(Courtesy of the Columbia University Libraries)
Carl William Ackerman (1890-1970), Columbia University B. Litt. 1913, was Dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism from 1931 to 1956. He spent from 1960 to 1962 researching and writing a biography (unpublished) of Hokan Bjornstrom Steffanson, 1883-1962, the Swedish-American industrialist and financier.
Ackerman was a champion of freedom of the press. His professional career was forged in both major World Wars. While working as a correspondent in World War I with the United Press, Ackerman came to attention when he published Germany, The Next Republic?, a book that discussed the possibility of a successful democracy in post-Kaiser Germany.
When the book was printed in 1917, at the height of World War I, this sentiment was considered quite radical. The London Times Literary Supplement commented: "For the serious student of affairs the importance of the book lies in the large mass of information which it contains as to the struggle which was going on all the time in Germany between the two great parties, the Pan-Germans and the party of comparative moderation which centered round the Foreign Office." Mexico's Dilemma was considered "topical," "limited in scope and subject," and of "little relevance." Trailing the Bolsheviki was similarly received. As a biography, Dawes, the Doer was panned as "poorly handled," whereas Biography of George Eastman was called by the New York Tribune "objective in the sense that it holds strictly to the drama of events in justification of its hero. This makes it eminently readable, even exciting at times, purely as an epic of success achieved, a sort of `Pilgrim's Progress' of business."
Mr. Ackerman was an outspoken advocate of a journalism foundation in the United States "dedicated to the study of the daily newspaper and government." He explained, "We need scientific studies of the press by the press, and for the press, which will contribute to the progress of journalism as the great educational foundations have advanced medicine."
Ackerman married Mabel VanderHoof in 1914, and was the father of Robert VanderHoof Ackerman. Writings by Ackerman: Germany, the Next Republic?, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917.; Mexico's Dilemma, Doran 1918, Gordon Press, 1976; Trailing the Bolsheviki, Scribner, 1919; Dawes, the Doer (biography), Houghton, 1930; Biography of George Eastman, Houghton, 1930. Ackerman authored numerous articles, pamphlets, and reports on journalism and related affairs.
(Courtesy of United Press International.)
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Sevellon Brown III, veteran Washington correspondent and reporter for the Providence Journal-Bulletin, died Wednesday at Rhode Island Hospital. He was 70,
Brown worked at the Journal-Bulletin from 1939 to 1968 when he retired because of ill health.
He was born in Washington on April 23, 1913, the son of Sevellon and Elizabeth Barry Brown.
His family had an association with the Journal-Bulletin that began in 1904 when his maternal grandfather, David S. Barry, left his post as Washington correspondent for the New York Sun to become editor-in-chief of the Providence newspapers.
Two years later, Barry returned to Washington as Journal-Bulletin correspondent. In 1919, he was elected sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. Senate.
The elder Sevellon Brown succeeded his father-in-law as Washington correspondent after service in World War I. He then moved to Providence as managing editor and later became editor and publisher of the newspapers.
The younger Brown, known as Jeff, was Journal-Bulletin Washington correspondent from 1939-1942 and as bureau chief from 1942 to 1944.
After World War II and service with the OSS in London, Brown returned to the Journal-Bulletin as assistant to the editor (his father) from 1946 to 1949, then as associate editor from 1949 to 1953. He was appointed editor on Feb. 4, 1953 and held the post until his retirement.
For several years he served on the advisory board of the American Press Institute, chaired the American section of the International Press Institute, served on Columbia University's Pulitzer Price selection committees, and on the committee that selected Nieman fellowships for Journalists at Harvard.
Brown was a board member and later president of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors and chaired the New England Associated Press News Executives Association.
He is survived by his wife, the former Janice O. Van DeWater, two daughters by a previous marriage, five grandchildren, and a brother, Barry Brown, of Washington.
A memorial service was scheduled at 1 p.m. Friday at Swan Point Chapel. Burial will be private.
(Courtesy of Mississippi Writers & Musicians)
By Jennifer Phillips (SHS)
“The South is so often damned for social backwardness, for reaction entrenched in smugness and lethargy, that it is a pleasure to introduce a young Southerner who represents a totally different school of thought and action.” Saturday Evening Post Feb.23, 1946, on Hodding Carter’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize
William Hodding Carter II, the son of William Hodding and Irma Dutarte Carter, was born on February 3, 1907, in Hammond, Louisiana (USM-McCain Library and Archives). As a young child, Carter spent his summer days with his grandmother in the Mississippi Delta along the Mississippi River. At the age of eighteen, Hodding Carter moved away to attend Bowdoin College in Maine, were he received his B.A. in 1927. Carter then transferred to Columbia University to study journalism for one year before taking a teaching fellowship at Tulane University in 1928. Upon completion of his fellowship at Tulane, Carter began writing for the New Orleans paper, Item-Tribune. He then took a job working as the Night Bureau manager for United Press in New Orleans. His competence and determination brought him to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1930 as the Bureau Manager of Associated Press (Current Biography 1946).
On October 31, 1931, Hodding Carter married Betty Werlein. However, their happiness immediately met with turmoil. In April of 1932, Hodding Carter was fired from his job at Associated Press for “insubordination.” The supervisor who made the decision to release Carter from his position wrote a letter to Carter. Carter says that the letter stated that he “had some good qualities, but I would never make a newspaper man, and I ought not waste any time getting into another business” (Carter 3). The man’s attempt to persuade the young writer from a career in journalism failed miserably. The young couple moved back to Carter’s hometown of Hammond, Louisiana, where they intended to open a daily paper, the Daily Courier. An attack on his abilities had only made the Carter more determined, “We had to prove to our families and ourselves and the man who had written the letter that the letter was wrong.”(Hodding Carter in his biography Where Main Street Meets the River). The main goal of Carter’s Daily Courier was to focus on the wrong doings of Congressman Huey Long. Carter’s newspaper was so strong that “theirs was the only district in the state [Louisiana] that never sent a Long henchman to congress,” (Time Magazine 20May46). Amidst the battle against Huey Long, the Hammond Daily Courier took the time to print such articles as the birth of Hodding and Betty’s first son, William Hodding Carter III, on April 8, 1935 (Current Biography: 1946).
In 1935 Carter attended a literary conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. While there, he met David Cohn, a Greenville, Mississippi, writer and author. Cohn convinced Hodding that Greenville needed his talents as an experienced newspaperman. On July 7, 1936, Hodding Carter drew up an outline for his new paper, and, with help from William Alexander Percy, author of Lanterns on the Levee (yet unpublished), the Delta Star was up and running (Waldron 69).
In 1938, Carter and Betty bought out the only other daily in Greenville, the Democrat Times, and merged the two papers to form the Delta Democrat-Times. The paper was a steady success, and Hodding gained more recognition for his talents as a editor and writer.
On September 29, 1938, Neville Chamberlain and Daladier met with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich. On the 30th, the Munich “Peace in our times” Pact was signed. Hodding’s feelings on this matter were so stong in opposition to the pact that he signed with the National Guard (Waldron 87).
In April of 1939, Carter was offered one of the prestigious Neiman Fellowships at Harvard University. After much debate and long conversations with his wife, Percy, and other shareholders of the Delta Democrat-Times, Hodding decided to accept the fellowship. In October of 1939, their second son, Philip Dutartre Carter, was born. In January of 1940, Hodding and Betty set off with their two boys to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While at Harvard, Hodding had time to think about an offer Ralph Ingersoll had made to him–to be the editor of Ingersoll’s creation, PM. On June 1, 1940, Carter reported to work in New York, New York. While Carter did gain some recognition at PM, he wanted to return to the Delta and his newspaper. On September 21, 1940, he was on his way out the door and back to Greenville, Mississippi, to take up his old job (Where Main Street Meets the River).
In November, 1940, the National Guard mobilized, and Carter was, once again, on the move– this time to Camp Blanding, Florida. While there, he became Public Relations Officer for the regiment. He also suffered an accident while training that cost him his sight in one eye. Sent overseas with the war, Carter wrote for the Middle East versions of the patriotic papers, Yank and Stars and Stripes in Cairo, Egypt. In 1945, Hodding Carter received an Honorable Discharge from the United States Armed Services and returned home to Greenville, Mississippi (Current Biography: 1946).
Upon arrival home, Carter took up his fight against Senator Theodore Bilbo. He wrote a series of articles dealing with racial, economic, and religious problems in Mississippi. His editorials were published at a very rocky time in the South, and Hodding’s articles stood apart from other debate and speculation on the status of African-Americans in society at the time. The magazine PM stated in an article published on August 5, 1945, that “The chief reasons for the silence are the fear of being labeled a ‘nigger lover’ or the feeling–even among many of those unsympathetic with such views–that the South should present a united front un racial matters” (Current Biography: 1946). Widely acclaimed and criticized, Hodding received national recognition as a writer when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in May of 1946. In August of ’46, Carter established a second paper, the Delta Star, which received attention when Hodding published an article dealing with the beating–death of a black boy by five white boys (Cox Mississippi Almanac).
Tragedy struck the Carter family on April 27, 1964, when Hodding and Betty’s third son, Thomas Hennen Carter, shot himself while playing Russian Roulette. That same day, Hodding had been hospitalized for separating his retina. He was temporarily blind (Waldron 305).
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill. Hodding continued to contribute editorial to the Delta Democrat-Times, which his son now ran unofficially. He also contributed two articles to the New York Times Magazine dealing with the South’s judicial system and the degradation of the Confederate flag (Waldron 317). In 1965, Hodding gave the very first Carlos McClatchy Memorial Lecture at Stanford University. In June of 1966, when son Hodding Carter III came back from Harvard, Hodding officially handed the paper over to him. Betty and Hodding spent the summer in Maine, trusting “Young” Hodding to take care of the business without his father watching over him.
In 1968, Hodding was asked to give the Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. He was so ill that he was unable to speak, and his wife was forced to read from notes he had prepared for himself. He also received the Tenth Annual First Federation Award for his service to Mississippi (Waldron 321). He was not able to travel to Columbia University in 1971 when he received the Columbia University Journalism Award.
Eventually, Hodding Carter’s condition deteriorated even more. On April 4, 1972, Hodding Carter died. Both of his sons wrote editorials about him in the Delta Democrat-Times. The following day. Philip, who runs the paper today, recalled, “We called him Big because he was; Hodding Carter was the biggest of his clan, a legend, first of all in his own tribe.” (Waldron 325).
“If I have gained anything in life, it is a belief in the soul and the destiny of man.”
Hodding Carter
Dwight D. Eisenhower rose to world prominence through his leadership of the Allied forces during World War II. As commanding general of American forces in Europe, he conducted successful campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. As supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, he directed the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France, and the subsequent military campaign—one of the most complex such operations in history—that culminated in victory over Nazism. He became America's 34th president in 1952 and was easily reelected the nation's chief executive in 1956.
During his presidency, the United States brokered the truce that ended the Korean War, introduced atomic weapons to the armed forces, sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce the desegregation of its public schools, launched the first U.S. space satellite, created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and sent the first U.S. military advisers to Vietnam.
Eisenhower succeeded Nicholas Murray Butler as president of Columbia, but did not take up the duties until nearly three years after Butler had resigned. He served as the University's thirteenth president from May 1948 until January 1953. "The principal purpose of education," he said the year he became the University's president, "is to prepare the student for effective personal and social life in a free society. From the school at the crossroads to a university as great as Columbia, general education for citizenship must be the common and first purpose of them all."
At Columbia, Eisenhower took a moderate position in the face of the Red Scare: He accepted a gift from the Communist government of Poland to establish a chair in Polish studies but also defended the dismissal of a left-wing member from Teachers College and served on a national commission that published a handbook declaring that communists should be excluded from employment as teachers.
On another front, he prevented legendary football coach Lou Little from leaving for Yale, and regularly attended the Lions' contests at Baker Field.
Never the most engaged of presidents, in December 1950 he took a leave of absence from Columbia to become the first supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He retired from active duty in 1952, but not from the Columbia presidency, to campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Once in the White House, his dealings with Columbia were infrequent.
-- http://c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/dwight_d_eisenhower.html
(Courtesy of The New York Times)
By Deirdre Carmody
June 17, 1981
John S. Knight, founder of the Knight publishing empire and editor emeritus of Knight-Ridder Newspapers Inc., died last night of a heart attack at the home of a friend in Akron, Ohio. He was 86 years old. Dale Allen, executive editor of The Akron Beacon Journal, the first Knight newspaper, said that Mr. Knight had been hospitalized for two or three days with a heart condition after attending the 150th anniversary celebration of another of his papers, The Detroit Free Press, about a month ago.
Mr. Knight retired in 1976 as editorial chairman of the Knight-Ridder chain and divided his time between working in the offices of the Akron newspaper and in Miami at the chain's corporate offices one floor above The Miami Herald, another of the chain's papers.
As principal stockholder he owned just under 20 percent of the Knight-Ridder stock. His brother James owns about 10 percent of the outstanding shares.
In the early years of American journalism, publishers tended to be strong-willed, competitive men whose personalities and political philosophies dominated the newspapers they produced.
As times changed there emerged a new generation of publishers whose primary interest was to buy newspapers and create newspaper groups, and they turned American journalism into a full-fledged industry.
John Shively Knight belonged, in a sense, to both breeds. He inherited The Akron Beacon Journal from his father in 1933 and went on to assemble the Knight-Ridder newspaper group, which became the chain with the largest weekly circulation in the country.
By 1981 it included 34 daily newspapers in 17 states with an aggregate weekly circulation of 25 million. It also included four television stations, and in 1980 its revenues were $1.099 billion.
But, unlike many publishers who had little to do with the editorial side of their papers, Mr. Knight wrote a weekly opinion column for years on an ancient typewriter in his office. The column, entitled ''The Editor's Notebook,'' won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for ''distinguished editorial writing.'' His opinions earned him descriptions by friends as ''crusty'' and ''blunt.'' Two More Pulitzers
Two Knight newspapers, The Detroit Free Press and The Charlotte Observer, also won Pulitzers in the same year as Mr. Knight. It was the first time that one publisher had carried off three of the journalism prizes.
''I'm a bleeder,'' Mr. Knight once said in describing his own writing habits. ''I used to sit here and struggle with the typewriter, smoking cigarettes and drinking soft drinks and ruining my gut. I'd go home from the office drained. This was work.''
One of his campaigns was for freedom of the press around the world and against censorship. His belief was that ''if the peoples of the world can come to know and understand one another through the freedom of international news exchange, many of the causes of war will have been eliminated.''
Mr. Knight was a firm believer in local control by each of his newspapers, as well as strong coverage of local news. He used to say that he wanted each of his papers to have its own ''character.'' Summing up his beliefs to fellow publishers in 1969, he said:
''Your first duty is to the citizen who buys your newspaper in the belief that it has characer and stability, that it is at all times a defender and protector of the rights and liberties of our people, that it does not yield to the pressure of merchant or banker, politician or labor union.''
Mr. Knight was born in Bluefield, W. Va., on Oct. 26, 1894. When he was 6 years old, his family moved to Akron, Ohio, where his father became advertising manager of The Beacon Journal. By 1915 the father had acquired full control of the paper.
As a boy, John worked at the newspaper on summer vacations; on election nights he sold extras on street corners. He attended high school in Akron, then the Tome School in Maryland and Cornell University. He left Cornell in his junior year to enlist in the Motor Transport Corps but was later transferred to the 113th Infantry, rose to Lieutenant and saw action in the Argonne. Just before the Armistice he joined the Army Air Corps.
After raising cattle for a brief time in California, Mr. Knight went to work at The Beacon-Journal in 1920 as a sportswriter. Five years later he became managing editor, and in 1933, upon his father's death, he inherited the paper.
Four years later he bought The Miami Herald and acquired and then discontinued The Miami Tribune. In 1938 he bought The Times-Press, the rival Akron paper, which left him with a monopoly in that city. In 1940 he bought The Free Press, Detroit's only morning paper, and in 1944 he bought controlling interest in The Chicago Daily News for $2.2 million, although he sold The Daily News in 1959. Public Triumph, Private Grief
By 1973 he owned 15 daily newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. The following year, he consolidated his group by merging with Ridder Publications, thus adding ownership or substantial interest in 19 more dailies in the West and Middle West.
While his public life prospered, however, his private life was marked by grief. His first wife, Katherine McLain, died in 1929, eight years after their marriage, leaving him with three young sons. In 1932 he married Beryl Zoller Comstock, who died in 1974.
In the closing weeks of World War II, his eldest son, John S. Knight, was killed in action, two weeks before the birth of his own son. Another son, Frank, died of illness in 1958. In December 1975, Mr. Knight's grandson, John S. Knight 3d, who was an editor of The Philadelphia Daily News, was murdered in a robbery in his apartment.
The surviving son, Charles Landon Knight of Akron, is president of Portage Newspaper Supply Company, a Knight-Ridder subsidiary. In 1976, Mr. Knight married Frances Elizabeth Augustus, widow of Ellsworth H. Augustus, a Cleveland civic leader and millionaire industrialist.
Like Mr. Knight, she owned racing horses. The Knight stables in Miami were called the Fourth Estate Stables and most of the horses were given names related to newspapers, such as Wire Editor and Extra, Extra. She died in January.
Mr. Knight, who had held the title of chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the company, relinquished his last post as editorial director in 1976, saying, ''There is a time to quit. I quit when I was doing well.''
But he remained an avid reader of newspapers and continued to send editors notes chiding them for mistakes or offering words of praise for a job well done.
Stuart H. Perry (1874-1957) was a newspaper publisher and authority on meteorites. He made extensive collections of meteorites and donated many specimens to the United States National Museum (USNM). In 1940, Perry became an Honorary Associate in Mineralogy, USNM, a title he held until his death.