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A Complex Fate
William L. Shirer and the American Century
By Ken Cuthbertson McGill-Queen's University Press
Copyright © 2015 McGill-Queen's University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7735-4544-1
CHAPTER 1
Midwestern Beginnings
His parents' plan had been to give him a patriotic name. William Lawrence Shirer's father was a rising star in the ranks of the Republican Party in Chicago. His mother was related to the Lawrences of Massachusetts, one of the most prominent blue-blood families in the early history of New England. Had he been born a few hours earlier – on 22 February, the birthday of George Washington – baby William would have been called George. Instead, from his first breath, Seward and Elizabeth Shirer's elder son did things his own way, stubbornly declining to make his appearance until the wee hours of the morning of 23 February 1904. That dogged determination, a distinguishing characteristic of Shirer's personality, would be at once his greatest shortcoming and greatest strength. It would lead to no end of turmoil in his personal life, yet it would also serve him well in his chosen vocation. He would emerge as one of the foremost American journalists of the twentieth century and as one of the pioneers of news broadcasting.
In both regards, it is fitting that William Shirer was born in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago, that most quintessentially American of cities. The exact location was an upstairs bedroom of his family's South Greenwood Avenue home, a five-minute walk south of the University of Chicago campus. At the time, the leafy streetscapes here were prosperous and awash in hope. The same neighborhood today is much less upscale and decidedly less fashionable. Like the core areas of so many other big American cities, Woodlawn suffered through a slow, painful period of urban decay in the latter decades of the twentieth century. However, in 1904, with the effervescent President Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, America itself was different, and all things seemed possible. Especially in Chicago.
Barely a century removed from its beginnings as the remote military outpost, America's so-called "Second City" was a bustling metropolis of 1.8 million people. This was the great American melting pot personified. Three out of every four residents of the city were foreign-born or were first-generation Americans. Immigrants from the four corners of the globe lived alongside tens of thousands of black Americans from the Old South, former slaves and their sons and daughters, who had migrated north seeking jobs and freedom from the corrosive racial intolerance of the day.
As the hub of the nation's vast economic heartland, Chicago was a place where life's possibilities seemed as limitless as the Midwestern skies, and a man with pluck, luck, and drive could grab a handful of the future and of the American dream for himself. There was no mistaking that this was very much a man's world. Poet Carl Sandburg dubbed Chicago the "City of Big Shoulders," and the nickname was apt. Chicago's sprawling stockyards, factories, rail yards, and wharves were among America's busiest. Here was a gritty, blue-collar town. Yet, paradoxically, Chicago was also a place in which the arts – music, painting, and literature, especially – flourished, and where architecture rose to dizzying new heights, literally as well as figuratively.
Seward S. Shirer, the father of the baby William, was in his element here. An attorney by vocation, he was handsome, well-spoken, and personable. Seward was also bright, ambitious, determined, and upwardly mobile. The proud father recorded the details of the arrival of his first son in his diary: "Five minutes to three – Baby Boy born. Weighed 7¾ lbs. William Lawrence Shirer. Born 6500 Greenwood Avenue."
William, the child's given name, was that of his paternal grandfather. Lawrence, his middle name, was drawn from his mother's side of the family. "Billy," as his parents affectionately called him, was the middle child of three siblings. His older sister, Josephine, named after her maternal grandmother, had been born on 8 September 1900. A younger brother, John, arrived two years after him, on 29 April 1906.
William L. Shirer always remembered his Chicago childhood as being happy and secure; the Shirers were solidly middle class, a loving, stable, and closely knit family. Seward Shirer, the patriarch, seemed destined for success, perhaps even greatness, if a cruel and tragic turn of fate had not cut short his life.
In order to understand and appreciate who William Shirer was, we must look at his family history, which was the archetypal American immigrant experience of the day. His genealogical roots were in the Palatinate area of the Rhineland, in the southwest corner of modern Germany. The family historian, Donald Boyd, has speculated that the "Scheurers" – as the Shirers originally were known – traced their origins to an area near the German border with Switzerland, where the Scheurer surname is common. William Shirer's namesake uncle, William G., informed him in a 1931 letter, "While the family was pretty much of the farmer type, they were sufficiently elevated above the common herd so that the men ... were in the habit of holding minor offices under the Grand Duke [who ruled the area], such as Keepers of the Black Forest. Your great grandfather and his father before him did this sort of thing." William G. also speculated that a man named Scheurer who served as president of Switzerland during World War One may have been "a not far-distant relative of ours."
In one of the largest influxes of European settlers of the pre-Revolutionary era, as many as 30,000 Palatine Germans came to North America. Among them were Seward Shirer's grandparents, who bypassed the big cities of the Eastern Seaboard to travel up the Hudson River to Herkimer County, ninety miles northwest of Albany. Here Johann Frederick Scheurer, his wife Marie Eva (née Brennizer), and their four children settled and began farming about 1844. Seward Shirer's father, William Walter Scheurer, was born in 1846. Being the fourth son in the family, his prospects were limited, and so he left home at fifteen, mere weeks before the April 1861 opening salvos of the Civil War. William W headed west in search of youthful adventures and farmland to call his own. Sometime in the course of his travels, his Scheurer surname became Anglicized. "My grandfather attached no importance to the [spelling] change," William L. Shirer wrote many years later. "It was done mainly because the town officials and tradesmen mistakenly kept writing it the way they thought it sounded, and it was simpler to go along with them."
In the mid-nineteenth century, Anglo-Saxon influences dominated North American society, and the imperative for immigrants to amend the spelling of "foreign-sounding" surnames was strong. However, that does not seem to have been a factor in William Ws acquiescence, for he continued to speak German at home.
William Ws travels took him to Will County, south of Chicago. There, in 1868, he took as his wife twenty-year-old Caroline Triem, a native of Canton, Ohio, who had been a student at Northwestern College in Plainfield, Illinois. Like her husband, she was a first-generation American, her maternal family members also being Palatine Germans who had settled in Ohio.
Following their marriage, Carrie and William W joined Carrie's parents, Ludwig and Elizabeth Triem, and her grandparents, Henry and Margaret Huppert, in a westward migration that took them south of Lake Michigan, across the flatlands of western Illinois, and into the rolling farm country of the Iowa frontier. At the time, a frenzied land rush was underway there.
Iowa had become the twenty-ninth state in the Union in 1846, the year William W. was born. The population grew quickly as land-hungry white settlers staked out homesteads and displaced the indigenous Indian tribes, save for the Sioux, whose warriors were too proud and too stubborn to surrender without a fight; the other tribes sold their land – and arguably their dignity and way of life – to the United States government. In his 1978 memoir, Twentieth Century Journey, William L. Shirer recalls experiencing the legacy of these developments a generation later: "We were brought up to believe that 'the only good Indian was a dead Indian' ... and nothing was said to us in those days of the cruel and savage slaughter and the robbery of the Indians by the white Americans, one of the darkest sides of our history."
By 1860, the population of Iowa was 700,000 and growing. The prospect of owning a chunk of the world's best farmland was a powerful draw for William W. and Carrie Shirer and their kin. Having crossed the Mississippi River, they traveled about ninety miles farther north and west before stopping in Benton County. There they staked a claim near the community of La Porte City, which is fifteen miles southeast of Cedar Falls.
After building a sod hut and putting a first crop into the ground, William W. and Carrie started a family. The eldest of their four children, daughter Lillian V(ictoria), was born 3 January 1870; son Seward S(mith) followed on 17 September 1871; daughter Mabel M(ay) on 4 March 1876, and a second son, William G(arfield), on 11 September 1880. Walter and Carrie's patriotism and political inclinations were underscored when they named their eldest son after former New York governor William Seward, the outspoken abolitionist who had served as Secretary of State in the Republican administrations of presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. Similarly, they gave their younger son the middle name Garfield, in honor of the ill-fated President James A. Garfield, the former GOP Congressman from Ohio – America's last "log cabin" president – who was fated to die by an assassin's hand in 1881.
However, Washington, presidential politics, and indeed the rest of the world were distant realities for the Shirers and other Iowa homesteaders. Their windswept farms were isolated, miles from the nearest neighbors. Travel was by horse and wagon or on foot. For that reason, and because money was tight, prairie settlers learned to be self-sufficient. What little social life there was for the farm families in the vicinity of La Porte City revolved around the local Evangelical Church, which most of the German families in the area faithfully attended.
The Shirer siblings grew up with a keen appreciation of the value of resourcefulness and of an honest day's toil. The girls helped their mother with housework, while the boys and their father worked the land and tended the livestock. There was never a shortage of chores to be done, and days during the growing season were endlessly busy and tiring. The Shirers grew corn, vast acres of it, to be used as feed for the livestock that became the family's main source of income.
As the Shirers' farm prospered and the children grew, William W. Shirer immersed himself in the area's political life, serving in various capacities: school trustee, justice of the peace, and township clerk. He also passed along to his children, especially to his son Seward, a keen sense of civic duty. Despite the family's deep ties to their rural community, the Shirers regarded farming as a means to another end: the chance for a better life for themselves and their children. When it became evident that daughters Lillian and Mabel May were keen to take voice and piano lessons, and that sons Seward and William were more interested in books than agriculture, the Shirers made a decision in spring 1889 that must have seemed bold, even foolhardy, to friends and neighbors.
William W Shirer was forty-three, Carrie forty-one, when shortly after Seward's graduation from the LaPorte High School, the Shirers sold their farm and moved fifty miles southeast to the town of Mount Vernon, Iowa. Here the children would have opportunities to continue their educations at Cornell College. The school, started by the Methodist Church in 1852, was typical of the dozen or so institutions of higher learning that were scattered around Iowa at that time. All had been founded as religious seminaries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. While the quality of the educational experiences offered depended on each school's resources – especially where the sciences were concerned – most students received a solid grounding in the liberal arts and humanities. In autumn 1889, with tuition just twelve dollars per term, a college education for their children was within reach of most farm families in the area, including the Shirers.
Seward, eighteen and burning with intelligence and ambition, enrolled at Cornell, while his sister Lillian began five years of study at the College's music conservatory. Younger sister Mabel attended prep school during the 1893–94 school year and then study at Cornell for a year, while their brother William ("Willie," to his family and friends) attended the College for four years, graduating in 1903.
After spending his freshman year in a sciences program, Seward Shirer switched his major to Classics. Oratory was one of the subjects in which he excelled, winning a cash prize in a regional competition and serving as the class salutatorian on graduation day in 1893.
Public speaking skills and a solid liberal arts education were not all that Seward Shirer took away from Cornell. In his senior year, he had also won the heart of Elizabeth Tanner, a twenty-one-year-old music student who hailed from nearby Cedar Rapids. "Bessie," as her family and classmates called her, was of Welsh-English stock.
Bessie Tanner and Seward Shirer were a stark example of the principle that opposites attract; the two could not have been more different in demeanor or physical appearance. A photo of Bessie taken during this period depicts an almost mournful-looking young woman of slight build. Though her features were plain, there was a beguiling delicacy to her, a wispiness even. The roundness of her face and the prominence of her nose were offset by a finely featured mouth and jawline. There was a gentleness to her that was reflected in her large eyes.
Bessie, being a talented pianist, preferred music to words. Reserved to the point of being shy, she clearly regarded the prospect of having her photograph taken with the same trepidation that she felt when first she caught the eye of Seward Shirer, one of the most engaging and popular young men at Cornell.
Six feet tall, willow-rod lean, and fit from his farm labors, Seward cut an impressive figure. He was a top student, an eloquent orator, and a talented athlete; he starred on the Cornell College varsity baseball team. As such, teachers and classmates had tabbed him as "most likely to succeed." His graduation photo depicts a dark-haired young man with a strong handsome face and a finely chiseled nose and jawline. The distinctive Shirer eyes, probing and alert beneath dark, full eyebrows, gave him an air of seriousness and intelligence. Seward was cerebral, but he was no bookworm. He was outgoing, bubbled with self-confidence and emanated an infectious enthusiasm for life. His personality and his oratorical skills prompted suggestions that he become an attorney, an idea that he liked. However, because he had no money for law school tuition, he was obliged to follow the legal career path of so many impecunious young men of the day: Seward set out to pass the state bar examination by "reading law" for a year or two in the office of an established attorney.
After graduating from Cornell, Seward found a job as the principal at a preparatory school in Blairstown, Iowa. He studied law in his spare time, and after passing the state examinations he was admitted to the Iowa bar in spring 1894. In the year he spent practicing law in Estherville, a small town northwest of Cedar Rapids, Seward managed to scrape together the money for tuition at the Lake Forest University law school in Chicago. Working part-time as a teacher in the city's public school system paid the bills while he was a law student. And teaching continued to be his fallback vocation in the first lean years after he graduated from Lake Forest in June 1896 and gained admittance to the Illinois bar. Hoping to save enough money so that he and Bessie Tanner could marry, Seward toiled for the next two years to establish himself in Chicago by expanding his social and business networks and joining the Republican Party.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Complex Fate by Ken Cuthbertson. Copyright © 2015 McGill-Queen's University Press. Excerpted by permission of McGill-Queen's University Press.
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