Author Interview: Stephen Bates

I learned about Colonel McCormick in the course of researching the Hutchins Commission. He’s a captivating, bigger-than-life figure, an arch-conservative with idiosyncratic views. He tried to change the American system of spelling—the Tribune railed against federal “burocrats” and the Hutchins Commission’s “totalitarian philosofy.” He considered the Rhodes Scholars program to be part of a sinister plot to brainwash young Americans into advancing the interests of Britain. He thought New Deal policies were being dictated from the Kremlin. Though they were fellow Republicans, he reviled Henry Luce, who the Tribune once said—in a news story, not a column or editorial—“nurses imperialistic ambitions that vie with those of a Mussolini.”

Yet alongside his many eccentric notions, Colonel McCormick harbored a deep-seated respect for the First Amendment. Deep-pocketed, too. He funded the appeal of the landmark Supreme Court case on prior restraint, Near v. Minnesota. Sponsoring a rebuttal to the Hutchins Commission’s report was part of his First Amendment activism.

Despite dismal sales, McCormick publicly touted his polemic as a success. Do you think he truly thought it was a success, or was he perhaps too prideful to admit defeat?

He was deluded about many things, and I think this is one of them. He believed that the book he sponsored, Prejudice and the Press, written by Tribune reporter Frank Hughes, would bury the Hutchins Commission once and for all. The irony is that the Hutchins Commission’s report, A Free and Responsible Press, is vulnerable to criticism on several grounds, and Hughes points out some of them, especially its Golden Age depiction of journalism in the founding period. In a review in the New York Herald Tribune, journalism historian Frank Luther Mott credited Hughes’s book with debunking “many of the too facile generalizations” of the Hutchins Commission. But Prejudice and the Press is so badly written that it had hardly any impact.

What accounts for McCormick’s view of the First Amendment and did he continue fighting for the First Amendment after the publication of Prejudice and the Press?

McCormick championed a very strong reading of the First Amendment. He harbored a worshipful view of the American founders and the Constitution, and he saw the press as a nongovernmental component of the system of checks and balances, serving to root out corruption. It’s a view that others have articulated in the years since, including legal scholar Vincent Blasi and Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.

 You wrote that McCormick prefigured conservative press critics that came decades later. Did McCormick have any ties to these press critics?

Not directly. He died in 1955. But the circles overlap. To take one example, former Hutchins Commission researcher Ruth Inglis became a conservative in the 1950s (she married the anticommunist researcher and writer J. B. Matthews). She helped Frank Hughes with his book and then held a book party for him. Twenty years later, Inglis was on the board of a foundation that helped underwrite The News Twisters (1971), the conservative media critique by Edith Efron, and the two became friends.

 What surprised you in researching and writing about McCormick’s efforts in trying to rebut A Free and Responsible Press?

First, I was surprised by Colonel McCormick’s level of paranoia about the Hutchins Commission. He thought it was part of a plot to eviscerate the First Amendment. Other elements, in his view, included books by George Seldes and Morris Ernst, a congressional investigation of competition in the news media, and even the New Deal. He initially wanted Prejudice and the Press to be called The Conspiracy.

Second, Colonel McCormick seemed to have poor judgment about how to influence attitudes toward the Hutchins Commission. Prejudice and the Press is a ridiculously padded and repetitive book, 642 pages long, with 75 pages of appendices and 62 pages of endnotes (McCormick thought it should be even longer). Not many general readers would pick up such a book. At the same time, scholars and judges weren’t likely to rely on a polemic that’s pervaded with “gangrenous adjectives” (in the phrase of a Tribune lawyer) and red-baiting. You’d expect the publisher of one of the country’s leading newspapers to have a shrewder feel for the audience.

Third, I was surprised to find that McCormick spent a fortune on Prejudice and the Press. The Tribune hired a political scientist to work as Hughes’s research assistant and a New York Post reporter to serve as fact-checker. The newspaper also footed the bill for typesetting, printing, and binding the book; indemnified the putative publisher from liability; and paid for advertising. In a sense, the costly enterprise casts doubt on one of the Hutchins Commission’s presumptions. It turns out that the bottom line isn’t always the foremost consideration for publishers. A Colonel McCormick will lose money in order to make an ideological point.

What are additional resources for people who would like to learn more about Prejudice and the Press?

The best resources are Richard Norton Smith’s marvelous biography, The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880-1955 (1996) and, for those with stamina, Prejudice and the Press.