Paul Y. Anderson was an American journalist. He was a pioneering muckraker and played a role in exposing the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s. His coverage included the 1917 race riots in East St. Louis and the Scopes Trial.
Background
Paul Y. Anderson was born on August 29, 1893 in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. the fifth among six children and third of three sons (the only one to survive infancy) of William Holston Anderson, a stonecutter, and his wife, Elizabeth Dill Haynes. For personal reasons he disliked his middle name and never used more than its initial letter. Both his parents were natives of Knox County. His paternal great-grandfather had emigrated from Ireland to East Tennessee. A maternal ancestor, John Haynes, served in the Revolutionary War from Albemarle County, Virginia.
When Paul was only three years old his father was killed in an accident. His widowed mother resumed school teaching, her occupation before marriage, and by careful management supported her family of three surviving small children.
Paul carried newspapers and delivered telegrams to buy books and clothes while he attended high school in Knoxville.
Education
In 1920-1922 Anderson took a special course at Washington University in St. Louis.
Career
In 1911, at the age of eighteen, Anderson became a news reporter on the Knoxville Journal. The next year he joined the St. Louis Times. In 1913 he moved to the St. Louis Star and in 1914 to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which was to be his newspaper home, with but a brief interruption, for twenty-three years.
In July 1917, when only twenty-four years old, he described so fearlessly the lax conditions leading to fatal race rioting in East St. Louis, Illinois, that he was called before a congressional committee investigating the affair.
The desire to apply his probing talents to the national scene led Anderson to leave the Post-Dispatch in 1923, after two years as editorial writer, and become a free-lance reporter in Washington. There, in the winter of 1923-1924, he followed closely the Senate investigation into the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills naval oil reserve transfers, sending out dispatches noteworthy for their penetrating understanding of the scandal as it first unfolded. This creative reporting was of great assistance to Senator Thomas J. Walsh, chairman of the investigating committee. It also impressed the Post-Dispatch's managing editor, Oliver K. Bovard, who reemployed Anderson and made him a Washington correspondent. In a later ramification of the oil inquiry (1928), an investigation into the affairs of the Continental Trading Company, Anderson participated actively, even to the extent of suggesting questions for Senator Gerald P. Nye to put to the principal witness, Robert W. Stewart, chairman of the board of the Standard Oil Company of Indiana. For his part in the investigation Anderson received a Pulitzer Prize.
Anderson gathered evidence which forced the resignation of Federal District Judge George W. English of Illinois under threat of impeachment (1925-1926). He reported the Loeb-Leopold trial, the Dayton "monkey" trial, the "bonus army" fiasco in Washington, and the early maneuvers of the House Un-American Activities Committee under Congressman Martin Dies. He also covered the national political conventions from 1924 through 1936.
He established close friendships with many Washington notables, including Senators Robert M. La Follette, Jr. , and Huey Long, Donald Richberg, and Hugh S. Johnson.
To express himself with more editorial comment than his reports in the Post-Dispatch permitted, Anderson became a regular Washington contributor to the Nation. A "reporter's reporter, " he was awarded in 1937 a gold medal by the Headliners' Club for "the best series of news stories on a subject of great public interest" (the Senate civil liberties investigation). Anderson had little time to study the causes of the political and social ills of which he wrote, being engrossed in digging out facts that correspondents generally ignored. His writing, provocative and incisive, was also belligerent and irreverent.
Holding much of the press in contempt, he helped to found the American Newspaper Guild in 1933.
Professional frustrations were complicated by personal troubles. Emotional strains induced alcoholic excesses, with the result that Anderson was discharged by the Post-Dispatch in January 1938. The St. Louis Star-Times promptly took him into its Washington bureau, but less than a year later, deciding that his usefulness was at an end, he took his own life in Washington by swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills. Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska and the labor leader John L. Lewis mourned him at a memorial service in Washington, after which he was buried in the cemetery of the Island Home Baptist Church in Knoxville. Oswald Garrison Villard wrote in the Nation (December 17, 1938) that this "detective-reporter" had no successor as "a crusading journalist. " In the words of another writer he was perhaps "the last of the muckrakers. "
Achievements
Personality
Anderson was a man of extraordinary bravery.
He had serious problems with alcohol, and, presumably, depression, which could have been caused by his stressful job.
Quotes from others about the person
Heywood Broun: "But just about the last person in the world with any right to mention the matter is some little snip sitting with scissors and paste pot in the office of Time piecing out the curious sign language in which that magazine is written for the delectation of commuters and clubwomen. Paul Y. Anderson, drunk or sober, was by so much the finest journalist of his day that it is not fitting for any moist-eared chit even to touch the hem of his weakness. It is not necessary for anybody to make apologies for Paul Y. Anderson. Taken in his entirety, he stands up as a man deserving love and homage from every working newspaperman and woman in the United States. "
Connections
He was married three times: in April 1914 to Beatrice Wright of East St. Louis, by whom he had two sons, Paul Webster and Kenneth Paine; on March 19, 1928, to Anna Alberta Fritschle of St. Louis; and on August 30 and September 3, 1937 to Katherine Lane, a New York stage and radio entertainer. The first and second marriages ended in divorce, in 1919 and 1936, while the third was broken by a trial separation.