The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878

THE PRESS GANG

THE PRESS GANG

Newspapers and Politics, 1865 – 1878

MARK WAHLGREN SUMMERS

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill & London

© 1994 The University of

North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the

United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the

Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on

Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Summers, Mark W. (Mark Wahlgren), 1951–

The press gang : newspapers and politics, 1865-1878/

by Mark Wahlgren Summers.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2140-3 (cloth : alk. paper). —

ISBN 0-8078-4446-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Journalism—United States—History—19th century. 2. Press and politics—

United States—History—19th century. 3. United States—Politics and

government—1865-1883. I. Title.

PN4864.S86 1994

071′.3′09034—dc20 93-36489

CIP

Mark Wahlgren Summers, professor of history at the University of Kentucky, is author of many books, including The Era of Good Stealings.

98  97  96  95  94      5  4  3  2  1

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.

This book is dedicated to my most beloved Susan,

and to my parents,

Clyde and Evelyn Summers,

whose passion for justice would rival

Henry V. Boynton’s.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Reporters’ Initials and Pseudonyms

Introduction

One. The Lords of the Linotype

1. Wonderful! Wonderful!

2. I Want to Give Those Fellows Hell!

3. Organs out of Tune

4. I Am the Paper!: The Independents

Two. All the News That Fits

5. Despotism Tempered by Assassination

6. A General System of Exchange, or, A D-d Bad Beat

7. Mr. Striker Goes to Washington

8. The Capital Offenses of Donn Piatt

Three. News Management Made Easy

9. A Beautiful Smiler Came in Our Midst: News Management

10. A Little Attention from James A. Garfield

11. The Silent Smoker in the Hands of the Foe

Four. News in Need of Reconstruction

12. A Perfect Hell: The Southern Road to Pike’s Pique

13. Carpetbagger Chronicles

14. An Extraordinary State of Affairs at Vicksburg

Five. The Breakup of the Press Gang, 1872–1877

15. The Worst Thing Yet! 1872

16. The Wild Animals Loose: The Panic of 1874

17. James G. Blaine Beats the Rap

18. The Hayesociated Press

Epilogue. Final Edition

Notes

Bibliography: Newspapers, Magazines, and Manuscript Collections

Index

Illustrations

The Third-Term Panic

A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion

Red Hot!

J. G. B. Jun. [James Gordon Bennett, Jr.], in His Property Room

A Brace of Dead Ducks

Wilkes Booth the Second

Every Public Question with an Eye Only to the Public Good

Diogenes Still Looking—We Are the Gentlemen You Are in Search Of

George Alfred Townsend (Gath)

Hang Yourself for a Pastime

Still Another Outrage

The Power of the Press

Upon What Meat Doth This Our Caesar Feed That He Hath Grown So Great?—Daily Press Question

Advertising for an Assassin of the President of the United States

Another Outrage

We Are on the Home Stretch!

There It Is Again!

How Many Times Shall Caesar Bleed in Sport

The Present Portentous Aspect of the Political Heavens

Mr. Blaine Showing His Hand

Fire and Water Make Vapor

Fun for the Press, but Death to Public Men

L’Homme Qui Rit

Acknowledgments

In tendering thanks, let me begin by rounding up the usual suspects: libraries whose courtesy and friends whose unsparing kindness made this book better than it could have been otherwise. In every archive, the staff worked diligently and energetically to roust out materials that I needed, though, as ever, those running the manuscripts division in the Library of Congress did the most, and with patience and humor. As usual, my chums at the University of Kentucky were trumps. Among those who pored over the chapters and red-penciled purple prose were Jeremy Popkin, Thomas Cogswell, David Hamilton, and David Olster. Besides some shrewd suggestions for ways that the manuscript might expand its focus, Jeremy did what he could to shorten the final work substantially. William R. Childs, at Ohio State, made more sense in his comments than much of the writing he was criticizing, and out at Arizona State, Brooks Simpson applied his expertise on General Grant’s career to that particular chapter. Still more let me hail Donald Ritchie, whose book on a similar subject might have made him incline to behave as a competitor. Instead, he welcomed the company; many short hours we spent swapping stories about the press gang and treating the reporters with all the cynicism they bestowed on public officials. His glance at the manuscript left it improved in quite significant ways. My appreciation for the painstaking copyediting of Stevie Champion goes beyond words.

A very different debt I owe to my dear wife, Susan Liddle, who let me rant about whole mobs of journalists as if they really existed, and to Ariel, who more than once reorganized the whole work by pushing the pile of pages onto the floor, a summary judgment which some critics may think the best of any. And finally, of course, my thanks go to my parents, Clyde and Evelyn Summers, the smartest, most thorough, and best editors of all. Their mark lies on every page of the finished manuscript.

Reporters’ Initials & Pseudonyms

Agate Whitelaw Reid, Cincinnati Gazette

Creighton R. W. C. Mitchell, Danbury News

Data W. W. Warden, Baltimore Sun and New York Times

Dixon Sidney Andrews, Boston Daily Advertiser

D. P. Donn Piatt, Cincinnati Commercial and Enquirer

Gath George Alfred Townsend, Chicago Tribune

and New York Graphic

G. G. Grace Greenwood, New York Tribune

Gideon W. S. Walker, Chicago Times

H. J. R. Hiram J. Ramsdell, Cincinnati Commercial

H. V. B. Henry Van Ness Boynton, Cincinnati Gazette

H. V. N. B. Henry Van Ness Boynton

H. V. R. Horace V. Redfield, Cincinnati Commercial

Laertes George Alfred Townsend, New York Graphic

M. C. A. Mary Clemmer Ames, New York Independent

Mack Joseph B. McCullagh, Cincinnati Commercial

Mrs. Grundy Austine Snead, Washington Sunday Capital

Nestor William B. Shaw, Boston Transcript

Observer R. J. Hinton, Worcester Spy

Occasional John Wien Forney, Washington Chronicle

Olivia Emily Edson Briggs, Philadelphia Press

Perley Ben: Perley Poore, Boston Morning Journal

Warrington W. S. Robinson, Springfield Republican

Z.L.W. Zebulon L. White, New York Tribune

THE PRESS GANG

Introduction

You are they

That search into the secrets of the time,

And under feign’d names, on the stage

present

Actions not to be touch’d at; and traduce

Persons of rank and quality of both

sexes,

And, with satirical and bitter jests,

Make even the senators ridiculous

To the plebeians.

Philip Massinger, The Roman Actor, 1630

The Third-Term Panic (Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, November 7, 1874).

The cartoon from late 1874 is one of Thomas Nast’s most famous: barely concealed in a lion’s skin called Caesarism, a donkey brays and panics the animals of the woods—a monocled unicorn, a frantic giraffe, an owl, and most conspicuously, in its first appearance as a symbol, a Republican elephant stampeding into the political abyss.¹ Any blockhead can understand the point—or can he? The more closely the picture is examined, the more puzzling it appears. The donkey, it turns out, is not a symbol for the Democratic party, but for a newspaper, and so is much of the rest of the menagerie. The cartoonist has made the jackass a virtual stock symbol for editorial idiots.² But why make the New York Times a unicorn? Or the New York Tribune a giraffe, or the World an owl dropping an arithmetic book?

Nast’s cartoon, in fact, is a comment on the so-called press gang of his age, and his better-read readers might have grasped the point of his symbols at once. They would have known that the Times was edited by the Englishman Louis J. Jennings; what better beast than one from the British coat of arms? Anyone familiar with Nast’s caricatures would connect World proprietor Manton Marble’s nose and the beak of a bird of prey; anyone familiar with Marble’s editorials would appreciate his reliance on statistics to make his points for free trade or to change a setback for Democratic candidates into a victory.³ As for the Tribune, the so-called tall tower of its unfinished office building was as conspicuous on Printing-House Square as a giraffe’s neck, and it just may have been Nast’s inspiration.

The fact that all these allusions might be second nature to Nast’s audience and not to later historians should give us pause. Rare is the artist today who would feature a newspaper, much less an editor’s face, in his cartoon, but in the 1870s the caricaturist poked fun at journalists on a regular basis. Even in cartoons where politicians took center stage, newspapermen often showed up in the background, observing, commenting, or just swelling a crowd.⁴ Nast’s penchant for making journalists his subject was typical of cartoonists in the nineteenth century.⁵ Clearly, something was significantly different about the role that the press played in politics, different perhaps from earlier times and certainly from our own.

This book is about that difference and its consequences for the making of policy. It is a study of professional journalism fresh out of the eggshell, just as it is discovering itself as a profession and before it has established standards of conduct and freed itself from the legacy of the past, a legacy of political engagement. It is the story of the independents’ attempt to turn that legacy to new ends: the political engagement of the outsider, with editors playing the role of Thersites, commenting on the flawed nature of the generals. And it is, in the end, a story of failure, a war with the politicians that the politicians, or at least politics, won.

A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion.

And such a Lion! and such a Jackass!

(Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, January 15, 1870).

Does the story really need telling? No scholar can fail to be daunted by the heaps of books already written about journalism, the magisterial overview by Frank Luther Mott, the biographies of editors, the works popular and scholarly about Civil War reporters, and the pathbreaking study of Washington correspondents up to 1932 by Donald Ritchie.⁶ And yet our first glance at the materials can be as illusory as our quick look at Nast’s cartoon of the Republican elephant. We know everything about a few editors during Reconstruction, but much less about reporters, and practically nothing about those outside of the capital. We also may not know the right things. The younger James Gordon Bennett cuts a delightful figure as he quails beneath the horsewhip swung by his former fiancee’s brother; but it was his jackass, the New York Herald, that did the braying in Nast’s 1874 cartoon, and the bray goes unheard by the biographer.⁷ Many an authoritative book on journalism seems to leave no stone unturned, and apparently no newspaper consulted. The omission is understandable. To read through ten years of one journal, much less several dozen journals, is tedious work, and the scraps of information often are scattered widely.

There is much that only exhaustive study would turn up, and on some matters, however reticent the press later became about its own habits, it loved discussing no topic more than itself. We know what position editors took on page four—but what about page one? What happened when the same man sat behind an editorial desk and in the legendary smoke-filled room with the politicians? We need to scrutinize a process as neglected as it is obvious: how reporters and editors gathered the news and how they slanted it. But how only leads to why. What was their relationship with those in the government, and how did officials try to control what the press said about them? What did patronage and personal influence mean for the way the news was reported? Precisely what role in party politics did the editors and correspondents play, and how well did this fit with their duty to inform the public?

This book is a beginning in answering those questions, a study of the way policy, political power, and press coverage merged and clashed between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the end of Reconstruction a dozen years later. As readers will soon discover, the way the metropolitan newspapers transformed, to meet their readers’ demand for information and to pay for the soaring expenses of efficient news gathering, had a powerful effect on their role as partisan tubs, thumped to the rhythm that political organizers set. At the same time, a growing sense of professionalism among reporters and the need to provide facts that the wire services had missed created a very different kind of Washington correspondence, where competition and cooperation together allowed readers to learn more about how their government worked and much more about what went on behind the scenes. In all these changes, the public was the gainer. Yet independence among editors, a sense of themselves as a profession among correspondents, did not do away with distortion and the ancient tradition of power brokering right away. Old habits outlived old conditions; pro-fessionalization came haltingly. Newspapers might not toe the party line (though most did, and even independents did not venture far from it), but they drew lines all their own. By the questions they asked, the information they chose to consider relevant, and the stereotypes they accepted, the new journalists could shape public discussion, and not always in the public interest. The inability of Southern Republicans to make themselves heard in a press establishment of their own or in the leading papers of the North, for example, would give a powerful impetus to the nation’s abandonment of its commitment to Reconstruction. Some of the manipulation, indeed, was deliberate, the determination to make news fit an ideological line. The press gang had set itself free, not just to report events, but to make them; journalists held government jobs, took favors, hired themselves out as lobbyists, acted as advisers, errand runners, and campaign organizers for politicians they liked, and attended political conventions to pull the wires against those they detested.

What developed was an uncomfortable misfit between officeholders and journalists. It ranged from kept correspondents passing on puffery to self-appointed advocates of the public interest pursuing blind vendettas. From the first, many politicians found ways of shaping news their way, but their control was always tentative and got more so as the adversarial way of thinking strengthened among denizens of the press gallery. They still had partisan editors willing to do their bidding, but they found this support less satisfactory than before. Even self-proclaimed party organs chose to speak with their own voices and went jangling out of tune. Beset by a journalism that had changed its character in ways they did not understand, others, notably President Ulysses S. Grant, made a botch of news management from the first and paid dearly for it.

By 1872, politicians and much of the independent press had taken on a poisonous quality. That year, some of the more ambitious editors grew so restive that they sought for political alternatives to the two-party system that once they had served so faithfully. Two years later, the midterm elections turned into a shindy, with journalists trying to persuade the public that the republic and a free press were in danger. The press gang scored one last victory, but changes in how public figures handled the press and how the press interpreted its professional responsibilities helped bring an end to the fighting. So did new commercial realities, which forced many of the independents back into the parties. Changed conditions did not turn them into the old-fashioned organs again. Professionalization and commercialization had gone too far for that. Instead, the changes helped remove the adversarial relationship and opened the way for a new kind of independence, where news and editorials each stood on their own.

Obviously, a monumental study of newspapers in the Gilded Age needs to be done.⁸ Clearly, this book is not it. Foreign policy, local crime reporting, society columns and the way class biases affected major metropolitan journals’ accounts, the methods and working conditions of city reporters all need coverage. A dozen reporters need biographies, a dozen editors need studies that concentrate more on what they said on the news page than in the lead editorial. With thousands of different newspapers extant and hundreds of correspondents covering Washington, D.C., alone, this book necessarily must be selective in both the journals and issues it covers, even within the narrow bounds of the relationship between the press and politics in the Reconstruction years. But a start must be made somewhere, and if a host of obscure figures—Donn Piatt, Deacon Smith, and Gath among them—are tugged out of the shadows, it will be a down payment on the reward that their energy and merits deserve.

The book has another aim as well. Historians use newspapers to document the events of the past, and well they should. They can do no other. For every limit and lapse, many a journal compares favorably for coverage of domestic events with its descendant today. But papers are sources with underappreciated risks, and not just those posed by the most obvious prejudices of race, class, and partisan affiliation. Distortions stem from the very definition of news itself. The biases are not just ideological, but occupational (what is defined as news? and does the ephemeral reflect or distort a larger and less newsworthy reality?) and institutional (what does it suit the financial and personal political fortunes of the paper’s owner to see published?). It is well to study the messenger carefully when the message he carries comes in his own handwriting.

PART ONE

THE LORDS OF THE LINOTYPE

Red Hot!

(Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly,

July 13, 1872).

CHAPTER 1

Wonderful! Wonderful!

Traveling down the Mississippi on a steamboat in 1871, a journalist watched a yawl shoot out from the bank. If he thought that the two passengers were coming to board or trade, he was quickly set right. Throw me a paper! one of them shouted, throw me a paper! Visiting America just after the Civil War, Scotsman David Macrae found newspapers as necessary as money but much more plentiful. Even some prisons supplied prisoners with the morning edition. To do otherwise, a warden informed one visitor, would be cruel and unusual punishment. By Macrae’s count, more dailies were published in New York City in 1868 than in England, Scotland, and Ireland combined.¹

Americans going abroad were impressed in just the opposite way. They returned aware that the press at home was something special. Anglophiles at the Nation, America’s foremost journal of opinion, had to admit that while European journals beat American ones for editorial writing, they came nowhere close at news gathering. For all the wit and eloquence in their political essays, French newspapers struck travelers as sensational claptrap; not even the New York Herald could match them. To be in France is to be excluded from news of France, a reporter for the Springfield Republican complained from Nantes, as he tried to find the latest news of the Franco-Prussian War. His first word about the fall of Paris came from New York; stories from Paris or Bordeaux seem to arrive by snail carriers, and the "innumerable childish on dits from the English newspapers" left confusion worse confounded. Staffed by young men reading law and graduates from Oxford and Cambridge, the great English journals put out essays as bulky and painstakingly prepared as a plum pudding; but fine phrases could not make up for a lack of up-to-date reports or factual accuracy in all but the best of them. Bemused Yankees traveling abroad could read that former Confederate president Jefferson Davis was now a Georgia congressman, that the American holiday Thanksgiving celebrated the end of the Revolutionary War, and that the ever-grasping United States was marshaling troops to annex Utah, which one newspaper put down as a British colony. A few hours dozing over the London Times would make anyone appreciate the American journalist, ‘cute’, lean, yellow-whiskered,… one leg thrown over the other, body bent, the nervous, rapid hand flinging ink now on the paper, now on the wall, with an output as direct, energetic, and effective as himself.²

Macrae’s figures were wrong,³ but he got the essentials right. By 1870, New York City had over 150 newspapers. Most of them were weeklies, of course, just like most papers were published outside city limits, but rare was that community with no press at all. Any place with more than five thousand people could support a daily, and many supported two or more: one for Democrats, the other for Republicans. A middle-sized city like Cincinnati began the 1870s with eight dailies, plus forty weeklies.⁴ All told, the country in 1870 had over 5,000 different newspapers and periodicals, one-tenth of them published every day, 258 German-language papers, 48 in French, and 15 in Scandinavian languages. (In Michigan, Hollanders could choose between the De Wachter and Vrijheids Banier [Republican], De Hollander [Democratic], and De Hope [Dutch Reformed church].) The greatest increase had come in the last ten years, as the number of dailies rose by 40 percent and their circulation by over 70 percent. The pace would only quicken over the decade to come. By 1880, 971 dailies served the public.⁵

How well they served it depended very much on how big a public read them; the most marked trait of the press was its uneven quality, between North and South, city and county seat, partisan organ and independent. Most papers were partisan, blatantly and deceptively so, in the way they slanted news and in what events they considered fit for their readers. Making good Democrats or Republicans mattered more than making a good profit. Beyond that, most journalists had little to say and precious little space in which to say it, even if their imaginations had run wild. Readers fared worst in small towns across the North and in nearly every place south of Louisville. The Little Rock Arkansas Gazette was the most important and richest newspaper in the state. Yet a glance at its contents in the late winter of 1870 would discourage any reader anxious to know what went on in the world. It was four pages long. Of its thirty-two columns, news rarely took up more than eight, and sometimes as little as five. Most of that was national. On February 24, the Gazette had thirteen lines of local and state events, on the following day two columns, and on the next two days only one. As for events beyond the United States, the ten days starting on March 4 were typical:

March 4, 18 lines

March 5, none

March 6, 12 lines

March 7, no newspaper at all (it being a Monday)

March 8, no news from abroad

March 9, 62 lines, 54 of them a dispatch from Cuba

March 10, 35 lines

March 11, no news from abroad

March 12, 30 lines

March 13, no news from abroad⁶

Compared to the hinterland, Little Rock’s papers looked downright informative. Viator, a correspondent of the Chicago Times visiting the resort at Hot Springs, Arkansas, looked through the newspapers available to residents and found plenty of advertisements, some tirades in the editorial column at the extravagance of federal officeholders, but not a jot of local news. Even a robbery less than one hundred feet from the newspaper office went unmentioned. The productions… denominated here as newspapers, are the most wretched sheets I have ever seen, Viator summed up, and are a disgrace to a civilized community.⁷

Yet the inadequacies of so much of the press establishment should not obscure the excellence of the few dozen newspapers that towered over the others in scope and influence, nearly all of them in the great cities of the North. Indeed, readers in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati could choose between rival eight-pagers of national consequence and extensive coverage.

Some 150 journals in metropolitan centers had circulations over 10,000. Only since the 1840s had technology made it possible to serve that many customers, with the spread of railroad lines and the improvement of printing machinery. Instead of 1,000 copies daily, the horizontal cylinder of the rotary Hoe press turned out 20,000 an hour.⁸ The Philadelphia Public Ledger building covered a third of an acre; lumber mills had to process fourteen tons of raw materials for a day’s publication, read by 400,000 people. So great was the demand by 1870 that no self-respecting city paper limited itself to one appearance a day. The Philadelphia Evening City Item’s first edition came out at 10:30 in the morning. The last, which might be its twelfth, hit the streets at 7:00 that evening.⁹

Journalism in the metropolis, obviously, was transforming from a printer’s shop into a big business, different in size, character, and financial backing from the establishments that had been publishing since the early 1700s. In small towns, the one-man operation persisted. A few thousand dollars could endow the would-be editor and publisher with office space, blank paper, and a well-worn flatbed press. Printing handbills, calling cards, and anything else that the community wanted, he could scrape by. Still, the sum called for there was in the thousands. No longer could any partisan hope to start the way Viator’s boss, Wilbur F. Storey, did in 1838 in Laporte, Indiana, on two hundred dollars. A young friend of ours wants to know a remedy for love sickness, a Georgia editor wrote. We advise him to start a newspaper, and if that don’t take the starch out of his hifalutin ideas of worldly felicity, we’ll cave.¹⁰

The sums called for in major cities made the old ways of raising money out of the question. Just to replace the type and buy a faster press cost the Memphis Appeal $10,000 in 1872, and had it bought one of the Hoe presses, the cost easily would have been double that figure.¹¹ In the late 1840s, as the potential of telegraph lines for the speedy transmission of news was just being discovered, New York’s most prominent newspapers set up the Associated Press (AP) to share the advantages at lower cost. Lower cost was a relative term. Regular members paid $14,000 a year for the service; together with other cable expenses in 1880, a metropolitan newspaper could pay Western Union some $70,000 annually. Naturally, AP’s sponsors only used their shared dispatches as a starting point. The more a journal aspired to publish the news, rather than merely editorial opinions, the more it laid out for its own telegraphic reports from Washington, D.C., and overseas. When the New York Tribune needed to cover the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, it put some of its best reporters on the job, including George W. Smalley. Their supplements to the Associated Press provided special prestige, but at a dear rate. Four days of Smalley’s cable bills from France totaled $4,000, and the whole war cost the Tribune $125,507 in telegraph costs.¹² The New York Tribune’s calculation of expenses just after the Civil War may offer a suggestion of how costly the whole enterprise could be:

Gradually, then, big newspapers had to take on the characteristics of corporations just to carry on their business. They might be financed by a dozen partners or, if they sold stock, by thousands of shareholders.¹⁴ Instead of relying on a few dozen news agents to sell the paper just to subscribers, they marketed their product wherever space was available. For the daily, news vendors mattered far more than subscription lists. Every hotel had its newsstand, and salesboys ran down the aisles of railroad cars hawking the latest copies of the New York Tribune or Cincinnati Commercial. Advertising, almost all of it for local firms, usually merchants announcing their wares, had grown important enough as a source of funds for newspaper offices to set up separate departments to handle it. Indeed, the expansion and specialization of the city journals’ staff were as impressive as the growth in cost. In 1840, editors worked as reporters, compositors, and general custodians. Those in New York, at the top of the profession, could afford only three assistants. No major daily in New York had less than one hundred employees thirty years later, and some had five times as many occasional contributors. In place of one printer, eight to ten were required. Forty people worked in one city paper’s Editorial Department, which split into eight specialties: Writing, City, European, Exchange, and Ship News editors among the most important.¹⁵ Different qualifications brought a wider span of wages between the ranks. Thus, a managing editor, paid as much as $10,000, would supervise editorial writers making $50 a week, subeditors earning $40, experienced reporters taking in $20, and novices beginning at $12 to $15.¹⁶

In the most essential sense, then, the Tribune, New York’s most honest newspaper, was no longer the one Horace Greeley had founded in 1841. Raising a few thousand dollars, taking a partner who tended strictly to the business, the editor had begun by doing everything. In time, he had taken on special correspondents (including Karl Marx and Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days), editorial assistants (among them Henry Jarvis Raymond, who would found the New York Times), and managing editors like Charles A. Dana, who by 1866 was running a newspaper of his own in Chicago and would soon turn the New York Sun into a dangerous rival to Greeley’s Tribune. Gradually, the founder’s own role receded in everything but popular reputation. By 1866, stockholders owned the Tribune. Though he still headed the concern, Greeley was too busy to write more than an occasional editorial, much less a news report, and went to the city only on Fridays. Instead, he collected a crowd of earnest, capable reporters, including James R. Young, Zebulon L. White, and Hiram J. Ramsdell. Two managing editors gave the Tribune its zest and thoroughness, first the brilliant, unscrupulous John Russell Young and then in 1869 Whitelaw Reid (Agate), star correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette. With more manners and a tighter grip on day-to-day business than Greeley, Reid brought new talent and expanded coverage in all areas.¹⁷

More newsmen meant more news, but there was more to it than that. Along with specialization, a change in how journalists saw themselves, a professional ethic, was beginning to emerge.

Before the Civil War, only a humorist would have described reporting as a profession. As a class, newsmen were as disreputable as drunkards, if somewhat less regular in their habits. It was only in slight deprecation that New York reporters took the sobriquet Bohemians, a term suggesting artistic pretensions less than personal irresponsibility.¹⁸ Correspondents were different. Many were contributors, paid for their letters, but were not regular employees. Their time, naturally, was their own, and they had discretion over how much opinion and rhetorical polish they put into the essays they sent. A few were literary men supplementing their incomes. Others were editors on tour. But neither group owed its reputation to its news gathering, if, indeed, the long ruminations and fulminations sent home could be classified as news at all. Only in the nation’s capital might the designation professional reporter seem more than a contradiction in terms, and then only in a few exceptional cases. Nor did reporters seem all that necessary. One could put together a very informative newspaper on clippings from the exchanges and the stenographic reports from House and Senate.¹⁹

Yet even before the war, a change was visible, though mostly on the metropolitan papers.²⁰ The war accelerated it by calling forth a public demand for eyewitness reports, graphic ones, in-depth, and everyday. From every city special emissaries hastened to the front—more than 150 in all and 40 from the New York Herald alone. War impelled newsmen to be more enterprising than before and drove them to a fierce competition to press ahead of all rivals.²¹

To journalists, the war seemed the moment when their craft came into its own. Before the war, men became editors because their party needed a reliable voice. After it, a journalist had a good chance of taking the editorial chair himself, and some editors treated service as Washington correspondent for a big-city press as if it were a promotion. By 1866, historian James Parton could extol the ascendancy of the news gatherer as the latest step toward modern journalism. For the majority of readers it is the reporter, and not the editor who is the ruling genius of the newspaper, agreed another essayist some years later. If the way that many of the leading editors were made is any indication, the two professions led to each other.²² Many a city publisher seemed intent, as one critic gibed, on giving the name and age of every dog that dies within a hundred miles of the city, with the color of his hair and the quality of his bark.²³

For well or ill, there seemed no getting away from journalists by the 1870s. Waiting on death row in the Tombs, twelve prisoners were interviewed on their views of capital punishment by a New York Herald reporter. (All but two of those responding disapproved of it, and the two ardent defenders had just received commuted sentences!) Foreign guests found the press gang waiting for them before their ocean liner had docked. Woe be to that stranger who made his way into some Western town short on copy! He might find himself cornered in an Omaha hotel and quizzed about where he was going, where he had been, what he thought of leading English politicians and California demagogues, his views on the projected canal across Central America, a flexible money supply, and a third presidential term for General Grant. One such victim discovered that the only way to rid himself of reporters’ presence was to recite the first chapter of Samuel Johnson’s romance, Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia, from memory.²⁴

Two postwar examples showed journalism at its news-gathering best: the New York Herald and the Chicago Times. Founded by James Gordon Bennett, Sr., in 1835, the Herald was, a French traveler declared, one of the most eccentric, the most intelligent, and most influential organs of the American press. No one has any idea what it stands for; to tell the truth, one suspects it doesn’t have any fixed principles…. it knows only that it is for the winning side.²⁵

So it was, but in the war for circulation the Herald knew that the winning side was the one with the best news and the most. Special correspondents from Austria to Asheville brought the freshest information, whether it was about the Battle of Sadowa or the latest depredations by half-breed Indian gangs in North Carolina. Its letters on French politics were so good, the Herald boasted, that even the French could make sense of them. Those lost in the wilds of Africa could not escape the Bennetts’ emissaries. There one of the paper’s correspondents, Henry M. Stanley, tracked down an elusive explorer in 1871 and obtained a fame greater than the man he met when he uttered the words, Dr. Livingstone, I presume. With a circulation as high as 150,000 in the 1870s, the Herald would remain unsurpassed until Joseph Pulitzer took over the New York World in the following decade and revolutionized New York journalism.²⁶

The Chicago Times was an even more astonishing success because it improved so rapidly. A poverty-stricken Democratic organ at the start of the Civil War, it was transformed by Wilbur F. Storey into one of the most thorough and raciest papers outside of Manhattan. Its Sunday edition, full of feature articles, ran sixteen pages, and Monday’s carried summaries of the leading sermons. That way, the Times boasted, readers could get the benefits of attending church at the bargain rate of a mere nickel. Or, if their tastes ran in other directions, they could read the regular feature, Nymphs du Pave, on Chicago’s prostitutes. By 1876, thirty or forty columns of specials by its journalists in the field were commonplace, to the amazement of even New York’s reporters. Does the Chicago Times do this every day? one of them asked in amazement; on being told that it did, he could only shake his head and murmur, Wonderful! wonderful!²⁷

J. G. B. Jun. [James Gordon Bennett, Jr.], in His Property Room (Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, December 25, 1875).

Chicago had room for a Tribune every bit as wonderful as the Times, and the Herald found its match in three other New York dailies. This was so not because papers offered the same basic services, but because their wares were sharply different. In New York City, an unflinching Republican might subscribe to the short-lived New York Standard, though he would be content with the coverage and biases of the New York Times. If he wanted free-trade argument and liberal reform, he might prefer the New York Evening Post; if he inclined to high-tariff ideas and humanitarian reform, nothing would do but Greeley’s Tribune.²⁸ And those were just some, not all, of the Republican alternatives.

The alternatives afforded more than a choice between distortions put on the same news stories. They allowed very different news, delivered in different ways. Separated from the daily routine though he was, Greeley’s own Utopian vision continued to define the Tribune’s strength in news gathering until he died in 1872. Whether it was a conference of old abolitionists or a convention of temperance reformers, the newspaper most likely to report it fully and most sympathetically would be Greeley’s, just as the most friendly and thorough coverage of laborers’ doings and union meetings appeared in Charles A. Dana’s New York Sun.²⁹ Readers could gather nearly all the news from one paper and then pick up another to get the rest. The comparative strengths of New York’s most important dailies became clear to Seymour, the Mobile Register’s local correspondent, during the adultery trial of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, foremost minister of his day: The Tribune and Times provided verbatim reports of the proceedings, the Sun gave the kernel of the testimony without superfluous husks and chaff, and the Herald specialized in trenchant courtroom sketches. Ask a journalist which newspaper he would pick to get his news of the world, a Charleston correspondent wrote in 1881, and he would choose the New York Times; but ask which paper he would most like to read if he had an hour to pass on a train ride, and very likely it would be Dana’s Sun.³⁰

Clearly the metropolitan press, individually, even more collectively, provided a marked contrast to the general mediocrity of provincial four-pagers. They were more: a potential rival to any and all of them on their own ground. Their clients stretched far beyond their own borders and did what they could to get more. In Hot Springs, Viator could go to a book stand and buy the Chicago Times (if he got there quickly enough; they sold out almost at once). Thanks to early morning trains, booksellers in Birmingham had the Louisville Courier-Journal in twenty-four hours. From Chicago, the big journals spread their readership and special news coverage across seven states. In 1876, newsdealers outside of Chicago sold over 14,000 copies of the Times every day in Illinois, more than 4,000 each in Iowa and Wisconsin, nearly 3,000 in Michigan and Indiana, and 66 as far away as New Orleans. In an age when a small-town newspaper had a circulation of around 500, it was a significant conquest when over 700 residents of Springfield and Peoria, over 400 in Joliet, Decatur, and Milwaukee, and over 200 in Quincy, Galesburg, and Pekin took the Times. Even by its own figures, hundreds more bought retail copies of its two rivals, the Inter-Ocean and the Tribune. That was just the impact of the daily. Most prominent metropolitan journals published a weekly, distilled from six dailies’ articles, for the countryside, where mail service was less regular. Farmers from upstate New York to Iowa read the New York Tribune’s weekly edition appreciatively and thought that there was none better. Indeed, for many newspapers, the Tribune among them, the weekly outsold the daily several times over.³¹

This was just the beginning of the larger presses’ influence, however. Thanks to their control of the Associated Press, New York’s leading newspapers made themselves the news distributors for presses nationwide. The system was far from perfect. Every bias, political, personal, and local, interfered with objective coverage. Returns from upstate New York, for example, became national news; but even Tennessee papers were in the dark about election results from the Volunteer state if they left official tallies up to AP. Every day almost a fresh lie, growled a former senator of its political coverage. The desperate effort of L. A. (Father) Gobright, the AP bureau chief at the capital, to make the Washington wire service fair infuriated those who wanted zest and scandal. There is no ‘go’ in him, and he is not ‘bright,’ sneered one critic, who accused the big dailies in charge of AP of keeping Gobright on hand as a way of making the syndicated news gathering so inferior that their own special reports (which they were paid for) would be in demand. Mormons complained that after the AP manager had a personal difficulty in Salt Lake City, he repaid scores in every dispatch about Utah affairs. Members roared lustily at the fees, especially those for foreign reports. Still, the association made news more readily available to over two hundred dailies, and just after the war, other consolidations rivaled AP. Exasperated at the financial costs and the New York bias, a host of major journals in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New Orleans formed a United States and European News Association and forced AP to give them better terms. There was a Western, a Southern, a New England, and a Texas Associated Press. The participants of each consortium would share the costs and scoops of far-flung correspondents. With each local agent paid per dispatch, the incentive to gather and send in news was immense.³²

Supplementing the commercial venture of press services was the established custom of taking and using anything good that appeared in print elsewhere. Large newspapers could afford a stable of reporters; if small presses could afford few or none, their editors could afford printers’ devils, scissors, and paste, and the material that metropolitan correspondents gathered, both editorial and news, was clipped out and fitted into the weekly columns of their lesser competitors (sometimes it was pared so skillfully that the original source would reprint it and imagine that it was getting something original). As any respectable paper received fifty to one hundred other sheets nationwide in exchange for copies of its own publication (and the New York Tribune got at least 2,500 on exchange), that gave the country publisher a broad array of news items from which to choose, but it also meant that whatever topic interested the major presses would have a national impact.³³

The important newspapers were not necessarily those with the largest circulation, but those with the best reporting and the most effective voices on policy. Among New York dailies, for example, the News outsold any rival locally. Beyond city limits, it had barely any impact. It was almost never quoted, nor even noted. The New York Evening Post, with one-seventh the circulation, gained more national attention; in that sense, it was more a major newspaper than the News.³⁴

Americans thus had reason for priding themselves on a press as diverse, as energetic, and as interesting as its people. The columnist Donn Piatt told a joke that took to extremes a faith rather widely held in Greeley’s newspaper. A Bible salesman traveling Ohio’s Western Reserve, it seemed, had tried to sell his wares to a Yankee farmer by leaving a sample copy with him for a week. To his distress, the Bible was returned, with thanks. Well, I declare, there’s a deal of good readin’ in it, the farmer admitted, "but I’ve subscribed for the [New York] Weekly Tribune, you see, an’ there’s readin’ enough in it for my family."³⁵

Whether it was worth reading is another matter. While journalism at its best delivered a prodigious supply of information, the quality of that information varied. One English critic suggested a connection between the declining importance of subscribers and the rise of misleading and sensational stories. As long as news vendors did the selling, they needed to excite and inspire prospective readers with extras, outlandish headlines, short paragraphs that sacrificed good writing for quick reading, and eye-catching stories, no matter how dubious.³⁶

The Civil War, for example, had shown the limits in the correspondents’ craft plainly. At their best, of course, wartime reporters were magnificent, and some were downright lyrical. No war had such speedy, thorough, and generally accurate coverage, with such attention to detail. But error was common and deception almost habitual: Still miserably paid, reporters pocketed bribes for the favorable mention of certain officers and filled their reports with every bias. If editors had denounced each others’ reporters as liars beforehand,