revolution. Mirroring developments in other industries, new processes in typesetting, bookbinding, paper manufacturing, and mechanical reproduction made publishing a wide variety of materials—newspapers, magazines, sheet music, lithographs, books, and later, photographs—faster and cheaper than ever before.3 By the middle of the nineteenth century, more people had more access to ideas and art forms outside their immediate surroundings than at any previous point in human history.
All these gains, however, inevitably brought losses. In the case of the publishing industry, the gains meant the end of a guild system that had provided class mobility to generations of workers who had been able to prosper by moving from apprentice to journeyman to master. Technological innovation greatly simplified jobs, which made them less fulfilling—and less remunerative, as employers turned to unskilled labor that could be exploited more cheaply than journeymen who had dedicated their lives to learning their craft. Nor, of course, could unskilled laborers hope for the training that might lift them out of poverty. Moreover, the great sums of money involved in acquiring the new methods of production put them out of the reach of all but the wealthy few, who grew more wealthy still. It was during this period that a pattern emerged that shapes the course of U.S. popular culture to this day: ever larger organizations controlling the production of art for common people while depending on those same people not only to buy, but often to produce, the individual works.
In its best and worst aspects, the new order emerged first in the world of journalism.
CLASS OPERATIONS:THE BIRTH OF THE MASS PRESS
For all their differences (which at some points in their fifty-year relationship led to bitter enmity), Thomas Jefferson and John Adams shared a belief that the American Revolution had been waged to replace a corrupt established aristocracy with what they called a “natural” one. In such a world, the plowman and the professor would have equal standing before the law, and there was the chance—even the hope—that any plowman could, by dint of effort, become a professor. It was always assumed, however, that the professor, whatever his origins, would lead the plowman.
Over the course of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, this last assumption became increasingly difficult to take for granted. The rapid growth of the Union through the addition of new states, many of which lacked elites comparable to the monied, privileged Federalist faction of 1789-1800, created new democratic pressures. So did increasing agitation by reformers and working people back East who were seeking to organize the growing numbers of men who lacked the vote because they did not own property. Many of these people flocked to the banner of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican party, which offered a vision of an agrarian republic rooted in equality. Yet even before the last dyed-in-the-wool Jeffersonian, James Monroe, left office in 1825, many Democratic-Republicans realized that their vision of a natural aristocracy was ebbing. The increasing prominence of Andrew Jackson—a (pseudo) “plowman” with no interest in becoming a “professor”—following his victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 and culminating in his election to the presidency in 1828, was taken by many as emblematic of a new breed of frank, colorful, decisive Americans ready to take destiny into their own hands. Jackson, a wealthy, authoritarian slaveholder, was in some ways an unlikely champion of the Little Man. But even if the movement he supposedly represented was far more limited than its supporters then and since have claimed, a bona fide reorganization of politics was taking place, one whose effects would subsequently ripple outward.
This political reorganization is clearly reflected in the transformation of newspaper publishing over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. As discussed in Chapter 1, newspapers got off to an uncertain start in the colonies, and it was not until the eighteenth century that the industry had securely established itself in the cities. The Stamp Act of 1765, which required all printed documents to use a stamped paper that carried a special tax, hit newspapers especially hard, and their publishers played an important role in galvanizing opposition to British rule. There were thirty-seven papers in the colonies at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, twenty of which survived paper shortages, difficulties in gathering information, and British occupation. One of these, the Pennsylvania Evening Post (published in Philadelphia), became the first daily.4
By the turn of the nineteenth century, U.S. newspapers had a primarily mercantile readership. In addition to carrying domestic politics and news from abroad, they featured shipping schedules and paid announcements by wholesalers seeking to sell imported goods to retailers. Indeed, their very names—Boston’s Daily Mercantile Advertiser, Baltimore’s Daily Commercial Advertiser, Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Packet—suggest their economic (and often maritime) orientation. These papers were generally sold in yearly subscriptions, and individual copies were relatively expensive.
By the early nineteenth century, however, the political functions of the press were becoming increasingly important, as politics itself became a kind of bruising competitive sport. The schism between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans in the 1790s was an unexpected and unpleasant development for a governing elite that professed antipathy toward sectarianism. As a result, many of their disputes were not played out directly but by proxy in the press. “Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion, our churches will be prostrated, and some famous prostitute, under the title of Goddess of Reason, will preside in the Sanctuaries now devoted to the Most High,” claimed one Federalist organ during the campaign of 1800, using rhetoric that was typical of the time.5 Jeffersonians, it should be added, gave as good as they got.
The growing scale of newspaper publishing, and the new prominence given editorial matter, led to the rise of an important new figure in U.S. politics and culture: the editor. Previously, newspapers had been small operations run by printers. Now, however, there was a new premium on political and entrepreneurial savvy. Party operatives with access to capital became central to the evolving direction of journalism, and parties became key funding sources and exerted tight control over editorial direction.6
The founding of the New York Evening Post by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 illustrates these patterns. The pre-eminent member of the Federalist opposition after the election of his arch-rival Jefferson, Hamilton raised $10,000 from some wealthy patrons, and established the Post as a counterweight to the Jeffersonian American Citizen. Hamilton did not actually edit the Post himself, but he was essentially the paper’s editorial director, using it to advance the Federalist political program (and writing articles under a pseudonym) until his death in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804. Ironically, Hamilton’s hand-picked editor later turned the editorship over to William Cullen Bryant, who became a Jacksonian Democrat committed to overturning Hamilton’s political and economic legacy (embodied most concretely by the Bank of the United States). Still more ironic was the Post’s later incarnation as a working-class tabloid that sought to sell papers with tart headlines. By the end of the twentieth century, it had become the longest running continuous daily newspaper in the United States, but has also moved a long way from Hamilton’s original vision.7
The Post’s success anticipated an important newspaper tradition that emerged in full flower during Jackson’s presidency: the mass-based daily catering to a working-class readership. Many of the strategies that mark contemporary tabloids—human interest stories, a fascination with crime and sex, the use of vernacular language, and a declared indifference to respectable opinion—can be traced back to the penny dailies of the 1830s. These newspapers were among the most important forms of popular culture in the nineteenth century, and a key influence on (and distributor of) such forms as dime novels, which will be discussed below.
The first successful example of this kind of journalism was the New York Sun, a daily founded by printer-turned-editor Benjamin Day. “The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of
