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.