The American Newspaperman

BERNARD A. WEISBERGER. The American Newspaperman. (The Chicago History of American Civilization.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. $4.50.

The Chicago History of American Civilization contains two kinds of volumes: chronological and topical. Weisberger’s book falls into the latter category, and divides the history of the American newspaper into seven phases: the colonial printer and the public business; politics and press in the infant republic; special-audience papers in the early nineteenth century; mid-century innovations caused by increased democracy, improved technology, and an intensified search for profits; the creation of newspaper empires through the last half of the nineteenth century; the world of reporting and punditry in the early twentieth century; and a final section on the impact of the newer media and conditions on the vanishing newspaper man.

The history of American journalism suffers from unevenly distributed documentation and inadequate conceptual apparatus. The first problem leads to the kind of overminute examination of the few precious scraps of surviving colonial newspapers characteristic of our early histories of journalism. The latter difficulty tends to cause later histories of journalism to break down, shortly after the Civil War period, into a formless registry of changing editors, mergers, and suspensions. Weisberger has avoided both these misemphases; the former through brilliantly written precis of earlier journals, the latter by judiciously selecting typical developments and analyzing them thoroughly. Thus, within the compass of little more than two hundred pages, he has written an extraordinarily good orientation to the complex history of the American newspaper.

Something of his method--an artful blend of generalization and pithy excerpt--can be gained from his summary of the colonial newspaper in 1760, just before it assumed its crucial role in the American Revolution: One could expect to find in it a column of ‘Occurrences, or the History of the Times,’ an essay or two of local or imported origin on any subject from astronomy to turnip culture, a list of advertisements running from prosaic requests to buy so-and-so’s fine laces to a modern-sounding claim for the wonders of some nostrum like Dr. Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, the infallible destroyer of ‘Fluxes, Spitting of Blood, Consumption, Small-Pox, Measles, Colds, Coughs, and Pains in the Limbs or Joints.’

And always, poetry, the unfailing recourse of the eighteenth century writer in the grip of mirth or malice--doggerel on the appearances of comets, the visits of dignitaries, the fall in paper currency, or the sins of rival printers. Perhaps the most important of all these rhymed flights of fancy, from a journalistic point of view, was the one which began: ‘A Newspaper is like a Feast; some Dish there is for every Guest’ (p. 24).

The book is based on secondary accounts, and the judicious Bibliographical Essay attests to the author’s catholic reading in this growing literature. Most of his judgments, thus, are standard ones, although his perception of special audience papers for businessmen, religious partisans, farmers, and reformers as the characteristic pattern of pre-penny-press journalism is fresh and useful. His fear that population increases appeared to outstrip circulation growth between 1950 and 1958 seems to me to overlook the fact that a baby boom has necessarily only a delayed reaction in increased newspaper readership.

Similarly, his observation of the irony that responsible monopoly comes awkwardly from the mouths of free enterprise ideologists overlooks the overriding consideration that some of our best papers-Louisville, Milwaukee-come from monopoly situations and some of our worst-Boston, San Francisco-are in fiercely competitive cities. The proof of this pudding would seem to be in the reading.

Finally-and this is more an observation on the state of journalism research than a comment on Weisberger’s shrewd and witty packaging of what has already been harvested-for a really fresh synthesis in journalism history we need more quantitative monographs to establish the relative influence of journalism on the course of American history. We need content analyses of typical papers to chart the changing tides of editorial and advertising content; we need modal leisure budgets of many historic American types to pin down just how much time each spent with newspapers as sources of information, entertainment, and consumership; and we need to relate this influence, over time, with the myriad other media and sources accessible to various
classes, regions, occupational groups, and other significant categories of association.

As the spectrum of American media expands and audiences fractionate, it is even more important to describe clearly the total pattern of potential media exposure and the actual configurations of audience attention and influence. Until research uncovers these relationships, a book like Weisberger’s will remain invaluable to non-specialists concerned about the role of mass communication in American civilization.