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The most consequential editorship in Fort Wayne's press history belongs to Jesse Austin Greene (1867–1923), and it belongs — the point matters, and is sometimes gotten wrong — to the afternoon paper. Greene was born in Indianapolis on March 3, 1867, the son of a Methodist minister, educated at Wabash College, where he took Phi Beta Kappa honors. He taught school in Missouri, then entered newspapers: editor of the Crawfordsville Journal in 1898, editor of the Terre Haute Tribune from 1902, and in 1904 a purchaser of an interest in the Fort Wayne News. He edited the News, and then the merged Fort Wayne News and Sentinel after 1918, for nearly two decades — building, in Peggy Seigel's summary for the Indiana Magazine of History, one of northeast Indiana's largest newspapers into a Progressive-era bully pulpit against vice, corruption, and bigotry, its editorials set off, in the phrase of the time, like "editorial dynamite."
When the Ku Klux Klan moved into Fort Wayne in 1921, Greene made his paper its declared enemy. From the fall of 1921 until his death two years later, the News and Sentinel condemned the Klan's "intolerance, prejudice and hatred" in a sustained editorial assault, assuring Klan organizers that Fort Wayne would not tolerate their "dangerous" organization, which Greene named a "menace to Americanism." He wrote as the Klan was organizing across Indiana toward the height of its political power in the state, and he wrote against the current of his own party and much of his readership; Seigel's study credits the campaign with helping slow the Klan's rise in the city. Greene died in October 1923, aged fifty-six, after a long illness, with the campaign still running. The tributes filled his own paper on October 16, 1923, and came from across the state — Muncie publisher George B. Lockwood called him "one of the brightest bravest and best newspaper men Indiana has ever known" — and a generation later Fort Wayne journalist Clifford Ward still remembered him to the Quest Club as a brilliant writer. A note on the record: Greene's paper was the News, and after the merger the News and Sentinel — never the Journal Gazette, to which his editorship is occasionally misassigned. The scholarly settlement of the point, and its correction elsewhere in this history, is documented in the note filed with this chapter.
Sources: Peggy Seigel, "A 'Fearless Editor' in a Changing World: Fort Wayne's Jesse Greene," Indiana Magazine of History 113.4 (December 2017), pp. 309–350 (the News and Sentinel attribution; the 1921–1923 campaign; the October 16, 1923 tributes); Herbert G. Bredemeier, "Colorful Journalism in Fort Wayne," Quest Club (1966) (Greene's career dates; Clifford Ward's recollection).