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15 1 Detachment The Caning of James Gordon Bennett, the Penny Press, and Objectivity’s Primordial Soup On a sunny spring day in 1836, James Gordon Bennett left his newspaper office to begin his morning perambulations around Wall Street, seeking information for the financial column of his new one-cent paper, the New York Herald. That morning, as he roamed the narrow, tortuous streets of the financial district, Bennett might very well have been counting his blessings. He was a man on the rise. In part because of his coverage of one of the most sensational crimes of the century—the ax-murder of a beautiful prostitute—his paper, which he had started a year before with a five-hundred dollar investment, was quickly becoming one of the most successful newspapers in New York.1 Bennett even boasted that his paper had the highest circulation in the world. Indeed, the Scottish-born Bennett, who had single-handedly sold the ad copy, reported events, wrote the columns, and edited the newspaper, was now in a position to advertise for help: “A smart active boy wanted, who can write a good hand.” Bennett also called for “a new corps of Carriers” to augment the growing army of those who hawked his paper. Bennett was a rare example of the total fulfillment of the American Dream, a man who could hardly keep up with his own success. It was on this brilliant spring morning that a rival editor, James Watson Webb, caught up with Bennett on Wall Street, shoved him down a flight of stairs, and beat him severely with his cane.2 Why Webb beat Bennett has never been explained beyond the former’s penchant for violence and the latter’s obnoxious character. It is true that in the weeks before the beating, Bennett’s columns had included numerous jabs at Webb, the editor of New York’s best selling newspaper, the staid and elitist Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer.3 “We are rapidly taking the wind out of the big bellied sails of the Courier & Enquirer,” wrote Bennett, poking fun at his rival’s rotundity and the dimensions of the Courier’s large news sheet. Bennett promised that the Herald would ulti- 16 | Detachment mately best the “bloated Courier” (italics mine). In the weeks before the assault, Bennett also called Webb a “defaulter” who was guilty of “disgraceful conduct,” and offered to send him a piece of the dead prostitute’s bed as a “momento mori.”4 But Webb was not the only editor Bennett addictively insulted; one of Bennett’s biographers pointed out that he “managed to attack in a single issue seven newspapers and their editors.”5 While other editors returned Bennett’s verbal abuse or simply ignored it, Webb beat Bennett—three times, in fact, in 1836. So why did Webb resort to violence while others abstained? This chapter examines the rise of the first “independent ,” nonpartisan press through the prism of Webb’s conflicts with Bennett . In doing so, this chapter grapples with the birth of “objectivity’s” first element: detachment. It is fitting that we begin our look at “objectivity” with an examination of the early “independent” press, the first American newspapers to detach themselves from political parties. How and why the popular, nonpartisan press arose in the 1830s is the focus of this chapter.6 I also explain how Bennett represents a departure from Webb’s brand of journalism, a departure that reflected an increasing detachment on the part of journalists. This is a step toward what journalists call “objectivity.” In order to discuss detachment, however, we must first consider the conditions that brought about its birth. How did this new kind of journalism evolve? As I will discuss, journalism historians have long maintained that the popular press of the 1830s came out of “Jacksonian democracy” in much the same way as Athena was born from Zeus’s head: springing out fully formed. But while journalism historians see the birth of modern journalism as a natural outgrowth of a benign and democratic period, other scholarship would suggest that modern journalism grew out of a violent and inegalitarian era. Why is this important? Because detachment was never as clear as when the first commercial press of the 1830s detached from the violent era in which it was born. The Penny Press In the beginning, that is, before the founding of the first penny paper, the New York Sun in 1833, most...

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