Doris Fleeson: “A Tiger in White Gloves”
Doris Fleeson (1901-1970) was the first woman to become a nationally syndicated political columnist, the predecessor of the likes of Molly Ivins and Peggy Noonan.
Fleeson began her career as a reporter at the Pittsburgh Sun. After several moves, in 1927, at the age of 26, she landed a job at the New York Daily News, where she covered state politics in Albany and became acquainted with then Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Later she was the only woman reporter who was a permanent member of the press entourage that accompanied Roosevelt on his campaign tours.) In 1930, she moved to the Daily News’ Washington bureau, where she co-authored a column called “Capital Stuff” with her husband, fellow Daily News reporter John O’Donnell. (The column survived; the marriage did not. They were divorced in 1942, reportedly over political differences.)
In 1943, she left the Daily News (also reportedly over political differences) to work as a roaming war correspondent in France and Italy for Women’s Home Companion.* (You can read some of her war reporting here. )
When she returned to the United States after the war, she entered a new stage of her career as a syndicated columnist based in Washington DC. Her column was soon carried in over 100 papers, reaching about 8 million households. Over the next twenty-two years, she wrote some 5,500 columns. According to a longtime friend, columnist, Mary McGrory "She roamed the Capitol, a tiger in white gloves and a Sally Victor hat,*** stalking explanations for the stupidity, cruelty, fraud, or cant that was her chosen prey." Her personal politics leaned left,**** but her columns were known not only for their intelligence and barbed wit,but for their lack of bias: as Newsweek put it in 1957, "There is, in fact, almost no Washington figure, Republican or Democrat, who has not felt the sharp edge of her typewriter."
Fleeson married a second time, in 1958, to Dan Kimball, a former secretary of the Navy. She went into semi-retirement in 1967 due to failing health. She and Kimball died within 36 hours of each other in 1970.
* Yes, you read that correctly. When the United States entered the war in 1941, American women’s magazines looked for ways to make their content relevant for their readers in a time of national emergency. They went beyond their core subjects of fashion, homemaking and romantic fiction to produce stories about topics such as the importance of women taking war jobs outside the home and dealing with wartime scarcity and rationing. Some of them also sent war correspondents to Europe. War correspondents for women’s magazines, including Sigrid Schultz, who was a correspondent for McCalls for a short time, were instructed to report on the “woman’s angle”** Schultz and her contemporaries expanded the “women’s angle” beyond articles on rations, food shortages, and women’s war jobs to include topics such as rape, civilian experiences of the war, sanitation, and field hospitals.
**Sound familiar?
***Sally Victor was a successful/important American milliner whose career spanned 40 years from the 1930s through the early 1950s, when well-dressed women wore hats. Her hats were distinctive and occasionally quirky, inspired by unusual sources such as Japanese armor and Matisse paintings. Victor described her mission as "designing pretty hats that make women look prettier."
****She described herself as a nonpartisan liberal.
Kathryn Cravens: The Flying Reporter
And speaking of women reporters and aviation, as I believe we were, allow me to introduce you to Kathryn Cochran Cravens (1898-1991), “The Flying Reporter.”
Cravens did not set out to become a reporter. In 1919, she went to Hollywood with the goal of becoming an actress. She began her acting career working in silent movies for Fox Films, which was a major player in the motion picture industry at the time. (Fox later merged with 20th Century Pictures to become 20th Century Fox, but I digress.) (1) In 1922, she married Rutherford Rector Cravens. (They divorced in 1937.) Even after her marriage, she worked in silent movies, stock theater companies, and radio theater throughout the 1920s.
In the early 1930s, Cravens’ career took a new direction. She had been working on a women’s program in St. Louis, when the station gave her the opportunity to do a 15-minute daily news program called “News Through a Woman’s Eyes.” (2) Instead of limiting herself to the classic “who, what, where, when and why” of newspaper reporting, she specialized in asking her subjects how they felt about the topic at hand. In 1936, when CBS picked up the show, Cravens and the program moved to New York and her career took off. CBS broadcast her program nationwide, making her one of the first women news commentators heard “coast to coast”. (3) Her show was so popular that it took four secretaries to handled the fan mail.
In 1937, she took to the air in a different way. (Whether this is related to her divorce that year is unclear to me.) She was an early promoter of the commercial air travel, before it was common. (4) As a result, airline companies offered Cravens free air fare in exchange for making air travel more visible. She traveled throughout the country in pursuit of stories, logging more than 100,000 miles as the “Flying Reporter.” During this period, she also produced a syndicated column, titled “Thru a Woman’s Eyes.”(5)
Toward the end of World War II, Cravens became an accredited war correspondent for WOL, in Washington, D.C. Her shortwave reports were titled—what else?—“Europe Through a Woman’s Eyes.” She was one of the first reporters to broadcast from Berlin after the Allied victory in 1945. Among other things, she broadcast live interviews with displaced persons who had relatives in the United States. (6) She covered the Potsdam conference,(7) the Nuremberg trials, and the post-war elections in the Balkans..
After the war, she reported from 22 countries for the Cowles Broadcasting Company and the Mutual Broadcasting system. She also published a novel, Pursuit of Gentlemen. Sources say it is a fictionalized version of her life, but that cover makes me wonder.
(1)The early motion picture industry seems to be tracking me down lately. Hmmm.
(2) Women often found their way into reporting hard news through “the woman’s angle.”
(3) Mary Margaret McBride ran her a close second.
(4) Air travel was expensive and still uncomfortable., even after the introduction of "sky girls" to tend to passengers. Though most Americans were fascinated by aviation, getting on a plane to go from point A to point B was a bird of a different feather.
(5) This is known in modern publishing as building your brand.
(6) Sigrid Schultz also tracked down European relatives for people back home. Instead of broadcasting interviews, she wrote personal notes to their families telling them what she had found.
(7) The Soviets arrested Cravens because she entered the post-war conference site before Truman, Stalin, and Churchill arrived, which was seen as compromising security. After her release, she was suspended from broadcasting for 72 hours.
My publisher is giving away 25 copies of The Dragon From Chicago on Goodreads. You can sign up here through July 4. Good luck!
Lady Hay Drummond-Hay : Around the World in a Flying Machine
Grace Marguerite, Lady Hay Drummond-Hay (1895-1946) was a British journalist who wrote for the Hearst papers. She made her name with a series of articles about her experiences as one of the passengers on the first transatlantic flight of a civilian passenger zeppelin in 1928.* The following year, she was the first woman to travel around the world by air, again in a zeppelin. She contributed to the public's general knowledge about aviation—and added a sense of glamour to the enterprise--by writing articles about her aerial adventures for American newspapers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. (She was more than just a passenger, she was also one of the few British women pilots to hold the military "blue certificate" for blind flying before World War II and was president of the Women's International Association of Aeronautics for many years.)
Drummond-Hay later traveled as a war correspondent in company with her Hearst colleague Karl von Wiegand. (In her obituary, Time described her as von Wiegand's Girl Friday. To which I can only say, grrrr.) Together they reported on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) and the Italo-Abyssinian War (1935-37). During World War II, the two reporters were interned in a Japanese camp in the Philippines. They were released in 1943 and traveled to the United States in the Swedish ship SS Gripsholm, which the United States had chartered as an exchange and repatriation vessel. In 1944, they were back on the job, assigned to cover conditions in Portugal and Spain.
Hay-Drummond's time in the internment camp left her in poor health, from which she never entirely recovered.** She died of coronary thrombosis in February 1946.
*For a time, it looked like Sigrid Schultz was going to be a passenger as well. Her father had been a friend of Graf von Zeppelin, the eponymous inventor of the aircraft, and she had friends in the Zeppelin organization who were willing to pull strings on her behalf. The opportunity fell through because McCormick wasn't willing to pay even the "friends and family" fare she had negotiated. Schultz was seriously disappointed.
**She probably wasn't in great shape when she was interned. Being a war correspondent was hard on the body.
Just a reminder: My publisher, Beacon Press, is giving away 25 copies of The Dragon From Chicago on Goodreads. You can sign up here through July 4. Good luck!