Mildred Mighell was 21 years old and settling into her first job as a journalist at her hometown newspaper in Aurora, Illinois, when an unusual request came from her alma mater: Please return to Ann Arbor and manage The Michigan Daily.
It was the fall of 1918, and the U-M campus was void of men because of a global war. That included the Daily staff, which was primarily men.
One of those heading off to war was Clarence Roeser, who was slated to become the Daily’s top editor that fall. But his enlistment led the Board in Control of Student Publications to ask Mighell to lead the paper.
Mighell’s new position as managing editor, paying $25 a week, made her the first female editor of The Michigan Daily, which was founded in 1890.
She was proud of her Daily team.
“This staff has pulled the Daily through the hardest two months of its existence,” she said, “and without any boasting, they are putting out far and away the best of the country’s college papers at the present time.
“If they keep up the pace and the campus continues to show a spirit of helpfulness and willingness to overlook our mistakes, we are going to make a record in spite of war times.”
Unfortunately, Mighell ended up making headlines herself during her time as editor.
In early 1919, the Student Publications Board faculty chair learned that three reporters, two men and a woman, had been playing after-hours poker for money. The “great poker scandal” snowballed. Reports of the number of gambling students grew, inaccurately, from three to 300. More reports claimed, again in error, that the students were playing strip poker.
Just a week earlier, Congress had adopted the Prohibition amendment banning alcohol, and the air was rife with priggishness.
“Everywhere the straightest-laced and most censorious were riding high,” Mighell recalled years later.
“The Board had me in for questioning,” she said. “Why hadn’t I reported the incident at once so the offenders could be suspended? Why hadn’t I, at least, ‘taken a broomstick to them’?”
The board held Mighell responsible for the gambling and demoted her to editorial writer, just as Roeser returned from the military to resume his role as top editor.
The three reporters were punished. Mighell was soon gone, from the masthead and from Ann Arbor.
She would go on to work in publications for a bit, then later founded the World Federalist Society, which advocated for a global system of governance.
— Adapted from a story written by Kim Clarke for the LSA Women in History series
