For the 146th episode of the Journalism History podcast, Historian Kathryn Olmsted discusses her recent book, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, and explains how anti-interventionist attitudes by publishers such as Hearst, McCormick, and Lord Beaverbrook hindered the U.S. and British responses to Hitler’s rise to power.
Kathryn Olmsted is professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She studies the cultural and political history of the United States since World War I. Her previous books include Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley, and Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11.
Transcript
Kathryn Olmsted: All of them always said it’s not our business what happens over there. So, we should not do anything, even like sanctions, even like tough language to provoke Hitler because then he might go to war against us and we would start losing our own empires.
Ken Ward: Welcome to Journalism History, a podcast that rips out the pages of your history books to reexamine the stories you thought you knew and the ones you were never told.
Teri Finneman: I’m Teri Finneman, and I research media coverage of women in politics.
Nick Hirshon: And I’m Nick Hirshon, and I research the history of New York sports.
Ken Ward: And I’m Ken Ward, and I research the journalism history of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. And together we’re professional media historians guiding you through our own drafts of history. Transcripts of the show are available online at journalism-history.org/podcast.
This episode is sponsored by Lehigh University’s Department of Journalism and Communication, inspiring the future makers.
I don’t think it’s difficult for most people to question the motives of those who own the biggest media companies of today or the media owners of the past, for that matter. While we’ve moved on from the William Randolph Hearsts of the newspapered past to the Elon Musks of today, critics have no trouble finding faults in the way these people use the power provided by their media machines to manipulate public opinion. I assume for most people, though, that there’s a line that they assume owners won’t cross. Setting aside the present for a moment, most people might assume that a publisher like Hearst would wield some control over what his paper published and left out, but wouldn’t go so far as to actively hurt the interests of their own country.
(01:47):In his time, for example, Hearst wouldn’t have acted in ways that would help a supreme evil such as Hitler and the Nazis, and yet that’s exactly the contention made by Kathryn Olmsted, professor of history at the University of California, Davis. And her recent book, The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, she lays out the story of how six publishers in the United States and Britain actively stymied efforts to confront Hitler’s domestic reign of terror and ever-expanding conquest in Europe. Kathryn, welcome to the show. So, can you tell us what led you to this topic in the first place?
Kathryn Olmsted (02:24): Well, I’ve written – I had written before this book four books on the political and cultural history of the United States in the 20th century, and my book that came out in 2015 was called Right Out of California, and it was about opposition to the New Deal in California in the 1930s. And William Randolph Hearst played a big role in that, ’cause more than 60% of Californians got their news from a Hearst newspaper in the 1930s.
And so I got interested in Hearst, and the more that I read the Hearst newspapers, I thought, you know, it’s kind of crazy that a lot of the books that look at foreign policy and, and political history in the 1930s don’t use the Hearst newspapers as sources, considering that, you know, it’s by far the biggest newspaper chain in the country. And so then the more I got into the Hearst newspapers, the more I started thinking about other right-wing media newspapers in the 1930s. And then I got interested in the relationship between the American press barons and the British press barons and how they worked together to try and influence American and British foreign policy in the ‘30s, specifically the response to the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Ken Ward (03:38): Fascinating. And, yeah, so there’s – there’s the focus of your book. So, I think that it’s important to understand this book to really the characters who were at the heart of it. And in this case, and often in these, a book like this, we’d have, you know, two, maybe three people at the center. You got six. You got a big cast in this book. So, I definitely think we need to at least kinda get an idea who each of those people are. And I thought we would maybe move from west to east, since this is a transatlantic project as well. So, let’s start the west-most… I mean, we could – it would be Hearst out in California, but I kinda pegged Chicago, in this era at least, as the westernmost. Robert McCormick. Tell us a little bit about him.
Kathryn Olmsted (04:15): Well, he owned the Chicago Tribune, which at that point was the bestselling, regular-sized newspaper in the U.S., the bestselling non-tabloid newspaper. And he sold not only in Chicago, but what he called Chicagoland, which was, you know, about six or eight Midwestern states that distributed the Chicago Tribune. And it was extremely conservative. One of his critics called him the best mind of the 14th century. He was not only opposed to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but he was also very conservative on foreign policy, believed the U.S. should control Latin America. He was very much an American imperialist, but he did not want the U.S. to get involved in Europe.
Ken Ward: Okay. And moving a little bit farther east then, we have Hearst, right? We could’ve put him in California. We’re gonna put him in New York instead because of the Journal and this chain. So, tell us a little bit about him.
Kathryn Olmsted (05:10): Well, Hearst was the dominant media figure of the time. At his peak in the late ‘20s, early ‘30s, he had almost 30 newspapers throughout the United States, as well as a newsreel company and, and mass circulation magazines and a feature film company, goes on and on and on. Um, and he claimed to have 30 million readers a week and he was a Democrat who in his early years had been very much in favor of workers’ rights, but by the 1920s he had turned very conservative, worried about communism in the United States. And though he initially supported Franklin Roosevelt for president in 1932, he quickly turned against Roosevelt, the New Deal, and especially what he viewed as Roosevelt’s excessive interventionism abroad.
Ken Ward (06:04): So those two, McCormick and Hearst, I think a lot of people in our audience are probably familiar with. Here are a couple that might be sort of on the line. We have Joe Patterson and Cissy Patterson as well. So who are those two?
Kathryn Olmsted: Well, they were McCormick’s cousins. Uh, they … Robert McCormick and Joe and Cissy Patterson were all the grandchildren of the Joseph Medill, who had been this – one of the original owners of the Chicago Tribune. And Joe Patterson is not that well-known because he only had the one newspaper, but it was the New York Daily News, which was the bestselling newspaper in the United States at the time going through World War II. In fact, the bestselling newspaper in the United States then or since. They were selling up to four million copies, more than four million copies a day during World War II, and each copy reached two to four people. So, he had a tremendous audience, and The Daily News was extremely nationalistic and populist. Uh, and Joe Patterson had supported Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, early on in, in the ‘30s and up until 1940, but he was a really strong isolationist who believed the United States should not go to war against Nazi Germany. And he very quickly turned against Roosevelt as the war began and continued in Europe.
Ken Ward (07:27): And how about Cissy then?
Kathryn Olmsted: Cissy was his sister. Cissy did not get involved in newspapers until she was almost 50. Uh, she was, you know, an heiress, a socialite but she… as she, you know, got deep into middle age, she decided, well, you know, I’m from a newspaper family. I’d like to run a newspaper. And at first, she worked for Hearst and then she bought two of his newspapers in Washington D.C., and then merged them. It was the Washington Times-Herald, which although it no longer exists and is not well-remembered, was the bestselling newspaper in Washington D.C., in the nation’s capital, in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s.
Ken Ward (08:06): So then across the Atlantic we also have two important characters in the story, Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook. Who are these two?
Kathryn Olmsted: Yes. Well, Rothermere owned the Daily Mail, which in the early ‘30s was the bestselling British newspaper. That was his flagship. He owned several others. He was extremely conservative even more so than McCormick. Rothermere was an admirer of Adolf Hitler throughout the 1930s up until the war began in 1939. Um, and Daily Mail was extremely nationalistic and conservative.
And then Max Beaverbrook was quite different. He – Lord Beaverbrook owned the Daily Express, as well as other British newspapers. And the Daily Express overtook the Daily Mail in the – in the mid-‘30s as the bestselling British newspaper. And the Daily Express was not pro-Nazi, but it was what Beaverbrook called isolationist. I mean, that might seem bizarre to us today because he was an imperialist, but he believed that the British empire should operate in isolation from the European continent and that whatever happened in Europe was none of Britain’s business.
Ken Ward (09:16): Well, so that idea of isolationism is really important. And I know you just kinda clarified that definition for Beaverbrook. How did the – how did these folks generally – right? – We have six people. I understand there’s gonna be differences maybe on different sides of the Atlantic, but what did – how did these people define isolationism? What did it represent to them?
Kathryn Olmsted: Well, to them it meant that the Anglo-American powers particularly, you know, the U.S. and, and Great Britain should work together to extend their influence all over the globe, but also to isolate themselves from any conflicts on the European continent. So, you know, some historians don’t like to use the term isolationist ’cause they say, you know, how could these imperialists be considered isolationists? But that’s the term that they themselves used, and they just believed that it was very important for the U.S. and the UK to have nothing to do with Hitler on the continent. If he was taking over other countries, that was European business and the U.S. and the UK shouldn’t get involved.
Ken Ward (10:22): Now, as, as you told the story, I was struck that, that that idea of isolationism and the way that it was, maybe not put forward to people, but what it kind of represented in terms of what the folks who were saying that were – were feeling. In the United States, it seemed to involve a lot of racism, right? How, how, how did that racism fuel, especially in the U.S., that isolationist position, at least in terms of these characters in this story?
Kathryn Olmsted (10:47): Well, at the time, they viewed all these publishers – and this was a widespread view – viewed Jews as belonging to a different race. And so they talked about Jewish blood and how Americans of Jewish blood naturally sympathized with Europeans of Jewish blood, but that they should not be allowed to, you know, “drag” the U.S. or the – or the UK into confrontations with Hitler. So, there was a lot of antisemitism. Um, there was also, of course, racism against Japan, which initially in the U.S. manifested itself in terms of saying, oh, we just shouldn’t worry about what’s happening in Asia. And then when the U.S. got involved in the war with Japan, it manifested itself as extreme racism that the U.S. should just wipe out what it called – what these publishers called the yellow race because there was a worldwide war between the white race and the yellow race.
Ken Ward (11:55): Okay. So, you talked a little bit about these publishers, especially in the United States and how they dealt with the New Deal. Uh, briefly, could you summarize for us the early part of this era, in the ‘30s, how these publishers responded to the New Deal as we’re working our way towards World War II and as Nazi Germany and Hitler’s kinda consolidating power in Germany?
Kathryn Olmsted: Well, the New Deal was – involved a lot of things, but of course mostly Franklin Roosevelt was concerned about using governmental power to help the economy recover and also provide a safety net for Americans who were in desperate times during the Great Depression. And Robert McCormick/the Chicago Tribune was absolutely opposed to the New Deal from the beginning, all aspects of it. He believed that the government should not play such a strong role in the economy, or any role at all. Hearst initially supported Roosevelt until it turned out that the New Deal meant supporting union rights, which Hearst (laughs) was very much opposed to-
Ken Ward (13:00): (Laughs)
Kathryn Olmsted: Especially when his own employees started unionizing. And so then he turned against Roosevelt by ’34 and was just resolutely anti-Roosevelt, used all of the powers of his newspapers to oppose Roosevelt from that point on. Interestingly, Joe Patterson viewed himself as a populist and was mostly supportive of New Deal policies until he decided that Roosevelt was this dangerous aggressor abroad and was, you know, involving the United States in a war against Hitler’s Germany, which was the wrong – at the wrong time with the enemy, as far as he was concerned.
Ken Ward: And so how did all of these people – and again, pick the ones that you think are most important in this part of the story, but you know, you have six, six publishers. Uh, how did they respond during the earlier phases of – of Nazi aggression, for instance actions in Czechoslovakia, Austria, things like that? How did they … as that aggression started becoming a little bit more apparent internationally, how did they respond?
Kathryn Olmsted (14:03): Well, it’s interesting. There was some variation. I mean, the common thread throughout is that all of them always said it’s not our business what happens over there. So, we should not do anything, even like sanctions, even like tough language to provoke Hitler because then he might go to war against us and we would start losing our own empires. Um, but there were differences in how they perceived these various events. Rothermere/the Daily Mail was quite favorable to Hitler.
Um, and Rothermere himself he stepped down in the late ‘30s. He was in his 70s, and he gave the newspaper to his son, but privately he continued writing letters to Hitler that were fawning. Um, and he just believed it was a triumph. Whatever Hitler did to take over countries was great because he saw Nazism as a bulwark against communism. Hearst also saw a lot of things to admire in Hitler in the 1933, ’34. Uh, then he sort of backed away from that, but continued to believe that the U.S. should not do anything to “provoke” Hitler and provoke Hitler’s ire against the United States.
(15:13): And the rest of them really sort of understood that – that Hitler was brutal but, uh… and they condemned say the Anschluss and the invasion of Prague, but again said, okay, what’s happening over there is terrible, but it has nothing to do with us.
Ken Ward: So how does that change over time, right? What, what is it that – that – how many of these people kept that position throughout the entire war, right? What – what shifted their opinion, if anything?
Kathryn Olmsted: Well, you know, it’s quite astonishing the extent to (laughs) which they continued to hold onto these beliefs. Um, Rothermere, as I say, held onto it until the war started in 1939. Uh, and then he began to be – he worried that he might be interned by the British government because he had been so pro-Nazi. So, he used his contacts to get sent abroad to Canada in 1940, and he eventually he died in 1940. Beaverbrook, when the war started, of course, he was in favor of Britain winning the war, but he rumbled a lot, like-
Ken Ward: (Laughs)
Kathryn Olmsted (16:19): Governments trying to regiment us. Why is there all this rationing? Why are there the blackouts? And he even privately tried to facilitate some diplomacy that would lead to a separate peace with Hitler so that he would be a – Hitler and the Nazis could take over Europe, and Britain would be left alone.
Um, and then, you know, once that became untenable, interestingly enough, Beaverbrook’s old friend, Winston Churchill, became prime minister, and he named Beaverbrook to be his minister of aviation production. And Beaverbrook then suddenly turned it around, and when he, you know, was working for Churchill, he tried as hard as he could to build as many airplanes as he could as fast as he could. And it was all very impressive. And so what most people in Britain remember about Beaverbrook is, oh, he was great in World War II, and they sort of, you know, gloss over (laughs)-
Ken Ward: (Laughs)
Kathryn Olmsted (17:16): Or just conveniently forget his isolationism up until 1940. Hearst was all – once the war began, there were flags all over his newspapers, and he was very much, you know, in favor of the war, but he believed in a Pacific first strategy. He said, you know, the Pacific is a white man’s ocean, and we need to, you know, establish control over the white man’s ocean. And then, you know, once we’ve completely defeated Japan and taken over Asia, we can turn to Europe.
Um, and you know, Joe Patterson, I think, was the most extreme in just grumbling throughout the war that U.S. should not be involved in the war, that Roosevelt had tricked the American people in some way, implying that into the war, and that Roosevelt was using the war as an excuse to amass dictatorial powers. And it’s quite interesting reading the Daily News from the war, the editorials in particular, that their predictions in 1942 that Roosevelt is going to end democracy and that in 1944 that he’s going to win the election and then abolish the Constitution, abolish democracy and appoint one of his sons to be a successor. Like they are… They… Uh, Patterson becomes positively unhinged in his fear of Roosevelt becoming some sort of interventionist dictator in the United States.
Ken Ward (18:45): Well, so I think those things, particularly with relation to the United States and the media market in the U.S. and the U.S. government, raised some questions for me. I mean, one question that I’m sure our listeners are wondering is how influential were these newspapers really in the era? Um, did a lot of people read them? Did they look to them for the types of opinion leadership that these publishers might’ve been offering?
Kathryn Olmsted (19:11): Well, of course, you know, as, as journalism historians, you know, it’s so (laughs) hard to say how much they influenced the views of ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans certainly read these newspapers, and they read them a lot in much greater numbers than they read the New York Times or the New York Herald Tribune of these, you know, much smaller circulation newspapers that influenced policymakers and elites, but they did not – they were not bought by what the Daily News called the ordinary consumer.
The Daily News had this idea of its ideal reader, and they called him Sweeney. And Sweeney was this, you know, second- or third-generation Irish immigrant who was working class, who didn’t care about elite policymaking matters, and just wanted simple language and entertaining newspapers. And this formula worked for the Daily News. As I said, it was the bestselling newspaper in the United States and in, and in Britain and the whole Anglophone world. And I think it’s conservative to estimate that 60 million Britons and Americans got their news from these six press barons in the late ‘30s and, and early ‘40s. So, there’s tremendous reach.
(20:30): Now, were the people who were reading the Daily News reading it for Joe Patterson’s editorials or for the sports, you know-
Ken Ward: (Laughs)
Kathryn Olmsted: Or, or the – or the sensational crime coverage? That’s a little harder to tell, but the Daily News did do surveys of its readers, and much higher percentage of Daily News readers would read the editorials than in other newspapers because they found them entertaining. They liked the sort of, um, pugilistic, uh (laughs), style of the Daily News editorials where Patterson would like tell it like it is and, you know, say Roosevelt was threatening democracy and have this real angry nationalistic tone that apparently was welcomed by a lot of American readers.
Ken Ward (21:24): And so how did – I mean, a big part of the story – and you moved through it so well chronologically it’s so easy to see how these barons are acting as, as the conflict with Nazi Germany sort of increases over time. But, but a big piece in that is, is FDR’s administration and having to deal with isolationists who were much greater in number than these, these four people in the press.
Kathryn Olmsted: Mm-hmm.
Ken Ward: How did – how did the FDR administration counter this massive circulation in the U.S. that was advocating for non-intervention?
Kathryn Olmsted (21:58): Right. Well, FDR did directly attack them, and particularly, he had his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, who was one of his top advisers and known as sort of like the attack dog for the Democrats go after these press barons. And it was Harold Ickes who came up with this term the newspaper axis that I use for the book, the title of the book, because he believed that they were … by the time that the war started in Europe, but the U.S. was not yet involved, he believed that they were so isolationist that they were creating this axis of profascist support across the Atlantic.
Um, so he – So, Roosevelt did not hold back in saying, “I think that these isolationists are giving you the wrong information and you need to listen to me.” And the way he got his message across, of course, was through the fireside chats, is that he had throughout administration. Uh, the bulk of the press, of the newspapers had been against the New Deal. And so Roosevelt had tried to go over the heads of the press barons by talking directly to the American people in their homes by using radio.
(23:14): And then also Roosevelt encouraged … he did have some friends in the print media who were interventionists, notably Henry Luce, who was opposed to Roosevelt’s domestic policies, but was very, you know, pro-aid the Allies. And Luce owned Time, Life and Fortune, and even more important, he had a newsreel company March of Time, which by 1938 was putting out anti-Nazi newsreels.
And then radio in general became more of an interventionist medium by 1940, particularly, with Edward R. Murrow in London and the radio accounts, the live radio accounts of the Blitz, which really reached Americans in their homes. They could hear what was happening in Britain and how the Nazis were trying to take over Great Britain. And this really had a huge impact on public opinion. So, in other words, as Americans shifted more to listening to radio and getting their news from radio than from newspapers, the relative power of the press barons began to decline.
Ken Ward (24:30): Well, so with that in mind – and you could answer this in a couple of different directions, but do you think that these barons had a lasting impact, right? You know, you can think about that in terms of the news industry, politics, public discourse, and that’s on both sides of the Atlantic. Did these barons have a lasting impact on – are we – are we feeling them now?
Kathryn Olmsted (24:53): I think so. Uh, at the time I think people perceived that, oh, these people were very powerful for a time, and then all of these press barons had died by the ‘50s, or early ‘60s in the case of, Beaverbrook, and that this was an era in the past, you know, some isolationist past in American and British history that the Cold War just obliterated. But I think that that style of the right-wing populist, isolationist media, I think that that definitely … that attitude continued, that culture continued throughout the Cold War. It just was not as prominent.
And then, of course it – once the Cold War was over, it once again came to life. And you can see this in Britain, where the Daily Express and Daily Mail are still very much with us and influential and in favor of Brexit. The Daily Express even, like, took credit for Brexit it campaigned for it so much. And then in the U.S., you have not the same newspapers because those newspapers that I talk about in this book are shadows of their former selves now, if they still exist, but in the U.S., certainly you have that right-wing populist, isolationist attitude most prominently in Fox News.
Ken Ward (26:14): Very good. Well, I wish we had more time to talk about this, but we’re short. And so I just wanna take the opportunity to ask one last question that we ask every guest on this show, and that is, to you, why does journalism history matter?
Kathryn Olmsted: Well, because I think it’s important to understand how people at the time learned about what was happening in their world. So, historians for years have looked at elite publications like The New York Times and said, oh, this is how Americans were learning about the foreign policy crisis of the 1930s, when really we need to look at what Americans were actually reading and what messages they got from that media in their time. And that helps us better understand the constraints and, and, and possibilities that faced policymakers in that era.
Ken Ward: Absolutely. Well, Kathryn, we’re out of time, but it’s been great talking to you. Thanks for being on the show.
Kathryn Olmsted: Thank you for having me.
Ken Ward: Well, that’s it for this episode. Again, the book is The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler. Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to subscribe to our podcast. Until next time, I’m your host, Ken Ward, signing off with the words of Edward R. Murrow, “Good night and good luck.”
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