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She was
born into a wealthy, influential family in America’s heartland, endowed
with riches, a restless intelligence, raw charm and a bountiful store of
courage that grew from her awkward role as a daughter forced to act like
a son. But in the early years of Alicia Patterson’s life, it seemed
doubtful that she would ever amount to anything.She attended the best private schools in America and Europe, but she managed to get herself kicked out of two of them. She made her society debut at an expensive coming-out party in a Chicago hotel. But a few months later, making another debut—as a reporter for her father’s newspaper, the New York Daily News—she fouled up one of her first stories so badly that her own father fired her.
Returning home ignominiously to Chicago, a sad failure before the age of 21, she soon married a department store executive’s son and dashed off for a long honeymoon in the horse country of England. That marriage, which began disintegrating in a series of arguments on the honeymoon, lasted only a year. She traveled the world, became a record-setting pilot and an experienced hunter and married a man who shared her interests in flying, hunting and fishing.
Her second husband, Joseph W Brooks, a fishing buddy of her father, was 15 years older than she was. At first, they were quite happy, living in a house that her father had rented her for $1 a year in Sands Point. She loved Brooks for his courage, his sportsmanship and his engaging personality, but in less than a decade, she had decided that her second marriage was simply too frivolous.
“As the years went on, I began to feel restive about a life based on sports.” she later wrote. “Joe and I grew apart.”1
With this shaky, seemingly purposeless start, she could very easily have become the stereotypical poor little rich girl, living a life of great leisure and little impact. But by the time she died in 1963 at the age of 56, Miss Patterson had in many ways shaped the growth of her adopted home, Long Island. What turned her around and molded her into someone who helped shape her community, physically and socially? What made the poor little rich girl into a Long Island power, the editor and publisher of one of the most successful new newspapers of the postwar era?
To begin with, she had something restless in her personality, a burning will to show the world that she could be as good a journalist as her father, one of the most influential newspaper executives of the century.
When Alicia Patterson arrived in the world on October 15, 1906, Joseph Medill Patterson already had one daughter and was more than ready for a son. His response to his second daughter’s birth was to slam the door, walk out and stay away for days.
“He had wanted a boy, instead of three daughters in succession and that meant one of the Patterson girls would have to be his substitute son,” Miss Patterson wrote later.2 So, as she grew up, her chief desire was to please her father, to hunt with him, fish with him, and show all the physical courage that any son would have showed.
“Father seemed to get a kick out of having me do dangerous things,” she said to an interviewer from The New Yorker. “In fact, what with one thing and another, I kept getting so scared that finally I wasn’t scared of anything anymore.”3
In her youth, she watched her father increase in stature, first as one of the leaders of the family business, the Chicago Tribune, then as founder of America’s first successful tabloid, the New York Daily News, which opened in 1919 and reached a circulation of 1,000,000 by the end of 1925.4 During those years, even as she struggled with the unruly instincts that made school a difficult adventure, she began aspiring to follow her father into journalism.
The other crucial element in her conversion from playgirl to woman of substance was her third marriage, to one of her Sands Point neighbors, Harry Frank Guggenheim.
Guggenheim was 16 years older than Miss Patterson, but that was not the most important difference between them. For one thing, there was the matter of life experience. At the time they met, she had done little of substance beyond writing a few articles for Liberty, a magazine that her father had established, and setting a few women’s flying records. In sharp contrast, Guggenheim was a man of immense accomplishment.
Guggenheim grew up in a wealthy Jewish family that had come to America to flee anti-Semitism in Switzerland and had made a fortune in mining and smelting. He had been an executive of one family-owned business, Chile Copper, had become one of the first naval aviators in World War I, and had helped his father, Daniel Guggenheim, to establish a foundation that would help develop American aviation industry. Among other things, Guggenheim money in those years established a model airline, paid for a cross-country tour by Charles Lindbergh after his Paris flight, arranged for the first-ever instruments-only flight, and bankrolled Robert Goddard’s rocket experiments. In addition, Harry Guggenheim had served as American ambassador to Cuba from 1929 to 1933 and built his own thoroughbred racing stable, Cain Hoy.
Their personalities and political beliefs, too, were sharply different. She was liberal. He was conservative. She was impulsive and fun-loving. he was serious and earnest. She had little sense of the value of money, because her father had always supplied her with whatever she needed. He was prodigiously careful with a dollar.
When they married in 1939, one of Guggenheim’s primary concerns was to keep his new wife busy and out of trouble. Miss Patterson believed that her father would someday leave her in a position of power at the News. Guggenheim felt that she should prepare for that opportunity by running a small newspaper of her own. To find the right newspaper, they sought the help of her father’s friend, Max Annenberg, the circulation director at the News.
While they were on their honeymoon in the summer of 1939, at Goddard’s rocket-testing site in New Mexico, Annenberg telegraphed them that he had found a good opportunity: the Nassau Daily Journal, a small paper located in a former auto dealership in Hempstead. It had opened on March 1, 1939 and closed on March 10. The paper’s equipment was still sitting in the building, unused.
“On the arrival of Max’s telegram, Alicia balked,” Guggenheim later wrote. “She wanted, at that moment, to give up the whole idea.”5 But Guggenheim was adamant. He insisted that they go through with the deal, and she finally agreed.
At that critical turning-point in her life, Guggenheim had supplied the wisdom and determination to push her into the first step toward her own life of accomplishment. The result was the establishment of Newsday on September 3, 1940. Not long after that, Guggenheim returned to active duty in the Navy and was assigned to command a naval air station near Trenton. That left Miss Patterson running the paper solo in its early, formative years.
Her first contribution to Long Island was to bring competition to a newspaper market dominated by one party and one newspaper, the Nassau Daily Review-Star. Its publisher, James Stiles, was not only a member of Nassau County’s dominant Republican Party, but also a committeeman. He was generous to the Republicans, publishing “thousands of dollars” worth of political advertising as a contribution to the party, and to individual candidates he wanted to help.”6 And the party was generous to Stiles, placing county legal ads—a profitable form of advertising—with his paper.
in 1941, only a few months after Newsday opened, Miss Patterson launched a campaign to wrestle the legal ads away from the Review-Star. In addition to arguing its merits before the county’s board of supervisors, Newsday campaigned in the newspaper itself, accusing Stiles of running up the cost to the taxpayers by setting the legal ads in a larger-than-normal typeface, surrounded by white space. Newsday argued that it could provide this service to the taxpayers at much lower cost.
The campaign finally succeeded when the county awarded the ads to Newsday in 1944. That was the first serious challenge to the monolithic dominance of the Nassau County Republican Party. Three years later, the two papers took opposing positions on an issue that was pivotal to the future growth of Long Island.
With the end of World War II, millions of veterans streamed back to the United States, ready to put the war behind them and start their families. What they found was a cruel housing shortage. Veterans ended up living with in-laws or in such substandard forms of housing as quonset huts and trolley cars. In consequence, wrote suburbia expert Kenneth T. Jackson, “the great American land rush after 1945 was one of the largest mass movements in our history.”7
In the metropolitan area, much of New York City itself had already been developed. So the wide-open spaces of Long Island became the natural target for new home construction. Even before the war ended, Newsday had carried a five-part series in 19448 on the need for cheap, mass-produced homes. The inspiration for the series was apparently a letter from Miss Patterson’s neighbor, Albert Wood, stressing the need for houses that would cost under $5,000. Wood had been the construction engineer for the Ford subsidiary that built inexpensive housing for Ford employees in Dearborn, Michigan. In that project, workers moved from house to house, performing the same functions on each, to speed construction.
That sort of assembly-line construction was exactly what the firm of Levitt & Sons had in mind for postwar Nassau County. Before the war ended, they had already begun to buy up the land and put together the needed materials to mass produce homes that they could rent to returning veterans at reasonable prices. On May 7, 1947, the lead story in Newsday detailed those plans, under the headline “2,000 $60 Rentals/Due in L.I. Project.”
The problem with their plan was this: They hoped to build on concrete slabs, without basements, and heat the houses with radiant heating pipes embedded in the slab. But the Town of Hempstead’s building code required cellars. Newsday jumped on the issue with both feet, citing Wood’s expertise as evidence that cellarless homes were the wave of the future, and arguing strongly in an editorial that nothing should stand in the way of the Levitt plan. “The Island Trees project is big, practical, and ideal enough to make national news,” the editorial said. “If it were prevented by the code it would make Long Island a national laughing stock.”9
But Nassau County Republicans had their doubts. The expressed reasons had to do with the viability of the radiant heating plan. But the unspoken subtext was apparently a fear that thousands of veterans moving into Long Island from New York City would be Democrats. If the Republican Party was cautious, so was James Stiles, the publisher of the Review-Star.
“If a revolutionary change in home construction is in process we will have to recognize it and reconcile ourselves to it, “the Review-Star editorial said. “But we should be extremely cautious not to permit the existing shortage of houses to stampede us into junking all the precautions that have been adopted to protect individual purchasers and the standard of entire communities.”10
During the interval between the announcement of the Levitt plan and the town board meeting at which the proposed ordinance change would be discussed, Newsday hammered relentlessly at the issue. Finally, confronted with a large crowd and an emotional appeal for housing, the town board unanimously approved the code change that allowed Levitt & Sons to build what later became Levittown.11
The key Newsday operative in this Levitt campaign was not Miss Patterson herself, but her chosen managing editor, Alan Hathway, an old-fashioned, hard-drinking, crude, rowdy, go-for-the-knees newspaperman who had learned his trade in the brawling era of Chicago journalism in the 1920s and later worked as an editor at Joseph Medill Patterson’s Daily News. From the time she made him managing editor in 1944, Miss Patterson allowed Hathway wide latitude to set the gutsy tone that she wanted for Newsday’s aggressive reporting of local politics.
She occasionally had to rein him in, as she did soon after the war, when he actually used her typewriter to help a veterans’ group craft a response to an expected attack by the Nassau Republicans over some garden apartments that the group wanted built. Once Hathway had helped them write the response, he put it in the paper. The Republicans found out and complained to Guggenheim, who relayed the complaint to Miss Patterson. She had to warn Hathway never to do that again, but he kept his job.12
Miss Patterson also had to rein Hathway in during the early 1960s, when he put the paper’s resources behind a plan by master builder Robert Moses to build a highway the length of Fire Island. Hathway was not a disinterested observer, since he owned property on Fire Island and stood to benefit by construction of the road.
The road’s opponents considered it a potential environmental disaster and advocated instead that the area become a national seashore. One of them, an environmentally conscious developer named Murray Barbash, met with Miss Patterson and arranged a meeting between her and Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall in Washington. The visit with Udall and his aide, Walter Pozen, helped convince her that Newsday should abandon the road and push exclusively for the national seashore. That change of heart was crucial to the creation of the Fire Island National Seashore. “So Newsday was incredibly important in that respect.” Barbash said.13
Though Hathway require occasional throttling back, he was the driving force behind the investigation of William DeKoning, a corrupt union boss who was able to control much of the Long Island construction industry. That investigation of DeKoning won for Newsday its first Pulitzer Prize, in 1954. It also set a pattern for a Newsday tradition of aggressive investigative reporting.
One of the keys to the success of that investigation was a young reporter named Robert W. Greene, who is now, of course, leading the development of Hofstra’s communications program. Hathway hired Greene from the New York City Anti-Crime Committee, where he was an investigator. At Newsday, Greene turned his skills to the DeKoning investigation.
In the years that followed, Greene pioneered a new level of investigative reporting. Before Greene, most investigative reporting relied on friendly sources inside government agencies to drop copies of investigative reports into the laps of reporters. Greene pioneered and developed journalistic techniques that allowed the newspaper to construct its own investigative reports, by aggressive and intelligent use of raw documents.
In later years, investigative projects led by Greene focused on such targets as widespread land corruption in Suffolk County. Of all Newsday investigations, perhaps none had greater impact than a two-year probe of the LILCO Shoreham nuclear plant. The reporter was a Greene disciple names Stuart Diamond. His 1981 series fundamentally changed the political atmosphere and ultimately led to the decommissioning of the plant before it had even opened.
It was Miss Patterson who established the overall atmosphere in which Bob Greene flourished and helped to change in lasting ways the face of Long Island. Though she delegated much of the detail work to Hathway, there were matters that she handled very much on her own, especially presidential politics.
Soon after the war, she began arguing in Newsday that General Dwight D. Eisenhower should run for the presidency. In 1952, Newsday heavily promoted a Garden City rally that served as a preliminary to a larger rally at Madison Square Garden, aimed at persuading the general to run. Later, Newsday’s circulation department actually gave out “WE LIKE IKE” buttons. Miss Patterson herself interviewed Eisenhower in Europe and reported back rhapsodically, “It was a blessed relief at long last to talk to a man who appears to be above the slime of our present-day politics.” she wrote in a full-page report. “I am more convinced than ever that I LIKE IKE.”14
But she soon found herself on the horns of a dilemma when the Democratic opponent to Eisenhower turned out the be her close friend, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson.
Miss Patterson had known Stevenson in Chicago in the 1920s, and some friends say he may even have proposed marriage to her then. In 1946, when he moved to New York to work at the United Nations, they renewed their acquaintance. From then until her death in 1963, they kept up a constant correspondence. Most of her letters are lost to history, but Stevenson’s letters are filled with terms of endearment almost adolescent in their intensity and with admiration for her toughness and talent.
“So you’ve made it—you indomitable little tiger,” he wrote her after Newsday passed the 100,000 circulation mark in 1949. “I could just bite your ears with savage joy.”15 Stevenson also relied on her judgment as he wrestled with the question of whether to run for the presidency. It was in a letter to Miss Patterson that he first hinted he might accept a draft by the Democratic convention.16 Even as she pushed for Eisenhower, she worked to persuade Guggenheim’s nephew, Roger W. Straus Jr., of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to publish a Stevenson campaign biography, which Straus did. “It was an enormous seller,” he recalled.17
Once Stevenson decided to run in 1952, Miss Patterson had to do an agile dance on the editorial pages. While not backing down from her support for Eisenhower, she made it clear that Stevenson would also be an excellent choice, for those inclined to vote Democrat. She even hosted a supper for Stevenson at Manhattan’s prestigious River Club, to introduce him to newspaper publishers.
Of course, Eisenhower beat Stevenson easily in 1952. Stevenson ran against him again in 1956. This time Miss Patterson, instead of endorsing the incumbent Republican, endorsed Stevenson. This stunned Guggenheim, who had told a Republican friend that Newsday would back Eisenhower. This surprise endorsement was one of the central reasons for a marital disagreement in 1957 that nearly resulted in divorce, as Guggenheim tried to assert editorial control of the paper and his wife resisted. Miss Patterson went so far as to type a letter of resignation.18 But in the end, they stayed together. She could not bear the thought of losing Newsday.
The bitter conclusion to the 1956 campaign planted the seeds of a bizarre arrangement in 1960. Guggenheim, the arch-conservative, was a firm supporter of Richard Nixon. Miss Patterson initially supported Stevenson. But Sen. John F. Kennedy met with her and her staff for lunch on Long Island, and he charmed her. She promised him that he would be her second choice for the nomination.
At the convention, when it became clear that Kennedy would be the nominee, Miss Patterson deputized Bob Greene to meet with Robert Kennedy and try to get a promise that the senator would make Stevenson his secretary of state, in exchange for Stevenson’s support at the convention. That ploy failed, and she came around to support Kennedy.
Newsday endorsed Kennedy, but it was not simple. Over the endorsing editorial was an editor’s note with Miss Patterson’s signature: “The opinions of this newspaper are expressed in the editorial column. Today we endorse John F. Kennedy for President of the United States. The reasons for our choice are set forth below. In a column on the opposite page my husband, Harry F. Guggenheim, president of Newsday, states his personal endorsement for Vice President Richard M. Nixon for President.”19
Between that time and election day, Guggenheim took several more opportunities to sound a pro-Nixon counterpoint to his wife’s pro Kennedy editorials—surely one of the strangest juxtapositions of political opinion ever to appear in a major newspaper. The last laugh, however, belonged to Miss Patterson. Not only did Kennedy win, but he was grateful enough for her support that he acceded to her request for a White House lunch. It was at that lunch that she made her pitch for his help on an issue that shaped the face of Long island.
The issue was a struggle over the future use of Mitchel Field, a former military air base. A group of businessmen wanted it converted to a general aviation airport. Through she was herself a pilot, Miss Patterson felt that the area around the base was so heavily developed that any aviation use was unsafe. There were plenty of other potential uses for the base, including space for Hofstra University and Nassau Community College.
At Miss Patterson’s White House lunch with Kennedy, the issue came up. With little hesitation, Kennedy picked up the phone and called Najeeb Halaby, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. In a brief conversation, Kennedy instructed Halaby to close Mitchel Field down. Bill Woestendiek, one of Miss Patterson’s key aides, recalled: “Then he turned around, put the phone down. He said ‘It’s closed...’ That was very impressive.”20
Of course, the saga of Mitchel Field has been anything but uncomplicated since then. It has been the center of hundreds of stories, as politicians fought over its use. But if it had not been for Alicia Patterson, Mitchel Field might very well have become a general aviation airport, which would certainly have altered the way this corner of Nassau County eventually developed.
Though she grew up in Chicago, Miss Patterson was a strong partisan of the community that her newspaper served. “She really did represent Long Island.” said her friend, Phyllis Cerf Wagner. “She felt so fiercely about it, as if she’d grown up there ...It was her child, as the newspaper was her child.”21
To protect her child, Newsday, she stayed in a marriage that had gone sour. Over the years, that dedication to Newsday had an impact on her adopted community that went beyond merely a road not built on Fire Island and an airport not operating in the center of Nassau County. She was an early advocate of women’s equality, filling her newsroom with female reporters from the start. She was a voice of sanity standing up to the abuses of the McCarthy era. She nurtured an aggressive style at the newspaper that proved a vigilant watchdog over Long Island identity for a fragmented community that had been little more than a collection of small villages separated by trees.
Alicia Patterson had her pet causes and her favored friends, her blind spots and her odd quirks. But when you add it all up, she created an institution that has lasted more than a half century and significantly shaped her chosen community. By any rational measure, that is a substantial epitaph for someone who could have remained just a poor little rich girl.
1 Alicia Patterson and Hal Burton, “This I the Life I Love,” Saturday Evening Post, February 21, 1959, page 45.
3 John M. Flagler, Untitled, unpublished manuscript about Alicia Patterson written for The New Yorker, 1963, Part 1, pages 14-15.
4 Leo E. McGivena, The News: The first Fifty Years of New York’s Picture Newspaper (New York: News Syndicate, 1969).
5 Harry F. Guggenheim, Newsday, “Silver Anniversary Edition,” September 10, 1965.
6 Edward Uhlan, Dynamo Jim Stiles: Pioneer of Progress (New York: Exposition Press, 1959), page 96
7 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), page 282.
8 Newsday, September 28-29, October 2-4, 1944.
10 Nassau Daily Review-Star, May 22, 1947.
12 Interview with Paul Townsend, December 9, 1987.
13 Interview with Murray Barbash, March 8, 1988.
15 Letter, Adlai Stevenson to Alicia Patterson, March 8, 1949;
16 Letter, Adlai Stevenson to Alicia Patterson, March 13, 1949; Porter McKeever, Adlai Stevenson: His Life and Legacy (New York: William Morrow, 1989), pages 187-188.
17 Interview with Roger Straus, May 20, 1987.
18 Draft of resignation statement, December 1957, in Alicia Patterson papers.
20 Interview with Bill Woestendiek, February 24, 1988.
21 Interview with Phyllis Cerf Wagner, September 16, 1987.