For most of his remarkably colorful career, Robert R. McCormick was the strong, strident voice of Chicago, America's Second City. From the 1920s through the mid-1950s he was the owner, editor, and personification of the Chicago Tribune, which under his leadership grew to become the most widely read daily in the United States. To his admirers he was the unbending champion of Republican values, the scourge of bleeding-heart liberals, an emblem of the Old Order in the age of the New Deal. To his detractors he was "Colonel McCosmic", a dangerous demagogue whose exploitation of a powerful news medium to his own political ends was the flagrant abuse of a public trust. Both were right.
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