Poverty to Publishing: The McClure Love Story
By - Harry Bulkeley
This story has all the elements of a Hollywood romantic comedy. Who knows, maybe these Forgottonia lovers will become as famous as Romeo and Juliet? Well, maybe not that famous but certainly as romantic.
Sam McClure was a poor boy. I mean really poor. He was born in Northern Ireland and came to America with his widowed mother. After graduating from high school he taught school to earn enough money to go to college and arrived as a freshman at Knox College with fifteen cents in his pocket.
He couldn't afford to pay for heat in his dorm room but when coal was delivered to campus, it was dumped in a big pile. After that had been sold and hauled away, there were a few chunks that were left stuck in the mud. Digging them out, Sam managed to keep from freezing over the winter.
He worked all kinds of jobs to earn the ten cents that would buy him enough crackers and grapes to feed him all week. His furniture was a shipping crate that a local merchant had given him, and he slept on the floor.
Poverty didn't keep him from working- HARD! He founded the college newspaper and later expanded it into the Western College Associated Press which was an early news service. Add to that his excellent academic performance and he would seem to have been a great catch for someone.
While still a freshman, he was smitten with a brilliant and vivacious senior, Harriett Hurd. Unfortunately, Harriett's father was Albert Hurd, AB, PhD, a chemistry professor who had just served a term as acting college president. He was also a senior member of the faculty. Professor Hurd had, to say the least, higher goals for his daughter than the scruffy Sam McClure. He absolutely forbade their relationship from going further.
Sam and Harriet continued to see each other and even talked of getting married. One day, however, Sam called on Harriet and was told by her mother that he was forbidden from seeing her again. It seemed final enough that they returned each others' remembrances and went their separate ways. When Sam was a senior, Harriet happened to be back in town and they ended up in a class together (Accident?) "Nothing doing," said Professor Hurd and Harriet soon found herself on a train headed east and far away from Sam. Problem solved- or so it seemed.
After graduation, Sam also headed east, intending to find his fortune, but not before stopping to renew his friendship with Harriet. For whatever reason, she gave him the cold shoulder, and dejectedly, he boarded a train for Boston. When he got there, someone had stolen his luggage, and he was broke- again. He called up a friend from Knox and stayed with him.
Bicycling was all the rage and his friend ran a bike "rink" where he gave Sam a job. Never one to sit still, Sam convinced his friend that they should publish a magazine about bikes and soon was born "The Wheelman" which took off as the magazine for Cyclists.
Whether it was this success or simply true love, Sam and Harriet reunited and were married in the front parlor of Harriet's very unhappy parents.
Sam's enterprising nature was fueled in the city and he went from being editor of The Wheelman magazine to starting the McClure News Syndicate which bought writings from noted authors and sold them to publications around the country. These contributors were important people like Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling to name a few.
A few years after that, Sam, with Harriett at his side, founded McClure's Magazine. With circulation eventually reaching 300,000 per month, McClure claimed that it had more paid advertising than any other magazine in the country, including Harper's and Century. At its height, McClure's did some of the most important journalism of the time.
There were serialized works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Most importantly, it was credited with starting the tradition of "muckraking" journalism and among its staff of reporters was one of the most famous muckrakers, Ida Tarbell who, along with others, published sensational exposes of industry giants like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel.
You can only pull the lion's tail for so long and eventually McClure's sensational reporting crossed the wrong people. It incurred the wrath of many of the most important bigwigs in America. Teddy Roosevelt actually coined the term muckrakers in referring to McClure's. Sam's interest in the magazine waned and eventually it folded.
So what happened to our lovers? Their marriage persevered even after their magazine was gone. You can still find them together if you go to the far west end of Hope Cemetery in Galesburg. One of the very last tombstones is Sam's and Harriet's. Immediately next to their stone is that of Harriet's parents, Professor and Mrs. Hurd. History doesn't tell us if the family ever reconciled, but I hope they have finally found peace back here in Forgottonia.