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and car crashes. Her name appeared nowhere in the Tribune. Bylines were reserved for the top reporters, and you had to land a big story—and successfully milk it for days or weeks—to qualify. After only a few days on the job, Maurine tried to show initiative by jumping into a taxi with Al Jennings, the famed outlaw turned politician. 2 She got the interview, but nothing came of it in the paper. If she were lucky, she might be assigned an innocuous soft feature about “bobbed wigs” or a theater reopening and see her work manhandled by copyreaders who had an aversion to modifiers or any phrase they could identify as possibly being an original thought. It hardly helped to know that all the cub reporters got the same treatment, including the Tribune ’s coeditor in chief, Joseph Medill Patterson, back when he was a young hack.
    Maurine didn’t dare complain. The Tribune local room had a faintly militaristic air about it. Robert Lee’s predecessor had been a cavalry officer during the Spanish-American War and insisted on being called Captain Stott. The newsroom’s majordomo was a profane, hulking, middle-aged man-child by the name of Jimmie Durkin, who would answer the phone and then order a reporter to hop to it: “Shake a leg! Take them dogs off that desk and give ’em a workout. You ain’t doin’ nothin.’ ” Lee, like the captain before him, wanted only team players on his staff. “The prima donna is one who will not understand that a newspaper is bounded by steel hoops—literally, not just speculatively,” the city editor told a group of Northwestern University students, referring to the huge metal molds used to print mass-circulation newspapers. “It is surprising what little elasticity there is in the metal page of type. And yet the prima donna will weep bitter tears, resign, curse the editor and classify him among the most unspeakable of blundering upstarts because the sacred brainchild of the prima donna has been trimmed to fit.”
    These were just words, the kind of scare-’em-straight words a newspaper editor was expected to drop on impressionable journalism students, but the family-run paper’s two editors in chief, Patterson and his cousin, Robert McCormick, strove to have the Tribune live up to them. Teamwork, not individual star reporters, would make their newspaper great. For the most part, it was working. By the middle of the century’s second decade, the Tribune had become the undisputed top dog in the city, having broken the back of the old Chicago Record-Herald with want-ad innovations that made the Tribune, in its own words, the “world’s greatest advertising medium.” By the early 1920s, the Tribune ’s daily circulation topped five hundred thousand. On Sunday, it was well over eight hundred thousand. This was double the newspaper’s circulation just a decade before. As a result, William Randolph Hearst’s Herald and Examiner was now the Tribune ’s only morning competitor.
    McCormick and Patterson were Ivy League boys, grandsons of Joseph Medill, the man who made the Tribune a powerful player in the city and state by helping put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. They took their stewardship of the paper seriously. They were determined that it be the best. When the country committed to the World War, for example, the Tribune Company, with a full recognition that it would lose money, launched a Paris-based edition of the newspaper. It debuted, appropriately and not at all coincidentally, on July 4, 1917. Throughout the rest of the war, soldiers at the front often found out what had happened to other units nearby not from the army but from the Chicago Tribune.
    This kind of ambition impressed readers—and competitors—but it didn’t faze Hearst. Rather than trying to match the Tribune ’s depth, he sought to bring his rival down to his level. The country’s biggest newspaper baron moved into Chicago in 1900 with the launch of the Chicago Evening American. The American, soon