Press: Parker v. Tribune

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Since last November, a $1,500,000 libel suit has been in progress before a Chicago circuit court. Last week, when the case went to the jury, no Chicago daily, no Chicago news service had carried a line about it. Reason: defendant was the Chicago Tribune ("World's Greatest Newspaper") and publishers usually do not play up the libel difficulties of their brethren.* What made the Tribune's trouble all the more remarkable were the character and quality of its accuser, Harrison McGowen Parker, who in his high- flying career has been business manager of the Tribune, publisher of the Chicago American.

Mr. Parker, now 59, left the American for a $45,000 a year job in the Hearst general management, went on from there into an independent career as spectacular as it was unorthodox. He soon was heading the Co-operative Society of America, Inc. which took in $11,000,000, had a top membership of 90,000, bought a life insurance company, a number of dairies, several packing houses, 190 grocery stores.

After litigation by investors, the Coopera tive Society of America sank from sight in 1929.

"Parker v. Tribune" goes back to 1931. In that year Mr. Parker went to trial and nine months later was found guilty in Cook County Criminal Court of em bezzling at least $100,000 from North American Trust Co., in which he was a large stockholder. State's Attorney John A. Swanson, who obtained his conviction, proudly announced to the press that "Parker has been a financial racketeer in Chicago since 1912. This is the first time the law has caught up with him. . . .

There are thousands of victims of Parker in Cook County alone. . . . His swindles in real estate were enormous. . . ." Of all Chicago's newspapers, only the Tribune published this blast, and Mr. Parker claimed the Tribune had libeled him in doing so.

His suit for $1,500,000 was not taken seriously by the Tribune until the State Supreme Court, reviewing the embezzlement case, found Parker innocent in February 1934. Meanwhile, Harrison Parker was doing everything in his power to make the Tribune sick at the thought of him. Discovering that since 1873 the paper had paid no State capital stock tax (few Illinois corporations bother to). Harrison Parker filed suit as a citizen to compel the Tribune to pay up $87,000,000.

Jailed for failing to meet judgment in a minor civil suit, Harrison Parker continued to hound his huge adversary. From his cell in Cook County Jail he accused the Tribune of trying to poison him with an arsenical birthday cake, raised such a row that Weymouth Kirkland of the Tribune's high-powered law firm of Kirkland, Fleming, Green, Martin & Ellis got him out.

Free again and having his day in court, Plaintiff Parker began to develop a line of legal reasoning in the libel case which was exquisitely embarrassing to the Tribune. According to Parker, the conviction of Leo Brothers for the murder of the Tribune's crook-reporter Jake Lingle (who saved up a fortune of $150,000 on a news-hawk's pay) was a frame-up. True it was that a member of the Tribune's law firm was made a special assistant state's attorney to help build the case against Brothers—and this appointment had been made by State's Attorney Swanson, thus presumably obligating the Tribune to him.