The popular press in the United States grew rapidly in the pre–Civil War era. Newspapers, magazines, and books, the authors of this monograph contend, both articulated and fueled national debates about moral values. Further, they specify that the major ethical debates of the era hinged on tensions between, on the one hand, a capitalist ethic that emphasized success and material acquisition, and, on the other, a set of values associated with Christianity and republicanism that underscored the importance of the common good and the practice of pious benevolence. Its chapters explore the shape of the debate in a range of genres, including New York, southern, and western newspapers; popular literary magazines targeted at middle-class readers; women's and merchant magazines; and books of various types by female and male writers.
This book is part of a genre that presents challenges. It is posthumously published, the completion of a scholarly project in progress at the time of the death of its principal author, Lorman Ratner, in 2007. Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (and Ratner's widow), and Dwight Teeter, former Dean of the College of Communications at the University of Tennessee and an important scholar in the field of mass communication, worked with a substantial draft and brought the project to publication. In some ways, the book can be seen as a continuation of the collaborative work of Teeter and Ratner, a political historian, on the cultural impact of mass media in the antebellum era. Their Fanatics and Fire Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) utilizes an approach to media history similar to that of this volume. Relying on content analysis of printed sources, the authors summarize rhetoric intended for different communities—regional, gendered, occupational—about what was moral and what was not in American culture as the juggernaut of capitalism exercised its transformative power.
Much seems familiar. In gendered terms, women were to be the safeguards of Christian values as men ventured forth into a corrupting marketplace. Rural America, seen through nostalgic Jeffersonian lenses as the haunt of virtuous yeoman farmers, provided a moral counterbalance for the coarsening tendencies of new, polyglot, and dangerous cities. The South was seen as perpetuating anti-Christian, republicanism-subverting, dehumanizing materialism through its defense of the institution of slavery—unless, of course, one came from the South. There one might conclude instead that it was the hard-hearted Yankees who cared nothing for family values or quality of life, emphasizing gain and greed whatever the human cost. Northern reformers such as Horace Greely, publisher of the New York Tribune, condemned competitors who pandered to the masses by substituting sensationalism for improving content, while all-out advocates of the free market such as James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the rival New York Herald, saw attitudes such as Greeley's as moralistic, socialistic, and condescending.
It is helpful to remember that the familiar moral tropes of this era became so through a popular press that relied on them to position readers in relation to a national moral ideal that was a constantly moving target. Today the popular media is still up to its ears in implicit moral judgments, despite “no spin zones” and “fair and balanced” coverage. Watch Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann on a weeknight (it's unlikely that you might randomly choose to watch both) and you will learn either that overreaching government interference erodes individual character and destroys the moral fiber of Americans by rewarding the immoral and unworthy, or that the excessive wealth of greedy, manipulative, and unrestrained hypocrites is corrupting national purpose and betraying America's promise. Although more than a century and a half has changed (some of) the particulars of the debate, its dynamics remain much the same.
In fact, a case might be made that the language and metaphors of public morality used in mass-mediated cultures are, for better or worse, generated, sustained, and fed through popular media. Al Gore made just such a case in his 2007 Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin), although he leveled his critique mainly at television. Ratner, Kaufman, and Teeter's content analysis of popular print a century and a half ago reminds us that contemporary electronic media hold no monopoly on serving up oversimplified versions of moral dilemmas to audiences who tune in. Forms of mass communication that rely on the market to sustain them typically incorporate the moral assumptions and prejudices of their intended audiences in order to insure continuing patronage.
Despite major issues of contemporary relevance potentially associated with the book's themes, disappointingly, the authors choose not to raise them. They content themselves with establishing the fact that popular definitions of morality in this period are discernable in the print media of the time, that they sometimes differed by group, and that the differences frequently hinged on the stance of that group toward the relationship of material acquisition to Christianity. What difference did it make, and to whom, that various segments of the media in the antebellum era defined America's major moral dilemmas in differing ways? Was it possible, in a market-driven communications environment where circulation was of paramount importance, to debate challenging moral issues with anything like the complexity they deserved? How have the wealth-focused forces of the market helped to insure that the media continue to be active players in shaping discussions of public ethics, and with what implications?
These are questions I wish the authors had used the materials at hand to explore. Perhaps Professor Ratner might have done so had he lived to complete this work.
