Edward Beale (Ned) McLean, publisher, 1916 - 1933

Under John McLean's son Ned, who took over the paper upon his father's death, the paper began to deteriorate financially as well as spiritually. As Chalmers Roberts wrote in The Washington Post: The First 100 Years:

Edward Beale McLean, Ned to one and all, was the third generation in the worst sense. Pampered and indulged as a child, early addicted to drink, his problems, as his wife wrote, were "the natural consequences of unearned wealth in undisciplined hands."

After years of abusing alcohol and squandering his wealth, Ned McLean nearly took The Post down with him as he used company funds to pay his personal debts. Finally, he was forced to yield control of The Post.

Before the paper's sale in 1933, The Post was down to a thin 14, or even 12, pages daily as readers and advertisers awaited a change in ownership. In a last frantic effort, The Post reduced its advertising rates and in a house ad reproduced replies praising the move. The Post had been forced into receivership in March when it could not pay newsprint bills it owed the International Paper Company.

On June 1, outside the historic Post building on E Street, the final bidders were an attorney representing Evalyn Walsh McLean, who hoped to save the paper for her two boys; a representative of Hearst, and George E. Hamilton, Jr., "an attorney representing an undisclosed principal" who made the final bid of $825,000. After a 10-day delay for court approval, The Post announced in a two-column box on page 1: EUGENE MEYER ANNOUNCED AS WASHINGTON POST BUYER.

John Roll McLean, publisher 1905-1916

From The Washington Post: The First 100 Years by Chalmers Roberts:

"John Roll McLean," his daughter-in-law (Evalyn Walsh McLean, owner of the "Hope" diamond) wrote of him, "loved power and nothing was too much trouble when he saw a chance to extend his reach and control of other men." He was, as she remembered 20 years after his death, "the oddest hybrid of gentle friend and fierce monster that I have ever known. In Washington he exercised a power almost like that of a political boss."

However one may discount a relative's judgment, it is beyond doubt that McLean exercised power with his money and his newspapers. For years he bankrolled the Democratic party in Ohio and through his Cincinnati Enquirer influenced his party and his state. ...Essentially, McLean was The Post's proprietor, in the business office sense, while also setting the general course for ...editorials and for news handling.

The newspaper began to change.

Perhaps the change, wrote a later Post editor Felix Morley in The Post in 1937, was "traceable to the fact that John R. McLean, while personally directing the paper, was at the same time almost equally interested in his Cincinnati organ and other business projects. Perhaps it was due to his weakness for politics, always dangerous indulgence in the case of the newspaper owner whose ambition is to conduct a first class paper." Slowly, but surely, as Morley aptly put it, "in rather intangible ways, The Post began to deteriorate spiritually under the McLean ownership."

Frank Hatton and Beriah Wilkins, copublishers

Frank Hatton, a former Postmaster General and a "stalwart" Republican, and Beriah Wilkins, an Ohio congressman and an ardent Democrat, were both 42 years old when they joined forces to purchase The Post on a 50-50 basis. According to The Washington Post: The First 100 Years by Chalmers Roberts:

They paid Stilson Hutchins $210,000 for The Post. They then sold back to him one of the paper's presses for $35,000, making the net cost $175,000 paid over a two-year period. They incorporated as The Washington Post Company with 600 shares of stock and a capitalization of $300,000. Hutchins later was quoted as saying he had 'made a fool of himself' in selling the paper. Judging from its continued success, that probably was true. In 1892-1894, the paper showed a profit averaging more than $100,000 a year. The new owners boasted in print of The Post's success but modestly never put their names on the paper's editorial page masthead as Hutchins had done.

Hatton was to die of a stroke only five years after the purchase. After he died his widow charged Wilkins with illegally taking majority control of the paper, but a settlement was reached and Wilkins, who had withdrawn from Democratic party affairs once he became a newspaper proprietor, carried on in sole control for another decade.

Wilkins died in 1903 and was succeeded at The Post by his sons, John and Robert, both Princeton graduates. In October 1905, however, the owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer, John R. McLean, purchased a controlling interest. Shortly thereafter, John Wilkins sold his interest, putting the entire newspaper under McLean's ownership.

Stilson Hutchins, founder and publisher

A native of New Hampshire, Stilson Hutchins edited and owned several newspapers in the Midwest before founding The Washington Post in 1877. After cofounding the St. Louis Times, he bought the Dispatch, then lost his stake in it. Before being forced out by the new owners of the Times, Hutchins gave a foreign-born journalist named Joseph Pulitzer his first job on an English-language newspaper. Later, his friend Pulitzer contributed occasional articles to Hutchins' next venture in journalism, a "Democratic daily journal" he named The Washington Post. On Thursday morning, December 6, 1877, Hutchins published Volume 1, Number 1 — four pages printed on rag paper and costing 3¢ — and observed in his first editorial:

Human beings sometimes come into the world without being able to assign practical reasons for their coming. When a newspaper is born there is always a reasonable excuse. In the case of The Post it needed only be said that Washington city is too large and too important to be denied the benign influence of a Democratic daily journal...

The Post will aim to be a thorough-going newspaper, always abreast of the times... We will do what we can to promote intelligence in this neighborhood, and will certainly increase the conditions most favorable to the success and prosperity of our institutions by preaching sound Democracy.

Twelve years later Hutchins sold his healthy journalistic offspring in order to pursue his interest in the development of the Mergenthaler "linotype" machine which was revolutionizing the printing industry.

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