Our Own Hall of Fame

 

WHITELAW REID

 

RAN FOR VICE PRESIDENT

Papers High-Hatted Reid; He Became a Publisher

 

DAYTON DAILY NEWS,  MARCH 13, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

 

     Whitelaw Reid had his troubles.  His teacher once locked him in a desk for insubordination.

     Two Cincinnati newspapers refused to hire him.

     He managed Horace Greeley’s campaign for the presidency.  Greeley lost.  He ran for vice president himself.  He lost.

     But the man who was born in a farm house near Cedarville in 1837 had his triumphs, too.  Reid rallied from the setbacks of his cub reporter days to become a famous Civil War correspondent and, later, editor and publisher of the New York Tribune.

     HE SERVED with distinction as ambassador to France and, as minister to Great Britain, was lauded by the British press as “the greatest ambassador America ever sent to London.”

     As a boy in Greene county, Reid cooled off in an old swimming hole at Massie’s creek, attended a one-room district school, went on to the Xenia academy and—a precocious 16—entered Miami university as a sophomore.

     He was 19 when he graduated and took a $50 a month job as superintendent of elementary schools at South Charleston.  Bur Reid wanted to be a newspaperman.

     Two years later he took over the faltering Xenia News and circulation leaped before ill health forced Reid to quit and go west. When he returned he couldn’t get a job in Cincinnati, finally wrangled a $5-a-week post as Columbus correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette.

     His lively newsletters (under the by-line “Agate”) attracted attention.  Reid was pulled back to Cincinnati and, during the Civil War, covered the bloody battles of Shiloh and Gettysburg.  (He also later wrote a detailed history called “Ohio In The War.”)

     REID A TALL, sinewy man with dark eyes and a broad, bulging forehead, was a Washington correspondent when Horace Greeley brought him to the Tribune as an editorial writer in 1868.  After Greeley’s death he became editor and publisher and by 1875 the Tribune’s circulation had passed 50,000—a top figure for that era.

     Reid had a pungent writing style, a reputation (around Xenia) of being “a bit snobbish” and a driving belief in the need for “the scholar in politics.”

     In 1889 President Benjamin Harrison named him ambassador to France.  Three years later Reid came home to run as the vice presidential candidate when Harrison sought re-election but the ticket was defeated by Democrat Grover Cleveland (who had lost to Harrison four years before.)

     The Greene county native played an important role in negotiating the treaty with Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War.

     Reid went to England as ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1910 and died there two year later at the age of 75.

  

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