THE RISE OF METROPOLITAN JOURNALISM,
1800-1840
The mechanical evolution of the modern newspaper is due chiefly to the steam-engine and the telegraph, but the evolution of the modern journalistic spirit is due chiefly to an aggressive democracy. Probably in no other country in the world has the press been so intimately connected with the inmost springs of the life of all political parties. No other nation has produced such a reading democracy as ours.
Democracy demands publicity. This great leveling force, pulling down on one side while it builds up on the other, is naturally hostile to any concealments and evasions of purpose or action. It scoffs at pretensions to esoteric wisdom. It revolts against secret machinations, as perilous to that regime of common consent which democracy calls "Law." From such reasons sprang those occasional popular frenzies against some secret fraternities, frenzies which shattered the Masonic order in 1829–1830, and which have buried the American, or Know-Nothing party, under forty years of obloquy. Upon the triumph of the democratic principle, therefore, the newspaper has been peculiarly dependent. It is, in theory at least, the very temple and shrine of Publicity. In fact, the newspapers, scattered throughout the body politic, act as lungs through which our system of representative party government draws most easily its vital breath.
To the mass of people the controllers of influential journals are the real managers of the great world's stage. They set the scene. They put the words into the players' mouths. They call attention to the moral which adorns the tale. "There's nothing," says the rattle-pated city editor in a recent story, "there's nothing like original news to show the influence of journalism. One morning, after the cakes had been bad for a week, I said to my landlady that I believed the fault must be in the buckwheat. She said 'No, she didn't think so, for the flour looked very nice indeed.' That day I put a line in the 'Local Glimpses' columns saying that unfortunately the buckwheat this year was of inferior quality. The very next morning she apologized to me, said I was right, the buckwheat was bad, she had read so in The Chronicle."
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