The Press: Passing of a Giant

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"I'm With You." One night in France, Joe Patterson and his cousin, both A.E.F. officers, sat down on a farmyard dunghill for a heart-to-heart chat.

"Bertie," said Joe, "I want to start a picture paper in New York."

"Good," said Bertie. "I'm with you."

On June 26, 1919, the Illustrated Daily News was born, a child so sickly that other publishers who had been toying with tabloid ideas promptly gave up. It sold out its first issue of 200,000 copies, but by August was down to 26,625, and its reportorial staff of four was cut to two.

But Patterson and his best friend, Max Annenberg, the circulation genius whom the cousins had hired away from Hearst, found a way out and up. They dumped the News on foreign-language newsstands for buyers who could understand its pictures if not its captions, and peddled it to subway riders who seemed to have a boundless appetite for crime and sex stories.

The News, with Hearst's Mirror and Bernarr Macfadden's now defunct Graphic, was the ribald historian of the flapper-speakeasy-whoopee '20s. They competed in a pell-mell rush to give Manhattan gum-chewers the lowdown on Fatty Arbuckle, Peaches Browning, Arnold Rothstein, Kip Rhinelander. The grisliest news-picture of the era—Murderess Ruth Snyder in Sing Sing's electric chair—was run by Patterson's personal order.

The News's headlines crackled; its pictures were good, and masterfully played; its news stories were models of clarity, conciseness and coarse wit. Joe Patterson's journalism owed more to P. T. Barnum than to Adolph Ochs. No story in the News was "important but dull"; if the news was important, there was no need for it to be dull. In world affairs, the News could tell in two columns most of what the New York Times took eight to tell. But the News did best on what the Times aloofly did not consider Fit to Print.

One-Man Poll. Patterson, strapping and sloppily dressed, used to roam the metropolis by night, haunting Bowery bars, El stations, cheap movies and the newsstands, casually asking people what they thought of the News and its boss.

Through such crude but effective polls, Patterson got the inspiration for an amazing assortment of Daily News features, the best of which was his Voice of the People letters column, drawing more than 50,000 letters a year. He thought up comic strips whose casts became national characters: The Gumps (his mother coined the name), Dick Tracy, Winnie Winkle, Terry and the Pirates, Smitty (whose boss, Mr. Bailey, was J.M.P. himself).

After 1925, when he moved to New York, Joe Patterson and Bertie McCormick divided the Medill dynasty into two spheres. Their profits ran as high as $10,000,000 a year. They split the income with Cissie Patterson and Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms. Together they founded Liberty magazine, ran up a $14 million loss in seven years, sold it.

Politically, they were often farther apart than Chicago and New York. While Bertie McCormick loosed isolationist and reactionary thunderbolts from his Midwestern stronghold, Joe Patterson won a reputation as a liberal (liberals were also isolationists then).