Edward J. Meeman Born: 1889 Died: 1966 Edward J. Meeman was a newspaper man and a conservationist who was born in Evansville, Indiana.  Immediately after graduation from Evansville High School in 1904 he took a job as a club reporter with the Evansville Press, which had been started by the Scripps organization.  He intended to earn money so that he could go to college, but he became so fascinated with newspaper work that he never did go to college.  He helped to establish the young newspaper and eventually became its managing editor.  After 14 years working at the Indiana newspaper, he moved to Tennessee where he was to spend another 45 years in newspaper work.

It was an expansion period of The Scripps-Howard newspapers when he was invited in 1921 by Robert Scripps to go to Knoxville, Tennessee, to start a newspaper, The Knoxville News.  The venture was successful and the News bought its competitor, The Sentinel, in 1926, whereupon Meeman became editor of the combined newspaper, The News-Sentinel, in 1926.

Meeman was a gentle but forceful champion of causes during his nearly 60 years as a newspaperman.  As editor of both The News and its successor The News-Sentinel, Meeman was a prime mover in the movement to establish Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  He was described by an historian of the park as “an instrumental figure in the Smoky Mountain park movement.”  He later recalled his experiences in the area:

In 1921 as a young man, I went to Knoxville to start a newspaper, the Knoxville News, for the Scripps-Howard organization.  To find recreation after the arduous, though pleasing work of launching a new newspaper, on weekends I took a little coach on a logging railroad up into the Great Smoky Mountains where there was a summer resort at Elkmont.  The railroad went up a gorge, and followed the course of the Little River, which tumbled clean and white-foamed over the great boulders which it had washed for centuries and eons.  Across the stream one could see masses of rhododendron and laurel.  Oak and pine and hemlock reached to the sky.  I was amazed to find the climate and vegetation of Canada in the heart of the sunny south. 

Meeman noted that the National Park Service had a strict rule that all lands for a national park had to be donated, not acquired by congressional appropriation.  They did this so that lands unworthy of national park status would not be wished on them through politics.

This situation called for a long and hard campaign that started in 1923 and did not end until 1940, when the park was dedicated.  The public had to be aroused and brought to one mind on the importance of the project to the region.  Donations had to be sought, legislators, governors, senators and philanthropists persuaded.  Enemies and rivals had to be defeated.

The campaign involved winning public support for the idea through a constant flow of photographic articles and editorials in the newspaper; encouraging the state legislature and city of Knoxville to commit funds to purchase the land; supporting a fund raising campaign to raise private donations; and encouraging the involvement of Arno B. Cammerer, at that time assistant director of the NPS, who was instrumental in persuading the Rockefeller family to commit $5 million to the project.  He summarized the Knoxville News-Sentinel’s role in the following terms:

The editor sat in the councils of the park movement and went with them on the field trips.  We reported the news, the activities of the citizens working for the park, accurately and zestfully.  We played it up.  When a crisis arose, we played that up.

When enemies struck at the park project, we hit back with hammer blows on our editorial page.  We praised the citizens who were working so unselfishly.  When skul duggery was afoot, we turned on a revealing light.  We exposed the machinations of the chief foe of the park movement, Attorney James B. Wright.