Most self-penned histories of editorial boards trumpet the obvious successes.
The legislation motivated. The bad actors removed. The scandals unearthed and decried. The endorsed officials elected. The common-sense suggestions that then became enshrined in a great city’s legacy of progress (and backsliding).
We’ve had a few of those over the last 175 years.
But the most common condition of the editorial board? The provision of advice not taken.
We’ve had rather more of those.
But as we take part in this newspaper’s 175th anniversary celebration over the next several weeks, we hope to bring you some examples of what this page has had to say at various points in the city’s history, offered up with a bit of context, maybe a puff of pride, sometimes more than a tinge of regret. The page has reflected the quotidian opinion of the city’s leading newspaper, as subject to the changing winds of time and thinking and proprietorship as the city itself and, invariably, crafted without the benefit of time of long-term reflection, this being a daily publication.
Rarely has the newspaper suffered from undue humility.
“EVERY MAN’S DUTY — READ!” trumpeted this page in 1861, decrying “lickspittles” and other undesirables. “Let no Northern man or woman tolerate in his or her presence one word of treason,” we wrote, leading at the edge of the Civil War. “There is a republic!”
The editorial is not so much a suggestion or argument as, well, a command.
Not all of our editorials, though, were written from a position of such surety. And some took more effort to produce than you might think.
That never has been truer than in the first example we share, among the most famous editorials in the newspaper’s history: a piece that strived not to change policy or officialdom but to buoy the mood of a stressed-out city.
The paper had editorialized in September 1871 about shoddy building methods in Chicago: the walls “a hundred feet high but a single brick in thickness.” (Even 150 years later, those “all sham and shingles” issues hardly have gone away, leading us to editorialize about the lack of government oversight on building safety, the fire safety problems that go undetected, the dangerous abandoned buildings that remain to haunt the city.)
Weeks later, catastrophe struck.
On Oct. 9, a Monday evening, fire surrounded the Tribune’s offices, as it did so much of Chicago, leading the paper to rush to open another newsroom at 15 Canal St. and, on Oct. 11, to put out the following editorial, accompanying our story of the fire. Histories of the day make note that the Tribune as a business entity almost went down with its city that week. But we survived. And we had a suggestion or two for a city in the throes of an existential crisis, penned with the moral authority of a fellow sufferer.
You can read it for yourself, knowing more is to come.
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