Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1904. Employee exodus follows spurned takeover attempt

Samuel Pomeroy Colt coveted nothing more than becoming a United States senator.

As an interim step, though, he coveted The Providence Journal.

In 1904, he started acquiring Journal Company stock and formed an alliance with Journal business manager Richard S. Howland.

City editor Jake Rosenfeld began taking orders from Colt.

Until Stephen Olney Metcalf stood in Colt's way.

Metcalf, president of the Journal Company since Feb. 13, 1904, united majority shareholders, blocking Colt from gaining control of the corporation.

On Dec. 23, 1905, he cleaned house, putting his own man in charge of the paper.

Colt knew Metcalf had blocked him from seizing The Journal, but he would not surrender his senatorial aspirations.

Colt bought The Journal's competitor, the Evening Telegram, later changing its name to The Evening Tribune. Then he planned one last dirty trick.

On Feb. 3, 1906, in what has become known as the Exodus, Colt hired away most of the Journal staff, leaving only four reporters and three copy editors to put out the Sunday paper.

The Journal did not fold, bolstered by reporters who headed south from Boston looking for work.

In response, Colt announced the addition of a morning paper to supplement The Evening Tribune.

That prompted The Journal to place a call to New York City, to a man who would become one of the most colorful and controversial figures in Journal history: John R. Rathom. With Rathom as managing editor, then editor, Metcalf's Journal was a lively and aggressive newspaper, one Colt could not compete with.

In 1907, with The Journal leading the charge against him, Colt was denied the appointment as U.S. senator. The next year, his Morning Tribune folded.

His Evening Tribune was bought by other papers twice in the 1920s and 1930s, becoming The Star-Tribune in 1937. In December that year, at a court-ordered bankruptcy sale, Metcalf's Journal Company bought the last vestiges of Colt's paper, then closed it forever on April 30, 1938.