Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/372

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.



affairs of the newspaper were so involved with those of Mr. Wins- low that legal obstacles made the suspension necessary. The stigma which was attached to The Boston Daily News did much to dampen the religious ardor of those who had planned to establish daily religious newspapers in other cities, for The Boston Daily News had not practiced what it preached.

A decade after the attempt in New York City to found The World as a daily religious newspaper, The New York Daily Wit- ness, "a Christian, one-cent, afternoon newspaper," appeared. It started on July 1, 1871, and aimed not only to be religious in character, but also "to give the news of the day and much excel- lent family reading besides." It inserted no advertisements of "liquors, theaters, lotteries, or anything inconsistent with its character." It failed to receive the financial support it ex- pected and was fittingly interred in the newspaper graveyard alongside of its more secular companions. No attempt to found a daily religious newspaper was successful until Mary Baker Eddy started The Christian Science Monitor in Boston on Wednesday, November 25, 1908.

RECONSTRUCTION OF SOUTHERN PRESS During the Reconstruction Period, The Charleston Mercury was revived in 1867 under Colonel R. Barnwell Rhett, Jr. At about this time South Carolina was holding its Reconstruction Convention which was spoken of in Charleston as "the ring- streaked and striped convention." A secret editorial conference of The Mercury was held, and in spite of some objection it was decided "to make any attempt to establish a mongrel govern- ment in South Carolina a stench in the nostrils of the public and to make the odium of it too great for white men to bear." The Mercury then proceeded to publish the careers of all the "carpet- baggers and scallywags" then running for office. The articles were illustrated with numerous cartoons showing the carpet- baggers and the negro delegates to the Reconstruction Conven- tion in the most ridiculous juxtapositions. So well did The Mercury carry out its purpose that to this day the stigma of "Republicanism and Mongrelism" remain odious in South