The Press: Assault on Chicago

Long a rumor—last week an acknowledged fact—was a well-advanced project to launch a new newspaper to break the Chicago morning-paper monopoly of the bitterly isolationist, bitterly anti-Roosevelt Chicago Tribune.

The news was broken by Marshall Field III, wealthy backer of Manhattan's tabloid PM. He said that he and "a group of friends" had definitely decided to go ahead with their plan. The one friend whom Field named*; was Silliman Evans, publisher of the Nashville Tennessean—an experienced publisher who may be capable of tangling successfully with Colonel Robert McCormick of the Tribune.

As now planned the Field-Evans paper will begin publication about Jan. 1, will be a full-sized paper published six days a week, will be operated not as a corporation but by Field as direct owner. For managing editor it may possibly have CBS's top-flight publicity chief, Louis Ruppel.

The paper's policy is to be one of unequivocal opposition to McCormick and isolationism. As prospective readers it already has 100,000 people whose names were collected by the Fight for Freedom Committee which, two months ago, at a big Chicago rally, launched a Tribune boycott, started a movement to "end the un-American monopoly now enjoyed by the Chicago Tribune." But it will doubtless have to fight for them in a costly, rough-&-tumble circulation war such as Colonel McCormick had three decades ago with Hearst.

At 47 tubby Publisher Evans has a remarkable record for putting his projects across in a big way. At 19, Silliman Evans became managing editor of a temperance sheet, later worked for fabulous Texas Publisher Amon Carter. (He was called "the alltime, all-American Diesel engine of Texas reporting.") In Washington, D.C., as Star-Telegram bureau chief, Evans played shrewd poker and shrewder politics with such admiring pals as Jack Garner, Jesse Jones, Jim Farley (who rewarded him with a Fourth Assistant Postmaster Generalship for helping swing the Garner delegates to Roosevelt in the 1932 convention).

Since then Silliman Evans has successfully carried off several big jobs; but none bigger than when in 1937 he bought the Nashville Tennessean, four years in receivership, impoverished by the mismanagement of its jailed publisher, Colonel Luke Lea, and soon made it again one of the most powerful papers in the State, one of the best-read Southern papers in Washington.

If anybody can rout Colonel McCormick in Chicago, Silliman Evans is a good candidate.