Relegated to the Sidelines

The British executed Nathan Hale as a spy for George Washington’s Continental Army. On September 22, 1776 he was hanged. After being captured with some incriminating documents in New York, the 21-year-old American army patriot made history with an epitaph uttered as his last words.

“I only regret,” Hale said, “that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

Although no credible historical record exists to document whether Hale really uttered those words, Colonel Robert McCormick, the legendary publisher of the Chicago Tribune, nevertheless found them inspiring enough to commission a replica of bronze sculpture of Hale in 1940. He had the words inscribed squarely in the center of Tribune Tower Plaza as a model of youthful patriotism for the thousands of journalists, including me, who marched through the Nathan Hale Plaza on their way to work in a newsroom that created a daily newspaper every day for decades.

No more.

Tribune Tower, once the home of the world-famous Chicago Tribune, where I was once the managing editor, now houses well-heeled residents of luxury condominiums. The newspaper’s financially strapped owners sold the building a few years ago to developers who converted it into condos that range in price from about $900,000 to $7 million. And they moved the Nathan Hale stature from its’ prominent perch in the Plaza to a spot near the curb of adjacent Michigan Avenue. It looks totally out of place there, as if someone wants him to turn around and hitchhike to a new place in history.

The relocation of the sculpture honoring Nathan Hale is just one of many changes at a place I used to work as a reporter and editor for decades. I can’t say I’m thrilled to see what “progress” has done to a famous building that I considered a monument to daily journalism.

Change disrupts everyone’s lives, though. I’m sure factory workers in Ohio and Michigan don’t like what has happened to places that provided them with healthy paychecks in the 1980s. Journalists deserve treatment no better than the people they cover. And to those who say: “get over it and move on,” I have. But the new owners of Tribune Tower market their pricey condos as “iconic” slices of history. I’m sorry to inform the squatters who now live there: You can’t replicate what happened in those halls over decades of producing a daily newspaper regardless of how much money you have.

Moving Nathan’s statue represents a slap in the face to the man who built the Tower. Even worse, the developers kept the Chicago Tribune sign hanging in big white letters on the exterior of the building, an tasteless act of architectural plagiarism.

I have no quarrel with the new owners right to occupy what once was home to a great newspaper. Published reports say they paid oodles of cash for one of its plush apartments. I also understand they have the right to TiVo episodes of The Real Housewives in the same space where journalists once won Pulitzer prizes for exposing corruption or engaging in public service journalism. The developers may have paid for the Chicago Tribune sign. But the residents can never own what that sign represents, or the history that the newspaper made.

Journalists risked their lives and limbs bringing news from around the world to the readers of the Chicago Tribune. Editors risked their names and reputations reversing the shame that the erratic Colonel Robert McCormick seared into some pages of the newspaper’s storied past. One admiring editor compared the restoration of the Tribune’s journalistic integrity to reversing the course of an ocean liner.

The name Chicago Tribune belongs to the reporters, editors, photographers, and graphic artists that dedicated their lives to publishing a newspaper every day 365 days a year. The current residents simply wander the halls of the Tower cooing at a journalistic history they barely know.

A lot of tourists and Chicagoans probably know that the Colonel, as he was widely known, had reporters and editors steal chunks of famous landmarks that he then implanted in the building’s walls, such as a piece of the Berlin Wall, the Great Pyramid of Egypt, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, or even Wrigley Field.

But I’ll bet not many know that the business office elevators in the old Lobby entry to the Tower didn’t stop on the fourth or fifth floors, home to the editorial department. In days past, no one wanted to do anything that implied the business side of the paper interfered with the paper’s editorial independence. So, ad sales folks using those elevators couldn’t even get off and wander into editorial space.

To honor the newspaper’s founding, the Colonel, in 1922, staged an international competition to design the 26-floor building that looms 463 feet over the start of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Some 260 architects from around the world submitted plans, but the Colonel picked the design of architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood of New York, a city he hated. The current Tribune Tower, a Chicago landmark is the city’s second Tribune Tower. The original one, built in 1868, was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1871, the inferno that prompted the Tribune’s famous editorial “Chicago Shall Rise Again.”

In many respects, the Colonel’s personal history makes Donald Trump look like Calvin Coolidge, who once sat through nine-innings of a baseball game without saying a word. McCormick, a fervent conservative and isolationist, spouted insults and personal invective throughout the pages of the Tribune and radio and TV stations he controlled. No one suffered as many diatribes as Franklin Roosevelt stemming from a conflict, according to FDR, between the two at a snooty prep-school they both attended.

As nasty as he could be in print and on the airwaves, Colonel McCormick vigorously championed the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution far more than any publisher of his day. He had testimonials from famous writers and thinkers around the world carved into the Tower’s walls extolling the freedom of expression championed in the First Amendment. One of my favorites:

“To the Press alone, checkered though it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all of the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over errors and oppression.” —James Madison.

I could probably exhaust the memory of this computer listing the many great and atrocious moments of the Chicago Tribune. But the paper and the journalists who worked there revered the traditions of the journalism they practiced. They would never have made Nathan Hale look like an afterthought in the paper’s history.

In the name of decency and good taste, Mr. Tower, take down that damn sign! The Chicago Tribune that was simply is not the “iconic” heart and soul of Tribune Tower anymore.

—James O’Shea

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James OSheaNovember 25, 2022Comment