All in the Family

A quarter-century ago the fantastically rich Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick and the fantastically rich Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, first cousins, began squabbling, ten years later parted. Of their contrasting characters legend has flourished ever since--Cousin Bertie McCormick, aristocratic, aloof publisher of the die-hard Republican Chicago Tribune, and Cousin Joe, masses-minded, erratic, lusty, ex-Socialist, publisher of the arch-New Deal New York Daily News. Each in his own way was a crass sensationalist. Joe got the biggest circulation in the U. S., Bertie the biggest in the Midwest. Said Friend-of-the-People Cousin Joe, onetime intimate of Bowery bums and taxi drivers: "Bertie certainly likes to crack the whip and watch the serfs march by."

Ten years ago, when the Daily News moved into its shining skyscraper new home, observers noted a trend in Captain Patterson toward quasi-respectability. Said he: "The Daily News was built on legs, but when we got enough circulation we draped them." Momentarily his contrast with Colonel McCormick was modulated. But two years later, with the Roosevelt election, the contrast flared sharper than ever: the News boomed Roosevelt and the New Deal; the Tribune screamed at both. They agreed on one thing: the need for a Big Navy. Last year Cousins Joe and Bertie found another bond: they agreed on appeasing Japan and urged Britain to settle with Germany on the "best terms possible."

In recent weeks, in one of the quickest reconciliations in journalism, the two old men really got together. On the Lend-Lease bill, they discovered they were true brother isolationists under the skin.

Almost daily Cousin Joe's colloquial, salty editorials clamored for "a new declaration of independence" from Britain; daily he labeled H.R. 1776 the "Dictatorship Bill." Cousin Bertie McCormick was free to concentrate his main fulminations against Willkie's "treachery," reading him out of the Republican Party as "the Republican Quisling," "a barefaced fraud," "Roosevelt's Charlie McCarthy." At the Lend-Lease hearings in Washington last month Cousin Bertie came out of his aristocratic tower bellowing in the manner of Cousin Joe, "I'm very willing to let Britain have whatever she needs, and I think she doesn't need anything."

Last week Cousin Joe gave new evidence of spiritual rapprochement with Cousin Bertie: the Daily News borrowed an "interesting and ominous" John T. McCutcheon cartoon from the Tribune; its point: Remember Woodrow Wilson's 1916 campaign promise! Warned Captain

Patterson in the follow-up editorial: Beware lest Roosevelt lead the U. S. into another crusade like those of the Middle Ages--which crusades, said he, were really the result of boredom on the part of knights who "must have got tired from time to time of sitting around dark and drafty castles, looking at the old woman, with a hangover every morning and nothing to read except religious parchments. . . ."

As a fond cousinly gesture the borrowing of John T. McCutcheon's cartoon was significant. Actually Cousin Joe had little need for borrowed isolationist cartooning. The Daily News's own Pulitzer Prizewinning, Kansas-born Cartoonist Clarence Daniel Batchelor had already created the most potent anti-war cartoon of all--the two creepy, skeleton-faced, voluptuous harlots labeled World War II ("Uncle Sap's New Girl Friend") and her fuller-blown mother, World War I (see cuts). Of late these ghoulish temptresses have appeared on Publisher Patterson's editorial page with almost comic-strip frequency--graphically timed to make the most of bitterly intensifying Lend-Lease debate, demonstrations, effigy lynchings and the like.

Should the U. S. indeed turn its back on Britain, such demonstrators, effigy hangers and isolationist Senators will no doubt receive their just meed of credit. But far more fateful than the influence of any of these will be another circumstance --the isolationist reunion of Cousins Bertie McCormick and Joe Patterson.

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