260830: Whitman's America
One of this blog's themes is the idea that we suffer from undue nostalgia, and an idealization of America's past. The hope is to break up this nostalgia by showing actual conditions in government, media, and public life in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.
In that spirit, I'm sharing some excerpts from David S. Reynolds's insightful Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. In all the following excerpts, Reynolds is treating the American 1840s and 50s:
Politically and socially, America was in some ways close to chaos. The old party system shattered, and a new one struggled to establish itself on the basis of a confusing array of splinter groups. Corruption in high places was rampant. Although a broad middle class was developing, the gap between the rich and the poor was wider than ever. Immigrants arrived in unprecedented numbers, changing the nation's ethnic makeup and fanning antiforeign sentiment. Urban death rates soared. America's largest city, New York, could boast of its economic and cultural centrality, but it was also crowded, filthy, and infested by rowdy gangs and roving prostitutes...
What did political corruption look like, in their day?
In the Manhattan mayoral elections of November 1854 Fernando Wood was elected on a promise to clean up a city he described as grubby and dangerous (ironically, it was quickly discovered that he had been elected by fraudulent balloting).
In November 1854 [also] the Kansas congressional election was decided by some 1,700 border ruffians who crossed over from neighboring Missouri and cast illegal votes for the proslavery candidate. The following March, fraudulent voting by Missourians ensured the election of a proslavery territorial legislature in Kansas... Fighting between pro- and antislavery forces broke out in what came to be called Bleeding Kansas.
Corruption had long been entrenched in antebellum politics, especially in Whitman's New York. Beginning with the state elections of 1834, Tammany Hall began its long-standing practice of controlling the Manhattan vote through muscle tactics, bribery, and illegal voting. Throughout the 1840s and beyond, Tammany "runners" would meet immigrants at the New York docks and, in return for giving them illegal naturalization papers and finding them homes and jobs, secure their vote. In a time of lax voter registration, liquor and money were freely given to "repeaters," or people hired to vote repeatedly under various names in different parts of the city... In one ward, the so-called Bloody Sixth, there were actually four thousand more votes [in 1854] than there were voters... In 1852 the infamous board of aldermen known as the Forty Thieves took power in Manhattan.
In sum, Reynolds writes,
The 1850s was... a time of vote-buying, wire-pulling, graft, and patronage on all levels of state and national government.
Meanwhile, the penny papers were exploding, and print media with it, leading to an information glut, and a crisis of yellow hyperbole, far exceeding our own time's:
American book production leaped some 800 percent between 1830 and 1850, growing ten times faster than the nation's population. Newspapers enjoyed a similar surge, increasing from 715 in 1830 to 2,526 two decades later.
What did these newspapers look like?
Like most newspapers of the day, [Whitman's] Eagle was a four-page, multicolumned paper with editorial and news on the second page, the other three pages being filled with advertisements, real estate listings, and political announcements.
And:
Late in 1849 [Whitman] served briefly as editor of a new penny paper, the New York Daily News, which suspended publication the following February, probably because of its noble but economically unwise policy of avoiding sensational news.
"Not greatness—never this nation great / But great in its ideal, always great of potential."