PRESS. Press in the Gilded Age. Yellow Journalism

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1 mandate from the people; his attempt was unsuccessful, and the Senate rejected the treaty. Wilson s efforts surrounding the World War I peace settlement were a logical extension of the changes in presidential authority that had been under way for the previous 40 years. He used his constitutional authority over foreign policy and his status as commander in chief to enmesh the United States in a number of powerful international relationships. Wilson employed his constitutional mandate to enforce the laws to mobilize an expanded federal government and the American public for the war effort. Congress was not yet willing to give up so much of its authority, however, and the Senate successfully curtailed some aspects of presidential power by rejecting the peace treaty. Presidents would continue to use the Roosevelt Corollary in the 1920s, but they retreated to a basic policy of noninvolvement in Europe. Not until presidents could draw on the rhetoric of national security and the need for secrecy in the conduct of foreign policy a development of the World War II years ( ) did the president become truly dominant over Congress. Bibliography and Further Reading Campbell, Ballard C. The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Cooper, John Milton, Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Headrick, Daniel R. The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunication and International Politics, New York: Oxford University Press, LaFeber, Walter. The American Age: U.S. Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750, 2nd edition. New York: W. W. Norton, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Rosenberg, Emily S. Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Imperial Presidency. New edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin, Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New edition. New York: W. W. Norton, Woolley, John T., and Gerhard Peters, eds. The American Presidency Project. (accessed June 6, 2009). Nicole M. Phelps PRESS During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the press moved from being a highly partisan voice of the mainstream parties, to an independent voice of reform, to being an indispensable tool in the preservation of democracy. This transformation occurred because of broader cultural trends, including the rise of consumerism and the public outcry against the excesses of industrial capitalism. The press of this period also shaped political ideology and contributed to the lasting imagery of the era. Press in the Gilded Age The American press that emerged out of the antebellum period was highly partisan, with party leaders and editors working together to convey party positions through ideologically slanted news accounts in local newspapers. The majority of newspapers remained partisan throughout the Gilded Age, but the number of independent papers increased rapidly. This growth was the result of a range of factors: journalism becoming increasingly professionalized, leading to more objectivity and less dogma; the emphasis on profit that swept business during the period prompting newspapers to expand their readership beyond party supporters; and the reform impulse in politics that caused liberals needing a voice for their reform sentiments to revolt against the Republican establishment. This outlet became the independent press. Yellow Journalism As independent papers increased their share of public discourse relative to the partisan press throughout the Gilded Age, both outlets found new competition from newspapers that focused more on human interest stories than politics the so-called popular press. Joseph Pulitzer is widely credited with starting the popular 291

2 press in St. Louis in 1878 with his Post-Dispatch. A onetime Liberal Republican who came to embrace the Democratic Party, Pulitzer offered news in his papers that looked a lot like that of the independent press stories on government corruption and growing class disparity. He differed in that he included more popular items such as cartoons, illustrations, and gossip to increase his readership. This new type of paper took the name yellow journalism after Richard Outcault s cartoon Yellow Kid in Pulitzer s paper. Pulitzer expanded his operations in 1883 when he took over the New York World. The World grew rapidly as its popular stories appealed beyond its original audience of bourgeois men to the working class and to women. Pulitzer s intent was to promote democracy through a more informed public, with professional journalists checking the power of big business and corrupt government (he established the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1912 toward this end). However, this type of newspaper actually contributed to a decline in popular politics by turning the focus on politics away from issues to human interest stories. Readers focused on the drama of corruption rather than the public policy that shaped their lives. Ironically, as more people read the news they became increasingly less informed. The popular press along with the independent press whose more intellectual stories, geared to an educated audience, turned away average readers contributed to a decline in popular political participation at the polls that began in the Gilded Age. Pulitzer may have started the popular press, but William Randolph Hearst gave it the sensationalism that Rival publishers Joseph Pulitzer (The World, left) and William Randolph Hearst (New York Journal, right), pioneers of yellow journalism, are depicted in this 1898 cartoon as yellow kids arguing over their respective papers sensationalist approach to coverage of the Spanish-American War. (Library of Congress) 292 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF U.S. POLITICAL HISTORY

3 earned yellow journalism a derisive meaning. Hearst started his journalism career in San Francisco, but gained wider attention when he bought the New York Journal in Like Pulitzer, Hearst championed the cause of average Americans against the ravages of plutocracy but endorsed more radical ideas like municipal ownership of utilities, labor unions, and progressive taxation. The Journal copied many of Pulitzer s popular ideas, including advice columns, a sports section, and large headlines over multiple columns. In the circulation war that ensued, the World and the Journal outdid each other in sensationalizing the big story of the day: the 1895 Cuban revolt against Spain in the lead-up to the Spanish-American War. Pulitzer kept his pro-cuban polemics on the editorial page, but Hearst blared sensational headlines on page one. The Journal s reporting ranged from embellishment of facts to outright lies, for example, the Cuban Girl Martyr, whose virginity was saved from the advances of a Spanish officer by a Journal reporter. The sensationalism of yellow journalism is perhaps best summarized by the plight of Frederic Remington. The famous Western artist was sent to Cuba to illustrate the Cuban revolt for the Journal, but lamented that there was no war to draw. Hearst famously wired Remington: Please remain: You supply the pictures and I ll supply the war. This circulation battle tinged with sensationalism did not cause the Spanish- American War, but contributed to public opinion pushing a reluctant government toward intervention. Alternative Press Pulitzer and Hearst represented a trend toward a national media that would take hold in the twentieth century; during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, however, the majority of newspapers remained local. Besides the partisan organs of the major parties and the growing independent press, ethnic, radical, and organization papers abounded. Immigration caused ethnic enclaves to grow rapidly in American cities during the Gilded Age. These neighborhoods supported newspapers in Old World languages with a mix of stories from their homeland, American politics, and local affairs. Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant, began his journalism career in St. Louis, writing for a Germanlanguage paper. In 1900, no fewer than 17 Germanlanguage newspapers were published in Milwaukee and 6 Yiddish dailies circulated around New York City. Often these papers agitated for radical political causes, such as Vorwaerts! (Forward!), a German-language socialist paper published in Milwaukee at the turn of the century. Its editor, Victor Berger, later edited the influential English-language socialist papers Social Democratic Herald and Milwaukee Leader and served multiple terms in Congress. The most influential socialist paper was Appeal to Reason, a weekly published in Girard, Kansas, that boasted a circulation of 750,000 by Political organizations other than parties circulated newspapers with great success, including the Woman s Christian Temperance Union s Union Signal (1883) which became the widest circulating women s paper in the world with more than one hundred thousand subscriptions and the NAACP s The Crisis (1910), which became a significant voice in African American politics. The Crisis continued a trend in black activism that had resulted in the publication of more than one thousand papers by black founders by America was awash in newsprint by 1910, with an estimated twenty-six hundred dailies published that year, the highest number in American history. Muckraking Newspapers were not the only outlet for the press. Magazines, which rarely secured more than ten thousand subscriptions in the years following the Civil War because of high per-issue prices, became more widely circulated during the 1890s because improvements in printing technology allowed publishers to charge less per copy. Older magazines like The Atlantic Monthly (founded in 1857) and The Nation (1865) took advantage, but new magazines like McClure s (1893) also entered the fray. Magazine editors such as S. S. McClure followed the formula for success of Gilded Age newspapers: professional journalists, sensational stories, and a nonpartisan approach. Of particular importance was the advent of investigative journalism, often printed serially in magazines like McClure s, Everybody s, and Collier s. Although investigative reporting could be found early in the Gilded Age, the January 1903 issue of McClure s marked the beginning of muckraking, a derisive term 293

4 RELATED ENTRIES THIS VOLUME Muckrakers OTHER VOLUMES Media (vol. 6); Network Television and Newspapers (vol. 7); Press (vol. 5); Press and Printers (vol. 1) applied by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt who did not appreciate journalists uncovering the seamier side of politics. In that issue, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker contributed articles on the nefarious business practices of Standard Oil, urban political corruption, and labor racketeering, respectively. Perhaps the best-known piece of muckraking, Upton Sinclair s novelized exposé of Chicago s meat-packing industry first appeared serially in Appeal to Reason in 1905 before being published as The Jungle in The political consequences of muckraking were significant, although hard to measure. The shocking stories of the muckrakers helped galvanize the middleclass reform movement that came to be known as progressivism. The lurid tales of political and industrial corruption helped legitimize to the middle class what working-class Americans had questioned for decades. The language of reform became a key ingredient in public political discourse. In terms of public policy, the Hepburn Act (1906), which regulated railroads, the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), and the Meat Inspection Act (1906), were all passed during the height of muckraking. However, the issues behind these measures all occupied a place on the political docket well before the 1903 issue of McClure s or publication of The Jungle making it difficult to ascertain the causative influence of muckraking on the passage of these measures or their timing. If nothing else, muckraking came to symbolize the reform impulse of the Progressive Era for later generations. World War I When war broke out in Europe in 1914, American journalists turned to debating the legitimacy of the war and the question of U.S. involvement. The press covered the war along ethnic and ideological lines, demonstrating the variety of press outlets at the time and a general public sentiment for nonintervention. Once the United States entered the war in April 1917, the Woodrow Wilson administration hired progressive journalist George Creel to head the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to rouse patriotic fervor the same way his muckraking compatriots aroused public indignation against political and industrial corruption. The CPI succeeded: millions of pro-war pamphlets and some seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men volunteer speakers who gave short dramatic speeches across the nation to engender support for the war used the techniques of popularization pioneered in the printed press a generation earlier. The propaganda campaign, however, included the suppression of press outlets deemed to be seditious. The Espionage Act (1917) and its extension, the Sedition Act (1918), made illegal the spreading of information that hurt the U.S. military cause or helped the enemy; it also criminalized speaking out against the government. Under these laws, many radical and ethnic news sources were denied access to the U.S. mail, which effectively put them out of business. Publications affected included Berger s socialist daily Milwaukee Leader, the Industrial Workers of the World journal Solidarity, the leading magazine for bohemian radical intellectuals The Masses, anything printed in German, pacifist publications, and Irish nationalist publications. The effects of this suppressive legislation on American politics and information availability were enormous. The American radical left was silenced and, in many respects, never recovered. The culture of fear contributed to the Red Scare of and can be viewed as the opening salvos in the Cold War. The American Civil Liberties Union (1920), which evolved from the National Civil Liberties Bureau (1917), was established in part to protect political dissent and thereby uphold democracy. These responses began to form the modern American understanding of freedom of the press as freedom of expression without restraints imposed by government. The press during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era helped shape the public discourse about politics by giving reformers and radicals a public platform and voice for their ideas. Progressivism, a political outlook that shaped twentieth-century American liberalism, benefited from the works of journalists like the 294 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF U.S. POLITICAL HISTORY

5 PROGRESSIVE (BULL MOOSE) PARTY muckrakers. The press also reflected the nationalization of American institutions. Just as locally owned workshops gave way to national and international corporations, so, too, did local newspapers give way to national media of various kinds. As America slowly underwent modernization, popular politics was affected paradoxically: cheaper papers, sensationalized stories, and independent voices brought news to more Americans, yet the loss of the local touch made politics seem less relevant thus contributing to a decline in popular political participation in America. Bibliography and Further Reading Filler, Louis M. The Muckrakers. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, Fitzpatrick, Ellen F., ed. Muckraking: Three Landmark Articles. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin s, Kennedy, David. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. New York: Oxford University Press, McGerr, Michael E. The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, New York: Oxford University Press, Shore, Elliott. Talkin Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, Spencer, David R. The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America s Emergence as a World Power. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, Thomas F. Jorsch PROGRESSIVE (BULL MOOSE) PARTY Called into being by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 as a result of the former Republican president s quarrel with the conservative, Old Guard wing of his party and then effectively killed by Roosevelt in 1916 when circumstances and priorities had changed the Progressive Party has usually appeared in historical accounts as an extension of its initiator s huge ambitions and personality. Still, the party s strong start in 1912 nurtured hopes that it would become a fixture in American politics. An impressive list of social and political reformers rallied to the Progressives and spent the next several years trying to turn the party into a practical vehicle for reform in the states as well as at the national level. The movement failed to fulfill activists hopes for a permanent reform party, but it did prove to be a key episode in the formation of twentieth-century liberal politics and in the shift of the Republican Party toward an identity with conservatism. Roosevelt and the Progressive Republicans Reformers had come regularly to label themselves progressive by January 1911, when Sen. Robert La Follette (R WI) organized the National Progressive Republican League. La Follette s immediate goal was to challenge Old Guard Republicans who dominated the party s congressional leadership. La Follette also aimed to block Pres. William Howard Taft s renomination and, with luck, take Taft s place. Republican progressives saw Taft as having defected to the conservatives after running in 1908 as a moderate reformer. The restless Roosevelt, meanwhile, began to criticize publicly his handpicked successor upon returning from a prolonged foreign trip in mid A series of eloquent speeches outlining his version of progressivism, the New Nationalism, brought Roosevelt back into the limelight as a probable candidate for Borrowed from political theorist Herbert Croly s 1909 pamphlet, The Promise of American Life, the concept of New Nationalism evoked Roosevelt s commitment to an active role for the federal government in dealing with the social, economic, and environmental challenges posed by the country s transition into an urban, industrial society with a formidable corporate business sector. When La Follette s candidacy for the Republican nomination faltered in February 1912, Roosevelt entered the race. Roosevelt attempted an unprecedented strategy of using victories in states that chose delegates by direct primaries to pressure the party into nominating him. Caucuses controlled by the party hierarchy, however, still chose most convention delegates. When the Republicans held their convention in Chicago in June 1912, Taft claimed a majority even though Roosevelt was clearly the more popular candidate. Taft had used venerable techniques of party management, similar to those Roosevelt himself had 295