Journalism and the American Experience

Bruce J. Evensen

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351336246
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: World History

Journalism and the American Experience offers a comprehensive examination of the critical role journalism has played in the struggle over America's democratic institutions and culture. Journalism is central to the story of the nation's founding and has continued to influence and shape debates over public policy, American exceptionalism, and the meaning and significance of the United States in world history. Placed at the intersection of American Studies and Communications scholarship, this book provides an essential introduction to journalism's curious and conflicted co-existence with the American democratic experiment.

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1 The Transatlantic Enlightenment and Colonial America

Elizabeth Eisenstein has noted how the shift from script to print created a “revolutionary situation” across Europe. Incunabula arose from Mainz to Cologne, Nuremberg and Leipzig, and out into Basel, Paris, over to Venice and throughout Italy. It might take a monk a year to hand-copy a Bible and lay stationers in university towns fared hardly better. In the 50 years following the miracle at Mainz, an estimated 20 million books were produced throughout Europe. In the century that followed, that increased 10 times more. Harold Innis observes that “monopolies of knowledge” came under attack with the appearance of printers. The authority of those who held power was threatened by those who had the power to print. By the mid-16th century, the Protestant press in Germany, Switzerland and Holland became important civic institutions in the diffusion of ideas across early modern Europe. Those who printed corantos and news-books were described by Thomas Macaulay as having the temerity of “forgers” in their “manufacture of treasonable works of all classes and sizes.”

Publishing opinions in Medieval England could get a man killed. History books say William Carter was hanged on January 11, 1584 for publishing his opinions. It took a hand-picked jury 15 minutes to convict Carter of a capital crime. He was bound and dragged on a wooden hurdle to the edge of town where a bluff overlooked the meeting of the Rivers Tyburn and Thames. It would be the place of his execution. A holiday had been called to boost the size of the crowd to witness this warning. A short drop assured a hanging would not break his neck. A splash of water revived Carter for the quartering table. Bound there, his private parts were cut away and burned before his eyes. Two years after Carter’s cruel dispatch, the secretive and lethal Star Chamber ruled that it was forbidden to publish news about Britain in Britain. King James I initially banned these broadsides from Britain, claiming they “print all manner of news” that might complicate his control over “matters of state.”

In August 1621, John Chamberlain, British ambassador to The Hague, wrote disparagingly of corantos, eight to 24 pages thick, that “every weeke” print “all manner of newes,” filling bookstalls surrounding St. Paul’s Cathedral with foreign news. English printers who published with authority might live to regret it. Puritan John Milton famously offered in Areopagitica the case for the freedom of unlicensed printing, comparing his case to Paul’s plea before Athenians on the Areopagus, a rocky hill in Athens where judges sat. Only in “Popish places,” Milton argued, “where the laity are hated and despised” were books banned. And those nations were no “better, honester, wiser, or chaster” for it. “Errors in a good government,” he declared, would go unrecognized “if the liberty of printing be reduced to the power of a few.” He claimed that “opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making” and “he who kills a good book kills reason itself.”

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Milton’s fellow Puritan William Brewster chafed at religious practices inside the Church of England and was punished for publishing his opposition. Fleeing to Leiden, he partnered with Thomas Brewer, starting in 1608 printing tracts that were smuggled into England. The Perth Assembly, published anonymously by Brewster and Brewer from the relative safety of Holland in 1619, captured the attention of King James since the sovereign was expressly mentioned in the manuscript. On September 8, 1619 Dutch authorities, under pressure from London, seized the press. Brewster fled and led 102 passengers, many of them Separatists, to the Mayflower, which arrived at Plymouth Colony on November 11, 1620, after a 66-day Atlantic transit. Barely half survived the first winter. Governor William Bradford later wrote they had agreed to go to “the remote parts of the world” because of their “great hope and inward zeal for the propagating and advancing of the gospel” free from the corruption of the state church. As a persecuted minority in England, Puritans emphasized freedom of expression to make their case against Anglicanism. As a majority in the New World, they were quick to print an oath to ensure loyalty to their commonwealth. Opposition to the oath showed the Atlantic was no barrier to the emerging Enlightenment belief that individuals should be free to make decisions that were in their own self-interest. “There cannot any one moral rule be proposed,” empiricist John Locke wrote, “whereof a man may not justly demand a reason.” In 1689 Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration appeared, arguing for greater liberality in expression and publication of religious differences. “We ought not impose” religious views “upon others,” he suggested, “unless we would be content also that other doctrines should be imposed upon us in the same manner.” His Two Treatises of Government went further. It attacked the divine right of kings by insisting “just governments rule by the consent of the governed,” a sentiment that would soon be echoed by Thomas Jefferson.

The publication on September 25, 1690 of Public Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick by Boston printer Benjamin Harris in Boston promised “an account of such considerable things as have arrived under our Notice.” America’s first newspaper, however, did not survive beyond its first issue. The month before, Harris had opened the London Coffee House in Boston. Increase Mather, acting president and rector of Harvard College and his son, Cotton Mather, became regular customers. The younger Mather appears to have briefed Harris on the embarrassingly unsuccessful efforts of a military expedition, sent out by the provisional government against Indians, who had attacked frontier communities in Maine. It was not news the governor of Massachusetts and his Privy Council welcomed reading. On the Monday after the first and only public appearance of Publick Occurrences, the paper was suppressed. It would be 14 more years before another printer tried to report to colonial readers the news of the day.

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On April 24, 1704, Bartholomew Green first printed the two-page Boston News-Letter of postmaster John Campbell. It paid to be politically connected, and Campbell could rely on Royal Governor Joseph Dudley for support. In 1704, Dudley was in the second year of his second tour as governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, despised by those who saw his initial appointment in 1686 as an extension of King James II’s power over the people and precincts of New England. Campbell’s masthead admitted he “published by authority,” affirming his fidelity and financial dependence on Anglican officials versus the familiar faith of the Puritan fathers. Taking sides permitted Campbell to publish but limited his readership. Cotton Mather, who had succeeded his father as pastor of Boston’s original North Church, considered Campbell’s news a “paltry” account of “antiquities” and a “thin sort of diet.” On November 9, 1715, Dudley was out as royal governor. His replacement Samuel Shute picked William Brooker as postmaster but Campbell kept the News-Letter. Brooker began the Boston Gazette on December 21, 1719, and the first newspaper war was on. Campbell “pitied the poor reader of the new paper.” Brooker replied that Campbell was a drunk and had been “turned out” because of it. The personal became political. Brooker backed Shute in his quarrels with the colonial assembly over salary and border security. Campbell counted Mather as an ally in his growing opposition to royal rights that included control over currency, timber and banking.

Between April and December 1721, nearly half of Boston’s 12,000 inhabitants suffered from smallpox. Parents panicked when they saw the first signs of forehead rashes in their children that would be terrifying, followed by fluid-filled blisters that enlarged and ruptured. The infection would prove fatal in four of every five children afflicted. Five thousand eight hundred and eighty-nine cases in all were reported, leading to three-quarters of all Boston deaths. Four hundred and eleven of the 844 people who would die from the disease succumbed in October alone. The scourge began when the HMS Seahorse bound from Barbados arrived in Boston Harbor on April 22, 1721. A day after passing inspection, one crew member showed signs of smallpox. He was quarantined in a house near the harbor. A red flag outside the home read: “God have mercy on this house.” Nine more cases appeared on the ship by early May. More than a thousand fled the city, hoping to stay safe, but by May 27, eight cases of infection appeared in Boston. Within 10 days, Cotton Mather had sent an abstract on inoculations throughout Boston’s medical community, urging action. Only Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, who lacked a medical degree, responded positively. On June 27, 1721, Boylston inoculated his 13-year-old son, Thomas, and two black slaves, Jack, aged 36, and Jackie, who was two years old. By mid-July, they had fully recovered, and he inoculated seven more. On August 12, Boylston inoculated Mather’s son Samuel.

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One week later, three men deeply opposed to Mather’s methods launched the New England Courant to oppose his influence. The paper’s printer, 24-year-old James Franklin, had returned to Boston from an apprenticeship in England four years before with a sturdy Ramage Press and a font of type to set up his own print shop. Brooker made Franklin printer of the Gazette, and Franklin made Benjamin, his 12-year-old brother, his apprentice. Mather and his supporters argued inoculation was a providential gift in the pages of the Gazette, which by the summer of 1721 had passed to postmaster Philip Musgrave and James Franklin was out of a job. John Checkley, a local apothecary, and William Douglass, a medical doctor, supported the start-up of Franklin’s new paper, and wrote some of its earliest articles opposing inoculation. Douglass, the town’s only doctor with a medical degree, published pieces denouncing inoculations in the News-Letter but wanted a freer hand and larger space to make his case. The Courant was his answer. Franklin promised that “anti-inoculators and inoculators would be welcome to speak their minds” in his paper. From the first, however, a steady stream of anti-inoculation arguments began appearing in his pages.

For Douglass and Franklin the inoculation controversy was a way of diminishing Puritan authority in New England, while creating a space for the authority of science in public life. For Mather and his supporters, the dispute was a way of preventing the spread of a dangerous contagion, while showing the compatibility of science and faith. On October 23, 1721, Mather published in the Gazette a “faithful account” of how Boylston’s experiments had managed to prevent the spread of smallpox. Douglass argued that only scientific testing and carefully observed experiments could prove that. Douglass mocked Mather’s method, claiming one way to eliminate the threat of Eastern Indians would be by killing them through inoculations. Opposition to inoculation grew. On the evening of November 14, 1721, a rock was hurled into Mather’s residence. Attached was the note: “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you. I’ll inoculate you with this, with a pox to you.” Boylston’s home was attacked too. Search parties with halters threatened to hang him. Boylston had to be hidden by his wife for his own safety. Soon, Mather and other members of his family received their shots. In all, 247 patients were inoculated from nine months to 67 years of age. Six of these died. Three were among the oldest patients inoculated. The other three likely had contracted smallpox prior to inoculation. Douglass would later admit “some years’ experience” had persuaded him inoculations had value, even if touted by ministers he could not abide. It was Mather who had the last laugh, publishing in the Gazette after the contagion had passed, “A Vindication of the Ministers of Boston.”

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James Franklin gets a bad press for being the bullying brother of Ben. Ben lived to tell that story and James didn’t. Ben helped reinvent American journalism with the Pennsylvania Gazette, while positioning himself at the center of the national debate over independence. There are no monuments to James, although his story is more characteristic of the hardships faced by colonial editors in the nine generations from America’s founding to its emergence as a new nation. He was on the wrong side of the inoculation controversy and behind bars a few months later for seeming to suggest in a June 11, 1722 issue of the Courant that the government council was insufficiently enthusiastic in its fight against pirates who threatened colonial shipping. Seven months later it was the same thing. A January 14, 1723 “Essay Against Hypocrites” was seen as an attack on Cotton Mather and part of the paper’s pattern “of mocking religion,” bringing it and its ministers “into contempt” and upsetting the public “peace and good order.” The January 28 edition of the Courant listed 17-year-old brother Ben as the publisher, an apparent effort to absolve James from further punishment for published remarks. The ruse backfired. Ben could claim he was no longer an apprentice of a paper he “printed,” and left hastily for Philadelphia to pursue his own plans in publishing. It left James to advertise on September 30 for a “likely lad” who wanted to serve as his apprentice.

James Franklin published without authority, making him vulnerable to political sanctioning. His paper was again suppressed after its 255th issue in a June 25, 1726 edition. By then, James had had enough. He wrote that he had been “persecuted for the expression of my opinions” and accepted the invitation of his older brother John “to find a more congenial home at the mouth of Narragansett Bay” by moving with his wife Ann to Newport, Rhode Island. John made candles and James published poetry and the official proceedings of the General Assembly. It seemed safer. Under the name “Poor Robin,” James issued eight almanacs from his printing shop on Tillinghast’s Wharf, ably assisted by Thomas Fleet, who would later become Boston’s most prominent printer. Having secured a small savings, Franklin resumed publishing a newspaper, the Rhode Island-Gazette, on September 27, 1732. The paper, 12 by 8.5 inches, appeared irregularly, finally disappearing after its May 24, 1733 edition. Ill and nearing death, James reconciled with his brother Ben, who made the trip to Newport and left with his nephew James Jr., who became his apprentice at Franklin’s highly successful Pennsylvania Gazette. Three small children remained at home when James died on February 4, 1735, his 38th birthday and 12th wedding anniversary.

James’s days were done, but those of Ann and James Jr. had barely begun. Ann became America’s first female printer at age 39 when she won a printing contract from the General Assembly in 1736. For five years, “the Widow Franklin” annually published the Rhode Island Almanack with its tide tables and philosophical ruminations, while training her daughters Mary and Elizabeth as typesetters. In 1741, Ann began selling brother-in-law Ben’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. James Jr. returned to Rhode Island and “Ann and James Franklin” launched the Newport Mercury in 1758. James died in 1762, and Ann brought her son-in-law Samuel Hall into the business. When Ann Smith Franklin died in Newport in April 1763, she’d lived to see Newport become a major port in the triangular trade that brought African slaves to America.

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Figure 1.1 Portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Siffred Duplessis (ca. 1785).

The revolutionary situation began when script gave way to print and created a culture on the other side of the Atlantic where published opinions opposed old orthodoxies. It was a tough game. Authorities still held many cards even in the American wilderness, where printing was not particularly profitable and often a family affair. In an age when a slave could be bought for five pounds, printers had few rights authorities felt obligated to observe. The difficult days of James Franklin were routinely repeated. During the first hundred years of printing in North America, 38 master printers set up shops...