Scripps’ newspaper roots were in rural Illinois

Bill Knight column for 3-12, 13 or 14, 2020

One of America’s most colorful newspaper publishers and supporters of working people came from downstate Rushville, a place that captivated a forebear who loved “the raw grandeur of the prairie and impulsively bought 160 acres one mile south of the courthouse,” wrote Vance Trimble in “The Astonishing Mr. Scripps.”

Trimble added, “Edward Wyllis (Willis) Scripps was born June 18, 1854, with the heart of a dirt farmer, the soul of a poet, and the flaming brain of a crusading newspaper publisher.”

Scripps, who died 94 years ago this week, and his family started dozens of newspapers, the United Press and Scripps-Howard news services, and other media.

The heads of the clan, William and Grace Scripps, came from England in 1791, and 53 years later, London Daily Sun publisher William Arminger Scripps followed his father and two brothers, George Henry and John, to the ‘Illinois frontier town’,” Trimble said.

Scripps’ father, James Mogg Scripps, was a celebrated London bookbinder relegated to homesteading the humble spread outside Rushville. After farm work, he and his family read books and discussed current events. In 1858, four-year-old Eddie and his father heard Abraham Lincoln speak at the courthouse. Even in boyhood, “Eddie first became aware of the importance of newspapers,” Trimble wrote.

Branches of the family continued to start newspapers. Cousin John Locke Scripps helped set up the Chicago Tribune: another cousin, Benjamin Franklin Scripps. established the Prairie Telegraph; another cousin, George Washington Scripps, launched the Schuyler County Citizen, eventually merging with the Telegraph to become today’s Rushville Times.

E.W. was 18 when he boarded a CB&Q train to join his older brother James at James’ Detroit Evening News.  E.W. started as a $3-a-week office boy and worked his way through the circulation department to the newsroom, where James finally made him a reporter.

“The idea that my brother submitted to me was the publication of a daily newspaper, very small, with large type, and which, by condensed writing, would contain all the news ... found in the large blanket sheets and sell it for two cents or a penny,” Scripps later wrote.

Although the Detroit experiment was James’ idea, it was E.W. who became the outstanding practitioner, setting up newspapers that were sensationalistic and cheap, and stood up for the common citizen.

Taking his talents to Cleveland, St. Louis and Cincinnati, then Denver, Chicago and Baltimore, Scripps became one of the world’s first newspaper-chain owners, calling himself a “people’s champion” and a “damned old crank” and instructing his editors and managers to work to improve the status quo.

By World War I, Scripps had almost 30 papers, coast to coast, including the New York World-Telegram. By the 1920s, Scripps’ newspaper holdings rivaled Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

            “Whatever is, is wrong,” he said. “The first of my principles is that I have constituted myself the advocate of that large majority of people who are not so rich in worldly goods and native intelligence as to make them equal ... in the struggle with individuals of the wealthier and more intellectual class.”

He attacked corruption in government and industry, greed by the trusts and monopolistic utility companies, and religious authoritarians. Scripps also believed newspaper employees should own part of the company. So although he paid only average wages, he gave his staff as much as 49 percent of each newspaper.

“I am one of the few newspaper men who happen to know that this country is populated by 95 percent of plain ... and poor ... people and that (their) patronage is worth more to a newspaper owner than the patronage of the wealthy 5 percent,” he said.

Eventually wealthy himself, Scripps nevertheless crusaded against many establishment policies and against the economic system that supported robber barons such as John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie against the interests of the rest of the country. He advocated for labor unions – even at his own companies.

“The wealthy people of the United States are damned thieves,” Scripps wrote. “The rascality of the rich man has been used to influence Congress to rig the tax law with purposeful defectiveness to provide loopholes for the wealthy. My own millionaire class could more easily pay a 25 percent income tax than the 99 million common working men could pay 2 to 4 percent.

“Whenever there has been a contest between the ruling classes on one side and the wage-earners on the other, I have chosen to be the friend, associate and fellow-striver of the second party,” Scripps wrote.

Speaking of his years growing up on a Rushville farm, he commented, “I always liked to work in the dirt.”