St. Louis
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Last call for the Morning Call
A patent medicine mogul who wanted to keep a seat in Congress decided the best way to fight the press was to start his own daily newspaper. It was an expensive mistake. James Henry McLean, a native of Scotland who arrived in St. Louis in 1849 at the age of 20, amassed a fortune by Continue reading
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Dead man talking
As a young reporter, Lincoln Steffens learned that successful police officers had a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the law. Here’s how it worked in some New York City precincts in the late 19th century: Criminal syndicates did a thriving business in age-old vices (gambling, prostitution, thievery) and the police protected them, as long as they Continue reading
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The Klan and the GOP
In 1925, Post-Dispatch reporter Paul Y. Anderson took note of the Ku Klux Klan’s apparent shift from the Democratic Party to the Republicans. The Klan, he wrote, was finding itself increasingly shunned by the South’s entrenched Democratic establishment because its terrorism was fueling the mass exodus of Black workers from the region, undermining white-controlled commerce. Continue reading
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‘Bulldog tenacity’
St. Louis reporters used to fight to get the news — each other, that is. One of the most spectacular examples of fisticuffery came in 1883, when scribes for the city’s two English-language morning papers came to blows at the old Four Courts building. John Fay, 22, of the Missouri Republican and John C. Klein, Continue reading
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A ‘skin game’
In 1900, after St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporters readily discovered “wholesale violations” of anti-gambling laws, including widespread use of illegal slot machines, the paper demanded answers from police. Harry B. Hawes, the 30-year-old president of the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners, conceded the newspaper’s findings were correct, but claimed his hands were tied. While Hawes Continue reading
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A town without police, courts, crime or taxes
As a schoolboy, Charles Lomax Delbridge discovered a remarkable faculty he didn’t quite understand — an ability to quickly solve multiplication problems involving fractions. He later described the process to a reporter: “It seemed to me that I simply telegraphed the problem into my brain and that scarcely an instant elapsed until the answer came Continue reading
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Population and crime
St. Louis City Hall, seen here on April 13, 2024. No St. Louis mayor in the past 75 years — there were 11 of them — has seen the city’s population grow during his or her time in office. And no mayor during that time has succeeded in reducing the crime rate below national averages, despite his or her Continue reading
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100 years of disappointment
The 1920 Census bumped St. Louis out of fourth place, launching a century-long quest to undo the Great Divorce of 1876. And though its population would climb for a few decades – peaking at 856,796 in 1950 – St. Louis kept sliding in the rankings and dropped out of the top 10 in 1970. Reaction Continue reading
Roland Klose 