Charles Gordon MacArthur was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. One of seven children, he was the son of a self-proclaimed evangelical minister, William T. MacArthur, and of Georgiana Welstead MacArthur, one of nineteen offspring of a British former officer in the East India army. MacArthur was educated at Wilson Memorial Academy, a Nyack, New York, school for missionaries. Unhappy living with his stern father, MacArthur left home at age seventeen and went to Chicago, where he spent a summer working on a small newspaper that had been founded by his older sister. He also worked as a reporter for the Chicago City Press before serving as a trooper in the First Illinois Cavalry on the Mexican border in 1916. During World War I, MacArthur served in France as a private with the 149th Field Artillery, Rainbow Division. He returned to Chicago and in 1919 went to work for the Chicago Herald...