Mad at McCormick

Not often does a mass meeting attack a newspaper but last week such a mass meeting was held in Chicago. The enemy it rallied against was Chicago's dominant morning newspaper, the all-powerful Tribune and its autocratic, arch-isolationist publisher, Colonel Robert McCormick.

The meeting, organized by the Fight for Freedom Committee, and held in Chicago's Orchestra Hall on a sweltering night, drew an overflow crowd of 3,000. Nominally called to support Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy, the meeting centered its fire almost exclusively on the Tribune. Not since 1936 election-night crowds burned Tribunes in the middle of State Street and rotten-egged the Tribune building had Chicagoans erupted in such hot anti-Tribune wrath.

Chief speaker was ex-Tribune Foreign Correspondent Edmond Taylor (The Strategy of Terror), a shrewd expert on Nazi fifth-columning, whose subject was What Is Wrong with the Chicago Tribune? Characterizing Colonel McCormick's editorial policy as "criminal nonsense," Taylor coupled the Tribune with Wheeler and Lindbergh as "dirty fighters who are using the political equivalent of poison gas. ..."

Said he: "They are traitors because they do not realize the subtle and seemingly innocent forms that treason takes in our modern world. Our job is precisely to make them understand."

Acting on this advice, the audience roared adoption of a resolution denouncing the Tribune and proposing a movement "to end the un-American monopoly now enjoyed by the Chicago Tribune, and in the interests of freedom of enterprise, freedom of speech, truth, fairness and justice, give positive encouragement and cooperation to those individuals or groups now contemplating to provide Chicago and the Middle West with another morning newspaper. . . ."

Steaming out of the meeting, the crowd started buying early editions of the Tribune and burning them in the street.

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