The Press: The Fair Lady of Milwaukee

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In Europe he met Dorothy Cook, a wealthy American girl, whom he married the same year at what he describes as a "goddamned society wedding." Grant felt that his in-laws wanted him to be "a gentleman of leisure." He had different ideas, and his marriage was unhappy. (Mrs. Grant died in 1923.) Grant went to Chicago to work for O'Mara & Ormsbee, Inc., the Journal's advertising representative. There he quickly rose to vice president and caught the eye of Lucius W. Nieman, owner of the Journal. Nieman hired Grant for $250 a week as business manager, with a promise of stock in the paper if things went well.

"A Public Stench." Nieman, a veteran newsman, had bought the newborn Journal in 1882, when it was barely 22 days old (the Journal considers Nieman its "founder"). Nieman was disgusted with the timidity of the city's half-dozen dailies, which he thought were more interested in pleasing businessmen and politicians than in covering the news. He set the Journal on a different course with his dictum: "Never care about classes, but about people. Get all of the information [;you can] about matters of importance to the public, giving them all sides of the question." When more than 70 people died in a hotel fire and the other papers called it an unavoidable tragedy, the Journal said the hotel was a "known firetrap" and denounced its owners for "greed" and "criminal negligence." The words "liar," "jackass" and "public stench" were familiar epithets in the Journal. By 1915, Lute Nieman was describing Germany as an international menace and urging preparedness for war. In Milwaukee, where German was a second language to thousands of families, the paper was denounced and threatened.

Nieman stuck to his guns. The Journal translated and printed more than 5,000,000 words of pro-German propaganda flooding the U.S. (including stories from German-language Milwaukee papers), to prove that some Americans were more loyal to the Kaiser than to the U.S. Government. Journal reporters smuggled themselves into pro-German meetings, wrote long eye-witness accounts. Many Milwaukeeans were so furious that Nieman posted armed guards outside the paper's doors, barred the windows and gave staffers revolvers to carry. For its campaign, the Journal won a Pulitzer Prize in 1919. The campaign also intensified the Journal's feud with the pro-isolationist Progressive Party, a feud that started when Democrat Lute Nieman had a political falling out with onetime Republican Bob LaFollette.

When Harry Grant arrived in 1916 in the midst of the battle, the Journal was thriving on controversy, with a circulation of 97,598, though still far behind the Sentinel (where Nieman had been managing editor). Three years after Grant joined the staff as business manager, Nieman's health failed and Grant became publisher. Though Nieman lived until 1935, Grant has run the paper since 1919.

With characteristic lack of modesty, Grant says: "The Journal became, through my energy and driving force—God knows I had an abundance of both—a thing worth buying."