The Profession of Journalism—Newspapers and Editors in America—Bennett,
Greeley and Raymond—Forney and Dana—The Education of a Journalist
I
The American newspaper has had, even in my time, three separate and
distinct epochs; the thick-and-thin, more or less servile party organ;
the personal, one-man-controlled, rather blatant and would-be
independent; and the timorous, corporation, or family-owned billboard
of such news as the ever-increasing censorship of a constantly
centralizing Federal Government will allow.
This latter appears to be its present state. Neither its individuality
nor its self-exploitation, scarcely its grandiose pretension, remains.
There continues to be printed in large type an amount of shallow stuff
that would not be missed if it were omitted altogether. But, except as
a bulletin of yesterday’s doings, limited, the daily newspaper counts
for little, the single advantage of the editor—in case there is an
editor—that is, one clothed with supervising authority who
“edits”—being that he reaches the public with his lucubrations first,
the sanctity that once hedged the editorial “we” long since departed.
The editor dies, even as the actor, and leaves no copy. Editorial
reputations have been as ephemeral as the publications which gave them
contemporary importance. Without going as far back as the Freneaus and
the Callenders, who recalls the names of Mordecai Mannasseh Noah, of
Edwin Crosswell and of James Watson Webb? In their day and generation
they were influential and distinguished journalists. There are dozens
of other names once famous but now forgotten; George Wilkins Kendall;
Gerard Hallock; Erastus Brooks; Alexander Bullitt; Barnwell Rhett;
Morton McMichael; George William Childs, even Thomas Ritchie, Duff
Green and Amos Kendall. “Gales and Seaton” sounds like a trade-mark;
but it stood for not a little and lasted a long time in the National
Capital, where newspaper vassalage and the public printing went
hand-in-hand.
For a time the duello flourished. There were frequent “affairs of
honor”—notably about Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in South
Carolina—sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of John H. Pleasants
and one of the sons of Thomas Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed,
and the yet more celebrated affair between Graves, of Kentucky, and
Cilley, of Maine, in which Cilley was killed; Bladensburg the scene,
and the refusal of Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the occasion.
I once had an intimate account of this duel with all the cruel
incidents from Henry A. Wise, a party to it, and a blood-curdling
narrative it made. They fought with rifles at thirty paces, and Cilley
fell on the third fire. It did much to discredit duelling in the South.
The story, however, that Graves was so much affected that thereafter he
could never sleep in a darkened chamber had no foundation whatever, a
fact I learned from my associate in the old Louisville Journal and
later in The Courier-Journal, Mr. Isham Henderson, who was a
brother-in-law of Mr. Graves, his sister, Mrs. Graves, being still
alive. The duello died at length. There was never sufficient reason for
its being. It was both a vanity and a fad. In Hopkinson Smith’s “Col.
Carter of Cartersville,” its real character is hit off to the life.