History of Journalism in the United States/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
"Democracy," says John Morley, "has come to mean government by public opinion." Like democracy itself, public, opinion is a new power which has come into the world since the Middle Ages. "In fact," declared E. L. Godkin, "it is safe to say,_that before the French Revolution nothing of the kind was known or dreamt of in Europe. There was a certain truth in Louis XIV's statement, which now seems so droll, that he was himself the state. Public opinion was HIS opinion. In England, it may be said with equal safety, there was nothing that could be called public opinion, in the modern sense, before the passage of the Reform Bill."[1]
Mr. Godkin, however, ignored the fact that, as early as 1738, Joseph Danvers rose in the House of Parliament and declared that Great Britain was then being governed by a power "that never was heard of as a supreme authority in any age or country before . . . it is the government of the press."[2]
Before England knew of this power, this new authority, it was established in America. De Tocqueville thought he saw, in the first Puritan who landed on these shores, the embodiment of democracy, but it was in the acquittal of the printer John Peter Zenger in 1734 that the first evidence of government by public opinion triumphant was given. The law was against him and legal precedents pointed to his conviction, but his lawyer appealed from the law to public opinion and the result was his acquittal—"the dawn of the Revolution."
The ideal of government by public opinion has been more nearly achieved in this country than elsewhere. With all the faults that foreign critics see in our government, it is admitted that, from the beginning, we have moved steadily toward that ideal. From De Tocqueville to Bryce, the critics have found only those faults that are in themselves the result of inactive public opinion. De Tocqueville's fear that the rights of minorities would be ignored has been proved groundless. In democracy or in a government by public opinon, minorities are as powerful as they are right. Our greatest reforms are the work of minorities, our greatest advances the triumph of the far-seeing few. The American Revolution itself was a minority movement, and it was successful only when public opinion was aroused. Mill's doubts before the Civil War about the evil effect of slavery, as well as Bryce's just criticism of our municipal government, have all been answered as public opinion has been aroused.
To assume that government by public opinion would be perfect would be to assume that man is perfect. At times the student may be disheartened or the philosopher dismayed, but, as long as the sovereign power rests with the people and the people are civilized, there is bound to be progress, for democracy itself is as positive a sign of evolution as is religion.
Those who regard democracy with misgiving are generally those who are more interested in man's written record than in man's place in nature. The entire recorded progress constitutes but the most superficial part of man's entire development. Assuming the human race to be 240,000 years old, and accepting the most generous figures on Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization, civilized man has existed only ten thousand years, or one-two hundred and fortieth part of the life of the human species. It is only in the last two hundred years that there has been a definite concept as to progress, unless one wishes to accept the gropings of Heraclitus and Lucretius as part of man's evolution toward an understanding of himself. How feeble then seem those doubts as to the future, when one contemplates the inevitable forces that are working toward man's progress!
That men will not easily be led from the lines of their accustomed thought, born of the instincts for immediate comfort and domination, is inevitable. For years we were in the habit of regarding the Middle Ages as great periods of darkness, when the human race went to sleep. We know now that scholarship was kept alive by the very monks who were formerly accused of strangling thought, and that the races that were then being slowly civilized were destined to give to humanity some of its greatest blessings. So when democracies seem to turn over, and the will of the people seems to be thwarted; or when, as frequently happens, some particular community refuses to respond to the call of those who assume that they have the greater vision, it is well to remember that the march of humanity's progress is as imperceptible as is the motion of the earth to those distant cousins of ours who still go on all-fours.
Since Turgot wrote his memorable essay on progress, we have learned to look on man's state as progressive so long as there is a development in man's intelligence. The moral sentiments, whether of utilitarian origin or not, are great factors in developing man's intelligence, and in turn intelligence develops the moral sentiments. So, where there is an intelligent people there will be a will to be free, and where there is a will to be free there will be a desire to be right.
The development of democracy in America is one of the greatest examples in recorded history of this law of progress—the triumph of democracy has always been the triumph of the moral sentiments.
How far democracy developed journalism and how far journalism developed democracy is an interesting question. That the democracy of ancient Greece, limited monarchy that it was, existed without journalism is true. But government was local and dealt purely with the affairs of those residing within the dema; the community being small, and the Greeks being a garrulous and politically developed people, they were able by word of mouth to keep track of their affairs. As soon as the government stretched out it became, not a democracy but a tyranny.
What is plainly evident is that the printing press was invented at a time when people were becoming restive. They had progressed to a point where they were no longer satisfied with the old servitude. Once given an invention by which man's thoughts might be communicated to others with a minimum of labor and expense, journalism was inevitable. The humblest effort to make it effective, such as that of Benjamin Harris, thus becomes an important page in our history.
Indifference to the history of journalism has been ascribed to the fact that research into those departments of knowledge that do not lead to an academic career is usually neglected. That comparatively few writers have been attracted to the subject is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that it is over a hundred and fifty years since the press in this country began to assume political functions. While the early historians entirely neglected this phase of our development, later writers have touched on it, but always most inadequately.
"Newspaper government," says the historian Rhodes, "we have with us, and it must be reckoned with"; yet little attempt has been made to investigate the origin of the political power of the new estate.
At a time when journalism has risen to the dignity of an academic career,—a time when it is conceded that it represents, if it does not furnish, the public opinion that makes and unmakes governments,—an inquiry as to its origin and development as a political power would seem to be, at least, labor not wasted. It is proposed in this book to trace the development of that power as it lies in the story of journalistic development.
It is recognized that this is only one of the many aspects from which journalism may be studied. A German economist, calling attention to the fact that the history of journalism has been a neglected study, declared that it is a study of the most direct concern to the political economist, for the reason that the newspaper was " primarily a commercial economic contrivance forming one of the most important pillars of contemporary economic activities."[3] Such a view is not justified by a research into American journalism, for we find that it is in affecting political results that its representatives have been most successful.
The history of journalism in America cannot be separated from the development of the democratic idea. The very first editor in this country, the forgotten and neglected Benjamin Harris, in all his interesting struggles represented that idea, for his fight was for freedom of expression, the very essence of democracy. With us democracy has. come to mean sovereignty of the whole body of the people; the achievement of that sovereignty was of the slowest development, and frequently the battle was made nowhere else than in the meagre and forgotten journals.
To journalism, then, democracy owes, not only its strength but, in whole or in part, all of its important victories. No political advance has been made in this country without the aid of the press; all of our democratic achievements have been accomplished with the help of men who were, in the beginning, regarded as mere mechanics, poor printers, or who were, in later periods, grudgingly given credit and political recognition as the representatives of a not entirely welcome social and political phenomenon.
Journalism, in turn, owes to democracy its enjoyment of enormous privileges, its practical admission into the government. In the preliminary skirmishes for liberty in this country, the people found that the free press was a powerful weapon by which they were able to wrest from tyranny the power of government. They found that through the press they could keep their own phalanxes compact, a difficult task in a country spread over the great area of the thirteen colonies.
"A free press" became their shibboleth. When a nation was born and the political thought of the philosophers of the eighteenth century had taken root, it was the press that made the battle for the extension of the suffrage and that wrested from the minority the power which, in a democracy, must be with the people. The abolition movement, variously explained, was a development of the democratic idea. What the statesmen of that time failed to realize was that there could not exist in a democracy a class, such as the slaveholders, claiming to have property rights in human beings. The press that took up the cause of the negroes did not represent the black men; it was impelled to action by the moral sense of those who had recently achieved sovereignty and who, subconsciously perhaps, acted as much for their own protection as for the betterment of the blacks. The low condition to which the poor whites were sinking at the South shows that a condition worse than slavery was possible, if the right to own human beings were not abolished.
Thus the development of democracy meant increase of the power of journalism. Strange and crude were the instruments of this journalism, it is true, but elegance and refinement are characteristic of neither biologic nor social evolution. The manners of men are rude, and, as journalism developed,—as a more or less illegitimate or "poor white" brother of literature,—it was subjected, helpfully in most cases, it is true, to criticism either by those who had little interest in the political significance or by those who were politically and socially opposed to the purposes to be achieved.
Strange instruments, as I have said, appeared in the course of this development. The elder Bennett and the Herald, as it was edited for years, would hardly seem the agents of either a moral or political development. Yet, distasteful as were many of his early exploits, and immoral as was his espousal of the slavery cause for purely commercial reasons, the elder Bennett did the country and democracy a great service, for he caused people to read newspapers in large numbers. He gave them news of events that lay about them daily, and of which they had little consciousness; he interested them in themselves and their fellow beings, he quickened their sense of life, thereby increasing their political power.
History is often read in terms superimposed by men with no sympathy for the story they are unfolding. The story of the evolution of such an institution as journalism should have very little to do with questions of taste or literature, except as they hindered or assisted the objects for which the journalist strove. Of all the editors in America, Bryant was pre-eminently literary, yet his influence was never so great as that of Bennett; even among the literary class he never achieved such influence and power as did Godkin, who wrote not a single poem.
We have spoken of journalism as the poor white brother of literature, a despised relative. In these later days it has become, with the impetus of being accepted as offering an academic career, something more; it might now be described as literature in action,—action first and action last. The artist may achieve success in journalism, as Dana did, but he must first be a man of action. The journalist must first see the truth, he must be one who is not deceived by the lie.
To tell such a story and to outline properly the relations of the press to government and to the people has necessitated a somewhat compact marshaling of a world of facts, the importance of which has been, not that they have been unrelated before, but that they show how resistless has been the law of advancement. The career of Benjamin Harris has been set forth in as careful detail as research would permit; this seems necessary if we are to understand journalism's very beginning, a beginning that makes luminous the struggle of Zenger and those patriots who made the Revolution possible.
The mere fact that Harris' name seemingly passed into oblivion does not mean that his influence was naught. Although directly, that influence was little, it was great in an indirect way, for the James Franklin who came back to Boston in 1719, to be the spokesman of the "Hell-Fire Club," that first organization of liberals, brought back with him from London a spirit that was as directly traceable to Harris and the other pioneers of journalism as the independent spirit of the pre-Revolutionary editors was traceable to Zenger. And as Zenger leads to Sam Adams, Adams leads to Jefferson and Hamilton and Duane and Coleman; Bennett to Greeley and Pulitzer to Hearst, a certain inevitableness marking the progress of the story.