Joseph Albert Wheelock

Background

Joseph Albert Wheelock was the son of Joseph and Mercy (Whitman) Wheelock. He was born in Bridgetown, Nova Scotia.

Education

He received his formal schooling at Sackville Academy.

Career

At an early age he went to Boston and thence to the newly organized Territory of Minnesota, following the advice of Caleb Cushing, who started Boston investments there. Wheelock reached St. Paul in 1850. After being employed as sutler's clerk at Fort Snelling by Franklin Steele, he began his life work in November 1854 by publishing with Charles H. Parker the Financial and Real Estate Advertiser, which was absorbed by the St. Paul Pioneer and Democrat in 1858. For a time he was associate editor of the Pioneer, but on January 1, 1861, William Rainey Marshall made him associate editor of the St. Paul Daily Press when it was launched as a Republican organ to oppose the Pioneer, a Democratic paper. Marshall's joining the Union army left Wheelock in charge of the new paper. A series of consolidations, ending with the absorption of the Pioneer in 1875, made the St. Paul Daily Pioneer-Press the most influential newspaper of the northwest. For nearly thirty years the Pioneer-Press was Wheelock, and Wheelock was the Pioneer-Press. Wheelock was known almost exclusively through his editorial columns, for he was not a man of easy friendships and "was little known for a man who wielded such a paramount influence over the early destinies of the state. He was polished, reserved, retiring. He cultivated neither the manners of the frontier nor the popular language of the new country". He rarely appeared in print outside his paper, although as commissioner of statistics he brought out in 1860 Minnesota: Its Place among the States and in 1862, Minnesota: Its Progress and Capabilities, reports which were praised as models of statistical presentation. No office-seeker, his only other public appointment was as postmaster of St. Paul (1871 - 75), until, in 1893, he was made a member of the city park board. Here he found congenial work, for the activities of this body carried into practice some of the things he had long advocated in the Pioneer-Press, and the system of parks and boulevards developed in St. Paul bears witness to the success of his endeavors. A Republican and editor of the leading Republican paper of the state, Wheelock was no slavish partisan. He disagreed with his party's Reconstruction program and did not hesitate to state his views. For twenty years he fought the faction led by Ignatius Donnelly, and through his "energy, impetuosity and indomitable will" saved the faction of Alexander Ramsey from "utter and ignominious defeat". When, in the eighties, the Republicans began to formulate a tariff policy Wheelock was indefatigable in opposing "the general proposition which the practical protectionist of today always tacitly asserts; that if an American citizen chooses to engage in any business under the sun, from the making of ice in Louisiana to the raising of bananas in Maine, he has a right to have a profit secured to him through the medium of a tax on the whole people". He would work for freedom of trade "which knows only such duties as may be necessary to equalize the cost of production here and abroad".

Achievements

• In the eighties he saw the significance of the silver question, and studied and expounded it frequently; in the nineties his editorials were generally acknowledged to have been a most significant factor in keeping Minnesota in the gold ranks, as well as exercising a potent influence over a much wider area. So often did he differ with his party that its leaders more frequently than not looked upon him as a bull in a china shop. With all his preoccupation with national problems he used his editorials incessantly for what he conceived to be the welfare of St. Paul and Minnesota. When he died, tributes to his influence appeared in papers all over the country. "Joe" Wheelock's demise was a national event.

Connections

Wheelock married Kate French of Concord, N. H. , in May 1861. They had three children.

Father:

Joseph Wheelock

Mother:

Mercy (Whitman) Wheelock

Spouse:

Kate French