by Doug Cumming, Washington & Lee University
I am putting together my syllabus for “Introduction to Mass Communications.” I will teach it for the first time. It sweeps across an awful lot of history, and communication theory, and sociology, and industry structures, and the fact that “media” is plural – very plural. As I pilfer the syllabi of colleagues who have taught this 100-level beginning course, I wonder: Where is the cast of characters?
Where are the stories of the eccentric printers, skulking reporters, the plutocratic publishers?
I know, I know. Journalism is only a part of the media landscape. And history is only one layer of any media & society survey course. And it’s no longer cool to teach history (even the most superficial run-through) as a Grand Narrative, much less one with Dramatis Personae.
But I want people in my stories – in the lede, if possible. I teach that in Introduction to News Writing. The same journalistic urge makes me want to invite characters from past and present into this JOUR101 course I’m preparing to teach. Come on in, old buddies.
It’s not that Ben Franklin, Heyward Broun, Henry Luce and such figures aren’t mentioned in my Media/Impact textbook, the 10th edition by a former editor of the trustworthy American Journalism. But I wish I could bring in something of the pioneers’ full personalities, their inventiveness and outrageous rule-breaking. I want the telling of stories, like those that Christopher B. Daly packs into his 533-page Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism.
Daly’s sketch of “Harry” Luce has him starting Time with his prep-school rival-buddy Brit Hadden because, at 25, they had “connections that ran deep into the heart of the American establishment, they had the youthful ability to ignore the high likelihood of failure, and they had very good timing.” As for Heyword Broun, he grew fed up with General Pershing’s total muzzling of American reporters covering the Great War. Broun returned to New York and in the Tribune broke “one of the great open secrets of the war – the nearly complete failure to equip the U.S. Expeditionary Force with guns and ammunition.” It cost him his credentials and his $10,000 bond.
And Ben Franklin? Daly begins his narrative with this cagy youth, a printer’s devil apprenticed to his older brother James. It’s early spring, 1722, and the 16-year-old boy is sneaking through the narrow twilit streets of Boston. He had written a precociously literary piece he knew his brother wouldn’t publish if he knew it was by his little brother. So he had a copy without his name attached and slipped it under the door of the closed print shop. It was published, and much enjoyed around the print shop, giving Ben the secret thrill that would draw so many American journalists into the trade – that exciting rush of being published and read for the first time.
I enjoy even more the stories of the eccentrics and outsiders, the ones who don’t usually make journalism history but in their own way, embody it. Lafcadio Hearn, for instance. I am fascinated by this exotic writer of obscure Greek-isle birth, deformed and half-blind, who excited attention with his gothic and strange stories in the daily papers of Cincinnati and New Orleans from 1871 until 1890. After that, Hearn left for Japan, where he transformed himself into a scholar and writer of Japanese folkways, taking a Japanese name and wife; Japan is where his grave and renown remain. But his journalism ought to be taught today.
His reporting included drinking blood at a kosher slaughterhouse and climbing a water tower with a steeplejack—anything to indulge his literary Muse of the Odd. “Enormous and lurid facts,” Hearn wrote, “are certainly worthy of more artistic study than they generally receive.”
Another wonderful figure I would bring to life in class is Ambrose Bierce. Bierce is known for his short stories and The Devil’s Dictionary, and for vanishing in 1913 in Mexico, where he had gone, like some early gonzo journalist, “with a pretty definite purpose . . . not at present discloseable.” Bierce was one of William Randolph Heart’s star columnists in California for more than 20 years. A book of Bierce’s ghost and horror stories is introduced by a writer named E.F. Bleiler, who describes Bierce hilariously. “He was courtly and suave in manner, even when he was in his cups,” Bleiler writes. “Extremely soft-spoken, still gentler and even more urbane when he became angry, he bewildered strangers who had expected to find a roaring bully. Most people were greatly impressed with him upon first meeting, and most who remained to know him better came to dislike him intensely. . .”
The challenge in the classroom is to have those brave and unbalanced characters of the wild, wild press make “understanding media” more interesting and real. I don’t know if students can relate, or if I am enough of a storyteller. I worry that Luce and the rest will sink into that static pool of textbook “facts,” not the enormous and lurid kind but the facts that barely register with students except as something to memorize for the exam.
My own inspiration came early, from having a father who ran the Newsweek bureau in Atlanta when it was covering the civil rights years of the 60s and 70s. After I started as a newspaper reporter in Raleigh in ’74, my appreciation steadily grew for that Southern band of brothers who covered the changing South – Ralph McGill, Gene Patterson, Claude Sitton, Harry Ashmore, Bill Emerson. The survivors would get together each year until 2000 for a “seminar” of drinking and confabulating with their patron saint John Popham, who began New York Times coverage of the South in 1947. These were colorful personalities like you wouldn’t believe.
Putting remarkable people into a survey course, giving it some full-bodied human noise, doesn’t have to mean reducing history to biography. It can mean the opposite, reaching for what the late James W. Carey called the history of consciousness. It’s not history’s actions, events or technologies that change through time so much as it is the cultural history, the way it felt to its key actors and its ordinary people. This is how Carey put it when he wrote about “the problem of journalism history” some 30 years ago. I think that is why I want to give the personalities of media history more depth, to make a survey of mass communication be closer to the history of consciousness.