George Bannerman Dealey was an American businessman, long-time publisher of The Dallas Morning News, and also owner of the A. H. Belo Corporation.
Background
George Bannerman Dealey was born on September 18, 1859 in Manchester, England. He was the fourth of nine surviving children and second of five sons of George Dealey, proprietor of a shoe shop, and Mary Ann (Nellins) Dealey. Bannerman was the name of a family friend.
His father was a native of Liverpool, his mother of County Monaghan, Ireland. When he was about seven years old, the family moved to Liverpool, where he attended school and worked as a grocer's apprentice. His father's bankruptcy in 1870 led the family to embark for Galveston, Texas, where relatives had settled. There the senior Dealey established a coffee and tea business.
Education
In Texas, Dealey attended school reluctantly for a few years while holding jobs as an organ pumper, office boy, and messenger. To improve his education he attended evening classes at the Island City Business College.
He received honorary degrees, mostly notably from Southern Methodist University, which he had helped bring into existence.
Career
In 1874 Dealey became office boy at the Galveston News, where his older brother was employed. Under the eye of the proprietor, Colonel Alfred H. Belo, George rose rapidly, becoming chief mailing clerk at the age of seventeen. In 1882 Belo sent him to north Texas to survey the possibilities for a new newspaper there as an offshoot of the Galveston News. Dealey recommended the raw town of Dallas as the best site, and when the Dallas Morning News was founded three years later, he was appointed its business manager.
Dealey spent the rest of his career at the Dallas Morning News. In 1895 Colonel Belo made him manager of the entire newspaper, not merely the business side, and five years later Dealey began the daily conferences that established his influence over editorial policy.
In 1902, after Belo's death, Dealey became a member of the board of directors for the Galveston and Dallas papers and, four years later, vice-president and general manager of the corporation. He became president in 1920.
In these years Dealey led the News into a gentlemanly, civic-minded journalism that was, as Adolph S. Ochs later asserted, the inspiration for the policies of the New York Times. Dealey turned down advertising he considered dishonest or immoral. Despite the loss of revenues, he banned hard-liquor advertisements, and during the booming 1920's he rejected oil-field promotions. Paternalistic toward his employees, he once settled by personal appeal a union stoppage that threatened publication of the initial issue of the Journal, an afternoon paper operated by the News from 1914 to 1938. As Dallas expanded into a city, Dealey enlisted the News in efforts for planning and improvements. His campaign in 1899 led to formation of a Cleaner Dallas League, which attacked litter and sewage pollution.
After a flood in 1908 Dealey pushed for a long-range city development plan; as an inspiration, the paper ran pictures of urban beauty from other cities. He aided in the building of a union railroad station and the removal of unsightly downtown tracks. Dealey was also active in publicizing Texas history and in urging aid to rural Texans. Dealey always followed a policy of tolerance. The news columns, for example, were early cleansed of anti-Semitic references. The News' uncompromising resistance to the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s, at a time when Dallas was a Klan stronghold, cost hundreds of subscribers and, coupled with the business recession, forced the sale of the parent Galveston News. With the decline of the K. K. K. in the mid-1920s, the company's outlook improved.
Dealey sought in these years to become owner, as well as manager, of the Morning News. After intricate negotiations with Colonel Belo's heirs, a reorganization was effected in 1926 under which Dealey received a majority of the company's voting stock, while the Belo family was compensated with nonvoting securities. Dealey cast a generally benevolent editorial eye on the New Deal, and the News supported Roosevelt's recognition of the Soviet Union.
Over the years Dealey brought members of his family into the company. His son E. M. (Ted) replaced him as president in 1940. Dealey at this time becoming chairman of the board. His younger brother, James Quayle, a retired political scientist, became editor-in-chief in the 1930s.
Dealey served on boards of nonprofit organizations (never on boards of other businesses), including Westminster Presbyterian Church in Dallas.
Still active at the age of eighty-six, Dealey died of a coronary occlusion in Dallas in 1946. The News continued under the leadership of his son and later of his grandson.
Dealey was determined to make Dallas a sound media and for businesses; he refused advertising that he considered dishonest or immoral.
Connections
On April 9, 1884, Dealey married Olivia Allen, the daughter of a newspaper publisher in Lexington, Missouri. They had five children: Annie, Fannie, Walter Allen, Edward Musgrove, and Mary.