On May 31, 1937, Virginia Gardner, realized that while some journalists work for a paycheck, others have a love affair with truth.
A star Tribune reporter, she was known for her exposes of quack doctors. In one story, her writing sharply skewered a defense attorney whose expert-witness tactic backfired. Pointing to an exhibit labeled “healing ointment,” the attorney asked the doctor he brought to court what purpose it served.
“To sell,” the witness replied.
But on this occasion, Gardner picked up a copy of the paper on her way to work, anxious to see the coverage of a strike at the Far South Side. The cops killed 10 workers on a picket line.
“The Tribune’s front page was unbelievable,” she recalled in an unpublished memoir, “Ruminations on a Long Life.”
“The idea was that it was all the strikers fault. Instead of their making a peaceful march before they struck Republic Steel, the Tribune had them making a frontal attack!”
When she arrived at Tribune Tower, a photographer came out of the darkroom and tearfully said: “ ‘Come here, Miss Gardner. I want to show you something.’
“Inside—we were alone in the darkroom—he showed me the pictures he had made—which the Tribune hadn’t used.”
All showed the brutality of the police actions. But the Tribune, under the control of archconservative publisher Robert McCormick, offered coverage more sympathetic to the police, with a story carrying the sub-headline, “Police Repulse Mob Attack on S. Chicago Mill.”
“The important thing is that it was on that day in 1937, Memorial Day, I decided that the thing I must do was to join the Communist Party,” she wrote. “I had no illusions that I’d change things. If I could make Col. McCormick and his like a mite less comfortable I wanted to do it.”
In fact, her decision changed the whole trajectory of Gardner’s life, notably with the demise of her marriage. Her husband, Marion “Red” Marberry, was a Socialist, and Communists and Socialists were at odds despite their mutual abhorrence of capitalists. He showed little sympathy for her dismay over the Tribune’s strike coverage, she recounted in her memoir.
“So what?” he sneered. “Do you expect the Colonel to come to Jesus suddenly?”
Gardner was born in 1904 in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, and grew up in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Her father was a well-to-do banker, with a hint of youthful radicalism. Having worked briefly for a newspaper, he tried steering her away from journalism. But as children will, she declined to heed his advice.
She enrolled in the University of Missouri’s Journalism School. Jerry Butler, a young man who sat next to her in an economics class, asked her to a fraternity dance. He wooed her by explaining the difference between bourgeois economics and Marxism.
“As if it was an entirely commonplace statistic, he said, ‘Of course I am a Socialist’,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir, which was provided to the Tribune by New York University’s Tamiment Library.
Butler’s ideology was free form, as she noted: “Being a Socialist meant for Jerry voting for Norman Thomas every four years and reading Marx because, as he said, it helped when he played the stock market.”
Thomas was a perennial presidential candidate, running unsuccessfully as a Socialist six times beginning in the late 1920s.
Gardner was hired by the Tribune in 1929, somewhat reluctantly. A Tribune editor, about to show her the door, asked about her schooling. Knowing old-timers frowned on college graduates, she hemmed and hawed before giving her credentials from Missouri.
“You certainly made it hard for me,” he replied. “The Colonel has just put through an order that no one is to be hired for the editorial department who isn’t a journalism school graduate.”
She started as a general assignment reporter at $65 a week. Two weeks later, the stock market crashed and hard times followed.
“The effects of the Depression were all around us,” she recalled. As she left the the Tribune Tower after work, she saw those effects firsthand.
“On a the ledge there, surrounding the lower part of the Tribune’s front, lay stretched the unemployed, wrapped in newspapers tied against the wind—a mass of men as close together as sardines in a can.”
Her assignments were wide-ranging and often sobering, given the times. In 1932, she wrote about the “Bread Line Frolics,” a show mounted by performers living in homeless shelters. “Feet that haven’t tapped the boards in many a month and voices that have grown a little husky since they sang in tent shows and burlesque houses years back, are being heard in daily rehearsals in the Majestic Theater,” she reported.
When Gardner surreptitiously organized a Tribune chapter of the Newspaper Guild, management cracked the secret code by which members’ identities were hidden. Even worse, a 1938 Tribune article named her as one of the picketers arrested during a clash between police and striking workers of the Chicago Evening American and the Herald American.
She was fired, but the National Labor Relations Board helped her get reinstated. McCormick was furious and ordered the paper’s copy desk to strip her stories of a byline.
But Cardinal George Mundelein admired her spunk and gave her a big scoop: Mother Cabrini was going to be beatified. A front-page story about a Chicago nun demanded a byline, and McCormick relented.
Newsroom wits quipped that incident left Mother Cabrini just one short of the two miracles required for elevation to sainthood.
In 1940, Gardner left the Tribune and became a wandering journalist. She searched for truth—as she saw it, not as some editor insisted she report it.
She was the Washington correspondent of the New Masses, a Marxist publication she left in 1947 to work for the People’s World, the Communist Party’s West Coast newspaper.
In 1951, she was fired by the People’s World, moved to New York, worked in a meatpacking plant, and was hired by the Daily Worker, the Communist Party’s East Coast newspaper.
She chronicled and was a victim of the 1950s Red Scare, a hysterical search for Soviet agents supposedly burrowed into educational institutions and government agencies. The inquisition’s supporters and opponents were fired up by the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of stealing America’s nuclear formulas.
Gardner thought them innocent and lambasted congressional investigators for outing people as members of leftist groups they’d long since left.
“A second stool pigeon was produced by the Un-American Activities Committee in its hunt for some pretext on which to make the ghoulish claim that the Communist Party’s coffers were enriched by the movement around clemency for the martyred Ethel and Julius Rosenberg,” she reported in the Daily Worker.
Meanwhile, she seems to have had her own doubts about her political choices. California’s Tenney Committee identified her as a “Revisionist,” whereupon a hard-line Communist publication suggested she was a stool pigeon.
Those intraparty battles were intensified the by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations about Josef Stalin. Long hero-worshipped by American leftists, in reality, he was a cruel dictator with an ocean of blood on his hands.
In 1959, Gardner resigned from the Daily Worker and left the Communist Party in 1962. Unable to find other assignments, she wrote a biography of Louise Bryant, a feminist and Communist, and worked on her own autobiography.
Gardner died in San Diego in 1992. Her Tribune obituary included a line that made clear she wasn’t a political theoretician with her head in the clouds and manicured fingernails. “While writing for the Daily Worker and other radical and communist publications,” the obit noted, “she worked in New York factories.”
Have an idea for Vintage Chicago Tribune? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at rgrossman@chicagotribune.com and mmather@chicagotribune.com.