The Public Ledger was a daily newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania published from March 25, 1836 to January 1942. Its motto was "Virtue Liberty and Independence". For a time, it was Philadelphia's most popular newspaper, but circulation declined in the mid-1930s.

History

Founded by William Moseley Swain, Arunah S. Abell, and Azariah H. Simmons, and edited by Swain, the Public Ledger was the first penny paper in Philadelphia, the first daily to make use of a pony express, and among the first papers to use the electromagnetic telegraph. From 1846, it was printed on the first rotary printing press. In 1864, it was sold to George William Childs and Anthony J. Drexel.^[1]

In 1870, Mark Twain, in his column for The Galaxy, mocked the Ledger for its rhyming obituaries in a piece entitled "Post-Mortem Poetry":

In 1902, The New York Times owner Adolph Ochs bought the paper, merged in the Philadelphia Times (which he had bought the previous year), and installed his brother George as editor. In 1913, Cyrus Curtis purchased the paper hired his step son-in-law John Charles Martin as editor, and 1914 launched an evening edition. ^[2] On April 16, 1934, the morning and Sunday editions were merged into The Philadelphia Inquirer (also held by the heirs of Curtis), but the paper continued an independent life as the Evening Public Ledger. In 1941, the Evening Public Ledger was sold to Robert Cresswell, formerly of the New York Herald Tribune. Mounting debts brought on a court-ordered liquidation, and the paper ceased publication in January, 1942.

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and Bolshevism

On October 27 and October 28, 1919, the Public Ledger published excerpts from - and the first published English language translation of - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as an article with the title, "Red Bible". The excerpts from The Protocols, a text proposing the existence of a Jewish plot to take over the world, had all references to the purported Jewish authorship removed and was re-cast as a Bolshevist manifesto.^[3] The author of the articles was Carl W. Ackerman, who subsequently became the head of the journalism department at Columbia University.

Known editors

• William M. Swain
• William Henry Fry (1844-1846)
• George Oakes
• Randolph Marshall (1918)
• Charles Munro Morrison (1930-1939, 1941)
• John McLaughlin

Public Ledger Building

The Public Ledger Building (1921) at 600-606 Chestnut Street was designed in the Georgian Revival style by Horace Trumbauer and houses a sculpture of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph A. Bailly (1825-1883).

See also

• List of defunct newspapers of the United States

References

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