Willis John Abbot was an American journalist, and a prolific author of war, army, navy, marine corps, and merchant marine books. Made huge impact on journalism due to being an active member of various internationalist and peace-related organizations, including League to Enforce Peace, Institute of Pacific Relations, World Peace Foundation, and also many other mass-media-related organizations.
Background
Abbot was born on March 16, 1863, in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, the grandson, grand-nephew, and cousin of notable biographers and writers. His mother was a practicing physician, and his father died from yellow fever when the boy was only a year old. His mother eventually remarried and moved her family to Chicago, where Abbot witnessed political activism on a daily basis and changed his life.
Education
Due to heavy interests in mass media and politics Abbot entered the University of Michigan in 1881 to major in literature. Although Abbot graduated in 1884 with a bachelor’s degree in law, he never actually pursued a career in law.
Career
After graduating from the University of Michigan Abbot accepted a job offer in New Orleans from a family friend to work as a “cub” reporter for the Times-Democrat, where on his first day on the job he witnessed the shooting of a local political player. According to Stuart James Bullion in Dictionary of Literary Biography, seeing the victim run into the newspaper offices holding his amputated trigger figure was enough to make Abbot refer to himself as “a pacifist for life.”
Abbot continued honing his reporting skills at the New York World, and the New York Tribune. He was influenced by late-night meetings of prominent New York reporters at Perry’s Pharmacy, where the professionals would talk about daily events and their trials and tribulations on the job. In 1886 he joined forces with a few colleagues to launch a newspaper in Kansas City called the Evening News. Unfortunately, shortly after the paper was born the midwestern city suffered a severe economic recession, and the paper closed down by 1889. Abbot then returned to Chicago and wrote editorials for the Chicago Evening Mail and later for its morning edition, the Chicago Times, where he became managing editor in 1892. During his five years in Chicago Abbot resurrected his interests in politics and was aligned with those candidates most sympathetic to the causes for the less fortunate.
After an unsuccessful attempt to merge the Times with the Herald, Abbot began an association with the empire belonging to journalistic tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Following an interview that lasted about an hour, Hearst appointed Abbot as the editor-in-chief for the New York Journal, a position he held from 1895 through 1898. Though it was not consistent with Abbot’s character to defame another, it is clear from his later comments that he thought little of Hearst’s personal and professional practices.
After being approached by a traveler who advocated first-hand experience over book-worming, Abbot was approached to write a book on the Panama Canal. Spending several weeks in Panama determining the environment on his own, Abbot wrote Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose, which was published in 1913. Amazingly, the book sold more than one million copies at ninety-eight cents apiece, despite the fact that the New York Times called it “gossipy and readable, but hardly worth reading.” This was Abbot’s most profitable book, although he authored more than twenty others, many of them written for children.
Abbot wrote for the Hearst's New York Journal in 1921. Later, he was named the editor of the Christian Science Monitor, a position which he held from 1922 to 1927.
He had a brief career in politics leading the movement for Ethics Enforcement with Herbert Bayard Swope working on the constitution of the ANSE. All these actions taken towards ethics amelioration was seen negatively by president Hopwood. Throughout this ethics debate, Abbot was on the board of directors of ANSE.
Politics
Abbot’s interests in social issues and politics surfaced in his adolescence, and when he was just seventeen Abbot worked as a page at a national political convention. During his lifetime he would participate in twenty more such events in various capacities.
In 1923 Abbot drafted a “Peace Plan,” which was his proposal for a constitutional amendment that would eliminate the profit motive of war. Though arguably aligned with socialism, this ambitious creation sought to legalize the drafting of labor and capital, just as the government is allowed to draft the services of its youth, who are often asked to risk their lives for the sake of their country. Abbot’s rationalization was as follows: “Capital equally with labor would be subject to the imperative demand of the state. The revolting theory that the state might command the lives of its youths, but that the money of the prosperous should be sacred, would be repudiated. Nor would the farmer or the miner be immune from the call to service. Food would be raised, but taken by the state at a price which would eliminate all profit; neither the digger of iron, the smelter, the puddler, nor the millionaire magnate who controlled the operation of all, should be allowed as the fruit of his labor during the continuance of the war more than what the boy in the trenches would be getting namely, a bare livelihood.” Although never passed into law, Congress gave the plan some serious consideration, and it undoubtedly influenced subsequent wartime policies and debates.
Personality
In the Dictionary of Literary Biography Bullion quoted Altgeld as saying: “I never heard Abbot repay slander, hatred and denunciation” to those who “seemed to be united in the effort to beggar him.” Altgeld also said that Abbot’s “nature appealed particularly to the more thoughtful people of his time.”
Quotes from others about the person
Bullion recorded a revealing description of Bryan written by Abbot: “He convinced himself of the righteousness of every cause before he became its prophet. Once convinced of its worth, he would brush aside the protestations of his closest friends and fling himself into what he thought a contest for truth. He may not have been a few of us who is a master of his fate, but ... he was always and in every contingency the captain of his soul.”
Admired during his lifetime and after, Abbot inspired and impressed those who knew him in action and in appearance. Erwin Canham, who worked for the Christian Science Monitor during Abbot’s run as editor and who later became the head of the Monitor himself, recalled Abbot fondly. According to Bullion, Canham said: “The gleam in his eyes, the neat little goatee on his chin, his tweeds, his easy kindness and sophistication composed a personality which charmed and inspired the eager young cubs. And, if one of the cubs may add a personal note, the sight of Mr. Abbot’s gracious wife and handsome collie dog waiting in the car in which they would all drive home, composed a picture of just what the cub thought an editor should be!”