E.W. Sided With the Working Class

By Barry M. Horstman

A collection of essays by E.W. Scripps is titled “Damned Old Crank” — a description that much of his family, many of his employees and all of the targets of his newspapers’ unrelenting crusades would no doubt find most fitting.

In an extraordinarily colorful life riddled with contradictions, Scripps, a school drop-out with no writing skills, became one of America’s first news media giants, presiding over more newspapers – - an empire that included The Cincinnati Post — than William Randolph Hearst.

Although the newspaper chain he founded made Scripps a wealthy man, he instinctively aligned the “Penny Post” and his other newspapers with the workingman. While philosophy — typified by his rebellious cry of “God damn the rich, God help the poor!” that served as a guiding light for his papers — entered into that decision, it also reflected a marketing judgment by Scripps, who found profit, pleasure and honor in siding with the working class.

“I’m a rich man, and that’s dangerous,” he once wrote. “But it isn’t just the money that’s the risk; it’s the living around with other rich men. They get to thinking all alike, and their money not only talks, it does their thinking, too…. So I don’t think like a rich man. I think more like a left labor galoot.”

The contrast between Scripps’s bank account and his newspapers’ editorial tone is only one of the dichotomies in his life. He chose to portray himself as a bit of a bounder who struggled to overcome “the mediocrity of his mental equipment,” but married a minister’s daughter from West Chester and created from scratch one of the great news enterprises of the world. And the man who boldly exposed political corruption and other malfeasance in an era when it was not uncommon for newspaper editors to be horsewhipped — or shot — was a hypochondriac who seldom shook hands because of a phobia over colds.

Scripps readily conceded the contradictions, attributing them — somewhat flippantly — to a lifetime of excessive drinking. “My convictions, if such, vary with the condition of my liver,” he said. He also often suggested that there was little distinctive about his life, saying: “There is but very little difference between my life’s career and that of the meanest and most ignorant, and that of the wisest and most generous of men.”

Edward Willis Scripps was born in June 1854 on a farm near Rushville, Ill., the youngest of 13 children from his father’s three marriages.

His father, James Scripps, was a widower with six children when he emigrated to America in 1844 from England. Having failed as a bookbinder in London, James Scripps came to America to take up a farm that his father, a London newspaper publisher, had bought near Rushville, where other Scrippses had settled.

En route to Illinois, James Scripps stopped off in Cleveland, where he met a 30-year-old schoolteacher who was to become his third wife. Because his father was 52 and his mother 40 when he was born a decade later, Scripps felt he was an unwanted child.

As a boy, Scripps had heard much about his English grandfather’s prominence as a publisher, and of other Scrippses who helped establish the Chicago Tribune and weekly newspapers in Rushville. He anticipated a smooth entry into journalism via his half brother, James E., who was editor and president of the Detroit Tribune. James, however, initially wanted nothing to do with the contentious, self-centered youth. Undeterred by the rebuff, Scripps moved to Detroit in late 1872 — ostensibly to help another relative open a drugstore, but really intending to use his proximity to James to press his case for a newspaper job.

While waiting weeks for the drugstore to open, Scripps nagged another half brother working at the Tribune, William, into giving him a job as an office boy in the counting room.

When monetary losses forced James out as editor of the Tribune in 1873, he started a new paper, the Detroit Evening News — which became a laboratory for what he felt a newspaper should be, from size and content to cost and delivery time. Believing that the city’s other dailies, the 5-cent “blanket” sheets, were too expensive and, with columns-long stories, too dull for blue-collar workers, James charged only 2 cents per copy for a four-page paper crammed with many shorter stories.

Scripps oversaw circulation, but the business side of newspapering held no charm for him. What had romanced him from his first moment in a newspaper office was the acrid smell of ink, the clacking of reporters’ typewriters, the tangible buzz — punctuated by shouts of “Copy!” — in the newsroom as edition deadline approached and the soft rumble of the building as the mighty presses began rolling.

After a year, Scripps went to James and announced himself ready for the paper’s news side. Surprisingly, James agreed and made E.W. city editor.

Penny-pinching was the watchword at the News, where reporters were directed to use both sides of copy paper, following the example of James, who customarily wrote on the inside of a flattened envelope. Later, as his chain of papers grew, E.W. set new standards for miserliness. Around the turn of the century, he outlawed free papers to staffers, ordered reporters to buy their own pencils, upbraided The Kentucky Post for spending 75 cents for towels and even disallowed a $1 expenditure for toilet paper at the Cleveland Press. James had long nursed the dream of a “cordon” of newspapers throughout the Midwest — a goal that would be achieved on a much wider scale by E.W. — and once his Detroit paper stabilized, looked to Cleveland for his next venture.

Scripps, who at 24 became editor over his brother’s objection, had his first paper when the Cleveland Penny Press began publishing in November 1878. The paper consistently sided with organized labor and underdogs generally, and refused — by reporting their peccadilloes — to extend the upper classes the journalistic deference to which they had become accustomed.

Five years later, Scripps — wanting the independence of owning controlling interest in a newspaper — found what he wanted in 1883 in Cincinnati. The four-page Penny Paper, founded in 1880 by Walter and Albert Wellman, was renamed the Penny Post after James and E.W. bought most of the stock. As the majority stockholder, E.W. decided the time had finally come to break from James. E.W. would control The Post, while James would go to St. Louis to run the business side of a newspaper that they had started there in 1880.

Though the Penny Post had never made ends meet in Cincinnati, Scripps, dismissively sizing up the competition, was certain he could turn it around — viewing the corrupt political machine of Republican George “Boss” Cox as a tempting target for the crusading journalism he favored.

Within weeks, The Post waded into the fray, accusing the city health commissioner of corruption for allegedly selling druggists the privilege of dispensing medicine to the poor. The commissioner responded by filing a libel suit against Post reporter F.B. Gessner and editor Robert Ross. After one court hearing, a dozen thugs with indirect ties to Cox attacked a group of Post people, bloodying Ross’ face. As the gang closed in on Scripps — widely thought to often carry a gun — he reached for his hip pocket. “He’s going to shoot!” someone screamed as the men turned and ran. The libel trial ended in a hung jury.

Though its power gradually declined, Cox’s machine dominated Cincinnati politics for nearly a decade after his death in 1916, until a voter-approved charter in the mid-1920s — strongly promoted by The Post — ended its long run at City Hall and the county building.

Whatever pleasure Scripps derived from The Post’s contribution to civic reform was enjoyed from afar, because he had by then retired to Miramar. His sons, James and Robert Scripps, managed the company he had created in 1890 to run his growing chain — which included, at various points, 48 papers and the United Press wire service. But E.W. for years ran the operation as an absentee landlord.

In 1922, the organization became Scripps-Howard, reflecting the leadership of longtime United Press head and Scripps partner Roy W. Howard. Today, Scripps is America’s 10th-largest newspaper publisher, and the broadcast division operates nine network- affiliated television stations, including Cincinnati’s WCPO-TV (Channel 9).

Scripps, a moody man whose misanthropic tendencies were exacerbated by his drinking, increasingly withdrew — from friends, family and business — in his final years.

Surrounded only by employees, Scripps — after a dinner party that included the American counsel and, as usual, too many cigars – - died of apoplexy at 71 in March 1926 aboard his yacht in Monrovia Bay, off the coast of Liberia.

For a man who spent his lifetime trying to reach the masses in a profession where history changes day by day — and sometimes, edition by edition — it seems an appropriate memorial to E.W. Scripps. You can read all about it.

This story is reprinted from Barry Horstman’s book “100 Who Made a Difference.”

Originally published by Post contributor.

(c) 2007 Cincinnati Post. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.