Now I may not be a white man, but I’d still say that I’m one lucky person. I go to Northwestern, the 10th best university in the nation according to U.S. News and World Report. I’m graduating with a degree that everyone tells me is going to get me a great job. And best of all, I live in the United States, which is, let’s face it, the best darn country in the entire universe.
I also realize that, as a journalist, I lucked out with Medill. One of the best things about Medill is this great new building we have, the McCormick Tribune Center. The $17.5 million facility, located next to Fisk Hall, has a lot of great stuff: a nice student lounge, new Macintosh computers and cool looking TVs in the lobby.
The Tribune Center was made possible primarily through the generosity of the McCormick Tribune Foundation. The foundation has been a longtime Medill friend, recently donating $20 million for the building and for Fisk renovations. This financial kindness is all in the name of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the foundation’s founder and “a firm and passionate advocate of journalism and press freedom,” according to the organization’s Web site. He’s so great, that even NU’s engineering school is named after him.
So as NU students, I feel we should know more about the man whose name is all over our schools. The Colonel (as he preferred to be called) was the long-time owner, publisher and editor of the Chicago Tribune until his death in 1955. He was a soldier who began his career in the Illinois militia, ran the Chicago Tribune like an army, and often wore his uniform around the office. There’s a story that he once mutilated the American flag and cut out the “Rhode Island star” because the state offended him.
But really, McCormick’s greatest legacy was his financial support of Jay Near in Near v. Minnesota — a case that helped cement this country’s freedom of the press.
Oh, one more thing, The Colonel was also a bigot.
“Minnesota Rag,” a book about the Near v. Minnesota case, asserts that words like “kike” and “nigger” were a part of the Colonel’s vocabulary. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor and publisher of The Nation, wrote, “If the Ku Klux Klan had a brief life in Illinois, it undoubtedly prospered while it lived because of the Tribune’s aid.”
The kooky Colonel also accused FDR and the New Deal of “creeping communism.” A supporter of Sen. McCarthy, the Colonel was convinced that the “red menace” was more than a scare. And under McCormick’s leadership, the Tribune accused the American Civil Liberties Union of “taking Bolshevik gold.”
A 1930 poll of Washington correspondents, reported in Time magazine, had McCormick’s Chicago Tribune among the “least fair and reliable” newspapers in America and called it a “ceaseless drip of poison.” (It sure is great that Medill has a connection to it.)
But for all of the Colonel’s quirks, he was one of the staunchest supporters of the First Amendment, and his foundation has a ton of money to give to good people. So what can we do except forget about all that other stuff?
Kristina Francisco is a Medill senior. She can be reached at [email protected].