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.