The Legacy of Citizen Robert
At 21 Robert Decherd set out to capture the prize that had eluded his father: the throne of Texas’ most powerful media dynasty. At 34 he has won control of the Dallas Morning News and much, much more—but to what end?
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The Galveston paper was owned by Alfred Horatio Belo, a bearded Confederate colonel originally from North Carolina. Belo wanted to start another paper in North Texas, where a daily wouldn’t be limited to an island. In 1882 he sent Dealey, who had risen to mailroom clerk, to scout the proper location. After considering such sites as Waco, Fort Worth, and Denison, Belo accepted Dealey’s conclusion that Dallas, a booming town of 18,000, was the most promising location. At 26, Dealey was named business manager of the nascent Dallas Morning News. The paper set up shop in a three-story brick building on Commerce Street in downtown Dallas, and the first edition appeared on October 1, 1885.
That was a perilous time in the newspaper business. Papers seemed to spring up, merge, fail, and disappear almost overnight; though a small city, Dallas already had two dailies. To survive, a paper had to be not only well-run but also carefully conceived.
The News was. From the beginning Dealey established policies that would remain with the paper. Belo wanted a regional paper, a sober journal of record with none of what he called the “shriveled localism” of the competition. Dealey filled the News‘ pages with dispatches on state, national, and world events and sent the paper by train throughout Texas. For the next 99 years (until Dealey’s great-grandson Robert Decherd at last made the paper supreme in its bailiwick), the News relied on its sales outside the borders of Dallas County to claim a circulation advantage over its surviving rivals.
Dealey also bluntly stated his intention to ally the paper with the interests of the city. “The advancement of Dallas is the advancement of the News,” an 1886 editorial announced. “The one is inseparable from the other.” By using the paper’s editorials and news columns in his frequent campaigns for civic improvement, he made the News the voice of the Dallas establishment. Not one to leave matters to fate, George Dealey found another way to assure success. A month after beginning publication, the News bought and promptly shut down the only other morning paper in town, leaving itself with a morning monopoly.
After Belo’s sudden death in 1901, the colonel’s heirs gave Dealey a free hand. The News fought for improved sanitation—it placed the first public trash can in Dallas’ streets—and, above all, city planning. In 1910 Dealey began running large, appealing photos of cities like Buffalo, under the standing caption “An example of civil attractiveness.” The series continued daily for eight years, three months, and 26 days and was the origin of Dallas’ civic obsession with cleanliness and order.
G. B. Dealey did not limit his campaigns to the pages of his newspaper. He pulled strings in Washington to help Dallas beat out Houston for the southwestern branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. He raised funds for parks, for hospitals, and for Southern Methodist University’s first building. Every month, beginning in 1908, he dined with the city’s most powerful men, a group called the Critic Club, who set the city’s future course. Those activities had enormous implications for the paper. Dealey was forging the fateful link between himself and the Dallas establishment that was to make his newspaper the embodiment of its will.
Later, in the hands of Dealeys less gifted and principled than himself, that solidarity would almost destroy the reputation of the newspaper. But G. B. Dealey never lost his long-range vision for the News. He wanted to build a great newspaper, and he knew that it would sometimes require making decisions that cost money. “Revenue must be had first,” he said. “but the revenue is not to be had unless the policy is correct.” In 1907, with the News‘ circulation up to 37,000, Dealey persuaded the Belo heirs to let him stop running advertisements on the front page; it would be another 72 years before the News stopped running ads on the front pages of its other sections.
The episode that most sharply distinguished Dealey concerned his opposition to the Ku Klux Klan in the early twenties. The Klan was strong in Dallas and in Texas; in 1922 it held almost every elective office in town and helped elect one of its own to the U.S. Senate. On the morning after a Klan parade down Main Street, the News (the same paper that many years later would embrace Joe McCarthy) editorialized that the spectacle had been “a slander on Dallas.” Dealey’s campaign prompted first a cancellation of subscriptions, then a boycott by advertisers, and finally a boycott of stores that continued to advertise in the News. The paper’s circulation fell by three thousand copies, forcing Colonel Belo’s heirs to sell the Galveston paper, by then less than half the size of its Dallas offspring. Dealey kept up the attacks, though, and by 1924 sentiment began to shift. That fall an endorsement from the News helped Ma Ferguson beat the Klan’s candidate for governor.
In 1926 Belo’s heirs sold the company to the man who had worked for the family for a half-century. At the age of 66, Dealey took on a twenty-year debt to become majority stockholder of A. H. Belo, purchased for a total of $2,725,000. Belo’s properties included the News, The Texas Almanac, the Semi-Weekly Farm News, and an afternoon paper, the Dallas Journal, which Dealey would sell in 1938. As an owner, Dealey was a benevolent monarch. He knew every employee by name, considered all requests for raises and promotions personally, and kept employees who were sick and unable to work on the company payroll. And only in the most extreme circumstances did the News ever fire an employee.
Dealey would read the paper in the morning and ride to work in a limousine driven by a black chauffeur who lived behind the Dealey home in Highland Park. (Dealey never bothered to learn to drive.) At the News he would shed his suit jacket and hat, slip on a black alpaca coat, reach for an expensive cigar, and begin dispatching memos. They were written on pink slips of paper that only he was permitted to use. Forever waging war on waste, he instructed reporters to slit open used envelopes and type their copy on the inside. New writers were advised not to expect many bylines; G. B. Dealey didn’t want large egos on his staff. Dealey was all business. He worked six days a week and on Sundays came to the office after church to open the mail. Humor came so rarely to him that he jotted down jokes in a small blue notebook for use in speeches.
In 1940, with circulation up to 102,000 and the News‘ place as Texas’ paper of record firmly established, Dealey, at 80, began to make provisions for succession. Among his five children, his first choice to take over the business had been Walter, the older of two sons. Walter had joined the company after college in 1920 and quickly showed that he had a head for numbers and an eye for a good deal. He had persuaded his father in 1922 to invest in a strange new proposition called radio, a business that would support the company during the Depression. Walter became general manager of the company, the man in charge on the rare occasions when his father was away. But Walter Dealey, whose father never drank, was an alcoholic. His affection for the bottle led to a separation from his wife, and in 1934, while in a Dallas clinic to receive the cure, he died of a heart attack. County records attributed his early demise, at age 43, to “alcoholic poison.”
G.B.’s other son was Edward Musgrove Dealey, a large man, moon-faced and broad-shouldered, who had played football for the University of Texas. In his older years, when his jowls sagged and his forehead wrinkled, he looked like a frowning bulldog. With Walter dead, Ted became the heir apparent. The only problem was that Ted didn’t want the mantle. He liked to write and travel. While Walter had been learning bookkeeping, Ted had happily busied himself as a reporter, chasing fires and politicians. More recently, he had written editorials and edited the News‘ Sunday magazine. Ted preferred eating lunch in the company cafeteria with ink-stained pressmen to chewing over the details of newspaper finance. “Hell, when I need to count over ten,” he told a relative, “I have to take my shoes off.” It didn’t matter. However ill-suited for the job he might be, however uninterested he was, Ted Dealey was the only remaining son of the founder. The burden was his. In 1940 his father gave Ted the title of president. Six years later G. B. Dealey died of a heart attack, and Ted had the reins all to himself.
Coarse and Ugly
The new publisher of the Dallas Morning News was unlike any other Dealey. And he was remarkably unlike his father. George Bannerman Dealey had been a serious, industrious child. Ted was expelled from the sixth grade and later sent to a private school for delinquents. G.B. was a cultured man with a fine-tuned sense of propriety. Ted once wrote a Belo executive who had moved into new quarters. “Some day when you’re sitting in that fancy new office of yours, keep in mind that at one time in that exact location stood the finest whorehouse in the entire city of Dallas.” In a collection of essays about his childhood, titled Diaper Days of Dallas, Ted offered anecdotes about his “masturbation period” and urinating in his pants. G. B. Dealey was a progressive man who ordered the staff to stop referring to “Jew girls” and was sensitive about the treatment of black people. Ted laced his speech with remarks about “niggers.” G. B. Dealey never drank, but Ted, like his late brother, drank too much, and the booze turned his mood coarse and ugly.
Ted cared little for the civic meetings and causes, the fundraising drives and betterment groups that had been his father’s lifework. He became a charter member of the Dallas Citizens Council, the group of Dallas executives that would chart the city’s political course from 1937 to the mid-seventies, but he rarely went to its meetings. He preferred to hunt and fish, often at a private lodge near Athens called Koon Kreek Klub, frequented by other members of the Dallas power structure. His great civic passion was the Dallas zoo.
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