The St. Louis Globe-Democrat was a daily print newspaper based in St. Louis, Missouri, from 1852 until 1986. The paper began operations on July 1, 1852, as The Daily Missouri Democrat, changing its name to The Missouri Democrat in 1868, then to The St. Louis Democrat in 1873. It merged with the St. Louis Globe (founded in 1872) to form the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1875.
In their earliest days, the predecessor newspapers which eventually merged to form the St. Louis Globe-Democrat were staunch advocates of freedom and anti-slavery in Missouri. The Globe-Democrat, colloquially called the Globe, eventually became the most widely read morning paper in St. Louis, with a huge circulation, and used this support to promote civic responsibility and great causes regarding urban improvements.
The newspaper was the morning paper for Greater St. Louis and had some competition from the evening St. Louis Post-Dispatch (created by a merger of the St. Louis Post and the St. Louis Dispatch) and the St. Louis Star-Times (created by a merger of The St. Louis Star and The St. Louis Times). The Star-Times ceased operations in 1951. The Globe-Democrat and the rival Post-Dispatch carried on an intense rivalry for three more decades, with clear and substantial philosophical differences both in news coverage (where the Globe focused heavily on local issues and the Post on national and international news) and editorial positions, where each had a national reputation—the Globe-Democrat as a strong conservative voice and the Post-Dispatch a strong liberal voice.
The animus of each paper for the other wasn’t so apparent in the business end of their operations. Following a lengthy and debilitating strike in 1959 at the Globe-Democrat, the two papers had operated under a joint operating agreement, with the protection of the Newspaper Preservation Act, which allowed two competing papers to have some joint operations free of antitrust violation, in return for which the failing paper of the two must continue operation unless it can show proof of irreversible financial losses. The Post-Dispatch, owned by the Pulitzer Publishing Company, handled all production and printing for both papers. The Globe-Democrat relinquished having an edition on Sunday, the most lucrative day for advertising and circulation revenue, since there was not press capacity to produce both the Post and Globe at the same time. Advertising was sold jointly, and profits were shared equally.
The Globe-Democrat’s competitive market position was reduced by the terms of that Joint Operating Agreement in 1959, which was expanded in 1969 and 1979. The papers shared all business and advertising functions, with only the news functions separate. Until the last fiscal year of its existence, the Post-Globe Agency, as the joint operation was known, operated in the red. The agency was said to be making a marginal profit that year.
In 1983 an agreement between the heirs of S.I. Newhouse and the St. Louis Post Dispatch to close the Globe and enter into a 50-year profit-sharing arrangement was determined by the U.S. Justice Department to be an Antitrust Act collusion, and the government required the Globe-Democrat to seek new ownership rather than summarily close the paper. (There was no requirement for the Post-Dispatch to do any of the services it had been providing under the Joint Operating Agreement, which lessened any attractiveness to prospective buyers). In early 1984 the paper was purchased by Jeffrey M. Gluck, which brought an end to all joint operations, and Gluck had to find his own printers and set up his own advertising, circulation, news, production and other departments from scratch in just a matter of weeks, something perhaps unprecedented in modern journalism history, certainly for a 250,000-circulation paper. When the change in ownership took effect on January 27, 1984, the Post-Dispatch switched to morning publication the same day, making it head-to-head competition.
In August 1986 the paper filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. At the time the newspaper listed $8 million in debts. In December the newspaper suspended publication, and the Bankruptcy Court appointed a trustee to seek new owners. In January 1986 Veritas Corporation purchased the paper for $500,000 and, after a 51-day hiatus, the paper resumed publication on January 27. Veritas, formed by businessmen John B. Prentis and William E. Franke, committed to contribute $4 million to the newspaper's operations. That did not prove sufficient, and the Globe-Democrat ended publication on October 29 after the newspaper failed to secure a necessary $15 million loan from the state of Missouri. An attorney had challenged the legality of the state's ability to grant that particular bond package, passed in the state legislature earlier that year.
History (1852–1986) The newspaper was an important voice in keeping Missouri in the Union; was praised by President Abraham Lincoln (who read the paper before his presidency) as being worth 10 regiments of troops; may have brought about Andrew Johnson becoming Lincoln's vice-president (and thus, ultimately, president); was widely read throughout the Midwest and the Western frontier (Texas papers tried to keep it from being distributed in that state due to the competition); was responsible, through its editor, of creating the American Society of Newspaper Editors; employed writers such as John Jay, Henry Morton Stanley, Theodore Dreiser and Patrick Buchanan; was a major sponsor of Charles Lindbergh's historic transatlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis; played a key role in getting the long-planned Gateway Arch actually built; and through its news investigations and editorial advocacy brought about numerous improvements at the local, state and even national level (an example of the latter being its series on national railroad problems that led to new federal legislation). These matters and others are discussed below.
1852–1865: early years What became the St. Louis Globe-Democrat was a product and beneficiary of two developments in the mid-19th century—an explosive population growth and a new technology, the telegraph. The population surge, in St. Louis as in some other cities in the United States and elsewhere, was due to such factors as immigration, the expansion of manufacturing and industry, and river transportation advances. The St. Louis population more than doubled from 77,860 in 1850 to 160,773 in 1860 and then almost doubled again to 310,860 in 1870; Until after the 1960 census, St. Louis was one of the 10 most populous cities in the United States. As for the telegraph, "It was in the city that the daily newspaper press, which spread rapidly in the wake of the telegraph after 1850, found its most habitual readers". More than a score of newspapers in the early years vied for that readership.
Before the Civil War the states and nation were divided as to whether new territories should be admitted to the Union as non-slave (free-soil) states or slave states. The predecessor newspapers which eventually merged to form the St. Louis Globe-Democrat were staunch advocates of freedom and anti-slavery in Missouri, at the time a border state with significant Southern values. Controversies with rival papers were commonplace. The first editor of the Missouri Democrat, Frank Blair, and the editor of another paper, the Union, were soon involved in a gun fight; neither was injured In 1853 the Missouri Democrat bought the Union and absorbed it. The paper increased its local news coverage without losing sight of the fact that politics was the chief purpose of the paper. In the first two years of the paper's existence, the Missouri Democrat's ownership shifted three times and had three editors who directed its political writings. Two of those editors, Blair and B. Gratz Brown, were in the Missouri Legislature; Blair was soon after elected to Congress and Brown was later a U.S. senator, Missouri governor, and vice-presidential candidate. Brown was going to engage in a horse pistol duel at ten paces in 1855 but his opponent backed out after Brown had already arrived at the dueling grounds. A year later another vitriolic Brown editorial ended in a duel with Thomas C. Reynolds, the U.S. District Attorney, fought on a sandbar in the Missouri River. Reynolds was not hurt, but Brown was severely wounded in the knee.
The issue of slavery became a primary issue in the mid-1850s across the nation and certainly in St. Louis, where slaves were sold at the courthouse and riots and political marches were not uncommon. Amid the 21 papers that were published in St. Louis at the time, views were heated. The Missouri Democrat gave a lukewarm endorsement on 1856 to James Buchanan, the Democrat candidate for president, rather than John C. Fremont, the candidate of the new Republican Party and the son-in-law of prominent free-soil politician Thomas H. Benton, one of Missouri's first two U.S. senators, whose political fortunes had been championed by the Missouri Democrat since its founding. Benton, a Democrat party loyalist to the end, opposed his son-in-law because he thought that Fremont could command only a small vote and that running him would aggravate sectional feelings, and the editors seemed to agree.
Meanwhile, there began ties between Abraham Lincoln and the Missouri Democrat stemming from the paper's Free-Soil days, when Blair and Lincoln had been in close agreement on the non-extension of slavery into territories. In 1857 Blair pledged that the paper would "bloom for Republicanism" in 1860, and Lincoln shortly after the meeting drew up an agreement, signed by him and nine other Illinois Republicans, to furnish $500 for the promotion of the Missouri Democrat in Illinois. John Hay, who was then reading law in Lincoln's office and later served as U.S. secretary of state under two presidents, became a correspondent of the Missouri Democrat, and Lincoln himself was a careful reader of the paper, sometimes scribbling notes on the margin of a copy. He used the paper to further his antislavery ideas, particularly in southern Illinois where the Missouri Democrat was gaining readers. Lincoln was probably cultivating the paper because St. Louis was a much larger and more important city than Chicago and because his connection with a metropolitan newspaper in a border state could prove an important factor in his 1860 campaign. The paper strenuously supported Lincoln in his 1858 senatorial campaign against Stephen Douglas.
By 1857 there was a split into factions between conservatives under Benton, strong in rural areas, and the editor and owners of the Missouri Democrat who were to declare openly during the year for emancipation and were devoted to the economic betterment of Missouri and the nation. The paper editorialized for eventual emancipation by colonization, suggesting that Missouri's colored people be shipped to Liberia and that slaveholders be fully compensated. By 1858 the Missouri Democrat had become the headquarters for the antislavery movement in Missouri led by Blair, who was then in Congress where he gave his famous colonization speech that proposed inquiring into the purchase of land on which colored people who were already free might be colonized. He believed that all Negroes had the right to be free and that further immigration of free people from Africa should be prohibited. The paper endorsed Blair's proposal, of course, and applied it to Missouri.