flag outside the Tribune building, with the 13th star (representing Rhode Island) removed; he relented after he was advised that alteration of the American flag was unlawful. He was also an America First non-interventionist who strongly opposed entering World War II "to rescue the British Empire". He famously published the "Victory Program," a military plan that FDR had ordered in the summer of 1941 to prepare the United States for possible entry into World War II. It had been leaked to him by US Senator Burton K. Wheeler. The publication was on December 4, 1941, only three days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The controversy it stirred died off quickly after the December 7 attack. In June 1942, the Tribune published an article that indicated that the Americans had broken Japanese codes, the 1942 Chicago Tribune incident. As a publisher he was very innovative. McCormick was a 25 percent owner of the Tribune's 50,000 watt radio station, which was purchased in 1924; he named it WGN, the initials of the Tribune'''s motto, the "World's Greatest Newspaper". He also established the town of Baie-Comeau, Quebec in 1936 and constructed a paper mill and a hydroelectric power plant there named McCormick Dam to generate electricity for the mill. McCormick carried on crusades against various local, state, and national politicians, gangsters and racketeers, labor unions, prohibition and prohibitionists, Wall Street, the East and Easterners, Democrats, the New Deal and the Fair Deal, liberal Republicans, the League of Nations, the World Court, the United Nations, British imperialism, socialism, and communism. Besides Roosevelt, his chief targets included Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson and Illinois Governor Len Small. Some of McCormick's personal crusades were seen as quixotic (such as his attempts to reform spelling of the English language) and were parodied in political cartoons in rival Frank Knox's Chicago Daily News. Knox's political cartoonists, including Cecil Jensen, derided McCormick as "Colonel McCosmic", a "pompous, paunchy, didactic individual with a bristling mustache and superlative ego." In 1943, he told an audience he helped plan a defence against an invasion from Canada at the end of World War I. In June 1947, he gave a 100-year birthday party for the Tribune that included a fireworks show called "the most colossal show since the Chicago fire." Other publications noted that everything about the celebration was called "the world's greatest". Time magazine editorialized that "the Tribune has been