Dwight Sargent, journalist, leaves special legacy

Unless you’re in the history or journalism trades, you might never have heard of Elijah Parish Lovejoy or Dwight Emerson Sargent.

Though born more than 100 years apart, the two men had an awful lot in common. Both were the sons of ministers, both were raised in Maine, both attended Colby College and both were smitten early in life with the highest ideals of the nation’s journalistic tradition.

Sargent died Thursday in New Jersey at the age of 85. For more than 50 years, he had carved out a distinguished career in journalism, beginning as a reporter in Bar Harbor and ending as a national editorial writer for the Hearst newspaper chain in New York. But one of Sargent’s proudest and most satisfying achievements was having been the spirit behind an award that commemorates the first American to die for the freedom of the press, a Maine man whose valor he had always admired.

The Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award, presented at Colby College each year to a member of the newspaper profession who exemplifies the courage of its namesake, stands as Sargent’s finest legacy.

“Your thoughts and ideas have helped to shape the opinion of American readers for the past half-century,” said Colby President William Cotter when he recognized Sargent with a special citation in 1996. “But one of your most enduring creations is Colby’s proud tradition of remembering its famous 1826 graduate, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, by honoring print journalists who have emulated his dedication to press freedom.”

Sargent came up with the idea for the award in 1951, when he was a Neiman Foundation fellow at Harvard University. The Colby graduate had been in the newspaper business for 15 years by then, and had always felt a strong kinship with the brave Maine native who became the country’s first martyr to press freedom.

“I thought surely there should be a way of creating an historic salute to a Maine boy who gave his life for a basic liberty,” Sargent recalled when I interviewed him six years ago. “So I presented a proposal to the president of Colby, and the first award was presented a year later.”

Despite Lovejoy’s extreme sacrifice for First Amendment principles, the young crusader’s name was not widely known at the time outside journalistic circles. He was born in Albion, Maine, in 1802, the son of a Congregational minister. He attended Waterville College (now Colby) and Princeton Theological Seminary. After moving to Missouri, Lovejoy started a religious newspaper that he used as an editorial platform from which to speak out against slavery. When angry locals destroyed his printing presses and burglarized his home, Lovejoy moved to Illinois and continued writing his anti-slavery editorials. In 1837, after his presses were destroyed twice more, Lovejoy was dragged from his newspaper office and murdered by a band of outraged locals.

While Sargent never had to confront such hostility in his own long career, his life shared interesting parallels with the Mainer whose memory he would honor one day. Sargent was born in Massachusetts, into a Congregational minister’s family. The family moved to Jonesport, Maine, where Sargent’s father ministered to islanders with the Maine Sea Coast Missionary Society. After graduating from Jonesport-Beals High School in 1934, Sargent got his first newspaper job with the Island Daily News in Bar Harbor. By the time the paper folded, just a few months later, Sargent knew he would rather be a reporter than a clam digger.

“Although I do believe clam digging to be an honorable occupation,” he was quick to add.

Sargent studied economics at Colby, while also writing for the school newspaper and a humor magazine. He then worked at the Biddeford Daily Journal and moved on to a paper in New Bedford, Mass., before doing a hitch in the Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

“And for a year,” he recalled with a grin, “I was called Sergeant Sargent.”

In 1941, he married Elaine Cass. She was a minister’s daughter from Pembroke, Maine, and he was a minister’s son from Pembroke, Mass. In Portland, where the couple lived after the war, Sargent worked as a reporter for the Evening Express and later as editorial page editor for the Portland Press Herald.

In 1957, his publisher sent Sargent on an assignment that would influence the rest of his newspaper career. For 21/2 months, he traveled the world with a handful of reporters and editors and wrote daily dispatches about “anything and everything” for readers back in Maine. He reported from Japan, Taiwan and Burma. He interviewed Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in China and President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. Sargent would always remember those globe-trotting days as the best liberal-arts education a journalist could ever hope to receive.

“For the rest of my working life,” he said, “whenever I wrote about issues overseas I had a better picture of the place because I had been there.”

The Sargents and their three children – a daughter, Janet L. Sargent, is a copy editor for the Bangor Daily News – moved to New York in 1959. Sargent worked as editorial page editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and later served as curator of the Neiman Foundation at Harvard and as president of the Freedom Information Center at the University of Missouri. He worked as editorial chief for the Boston Herald before finishing his rewarding journalism career as national editorial writer for the Hearst newspaper chain.

Over the last 50 years, the journalism award he helped to found has been bestowed on some of the most famous names in print journalism, as well as on editors, writers and publishers whose renown did not spread much beyond their newspapers’ humble circulation areas. As Sargent liked to say, “The best part is that you don’t have to get shot covering a war to be recognized.”

And while Sargent never won a Lovejoy award himself, he took his greatest satisfaction in knowing that his youthful idea to honor a courageous Maine freedom fighter had become a lasting and venerable tradition in American journalism.

“That’s enough for me,” he said.