Carr Vattal Van Anda was the managing editor of The New York Times from 1904 to 1932.
Background
Van Anda was born on December 2, 1864, in Georgetown, Brown County, Ohio, the only child of Frederick C. and Mariah E. (Davis) Van Anda.
Both parents were natives of Virginia. His mother, listed in the 1870 census as an invalid, evidently died soon afterward, for by 1880 his father had remarried and was living, with his son and his new wife, in Wapakoneta, Auglaize County, Ohio. A lawyer, he was serving in that year as prosecuting attorney.
Young Van Anda early evinced a passion for newspapers by producing his own paste-up version at the age of six. When he was ten, he built a makeshift printing press. He soon acquired a regular small press and began doing job printing, spending the profits on materials for experiments in chemistry and physics.
Education
At sixteen, Carr Vattel entered Ohio University at Athens, filled with ambition to excel in mathematics and physics. But after two years, deciding he had had enough "formal" education, he returned to Wapakoneta as printing foreman for one of the three village weeklies, the Auglaize Republican.
Career
Carr Vattel retained, however, throughout his life a strong and perceptive interest in science and mathematics. After a year with the village weekly, Van Anda in 1883, joined the Cleveland Herald, graduating from printer to reporter to telegraph editor. When his paper was merged with the Plain Dealer, he moved to the Evening Argus, but it failed in 1886.
Traveling east, he applied at the office of one of the leading newspapers of the country, the Baltimore Sun, and at twenty-two was offered the important position of night editor, with final responsibility for the selection of news and production of the paper's editions through the late night and early morning hours.
He left Baltimore in 1888 to become a reporter and copyreader for the New York Sun, published by Charles A. Dana and generally regarded as the top-ranking training ground for newspapermen. There, from 1893 to 1904, he served as night editor. Van Anda's work at the New York Sun had come to the attention of another former Midwesterner who also had dropped out of school to become a printer Adolph S. Ochs of the New York Times, who in February 1904 hired Van Anda as his managing editor.
During the next two decades, under Ochs's direction, Van Anda joined with editor Charles R. Miller and business manager Louis Wiley to develop a newspaper of outstanding stature. Van Anda's province was the newsroom, and it was his skill and leadership that stamped the Times by the 1920's as the foremost news operation in the country. Both historians of the Times agree that it was Van Anda who was "most directly concerned with the extraordinary development of the news department" and who "had an extraordinary flair for extending news-gathering techniques into fields previously held too deep for the reading masses".
But Ochs also wanted top-quality news gathering, spent the money for it, and insisted that Van Anda's news be put into the paper before space was allocated to advertising, and not vice versa. When Van Anda became too ill and exhausted in 1925, at age sixty, to continue his twelve-hour daily pace, he retired but retained the title of managing editor until 1932. He held stock in the Times, and his son, a lawyer, became a company director.
On January 28, 1945, his daughter, Blanche, died and a few hours after her death Carr Van Anda died of a heart attack in his New York apartment. Episcopalian rites were conducted for both father and daughter, and their ashes were buried at Frankfort, Kentucky.
Achievements
Van Anda is credited with an important role in the early use of trans Atlantic wireless news by the Times, in its development of a network of staff correspondents in the United States and abroad, in its introduction of rotogravure printing in 1914, in the development of the concept of the Times as a "newspaper of record, " which began with its exhaustive coverage of World War I, and in the founding of the famed New York Times Index.
It was Van Anda who produced the tremendous editions of the Times reporting the sinking of the Titanic in 1912; who focused attention on Einstein's theory of relativity in 1919 and later years; who obtained exclusive Times coverage of stories of adventure and science, ranging from the opening of the tomb of Tut-ankh-amen to the flights of Adm.
Richard E. Byrd over the poles and of Auguste and Jean Piccard in the stratosphere; who saw the Times win a Pulitzer Prize in 1918 for its documented war coverage; and who gloried in one of his final news beats, won by tying up the only telephone line into the remote Vermont village where Calvin Coolidge was taking a midnight oath of office as president of the United States.
Personality
Much of Van Anda's almost legendary fame is owing to his intuitive sense of news values, his enormous capacity for long hours of work, his keenly analytical intellect, and his educated curiosity about all manner of subjects. He loved to handle a major story, matching speed and wits against a deadline.
He also loved to exploit an important but underdeveloped story and give it painstaking coverage and significant play. But he never lost sight of the importance of conscientious and intelligent handling of the bulk of the news, and he transmitted this spirit to his staff, which found him a reserved, modest, and sympathetic chief.
Obituaries made clear that the man who had insisted upon virtually complete anonymity during his working life was recognized by his peers as "a giant of the press. "
Connections
While in Cleveland, on December 16, 1885, Van Anda had married Harriet L. Tupper; she died after the birth of their daughter, Julia Blanche, in December 1887. On April 11, 1898, he married Louise Shipman Drane of Frankfort, Ky. , by whom he had a son, Paul Drane.
