page_title: Walter A. Strong
section_title: Business and civic leadership
hierarchical_section_title: Walter A. Strong / Business and civic leadership
context_page_description: Walter Ansel Strong was the publisher of the Chicago Daily News during Prohibition and the early days of the Great Depression. He was an innovator in business and a prominent civic leader.
context_section_description: In addition to being publisher of the Daily News, Strong was the president of the 100,000 Group, which brought together leaders of major U.S. newspapers for the purpose of growing and improving newspaper advertising. He was also a director of the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the American Newspaper Publishers Association, and the Associated Press. In 1930, he was elected chairman of the Advertising Federation of America. Strong gave many speeches on the state of the industry, including an address at the University of Chicago entitled “Newspapers and the New Age.” He was a crusader for honesty in advertising. In recognition of his efforts to promote high standards throughout the advertising industry, he was posthumously named to the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1949, the first year of such awards.
  Strong was a long-serving trustee of his alma mater, Beloit College. In January 1931, four months prior to his death, he proposed to his fellow trustees that a stadium be built at Beloit's athletic field, presenting a small-scale model of his idea. After his death, his widow, Josephine W. Strong, donated funds to construct that stadium in his honor. Strong Stadium, which was designed by Mrs. Strong's brother architect Maurice Webster, was dedicated on October 13, 1934. It is still in use today.
  Strong's tenure at the Daily News coincided with Prohibition in the United States. Chicago was racked with mob violence, much of it centering around Al Capone. The city seemed incapable of imposing law and order, in part because the Chicago Mayor Big Bill Thompson, who was supported by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, maintained mutually beneficial relations with organized crime figures like Al Capone. Hearst published both a morning and an evening newspaper in Chicago at the time. When Thompson declined to run for re-election after two four-year terms as mayor, Strong was active in the successful mayoral campaign of William Emmett Dever, the Democratic Party candidate, a former alderman and judge who was an honest and able public servant. Although Dever served honorably for four years, he was defeated for re-election in 1927 by Thompson, who made a comeback with the support of the Hearst newspapers and anti-prohibition sentiment.
  It was Strong's vision that the new Chicago Daily News building would become a symbol of renewed civic pride and an agency for a better future for the corruption-plagued, gangster-ridden city. But with the re-election of Thompson and his corrupt political associates, it was clear that to reach that vision, something had to be done before the completion of his new headquarters. In April 1928, with positive coverage and editorial support from the Chicago Daily News, Judge John A. Swanson overwhelmingly defeated the incumbent State's attorney for Cook County, an ally of Thompson. The so-called Pineapple Primary held before the election was marked by political violence – bombings and murder – culminating in the assassination of Octavius C. Granady, a black attorney and Thompson opponent who was a candidate for alderman. When criminal investigations by the lame-duck State's attorney proved fruitless, Strong's friend Frank Loesch was appointed special prosecutor to conduct an independent investigation of election crimes. Later that year, Loesch was elected President of the Chicago Crime Commission, a nonpartisan anti-crime organization he had helped to found in 1919.
  
  After the notorious 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Strong decided to make a private appeal to his friend President Herbert Hoover for federal intervention to stem Chicago's lawlessness and corruption. A secret meeting was arranged at the White House, just two weeks after Hoover's inauguration. On March 19, 1929 Strong, joined by Frank Loesch and Laird Bell, made their case to the President. In his Memoir, Hoover described the meeting and its outcome.
  In March, 1929, a committee of prominent Chicago citizens, under the leadership of Walter Strong, the publisher of the Daily News, and Judge Frank Loesch, president of the Chicago Crime Commissi
caption: Walter Strong at the dedication of the Chicago Daily News Building. Courtesy Walter Ansel Strong Papers, The Newberry Library, Chicago.
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