American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The “middling” classes who were in favor of the common school movement supported the reformers, voted for the extension of public educational services, and sent their children to the public schools, but they wanted an educational system that would set their children apart from the lower classes. With only elementary schools opened to all, they turned to the high school with its entrance and graduation requirements, its teaching of the classics and American values, as the institution to maintain the advantage of their children over the poor. The latter usually could not attend high schools, for by that age a child of poor parents had gone to work. The 80,000 elementary schools had 90,000 teachers and 3,300,000 pupils in 1850; in contrast there were only 6,000 secondary schools with 12,000 teachers and 250,000 pupils.

  By the 1850s, another purpose was intruding into the consciences of reformers: improving the lot of the poor. How could the mass of people be informed or reformed, trained or restrained, when more than three million persons remained in bondage and ignorance? “Our motto used to be ‘the cause of education, the first of all causes,’ ” Horace Mann said in his farewell to Massachusetts teachers in 1844. “Recent events, however, have forced upon the public attention the great truth, that before a man can be educated, he must be a free man.” The movement for common education did not reach out to the children of slaves. Horace Mann could not wait for education to effect that change; in 1848 he resigned his educational office to win election to Congress and join the political battle for the liberty and equality of black people.

  Could the schools expand liberty, increase prosperity, create better workers, safeguard property, prevent revolution, and at the same time blur class lines, lift the poor, foster equality? The contradictory purposes of the common school movement, with its lack of even a rough sense of priorities, were to plague education in the United States for years to come. Yet the movement, divergent and contradictory as it was, brought important gains in several states; a public school system, if only in skeleton form, was established; common schooling was a step away from a class system in the nation; the door of education partially opened to the middle classes and to the poor.

  LEADERS OF THE PENNY PRESS

  “What is the liberty of the press?” Alexander Hamilton had asked in the Federalist. It depended first of all on public opinion, answered this foe of revolution. Conditions in the 1830s, however, seemed ripe for a newspaper revolution. The egalitarian, individualistic, participatory temper of Jacksonian politics had quickened the interest of larger numbers of people in party combat, public issues, and political personalities—and quickened also their appetite for news of scandal, crime, disasters, sports, explorations, scientific discoveries. Liberty of speech and press was still largely honored in fact as well as in the national and state constitutions. Editors could freely assail the government, opposing parties and politicians, and one another. Newspaper editors who denounced politicos as crooks and liars, and one another as prostitutes and panderers, ran far greater danger of being knocked down or horsewhipped in the streets by their victims than of being taken off to jail by the local constable. Abolitionist editors, of course, were never safe from mob violence.

  Other conditions were creating the potential for change. Newspapers, so needful of rapid transportation and communication, expanded along with the railroad and telegraph. The new journalism would be as dependent on a big-city environment as the Concord literati were on a village one, and this was a time of rapid urbanization. By the late 1840s Manhattan was approaching a population of 515,000, with another 97,000 people in Brooklyn. Newspapers needed a concentrated volume not only of readers but also of advertisers, pressmen, and craftsmen. New York alone employed 2,000 workers in printing and publishing by 1840.

  The great mercantile dailies, serving primarily the business world through their ample coverage of ship arrivals and departures, stock and commodity prices, and business dealings, had hardly changed in decades. Subscribers purchased these papers by the year, at six cents a copy delivered to their homes; it was difficult to buy single numbers. The established newspapers were overdue for change. The presses themselves were about to be outmoded. In Britain the old-time hand press had been superseded by steam-powered cylinder presses that rolled back and forth over a flat type bed, and were capable of two to four thousand impressions an hour.

  Innovating leaders and daring experimenters were needed as the catalysts for real change in journalism. The crucial act was an idea—the idea that tens of thousands of middle- and low-income people would buy newspapers if the papers were cheapened in content and price. This notion of a “penny press” came to a number of persons around the same time. Two of these were a brother and sister in Boston, Lynde and Cornelia Walter, who founded and established the Transcript at the low price of four dollars a year. But Boston, with a population in 1830 of only 61,000, was not the place for a mass-circulation paper. It took a metropolis like New York, and a man like Benjamin H. Day.

  A onetime apprentice on Samuel Bowles’s Springfield Republican, Day had come to New York at the age of twenty and worked at the case in the offices of several papers until he could set up shop as a job printer. Cholera and a bank crisis cut into his business so badly that in desperation he decided to try out an idea he had flirted with since his days as a compositor—putting out a one-penny newspaper, to be sold on the streets. Almost single-handedly, working in a small room on William Street, Day got out his first issue of the Sun on September 3, 1833. Only eight by ten inches in size and four pages long, it was hardly a sensation. The left-hand of its three columns on the first page listed steamboat advertisements—to Albany for one dollar, to Hartford by the “splendid low-pressure steamboat WATER WITCH,” to New Orleans and Liverpool and Le Havre. Most of the rest of the front page offered the story of an “Irish captain.” But up on the right side of the masthead was the magic phrase “PRICE ONE PENNY.”

  Day had sensed the great popular appetite for “human interest” stories, and soon the Sun was dishing them up. Most popular were young George Wisner’s police-court reports:

  “…Bridget McMunn got drunk and threw a pitcher at Mr. Ellis, of 53 Ludlow St. Bridget said she was the mother of 3 little orphans—God bless their dear souls—and if she went to prison they would choke to death for the want of something to eat. Committed.”

  “Catharine McBride was brought in for stealing a frock. Catharine said she had just served out 6 months on Blackwell’s Island, and she wouldn’t be sent back again for the best glass of punch that ever was made. Her husband, when she last left the penitentiary, took her to a boarding house in Essex St., but the rascal got mad at her, pulled her hair, pinched her arm, and kicked her out of bed. She…got drunk and stole the frock out of pure spite. Committed.”

  “…Bill Doty got drunk because he had the horrors so bad he couldn’t keep sober. Committed.”

  Soon the Sun had its imitators, the most notable and successful being James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald. Scottish-born, Bennett had knocked about as a teacher in Nova Scotia, bookstore clerk in Boston, reporter in New York, translator of Spanish-American newspapers in Charleston, and a Washington correspondent for the New York press, before resolving to publish his own newspaper. Two ventures failed before he began publication of the Herald in May 1835. Acting as editor, reporter, proofreader, and folder, he put out the first issue in a Wall Street cellar, with a plank across two flour barrels serving as business and editorial desk. His paper, he proclaimed, was “equally intended for the great mass of the community, the merchant, the mechanic, working people.…”

  The Herald seemed at first as sensationalist as the Sun, but Bennett outdid Day as a newspaperman. He developed a first-class financial section, a lively letters column, a reasoned and informed editorial column, wide political, society, and sports coverage. He attacked Nicholas Biddle, and he took on a local financier so fiercely that twice the money man assaulted him in the street. He was not above devoting entire issues of his paper to sensational murde
r cases, as in the trial of a notorious man-about-town for the killing of a prostitute in a brothel. And he took on church, political, and financial establishments. Within a year the Herald boasted a daily circulation of 30,000.

  As the penny press expanded, printing technology advanced with it, in turn making possible even larger and faster outpourings of newspapers. The Hoe “lightning press” of 1847 had a revolving printing surface, with type ingeniously locked into the curved cylinders by means of V-shaped column rules. Men stood on four tiers on both sides of the huge cylinder, feeding in pages from tilted tables. In 1849 Bennett installed a Hoe press with six cylinders capable of 12,000 impressions an hour. The cost of such presses—at least $20,000—threatened to end the days when young editors could start a newspaper for a few hundred dollars, and the cost also made advertising more important.

  Innovating publishers competed feverishly to speed up their news gathering and distribution. They sent sloops out to meet ships bringing news from abroad. When one New York combine of publishers set up a semaphore system from the Sandy Hook sloop base to the Battery, a rival publisher ran a pony express between the two points. Sun reporters dispatched carrier pigeons out of a dovecote on top of their plant. The telegraph changed much of this. The first telegraphic dispatch published in a newspaper appeared in the Baltimore Patriot in May 1844, from Washington: “ONE O’CLOCK.—THERE HAS JUST BEEN MADE A MOTION IN THE HOUSE TO GO INTO COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE ON THE OREGON QUESTION, REJECTED,—AYES, 79; NAYS, 86.”

  Selling the penny papers was even more competitive. Ragamuffin newsboys paid the publishers sixty-seven cents for a hundred copies and hawked them on the streets; their shrill cries became a vivid part of the urban clamor. Papers could be found in “every hotel, tavern, counting-shop,” in the hands even of porters and draymen and boys old enough to read. The post office distributed newspapers free, or at heavily subsidized rates, in rural areas—a beneficence that did not stop publishers from complaining of poor postal service. Reliance on the postal service had its risks too, as abolitionist editors discovered when southern postmasters refused to deliver their papers.

  New York kept its leadership in the newspaper world, but the Baltimore Sun, founded in 1837, quickly won a reputation for excellent reporting from Washington—and a circulation of 12,000. The Philadelphia Public Ledger, established the next year, fearlessly attacked local corruption and abuses, at the cost of libel suits and even a mob attack. The Ledger carried on the Philadelphia image of tolerance by defending the rights of Catholics against rioters and those of abolitionists against lynchers. Boston’s new Daily Times gained a circulation of 12,000 in four months, in part by peddling its copies throughout eastern Massachusetts towns. The Boston Post continued as the great Democratic organ. Southern cities, especially Charleston, developed fine newspaper traditions.

  The press had long followed flag and flatboat. “Wherever a town sprang up,” Frank Luther Mott wrote, “there a printer with a rude press and ‘a shirt-tail-full of type’ was sure to appear as by magic.” By the 1850s rapidly growing cities like Cincinnati and St. Louis had half a dozen or more papers each. In Chicago, in 1840, John Wentworth, an Exeter and Dartmouth graduate, had walked the lake beach into town with thirty dollars in his pocket; within three years he owned the weekly Chicago Democrat and a year later converted it into a daily. In 1847 three businessmen founded the Chicago Daily Tribune, which they sold a few years later to Joseph Medill, Alfred Cowles, and several partners. Newspapers were already sprouting in the territories to the west—in Green Bay and Milwaukee and “Du Buque,” in St. Paul and Sioux Falls and down in Leavenworth and Lawrence, Kansas.

  Publishers adapted themselves to local conditions and crises. The first newspaper in Oklahoma was a Baptist missionary organ printed in an Indian dialect. The staff of the San Felipe Telegraph and Texas Register had fled for their lives on the approach of the Mexican army, which seized their printing press and threw it into a nearby bayou, but the Telegraph carried on with another press. The Santa Fe Republican published two pages in Spanish and two in English. The Weekly Arizonian had to suspend publication for two years when one of its publishers was shot for resisting arrest for a stage robbery. The Deseret News in Salt Lake City had great trouble obtaining a steady supply of paper over the mountains. California newspapers, stimulated by the gold rush, exploited the pony express—a total of seventy-five mustangs and their riders relaying mail and newspapers between stations fifteen miles apart, all the way from Missouri, in half the time that stagecoaches required.

  The famous old newspapers of the East did not fold in the face of the rise of the penny press and the westward movement. Great mercantile dailies, often still charging six cents for home delivery, carried on. The even more noted partisan papers—the historic Democratic triumvirate of the Washington Globe, the Richmond Enquirer, and the Albany Argus, and such Whig organs as the National Intelligencer in Washington, the Springfield Republican, and the Louisville Journal—conducted a party debate that broadly set the shape of national political conflict. Americans were discovering once again that new ideas, institutions, and inventions did not have to replace the old; the country was vast enough for the old and new to live side by side.

  The new, popular press did run into heavy criticism for its sensationalism, vulgarity, even blasphemy. Bennett’s Herald was a particular target. Ministers who hated him for his irreverent coverage of religious news, politicians who feared his editorial pen, and rival editors who envied his circulation triumphs—these and others opened up a “moral war” against this “venomous reptile,” this “obscene vagabond,” this “polluted wretch,” as one editor gently labeled him. After losing both advertising and readership—he saw a third of his circulation go, it was said—Bennett toned down some of his more strident coverage. His circulation climbed back toward 33,000 by 1849, in part because of the Mexican War, which enabled the Herald and other papers to demonstrate their news-gathering enterprise.

  Critics of the penny press feared that its truckling to the baser instincts of the masses would enable it to drive out the quality ones, as cheap money drives out dear. Yet the penny papers, even while exploiting the popular appetite for news of crime and vice, also drew tens of thousands into the newspaper-reading habit. They awakened the aspirations and expectations of large numbers of lower-income and less-educated people, bringing them to political self-consciousness during and after the Jackson years. Indeed, fears of the degrading of the whole press by the penny press were soon quieted by the journalistic feats of one man: Horace Greeley.

  He was an unlikely-looking editor in a profession that professed to be composed of gentlemen—“my clothes were scanty and seedy,” he remembered, “my appearance grim and unprepossessing.” But ever since his earliest years on a stony New England farm Horace Greeley had been in love with the printed word—he could “read fluently” at the age of four, he said later, “and quite passably with the book upside down—an absurd practice.” Arriving in New York with his personal possessions wrapped in a bandanna slung over his shoulder, he spent years in short-term jobs, one of which consisted of editing the Jeffersonian while steamboating up and down the Hudson, and another of typesetting, from which he was sacked because, it was said, the boss caught sight of him in the composing room and cried, “For God’s sake, fire him; let’s have decent-looking men around here, at least!” But through sheer doggedness, intense ambition, a fecund editorial imagination, and a good deal of experimentation, Greeley fought his way to the top of the tough, competitive world of Manhattan journalism. In April 1841, with his own savings and borrowed money, he launched the New York Tribune.

  The Tribune would be a penny paper, but with a difference. Although Greeley had worked closely with Whig leaders for years, he wanted a paper free of “servile partisanship” as well as of “gagged, mincing neutrality.” He would shun sex and celebrity stories, scandals, quack medical advertisements, and police reports in favor of serious, responsible, high-minded journali
sm. Greeley’s list of causes was lengthy: liberty, egalitarianism, a vague form of socialism, the rights of labor, the agrarian movement, free distribution of government lands to settlers, certain women’s rights, internal improvements, cooperativism. He believed that leaders among the privileged should engage literally in Social Uplift: the “great, the all-embracing reform of our age,” he preached, “is the Social Reform—that which seeks to lift the Laboring Class, as such—not out of labor, by any means—but out of ignorance, inefficiency, dependence, and want.”

  His list of dislikes was even longer: landlordism, capital punishment, human exploitation, monopoly, both wage and bond slavery, liquor, tobacco, and—alas—the theater, as a place of intoxication and assignation, full of “libertines” and “courtezans.” But he was much more than a moralist; a literary leader too, he assembled a brilliant staff, including Margaret Fuller, published major book reviews, book extracts, and lectures, and hired Karl Marx as a London correspondent. He was a trainer of younger writers, advising them never to publish a book until asked by a bookseller and offered “current cash of the realm,” and to remember that even though they might “write with an angel’s pen,” their writings would not sell unless they were known and talked about as authors. Hence they must write for the magazines; Mr. Emerson, he said, would have been twice as much read if he had done so, “just to let common people know of his existence.”