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IN THOSE days six newspapers gave Toronto its news and fought for influence and circulation, of which The Star was the youngest. No more generally honest and downright group existed anywhere to entertain and enlighten a community. None was a chain or syndicate product. Each was home-owned, written and edited, although there were implications that The Mail and Empire was Montreal-influenced, a dreadful accusation in Toronto. Montreal was a Gomorrah whose race, religion and morals threatened everything Toronto held dear and, besides, housed St. James Street, den of financiers who planned darkly.

This implication may have arisen because The Mail and Empire was then colourless compared to the other papers which had publishers or editors, or both, who had convictions and personality. In Toronto convictions might land a man in jail but without them, however subversive, he laid himself open to doubts. It has never been a place for neutrals or philosophers.

Toronto news, views and politics were the principal interest of the six journals. Fire in an Earlscourt shack had more reader value than Vesuvius in eruption. A City Council squabble between a couple of aldermen was more important than the fall of a ministry in France. Of course, they featured the War, but Toronto’s human investment there made it virtually a local fight. A letter from a Beaches soldier describing how he had been wounded “Somewhere at the Front” might find itself as important as a Joffre communiqué.

While any of them might have piquant or dramatic flurries, none was persistently sensational in terms of the English ha’penny press or consistently yellow after the fashion of certain American papers in the days before tabloids made them seem prosaic. Yet yellowness was constantly being suspected and the name of William Randolph Hearst, famous American journalist of ebullient methods, was bandied among them as an epithet of contempt for each other’s deeds.

Generally though, they were as reputable and respectable as Toronto demanded, even if The Star was charged with being more than a little hoydenish in printing a couple of comic strips, Bringing Up Father and Keeping Up With The Joneses. These The Telegram considered a menace to civilization.

It was at municipal elections that their local concern burst into full bloom. Then they staged an outburst of advice in regard to their favourite candidates of sufficient energy to have elected a demi-god and a cabinet of archangels for all eternity instead of merely a mayor and council for the ensuing year. Each December the city was enwrapped in a newspaper mayoralty contest that might, for its warmth, be regarded as deciding the fate of worlds.

It was all valiant effort, significant of the interest which the community had for its own people. There was concern about Provincial matters, too, but few questions existed then like highways, the gasoline tax, surplus of purchased water power, relief problems, farm loans, huge debts and defaulting municipalities—except the prohibition of liquor and bilingual schools—to exercise their minds. And there was absorption in Federal politics that was much more serious than of recent years, each paper displaying its Ottawa correspondence.

But, except for the interjection of the War, the universe of Toronto was largely local and almost entirely British, though The Globe particularly did carry American and other foreign news.

The Globe, self-styled Canada’s National Newspaper, was then at its peak as a splendid journal of its time and place edited in a high, if somewhat pious, tradition. It was the great paper of what was called Reform, organ of Liberalism and of Laurier until Conscription and the formation of Union Government in Canada gave it a mighty indecision which altered its status as the Grit Bible. Its owner was the late Senator Jaffray. Its editor, recently resigned, had been the late Rev. Dr. J. A. McDonald, Presbyterian divine with a pen mighty for righteousness whether it was banishing the saloon or the cause of British arms. It was a well-written, well-edited paper, dignified and generally fair, with an interest in the arts. A job on it was the aim of most Canadian newspapermen.

The Mail and Empire was a Conservative party organ with certain fixed ideas such as: the sun always rises therefore all’s right with the world—so long as Tories are in power. It was dull of editorial utterance and lacked virtuosity in its news treatment except of criminal events which were apt to excite it. Of recent years it has become a fine and urbane newspaper. It remains Conservative but its news reports are notably unbiased and its editorial page is enlightened by the witty Fourth Column pen of the generous and broadminded J. V. McAree.

The World was also Conservative but it was lively and sometimes brilliant, its columns displaying a brevity of items that was tabloid in manner. Its front page was designed for street-car reading. It specialized in sports and finance. Its publisher and editor was the late W. F. Maclean, M.P., an idealistic, imaginative, impractical, somewhat impish, journalistic great. His happy-go-lucky capacity for business did not balance his flair for ideas and The World died after the War. Newspapermen mourned its passing as they were later to mourn the death of the much greater New York World.

These were the morning papers. The afternoon papers were The News, The Evening Telegram and The Daily Star. The News like The World is dead. It, too, was Conservative, with a front page for the groom and an editorial page for the gentleman. Its editor was the late Sir John Willison, a pundit of his day who had been editor of The Globe and wrote in solemn fashion. A number of columnists gave it a literary flash. It made a display of sports and society doings. But when The Telegram and The Star locked horns in a battle for primacy, the pace was too fast and The News died.

The dominant local paper was The Evening Telegram, owned by John Ross Robertson, one of the characters of Canadian journalism, and edited by John R. (Black Jack) Robinson, who holds a place all his own among the individualistic editors of history. Both are now gone to some restless Nirvana of the scribes, and Toronto has never been the same place since. The Telegram, under a board of trustees, has been greatly modified, though it remains a lusty newspaper.

It was unique in many ways. Mr. Robertson had his views of what was right and what was wrong for Toronto, always Toronto, and Mr. Robinson voiced them in editorials that were not duplicated on earth. They iterated and reiterated, strung lines of derogatory adjectives like files on parade, frequently broke into capitalized phrases and often, if the subject was even vaguely patriotic—and most subjects were patriotic to The Telegram—separated their paragraphs with minute Union Jacks or tiny Maple Leaves.

It sought to boss municipal politics from the motive of running Toronto right and elected to the City Council largely whom it chose. It believed in God, the King, Toronto, the Empire and Canada and made a fetish of publicly owned hydro-electric power, Sir Adam Beck, the founder thereof, and Tommy Church, perennial mayor who said his prayers to Beck. Yet the mere shadow of Socialism under its own name made it foam.

With standards all its own and a veritable menagerie of fears and hates, it was at once obstructionist and enthusiastic, honest and scheming. Once it put the whole force of its reactionary venom into opposing Sunday street cars as devices of the devil which would empty churches, ruin the young and, of course, wreck the British Empire. It built a fortune out of small want ads, regarded them as its most important circulation device and kept them solidly on Page One for many years instead of giving it to news and headlines. It constantly changed front without logic or apology. Its great appeal was to the British-born.

In politics it professed to be Conservative, but it was as liable to rend its friends as its enemies. A politician might be tried and true in terms of most of its orthodoxies, but slip in his attitude towards the Flag, the Bible, the English Language, Beck or Tommy Church—then woe betide him! Hell had no fury like The Telegram in vitriolic blast. The Star was then far behind it in circulation and influence, but it kept up an endless tirade against it. It was enough for The Star to opine that a colour was white to have it declare blisteringly that it was black. Day after day it publicized its younger rival—with a strange, quick sequel. John Ross Robertson, the emphatic dictator, is dead. John R. Robinson, the vehement, sentimental editor who neither asked nor gave quarter, is dead. And their claymore of a newspaper has become almost tender in its thrust. It is now some 90,000 copies behind the despised Star in daily circulation. Even in the city of Toronto, which they once held on the point of their pens, the latter is ahead.

The Toronto Daily Star on which fate made me a reporter in 1916 was not only a junior newspaper; it was, in the most Tory city of Canada, run by an Orange machine of which The Telegram was the voice, looked on as an intruding upstart which dared to be irritatingly liberal, outrageously radical in advocating such new-fangled notions as old age pensions, unemployment insurance and mothers’ allowances, and economically traitorous in advising reciprocity with the United States and low tariffs generally.

But in conservative, provincial Toronto this liberal newspaper won through to a grudging recognition and finally to a very great, if not altogether converted, following because it never wavered in its independent editorial policy to argue for the under-dog, to indicate the changing world, to pursue a good-humoured pathway towards reform and to preach and practise, in the midst of an imperialist chauvinism, a sturdy Canadianism—and because of the vivacity and sweep of its news columns and its special features.

People found themselves reading it while they professed to distrust its opinions and despise its sprightliness. Conservative politicians railed against it and local contemporaries jeered, sneered and lampooned. But the paper moved on and up while politicians retired to obscurity and rival journals lagged in the race.

Born on November 3, 1892, of a strike of printers on The News against machines which had arrived to oust the historic hand-setting of type, it began as The Evening Star, A Paper of The People. It suspended next year, revived shortly and survived, but without purpose. Then, on December 13, 1899, Joseph E. Atkinson, a youthful newspaperman who had been a reporter on The Globe and was Managing Editor of The Montreal Herald, was made Managing Director by a group which had acquired it. It had then a circulation of 6,000.

Thus The Star had its real beginning on the threshold of the Twentieth Century. In February, 1916, when I found myself a reporter, Mr. Atkinson, already become owner and President, had nursed it from an uncertain infancy to a circulation of 98,000. It was stretching its wings to soar through post-war years of expansive adventuring that made a long golden decade of vivid journalism, earned it the title of The Greatest Newspaper in Canada and won it recognition as one of the world’s most enterprising papers.

Such was the fabric built by Mr. Atkinson’s genius; and that is the only word that embraces his capacity for newspaper making, alike on the editorial and on the business side. Of him the Canadian public has known little, and that largely through splenetic local paragraphs and cartoons. Lesser names have become familiar through news mention and magazine articles but the publisher of The Toronto Star has seemed content to let his paper appear in public for him, rarely making one of his most apt speeches, never seeking office, never accepting it when offered except on some hospital board or other similar committee, never going in for society, finance or politics where his judgment and force would have won him place.

It is not possible to measure his determination as a publisher or to say how definitely he set himself a goal. He gave, as few men have given to any enterprise, all his energy of intelligence and will to The Star. One may no more than etch the way in which, fairly but resolutely, he hung on the flanks of competitors, gaining yard by yard, mile by mile, day after day, year after year, until he caught up, drew level and passed each of them.

He faced not merely competition but derision, for his mood was alien to that of the community in which he had ventured and the entrenched outlook of older rivals indignant at the splash he was making in their waters. But he carried on, rarely letting his left hand know what his right hand did, one of the significant Canadians of his time, a great newspaper maker, one of the few men left who single-mindedly owns and runs a big single newspaper.

Pulitzer, Hearst, Northcliffe were no more important in their day and place than J. E. Atkinson has been in the domain of Canadian journalism. He may have had something of the publishing spark of each of them, but he has possibly more closely resembled Pulitzer, blind wizard of The New York World, than the others, in his pursuit of liberalism, his reformist aims, his sense of public values, his flair for seeing history ahead, his zest for features, his encouragement of distinctive writing—but he has been content to be a guide instead of a crusader.

One of his great strengths has been a never-ceasing awareness. He has never seemed to be caught napping by what was coming, either on the news front or the editorial side, least of all on the business sector. Other newspapermen might fail to sense what the automobile, the movies, the aeroplane, the radio, the machine, mass production, the War, the boom years, the depression years were going to mean in terms of social behaviour and economics. Others might be bewildered by the changes that have come during the past twenty years in political values, human values, entertainment values, newspaper values, but he always knew uncannily; at least, his newspaper constantly reflected his prescience; and he was abreast or ahead of the change, in recording it and meeting it.

Sensitive, alert, insatiably curious, with few prejudices and fewer fears, untiringly youthful in his welcoming of problems that increased rather than lessened with the growth of his paper in the maelstrom of the last few years, he has forever quested. He opened his columns wide to such varied forms of human effort as the Farmer’s government in Ontario, the Oxford Groups movement, Soviet rule in Russia, the Roosevelt experiments in the United States, the Nazi régime in Germany, the social-democratic party called the Coöperative Commonwealth Federation which had arisen in Canadian politics and, more recently, Social Credit. In a city of static likes and standard dislikes he was friendly alike to Jew, French-Canadian, Roman Catholic, Radical and Christian Scientist as brothers-under-the-skin of the Orangeman and the Anglican. Small wonder he was frequently suspect by the capitalist and the communist, the intellectual and the man on the street. All of them struggled to find his motives from their viewpoint, seldom realizing that he was merely charting the times.

Perhaps the key to his success—at a time of imperial parochialism and in a city wallowing in a British sentiment that was more imagined than real—lies in his early sensing of the scene as North American in fact and getting out a newspaper continental in values and performance.

Mr. Atkinson has left his imprint on his Canadian generation, for he gave to Dominion journalism a new vigour and, in spite of his critics, new ideals in a country of scattered localisms. Out of a morass of provincialism, he ranged. More than that, he gave a new measure to working Canadian newspapermen by giving them an opportunity to write and a decent wage. Except for a few magazines which have developed, The Daily Star and The Star Weekly, the week-end or Sunday edition inaugurated on August 9, 1910, offered for years practically the only market to Canadian writers.

During the War salaries on The Star went up as the cost of living rose and, subsequently, the paper paid special and senior men amounts high in relation to general newspaper pay in Canada. With these went an immense sense of liberty. A number of staff men have written for years, according to their personality and philosophy, without other instructions than to go here, go there, virtually without editing other than a desk man’s interjection of sub-headings. Naturally they reflected the paper’s policy and viewpoint, but considerable freedom was theirs of individual reaction so long as they entertained.

Such was the newspaper and its publisher to which this reporter found himself attached. At the moment of his intrusion on the Canadian scene, and for some time afterwards, he did not know his luck.