Mark Wahlgren Summers - The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878

You are they
That search into the secrets of the time,
And under feignd names, on the stage
present
Actions not to be touchd at; and traduce
Persons of rank and quality of both
sexes,
And, with satirical and bitter jests,
Make even the senators ridiculous
To the plebeians.
Philip Massinger, The Roman Actor, 1630

The Third-Term Panic (Thomas Nast, Harpers Weekly, November 7, 1874).

The cartoon from late 1874 is one of Thomas Nasts most famous: barely concealed in a lions skin called Caesarism, a donkey brays and panics the animals of the woodsa monocled unicorn, a frantic giraffe, an owl, and most conspicuously, in its first appearance as a symbol, a Republican elephant stampeding into the political abyss. But why make the New York Times a unicorn? Or the New York Tribune a giraffe, or the World an owl dropping an arithmetic book?

Nasts cartoon, in fact, is a comment on the so-called press gang of his age, and his better-read readers might have grasped the point of his symbols at once. They would have known that the Times was edited by the Englishman Louis J. Jennings; what better beast than one from the British coat of arms? Anyone familiar with Nasts caricatures would connect World proprietor Manton Marbles nose and the beak of a bird of prey; anyone familiar with Marbles editorials would appreciate his reliance on statistics to make his points for free trade or to change a setback for Democratic candidates into a victory. As for the Tribune, the so-called tall tower of its unfinished office building was as conspicuous on Printing-House Square as a giraffes neck, and it just may have been Nasts inspiration.

The fact that all these allusions might be second nature to Nasts audience and not to later historians should give us pause. Rare is the artist today who would feature a newspaper, much less an editors face, in his cartoon, but in the 1870s the caricaturist poked fun at journalists on a regular basis. Even in cartoons where politicians took center stage, newspapermen often showed up in the background, observing, commenting, or just swelling a crowd. Clearly, something was significantly different about the role that the press played in politics, different perhaps from earlier times and certainly from our own.

This book is about that difference and its consequences for the making of policy. It is a study of professional journalism fresh out of the eggshell, just as it is discovering itself as a profession and before it has established standards of conduct and freed itself from the legacy of the past, a legacy of political engagement. It is the story of the independents attempt to turn that legacy to new ends: the political engagement of the outsider, with editors playing the role of Thersites, commenting on the flawed nature of the generals. And it is, in the end, a story of failure, a war with the politicians that the politicians, or at least politics, won.