Webb Miller was born Cub Webster Miller, on February 10, 1891, on a tenant farm near Pokagon, Michigan. He was the eldest of five children of Jacob H. and Charlotte (Alexander) Miller, both old-stock Americans principally of English-Scottish ancestry.
Webb attended rural schools in the area, walking some ten miles daily to do so, and helped his father in the fields as soon as he could maneuver a plow. He also studied at the Dowagiac High School.
Following his graduation, Miller devoted a year to school-teaching before joining the Chicago American as a police reporter in 1912. Miller quit the American during the "Pancho" Villa excitement in 1916 to go to the Mexican border as a free-lance a decision he regarded as the crucial one of his life. By working up pieces on the sidelights of the Mexican situation and selling them to regular correspondents who were too busy to write them, he won an offer from the United Press Associations to join the staff. With this major news service he remained for the twenty-four years that were left him. He reported the closing phases of World War I on the Western Front, served as chief of the Paris bureau, 1920-25, then as assistant to Ed L. Keen in London. Following a stint on the Finnish front in 1939, Miller returned to London to cover the cabinet crisis which followed the German invasion of Norway. En route to his suburban home late one night during the wartime blackout, he apparently stepped off a moving train, near Clapham Junction, to his death. He was buried near his birthplace in Pokagon.
In 1930, Miller succeeded Keen as general European news manager and was thus responsible for United Press coverage of the turbulent developments which led to World War II. He reported many of them himself, including the major economic and disarmament conferences, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, on the launching of which he scored a worldwide beat, the Spanish Civil War, and the Munich Conference.
During a four months' leave on a Connecticut farm in 1936, Miller wrote I Found No Peace, one of a popular genre by foreign correspondents which, George Bernard Shaw remarked, betrayed "the sickly conscience" of an era. In it Miller expressed his conviction that science and the machine had made collectivism all but inevitable. Disillusioned by the frailties of world leaders as he knew them, he confessed that he was no less confused than they and that he found solace only in the philosophy of Thoreau. He concluded, "but now I am starting back to Europe to cover the next war. " Neville Chamberlain's interpretation of the Munich Agreement as "peace in our time, " Miller told a colleague when he heard of it, was simply absurd; the next year he was in Flanders with the British, reporting the war he had foreseen.
Quotations: "I have to pull out every sentence by the roots. "
Miller suffered acute feelings of inadequacy: he considered his appearance unprepossessing, his farm-boy naïveté shameful, his personality colorless. Four years of the rough-and-tumble life of a Chicago reporter, during which he embarked upon a deliberate campaign of self-improvement, brought a measure of confidence. He grew a mustache, changed his given name from Webster to Webb, "which sounded better to me, " dressed strikingly, developed social presence by assuring himself that "if I liked people and showed it they would usually like me, " and steeped himself in the Harvard Classics, purchased on the installment plan.
His sensitivity and perception, his knowledge of the intricacies of news transmission, much of it imparted by Keen, and his ability quickly to assimilate background material on missions as varied as the news itself brought Miller to the front rank of his profession in spite of the fact that writing always came hard for him.
In 1920, Miller married Marie Alston of London. They had one son, Kenneth.
