�

Robert Rutherford McCormick (July 30, 1880 – April 1, 1955) was a Chicago newspaper baron and owner of the Chicago Tribune. His grandfather was Tribune-founder and former Chicago mayor Joseph Medill, and his great-uncle was the inventor and businessman Cyrus McCormick.

McCormick was born in Chicago. From 1889 through 1893, he lived with his parents in London where his father Robert Sanderson McCormick was a staff secretary to Robert Todd Lincoln. In 1899, McCormick went to Yale College; he received a law degree from Northwestern University. In 1908, he co-founded the law firm that became Kirkland & Ellis. In 1911, he became the president of the Chicago Tribune.

During World War I, footage of McCormick meeting with Tsar Nicholas became the first newsreel footage. On this trip, McCormick also began collecting pieces of historically significant buildings which would eventually find their way into the structure of the Tribune Tower.

Politically McCormick was a leading Progressive during the Progressive Era, but he turned against the New Deal and as a conservative was an America First isolationist who strongly opposed entering World War II to rescue the the British Empire. As a publisher he was very innovative. McCormick bought a radio station in 1924 and was the first to broadcast the Indianapolis 500, the World Series, and the Kentucky Derby. He also established the town of Baie-Comeau, Quebec in 1936 and constructed a paper mill there.

The giant convention center McCormick Place on the near South Side of Chicago is named after him.

McCormick's Wheaton, Illinois estate, Cantigny, was named after the French city of the same name, where the First Division of the U.S. Army first encountered trench warfare during WWI. It has since been converted into a war museum and popular tourist attraction.

Today, the Engineering School at his alma mater, Northwestern University is named in his honor.

Some of McCormick's personal crusades were seen as quixotic (such as his attempts to reform spelling of the English language) and were parodied in political cartoons in rival Frank Knox's Chicago Daily News. Knox's political cartoonists derided McCormick as "Colonel McCosmic".

[edit Bibliography

• Richard Norton Smith. The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick, 1880-1955 (2003)