Cissy Patterson - Business Dealings and Social Life

Business Dealings and Social Life

After her experience abroad, she moved to Lake Forest, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, but she returned to Washington in 1913. In 1920, her brother Joseph finally succumbed to his sister's entreaties and allowed her to write for his New York Daily News, founded the previous year. She also worked for William Randolph Hearst. She published two novels, romans a clef, Glass Houses (1926) and Fall Flight (1928), part of her feud with former friend Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The friendship with Alice Longworth ended when at a dinner party hosted by the Longworths, Eleanor and Nicholas were caught on the floor of a bathroom, with the light on and the door unlocked. Alice then retaliated by having a lasting affair with Senator William Edgar Borah, which at its height, produced a child Paulina Longworth. Eleanor also had an affair with Borah, but Alice won out reportedly because Eleanor frequently gloated about their experiences unlike Alice.

In 1925, Eleanor married Elmer Schlesinger, a New York lawyer. He died four years later and in 1930, Mrs. Schlesinger legally changed her name to Mrs. Eleanor Medill Patterson.

Patterson tried to buy Hearst's two Washington papers, the morning Washington Herald and the evening Washington Times. However, Hearst hated to sell anything, even when he needed the money. Although he had never made money from his Washington papers, he refused to give up the prestige of owning papers in the capital. However, at the urging of his editor Arthur Brisbane, Hearst agreed to make Patterson the papers' editor. She began work on August 1, 1930. Patterson was a hands-on editor who insisted on the best of everything—writing, layout, typographic, graphics, comics, everything. She encouraged society reporting and the women's page and hired many women as reporters including Adela Rogers St. Johns and Martha Blair. In 1936, she was invited to join the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Patterson made her paper popular with all strata of Washington society and doubled its circulation. She also shifted the papers' editorial stance sharply to the right.

In 1937, Hearst's finances had gotten worse and he agreed to lease the Herald and the Times to Patterson with an option to buy. Eugene Meyer, the man who had outbid Hearst and Patterson for The Washington Post in 1933, tried to buy the Herald out from under Patterson, but failed. Instead, she bought both papers from Hearst on January 28, 1939, and merged them as the Times-Herald.

Along with her brother at the New York Daily News and her cousin at the Chicago Tribune, Patterson was an ardent isolationist and opponent of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1942, after the Battle of Midway, the Times-Herald ran a Tribune story that revealed American intelligence was reading the Japanese naval code. Roosevelt, furious, had the Tribune and the Times-Herald indicted for espionage but backed down because of the publicity, charges he was persecuting his enemies, and the likelihood of an acquittal (since the Navy's own censors had twice cleared the story before it was published). During World War II, she and her brother were accused by their enemies of being Nazi sympathizers. Representative Elmer Holland of Pennsylvania on the floor of the United States House of Representatives said Cissy and Joseph Patterson "would welcome the victory of Hitler."