Political Disputes Become Personal as Publisher, Congressman Nearly Come to Blows in 1925

Stories of 19^th century newspaper editors being challenged by their opponents to settle disputes with a duel are legendary. Rarely do you hear of newspapermen in the 1900s being challenged to settle a matter of honor with a duel.

But in the mid-1920s, Mobile Register publisher Frederick I. Thompson received a personal

John McDuffie

challenge that many of those involved thought might lead to violence. The challenge came from John McDuffie, U.S. representative from the First Congressional District of Alabama.

Thompson and McDuffie were already political enemies, backing different factions of the Democrat Party. They also disliked each other personally.

When an editorial in the Sunday, May 31, 1925, Register seemed to imply that McDuffie was connected to bootleggers in Mobile, McDuffie determined to settle his differences with Thompson face to face. McDuffie boarded a train June 5 in Mobile for Birmingham, where Thompson was staying at the time.

In Birmingham by 7:30 a.m., McDuffie went to the Comer Building where Thompson had his offices. There he stood on the corner waiting for Thompson.

“I stood there…unarmed. I never carried a pistol and had no idea of using one,” McDuffie later said. “But I did have the intention to meet him as he came to his office and have it out, man to man.”

Comer Building in Birmingham

After McDuffie had waited for more than an hour, his close friend, Theodore K. Jackson Sr., a Mobile Attorney, persuaded McDuffie that it wasn't dignified for a U.S. congressman to lie in wait for another man.

Jackson got McDuffie to go to the Tutwiler Hotel where they were joined by two more friends, Tom Bragg and Robert Mangum, both Alabama Power Co. officials. Early that afternoon, McDuffie wrote Thompson a letter demanding a retraction of the Sunday editorial or to meet him in the lobby of the hotel and hinting at fisticuffs to settle their dispute.

Thompson wrote back that McDuffie wrongly interpreted the editorial. Thompson also refused to meet him at the Tutwiler, informing McDuffie that he conducted all his business from the Age-Herald building where McDuffie was welcome to come by. McDuffie refused and wanted Thompson to meet him at a place he considered neutral.

The two men continued to exchange letters by messengers into the next day, but the best McDuffie could get out of Thompson was a letter confirming that the Register had never intended to reflect on McDuffie’s personal honor or intimate that he was controlled by bootleggers in Mobile.

McDuffie left Birmingham feeling that he had “made a fizzle of the whole thing.”

A few years later, McDuffie had a revenge of sorts. Many of his associates were backers in creating The Mobile Press in 1929. In 1932, the Press absorbed the Register and helped drive Thompson out of the newspaper business. Eventually, McDuffie’s daughter, Cornelia McDuffie Turner, joined the newspaper’s staff and served as the Press Register’s society editor for many years.

Business Leaders Essential to Success of Mobile Press Over Competitor Register

Merchants National Bank, the tall building in the background, opened its new headquarters in 1929, the same year the stock market crashed and The Mobile Press began publication. Officers of Merchants bank and two other banks in Mobile were investors in the Press. Such backing helped ensure the Press' eventual success over its competitor, The Mobile Register.

The Mobile Register usually gets most of the attention from historians, but it is really The Mobile Press that won the newspaper wars during the Great Depression and survives until today.

The idea for The Mobile Press was born at a conference in Mobile of engineers and executives of the Alabama Power Co. and the International Paper Co. Over lunch at the conference, Mobile attorney Thomas M. Stevens told Alabama Power President Thomas W. Martin of his desire to establish a newspaper in opposition to publisher Frederick I. Thompson’s Mobile Register.

Martin suggested Stevens consult Victor H. Hanson, publisher of The Birmingham News, which in 1927 had absorbed Thompson’s Age-Herald. Hanson, unwilling to undertake the Mobile venture himself, contacted Ralph Bradford Chandler, founder of Scripps-Howard’s Birmingham Post.

Hanson highly recommended the project to Chandler and got him to meet with Stevens in Hanson’s Birmingham office in January 1928.

Intrigued with the idea of starting a newspaper in Mobile, Chandler spent the next few months surveying the possibilities in the Port City and negotiating with those willing to back the venture. In an indication of the intensity of feelings against Thompson among business leaders, Chandler secured an agreement from the presidents of the three Mobile banks to underwrite $100,000 from Mobile investors provided that Chandler also furnish $100,000.

Walter D. Bellingrath

To finance his share of the newspaper, Chandler approached wealthy Mobile capitalist Joseph Frederick McGowin. McGowin, born on a farm in Brewton, Ala., in 1867, became a successful lumber mill operator in his 20s and moved in 1891 to Mobile where he bought a bankrupt wholesale hardware business and transformed it into a highly profitable enterprise.

By the late 1920s, he was one of Mobile’s pre-eminent citizens as the head of real estate, financial, automobile and construction firms. He also served as one of the directors of the Merchants National Bank.

Besides backing Chandler, McGowin also bought shares in the newspaper company. Other stockholders included some of the city’s most prominent citizens: 

• Former Mayor Albert P. Bush
• Merchants National Bank President Ernest F. Ladd
• First National Bank President D. Paul Bestor Jr.
• Coca-Cola bottling magnate Walter D. Bellingrath
• Drug and real estate businessman J. C. Van Antwerp
• Alabama, Tennessee and Northern Railroad President John T. Cochrane
• Attorney Thomas M. Stevens
• Musical instrument and citrus dealer W. H. Reynalds
• Lumber and hardware supplier W. B. Patterson
• And about 17 other businessmen and professionals.

The stockholders of the Press represented an informal interlocking directorship of the city’s major businesses, banks and industry. Even with all those business and political forces working against him, however, Thompson proved to be his own biggest obstacle. But that is a subject for another post.

Why New Orleans and Not Mobile? Lessons from the Past About Newspaper Competition

Mobile's newspaper market in the early 1900s holds lessons for today.

Why didn’t a daily newspaper competitor move into the Mobile market after Newhouse Newspapers announced that The Mobile Press Register would cease daily publication in 2012?

After all, that is what happened in New Orleans. The Baton Rouge Advocate began publishing daily in New Orleans shortly after the Times Picayune went to three days a week. Many people wondered why Mobile didn’t have a similar white knight riding in.

An example from the past can help explain why.

When Mobile Register owner Frederick I. Thompson bought The Mobile Item in 1916 it gave him control of all the daily papers in the Port City.

Thompson had made many political enemies in Mobile because of his newspapers’ editorials. At one point, a number prominent citizens invited Frank P. Glass, one of the owners of The Montgomery Advertiser, to Mobile to talk about starting a newspaper in opposition to the Register. 

But when Glass told them that it would cost about $500,000 a year for three years before they started to receive any profits, they decided it was too expensive and dropped the idea.

In 1919, Mayor George E. Crawford spearheaded a secret drive to raise $100,000 from Mobile businessmen to start an opposition paper. In September, Shirley Olympius of the International News Service met at the Cawthon Hotel with Crawford and a number of other men to discuss the needed steps.

They immediately began subscribing to $1,000 stock shares for the venture. Crawford also contacted W. L. Maher, owner of the The Jackson Daily News and The Hattiesburg American in Mississippi, about investing in the project.

Maher became enthusiastic about the idea and decided to switch $25,000 he had raised for another newspaper to the Mobile venture. He also attempted to raise another $25,000 from investors in New Orleans. Despite Crawford’s success in finding a number of willing investors to oppose Thompson, he never completed the project.

Not until 10 years later did Thompson’s enemies successfully establish an opposition newspaper, The Mobile Press.

So starting an opposition newspaper requires:

• Willing investors. 
• Financial ability to go for some time without showing a profit. In other words, a lot of money.

In the case of modern-day New Orleans, the Crescent City has another advantage that Mobile does not. Baton Rouge is about 80 miles from New Orleans in the same state. No other daily paper existed in Alabama that close to Mobile.

The closest daily in Mississippi, The Mississippi Press in Pascagoula, was also owned by Newhouse. And it was highly unlikely that the Pensacola News Journal would try to enter the Mobile news market.

Do you have any other thoughts about why daily competition didn't spring up in Mobile as it did in New Orleans after the Newhouse switchover to digital?

Sullivan-Kilrain Fight First U.S. Sporting Event to Draw National Press Coverage

Sports news in The Mobile Register increased greatly after 1880. One sporting event on the Gulf Coast in 1889 drew nationwide attention.

No formal boxing titles existed in that era, but John L. Sullivan spent the summer of 1889 in New

Orleans preparing to defend his heavyweight championship against Jake Kilrain. Boxing matches were illegal

John L. Sullivan

and the fight proved to be the last bare-knuckle heavyweight championship title bout. The match was also significant because it was one of the first American sporting events to draw national press coverage.

The site for the fight was a closely guarded secret. Fans had to purchase train tickets to an unknown location.

The Register editorially condemned the match that everyone knew was about to take place as well as prize fighting in general. But when more than 3,000 visitors showed up in the lumbermill town of Richburg, Miss., which had a normal population of about 300, to watch the fight, the Register had arranged for telegraphic reports to be sent.

Jake Kilrain

A crowd began to gather in front of the Register’s bookkeeping room and the telegraph office at about 8 a.m. July 8 to hear news of the fight, which began about 10:30 a.m. Knots of men gathered along Royal Street for the four blocks from the Register office at St. Michael Street to Government Street.

The crowd grew in size as the hours passed and the men awaited news of the boxing match. Men flooded the Register staff with questions and every time a newspaper runner “poked his nose out of the office door, he was besieged by a throng of expectant waiters, and plied with all manner of interrogatives. . . ” One bettor tried to bribe a reporter with $25 for a tip on the fight’s outcome.

At 2 p.m. the crowd surged from the sidewalk into the Register’s bookkeeping room and almost took it over. The staff called police to clear the men out. As the afternoon wore on, the crowd again became rowdy as rumors passed that the Register was suppressing news of the match to use in an extra.

The crowd again surged into the bookkeeping room at 4:30 p.m. demanding to know the outcome of the fight. The editors, awaiting reports, held the evening edition four hours past deadline and finally went to press at 6 p.m. The newsboys took to the streets shouting “Yer’s y’extra, all about the prize fight,” which had gone on for 75 bloody rounds before Kilrain's manager threw in the towel.

Newspaper sales that night were the largest ever up to that time for the Register.

How often do you look at the newspaper's classified ad section?

An area of the Classified Ad Department, probably in the 1970s.

Discussions about what is causing the changes to The Mobile Press Register and other newspapers often focus on news content and overlook the changes to advertising, particularly classified advertising.

Classified ads until 1995 were the cash cow of the newspaper business. Classifieds were enormously profitable for the Press Register and all other newspapers.

If you were looking for a job, you searched the classified ads. If you ran a business and wanted to hire someone, you placed a help-wanted ad. Real estate and car dealers were the biggest buyers of classified ads. Garage sales, auto parts, used cars, farm equipment, furniture, pets, cameras, property rentals—practically anyone who had anything to sell placed a classified ad.

Many people spent Sunday mornings leisurely looking through the small type of the newspaper’s classified ads just for the sheer entertainment value of seeing all the stuff for sale.

All that started to change in 1995 with Craigslist, the free online classified service, and eBay, an online, consumer-to-consumer auction and shopping website. Newspapers started losing readers searching for new jobs to HotJobs, started in 1996, and Monster, started in 1999. Now you can go online and find a job or camera lens anywhere in the world, not just in your newspaper’s circulation area.

Today, there are people in their 20s who have no idea what a newspaper classified ad is. And newspaper classified ad departments, which used to occupy large areas of a newspaper building, barely exist.

How often do you look at the newspaper's classified ad section?

Changing jobs for $3 more a week

In the first two decades of the 20^th century, salaries were so low at The Mobile Register and most other newspapers that employees would often pick up and move to a paper in another city for a few extra dollars a week.

Perkins J. Prewitt, on the right in the above photo, left the Register in 1916 for The Birmingham News because he was offered $3 more a week. Prewitt may have left because he was unhappy with his situation in Mobile. In July 1916, Prewitt, who had been serving as the state editor of the Register, was transferred to its sister paper, The Mobile Item, as its telegraph editor. In Birmingham he became an editor on the News and a member of the Loafers' Club, a men's literary group.

Pictured with Prewitt on the left is Edgar Valentine Smith, the News copy editor and another member of the Loafers' Club. Smith was also a writer and playwright and his short story "Prelude" won the O. Henry Prize in 1923.

Moving from newspaper to newspaper didn’t leave time for making friendships outside the newspaper. The Register often developed camaraderie as family. That occurred in part because they spent so much time together putting out the paper, and in part because they might have no other family.

This Battle House, built in 1906,

was only 10 years old when Prewitt

worked at The Mobile Register.

men and women who worked on the

Those who worked on the nightside of the Register often continued their time together by going to

breakfast at the Battle House Hotel after work, Prewitt once noted. Or they used part of their day time to go sailing together on Mobile Bay.

Hand compositors struggled against the machine age

Press Register Linotype operators

Digital production and delivery of the news are not the first technological advances to wipe out jobs that had a long tradition of being part of The Mobile Register and newspapering.

From the time Register first set up shop in 1821 until the 1890s, the newspaper’s type had been set by

hand. By the late 1800s, several shifts of compositors sat at type cases 20 hours out of every 24, “and hereRegister told its readers.

Hand compositor sets type on a 'stick'
 Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

the ceaseless click of the busy type, as it drops in the ‘stick’... makes a ceaseless scene of industry and active business life” the

Typesetting became mechanized when the Register installed six Linotypes early in July 1893. The average hand compositor set about 700 lines of type on a 10-hour shift. A Linotype operator could produce about 2,500 lines of type on an eight-hour shift.

A Linotype machine cost about $3,000 to buy or could be rented for about $500 a year. The operator set the type by means of a keyboard similar to a typewriter. The machine cast lines of type on a metal slug that it automatically justified and then assembled the individual lines of type on a galley.

Press Register Linotype room 1940s

The increased speed of composition afforded by a Linotype meant a reduction in the number of hours the compositors had to put in to set up the newspaper. Increased output also meant that fewer typesetters were needed and some were laid off.

One group of hand compositors thrown out of work joined together to publish a rival newspaper, The Daily Herald. But hand composition then, like the way of publishing and delivering a printed newspaper today, was doomed.

Do you remember these newsroom folks?

The above photo was taken in The Mobile Press Register newsroom sometime between 1979 and the early 1980s. I remember the names of most of the people. From left, Lynette Stegall (can’t make out the man behind her), Mignon Kilday, Sybil Wright, John Sellers, clerk name unknown, Ben Rapport, Mark Kent, Ralph Poore, Kenny Morgan, woman unknown, and Royce Harrison. I don’t know the name of the man seated in the slot, nor do I remember the occasion for the photo. Note the metal squirt can on the desk. Anyone remember what they were used for? Hint: It didn’t hold oil for lubrication.