The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick.

• Author: Ybarra, Michael J.

During may last year of college, I took a semester off to intern at the Chicago Tribune. Walking out of the Tribune Tower to lunch with some senior colleagues one arctic January afternoon, I asked why the publication's gothic edifice on Michigan Avenue didn't have a cafeteria like most good-sized newspapers. The Colonel didn't want one, was the reply. At the Trib, that settled things -- even almost a half century after Col. Robert McCormick's death in 1955.

No publisher was ever more synonymous with -- or his whims satisfied so thoroughly by -- a single paper. "The world's greatest newspaper" -- the Colonel's favorite boast -- was laughably parroted on the Tribune's masthead until 1977. In 1934 McCormick decided that English was too complicated and ordered his minions to turn the Tribune into an orthographic experiment, changing "island" to "iland" and "freight" to "frate" This silliness persisted until 1975. And the last time I looked, the Tribune still flew the American flag that the Colonel had first hoisted atop its front page.

But today the Trib is as colorless as it was once colorful and so insipidly mediocre that it is hard to imagine the influence it once wielded in the country. Only a few cosmetic relics remain of the paper's quirky past. For instance, the Tribune's otherwise staid metro section still goes by the name of Chicagoland. In the Colonel's day, this denoted more than a city and its suburbs; it was a vast inland empire that included parts of Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana and held 10 percent of the country's population prior to World War II.

Chicagoland was the heartland, a vast citadel of conservatism and nativism, a safe haven for American virtue and democracy under attack from the decadent denizens of both coasts, but particularly the effete elite and teeming masses of the East. "The very sight of the New York crowd antagonizes the visitor who has come into New York from his farm or small town on the Western plains," a Tribune correspondent reported in 1944 from Gotham -- which the Colonel referred to as a foreign bureau. "These frizzy heads, these broad, brutish cheekbones, these furtive, piggy eyes, these slacken mouths -- the whole `muffinfaced race' which he sees in the New York subway -- how different from the well-marked features of his neighbors back in Iowa or Kansas."

McCormick once proposed a sort of Maginot line running from Albany to Atlanta and along the Rockies that would have ceded, without much...