Chapter VII: A City Editor at Twenty-Five

Just a week after the McCauley homicide, I became city editor of the Chicago _Times_. It was a great newspaper when I was a youngster, but it was subsequently wrecked by incompetent management and was finally absorbed by the _Herald_, as were also the _Record_, and the _Inter-Ocean_, and all have since been merged with the _Hearst_ publication.

For a quarter of a century the _Times_ was one of the most enterprising newspapers in the West. A crisis came in its career when Wilbur F. Storey suddenly developed a kink in his overworked brain and neglected his editorial duties to devote most of his time and thought to spiritualism. He became a fanatic on the subject, fell an easy victim to charlatans, lost his mind completely and died in obscurity. For awhile the paper ran along under the loose management of his executors and in the end was sold to James J. West, a chap without much newspaper experience, but possessed of some brains and much gall. Clint Snowden, his brother-in-law, was a brilliant newspaper man who had been city editor under Storey and was editing the _Evening Mail_ when West bought the _Times_. He had agreed to go with West as editor. They had just assumed control when my story of the McCauley tragedy appeared. West asked Snowden who the _Tribune_ reporter was.

“I haven’t learned,” replied Snowden, “but I’ll gamble it was Chapin, who landed that McGarrigle scoop. He’s the luckiest reporter I ever heard of. They say he can walk into a news sensation blindfolded.”

“Let’s make him city editor of the _Times_,” said West. “Then he can’t scoop us.”

And that is how I came to receive a note the following Saturday, asking me to call and see West and Snowden about a matter of personal interest. I had been to a fire and was writing a report of it when the note came. As soon as my task was finished I went over to the _Times_ office and accepted their offer, with the understanding that I was to have control of the entire staff without interference and that no one should be employed or dismissed except by me. West insinuated that this was too much authority to confer on so young a man, but I would come under no other condition, so he yielded.

They insisted that I take charge that night and I agreed to report for duty in an hour. I felt considerably embarrassed when I returned to the _Tribune_ office to quit without notice, for I had been kindly treated during the four years I had been there and I recognized that it was the training I had received under Mr. Hall that had made it possible for me to land a city editor job at twenty-five. Nearly all of the city editors at that time were twice my age. Mr. Hall flew into a passion when I told him what I had done and parentally forbade my leaving. When I went in to tell Mr. Patterson, he listened to me courteously.

“I can’t make you city editor,” he said, “but the _Tribune_ will pay you as much salary as any paper, so why not stay with us?”

“It isn’t a question of salary,” I replied, “I don’t even know what my pay is to be, for I didn’t ask, but I do know that I would very much like to boss that gang of reporters that have been calling me a cub for four years.”

Mr. Patterson was big enough to understand. He said he didn’t think I would like it as much as I imagined, but if I grew tired of the job to remember there would always be a good one waiting for me in the _Tribune_ office.

The entire staff was assembled in the local rooms when I got back to the _Times_ office, for the news that I was coming had traveled fast. They were all much older and much more experienced than I, and most of them were hostile. Guy Magee, whom I was to replace, gracefully surrendered his desk and turned to go, an old man without a job. I felt a sharp twinge in my heart when I saw his white face and realized what my coming meant to him.

It is the fate of most newspaper men. They give all that is in them to the service of their employers and when they are old and worn-out they are cast adrift, like battered wrecks. Some find a brief haven in an obscure political job, to be again turned adrift with the next change of administration. I shudder at the thought of what may come to them after that. The luckier ones die young. Few remain actively in harness as long as I did. There were older men than I on the great newspaper where I worked the last twenty-seven years of my career, but they were editorial writers, who came to the office in the middle of the day, spent a couple of hours chatting with their associates, another hour in composing an editorial, and then went home to rest.

As these thoughts come to me I am reminded of dear old Harry Scoville, one of the gentlest characters I ever met in a newspaper office. He was on the _Tribune_ when I was and was probably there before I was born. He had filled many important positions but when his hair and beard grew white he was relegated to the exchange desk, the last anchorage in a newspaper office for editors who are nearing the toboggan.

Soon after I went over to the _Times_, word came to me that after all of his many years of service on the _Tribune_, old Harry had gone into the discard. The man who told me about it said that an hour before he had encountered the cast-off editor disconsolately standing on one of the bridges, gazing longingly down into the swift, flowing waters of the river. I asked him to look Harry up and send him to me.

That evening I told the white-haired editor how much we needed a man of his wide experience and offered him a better berth than the one he had lost and it was gratefully accepted. His story of what had happened was that late on Saturday night he was summoned to the office of the managing editor and curtly told that a younger man had been engaged to take his place, but--“because of your long and faithful services I have secured you an easy job in the office of the county clerk,” benevolently concluded the managing editor. It was the meanest act I ever heard associated with Mr. Patterson’s name. In all the later years of my career I never forgot what happened to Harry Scoville in his old age.

The first man I ever employed was Pete Dunne--Finley Peter Dunne, he importantly called himself after he won fame and fortune with his “Mr. Dooley” stories. I hired hundreds of men afterwards, but Pete was always my special pet, both because I was fond of him and that in hiring him I was raised from reporter to boss. It was my first official act as city editor.

I met Pete on the street when I was hurrying over to the _Times_ office to begin my new duties. He was just out of high school and had written some clever stories for the _Daily News_. He agreed to join me on the _Times_ the next day. He became the star man of the staff and in the end succeeded me as city editor.

The first man I ever fired was a chap named Scott and I hadn’t been city editor fifteen minutes when I did it. While I was bidding my predecessor a regretful good-bye, I inadvertently overheard what some of the reporters in an adjoining room were saying about me. What they said wasn’t complimentary and what Scott said was so offensive that I would have been justified in punching him. When he coupled my name with the most objectionable epithet he could think of, I stepped into the room and discharged him.

“If there are others who share Scott’s opinion of me you may all ride down in the same elevator,” I said, as I turned back to my desk. Scott went alone.

About a fortnight after I became editor I employed a young school-teacher who had considerable talent as a writer and directed her to answer “help wanted” advertisements, obtain employment in sweatshops and factories where girls worked, and write a series of articles on the conditions she found. The stories of her experiences and observations, under the caption of “City Slave Girls,” attracted wide-spread attention and the circulation of the paper increased so rapidly that the presses were overtaxed. Elated with her success, the young woman went to New York, showed clippings of what she had done to an editor, and was promptly employed to repeat in the Metropolis what she had done in Chicago. Afterward she joined the regular staff and continued to do newspaper work until she married the editor, now a wealthy publisher. They live in a mansion in the city and have a beautiful summer home in the country, with all that goes with it.

The success of the “City Slave Girls” made such an impression on Mr. West, publisher of the _Times_, that he came to me with the “yellowest” suggestion I ever listened to in a newspaper office. The inflated circulation was beginning to slump and he wanted to do something, he said, to revive it and send it higher than ever. He was confident that he had hit upon the thing that would do it. When he told me what it was I was so angry I wanted to quit and we came very close to the breaking point while he was stubbornly arguing that what he had in mind was within the scope of decent journalism.

What he asked me to do was to send a man and a woman reporter to all of the reputable physicians in the city, let them pretend they were sweethearts and that the girl was in trouble, and offer to pay liberally for an illegal operation. I pointed out to West that sensationalism of that sort would ruin his paper. He was so inflated with the idea that he sent for the editor, but Snowden was as much opposed to it as I had been. Both of us flatly declared that we would sever all connection with the paper before we would suffer our professional reputations to be linked with such indecency.

For awhile nothing more was said on the subject and Snowden and I supposed that West had come to his senses and dropped it. The paper continued to lose circulation and some of the big advertisers began withdrawing their patronage, the chief reason being that stories affecting West’s integrity were being noised about.

One day a note came from West, directing me to assign a bright man and a woman reporter to report to him for instructions. He didn’t mention what he wanted them to do and I didn’t ask. It was my duty to obey the order. The reporter came back and wanted to tell me what the assignment was from the publisher, but I declined to listen.

I went into the composing room shortly afterward and discovered a page of type that was to go in the next issue. It was headed “Chicago Abortioners.” The foreman told me it had been ordered in by the publisher. I hurried to editor Snowden’s room and told him about it. He was as indignant as I. We waited for West to return from a theater and both of us pleaded with him not to print the nasty stuff, but he obstinately refused to yield to our arguments, so we both put on our coats and quit.

It was the end of Snowden’s newspaper career. He was an able newspaper man, but he gave up his profession and sacrificed ambition rather than depart from his high ideals. I always honored him for it. He became a Government Indian agent and the last I heard of him he was old and blind. West hired another editor, but his paper never recovered from the black eye it got when he attempted to besmirch reputable physicians.

Several months after Snowden and I had quit the _Times_, I met West on the street and he asked me to accept the position of Washington correspondent at a liberal salary, offering to sign a contract for three years and give me freedom of pen. Although I disliked the man, his offer was alluring in that it would bring me into intimate contact with all that was going on at the national capital. I had a yearning for that sort of work and as there was no other opportunity within reach I smothered my feelings and accepted.

I went to Washington shortly before the inauguration of President Harrison and remained a year. ’Lije Halford, the President’s secretary, had been my friend when he was an editor in Chicago, and he aided me in getting a foothold in Washington by introducing me to many of the most important statesmen. Senator Farwell and Senator Cullom, both of them from Illinois, I had known in Chicago and I found them obliging and helpful. I lived next door to Senator Farwell’s home and he directed me to drop in on him every evening, and he would stuff my notebook with news that would interest my readers. He gave me many important stories that no other Chicago correspondent got. Reginald De Koven, the musical composer who died recently, was his son-in-law.

Senator Cullom I won by writing a personal article that compared him to Lincoln, to whom he bore a striking resemblance in physical characteristics, if not in mental equipment. It tickled his vanity so much that he never failed to look me up if he knew anything worth printing. He was chairman of the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce at that time and a most useful source of important news. So was Congressman Bob Hitt, one of the brightest minds among the Illinois delegation and always my reliable friend.

“Uncle Jerry” Rusk was a perfect gold mine of information. I had known him when he was Governor of Wisconsin and had ingratiated myself to such an extent that he became one of my most valued friends when Harrison appointed him Secretary of Agriculture. He would take notes at all of the Cabinet meetings and read them to me in his rooms at the Ebbitt House. Many wondered how I got so much accurate information of the secret meetings of the President with his Cabinet, but this is the first time I have ever betrayed my informant. He has been dead so many years it no longer matters.

Blaine was ever icily unapproachable. He didn’t like newspaper men, except when he could use them to his personal advantage, but I found it unnecessary to court him, for I was on an intimate footing with his son, who knew most of his father’s secrets and kept me well-posted on affairs connected with the State Department.

Attorney General Miller was always affable. Sometimes when I exhausted all other sources in trying to get at the bottom of some important news that no one else would talk about, I would go to him and he would explain every detail. I looked on him as one of the ablest and best-informed men in Washington. He related to me once an amusing personal story of a visit he made to his old home in Indiana during his first summer in Washington. After calling on friends in Indianapolis, where he and President Harrison had been law partners, he decided to pay a visit to the town where he was born and where he had passed his early boyhood. It was night when he arrived and he was the only passenger to get off at the station. Miller climbed on top of the omnibus beside the driver and they started for the hotel. The driver had lived in the town all his life.

“Know who I am?” Miller asked.

“Yep, you and me went to the same school.”

“Indeed! Well, that was a long time ago.”

“Yep, sure was.”

“Do you know that I am now Attorney General of the United States?”

“Yep.”

“Folk here generally know about it?”

“Yep.”

“What do they say?”

“They jes laugh.”

The remainder of the ride was in silence.

One of the men in public life I esteemed most highly was James S. Clarkson, Assistant Postmaster General. He had been a prominent newspaper man in Iowa and had a fine appreciation of the value of news. He not only knew news but he came into intimate contact with people who created it, and nearly everything worth while that came to him was passed on to me. Night after night he would slip quietly into my office and often with the biggest news story of the day.

Clarkson was one of ’Lije Halford’s friends and we three played a trick on the President that resulted in the appointment of Frank Palmer as Government Printer. The job is a lucrative one and was much sought after. The Typographical Union was boosting a Philadelphia man. Palmer had been an editor on the Chicago _Inter-Ocean_ with Halford, and ’Lije was doing all he consistently could to get him appointed.

I called at the White House one day and found ’Lije agitated over charges that had been filed by the powerful Typographical Union that Palmer was editing a paper in Chicago that employed non-union printers. If the charges were proven Palmer was beaten. I explained to Halford that Palmer was working for a salary and had no more to do with employing printers than I had with hiring compositors on the paper I worked for.

Shortly before midnight a messenger came from the White House with word that the President wished to see me immediately. I obeyed the summons and was conducted into the President’s private office, where he sat so sedate and dignified at his desk that one couldn’t help wondering if he had ice water in his veins. He asked if I knew to be a positive fact what I had told Halford about Palmer. I assured him it was and he then asked me if I had means of finding out for him if the appointment of Palmer would meet the approval of the Typographical Union in Chicago. I replied that my brother was a member of the union and I could wire to him.

“Do so to-night and send me the reply; I will wait up for it,” said Mr. Harrison. “But do not misinterpret what I have said as meaning that I shall appoint Mr. Palmer,” he diplomatically added.

I wasn’t sure of my brother, so I wrote a dispatch such as I wished him to send, and rushed it to my office in Chicago, with instructions that it be repeated back to me. In half an hour it was returned and was speeded to the White House. It read: “I am positive that the appointment of Mr. Palmer will be most acceptable.”

I sent another telegram that night to Frank Palmer, advising him to get ready to come to Washington and he had his grip packed and his ticket purchased when, a few hours later, he was officially summoned. When he arrived in Washington the following day and received his appointment, General Clarkson piloted him around to my office and we three had dinner together. My brother was the first person to be given a job under him.

Melville W. Fuller, then one of the justices of the United States Supreme Court, was one of my most dependable sources of important news. He was a Chicago man and not long before my coming to Washington he had sat at my desk in the _Times_ office waiting for news to come over our leased wire from Washington that his appointment by President Cleveland had been confirmed by the Senate. I had the pleasure of being first to tell him that his appointment had been approved and first to salute him a justice. He mentioned the incident the first time I called on him in Washington and assured me that he would be glad to help me all he could with my work as correspondent.

I have a picture of him in my mind as he was that day of my first visit. He was in his chamber in the dingy old building that then housed the highest judicial authorities of the country, stretched full length on a lounge, his coat and vest flung carelessly across a chair, a tall mint julep on a stand by his side. He was reading a book and puffing into its pages dense clouds of smoke from an enormous black cigar. He closed the book as I entered the room, but my eye caught the title. It was the _The Decameron_ of Boccaccio. I fancied he looked as sheepish as my mother once did when I came from the office long after midnight and found her propped up in bed with a copy of the Italian novelist’s erotic stories of amorous adventure.

When I had been almost a year in Washington, a messenger boy came to my home early one morning to tell me that a “crazy man in our hotel wants you to come as quick as you can.”

I went with him and found my employer, Publisher West, pacing his room like a caged animal. He was almost hysterical. I calmed him as best as I could and after much urging got him to tell me what ailed him. He had been hard pressed for money, he told me, and had issued duplicate certificates of stock, pledging the fictitious securities for large loans at the banks. His irregularity had been discovered and prison was staring him in the face. He had brought a suitcase full of money to Washington and he wanted me to go to Europe with him. I counseled him not to act like a madman, but to return to Chicago on the next train and try to adjust his tangled affairs before it was too late. After much argument he accepted my advice and I saw him aboard of a westbound train.

In a few days word came that a new man was in charge of the _Times_ and that an editor for whom I had the utmost contempt had been given editorial charge. It didn’t take me long to telegraph my resignation and follow it by the first train.

The day I returned to Chicago I was introduced to a banker from Salt Lake, one of the elders of the Mormon Church, who had been sent to Chicago in search of someone who would go to Utah and teach his people modern methods of running a political campaign. A wholesale merchant whom I had known for many years and who ran into me on the street a few hours after I arrived from Washington, recommended me. The banker explained that there was to be an important local election in Salt Lake City within a month and the Mormons were anticipating a bitter fight with their implacable enemy, the Gentiles. He offered a thousand dollars and liberal expenses if I would go to the Mormon capital and secretly direct the campaign.

The proposition appealed to me, for I had never been in Salt Lake and this would afford me the best opportunity I might ever have to get a close-up view of Mormonism. Besides, I needed the money. An hour after I promised to go, Horatio Seymour, editor of the Chicago _Herald_, offered me the city editorship of his paper, which I promptly accepted with the understanding that I was not to begin until my return from Utah.

I had an interesting time during the month I spent with the Mormons. We tore up the streets and brought colonies of voters from all over the territory to do the work of repaving. Fortunately I was able to get away before the finish, for one less experienced in politics than I could have seen at a glance that the stupid Mormons hadn’t a ghost of a chance of winning. The night before I left for Chicago they gave me a banquet at the famous Amelia Palace, where old Brigham Young once lived with his favorite wife. President Woodruff presided at the feast and George Q. Cannon made an impressive speech, after which all of the dignitaries congratulated me on having won the election for them. I felt as if I had sold a gold brick when they handed me a thousand dollars and a return ticket to Chicago. They were overwhelmingly defeated.

In many respects the _Herald_, where I was soon installed as city editor, was the pleasantest office I ever worked in. The paper was alive with enterprise, brightly written and ably edited. The staff was like a happy family. I never knew such teamwork, every man pulling harmoniously with his mates and giving the best that was in him for the glory of his paper. The only newspaper staff at that period that equaled it in alertness, brilliancy of intellect, and ability to write, was the splendid organization with which Mr. Dana and Chester Lord were surrounded on the New York _Sun_. The staff of the _Sun_ was larger and better paid than ours but in no other respect did it surpass us.

The editor of the _Herald_ was Horatio Seymour, one of the ablest of American journalists, keen, calm, logical, a close student of public affairs. His brain was ever alert with ideas and with power to express himself such as possessed by few editors I ever came in contact with. He is now and has been for many years, an editorial writer on the New York _World_. He was managing editor of the _Times_ when Storey was in full vigor of greatness.

It was Seymour who put “Jerked to Jesus” over the account of a hanging. He afterward told me that he was more ashamed of it than anything he had ever done. Anyone who knows him would never suspect him to be capable of so much as a blasphemous thought. He was one of the gentlest gentlemen I ever knew. The harshest word of reproof I ever had from him was when a story in which he was specially interested and which he had suggested did not appear in the paper. He summoned me to his office and asked why it had not been written. I mumbled some excuse, the real reason for my neglect being that I had been pressed with other matters and had forgotten his instructions.

“Please take it up to-day and pursue it until completed,” he mildly directed, without raising his voice or betraying the irritation I know he must have felt. The reproof as he administered it was far more effective than if he had blustered with rage and cursed until he was black in the face, as I have seen some editors do with much less provocation. It is more than thirty years since that “scolding” and I have never forgotten it.

John R. Walsh, a banker, owned the _Herald_, but beyond his first investment, he wasn’t drawn upon for financial backing, Editor Seymour’s brains having put the paper on a solid foundation almost from the time he assumed control. It had been started a few years before by some bright young men who quickly made it popular but who had the property taken from them when they lost a libel suit for half a million dollars that was won by a department store proprietor. As soon as I became city editor I began employing from other newspapers the ablest young men I knew. Mr. Seymour gave me free rein and never found fault with my bidding for brains.

Philip D. Armour, one of the greatest of American business men, once told me that the secret of his success was in selecting the best men he could find for his organization. I never forgot it and in my small way I put into practice that principle. Whatever success I attained was almost entirely due to the fact that I first bargained with my employer that I was never to be interfered with in selecting a staff, and always reaching out for men of ability and energy with which to recruit it. I lured them away from other jobs and rewarded their coming by paying higher salaries than some of them had ever dreamed of earning, in return for which I always exacted from them the best they had to give. If they “made good,” they were rewarded still further. If they shirked, it was but a short walk to the elevator.

There were no shirkers among the young men of the _Herald_ staff. They were always greedy for work and I gave them every opportunity to gratify their desire. There was nothing in the line of reporting they couldn’t cover and write better than the best reporters of rival papers. In the vocabulary of the profession, they were all “stars.” There was Pete Dunne, the “Mr. Dooley” humorist, who had been with me on the _Times_; Brand Whitlock, until recently Ambassador to Belgium; Charlie Dillingham, now proprietor of the Hippodrome and the Globe Theater in New York; John Eastman, proprietor of the Chicago _Journal_; Charlie Seymour, brother of the editor and almost as brilliant a writer; Ben (I forget his last name) the chap who wrote “nothing to eat but food; nothing to wear but clothes”; and many others, some of whom are dead. Most of those who survive are in the front ranks of journalism or in positions high up in the business world.

They were sometimes a difficult bunch to handle, for most of them were spirited young geniuses and not always amenable to discipline. They had a Bohemian sort of club close by which they called the Whitechapel and where they could always be found when not on duty. Stories came to my ears that made me apprehensive that some of my youngsters were in danger of becoming demoralized. I posted a notice that no member of the club would be employed on the _Herald_ and all of my stars quit in a bunch, leaving only the cubs to report a disastrous railroad wreck. Their pride was stung to the quick when they read the _Herald’s_ poor account of the wreck and they came back to their desks in a hurry the next day and asked to be forgiven, and of course they were.

The crowning folly of the Whitechapel bunch was to take the body of a member who died to the outskirts of the city, put it on a blazing pyre, join hands and circle about it, chanting weird songs until the body was reduced to ashes.

Late one Saturday night a reporter brought in a story of a mother and her daughter having been found frozen to death in their fireless home. It was bitter cold weather and there was much poverty and suffering, for many were out of employment. A man read the story and came to the office the following day with a thousand dollars, which he asked me to distribute among the needy. A blizzard was raging all of that Sunday. I gave ten reporters a hundred dollars each and directed them to go to different police stations, obtain from the police names of suffering families and relieve distress as far as the money would go. What the reporters found and did among the poor filled a page of the paper and the man came back before noon with another thousand dollars. He wouldn’t tell his name. I called him “the man with a heart.”

Many others sent money, for the story startled Chicago as nothing had done for years. Thus began one of the biggest and most successful campaigns for helping poor folk that I ever participated in. Within two days we had a building full of willing workers for a headquarters and the merchants sorted out their stocks and sent around dray loads of goods of every description, while the well-to-do reduced their wardrobes to contribute to the poor. Illinois mine owners sent an entire train of coal. Wholesale houses and department stores sent horses and trucks and men to aid in the distribution. Hundreds of tons of clothing and provisions were received at headquarters and promptly sent to different parts of the city, society women volunteering their services to act as investigators, for we were careful to guard against impostors. I doubt if any great public charity was ever more prudently or systematically distributed. It was several weeks before the money and supplies were exhausted, and by that time fine weather had set in and there was employment for all that wanted it.

I don’t know why this incident comes back to me so vividly now unless it is because I broke down my health under the strain of it and was sent away unconscious to rest until I had recovered.