The Press: The Fair Lady of Milwaukee

(See Cover) Out from Miami's palm-lined Biscayne Bay headed the 71-ft. white-hulled motor cruiser High Tide, bound for a day of fishing in the Gulf Stream. At a table on her afterdeck sat the High Tide's owner: Harry J. (for Johnston) Grant, 72, a florid-faced millionaire with china-blue eyes, a mouthful of flashing gold teeth, and the booming voice of a sideshow barker. But energetic, stubby (5 ft. 8¾ in., 220 Ibs.) Harry Grant did not act like the run of carefree yachtsmen. When he was not tending the deep-sea fishing line trailing over the stern, he riffled through mountains of papers, pounded out letters and memos on a portable typewriter, talked by ship-to-shore phone.

For two hours of the day, he stopped everything else while he concentrated on an evening newspaper that had been airmailed from 1,268 miles away. The newspaper: the Milwaukee Journal (circ. 339,532). Harry Grant was no ordinary reader —and the Journal is no ordinary paper. Harry Grant is boss of the Journal, which he has made into one of the best newspapers in the U.S. He has also made it one of the most controversial.

The Stamp. From the center of the Midwest, often considered a seedbed for isolationists, the Journal speaks in a ringing, uncompromising, internationalist voice. In Senator McCarthy's home state, the Journal attacks him so fiercely that McCarthy calls it "that left-wing smear newspaper, the Milwaukee edition of the Daily Worker" Other readers, damning its doggedly independent, liberal ways, refer to it as "that damn Journal." (One prominent Milwaukeean pays his newsboy 25¢ a week to tear out the editorial page before delivering the paper.) Isolationist Chicago Tribune Publisher Colonel Robert McCormick, who considers the Journal a radical upstart in the Trib's Chicagoland, calls it a "wood pussy."

Onetime Wisconsin Governor Phil La Follette, still smarting from the long feud between his family and the Journal, has vowed that he would rather have his children grow up "illiterate" than read the Journal. On the other hand, Milwaukee's Socialist Mayor Frank Zeidler, who has been opposed as often as he has been supported by the Journal, has only respect for the paper: "The Journal is almost utterly dominant in the community. It's the intellectual life of Milwaukee. You discuss the issues the Journal raises [and] you hardly know of the existence of any other issues. The Journal's standard of morals, political and social, sets an all-enveloping stamp on the city.

None of this bothers Harry Grant, who talks about the Journal with the purple sweep of a Fourth of July orator and the fervor of an evangelist. Says he: "The Journal must be our Fair Lady. We must have freedom, freedom, freedom—not to be willful, or bigoted, or swell-headed, or to give us delusions of grandeur—but so that the Journal can act entirely as it thinks best for the community. The Journal is above our frailties. The Journal's job is to serve the public. It can't be anything else."