When Lincoln became Nebraska’s state capital, it had no real reason for existence, let alone reason to become a capital. It had no people. It had only five little houses, “a part of one being used as a store, and the stone walls of a building commenced as a seminary.”
It was “50 miles from anywhere,” as its detractors liked to say, and it was not even on the way to anywhere. No railroads or wagon roads ran by it. The nearest road, the Fort Kearny Cutoff, passed several miles to the south.
It had no sizeable river to provide power to run a mill or any other kind of manufacturing. Some people pinned high hopes on the salt deposits that supported a short‑lived mining industry. But salt mining soon languished for lack of efficient extraction technology—and sufficient salt.
As the little town worked and sweat to realize its aspirations, each citizen had to know in his or her own heart that every bit of private business in Lincoln was public business. As Benjamin Franklin had said nearly a century earlier, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,” although the consequences of failure in Lincoln were not nearly so dire.
The realities of existence in Lincoln encouraged its founding fathers to form a habit of public spiritedness. And in fact, in the absence of any other salable export, the community came to export public service—government and education and institutions. If that export business was to truly serve its “customers,” it must also make them aware of exactly what they were getting. The mandate was clear and ancient. Community service was the highest calling and those out to serve themselves must be exposed.
Demosthenes articulated the public’s need for attention to the dealings of government in the third century B.C. “There is one safeguard known generally to the wise,” he wrote in Philippic, “which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.”
Demosthenes’ wisdom has developed through the ages in the British and American legal and political tradition.
John Adams clarified the argument for Americans even before the Revolutionary War when he wrote about “mankind’s divine right to knowledge, well digested and ready at command,” in a letter to Jonathan Sewall in 1759. In a 1765 Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, he wrote, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right . . . an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in an 1820 letter to William Charles Jarvis, “but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”
In a 1938 Fireside Chat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought that thinking into the 20th Century, “The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government.”
In 1965, before the International Press Institute Assembly in London, Walter Lippmann said, “A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society . . .”
Joseph Rushton Seacrest echoed that mandate in a 1988 interview. He found it “hard to envision a democracy whose right is limited to election day. And even if it is limited to election day, how is the public to know how an intelligent vote is to be cast on election day?” He based all arguments for press freedoms on the “right of the citizen to have information.”
“We have the proxy of the public,” he would say. He knew not everyone could attend the meetings and the speeches. That’s what the press did for them.
Joe R. came from a long tradition of information purveyors and community servants that served Lincoln on four fronts.
First of these was direct community action. Among Lincoln’s founding fathers was Charles Henry Gere, former secretary to the territorial governor and publisher of the community’s first newspaper, The Nebraska Commonwealth, later called the Nebraska State Journal and then the Lincoln Journal. As Gere worked to establish a city on Nebraska’s prairie, he also established a tradition of community service in his newspaper. On the masthead of his first issue, he proclaimed The Commonwealth “Dedicated to the people of Nebraska and to the development of the resources of the state.”
Gere personally dedicated himself to his community and to the development of community resources, as well. He served on the state constitutional convention, in both houses of the resulting state Legislature, as chairman of the Republican Central Committee, as a University of Nebraska regent and as City Library Board president. He founded the Nebraska State Historical Society.
During his days in the Legislature, he boosted his city as chairman of the Senate Education Committee. There, he took only four days to push a bill through both chambers organizing the University of Nebraska—in Lincoln, where else? Gere provided the motive power behind making Lincoln a railroad center and “building the village into a thriving business center.” In 1870, he helped organize the Board of Trade and served as chairman of Lincoln’s last town board of trustees—until the village became a second class city with a charter, mayor and city council.
Within his profession, Gere took a leadership role, too. On February 14, 1873, he called Nebraska newspaper editors together to form a press association. As a result, Nebraska has one of the oldest press associations in the United States; in fact, the Nebraska Press Association is apparently the oldest continuing corporation of any kind in Nebraska.
So, when Joseph Claggett Seacrest stepped off the train in 1887, Lincoln already had a well established tradition of community service journalism under the guidance of a strong community servant. That tradition fit Seacrest like a tailored shirt and he plunged head-first into the fray, exposing dens of iniquity and rate fixing schemes under the direction of Will Owen Jones, at first. Later, with his partners at the Globe, he tweaked the men who weren’t where they were supposed to be on a Saturday night, and the town’s socialites and speculators who failed to report the diamonds, that glittered on their fingers and around their necks at the social gatherings, when the tax assessor came around.
As Seacrest bought his way into Gere’s newspaper, he followed his predecessor’s lead, getting involved in everything. He joined the Chamber of Commerce, successor to the Board of Trade. He joined the YMCA and YWCA and served on both boards of trustees. He participated in the Nebraska Art Association and the Historical Society. He joined the Nebraska Press Association and served on its executive committee. He gave money to the University of Nebraska and helped buy out a failing street railway company and a failed military academy.
Seacrest taught his sons to revere and perpetuate the newspaper’s tradition and their own potential to serve the community. And serve they did. Like their father, Fred and Joe W. served on the boards and commissions, including the Seacrest Foundation, created by J.C. to share the benefits he’d derived from operating in Lincoln, and to serve the community’s needs in perpetuity. And the brothers made clear they wanted their newspapers to serve the community, as well. They stayed out of the newsroom, although they vigorously and tangibly cheered their professional staff from the sidelines. They even paid travel expenses so their editors could take delegations to Washington to lobby for Lincoln area projects. In 1948, Joe’s son Joseph Rushton Seacrest, was back from the Navy, attending law school and working city hall and the courthouse beat when the paper received the Pulitzer prize for public service, based upon one of managing editor Ray McConnell’s campaigns, the “all-star presidential primary.”
In 1972, the year after he and Fred retired in favor of their sons, Joe W. received the Nebraska Press Association’s first Master Editor-Publisher Award. Three years later, in a note to Joe R, he offered some advice:
Be pleasant when possible.
Have fun when appropriate.
Keep doing some things for somebody else.
Carry at least your share.
Try to be a good listener.
Joe framed that note, put it on his wall, and tried to live up to it. He helped McConnell with the Salt-Wahoo project, then branched out into his own projects—interstate highway funds distribution, Lincoln hospitals’ non-competition certificate of need, Lincoln’s Railroad Safety District and the Game and Parks Commission Foundation.
The second prong of newspaper families’ service to Lincoln was in fostering their own competition. These Lincoln journalists believed a community’s best interest lay in a variety of information sources—the more knowledge the better. Time after time, they refrained from squashing competition and instead found ways to help it thrive. It kept them on their toes. In 1899 Gere, Mendenhall, Traphagen and Joseph Claggett Seacrest stepped in and provided printing facilities to the Post after the fire, in the interest of that competition.
Although the newspaper freed the next generation, Joe and Fred, from the hair-tearing burden of keeping a marginal enterprise afloat, competition from the rising Star and the Omaha papers caused Joe W. some unhappy Sundays until he solved his problem by putting his paper to bed on Saturday night and refusing to look at his competitors’ papers until Monday.
In 1931, however, when vigorous competition threatened to silence one or another of Lincoln’s editorial voices, or all three, Joe and Fred engineered a deal. The first joint operating agreement in 1931 combined the Journal, News and Star advertising departments. From then on all three papers sold ads together and ran the same blocks of ads—except liquor ads. The Star was free to run them, but the Seacrest papers would not. When the two publishing companies signed that agreement, the Journal and News still dominated the circulation wars with 42,823 to the Star’s 38,894.
By 1950, newspapers felt the squeeze again, although the Journal and News remained strong enough to build a new production plant. It was nearly complete when the brothers signed another agreement to combine the morning Journal and evening News into one afternoon paper so the Star published in the morning. The two publishing companies could use the same facilities. Journal and News circulation was 49,421 and the Star claimed 23,860 readers.
The third area of service came within a larger public arena. In the 50s and 60s, the press had weathered repeated conflicts between first and sixth amendment law with gag orders in the courts and press exclusion from hearings. During that same time, closet meetings to decide public issues became more repugnant to the public and journalist alike. Joe R. stepped gladly into that milieu to joust any public entity that wanted to limit the public’s right to know. His patience and persistence often tipped the balance and resulted in Nebraska’s liberal open courts, open meetings and open records law, a carefully-crafted shield law that really protects journalists’ sources and a privacy law the press may not like, but can at least tolerate.
Fourth, the Seacrests knew that a newspaper could better serve the community if it were financially sound. That would alleviate pressure from advertisers who might withdraw if the newspaper covered something they didn’t like or took an unpopular editorial stand. Newspapers were good investments and the combined Nebraska State Journal and Lincoln Evening News, serving both morning and afternoon readers, provided the wherewithal to invest in the city. But further, the newspaper itself served the city and the state as a source of information.
Fred took care of production and he made sure the paper always came out on time so people all over the state would have a capital city paper to read. Joe W. took care of advertising and subscriptions and he made sure the paper stayed prosperous enough to support a good news and editorial department. They wanted the best newspaper they could print and they wanted it fast, so they purchased equipment to get them from the event to the streets as fast as possible.
In 1971 when Joe R. and his cousin Mark T. took the helm of the Journal, the newspaper kept making money. Joe R. and his son Eric took the lead, both in the family newspaper enterprises and in the industry, in finding and using new technologies. Some of those technologies made newspaper production less expensive, some of them just made the newspapers better and some did both. Most of the innovations took place at the Western Publishing papers and included everything from the first VDT terminal in a U.S. newsroom to newsrack monitors.
As Joe R. took more responsibility and increasing control he developed his own style. His wife described him as a workaholic and that was true. But she observed, Joe had the luxury of “being a workaholic in what he wanted to be a workaholic in.” Born to a fortune, Joe R. began to choose his obsessions early. In his childhood, it was stamp collecting. Once, when he didn’t return home until much later than expected, he explained that he’d found a postage stamp he prized—on sale. Still, it had cost all the money in his pocket, including streetcar fare, so he’d walked the several miles home.
Freedom to choose his own causes enabled Joe to focus single-mindedly on a particular subject in a way few adults can do. And focus he did, to the exclusion of any distraction—meals, appointments, sleep, anything. According to his son, Kent, he would fill 3- and 4-inch notebooks with information on a particular subject, a phototypesetting system, perhaps, and he would read every scrap of it. By the time he was ready to act, he knew more about the business at hand than the experts, and he would ask questions that would send them scrambling for answers.
Joe earned a law degree from the University of Nebraska. The necessarily intricate ways of thinking about the law and of balancing interests added a layer to Joe’s way of organizing information and of foreseeing consequences. It may have also emboldened him to seek formal, legislative solutions to problems. It certainly helped him to recognize well-crafted bills that would serve his purposes. And anyone who has argued a different point of view will testify that Joe R’s passion for detail and his ability to collect and absorb volumes of information in a retrievable, orderly way made him a formidable opponent.
It also contributed to his self confidence. Joe was never afraid of looking silly. He told some of the best stories on himself. He didn’t mind pursuing a few wacky ideas in the interest of discovering the visionary solution that would take the newspaper industry into the next decade or the next century. He didn’t seem to mind when his ideas were so far ahead that people called them crazy – or maybe he didn’t notice.
Joe had the kind of openness to new ways of thinking that allowed him to entertain thoughts others would dismiss out of hand. Some of them he dismissed almost immediately himself because of obvious flaws. Others he chewed on for a while, but decided the time wasn’t ripe yet. Perhaps the technology hadn’t developed to an efficient enough level. Sometimes he judged it close enough and he’s invest in the company doing research and development. His investments involved contributions not just of cash, but also of purchasing new equipment, using new technologies and making his considered suggestions about how they might better serve the purpose.
Joe was willing to take the “arrow in the back” from being ahead of the curve, but he also protected the reputation and tradition of the newspapers and the income of others dependent on them. Like his predecessors, Joe believed a newspaper’s greatest asset is its dependability. To succeed, it must show up on time every day. It can’t make capricious changes in appearance, and it must always be a purveyor of truthful, balanced and reliable information. He believed absolutely in the mission of newspapers and he took great pride—extreme pride—in family tradition. “He would quote his grandfather and his father 20 times to what I would quote my parents,” said his wife. That grounding in the past allowed Joe a frame of reference to take with him into the future. Each time he looked at a new idea, a new technology, a new way of approaching some conflict between First Amendment rights and privacy or efficient government, some new project to serve the community, he could ask in a very directed way, “How will this better serve the end of informing the public or of making Lincoln, or Nebraska, or the world, a better place to live.”
Joe R’s family tradition made him familiar almost from birth with the mission of newspapers and with the workings of newspapers. His life’s work was truly in the blood. The dinner table conversations, the visits to the newspaper office, the smell of printer’s ink, the sweltering heat in production, the vision of scorched floors around the linotypes and operator’s clothing, the clattering confusion in a newsroom at deadline, all these things provided a background, an instinctive second nature that guided Joe R. through the daily labyrinth of decisions and investigations into better ways of gathering and disseminating fair and accurate information.
Joe was always willing to invest in informing the public. That’s why he was there. That’s why a newspaper exists. Though newsroom employees didn’t necessarily see it, the Journal always ran an expensive newsroom. Up until the very last day of Seacrest involvement, the Journal newsroom budget appreciably surpassed that of the Star. That allowed Journal editors and reporters to seek out and pursue news that has substance for the community. It allowed them the time to spend on covering a story in depth. Joe’s little “See me” notes fostered an atmosphere in which reporters and editors would get the news, all the news, or explain to Joe why the World-Herald or the Star had a story they’d missed.
Joe didn’t know how the public would get information in the future, but he believed that newspapers had a logical role in providing it. He could see electronic means of dissemination might take the place of paper, but he also saw the existing organization of newspapers. He recognized the training and experience of today’s editors and reporters as the raw materials of the future. He saw the internet as a labyrinth of information and misinformation. What better people to navigate that labyrinth than the folks who made order out of the chaos that comes into a newsroom every day, he wondered.
Joe didn’t know how newspapers would make on-line delivery of information pay, but he had a great deal of confidence in newspaper people. Given a chance, they would provide the information the public needs to maintain a democracy. He visualized some kind of delivery system that would allow a reader to print and read a news story, but also to click on an icon to get the rest of the story—previous stories filed in the newspaper’s archive, for example, or the transcript of an interview.
He didn’t get to pursue his ideas about internet news delivery. He died on March 28, 1995. But he had taken the first steps in helping promote and develop library retrieval systems that will make newspaper archives more efficient and accessible for whatever use following generations choose to make of them. He would be exhilarated by the challenges involved in adopting new information technologies. He’d have taken a firm grip on his old values, the value of serving his community, the value of providing complete, accurate coverage of all the news, the value of arranging and interpreting the bewildering array of information that bombards every one every day. And he’d have judged every new technology for its contribution to giving each day’s events more clarity, to making relevant information more deliverable, to providing ease of use so that the newspaper, or whatever its successor turns out to be, can inform the people’s discretion, all the people’s discretion. He’d have used himself up, to ensure the people would be “strong enough and well enough informed to maintain . . . sovereign control over . . . government.”
In 1977 Chicago journalist Studs Terkel interviewed poet Philip Levine. As they talked about the politics in poetry and why Levine writes it, Levine said, “To me, the worst . . . thing in the world is to pass from this place unused. My heroes are all used. Not misused . . . . I want to use myself and I want to use other people well. We’re self-conscious about being used . . . . Well, what . . . are you going to do, sit home all day?”
Joe would have agreed with Levine, if he’d had time for poets or poetry, and he certainly never sat at home all day.