To Print the News and Raise Hell: A Biography of Wilbur F. Storey (review)

350CIVIL WAR HISTORY author). His study of this powerful figure in the Calhoun wing of the Democratic party is especially valuable for the insights it gives us into the problems the southerners faced in their efforts to develop a more balanced economy in the slave states. In a lighter vein are his charming essays, "Let the Eagle Scream," on Fourth of July celebrations, and "On Tour with President Jackson." Unlike the foregoing essays, which appear as fresh today as when they were written, the more interpretive ones naturally bear the stamp of time, historians and especially southern historians having never learned to pronounce eternal truths but always having to settle for how things look from here and now. Thus, in 1945, when "Democracy in the Old South" was written, it seemed that New Deal democracy had been vindicated at home and abroad. To Green it appeared that even the ante-bellum South, the institution of slavery notwithstanding, had continued to make its contributions to the ultimate triumph of democracy as religious and property qualifications on voting were removed and the constitutional basis for government was broadened. But the frustrations of the past twenty-five years have darkened the historian's pen. Many scholars today, Green perhaps included, viewing ante-bellum institutions from our "here and now", might ask if the democratization of the requirements for voting and office-holding had produced any change in the actual locus of political power. Did the expansion of political democracy have more influence over who made die decisions tiian the simultaneous concentration of economic power? From year to year we ask different questions, but the questions suggested in diese essays will continue to absorb us. W. McKee Evans California State Polytechnic College To Print the News ami Raise Hell: A Biography of Wilbur F. Storey. By Justin E. Walsh. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Pp. ix, 303. $7.50.) Soon after Wilbur F. Storey took over the Chicago Times in June, 1S61 he stated his creed: "It is a newspaper's duty to print the news, and raise hell." He did both most effectively, making the Times the most widely read newspaper in the Middle West and gaining a reputation as a colorful and controversial character. The capable curmudgeon made a major contribution to the art of publishing a newsjpaper: expanding news coverage, accenting the sensational (he was a precursor of Pulitzer and Hearst), pioneering the modern Sunday newspaper, innovating in management and internal organization, and leading the way "in blazing untrodden and unexplored paths for news that transformed the daily paper from a mere BOOK REVIEWS351 chronicle of local events into an epitome of the news of the world." (269). Professor Justin E. Walsh's opening chapter serves as an overview, justifies this book, and gives the reader a taste of Storey—a sample which whets the appetite. The next five chapters deal with die rising newspaperman's prewar career. Walsh seems partial to Storey's eightyear stint as editor-publisher of the Detroit Free Press. Those years served as the training school for an emerging editor who worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day and who drove himself as relentlessly as he drove his staff. "The groundwork for the greatness of the Chicago Times between 1865 and 1884," Walsh states (115), "was laid in the columns of the Detroit Free Press in die pre-war decade . . . ." Civü War students may complain that Professor Walsh devotes only one of his ten chapters to Storey's "personal vendetta" against President Lincoln and to Storey's contributions to Midwestern Copperheadism . Those interested in wartime dissent as an American phenomenon may be disappointed to note that Walsh treats the war issues in a cursory fashion and credits Storey's non-conformism to personal traits. ". . . Storey was no more than an exceedingly unpleasant human being," writes Professor Walsh (198), "who filled Civil War Chicago news and editorial comment with a phosphorescent and fascinating malice." Only a couple of paragraphs are devoted to General Burnside's suppression of the Chicago Times in June, 1863, and the account is recited in a matter-of-fact way. There is no explanation of why President Lincoln revoked Burnside...