Font ResizeDon't go for irony, the left-leaning owner of The Gazette and Daily told his editor Jim Higgins.
The York newspaper's heavily Pennsylvania German readership wouldn't get it.
Just say it.
Straight out.
This call for simplicity came from a complex person:
· He married into Glatfelter paper wealth but crusaded to advance the disadvantaged.
· He was an Ivy League-trained attorney working as a newspaperman in an area where half of his readers lacked even a high school education.
· He lived in Hanover, often thought to be a world unto itself, and exercised influence throughout York County, the nation and the world.
· He wrote often about objectivity and adopted a newspaper motto eschewing prejudice. Yet he frequently turned on a stream of positive coverage concerning candidates he backed and shut off news about their opponents.
· He lobbied for civil rights and against racism, but his wealth and family background enabled him to belong to a variety of exclusive clubs. That included the then all-white, all-gentile Lafayette Club in
Depending on one's views about Gitt and his newspaper's politics, Gazette and Daily readers either reconciled these and other complexities or blasted them as inconsistencies that undermined his message.
Mary Allienne Hamilton, foremost authority on Gitt's life and work, explores these themes and other issues in her just- released biography, "Rising from the Wilderness."
Hamilton was a reporter for The Gazette and Daily in the 1960s and later a St. Bonaventure University journalism professor.
She adapted the title from historian Richard J. Walton's assessment of Gitt and his Gazette:
"If ever American journalism had a hero, it was he, but, alas, his brave newspaper was published in a small Pennsylvania city and not Washington or one of the metropolitan centers. Literally, and sadly, a voice in the wilderness."
Hamilton believes the biblical reference to the wilderness is actually a public cry of triumph and hope.
And Gitt operated for 55 years as a newspaper owner with the hope that his ideals would triumph.
Gitt was a force in the post-World War II movement of Progressives and liberals who, among other things, questioned the Cold War, battled against McCarthyism and challenged the Vietnam War.
This association inevitably caused some York countians - and others among the large out-of-town readership his newspaper commanded - to place him squarely in the Communist camp.
But as Hamilton demonstrates, he resigned from the Progressive Party because Communists were hooking up with that movement.
Further, the FBI monitored Gitt for links to the Communists for more than two decades and could make no such connections.
This biography starts with the Gitt family's roots in early York County.
It follows Jess Gitt's trail from his Hanover boyhood through law school to newspaper owner who became an internationally known figure.
It covers his correspondence with Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling and other elites.
As such, it should appeal to readers in York and Adams counties, journalists in the media and academia, specialists of the Cold War and Vietnam eras and traditional and neo-Progressives.
This work draws heavily on Hamilton's Michigan State University dissertation and other scholarly work.
But it is written in the simple style of a journalist.
"Rising from the Wilderness" bears the subtitle: "J.W. Gitt and His Legendary Newspaper: The Gazette and Daily from York, Pa."
If Gitt were alive, one can imagine him looking at the cover, noticing the drawn-out title and asserting:
"Rising from the Wilderness" is enough.
Just say it.
Straight out.
James McClure is editor of the York Daily Record/Sunday News. He is a member of the York County Heritage Trust board and was part of that organization's publication committee that edited "Rising from the Wilderness." To contact him, call 771-2000, or e-mail jem@ ydr.com.
Newspaper history
Some key events in Gazette and Daily/York Daily Record history:
1915 - Allen C. Wiest and law partner J.W. Gitt acquire the foundering Gazette. This begins Gitt's 55-year reign as Gazette owner. Under Gitt, the newspaper gains a national reputation for its independent, some said leftist, news orientation and editorial positions.
1918 - TheGazette purchases the Daily, York's first daily newspaper, and the York Legal Record. TheGazette is renamed TheGazette and Daily.
1943 - Because of wartime newsprint shortages, TheGazette and Daily changes to a tabloid format.
1948 - Gitt draws criticism after backing Henry Wallace, Progressive Party candidate for U.S. president. The York newspaper is the only commercial daily in the United States to back Wallace.
1964 - Gitt refuses advertisements for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, saying the Republican is as harmful as tobacco and liquor. Gitt has long rejected ads for those products.
1970 - Amid labor problems, the newspaper shuts down. Gitt sells assets to a local group headed by attorney Harold N. Fitzkee Jr. Gitt retires TheGazette and Daily name. The newspaper soon reopens with a York Daily Record nameplate. The name is said to come from TheDaily and TheYork Legal Record.
To buy the book
“Rising from the Wilderness” is available for $29.95 at the York County Heritage Trust museum shop, 250 E. Market St., York, or on the Web, http://www.yorkheritage.org. The trust published this 342-page biography.
From 'Rising from the Wilderness'
“What they wanted to do was get J.W. Gitt. They wanted me to say that he was a Communist, and he was not.”
- Harry Sharkey, former Gazette and Daily staff member, called before a “loyalty board” during the McCarthy era.
“I think of those editors at the (Gazette and Daily) and various members of the community who helped me.”
- Robert Maynard, who went from The Gazette to The Washington Post and later became the first black to own a major metropolitan daily, The Oakland Tribune.
“No one knew anything much about golf in Hanover at that time except me, so they looked upon me to take up the problem of laying the course out.”
- Golf enthusiast J.W. Gitt, on the Hanover Country Club's early years.
“It's easy enough to make friends
When life goes by us all along,
But the man worthwhile
Is the man who can smile
When everything goes dead wrong.”
- Recited by Elizabeth Gitt, J.W. Gitt's wife, on her 103rd birthday in 1993.
