Ch 2 Industrial press

This chapter describes the emergence of the partisan press and the development of the “penny press” in the US and Europe between 1800 and 1900.  It also emphasizes the interrelationship between the emerging media in France, Britain, Germany and the US.

A selection from this chapter is found in the features section:  The industrial printing revolution.

An important sidebar to the main history of the industrial and modern press is Civil Rights and the press, also on this site.

Discussion questions

  1. Lampooned: How famous — and how hated — was James Gordon Bennett?  His name is still used an expletive in the UK, even in the 21st century.   Back in the 19th, during his lifetime, Biritish author Charles Dickens used James Gordon Bennett as his model for Col. Diver of the Rowdy Journal in Martin Chuzzlewit.   Look up the novel at the Gutenberg Project and compare  the fictional character with Bennett.   You might also compare the Dickens fictionalization of Bennett with Orson Wells portrayal of William Randolph Hearst in the 20th century.
  2. Where are they now?  What has become of Niles Register and some of the other papers of the partisan press era?  Did the New York Herald, Tribune, Sun, and Times survive from the penny press era?  Who owns the Times of London today?
  3. Remember the Maine — Did Hearst get it right when he said the Spanish blew up the Battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898? What do we know about the incident today?
  4. Trans-Atlantic connections — Look through the chapter and find  examples of reporters and editors who worked on both sides of the Atlantic or the English Channel.  Are there other connections you can find?
  5. American journalism as seen from across the pond  — Read British editor W. T. Stead’s essay, The Americanisation of the World, from his book published in 1902.  How do you think his point of view has held up over the centuries, and in what ways might he have missed the mark?

People & Events

Major figures: John Walter II, Benjamin Day, James Gordon Bennett, James Gordon Bennett Jr., Horace Greeley, Henry Raymond, Joseph M. Levy, William T. Stead, Henry Morton Stanley, Emile Zola, Georges Clemenceau, Carl Schurz, Kark Marx, August Sherl, Mark Twain, Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, E.W. Scripps, Nelly Bly, Alfred Harmsworth, Walter Lippmann

Events  & Trends:  Halfpenny press, partisan press, steam printing, penny press, taxes on knowledge, yellow journalism, crusading journalism, stunt journalism,  four stages of the media

Documentary Videos

Interesting Links

Partisan media: Whigs and Tories, Federalists and anti-federalists

  1. Excerpts from the Aurora newspaper of Philadelphia (1798) — This is the notorious anti-Federalist newspaper that so infuriated John Adams and the Federalists. It may have been a factor in  the creation of the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798.
  2. The Sedition Act, 1798   And the reaction:  The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1799.
  3. William Cobbett on American Ships, 1829 (
  4. Newspapers of the 20th century (as envisioned by editors of the 19th century).  One major improvement — truth, truth, truth!
  5. Charles Henry Ambler, Thomas Ritchie: A Study in Virginia Politics (1913)  Overly worshipful biography of the politically powerful editor of the Richmond Enquirer 1804 – 1845.

The Penny Press

  1. The Great Moon Hoax by the New York Sun in 1835 was intended to be a demonstration of how the new, cheaper penny press was no worse than the more expensive journals.
  2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835 Especially Chapter 11; Liberty of Press in the United States  
  3. Biographies of three famous editors from the penny press era, written in 1898 by US historian James Parton:
    1. Horace Greeley  — Founder of the New York Tribune, 1841, who saw journalism as an editor’s job.  Greeley was a major political force in the US in the 1850s whose backing was essential for Abraham Lincoln’s nomination.  Parton said:  Greeley aimed to produce a paper which should morally benefit the public. It was not always right, but it always meant to be.
    2. James Gordon Bennett — Founder of the New York Herald in 1836, Bennett saw journalism as a reporter’s job, and was the first to set up a Washington DC bureau.  He was also pugnacious and loved to get in arguments with his detractors.  Parton said:   Six times he was assaulted by persons whom he had satirized in his newspaper… On one occasion, for example, after relating how his head had been cut open by one of his former employers, he added: “The fellow no doubt wanted to let out the never failing supply of good-humor and wit which has created such a reputation for the ‘Herald.’… He has not injured the skull. My ideas in a few days will flow as freshly as ever, and he will find it so to his cost.”
    3. John Walter and sons — Founder of the London Times in 1787.   —  When The Times had been in existence little more than a year, Walter took the liberty of making a remark upon the Duke of York, one of the king’s dissolute sons, saying that the conduct of his Royal Highness had been such as to incur His Majesty’s just disapprobation. For this offense he was arrested and put on trial for libel. Being convicted, he was sentenced to pay a fine of fifty pounds, to undergo a year’s imprisonment in Newgate, to stand in the pillory for one hour…

Reporters as explorers

  1. American journalist John L. O’Sullivan explains Manifest Destiny, 1839
  2. An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco,1859, by N.Y. Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who famously said: “go west, young man.” See especially:
    • The big trees of Mariposa Grove. Note especially his remorse over the chopping down of the largest sequoia.
    • Interview with Brigham Young.Greeley says afterward: “I joyfully trust that the genius of the nineteenth century tends to a solution of the problem of woman’s sphere and destiny radically different from this.”
    • Life of Horace Greeley by J. Parton. It only goes to 1855, so it misses the later controversies.
  3. Jules Verne, Michael Strogoff — In which Daily Telegraph reporter Harry Blount  risks his life to follow a fictional uprising in Siberia and send news to the Telegraph ’s readers. 
  4. Nelly Bly goes undercover “Inside the Madhouse.”
  5. Nelly Bly goes   Around the World in 72 days, 1889.
  6. Nelly Bly celebrated on the radio in 1945 (from newspaper heros web site by Bob Stepno).
  7. The Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl – 1902
  8. Mark Twain short stories about journalism:  Editorial Wild Oats, (1875).
  9. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, JHistory Podcast.

The Press Barons and their critics

  1. Yellow journalism (PBS) in the crucible of empire (PBS)
  2. The Yellow Kid and the origins of yellow journalism
  3. Pulp magazines project has hundreds of examples of thriller, crime and science fiction from the 20th century.
  4. Joseph Pulitzer, “Planning a School of Journalism: The Basic Concept,” North American Review, May, 1904.  “Our republic and its press will rise or fall together.”
  5. Joseph Pulitzer – Front Page Pioneer —  Iris Noble, Copp Clark Publishing Co. Limited, 1957.  (Full text)
  6. Joseph Pulitzer, Master Journalist — James Creelman, Pearson’s Magazine, 1909. (Magazine article)
  7. W. T. Stead’s  1902  The Americanisation of the World,  “It is in the newspaper offices that the drive, bustle and intense strain of American life is preeminently centred…”   
  8. Attacking the devil — a site devoted to W.T. Stead, publisher of the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s and 90s.
  9. Satan’s Invisible World Displayed: A Study of Greater New York, by W.T. Stead, available on Gutenberg. org
  10. W.T. Stead on William Randolph Hearst:

    Certainly no man in all New York has such a chance of combining all the elements that make for righteousness and progress in the city as the young Californian millionaire-editor who founded the Journal.
    There is, however, no greater delusion than to imagine that a newspaper in America has any influence merely because it is a newspaper. The habit of running newspapers as if they were mere commercial dividend-earning undertakings has so largely discounted the influence of the press as to lead many shrewd observers to declare that they would just as soon have the newspapers against them as in their favour.”

  11. The Brass Check — Upton Sinclair, 1920.  An especially bitter attack on the press of the day, Sinclair compares journalists to prostitutes who take the “brass check” — a token system representing payment for services rendered.
  12. History of American Journalism — James Melvin Lee, 1917.

JFK’s speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, April 20, 1961

“You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.   We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the “lousiest petty bourgeois cheating.” But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.  If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man…”

” No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.

“I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers — I welcome it. This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for as a wise man once said: “An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.” We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.

“Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment — the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants” — but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.
This means greater coverage and analysis of international news — for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security — and we intend to do it.

It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass have made us all citizens of the world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world’s efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure.
And so it is to the printing press — to the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news — that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.