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Former ISHS President Irving L. Dilliard passes

Irving L. Dilliard, 1899-2002
photo courtesy Collinsville Herald Journal

Irving L. Dilliard, the retired St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page writer, who used the might of his pen to champion victims of injustice, has died.

Mr. Dilliard was a respected writer, editor, and expert on the Constitution and the Supreme Court who wrote more than 10,000 editorials and many books.

He died October 9, 2002, at Eden Care Center in Glen Carbon of complications of leukemia. He was 97 and had lived in Collinsville all his life.

At the age of fourteen, he was among a crowd watching as the body of a German-born bakery employee was taken down after a mob lynched him in the unsupported belief he was a World War I spy. The event left a last ing impression on Mr. Dilliard and helped shape his views on injustice.

While in Collinsville High School, Mr. Dilliard began sending letters to famous writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Frost, asking advice on writing. Their responses grew to a collection of 120 handwritten letters, notes, and postcards.

He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1927, followed by a year of graduate work at Harvard University.

Mr. Dilliard became a reporter at the Post-Dispatch in the late 1920s. His eccentric habits were as memorable as his talent. He wore no socks. He greeted others by shaking both hands. And he relaced the shoestrings of almost everyone he met, saying his way would make them more comfortable. He wrote letters on scraps to conserve paper and saved everything from news clippings to tree cuttings from places he visited.

In his early years at the newspaper, Mr. Dilliard wrote "Building the Constitution," a pamphlet on the 1787 Constitutional Convention that was distributed free to schools and saw 850,000 copies in print.

Mr. Dilliard, whom the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once called the finest journalist to cover the Supreme Court, also contributed roughly 100 essays to the Dictionary of American Biography.

In 1938, Mr. Dilliard briefly left the Post-Dispatch to become one of the first Nieman Fellows at Harvard, a yearlong program for journalists.

He returned only to take leave again in 1943 to enter the Army in World War II. He earned the rank of lieutenant colonel and served as psychological warfare specialist on General Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff. He also was an editorial advisor for the European edition of the Stars and Stripes.

After the war, Mr. Dilliard returned to the Post-Dispatch as an editorial writer, specializing in the Supreme Court and Constitution; he became editorial page editor in 1949.

"He would have Supreme Court justices in for lunch, and they would take a sandwich down to Lucas Park and discuss issues that if you were a student at Harvard Law, you'd give a semesters tuition to merely sit and hear," said former Post-Dispatch Editor William F. Woo, now a journalism professor at Stanford University.

But Mr. Dilliard's writings were often in defense of those who weren't making headlines.

"Dilliard championed the causes of people that he never knew," said the Reverend Robert Tabscott of the Elijah P. Lovejoy Society. "He had that amazing capacity to look inside the American experience.

One example was a crusade for an Illinois lawyer who was denied the right to practice because he refused to tell a bar ethics committee whether he believed in God. His causes ranged from racial discrimination to corruption of Illinois state mine inspectors.

Mr. Dilliard crusaded for Ellen Knauff, a German war bride denied admission to the United States because of Justice Department suspicions. His more than forty editorials helped win her citizenship.

In 1954, Mr. Dilliard wrote "A War to Stay Out of," a series of editorials warning against any American involvement in the conflict that became the Vietnam War. His colleagues would later say those editorials went beyond visionary to clairvoyant.

"He was one of those irrepeatable experiences in American journalism," Tabscott said.

Mr. Dilliard's defense of his convictions sometimes caused ripples with his superiors, including the late Joseph Pulitzer Jr., his publisher.

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"He was a tremendous editor of the editorial page," Woo said. "He had powerful convictions, and he was not afraid to stand behind them, even at the possible expense of offending the owners of the newspaper."

Whether it was his own desire or a nudge from the management, Mr. Dilliard retired from the Post-Dispatch in I960.

After a stint as a lecturing faculty member at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in Austria, he taught journalism for ten years at Princeton University.

"He is one of America's great citizens, in that he believes in the institutions of government,' said a former Princeton student, Landon Jones Jr., former editor of People and Money magazines. "He was an inspiring individual because of his beliefs. He really lived and breathed the Constitution of the United States."

Mr. Dilliard left Princeton in 1973 and served as the first director of the Illinois Department of Aging. In 1995, he was an Illinois delegate to the White House Conference on Aging.

Mr. Dilliard was a past president of the Illinois State Historical Society and a member of the Elijah P. Lovejoy Society.

He was also a lifelong historian of his hometown. In 1998, he presented Collinsville with a gift—an 1845 Greek revival frame house that he saved from the auction block. In the 1930s, he had performed a similar feat by writing editorials that inspired others to save the Eugene Field House in St. Louis.

"He is and was a great citizen," Jones said. "He took all these civic responsibilities that we all talk about, but he acted on them on a very personal level.1

Mr. Dilliard's wife of almost sixty-two years, Dorothy Dorris Dilliard, died in 1993.

A memorial service was held for Mr. Dilliard on October 20 at First United Methodist Church in Collinsville. Mr. Dilliard had arranged to donate his body to Washington University School of Medicine.

Among his survivors are two daughters, Doris Sprong of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Mary Sue Schusky of Collinsville; three grandchildren; and two great-grandsons.

Memorial contributions may be made to First United Methodist Church of Collinsville, 207 West Church Street, Collinsville, Illinois, 62234; or to the D. D. Collins House, c/o Downtown Collinsville Inc., 216 East Main Street, Collinsville, Illinois 62234.

—Bethany Prange

Suckers forever

The following explanation of the derivation for the Illinois nickname "Suckers" was printed in the September 1938 issue of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Volume XXXI, #3. Governor Thomas Ford's original spellings and punctuation are retained to give a taste of the prairie vernacular.

Col. James Johnson of Kentucky had gone there (Kentucky) with a party of miners in 1824, and had opened a lead mine about one mile above the present town. His great success drew others there in 1825; and in 1826 and 1827, hundreds and thousands of persons from Illinois and Missouri, went to the Galena country to work the lead mines. It was estimated that the number of miners in the mining country in 1827, was six or seven thousand. The Illinoians run up the Mississippi river in steamboats in the spring season, worked the lead mine during warm weather, and then run down the river again to their homes, in the fall season, thus establishing as was supposed, a similitude between their migratory habits and those of the fish tribe called 'Suckers.' For which reason the Illinoians were called Suckers,' a name which has stuck to them ever since. There is another account of the origin of the nick-name 'Suckers,' as applied to the people of Illinois. It is said that the south part of the State was originally settled by the poorer class of people from the slave States, where the tobacco plant was extensively cultivated. They were not such as were able to own slaves in a slave State, and came to Illinois to get away from the imperious domination of their wealthy neighbors. The tobacco plant has many sprouts from their roots and main stem, which if not stripped off, suck up its nutriment and destroy the staple. Theses sprouts are called 'suckers,' and are as carefully stripped off from the plant and thrown away, as is the tobacco itself. These poor emigrants from the slave State were jeeringly and derisively called 'suckers,'

because they were asserted to be a burthen upon the people of wealth; and when they removed to Illinois, they were supposed to have stripped themselves off from the parent stem, and gone away to perish like the 'sucker' of the tobacco plant. This name was given to Illinoians at the Galena mines, by the Missourians. Analogies always abound with those who desire to be sarcastic; so the Illinoians, but way of retaliation, called the Missourians 'Pukes.' It had been observed that the lower lead mines in Missouri had sent up to the Galena country whole hoards of uncouth ruffians, from which it was inferred that Missouri had taken a 'Puke,' and had vomited forth to the upper lead mines, all her worst population. From thenceforth the Missourians were regularly called 'Pukes;' and by these names of 'Suckers' and 'Pukes,' the Illinoians and Missourians are likely to be called, amongst the vulgar, forever.

Thomas Ford, History of Illinois

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