Robert Ewing

Who was Robert Ewing?

Robert Wilson Ewing, I, also known as Colonel Ewing, was a prominent newspaper journalist, editor, and publisher and political figure, primarily in Louisiana, in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century.

Ewing was born in Mobile, Alabama, to James Lindsay Ewing, a cotton merchant, and the former Martha Hunter. At the age of thirteen, he was a messenger for the Western Union Telegraph Company. At seventeen, he was a telegrapher for the Associated Press. In 1879, he helped establish and managed the Mobile division of the Union Telegraph Company. After he joined a strike of the Order of Telegraphers union, Ewing was blacklisted in Mobile. He therefore relocated to New Orleans, where he managed the former Morning Chronicle, a journal owned by the conservative Democrat Henry J. Hearsey, who also published the New Orleans Daily States.

In 1888, Ewing became affiliated with the reform, anti-machine faction of city politics. He served in the administration of Mayor William Shakespeare as an innovative city electrician and superintendent of the police telegraphy and fire-alarm systems.