Post-Office Box 666 and the Newspaper Collusion of 1893
In which too much newspaper can be too much of a good thing.
Saturday, March 2, 2024. Good morning.
I've often argued that democracy was alive and kicking in Gilded Age Chicago because the depth and breadth of newspaper coverage made it impossible for shenanigans to hide. But a few times in Chicago's history, there was, in fact, “too much newspaper.” That is a quote from William Penn Nixon, the venerable editor of the Chicago Daily News, who later lamented that newspaper coverage had likely caused the tragedy at Haymarket Square in 1886.
I should write a column about that, but this week, we talk about the newspapers at a time more immediately pertinent to the Chicago mayoral election in November 1893, which is the Chicago mayoral election in April 1893. Many major Chicago newspapers conspired to keep Carter Harrison from being elected mayor again. This attempt was met with significant push-back by the lone major democratic paper not involved, the Chicago Times. Some of you will remember that Carter Harrison owned the Chicago Times.
It was often easy to forget newspaper editors weren't on the ballot during campaign seasons. That was especially so as the campaign for mayor heated up in early 1893.
In late February, the Chicago Times published this illustration. It shows the Chicago Herald (and the Post) as a donkey kicking at Harrison. The publishers of the Herald and Post were John R. Walsh and Jimmy Scott. Scott was a press man from his earliest days. He was also childhood friends with George B. Swift, growing up together in Galena. John R. Walsh was a banker who would later do some time in Leavenworth for bank fraud.
A couple of weeks earlier, the Republican Tribune had reported that the biggest threat to Harrison’s renomination was “the bitter opposition of the Democratic press.” That is to say, the Herald and Post. (They were sort of like the Lincoln Project of their day.) Indeed, the previous editor of the Times had once said, “he would rather put a keg of dynamite into his newspaper establishment and blow it up than support Carter for Mayor for a fifth term.” That was in 1887 when the vicious attacks by the press caused Harrison to back down from running again. In 1891, Harrison bought the Times to narrow the field of Democratic papers against him. (It was ironic that he became a newspaper editor, given his professed hatred of the genre.)
In early March, the Times reported that a group of editors had met in secret to decide on an independent mayoral candidate to oppose Harrison. The Republican mayor, Hempstead Washburne, wasn’t running for re-election. For reasons I don’t completely understand, they weren’t crazy about running on his record. Or even, evidently, as a party. The editors were working on what was initially called the "Citizens’-Republican Ticket." Later, the word “Republican” was dropped.
Among the editors named were:
• James W. “Jimmy” Scott, editor of the Herald (morning) and Post (evening) newspapers.
• William Penn Nixon, editor of the Republican Inter Ocean.
• Robert W. Patterson, editor of the Republican Chicago Tribune
The Times called out the editors on March 8th. “Are the editors the people?” it - or, rather, Harrison - asked. The editorial is too long to include here, but here are the last two paragraphs:
"And what stake in this community have the editors more than any other half dozen men who are citizens of Chicago? Where do they get their authority? What right have they to set themselves up more than half a dozen apothecaries or a half dozen of the tailors who upon memorable occasion assembling in Tooley Street represented themselves as the people of England? Editors are not infallible. Editors are not animated solely by civic pride. The press is unhappily neither pure nor infallible.
"The people of Chicago will settle this controversy as to the mayoralty, and when that settlement is made each editor's vote in a poll of more than 200,000 electors will count for one."
While no newspaper directly pointed out the hypocrisy of a candidate using his own newspaper to call out other editors, the Tribune routinely referred to Harrison as “Editor Harrison” on its opinion pages.
The Times was not wrong, however, about the intent of the city’s editors. The next day, on March 9th, most of Chicago’s other major newspapers published the following notice and ballot on their front pages:
One could understand the editors' concern, if not their methods: The World’s Fair was due to open in two months. Under Harrison’s administration, the vice crowd led by Michael Cassius McDonald had run rampant in Chicago while essential services like street cleaning languished. There was a general sentiment that a “business administration” was wanted during this crucial moment in Chicago’s history.
But there was the small matter of their less-than-democratic solution to the problem.
Harrison had a field day with this attempt to do an end-run around the usual political process - and with the editors’ odd choice of post office box number. Here is part of what he wrote in the March 11 edition of the Times:
Undaunted, the editors continued with their plan. On March 12, the Inter Ocean reported that Chicagoans had submitted 20,000 ballots to post-office box 666 and that Lyman Gage, the millionaire whose last-minute raised bid to Congress got the World’s Fair to Chicago, was overwhelmingly the people's choice. Well, the ones who sent in ballots, anyway. "Twenty Thousand Voters Speak for Non-Partisanship." ran the headline. Gage immediately turned down the honor.
The search for a candidate continued. It is telling that the most seasoned politicians, George B. Swift among them, were offered and refused the opportunity. Harrison was a formidable candidate, and his machine was well-oiled. Meantime, the Citizen’s Ticket (unrelated to the editors’ group) had nominated an affable meat-packing magnate (and Republican) named Samuel W. Allerton. On March 15, the Republicans held their convention and also nominated Allerton.
With the candidates identified, the gloves came off. Scary and mean cartoons abounded. Here's one of the ordinarily kindly-looking Harrison:
On Sunday, March 26, ten days before Election Day, all the newspapers in the "trust" published a bombshell report. Although “editor Harrison” had claimed to have severed ties with Mike McDonald (calling him in the pages of the Times “a gambler and a fraud, a cheap politician, whose every instinct is scoundrelly,” the newspapers had found evidence that Mike was running Harrison's campaign.
They all printed a “fac-simile” of a letter written on Democratic party letterhead from King Mike to an unknown recipient.
On Tuesday, a week before the election, Mike McDonald himself was interviewed by a Herald reporter:
“I am sorry my letter fell into the hands of THE HERALD and the other papers, but it is done and there is no use crying over milk that is spilled. I grant that we may lose a few votes by the discovery, but we will do enough business in other ways to offset the loss. We will elect the “old man” if money will do it.”
That should have been it, right? Harrison was not their man if Chicago wanted an “honest businessman” to run the city.
Another democratic newspaper, though, had had enough of this foolishness. The Eagle was a weekly owned, edited and written by Harry F. Donovan, a Democratic party apparatchik. (Looking closely at the fax, you will see Donovan’s name listed as a member of the Cook County Democratic Party’s Executive Committee). Three days before the election, it devoted much of its front page to what it considered to be the true crime while extolling its candidate's virtues.
(It amuses me that the motto of the Eagle is Independent in All Things, Neutral in None.)
The Eagle enumerated reasons the “newspaper trust” was dangerous and had to be busted:
•” Someone” had bought up and destroyed copies of the Times that had been distributed in parts of the city where Harrison was popular
• the editors’ motivations were not civic-minded but financial: they did not want a rival newspaper publisher and editor in power
• the motivations of the Herald and Post had an additional financial concern: If Harrison won, the city funds in Walsh’s banks would likely be moved elsewhere.
Given where we are today, it’s not hard to see how this would go. Carter Harrison, the populist millionaire, won in a landslide on Tuesday, April 4. That night, his supporters ran through the streets. They tore down “Citizens’ Ticket” banners strung up on newspaper buildings and shoved them into oil barrel fires. Policemen were summoned to protect the newspaper buildings.
The next day, the Tribune and Inter Ocean congratulated the new mayor. They said they hoped he would indeed implement a “business-like” administration, the Trib offering this neighborly advice:
"With the kind permission of Mr. Harrison THE TRIBUNE will take the liberty of whispering in his ear that the foreign potentates who are likely to visit Chicago this summer would rather see a clean city than hear eloquent speeches of welcome."
But Editor Harrison wasn’t done. Interestingly, his warning was published in the Tribune.
I think that the people will not at any time follow a combine, as was made against me by the press, when the combination has nothing stronger to back it than it had in this campaign. And I think it will be fatal to the interests of this or any other city when such a thing should prevail."
Indeed.
Alas for Harrison, one of the volunteers on his campaign - a troubled newspaper carrier named Patrick Eugene Prendergast who was obsessed with the economist Henry George - had believed he was promised the job of corporation counsel in the new administration. After Harrison won, Prendergast pestered Harrison's office and other offices at City Hall and his employer, the Inter Ocean, with his claim, only to be turned away. On October 28, he'd had enough. He went to Carter Harrison's home and shot him dead in his own hallway.
If the newspaper trust's candidate, Sam Allerton, had won, Carter Harrison would have lived to marry Annie Howard. How democracy would have fared, we'll never know.
Next week: one of the most violent chaotic meetings of Chicago’s City Council ever. And that’s saying something.