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Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its Star

Amazon.com Price:  $27.09 (as of 02/05/2019 12:10 PST- Details)

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Description

      At the turn of the twentieth century, the Kansas City Star was once a consider-busting newspaper acclaimed for its crusading progressive spirit; fifty years later it was once a busted consider, targeted in a very powerful antitrust action ever brought against an American daily. Now Harry Haskell tells the tale of the Star’s rise and decline against the richly textured backdrop of Kansas City—the story of how a newspaper and a city grew together and in the end grew apart.

Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds takes readers into the city room and executive offices of probably the most respected American newspapers, whose influence extended beyond its own community to international affairs. Re-creating life at the Star from the inside, the book traces the shifting fortunes of a great newspaper and the compelling “power of purpose” it exerted from the birth of the progressive movement in the 1880s to the 1950s.

            This fascinating tale—with underlying themes of sin and redemption, high-minded ideals and gutter politics—is populated by a cast of larger-than-life characters, ranging from power brokers to presidents and including such Kansas City notables as Tom Pendergast, J. C. Nichols, and Frank Walsh. But at heart this is the story of three men with contrasting personalities and agendas who shaped the newspaper over more than three-quarters of a century: William Rockhill Nelson, a number of the last of the great “personal” editors from journalism’s golden age; the scholarly Henry J. Haskell, who led the Star to its peak of influence in the 1930s and ’40s; and Roy A. Roberts, who went on to combine the roles of newspaper publisher and political kingmaker.

Along the way, Haskell recounts such milestones as the Star’s role in the City Beautiful movement that helped develop into The united states’s urban centers; the nation’s entry into two global wars; a bold but ill-starred experiment in employee ownership; and the paper’s on-again, off-again battle with Boss Pendergast’s legendary political machine. And he brings into focus issues that remain timely today, from social and political reform to the very role of newspapers in a democracy, even as also drawing parallels with contemporary American history—disillusionment with liberalism, the hijacking of the GOP by the far right, The united states’s go-it-alone attitude—that are as alarming as they are instructive. 

As Haskell shows, the evolution of American journalism from crusading newspapers to pawns of corporate culture was once already under way in the early 1900s and was once substantially complete by midcentury. Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds chronicles the glory days of an illustrious newspaper as it opens new windows on a city’s history.


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