The Marion Star (known as The Marion Daily Star until 1926) is a daily newspaper in Marion, Ohio. The paper is owned by USA Today Co., formerly the Gannett Newspaper organization. It was founded in 1877 by Sam Hume and, in its early years, was so unprofitable that it became insolvent in 1884. After the business was put up for auction at a sheriff's sale, it was purchased by Warren G. Harding, future president of the United States of America. Harding made the newspaper commercially successful and owned it until he sold the business to Roy D. Moore and Louis H. Brush, who later founded Brush-Moore Newspapers, in 1923, two months before his death. The Star was acquired by Thomson Newspapers in 1967 and the Gannett Company in 2000.
The Marion Daily Pebble was founded in 1877 by Sam Hume, a street doctor in Marion, Ohio.[3] It changed its name at some point thereafter to The Marion Daily Star while under the ownership of Hume's sons Willis and Harry. The Marion Daily Star was passed to Ben Dempster, then to Kelley Mount and then back to Dempster. Despite its name it usually sent out only twice a week. Having the paper delivered to one's home cost ten cents and picking it up at the post office cost seven.[4][5] The newspaper's editorials and features were at first highly comedic, but because readers quickly lost interest in the comedy, the business began to struggle financially.[6] It was described in The World's Work as having been a "hell-box full of pied type and a broken-down press" during that time.[7]
Warren G. Harding's version of events held that when the Star became insolvent in 1884 the newspaper business was put up for auction at a sheriff's sale.[8] His father, George Tryon Harding, bought it with real estate instead of cash, paid off its debts and gave his son ownership of the newspaper; Warren, however, lost his proprietorship shortly thereafter when it was ruled in court that the real estate George had traded was invalid.[9]
Management by Warren G. Harding (1884–1923)
Harding in 1882, aged 17
Later in 1884, an eighteen-year-old Warren Harding, along with his friends John O. Sickle[a] and Jack Warwick,[10] repurchased The Marion Daily Star for either $300 or $450 (Harding's recollection of the price varied). It is not clear whose money bought the newspaper. George may have paid for it,[5] or Warren, Sickle and Warwick may have pooled their money.[11] Harding named the business under which he published the Star the Star Publishing Company; it later became the Harding Publishing Company.[4]
Within weeks after the purchase Sickle, frustrated with the poor quality and difficulty of the printing equipment available at the office, quit.[8][11] Warwick, though, kept a job at the Star as a rewriter until he was employed at the Toledo Blade in 1904.[12][4]
Harding began editing at the newspaper immediately after he acquired it.[11] Harding was responsible for writing, proofreading, typesetting and printing the newspaper, and for managing and promoting it as a business; Warwick assisted him in proofreading, typesetting and printing.[13][4] Harding furnished the headquarters with new printing presses, a telephone and a telegraph, and hired reporters so that he could spend his time requesting advertisements and writing editorials instead of doing the reporting himself.[10] Warwick got into an argument with Harding over Harding's decision to install the telephone.[14]
Harding believed that classified advertisements were an important aspect to a newspaper's financial success and ability to beat competition. His preferred method of convincing people to pay to put advertisements in the Star was to meet with them personally and explain the advantages of advertising in a newspaper.[15] He paid the Star staff better than competitor newspapers paid their own staff, which kept his employees satisfied and deterred strikes.[16]
Warren G. Harding working at The Marion Star
Harding increased the length of the Star from four pages to an average of fourteen, with a comic strip and extra pages on Saturdays.[17] The paper's circulation increased from 1,000 to 15,000,[18] it began to publish six days each week instead of semiweekly and by 1885 it had financially recovered; while Harding was a senator he jested to a man who offered to buy the newspaper from him that it would cost $200,000.[19][20] Florence Kling, who became Florence Harding after Warren married her in 1891, occasionally did accounting and managed the Star's staff but did not influence the actual editing or publication of the newspaper.[10]
The Star encouraged industrialists to make improvements to the city of Marion, including through the development of new railroads; it supported the Black Diamond railroad, which was to send coal to Marion from Coshocton County mines. The railroad was never completed, and after the project's failure became apparent Harding denounced Albert E. Boone, the railroad's original proponent.[21]
In 1890 Harding wrote in the Star that promoting Marion, which was not legally a city, to the status of a city would permit its municipal government to pave the then-dirt streets properly, because only a city council could handle the expenses to do so. On April 7 of that year the majority of Marion citizens voted to make Marion a city. The project was delayed by several years after Harding wrote an editorial on April 9 that disparaged wealthy people who did not want the pavement.[22]
Later in the 1890s Harding and George Crawford, publisher of the Independent (a competitor to the Star), insulted and degraded each other via their own editorials. After Crawford published one in 1894 referring to Harding as a "moral leper" by whom "[s]ome of the best men in the city have been assailed", Harding called Crawford a "lickspittle organ" and a "parasite" in return.[23] James H. Vaughn, the publisher of another competitor, the Democratic Mirror, accused Harding's father of being black ("woolly-headed"); Harding responded, "The Mirror grows amusing on the subject of wool. The suspicion is abroad that Colonel Vaughn has been chased by a vicious ram".[24]
The Star reported on Harding's campaigns for Ohio senator in 1914 and United States president in 1920. When Harding announced his campaign for senatorship in May of 1914, the Star portrayed him on May 28 as a politician whose appeal crossed economic, party and county lines: "His assurance of support come from every class, every faction and every locality in the state... The home sentiment is apparently very favorable to the candidacy".[25]
In July of 1920, the Star claimed that the ceremony in which Harding was formally notified of his selection as the primary Republican candidate for president "was the most notable exercise of its kind in history and drew more people than any similar ceremony within memory".[26] On October 4, 1920, the Star published an opinion piece by Gifford Pinchot in which he explained why he wanted Harding to become president.[27] After Harding won the election on November 2, employees of the Star gifted him a golden printer's rule and gave Florence a flower bouquet.[28]
A few weeks after the election Harding announced at a meeting with shareholders that, because he could not simultaneously work full-time at the Star and fulfill his obligations as president, he would give up his responsibilities as editor. Harding was sad to retire; he claimed that he loved the Star as if it were "a part of [his] body" and that he had had no regrets in becoming a newspaper publisher.[4] One of the last columns he wrote celebrated the centennial of Marion's founding.[29]
Later history (1923–present)
Harding retained ownership of the Star until June of 1923 when he sold the business to Louis H. Brush and Roy D. Moore for $480,000, although he intended to keep writing editorials for it.[30][31] Two months later he fell ill and died unexpectedly while in San Francisco, California, on August 2, 1923. The Star's obituary of Harding the next day stated that "[w]ith a profound feeling of personal loss... the national capital was plunged into deepest mourning today as it awaited the return of [Harding's] body".[32]
Roy D. Moore (left) and Louis H. Brush (right)
In February of 1924, Brush and Moore filed a libel lawsuit against banker Frank A. Vanderlip, seeking 1.2 million dollars in damages. Vanderlip had alleged in the New-York Tribune that the $480,000 that Brush and Moore had given Harding was a much higher amount than the newspaper's supposed actual value of $200,000, meaning that they had bribed Harding into selling them the Star.[33] The case was settled in January of 1925 with Vanderlip paying an undisclosed amount of money to Brush and Moore.[34]
The masthead of the May 17, 1926 issue of the Star gave the newspaper's full name as the "Marion Daily Star",[35] but on the May 18 issue it became the "Marion Star";[36] the paper would be known by the latter from then on.[37] Brush and Moore founded Brush-Moore Newspapers with William H. Vodrey in 1927.[4]
In 1935, Brush-Moore Newspapers lost a case in which they wished to deduct a $13,300 yearly salary, which Harding would have received from The Marion Star had he lived to retire from the presidency, from their income tax; it was ruled that the salary would remain taxable.[31]
Thomson Newspapers acquired Brush-Moore Newspapers in 1967, whereupon The Marion Star became part of the Thomson Newspaper chain, which already possessed 23 newspapers in the United States and 12 in Canada.[38]
In June of 2000, the Gannett Company, now USA Today Co., purchased Thomson's Central Ohio group of eight newspapers (including the Star), plus 13 other Thomson papers.[39]
The Marion Star is headquartered on 163 East Center Street in Marion, Ohio.[40] Since 2014 the Star and other Ohio newspapers in the USA Today Co. network have been printed by the Dispatch Printing Company in Columbus, Ohio.[41] In April 2024 The Marion Star switched from carrier to postal delivery, as its website had grown more popular, and thus more profitable to maintain, than its print edition.[42]
Harding refrained from letting his Republican political views dictate the Star, because he thought that a political slant would ruin its profits by offending Democratic and nonpartisan readers;[45] so, though it tacitly praised the Republican Party it never scorned the Democratic Party.[46] The Star never explicitly associated itself with either party, and it did not give any opinions about the political issues and candidates of the 1885 and 1887 gubernatorial elections of Ohio.[45]
In the 1880s during the temperance movement, the Star repeated Harding's belief that, if the government wanted people to stop drinking alcohol, it would be more effective to tax people for alcohol than to ban it altogether. Harding supported the Dow Law, an act created in 1886 by Ohio governor Joseph B. Foraker that taxed alcohol vendors a yearly $100 or $200 depending on whether they sold wine/beer or liquor.[47] A September 10, 1886 editorial in the Star opined that the only reason prohibitionists opposed the Dow Law was "the fallacious idea that taxing the liquor traffic legalizes it".[48]
The Marion Star claimed in a list of ethical policies in December 2023 that it, like all other USA Today Co. publications, would not and would never endorse or financially support any political parties, candidates or campaigns, nor allow its staff (barring opinion and editorial writers) to publicly express their political beliefs.[49]
Notable staff
Gary Abernathy – Political commentator who was a city editor for the Star between 1991 and 1993.[50]
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