Lowell Thomas is, depending on how you measure it, the first broadcast journalist. He died before my time, and most of his legacy is buried in archives of analog tape that hasn’t been put on the internet, but I’ve drawn on him for inspiration from time to time.
His big story was with T. E. Lawrence, a lieutenant in the British Army serving in the Middle East during World War I. With the help of the US government Thomas traveled to the region and filmed the British-supported Arab regiments as they fought against the Ottoman Empire for their independence. When the war was over, Thomas traveled with Lawrence to London and with the help of the footage he took in the desert along with some staged photos, promoted Lawrence and created the myth of “Lawrence of Arabia.” When the film of the same name came out in 1962 Thomas was portrayed as the fictional reporter Jackson Bentley, a roving columnist for the equally fictional newspaper the Chicago Courier, whose coverage of Lawrence creates a legend that is recognized even by Emir Faisal (played in the movie by Sir Alec Guinness).
What fascinates me is the story that brought Thomas to the desert. Yes, the US Government sent him there to “document the history of the war,” as an academic (in actuality it was a propaganda outing), but the actual funding came from a group of Chicago meatpackers, related to his first big break a few years earlier.
In 1913 Thomas was a part-time reporter for the Chicago Evening Journal, and was assigned to investigate a man named Charleton Hudson, a pillar of the Moody Church (now the Moody Bible Institute), who turned out to be wanted in New York (under his real name, Charleton Hudson Betts) for forgery and fraud in 1894. As that was happening he skipped town and began a lucrative blackmailing scam in Chicago where he would win the trust of wealthy widows, mostly through his connections to the Moody Church, and entice them to sign wills making him the only legal heir to their fortunes when they died.
Thomas exposed the man in his story, on December 3, 1914, but he also discovered something that was not printed in the paper: Betts had been threatening to blackmail a group of Chicago meatpackers, into giving him money he claimed they owned him. As a thank you for exposing Betts, their lawyer, Silas Strawn, signed an IOU for Thomas which he could use any time he wanted.
One interesting side note: one of the meatpackers was Armour & Co., whose top salesman was at one time Dale Carnegie. Carnegie later worked as Thomas’ assistant on his presentation on T. E. Lawrence and with Thomas’ help published the uber-successful “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Thomas wrote the introduction to the first edition, which has since been taken out.
Sure enough, in 1917 Thomas called Silas Strawn (whose firm is still active today) and asked him to cash that IOU, and off he went to the Middle East and greater fame.