Review | ‘Crusading Iowa Journalist: Verne Marshall’

Here's a place you didn't want to be in the 1930s: Verne Marshall's crosshairs.

Marshall, the Cedar Rapids man who drove an ambulance for the French Army during World War I.

Marshall, who later became a national leader of the No Foreign War Committee during World War II and 'managed to alienate virtually everyone he encountered in this effort,” as author Jerry Harrington states in a new book he has written about Marshall: 'Crusading Iowa Journalist: Verne Marshall,” (The History Press, 2017)

Marshall, editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette from 1932 to 1941 and the driving force behind the newspaper's only Pulitzer Prize.

The newspaper was awarded the 1936 Pulitzer for public service because of Marshall's bulldog - some called it obsessive - drive to expose corruption in Iowa government related to illegal gambling and liquor sales. Marshall's accusations shot all the way to then-Iowa Attorney General Edward O'Connor while Marshall also managed to constantly harangue then Gov. Clyde Herring during the 1930s.

Harrington's book gives all of the details of Marshall's drive against corruption but also how Marshall's - how to put this in this newspaper he and his father each led as editor and as officers in the family-owned business - prickly personality tarnished him. Such is the case with people who have difficulty believing they could ever be wrong.

Harrington's 127-page paperback goes into intricate detail about how Marshall, a cigar-smoking champion for what Marshall believed to be right, started to suspect something fishy in Des Moines after state agents raided a canning factory in Cedar Rapids in 1934. Turned out that the factory was a front for an illegal bar that had equally had illegal slot machines.

The logical answer to Marshall when he asked himself how this could happen was that someone in Des Moines was looking the other way when it came to unauthorized liquor sales and gambling.

Marshall's investigation led him to Sioux City, an unlikely place for a Cedar Rapids newspaper some 270 driving miles to the west. But Marshall believed, Harrington notes, that he could connect dots there to Des Moines.

Marshall was right. He learned that law enforcement officials in Sioux City were taking bribes to allow liquor to be sold at establishments that did not have the required, authorized state stamps, that illegal gambling was taking place, and that consent was coming from Des Moines.

Marshall's reporting forced Iowa's Democratic Party chairman at that time to resign. It also forced Woodbury County's county attorney and Sioux City's public safety commissioner to resign and, Harrington points out, helped end the attorney general's political career at the state level.

It also resulted in some 50 indictments, although most did not result in convictions.

Reports Marshall published in The Gazette produced pushback from the government officials he accused, including accusations that Marshall improperly was influencing a grand jury looking into Marshall's allegations. That, in turn, produced pushback from Marshall. 'Whoever says or implies that ... is a deliberate liar,” Harrington quotes from one Marshall front-page column. If anything, that shows that the 2017-style battle between government officials and journalists we see now might not be so new after all.

The Gazette learned on May 5, 1936, that it had won the Pulitzer Prize. The announcement's timing was bittersweet, though, because the Iowa Supreme Court ruled on the same day that cases stemming from Marshall's investigation against Iowa First Assistant Attorney General Walter Maley and others were being tossed out of court.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court took a dim view of the fact that Marshall had paid $700 to Woodbury County's special prosecutor, former Iowa Attorney General Horace Havner, for trial expenses and to help amass evidence for the case. Havner denied receiving any Gazette compensation to prosecute the defendants and Marshall, who had made thousands of dollars in other payments as well to help build the case, said he didn't bribe investigators. Rather, he said, he paid expenses that the case accrued.

Thus, you have an iconic May 5, 1936, Gazette front page - the newspaper was delivered in the afternoon with the headlines 'Gazette Pulitzer Winner” and 'Graft Case Indictments Wiped Out” stacked at the top of the page. No surprise, the Pulitzer got the main headline. Marshall wrote that the prize vindicated the Sioux City indictments.

Harrington reaches a judgment in his book on how effective, overall, Marshall's reporting was in the big scheme of things, especially given the volume of acquittals in cases and the cases that went to court, or the cases that didn't go to trial at all. You are able to determine whether you agree because of how much detail Harrington writes in this book.

While this is a story about Marshall's crusade against corruption and how he used his newspaper for that crusade, Harrington also reports on how negatively Marshall became viewed with his opposition to United States involvement in World War II. He makes note of what Coe College graduate and 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” author William Shirer said was Marshall's fanaticism about opposing involvement. And he makes note of others whom Marshall rubbed the wrong way, like members of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration and one-time ally and aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh.

For a relatively short book, Harrington's story requires attention, in part because he packs a lot of information into every paragraph. It can be dense at times because so many things were happening by so many people. You might have to double-check at times who's who in the large cast of characters.

But Harrington manages to reveal an interesting piece of Iowa's history and the people who made it remarkable in the 1930s. Moreover, he embraces the largeness of Marshall without either deifying him or denigrating him. In the process, he reminds readers of how powerful newspapers can be when put in the hands of a driven crusader, right or wrong, warts and all.

l Lyle Muller is a former Gazette editor. He is now executive director-editor of Iowa Watch/Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism in Iowa City, an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that produces explanatory and investigative journalism in Iowa.