Tagged: IDW

I did a column a couple weeks ago about the wacky New York Post, spurring a comment from Vinnie Bartilucci about how the rag is merely a return to the glory days of yellow journalism. There’s a lot of truth to that, and I was reminded of statements by the brilliant columnist Jimmy Breslin. He persistently advocates on behalf of the entertainment value of the medium and recently told New York magazine “newspapers are so boring. How can you read a newspaper that starts with a 51-word lead sentence? They’re trying to prove they went to college.”

My first journalism teacher got his start in Chicago’s The Front Page days, and he dazzled me. Here’s a guy who, when he was roughly the age I was at the time, ran with the likes of Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur. He worked for William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago American, a paper so yellow they actually printed the front page flat on yellow newsprint – hence the name. He worked in the fabled Madhouse on Madison Street, a building across from the Chicago Civic Opera house (of Citizen Kane fame) that was so ugly that when Hearst saw it, he refused to walk in. Editors would routinely call the wives of murder victims posing as policemen asking the immediately-widowed that she gather a few really “interesting” photos of the deceased for a “detective” who would be showing up at the front door within a few minutes. Within an hour or two, those photos would be on the front page.

I loved that stuff. By the time I was reading newspapers, Hearst died, the American had been sold to the staid Chicago Tribune, and the Madhouse on Madison Street became a commercial office building with a slightly less tacky new façade. Ironically, Hearst’s Midwest advertising sales offices remained headquartered in the facility.

But Hearst and Hecht and MacArthur, and their New York counterparts like Walter Winchell and the amazing Damon Runyon, had nothing on Bernarr Macfaddon. For one thing, back before the Great Depression, Macfaddon invented Photoshop.

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Well, that headline ought to cause some Google searcher meltdown. But the fact is, right wing poster child Little Orphan Annie has a lot in common with mega-leftie songleader Pete Seeger.

This dawned on me because of the confluence of recent events. IDW released the first volume of The Complete Little Orphan Annie last week. American Masters ran its documentary about Pete earlier this month and, yes, it’s PBS so it’ll be rerun forever. Which is fine; both are absolutely first rate. Both are American legends.

Little Orphan Annie was created by Harold Gray, a man who fit in nicely with his boss, the contemptible isolationist Col. Robert McCormack, a man so far to the right when he disagreed with the politics coming out of Rhode Island he removed their star from the American flag that was raised right above his office atop Chicago’s Tribune Tower. Until he was told he could go to jail for desecrating the flag, McCormack and his employees – including Gray – worked right under America’s only 47 star flag. Both Gray and McCormick loathed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the point of histrionics. Gray’s comic strip fully represented those values; Annie’s Daddy Warbucks even did a little jig on FDR’s grave.

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