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Activities: Context Activities Black, White, and Yellow: Coloring the News in Late-Nineteenth-Century America  Back to Context Activities
Americans in the late nineteenth century had unprecedented access to news, both of their immediate neighborhoods and of the world, as print technology, literacy, and appetites for information exploded. By 1900, there were twenty daily newspapers in circulation for every one that had existed in 1850. Industrialized printing presses enabled publishers to put out periodicals more cheaply than ever before--at one or two cents a copy, some newspapers sold in the 1890s were six times cheaper than they had been at the beginning of the century. Even high quality magazines and monthly periodicals could be purchased for just a few pennies. The changes in the cost and distribution of American newspapers meant, by the end of the century, that national and international news reached even poor and rural Americans. Newspapers brought the nation together. Many of the writers featured in this unit began their careers as printers' apprentices and journalists. Bret Harte and Mark Twain met when they were writing for newspapers in California; Alexander Posey founded and edited the first newspaper owned by a Native American; Joel Chandler Harris published his first Uncle Remus stories while working for the Atlanta Constitution and had them syndicated in newspapers throughout the North. Other important nineteenth-century writers got their start or in some cases published the majority of their work in magazines and monthly periodicals. Charles W. Chesnutt, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Zitkala-Sa all published in the Atlantic Monthly and a variety of other literary journals. Undoubtedly, the close affiliation between journalists and fiction writers in the nineteenth century influenced the development of realism as a literary style. Borrowing ideals of truth, objectivity, and accuracy from journalistic techniques, these writers helped formulate the dominant aesthetic in American letters in this period. William Dean Howells, a pre-eminent practitioner of literary realism and the editor of Harper's Monthly magazine, pronounced that realism "is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material." For realists, this commitment to "truthfulness" often led them to explore characters, places, and events that had never before seemed appropriate subject matter for literature. Just as nineteenth-century newspapers democratized the news, realism democratized the scope of literature. The enfranchisement of "common" or "everyday" subject matter extended literary representation to ordinary people whom authors had previously ignored or romanticized. Perhaps influenced by their consumption of newspapers, American audiences evinced a new willingness to read about unrefined and even tragic or ugly subjects in the interest of gaining access to authentic accounts of the world around them. Journalistic coverage of the carnage and horror of the Civil War--an event that dramatically touched the lives of almost all Americans who lived through it--had exposed readers to realistic, if horrifying, depictions of actual events. As the stark photographs of the aftermath of Civil War battles featured in the archive make clear, these depictions could hardly fail to make a profound impression on readers and viewers. By the end of the century, journalism's aesthetic of truth and accuracy had found its way from the newspapers into the fiction of the country. Unfortunately, the journalistic ideals that had such a powerful impact on American fiction did not always shape newspapers themselves. As the newspaper industry became big business--and as men like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer amassed enormous fortunes through their creation of publishing empires--journalistic integrity sometimes took a back seat to a desire to boost circulation and please readers. New techniques designed to sell papers rather than to provide accurate coverage of events started to shape the look and feel of American newspapers. Novelties like giant banner headlines, color inserts, provocative cartoons, and large engravings put a focus on visual appeal rather than substance. The content of stories, too, privileged sensational impact over objectivity or thoroughness, focusing on scandal and human-interest stories to the exclusion of important events. The term yellow journalism was coined in the 1890s to characterize this new trend in news reporting. Named for R. F. Outcault's popular comic strip, which featured a yellow-robed character named the "yellow kid," the term refers to the circulation war that arose between Hearst's New York Journal and Pulitzer's New York World. The competition began when Hearst, determined to lure readers from Pulitzer's paper, hired Outcault away from the World to draw for the Journal. Pulitzer responded by commissioning a new cartoonist to draw a second "yellow kid" comic. Soon, the war between the two largest New York newspapers became a competition between two "yellow kids," and the term "yellow journalism" was coined to describe the sensationalist, irresponsible journalistic tactics the papers adopted in their attempts to outsell one another. The Sioux writer Charles Alexander Eastman learned first-hand the potentially devastating impact yellow journalism could have on already tense situations. When the Ghost Dance movement was gaining momentum on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Eastman hoped to diffuse the anxiety the spiritual movement caused in white reservation authorities by assuring them of the non-threatening nature of the dancers' activities. Instead, rumors of a possible Indian attack--rumors started mainly by irresponsible journalists--increased the white authorities' fears. Eastman lamented, "of course, the press seized upon the opportunity to enlarge upon the strained situation and predict an 'Indian uprising.' The reporters were among us, and managed to secure much 'news' that no one else ever heard of." The reporters' specious news stories fueled an already fraught situation that eventually culminated in the tragic massacre of 150 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in December 1890. Yellow journalism also played a key role in the Spanish-American war, a conflict that has gone down in history as the first "media war." As the conflict between rebel Cubans and Spanish colonists escalated in Cuba in 1896, newspapers seized on the event as a chance to attract readers and increase their circulation. Dispatching the first "foreign war correspondents" to Cuba, the papers began printing inflammatory stories (often based on little or no evidence) about Spanish brutality and noble Cuban resistance. The papers commissioned some of the country's most popular artists to provide graphic illustrations of Spanish atrocities designed to whip the American public into a frenzy of outrage and war mongering. As New York Journal editor Hearst told artist Frederic Remington, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." The newspapers' strategy worked: circulation increased dramatically and the American public demanded armed intervention. By 1898, President McKinley had become convinced that his political party would suffer if he did not engage in war with Spain, however unjustified. While it may not be fair to hold the newspapers responsible for the war, it is accurate to say that the press fueled pro-war sentiment and that the outcome of American involvement in nineteenth-century Cuba might have been very different without the sensational headlines and distorted reporting provided by the yellow journalists. As newspapers began to shape the values and style of American culture in the late nineteenth century, artist William Harnett began to produce canvases that served as visual essays on the new role of newspapers in American life. Between 1875 and 1890, he painted over sixty still-life representations of newspapers. Never painting readers, Harnett instead offered tableaux of newspapers on tables surrounded by glasses, books, and other reading accoutrements. Often featuring matches, candles, pipes, and even smoldering embers next to the papers, he highlighted their potential to catch fire--that is, their tendency to inflame delicate situations. The papers in Harnett's paintings are not readable--he represented news copy as illegible marks--perhaps commenting on the fact that the content of the stories had become secondary to the circulation of the paper. Despite the blurred print, Harnett's representations consistently tricked his viewers: guards had to be posted at his exhibitions to restrain viewers from trying to touch the canvases. His paintings, then, are a visual corollary to the realist aesthetic that shaped American fiction, even as they subtly hint at the problems with the journalistic techniques that spurred the realist movement. Questions
[1962] Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Unfinished Confederate grave near the center of the battlefield of Gettysburg [stereograph] (1863), courtesy of the Library of Congress, American Memory Collection [PR-065-793-22]. Photograph of dead Confederate soldiers in a shallow grave at Gettysburg. Journalistic coverage of the Civil War exposed readers to realistic depictions of actual events, paving the way for the aesthetic of truth and accuracy in American fiction. [2818] Anonymous, Refugees leaving the Old Homestead (c. 1863), courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration [NWDNS-LC-CC-306]. This photograph shows a family of Civil War refugees ready to leave the homestead. To escape the Rebels, Union families would gather as much of their belongings as would fit on a wagon and head north. [3228] Timothy O'Sullivan, Incidents of the War. A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July, 1863, courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-B8184-7964-A DLC]. Federal soldiers dead on the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Graphic, bleak war photographs inspired postwar literary realism. [4219] Western Photograph Company, Gathering up the dead at the battlefield of Wounded Knee, South Dakota (1891), courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. U.S. soldiers standing in front of a wagon full of dead Sioux. A blizzard delayed the burial of the dead. Eventually the Sioux were buried in a mass grave, with little effort made to identify the bodies. [5149] Kurz and Allison, The Storming of Ft. Wagner (1890), courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. This illustration shows soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment leading the Union charge against the Confederate stronghold of Fort Wagner, South Carolina. The 54th Massachussetts was the first black regiment recruited in the North during the Civil War. [5808] Barthelmess, Buffalo soldiers of the 25th Infantry, Ft. Keogh, Montana (1890), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC4-6161 DLC]. In 1866, Congress approved six new cavalry and infantry regiments comprised solely of African American enlisted troops. Called Buffalo Soldiers by the Native Americans, these units performed the same frontier duties as their white counterparts and later served with distinction in the Spanish-American War. [6332] Archibald Gunn and Richard Felton Outcault, New York Journal's colored comic supplement (1896), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-2553]. This color poster from the comic pages of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal features a woman in dancing costume with a rope around the popular comic character "Yellow Kid," developed by artist Richard Felton Outcault. [6551] Kenyon Cox, Columbia & Cuba-Magazine Cover-Nude Study (1898), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-68463]. An allegorical cover of an 1898 magazine, exemplifying the openness toward the human body of the late-nineteenth-century realists. The women's names, "Columbia" and "Cuba," refer to an imagined relationship between the nations during the Spanish American War. |
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