Good morning, Chicago.

In the early 20th century, Chicago was a city of 1.7 million people and growing fast. Skyscrapers soared into the air, the Great Migration was transforming the South Side, Capone was king, and women – finally – secured the right to vote. Competition for the news was fierce, and the Chicago Tribune was keen to build its reputation, first adopting the self-appointed moniker of “World’s Greatest Newspaper” in 1909 and, a decade or so later, holding a design competition for its fancy new digs on North Michigan Avenue.

It was a time of great tragedy but also new diversions as readers sought respite on the comics page from the violence found in the news, writes Rick Kogan. And there was violence aplenty; the Tribune itself was not immune, as detailed in this piece from Ron Grossman.

Read on for more stories about this rough-and-tumble era of Chicago, and don’t forget to pick up your copy of our new book commemorating the 175th anniversary of the Chicago Tribune, with more than 100 historic front pages. For more anniversary merchandise, visit the Chicago Tribune store.

And finally, a reminder to former newspaper carriers: You can share your memories here. Boys delivered the Tribune through most of the paper’s history. Any women out there with a story to share? We’d love to hear it.

-Jocelyn Allison, Marianne Mather and Kori Rumore

More anniversary coverage | Vintage Voices | Pulitzer Prizes | Famous front pages | Vintage Tribune newsletter | 175th merchandise

By the early 20th century, Joseph Medill had built the Chicago Tribune’s circulation to a robust 100,000 amid intense circulation wars with the city’s many rival papers. Some of the news was hopeful but there was much tragedy, and the ways in which those stories were covered by the Tribune not only set the tone for other papers but attracted tens of thousands of new readers, writes Rick Kogan.

As the city roared through the 20s, the so-called World’s Greatest Newspaper got a new home in Tribune Tower, but it also got a new competitor: radio.

In 1924, a man named Harold Gray walked into the offices of Joseph Medill Patterson, the co-editor of the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. He carried with him a number of drawings, samples for his proposal for a comic strip he wanted to call “Little Orphan Otto.” Patterson looked over the drawings, sat back in his chair and said, “Put a skirt on the kid and call him Annie.” Thus was born one of the most enduring and distinctly American comic strip characters, writes Rick Kogan.

Reporter Alfred “Jake” Lingle was walking toward the stairway to the Illinois Central Railroad Station at Randolph Street and Michigan Avenue on June 9, 1930, when someone stepped from behind and shot him dead. He was wearing a diamond-studded belt buckle, a gift from Al Capone. The eventual headline: “Tribune reporter was on the take, big time.”

Capone, a New York native, had arrived in Chicago in 1920 and would turn 21 the same day Prohibition was enacted. Bootlegger, racketeer and suspected orchestrator of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, the Tribune first referred to Capone as “public enemy No. 1″ in 1930.

No one knows how Maurine Dallas Watkins was hired at the Chicago Tribune in 1924 with no previous professional journalism experience. During her 8-month stint at the paper, she covered crime, courts and funerals, but also health, style, and the pacifism movement. Most importantly, she reported often on women inside Cook County Jail, then dubbed “murderess row.”

Between 1915 and 1920, Black Southerners were arriving in Chicago at a rate as high as 100,000 in one year, heeding the Chicago Defender’s call of the “promised land.” But as the city’s Black population grew, it was repeatedly relegated to run-down neighborhoods. When African-Americans arrived in more desirable neighborhoods, they were greeted with Tribune headlines like this one, from Feb. 23, 1918: “Rumored influx of Negroes stirs Wilson Avenue.”

Then Black teenager Eugene Williams drowned after crossing an imaginary line dividing the races while rafting on Lake Michigan in July 1919. Some 6,000 National Guard troops were deployed to the ensuing riot, and 23 Black people and 15 white people were killed.

Some 10,000 Chicagoans died in the epidemic that began locally on Sept. 8, 1918, when several sailors reported sick at Great Lakes Naval Training Station. Military bases had been jammed ever since the U.S. entered World War I the previous year, making them breeding grounds for a highly contagious disease.

But authorities were slow to acknowledge the looming disaster. On Sept. 21, the commanding officer of Great Lakes issued a statement reassuring worried relatives that “we have only 800 cases” among the base’s 45,000 sailors. A few days later, the Tribune editorially discounted “the so-called influenza epidemic.”

Riding high after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago’s civic and business leaders were looking to permanently beautify their city. In 1909, architect Daniel Burnham, who had overseen construction of the fair’s neoclassical “White City,” presented them with a big one. But his name, now synonymous with the plan that would remake the city’s lakefront, barely merited a mention in Tribune’s early coverage.

The plan would lead to the creation of iconic Chicago landmarks, from Navy Pier to Grant Park. But the South Side park that bears his name would go on to serve as an example of “benign neglect” affecting parks in Chicago’s Black and brown neighborhoods.

By the fifth game of the ill-fated World Series of 1919, the Chicago White Sox manager was ready to blow his top. “I don’t know what’s the matter,” William Gleason told a Tribune reporter after his team was shut out by the Cincinnati Reds on Oct. 6. “The bunch I had fighting in August for the pennant would have trimmed this Cincinnati bunch without a struggle.”

What Gleason didn’t know was that some of his players had been bribed to not play their best. When their duplicity came to light, it triggered one of the most notorious scandals in sports history. A century later, the 1919 team is still tagged the Black Sox.



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