Born of a Family Split.

The New York Illustrated Daily News made its debut on 26 June 1919. Two grandsons of Chicago Tribune founder Joseph Medill served as copublishers of their family paper, and both served in World War I. Col. Robert R. McCormick was as conservative as his grandfather, but Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson had imbibed the reform spirit of the early twentieth century. As a young man he had enrolled at Yale University but took time off to become a Tribune correspondent in China, where he covered the Boxer Rebellion. After graduating from Yale in 1901, he defended the rights of the common people against political corruption in his reporting and won election to the Illinois legislature. His politics never meshed with those of the conservative paper, and he left the daily to write socially minded novels and plays. Before the United States...