Reporting for Duty: The Bohemian Brigade, the Civil War, and the Social Construction of the Reporter

Just a few years before the Civil War, in a beer cellar just a stone's throw from the assembly hall where the polka had been danced in New York City for the first time, began a turning point in the social construction of the reporter.

Historians interested in the development of journalism as a profession generally agree on two other landmarks that bracket that one. The reporter himself, they agree, was born in the 1830s (the reporter herself generally came later) as a necessary agent of the new urban penny press, which was redefining the idea of "news" to mean not the customary commercial or partisan intelligence but rather gathered information about everyday life that was timely, accurate, independent, enterprising, and commercially valuable. Most also agree that the reporter began to take on many of the generally accepted sociological characteristics of a professional in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when journalists joined the members of other emerging vocations such as law, medicine, and teaching in the widespread effort to identify, organize, and control the distinctive bodies of knowledge, codes of behavior, and modes of inquiry that set them apart from ordinary people. For journalism, and for journalists, objectivity became the ideal that not merely defined the profession but actually legitimated it—a somewhat desperate measure, as Michael Schudson has argued in his influential study, or at least a defensive one, taken in response to the increasingly clear understanding that overcoming subjectivity in presenting the news was not actually possible.¹

While those two landmarks are generally accepted without dispute, the one I propose is somewhat more contentious. In fact, Schudson explicitly rejects the notion that the Civil War marked a "turning point" in American press history, arguing that "It did not 'turn' the direction of journalism; its impact was to intensify the direction in which journalism had been turning since the 1830s."² Yet while I agree that the tactics and techniques used by reporters for gathering the news did not materially change during the war era, I contend that the journalists' sense of themselves and their work did. For the first time, people engaged in everyday newsgathering were making an effort to craft their public image, to present to the world their own picture of who reporters were, what reporters did, and why the public should care. For the first time, some journalists—a small group of them, to be sure, though among them were some of the most influential practitioners on some of the largest-circulation papers of the day—were not just doing their job of reporting but were also writing about their job of reporting, making explicit claims about their rights and responsibilities as narrators of the nation's stories. Journalists were, in other words, beginning to think of and present themselves as a class apart—as professionals.

In books intended for a mass audience they recorded what they thought about the work they did. They pictured themselves as a special kind of person, doing a special job in a particular way that others could not manage, with privileges and obligations that others did not share, and that provided a public service crucial to the well-being of the citizenry. At the same time, newspaper writing, at least for the flagship metropolitan press, was taking clear shape as something different from other kinds of literature, the newspaper as the exclusive and appropriate home for this kind of writing, and the journalist as the kind of writer most particularly suited for this work. In fact, journalists were seeking a double distinction, differentiating themselves not just from ordinary people but also from the many other kinds of authors—novelists, playwrights, poets—who were also struggling to define themselves as skilled professionals. Like those literary writers, journalists were concerned with the most basic components of professional recognition: Would they be adequately paid? Would they be respected as possessors of a talent not everyone had? But the particular kind of writing they did—the construction, every day, through the use of special interpretive techniques and...