Sundown in Chicago

Bertie McCormick has won the Battle of Chicago.

The noisiest journalistic joust of the decade, the battle began three days before Pearl Harbor, when a rich newcomer, Marshall Field, started his liberal Chicago Sun to fight McCormick's well-entrenched, isolationist Tribune. One bitter morning last week, while frozen-fingered printers picketed Field's plant on windswept Wacker Drive, the battle ended. The Sun gave up the ghost and merged with Field's afternoon tabloid Times. This week, when the Sun & Times went on the newsstands, there were few recognizable Sunbeams in it.

The new paper is being published round the clock. Except for freshening the news for each edition, the Sun & Times will be the same paper morning, noon & night, with one set of editorials, comics and columns.

The defeat was costly to the loser: Field had spent $10,000,000 to learn that a newspaper war takes more vigor than virtue to win. The casualties were heavy: a third of the 360 on the editorial staffs were fired. Most were Sun employees, whose only solace was double severance pay.

Hearst First. When the Sun set, its circulation was 305,000, a 45,000 drop since September, when it shrank to a tabloid. The Times has 468,000. Field hopes the Sun & Times will keep a total of 650,000 a day, second only to the Trib's 1,000,000. "From now on," a Field executive chirped hopefully, "we'll concentrate on Hearst,* and get at McCormick sideways. " His optimism was not contagious. Marshall Field, his pleasant smile and soft voice gone for once, snapped: "I have nothing to say--on or off the record."

There was not much he could say. Crippled by bad advice, bad generalship, bad luck and inexperience, Field had never had much of a chance. Colonel McCormick, always a wily strategist, has never let his prejudices and hobbies keep him from doing a bang-up job of covering the news.

In with Finnegan. The merger made the Times's white-haired Publisher Richard J. ("Uncle Dick") Finnegan, 63, survivor of many a Chicago shakeup, stronger than ever. A shrewdly affable graduate of the old Inter Ocean, he has been with the New Dealing Times since its career began 18 years ago.

Easy-going Marvin McCarthy, a Finnegan man, stayed on as managing editor. Scores of Sun legmen, columnists and correspondents were axed; overseas, only faithful Frederick Kuh was left.

Looking hard for a silver lining, Marshall Field Jr., now assistant to Finnegan, said: "Now we certainly ought to get into the black." But staffers had their doubts. Round-the-clock papers have seldom worked well except in monopoly cities, where readers had no choice but to buy them morning & night. Newsmen once more asked an old question: did Marshall Field intend to stay in the newspaper business?

*Hearst's Herald-American has 520,000 circulation, John S. Knight's Daily News 494,000.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.