By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Webb Miller "Found No Peace."
The celebrated foreign correspondent never really sought it except for four months while writing his 1936 book.
An admirer of Henry David Thoreau, Miller visited Walden during that period.
Three filled passports bear witness to his relentless globetrotting, including being the only journalist at the end of World War I to witness Germany's withdrawal from the air to appreciate its immensity.
The armistice was Miller's scoop.
He looked for a reaction, which was remarkable in how unremarkable it was. Miller said, "Often I heard bigger demonstrations when a man rolled seven and won five dollars."
Miller would say it took eight years for the full effects to sink in.
Recalling Verdun, where 1,050,000 men died, he encounters a French priest who collects bones fulltime in the bins designated for eight sectors of the battlefield.
On a train, he meets a poor German woman in tears who saved for the trip to visit the place her husband and two sons died.
A disillusioned Miller recognizes "the obscenity and futility of war. During the war I had been deluded along with millions of others by ignorance and propaganda that it really meant something, that it was a crusade to crush militarism, squash hypocrisy and end war forever. But the world war succeeded only in breeding new wars."
Pokagon Township produced the man whose cigarette case was autographed by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini.
Mussolini's former reporting colleague's 400,000 miles of journalism through four wars by train, plane, boat and even zeppelin (the inaugural trans-Atlantic flight of the Hindenburg) earned the dictator's respect.
Miller, a finalist for the 1935 Pulitzer Prize (losing to a New York Times account of Charles Lindbergh's family moving to London), inspired Martin Sheen's character Vince Walker in the movie "Gandhi."
He walked with Italian troops in Ethiopia until his "socks filled with blood." He reports from behind sand bags as they advance, reaching Rome faster than the military's official reports. Mussolini heard his troops were successful from Webb Miller.
Members of Miller's family, including his niece, Margaret, attended the last installment of The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College's spring lecture series by Dr. Scott and Lisa Topping to announce that the famed war correspondent's memorabilia – minus the stolen cigarette case and the briefcase missing after his suspicious death on a London train during a blackout on May 8, 1940 – are returning home from New York to join SMC's collection.
"Given the fact that he was a journalist, reporting other things, they have risen to the level of importance and he has faded to the background," Topping said. "However, in a number of books about reporters and compilations of war writing, he's found," plus the name of "the best-known American war correspondent" was emblazoned on a ship in 1943.
Topping, an authority on Niles writer Ring Lardner, a contemporary of Miller, noted that Lardner wrote about Miller being from a "Niles suburb," but Miller never mentions Lardner in his memoir, "I Found No Peace," where he recounts walking five miles to Dowagiac for school and to check out stacks of books from the public library.
Topping, a 1981 Union High School graduate who has been teaching at SMC for 14 years, said his wife, who has been at the college for four years for Ferris State University, with delving into Miller's life.
She began researching his life for a 2001 history project at Western Michigan University.
Casting around for a topic that would be "original" and "different," her husband suggested Miller. "That kicked the whole thing off," she said of two large framed collections of information gathered.
"Just as I was introduced to Ring Lardner when I lived in Colorado," Topping said, "I also learned about Webb Miller when I was away and I'm most fascinated because he came from here."
By Miller's own admission, he didn't think he possessed the temperament for newspapering.
"Too introverted, too sensitive, too squeamish, but he did have drive," Topping said. "He loved Thoreau from an early age" and carried a copy of Walden with him. "That pointed to a different lifestyle than he ended up leading. He loved Walden because of the peace and solitude it conveyed, so what does he do but go out into a career where he's constantly with people and surrounded by anything but peace.
"He invented himself to overcome these things," Topping continued. "He shortened his name from Webster to Webb because it sounded better. He practiced becoming more outgoing and, most importantly for us, he forced himself to keep his eyes open while witnessing and reporting on things he would rather have turned away from."
Miller, born Feb. 10, 1891, said of his remarkable career that he had "a grandstand seat at the most momentous show in history."
"Webb Miller is there" went promotional ads for his dispatches like one which appeared in the Cleveland Press.
"Besides four major wars," Miller saw "smaller skirmishes, executions, some cruel beatings, murder, sadness and cruelty," Topping said. "All of the best the human spirit has to offer. He was London chief of United Press and Paris bureau chief of UP and ended his career as European chief of UP. Even though he was an administrator, he always sought ways to leave the desk and go to the front lines himself."
Lisa read selections of Miller's reportage, including a story about a dog traveling with "physically exhausted men lurching along in a daze with glazed eyes and faces deeply lined with the stubble of beards" – "the only time during the entire war that he cried."
The pathetic black-and-white mongrel was lashed to a rifle with a piece of cord, half drowning from each squirt of mud. It moved him more than all the "mangled wrecks of human beings lying patiently on the ground."
Miller, who is buried in Dewey Cemetery in a grave as simple as Thoreau's, attended Sumnerville and Hampshire schools before coming into town for high school.
"His greatest memory of his later youth is walking to Dowagiac for school," Topping said. "Supposedly, one of the last times he visited he walked it again by himself just to relive it. Walking is indicative of his drive for education and to improve himself. He didn't come from any means, but he made up for that. His father (Jacob), after finding his interest in newspapers, subscribed to Grit and the Kalamazoo Gazette."
"He was unusual as a youth not just for his reading, his walking and his mild manner," Topping said, "but he was also a young vegetarian. There weren't a lot of farm kids growing up in the late 1800s and early 1900s who were vegetarians."
Miller wrote sports stories for the Dowagiac paper in high school, then tried to go to the South Bend Tribune, "but they turned him down," Topping recalled. "He did the next best thing, as any budding newspaperman does, and became a driver on a passenger schooner at Diamond Lake. He did that for a while and wrecked the boat.Then, the next year, he took the exam in Cass to become a teacher."
Miller taught at Walnut Grove School "and was almost fired for 'smoking in the boy's room,' as it were, except it was a one-room schoolhouse. He called them 'pip sticks.' I won't talk about the education he got at the brothel here in town, but it was, by his account, the sort of education a good journalist should have. He paid the money and recorded the scene. The greatest thing about reading his account of his youth is I like his spellings. I like seeing 'Pea Vine' spelled as two words."
The following summer at Indian Lake, Miller happened to meet a Chicago American editor, who gave him his big break. Miller joined the staff in 1912. His first year Miller counted covering 33 murders and six hangings. His editor told him, "That's the reason you're a good reporter on such things. The more you hate it, the better job you do."
Chicago brought Miller the first of two "strange encounters" with salt.
As Topping tells it, Miller was called on to interview Helen Morton, daughter of Mark Morton, co-founder of Morton Salt. "She had eloped and it was reported she was back in town. He took the train. The first place he went to rent a car turned him down, saying they'd been warned not to take anyone out there. He lied to the second one. He saw what he thought were two farmhands and a foreman. He walked up the driveway and asked if Helen was around. The foreman's response was quick and unexpected. He just hit him in the jaw and knocked him out.
"When Miller woke up, the foreman was sitting on his chest and the farmhands were gathering rope to tie him up. The big guy sitting on him was yelling at them to start a fire because they wanted to tar and feather him. Fortunately, the farmhands drew the line. The guy threw him in the back of his car. He quickly ascertained he wasn't a foreman, but Mark Morton. They're driving so quickly that they get in a crash. Webb is thrown from the vehicle and gets knocked out a second time. Finally, he is arrested for trespassing, but gets off on a technicality and sues the Morton family for $50,000. He kind of won, a settlement eight years later for $700. He got $500, the lawyers took $200, in 1920."
Miller's other salt incident involves Gandhi, whom he met not in India, but in London.
Miller "was the first foreign journalist to report in a large way the cruelty the British were using against the pacifist Gandhi followers in the salt march," Topping said. "He traveled 14,000 miles to get this story, but by the time he got there, Gandhi was in prison. Gandhi's idea was to march to the sea to make salt because the British wouldn't allow Indians to make their own salt or use their own salt. His report, which took a lot of effort to get through British censors into the international press, is credited with changing – or at least influencing greatly – world opinion against the British. Gandhi credits Webb with that, of getting the world on his side."
Miller left his job in 1916 and headed for the Mexican border to report on Gen. John Pershing hunting Pancho Villa. UP hired Miller, who was dispatched to Mexico City, New York, Chicago and Washington.
In July 1917, he got the call: "Catch the four o'clock train in New York. You'll get here at 9 and will sail at midnight" for World War I overseas.
"After 1917, he was never for a long period of time in the United States other than the trip of a king," Topping related.
Miller covered the Irish uprising, then headed for the British front lines.
In 1918, Webb went to the wire service's Paris bureau and to the American front lines.
In France, Miller witnessed a guillotine beheading carried out in 26 seconds by his watch.
Miller was also in France when he met Mussolini in 1922. They were skeptical that "that little disheveled guy who's a reporter like us" could lead the fascist movement. "Eight months later he was the head of Italy," Topping said.
"Ten years later he got an audience in Mussolini's famous 60-foot marble office with his desk alone at the other side to intimidate people. Mussolini came around to greet his 'old friend.' Webb said, 'We were both reporters covering the same story. I'm still a reporter.' They had a strange relationship and on fairly good terms."
Mussolini tracked public opinion by opening a desk drawer filled with Miller's clippings from Italy's invasion of Ethiopia.
Miller is credited with recording "the most curious human document known on Mussolini" from an interview about health tips.
"Mussolini talks about eating moderately, eating a lot of fruit, getting seven or eight hours of sleep, staying away from caffeine and alcohol, exercising every day – skiing in the winter, swimming in the summer – he 'only drank a little wine at official lunches or to celebrate the end of a war … Fencing is an optimal exercise.' "
Miller went to the Soviet Union "and beat the censors there, as well," Topping said. "He sent a series of reports about the Stalinist purges. Then he reported on the Spanish Civil War. He was at the Munich conference with Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain. He was in Czechoslovakia when German troops occupied it. His last Christmas he spent on earth, 1939, he was out with Finnish soldiers in four inches of fresh fallen snow on a moonlit night, cigarettes "freezing between puffs" after the Russians invaded.
Miller "was due to go into Norway," Topping said, "with the British, but they were pulling out. He had his passports and maps ready for any possible country (World War II) could spread to. His last day, May 8, 1940, he covered the historic speech by Chamberlain at the House of Commons. Chamberlain was explaining why Britain let the Germans have Norway, but resigned the next day. The last story he did was to report the end of Chamberlain. He went to the UP office, sent his nightly dispatch, then boarded a train from London. He was going to switch trains at Clapham Junction for his little country home, rest and come back the next day. It was a little after 9 o'clock, the train went into a curve and, somehow, Webb Miller fell out. The official report says police believed Miller stepped off a coach, believing it was near a platform. A hard blow on the right side of his head occurred when he stepped from the speeding train. We are to believe a man who traveled 400,000 miles, several times a day by train, somehow gets fooled by 9 o'clock at night because everything was blacked out because of air raids, goes to Clapham Junction, where he goes every day, but doesn't know the train is speeding and just steps out. It's a crazy story. The Nazi news service was the only one to question it at the time," blaming the British Secret Service with his "assassination" because of his depiction of Chamberlain as tired, uneasy and unconvincing.
"The events surrounding his death are very suspicious for a person who traveled so much," Topping said, closing on a lighter note with "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," the lead story in Reader's Digest's September 1934 issue, reprinted from Collier's.
Topping owns the magazine because on page 19 there is a Lardner piece.
Miller's article recalls coming home to America to visit and dwells on the things his countrymen take for granted.
His only complaint was the amount of cellophone used in packaging.
Lardner reported on some journalists and naval officers engaging in a "bitter argument" over the merits of their respective hometowns – Baltimore, Dowagiac, Rockford, Niles and a town in Iowa.
Dowagiac was acclaimed "for handsome young men," Niles "for scenic grandeur."