Читать книгу The Art of Democracy - Jim Cullen - Страница 14

For all their differences (which at some points in their fifty-year relationship led to bitter enmity), Thomas Jefferson and John Adams shared a belief that the American Revolution had been waged to replace a corrupt established aristocracy with what they called a “natural” one. In such a world, the plowman and the professor would have equal standing before the law, and there was the chance—even the hope—that any plowman could, by dint of effort, become a professor. It was always assumed, however, that the professor, whatever his origins, would lead the plowman.

Over the course of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, this last assumption became increasingly difficult to take for granted. The rapid growth of the Union through the addition of new states, many of which lacked elites comparable to the monied, privileged Federalist faction of 1789-1800, created new democratic pressures. So did increasing agitation by reformers and working people back East who were seeking to organize the growing numbers of men who lacked the vote because they did not own property. Many of these people flocked to the banner of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican party, which offered a vision of an agrarian republic rooted in equality. Yet even before the last dyed-in-the-wool Jeffersonian, James Monroe, left office in 1825, many Democratic-Republicans realized that their vision of a natural aristocracy was ebbing. The increasing prominence of Andrew Jackson—a (pseudo) “plowman” with no interest in becoming a “professor”—following his victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and culminating in his election to the presidency in 1828, was taken by many as emblematic of a new breed of frank, colorful, decisive Americans ready to take destiny into their own hands. Jackson, a wealthy, authoritarian slaveholder, was in some ways an unlikely champion of the Little Man. But even if the movement he supposedly represented was far more limited than its supporters then and since have claimed, a bona fide reorganization of politics was taking place, one whose effects would subsequently ripple outward.

This political reorganization is clearly reflected in the transformation of newspaper publishing over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. As discussed in Chapter 1, newspapers got off to an uncertain start in the colonies, and it was not until the eighteenth century that the industry had securely established itself in the cities. The Stamp Act of 1765, which required all printed documents to use a stamped paper that carried a special tax, hit newspapers especially hard, and their publishers played an important role in galvanizing opposition to British rule. There were thirty-seven papers in the colonies at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, twenty of which survived paper shortages, difficulties in gathering information, and British occupation. One of these, the Pennsylvania Evening Post (published in Philadelphia), became the first daily.⁴

By the turn of the nineteenth century, U.S. newspapers had a primarily mercantile readership. In addition to carrying domestic politics and news from abroad, they featured shipping schedules and paid announcements by wholesalers seeking to sell imported goods to retailers. Indeed, their very names—Boston’s Daily Mercantile Advertiser, Baltimore’s Daily Commercial Advertiser, Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Packet—suggest their economic (and often maritime) orientation. These papers were generally sold in yearly subscriptions, and individual copies were relatively expensive.

By the early nineteenth century, however, the political functions of the press were becoming increasingly important, as politics itself became a kind of bruising competitive sport. The schism between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans in the 1790s was an unexpected and unpleasant development for a governing elite that professed antipathy toward sectarianism. As a result, many of their disputes were not played out directly but by proxy in the press. “Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion, our churches will be prostrated, and some famous prostitute, under the title of Goddess of Reason, will preside in the Sanctuaries now devoted to the Most High,” claimed one Federalist organ during the campaign of 1800, using rhetoric that was typical of the time.⁵ Jeffersonians, it should be added, gave as good as they got.

The growing scale of newspaper publishing, and the new prominence given editorial matter, led to the rise of an important new figure in U.S. politics and culture: the editor. Previously, newspapers had been small operations run by printers. Now, however, there was a new premium on political and entrepreneurial savvy. Party operatives with access to capital became central to the evolving direction of journalism, and parties became key funding sources and exerted tight control over editorial direction.⁶

The founding of the New York Evening Post by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 illustrates these patterns. The pre-eminent member of the Federalist opposition after the election of his arch-rival Jefferson, Hamilton raised $10,000 from some wealthy patrons, and established the Post as a counterweight to the Jeffersonian American Citizen. Hamilton did not actually edit the Post himself, but he was essentially the paper’s editorial director, using it to advance the Federalist political program (and writing articles under a pseudonym) until his death in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. Ironically, Hamilton’s hand-picked editor later turned the editorship over to William Cullen Bryant, who became a Jacksonian Democrat committed to overturning Hamilton’s political and economic legacy (embodied most concretely by the Bank of the United States). Still more ironic was the Post’s later incarnation as a working-class tabloid that sought to sell papers with tart headlines. By the end of the twentieth century, it had become the longest running continuous daily newspaper in the United States, but has also moved a long way from Hamilton’s original vision.⁷

The Post’s success anticipated an important newspaper tradition that emerged in full flower during Jackson’s presidency: the mass-based daily catering to a working-class readership. Many of the strategies that mark contemporary tabloids—human interest stories, a fascination with crime and sex, the use of vernacular language, and a declared indifference to respectable opinion—can be traced back to the penny dailies of the 1830s. These newspapers were among the most important forms of popular culture in the nineteenth century, and a key influence on (and distributor of) such forms as dime novels, which will be discussed below.

The first successful example of this kind of journalism was the New York Sun, a daily founded by printer-turned-editor Benjamin Day. “The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY, and at the same time afford an advantageous medium for advertising,” he proclaimed in his inaugural issue of September 3, 1833. To achieve this end, the Sun sold for one cent—one sixth the price of the mercantile or political papers sold by subscription. Moreover, Day followed the British practice of selling copies at a discount to boys who in turn sold them on the street. This greatly enhanced the paper’s circulation, which reached 2,000 by November 1834, 5,000 by early 1835, and 15,000 by the middle of that year.⁸

The Sun sold in such quantities because it defined “the news of the day” in terms that made sense to an ever growing laboring class of immigrants and rural migrants, for whom international trade and even partisan politics were largely irrelevant. Certainly, the paper catered to advertisers, much to the chagrin of readers who learned the hard way about the dangers of buying fraudulent products from the array of merchants who saw opportunities in a market that was just beginning to emerge. Still, a paper could not sell advertising unless it attracted readers, and Day did so with a mix of human interest stories, police reporting, and exposés of churches, courts, banks, and government.

Contemporary accounts make it clear that the Sun—as well as the Philadelphia Public Ledger (1836), the Boston Daily Times (1836), the Baltimore Sun (1837), and a wave of other papers that sprang up along the Eastern seaboard—created a vast new readership. As with so much else in popular culture in this period, the center of the newspaper world was New York. Surveying the scene, the Ledger described an environment that clearly excited the writer in its novelty:

In the cities of New York and Brooklyn, containing a population of 300,000, the daily circulation of the penny papers is not less than 70,000. This is nearly sufficient to place a newspaper in the hand of every man in the two cities, and even every boy old enough to read. These papers are to be found in every street, lane, and alley; in every hotel, tavern, counting-house, shop, etc. Almost every porter and dray-man, while not engaged in his occupation, may be seen with a paper in his hands.⁹

The Sun’s success was soon matched, and then eclipsed, by the New York Herald, founded by James Gordon Bennett in 1835. The Herald borrowed many of the Suns techniques, but took them a step further, as when Bennett made the trial of a young clerk for the murder of a prostitute—two people of no social standing—into a gripping national saga. The paper was also particularly aggressive in attacking church leaders, as well as its own rivals. Bennett’s decision to raise the price of the Herald to two cents in its second year turned out to be a savvy investment, for it allowed him to expand and to experiment with new techniques, ranging from buying a fleet of boats to meet news-bearing vessels from Europe to developing his business reporting to the point where it was competitive with the mercantile papers.¹⁰

Indeed, the Herald’s success was so great that it inspired attacks from the elite press, which in 1840 declared a “moral war” that was joined by papers in Boston, Philadelphia, and even England. Sinking to the level they supposedly deplored, these papers excoriated the Herald and its editors for “reckless depravity.” and “moral leprosy” Barely concealed beneath their fear of an encroaching rival was a growing concern over the direction of American journalism.¹¹

Meanwhile, the expansion of penny newspapers along the Eastern seaboard—and their steady penetration westward—was greatly facilitated by technological developments. The first penny papers were printed on hand-operated presses, but mechanically powered steam and cylinder machines soon allowed for a tremendous growth in productive potential. Moreover, the relationship between newspaper culture and technology was a reciprocal one: new technologies created new markets, and new markets spurred the development of more efficient presses, paper manufacturing, and distribution methods.¹²

Probably the most important technological development in this period was the telegraph. Building on the work of other scientists and inventors, Samuel Morse, a New York professor of art and design, gave the first public demonstrations of his new device in 1838. Although many early observers were impressed, it took a while before the telegraph’s tremendous potential—the opportunity to communicate instantly across space—overcame early skepticism and logistical problems. Journalistic adoption of the telegraph was pioneered by the Baltimore Sun, which used an experimental line between that city and Washington to report on the presidential nomination of James Polk at the Democratic National Convention in 1844. Baltimore was also strategically located on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad line, which made it a key communications center in the years that followed. The outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846 also stimulated the rapid expansion of telegraphy as a means of communication. In the first week of 1848, Bennett claimed to have spent over $12,000 for 79,000 words of telegraphic content in the Herald.¹³

As has so often happened in the annals of technological revolution, the telegraph opened possibilities that soon became severely constricted by commercial interests. Samuel Morse was desperate to sell his new invention to the government, which he hoped would build and operate its own lines for the public good. The government refused, failing to recognize the telegraph’s potential and fearing waste and fraud. A series of companies that wanted to exploit—and control—the telegraph for profit then rushed into the vacuum. In a pattern that would be repeated throughout the next 150 years, the result was a bruising financial battle over how to organize the new communications technology and whom it should benefit. In the case of telegraphy, this at first meant the proliferation of duplicate lines, many of poor quality, and rampant speculation. By the late 1840s, however, three organized interests had emerged: those who owned the lines, those who operated them, and those who prepared the information to be sent along them. In 1849, a consortium of six New York daily papers formed the Harbor News Association, later to be called the Associated Press. AP brought telegraph operators into the organization, but it passed up the opportunity to buy telegraph lines, leaving that part of the field to others. Beginning in the 1850s, the Western Union Telegraph Company began to buy and build lines, until it eventually became a monopoly. After the Civil War, AP and WU formed a communications axis (a matter to be discussed in Chapter 3).

Unlike the political press, the penny papers generally disavowed party affiliation. Nevertheless, they did become involved in the political issues of day, and they reflected the powerful, if incomplete, egalitarian currents that suffused the Jacksonian era. Indeed, many newspaper editors participated in an artisanal radicalism (a kind of proletarian politics with a Jeffersonian spin) that marked a class order still in flux. Three years before founding the Sun, for example, Benjamin Day was briefly listed as one of six directors of the Daily Sentinel, a political arm of the Workingmen’s Party. The party, which had shown surprising strength in the New York municipal elections in 1829 and which published a weekly paper for fifteen years, suggested the rich possibilities for radical politics that would resurface periodically in the decades before the Civil War.¹⁴

By the mid-1830s, much of this vitality had been absorbed by the new Democratic Party, which had become a broad-based coalition of Northern urban workers and wealthy Southern agrarians deeply distrustful of the nascent capitalists who would soon be known as Whigs. Men like Day, who had trimmed their radical sails in the process of starting their own businesses, nonetheless retained a deep distrust of financial elites. To some extent this reflected their personal frustrations in securing capital while upper-class newspapers could serenely count on the help of banks, especially the hated Federalist-founded Bank of the United States (which Jackson eventually destroyed by refusing to renew its charter). To some extent too, the penny press’s political stance was tailored to the perceived needs of its audience. There can be little doubt, in any case, that there was an important democratic component at its core.

Unfortunately, the coalition between Northern urban workers and Southern agrarians was an unstable compound. Rhetoric notwithstanding, politicians like Jackson’s successor Martin Van Buren probably had more in common with his Whig rivals than the working people he presumably represented (his power base was tellingly known as the Albany Regency). Moreover, the rich Southern planters’ and poor Northern workers’ shared fear of Whig domination created a powerful, and lasting, institutionalized foundation for racism. Both Whigs and Democrats realized that slavery was a bulwark against the expansion of free market, free labor capitalism, and many Democrats (and even some Whigs) therefore saw it as a positive good. In the insecure labor market of Northern cities, white workers saw free blacks as a threat to their job security, while slavery gave them a twisted source of psychic satisfaction in their whiteness. One of the most unlikely partnerships in working-class history was the alliance between the fiercely pro-slavery theorist John Calhoun and the rabble-rousing, Bowery-based politician Mike Walsh.¹⁵

It was an alliance that dismayed many Democratic voters and newspaper readers, and further fractured the party into abolitionist (“Barnburner”) and anti-abolitionist (“Hunker”) wings. Into the breach rushed such new Whiggish papers as the New York Tribune, founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley, and the New York Times, which was launched in 1851 but whose Olympian reputation was still a half-century away. Drawing on many of the same techniques as the Democratic penny press, these political papers signalled the formation of a new political order that would finally crystallize with Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860.

In New York, at least, resistance to the racist tendencies of the Democratic Party and its papers also came from the African-American press. The first black paper in the country was Freedom’s Journal, founded in 1827, followed shortly thereafter by the Colored American. These papers were largely oriented to the free black elite of ministers, teachers, and other professionals, and focused on religious issues, opposition to black colonization of Africa, and the prevention of white mob violence. They also debated the propriety of black participation in such white celebrations as the Fourth of July, and condemned black patronage of parades and shows that drew on racist stereotypes. At times this concern for the image of the community shaded into class bias, as when forms of religious worship among poor black people, such as the highly expressive “ring shout,” were criticized as undignified.¹⁶ Yet the existence of papers like the Colored American suggests how, by the Jacksonian era, even relatively small constituencies were able to support their own publications.

Meanwhile, the mass press continued to proliferate. By 1860, Illinois had over 400 newspapers, with eleven dailies in Chicago alone. St. Louis had ten. And Cincinnati, an emerging cultural center, had twenty-six monthlies, semi-monthlies, and quarterlies. In addition, while penny, mercantile, and political papers remained important, other journalistic forms were emerging and blending with them. Sunday papers, which were first issued as extras during the Revolutionary War, became increasingly common in the early nineteenth century. Some were published on Saturdays for Sunday reading, such as Philadelphia’s Saturday Evening Post. They included news along with pieces of a magazine-like tenor. Story papers, which published fiction, poetry, and essays in a newspaper format, flourished after 1840. Pictorial weeklies, which became tremendously popular before and during the Civil War, blurred the lines even further. This is not to say there were no magazines in the modern sense of the word. On the whole, however, they tended to be aimed at the emerging class of merchants, professionals, and their families.¹⁷

There was much to dislike about the penny press: its habits of manufactured outrage and sexual pandering; its aggressive support of Jacksonian Indian removal in the South and West, instead of policies of toleration (or even the less brutal National Republican policy of assimilation); its rabid enthusiasm for the Mexican War in the name of Manifest Destiny; and its often tacit—and occasionally explicit—support of slavery. All too often in U.S. history, those with the most egalitarian class politics have had the worst race politics (and vice-versa), a pattern that these newspapers amply document. Yet this connection was complicated. Important figures in the Workingmen’s Party, most notably the irrepressible writer, lecturer, and reformer Frances (“Fanny”) Wright, were principled abolitionists, and the realities of interracial cooperation remained alive throughout the rest of the century (particularly in the early Populist movement). If the early mass media was limited in spreading its egalitarian ethos, it nonetheless represented an important first step in the eventual development of a diverse popular culture.