Frank Gannett

Born Sept. 15, 1876. The nation was still smarting over the deaths nearly three months earlier of Col. George A. Custer and 210 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry at the hands of the Sioux in the Battle of Little Big Horn. Transcontinental rail travel had been achieved only seven years earlier.

Three years before Gannett bought into his first newspaper partnership in Elmira, N.Y., in 1906, Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air machine at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Gannett saw warfare intensify from the Spanish-American War's mounted cavalry charges to World War II's atomic devastation.

Just a few weeks after he died in 1957, Explorer I was the first U.S. earth satellite to be launched into orbit at Cape Canaveral, Fla. And within a year, National Airlines began domestic jet airline service in the United States with a flight between New York City and Miami.

The contrasts in Gannett's own life were equally remarkable. At his death he had achieved wealth that amply qualified for the denigrating cliche "filthy rich." Yet he was born in upstate New York's hardscrabble country to struggling farmers who could accurately be described as dirt poor.

Despite having the means to indulge the trappings of leisure, he set a personal example of his belief in hard work.

</p><p>He was accused by labor of being a pinch-penny, for which there is considerable evidence, yet condemned as a traitor by fellow businessmen for his early advocacy of profit-sharing and pension plans.

As a child of struggling parents, he wrote and spoke fervently against the railroads, the trusts and monopolies. As a successful businessman, he was distressed by envious condemnations of his newspapers as monopolistic predators on their communities.

His early newspapers staunchly supported the Democratic Party, yet he went on in his 60s to mount a quixotic and ill-fated campaign for the Republican nomination for president.



He was an acquaintance and early supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but founded and mobilized the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, which was the primary deterrent to FDR's attempt to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.

He went from evangelical isolationism in the late 1930s to unstinting support of the Allied effort to win World War II. His eloquent tributes to First Amendment freedoms were occasionally sullied by intemperate and unsubstantiated attacks on Roosevelt.

Stereotypical caricatures of him as a grasping profiteer contradicted his ready philanthropies, not the least of which was placing most of his fortune into a foundation to provide job security for Gannett employees and assist the communities they served.

Vin Jones, who succeeded Fay Blanchard as head of the News and Editorial Office, recalled, "One of the odd things about Frank Gannett was he hated radio and television. God, he couldn't stand them, although he owned several radio stations. He never wrote anything that he didn't just absolutely castigate radio and television."

Source: Harvard Square