WARD CARLTON MAYBORN: SILENT GIANT OF THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY by JAMES EDMOND CASON, B.S. A THESIS IN MASS COMMUNICATIONS Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Approved Accepted May, 1987 it\ /:- 90-~ N^, 1' C^' .. ^ TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. HARD TIllES AND THE LAUNCHING OF A CAREER ... 9 III. STARTING THE EVANSVILLE PRESS 16 IV. THE PUBLISHING HOUSE CONCEPT 31 V. MAYBORN LEAVES THE SCRIPPS ORGANIZATION ... 47 VI. STARTING THE CHICAGO SUN 54 VII. MAYBORN RETURNS TO TEXAS 61 VIII. SUMMARY 70 REFERENCES 75 11 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION When Ward Carlton Mayborn was born October 10, 1879, the Civil War had been over for 14 years. The nation was experiencing the problems associated with healing the wounds of war while the age of the industrial revolution was dawning upon the nation. Thomas A. Edison in 1864 invented an automatic telegraph repeater, making possible the sending of mes­ sages over long distances (1, p. 587). In the early 1870s, less than 10 years before Mayborn's birth, a telegraph system was incorporated into the nation's fledgling railway system (1, p. 587). Edison started to work in his Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratory in 1876 (1, p. 587). It was not until Septem­ ber 4, 1882, when Mayborn was almost three years old, that New York City got its first electric street lights (2, p. 118) . In his book, The Rise of Industrial America, Page Smith detailed events taking place in the nation at the time of Mayborn's birth and during the next 20 years when Mayborn was receiving all the formal education he was to have and when he found himself, due to economic conditions of the time, looking for work. Smith cited the growth of the nation's railroads in the late 1870's and the complimentary growth of the telegraph system. He said that in 1878, just one year prior to Mayborn's birth, the nation had 12,000 telegraph offices, 9,000 of which were in railroad stations (2, p. 113). The nation's telegraph system in that year con­ sisted of 76,955 miles of wire (2, p. 113). Alexander Graham Bell first displayed his marvel, the telephone, at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 (2, p. 115). The Bell Telephone Company was born one year later and by 1885, under the direction of Theodore Vail, the company had established telephone systems in many of the nation's larger cities (2, p. 115). The first long-distance telephone system, between New York City and Boston, was in place in 1885 (2, p. 116) when Mayborn was almost six years old. The nation's steel industry began to develop rapidly in 1872 under the leadership of Andrew Carnegie (2, pp. 121-123) and at about the same time, the nation's oil industry began to develop under the leadership of Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller (2, p. 123). The textile industry developed on a large scale at about the same time as the steel and oil industries (2, p. 124) . Mining played an important part in the development of the Western and Mid-Western portions of North America, beginning in 1872, only seven years prior to Mayborn's birth, when mining operations were started in Utah and Nevada. Small mining operations had previously been conducted in California (2, pp. 125-127). As industrialization took place in the United States from the early 1870's through the turn of the century, the railroad industry grew significantly along with it. By 1890, the railroads had become the nation's principal employer with 749,000 people on the payroll (2, p. 103). With the advent of the Industrial Age came trade unions and strikes. The summer of 1877 had "burst forth with frightening violence" as a long list of grievances on the part of American workmen toward their employers began to surface (2, p. 168) . The wrath of the workers was at first directed against railroads in the major rail centers in the form of strikes. But, Smith said, as the activity picked up momentum across the nation, it became apparent that the bitterness on the part of the workers "reached far beyond any particular industry" (2, p. 168). Smith said that the Knights of Labor, founded in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1869, only ten years prior to Mayborn's birth, became the first major union in the nation. The Knights became very vocal in 1876, urging workers in several occupations to strike against their employers (2, p. 216). Strikes, violence and the rapid propagation of labor unions continued to the turn of the century and set the stage for future widespread strikes. Ward Mayborn would experience his first real chal­ lenge in his chosen career, the newspaper industry, in 1909 when his paper. The Evansville Press, would be caught in the middle between union strikers and management of a streetcar company in Evansville, Indiana. As the age of industrialization progressed in the United States, the printing industry developed as well. Newspapers, which prior to Mayborn's birth had been limited to single-page papers printed on hand-operated presses, now developed into multi-page papers printed on presses driven by steam engines (3) and later on large electrically-operated presses. At about the time of Mayborn's birth, the newspaper industry became capable of publishing thousands of copies daily instead of hundreds of copies. Circulation increased dramatically. In his book. Mass Media in America, Don Pember told of the dramatic rise of the daily newspaper in America. During the first quarter of the 19th century, newspapers in America reached only a handful of people. Few news­ papers could claim more than 1,000 subscribers (4, p. 62). In 1833, a new kind of newspaper appeared in New York. It was filled not with the typical fare of serious discussions of government, politics or economics, but instead contained news of violent crimes, reports of tragedies and calamities, and other sensational incidents (4, p. 62). Benjamin Day's New York Sun was the fore­ runner of a major change of direction for the American press. Day's paper appealed to many persons who had previ­ ously ignored the press, and it was inexpensive, selling for one cent—five cents less than most other newspapers (4, p. 62). To put the price in perspective, Pember said that at the time, six cents would buy a quarter-pound of bacon as well as a pint of whiskey (4, p. 62). In six months, the Sun had a circulation of 8,000—twice that of its nearest competitor (4, p. 62). Other newspapers soon began publication, most notably the New York Herald. By 1860, the Herald had a circula­ tion of 77,000, making it one of the nation's largest newspapers (4, p. 62). During the 1870's, advertising took on an important role in the nation's newspapers. By 1880, the year after Mayborn's birth, most newspapers in the nation were devoting about 25 percent of the available space to advertising (4, p. 64) . Mayborn was to make his entry into the newspaper industry as an advertising specialist. By 1890, when Mayborn was about 11 years old, tech­ nology had reached a point where the mass production of large numbers of newspapers was possible. Faster presses, new printing processes and new means of typesetting all gave the press the ability to increase its volume. New developments in paper making significantly lowered the cost of newsprint. By 1890, Pember said, 8.3 million newspapers were being printed each day in the United States (4, p. 65). A development which had a significant impact on the newspaper industry was Ottmar Mergenthaler's invention of the Linotype typesetting machine. Mergenthaler, an American inventor, was asked in 1876 by a group of short­ hand reporters in VTashington, D.C., to invent a device for simplifying the taking of notes during legal proceedings. What was envisioned by the reporters was a device which we know today as the typewriter. But Mergenthaler's endeav­ ors led eventually to the widespread use in the newspaper industry of the Linotype machine, a device which set type mechanically instead of by hand (5, p. 672). Mergenthaler spent several years working on various unsuccessful ideas. In about 1885, he thought of using a single bar of metal to carry a composed line of type. For letter molds, he first employed sliding bars, each carry­ ing a full alphabet. Then came the idea of individual matrices to be circulated through the machine. That principle proved to be more successful and was embodied in the first Linotype machine to be commercially operated in 1886 by the New York Tribune (6, p. 443). The larger newspapers and book printers of that period employed great numbers of hand typesetters, which made the success of the new machine of imm.ediate interest to them. Publishers and master printers provided financ­ ing for building the machines in quantity, and the appre­ hensive hand-compositors soon realized that Linotype operation was easily learned and saved considerable time in typesetting (6, p. 443). The machine was to be a potent factor in a worldwide increase in the production of printing. The Intertype, a more advanced version of the Linotype, was introduced into printing circles in 1913 after Linotype patents had expired (6, p. 443). Mayborn once told a friend and colleague that he helped establish the Intertype Company (7). Population centers had developed by 1890 to a point that made the printing of vast numbers of daily papers profitable.