The Press: The Fair Lady of Milwaukee

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The Journal treats its own staff the same. When a top Journal executive was arrested for drunken driving after an auto accident, the Journal's only competitor, Hearst's morning Sentinel (circ. 183,772) offered to keep the story out of the paper. The Journal not only turned down the Sentinel's offer but played the story on Page One. After the story, the executive resigned. The Journal has fought gambling so effectively that a bridge party with a door prize has been a front-page story (although the paper's executives match coins for the lunch check in the executive dining room). When the owner of a taxi company gave each of Milwaukee's 27 aldermen an electric blanket for Christmas, the Journal exposed the "bribe." (Some of the blankets were returned.) The Journal never lets up its effort to instruct its readers in the ways of civic virtue. "It takes a long time to educate a community," explains Grant, "and it can't be done by spellbinders, moneybags, hypnotizers or magicians, by J. Rufus Wallingford or Aladdin's lamp. Character is what matters on a paper."

"Just Julius." In no place in the Journal does the educational effort stir up more of a storm than on the editorial page. The paper calls itself "independent" as many other dailies do, but for the Journal, the term is an understatement. In a single election, the paper once sup ported a Socialist, a Republican, a Democrat and a Wisconsin Progressive. The Journal, which backs losers as often as winners, backed Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, Willkie in 1940 (because of the third-term issue), no one in 1944, Dewey in 1948 and Stevenson in 1952. Politicians have learned that Journal support can easily be turned into opposition. In his two successful campaigns for governor, the paper backed Republican Candidate Julius Heil, who used the slogan "Julius the Just." Next election, when the Journal turned against Heil, it sneered at him as "Just Julius." He lost.

When Joe McCarthy, then a circuit judge, ran against the late Bob La Follette Jr. in the Republican senatorial primary in 1946, the Journal did not support La Follette, and McCarthy squeaked through by little more than 5,000 votes. "One editorial for Bob," recalls a Journal editorial writer ruefully, "would have turned the tide, and McCarthy might never have got to the Senate at all." A month after the primary, the paper realized its mistake. It charged that Judge McCarthy had granted quick divorces to political friends. Later, it found that he had been censured by the Wisconsin Supreme Court for destroying official court records, and had been delinquent in thousands of dollars of state income taxes. The Journal later deflated his "war injury" as a broken foot he suffered in a rough equator-crossing party aboard a Navy transport. His whole record, the Journal pointed out, is "an appalling record of fraud and deceit." "McCarthy," said Chief Editorial Writer Lindsay Hoben, "is a very simple issue for us: integrity and truth, or not."