The Press: Passing of a Giant

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Soon after the Wall Street crash, Patterson the scandalmonger strode into the city room and announced: "We're off on the wrong foot. The people's major interest is in how they're going to eat." Next year, his $10,000,000 skyscraper was completed, with six words from Lincoln's famed homily about God loving the common people carved over the door: HE MADE SO MANY OF THEM. On March 6, 1933, the Daily News pledged itself to support President Roosevelt "for a period of at least one year." The support lasted almost up to Term III, and Patterson was a frequent caller at the White House.

With World War II, the Patterson & McCormick lines began to converge. The Daily News's breezy, colloquial editorials began to shout against "intervention," and for America First. (Joe's rebellious daughter Alicia Patterson Guggenheim shouted right back in her interventionist tabloid, the Hempstead, L.I. Newsday.) In 1940 Patterson, who often pecked out his editorials for himself, urged the U.S. to "warm up to Japan." The News stopped its appeasing during the war, but for a year it has been giving F.D.R. a posthumous whipping for getting the U.S. into it.

Three on a Train. A Daily News truck delivered the morning papers each day to Eagle Bay. Publisher Patterson and his regal, grey-haired second wife, the former Mary King,* read them while breakfasting in bed. Daily, they caught a commuters' train to Manhattan, with a bodyguard riding the seat behind them. At the office, where Mrs. Patterson was women's editor and fiction buyer, her husband paid morning calls on the Sunday room, city room, picture department.

Head & Heart. What people thought of Joe Patterson depended largely on whether they agreed with him—a difficult task. Many people liked his paper, but few loved him in a way that public figures are often loved. (Around the News only ex-Theater Critic Burns Mantle, 72, dared call him "Joe.") It was hard to be neutral about Joe Patterson's News. It was widely hated (even by people who could not stop reading it) for its blind prejudices, and the adroit, insidious, vindictive way it advocated them.

Joe Patterson could understand the issue of the nickel subway, and the fact that two battleships were better than one. But larger facts were beyond him: facts like the world's oneness. He resented the spread of Communism but was entirely willing to let the whole of Europe go Communist. The U.S. was the biggest force in the world, but what happened elsewhere was none of our business—until the bombs landed on the U.S. Uncle Sam became Uncle Sap in C.D. Batchelor's News cartoons, and the outside world was a seductive harlot in a tight silk dress and a skull's face, labeled "World War III."