Background: Electoral-vote made a very snide reference to Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko and implied that he was guilty of some serious wrong. I ended up sending a protest and receiving a one sentence answer to google his name and AIDS. I did do that, but barely found anything wrong (a complaint in the Advocate, but no smoking gun really). I don’t know what Mike Royko did during his writing or personal life, but he is one of America’s greatest columnists. Frankly, it is getting a little too easy to accuse writers and comedians of being assholes or bigots or sexist pigs. By definition, writers provide color and personality and humor. Mike Royko’s track record stands for itself and outweighs a few complaints about one or two columns. See: this Cspan Book-talk discussion about Royko and this survey about his life and works two years after his death. Holy cow! It turns out that all his columns were digitized into a 2 million word ebook (Mike Royko: The Chicago Tribune Collection 1984-1997)! The price is a little high $11, but no matter how you look at it, you still are going to get your money’s worth.
I never lived in Chicago and, of course, never knew him personally. I only know Royko through his writings. After his death, I have read about half of Royko’s books with his columns, and for about 5 years in the early 1990s, I read his syndicated columns religiously. His columns were great fun and often perceptive. He used personas and characters to tell anecdotes (which was a pretty common technique at the time—see Jimmy Breslin, Art Buchwald, Molly Ivins and, even more recently, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who still do this on occasion).
My background is mainly in literature, and I confess it’s been at least a decade since I’ve read any of Royko’s columns. And I’m assuming that only his best writings were put into books. Over the years, a prolific columnist is going to say a lot of things that don’t date well or that stir up negative reactions at the time. But aside from a few off-color remarks, I saw absolutely nothing in Royko’s writings which would merit the charge of asshole, homophobe, whatever. He did use personas to voice some uncomfortable truths or attitudes. But any accomplished author knows how to use these personas ironically. The tone of his columns run the gamut, but I was struck overall by the humaneness of his approach to social problems and his sympathy for the little guy.
Perhaps one can dig up a statement by one of Royko’s characters and find something that would probably seem repellent to the modern sensibility. But that happens often for lots of respected authors. Especially when you are trying to be humorous or satirical or caustic, you run the risk of alienating audiences. Whenever a character somehow doesn’t ring true to the contemporary reader, somehow the charge surfaces that the author was a bigot. More often, it’s just that the character didn’t work or that one particular reader didn’t enjoy or disagreed with that characterization. At the very minimum, these kinds of misses can serve as interesting time capsules for language and attitudes. But I’m always glad that a columnist took chances.
I never lived in Chicago, so I’m open to the possibility that Royko was boorish in person or at local media appearances. But I don’t think it’s fair to compare Royko with today’s media blowhards. Perhaps he just played the part of public curmudgeon in typical H.L. Mencken style. But I regard many of his columns as literary gems. (And it’s scandalous that his books still haven’t been digitized). While looking up Royko’s Wikipedia page, I was horrified and saddened that Royko died at 64 years of age.
Perhaps there is information about his biography that I am not aware of. But denigrating Royko for using personas to create dialogues is no better than accusing columnist Alistair Cooke of being MAGA simply because he and Donald Trump shared a love for golf.
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