David T. Z. Mindich

Abstract:
Mindich argues that a synthesis of journalism and mainstream histories can bring the understanding of Frederick Douglass in particular, and the field of antebellum journalism in general, to a more historically relevant plane. If viewed in terms of a collision between fields, views and ideas, Douglass' work can provide a model for a new synthesis of journalistic ideas.

To discover how much the field of journalism history is in need of a fundamental revision, thumb through the indices of all the usual suspects and look up references to Frederick Douglass. It is no exaggeration to say that you will find that nearly all the standard journalism histories fail to place him in the context of nineteenth century political reality.1 The corollary is true, too: mainstream histories can help us understand his politics but fail to explain his journalism. This article argues that a synthesis of journalism and mainstream histories can bring Douglass in particular, and the field of antebellum journalism in general, to a more intellectually challenging and historically relevant plane. This is to say that we need to develop a new approach to the journalism of the Jacksonian age and that this approach must be rooted in the strengths of both journalism history and American history.

To this end, I have looked at how Douglass in particular and nonpartisanship in general are viewed in the synthesis studies of journalism and mainstream history. I have also surveyed many smaller works in article and monograph form, which I refer to in the course of this study, but my main focus will be on the synthesis histories.

The first time Douglass was mentioned in a book about American journalism was probably in Frederic Hudson's Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872. Hudson's single mention of Douglass was, "the New Era . . . is edited by Frederick Douglass."2 In 1920, George Payne noted that "it was not the white man alone" who practiced journalism, and mentioned "Frederick Douglas [sic]."3 Though these early references were scant, Douglass fared worse in later histories: Willard Bleyer (Main Currents in the History of American Journalism) and Michael Schudson (Discovering the News) did not mention Douglass at all.4 The first assessment of Douglass' work in a journalism textbook may have been a brief mention by Mott in 1962: "The ablest of all [`Negro publications'] was Frederick Douglass' North Star, founded in Rochester, New York, in 1847."5

Four recent journalism history books went further than the rest in their coverage of Douglass. The eighth edition of Emery, Emery, and Roberts' The Press and America cited Douglass as a "symbol of black achievement and inspiration" and recounted the various adversities that he had to overcome.6 Mitchell Stephens, in his second edition of A History of News, took a similar approach. Stephens told how Douglass' house was destroyed and his papers burned by mobs, how he taught himself to read, and how he rose to greatness. Douglass "became an eloquent crusader against slavery," wrote Stephens.7 Douglass' life and work were discussed in more detail in the latest edition of Folkerts and Teeters Voices ofa Nation and in William Huntzicker's The Popular Press: 1833-1865. These two went into greater depth on Douglass' life than any other journalism history synthesis read for this study.8 I will discuss these books again later in this article.

The broad outline of the above historiography suggests that our understanding of Douglass has gone through two stages and may be entering a third. The first stage was simply neglect. Douglass was not viewed as important in the history of American journalism. We may explain some of the earlier sins of omission by placing them in the context of their time, as did Arthur Schlesinger Jr. when he looked back at his own Age of Jackson, published in the 1940s: "When I wrote The Age of Jackson," said Schlesinger, "the predicament of women, of blacks, or Indians was shamefully out of mind."9 Douglass was nowhere to be found in Schlesinger's book either.

The second phase, in which most journalism histories are firmly planted, is that of inclusion and accommodation. If Douglass, as I will argue, is useful in understanding the history of his day and is a central figure in nineteenth century journalism, then he should certainly be included in our histories. And inclusion is, after all, a well-meaning aim, put forth by well-meaning historians and lately by the Newseum in its grand celebration of diversity.10 And yet, inclusion is a dead-end street. I say this because it carries no inherent intellectual challenge.

The ways Douglass was and is depicted in journalism history textbooks suggests an area of future exploration for journalism historians: to analyze Douglass' importance in journalism's intellectual history. Because Douglass is mainly ignored, summarized, or praised, his role as a journalist is rarely examined in depth.

In 1997 Jane Rhodes wrote a call to arms for media historians to develop a greater context for minority issues in journalism history. Writing in Clio Among the Media, Rhodes argued that we must move beyond "compensatory history":

A handful of media historians have pioneered the transition to integrating diversity into their research; there are fine studies of the African American press, women in journalism, immigrant periodicals, and more recently the lesbian and gay press. But much of this scholarship has been stymied in what Gerda

Lerner had called history ... the "add and stir" method .... There are few syntheses that pull together the findings of these case studies and situate them within a broader historical context . . . More such scholarship is needed.11

Two ways of broadening historical discourse have been proposed by James W. Carey and John Pauly. I offer their suggestions as a recommendation to future historians in treating Douglass in particular and minority journalists in general. Carey, in his seminal "The Problem of Journalism History," advocated a less "whiggish," more "interpretive" approach to journalism history.12 Carey's frame might call for interpretative questions such as: Why did Douglass write? What void was he trying to fill? How does his journalism compare with the journalism of others of his day? These questions generally go unanswered; indeed, they are asked by only two of the above histories: Folkerts and Teeter and Huntzicker have broken into what we can call the third phase in the Douglass historiography: the interpretive phase.

In a 1985 article, John Pauly called for a greater "understanding of news as a form of mass culture." Pauly proposed a history of news that would account for the mass culture and what impact it would have on minority voices. It is this proposal that is so pertinent to future historians' treatment of Douglass:

A history of news would need to describe how-in one sense-news stories sometimes speak in renegade voices despite attempts to control them, and how-in another sense-- the attempt to legitimize "the news" as the single best account of everyday life has helped drive alternative conceptions of intelligence, imagination, and understanding to the margins, rendered them inconsequential, or deemed them merely private.13

The interplay between "the" news and minority voices is a central issue in journalism history in general and in Douglass' case in particular. It is what brought Douglass to journalism in the first place: white papers, even the more progressive ones, were generally against black labor and black rights, at least until the late 1850s. In 1846, when blacks tried to change the New York Constitution's racist exclusion of many black voters, even the Sun, with its progressive slogan, "It shines for all" was against the change. When a black man sent a letter to the editor, the Sun decided to view it as an advertisement and charged the man $15. The editor explained, "The Sun shines for all white men, and not for colored men."14 It was this exchange that launched Douglass on his long career as a newspaperman, first as editor of the Ram's Horn in 1847, and then as editor/publisher of his own paper, the North Star, which later became Frederick Douglass ' Paper.

Building on Carey and Pauly's proposals, I suggest that Douglass should be viewed in a wider cultural and professional frame. Two questions should be answered in discussions of Douglass' journalism: 1) What was the void that Douglass sought to fill in his journalism? Douglass had been writing for Garrison's Liberator; why he chose to found his own paper should be explored. 2) How does Douglass fit into the spirit of nonpartisanship that had been growing since the 1830s? Douglass, for example, could be compared with other journalists who shunned formal political affiliation, such as Garrison and James Gordon Bennett.15

Frederick Douglass (Library of Congress)

To begin to answer these questions, journalism historians would need to build on two interpretive frames, one for understanding Jacksonian "democracy," the other for understanding non-- partisanship. Fortunately, there are models for these frames.

In order to property understand Douglass one needs to understand Jacksonian Democracy. It is an area in which journalism historians need to catch up to mainstream historians. In Discovering the News, Schudson argued that the nonpartisan press that emerged in the 1830s grew out of the rise of the middle class, an "egalitarian market economy" and above all, what Schudson called "the age of egalitarianism."16 Citing older studies of "progressive historians," so-called because of their whiggish faith in antebellum democracy, Schudson noted that most recent histories still confirm the earlier beliefs. The revisionist view, wrote Schudson, "far from being an attack on the idea that the 1830s were an egalitarian age, confirms just that hypothesis."17 Anyone who closely follows the field of journalism history would recognize Schudson's view as the dominant one today in conference papers, articles, and textbooks.

But from the years directly before Schudson's book in 1978 until today, historians of the Jacksonian age have produced a body of work that thoroughly discredits the "progressive" view of Jacksonian democracy.18 And to suggest that revisionists, led by Edward Pessen (whom Schudson cited) confirm Jacksonian "democracy" is to misunderstand the revisionism of Pessen and others. Pessen's own words, for example, underscore this point: "The age may have been named after the common man but it did not belong to him." At the end of his Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics, Pessen even suggests a new name for the period: "Not the `age of Jackson' but the `age of materialism and opportunism, reckless speculation and erratic growth, unabashed vulgarity, surprising inequality, whether of condition, opportunity, or status, and a politic, seeming deference to the common man by the uncommon men who actually ran things."19 While the edges of the revisionist approach have in turn been revised in recent years, the findings about the age's inequalitarian nature remain intact.20

Schudson's theories of the birth of commercial journalism, from whence so much of more recent journalism history gains its intellectual framework, are built on a dated and discredited model: that the Jacksonian age was egalitarian.To see the extent of the inegalitarian nature of the age and what a new understanding of it would do to our vision of early journalism, consider the following findings central to modern scholarship on the Jacksonian era:

1

The middle class didn't rise, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and democracy was limited to white men. It is difficult to imagine a definition of democracy that would include the Jacksonian kind. There was no democracy for the vast majority of Southern blacks who were slaves. Northern blacks were badly abused and politically disenfranchised. American Indians generally fared no better than free blacks, with soldiers (including a young Andrew Jackson) regularly attacking them and the U.S. government breaking treaty after treaty. Irish and other non-native born Americans were often deprived of their civil rights. And women, too, politically powerless, did not gain suffrage until the twentieth century; some even compared their plight to that of the slaves.21 Although popular belief sees Jackson as introducing universal white manhood suffrage, this view is factually incorrect. Jackson was a beneficiary not an inventor of suffrage for all male whites. And despite his professed empathy to the poor, Jackson's laissez-faire policies may have hurt them.22 In Northeastern cities, the top 1 percent of wealth holders owned a quarter of all wealth just before Jackson came to Washington, and owned half by mid-century. And, conversely, the majority of all Americans in 1850 were assessed for no property whatsoever.23

2

The Jacksonian age was marked by vicious and bloody conflicts. The rise of the pennies starting with the founding of the New York Sun paralleled the peak, from 1833-1837, of mob violence, especially partisan and anti-abolitionist mobs. This violence included destroying presses and trying to lynch abolitionist editors, as a mob did with William Lloyd Garrison, pulling him by a rope around the Boston streets.24 On one occasion in 1837 a mob destroyed both a press and its editor, Elijah Lovejoy, in Alton, Illinois.25 The violence, from mob riots to the odd practice of "eye-- gouging," was most certainly affected by the enormous quantities of hard liquor consumed by Americans-an annual consumption of four gallons per capita-and was a daily fact for many city-dwellers.26 One historian counted nearly fifty reported riots nationwide in the years 1834 and 1835 alone.27

3

This violence was often instigated by newspaper men. The piquant and combative nature of Jacksonian journalism is seen by the Schudson model as an outgrowth of democracy. But some editors went far beyond bellicose prose. James Watson Webb, the editor of the Courier and Enquirer, best known for beating James Gordon Bennett (on three separate occasions) on the streets of New York City, was involved in violent practices best described as antidemocratic.28 In 1833, after the Liberator denounced the reactionary American Colonization Society, the society called a meeting, held in Webb's office, and staged a massive riot, which included kidnapping and torturing an elderly African American man.29 In 1834, Webb led a mob in the bloody election riots in New York City.30

4

Much of this violence was directed against free blacks, who were marginalized. Free blacks were terribly abused by whites during this period, particularly by anti-abolitionists but also by the efforts of both parties to marginalize them With popular politicians of both parties advocating sending blacks back to Africa, and with the 1857 Dred Scott decision questioning whether blacks could even be citizens, blacks were always on the verge of total exclusion.31

Understanding the above points helps us to view antebellum journalism, particularly that of Douglass, in a new light Douglass' most dramatic political act, it could be argued, was his break with William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator. At first glance, one wonders why Douglass published a paper when the Liberator was so closely identified with the radical abolitionist movement, so willing to print Douglass' words, and so influential. In fact, this puzzled Garrison as well. One scholar has argued that Douglass' move was due to his advocacy of black "separatism."32 In fact, their split came about because, as David Nord and others have argued, Garrison rejected the U.S. Constitution, at one point burning a copy of the document before a large crowd and calling it "an agreement with hell."33

Douglass did not agree with Garrison's rejection of the political system. Because blacks were at best marginally citizens, and because even many abolitionists advocated shipping blacks back to Africa, Douglass never had the privilege to reject the political system as Garrison did. In the 1850s, Douglass began a formal affiliation with political parties that would last the rest of his life. In his support of the Free Soil party in 1852, Douglass found himself among unlikely bedfellows, such as the racist James Watson Webb who was attracted to the Free Soil party because of its position that the territories were to be free of slavery, perhaps even of free blacks, and thus a good place for poor whites to work without fear of competition from free and enslaved blacks.34 Douglass' endorsement represented a compromise that Garrison was unwilling to make. The central difference between Garrison and Douglass can be reduced, with little exaggeration, to the following: Garrison spent much of the antebellum era trying to drop out of America; Douglass spent these same years trying to enter it. Much like Thoreau's trip to his shack on Walden Pond, Garrison's journey away from American politics left him isolated. We must remember, however, how much easier dropping out of society must have been for Thoreau and Garrison than it was for Douglass.35 When Thoreau and Garrison left society, they knew that, as white men, they were welcome back.

Not only Douglass, but the very birth of commercial journalism could be seen differently after viewing the revisionists' findings. The pennies' break from the violence of Webb, their attempt to get between two bellicose partisanship factions (instead of being beholden to them), and the way they increasingly distinguished news from editorial seems downright revolutionary given the above cultural and historical backdrop. I would argue, as I have elsewhere, that the central innovations of antebellum press, detachment and nonpartisanship were not nurtured by "democracy." Instead, they were a response to the failures of the violent and partisan era.36 The "independent" press had to extricate itself from the partisan press and forcibly detach. To accept this theory, or to argue forcefully against it, journalism historians need mainstream historians' sense of party and the failures of the era.

If journalism historians need mainstream historians, the corollary is true as well: mainstream historians cannot understand the era without the perspective of journalism historians, particularly that of nonpartisanship. In their attempts to examine antebellum politics, revisionist historians have analyzed political parties, their message and membership, and discussed alternative parties. But much of antebellum political life existed outside the parties. The position of the nonpartisans is largely ignored by historians. The role of newspaper editors was, according to the historical narratives, to support parties and causes. Thus, party-supported editors and the partisan editors, like Greeley, are given more attention than the nonpartisan Bennett. Indeed the editor of the Herald, arguably the most influential journalist of the antebellum era, is ignored in four of the six mainstream synthesis studies read for this article and mentioned only in passing in the other two.37

With only slight oversimplification, one can say that the mainstream histories have ignored nonpartisanship and would benefit from the perspective of journalism historians. Frank L. Mott, Michael Schudson, Daniel Schiller, Mitchell Stephens, and the Emery/Emery/Roberts may have not entered what I call the third phase of Douglass scholarship, but they have contributed significantly to our understanding of nonpartisanship.

In 1836, James Gordon Bennett supported Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, for president. In 1840, he endorsed Van Buren's opponent, William Henry Harrison. Bennett then supported a Democrat in 1844, a Whig in 1848, a Democrat in 1852, and a Republican in 1856. This extraordinary record of early nonpartisanship, perhaps the first of any major American editor, is explained well by such scholars as Daniel Schiller, Michael Schudson, Andie Tucher, and Mitchell Stephens. Schiller, using a model of Jacksonian class conflict that grows out of Sean Wilentz and other mainstream scholars, sees a "pattern of objectivity" early in the antebellum era.38 Schudson's model of nonpartisanship and objectivity is beautiful in its clear narrative that remains the default theoretical frame for our field Tucher, in her readable and probing book on Bennett, argues that the editor was flawed in his reporting; she argues, with considerable evidence, that Bennett took bribes that guided his editorial stances.39 And Stephens, groundbreaking account of Bennett allows us to understand Bennett's nonpartisanship, independence, and aggressive reporting as a precursor to what we value in today's journalism and as practices that have a long precedent in the annals of reporting. We can apply the excellent analysis of Stephens and others about nonpartisanship to Douglass and other figures who supported, yet remained apart from political parties.

If we apply journalism history's understanding of nonpartisanship to Douglass, how would it allow us to see differently? We could see Douglass, Garrison, and Bennett, three very different men, as nevertheless sharing an interest in politics while retaining significant independence. In fact, I would argue that Garrison and Douglass could be seen as nonpartisan, albeit in a different way than Bennett. Garrison refused to be "the political partisan of any man,"standing outside partisan politics altogether.40 Garrison had no need to "balance" issues in partisan terms, especially considering that until 1864, no major political party would adopt abolition in its platform. While Douglass eventually endorsed a political party, it should be remembered that the party never endorsed him. This is to say that Douglass, like Bennett, made his endorsements from a distance, without formal political support. This is a marked break from the days of party-- sponsored journalism, paid editors, political sinecures, and political mob rallies planned in newspaper offices.

One useful model for understanding the non-- partisanship of Bennett, Garrison, and Douglass comes from Daniel Hallin in his book about the press and the Vietnam War, The Uncensored War. Hallin saw nonpartisanship as represented by three spheres: Consensus (where we all agree), Legitimate Controversy (the domain of views included by journalists in their news stories), and Deviance (the area of excluded views).41 A number of journalism historians have discussed how antebellum activists tried to enter the mainstream debate. Linda Steiner focussed on women's press and viewed the difficulty they had in breaking into the mainstream. Jean Fagan Yellin, a historian, viewed the famous abolition line, "Am I not... a brother," as a question requiring an answer, thus provoking a dialogue with the sphere of Legitimate Controversy.42 The extent to which Douglass tried to alter the spheres can be seen in light of these other attempts, by women, blacks, and other groups that were operating on the margins of mainstream media.

While it is becoming increasingly clear that the Jacksonian age was not democratic, one cannot help but feel the spirit of democracy and optimism in the pages of nonpartisan newspapers. Even though they should acknowledge the lack of democracy on the ground, journalism historians do capture democratic spirit of the age. And the mainstream historians are starting to investigate this spirit as well, including what is implied in the title of Daniel Feller's recent synthesis, the Jacksonian Promise. "The exuberance was real," Feller tells us, and the newspapers seem to confirm this.43 We see this sense of promise in James Gordon Bennett's bombast, in Garrison's millennial fever, and even in Douglass, who, as a black man, had as much reason for pessimism as anyone else. In talking about his support of the newly formed Republican Party, Douglass said he would endorse them, "not merely for what they are, but for what we have good reason to believe they will become."44

In a recent series of articles in the Journal ofAmerican History, a group of historians of the Jacksonian period debated the era's significance. Ronald Formisano made the argument that "the diversity of the public sphere in the nineteenth century, as discovered in a variety of subfields including histories of labor, cities and communities, social movements and third parties, policy, and politics, parties, and government institutions, is not entirely captured by the party period concept."45 Formisano's argument, which suggests that "anti-partyism" was more rampant than hitherto thought, would have certainly benefited from the findings of journalism historians, a subfield he ignored in the above passage and throughout his article.

We can discern a new understanding of Douglass emerging in journalism histories, a third stage. Folkerts and Teeter provide a up-to-date examination of the antebellum political climate, view black newspapers "as a response to white society," and place Douglass' split with Garrison in the context of the political realities of abolition.46 Huntzicker's extremely thorough and analytical history of the antebellum press explains Douglass through three contextual prisms: the black press, the inegalitarian nature of Jacksonian politics, and the rising nonpartisanship of the era. Only a synthesis grounded in both Jacksonian history and journalism history could produce such an analysis.

As journalism historians, most of us are used to living in two or more of the following identities: historian, journalism teacher, former journalist, social scientist, Americanist, cultural critic, media analyst. On bad days we might complain that our field forces us to work in too many methodologies, to keep up with too many disciplines. But our great strength is one that most of us already have as former journalists: the ability to create collisions between fields, views, and ideas, and to develop, through these collisions, new understanding. We have an opportunity to see Douglass and the birth of American journalism in a new way. If we allow ourselves to force these collisions, we can find ourselves at the horizon of a new synthesis of ideas that will create something more than the sum of its parts.

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