In 1914 a beautiful, eager, and arrogant young woman from the backwoods of Indiana founded the Little Review. Margaret Anderson made it into one of the most influential literary journals of the first decades of the twentieth century.

While he would receive greater notoriety with his liberal column "It Seems to Me" and as an organizer of the American Newspaper Guild in the 1920s and 1930s, Heywood Broun reported World War I for the New York Tribune and found innovative ways to get around military censorship. In December 1917 he exposed inferior supply operations for the American Expeditionary Forces in France that endangered the troops, and his paper was fined $10,000 by the War Department.

James Middleton Cox, publisher of the Dayton Daily News, was elected governor of Ohio in 1912. He had bought the paper with help from his boss, Congressman Paul J. Sorg, in...