DOWAGIAC — Of all the items that Webb Miller owned, none could be more desirable than his golden cigarette case. Etched on the inside of it were signatures from several of the most well-known people in the early to 1930s — each of which Dowagiac’s famous journalist interviewed — including Eleanor Roosevelt, J. Pershing and Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi.

Many of the inscriptions are hard to make out, but other world leaders that he spoke to during that time were Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Unfortunately, it was lost while his son, Kenneth Miller, was traveling with his wife in the Middle East in the 1970s.

“They were in Libya, and they were robbed and that was one of the things they took,” says Margaret Cousins, Miller’s niece. “I think it probably went to the melt pot. I think somebody probably melted it down until it was gold, but it had wonderful signatures and Gandhi told him he would sign it only if he promised to never ever put cigarettes in it.”

While this priceless memento is lost, Miller’s impact on the world can still be felt today. If it were not for him, the world may not fully understand that great challenges Gandhi endured to achieve India’s independence from the British.

Working in India

Miller worked for the United Press in 1930 and traveled 12,000 miles to India and met Gandhi at the height of his campaign of civil disobedience.

“He was gone so far away and travel wasn’t easy,” Cousins said. “They didn’t have the flights they do now. It was not an easy thing to go that far.”

At the time, Indians were not allowed to make salt in their own country, and Gandhi travelled more than 200 miles to the Indian coast to do so. When he reached the water, he picked up muddled salt and said “I am shaking the foundations of British Empire.”

With many of his followers by his side, Gandhi found a way to break a British law and challenge their authority without committing an act of violence.

By the time Miller arrived, Gandhi was arrested, but he learned of the Satyagraha Salt March and got there just in time to see more than 1,300 Indians attacked by British soldiers without fighting back. He was the only western journalist there.

He shared his dispatch, describing the event with the world. It was printed it more than 1,000 newspapers and read aloud in the U.S. Congress.

“In 18 years of reporting in  22 countries, during which I have witnessed innumerable civil disturbances, riots and rebellions, I have never witnessed such harrowing scenes as at Darsana,” he wrote. “It was astonishing and baffling to the western mind accustomed to see violence met with violence, to expect a blow to be returned. My reaction was of revulsion akin to the emotion one feels when seen a dumb animal beaten: partly anger, partly humiliation. Sometimes the scenes were so painful, I had to turn away momentarily.”

This dispatch helped change the world’s opinion of Britain’s occupancy in India — a sentiment Gandhi is said to agree with.

Time in the Midwest

Painfully shy, Miller had little business becoming a reporter — but he became one of the most influential journalists in American History.

Born Cub Webster Miller in 1891, he was raised on various plots of land in Pokagon, as his father was an itinerant farmer, bouncing from field to field and contanstanly in debt. Still, Miller managed to become a fine writer and read as often as he could, including by borrowing many books from the Dowagiac Library.

“I think Uncle Webb read every book in the Dowagiac Library,” Cousins said. “He would read while he was walking home to Pokagon. He’d go and get books and then read them while he walked home.”

He graduated from Dowagiac High School, but his career as a reporter was stunted by what he referred to in his 1936 memoir “I Found No Peace”as his “colorless personality.” He tried to get a job with the South Bend Tribune but had no success.

Thanks to his persistence, he eventually became a reporter with the Chicago American, making $12 per week. But he still had to overcome his fear of talking to strangers, particularly members of the opposite sex.

“Yet I pitchforked myself into a profession principally devoted to human contacts, both male and female,” Miller wrote in his memoir. “I used to walk up and down, screwing up my courage, before entering to interview a person and for years avoided women whenever possible.”

Initially, his job was to sit in police stations, courtrooms and other places throughout the city and gather information before relaying it to a journalist via telephone to write the story.

His big break came when the daughter of Mark Morton, of Morton Salt, eloped and reporters throughout the Midwest were trying to get the scoop. Morton said that if anyone came fishing around his property that he would tar and feather them.

“Like any good journalist, he decided to try and go and get the story,” said Steve Arseneau, the director of the Dowagiac Area History Museum. “He snuck his way onto the property, and eventually Mark Morton found him and he was telling his people, ‘go get the tar ready.’ But instead he hog tied him, threw him in the back of a car, kidnapped him and got him down to the sheriff’s office.”

The Chicago American bailed him out, and Miller filed a lawsuit against Morton, but only received a $700 settlement more than six years later — $200 of which went to his lawyer. Yet, the spectacle earned Miller notoriety amongst his peers and in the journalism world, and helped him vault his career.

Eventually he got tired of the day-to-day grind of being a local journalist and followed Gen J. Pershing down to Mexico, while he pursued the Mexican Revolutionary General Pancho Villa. He broke several stories while freelancing there, when eventually earned him his job with the United Press and lead to worldwide exhibitions.

“It was probably more exciting for him,” Arseneau said. “He was going and traveling the world and stuff, but when he was on the Chicago beat he was sitting in a police station trying to find out what hookers got arrested or things like that. So it was certainly a more exciting way to cover the world.”

In an upcoming edition, Part II on Webb Miller will discuss him covering World War I, Mussolini and the start of World War II, his mysterious death and how he is remembered today.