Field Flowers a Small Bunch of the Most Fragrant Blossoms
(A Eugene Field Monument Fund Souvenir, published to creat...)
A Eugene Field Monument Fund Souvenir, published to create a fund equally divided between his family and a fund to build a monument Blanck, Vol.III, sec. iii, p.140 . Poems by Fields with illustrations by A.B. Frost, E.W. Kemble, F. Hopkinson Smith, Frederic Remington, Will Bradley, Mary Hallock Foote, and others. With a press release from the monument committee loosely inserted. Some soiling to covers, small tear on front free endpaper. 40 pages. original decorated cloth, all gilt edges. large 8vo..
William Penn Nixon was an American journalist. He took a leading part in all the progressive and esthetic public activities of the day, not merely as a journalist but as a public servant.
Background
William Penn Nixon was born on March 19, 1833 in Fountain City, Wayne County, Indiana, United States. His father, Samuel Nixon, was the son of a famous Quaker preacher, a Virginian of English ancestry and an early protestant against human slavery; while from his mother, Rhoda Hubbard (Butler) Nixon, who was descended from Cherokee Indians, he may have acquired the quality of patient persistence which, coupled with a Quaker's devotion to the right as he saw it, made him a power in his profession.
Education
Nixon sought his education mainly in the schools adjacent to his home, going at fourteen years of age to Turtle Creek Academy, Warren County, Ohio, then entering Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana. In 1854 (according to Who's Who in America) he was graduated at Farmers' (now Belmont) College near Cincinnati, having interrupted his scholastic endeavors from time to time by months of teaching. A four-year course in law and graduation (Bachelor of Laws) at the University of Pennsylvania in 1857 completed his academic training.
Career
Like many others destined to win later success in journalism, Nixon embarked first upon the practice of law. In Cincinnati between 1860 and 1868 he attained a measure of success as an attorney, though his taste for politics, already apparent, interfered with a single-minded devotion to his profession. He was elected to the state legislature in 1864 and through reelection served until 1868. In that year he joined his brother, Dr. O. W. Nixon, in the establishment of the Cincinnati Daily Chronicle, an evening newspaper. The position of financial editor, which he held at first, he soon abandoned for the post of publisher and general manager, and as such continued until 1872 when the paper was merged with the Times.
In 1872 Nixon went to Chicago, which was just beginning to be rebuilt upon the charred ruins of its great fire. Here he found that the chief Republican paper of the city and state, the Chicago Daily Tribune, was at odds with its party on the fundamental issue of the tariff, while an almost moribund paper, the Inter Ocean, was feebly attempting to make its way. In May 1872 he became business manager of the latter journal. After serving for a time in this capacity, he secured with his brother a controlling interest, and in 1875 became general manager and editor. Thenceforth until 1897 he gave his personal attention to every department of the paper. Under his editorship the Inter Ocean was always what the politicians call a "reliably" Republican newspaper. The party platform was its sufficient guide in matters economic and political. Believing thoroughly, as he did, in the worth of the policy of protection to American industries, Nixon made the paper the most unfaltering advocate of that policy in the Middle West. It was generally believed that some beneficiaries of protection were among its owners, for the period was one in which newspaper management had not reached its present business stage, and the profits of many papers were based as much on their political associations as upon legitimate advertising receipts. The journals of that time were more scholarly, however, than the press of a later day--less sensational, more world-wide in their viewpoint--and Nixon's own editorial endeavors impressed these characteristics especially upon the Inter Ocean.
In 1896 he was chosen delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention. It was the year of the struggle over free silver, and those who recalled that he had printed "Coin's Financial School" in the Inter Ocean (greatly to the advantage of the paper's circulation) apprehended that he might not follow his party on that issue. But the life-long habit of regularity was not easily interrupted, and during the heated campaign he earnestly advocated the election of William McKinley. In December 1897 he was appointed collector of the port of Chicago, and reappointed in 1902. His paper passed into other hands, and his later years were spent in retirement.
He went with his party with little endeavor to lead it, yet his influence was extended and in the main for good. He did not succeed in making his paper financially successful, but at least he made it eminently respectable and, within its own party, exceedingly influential.
Achievements
Nixon was a member of the Lincoln Park Board in 1896 and its president in 1897-98. For some time he was president of the Associated Press.
(A Eugene Field Monument Fund Souvenir, published to creat...)
Personality
In what was perhaps the stormiest period of Chicago's social and political development, Nixon displayed a quiet and kindly demeanor, an aversion to anything which savored of self-assertion or a desire for political domination.
Connections
Nixon was married twice; in September 1861 to Mary Stites of Cincinnati, who died a year later, and on June 15, 1869, to Elizabeth Duffield of Chicago.
