Midwestern Beginnings

His parents' plan had been to give him a patriotic name. William Lawrence Shirer's father was a rising star in the ranks of the Republican Party in Chicago. His mother was related to the Lawrences of Massachusetts, one of the most prominent blue-blood families in the early history of New England. Had he been born a few hours earlier – on 22 February, the birthday of George Washington – baby William would have been called George. Instead, from his first breath, Seward and Elizabeth Shirer's elder son did things his own way, stubbornly declining to make his appearance until the wee hours of the morning of 23 February 1904. That dogged determination, a distinguishing characteristic of Shirer's personality, would be at once his greatest shortcoming and greatest strength. It would lead to no end of turmoil in his personal life, yet it would also serve him well in his chosen vocation. He would emerge as one of the foremost American journalists of the twentieth century and as one of the pioneers of news broadcasting.

In both regards, it is fitting that William Shirer was born in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago, that most quintessentially American of cities. The exact location was an upstairs bedroom of his family's South Greenwood Avenue home, a five-minute walk south of the University of Chicago campus. At the time, the leafy streetscapes here were prosperous and awash in hope. The same neighborhood today is much less upscale and decidedly less fashionable. Like the core areas of so many other big American cities, Woodlawn suffered through a slow, painful period of urban decay in the latter decades of the twentieth century. However, in 1904, with the effervescent President Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, America itself was different, and all things seemed possible. Especially in Chicago.

Barely a century removed from its beginnings as the remote military outpost, America's so-called "Second City" was a bustling metropolis of 1.8 million people. This was the great American melting pot personified. Three out of every four residents of the city were foreign-born or were first-generation Americans. Immigrants from the four corners of the globe lived alongside tens of thousands of black Americans from the Old South, former slaves and their sons and daughters, who had migrated north seeking jobs and freedom from the corrosive racial intolerance of the day.

As the hub of the nation's vast economic heartland, Chicago was a place where life's possibilities seemed as limitless as the Midwestern skies, and a man with pluck, luck, and drive could grab a handful of the future and of the American dream for himself. There was no mistaking that this was very much a man's world. Poet Carl Sandburg dubbed Chicago the "City of Big Shoulders," and the nickname was apt. Chicago's sprawling stockyards, factories, rail yards, and wharves were among America's busiest. Here was a gritty, blue-collar town. Yet, paradoxically, Chicago was also a place in which the arts – music, painting, and literature, especially – flourished, and where architecture rose to dizzying new heights, literally as well as figuratively.

Seward S. Shirer, the father of the baby William, was in his element here. An attorney by vocation, he was handsome, well-spoken, and personable. Seward was also bright, ambitious, determined, and upwardly mobile. The proud father recorded the details of the arrival of his first son in his diary: "Five minutes to three – Baby Boy born. Weighed 7¾ lbs. William Lawrence Shirer. Born 6500 Greenwood Avenue."

William, the child's given name, was that of his paternal grandfather. Lawrence, his middle name, was drawn from his mother's side of the family. "Billy," as his parents affectionately called him, was the middle child of three siblings. His older sister, Josephine, named after her maternal grandmother, had been born on 8 September 1900. A younger brother, John, arrived two years after him, on 29 April 1906.

William L. Shirer always remembered his Chicago childhood as being happy and secure; the Shirers were solidly middle class, a loving, stable, and closely knit family. Seward Shirer, the patriarch, seemed destined for success, perhaps even greatness, if a cruel and tragic turn of fate had not cut short his life.

In order to understand and appreciate who William Shirer was, we must look at his family history, which was the archetypal American immigrant experience of the day. His genealogical roots were in the Palatinate area of the Rhineland, in the southwest corner of modern Germany. The family historian, Donald Boyd, has speculated that the "Scheurers" – as the Shirers originally were known – traced their origins to an area near the German border with Switzerland, where the Scheurer surname is common. William Shirer's namesake uncle, William G., informed him in a 1931 letter, "While the family was pretty much of the farmer type, they were sufficiently elevated above the common herd so that the men ... were in the habit of holding minor offices under the Grand Duke [who ruled the area], such as Keepers of the Black Forest. Your great grandfather and his father before him did this sort of thing." William G. also speculated that a man named Scheurer who served as president of Switzerland during World War One may have been "a not far-distant relative of ours."

In one of the largest influxes of European settlers of the pre-Revolutionary era, as many as 30,000 Palatine Germans came to North America. Among them were Seward Shirer's grandparents, who bypassed the big cities of the Eastern Seaboard to travel up the Hudson River to Herkimer County, ninety miles northwest of Albany. Here Johann Frederick Scheurer, his wife...