American printers had been circulating news for a century when George Washington took office as president, but the new nation's provincial press faced an uncertain future. "The expectation of failure is connected with the very name of a Magazine," Noah Webster said in the first days of the Republic. Of the more than two hundred papers in 1800, only about a dozen had published during the American Revolution, and not one of the twenty-four dailies was that old.
The weekly newspaper was the first form of journalism to adapt to an expanding democratic society. The flatbed press, not much changed since Gutenberg's time, was ideal for the frontier. Loaded onto a wagon or boat, set up in a tent or under a tree, the press became one of the earliest marks of community, both purveying news and boosting the town. Cincinnati got its first newspaper in 1793 when it had fewer than five hundred citizens. The first newspaper west of the Mississippi came to St. Louis in 1808 when the population was less than fifteen hundred. Leavenworth, Kansas, had a newspaper in 1854 when the town consisted of four tents. These papers relied on government subsidies through printing contracts and special postal rates. Editors received exchange papers, the source of most news, for free. Local papers could be sent free by post in the publisher's home territory throughout most of the nineteenth century. The pattern of settlement and government subsidies created the most decentralized press in the world.
These diverse papers, with names such as Porcupine's Gazette, Huntress, and Live Giraffe, were charged with many sins, but never dullness. The drama of politics was the center of almost every newspaper, but readers expected to be informed about wonders and horrors, too. In 1843, the Illinois Statesman tried to avoid this, saying "If our readers will for the present just have the goodness to imagine a certain due proportion of fires, tornadoes, murders, thefts, robberies and bully fights, from week to week, it will do just as well, for we can assure them they actually take place." The paper lasted less than a year, a lesson ignored by later publishers at their peril.
Mass circulation did not become the key to political influence until the middle of the nineteenth century. In the age of Andrew Jackson, powerful editors such as Amos Kendall, Thurlow Weed, and Thomas Ritchie owed their power to their parties, not their subscription lists. It was local editors who inspired voters and made electoral politics work.
The main-line press was not the pioneer of mass circulation. Evangelicals and social movements stemming from the religious impulse led the way in providing news for all. In the 1830s the American Tract Society alone produced five pages of religious information each year for every adult and child in America. Reform movements such as abolitionism broadened the audience for journalism to include women, children, and blacks. In the middle of the 1830s, for example, the American Antislavery Society flooded the mails with its publications.
Some commercial dailies in the largest cities, however, were becoming masters of mass circulation. They commanded capital just as the technological changes in printing demanded large investments. In the 1840s, big-city publications began to take advantage of the railroad and telegraph, and journalists reached an audience undreamed of earlier.
The newspaper became an impulse item in the 1830s when the "penny press" was born in eastern cities. Benjamin Day and James Gordon Bennett, unsatisfied with subscription sales, sent newsboys out to hawk papers. These dailies sold for a penny or two rather than the standard six cents. They mixed crime and adventure with news of politics and trade. Bennett's New York Herald, begun in 1835, had sales of 77,000 on the eve of the Civil War, the largest daily circulation in the world. Bennett, a cantankerous Democrat, published news for every taste, from the common reader to the elite. Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, also catering to a broad readership, published a weekly edition of 200,000 that circulated in the countryside. Greeley was a hero to urban artisans and entrepreneurs. A cross section of American radicals had their say in his paper, and Karl Marx was one of his European correspondents.
No American magazine had comparable influence before the Civil War. The Jacksonian Democratic Review, however, provided an attractive forum for writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. Niles' Weekly Register, a compendium of newspapers, had a grasp of the whole nation that was unmatched by other periodicals. Northern magazines dominated the flow of information and the definition of culture. Even DeBow's Review, targeted to southern readers and espousing secession, was published in New York City for about three thousand subscribers. Most contributors to these magazines were either poorly paid or not paid at all.
Magazines came to play a larger role when they published stories and articles directed at readers whom newspapers overlooked. Godey's Lady's Book, edited by Sarah J. Hale, and Peterson's Ladies' National Magazine helped create the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. These Philadelphia journals each had 150,000 subscribers by the 1860s. Some of the earlier general interest magazines featured pictures and cartoons. Millions of Americans followed the Civil War in the woodblock prints of Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
After the war, a new breed of powerful dailies appeared. Immigrants and their offspring controlled many of the most influential papers: Joseph Pulitzer ran the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World; Adolph S. Ochs, the New York Times; Edward W. Scripps, the first great chain of newspapers. A millionaire from California, William Randolph Hearst, followed Pulitzer and Scripps in creating dailies that caught the imagination of working-class Americans. The Appeal to Reason of Girard, Kansas, was the one radical publication in modern America to break through to a mass audience. This weekly had a circulation of 750,000 in 1912, and an "appeal army" of eighty thousand subscription agents was busy in every state.
Ethnic newspapers thrived as well; many newcomers found more newspapers printed in their language in the United States than in their homeland. At the turn of the century, for example, there were six Yiddish dailies in New York City. African-Americans founded some forty papers before 1865 and responded to the end of slavery by starting more than one thousand by 1900.
Overall, the United States began the twentieth century with more varied sources of news in print than it had ever had or would have again. The number of daily newspapers alone peaked by 1910 at about twenty-six hundred.
News edited for a particular geographical, ethnic, or political community is limited in its appeal. Magazines of the Gilded Age had sought to bridge these divides, but rarely succeeded. Editors of the Nation, the North American Review, and the Atlantic Monthly had been grateful for ten thousand subscribers. But truly popular magazines capable of setting the national agenda appeared in the 1890s. Publishers cut their prices from the standard thirty-five cents to a nickel, took advantage of printing improvements such as the halftone engraving process, and sought out the best writing of the time.
New entrepreneurs such as S. S. McClure hit upon what Theodore Roosevelt dubbed as "muckraking." The term was taken as a compliment by the men and women who exposed corruption in politics and greed in business. Some of the most celebrated muckraking series were an exposé of patent medicines by Samuel H. Adams, a study of the Senate by David Graham Phillips, a report on urban government by Lincoln Steffens, and a history of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Tarbell. Several muckraking magazines had more than half a million subscribers, and overall, some 20 million American homes followed these investigations. In 1910 Senator Albert J. Beveridge called muckraking a "people's literature" amounting to "almost a mental and moral revolution." No permanent revolution of this type changed the American press, however. Cheap cover prices meant a heavier dependence on advertisers, who objected strongly to such journalism. Moreover, the exploitation of reform themes by so many magazines eventually made the formula stale in a culture attuned to novelty. Finally, as Roosevelt had feared, muckraking made political participation itself seem unappealing.
World War I gave popular journalism a fresh set of ideals as well as villains, and when it ended, few tried to return to the crusades of the prewar era. Several magazines appeared that were targeted at sophisticates: the Smart Set and American Mercury, edited by newspaperman H. L. Mencken, and the New Yorker, founded by Harold Ross in 1925. The general circulation magazines dropped the theme of reform and celebrated a culture of consumption. In the 1920s the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal became fixtures in middle-class homes and attracted some of the best young writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. The new tabloid newspapers of the 1920s, notably the New York Daily News, achieved large circulations by covering crime, sports, and scandal. The most successful effort to win readers to serious topics in the interwar years was the family of magazines begun by Henry Luce: Time (1923), Fortune (1930), and Life (1936), a brilliant exercise in photojournalism.
Luce thought the duty of journalists was to see the world the way he saw it, an outlook shared by such publishers as Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and the aging Hearst. But most of the press was no longer a pulpit for owners. As Walter Lippmann observed, professional staffs were exerting more control. The Newspaper Guild, for example, founded during the New Deal, challenged the authority of management over editorial employees. But if owners grew less important, the corporate organization of the press now acquired a greater influence on what Americans read. Newspaper chains, such as those founded in the 1920s by Frank E. Gannett and Samuel I. Newhouse, helped standardize local papers. At the end of World War II, four out of five newspapers were locally owned; in 1990 four out of five were controlled by outside corporations. The United States had more than sixteen hundred daily papers, but just fifteen chief executive officers were responsible for the majority of the circulation. About eleven thousand magazines were published, but with only six corporations accounting for the bulk of the business.
Only in folklore were newspapers and magazines in a race for circulation. This competition was real enough when Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote The Front Page (1928), the classic account of journalists who would do anything to beat a rival and sell more papers. In the 1920s more than five hundred cities had competing dailies; sixty years later, there were forty and in only about half of these cities were the papers separately owned. The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 exempted failing newspapers from antitrust laws, allowing them to divide up their market. Ninety-eight percent of daily papers had no local competition for readers. General interest magazines found that large circulations could be a disadvantage. The Saturday Evening Post died in 1969 with 7 million paying readers; Life had even more when it folded in 1972. Individual copies of these weeklies sold for as little as half of what they cost to produce, so publishers had to rely on advertising to make a profit. But many readers were too isolated, too poor, or too old to be an attractive audience for advertisers. Television had eclipsed newspapers and magazines as a general advertising medium.
The age of print journalism as a common denominator providing news for all at a profit was over by the last quarter of the twentieth century. Most dailies were edited to appeal to upscale readers and the advertisers who wanted access to them. Hearst and Pulitzer had believed that everyone should read their papers, and Luce had had the same dream for his magazines. But in 1990, no publication was edited with such an audience in mind. Although the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today used satellite communication and regional printing plants to reach across the nation, they targeted only special groups of readers. Similarly, most successful magazines aimed at desirable consumers, not the public at large.
The press has never lacked critics. Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were outraged by lies in the newspapers of their times. In the nineteenth century, pictures in the press were condemned as frivolous and misleading. When Upton Sinclair compared the press establishment to a brothel in The Brass Check (1919), H. L. Mencken accused him of understatement. The persistence of such criticism draws attention to an enterprise where the rules have never been clear but expectations have always been high. News in print has never lost the power to shock and worry Americans. The rise of new media has not dulled this concern. The consolidation of the press among fewer owners and narrower readerships means that the criticism has never been more necessary.
Bibliography:
Thomas C. Leonard, The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (1987); Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (1930-1968).
Author:
Thomas C. Leonard
See also Bennett, James Gordon, and Bennett, James Gordon, Jr.; Bok, Edward; Freedom of the Press; Greeley, Horace; Hearst, William Randolph; Howells, William Dean; Leslie, Frank; Luce, Henry; Mencken, H. L.; Muckrakers; Nast, Thomas; Pulitzer, Joseph; Wallace, DeWitt; Zenger Trial.
