Joe

A handful of Senators and Congressmen became purple last week attacking and defending the McCormick-Patterson publishing family. At hubbub's end the man who had taken the hardest lumps was not widely hated Colonel Robert McCormick, of the Chicago Tribune, but the most engaging member of the family: Captain Joe Patterson of the New York Daily News.

Joe Patterson is a different sort of journalistic bird from, Bertie McCormick. Unlike the Tribune, the tabloid News plays the news straight--except for queer capers in some "feature" stories. Having long ago graduated from reliance on a cheesecake-and-scandal diet, it now commands respect from its contemporaries for its enterprise and alertness. Equally respected is Captain Patterson, who distinguished himself in combat in World War I, has espoused many a liberal cause. But his pre-Pearl Harbor isolationism and editorial changes of pace on the conduct of the war have prompted many to tar him with the same brush as Colonel McCormick.

Last week, while Colonel McCormick's Senator (C. Wayland Brooks) orated in defense of the Tribune, Captain Patterson got a blasting from a freshman Representative from Pennsylvania.

A former Pennsylvania legislator, Elmer Holland (D), 48, was elected to an unexpired term in the House after a fiery campaign in which he promised to "deal firmly with the defeatists, the sowers of dissension . . . who are working with the Axis warlords to . . . hamper our country's war effort." Taking his pretty wife (a onetime secretary of Mrs. Gifford Pinchot) to Washington as his secretary, Elmer Holland started right in on a seven-days-a week study of Captain Joe's News and Cissie Patterson's Washington Times-Herald. Last fortnight, in his maiden speech, he let fly: Captain Joe and Cissie, he charged, were "America's No. 1 and No. 2 exponents of the Nazi propaganda line . . . doing their best to bring about a Fascist victory, hoping that in that victory they will be rewarded."

Joe Patterson's editorials are always bluntly to the point. But the News's 2,000,000 readers were startled by a Patterson editorial blunter than usual: "Congressman Holland: You are a liar. Make what you like of that."

What Elmer Holland made of it was a full-dress speech repeating his charges in more vitriolic terms. Cried he: "Daily these publishers rub at the morale of the American people. Daily they sow suspicion. Daily they preach that we are a nation of fools, led by rascals into a hopeless struggle. Daily they wear at the moral fiber of the people, softening it, rotting it, preparing us for defeat."

This time Captain Patterson did not reply. But the captain has a daughter-brown-haired Alicia, 34, as smart as she is pretty. Long before Pearl Harbor, in her own Long Island tabloid Newsday, she had disagreed with her father's pre-war isolationism (TIME, Oct. 6). Last week she came to his defense in a signed column (reprinted in Aunt Cissie's Times-Herald).

Said Alicia: "I know him perhaps better than most daughters know their fathers. We have hunted together and fished together. . . . I have seen him under all sorts of circumstances . . . when he joined up with the Rainbow Division in the last war although he was 38 years old with a wife and three children; when he came back from France in 1918 looking older and grimmer. . . . As long as I can remember he was carrying the torch for the U.S.A. . . . After the Japs bombed Hawaii . . . he tried to enlist but was told that he was too old. . . . It is true that my father has from time to time criticized the Administration. Does that make him a traitor? . . . If that is so we have lost our democracy before we have begun to fight for it."

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