WELL BEFORE THE PEARL HARBOR ATTACK, Alicia Patterson’s sympathies had been internationalist, even interventionist, when it came to the war in Europe. How she escaped the pull of isolationism, with her mostly beloved father regularly preaching it from the pulpit of the Daily News, her uncle and aunt declaiming it on the pages of the Chicago Tribune and Washington Times-Herald (itself a deceptively complex belief system, with elements of both nativism and pacifism, that for a while even sucked in sister Josephine, a spirited, freethinking young woman who nonetheless was active in the isolationist America First movement) can be somewhat explained by her earlier decision to leave the landlocked, conservative Midwest, the nativist heartland, where isolationism was especially entrenched, for New York, a city with its toes in the Atlantic, its mind attuned to Europe.
True, Joe Patterson also lived in New York, had been living there for twenty years or so, and published an astonishingly successful newspaper for New Yorkers. But Joe Patterson’s New York was an odd blend of that older, still-mainstream, mostly WASP establishment of boardrooms, law firms, private clubs (a world defined and defended by the dominant “culture” of Ivy League colleges and private schools) which he’d grown up with, and at the lower end, his blue-collar circulation base, the “little guys” who filled the seats at the Daily News’s Golden Gloves boxing tournaments, the “little women” who eagerly sought out the Daily News’s “Helpful Hints for Housewives,” one of Mary King’s contributions. In contrast, Alicia’s version of New York, pretty much from the time she moved there, a refugee from Lake Forest, had increasingly been the “new” Manhattan: smart people, talky people, talented people, many of them part of that emerging amalgam (mostly men, though quite a few women) that would later be known as the media; perhaps above all “cosmopolitan” people, which is to say Jewish people, such as her close friends Bennett and Phyllis Cerf, to say nothing of the new world of the Guggenheims (which in some ways was deeply Jewish, in other ways barely Jewish at all). As much as anything, though, what probably freed Alicia from her father, from the tidal tug of his “political philosophy,” was something emerging, solidifying, in her nature: what might be described as a growing (if largely unexamined) sense of who she was and what she wasn’t. On the one hand she was curious, quick-witted, direct, responsive, prone to surface likes and dislikes; what she wasn’t was a deep thinker, an intellectual. Joe Patterson was also a quick study, impulsive, intuitive, indeed owed much of his success to his flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants proclivities; but at the same time, in another corner of his brain, so to speak, he lived what might be called another life, a parallel vocation: that of a determinedly, earnestly, sometimes obsessively deep thinker, but with the quotes around it: a “deep thinker,” caught up in theories and abstractions, sometimes seemingly for their own sake. To a great extent, isolationism was an abstraction, a worldview based on the interplay of abstract forces. His daughter Alicia, however, who once wished so much to mimic him, traveled lighter, with little propensity for abstraction. What she saw was what she saw, her instincts unimpeded by theory. Pundits might describe her response as internationalism or interventionism; what she would probably have called it (if asked) was common sense.