C.
P. Connolly was born in 1863. He moved to Montana when he was twenty-one
where he became a lawyer. An outspoken critic of corrupt business
activities, he had an article about what was going on in Montana in
McClure's Magazine in 1906. The
Story of Montana, was followed by The
Fight of the Copper Kings.
The success of these articles persuaded Connolly to become a full-time
journalist. He wrote mainly for Collier's
Weekly, but contributed material to most of the country's
leading magazines. As a lawyer, Connolly was very careful about checking
his facts. When one businessman, Caruthers Ewing accused him of writing
articles that were "false and misleading", Connolly successful
sued him for libel.
(1)
Mark Sullivan, editor of Collier's Weekly,
commenting on the work of C. P. Connolly.
Whenever in Collier's you find a passion for the sacredness of a fact,
that is likely to have been written by Connolly. His zest in life
was in finding the facts of a complex situation and most of the waking
hours of his existence were spent in that absorption, in a concentration
if all his faculties on comparing and testing and verifying, in separating
the ragged shadows from the solid substance of truth, and finally
in reducing the facts to what they were as God made them.
(2) In his book, The Era
of the Muckrakers, C. C.
Regier wrote about C. P. Connolly's career (1932)
Whereas most of the muckrakers
began as journalists, Connolly had been a business man and a lawyer,
and it was the success of the Montana articles that led him to adopt
a literary career. He wrote for various magazines, but especially
for Collier's, for which he reported the Steunenberg murder, the McNamara
trial, and the Leo Frank case.
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