Volume 44, Number 14 · September 25, 1997
The Front Page
By Garry Wills
The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick: 1880-1955
by Richard Norton Smith
Houghton Mifflin, 597 pp., $35.00
The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, created the image of Chicago journalism in the brawling Twenties. But newspapering had actually grown tamer by that time. The first decade of this century saw a literal war between rival dailies, war waged with guns, blackjacks, hijacking, and intimidation. It started when William Randolph Hearst set up the Chicago American in 1900, a version of his New York American, promising to extinguish his rivals with gimmicks and gore. But he came up against a tough customer in the Tribune's pay, Max Annenberg, who had been a publicist for the World's Columbian Exposition and knew tricks to gain attention that not even Pulitzer or Hearst had dreamed of.
Review, 6829 words
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