'Just a newspaper hack on the side of the angels': Crusading reporter Paul Y. Anderson.

Writing in the March 1948 issue of Esquire magazine, a journalist surmised that St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Paul Y. Anderson would remain a hero of newspapermen "for as long as there is a city room and a bar down the street."

The tribute came a decade after Anderson's suicide, when the legend of his career remained stamped in the memories of a generation of scribes. Anderson, a 1929 Pulitzer Prize winner, is one of many noted journalists who have so far been excluded from the ranks of St. Louis Media Halls of Fame, the local organization that honors distinguished members of the media. It's also a safe bet that few, if any, current staffers at the Post ever heard of him.

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That his work is overlooked nowadays is unfortunate because he was one of the leading journalists of the early 20th century. Anderson, the last of the great muckrakers, was the personification of the Post's vaunted platform. He aggressively fought corporate greed and government malfeasance for nearly a quarter of a century.

Seventy years after his death, there remains a strong likelihood that some special interests would prefer to forget that he ever existed. After all, Anderson's brand of crusading reporting is emblematic of journalistic values that could still be considered a threat to the status quo.

He was born into poverty in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee in 1893, the son of a schoolteacher and a stonecutter. Anderson took a job as a copy boy for the Knoxville Tribune at 18. Two years later, he moved to St. Louis and started working for the St. Louis Times. He joined the staff of the Post in 1914.

His career gained national prominence three years later for his coverage of the East St. Louis race riot in which more than 30 blacks and eight whites died. In what became a hallmark of his reporting, Anderson went beyond his eyewitness account of the violence and delved into its causes. In a prescient series of stories the preceding year, he had written about the alliance of East St. Louis political bosses, racketeers and employers that fostered the competitive labor conditions leading up to the riot.

The final report of a congressional probe of the riot lauded Anderson by saying: "He saw everything, reported what he saw without fear of consequences, defied the officials whom he charged with criminal neglect of duty, ran a dally risk of assassination and rendered an invaluable public service by his exposures."

Anderson received more death threats during World War I, after he reported on the Collinsville, Ill., mob that lynched Robert Paul Prager, an innocent German immigrant coal miner. By 1923, he had been elevated to editorial writer and spearheaded a campaign to free political prisoners incarcerated during the war.

When his request for a transfer to the Washington bureau was rejected, Anderson quit the Post and became a freelancer in the nation's capital. His dispatches on the brewing controversy over the leasing of Western oil lands owned by the federal government appeared in the Omaha World-Herald and Raleigh News Observer, as well as the Post, prompting editor O.K. Bovard to rehire him.

Anderson would intermittently cover the Teapot Dome scandal for the next six years. In the initial 1924 Senate inquiry, it was revealed that Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, a member of President Warren G. Harding's administration, had received $230,000 in Liberty Bonds, a kickback from oil interests for granting the leases.

Four years later, at Bovard's urging, Anderson resurrected the case through a series entitled "Who Got the Bonds?" His stories delved into whether more than $2.7 million in remaining bonds had been used to bribe public officials. Anderson's agitation on Capitol Hill spurred a renewed investigation. As a result, Robert W. Stewart, the chief of Standard Oil of Indiana, was charged with contempt and perjury. Though acquitted, Stewart ultimately lost his job. Oil tycoon Harry Sinclair fared less well. He served more than six months in jail for contempt of Congress.

Eventually, the government regained $6 million in restitution from the oil cartel, and Anderson won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage.

Throughout the 1920s, he reported on other headline-making news and often scooped the competition. He provided insightful coverage of the Leopold and Loeb murder case in Chicago, the Scopes monkey trial in Dayton, Tenn., and the funeral of three-time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan. In 1925, Anderson collaborated with Post reporter John T. Rogers on an investigation of a corrupt federal judge, which led to the jurist's resignation. Rogers won the Pulitzer for that reporting. The following year, Anderson sparked a congressional inquiry into Indiana Republican Sen. James E. Watson's ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

After the murder of Chicago Tribune reporter Jake Lingle in 1930, Anderson wrote a lengthy analysis of the origins of corruption in the Windy City. Instead of limiting the blame to Prohibition-era gangster Al Capone, Anderson fingered Samuel Insull, the founder of Commonwealth Edison, Chicago's electric company.

A contemporary once described Anderson as being "a police reporter writing about politicians instead of racketeers."

With his fedora, foppish mustache, and boutonniere, Anderson had the appearance of a well-to-do bookie. He commanded a salary of $16,000 annually in the depths of the Great Depression. But his allegiance to his fellow workers never wavered. He zealously supported labor unions and helped organize the Newspaper Guild. His allies included United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis and populist Louisiana senator Huey Long. Among the press, he counted Heywood Broun, H. L. Mencken, and Marquis Childs of the Post as friends.

Anderson's critics faulted him for being egotistical, erratic and possessing a "prosecutorial complex." But nobody ever questioned his determination to get the story or his devotion to the underdog. In 1932, he reported on the Hoover administration's brutal attacks on World War I veterans, the so-called Bonus Marchers, who had gathered in Washington to demand cash payments for bonds that had been issued earlier for their military service.

From 1929 to 1934, Anderson wrote a regular column for The Nation magazine in addition to reporting for the Post. By the mid-1930s, however, deadline pressures and chronic alcoholism began to take its toll. Moreover, his dedication to his work made a shambles of his personal life, which included three failed marriages.

In late January 1938, Post management fired him for lagging productivity. But by early March, the St. Louis Star-Times had hired Anderson to be its chief Washington correspondent. In 1937 and 1938, despite his drinking problem, Anderson broke a major story involving the suppression of a Paramount newsreel that documented the murders of 10 strikers by Chicago police during a labor stoppage at the Republic Steel Co. He also reported on bloodshed in the coalfields of Harlan County, Ky., and spying by the Detroit auto industry on its union employees.

In a final act of defiance, Anderson appeared on a nationally broadcast radio program in October 1938 to denounce the House Un-American Activities Committee. He railed against the committee for its witch-hunting campaign that targeted alleged Communist infiltration of the Roosevelt administration's Works Progress Administration, including the Federal Theatre Project.

Anderson died of an overdose of sleeping pills at his residence in Washington at 3:55 a.m., Dec. 6, 1938. He was 45-years-old. Speaking at Anderson's funeral, Lewis, the fiery labor leader, eulogized the reporter with much pomp and circumstance.

The accolades that followed came from friends and foes alike. But perhaps Anderson's self-appraisal sums up his career best: "I'm just a hack who happens to be on the side of the angels."

C.D. Stelzer is a contributing writer for the Illinois Times in Springfield.