Anne Elizabeth O'Hare McCormick

Background

Anne O'Hare McCormick was born on May 16, 1882, in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England, of American parents, Thomas and Teresa Beatrice O'Hare. She was brought to the United States as an infant and grew up in Columbus, Ohio.

Education

Anne attended private schools there, graduating from St. Mary of the Springs Academy in 1898 and earning a B. A. from the College of St. Mary of the Springs.

Career

During the second decade of the century, McCormick began her career in journalism by serving as an associate editor of the Cleveland-based national Catholic weekly, the Catholic Universe Bulletin. (At one time, her mother had contributed poetry, written a column, and served as the women's-page editor for the Bulletin. ) She also wrote poetry, which appeared in such magazines as Smart Set, and was occasionally good enough to be included in the annual Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse. She soon began writing feature articles on a free-lance basis for the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and others. Around 1920, McCormick wrote a "timid note" to Carr V. Van Anda, managing editor of the New York Times, asking if she might send him some dispatches from abroad. Van Anda replied "Try it, " and in late 1920, her articles began appearing occasionally in the Times. Her early stories covered the rise of fascism in Italy and focused on Benito Mussolini. While other journalists were dismissing Mussolini as just "an upstart Milanese newspaper editor, " McCormick insisted that his was "the master voice" to which Italy was responding. In 1922, she was made a regular correspondent, and after 1925 she wrote exclusively for the Times, with the exception of a series in the Ladies' Home Journal, in 1933-1934. McCormick continued to write features and news stories, often traveling at a whirlwind pace. In 1939, she studied conditions in thirteen countries in five months, including a stay in Huszt, Carpatho-Ukraine, during an aborted revolution, when she lived under three flags in twenty-seven hours. Her prose, which at first earned her the nickname "Verbose Annie" among the Times copy editors, was gradually streamlined until it needed virtually no editing at all. Eventually she was given a thrice-weekly column, first called "In Europe, " then later "Abroad. "

McCormick's work was characterized by thorough preparation. Her initial interview with Mussolini, in the fall of 1926, was typical. She had read, in the Italian original, Mussolini's new fascist law of corporations; when Mussolini asked her what interested her most in Italy, she answered, "The new law for the corporate state. " Upon discovering that she had actually read it, he rose, smiling, and took her hand, exclaiming, "My congratulations; you and I are the only ones who have!" This was the first of many interviews with Il Duce. McCormick also interviewed most of the other political leaders of her day, including Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Truman, Eamon de Valera, Léon Blum, Engelbert Dollfuss, and Gustav Stresemann.

Achievements

• In June 1936, McCormick became the first woman member of the editorial board of the Times, a position she held the remainder of her life. She thus wrote two unsigned editorials each week in addition to her column. In 1937, she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer prize in journalism. She received a number of other awards and honorary degrees, and was a delegate to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization conferences in 1946 and 1948. McCormick's one book, Hammer and the Scythe: Communist Russia Enters the Second Decade (1928), received excellent reviews. Two collections of her New York Times writing were published posthumously: The World at Home (compiled and edited by Marion Turner Sheehan, 1956) and Vatican Journal, 1921-1954.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Vatican journal, 1921-1954

    (This book opens with eye-witness accounts of two historic...)

  • The Hammer and the Scythe: Communist Russia Enters the Second Decade

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Communist Art

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • book

  • Story of St. Agnes parish, Cleveland, Ohio, 1893 to 1937
  • The World At Home: Selections From The Writings Of Anne O'Hare McCormick

Views

Quotations: "Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but the capacity to prevent it. "

"Groping along the tunnel-like streets you almost never hear a voice. Other gropers are shadows and footsteps. "

"Daily it becomes plainer that the struggle in Europe is the Apocalypse of the long drawn-out fight of man to control the machine. "

Personality

While interviewing she took no notes ("It makes people too cautious, " she asserted) and sought no political statements, since, she maintained, interviews were for revealing personality. McCormick's beat included Europe, Asia, and the United States, where she covered national political conventions, made campaign surveys, and reported local stories of national import. But she also frequented the "shops, farms and homes of the world's little people who were so frequently the vulnerables in the play of power politics. " McCormick's writing was marked by impartiality and precise logic. She was also given to sweeping, dramatic metaphors. Modest to a fault, McCormick was unwilling to reveal details of her personal life, and refused for years to be listed in Who's Who. When described by her colleagues as having an "uncanny knack of being where the news was breaking, " she commented merely that "crises were popping all over Europe at the time, so it isn't strange that I bumped into a few. " When in 1939 she was named Woman of the Year, she remarked that she had only "stolen some of the thunder" from a year of "thunderous events. "

Quotes from others about the person

• "McCormick is truly great reporter, respected at home and abroad for her keen analysis and impartial presentation of the news developments of our day. " - President Eisenhower

Connections

On 1916 Anne married Francis J. McCormick, an engineer and importer whose work frequently took him to Europe.

Father:

Thomas McCormick

Mother:

Teresa Beatrice O'Hare McCormick

husband:

Francis J. McCormick