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The contribution of the Christian Science Monitor to the 1937 Chicago Exhibition was a display celebrating its first three decades in print, featuring letters of appreciation from major figures in U.S. political and intellectual life and popular culture. These letters-some solicited specifically for the occasion and some collected from the paper's archives-uniformly attested to the daily's high standards of journalistic objectivity and attentiveness to world affairs. As University of California President Robert Sproul stated, "I have been struck by the discrimination with which it eliminates from the news of the day those items which cater to pathological emotionalism, and by the thoroughness with which it reports matters of serious and lasting import." Reflecting on its merits relative to other news outlets, he added, "These comparisons have led me to wish that the spirit of intellectualism which guides the editorial policy of the Monitor might be more widely adopted in journalism."1 This reputation for fairness and a judicious avoidance of sensationalism followed the paper throughout its history, becoming a central feature of its brand. In 1970, a survey by Seminar magazine (a quarterly publication for newspapermen published by Copley Newspapers) ranked the Christian Science Monitor as the "fairest" newspaper in the United States with 32% believing it had a liberal bias and 41% a conservative one.2 Second place went to The Wall Street Journal, which survey respondents overwhelmingly considered to have a conservative bias (72%). That same year, Walter Cronkite wrote to editor Erwin Canham, describing the paper as "representative of the finest in independent, courageous and unbiased American journalism."3
That the Monitor achieved this kind of reputation-that as a paper owned by a long-embattled religious movement it somehow avoided the pitfalls of propagandizing or even the perception that it was engaged in such-was hardly inevitable when Mary Baker Eddy established it in 1908. At that time, Eddy was the founder and leader of one of the fastest growing and most controversial religious sects in the nation. Christian Science was founded (or, as Eddy frequently claimed, "discovered") in 1866 when after a lifetime of chronic illness and a brief period under the tutelage of mind curist Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy healed herself of a supposedly fatal injury through her capacity to realize the fundamentally...