Webb Miller: From Cass County to the Killing Fields

Long before television news, a Michigan reporter brought the world's conflicts home to American readers.

BY KEN BRADFORD // POSTED OCTOBER 15, 2025

The first page of an autobiography can be like the gangway to a river cruise.

You're starting on a journey you don't control. Someone will take you somewhere, decide what you see and tell stories that are not up for discussion.

You don't get to hold up a hand and say, “How about this instead?”

I started on such a trip after talking with a docent at the Dowagiac Area History Museum. I was curious about an exhibit featuring journalist Webb Miller, and he recommended Miller's 1936 book, I Found No Peace. It starts as follows:

“I was born forty-four years ago on a run-down tenant farm near the tiny hamlet of Pokagon, Michigan, five miles from our metropolis, the little town of Dowagiac, with its 5,000 inhabitants.”

He recalled, as a youngster, being ground down by the menial work required in dead-broke families. In his worst moments, he would hear train whistles and dream of a more glamorous life writing stories anywhere else.

I felt an immediate kinship. Like him, I grew up on a farm, working a lot of hard, joyless hours. My ticket out, like his, was going to be as a writer.

He wanted to write, in part, because authors in the early 20th century were celebrities. His was the generation of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, whose characters rose from meek beginnings through pluck and determination.

Miller had a passing acquaintance with Ring Lardner, who abandoned nearby Niles on his path toward national renown with his humorous sports articles.

Miller applied at the South Bend Tribune, was rejected, and he left our dreary area for Chicago at age 20. By the time he was 30, readers were reading his stories distributed nationwide by United Press International.

At his zenith, Webb Miller was one of the best-known journalists in America. He had hit it big.

At his first stop, the Chicago American, his specialty was crime stories. He had plenty of sordid material there. Shy by nature, he pushed himself to go beyond what other reporters were willing to do.

An example: The city was buzzing with gossip because a daughter of the Morton Salt Co. tycoon had eloped with a ne'er-do-well. Miller bullied his way onto the Morton estate, where he was beaten, and nearly tarred, feathered and killed before a sheriff intervened.

Soon after, Miller left Chicago to venture out as an independent journalist. He high-tailed it to Texas, where the U.S. Army was pursuing Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

Reporters had heard that three of Villa's men had been captured, and they were to face a firing squad at daybreak. Miller reckoned it could be a huge story if he watched it. And in fact, Miller's account contains some of the finest writing I've ever found. It pains me to spoil it by excerpting. But as this shortened story goes, the doomed men were a Colonel Garcia and two teen-age boys.

The first blast of firing squad bullets killed the two younger men. Garcia was left gravely wounded, twitching in the dirt.

“Shoot me there … there … through the hand, brothers,” Garcia pleaded to the squad, patting his breast over his heart with his left hand. The squad inserted fresh cartridges … Another volley. Still Garcia lived. His mouth worked and his leg quivered. His hand still patted the spot over his heart. A third volley. The crumpled figure lay still.

We walked silently back to our automobiles. The bodies lay huddled against the wall. “God, how I need a drink,” said the International News Service correspondent. We finished the cognac. I felt ill. I couldn't find words to convey the casual horror of the scene.

“I've seen men die,” said one of the reporters, “but never as bravely as that colonel.”

“Yes,” said the consul general sadly. “Mexicans know how to die.”

Miller's pursuit of violent death continued. President Woodrow Wilson was declaring war on Germany, and that's where Miller wanted to be next.

Later, he lamented that his war coverage was done primarily from examining maps at outposts miles away from the front-line trenches. He craved to get closer, even though he was repulsed by the broken and bleeding bodies returning daily to headquarters.

When he returned to Verdun in 1926, the enormity of the slaughter of 1,050,000 soldiers there finally sank in.

"Even after eight years, a few steps off the beaten path anywhere revealed pieces of skulls, bones protruding from rotted shoes, bits of rusted rifles and machine guns, shrapnel-punctured steel helmets, sodden scraps of uniforms."

Miller was based mainly in Europe after the war and continued to make a name for himself by interviewing kings and queens as well as political leaders who were in the next new wave.

For example, his book explores the eerie control that Mahatma Gandhi had over his adherents in 1930 during their non-violent uprising against British rule in India. He also followed another leader, Benito Mussolini, who persuaded a different nation, Italy, to address its grievances by inflicting cruel bloodshed on others.

Miller's travels took him to the Irish civil war, turbulent Jerusalem, and then warn-torn Ethiopia. He became an expert on the rise of Nazism.

Finally, he came back to Dowagiac to write a book. And what did he say that he had learned?

He saw a world where fewer people could follow their dreams. It's logical, he said, that as the world's population increases, so does the need for more autocratic rule. In the early days of automobiles, cars were so few that there was no need for traffic laws. More cars. More rules. More people. More restrictions on freedoms.

He also was predicting a second world war, having watched nations worldwide continue to stockpile armaments and cultivate grievances.

“Meanwhile, the plows of peasants turn up rotted corpses from the last war, and tens of thousands of pitiful wrecks of men drag out hopeless lives in wheel chairs in military hospitals.”

These stories can be eye-opening for people like me. The historians who wrote our textbooks didn't bother much with Europe, Asia or Africa between the Great Wars. All we got was America's Great Depression.

It's been almost 90 years since he wrote this book, and it's unfair to make judgments using today's standards. Dowagiac is right to be proud of Webb Miller, who rose to international prominence from humble beginnings.

But there's something very sad about his personal journey as well. The train whistle that led him away from rural Cass County could have taken him anywhere. He chose to satisfy his curiosities by traveling to faraway lands and witnessing the cruelest work of mankind.

Nearly everywhere he went, he was looking for a war.

After Miller wrote the autobiography in 1936, he returned to a roiling Europe. He made one final visit to Dowagiac in July 1939 after an exhausting cross-country tour of America with British King George and Queen Elizabeth.

Months later, he was back in London, covering the blitzkrieg of World War II. The official story was that he was returning from an assignment at the British Parliament when he exited a train car by the wrong door. He stepped in front of a train going the opposite direction and was killed instantly.

An alternative account that made the rounds was that Miller had made enemies within the British government and was murdered by its secret agents.

One version has more drama than the other. But either way, dead at age 49, he still had not found peace. He had spent his life looking in the wrong direction.