Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor. Adam Tuchinsky. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. 336 pp.
The Civil War era continues to be one of the most prolific fields of study in journalism history. These two books significantly advance scholarship and teaching—one with a compact survey of the abolitionist press, a crucial early success in the history of American advocacy journalism, and the other with a detailed research monograph about Horace Greeley’s socialism, an often glossed-over facet of one of the most influential U.S. editors.
Risley’s survey, like many other volumes in the excellent Visions of the American Press series by the Medill School of Journalism, could be used as a textbook in an undergraduate or graduate class about the history of American journalism and of the advocacy press. Tuchinsky’s specialized subject is more appropriate for a graduate seminar, but it is a must-read for nineteenth-century media historians.
Despite their very different subject matter and approaches, both books at their core illuminate an essential aspect of nineteenth-century journalism: the role of editors in promoting social change and radical reforms, often against paralyzing odds. The journalists profiled in these volumes, working from either the fringes or the epicenter of the booming media landscape, firmly believed in shaping American public opinion, and in some essential cases, they unquestionably did. Reading these books in the twenty-first century, at a time of growing criticism of the relevance and independence of journalism as a social institution, readers can be inspired by finding evidence of the press’ transformative power.
Risley has created an eminently readable survey of the abolitionist press from the 1820s to the 1860s, providing both page-turning detailed narratives and a broader feel for the complexity and diversity of this often-neglected journalistic activism.
As aptly summarized in Risley’s conclusion, abolitionist editors, along with most of their counterparts in the commercial mainstream and the nascent African American presses, “believed passionately in the power of the printed word.” Journalists as different as firebrand William Lloyd Garrison, colonization proponent Benjamin Lundy, and black rights activist Frederick Douglass all bet their life work, and often their very lives, on this belief and the related assumption that a rational informed citizenry is the best bulwark of democracy. If only Americans could be made to see—in print—how evil slavery was, they reasoned, they would revolt against it and the government would be forced to eradicate it. While Southern and Northern supporters of the slave system attacked the abolitionists as agitators aiming to overthrow the government, the editors kept beating their drums, firmly believing that, on the contrary, the right to criticize policies was fundamentally American.
Quoting heavily from the most influential of the approximately three dozen abolitionist newspapers founded in the Civil War era, Risley paints a compelling portrait of the editors’ fight. He reminds the modern reader of just how radical their stance against slavery was in a country that then had “the most formidable slave economy in the Western world,” and where the immediate emancipation of slaves was broadly considered “sheer fanaticism.” From the humble beginnings of the Genius of Universal Emancipation in 1821 to the 1865 closing of the movement’s iconic Liberator, Risley traces how the abolitionist press helped change American public opinion on slavery and, therefore, significantly shaped the country’s future.
Risley, the head of the journalism department at Penn State University and a scholar of the Civil War press, manages to delve into minute portraits of compelling figures like Garrison—who “with his own hands proudly set the type” for the Emancipation Proclamation news—without losing track of that larger story. One of the most valuable traits of the book is that it does not sacrifice nuance despite its readability and compactness. Readers are introduced to the different approaches of white and black abolitionists, of those who envisioned a multiracial society and those who wanted African Americans to resettle in Africa, believing that colonization would solve one of the most explosive issues of freedom, the role of former slaves in American society.
The chronological narrative highlights how unlikely the success of the abolitionist press was. The newspapers were a miniscule, money-losing enterprise in an increasingly commercial media industry, a labor of love of editors who did everything from setting the type to writing the editorials. They also faced some of the most suppressive legal and extra-legal violent opposition ever met by American journalists. Indeed, as Risley points out, it was a turning point for the movement when the repression—including such climactic moments as the mob killing of editor Elijah Lovejoy defending his press—linked the abolition effort to wider civil liberties in the minds of a slavery-indifferent public opinion.
From such bloody marginalization, the abolition movement moved into the political arena, just as territorial expansion was making slavery the national issue. The tide started turning in the 1850s as anti-slavery went mainstream and the new Republican Party took it as its platform. Lincoln’s election was greeted in the abolitionist press as “not the harvest, but … the green blade that must go before it.” Editors would be the standard-bearers in more battles fought in ink, joined with those in blood, before the harvest of the Thirteenth Amendment would bring the movement to a triumphant end.
One minor criticism of Abolition and the Press is that some pages are a jumble of names—of editors, papers, societies. But despite a few minutiae, the major point is loud and clear: The press helped radically reshape American public opinion at a critical juncture in U.S. history.
Tuchinksy, in his exploration of what was arguably the era’s leading news-paper, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, studies a different but no less radical cause it promoted: socialism, or the early American interrogation about “the justice and efficiency of market outcomes.” Tuchinsky rightly points out that this is an understudied facet of a hyper-studied figure in American journalism narratives, which usually only touch upon Greeley’s hiring of Karl Marx as Tribune European correspondent throughout the 1850s.
The book’s central argument is that the organization of labor was the central question of the Civil War era. The Tribune, between 1841 and 1871, introduced to mainstream America a “consistent social democratic program,” which looked at politics from the perspective of economy and society and criticized the assumption that an unrestricted market system could lead to social mobility and “propertied independence.”
At first, the Tribune appropriated the Fourierist concept that “social inequality was a threat to democracy,” essentially launching a mellower brand of socialism in the United States. Testament to Greeley’s eclecticism and intellectual voracity, that critique of the social consequences of industrialization merged with the one provided by transcendentalism, which lamented how the new, materialist market imperatives were corrupting and fragmenting American democracy.
Domestic and international events of the late 1840s—anti-slavery agitation and revolutions in Europe—convinced Greeley that the hour of socialist reform had come. Whether in the microcosm of the family or the macrocosm of land reform, Greeley believed that the government had a necessarily interventionist role in the spread of “benevolence and reciprocity” across the rapidly modernizing society. It is this peculiar mix of conservative Whig values and radical politics that made Greeley a leading figure in the foundation of the Republican Party, which Tuchinsky argues established politics “as a contest of social forces, at times even violent.”
Tuchinsky skims over the Civil War years, in which Greeley played a pivotal role, and jumps straight into the editor’s eyebrow-raising performance during Reconstruction, including his bailing out of Jefferson Davis, and concludes rather abruptly with his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1872. By that time, the fiery Tribune had gone bourgeois, embracing the new Liberalism in open contradiction to Greeley’s antebellum activism, the author argues. Despite such an inglorious end, Tuchinsky suggests that Greeley’s “conservative radicalism” on the question of labor laid the foundation for future challenges to the social inequalities and governmental aloofness of the market economy.
Perhaps the major difference between the two books is that Risley’s is a history of journalism, while Tuchinsky, a professor of history at the University of Southern Maine, writes an intellectual history based on a specific newspaper and, therefore, appears less interested in the press as an institution. Both volumes, however, are essential readings for students and scholars of how the press in the nineteenth century played a critical role in introducing public opinion to radical criticisms of American society that would have enduring consequences.
GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO
University of Minnesota