U of Ideas of General Interest -- November 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Andrea Lynn, Humanities/Social Sciences Editor (217) 333-2177; [email protected]
NEWSPAPERS
Scholar-son of former reporter examines print's golden age
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Horace Greeley and James Gordon Bennett -- neither's a household name today, but they certainly were in their day. They were, in fact, "the giants of a new age."
"Between the two of them, they made the modern newspaper possible." So says George Douglas, the author of "The Golden Age of the Newspaper" (Greenwood Press). Douglas, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois, is the author of several books that explore giants of U.S. social history, including radio broadcasting, the railroad, the skyscraper and social critic H.L. Mencken.
In his new book, Douglas turns a critical lens on a century (1830 to 1930) of major movers and shakers. He discusses the men (Dana, Pulitzer, Hearst) -- and a few women (Nelly Bly); the machines (linotype, the Hoe lightening press); the movements (tabloids, the funnies); and the moments (Western expansion, the Civil War) that not only sold papers and made empires, but also helped the American newspaper become what Douglas calls "a great civilizing influence in spite of its many impurities."
Two early influences -- Greeley and Bennett, founders of New York's Tribune and Herald, respectively -- were contemporaries, yet they've never been "yoked together in journalism histories," Douglas said, which is odd since they represent "two different points of emphasis" in that history.
According to Douglas, Bennett was interested in "the mad rush of experience -- some people would have called it sensationalism in its early stages." Still, what Bennett did was revolutionary: He "invented the news -- the idea of an ongoing story. Before him, people thought of the day's news as static entities, not something that unfolded over time."
On the other side was Greeley, who "thought newspapers had intellectual potential," and thus, tried to make them into "a forum for national opinion." Greeley became a kind of national
sage -- Douglas said, "at a time when it seemed almost impossible to do so because in the 1840s and '50s, the country was intellectually in shambles over the dissolution of the Whig Party and the growth of the Republican Party. So here's a man searching desperately for ideas that would make the country work," Douglas said, noting that the Republican Greeley even hired Karl Marx as a correspondent.
Whether in the metropolis or on the prairie, newspapers rapidly became "a kind of a people's forum. They provided a sense of community." The beginning of the newspaper's decline came with the radio and other competitors for news gathering. "But as late as the 1920s, the newspaper was still the form of communication. It kept the country alive."
Douglas comes by his interest in newspapers naturally. His late father, Halsey Douglas, wrote for the Newark [N.J.] Evening News. Douglas Jr. often visited the paper after school. "I loved the roar of the presses," Douglas said, especially the flying paster, which glued a new roll of paper onto an old roll. Of his father, who covered the FBI, German saboteurs and labor unions, Douglas said: "He was a very good street reporter. He could get anybody to talk. He'd just look at them and they'd spill the beans."
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