The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878

by Mark Wahlgren Summers

Relations between the press and politicians in modern America have always been contentious. In The Press Gang , Mark Summers tells the story of the first skirmishes in this ongoing battle. Following the Civil War, independent newspapers began to separate themselves from partisan control and assert direct political influence. The first investigative journalists uncovered genuine scandals such as those involving the Tweed Ring, but their standard practices were often sensational, as editors and reporters made their reputations by destroying political figures, not by carefully uncovering the facts. Objectivity as a professional standard scarcely existed. Considering more than ninety different papers, Summers analyzes not only what the press wrote but also what they chose not to write, and he details both how they got the stories and what mistakes they made in reporting them. He exposes the peculiarly ambivalent relationship of dependence and distaste among reporters and politicians. In exploring the shifting ground between writing the stories and making the news, Summers offers an important contribution to the history of journalism and mid-nineteenth-century politics and uncovers a story that has come to dominate our understanding of government and the media.

Genres: Politics

424 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1994

About the author

Mark Wahlgren Summers is Thomas D. Clark Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, Lexington.

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book Mark Wahlgren Summers shows why he is America's pre-eminent historian of Gilded Age politics. For one, he does on just regurgitate the famous political battles of the era, say, on Andrew Johnson's impeachment, or the end of Ulysesses S. Grant's Whiskey Ring, but, instead, looks at politics in the era as a whole social world that needs to be infiltrated and understood. In this case, he looks at the "Press Gang," or the political press as it existed during Ulysses S. Grant administration. It was an entirely different world.

Of course the press in that day was largely partisan, but the rise of "independents" during the Grant era, like John Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, Murat Halstead's Cincinnati Commercial, and Horace White's Chicago Tribune, meant many pressmen began to search even their own party for scandal. Yet, except for the rare exception like Henry Van Ness Boynton of the Cincinnati Gazette, that did not mean sending investigative journalist out to search documents, but merely printing every rumor or second-hand report as gospel. The press still relied on many special government posts, from flagrantly overpriced advertisements (a dollar a line for NYC instead of the usual 40 cents) and government printing contracts (often, for instance, paying to print all of a state's legislative debates, which many papers did anyway without payment), government postmasterships, or, surprisingly frequently, clerkships in the House and the Senate or in local statehouses. Yet all this patronage did not always buy love, but instead often became a source for more leaks and accusations, occasionally traded by journalists with other, less politically aligned, presses.

The Washington beat became especially important in this era. For one, the rules of the Associated Press required that all its members share news gathered, with the only two exceptions being Washington and Albany. So more and more papers sent special "correspondents" to Washington, with the understanding that they would not just report the news but establish a paper's "voice." The fall of telegraph rates by over 90% in the 20 years after the Civil War allowed them to keep the news coming home, but most correspondents, as opposed to reporters, wrote out their articles long-hand and sent them by mail, obviating the need to pay by the telegraphic word, in an era when telegraph expenses could be the greatest single line-item for many papers. The increase from 1 to 9 special trains a day moving between DC and NYC made sending distinctive correspondent mail even easier. "Interviews" only began shortly before the war, but took off afterwards, with President Andrew Johnson giving the first, disastrous, presidential one, in 1866.

This was an era of flourishing local papers. New York had over 150 (albeit, most weeklies), even a city like Cincinnati featured 8 dailies and 40 (!) weekly newspapers. But most of these printed half a dozen columns of news at most, almost all of it national. For instance, the Arkansas Little Rock Gazette, on some days at 13 lines of state and local events, and often 0 lines about international. The rest was national. Many of these local 4-pagers relied on the burgeoning AP syndicated press reports, although these were often colored by the local agents which gathered the news, often only relaying Democratic news from teh South, for instance. In DC AP's Lawrence Gobright supposedly kept the syndicated news so unbiased and boring so people would have to buy AP's special reports at extra cost.

In the end, when the "Quadrilateral" of four independent presses gathered in Cincinnati in 1872 to nominate one of their own, Editor Horace Greeley of the Tribune, for the "liberal Republican" new ticket, they showed the limits of their power. People were less likely to follow the independent papers then follow those that agreed with them, and the reform papers that tried to boost Greeley ended up losing subscribers, as well as the election. Eventually, after 1878 (when the House established the first self-directed rules for the press-gallery) the press became partisan again but also less sensationalistic and scandal-mongering. It established a new world that was only broken apart by the likes of the true independents of Hearts and Pulitzer at the turn of the century

[Cerebralcortext · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It is well to study the messenger carefully when the message he carries comes in his own handwriting” (6). Journalists, wielding the scepter of newsworthiness, have immense heft over the direction and emotional (dys)regulation of a nation’s affairs. But are they, in fact, a necessary class of actors? Summers points out that, even in the Gilded Age, as the modern press that we know—with its editorials, columns, opinions, and breaking news—emerged, one could compile a more-than-adequate broadside simply by gathering the wires that came in from across the country and abroad alongside House and Senate stenographic records. Just the pure facts were all one needed. The reason we care about journalists, if we do at all, is for their voice.

But that, as Summers argues convincingly, was a strange conclusion to arrive at in the nineteenth century. Sure, from the coffeehouses and salons of the Old World were derived older forms of news engagement such as the long-form essays associated with particular polemicists. What America did differently was to raise substantially the velocity, the quantity, and the quality of basic news, to the extent that few countries, much less papers, could rival the top American dailies in delivery and execution. And these seemingly innocuous bits of data were married to an individual journalist or editor’s sense of justice, public opinion, and gross ambition. Taken together, the Gilded Age saw a level of political involvement from news figures which dwarfed what came before. Where before critiques were formal submission pieces, now news items were fashioned into weapons as well. Cartoonists like Thomas Nast acknowledged this trend when their criticism turned not just on politicians, but on newsrooms and journalists too who were becoming figures large than life (think Henry Morton Stanley and his search for David Livingstone). More than their former role as partisan publishers, journalists began to conceive of themselves as independents who might become participants and players in the political game they had done so much to upset.

There are really two main stories that Summers wants to tell. One is of politicians before the age of PR struggling against the insouciance and hyperactivity of the press gangs, most succinctly exemplified in the travails of Grant’s presidency. The other is of the ‘independent’ press’ humiliation with the failed campaign of one of their own, Horace Greeley. This setback, Summers avers, contributed to the decline of one era, doubling that of the Gilded Age, marked by “the venality and venom of the journalistic fraternity” (315). New standards would arise amidst the fallout, but the damage, arguably, had been done.

Summers is, on that last note, reticent in drawing parallels to journalistic attitudes in our day and age. It is true that there could be no true journalistic independence, “not until newspapers took themselves further from the political arena and acted as spectators rather than gladiators, and even then it was an independence biased strongly toward the respectability and ideology of its commercial sponsors” (318). Missing in his analysis is how the fundamental precepts of adversarial reporting, ‘leading’ the public, and pushing narratives from editorial desks have remained, even if they are less vociferously blatant than they were when the New York Herald led the country. The independent press establishment, of course, had positive qualities “in news gathering and readiness to deal with a broad array of issues,” and Summers concedes that papers rarely lived up to their rhetoric of putting newly-minted professionalism and responsibility to the ‘truth’ ahead of political obligations (69). But Summers does not analyze the establishment as a structure, and why that very structure, and not just the private (and very public) sins of his actors, contributed to the impossibility of ever fulfilling its raison d’être.

In order to have done so, Summers would have had to write a different version of this book, one which interrogated much more strongly why, as he relates, local newspapers turned out to be so anemic and vapid (as they often are today, unfortunately), and why people seemingly willingly gravitated to larger papers and national news. Considering Tocqueville’s reflections on the vitality of local American governance and civic health mere decades ago, genuflection to national priorities cannot be taken for granted as a self-evident truth which naturally obtained. Furthermore, Summers would have had to foreground the expense of gathering news in the first place. Summers, to be sure, has many fine moments in which he carefully rolls out prices and describes the physical and emotional toll rookie journalists underwent to feed the machine. Yet, without considering the friction of journalistic endeavor as an inherent aspect of the whole enterprise to be lubricated with cash as the final solution, we are deprived of the opportunity to really grapple with the difficulties and stakes involved in wanting to know what is going on in the world, and this ultimately distorts our understanding of where and why the press gang succeeded and failed, and how their legacy endures today.

Nevertheless, Summers is a wonderful and engaging writer with an eye for the telling detail and illuminating remark. This work is a testament to his scholarship and contributes not only to the history of nineteenth-century America but also our own times. With the advent of algorithmic feeds and AI-generated content, the question of who tells the news, and tells it slant, is ever more vital to the health of individual and nation.