The Art of Democracy. Jim Cullen

on the work of other scientists and inventors, Samuel Morse, a New York professor of art and design, gave the first public demonstrations of his new device in 1838. Although many early observers were impressed, it took a while before the telegraph’s tremendous potential—the opportunity to communicate instantly across space—overcame early skepticism and logistical problems. Journalistic adoption of the telegraph was pioneered by the Baltimore Sun, which used an experimental line between that city and Washington to report on the presidential nomination of James Polk at the Democratic National Convention in 1844. Baltimore was also strategically located on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad line, which made it a key communications center in the years that followed. The outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846 also stimulated the rapid expansion of telegraphy as a means of communication. In the first week of 1848, Bennett claimed to have spent over $12,000 for 79,000 words of telegraphic content in the Herald.¹³

      As has so often happened in the annals of technological revolution, the telegraph opened possibilities that soon became severely constricted by commercial interests. Samuel Morse was desperate to sell his new invention to the government, which he hoped would build and operate its own lines for the public good. The government refused, failing to recognize the telegraph’s potential and fearing waste and fraud. A series of companies that wanted to exploit—and control—the telegraph for profit then rushed into the vacuum. In a pattern that would be repeated throughout the next 150 years, the result was a bruising financial battle over how to organize the new communications technology and whom it should benefit. In the case of telegraphy, this at first meant the proliferation of duplicate lines, many of poor quality, and rampant speculation. By the late 1840s, however, three organized interests had emerged: those who owned the lines, those who operated them, and those who prepared the information to be sent along them. In 1849, a consortium of six New York daily papers formed the Harbor News Association, later to be called the Associated Press. AP brought telegraph operators into the organization, but it passed up the opportunity to buy telegraph lines, leaving that part of the field to others. Beginning in the 1850s, the Western Union Telegraph Company began to buy and build lines, until it eventually became a monopoly. After the Civil War, AP and WU formed a communications axis (a matter to be discussed in Chapter 3).

      Unlike the political press, the penny papers generally disavowed party affiliation. Nevertheless, they did become involved in the political issues of day, and they reflected the powerful, if incomplete, egalitarian currents that suffused the Jacksonian era. Indeed, many newspaper editors participated in an artisanal radicalism (a kind of proletarian politics with a Jeffersonian spin) that marked a class order still in flux. Three years before founding the Sun, for example, Benjamin Day was briefly listed as one of six directors of the Daily Sentinel, a political arm of the Workingmen’s Party. The party, which had shown surprising strength in the New York municipal elections in 1829 and which published a weekly paper for fifteen years, suggested the rich possibilities for radical politics that would resurface periodically in the decades before the Civil War.¹⁴

      By the mid-1830s, much of this vitality had been absorbed by the new Democratic Party, which had become a broad-based coalition of Northern urban workers and wealthy Southern agrarians deeply distrustful of the nascent capitalists who would soon be known as Whigs. Men like Day, who had trimmed their radical sails in the process of starting their own businesses, nonetheless retained a deep distrust of financial elites. To some extent this reflected their personal frustrations in securing capital while upper-class newspapers could serenely count on the help of banks, especially the hated Federalist-founded Bank of the United States (which Jackson eventually destroyed by refusing to renew its charter). To some extent too, the penny press’s political stance was tailored to the perceived needs of its audience. There can be little doubt, in any case, that there was an important democratic component at its core.

      Unfortunately, the coalition between Northern urban workers and Southern agrarians was an unstable compound. Rhetoric notwithstanding, politicians like Jackson’s successor Martin Van Buren probably had more in common with his Whig rivals than the working people he presumably represented (his power base was tellingly known as the Albany Regency). Moreover, the rich Southern planters’ and poor Northern workers’ shared fear of Whig domination created a powerful, and lasting, institutionalized foundation for racism. Both Whigs and Democrats realized that slavery was a bulwark against the expansion of free market, free labor capitalism, and many Democrats (and even some Whigs) therefore saw it as a positive good. In the insecure labor market of Northern cities, white workers saw free blacks as a threat to their job security, while slavery gave them a twisted source of psychic satisfaction in their whiteness. One of the most unlikely partnerships in working-class history was the alliance between the fiercely pro-slavery theorist John Calhoun and the rabble-rousing, Bowery-based politician Mike Walsh.¹⁵

      It was an alliance that dismayed many Democratic voters and newspaper readers, and further fractured the party into abolitionist (“Barnburner”) and anti-abolitionist (“Hunker”) wings. Into the breach rushed such new Whiggish papers as the New York Tribune, founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley, and the New York Times, which was launched in 1851 but whose Olympian reputation was still a half-century away. Drawing on many of the same techniques as the Democratic penny press, these political papers signalled the formation of a new political order that would finally crystallize with Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860.

      In New York, at least, resistance to the racist tendencies of the Democratic Party and its papers also came from the African-American press. The first black paper in the country was Freedom’s Journal, founded in 1827, followed shortly thereafter by the Colored American. These papers were largely oriented to the free black elite of ministers, teachers, and other professionals, and focused on religious issues, opposition to black colonization of Africa, and the prevention of white mob violence. They also debated the propriety of black participation in such white celebrations as the Fourth of July, and condemned black patronage of parades and shows that drew on racist stereotypes. At times this concern for the image of the community shaded into class bias, as when forms of religious worship among poor black people, such as the highly expressive “ring shout,” were criticized as undignified.¹⁶ Yet the existence of papers like the Colored American suggests how, by the Jacksonian era, even relatively small constituencies were able to support their own publications.

      Meanwhile, the mass press continued to proliferate. By 1860, Illinois had over 400 newspapers, with eleven dailies in Chicago alone. St. Louis had ten. And Cincinnati, an emerging cultural center, had twenty-six monthlies, semi-monthlies, and quarterlies. In addition, while penny, mercantile, and political papers remained important, other journalistic forms were emerging and blending with them. Sunday papers, which were first issued as extras during the Revolutionary War, became increasingly common in the early nineteenth century. Some were published on Saturdays for Sunday reading, such as Philadelphia’s Saturday Evening Post. They included news along with pieces of a magazine-like tenor. Story papers, which published fiction, poetry, and essays in a newspaper format, flourished after 1840. Pictorial weeklies, which became tremendously popular before and during the Civil War, blurred the lines even further. This is not to say there were no magazines in the modern sense of the word. On the whole, however, they tended to be aimed at the emerging class of merchants, professionals, and their families.¹⁷

      There was much to dislike about the penny press: its habits of manufactured outrage and sexual pandering; its aggressive support of Jacksonian Indian removal in the South and West, instead of policies of toleration (or even the less brutal National Republican policy of assimilation); its rabid enthusiasm for the Mexican War in the name of Manifest Destiny; and its often tacit—and occasionally explicit—support of slavery. All too often in U.S. history, those with the most egalitarian class politics have had the worst race politics (and vice-versa), a pattern that these newspapers amply document. Yet this connection was complicated. Important figures in the Workingmen’s Party, most notably the irrepressible writer, lecturer, and reformer Frances (“Fanny”) Wright, were principled abolitionists, and the realities of interracial cooperation remained alive throughout the rest of the century (particularly in the early Populist movement). If the early mass media was limited in spreading its egalitarian