Helen Rogers Reid was born on November 23, 1882 in Appleton, Wisconsin, the daughter of Benjamin Talbot Rogers, a hotel operator and owner of mining interests in Wisconsin and Michigan, and Louise Johnson. Business difficulties and the death of her father in 1885 irreversibly depleted the family's resources.
She received encouragement from one of her older brothers, who in 1892, as headmaster of Grafton Hall, an Episcopal seminary for girls in Fond du Lac, secured a scholarship for his sister. In 1899 she enrolled at Barnard College in New York City. She managed and acted in school plays, sang in the chorus, turned a profit for the yearbook, and volunteered at the Henry Street Settlement. She chose zoology as her major, influenced by Henry Crampton, for whom she wrote a senior thesis called "The General Physiology of Minute Crustacea. " Money from home completely disappeared in the middle of her college years, and she therefore took on clerical work in the bursar's office, tutoring, and dormitory housekeeping. Rogers received her B. A. in 1903.
With her mother as chaperone, was hired as social secretary to Elisabeth Mills Reid, who was the daughter of the financier Darius Ogden Mills and the wife of Whitelaw Reid, the owner of the New York Tribune.
Elisabeth Reid admired Rogers' better education and her articulate decisiveness. For the next eight years, Rogers made the most of her knack for detail, an unfrivolous nature, and a determination to escape her family's genteel poverty.
She started at $100 a month, twice the salary she was offered to teach school in the Midwest, and proved a good companion and increasingly indispensable manager for the lavish Reid households in Westchester, New York City, and London, where, from 1905 until his death in 1912, Whitelaw Reid was ambassador to the Court of St. James's.
Helen Reid began to study her husband's pursuits. She took little interest in the Tribune, her husband's property after his father's death, until 1918, when her sister Florence moved east to help with the children and housekeeping, freeing Reid to become the Tribune's advertising director.
Her first two years with the paper were especially productive, with gross revenues increasing from $1. 7 million to $4. 3 million. The newspaper's historian, Richard Kluger, credits her with securing 90 percent of the increase. She personally interviewed and persuaded leading retailers to buy advertising space in the Tribune. She was made a vice-president in 1922 and helped arrange Elisabeth Reid's purchase of the New York Herald in 1924.
The expanded paper, the Herald Tribune, returned a profit of over $1 million by 1928 and became one of the nation's best newspapers. Reid bitterly blamed herself and her busy schedule for her daughter's death in 1924 from typhoid fever.
Her husband's ill health, a result of alcoholism, began to curtail his role at the paper and in Republican politics. She tried to fill the void, earning a reputation as "Queen Helen. "
At dinner parties, she combined prestige and politics, and illustrious guests were known to rise and answer her questions as if addressing a public meeting. Although Reid was generally kept to the advertising side of the newspaper by her choice and her husband's design until his death in January 1947, when she succeeded him as president, her influence extended to editorial content. She brought the columnists Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Thompson to the paper and appointed Marie Mattingly Meloney director of the annual Forum of Current Events, which in the 1930's and 1940's served as the political agenda for an estimated 50, 000 women's clubs. She helped establish the paper's Home Institute, a demonstration kitchen, and hired Clementine Paddleford as a food writer.
She hired Dorothy Dunbar Bromley to write on social issues and her close friend Irita Van Doren, Wendell Willkie's companion, as the well-regarded editor of a Sunday literary section. She brought in the fashion arbiter Eugenia Sheppard and sent to Europe and the Far East the reporter Marguerite Higgins, one of the first women to cover a war and the first to win a Pulitzer Prize for doing so, for her coverage of the Korean War.
The Herald Tribune is credited with having had more women staff members in the 1940's than any other American daily newspaper.
Reid traced her feminism to her Barnard years, noting that "working my way through, the necessity for complete independence of women was borne in upon me. " She rallied to woman's suffrage as state treasurer for New York's successful 1917 campaign, helping to raise a half-million dollars.
She was a trustee of Barnard from 1914 to 1956 and chairman from 1947 until her death. She instituted a liberal maternity leave policy at the college and solicited donations that enhanced its budget. She regularly endorsed educational advancement and economic independence for women, greater contributions by men to daily family life, and military service for women. A liberal Republican all her life, Reid met with President-elect Warren Harding to influence his cabinet choices. She also advised the presidential campaigns of Wendell Willkie and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The latter appointed her in 1953 to the Committee on Government Contracts, investigating discrimination in the awarding of federal funds. Clare Boothe Luce said of Reid's influence in New York, "In those years, New York Republicanism was Helen Reid. " Since a great deal of local and state politics was controlled by Democrats, Reid was not always in touch with decision-makers. Her preference for the social elite often inhibited, rather than fostered, her influence. Similarly, at the Herald Tribune many associates thought she refused to promote capable Jewish staff members, some of whom left to pursue brilliant careers at the rival New York Times.
In 1937 poor judgment led her to accept the Cuban Red Cross's Comendador Order of Honor and Merit in October and, the next month, to publish a forty-page supplement extolling Cuba's Fulgencio Batista, an essay purchased for $32, 000 and not identified to the reader as an advertisement. She also lost irretrievable advertising and circulation to the Times because of her higher advertising prices, based on the assumption that the bulk of her newspaper's readers were, and should remain, well-to-do consumers.
In 1953, Reid became chairman of the Tribune's board and relinquished the presidency to her son Whitelaw, retaining controlling stock ownership.
In 1955 she eased Whitelaw out of the presidency to make way for her younger son, Ogden, who became president, publisher, and editor. Neither son succeeded at the editorial or business tasks of the paper, and in 1958 the Herald Tribune was sold to John Hay Whitney, who also was unable to reverse the decline. Renamed the World Journal Tribune, the paper closed in 1967, though offspring such as the International Herald Tribune and New York magazine continued to maintain independent publication. She died in New York City.
Feeling burdened by "the almighty struggle for adjusting and manipulating everything for myself, " Rogers became engaged in 1910 to Francis Nash, a Princeton graduate whose background resembled her own. Rogers' interest in Nash paled quickly, however, when she assessed his limited prospects as a small-town lawyer. She broke the engagement within a few months, much to the relief of Elisabeth Reid and her only son, Ogden Mills Reid, who had casually entertained Rogers for years. Attracted to Ogden Reid's sunny personality, though dubious of his intellectual abilities and flippant attitude toward work, Rogers married him in Appleton on March 14, 1911; they had three children. Elisabeth Reid gave her daughter-in-law a generous monthly allowance and substantial cash gifts on each anniversary, effectively foreclosing Helen's dependence on her husband and permitting her to help her family.
