Patterson, Eleanor Medill

Eleanor Medill Patterson, original name Elinor Josephine Patterson, byname Cissy Patterson, (born November 7, 1881, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died July 24, 1948, Marlboro, Maryland), the flamboyant editor and publisher of the Washington Times-Herald.

Elinor Patterson came from one of the great American newspaper families: her grandfather, Joseph Medill, had been editor in chief of the Chicago Tribune; her father, Robert W. Patterson, and her cousin, Robert R. McCormick, were in turn editors and publishers of the Tribune; and her brother, Joseph Medill Patterson, was publisher of the New York Daily News. After a private education at Miss Hersey’s School in Boston and Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, she married a Polish nobleman, Count Joseph Gizycki, in 1904; the count had other interests besides his wife, however, and she left him after less than four years. He followed Patterson, abducted their baby daughter, and initiated enough scandal and intrigue to raise eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic. It took a year to get the baby back and another eight years for Patterson to obtain a divorce. As Eleanor M. Gizycka she later published two novels, Glass Houses (1926) and Fall Flight (1928). Another marriage left her a widow in 1929.

She decided to try the newspaper business, and in 1930 she was engaged by her old friend William Randolph Hearst to edit the Washington Herald. (That same year she legally changed her name to Eleanor Medill Patterson.) She was an eccentric editor in chief, often arriving at the office in riding costume or in evening clothes. She feuded with a series of city editors in the course of proving her seriousness and determination to shape her own paper. Patterson’s involvement in the Herald extended to covering many important stories herself, usually in disguise. Her editorial style tended strongly to the personal, even idiosyncratic, and included sharp wit and venom among its weapons. Her conservative political views were reflected in the paper, and, like her brother and cousin, she opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal.

Patterson was an early crusader for home rule for the District of Columbia and for a hot-lunch program for District schoolchildren (a program she underwrote herself for a time). She clearly possessed the family genius for circulation-building publicity. Within a few years her paper’s circulation had more than doubled. In 1937 she leased the Herald from Hearst, together with his evening paper, the Washington Times, and in 1939 she bought them outright. Against her brother’s advice she combined them into a single all-day paper with six editions, the Washington Times-Herald. By 1943 the paper had the highest circulation in Washington and was out of the red. It thrived during World War II but declined afterward. After her death the Times-Herald was sold to the Chicago Tribune in 1949 and to The Washington Post in 1954.