Moses "Moe" Louis Annenberg was a Jewish American newspaper publisher, who purchased The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Background
Moses Louis Annenberg was born on February 11, 1878 in Kalwischen, East Prussia, later part of the Soviet Union.
He was one of eight children and the youngest of three sons of Jewish parents, Tobias and Sarah (Greenberg) Annenberg. In 1882 the father, a farmer and storekeeper, emigrated to the United States, and by 1885 the entire family had joined him in Chicago. Their way up from poverty was hard.
Tobias Annenberg started a junk business but never achieved any degree of wealth. His sons went to work after only brief schooling, Moses in his father's business and then as a Western Union messenger, as a starter for a livery stable, and as a bartender.
Education
Annenberg only had a scant amount of schooling.
Career
William Randolph Hearst's new Evening American hired Annenberg's brother Max as a circulation manager, and in 1900 Max in turn hired Annenberg as a "40-mile road man" soliciting subscriptions.
Annenberg rose fast. In 1904, when Hearst started a morning paper, the Examiner, he became circulation manager and took charge of the battle to capture choice street-sale positions from established papers--a competition that later broke into murderous gang warfare. The circulation war and his brother Max's deeper involvement in it dogged his reputation ever after.
Before open fighting began, however, Annenberg had quarreled with his brother and had moved, about 1907, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Pawning his young wife's jewelry to raise the initial $1, 500, he started an agency to distribute all the Chicago papers.
The business expanded gradually; in a dozen years he set up similar agencies in twenty cities. His first substantial money came from a promotion scheme suggested by his wife (a newspaper coupon offer of teaspoons decorated with state seals), and he was able to invest in such Milwaukee real estate ventures as automobile garages and inexpensive apartments.
His career moved upward again in 1917 when Arthur Brisbane, Hearst's premier editorialist, bought three Milwaukee papers and merged them into the Wisconsin News. He made Annenberg publisher; the new publisher promptly tripled the circulation to 80, 000. When Brisbane sold the paper to Hearst (as was the custom in the Hearst organization), Annenberg remained as publisher for a year before Hearst called him to New York in 1920. Annenberg thus attained the summit of the Hearst organization just twenty years after his humble start. The publisher made him circulation director for all Hearst newspapers and magazines and a member of his executive council. His salary was $50, 000, but he was already making more from his own properties, which Hearst permitted him to keep. When Hearst covertly founded the New York Mirror in 1924, Annenberg became its president and publisher.
By 1926, Annenberg's personal enterprises were so substantial that he resigned from the Hearst organization. Among his holdings was the Daily Racing Form, which he had bought in 1922 with two associates. Later he added other horse-racing papers, notably the New York Morning Telegraph.
In 1927 Annenberg pursued even larger returns by working his way into the racing wire services, which supplied instant information on racing results to subscribers--mostly illegal betting sites. He bought a half interest in the General News Bureau, based in Chicago, and acquired a partner named John L. Lynch. Annenberg devoted the next seven years to driving out first the competition, then his own partners.
About 1930 he absorbed the three major competing services and established a near monopoly of information transmitted from twenty-nine American racetracks to possibly 15, 000 bookmaking establishments. To get rid of his partner Lynch, he started a rival bureau called Nation-Wide News Service, Inc. By manipulating the prices and services of both bureaus, Annenberg forced Lynch to sell out; the old General News Bureau was then discontinued and Nation-Wide took over. By similar means, Annenberg drove his partners out of the Daily Racing Form.
He established a dominance not only in racing newspapers but in the miscellaneous publications, such as scratch sheets, used by bettors. While the country struggled in the Great Depression, Annenberg prospered. The government estimated his income for the single year 1936 at more than $2, 300, 000; it also estimated that his net worth rose from just under $8, 000, 000 in 1930 to $19, 500, 000 in 1938.
He divided his holdings into sixty-five or more corporate entities, controlled through holding companies--notably the Cecilia Company, named for his wife and held entirely by Annenberg family members.
Annenberg reentered general newspaper publishing in 1934 with the founding of the Miami Tribune. With his experienced touch it soon reached a circulation of 100, 000. It also became involved in a dispute with Miami's mayor, E. G. Sewell, over the mayor's antigambling campaign. Before the fight ended, the Tribune had driven the mayor out of office. Annenberg abruptly sold the paper in 1937 in exchange for $500, 000 and a daily in Ohio; the Tribune's city administration was swept out by Miami voters the next year. Even before leaving Miami, Annenberg had staked his claim to journalistic respectability in Philadelphia.
There, in August 1936, he bought the 107-year-old Inquirer. The price was said to have been $15, 000, 000; later court testimony set it at $6, 750, 000. The paper, declining in circulation, soon reversed itself under Annenberg's stimuli--a bounteous increase in comic strips, a sensational picture magazine, and the publisher's detailed attention to distribution. In two years daily circulation rose 23 percent to 345, 000; the Sunday paper rose 55 percent to 1, 036, 000.
Annenberg used the Inquirer to jump into state politics on the side of the Republican organization of Joseph N. Pew, Jr. His chief newspaper competitor in Philadelphia, J. David Stern of the Record, was also his political antagonist, Stern being one of the few publishers close to the New Deal. Annenberg had supported Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, but in a long editorial on June 30, 1937, he broke with the administration to pursue the double goal of political and business victory.
In 1938 the Inquirer endorsed Superior Court Judge Arthur H. James to succeed Gov. George H. Earle, a Democrat known for his "little New Deal" program. Annenberg himself had become a major campaign issue. Senator Joseph F. Guffey assailed him in a statewide address, and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes came to Philadelphia to denounce him as "the scourge of two cities. "
A flurry of libel suits followed, all of them dropped after the Republican victory in November. Annenberg's political emergence coincided with the first signs of official action against his racing-news monopoly. During the campaign, Governor Earle had inspired a state investigation that resulted in a Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission order to three telephone companies to stop service to Annenberg's racetrack circuits. Annenberg responded by moving his facilities across state lines. More serious was his trouble with the federal government.
On April 25, 1939, Attorney General Frank Murphy announced that the findings of a three-year investigation of Annenberg's income taxes would be placed before Chicago grand juries. In August 1939 the grand juries produced two sets of indictments, one dealing with tax evasion, the other with the track-information monopoly. Annenberg was indicted for evading $3, 258, 809 in federal income taxes from 1932 through 1936; penalties and interest brought the total owed to more than $5, 500, 000. Annenberg's son, Walter, was indicted at the same time for aiding evasion. The second group of indictments charged that the Annenberg services had used the mails for an illegal lottery by distributing coded sheets that identified the horses.
Only weeks later, federal pressure brought the collapse of the wire-service system: the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Western Union, and Illinois Bell Telephone agreed to end service on their leased facilities, and Annenberg dissolved Nation-Wide at once. Even with his wire-service business closed, Annenberg was unable to strike a bargain with the government.
Although he maintained that he owed much less than the government claimed, he pleaded guilty on April 23, 1940, to one charge of tax evasion--that for 1936. In June he signed an agreement with the Treasury to pay nearly $10, 000, 000 to cover all claims dating back to 1923. If he had hoped to avoid prison with this step, he was disappointed; he received a sentence of three years, and was sent to the Northeastern Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, on July 23, 1940.
The other charges against him and his associates, including his son, were dropped or reversed. Before entering the penitentiary, Annenberg had told an interviewer: "I am physically broken. " During his sentence his health deteriorated.
The Department of Justice, after turning down two parole applications in 1941, abruptly released him in June 1942. He died that July of a brain tumor at Rochester, Minnesota, where he had gone for treatment at the Mayo Clinic. His funeral, attended by Governor James, was held in Philadelphia, and burial took place in Mount Sinai Cemetery, Frankford, Pennsylvania.
Achievements
During his career Annenberg became a prominent figure; he greatly developed his publication empire and became a very rich man. As the publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, he made it the third-oldest surviving daily newspaper in the United States in 1936. The Inquirer has the sixteenth largest average weekday U. S. newspaper circulation, and has won eighteen Pulitzer Prizes.
Works
book
book
Personality
Those who knew Annenberg have paid scant tribute to his personal graces; he was parsimonious, harsh, boastful, and unscrupulous.
Connections
On August 20, 1899, he married Sadie Cecilia Friedman, the daughter of a Chicago merchant. They had nine children.
