Shedding light: 'Citizen Carl' a biographical look at a New Mexico muckraker

If it weren’t for Jack McElroy, Carl Magee would likely remain in obscurity.

McElroy is the author of the recently published biography of Magee, titled “Citizen Carl: The Editor Who Cracked Teapot Dome, Shot a Judge, and Invented the Parking Meter.”

Magee was a man of many and wide-ranging abilities. He was a school superintendent, a lawyer, an inventor, a business entrepreneur, an elder in the Methodist church and a newspaperman.

Shedding light: 'Citizen Carl' a biographical look at a New Mexico muckraker

It was in his role as a columnist for Albuquerque newspapers from 1919 to 1927 that Magee holds special interest for New Mexicans today.

Magee was a muckraker. He fearlessly went after what struck him as wrongdoing and political corruption. Sometimes Magee’s columns resulted in libel suits and angry jousts in print with rival newspapers. Still, he was indefatigable, grinding out daily columns year after year.

Not only was Magee a columnist, but in 1920 he became the owner of the Albuquerque Journal, having bought the paper from Albert B. Fall, the same Albert B. Fall who was a U.S. senator from New Mexico and a wealthy landowner.

Fall was picked as Secretary of Interior by President Warren G. Harding. Fall soon found himself at the vortex of a naval oil reserves scandal nicknamed the Teapot Dome.

Fall became the first cabinet secretary to be imprisoned, and Magee is credited with shining a light on Fall’s backdoor shenanigans.

Magee started writing his columns in New Mexico in a soft-spoken tone.

After a few months, McElroy notes, “Magee’s voice became more strident and his criticism sharper.”

On July 20, 1920, Magee laid out the main reforms the Journal would advocate — primary elections, an end to tax evasion, especially by mining companies, a state budget to manage spending, and the most volatile — a nonpartisan commission to manage the state’s trust lands.

McElroy said Magee’s first broadside took aim in an editorial on the State Land Office. The office managed more than 13 million acres the federal government had turned over to New Mexico when it became a state.

The income from the acreage was to benefit grade schools and colleges, McElroy writes.

“Magee accused the State Land Office of turning this ‘sacred trust’ into the ‘plunder of politicians.’ Magee gave examples. Ranchers could pay only 15 cent an acre for a 30-year option or they could buy land with 5% down and the rest ‘any old time,’ ” McElroy writes. Further, the columnist alleged that no bids were required and no process existed to appraise the land.

Magee pushed for a nonpartisan state board that would replace a single land commissioner beholden to politicians.

Fall himself was the first politician to object, and loudly, to Magee’s Land Office reform proposal. McElroy quotes Fall confronting Magee with the rhetorical question, “Didn’t I tell you that the public land office was organized to suit me?”

Magee’s editorial staff soon got a boost when it hired a young reporter named Clinton P. Anderson, who had moved from the Midwest to Albuquerque for health reasons. Anderson later started a successful insurance agency and entered politics, rising to Secretary of Agriculture under President Truman.

By 1921, the Journal was in financial straits. The next year, Magee was forced to sell the newspaper. But he wasn’t out of journalism for long.

Within days, and a block away from the Journal, Magee started up a weekly paper, called Magee’s Independent.

Magee’s columns in the weekly took aim at, among other political subjects, the Secundino Romero political machine centered in San Miguel County. And Magee went after David Leahy, a district judge in the county being considered for a lifetime appointment to a federal judgeship.

Magee blew his top in a column: “Leahy is a ward politician and totally unfit.” Leahy didn’t get the post.

Some months later, Leahy, since defeated seeking reelection as a judge, saw Magee in a Las Vegas, New Mexico, hotel and began pummeling him.

Magee pulled out a pistol, shooting Leahy in the elbow but accidentally killing an innocent bystander.

Magee continued running the newspaper after it changed its name and frequency of publication. It would now be called The New Mexico State Tribune and would be published daily.

In 1923, Magee was seeking financial aid for the paper. He found it in the Scripps Howard chain, which bought a two-thirds interest in the paper. Four years later, Magee became an editor at the chain’s daily Oklahoma News.

Moving forward seven decades, E.W. Scripps, as the chain was retitled, placed the rebranded Albuquerque Tribune up for sale. When no new buyers stepped up, it closed its doors in February 2008.

McElroy was a reporter and an editor at the Tribune for 14 years, starting in 1977. He worked as an editor at the Rocky Mountain News and the Knoxville Sentinel, also Scripps papers. Thank McElroy for shining a light on Magee, and thank Magee for shining a spotlight on New Mexico’s shadowy political landscape with his column “Turning on the Light.” May their journalistic legacies never dim.