Ruth Elizabeth "Bazy" Tankersley (, formerly Miller; March 7, 1921 – February 5, 2013) was an American breeder of Arabian horses and a newspaper publisher. She was a daughter of U.S. Senator Joseph Medill McCormick. Her mother was progressive Republican U.S. Representative Ruth Hanna McCormick, making Tankersley a granddaughter of Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio. Although Tankersley was involved with conservative Republican causes as a young woman, including a friendship with Senator Joseph McCarthy, her progressive roots reemerged in later years. By the 21st century, she had become a strong supporter of environmental causes and backed Barack Obama for president in 2008.
Tankersley's father died when she was a child. When her mother remarried, the family moved to the southwestern United States, where Tankersley spent considerable time riding horses. She became particularly enamored of the Arabian breed after she was given a part-Arabian to ride. At the age of 18, she began working as a reporter for a newspaper published by her mother. She later ran a newspaper in Illinois with her first husband, Peter Miller. In 1949, she became the publisher of the conservative Washington Times-Herald. That paper was owned by her uncle, the childless Robert McCormick, who viewed Tankersley as his heir until the two had a falling-out over editorial control of the newspaper and her relationship with Garvin Tankersley, who became her second husband. After The Washington Post absorbed the Times-Herald, she shifted to full-time horse breeding.
Tankersley purchased her first purebred Arabian when she was 19 and began her horse breeding operation, Al-Marah Arabians in Tucson, Arizona, in 1941. As she moved across the U.S. for her newspaper career, her horses and farm name went with her. She purchased her program's foundation sire, Indraff, in 1947, while living in Illinois. Upon her move to Washington, DC, her Al-Marah operation relocated to Montgomery County, Maryland, where by 1957 it was the largest Arabian farm in the United States. Tankersley returned to Tucson in the 1970s, where in addition to horse breeding, she created an apprenticeship program at Al-Marah to train young people for jobs in the horse industry. She set up a second horse operation, the Hat Ranch, near Flagstaff, Arizona. Over her career, she bred over 2,800 registered Arabians and was one of the largest importers of horses from the Crabbet Arabian Stud in England.
Tankersley was a patron of many charities. Upon her death from Parkinson's disease in 2013, she bequeathed her Tucson ranch to the University of Arizona and placed the Hat Ranch in a conservation trust. In her final years, she downsized her breeding operation to about 150 horses. Most remaining stock went to her son, Mark Miller, who moved the Al-Marah Arabian farm name and horse operation to his home base near Clermont, Florida.
Background and personal life
Tankersley was described as having "inherited a love of politics and horses, not necessarily in that order."Smith, p. 461. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, on March 7, 1921. Her nickname "Bazy" came from how she pronounced the word "baby" when she was a toddler. Her father was Joseph Medill McCormick, part-owner of the Chicago Tribune and a Senator from Illinois. Her mother, Ruth Hanna McCormick was a daughter of Ohio Senator Mark Hanna was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Illinois, serving in the 71st Congress from 1929 to 1931 as a progressive Republican.
Tankersley was the youngest of three children, with an elder sister Katherine ("Katrina") and an elder brother John. When Tankersley was four, her father committed suicide, believed to be partly attributed to his defeat for renomination in 1924. Her mother remarried in 1932 to Albert Gallatin Simms, a lawyer, banker and congressman from New Mexico.
Tankersley spent part of her childhood on her mother's Rock River dairy farm in Byron, Illinois. She later moved to the Southwest with her mother and stepfather,Ahneman-Rudsenske and Bavaria, p. 62. living initially at a ranch owned by Simms in Albuquerque, New Mexico, then moving in 1937 to the Trinchera Ranch, a property in Colorado that her mother had purchased. Tankersley attended a boarding school in Virginia and spent summers in the West. Her love of horses in general and the Arabian horse in particular came from those years: "Right away, my stepfather bought me a cow pony, and I wore it out ... So my mother got me a Arabian that I couldn't wear out." She also showed horses on the East Coast in the 1930s. Her interest in Arabian horses led her to meeting several major breeders of the time, including Jimmie Dean of Traveler's Rest, Roger Selby, W. R. Brown and Carl Raswan.
Tankersley did not complete high school, and she later said "I virtually had no education." Nonetheless, she studied genetics at Vermont's Bennington College between 1939 and 1941 without completing a degree. While there, she gained some notoriety for genetic studies she conducted by raising fruit flies in her dorm room. In 2004, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Arizona.
She married Maxwell Peter Miller, Jr. in 1941. She and Miller lived in Tucson for two years, where she developed a deep love for Arizona. They then moved to Chicago for a time, and subsequently to her mother's Trinchera Ranch, which Bazy ran. Her mother died of pancreatitis on December 31, 1944, two months after a serious riding accident.Smith, p. 463.
The couple moved back to Illinois prior to relocating to Washington, DC. She divorced Miller in 1951 to marry Garvin E. "Tank" Tankersley, an editor at the Washington Times-Herald ten years older than she was.Smith, p. 505. Garvin Tankersley had started his news career as a photographer, and he was the managing editor when he left the paper in 1952. The couple met while Bazy was running the Times-Herald, but Robert R. McCormick, Bazy's uncle and owner of the newspaper, considered Garvin Tankersley to be of unsuitable social status for Bazy because "Tank" was from a poor Lynchburg, Virginia, family. McCormick also disapproved of her divorce. Bazy saw the latter stance as hypocritical, given McCormick's own complicated personal life. McCormick's attempts to end the relationship ultimately prompted the couple to elope, and they were married for 45 years until Garvin's death in 1997.
Tankersley also dabbled in campaign politics. In 1948, she organized "Twenties for Taft" clubs to support the 1948 Presidential campaign of Robert A. Taft. She followed in the footsteps of her mother, who was the first woman to manage a presidential campaign, the 1940 and 1944 efforts of Thomas E. Dewey. Tankersley later described herself as a friend of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and in 1952, she advocated for the removal of Guy Gabrielson as chair of the Republican National Committee. Tankersley's politics shifted dramatically during her life. Noting her earlier strong affiliation with the Republican party and conservative politics, The Washington Post reported that in 2008 she voted for Barack Obama. She also supported Democratic Arizona Representative Gabby Giffords.
From her two marriages, Tankersley had three biological children – a son, Mark Miller (born 1947), and two daughters, Kristie Miller (born 1944) and Tiffany Tankersley (1970–2012). She also had two stepchildren, Anne Tankersley Sturm and Garvin Tankersley, Jr. At the time of her death, she had six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Newspaper career
At 18, Tankersley (then Bazy McCormick) began working as a reporter for the Rockford Star, published by her mother. She gained experience running a newspaper in 1946 when she and Peter Miller purchased the LaSalle Post-Tribune in LaSalle, Illinois, and the Peru News-Herald, in Peru, Illinois, merging the papers to create the Daily News-Tribune. In 1949, her uncle, "Colonel" Robert R. McCormick, appointed her as the publisher of the family-owned Washington Times-Herald, an "isolationist and archconservative" paper known for sensationalism. McCormick had purchased it following the 1948 death of Eleanor Medill "Cissy" Patterson, his first cousin, and wanted Bazy to use the paper to create "an outpost of American principles". Robert McCormick had no children of his own, and "doted" on Bazy. He considered her the heir to his newspaper company. Tankersley was 28 at the time and was given the title of Vice-President.
During Tankersley's tenure as publisher of the Times-Herald, the paper was embroiled in two controversies related to McCarthy, one involving attacks intended to help unseat Democratic Senator Millard E. Tydings in 1950, and the other a lawsuit brought by Drew Pearson in 1951 over what Pearson viewed as a "conspiracy to smear his reputation". In the Tydings case, a composite photograph created by Garvin Tankersley made Tydings appear to be meeting with a communist party leader and was a factor in Tydings losing his race. It also brought Bazy and her paper to the attention of the United States Senate, where the paper's treatment of Tydings was viewed by a bipartisan Senate panel as a violation of "simple decency and honesty" and "a shocking abuse of the spirit and intent of the First Amendment of the Constitution". The Pearson lawsuit was a $5.1 million cause he filed against multiple defendants, including McCarthy and the Times-Herald, Westbrook Pegler and Fulton Lewis, alleging they had "contrived ... to hold plaintiff up to public scorn and ridicule". Pearson had frequently criticized McCarthy, McCarthy in turn criticized Pearson in a speech on the floor of the Senate, and the two men had even been in a physical altercation in December 1950. The Times-Herald was involved because the paper ran articles critical of Pearson and in one case described Pearson as a "New Deal communist", though it was asserted to have been a typographical error that should have read "columnist".Smith, p. 495.
Bazy (then Miller) was publisher of the newspaper for only 19 months. By April 1951, McCormick and his niece developed differences of opinions over both the newspaper and her relationship with Garvin Tankersley. She later said, "I understood when I went to the Times-Herald I was to have full control. That control was not given me ... There is some difference in our political beliefs. I have broader Republican views than [McCormick] has. I am for the same people as the colonel, but I am for some more people." McCormick also told her to decide between Garvin Tankersley and the Tribune Company. As a result, she resigned from the Times-Herald. McCormick tried to run the paper himself, but lost money on the venture, and sold the Times-Herald to The Washington Post in 1954. When he announced the sale, one of the paper's board members insisted that Bazy Tankersley be given a chance to purchase it, so McCormick gave her 48 hours to match the $10 million asking price. She could not raise the money to do so. Upon the purchase of the Times-Herald, the Post consolidated its market position by discontinuing the rival paper. Though estranged for many years, Bazy and McCormick reconciled prior to his death.
After the sale, she continued to write a newspaper column for the Post, but also turned her attention to raising Arabian horses as a full-time occupation.
Horse breeding career