This series contains Colonel McCormick's private correspondence with Arthur Schmon. It relates McCormick's attitudes for that time towards the people and the governments of Canada and the Colonel's isolationism as manifested in The Chicago Tribune's editorial policy. The Colonel's achievement is thoroughly documented in the sub-series. During the inter-war period The Chicago Tribune, which had the largest circulation of any newspaper, followed McCormick's distinctive editorial Line. The Colonel was an isolationist Republican whose beliefs were based an idealized view of small town mid-western United States. He presented the new towns to American readers as a symbol of American civilization transplanted to the wilderness of northern Canada. The paper mills at Baie-Comeau and Thorold, Ontario fit neatly into this world view. The Colonel was not merely investing in a supply of a raw material for his newspapers, he was building a necessary part of an integrated ideological whole. Indeed, the mills should considered as the industrial component of a grander vision, a Republican led mid-western American civilization (from the biography of McCormick written by Richard Norton Smith entitled "The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick (Boston, 1997).
The photographs in this sub-series visually documents the two personalities, Colonel Robert R. McCormick and Arthur Schmon, that controlled The Chicago Tribune's Canadian empire from 1912 to 1964. The majority of the sub-series consists of six chronological scrapbooks complied for Schmon. Subjects range from the timber cruises in the 1920s through, the development of the Quebec Lower North Shore, particularly the building of the Baie Comeau mill and townsite to efforts at reforestation on Manitoulin Island. Taken to together they do more than merely illustrate the development of the Company's properties in Quebec and Ontario. In demonstrating the link between these two men and the Company's activities these records provide essential documentation for business and economic historians. These records also furnish a wealth of information for environmental studies.
These photographs were taken by professional photographers including, among others, W. E. Shore who photographed the QUNO's Ontario properties and Editorial Associates of Montreal who worked for the Company on the Lower North Shore. Paul Provencher, the company's chief forester, took many of the images in this sub-series. The photographs in this sub-series are more fully described in the finding aid.
