally did in September 1862.
Medill also was keenly interested in securing Illinois recruits for the Union army; his brother William commanded a company of cavalry, 20 members of which enlisted at the Tribune’s offices. As a result, armed guards had to be stationed at the newspaper’s headquarters because of threats from Confederate sympathizers to burn the building.
A half-dozen years after the Civil War, Medill’s faith in Chicago was put to the test. By then, Chicago had lost its earlier look as a frontier settlement and was a bustling city of about 300,000 people. The Tribune was selling 30,000 copies daily and had moved into a building of its own at Dearborn and Madison Streets that it proudly advertised as fireproof.
On Oct. 8, 1871, that claim went up in smoke as the paper’s headquarters was among the 17,500 structures reduced to ashes by the Great Chicago Fire. More than 100,000 were left homeless by the blaze that claimed about 300 lives.
Undaunted, Medill found a small print shop that had survived and by Oct. 11 was ready to publish the Tribune’s first post-fire edition. Under a headline “CHEER UP,” an editorial (usually credited to Medill) advised Chicagoans not to waste time bemoaning their fate.
A few weeks later while he was setting up temporary offices for the Tribune, Medill discovered how readers had responded to the editorial. A passerby informed him that he had been nominated for mayor on a newly formed “fireproof” ticket. Elected over token opposition, Medill presided over Chicago’s reconstruction and also opened the city’s first public library.
Returning to the newspaper, Medill watched as his prophecy was fulfilled and Chicago’s new factories became a proving ground for America’s Industrial Revolution.
To Medill, the boom of the post-Civil War years was a mixed blessing, one that provided him and his newspaper with a new cause.
The rapid expansion of the economy created a set of instant millionaires whom Medill disdained as “wealthy predators.” By the 1880s, he was crusading against the concentration of financial power in a few hands–mostly of East Coast businessmen–seeing their domination as a threat to American democracy no less than slavery had been. Accordingly, he appointed as his chief editorial writer Henry Demarest Lloyd, a founder of the muckraking movement of reform-minded American writers.
Lloyd took on such targets as railroad magnate Jay Gould, whom he called a “colossal thief.” On March 17, 1883, the Tribune published a one-page map showing the free land the government had bestowed upon the railroads. It was Medill’s and Lloyd’s belief that when government meddles in business affairs, the prognosis is never good.
That was a conviction successive generations of Tribune editorial writers never lost.
Medill had a strong sense of mission and a shrewd head for business, a combination that put a lasting foundation under his newspaper and help to set the direction of Chicago’s evolution. By the time of his death at age 76 in 1899, he had seen his adopted city grow from a small town to a metropolis of 1.5 million. Under his direction, the Tribune’s circulation had reached 100,000. A consummate newspaperman, Medill, according to Tribune legend, fulfilled his oft-stated prediction that his final words would be: “What is the news?”
