DEAREST PRUDENCE: LETTERs HOME FROM THE FRONT
During the Civil War, newspapers were the primary means for the public to keep track of battles, campaigns, and how many cousins, nephews, and sons they had left. On assignment from big-city papers and news bureaus, Northern reporters embedded with the Army of the Potomac fed the public’s inexhaustible appetite for war reporting and straight talk directly from the men in charge with exclamation-point-laden stories like “Friends Till the End! Lincoln and McClellan Pledge Loyalty to Each Other as the Winning Team the Union Needs!”
In addition to reporting the news, war correspondents also related common soldiers’ day-to-day experiences amid the carnage and provided a conduit for them to share their firsthand accounts of the war. Many newspapers published soldiers’ personal letters and diaries, often penned before major battles. Such missives gave a human face to the rank-and-file participants of this brutal conflict. They are also among the earliest known examples of the modern genre of the advice column, as many of these letters were sent directly to papers by soldiers seeking help with personal matters. Reproduced below is an example of one of these historical documents, originally published on July 17, 1862, by the New York Daily Crier.
My Dearest Prudence,
I am still among the living, though have taken ill and have decided to use my time in the diarrhea tent to compose a few lines to you on an issue that has vexed me much during these long months away from home. I have been married two and half score years to my beloved, whom we shall call Annabelle. She is the kindest, most beautiful object of my most assiduous affections. She is a wonderful mother to our—at last count—eleven children, and has been such a friend and companion to me that I dare not imagine a better or more divine specimen of the female species.
However, there is but one small problem that haunts our otherwise blissful wedded harmony. I speak of her excessive and often cruel condemnations of my mother’s hardtack. I was raised eating mother’s delicious dry biscuits with extra flour, and I fear Annabelle has always harbored a deep resentment of my Olympian regard for Mother’s biscuits. This has boiled over as of late when, in my last correspondence, Mother mentioned she had given Annabelle a batch of her hardtack to send to me. However, when the package from home arrived, the hardtack was nary to be found, replaced by Annabelle’s pickled onions. Should I confront Annabelle over her pilfering of my tack and risk having this be her last memory of me, or should I let this hound continue to sun itself on the porch in the late summer afternoon? Sometimes I fear that this cursed war and the problems betwixt Annabelle and my mother will never end.
Sincerely,
Aggrieved in Antietam
In the late Gilded Era a new model emerged, one in which the news could be underwritten by paid ads for Dr. Consham’s Miracle Woman-Hysteria-Curing Tonic and opium-based baby formulas. Media magnates like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer snatched up local papers and forged the first news conglomerates. Political content slowly sank off their pages, replaced by lurid true-crime stories about debauched women exposing their bare shoulders on the beach, crotchety opinion columns about how Pullman porters weren’t entitled to exorbitant half-penny tips, and, for illiterate consumers, comic strips.
It was also around this time that a Hearst paper led the country into war with Spain on false pretenses through breathless and selective reporting about the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana, a naval accident that was spun as evidence of Spanish aggression against America.
At a penny per copy, papers publishing such sensationalistic “yellow journalism” sold extremely well. But some readers craved more than just bulletins about Italian-on-Italian crimes and daily reports of President Taft’s expanding waistline. Yellow papers could also be serious as well, as several Hearst titles published accounts of Bella Allabonne, a seven-year-old trapped in war-torn Belgium who urged President Wilson to “do something.”
The Progressive movement spawned a class of hard-nosed investigative journalists who dedicated their lives to rooting out corruption, challenging the entrenched power of monopolists, exposing the horrifying conditions in which the working classes lived, and doing their best to make sure those working classes didn’t breed too prodigiously. Fearless muckrakers like Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, and Jacob Riis showed how dedicated journalists could improve the lives of the millions by doggedly pursuing the truth.
But most journalists were not fearless muckrakers. Ninety-nine percent of newshawks were what we like to call “hacks.”
In this era, long before Columbia J-School and valuable résumé-building unpaid internships, the job of reporting the news was not the province of failsons of the educated upper class like it is today. Instead, most journalists were the children of impoverished immigrants. They were the seventh sons of a proletariat deemed too sickly and weak to pursue a respectable child-labor trade like coal runner or Triangle Shirtwaister. These young cowards were plucked from the slums at an early age and sold to the Hearst Corporation.
The media industry put these amorphous lumps of raw humanity through a brutal baptism by fire. The cubs were instilled with a healthy fear of challenging entrenched power, taught to fairly report on both sides of any given issue—such as women’s suffrage or lynching—and totally sequestered from contact with females so they would emerge from their chrysalides as weird sexual neurotics. The ones who survived earned the right to call themselves bona fide journalists.
Some of them became investigative reporters, adopting the moniker “gumshoe,” a reference to their habit of stopping women on the street and offering to inspect their feet for grime, often even going so far as to offer a thorough tongue-cleaning, free of charge.
The cream of the crop became pundits—regular columnists paid to pontificate about every single issue, with special emphasis on the issues they knew absolutely nothing about. In the rapidly modernizing world of the 1920s, when women’s skirts were getting shorter and wearable tech like polio braces proliferated, the common man relied on these noble perverts to analyze, predict, and explain. To today’s reader, the concept of an individual possessing a perfectly average level of intelligence and education (at best) shitting out half-baked analyses of complex political and social matters to be closely read by millions as if they were the divinely inspired words of a prophet descending a mountaintop may seem absurd. But remember that people were stupid back then and didn’t have Yahoo! Answers and r/legaladvice to explain things to them.
Some examples of punditry from the early twentieth century:
“Union Organizers Are Murdered in Some Parts of the Country, and That’s Okay”
“Why We Need a Second Great War to Toughen Up the Entitled ‘Greatest’ Generation”
“What My Rickshaw Driver Taught Me about Nanking, the Next Up-and-Coming Global Hotspot”
“Limiting the Workweek to Just 80 Hours Will Hurt the People It’s Meant to Help”
“Spanish Flu or Spanish Boo-Hoo? New Influenza Nothing to Worry About”
“We Need to Talk about Al Jolson. Is He Ashamed of Being White?”
“Civility and Compromise: Why the Weimar Republic Will Last for a Thousand Years”
No matter their specialty, these journalists all shared in the belief that their high salaries (seventy-three cents per annum) and total subservience to robber barons made them superior to normal human beings. They knew that their obvious physical and social deficiencies were more than compensated for by the strength of their minds, and that any criticism leveled at them was wholly due to the fact that others were just jealous and intimidated by their massive intelligence. Occasionally one of them would be publicly humiliated by the leaking of their private telegrams to Ida B. Wells, but overall, print scribes were the undisputed alpha males of the media.
Or so it was until the print guys were hit by a wave—a radio wave, to be exact. In the 1920s and ’30s, radio (or “talkies”) emerged as a news medium that could transmit live coverage of sporting events, politic
al rallies, and Hindenburg explosions. With the advent of radio came a new form of slick demagoguery, exemplified by the most popular radio host of the Depression era, fascist anti-Semite Father Charles Coughlin.
Excerpt from a Transcript of The People’s Pulpit Radio Broadcast, August 5, 1938
* * *
FATHER CHARLES COUGHLIN: Imagine my surprise when the conspiratorial Hebrew showed himself not just to be a wandering interloper of national affairs, not simply a cancer in our body, but painfully and proudly illogical. Time and time again, I have challenged “comedian” Jack Benny to debate me about his obfuscation about the factual claims I am making. When pressed to prove his claims that Jews are not infecting Caucasian Americans with buggery using pies and seltzer made with dark Talmudic science, he told me to “Take a hike into the lake, pal.” This is the supposedly peaceful and easygoing Yiddish liberalism the media tells us about? Let’s look at the facts: If I were to walk into a lake, I would most likely perish. When I simply ask him if he is using scientifically altered food to make Catholic fathers abandon their families for bathhouses, he issues a death threat. Furthermore, Sid Caesar has yet to condemn this political violence. Tell me this: If they truly believed in the merits of their arguments, why would they avoid a spirited debate?
As if there weren’t enough war waged on Christian men by the psychotic liberal entertainment industry, The Three Stooges Meet the Mummy continues these Jewish-controlled attacks. Tell me, if these are just “comedy talkies,” as abusive Bolshevik liberals insist to me they are in their many letters, why do all three of the Stooges get their feet caught in buckets in this production, thus revealing their location to the clearly Jewish mummy? Why have we seen similar such buffoonery in their previous entries, such as The Three Stooges Meet Frankenstein and Dopes at Sea, wherein their antics defy reason and show them repeatedly humiliated by several varieties of Draculas, Wolfmen, and Negroes? Yet when they encounter other whites such as wealthy dowagers, they attack them with pies. Explain to me how this makes logical sense, that these men would get the better of intelligent Caucasoids but are humiliated by Hebrew-like creatures. You cannot make such a good-faith argument. The “Stooges” are simply that—stooges for the Hollywood Jews who seek to emasculate Christian men by portraying them as mute, dumb, and lame nincompoops who cannot paint a house or even move a heavy safe without saying “humina humina!”
That about does it for today. As always, please share this broadcast with your friends by inviting them over to listen to your radio. ’Bye, guys.
The outbreak of the Second World War gave radio the opportunity to prove it could be used for more than just broadcasting fascist propaganda. Radio correspondents stationed in Europe brought the war right into Americans’ living rooms. A young CBS man named Edward R. Murrow issued gripping dispatches from the Blitz, each one heralded by his signature line, “This is London, brought to you by Stevenson & Sons Goiter-Be-Gone: When you absolutely, positively need your goiter gone before prom night, look for the Stevenson & Sons label.”
After the war, television slowly grew to replace radio as the dominant news medium. Richard Nixon used it to defend his sending his adopted dog, Lamby, back to the shelter. Joe McCarthy used it to broadcast a list of known queers in the State Department, carefully compiled by his cool bachelor friend Roy Cohn. And a handful of brave journalists used it to push back against the preferred narrative of the ruling class. Among them were Martha Rountree of Meet the Press, Huntley and Brinkley of the Huntley-Brinkley Report, and Spy and Spy of Mad Magazine Roundtable. In 1954, addressing a soda jerk in the Annapolis, Maryland, malt shop where he had just been denied a third free refill on his root beer float, Edward Murrow coined the journalist’s creed that would ring through the ages: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
It was also around this time that the media led the country into war with Vietnam on false pretenses through breathless and selective reporting about the government’s version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, a total fabrication that was used as evidence the North Vietnamese had attacked the United States.
Television brought Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class face-to-face with the bedlam of the 1960s: civil rights marchers mauled by dogs, protesters brutalized by Mayor Daley’s thugs outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the seemingly endless torrent of visceral carnage that spewed from Vietnam. As the nation’s folk-poet laureate, Bob Dylan, put it, “Blood on the screen, Mr. Clean, can’t wipe the sheen, with your dope fiend [harmonica solo].”
The terror in Indochina—massacres of innocents, soldiers fragging their commanding officers, endless exports of flag-draped coffins, and torturous comedy radio broadcasts by Robin Williams—gnawed at our nation’s conscience. In an appearance on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Davy Jones famously declared, “This war’s a bummer, huh. It’s far out.” Back in Washington, Johnson reputedly said, “If I’ve lost the Monkees, I’ve lost Middle America.”
Meanwhile, in the print media, a different kind of revolution was taking place. At the top of the decade, novelist Theodore White took political reporting to a new level with his behind-the-scenes account of the 1960 election, The Making of the President 1960. Before White, campaign reporters were essentially stenographers, filing dry and matter-of-fact dispatches from the trail (e.g., “Whistle-stop at Akron, Ohio. A waterfowl gets itself embedded in the crevice between Mr. Taft’s hefty bosom and generous gut whilst the candidate was in the middle of a hearty stemwinder against the Polack, much to the amusement of all but the be-periled Ohio Gentleman”).
That all changed when White’s gripping narrative, written in a novelistic style replete with psychological probing of powerful men and careful attention to symbol and conflict, showed that political reporting could be something more contextual and profound than transcription. Namely, it could be about the winners and losers of the week. It could be about which candidates have the “It” factor and which are failing to project strength and vision. About what the candidates’ wives are wearing.
Since White, this new mode of nuanced, analytical political reporting—modulated by the insights of gimlet-eyed pundits—has helped guide voters to the 100 percent correct decision in every single presidential election. Reporters were further freed from the shackles of objectivity by the innovation of New Journalism, ushered in by Tom Wolfe’s landmark Esquire article, “Encomium for the Whisky Slum High-Octane Junkie Rat Mothers Kill Kill!” about the Boy Scout Jamboree. And the drug-laced gonzo reporting of Rolling Stone’s Hunter S. Thompson further allowed egg-shaped pundits with nascent alcohol problems to think of themselves as outlaw rebels.
But journalists didn’t truly reach the apex of esteem until two lowly print reporters brought down a president in their hit investigative series, All the President’s Men.
Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford were just two green reporters working for the legendary Washington Post. Redford’s reporting style was classically handsome in a blond, all-American way, while Hoffman’s writing was offbeat, shaggier, but no less dreamy. These two young guns combined forces to break one of the biggest stories of all time. Along with their memorable editor, the legendary Jason Robards, Hoffman and Redford beat the streets and worked the phones, turning what started out as a minor break-in at the Democratic Party’s national headquarters into a conspiracy that went all the way to the White House. The reporting in All the President’s Men is a popcorn classic that still holds up to this day.
With the reputation of the federal government and the military shattered after Watergate and Vietnam, journalism emerged as the most respected institution in the country. In the public imagination—and in their own—reporters and pundits were finally perceived as whisky-slugging alpha dogs, fearlessly challenging the powers that be, beating up sources in dark alleyways, and bedding woman after woman. By the end of the 1970s, they could carry themselves as thought leaders, opinion makers, and sex symbols. In children’s bedrooms across the country, posters of Gerald Ford, Gen. Westmo
reland, and Lt. Calley came down, to be replaced by cheesecake pinups of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.
Journalists spent the coke-fueled 1980s living the dream. The nascent twenty-four-seven cable news channel CNN put frowzy pundits in front of cameras, increasing their celebrity and vanity. Meanwhile, America elected a Hollywood actor president, and unflinching, heroic newsmen got to the bottom of Iran-Contra, the S&L crisis, and AIDS denialism by demanding that Reagan tell them folksy stories about being friends with Tip O’Neill.
It was also just a little later that the media led the country into a war with Iraq on false pretenses through breathless and selective reporting on Saddam’s regime, claiming it dumped Kuwaiti babies out of incubators—a total fabrication that was used as evidence the Iraqis were committing grotesque war crimes against an American ally.
The Gulf War and the O. J. Simpson trial, two high-budget TV specials produced by CNN, generated massive ratings for cable news, encouraging the establishment of imitators like MSNBC and Fox News. Conservative talk radio gave voice to the millions of reactionary white men who couldn’t speak for themselves due to their mouths being stuffed with hoagies. The good ol’ print world boomed as well, with innovative new magazines springing up, such as George, founded by John F. Kennedy Jr., and Brill’s Content, founded by Steven Brill and sadly shuttered in 2001 for being too successful. Over in the UK, so-called lad mags like Council Bottoms, Fanny Mates, and Rude exploded in popularity. Even photojournalists got into the action by murdering Princess Diana.
Events like the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine massacre, and the White House–Lewinsky drama whetted the public’s appetite for more stories, more gossip, more context, and more baseless speculation. Ad revenue was through the roof. The New York Times commissioned an $850 million skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. In the words of Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., “The good times for newspapers will never, ever end.”
The Chapo Guide to Revolution Page 13