In 1910, Daniel Rhodes Hanna, a wealthy industrialist and son of legendary political kingmaker Marcus Hanna, bought the Cleveland Leader, an historic, but struggling, daily newspaper. The Leader's offices were at the time located in a small two-story building on the south side of Superior Avenue, just west of that street's intersection with East Sixth Street. Directly across Superior, a massive five-story building was slowly going up.  Built in two phases, and stretching all the way from Superior Avenue to Rockwell Avenue, it was the new home of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the city's leading morning newspaper.

Over the next three years, "Dan" Hanna would invest heavily in the newspaper industry in an attempt to increase the circulation of the Leader and make it, as it had once been in the nineteenth century, a viable competitor of the Plain Dealer. In 1912, he purchased the Cleveland News, giving him control of an afternoon, as well as a morning, daily. Then, from 1913 to 1914, he engaged in a nasty and costly circulation war with the Plain Dealer.  And finally in 1913, he tore down the Leader's two-story building and replaced it with an elegant, state-of-the-art 14-story building, which not only dwarfed the new Plain Dealer building across the street, but became the largest office building erected in Cleveland to date.  

Despite the magnitude of Hanna's efforts, and the long shadow which the new Leader-News Building cast — literally — on its competitor across the street, the Cleveland Leader continued to struggle in the newspaper industry and, in 1917, it went out of business. But, though the newspaper itself disappeared from the city, the building Hanna erected did not. Later renamed "The Leader Building," it has now stood on the corner of East Sixth and Superior for more than a century, and, though no longer downtown Cleveland's largest office building, it remains one of its most elegant and historic.

The Leader Building was erected in 1912-1913 on grounds that were already steeped in Cleveland history. Since 1854, most of the site had been home to Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, the place where many of the city's pioneer merchants and industrialists first worshiped. In 1902, after the Episcopal Diocese had relocated to its present-day site on the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 22nd Street, the Wardens and Vestrymen of Trinity sold the church's property on Superior Avenue to Ralph King, then downtown's largest real estate developer and a patron and future President of the Board of Trustees of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

In 1905, King built a small two-story structure — call it the first Leader Building — on the site of the old Trinity Cathedral, wedging it in between the Arcade Building to the west and the Samuel Raymond mansion, by this time a boarding house with a one-story commercial addition attached to its front, to the east. This first Leader Building was standing for only five years when Dan Hanna bought the Cleveland Leader and then arranged for the construction of the second and much larger Leader Building, which would cover all of the grounds once occupied by Trinity Cathedral and its Parish House, as well as those of the Samuel Raymond mansion on the corner.

The new Leader Building was designed by Charles A. Platt, a New York architect whom Eleanor Roosevelt once referred to as "an architect of great taste." Platt designed the Sara Delano Roosevelt townhouse in New York, which is now an historic landmark, as well as many other buildings across the country, a number of which remain standing, including the Smithsonian's Freer Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. Platt's plan called for the Leader Building to occupy nearly all of the large site at the corner of Superior Avenue and East Sixth Street. The rectangular-shaped Beaux-Arts style building with a limestone block exterior takes up 150 feet of the site's 160 feet of frontage on Superior Avenue and 215 feet of the 220 feet of depth on East Sixth Street. It has a total of more than 300,000 square feet of interior space, almost 250,000 square feet of which over the years has been built-out for offices. The interior of the building is constructed with many notable quality materials, and features marble walls, maple wood floors, a grand lobby with columns, wrought iron screens and other ornamentation, and bronze elevators said to have been designed by Tiffany.

When the Leader Building first opened in 1913, it housed the presses of the Cleveland Leader and the Cleveland News in its basement. Its first floor was entirely occupied by the business offices of the two newspapers and the fourteenth (top) floor by the staffs of the two separate editorial departments. The remaining 12 floors were leased to a variety of business tenants, including the prestigious law firm of Squires, Sanders and Dempsey, which rented the entire 12th floor. After the Cleveland Leader went out of business in 1917, the Cleveland News continued to occupy the basement, and first and 14th floors of the Leader Building until 1926, when it moved to a new and more modern newspaper plant building at East 18th Street and Superior Avenue. The basement, which formerly held printing presses, became home to the Colonnade Cafeteria, which served building tenants and others working downtown for the next 60 years.

As the years passed, the Leader Building became known not for the newspapers once printed there, but instead for the many law firms that continued to locate there. In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a glut of available office space in the downtown area developed and tenants began to leave older buildings like the Leader Building. In 2014, with its occupancy rate declining, the building was sold to K & D Properties, a local company specializing in real property management. In 2016, K & D, in response to a demand for more residential units in downtown Cleveland, restored the Leader building and converted its upper floors into luxury apartments. It was a process that, in the last decades of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty first century, gave new life to many of the city's historic downtown buildings, including the historic Leader Building.

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In a business where circulation numbers have historically counted for nearly everything, there was probably never any love lost between the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Leader. The Plain Dealer--a partisan Democrat paper, was founded in 1842. The Leader--founded a decade later, became the Republican counterpart when, in 1859, fiery Edwin Cowles became its editor. In the years that followed, the ideological competition between the papers took on a personal dimension as the editors often exchanged barbs, including this one which appeared in an article reprinted by the Leader in 1876: "When the snarling, ill-conditioned editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer gets drunk and falls out of the third story window of his boarding house, people in the street who catch a glimpse of his florid face and sanguinary hair cry out: 'Behold, that blazing meteor!' " In 1885, the competition, if anything, intensified, when the new owner of the Plain Dealer, Liberty Holden, began publishing a morning edition in direct competition with the Leader.

It wasn't long after these competitive foundations of the relationship between the Plain Dealer and Leader were formed that the twentieth century arrived, ushering in a period that has been called Cleveland's "golden era of journalism." The two rivals were just two of the city's six dailies--not to mention the numerous weeklies and ethnic newspapers, all of whom were vying for the attention of the city's reading population. The situation for these newspapers soon reached critical mass and some sought new methods to improve their bottom line, or to at least stay in business. One was merger. In 1905, the number of dailies operating in the city was reduced to four when the Cleveland News was created from the merger of three of the dailies. Then, Dan R. Hanna, the son of the late Republican kingmaker Marcus Hanna, employed a different type of merger. In 1910, he purchased the Leader and then purchased the News two years later. But despite this merger of ownership, a year later both the Leader and the News trailed the Press and the Plain Dealer in circulation. As the old adage goes, desperate times now demanded desperate measures.

According to Plain Dealer accounts, the Circulation War began in the summer of 1913 when Hanna, who had ties to Chicago's newspaper industry through his brother-in-law Joseph Medill McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, imported a number of Chicagoans to Cleveland. These included William P. Leech, formerly an editor of a Chicago newspaper, and two other men, who would later be widely associated with organized crime--Arthur "Mickey" McBride, who founded the Cleveland Browns in 1944 and was a target of the Kefauver Crime Commission hearings here in 1951, and James "The Built" Ragen, who was gunned down in Chicago in 1946 by mobsters who had taken over Al Capone's gang. Leech became Hanna's general manager for both papers and Ragen the Circulation Manager for the Leader, while McBride was assigned the same Circulation position, which entailed building up the paper's circulation numbers, at the News.

Despite his recent arrival in Cleveland, James Ragen wasted no time in going after the Plain Dealer. At his direction, newsboys (also called "newsies"), hawking the Plain Dealer at well-traveled intersections of the city, were threatened or roughed up. Bundles of Plain Dealer papers dropped off at street corners all over the city were torn up or mysteriously ended up in dumps. And, just to show that he was a hands-on manager, Ragen, on November 17, 1913, personally participated in an attack on Joseph Unger, a Plain Dealer newspaper distributor (also called a "circulator") on the east side of town. For his part in that attack, Ragen was convicted in a Cleveland court in January 1914 of assault. Amazingly, he retained his job at the Leader.

For the next year, attacks against newsboys and their distributors took place all over Cleveland, most of them initiated by employees of the Leader. One of the last occurred on November 17, 1914, when three armed men attacked William "Scance" Chambers, a west side distributor for the Plain Dealer, at the corner of West 117th and Detroit Avenue. Chambers, who some believed was also a member of a west side Irish street gang, didn't take the attack sitting down. According to Cleveland News reports--which though biased carried a certain ring of truth, he and another Plain Dealer distributor assembled a group of "toughs," and on the evening of November 21 transported them to Detroit Center--a cluster of retail stores and saloons on Detroit Avenue near its intersection with West 75th Street and Lake Avenue, to exact some revenge. While most of the hired toughs were having a drink at Louis Schwartz' saloon at 7507 Detroit, Chambers and Thomas Gibbons stood outside watching for the Leader delivery truck. They were standing there when it showed up at around 9 PM. Soon, several shots rang out and Gibbons fell to the ground, bleeding from a bullet wound to the neck. He was rushed to German (Fairview) Hospital, but later died from his injuries.

The killing of Thomas Gibbons--regardless of whether he was an innocent victim, as alleged by the Plain Dealer, or a co-conspirator as alleged in the Cleveland News, galvanized the public to stop Cleveland's Circulation War. Mayor Newton Baker was outraged by the killing and promised that the war between the Leader and the Plain Dealer would soon end. Two Leader employees--Harvey Callahan and Frank O'Neill, were indicted for murder. After a two week jury trial in January 1915, however, which featured dozens of witnesses and wildly differing reports by the competing newspapers, Callahan, was acquitted. The charges against O'Neill, his alleged accomplice, were then dropped. Despite the prosecutor's failure to get a conviction in the case, there were thereafter no reported new incidents of violence between Cleveland Plain Dealer and Leader employees. Perhaps the owners of the two newspapers had sat down over a martini and declared a truce. Clearly at some point they did sit down, because just two years later, in August 1917, Hanna sold the newspaper to the Estate of Liberty Holden, now owner of the Plain Dealer. Publication of the Cleveland Leader abruptly came to an end, also ending more than a half century of competition, as well as at least one war, between these two historic Cleveland newspapers.

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In 2008, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, making him the first African American to hold the office. President Obama was a Democratic candidate, which is not surprising. Because of the Democratic policies of the New Deal and Great Society, Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, and the overwhelming number of Civil Rights leaders who were Democrats, the Democratic Party cemented itself as being the party representing the best interests of the black community. Yet, there was one Civil Rights leader in Cleveland who did not fit the mold. William O. Walker was the editor of the Call and Post, one of the nation’s most prominent African American newspapers, and he was a staunch Republican. Yet Walker was first and foremost a Civil Rights leader who would work with anyone, regardless of political affiliation, to advance the African American community. Born in Selma, Alabama, in 1896, Walker was raised in a community where the Republican Party enjoyed heavy support from African Americans who still saw it as the Party of Lincoln. Many Republican politicians also appointed African Americans to federal positions in the South, including postmasters and custom agents, which only furthered Republican support in the African American community. As a result, Walker became a firm supporter of the Republican Party. In 1932, Walker came to Cleveland to manage the Call and Post. In just four years, he managed to take the fledgling newspaper with a weekly circulation of 1,000 or less and turn it into a must-read source for Civil Rights information. Already an established journalist, Walker understood the power of the press for the creation of community activism. In the 1930s Walker was a founding member of the Future Outlook League, an organization that was devoted to fight for increased jobs for African Americans in Cleveland. The Future Outlook League successfully led pickets against some of Cleveland's most prominent businesses, including the Cleveland Trust Co., Ohio Bell Telephone Co., and F. W. Woolworth. Walker used the Call and Post to inform, encourage, and support these protests, while showing the success of such actions in creating jobs for African Americans. Similarly, in 1968, Walker used the Call and Post as the mouthpiece for Operation Black Unity’s boycott of the McDonald’s Corporation for not giving franchises to African Americans. Walker also used the Call and Post to create a sense of pride in the black community. In his weekly editorial, "Down the Long Road," Walker advocated for an increase of African American businesses, a cry for African Americans to pay attention to the bigger political picture, and most importantly, that race does not have to be a handicap. "Down the Long Road" also tried to put agency back into the hands of the black community. Yet in these articles, there is also evidence of his Republican beliefs. Emphasis on self-help and business as the true drivers of improvement have always been a pillar of the Republican ideology, and Walker advocated for them throughout his career. Although he held Republican views, Walker remained critical of both political parties. For example, he was critical of both President Eisenhower and President Reagan for not appointing African Americans to their cabinets. He also argued that the Republican Party was taking increasingly larger steps to isolate themselves from African Americans, which he saw as detrimental both to the Republican Party and the black community. As his career continued, Walker started working more closely with Democrats, including Carl Stokes, the first African American mayor of a major U.S. City, to advance the black community. Walker was also an important political figure, serving as the first African American member of an Ohio Governor’s Cabinet during the Rhodes administration. Walker also received a nomination from President Reagan for chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1981. Walker died at his desk in the Call and Post headquarters at the age of 85. In his Cleveland Press eulogy, Walker is quoted: "If it's ever a choice between friendship and race, I'll always support my race." The quote perfectly encapsulates everything that he believed in and worked for. Walker was, first and foremost, an African American man who worked tirelessly for the advancement of his race, and would work with anyone, regardless of party affiliation, to achieve his goals.

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In 1926, this may not have been a reassuring adage for John Pankuch, long-time editor and publisher of Hlas ("The Voice"), Cleveland's only weekly Slovak newspaper. Pankuch had just lost his publishing company located at 634-38 Huron Road in downtown Cleveland, because, according to one of his grandsons, he had refused to publish certain articles in his paper that his major advertisers demanded he publish. However, as a result of this business loss, Pankuch now had some extra time on his hands. Ever the active journalist, he used this time judiciously, writing and then publishing in 1930 a book entitled "History of the Slovaks of Cleveland and Lakewood." The book, which draws in large part upon oral histories and written recollections of Cleveland's first Slovak immigrants--many of whom were still living at the time, is today an invaluable resource for learning about life in Cleveland's immigrant communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Pankuch's own Slovak immigrant story is a compelling one. He became a newspaper editor, and consequently a leader in the Cleveland Slovak community, by accident--literally. In 1883, as a 13-year old, he had immigrated to the United States and joined his father, working as a coal miner in western Pennsylvania. A year after arriving in America, young John was involved in a mine accident in which he suffered a severe injury to one of his legs, nearly resulting in its amputation. When he finally recovered from that injury a year later, his mother refused to allow him to return with his father to the mines. Instead, the family gave the 15-year old boy the name of a Slovak immigrant friend living Cleveland and sent him there to study business.

Arriving in Cleveland, John Pankuch found a small, but closely-knit Slovak community. He never forgot the caring nature of this early community. As a result, "unity" became a theme that he would preach to the Slovaks of Cleveland and Lakewood for the rest of his life. While Pankuch was compelled to leave Cleveland and return to Hungary in 1888, after the death of his father in a coal mine accident, Pankuch returned to Cleveland just one year later in June 1889, bringing with him his soon-to-be wife, Rose Gasgaber, and a renewed determination to make his life in Cleveland. In October 1892, John Pankuch became a naturalized citizen of the United States, and was already beginning to become involved in local politics, his church, and in the printing and publishing businesses in Cleveland.

The story of John Pankuch's leadership in his immigrant community is a lesson in the importance of ethnic journalists to nineteenth century immigrant communities. Newspapermen, along with clerics, were often the most important leaders in these immigrant communities. While publishing "Hlas," Pankuch also served as a lay leader of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Cleveland's first Slovak Lutheran church. He founded the Slavonian Republican Club of Cleveland in 1897 and became a precinct committeeman. As a member of the Association of Slovak Journalists, Pankuch was instrumental in organizing the Congress that met at Cleveland's Grays Armory on May 26, 1907 to create the Slovak League of America--an organization subsequently of critical importance to the formation of the first Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.

After World War I ended, Pankuch remained active in the Slovak community. In 1923-1924, he chaired the committee which completed the purchase of and erected the General Milan Stefanik memorial statue in Wade Park near the Cleveland Museum of Art. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he was a featured speaker at almost every important event in the Cleveland Slovak community, always preaching his theme of ethnic success through ethnic unity. In 1937, Pankuch capped his civic career by serving as the national president of the National Slovak Society. Having resurrected his newspaper Hlas in 1932, he continued to publish the weekly Slovak paper in Lakewood until 1946. He died in that suburb in 1952 at the age of 82 years old.

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