Frank Luther Mott

• Dean, 1942-1951

By Paul Hagey

Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar Dr. Frank Luther Mott succeeded Frank L. Martin as dean of the Missouri School of Journalism in August of 1942, just a few months after the United States entered World War II. Before arriving in Missouri, Mott was an English professor and director of the journalism school at The University of Iowa. With this diverse background, which included a position as editor and publisher of the Grand Junction (Iowa) Globe and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, he brought with him to Missouri both extensive experience in journalism and a wide-ranging scholarly and intellectual mind.

Like Walter Williams before him, Mott had worked on newspapers at a young age, setting type in his father's newspaper, the What Cheer (Iowa) Patriot, at the age of 10. He continued working in the newspaper business through adolescence, and by age 28 had achieved the position of editor and publisher of the Grand Junction Globe.

Frank L. Mott posed at his home in 1961 as artist Edward B. Etheridge finished his portrait, which was presented to the School at a Kappa Tau Alpha dinner in 1961. Professor Emeritus William H. Taft, the KTA chapter adviser, helped raise funds for the painting. University Archives, C:11/13/3.

Mott, however, had wider interests than solely those of the newspaper business; he wanted to teach. He earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Chicago University in 1907, and in 1917, following his desire to become an educator, he left the Grand Junction Globe and enrolled in a master's degree program at Columbia University in New York. After receiving his degree from Columbia, Mott returned to Iowa to teach English at Simpson College, eventually transferring to The University of Iowa where he taught English as well. He took over its journalism school in 1927. In 1928 he earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his dissertation was the start of his work in the history of American magazines that would later earn him the Pulitzer. He also had published several books by this time, ranging in genres from history to fiction.

By the time he arrived at Missouri in 1942, Mott was already a nationally known scholar for his 1939 Pulitzer Prize in American History for volumes II and III of his four-volume History of American Magazines. He was also the first Missouri School of Journalism dean to hold a Ph.D. However, Mott's credentials and renown did not make his tenure any easier. He guided the School at a turbulent time in its history as it dealt with the turmoil of World War II, issues of segregation and the challenge of emerging technologies.

Mott recalled the challenge of becoming dean of the Journalism School at that time in an essay from his autobiographical book Time Enough: "Transferring to Missouri was accepting a challenge. Here I found a remarkable body of tradition, a great loyalty to the school, and generous support from the administration...I made the change at a time when we had to cope, in our small way, with great events. The United States had entered the Second World War a few months earlier, and the whole pattern of our operations had to change abruptly."

Mott adapted these challenges to the classroom. David Alter, BJ '50, a former student of Mott's, recalled Mott's teaching style.

"Journalism under the tenets of Dr. Frank Luther Mott at the University of Missouri was demanding," Alter said. "We were taught to write like we want to be heard and ask...ask...ask questions. Dig into the shadows of the story."

Alter attended the School after serving in World War II, which left the Journalism School and University overall with a low enrollment and few male students. In 1943, only 18 of the 131 Missouri Journalism students were men, and due to the enormous impact of the war, Journalism Week was cancelled for the first time since it began in 1910. In its stead, Mott helped direct the publication of Journalism in Wartime, a book that consisted of a series of articles by different journalists who examined the role that journalism played in interpreting the war.

Twice during his tenure as dean, Mott was called abroad to help with journalism education, one time to head a journalism school for American soldiers in Biarretz, France, in 1945, and another to help with the guidance of the emerging Japanese press in Tokyo in 1947.

Mott's travels for journalism training were not solely in a wartime context. In 1944, he and four other Journalism School professors participated in what has been called the "traveling school of journalism," a scheme that circumvented the university-wide policy of segregation at that time. They traveled to Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo., three days a week to instruct two black students. Six years later, with the ruling in the 1950 case Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, the university opened its doors to all students.

Technology at the Journalism School evolved under Mott as well. The School established its radio sequence, building on the first radio course in 1936, in addition to printing news with then-new facsimile technology and starting the process for acquiring a TV station. Mott also oversaw the development of the formal national accreditation program of the American Council on Education for Journalism in 1945, with the assistance of Professor Earl English. By 1948, the School led all other ACEJ schools with six accredited sequences.

While acting as dean, Mott also continued to teach. Among other classes, he taught The Literature of Journalism and History and Principles of American Journalism. Mott's successor in those courses, Professor Emeritus William H. Taft, remembers him as an approachable man with a love of books.

"I think his favorite class was his Literature of Journalism, which met in his home in east Columbia on Cliff Drive. He had a basement entry and his study could sit 12 students, so that was the limit," Taft said. "He permitted me to sit in one time, knowing I would later take it over, as I did. I recall he was surrounded by books -- I always said he never threw away a book."

In spite of such serious coursework, Mott was known to have a little fun with students as well. According to Taft, the dean offered a challenge to students every semester that involved the notoriously bad handwriting of Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune.

"His favorite character in journalism left no doubt -- it was Horace Greeley. He would spend several lectures on Horace," Taft said. "He had an original Greeley letter, and he would challenge students to translate it and offer them a free meal when they did. Someone finally did, and that task ended."

In a 1956 talk Mott gave to Kappa Tau Alpha, the journalism national honor society founded in 1910 at Missouri, Mott reflected on his philosophy of education: "A former student, later a colleague, told me not long ago that I should have been a preacher. I told him that I hoped I had been." Missouri's KTA chapter was named after Mott in 1945. Among other principles of life Mott taught, he preached the realization of an inspired life unbounded by time.

"Anything you want to do, and want hard enough, you will have time for," he said at another KTA address. "No matter how burdened or how harried we are, there is always time for what we want most if we make it. There is time enough in a week for that week; there is time enough in a year for what we want to make of that year. There is time enough in a life."

As the first dean to hold a Ph.D., Mott brought a research emphasis to the Journalism School that had not existed before. It was not an easy task, however; the School's graduate programs were temporarily discontinued beginning in 1942 due to World War II. The master's program resumed in 1944, but the doctoral program was on hold until 1946. Up until that point, there had been six graduates of the doctoral program, which began in 1931. There were no more Ph.D. graduates until 1949, but the 1950s brought a renewed focus on journalism scholarship throughout the industry; Mott initiated the move toward research at the Journalism School by hiring faculty with doctorate degrees like Earl English.

Mott stepped down as dean at the age of 65 in 1951, handing the helm of the Journalism School over to Associate Dean Earl English in order to focus on some of his self-proclaimed passions and joys: writing, research and study. He retired as dean emeritus from the Journalism School in 1956.

Consistent with the lifelong passion Mott exhibited for scholarship and learning, he died in 1964 at the age of 78 while working on Volume V of his classic The History of American Magazines. According to Taft, Mott embodied the characteristics of a true scholar.

"I don't think Mott wrote what he did for the money. I think he was a true researcher, getting the pleasure of seeing something in print," Taft said. "I considered him a good friend, and he always helped where he could."

Mott concluded the last chapter of his book of autobiographical essays, published two years before his death, with, "I have had a full life. I have always felt that it must be not only full but well ordered to be worth living."

Mott used this order and life to continue the legacy of Walter Williams by his prominence, scholarship and breadth, and thus prepared the way for the School's distinguished future in the postwar era.

Mott's Commitment to Free Speech

Mott's vision and integrity are exemplified by an incident at the 1947 Journalism Week.

Controversial Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Westbrook Pegler was invited to speak at the 1947 Journalism Week, and he met opposition from some students in the Journalism School. Among other controversial positions he espoused, Pegler criticized President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Mott silenced the opposition and clarified the values and goals of journalism as it was taught at the Journalism School in his introduction of Pegler:

"Anybody who thinks the Journalism Week programs are set up as a mutual admiration society is badly mistaken. We try to provide a realistic view of American journalism as it is; and anyone who dislikes that view has a right to dislike it and say so, but no sensible person will question the value of a presentation of varying opinions, varying modes of writing, and varying personalities on this platform. The man I am about to present is a stormy petrel of American journalism. Many readers, myself among them, disagree with many of the things he has written. We have invited him to this platform not because we agree with his opinions, but he is a distinguished writer for many of our leading newspapers and we think you ought to see and hear him. Even those of our friends who hate him most violently ought not to think the students of the Missouri School of Journalism are a set of precious darlings wrapped in cotton wool who are likely to be contaminated by the sight of his face and the sound of his voice."

Career Timeline

• 1886 Born in Keokuk County, Iowa
• 1907 Served as co-editor of The Marengo (Iowa) Republican
• 1914 Served as editor and publisher of the Grand Junction (Iowa) Globe
• 1917 Published first book, Six Prophets out of the Middle West
• 1928 Earned Ph.D. at Columbia University
• 1930-1935 Served as editor-in-chief of Journalism Quarterly
• 1939 Won Pulitzer Prize in American History for The History of American Magazines, Vols. II and III
• 1939 Awarded honorary degree, Simpson College
• 1941 Awarded honorary degree, Boston University
• 1942 Appointed dean of the Missouri School of Journalism
• 1945 Awarded honorary degree, Temple University
• 1945 Honored as namesake of Kappa Tau Alpha MU chapter
• 1951 Retired as dean of the Missouri School of Journalism
• 1956 Retired as professor emeritus of the Missouri School of Journalism
• 1957 Won Bancroft Prize for Volume IV for The History of American Magazines
• 1958 Awarded honorary degree, Marquette University
• 1964 Died in Columbia, Mo.

• English, E. (1988). Journalism Education at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Marceline, Mo.: Walsworth Publishing.
• Mott, F. L. Kappa Tau Alpha Addresses: 1955-58, Frank Luther Mott. University of Missouri Archives, C: 0/45/1, Box 3.
• Mott, Frank Luther (1962). Time Enough: Essays in Autobiography. Durham, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press.
• The Columbia Missourian, Oct. 23, 1964.