Preface
ix Preface For nearly thirty- five years, from the election campaign of 1898 until he became U.S. ambassador to Mexico in 1933, Josephus Daniels was the most powerful man in North Carolina. Governors came and went, but Daniels and his flagship newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer (N&O), stayed. During President Woodrow Wilson’s two terms in office (1913–21), Daniels served as secretary of the navy. No one ever held the position longer than he did. In that capacity, and as one of Wilson’s closest confidants, Daniels was one of the most powerful men in the country. Once the United States entered World War I in 1917, Daniels became one of the most important men in the world. Daniels earned his initial fame and made a fortune in the newspaper business. A self- made man, he owned his first newspaper at age eighteen. Before his twenty- first birthday, he owned three. Daniels revolutionized the newspaper business and, with other newspapermen of his generation, changed the relationship between politics and the news media. Before Daniels entered the business, except for the owners of the big- city papers, newspapermen could not survive financially on subscriptions and advertising alone. At the time, governments did not generally maintain their own printing shops; thus political patronage, in the form of government printing contracts, provided local newspapers with the margin between profit and loss. The price of that profit was effective control of the newspaper’s content. The holder of the government contracts became a wholly owned subsidiary of the majority wing of the majority party granting the contracts . Daniels recognized that an expansion of subscriptions would allow a local newspaper to be profitable without government contracts. Advertising would follow where subscriptions led. But a broad subscription base required newspapers to be sold for their news content, not their political opinions. As a teenage newspaper entrepreneur, Daniels surmised that if he could create a news organization that generated a sufficient circulation and advertising revenues, then the politicians would come to his newspaper with their hats in hand rather than the other way around. It took many years, but Daniels succeeded in this quest, creating a publishing dynasty that would last a century. Preface x Daniels grew up in a world with no radio, no television, and no Internet. News came from two sources, newspapers and gossip, and most of the important gossip came from something in the newspaper. Daniels supplied newspapers. When Daniels was born, “news gathering was considered a lowly occupation, its practitioners on a par with actors and acrobats. Not yet a profession or even a dignified craft, it was the ‘haven of shipwrecked ambitions,’ sought by men who had failed in other endeavors.”1 Daniels was among the handful of men who changed that situation, creating the modern newspaper, with international, national, and local news sections, including features, sports, comics, and editorials, all interspersed with advertisements and supplemented by classified ads. A few of Daniels’s contemporaries, such asWilliam Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, could make a living selling independent newspapers in a small number of densely packed cities, but America was a nation of farms and small towns. Daniels figured out how to turn a profit in places like Wilson , Kinston, Rocky Mount, and Raleigh, North Carolina. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the U.S. economy grew, on average, a bit more than 3 percent a year. The circulation of Daniels’s newspapers grew five times as fast.2 While Daniels was amassing his own fortune, he served as one of his generation’s most articulate and persistent critics of unregulated capitalism , never failing to call for government control, or outright ownership, of various private enterprises—including the era’s greatest industry, the railroads. His newspapers pushed for the passage of the nation’s landmark antitrust laws and the hard- nosed prosecution of other capitalists. Daniels foresaw the concentration of great wealth in the hands of men like James Buchanan Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Company. Arguing that the Dukes of the world would not use their wealth for society’s betterment, Daniels did not hesitate to call upon the coercive powers of the state to constrain such men. Daniels leveraged his success as a businessman into political clout, and he leveraged his political clout into an unlikely position: head of the U.S. Navy. A devout Christian and a near- pacifist, Daniels created one of history ’s greatest war machines, which helped win World War...
OR
Buy This Book in Print