Photo of the Day: Horace Greeley Monument, City Hall Park, NYC

I’m not sure what I expected as I walked briskly through City Hall Park one afternoon last week, but it wasn’t this monument to an influential businessman and media magnate who never served in the Big Apple’s government.

With that said, though not be as well remembered today as he might have wished, Horace Greeley was a person of consequence in 19^th century America, and it wouldn’t hurt anyone passing through this area of Lower Manhattan to learn at least a bit more about him. This outdoor sculpture is as good a place as any to start.

In the New York area, the only press lords besides Greeley with designs on the Presidency were William Randolph Hearst (who never made it higher than Congress) and Michael Bloomberg (whose 2020 Democratic primary campaign failed dismally, despite $60 million of his own fortune).

Greeley, at least, filled an expiring Congressional term before being nominated in 1872 by both the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties. He lost that fall to Ulysses Grant—then, only a few weeks later, died, worn out in body and mind by the race, the recent death of his wife, and a bruising, losing struggle to keep his paper, the New York Tribune, out of the hands of a business rival.

Well before that, Greeley had made his mark as a tireless editorial voice for westward expansionism, free homesteading, the rights of labor, agricultural improvement, high tariffs, the beneficial impact of immigration, and most important, abolitionism.

His influence was so considerable that in 1862, after his open public letter to Abraham Lincoln advocating the confiscation of slaves held by Confederates, the President felt compelled to make one of his most famous explanations about the connection between freeing the slaves and preserving the Union.

For all his high-mindedness, Greeley earned a parallel reputation as an eccentric. His public advocacy for causes such as vegetarianism, spiritualism, and utopian socialism were considered especially fringe for his time.

Moreover, what people encountered when meeting him in person—his oversized, floppy hat covering unkempt white hair, a threadbare white coat, and a high-pitched voice that could erupt irritably—led cartoonist Thomas Nast to caricature him, repeatedly and unforgettably. (See this May 2008 blog post from the National Portrait Gallery on how Greeley was depicted.)

You’ll see little of that in the far more respectful monument in City Hall Park, created by John Quincy Adams Ward, one of the foremost sculptors of the day. The artist, Greeley’s daughter Gabrielle recalled, “spent hours studying my father as he worked in his office [and] after his death took a mask of his face." 

The statue shows Greeley sitting in a Victorian easy chair, with a copy of the Tribune spread out loosely over his knee—not just scrutinizing it for appearance or content, but perhaps contemplating how he could keep it from descending into the sensationalist abyss occupied by competitor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald.

When the monument was unveiled in 1890, it stood in front of The Tribune’s building. By 1915, with the paper leasing corner, ground floor space in its building to a drugstore, the monument was moved to where it was originally intended: across the street, in City Hall Park.

Quote of the Day (Frederick Douglass, on Education, Newspapers, and Slavery)

“My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and in the simplicity of her soul she commenced, when I first went to live with her, to treat me as she supposed one human being ought to treat another. In entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, she did not seem to perceive that I sustained to her the relation of a mere chattel, and that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practice her husband's precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself. She was not satisfied with simply doing as well as he had commanded; she seemed anxious to do better. Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger. I have had her rush at me with a face made all up of fury, and snatch from me a newspaper, in a manner that fully revealed her apprehension. She was an apt woman; and a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.” —African-American abolitionist, reformer, and memoirist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)

Several reasons led me to use this quote from Frederick Douglass, arguably the most significant African-American before Martin Luther King Jr.: Black History Month, this week’s History Channel “Lincoln” documentary (in which Douglass played an important role), and the sheer dramatic power inherent in this scene.

But above all, I wanted to highlight the role of newspapers in the African-American struggle for freedom.

The more pious slaveowners, like the plantation “mistress” in the first of Douglass’ three autobiographies, might be willing to teach slaves how to read the Bible. But even this practice became more limited by Southern legislation after Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831.

Plantation owners feared that their slaves would take literacy one step further to search out newspapers that would not only lead them to think for themselves but also to exchange information that could help overthrow the “peculiar institution.” (Indeed, the reaction of Sophia Auld, wife of Douglass’ master, was so harsh because she discovered him in this clandestine activity.)

But psychologically speaking, another concern could have been lurking: the thought that, if a slave could master a discipline entirely limited at this time to whites, it would immediately undercut the belief in racial inferiority used to justify slavery (and, later, segregation).

Today, black newspapers face many of the same challenges that their white-owned counterparts do—notably, the increasingly daunting economics of fielding a print product in the digital age, and the popular belief, propounded by a prior President, that the press is “the enemy of the people.”

But, just as these papers’ longtime role as the voice of their people should not be forgotten, so their future as an information alternative for the same group should not be abandoned.

Douglass’ own experience with owning three newspapers illustrates the importance of such alternatives and the difficulties in maintaining them for the long term. His service as editor and part-owner of the New National Era in the early 1870s proved such a money pit that swore off ever to be involved with the media again.

But, no matter how negative an impression he came away with, Douglass had during that time proved a key national voice during the Reconstruction Era—and his departure left a vacuum just when white America was starting its retreat from equal rights for freedmen.

More significant, when he founded the abolitionist paper The North Star in Rochester in 1847, thrust to the forefront the victims of slavery, in the belief that “that the man who has suffered the wrong is the man to demand redress,—that the man STRUCK is the man to CRY OUT—and that he who has endured the cruel pangs of Slavery is the man to advocate Liberty.”

The black press continued to press the nation to pay attention through long, lonely years when many white politicians and even journalists, when they did not incite hatred against them, acted as if they were invisible. (That might explain why the former President named above could say--puzzlingly using the present tense, as if the object of his praise were still alive--that Douglass was "an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and he’s being recognized more and more, I noticed.”)

In today’s Bergen (NJ) Record, Jim Beckerman paid tribute to Douglass, anti-lynching crusader Ida B.Wells, pioneering editor T. Thomas Fortune, and other luminaries in his article on “How the Black Press Changed America for the Better.”

Quote of the Day (Noel Coward, on an English Institution)

Charles: "Anything interesting in The Times?"

Ruth: "Don't be silly, Charles."—English playwright Noel Coward (1899-1973), Blithe Spirit (1941)

In the U.S., conservatives would say the same thing about The New York Times--but for far different reasons than the couple in this play talking about the London institution...

New York’s ‘Hometown Newspaper’ on Death Watch

“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ the banks, commands the milishy, conthrols the ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim afterward.   They ain’t annythihng it don’t turn its hand to fr’m explainin’ th’ docthrine iv thransubstantiation to composin’ saleratus biskit.”—American humorist (and journalist) Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902)

I came across this quote in a letter to the New York Times in May 20165 from Miranda Dunne, granddaughter of Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago columnist who created Irish immigrant bartender "Mr. Dooley." But I happened upon it on a singularly awful day in the recent history of the tabloid press: the announcement that the New York Daily News was laying off half its newsroom staff. 

The paper that long carried the motto "New York's Hometown Newspaper" was one of the two newspapers bought by my blue-collar immigrant family when I was a kid. The years haven’t been kind to The Daily News or the other paper we habitually read, The Bergen Record.  (These days, the latter—sold over a year ago by the North Jersey Media Group, the umbrella organization long owned by the Borg family—looks like just another pallid property of its new owner, Gannett--especially so given its own draconian round of cuts.)

I never achieved my youthful ambition of writing for a newspaper, and now that I am in a job where I often have to deal with the results of news articles, I am more skeptical than I was before of the notion that reporters and editors try to exclude any preconceptions from affecting their coverage.

But I continue to read newspapers every day, in the form I always read it—newsprint—and I can’t imagine living without them. Their outright disappearance would amount to a total eclipse of American freedom, as far as I'm concerned, since no trained cadre would be around to mind the vast chicken coop that constitutes the American political system.

Its glory was epitomized by Jim Bishop, who practically swooned at the tactile atmosphere when he became a copy boy at the paper, imbibing the press room in all its glory: 

“Silence,” he recalled in his memoir, A Bishop’s Confession. “The sound of dust settling…I waited. It came—the dull tentative growl of presses. It was slow. It gathered confidence. The hollow sound, like a train approaching a tunnel, hit its stride, and the floor, the walls, the ceiling trembled as though in fear of the news they spawned.” (Bishop would move on to the New York Mirror before becoming a columnist and the author of books on the deaths of major historical figures like Lincoln, Christ, JFK, and Martin Luther King Jr.)

Nearly 30 years ago, in a continuing ed writing class, our instructor, Paula, a onetime reporter for the News, asked us to judge six different sets of unnamed leads for the same story—one from the News and the other from the New York Times. The winner in each case turned out to be the Daily News. 

Though Paula might have been forgiven for rooting for her old employer, I think she had something more elevated in mind. She wanted to remind us not to let a reputation for global or national coverage, no matter how well-deserved, color our judgment of what constituted good or bad writing—particularly at the local level, which The Good Gray Lady has never really made a priority.

The tone of the leads chosen by Paula was punchy. It was the scrappy voice of the working class that the News carved out as a niche—and not only against the Times: For the past 40 years, it has been the centrist-to-liberal counterweight to Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing New York Post.

Founded in 1919, the News, as the first American tabloid, basked in the supernova energy of the city in the 1920s. You didn’t go to the News for stock-market stats or news—most of its readers were lucky to rub two nickels together, let alone invest them. It wasn’t trying to influence national leaders, either. Its staff writers, especially at the start, weren’t college boys, let alone Ivy Leaguers. 

But its readers were happy with a formula that might best be described as S+S=S(quared)—in other words, Sex plus Sensationalism equals Success. The particular variations in it helped continue the tradition: comic strips, columns, gossips, sports, and the latest ax murder.

Most of all, there were those headlines. Some must have made its inventors double over in laughter (e.g., when Long Island Auto Mechanic-Turned-Lothario Joey Buttafuoco got his hand caught in the cookie jar yet again, this time for soliciting sex from an undercover policewoman: “SO JOEY, HOW’S TRICKS?”). At least one has been credited with helping ensure that a GOP incumbent President would lose in the next fall election ("FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD")

The paper’s moment of truth has been coming for a while—many would say since the 114-day 1962-63 newspaper strike, which helped kill four other papers. Automation was the point of dispute then, and now another technological factor—the Internet—has come into play.

Nearly 25 years ago, when the paper also looked on life support following the financial machinations of its owner at the time, Robert Maxwell, a former co-worker at my company recounted his onetime News colleagues’ determination: “They were all saying, ‘Just try to kill us.’” I can only hope that this same never-say-die spirit gets today’s staffers through their own current crisis.

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on the ‘Immemorial Sacredness’ of Print)

“Now, print enjoys a strange and almost invincible prestige. A man must be an extremely hardened, cynical, and skeptical reader before he can quite ignore that prestige. The great majority of human beings are simple-hearted, trustful and unsuspecting folk for whom the printed word still has (in spite of newspapers, in spite of hyperbolic advertisements) a certain mystical and almost sacred authority. They start with a predisposition to be impressed by the written word, to believe in it, to obey its suggestions. If they met the author of the printed word and he tried to ‘put it over them’ by word of mouth, their natural instinct would be to resist, to be skeptical, to reject his claims to exercise authority. But then the author is only a man; whereas the printed word still preserves something of that talismanic and supernatural quality which letters and symbols, hieroglyphs and formulas have possessed from the remotest beginnings of civilizations….Universal education has made us all readers. But familiarity with words has not bred contempt. Even for newspaper readers words retain something of their immemorial sacredness.”—British novelist-essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “Print and the Man,” in Complete Essays, Vol. 2: 1926-1929, edited by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (2000)

In this year in which real life has confirmed many of the worst fears of dystopian fiction, Brave New World has found a new rapt readership. It’s been years since I read the 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley, but I have to confess that it never made the kind of impression on me that 1984, by Huxley’s student at Eton, George Orwell, did. 

But I was interested enough in Huxley to take out a book of his essays from a local library. From what I’ve seen in this thick volume from only a short period in his life, I think that the novelist missed his natural genre: essayist. (You could say that the form was practically in his blood: his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a biologist and essayist of such immense rhetorical skill that his defense of evolution earned him the nickname "Darwin's bulldog.")

Several months ago, I was intrigued by Aldous Huxley’s thoughts, in “Political Democracy,” on the dangers of demagogues. Late the other night, I turned to his thoughts on print. The almost anthropological tone noticeable here (see, for instance, his observation about print’s “talismanic and supernatural quality”) goes down far more easily than it should have because of Huxley’s lightly ironic, almost crystalline, prose.

There is another quality on display here: Huxley’s love-hate relationship with his subject. During the 1920s, as he tried to carve out the necessary time to work on the novels he cared about, Huxley couldn’t resist the short-term but certain and lucrative lure of literary journalism presented by British press baron Max Beaverbrook: “I so resent the pressure these swine put on one with their beastly money,” he wrote his lover, Bloomsbury hostess Mary Hutchinson. “At the same time it's almost a duty to milk them of as much of it as one can. So I remain torn between a desire to send him to the devil and a desire to haggle for the highest price.”

“The voice of the linotype is the voice of God,” Huxley wrote sardonically. But, considering the reputation he developed as a 20^th-century Cassandra in Brave New World, Huxley—at least in the quote above—cannot imagine a future without print. Nor does it appear that he anticipated the possibility that the Internet might create the exact opposite of the kind of unquestioning faith in authority that he dreaded—i.e., the discounting of any news that does not comport with the reader’s preconceived notions.

He does present one idea here worth putting into practice, however: that all newspapers "must publish extensive and truthful biographies of their proprietors, editors and writers." It would certainly go a long way toward detailing not only the vested interests of those in the media business, but of making clear the assumptions that underlie any claims to publishing "all the news that's fit to print" or conveying a point of view that proclaims as its motto, "We report, you decide."

Quote of the Day (Richard Brookhiser, on City Newsstands)

“Why would anyone want to use a newsstand? The pleasure of service counts for something. Thousands at your bidding do not speed, but this man behind his counter will, if you give him a dollar. Newsstands made a show of plenitude. Their wares were on display, from broadsheet seriousness to tabloid shout. Newsstands made you feel on top of things, even when you were in motion. Hurrying to an appointment, plunging into a subway, you could tell at a glance, even if you did not spring for a paper, what the headlines were. Just as promoters of plays used to cover the board walls around construction sites with one, two, three, ten, 20 posters, to satisfy the eye on the move, so a scattering of newsstands along your daily commute served the same function.” — Richard Brookhiser, on city newsstands, in “Black and White and Read: All Over,” National Review, June 13, 2016

(Photo of Richard Brookhiser discussing his book James Madison at the Miller Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, December 9, 2011)