Background
Herman Henry Kohlsaat was born on March 22, 1853 in Albion, Illinois, United States. He was the son of recent immigrants, Reimer and Sarah (Hall) Kohlsaat, was identified with Galena, Illinois, in his youth.
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Herman Henry Kohlsaat was born on March 22, 1853 in Albion, Illinois, United States. He was the son of recent immigrants, Reimer and Sarah (Hall) Kohlsaat, was identified with Galena, Illinois, in his youth.
With scanty formal education, Kohlsaat undertook his living in Chicago.
Before Kohlsaat was forty he had bestowed upon his adopted town, Galena, a striking statue of General Grant, and a painting of Lee's surrender, by Thomas Nast; and he had brought Governor McKinley of Ohio to that town on Grant's birthday, to deliver a commemorative address. Kohlsaat was one of the little group of friends that had rescued him from bankruptcy when he was involved in the failure of Robert L. Walker in February 1893. His fortune came from his interest in a wholesale baking concern, in which he had first worked as an errand boy and drummer, and from a chain of low-price lunch rooms in Chicago. Thus was explained, if not justified, the epithet of John J. Ingalls, who called him in a moment of exasperation "that d--d pastry cook".
He was a devoted Chicagoan, using his journal for the advancement of the interests of the world's fair of 1893. And he had now become a devoted admirer of William McKinley. After the sale of his interest in the Inter Ocean, Kohlsaat took the first vacation of his life, and for the remaining thirty years of his career he permitted himself to do as he pleased in business, politics, and travel. He searched for another metropolitan newspaper, looking into the affairs of the Chicago Tribune, the New York Tribune, and the New York Times; but he came to it by the accident of the unexpected death of his old friend James W. Scott. Scott had combined the Chicago Times with the Chicago Herald, March 4, 1895, but had dropped dead in New York six weeks later. On April21, 1895, Kohlsaat appeared as editor and publisher of the Chicago Times-Herald, converting it immediately into an independent journal devoted to a protective tariff and the gold standard. On March 28, 1901, he renamed it the Chicago Record-Herald, having bought the Chicago Record from Victor Lawson. The Chicago Evening Post, which had been part of the Times-Herald property, he released in 1901 to John C. Schaffer.
He had no desire for office for himself, but his brother Christian was made a federal judge by McKinley, and he secured the Treasury for Lyman J. Gage of Chicago. He had great satisfaction in knowing the presidents and acting as their "brutal friend. "
For several years after 1902 he took a vacation from journalism, interesting himself in Chicago real estate; but he was back in the editorial chair of the Record-Herald from January 1, 1910, until September 7, 1911, directing that journal alongside the Chicago Tribune in the fight to unseat William Lorimer as senator from Illinois. A little later he had a year with the Inter Ocean again, before James Keeley merged it and the Record-Herald into the Chicago Herald, which first bore the new name June 14, 1914. In 1912 Kohlsaat was driven by rough misrepresentation by Roosevelt into an active support of Taft, and he could not resume his intimacy with Roosevelt until war made it seem to be an imperative duty. His death came suddenly in Washington, whither he had gone on invitation of Judge K. M. Landis to see the world series, and where he was a guest in the house of Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce.
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Kohlsaat was a devoted Republican, going to the convention of 1888 as an alternate, and bringing to the party the support of the Daily Inter Ocean, of which he was part owner from 1891 until May 3, 1894.
As the aggressive antagonist of free silver Kohlsaat increased his prominence among western Republicans. He pressed upon McKinley the necessity for an emphatic stand upon gold, and he was with Hanna in the preconvention conferences of 1896, when the leaders agreed that the Democrats should be met squarely upon this issue. It irked him to hear that anyone else claimed to be the author of the gold plank, and he carried on a prolonged fight in defense of his own claim from the time he announced it when a journalist (Chicago Times-Herald, June 17, 1896) until he published his reminiscences in the Saturday Evening Post from May 13, 1922, to January 13, 1923.
At the age of twenty-seven Kohlsaat married Mabel E. Blake, daughter of E. Nelson Blake, the president of the Chicago board of trade. His two daughters survived him.