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4. Transitions
- University of Missouri Press
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4 Transitions ••• I cannot claim to be much ofa horticulturist, but I know a peach when I see one. - Walter Williams While twenty-three-year-old Walter Williams may well have been contemplating ajournalistic federation of the world, he prudently realized the need to start with something a bit smaller and nearer at hand: his home state, for example. In Missouri, as everywhere, he was certain the newspaper stood in need of understanding and elevation. He saw the challenge to the press as personal and urgent, and he attacked it head-on. Throughout his one-year term as president of the Missouri Press Association, and editing the Boonville Advertiser all the while, he doggedly crisscrossed the state, inspecting newspaper offices, conferring with community leaders, preaching the gospel of community journalism in speech after speech to civic and church and scholastic gatherings, exhorting his brother editors to do better, urging their readers to appreciate the task local editors faced and the dedication he believed their jobs required. "It should scarcely be necessary to say that the lips and life of the editor should be clean," he declared in a typical civic club speech. "His supreme mission is, I believe, to be a teacher. He is close akin to the philosopher, poet, priest. How important is his life, which is going to project itself through the printed page into so many other lives! It should be large-souled, manly, blameless. For the sake of journalism and more, for the sake of the struggling world, for which journalism is both staff and guide, let the Press stand for the noblest in thought and deed!"1 Williams's oratory, high-pitched but genuine and persuasive, won him plaudits from far and wide during 1889, the year of his press association presidency . Perhaps more far-reaching in importance than his civic club evangelism, however, were the private visits to newspaper plants throughout the state. In town after town he met newspaper staff members and heard their concerns, praised a well-printed front page or an attractive ad layout or an eye-catching headline or a new piece of typesetting equipment. He learned all he could. I. Published in the Proceedings ofthe Missouri Press Association, \889, 42. 52 Transitions 53 Later, over a quiet dinner with the publisher, he listened with care and talked knowingly about the community and the local newspaper's role in it. Before the evening was through, Williams typically had made the local publisher a friend for life. "Mr. Williams is an excellent gentleman, possesses splendid social qualifications, and causes cheerfulness to reign supreme wherever he is about," the editor of the Monroe City News wrote after one such visit in 1889. "He is ... in every way a credit to his profession."2 While bonding with his fellow journalists, Williams was also impressing Missouri's powerful politicians. Many of them he knew already; largely through his distinguished brother Billy and other members of his active and unwaveringly Democratic family, he had become personally acquainted with the governor and all living past governors, senators, congressmen, justices of the Missouri Supreme Court and most officials in state government as well as a fair number ofcounty politicians and municipal office holders across Missouri. Especially taken with young Williams was David R. Francis, dynamic former mayor of St. Louis, now settling into the governor's mansion at Jefferson City. With his elegant handlebar mustache, penetrating eyes, easy charm and smooth, big-city ways, Francis had managed in 1888 to recruit enough country voters to join his Democratic party power base in St. Louis and edge out the Republican, Prohibition, and Union Labor candidates for the governorship. When he took the oath of office in 1889 he was only thirtyeight years ofage. Later he would become Grover Cleveland's secretary ofthe interior and then president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Corporation. In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson would appoint him ambassador to Russia, where he served during the turbulent years of World War I and the Russian Revolution. On one vivid occasion in Moscow he single-handedly held off at gunpoint a Bolshevik mob on the steps of the American Embassy.3 In 1889, meanwhile, Francis was proving to be a highly effective governor: under his leadership the Australian, or secret, ballot became the norm for Missouri elections, affording voters a degree of confidentiality they had not enjoyed previously. He established a single statewide commission to buy textbooks for Missouri pupils, saving the strapped school districts an estimated...