Joseph Medill Patterson (January 6, 1879 – May 26, 1946) was elected to The Lambs in 1911 as a non-professional member while residing in Chicago. He was a journalist, publisher, and founder of the New York Daily News. At the time of his death, the Daily News maintained a Sunday circulation of 4.5 million copies, the largest circulation of any paper in the United States.
Joseph Medill Patterson was born into a newspaper family. His mother, the former Elinor Medill, was a daughter of Joseph Medill, founder of the Chicago Tribune and a mayor of Chicago. His father, Robert Wilson Patterson Jr., was himself a journalist at the Tribune. As a scion of a millionaire family, Joseph received a top-flight education, attending Yale University. He briefly left school to report on the Boxer Rebellion in China as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune, returning in time to complete his studies and graduate from Yale in 1901.
Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago, and covered the police beat for the Tribune. Patterson served in the Illinois House of Representatives as a Republican in 1903 and 1904, married and was the father of three daughters by 1906. Nearly 20 years later, in 1923, after his three daughters had become young women, his mistress (and future second wife) gave birth to his only son, James Joseph Patterson, in England.
Joseph Medill Patterson feuded with his father and resigned from the Tribune. Patterson moved to a farm in the country, wrote a socialist novel, A Little Brother of the Rich (1908), which became a motion picture in 1919. Patterson returned to work at the Tribune by 1910. With the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted in the United States Army and served with distinction as a Captain of Field Artillery.
After his father died, Patterson took over the management of the Tribune. He had a dispute about how to run the Tribune with his cousin, Robert R. McCormick. After World War I ended, he visited London and observed a newspaper in tabloid form for the first time. Patterson moved to New York City and founded the New York Daily News as a tabloid on June 26, 1919, with McCormick as co-editor and publisher. However, the two were unable to resolve their dispute, so in 1925 Patterson ceded full authority over the Tribune to McCormick in return for full control of the Daily News. Patterson won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials supporting Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He took a hands-on approach to managing the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, distributor for his papers’ comic strips. In 1921, he suggested the lead character of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley adopt a foundling child who became Skeezix, a central character in the strip. Patterson influenced Chester Gould’s 1931 strip Dick Tracy, changing the title from “Plainclothes Tracy,” and he supported Gould’s vision of a technical, grotesque, and violent style of storytelling. Milton Caniff credited Patterson for suggesting a comic strip about Asia, which led to the creation of Caniff’s 1934 strip, Terry and the Pirates.
Patterson died on May 26, 1946, age 67. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.