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| Robert R. McCormick |
"I am determined," the young Robert McCormick
wrote to his mother, "to have a great life and an adventurous one."
He had started early. At nine, he and his cousin Joe decided, while on a visit with their mothers to the old pirate island of Nassau, to run away. They walked and ran for miles. A phaeton came into view. In it were two women, their mothers. The boys climbed aboard and rode back to town. The mothers did not ask what they were doing so far away, nor did the boys reveal their plot.
At eleven, he and another boy borrowed a small sailing boat on the French Riviera. Beyond the horizon was Africa. "Let’s go there," the boys said, as one. But before the craft passed into the distant blue, a speedboat caught up. "Head for shore," the captain said. Africa had to wait.
That autumn Robert, fluent in French from living with a French family, set off for school in England alone: a train to Paris, a carriage across town, a train to Calais, a boat to Dover, a train to London, another to Ludgrove where the school carriage waited.
He early had a pony. As a teenager he rode the cattle range in Idaho and hunted. His twenty-first birthday found him and some other boys on a small ship far into Hudson Bay. They spotted a polar bear on the ice. McCormick chased it. The bear stopped. McCormick killed it, and brought home the skin. For the rest of his life the pelt, on his bedroom floor, reminded him of his reckless chase—and his good luck.
He knew about cars when ten. With another teenager, he flew a hot air balloon over France. Villagers organized a feast—and gave the fliers the bill. Alice Roosevelt drove him to see the Wright brothers make their first public flight. In 1910 McCormick had his first flight. Later, resenting the forty-five minutes needed to commute by car to Tribune Tower from his country estate at Cantigny, he bought an amphibian plane and cleared a strip through Cantigny fields. Downtown, a Tribune man waited in a row boat to bring the flier ashore.
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| Riding his favorite mount |
As his years at Yale ended, McCormick considered
becoming an explorer, joining the race to the poles, and searching unknown parts of
Africa, Asia and South America. Panama was in the news. American marines had landed.
McCormick went there to see for himself. He rode a horse through the unfinished Culebra
Cut, and was impressed by the strategic importance of a canal. On a homeward banana boat,
a sailor who had not been ashore became ill with yellow fever. The captain surmised the
disease must be carried by a mosquito. How else could the sailor have caught it? Later he
was proved right, and the colonel had one more example of the importance of clear
observation and common sense.
Common sense persuaded the young man to give up the alluring challenge of exploration and become a lawyer and seek adventure in politics. At twenty-four he was a city alderman, at twenty-five president of the Sanitary District and reversing the flow of the Chicago River. While exploring the waterway, he drifted in the dark over an unseen coffer darn, fell from the boat and had to swim for his life.
Unexpectedly a way opened into the Tribune. The editor, Robert Patterson, suddenly died. Medill McCormick, the Colonel’s elder brother and Joseph Medill’s designated heir, withdrew into politics and the United States Senate. The paper was for sale. Robert McCormick and his run-away cousin, Joe Patterson, persuaded stockholders to let them take turns running the paper. On off months, McCormick disappeared, with only an Indian for a companion, into Canadian woods seeking timberlands and a site for a newsprint industry.
War burst in Europe. Ordinary newsmen headed for the western front. McCormick became an honorary Illinois colonel and, so bedecked, went to Russia as a personal guest of the Czar. He paused in London to marry, to talk with the prime minister, and to pick up secret code books for the British embassy in St. Petersburg. The box traveled safely, disguised as his wife’s jewels. He studied the eastern front battlefields. A presumed dead German soldier suddenly arose, handed his rifle, butt first, to the startled, unarmed American, and then held up his arms in surrender. McCormick brought him to Russian headquarters. "Take him," the commander said, "as your servant."
On the way home, he wrote a book that proved to be unique. No other American newspaperman had ever seen the Russian army in action.
Trouble erupted on the Mexican border and McCormick went south with the Illinois National Guard. He met Pershing and when the United States declared war on Germany and Pershing was named American commander, McCormick offered his services in France. Pershing sent McCormick to the English and French headquarters as his representative, and spy. The French wouldn’t tell him how many divisions were involved in the war action.
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| Member of First Cavalry Division |
McCormick learned where the list was kept and arranged
a fracas which diverted attention long enough for him to copy the list. When Pershing
issued his first attack order—the First Division will drive the Germans out of
Cantigny—McCormick commanded an artillery battalion. After the war, the colonel
changed the name of his grandfather’s Wheaton farm from Red Oaks to Cantigny.
The 1920s and 1930s, when he was editor, publisher and principal owner of The Chicago Tribune with a controlling interest in a number of other nationally important newspapers, were packed with adventure ... setting up transatlantic wireless, printing daily papers in Paris and on ocean liners, creating trees-to-Tribune empire, enlarging Cantigny. And always learning, learning, learning. Often he differed radically with elected leaders—local, state and national.
McCormick looked upon war in Europe as Europe’s business and believed President Wilson had lied when he promised to keep America out of the first world war and that President Roosevelt had lied when he promised that American sons would never die on foreign battlefields. He shouted against increases in government power and spending. He rarely won, but he continued the fight.
To the end, he wanted to see things for himself. After the second world war, he bought a never used Flying Fortress, converted it, and ventured afar. He died in 1955 at his beloved Cantigny in Wheaton. He was seventy-five.
Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey(Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey, authors of the best selling book, "Halas by Halas ... The Chicago Bears Story," are writing a new book, the first biographical treatment of Robert R. McCormick. Entitled "The Colonel of Cantigny," it is scheduled for publication in 1982. There will be a special edition for DuPage Heritage Gallery members.)