Milton A. McRae was an American newspaper publisher.
Background
Milton Alexander McRae was born on July 13, 1858, in Detroit, Michigan. He was the third child of Duncan B. and Helen (Stevenson) McRae, both of Scotch descent.
The father had been brought to Canada as a lad; later he went to Detroit, where he engaged in the dry-goods trade.
Education
In the public schools, Milton at once manifested noticeable creative talent, particularly in contriving and managing juvenile shows and circuses.
Career
After the death of his mother, when McRae was fourteen, McRae persuaded his father to let him go to work. For some time, he ran a wide gamut selling groceries, acting on the stage, managing a traveling theatrical troupe, teaching a country school, braking on a railroad, compiling a city directory, newspaper reporting all the while cherishing an ambition to become a physician, an ambition which he sharpened by industrious reading of books on physiology and anatomy.
A cub reporter on the Detroit Free Press, he wormed his way, as an intern, into the pest house during a smallpox epidemic and wrote so realistic a story of his experiences as to cause an increase in his pay. Assigned to help in the promotion of an "Excursions-to-the-Sea" scheme undertaken by the paper, he did so well that he was induced to stay on in the advertising department at a salary.
Closer contact ensued with the publisher, James E. Scripps, and also with Scripps's brothers, who were interested together in dailies in Cleveland and Cincinnati. McRae was on the point of taking a War Department clerkship at Washington, when Scripps convinced him that a greater opportunity awaited him as advertising manager of the Cincinnati Penny Paper, soon renamed the Penny Post.
He accepted this position and his rise in the newspaper world was thereafter continuous. He became business manager of the Post the next year, 1883, and, in 1887, managing director of the Evening Chronicle, which Edward W. Scripps had started in St. Louis and which McRae consolidated with the Star. These papers were the first in each city to sell for one cent.
In 1889, McRae entered into a life-partnership agreement with Edward W. Scripps to pool salaries and profits on a division basis of one third and two thirds respectively. They soon began systematic development of their plan for a chain of newspapers of the same popular type as those they had been conducting. Their policy called for the purchase or establishment of papers in many cities.
During one period of six months, McRae organized and put into operation six such papers. Not all were successful. Characterizing William R. Nelson as "one of the best newspapermen America has ever produced, " he added, "I ought to know he ran us out of the Kansas City field and cost us several hundred thousand dollars". The enterprise as a whole proved most profitable, however, and, subsequently reorganized, became the Scripps-Howard Newspapers.
In 1897, the Scripps-McRae Press Association, with McRae as president, was formed to furnish news to the papers of the Scripps-McRae League. Other evening papers desiring the service were later admitted and the association developed into the United Press Associations, a worldwide news-gathering and distributing agency of the first magnitude.
Forced by ill health into partial retirement at the age of forty-nine, McRae returned to Detroit and directed his energies to civic and philanthropic objects. The Boy Scouts of America, especially, commanded his hearty support and he filled out an unexpired term as its national president.
Public office, however, never tempted him. He refused a commission on the military staff of McKinley when he was governor of Ohio and was promptly dubbed "Colonel" by his newspaper colleagues. The title thus bestowed clung to him and was proudly borne. His keenest enjoyment came from extensive travels to all quarters of the globe.
Newspaper reminiscences and observations abroad constitute the subject matter of his Forty Years in Newspaperdom, published in 1924.
His death occurred in the Scripps Memorial Hospital at La Jolla, California, not far from his winter home in San Diego, in which place he was buried.