Eleanor Medill Patterson was an American newspaper editor and publisher.
Background
Eleanor Medill Patterson was born on November 7, 1881 in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, United States. She was the second of two children and only daughter of Robert Wilson Patterson, Jr. , and Elinor (Medill) Patterson, both of Scots-Irish ancestry. Her mother was a daughter of Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, the city's leading newspaper; her father succeeded Medill as editor. Her parents were not a happy pair, the father preoccupied with work, the mother intent on social position. Cissy, as her brother Joseph called her (she disliked her given name, Elinor Josephine, and later changed it to Eleanor Medill). Cissy became a willful, "spoiled" child, as she later admitted, and suffered the consequences all her life.
Education
Eleanor Medill Patterson was brought up by governesses and was educated at Miss Hersey's School in Boston and subsequently at Miss Porter's in Farmington, Connecticut.
Career
Eleanor Medill Patterson's uncle, Robert S. McCormick, ambassador to Austria-Hungary, provided entre to Viennese society; and it was at a ball in Vienna that she met Count Josef Gizycki of Poland, a fortune hunter twice her age. Cissy moved through the 1920's with little sense of purpose. She bought a ranch near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she became a crack shot and imbibed a measure of Western progressivism. She presided at Dupont Circle as one of the capital's brighter hostesses and roamed the country in her private railroad car. She tried her hand as a novelist with Glass Houses, first published in French (in 1923), a satire on Washington society. Fall Flight (1928), a thinly disguised account of her harrowing marriage to Gizycki, was written after her second marriage.
The true career of Eleanor Patterson, as she now styled herself, began in 1930, when her friend Arthur Brisbane persuaded William Randolph Hearst to try her as editor-publisher of his ailing Washington Herald. Although she knew of newspapering little more than she had gleaned from her brother, founder of the New York Daily News, she threw herself into the job with familial zeal. From Boston she lured one of Hearst's best circulation men. She covered some stories herself, with flair, walking in on Al Capone for an interview. She hired and fired editors (seven in ten years), often on impulse, and she launched campaigns for home rule in the District of Columbia, for hot lunches for schoolchildren, and for a cleaner Potomac. In the early New Deal years, the Herald, sympathetic within Hearst-imposed limits, brimmed with news and gossip, and by 1936 Mrs. Patterson could point to a circulation double that of 1930. In August 1937, she leased from Hearst the Herald and his evening Times, and in January 1939 she exercised options to purchase them.
Against the advice of her brother and others, she combined them into a single all-day paper with six editions, the Washington Times-Herald. As lively and spiteful as its owner, the paper shortly became Washington's largest, turned a profit in 1943, and by 1945 was clearing $1 million a year. The paper backed Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election, but his lend-lease program soon roused isolationist feelings that led Mrs. Patterson to join her brother and her cousin, Col. Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, in strident opposition. Foes termed the trio "the McCormick-Patterson axis, " their antagonism to Roosevelt's policies continuing for the rest of his days. If she wielded the lightest weapon of the three, she did so with such joyous malice and vituperative zest that victims at times seemed more bemused than hurt.
Her paper, although readable, carried little weight in affairs of state. Mrs. Patterson's interest in her paper dwindled after World War II, and a lifelong sense of loneliness intensified after her brother's death in 1946. Eleanor Medill Patterson died in bed, apparently of a heart attack, at her estate near Marlboro, Maryland, and was buried in the Medill plot at Graceland Cemetery, Chicago.
Achievements
Politics
Eleanor Medill Patterson was an ardent isolationist and opponent of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Personality
Slender, copper-haired, wide-eyed, and of graceful carriage, Eleanor Medill Patterson cut a striking figure in Chicago and Washington society at the turn of the century. She was a quick-witted and mercurial, arrogant, self-deprecating, by turns kind and cruel, thoughtful of associates and suspicious of them.
Connections
Eleanor Medill Patter married Josef Gizycki at the family's new mansion on Dupont Circle in Washington on April 14, 1904, but left him soon after the birth of their daughter, Felicia, in Poland. There ensued a headlined struggle for custody of the child, which she finally won, and eight years of divorce litigation, settled in June 1917. On April 11, 1925, Eleanor Medill Patterson married to Elmer Schlesinger, a New York attorney. This marriage was dissolving when he died in February 1929.