Fremont Older

• Fremont Older
• Born: August 30, 1856
• Died: March 3, 1935

Urban Populist editor and crusader remembered particularly for his espousal of the Tom Mooney labor case in World War I, was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, the second son of Emory Older and Celia (Augur) Older, both of British background. Emory Older, a farmer, lived in a log cabin; a volunteer in the Civil War, he died in 1864 of a disease contracted in a Confederate prison camp. With her husband’s death, Celia Older sold books to piece out a living, one of them a biography of Horace Greeley, the reformer-editor of The New-York Tribune—a book that influenced her son’s career.

Fremont Older’s formal education was limited to country schools and a few months at nearby Ripon College. Tough physically, he worked as a farmhand, school janitor, shop employee, and riverboat cabin boy. After his mother remarried, he wandered West and worked on numerous newspapers in jobs ranging from printer’s devil to compositor to circulation manager. Eventually, the tall, erect Older, whose dominating stare many remarked, became a writer and editor and joined the staff of The San Francisco Morning Call, where he established a reputation in the early 1890s as a star reporter and editor.

In 1895 R. A. Crothers bought The San Francisco Bulletin, an ailing evening paper, for $65,-000 dollars and hired Older as managing editor on the basis of his reputation for building circulation. In those days a managing editor functioned also as a news editor who selected the day’s page-one stories and who decided on their comparative emphasis. In this tradition, Older applied himself to snaring readers by any means, not caring whether his sensational articles and headlines “might make people suffer, or might utterly ruin someone,” as he wrote later in My Own Story.

Within a year, the Bulletin’s circulation and advertising revenue had spurted and the paper moved to better quarters and installed Linotype machines to replace the hand-set type. Older continued to develop many of the techniques of sensational journalism, pioneering in enormous headlines and in sponsoring contests. Crothers, a cultivated classical scholar, was aghast at the stunts that were making his paper profitable. The standards of the Bulletin permitted such headlines as “Governor’s Friend Has Fat Job”; “One or More of These Men Are Taking Bribes in Chinatown” (with their pictures); and “Ruef Squeals Like Cornered Rat.”

In the late 1890s San Francisco was notorious for its vice and corruption, its disorderly condition costly to the city’s increasingly powerful financial, real estate, and middle-class interests. Municipal reform, which was being bruited in other cities, was taken up by San Francisco’s urban Populists, by its meager Socialist group, and by up-and-coming progressives. Realizing the potential of reform, Older embarked on a campaign to achieve clean government and to break the grip of the Southern Pacific Railroad—this although the paper was receiving a monthly subsidy of $125 from the railroad.

Politicizing the Bulletin, Older was instrumental in electing a reform mayor. In 1901, however, the old machine returned to power, and in the long fight against it, Older narrowly escaped assassination. The prosecution of grafters, a favorite Bulletin target, gave Hiram W. Johnson, later a progressive senator, one of his first prosecutorial coups. Despite Older’s vigorous antigraft campaigns, only one political boss, Abraham Ruef, was incarcerated, a broken man. After visiting him in prison, Older concluded that not Ruef personally but “the system” was guilty of fostering corruption; and he was later to think that criminals suffered “some twist in their brains,” for which they were not responsible. His compassion aroused, Older tried to have Ruef set free; failing that, he battled for prison reform, against the death penalty, and for the equality of rich and poor before the law.

After the arrest of Tom Mooney and Warren K. Billings, two trade unionists, in the bombing of the San Francisco Preparedness Day parade in 1916, Older was initially convinced of their guilt, but letters indicating perjury by a key prosecution witness changed his mind. On April 12, 1917, the Bulletin opened a campaign for a fair trial for Mooney and Billings, and Older published the compromising letters. In the heat of American entry into World War I and because of the purported pacificism of Mooney and Billings, the newspaper’s management called a halt to Older’s campaign, and he resigned.

In August 1918 William Randolph Hearst, whom Older had respected in years of amicable competition, invited him to become editor of The Call and to “bring the Mooney case with you.” And so Older pressed his campaign, publishing in nine newspaper pages the Densmore Report, a federal inquiry that demonstrated that the cases against Mooney and Billings had been concocted by the prosecution. The report saved the two men, whose case was by then internationally known and the subject of worldwide labor protest. After twenty years of agitation, in the late 1930s, Mooney and Billings were pardoned.

Eleven years after he joined Hearst, the publisher bought the Bulletin and merged it with The Call. Older was named president of The Call-Bulletin as well as editor, posts he held until his death. In his last years he did much to develop the writing and publication of serial fiction in the Hearst papers. Also at Hearst’s request, Older wrote a daily column in which he voiced his thoughts on people and events, economics, religion, crime, history, dogs—anything that his interests and rich experience suggested. Older had always admired Hearst’s policy of competitive hiring, which had forced up the general level of newspaper salaries, and he felt particularly grateful for the right to continue the Mooney campaign. In 1932 Older wrote of Hearst’s “record of progressive achievements … unparalleled in American journalism.”

In all his travail and triumphs Older’s second wife, the writer Cora Miranda Baggerly, whom he married in 1893, was a constant and sturdy companion. (An earlier marriage, to Emma Finger, had ended in divorce.) Fremont and Cora Older enjoyed San Francisco’s social life, its fine restaurants, its opera, and its theaters. Older’s extrajournalistic interests included expensive clothes, cars, Havana cigars, and, above all, reading. He was especially devoted to Dickens.

The Olders, who had no children, found peace and quiet at their isolated ranch, Woodhill, high above the Santa Clara Valley. He died at seventy-eight, at the wheel of his car, and was buried beside his pet dogs in a glade on the ranch, under the live oaks.

Fremont Older wrote two autobiographies: My Own Story (1926), detailing many of his experiences with fellow newspapermen, politicians, and convicts; and Growing Up (1931), an account of his early life. Evelyn Wells, a protege, was the author of Fremont Older (1936). The diaries of Cora Older, from 1916 to 1923, edited by D. M. Harris, were published as The Diary of Cora Baggerly Older (1971). Fremont and Cora Older collaborated on a biography of the father of William Randolph Hearst, The Life of George Hearst, California Pioneer (1933). Cora Older wrote books on California. Books on newspapers and history of Older’s time include L. Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939) and O. G. Villard, Some Newspapers and Newspapermen (1923) and W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (1961). See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 1 (1944).