Canton High School - Echo Yearbook (Canton, MA)

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Q THE ECHO g star of that liberty which subsequent- ly revolutionized America. The royal officers were correct in assuming that a free press would stir up public discontent with the govern- ment. The feeling against Great Britain on the eve of the revolution was strongest in the news centers: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, An- napolis, and Williamsburg'. In the newspaper oiiices ardent young revo- lutionists wrote appeals to their countrymen to resist Great Britain. These little newspapers were scat- tered around in the coffee houses and club rooms, spreading rebellion every- where. They helped carry the news of the revolutionary movement and to create a nation by enabling the citizens in every part to know what was going on in the most distant places. The Royalists of Boston called the ofiices of the MASSACHUSETTS SPY the sedition foundry. During the war these received a powerful there appeared numerous political pamphlets, the most effective of which, Thomas Paine's, Common Sense , was reprinted in thousands of copies and circulated among four mil- lion readers. It contended that inde- pendence was vital, not conciliation with the mother country, and proved most influential in forcing the nnal separation. It is doubtful if any other printed work in American His- tory has had a greater influence than Common Sense . With the successful conclusion of the war, newspapers multiplied and a new period of growth began during the nineteenth century, which was to build up a free American press un- equalled by any in the world for ac- curacy and freedom from arbitrary governmental censorship. Following the adoption of the Constitution, and the rise of the two political parties, Federalists and Jeffersonians, the discussion of political issues became of supreme importance. Hamilton supported the UNITED STATES GAZETTE, while Jefferson gave his utmost to the NATIONAL GAZ- ETTE. In the contest over the adoption of the Constitution, Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay wrote a remarkable impetus, and in addition, series of papers in defense of the new plan of government, later collected and now published as a school text- book on American government. Among later political writers should be mentioned John C. Calhoun, from South Carolina, the famous statesman and defender of slavery, and Daniel Webster, whose speeches on the Con- stitution and the Union were almost as widely circulated in the north as the Federalist itself. Some reasons for the marvelous growth of newspapers during the first half of the nineteenth century were: 1. The telegraph and rail- way, multiplying the means of securing information. 2. Advertising, which grew in proportion as the cities grew in size and population, enabling the newspaper own- er to reduce the cost of his paper and allowing the man in the street to have his pa- per every day. 3. Universal E d u c a t i o n. which made it possible for even the humblest to read. 4. There appeared a number of newspapers of national importance. One of these was the NEW YORK TRIB- UNE, founded by Horace Greeley. Daily and weekly editions of this paper were published, and thosuands of farmers in the East and West relied upon the TRIB- UNE for their national news, and more important, their political opinions. 5. Improved presses. About 1850 the rapid rotary press driven 'by steam took the place of the old-fashioned hand press in the largest newspaper plant and made it possible to turn out thou- sands of copies an hour. Cheap printing, combined with advertising, made books and newspapers available to all at small cost. 6. In order to encourage the reading of newspapers, the government fixed the post- age rate for printed material fContinued on page 231

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THE ECHO 21 graphs of stale news -brought by the latest packet from London, a letter from a citizen who was traveling abroad, a protest against some meas- ure of local misgovernment, and sun- dry advertisements for the sale of Indian bitters or the recovery of a stray horse or a runaway slave. The colonial papers were crude and had only a small circulation, for ex- ample, only three hundred copies of the NEWS LETTER were printed each week, since all work must be done by hand. There was little news in the papers, because the editors as- sumed that everyone knew what was going on in the local community and relied upon foreign exchanges and private letters for information about outside affairs. Then too, early editors placed no premium upon accuracy, nor did they go out of their way to verify re- ports. By the time the new Repub- lic had its third President, Jefferson is said to have remarked that he never believed anything he read in the pa- per except the advertisements. The reason for this uncertainty is not hard to find. In the days of the founder of Democracy, newspapers were, with apologies to Benjamin Franklin, universal instructors in all the arts and sciences. The adver- tisements were so few in number and so small in size that they afforded no permanent hiding place for the spirit of lying . When, however, the paper began to give more in detail, not only the gossip of the homes but also of the stores, Beelzebub, and all the members of his family moved to the more commodious quarters in the advertising section, where he still re- sides. In colonial times the influence of these small newspapers was great. They formed the only reading matter of the people, with the exception of the Bible, and were passed from hand to hand, memorized, and quoted by thousands. The sayings of Benjamin Franklin, published in his Poor Richard's Almanac, survive to the present day as popular proverbs. Because ol' this influence among the common people, the colonial gov- ernors objected to newspapers saying anything about political matters. In 1735, the tyrannical royal governor of New York removed the chief jus- tice of the colony from office for per- sonal reasons. Peter Zenger, who edited a weekly newspaper, criticized this action of the governor, declaring that it threatened slavery to the peo- ple. Zenger was prosecuted for libel and the new chief justice, a crony of the governor, presided at the trial and was plainly determined on punishing Zenger severely. Lawyers hired to defend Zenger lost their licenses, while the judge tried to limit the jury to deciding only whether Zenger was responsible for the publication, fa matter not deniedb, reserving to him- self the decision as to how far the words were punishable. This was an evil custom of English courts in such cases to a much later period. The aged Andrew Hamilton, one of the foremost lawyers in the colo- nies, journeyed from Philadelphia to New York to offer his services in Zenger's behalf, and in his address to the jury argued convincingly that public criticism is a necessary safe- guard for free government, and that the jury must have the right to ac- quit Zenger if it found that his charges were true. Men who injure and oppress the people, said the law- yer bluntly, Hprovoke them to cry out and complain, and then make that very complaint the foundation for new persecution. This cause is not the cause of a poor printer alone, nor of New York alone, but of every free man in America. He called upon the jury to guard the liberty to which Nature and the laws of this country have given us the rightf-the liberty of ex- posing and opposing arbitrary power, in these parts of the world at least, by speaking and writing the truth. A free people are not obliged by any law to support a governor who goes about to destroy a province. The Declaration of Independence was not signed until forty-one years later, but the American newspaper declared itself free when the jury de- clared Peter Zenger not guilty of criminal libel. The victory for free speech was celebrated joyously throughout the colonies. A later his- torian called this trial the morning fflontinua-rl on page 223

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g THE ECHO at a very low figure, even less than the actual cost of carriage. During the years from 1840 to 1860 the question that most agitated the country was that of slavery, and like every other national tendency or con- troversy, it found ready expression in the press of the period. William Lloyd Garrison was the publisher of an abolition paper, THE L-IBER- ATOR, which he circulated all over the country by the thousands of copies, and kept up an effectual agi- tation of the subject in the public mind. Not all Northerners were of the rabid stamp of Garrison, and many of them resented his methods of treating the question. At one time he was dragged through the str gets of Boston with a rope about his neck, and his publication was excluded from the mails in many of the south- ern states. But the question could not be shoved aside. Prohibition, as ever, failed to quiet it, and persecution made it flourish the more. Other leaders flocked to the anti-slavery banner, Horace Greeley brought his TRIBUNE and Henry Ward Beecher his NEW YORK INDEPENDENT, and lined them up by the side of the struggling Garrison and his impover- ished LIBERATOR. Wendell Phillips, the orator, and Charles Sumner, Sen- ator from Massachusetts, threw their immense influence into the balance on the side of freedom. Slowly, but nevertheless surely, the scales began to turn in their favor, but slavery was not to be abolished by peaceful means. It took a long and bloody war to end it, but it was ended, and the first indication of its doom was the growth of abolitionist sentiment in the newspapers of the time. One other influence should be men- tioned in a journalistic summary: Uncle Tom's Cabin, the somewhat sobby and sentimental but effective novel written by Mrs. Harriet Beech- er Stowe. Strictly speaking, this was not journalism, for it did not truly picture the plight of the ordin- ary slave family, but like many mod- ern newspapers, seized upon an ex- aggerated phase of Southern life and magnified it. Not all slave-owners were like Simon Legree, nor did every slave become an Uncle Tom. How- ever, the novel did its work in placing the slavery question uppermost in the minds of the younger generation of voters and it sold by the hundreds of thousands, becoming a stage play that survived the Emancipation Proc- lamation by more than seventy-five years. Journalism entered a new phase after the war, influenced by the war- time hysteria, the flood of corruption which ensued as the North divided the spoils of its conquest, and new in- ventions and methods in the art of printing. Gone were the direct meth- ods of handling news, and with tnem went the old-time editor-printer, per- sonified by Benjamin Franklin. In his place came college-trained men, executives, and men of letters, who recognized the importance of the newspaper in American life and pre- pared to make the most of it. An important feature of news- paper development at this time was the Associated Press, an organization of newspapers formed in 1848 to co- operate in gathering the news in the city of New York. During the war, the great demand for news of the armies led to its extension in branches with member newspapers in every large city and correspondents in every village in America. This eliminated costly telegraph and cable tolls and simplined the gathering of news. The modern paper depends upon such an Association for its outside news and maintains only a few correspondents in localities in which it is especially interested. From time to time, over the wires of this nation-wide newspaper orga- nization had come rumors of corrup- tion in the large cities of the East and in Washington itself, but it was left to a national magazine to lift the veil on the shame of the cities and reveal the fearful graft of Tammany in New York State under Boss Tweed, and in Philadelphia under the Republican mogul , Matt Quay. These political rings stole over two hundred and fifty millions of' dollars before they were broken up and their leaders sent to the penitentiary, large- ly through the efforts of Thomas lfTontinur,-fl on page 2-13