Editorial: At age 175, still your ‘watchman on the walls’

As we celebrate this newspaper’s 175th year in business, it is illuminating to look back at where our editorial voice got things right and where it fell off target.

Our reaction to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision of 1954 offers a humbling example of the latter, not by opposing the decision but by woefully and complacently underestimating the event’s sweeping impact.

The Tribune helpfully printed the full text of the unanimous opinion that effectively paved the way for other landmarks to come, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Our editorial page, boldly and famously conservative at the time, applauded the decision in keeping with our historical ties to Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party, yet also expressed a cautionary shrug:

“In much the greater part of the United States, measured either in area or population, the decision will make no difference at all, for segregation by law in the public schools is largely, though not wholly, a Southern phenomenon,” we wrote. “It remains to be seen how the South will accept the court’s decision.”

In fact, the decision would set off powder kegs in the North too, especially in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago. Protests would erupt over real estate redlining and discriminatory school districting policies. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would join Dick Gregory and other local activists as Daley tried to avoid a repeat of the 1919 race riot.

Yet, as much as our editorial voice may have urged you to think twice, even about the true costs of programs as popular as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, we have consistently gone to bat for such foundational principles as the right of all children to have equal access to high-quality public education, regardless of race, creed, ethnicity or gender. And we’ve long advocated for the freedom of all Americans to write, and speak, their minds.

Our guiding light has been the legacy of Joseph Medill, founding co-owner and managing editor of the Tribune and later mayor of Chicago. As an opponent of slavery and its expansion into the territories, Medill was an early organizer of the Republican Party whose fierce support of the promising young state legislator from Springfield led to such nicknames for the Tribune as a “Newspaper of Lincoln.”

Medill’s legacy was carried on most prominently by his legendary grandson, Robert R. McCormick, nicknamed affectionately and otherwise as “The Colonel” for his decorated service in World War I and his larger-than-life leadership style and presence in media and civic affairs.

Some editors and publishers take a hands-off attitude toward their editorials. Not the Colonel. Fiercely ideological and sometimes bullheaded, he was a crusader for press freedoms and an unsparing opponent of Roosevelt, whose New Deal he openly compared to “communism.”

Yet, like other press barons of the age, he was a hugely successful Chicago innovator whose legacy endures in, among other enterprises, Chicago’s WGN (for “world’s greatest newspaper”) radio and television.

His legacy and editorial policies endured long past his death in 1955, even as newspapers felt increasing competition with television and the changing tastes of younger newspaper readers in the turbulent and news-rich 1960s.

Pressured to keep up with changing times in the era of hippie communes, Black Power and draft card-burning protesters, top Tribune executives faced the challenge of modernizing to reach a new generation of readers without losing their older ones.

In direct contrast to the legendary Colonel, the comparatively low-key Clayton Kirkpatrick initiated profound modernization changes over the following decade, but he did so gradually so as not to scare off older readers, and the editorial board followed in kind.

But echoes of the bold Colonel’s legacy re-erupted in 1974 when the Tribune printed uncensored transcripts of President Richard Nixon’s invective-filled taped Oval Office conversations regarding Watergate.

Days later this editorial board published a three-part editorial calling for Nixon to resign or be removed from office.

No editorial in the history of the newspaper has had a greater impact on the nation.

The shock of having “lost” the newspaper of Lincoln hit the embattled Republican president particularly hard, White House sources told the Tribune’s Washington reporters at the time.

“Yet the new Tribune also continued philosophically to be the Tribune of 19th Century political traditions, with a strong Colonel McCormick presence felt not only in the technological and financial areas, but also in its eternal watchfulness for a threat from communism or a menace to press freedom,” wrote veteran Chicago journalist Lloyd Wendt in his definitive “Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper.”

“It was truly,” he wrote, “the wary ‘watchman on the walls’ envisioned by Joseph Medill.”

That sounds about right to us. Over the years, we haven’t always gotten it right. But the values that brought us here have prepared us well to face the uncertainties of the future. We can’t tell you what to think, as an old saying goes, but we always try to give you something worth thinking about.

Still. After 175 years. And, come Monday, we’re back to endorsing candidates in the upcoming primary elections in the Land of Lincoln.

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