Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans

Newsprint Metropolis

Edited by Lilia Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda I. Seligman James R. Grossman, Editor Emeritus

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Newsprint Metropolis

City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans

Julia Guarneri

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The Fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris.

Publication of this book has been supported by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017.

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34133-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-34147-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/[9780226341477].001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Guarneri, Julia, author.

Title: Newsprint metropolis : city papers and the making of modern Americans / Julia Guarneri.

Other titles: Historical studies of urban America.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. |

Series: Historical studies of urban America | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016058657| ISBN 9780226341330 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226341477 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: American newspapers—History—19th century. | American newspapers—History—20th century. | American newspapers—Social aspects. | News audiences—United States. | City dwellers—United States. | Cities and towns—United States—History. | Urbanization—United States—History—19th century. | Urbanization—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC PN4864 .G83 2017 | DDC 071/.309034—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058657

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

Local Media, Commercial Media

The World That Newspapers Made

One: A New Newspaper Model

More news, more advertisements, more paper, more print

Readers Become Customers

Newspapers Remake Their Cities

The Objectivity Question

Two: Making Metropolitans

Advising Women

Defining the Working, Middle, and Upper Classes

Teaching Technology

Toward a Mass Audience

Shaping Modern Men and Women

Three: Building Print Community

A Concerned Public

Inside the City’s Many Spheres

Hardened Hearts and Human Interest

Middle-Class Cosmopolitans

An Urban Brand

Four: Connecting City, Suburb, and Region

Building the Suburbs, Selling the Dream

Writing for Suburban Subscribers

Reading Suburban Newspapers

Newspapers Define the Region

Five: Nationalizing the News

Finding Milwaukee’s Place

Shared and Syndicated News

Newspapers Nationalize

Chains and Big-Budget Features

Striking a Balance

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Notes

Index

Plates

Introduction

In February of 1911, identical ads appeared in the newspapers of fifty-six different American cities. "We need your viewpoint, the ads said, and we ask you to answer these six questions":

1. What local newspaper do you read regularly?

2. How are your opinions influenced by its editorials?

3. Do you as a rule believe what you read in the news columns?

4. What feature or department do you value most?

5. What criticisms, if any, have you to make?

6. Which local newspapers exert a good, and which a bad, influence on your community?¹

Collier’s Weekly magazine was conducting a national survey of newspaper readers as part of a year-long investigation into the history and influence of the press. The ads offered fifty-dollar prizes for the best essay from each of the fifty-six cities. In the three months before the deadline, Collier’s received ten thousand essays from every state and territory in the nation.

Collier’s began by asking people which local newspaper they read regularly because nearly all American cities housed multiple daily papers. Like true Americans, explained Egmont H. Arens in his essay for Collier’s, the citizens of Albuquerque must have the news. It is an essential of modern life. Everybody in town has one of the papers, and a great many of us read both the morning and evening sheets.² Of course, some essay writers complained that even with two (or four or seven) papers to choose from, they could not find the kind of news they wanted. But others seemed to revel in their choices. Curtis C. Brown of Kansas City reported that he occasionally read the Journal and the Post, and always read the Star and the Times.³ O. H. Chamberlain of Chicago called the Chicago Tribune his paper, but commented knowledgeably on Chicago’s Record-Herald, Daily News, Post, Journal, and Inter-Ocean.⁴ Because early twentieth-century papers had grown fat with new sections, ads, and special features, readers could easily find something to love in each of them.

The ten thousand responses to the Collier’s contest sounded some consistent notes. Readers tended to believe the news reports printed in their papers, but insisted that the editorials did not influence them. They scorned the sensationalism that had spread from San Francisco and New York papers into their hometowns, but they appreciated the investigative reporting these same papers performed. Essay writers clearly felt that their choice of newspaper spoke to the kind of person they were. Mr. Chamberlain believed that, by choosing the Chicago Tribune, he was choosing self-improvement: It brings to a mind like mine, which has a breadth of thought on things current, the depth which it needs.⁵ Edward Broderick of Pittsburgh read the Chronicle-Telegraph in the evening and the Gazette-Times in the morning because they alone, among our seven, have a flavor of intellectuality.⁶

Readers formed intensely personal relationships with the papers they had chosen. The editorials of the ‘Times’ have been a source of pleasure and interest to me, wrote May V. Godfrey, New York Times reader. Every morning I have lengthy arguments with the man who writes them. Often I praise him because he is so catholic in his knowledge, so fair in his judgment. . . . Occasionally he displays such a lack of insight of information that I box his ears, shake him, scold him because his view-point is not the same as mine.⁷ Frederick Thomas Bowers, a New York Evening Post reader, wrote that to read the ‘Post’ regularly is like meeting every day your broadest-minded, best-informed friends, the people who are concerned with things worth while. Your faith in humanity is stimulated, your interests expand, your knowledge grows.⁸ Curtis Brown explained that the Kansas City Star and Times are the papers that come into my home, welcomed with a spirit of confiding friendship.⁹

Readers turned to their newspapers not just for companionship and familiarity but also for guidance. For Mr. Chamberlain of Chicago, John McCutcheon’s cartoons in the Chicago Tribune provided a daily reminder of what was right and good: Kindly, intelligent, sincere, and delightfully funny, they bring to each one at our breakfast table something needed to begin the day on.¹⁰ Newspapers helped other readers to envision success and imagine how they might achieve it. Marjorie Van Horn, reader of the New York Journal, loved the pictures of glamorous Brinkley Girls in the Sunday magazine; these pictures became many women’s beauty icons in the 1910s and 1920s. The pictures which Miss Nell Brinkly puts in this paper is some thing elaborate, she wrote. I have many of those beautiful pictures framed and placed around on the walls of my room which shows great skill done by her, also the advices which Miss Fairfax gives are very good indeed, they aid the lovers just what to do and how to win love.¹¹ Van Horn did not even have to write in to Beatrice Fairfax’s advice column to feel that the columnist was helping her toward love and happiness.

Readers isolated in their offices, homes, or neighborhoods explained that their newspapers connected them to the greater workings of the city and the world. Ms. Van Horn worked during the day and only got the chance to read a paper in the evenings. Now if it was not for the evening journal being a nights paper I would not know nothing about what is going on in the large cities, she wrote.¹² May Godfrey’s tuberculosis kept her homebound, but her daily New York Times, she said, connected her to the wider world. In one of Collier’s 1911 investigative articles on the newspaper, journalist Will Irwin argued that to read the news was to plug into global circuits, to be a part of a larger system, to be alive. We need it, we crave it, he observed. This nerve of the modern world transmits thought and impulse from the brain of humanity to its muscles.¹³

The Collier’s editors may have thought it common sense to structure the contest around fifty-six cities, for newspapers were fundamentally urban institutions. Papers’ offices stood at cities’ busiest intersections. They sent dozens or hundreds of reporters out each day to take the city’s pulse. Reporters covered cities, and so did the papers they produced. The Collier’s questions assumed that all newspapers influenced their cities, for better or for worse. And in both its initial ad and in follow-up reminders, Collier’s appealed to newspaper readers’ sense of civic duty. If you do not care about the prize, please write anyway. These letters are a piece of public service, the magazine explained. We want letters from you, the intelligent citizen who has the well-being of his city at heart.¹⁴

As the scale of the response to the Collier’s contest makes clear, newspapers were flourishing in the turn-of-the-century United States. Between 1880 and 1930, both the number of individual newspapers and the number of copies they printed reached record highs. Whereas the country’s existing daily newspapers had printed fewer than one copy for every two U.S. households in 1880, they printed one and a half copies for each household by 1915.¹⁵ The issues themselves grew fatter and fatter. In 1880, urban daily papers had run about twelve pages. By 1930, those papers would run perhaps forty or sixty pages, with their Sunday editions topping one hundred. Many turn-of-the-century Americans read several papers a day, and some families had two copies of the same paper delivered each morning—one to take to work, one to keep at home. Millions of women had recently picked up the newspaper habit, and working-class Americans—seamstresses, mill hands, steel workers—had become, in an era of mass literacy, dedicated consumers of news.¹⁶ Marjorie Van Horn’s effusive letter may have won the Collier’s contest in part because a working woman so perfectly represented the newspaper reader of modern times.

The growth of U.S. cities stoked Americans’ appetites for news. Many American cities doubled or even quadrupled in population between 1880 and 1930, swelling with migrants from farms and small towns and with immigrants from abroad. Cities built up manufacturing economies and developed into centers of both wholesale and retail commerce. Their citizens adapted to the era’s new urban technologies: streetcars, electric lights, subways, and skyscrapers. As cities became richer and more diverse, so too did their media. Major cities boasted a dozen or more dailies each. Cities such as Chicago and New York, with their large suburban peripheries, printed more newspapers than they had residents.¹⁷ In bustling metropolises, explained New York journalist John Given, apparently the thirst for information is in the air. In the crowds that ride to the offices, stores, and factories in the morning there is scarce a man or a woman who does not carry a paper, and in the home-going crowds those who are not reading, or carrying papers as evidence that they intend to read, are so few that unless sought for they are overlooked.¹⁸

Newsprint Metropolis tells the linked histories of newspapers and the cities they served between 1880 and 1930. It tracks two simultaneous processes: how cities made newspapers, and how newspapers made cities. It therefore treats newspapers not just as historical records but also as historical actors, not just as repositories of information but also as instruments of change. The book reaches beyond the front pages and into the colorful world of feature news, which entertained readers while teaching them how to deal with this urban world of diversity and possibility. Newspapers circulated the local logistical information that enabled readers to conduct their lives within cities and city-centered metropolitan regions. They presented readers with place-based definitions of class and community, sophistication and success. They facilitated an imaginative relationship to city and region, conjuring the experiences, qualities, and commitments that supposedly bound readers to their metropolitan neighbors.

In the 1920s, toward the end of this story, newspapers began to come a bit unmoored from their urban context. Distribution of news articles and images through syndicate services or through chains enabled newspaper editors to piece together satisfying papers without commissioning much local news. But while newspapers never again focused as intensely on their own cities, their heyday as city organs left a lasting mark. The civic campaigns, the commerce, the fast pace, and the variety in turn-of-the-century cities all combined to create the newspaper model that endured through the twentieth century and that we might still recognize in today’s media.

Local Media, Commercial Media

In 1792, the congressmen of the very new United States saw newspapers as more national than local organs. In the Post Office Act of that year, they set extraordinarily low postal rates for newspapers, so that delivery cost would not dissuade anyone from subscribing to a paper printed hundreds of miles away. The act enabled editors to exchange newspapers through the mail for free as well, encouraging the constant sharing and reprinting of national (rather than local) news. If Americans kept track of one another’s doings, congressmen reasoned, they might learn to think of this agglomeration of territories and peoples as a coherent unit. In the early years of the United States, newspapers’ editorials and their letters to the editor discussed national and state politics more often than they discussed city affairs, and that focus made sense in what was still an agrarian nation. Yet the only people who determined state and national laws, and who were therefore explicitly welcome in this public sphere, were those who could vote—white men of property.¹⁹ Federalist, Whig, and Democratic-Republican newspapers vied for these voters’ loyalty and attention.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, as native-born and immigrant Americans flocked to cities, editors began to recognize those cities as lucrative markets for newspapers and as rich sources of news. Readers eagerly bought papers that both portrayed and decoded their cities for them. In the biggest cities, this process started early. In the late 1830s, New York City newspapers began reporting on urban crimes and using those articles to explain secret worlds—brothels, jail cells, politicians’ backrooms—for cities’ own readers and residents.²⁰ In the second half of the nineteenth century, newspapers increasingly hosted civic dialogues, not just national ones, over issues such as street lighting, slumlords, utility costs, or the construction of new city buildings. These urban issues affected many city dwellers, regardless of whether they could vote, so newspapers’ civic conversations expanded their reading audiences. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, newspapers had rooted themselves much more deeply in cities.

Publishers never issued newspapers solely as a civic good—they intended to turn a profit. In the nineteenth century, publishers cobbled together their budgets and their profits from a combination of subscription prices, support from their chosen political party, and advertisements. The advertisements in early nineteenth-century newspapers coordinated the markets for land, labor, and shipping services. They did a business in smaller goods as well, though the trade was often wholesale, for barrels of molasses or bags of wheat. Newspapers’ classified sections functioned as nodes within far-flung mercantile economies, in which the goods or labor advertised inside might start or finish in a nearby town, a western territory, or a Caribbean island.

As the United States urbanized, however, newspapers’ advertising clearinghouses concentrated on city markets. Papers could bring in plenty of ad revenue simply by hosting urban commerce. Advertisers, too, could benefit from the access to denser economies. Instead of selling barrels of molasses to out-of-town merchants, shopkeepers or manufacturers could market individual tins of molasses directly to urban readers and reap most of the profits for themselves. Newspapers that had once facilitated mercantile exchange became organs of new consumer economies.

In the late nineteenth century, advertising for consumer goods and entertainment became so important to publishers’ bottom lines that they reconsidered their target audiences and redesigned their articles to better fulfill advertisers’ wishes. Advertisers wanted to pitch to any and all prospective buyers, not just the white male partisan readers of most nineteenth-century papers. So publishers began crafting features that explicitly invited women, immigrants, teenagers, and children into their reading audience. By focusing the new feature news on topics such as fashion, cooking, real estate, or travel and by making the composing room aware that advertisements needed to run alongside relevant content in the paper, publishers increased ad sales. They also hired a more diverse news corps as they tried to draw in a more diverse audience. White middle-class men may have dominated papers’ editorial boards and city newsrooms, but new types of workers, such as female freelance writers and self-taught immigrant illustrators, contributed a wider variety of voices to daily papers.²¹

We—like the editors of the turn of the century—might be tempted to see the new, advertiser-subsidized business model as an unfortunate if understandable tradeoff. Ad income kept subscription prices down and subsidized the spread of what many people deemed the truly important information, the hard news and the editorial columns. But this view ignores the fact that many readers enjoyed the features, and even the advertisements, more than the regular news. The vast majority of front-page stories—news of international diplomacy, tornadoes, national politics, or egregious crime—did not reflect readers’ everyday experience. By contrast, the women’s page, Sunday magazine, classified advertisements, and wedding announcements spoke to readers about how to live their lives and gave them basic tools to get through a city day. Men jump-started their morning with jokes from the sports pages. Children stole away with the comics section on Sundays. Teenagers trusted their most intimate questions to newspaper advice columnists. Because these new categories of news often struck readers as personally relevant, it was this material to which many people grew most attached.²² Readers’ responses pushed newspapers to further expand the features. As letters and queries poured into advice columns, editors created more of them. As readers snapped up the Sunday papers with the best comic strips, editors created entire separate comics sections, and the funnies were born.

Readers’ embrace of spectacularly commercial newspapers forces us to question the idea that advertising simply corrupted public dialogue. Without pressure from advertisers, twentieth-century newspapers might never have broken from the nineteenth-century newspaper mold, which was visually bland, stridently political, intended only for white male readers, and, generally, no fun. With the birth of ad-driven newspaper features, the phrase the news shifted its very meaning; it no longer indicated just international events or national politics, but also the latest sports scores, the current fashions, and advertisements themselves. Those in the industry might refer to this material as leisure news, but many readers regarded it as news all the same—up-to-the-minute information about changing events and conditions in the modern world. All of this resulted in a new breed of newspaper and, by extension, a new kind of public sphere: more commercial, to be sure, but also more colorful and more inclusive.

The World That Newspapers Made

Readers used their daily newspapers as maps that could help them navigate the modern city and the modern world. Many looked to their papers for guidance on how city people ought to behave. In the late nineteenth century, when most city papers served niche audiences, those standards could be fairly class specific and may have actually sharpened class boundaries within cities. By the early twentieth century, as advertisers exerted similar pressures on nearly all papers, class-specific advice began to disappear. The new model of newspaper attracted readers with particular features—a sports section, a Sunday magazine, a favorite columnist—rather than with class or party loyalties. Editors sorted city dwellers into separate interest groups to whom they could pitch specific goods, and these categories became lenses through which readers might think of themselves: sports fans, cyclists, cooks, homeowners. These sections created communities in which buying became a signal of belonging; they wove consumer goods into definitions of modern manhood, womanhood, middle-class respectability, and metropolitan style. As publishers deemphasized their papers’ class and party affiliations, they paved the way for the newspaper mergers in the first years of the twentieth century. After these mergers, readers often found a great deal of variety within their newspapers but much less variety from one newspaper to the next.

As papers guided readers through the details of daily life, they also sketched a bigger picture, offering a sense of the place—the community—that readers belonged to. Community may seem an odd concept to apply to cities of five hundred thousand or a million people. The term appears an easier fit for smaller groups within cities: migrants from the South, Italian immigrants in a single neighborhood, or the workers at a particular factory. Yet news features let readers interact, through the paper, with their fellow city residents. They consciously mimicked the in-person experiences of neighborly conversation, market bartering, sidewalk wandering, and restaurant eavesdropping. Through those re-creations, newspapers allowed readers to grasp and join a newsprint metropolis when the physical city had grown too large to fully explore or comprehend.

Articles often depicted cosmopolitan cities whose vitality and distinctiveness derived from the interactions among their polyglot populations. But they also consistently placed city residents in hierarchies of importance and belonging. Similarly, many varieties of local news fostered a climate of civic responsibility and modeled a relationship with the city that involved charity and political activism yet seemed only to speak to the white, middle-class residents that editors assumed made up the bulk of their readership.

Newspapers forged bonds between people with print interactions rather than in-person encounters. They offered secondhand rather than firsthand knowledge and created one-sided and unequal relationships between news readers and news subjects. None of this sounds like community in any traditional sense. But this is the point. Newspapers cultivated a new model of urban community, in which residents understood and interacted with their cities not simply by living in them but by reading about them.

Feature news rarely addressed politics head-on, yet newspaper features do illuminate the broader political arc of the early twentieth century. Newspapers offer one explanation for how the fragmented cities of this era, riven with racial, ethnic, and class tensions, continued to cohere at all. Etiquette columns taught readers new habits that marked them as urbanites and also helped to maintain the peace on crowded streetcars and sidewalks. Papers’ question-and-answer sections fashioned open public forums that made the city legible to immigrants and rural migrants, as well as urban natives. Newspapers’ articles collectively encouraged municipal pride, a consciousness of how the other half lives, and a sense that all urban residents shared a common fate. In this, newspapers were integral to the rise of Progressive politics.

In the early twentieth century, urban newspapers broadened their circulations into suburbs, small towns, and rural hamlets. As they expanded, newspapers reoriented readers to a larger metropolitan geography. City papers followed their readers as they moved to the city’s perimeter, offering suburban delivery service and suburban news coverage. Further afield, canvassers pushed metropolitan papers on small-town and rural residents. When daily newspapers expanded into broader regions, they whet appetites for urban goods and connected formerly isolated populations to elements of mass culture. But as newspapers sent urban information into small towns, they also brought the region into the city. Newspapers’ real estate sections promoted the suburban ideal and stoked suburban growth. Agriculture sections and regional society notes brought small-town life to urban readers. By facilitating flows of people, goods, and information, metropolitan papers functioned as economic infrastructure and enabled coordinated regional economies. And by circulating definitions of regional character among widely dispersed readers, newspapers helped to build metropolitan regions and turned Americans themselves into metropolitans, bound to their regional neighbors by both real and imaginary ties.

Even as newspapers expanded their local coverage outward into suburbs and regions, they were abandoning other kinds of local newswriting. Beginning around the turn of the century, the nation’s largest newspapers formed syndicates, which sold news material to dozens of smaller papers. By the 1910s and 1920s, most of the articles that Americans read in their local papers had either been bought on the national news market or distributed through a chain. Newspapers never gave up on local news completely, since it was their tie to a particular place, and their daily publication schedule, that distinguished them from magazines. But the center of gravity shifted within newspapers, and especially in their features, from local and specific to national and generic.

The nationalization of news through syndication and chain distribution was more accidental than purposeful. The directors of syndicates and chains did not see their work as part of a patriotic project; they sought only to expand their markets and capitalize on economies of scale. Yet because of national chain distribution and syndicated news, Americans across the country read the same headlines, bought the same products, cooked the same recipes, and laughed at the same jokes. City newspapers played even more subtle roles in the spread of mass culture as they advertised national brands, reviewed Hollywood movies, and printed national radio broadcast schedules. Urbanites may not have realized that they were coming to live their lives in parallel with residents of other cities, and suburban and rural people may not have noticed how urban their information diet had become. When wartime propaganda marshaled residents’ pride in the American way of life, however, or when radio or television pandered to audiences’ commonalities, each used the shared vocabularies and shared values that newspapers had helped to spread.

Newspapers, through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, often claimed to be for and about everyone. Some called themselves voices of the people. Others turned their editorial pages into public forums in which seemingly any reader could broadcast opinions to the city at large. By the 1910s and 1920s they were circulating images of an America that all readers were meant to recognize as their own. But daily newspapers did not actually speak for everyone, nor did they welcome all readers. Most papers catered to specific classes, spoke to specific political persuasions, and ignored the poor and minority audiences that they did not care to reach. While many papers began to subtly accommodate immigrant readers in the 1890s and the early 1900s, they still relegated African Americans to the help-wanted ads and to derogatory depictions on the humor page through the 1910s and 1920s. Each of these editorial decisions reflected publishers’ assumptions about who belonged in the public sphere and what kind of part each person ought to play there. Each also reflected newspapers’ roles not as civic instruments but as commercial organs. Editors, focused on ad revenue, did not see all Americans as equally desirable readers.

Because metropolitan dailies failed to cover and cater to all populations, many readers turned to other kinds of papers made especially for them. Foreign-language papers, African American papers, religious weeklies, neighborhood weeklies, and suburban newsletters all thrived in the turn-of-the-century metropolis. The collective circulations of foreign-language papers rivaled those of English-language papers in several cities, and African American weeklies’ circulations usually reached across several states. These other kinds of papers can help us better understand metropolitan dailies’ omissions, weaknesses, and—significantly—their power. The influence of big-city papers was so strong that black papers and foreign-language papers, while reflecting the priorities and desires of their specific audiences, could look and sound strikingly similar to metropolitan dailies.

This book tells the history of a local medium, so it takes a local approach. The story unfolds through studies of four U.S. cities: Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee. Each chapter focuses on a particular city in order to study the relationships between cities and their news. The first chapter is the only one that is uniformly national in scope; it examines critical changes in the late nineteenth-century news industry that launched newspapers into a more prominent place in urban life. Chapter 2 investigates metropolitan newspapers’ roles as advice manuals that taught different modes of urban living to men and women, to the working class and the middle class, in Philadelphia. The third chapter turns to New York and examines the print community that emerged in features such as human interest stories, urban travelogues, reprinted church sermons, and letters to the editor. Chapter 4 takes the example of Chicago to show how newspapers fueled suburban and regional growth but also kept those outlying regions tethered to downtown. The fifth chapter reveals how newspaper syndicates and chains created and distributed national culture. A smaller city, Milwaukee, illustrates this process. The epilogue paints a portrait of the news industry of the interwar years. Buyouts and mergers produced behemoth newspapers that took the innovations of the preceding decades and refined them into a model with true mass appeal. The resulting corporate newspaper model and the consolidated national newspaper field was to endure for decades.

It is impossible to separate the history of one city’s papers from those of all others. Newspapers constantly exchanged information, ideas, and employees, so while each paper ran local news and catered to local tastes, that content appeared within a template that varied little from one city to the next. Editors subscribed to each other’s papers, responded to each other’s opinions, and adopted each other’s inventions. Under pressures to maximize profits, editors employed the same technologies: the rotary press, the half-tone, the linotype machine.

Cities’ histories, too, cannot be entirely separated from one another. Across the Northeast and Midwest, cities expanded and industrialized at roughly the same time. Urban growth in the South and West looked a bit different from that in the Northeast and Midwest: Southern cities attracted fewer immigrants from Europe and Asia, and most Western cities did not develop dense urban cores. These differences rendered some eastern newspaper trends irrelevant, but Southern and Western editors still borrowed plenty from their peers. Everywhere, the challenges of city life created niches for newspapers to fill, whether that meant schooling readers in office etiquette or circulating daily prices for department-store goods. The closing section of each chapter brings in examples from many cities to show how news patterns played out across the country.

The newspapers of the turn of the century were sprawling, chaotic, and wildly contradictory documents. Because editors tried to craft papers that provided something for everyone, a single newspaper issue might contain articles on thrifty housekeeping but also advertisements for luxury purchases; the details of a grisly murder but also the heart-warming tale of a local hero; a culturally curious profile of an immigrant community but also gross ethnic stereotypes in a humor column. As is still true today, advertiser-approved feature news subsidized hard news, and the two types of material could be completely at odds with one another. What newspapers offered does not cohere, but it does matter.

Between 1880 and 1930, as Americans witnessed astonishing changes, they turned to newspapers to keep track of and understand the shifts around them. They read about the tides of immigrants settling in American cities, adapting to American ways and changing the nation in the process. They read about a new Progressive politics that attempted to rein in the excesses of capitalism while limiting the influence of immigrant politics and cultures. They learned that the U.S. population had shifted, by 1920, from majority rural to majority urban. And they read about the United States’ entrance onto a world stage, first with imperial outposts in Cuba and the Philippines, later with intervention in World War I.

But daily newspapers did not just tell Americans about these shifts—they participated in them and enabled their readers to do the same. The quotidian ritual of skimming newspapers’ varied offerings, when repeated by millions of people over many decades, transformed cities, regions, and the nation.

1: A New Newspaper Model

The American newspaper is distinctly ahead of its English contemporaries, announced William Thomas Stead, one of the most celebrated newspapermen in England, in 1901. To begin with, there is more of it, more news, more advertisements, more paper, more print, he explained. Hence the busiest people in the world, who have less time for deliberate reading than any race, buy regularly morning and evening more printed matter than would fill a New Testament, and on Sundays would consider themselves defrauded if they did not have a bale of printed matter delivered at their doors almost equal in bulk to a family Bible.¹ The sheer quantity of news necessitated some sort of organizing system. Stead analyzed and praised one American solution, the large headline—or as he called it, the scare-head. Scare-heads made reading more efficient, allowing people to glean information in only a few seconds and to choose the articles they wanted to read in full. But headlines also, thought Stead, made the news more appealing. The scare-head is like the display in the show window in which the tradesman sets out his wares, he wrote. Good journalism consists much more in the proper labelling and displaying of your goods than in the writing of leading articles. The intrinsic value of news is a quality which does not depend upon the editor, but the method of display.²

Stead had encountered a new newspaper business model, in full flower in turn-of-the-century American cities. Faster presses suddenly made it possible to print Bible-sized papers, and revenue from advertising kept those papers affordable. For the first time, publishers could sell their product for next to nothing yet still reap healthy profits. Under this system, urban daily newspapers cut their prices, expanded their offerings, and grew their circulations. Stead was witnessing newspapers’ transformations into true mass media whose influence reached across thousands or even millions of readers’ lives.

To turn out such large newspapers, publishers had to grow their companies. They constructed new buildings, hired large corps of news workers, and purchased massive machines. Newspapers—as organizations as well as objects—became emblems of the modern era, whose profitability, efficiency, and sheer size garnered popular attention and outright awe. Stead noticed that, as newspapers grew, they provided more information than anyone could actually use; they made the busiest people in the world even busier. Newspapers contributed to urban information overload; they circulated pages full of clashing messages and eye-catching images and filled city streets with newsboys’ loud pitches and reporters’ hard-hitting questions.

Stead chose an apt metaphor, the shop window, for newspapers had indeed become more commercial products than ever before. Stead described the articles themselves as products to be consumed, each one vying to be chosen and read. Newspapers became shop windows more literally, when editors ran elaborate ads, crafted features that focused readers’ attention on consumer topics, and persuaded local merchants to advertise. By the turn of the century, publishers regarded even their own audiences as products to be sold. Publishers boasted about the numbers, the wealth, and the spending habits of their readers and then sold the attention of those readers to advertisers.

The huge new papers of the turn of the century came in for both praise and criticism, as Stead’s defense suggests. But they were unqualified successes. Fast, lucrative, efficient, and abundant, newspapers became beacons of a new era in urban America. They also entwined public dialogue with commerce so thoroughly that readers could not disentangle the two.

More news, more advertisements, more paper, more print

When a man or woman in 1880 paid two cents for the daily paper, he or she walked away with four pages absolutely crammed with information. Printers chose small type for the titles, smaller type for news, and minuscule type for the classified ads. Many printers dispensed with titles altogether, printing only the broadest of headings: The Latest News or Local Affairs. Wherever extra space remained, printers tucked in one more tidbit—an anecdote, a statistic, or an advertisement.

These papers were products of nineteenth-century technology. Rags, the raw material for newsprint at the time, yielded sturdy and long-lasting paper but were relatively expensive and in constant short supply. Editors had to perpetually weigh whether information was worth the cost of the paper it would be printed on. The painstaking printing process also forced publishers to keep their papers to a modest size. The circulation of a daily newspaper was imperatively limited by the number of pulls one pair of arms could give a Washington press, explained Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune. A large and successful paper might circulate only four hundred copies.³

Nineteenth-century publishers relied on advertisements as well as subscriptions for revenue, and assumed ad printing to be part of their job. Indeed, papers in dozens of different cities took the name Commercial Advertiser and crowded their entire front pages with ads. Advertising, however, still carried with it a shady reputation. In a world where people made most of their purchases and sought most services from people they knew, readers treated items advertised in the paper with caution. Why would they buy something of unknown origin? Why would they take advice on what to buy from a stranger? Advertisers often did have something to conceal, whether touting the benefits of a health tonic or trying to sell an arid patch of farmland.⁴ So most urban daily newspapers kept advertisers to certain parameters, requiring that they use extremely small typeface, insisting that they keep their ad the width of a single column, and permitting them to illustrate only with a tiny symbol indicating the type of good or service offered. This formula minimized the space that each individual ad took up—important in the era of expensive newsprint—and kept advertisements from overshadowing the news. And crucially, it was the vertical lines between columns, when placed on the printing frame, that physically held the type together. Without the column marker wedged between, the letters simply fell