At this time endless lists of giants of the millennium and the century, it is only natural to think of those persons who have most influenced one's own life and work.
My father admired Robert E. Lee, not because he believed in the Southern cause, but because he saw him as a strong and gentle man of intellect who sacrificed for what he believed. Nearly as high on his list was Abraham Lincoln.He personally had few living role models; his father, a schoolteacher, having succumbed to typhoid when my father was barely out of diapers near the turn of the century. His stepfather was a kind man, but uneducated and of little positive force in his life. He managed to talk endlessly about his father, a college graduate, and of his grandfather, an ordained Methodist minister, who was a graduate of the University of North Carolina, although he never knew either of them.
So perhaps it wasn't a person that influenced him most, but a belief in a legacy -- in education. He was determined to carry on that family tradition despite the meager circumstances of his boyhood, and he did. Then, in turn, he instilled that same responsibility in each of his children.
He would be pleased, I'm certain, to know that he would top my list of most influential. We didn't always get along that well, but one couldn't have asked for a better example of rectitude and integrity and honor. He simply was the most honest man I ever have known.
It occurred to me while participating in one of those list things for another publication that, like my father, the most influential thing in my life had been an idea, the concept of a completely unfettered flow of information, a legacy left by a group of men to all of us by the dedicated pioneers of our craft.
Through the more than 200 years of American history, it was these passionate advocates of a free press that kept the boat afloat, that preserved the founding father's concept of this wonderful experiment in democracy. For without the restraint caused by constant public oversight and examination, every government is potentially despotic and tyrannical.
Who were these persons? They were philosophers and businessmen and visionaries and entrepreneurs and curmudgeons and cynics and self-promoters, who all had one thing in common: a passion for seeking the truth that knew no bounds. They were willing to risk their fortunes and their lives to bring it to their readers and they saw the public's affairs as just that -- public. They were dedicated to righting wrongs and dispelling evil.
There is not enough space to list them all. Many were here but briefly -- their efforts cut short by physical or business adversity -- but not before they had contributed in some small measure to the safety of our way of life. Some like E.W. Scripps, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Roy W. Howard, James M. Cox, Adolph Ochs, the Knight brothers, Frank Gannett, and S. I. Newhouse, and Eugene Pulliam and Robert McCormick built great lasting publishing empires. The dynamism of their personalities and their convictions were such that their principles survive to this day in the enterprises that bear their names.
Others, while less entrepreneurial, were powerful voices in battling injustice in all strata of society and at all levels of government, from country villages to urban centers. They were frequently out of tune with the prevailing social music of their times. From John Peter Zenger to William Allen White to the modern soldiers of the New South, Hodding Carter in Mississippi and Harry Ashmore in Arkansas and Durard LeGrand in Alabama, and Ralph McGill in Georgia they took on institutional evil and won.
Thus, I feel it is fair to say, the philosophy of freedom set out in the simple words of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States has been the overriding influence in the lives of most of us who practice this profession.
My father would understand this without question. When I told him at an early age that I wasn't going to be a doctor as he and my mother had wished so fervently, but that I wanted to be a newspaperman, he smiled, nodded and replied that there wasn't much difference.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, you're just going to minister to the welfare of others in a different way," he said.