JOURNALISM

The volatile journalism scene between 1870 and 1920 allowed American writers access to a broader, more diverse set of readers than ever before and helped to shape the content and form of American literature, particularly the novel. The objective method of reporting was not yet fully established as a journalistic ideal, nor was the sharp division between literature and journalism that many twenty-first century readers take for granted—the notion that literary writers produce art worth lingering over, while journalists produce only functional prose worth a quick read and a toss into the trash. The era's papers published poetry, fiction, and literary essays as well as news. Many celebrated literary figures—Mark Twain, Henry James, and Edith Wharton among them—published work in newspapers and magazines at the turn of the century. Willa Cather decided she wanted to be a writer in the 1890s after her college English professor got Cather's essay on Thomas Carlyle published in the Nebraska State Journal. Cather's career as a theater critic, editor, and sometime reporter lasted nearly two decades. Yet when she achieved success as a novelist, Cather did not hesitate to denigrate journalistic writing as commercially driven, shallow, and slipshod.

Such ambivalence was characteristic of the relationship between journalism and literature: the two realms were inevitably intertwined, but attitudes toward the press varied dramatically. Journalism was celebrated as a vibrant force that brought writers in touch with "real life." But it was also attacked as a mind-numbing phenomenon destructive to literary culture, threatening to reduce the American reading public to thoughtless consumers. Such divergent views notwithstanding, literary historians agree that the major literary movements in American fiction at the turn into the twentieth century—realism, naturalism, and modernism—all owe significant debts to journalism.

MAINSTREAM PRESSES: NEW READERS, NEW REALISM

The period after the Civil War saw a decline in the older model of partisan newspapers controlled by political parties. Instead journalism continued to evolve along the lines set by the advent of the penny press in the 1830s, which featured low prices and high accessibility. When the first mass-circulation newspapers and magazines emerged in the late nineteenth century in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and other cities, revenue from advertising allowed them to be independent from political party support, and the press's primary motivation shifted from political to business advocacy. As a result, popular journals addressed their readers less as potential voters and more as potential consumers of mass-produced products such as soap, baking powder, medical remedies, shirtwaists, and shoes. This shift troubled some citizens, who worried that American democracy was being undermined by corporate control of public discourse. Writers, some critics complained, no longer acted as independent interpreters of the news. Hearst and Scripps emerged as the nation's biggest group owners, buying out the competition and consolidating newspapers in dozens of cities. At the same time, skyrocketing circulations indicated that more Americans, from more varied walks of life, were reading magazines and newspapers than ever before. Because so much advertising was aimed at women, attracting female readers became a priority for many papers. Newspapers and magazines also sought to expand their readerships among the working classes and immigrants, reaching out to the new urban masses, even those who were barely literate in English.

Immigrants played an influential role in the press, not only as readers but also as editors and publishers. One of the most famous was the Hungarian-born Joseph Pulitzer, who took over the New York World in 1883 and ushered in a new era of journalism, promising to entertain and inform readers with a bold mix of illustrations, human-interest stories, editorials in support of the working class, and crusades against government and corporate corruption. The average daily circulation of the World doubled during Pulitzer's first three months, from 15,000 to 30,000, and by 1887 it had reached a quarter million, an unprecedented figure. Pulitzer would soon be drawn into a legendary circulation battle with William Randolph Hearst, heir to a California mining fortune and publisher of the San Francisco Examiner. Hearst bought the New York Journal in 1895, hired away some of Pulitzer's best editors, and set out to woo the World readers. The fight led both sides to adopt increasingly aggressive strategies, such as pursuing exclusive rights to stories and trumpeting their own social-justice crusades. "While Others Talk the Journal Acts," bragged Hearst's paper while featuring eyebrow-raising headlines like "A Startling Confession of a Wholesale Murderer Who Begs to Be Hanged" and "Strange Things Women Do for Love" (Bleyer, pp. 357–364). These tactics became known as "yellow journalism" because of the World's popular "Yellow Kid" comic strip, which soon began appearing in the Journal as well. Promotions for both papers featured the goofy, vacant-looking figure, and the comic strip became a symbol of sensationalism and journalistic irresponsibility. That irresponsibility peaked in 1898, when overblown coverage of the sinking of the American battleship Maine helped to bring about an ill-advised war with Spain. Despite a chorus of critics, newspapers across the country practiced variations of the yellow journalism formula, and the number of daily newspapers continued to increase, peaking at about 2,600 between 1910 and 1914.

After the Civil War, elite "establishment" magazines such as Harper's, Century, and Scribner's continued to enjoy cultural power and prestige. The Century's popular series on Civil War battles, published in the mid-1880s, led to a four-volume book. By the 1890s, however, magazines became cheaper, and a different type of journal gained national influence. The new leaders in magazine journalism—such as Edward W. Bok, who took over as editor of Ladies' Home Journal in 1889, and S. S. McClure, who founded McClure's Magazine in 1893—printed popular fiction, general articles, and plenty of illustrations. Bok and McClure, both immigrants themselves, foresaw the future of American magazines. They helped to create syndicated journalism, and they went on to redefine the relationship between magazines and their readers. McClure's put the Progressive Era reform impulse into practice and was hailed as a muckraking journal. The term "muckraker"—first used by Teddy Roosevelt as an insult for reformers who looked only downward, wallowing in the filth of society—became a badge of honor for investigative reporters who documented government corruption, gathered evidence against business monopolies, and fought for better conditions and wages for workers. Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and David Graham Phillips were among the best-known muckrakers. Although Bok's Ladies' Home Journal did not take up reform with the fervor of McClure's, Bok positioned the magazine as a clearinghouse for women's domestic concerns and created a new advertising-oriented market.

This combination of reform journalism and reliance on advertising forged a new mode of "realism" that was oriented toward consumers. Even the most sensational forms of this realism could lead to beneficial reforms. The World's daring Nellie Bly inspired significant improvements in conditions for the mentally ill when she pretended to be insane and had herself committed to a notorious asylum in New York City in 1887. In the heyday of the muckraking era, Samuel Hopkins Adams helped bring about new government regulations with his series on the bogus claims of patent-medicine makers, published in Collier's in 1905 and 1906. But some critics have argued that this new realism compromised American democracy by transforming readers from active citizens to passive consumers. According to this view, the new realism was damaging because it turned readers into mere spectators. It packaged information in a way that suggested readers did not have access to "real life" on their own. Moreover, it gave journalism a misleading aura of absolute authenticity. Although magazines and newspapers appeared to be providing readers a clear, neutral window into the real world, they were in fact manipulating information at least as carefully as political journalism had been doing for more than a century.

COUNTERPUBLICS: ALTERNATIVE VOICES

Despite the growth of advertising and the consolidation of corporate influence in journalism, Progressive Era readers could choose from among a wider variety of print sources than at any other time in the nation's history. Mainstream journals were just one part of the phenomenon; Americans also had access to alternative presses that varied widely in content, format, and even language. Although newspapers like Pulitzer's and Hearst's served as Americanizing aids for many immigrants, smaller ethnic presses in Yiddish, German, Polish, Italian, and other languages also flourished, fostering communities in the native languages of recently arrived city dwellers. Throughout America thousands of alternative presses sprang to life, providing critical outlets for voices raised in social protest, racial and ethnic pride, or artistic experimentation. These journals created counterpublics, which scholars have defined as alternative forums for groups whose members have been denied access to the dominant public sphere. In these arenas, members of subordinated social groups circulate their own interpretations of their identities and needs. Alternative presses allowed readers relegated to society's margins to gather information, share opinions, and find entertainment.

These presses also launched and supported individual literary careers, not unlike mainstream newspapers and magazines. Zitkala–Ša, the Sioux author and Indian rights activist, served as a contributor and editor of American Indian Magazine, the periodical for the Society of American Indians, from 1916 to 1920. The novelist Abraham Cahan, a Russian immigrant, began writing for both English and Yiddish newspapers soon after he arrived in America in 1882. Cahan would go on to serve as editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, a socialist organ that became the leading Yiddish newspaper in the world in the early twentieth century. At the turn of the century radical women's publications blossomed, spurred by rising labor reform, temperance, and women's rights movements. From 1909 to 1916 the feminist activist and author Charlotte Perkins Gilman published and also wrote most of the copy for the Forerunner, a monthly magazine featuring fiction, poetry, editorials, and news reports. The Masses (1911–1917), edited by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, and Mother Earth (1906–1917), edited and published by Emma Goldman, also promoted feminist goals. The so-called little magazines, such as Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, published experimental writing, promoting radical political views and avant-garde aesthetics. Although these magazines appeared erratically and were short-lived, they published work by important poets like Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore. Their influence went far beyond their small circulations.

Meanwhile the rising tide of racial violence against African Americans fueled an explosion of black newspapers. Between 1895 and 1915, some 1,200 African American newspapers were launched, more than in any other era of American history. At a time when almost all white-owned newspapers refused to hire African Americans, these newspapers gave writers a platform from which to condemn injustice, call for change, and celebrate the achievements of their race. Ida B. Wells, the daughter of former slaves, started writing for the black press in 1884 and went on to become an internationally recognized anti-lynching crusader. Her impassioned journalism, which exposed the hypocrisy of white society's rationale for lynchings, contrasted sharply with the approving reports that appeared in the white press. African American journals also printed poetry and fiction. The Colored American Magazine, founded in 1900, published the serialized fiction of Pauline E. Hopkins, now recognized as a major voice in turn-of-the-century black fiction. The Crisis, the official organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), debuted in 1910. It was edited by the scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a groundbreaking study of African American culture.

GETTING STARTED: CHANGING PROFESSIONAL OPTIONS FOR WRITERS

When Ernest Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star in 1917, he launched a writing career that would make him one of the world's most famous novelists. Hemingway's spare prose style has often been linked to the brevity required of reporters, who must compress information into the limited space of newspaper columns. His first book, In Our Time (1925), combined journalistic reports with fiction in a complex collage of perspectives on the First World War. Although Hemingway's achievement was extraordinary, changes in journalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for his rise from reporter to literary celebrity.

Only in the decades after the Civil War did reporting become widely recognized as a respectable profession. By the 1880s reporters had come into their own, and journalism offered new career options for Americans who wanted to write professionally. Bylines became more common as reporters achieved new prominence in news organizations. At the same time, journalists joined lawyers, librarians, social workers, chemists, economists, teachers, engineers, and doctors in carving their own specialized niche in the working world. The first professional organizations for journalists were founded in this era, as was the Journalist, a trade publication that appeared in 1883. Colleges and universities initiated journalism courses, and in 1908 the University of Missouri established the first college of journalism. Columbia University soon followed suit, funded by a generous grant from Joseph Pulitzer.

Although salaries remained low for all except a few top executives, writing for newspapers and magazines became known as a potentially glamorous job. Richard Harding Davis, the dashing son of the author Rebecca Harding Davis, personified that glamour for many turn-of-the-century readers. A star reporter who began in Philadelphia and moved quickly to the New York City metropolitan papers, Davis launched his career covering crime and sports and soon began writing popular fiction as well. Davis's expansive personality, good looks, and friendship with the magazine illustrator Charles Dana Gibson made him one of the best-known faces in American journalism, especially after he became the model for the male companion to Gibson's famous "Gibson girl." Davis also helped popularize the image of the journalist as a swashbuckling adventurer. He served as a correspondent in the Spanish-American War and later in World War I.

Although journalism was dominated by men, women also flocked into newsrooms in the 1880s. Most female journalists covered fashion news, domestic tips, and society events for the newly created women's pages, but some also wrote front-page news. More likely to use pseudonyms than male journalists, newswomen also were more likely to be highly visible, their names and faces promoted along with their stories. Dorothy Dix, hired in 1894 as a "girl Friday" for the New Orleans Picayune, became one of the most successful newspaperwomen of her day. Dix (the pen name of Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer) began with obituaries, graduated to news events, and ended up writing a popular advice column, "Dorothy Dix Talks," for fifty years. Dix's contemporary, Nellie Bly (the pen name of Elizabeth Cochrane), made headlines with her incognito excursions into the darker parts of the city. Winifred Black, Ada Patterson, and a host of other imitators helped to make "girl stunt reporting" into a national phenomenon. This fad preceded the cross-class adventures of other late-nineteenth-century writers, the best-known of whom is Stephen Crane, whose sketches "Experiment in Misery" and "Experiment in Luxury" appeared in the New York Press in 1894. Two years later Crane registered as a seaman on a gunrunning ship to Cuba to seek experience as a war correspondent. He found himself reporting on a different sort of trauma when the ship sank and he spent almost thirty hours, in dangerously high seas, with three other men in a ten-foot dinghy. Soon after, Crane published a report in the New York Press, and a few months later his short story based on the incident, "The Open Boat," appeared in Scribner's Magazine.

Crane's movement between fact and fiction was not unusual. The newspaper editor and novelist Abraham Cahan's realist novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) evolved from a series McClure's Magazine commissioned him to write on Jewish immigrants in the garment trade. The former journalist Theodore Dreiser adapted news reports from a 1906 murder case for his important naturalist novel An American Tragedy (1925). Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos were among the many writers who collected newspaper headlines to use in their own work. An unprecedented number of American authors between 1870 and 1920 began their careers as journalists, more than in any period before or since. The list includes celebrated novelists such as Crane and Hemingway as well as popular novelists whose work is less known today, such as Edna Ferber and David Graham Phillips. For many writers, journalism acted as a bracing substitute for formal education. "At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues," H. L. Mencken recalled, "I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show . . . getting earfuls and eyefuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools" (p. ix).

Yet journalism's impact on American letters was too sweeping and complex for a single formula to explain. Journalism was viewed as a new form of literary apprenticeship. It offered aspiring writers steady income as well as the opportunity to immerse themselves in a broad range of American experiences. It also provided an influential venue for writers like Eugene Field, a poet whose "Sharps and Flats" column in the Chicago Daily News mixed urbane commentary on contemporary life with verse and whimsy. The in-house humorist became a standard feature of late-nineteenth-century newspapers, and several, such as Field, Bill Nye, George Ade, and Finley Peter Dunne, rose to prominence in this role. But commercial imperatives and deadline pressures made some journalists view their workplaces more as industrial prisons than schools. As editors exerted more control over the content and style of stories, writers resented their lack of autonomy and grew alienated from management. The press attracted some vocal critics. "The great presses of the country," the novelist Frank Norris declared, "are for the most part merely sublimated sausage machines that go dashing along in a mess of paper and printer's ink turning out meat for the monster" (pp. 104–105). The muckraker Upton Sinclair, known for his meatpacking industry exposé The Jungle (1906), launched a systematic, passionate attack on the commercial press in The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (1919). Comparing journalists to prostitutes, Sinclair dismantled any claims to freedom of the press and declared that corporations controlled the American news industry. "To expect justice and truth-telling of a capitalist newspaper," Sinclair concluded, "is to expect asceticism at a cannibal feast" (p. 224).

Although Sinclair's indictment was extreme, many works of fiction reflect their authors' frustration with journalism. William Dean Howells represents the newsman as a selfish, manipulative liar in A Modern Instance (1882). James mocks "lady-correspondents" in his characterization of Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), then goes even further with his portrayal of the villainous Boston interviewer Matthias Pardon in The Bostonians (1886). The conclusion of Edna Ferber's Dawn O'Hara (1911) rewards the hardworking reporter-heroine by affording her two avenues of escape from journalism: she gets a book contract and a husband. Journalism's influence on literature went even deeper than any individual characterizations of reporters can reveal, however. Some writers, James and Cather among them, saw newspapers as a symbol for all that was going wrong in American culture. They protested the consumerism and standardization of the new mass culture. Against a rapid-fire model of reading and writing, they fought to assert the value of contemplation and carefully crafted expression.

SHAPING FICTION: REALISM, NATURALISM, AND MODERNISM

The reporter's access to raw experience was especially prized among novelists who sought to record the brutalities of everyday life in America. The Harvard-educated Hutchins Hapgood, who complained that American novels lacked vivid realism, set out to remedy the problem by forging his own brand of participatory journalism, immersing himself in his subjects' lives as much as possible. Hapgood's series of articles on the Jewish ghetto, written for New York's Commercial Advertiser, were revised and published in a book, The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902). Although not a novel, the book was praised in literary circles. When the New York City police reporter and photojournalist Jacob Riis published a pioneering attack on tenement housing in 1890, his book's title, How the Other Half Lives, summed up what many writers hoped to gain from their reporting days. Riis, who spent years covering slums, took a scientific approach to fact gathering. To document the exploitation of children in tenement factories, Riis consulted a statistical table from the health department showing how to tell age by children's teeth, then went into factories and looked in little girls' mouths to see how old they were. Journalism's stress on precise observation and, more broadly, its assumption that reality was external and thus reportable, contributed to the two major movements in American fiction in the late nineteenth century, realism and naturalism.

Realism was championed by the literary critic and novelist William Dean Howells, who as a boy helped his father edit a small-town newspaper in Ohio. The movement encompassed a diverse set of approaches and authors, from the frontier humor of Mark Twain to the social-problem fiction of Howells. A reaction against the enormous popularity of sentimental fiction, realism centered on ordinary life, insisted upon verisimilitude of detail, represented vernacular speech, and attempted to present an objective view of American society. This last characteristic—the celebration of objectivity, the goal of depersonalized narration—has inspired the most skepticism from later readers because many critics rightly point out that no narrative can be value-neutral and no story exists without some particular angle of vision. Realist fiction, although less idealistic than sentimental fiction, nonetheless tended to advocate an ethical standpoint. That standpoint becomes clearer when realism is compared to its counterpart, naturalism, a pessimistic subset of realism. Naturalists, like realists, sought to document oppressive realities of turn-of-the-century lives, but their fiction featured a deterministic vision, showing individuals at the mercy of biological and social forces beyond their control. The journalists Crane, Dreiser, Norris, and Jack London all wrote major naturalist fiction.

Modernism, an elite literary movement that emerged in the 1890s in Europe and blossomed in the United States shortly after, was more directly antagonistic toward the mass culture associated with journalism. Modernist fiction, like that of the realists and naturalists, sought to create authentic portrayals of life. But modernists like Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos challenged standard ways of reading, experimenting with unusual narrative structure and adapting the abstract methods of modernist painters to represent multiple, shifting perspectives. They rejected the idea that language could give readers access to a neutral view of reality. Their demanding, often elliptical writing forced readers to grapple with the printed word, widening the gap between how one read the newspaper and how one read literature. That so many readers take this gap for granted today reflects the power of the modernists' literary legacy.

Some scholars argue that a special category of journalism emerged at the turn of the century, an elite form that combined the creative license of fiction writers with the fact-based method of newly professionalized journalists. Authors such as Crane, Davis, Cahan, Dreiser, Hapgood, Lincoln Steffens, and the longtime New York reporter Julian Ralph have been called "literary journalists" because they sought to endow factual accounts with the grace and power of literary prose. Their writing is distinguished by the depth of its research, complexity of its topic, and subtlety of its approach. It is worth noting that almost no women from the turn of the century have been included in lists of "literary journalists." Female journalists, stereotyped as "sob sisters" who produced only emotional drivel, were rarely taken seriously as writers, even though some of them, such as the writer and editor Elizabeth Jordan, went on to have successful careers as fiction writers. Jordan's first book—a story collection titled Tales of the City Room (1898)—attracted attention in part because of Jordan's notoriety as one of the only female reporters to cover the murder trial of Lizzie Borden in 1893. Although women took on visible roles in newspaper and magazine journalism, newsrooms have been depicted as overwhelmingly masculine. Whether they were writing news or fiction, women were more often identified with an earlier generation's sentimentality, seen as throwbacks to a literary movement the realists and naturalists were struggling to move beyond.

By the late 1920s print culture was competing with film and radio, and a new shift in American cultural practices was occurring. But authors would continue to negotiate the multiple legacies of journalism, which inspired new forms of expression, created new reading publics, and challenged writers to invest the printed word with a newly vital sense of "the real."

See alsoAppeal to Reason; Century Magazine; Editors; Harper's New Monthly Magazine; Literary Marketplace; Little Magazines and Small Presses; McClure's Magazine; Newspaper Syndicates; Scribner's Magazine

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

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Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. 1925. New York: Library of America, 2003.

Ferber, Edna. Dawn O'Hara. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1911.

Hapgood, Hutchins. The Spirit of the Ghetto. 1902. Edited by Moses Rischin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967.

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Howells, William Dean. A Modern Instance. 1882. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

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Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. 1890. New York: Penguin, 1997.

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Jean Marie Lutes