Robert Rutherford "Colonel" McCormick (July 30, 1880 – April 1, 1955) was a member of the McCormick family of Chicago who became owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. A leading non-interventionist, an opponent of American entry into World War II and of the increase in Federal power brought about by the New Deal, he continued to champion a traditionalist course long after his positions had been eclipsed in the mainstream. McCormick returned from the war and took control of the Tribune in the 1920s. Given the lack of schools of journalism in the midwestern United States at the time, McCormick and Patterson sponsored a school named for their grandfather, the Joseph Medill School of Journalism. It was announced by Walter Dill Scott in November 1920, and began classes in 1921.[4][5] As publisher of the Tribune, McCormick was involved in a number of legal disputes regarding freedom of the press that were handled by McCormick's longtime lawyer Weymouth Kirkland. The most famous of these cases is Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931), a case championed by McCormick in his role as chairman of the American Newspaper Publishers Association's Committee on Free Speech. A conservative Republican, McCormick was an opponent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and compared the New Deal to Communism. For a period in 1935, he protested Rhode Island's Democratic judiciary by displaying a 47 star flag outside the Tribune building, with the 13th star (representing Rhode Island) removed; he relented after he was advised that alteration of the American flag was unlawful.[6][7] He was also an America First isolationist who strongly opposed entering World War II to rescue the British Empire. As a publisher he was very innovative. McCormick was a 25 percent owner of the Tribune's 50,000 watt radio station, which was purchased in 1924; he named it WGN, the initials of the Tribune's modest motto, the "World's Greatest Newspaper". He also established the town of Baie-Comeau, Quebec in 1936 and constructed a paper mill and a hydroelectric power plant there named McCormick Dam to generate electricity for the mill.[8] McCormick carried on crusades against various local, state, and national politicians, gangsters and racketeers, labor unions, prohibition and prohibitionists, Wall Street, the East and Easterners, Democrats, the New Deal and the Fair Deal, liberal Republicans, the League of Nations, the World Court, the United Nations, British imperialism, socialism, and communism. Besides Roosevelt, his chief targets included Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson and Illinois Governor Len Small. Some of McCormick's personal crusades were seen as quixotic (such as his attempts to reform spelling of the English language) and were parodied in political cartoons in rival Frank Knox's Chicago Daily News. Knox's political cartoonists, including Cecil Jensen, derided McCormick as "Colonel McCosmic", a "pompous, paunchy, didactic individual with a bristling mustache and superlative ego."[6][9][10] In 1943 he told an audience he helped plan a defence against an invasion from Canada at the end of World War I. In June 1947 he gave a 100-year birthday party for the Tribune that included a fireworks show called "the most colossal show since the Chicago fire."[7] Other publications noted that everything about the celebration was called "the world's greatest". Instead, they said "the Tribune has been made into a worldwide symbol of reaction, isolation, and prejudice by a man capable of real hate." Upon his death McCormick left an estate estimated at $55 million, and set up a charitable trust in his will. The Northwestern University School of Law building that opened in 1962 was named McCormick Hall after a donation from the foundation.[29] After a donation to renovate the Technological Institute building at Northwestern University in 1989, the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science was named for him.[30] Formerly called the McCormick Tribune Foundation, the trust divested its ownership of the Tribune Company, so in 2008 changed its name to simply the McCormick Foundation.[31] It contributed more than a billion US dollars for journalism, early childhood education, civic health, social and economic services, arts and culture and citizenship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_R._McCormick

• published: 31 Oct 2015
• views: 260