Ozarks First, the digital news platform of two television stations in Springfield, Missouri, examined the history of The Menace, a Missouri-based anti-Catholic weekly newspaper founded in 1911.
“By September 1913, circulation surpassed 1 million,” Kathryn Skopec wrote in her article, published yesterday. “In comparison, the New York World reported 383,000, the Chicago American 363,000 and the New York Times 250,000.”
Skopec reported that “from 1917 to 1919, internal disputes and America’s entry into World War I deepened the Menace’s decline.” The newspaper’s offices, based in the town of Aurora, were destroyed in a 1919 fire.