Murder of a Journalist: The True Story of the Death of Donald Ring Mellett

Preface

Preface T he late-nineteenth-century press lord and father of journalism ’s highest award, Joseph Pulitzer, wrote in 1904, “our republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested public spirited press, with trained intelligence to know right, and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.” Pulitzer knew something about journalism as a profession and the role of the press in a free society, having himself become rich crusading against public and private corruption. Pulitzer introduced a populist appeal to newspapers, asking the public to accept them as a champion of the little guy. His splashy investigative articles and editorial crusades worked. Circulation went up and with it profits and influence. every successful publisher of the day would have to follow some version of Pulitzer’s model. There were critics, and charges of yellow journalism, but the industrialization of newspapers by large corporations seeking profit ensured that Pulitzer’s template would endure. Despite this new aggressiveness by the press, violence against journalists was very unusual.· ix · x · preface The 1926 murder of Donald ring Mellett was an exception—a rare act of retribution against a journalist for what he advocated in print. The 1920s are remembered today for bootleggers and gangsters who organized crime syndicates that were far more sophisticated than most city law agencies and who operated across the lines of legal jurisdiction . A newspaper editor murdered for his editorial stance would be shocking today. But in the 1920s—the roaring Twenties—at the height of Prohibition, it was seen not as a killing but an assassination, with the victim becoming a martyr. The eighteenth Amendment was adopted to bring about a better world, one free of the social ills associated with alcoholic excess. instead, Prohibition resulted in a rise in crime, rich and powerful bootleggers, gangland violence, and widespread corruption. Prohibition could not have arrived at a worse time. The country was in a buoyant mood. A world war had just been won, and the united states was an emerging world power. The stock market was in a seemingly endless climb, fueled by borrowed money. And then there were the flappers wearing eye-popping short skirts, smoking , listening to the new jazz, and dancing the Charleston. Prohibition was seen by many Americans as spoiling the party and was ignored in the pursuit of a good time. reasoned voices in America, especially in the press, decried the decline in accepted mores and increasing disregard for the law. Their editorial protests generally lacked a focal point, however, and did not succeed in sparking national outrage. But, for a brief time, the slaying of Don Mellett did provide the focus needed to bring the issue of corruption and chaos to national attention. While calling for the speedy apprehension and punishment of Mellett’s slayers, many editors could not resist the opportunity afforded by the murder to attack what they saw as an epidemic of lawlessness that an apathetic American public seemed willing to tolerate. Press giant William randolph Hearst wrote in the trade journal Editor and Publisher that the assassination was “a crime against human life, a crime against freedom of the press, a crime against the safety of the public.”1 Journalists saw Mellett’s death as an assault by powerful criminal forces on their most cherished ideal: the freedom of the press. For many in the newspaper world, nothing less than the fate of the republic was at stake. preface · xi Don Mellett was not your typical 1920s journalist. A college-educated , temperate, and God-fearing man, Mellett came from a family of newspapermen in indiana that believed it was the duty of the press to work for the public good. He married his high school sweetheart and was father to four young children. As the sixth of seven sons born to a small-town publisher, Mellett was, not surprisingly, highly competitive. His much-traveled career included stints as the editor of a pro-Prohibition paper and of his own failed daily in indiana. At age thirty-three, Mellett landed in Canton, ohio, and in less than a year became editor and publisher of the Canton Daily News, one of several papers owned by former ohio governor James Cox and the number-two paper in a two-newspaper town. Mellett, who came to the job feeling he was a failure, was...