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The Early Nationalization of Political News In America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Samuel Kernell
Samuel Kernell
Affiliation:
The Brookings Institution
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Extract

When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he found Washington occupying a lowly position in the political life of the country. In a footnote, Democracy in America informs the European reader, “America has no great capital city where direct or indirect influence is felt over the whole extent of the country.” Throughout the book, he expands on the effects of this decentralization. And we may fairly suspect that as much as any other, this observation led de Tocqueville to concentrate his inquiry on the performance of democracy in communities across the country.

Type
Notes and Exchanges
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 1 , Spring 1986 , pp. 255 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

The research reported here was presented in part in papers delivered at the 1983 Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association and at the 1984 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Some of the findings were also presented to fellow members of the History of Congress Seminar in 1983. Consequently, I have benefited from more than the usual complement of advice. Much of it I have heeded. I wish especially to thank the following people who helped me improve upon the earlier efforts: Ballard Campbell, whose incisive remarks prompted me to return to the Annals of Cleveland to add to my data three years without national elections, 1835, 1845, and 1855; Nelson W. Polsby, who advised me to back up the Cleveland findings with a sample of stories from the Hartford Daily Courant; Del Powell, who coded the data with unfailing diligence and care; and Anita Schiller, who discovered and pointed me to the Annals and thereby made a systematic study of fifty years of nineteenth-century news reporting a feasible enterprise. I also wish to thank Gary C. Jacobson and Michael Robinson for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

1. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, vol. 1, ed. Mayer, T. P. (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969), 278Google Scholar.

2. Adams, Henry, Democracy, An American Novel (New York: Harmony Books, 1981), 10Google Scholar.

3. Young, James Sterling, The Washington Community: 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, chap. 3, esp. 49–64.

4. For the emergence of the professional lobbyist during this era, see Thompson, Margaret S., The Spider Web: Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, and Rothman, David J., Politics and Power: The United States Senate, 1896–1901 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Keller, Morton, Affairs of Slate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Polsby, Nelson W., “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” American Political Science Review 62 (03 1968): 144–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Price, H. Douglas, “The Congressional Career—Then and Now,” in Congressional Behavior, ed. Polsby, Nelson W. (New York: Random House, 1971), 14–27Google Scholar.

7. Wiebe, Robert H., TheSearchforOrder, 1877–1920(New York: Hilland Wang, 1967), 2Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., pp. 27–28. For an endorsement of this view see McCormick, Richard L., “The Party Period and Public Policy: An Exploratory Hypothesis,” Journal of American History 66 (09 1979): 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Stokes, Donald E., “Parties and the Nationalization of Electoral Forces,” in The American Party Systems, ed. Chambers, Walter Nisbet and Burnham, Walter Dean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 196–97Google Scholar.

10. Works Progress Administration of Ohio, Annals of Cleveland, 1818–[1876] (Cleveland: WPA of Ohio, District Four, 1936–39).

11. The first weeks of April, July, and September were arbitrarily selected for content analysis. Well into the analysis we discovered that the Connecticut legislature adjourned during the last week of June in 1855 and 1860 and some of its new laws were published verbatim, without news or commentary, in the Daily Courant; since we did not find similar transcripts in subsequent weeks' papers, these entries were omitted from the percentages.

12. Over the time frame of this study Cleveland grew from a town of 150 individuals to a leading industrial center of 140,000. The following decennial population estimates are taken from Chapman, Edmund H., Cleveland: Village to Metropolis (Cleveland: Western Re-serve University, 1964)Google Scholar: 1820, 150; 1830, 1,075; 1840, 6,071; 1850, 17,034; 1860, 43,417; 1870, 92,829; 1880, 140,000.

13. That newspapers would be founded as much out of party as business considerations is not limited to the early nineteenth century. Joe Martin, Republican House minority leader during the 1950s, had his political beginnings as editor of a newspaper financed by local Republicans in order to promote their candidates. See Martin, Joe, My First Fifty Years in Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960)Google Scholar.

14. Rubin, Richard L., Press, Party, and Presidency (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1981), 53–54Google Scholar.

15. See Hooper, Osman Castle, History of Ohio Journalism, 1793–1932 (Columbus: Spahr and Glenn Co., 1933)Google Scholar, and Stevens, Harry R., The Early Jackson Party in Ohio (Durham: Duke University Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

16. On the emergence of the penny press and its role in mid-nineteenth-century American journalism, see Schudson, Michael, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1978)Google Scholar.

17. Because the trends for column inches and number of articles closely correspond, I shall give only the former in subsequent tables and figures, except where the cell entries are small.

18. Until the constitutional reform of 1850 governors and state senators were elected biennally on even years. Local offices and the state House of Representatives were elected yearly. Subsequently, state elections were conducted biennially on odd years. At midcentury—the precise date is uncertain—local elections also became biennial.

19. Rose, W. G., Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1950), 175–76Google Scholar.

20. Stevens, The Early Jackson Party.

21. Harry N. Scheiber has documented well how Ohio was exceptional in initiating many local improvements on its own—the most prominent being the Ohio canal. See his Ohio Canal Era (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966). Nonetheless, federal public works remained a vital concern in Ohio as in the other western states. Francis P. Weisenburger related the story of how both John Adams's and Andrew Jackson's forces in Congress in 1827 sought to woo Ohio's support in the next election with internal improvements: “Each group attempted, through its representatives in Congress, to secure a liberal grant to aid Ohio in its canal program. Apparently the Jackson members succeeded in launching their bill first and insuring it prior consideration by the committee. But John Woods, an Administration congressman from Ohio and a member of the House Committee on Roads and Canals, was able to report the Administration measure, providing for a grant of 500,000 acres, first. When the measure was passed the Jackson measure seemed unnecessary. In the Senate, however, the Jacksonians secured the incorporation of their bill as an amendment to the Administration measure, and in this form it became a law. Thus, Ohio received a double grant of public lands, each party claiming the credit.” In The Passing of the Frontier, 1825–1850 (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1941), 230.

22. Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918), 261–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. In addition to his Search for Order, Robert H. Wiebe elaborates this theme in Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (New York: Oxford University Press). Samuel P. Hays offers a similar if somewhat more abstracted version of political transformation. Borrowing from Tonnies the concepts of community and society, he assigns them as endpoints on a continuum, which he then describes America as traversing during the late nineteenth century. See his “Political Parties and the Community-Society Continuum,” in American Party Systems, ed. Chambers and Burnham, 152–81.

24. Wiebe, Search for Order, 11–43.

25. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, 185–86. A contemporary chronicler of America's experiment, James Fenimore Cooper, credited the influence of the press to the country's small and distant communities, which contained too few men of “better opinion” to refute the rantings of newspaper editors; The American Democrat ([1838] Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969).