Goddard was way beyond all that. He had an ion motor running inside a vacuum chamber while the NYT was telling him all that junk.
Check this out,
http://wildcat.phys.nwu.edu/classes/2002Fall/Phyx135-2/Projects/Ion_Propulsion/ion_propulsion/history.htm . Interestingly, I worked for a company called Ion Optics for some time. The founder, Dr. A. John Gale, was a contributor and performed research into ion propulsion for NASA in the '70s. We designed ion guns for milling optics.
You may be mistaken in the fact that Goddard actually had a working ion device as he died in 1945. I searched the records and found no such info but in the URL above it does mention that he believed that ion propulsion was a possibility. Fact is again German trained scientists did much of the early work. BTW, A. John Gale was a partner in High Voltage Engineering, a company founded by Dr. Robert van de Graf, a European. This company was the force behind making semi-conductors uniform (hence cheap and plentiful) by doping the silicon using ion implanting. They were hired by Bell Labs for this effort.