IN THE BEGINNING . . . OUR PARADOXICAL PRESS
It was the best of times, it was the worst of journalism — and it is no small irony that the former condition led directly to the latter, that the golden age of America’s founding was also the gutter age of American reporting, that the most notorious of presses in our nation’s history churned out its copy on the foothills of Olympus. The Declaration of Independence was literature, but the New England Courant talked trash. The Constitution of the United States was philosophy; the Boston Gazette slung mud. The Gazette of the United States and the National Gazette were conceived as weapons, not chronicles of daily events; the two of them stood masthead to masthead, firing at each other, without ceasing, without blinking, without acknowledging the limitations of veracity. Philadelphia’s Aurora was less a celestial radiance than a ground-level reek, guilty of “taking a line that would have been regarded as treasonable in any later international conflict.” And Porcupine’s Gazette, the Aurora’s sworn foe, was as barbed as its namesake.
Perhaps, then, they were not the best of times. Perhaps they were too divisive, too uncertain. Perhaps they only seem the best in retrospect, to generations who live in the country that those times produced, under the laws they established and the rights they defined and the liberties they so carefully prescribed.
But in many ways the men and women who settled the New World were the best of people. Surely not the type to print lies in their newspapers when the truth was insufficiently compelling or contradictory to their causes; to smear sex scandals across their pages or raise invective to levels previously unknown outside a cockfighting den. Not the type to confuse hyperbole with fact or scatology with analysis; to be ill informed or uninformed or misinformed; to correct their mistakes rarely and grudgingly; to inflate a peccadillo into a crime; to condemn a lapse of judgment with a sentence of perdition; to encourage violence against those who disagreed with their views.
Yet they did it all, these best of people, all of it and more, time and again over the course of many decades, an incendiary press somehow becoming the basis of a humane and enduring society.
from Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Beginnings of American Journalism
by Eric Burns
PublicAffairs
480 pp. $27.50
WHAT HAPPENED IN MINNEAPOLIS, WILLIE?
In 1969 one William S. Blair had suddenly appeared as business manager at Harper’s. I did not see much of the man or know much about him. Willie said he could not discern what Blair’s duties were: “He spent a small fortune redecorating his office, money we damn well could have used to pay writers for articles, and yet Blair just sits on his butt for the most part except when he’s nosing around me.”
On the other hand, Willie thought Blair did too much in terms of trying to set the editorial agenda. “All those damned surveys, asking our readers picky questions about which article they read first in the last issue, which one they read last, did they like this thing or that thing, what would they like to read in Harper’s? Asking our readers about their hobbies, what sports they liked, where do they vacation, all manner of rot.” Willie had called Minneapolis to complain that he thought such surveys were worthless — though terribly costly — and asked if they were designed to take control of the magazine’s content away from the editor? Oh no, Cowles assured him: just routine.
I never learned at what point Cowles told Willie that he was changing Blair’s title to president and chief executive officer of the corporation running Harper’s and that he was to thereafter be considered Willie’s superior. Willie didn’t tell his staff. Indeed, he seemed to have a CIA “need to know” policy when it came to sharing with us just what occurred at all those high muckety-muck meetings in Minneapolis; we were told next to nothing. My best guess is that the change occurred in early 1970, because that’s about when Blair referred to himself as “The Boss” when talking with me. Being a skilled diplomat I immediately said, “You’re not my boss. I’m not a goddamned accountant. I’m a writer. Willie Morris is my boss.” I number that incident among the several times I forgot that I was a mere mill hand, too.
Still, none of us realized the extent to which Willie and the Cowles people were on the outs — until the opening volley of shots of a very heavy caliber. We knew a little something was amiss, just didn’t feel right, and at times we fretted a bit over Willie’s erratic conduct. But he continued to produce; with each new Harper’s issue came praise in the media, at dinner parties, from other writers and editors, on our travels, in the mail. We could compare what we were publishing with our competitors and feel confident that nobody was putting out a better magazine: not Esquire, not The New Yorker, not New York, not Atlantic Monthly, not Life, not Playboy, not Commentary, not The New Republic, just no-by-God-body. So how could that be faulted? We wrote our articles and our books, feeling maybe a bit smug, certain that any problems between Willie and Minneapolis were minor bumps on our smooth highway. And when the firing started, we were as startled and unprepared as American forces had been at Pearl Harbor.
from In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor
by Larry L. King
PublicAffairs
368 pp. $26.95
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