Lincoln and the Power of the Press Read online

  From the very start, the new, one-cent paper’s earnest though occasionally indiscriminate public spiritedness struck readers as fresh and appealing—somewhat like medicine, occasionally distasteful but usually good for them. Its prospectus boldly described the Tribune as nothing less than “a New Morning Journal of Politics, Literature, and General Intelligence” that would “advance the interests of the people, and . . . promote their Moral, Political and Social well-being.” Along with Whig Party interests, it advocated workers’ rights, improved status for women, temperance, and utopian social improvement. With a bold swipe at the Herald, Greeley pledged that “the immoral and degrading Police Reports, Advertisements, and other matter which have been allowed to disgrace the columns of our leading Penny Papers, will be carefully excluded.” The Tribune would be “a welcome visitant at the family fireside.”60

  The editor’s “leading idea,” he declared, “was the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other. Party spirit is so fierce and intolerant in this country that the editor of a non-partisan sheet is restrained from saying what he thinks and feels on the most vital, imminent topics.” Democratic and Whig journals alike, Greeley knew, were “generally expected to praise or blame, like or dislike, eulogize or condemn, in precise accordance with the views and interest of its party. I believed there was a happy medium between these extremes.” The editor pledged to remain loyal to his party’s “guiding convictions,” but also “ready to expose and condemn unworthy conduct or incidental error.” Hewing to this credo for the rest of his career, Greeley would come to be seen as an unpredictable, undependable gadfly by governors and presidents, but as an incorruptibly honest and freedom-loving wise man to his devoted readers.61

  Yet Greeley nearly went out of business on that very first day. Eight years earlier, the maiden issue of his Morning Post had reached city streets just as the boulevards all but vanished beneath a swirling New Year’s Day snowstorm. Now a surprise April blizzard once again blanketed the city, as a result of which most of the Tribune’s initial run of five thousand copies went unsold. No doubt feeling himself cursed, Greeley bravely soldiered on. One of his chief assets, he believed, was his talented staff of young writers, especially the eager twenty-year-old from the New-Yorker he began training as his right-hand man. This particular novice, Henry J. Raymond, future editor of the New York Times, would serve at the Tribune for some thirty-six months.

  Rapidly, the New York Tribune found both its voice and its audience. Smaller in size than the blanket sheets and attractively priced as well, its crusading spirit moreover captured a growing mood for reform. Most subscribers forgave the fact that Greeley was irresistibly drawn to fringe movements like Fourierism, named for a French socialist who advocated the creation of classless “Harmony” communes. Skeptics had a field day tormenting Greeley as “Horatius the Fourierite.”62 Such criticism did not inhibit Greeley from advocating his “new and original” plan for social reorder. Eschewing what he dismissed as “piece-meal reform,” Greeley also embraced a broad socialist program he called “Association, or Principles of a True Organization of Society.” It would, he vowed in a front-page column in 1842, “correct the Frauds, Extortions, Monopolies, and Adulterations of Commerce,” not to mention “the Tricks and Injustice of the Law” that political parties were unwilling to address. Greeley’s concept of “Attractive Industry and Association,” promised to do away with “vice, crime, drunkenness and brutality” through education, and eliminate the “Drudgery and Degradation of Labor” by “uniting Labor and Capital in the same hands.” Quick to grasp the commercial threat posed by Greeley’s upstart venture, Moses Beach’s New York Sun resolved to “crush” the new paper by bribing—and when that failed, publicly whipping—newsboys to discourage them from hawking the Tribune on the city’s streets. When the circulation war escalated, the usually peaceful Greeley dispatched thugs of his own to retaliate violently. At one point Beach himself was seen on the streets trading blows with the “emissaries” hired by the new competition. Somehow the Tribune weathered the attempts to destroy it. Readers flocked to buy copies because they immediately sensed that Greeley’s paper offered twice the news for the same price.63

  Greeley’s sudden emergence as a journalistic rival prompted a resentful James Gordon Bennett to commence an acrimonious feud with his new competitor—a battle that would last for a quarter of a century. When, for example, the Tribune began preaching social change in the early 1840s, the Herald proudly defended America as it was, boasting that its unmatched circulation and advertising numbers showed that patriotic New Yorkers agreed that major upheaval was unnecessary. In 1844, Bennett published a supplement offering his “regular and respectable subscribers” (as opposed to the Tribune’s “street buyers and loafer purchasers”) an unprecedented package of rare Western news. He could not resist accompanying the bonus with a notice that managed to include both a self-congratulatory reminder of the Herald’s popularity and a subtle swipe at Greeley’s slavish party loyalty and his frequent dissatisfaction with the status quo. “We are enabled to go to the expense of doing so,” ran the Herald announcement,

  from the extraordinary patronage and popularity which the American people, through this wide Republic generously bestow on a fearless, honest, independent and truthtelling newspaper, bound to no party, but above all parties. At this moment our circulation is equal, if not greater, than two-thirds of the whole daily newspaper press of New York. This great fact, alone, indicates the mighty intellectual and moral revolution now going on in the public mind of this most wonderful nation;—a nation—a people now in the first throes of civilization, higher and holier—wider and deeper—more massive and mightier than the old world ever imagined or knew.64

  Only an editor with Bennett’s craft and brass could manage to praise and insult his readers at the same time.

  The Bennett-Greeley feud exploded into open warfare during the bitter 1844 Henry Clay–James K. Polk presidential campaign. The Tribune supported Whig Clay and the Herald endorsed Democrat Polk, with each publisher not only editorializing, but appearing at campaign events to stump for the candidate of his choice. “Poor Horace!” chortled Bennett a few weeks after Polk won the White House. “His whig friends wont listen to the voice of the charmer, and as they refuse to be comforted, coolly turn round upon him and aver that his sad miscalculations of the strength and prospects of the whigs blinded them to their danger, and had no small influence in producing their defeat.”65 The Herald added injury to insult by publishing a gloatingly satirical poem, “The Last Procession,” which described in dirgelike meter a “sullen” funeral march for Clay’s dead campaign whose mourners included the grieving Tribune editor: “And as along the dusky way / its darkening course it kept, / Beside it with his Clay ‘Tribune,’ / Poor Greeley walked and wept.”66

  The attacks did not abate after Polk’s victory. Dismissing Greeley as an addled and dangerously indiscriminate do-gooder, Bennett assigned the Tribune editor such disrespectful monikers as “our amiable contemporary philosopher” or “the man in the white coat,” a reference to his fondness for light-colored dusters.67 Whenever Greeley responded in kind, the Herald dropped the coy name-calling and unleashed furious salvos of invective. After Greeley published a rueful commentary on the late presidential election, charging the Herald with “misrepresentation of every whig principle and measure,” Bennett denounced Greeley for exhibiting a “total depravity” typical of the party press and “promulgating . . . miserable subterfuge . . . gross fabrications . . . forgeries, and frauds of all kinds.”68 Greeley in turn charged that Bennett had joked during a Pennsylvania campaign swing that he “had no care” about leaving his New York office to give speeches because “it had been hired for the campaign by the locofocos.” Outraged, but keenly aware that readers found such squabbles irresistible, Bennett replied in print that Greeley was guilty of nothing less than “licentiousness,” and demand
ed that the editor produce an eyewitness or admit he lacked “reputation” and “character.”69

  Not to be outdone, when Bennett commenced his long and ugly new feud with John Hughes, the Catholic bishop of New York, Greeley republished Hughes’s long, angry letter identifying Bennett as “the first and persevering chief” of his “assailants” and “calumniators.”70 This did nothing to inhibit Bennett from charging in turn that Greeley was growing increasingly “bewildered.” He “twists and turns like a fish thrown ashore by a chance wave,” chortled the Herald, “with its belly up, tossing and tumbling on the sandy beach.” Although the Herald dutifully reported one of Greeley’s well-received campaign speeches at a Whig rally at City Hall, it gloated that he had been barely audible to the rowdy crowd. “Alas! Poor Yorick!” Bennett further gloated after the Tribune inadvertently misidentified a U.S. senator in one of its reports on congressional debates. “Greeley had better devote the remainder of his days to the culture of vegetables and Fourierism.”71

  Above all, Bennett loved taunting Greeley whenever the Tribune founder launched an esoteric new crusade for the betterment of mankind. When Greeley began consoling himself after Clay’s loss by advancing another experimental new idea, Bennett crowed: “Horace in this dilemma has taken himself to philosophy, and has engaged one of the most distinguished Swedenborgians in the country to enlighten the readers of the Tribune, while he himself pays some attention to Fourrierism [sic], which has latterly been in rather a declining state, whilst the chief apostle was engaged in saving the country.”72 After the Herald discovered in late 1844 that the Tribune editor had endorsed “water cures,” it promptly reported “the newest favorite idea of Philosopher Greeley” under the headline: “HORACE GREELEY’S LATEST ENTHUSIASM.”

  When Greeley embraced a bran-heavy diet as the ultimate path to a purer immortality, Bennett sarcastically warned that even cleansed by bran into nothing more than an “aroma,” dead Whigs might one day return in “their original elements of rowdyism and brandy-smashers.”73 “The world is an excellent world,” the Herald editorialized in early 1845. “It is a happy world. It is clothed with beauty.” By criticizing all of society, rather than those who violated its laws, Greeley was attempting to reorder God’s plan. In Bennett’s view, his rival’s “new philosophies” promised “a system founded on gloomy, distorted, and morbid views of human nature.” Greeley and his “ilk,” charged Bennett, “act like the wicked men in the scripture who, when asked for bread, give the starving applicant a stone.”74

  Greeley’s passion for pet social theories, all routinely plumped in the Tribune, did not prevent him from participating with gusto in the city’s rowdy newspaper wars. In print, he continued to give as good as he got. The Herald, he declared in one such outburst, was best suited to “houses of depravity.” Bennett returned this particular volley by calling the “unmitigated blockhead” Greeley a “miserable dried vegetable” no more capable to edit a paper than “a large New England squash.”75 Jumping into the fray, the New York Sun declared its new competitor guilty of writing “dirty, malignant, and wholesale” falsehoods, and suggested that Greeley “go to school and learn a little decency.”76

  Mere mockery never inhibited Greeley from taking up faddish causes. He advocated trust-busting, profit sharing, gender equality, Sabbatarianism (the rigorous observance of the day of rest), utopian socialism, and the liberal Transcendentalist movement (placing one of its strongest early voices, Margaret Fuller, on his staff as a book critic, and later giving her local and foreign assignments, making her one of the first females in New York given a chance to write on nondomestic matters).77 Greeley even embraced the then radical idea of labor unions.

  Ever the optimist, he stressed his incurable belief in “the essential Harmony of Interests,”78 and flaunted his personal commitment to spiritual and physical well-being—“temperance in all things,” as he put it—by preaching the sanctity of marriage and (like Lincoln) disdaining liquor and tobacco (occasionally reminding readers of his own nightmares about a repellent chore from his boyhood: lighting his mother’s foul pipe for her evening smoke). For a time, he eschewed red meat and took up residence in a Grahamite rooming house (named for dietary innovator Sylvester Graham) where hard drink, constrictive clothing, and sexual urges were all discouraged. Greeley also embraced the growing rage for spiritualism—widely derided by nonbelievers as paganistic fakery.79 His onetime employer Thurlow Weed could not help chortling over such Tribune obsessions as “ ‘table-rappings,’ ‘Brook farms,’ and various ‘isms’ by which Mr. Greeley was from time to time misled.” Greeley shrugged off such scorn by grandly contending: “The tombs of dead prophets are built only of the stones hurled at them while living.”80

  Besides, not all of Greeley’s proposals proved irrelevant or impractical. When, for example, the editor pressed city fathers to create a “House of Industry” to teach useful job skills to indigent young people, philanthropists soon took up the cause as well. A privately funded school bearing just that name soon opened in New York’s most horrific slum, the notorious “Five Points.”81 Greeley’s unrelenting commitment to civic improvement won him many famous admirers, most of whom applauded his energy even while acknowledging his impatience. And his sincere opposition to slavery earned appreciation from the abolitionist movement. In 1846, when Greeley reprinted a letter from Ireland that abolitionist Frederick Douglass had published in the antislavery movement’s principal press organ, the Liberator, during his recent European speaking tour, the African-American leader wrote to thank the Tribune editor “for the deep and lively interest you have been pleased to take in the cause of my long neglected race.” Douglass was sorry to hear that Greeley’s “immediate neighbors are very much displeased with you, for this act of kindness to myself, and the cause of which I am an humble advocate.” But he felt certain—overoptimistically, as it turned out—that Greeley’s enthusiasm was one of those “indications on the part of the press—which, happily are multiplying through all the land—that kindle up within me an ardent hope that the curse of slavery will not much longer be permitted to make its iron foot-prints in the lacerated hearts of my sable brethren.”82

  When Ralph Waldo Emerson came to New York for a lecture swing of his own, he accepted an invitation to dinner—vegetarian, of course—at Greeley’s dwelling, and then wrote to Margaret Fuller to share his conflicting impressions. “Greeley is a young man with white soft hair from New Hampshire, mother of men,” Emerson wrote, “of sanguine temper & liberal mind, no scholar but such a one as journals & newspapers make, who listens after all new thoughts & things, but with the indispensable New York condition that they can be made available. . . . He declares himself a Transcendentalist, is a Unitarian, a defender of miracles, &c[.] I saw my fate in a moment & that I should never content him.”83 Rather envious of his growing influence over growing numbers of Americans, Emerson complained that Greeley “does all their thinking and theory for them, for two dollars a year.”84

  Whatever his quirky facade, Greeley was not only capable and self-assured, but determined to do nothing less than reinvent daily journalism (and the American way of life in the bargain). The Tribune could not yet compete against the penny dailies’ profitable stranglehold on advertising (some whispered that the Herald and Sun extorted paid notices from their seamier advertisers by threatening to expose them to the police). So Greeley focused on amassing paid subscribers, and offering them promptly and reliably reported government news, abetted by scoops provided by friends in Governor Seward’s administration, together with treatises on social and moral improvement.

  To some, the overzealous Greeley seemed a humbug. But behind the mask of the lofty ideologue he was a shrewd newspaper professional who worked endless hours to ensure success. “I am not now . . . Editorial Manager of the Tribune office,” he protested years later. “I am a writer of Editorials.”85 But at the beginning, Greeley was a true managerial innovator. To get news first from Boston, Greeley used a flock of carri
er pigeons. To make sure stories from the state capital of Albany could be reported quickly, he arranged for compositors to ride the Hudson River steamers heading south to Manhattan, ordering them to typeset political speeches while still on board so they could be rushed into print as soon as the boats docked.86 He began collaborating with the blanket sheets to forge a network of pony express, steamboat, and railroad to deliver pooled news more quickly.

  Greeley also hired superb journalists and gave them room to express themselves and learn the business. At one point, his glittering staff of writers and associate editors included not only Raymond and Fuller, but literary critics George Ripley and Herbert Bayard Taylor, music critic William Henry Fry, and correspondent Charles A. Dana, who eventually became managing editor. Greeley even convinced Henry David Thoreau to write for him, and though the submission disappointingly proved “not in the Reformist vein,” the editor proudly told a friend that at least it was “full of Poetry and Nature.”87 Wary of the fact that Greeley had “no education at all, except what he had acquired himself,” fellow Transcendentalist (and Fourierite) Dana, who had attended Harvard, held that the “worst education that a man can be sent to, and the worst of all for a man of genius, is what is called a self education.” Yet to Dana’s amazement, the publisher’s “wit and his humor flowed out in idiomatic forms of expression that were surprising and delightful.”88