Volume III: Biographies

PATTERSON, J. Medill

Advisor (1914)

Thanhouser Career Synopsis: Joseph Medill Patterson was a promoter and backer in 1914 of the 1914-1915 serial, The Million Dollar Mystery.

Biographical Notes: Joseph Medill Patterson was born in Chicago on January 6, 1879, the son of Robert W. and Elinor Medill Patterson. His father was a newspaper publisher. Young Patterson went to private schools in Chicago and France, then attended the Groton School, in Massachusetts, from which he was graduated. After spending a year on a ranch in New Mexico, he enrolled at Yale. During one summer he was a newspaper correspondent covering the Boxer Rebellion in China. The next year, 1901, he graduated from Yale, after which he landed a job as a reporter for the newspaper in which his family had an ownership interest, The Chicago Tribune, at salary of $15 per week, which his family supplemented with an allowance of $10,000 per year! In 1903, with his family's backing, he was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives. Patterson remained in state and local politics for the next several years, after which he turned his interest to writing stories and plays, among which were Confessions of a Drone, A Little Brother of the Rich, Dope (a stage play that was later adapted for the screen by Thanhouser), and By-Products. The most successful was said to have been The Fourth Estate, co-authored with James Keeley and Harriet Ford, which was staged on Broadway in 1909. In a lawsuit filed in Chicago in 1910, Eugene Quirk, a Chicago newspaper reporter, claimed that The Fourth Estate was stolen from his novel, Drifting. The plaintiff charged that Patterson "filched, purloined, plagiarized, and appropriated practically every speaking character in the newspaper play."

Following his father's death in 1910, Joseph Medill Patterson went back to the Tribune, where he served as co-publisher and co-editor with his cousin, Col. Robert R. McCormick. In 1914, Patterson was involved with the Mutual Film Corporation and was a promoter and backer of The Million Dollar Mystery, which was first syndicated by The Chicago Tribune. In 1914, tiring of his newspaper management duties, he went to Europe as a war correspondent. He joined the American Army in 1916 and served in France. Later, he became involved in newspaper publishing in England while retaining his interests in Chicago. In later years he became an increasingly important newspaper publisher in America, in Chicago and New York, with his New York Daily News reaping large profits and garnering a Sunday circulation of over 4,500,000.

At first a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Patterson split with the president and in 1941 described him as a "dictator." Patterson married Alice Higginbotham, of Chicago, in 1902, and divorced her on June 10, 1938. A month later he married Miss Mary King. At the time of his death due to a liver ailment, at Doctors' Hospital, New York City, on May 26, 1946, he was president of the News Syndicate Company, Inc., publisher of the New York Daily News and Sunday News. He was survived by his widow, Mary King Patterson, a son, James Patterson, and three daughters, Mrs. Elinor Medill Patterson Baker, Mrs. Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, and Mrs. Josephine Medill Patterson Albright. It was later announced that his estate was valued at $11,186,052.

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