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[ 56 ] Chapter 3 Putting the News in Newspapers, 1833–1850 I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch —AND I WILL BE HEARD! —William Lloyd Garrison, 1831 Business is business—money is money. . . . We permit no blockhead to interfere with our business. —James Gordon Bennett, 1836 Deep changes were coming. Without any program or ultimate purpose guiding them, a number of people, acting independently during the first decades of the nineteenth century, came up with inventions or made new social arrangements that, taken together, had the effect of setting the stage for the creation of the modern newspaper. From those separate and uncoordinated acts there arose a major manufacturing industry, a vessel of popular culture, and a pervasive institution that changed the flow of information, broke down barriers of isolation, and—sometimes—challenged the powers that be. After 1833, the newspaper became the key element in a web of mass production, mass consumption , and mass communication that has come to characterize life in America. If we live in a media age, it is because of decisions made, struggles fought, and power wielded in the crucial period before the Civil War. The conditions that made it possible for people to make that change were many. In the early nineteenth century, America held out a measure of promise to its inhabitants—provided they were white and male and not indentured to someone else. It was a country where land was comparatively cheap, and labor, especially skilled labor, was comparatively dear. It was one of the few countries in all of world history up to that point where the mass of people were not kept miserable by some form of serfdom. “Americans do not use the word peasant. They do not use the word because they do not possess the idea,” the French nobleman Alexis [ 57 ] PUTTINg THE NEws IN NEwsPAPERs, 1833–1850 de Tocqueville observed after his travels in America during 1831–32.1 As he saw, America was a place where people (not equally, but generally) were a valuable resource. In this setting, however, the flow of information was still rather spotty. America had more newspapers than any other country on earth, and thanks to the Post Office, they could be delivered to even the rudest new cabin in the farthest reaches of the frontier.2 But those newspapers that arrived in the mail had some serious limitations: most were published weekly, so their contents were not as timely as they might be, and they usually had a near-exclusive focus on one of two topics—commerce or party politics. The changes in newspapers built on changes occurring elsewhere. According to the sociologist Michael Schudson, these conditions can be grouped into a few categories.3 In terms of technology, change was finally coming to the printing trade. In the early nineteenth century, steam power was applied to the printing press, a step that burst through the physical limitations of hand-powered printing (fig. 3.1). When each page had to be literally pressed against the inked tablet of metal letters by hand, no printer could hope to make more than a few hundred impressions a day, so no newspaper could plan to sell more than that number. With steam, however, presses could run off thousands of copies. At the same time, the price of paper was beginning to fall (it would fall even further with the development of papermaking processes based entirely on wood pulp later in the nineteenth century), and it was becoming easier, cheaper, and faster to move people and things around the country. One legacy from the colonial experience was a transportation network that had originally centered on London. After the coming of independence, Americans addressed the huge task of uniting the states by crossing the many rivers and mountains with a system of roads, canals, and rails that would constitute a truly continental network of transportation and communication. During the early nineteenth century, progress was rapid, but the starting point was quite basic. In 1830 there were just twenty-three miles of railroad track in all of the United States. Ten years later there were three thousand miles, and by 1860 there were ten times that number.4 With the advent of the railroads, news reports could travel quickly back to newspaper offices for inclusion in the paper, and the finished product could be delivered much faster to distant points. Another indispensable condition for newspaper growth...

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