Humbug!: The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City's Penny Press

By Wendy Jean Katz

Offers a unique peek into myriad antebellum New York newspapers but most prominently the New York Herald, widely regarded as the leading exemplar of New York’s penny press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Empire State Editions
• Release date: Feb 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780823285396

Wendy Jean Katz

Wendy Katz is Professor of Art History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The most recent of her books are Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press (Fordham University Press) and The Trans Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898: Art, Anthropology, and Popular Culture at the Fin de Siècle.

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Humbug!

HUMBUG!

The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press

Wendy Jean Katz

AN IMPRINT OF FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK   2020

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

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First edition

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Penny Press

1    The Aristocracy of Art and Bennett’s Herald

2    Artists, Their Agents, and Press Manipulation

3    Old Masters versus Young America

4    The Penny Press’s Utopian Alternative

5    The Genteel and the Bohemian

6    Rearing Statues amid Gothic Spires

Conclusion: Art and Politics

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

I.1  Sun, February 17, 1834

I.2  Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, April 24, 1854

I.3  Herald, October 19, 1837

I.4  John Bleecker, Meeting of the Locofocos in the Park, Sunday Morning News, April 8, 1838

I.5  Walter Oddie, View across the Catskills, 1838

I.6  James Cafferty, Newsboy Selling the New-York Herald, 1857

1.1  Alfred Hoffy, R. P. Robinson, The Innocent Boy, 1836

1.2  John Vanderlyn, The Death of Jane McCrea, 1804

1.3  Henry Inman, Portrait of John Inman, c. 1828

1.4  Grand Fancy Dress Ball, Herald, March 2, 1840

1.5  Brilliant Bal Costume, Herald, March 5, 1840

1.6  Opening of the National Academy, Herald, April 27, 1840

1.7  William Page, Portrait of Colonel William Leete Stone, 1839

1.8  Henry Inman, Newsboy, 1841

1.9  J. J. Butler, The Newspaper Boys, New World, January 1, 1841

2.1  Dick Dropsy, An Office Beggar, Herald, December 29, 1840; The Loafer Literati of New York, Herald, December 8, 1844

2.2  Henry Inman, The Children of Bishop George Washington Doane, 1835

2.3  James McDougall, James Varick Stout, Sunday Mercury, December 1842

2.4  James Stout, Sketch of Fanny Elssler, c. 1841

2.5  William Page, Young Traders, 1842

2.6  William Page, Cupid and Psyche, 1843

2.7  Tompkins Matteson, The Spirit of ’76, Columbian Magazine, April 1846

3.1  Copy of The Assumption of the Virgin, after Francesco Albani, c. 1775–1825

3.2  New York Gallery of Fine Arts, Herald, December 15, 1844

3.3  Charles Burt, after Daniel Huntington, The Signing of the Death Warrant of Lady Jane Grey, 1848

3.4  Young America Celebrating the National Anniversary, Herald, July 6, 1847

3.5  Jesse Talbot, Happy Valley, from Rasselas, the Prince Meditating His Escape, 1841

3.6  Jesse Talbot, Christian at the Cross, 1847

4.1  Thomas Whitley, Passaic Falls, Spring, c. 1839

4.2  Alfred Jones, after Lilly Martin Spencer, One of Life’s Happy Hours, c. 1854

4.3  Henry Gray, The Wages of War, 1848

4.4  William Mount, Bishop Benjamin T. Onderdonk, c. 1830–1833

4.5  Henry Brown, Choosing of the Arrow, 1849

4.6  Thomas Whitley, View of New York City from Hoboken, New Jersey, 1865

5.1  Lilly Spencer, Jolly Washerwoman, 1851; Lilly Spencer, Shake Hands?, Cosmopolitan Art Journal, September 1857

5.2  The Cook, Dispatch, December 24, 1848; The Washerwomen, Dispatch, August 27, 1848

5.3  National Academy, Picayune, June 20, 1857

5.4  We Visit the Academy of Design, Vanity Fair, April 28, 1860

5.5  Karl Lessing, The Martyrdom of Hus, 1850; Christian Kohler, Awakening of Germania in 1848, 1849

5.6  Lilly Spencer, Young Husband, 1854

5.7  John McLenan, Scene in a Market House, Market-Scene, Yankee Notions, June and August 1853

6.1  Dispatch, January 23, 1848

6.2  Picayune, December 27, 1851

6.3  Philippe Garbeille, Guillot, n.d.

6.4  David d’Angers, Thomas Jefferson, 1834; Democratic Review, January 1846

6.5  Correspondence of Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, September 1, 1860

6.6  Engraving of the Washington Monument, after Walcutt’s Design, by William N. Dunnel, 1848

6.7  Henry Inman, A Valentine, Sunday Mercury, February 20, 1842

6.8  "The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers," Illustrated News, September 17, 1853; Artistic Feeling, Picayune, July 4, 1857

6.9  Henry Brown, George Washington, 1856

6.10  William Walcutt, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III at Bowling Green, 1857

6.11  Clark Mills, Andrew Jackson, 1853; Equestrian Statue of Jackson, Illustrated News, January 15, 1853

6.12  Frank Leslie, Inauguration Ceremonies of the Crystal Palace, "Kiss’s Statue of the Amazon," Illustrated News, July 23, 1853

6.13  President Pierce at the Opening of the Crystal Palace, Illustrated News, July 23, 1853

6.14  How He Is Bought into It, Picayune, January 24, 1857

6.15  Inauguration of the Perry Statue, at Cleveland, 1861; Perry Monument, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 15, 1860

C.1  The New Brown Stone Front Statue, Picayune, May 16, 1857; James Thom, George Washington, 1838

C.2  Henry Sadd, after Tompkins Matteson, Union Portrait, 1852

Humbug!

INTRODUCTION

The Penny Press

If newspapers cannot be made entertaining without a daily exhibition of poor human nature in its most miserable or contemptible points of view, let them be dull forever…. [Penny] papers are very extensively read, and that in very many instances by persons who read nothing else; they … corrupt and mislead their readers, by ministering to the morbid appetite for horrors and excitement, for the sake of increasing circulation…. A licentious and disorganizing press was among the forerunners of the French revolution.

—New York Spectator, May 2, 1836

The daily press and the cheap periodicals appear to possess the only strength—the only eloquence—the only nerve—the only real talent and genius…. The cheapness of the Penny literature and its sterling good sense—its foundation in science, art and genius, have opened for it a channel in every rank of life, and to every variety of mind.

—New York Herald, September 30, 1836

THIS BOOK ARGUES that the politics of the antebellum press affected the meaning of American art in ways that have gone unrecognized. In an era when political parties and factions were dissolving and reforming, artworks were an occasion for political positioning. By taking seriously the art criticism of mass-circulation newspapers, it is possible to see how art actually shaped antebellum politics. These cheap papers, though unquestionably part of the period’s expanding capitalist economy, offered socialists, working-class men, bohemians, and utopianists a forum in which they could propose new models for American art and society and tear down existing ones. This book accordingly traces the personal and political relationships between editors, writers, and artists that drove the terms of art criticism for thirty years, from the emergence of the penny press to the Civil War, years when art seemed most vulnerable to manipulation.

The inexpensive penny papers that appeared in the 1830s, unlike older, larger sixpenny dailies with subscription lists, relied on advertising and so on sensational stories and breaking news that would sell papers on the streets. These papers also were explicitly or implicitly motivated by local political conflicts and conviction. They therefore innovated new kinds of coverage of city politicians, markets, crime, and celebrities, including artists and art exhibitions. Newspaper commentary on art, with its rich language of personalities, satire, and partisan judgments, was equally aimed at contesting traditional sources of power in American society. Locating antebellum art and artists within the competing political aims and agendas of the penny press, particularly in the context of the drive to undermine cultural authority, brings the social and economic values that shaped the practice and consumption of art into sharper view.

Mass-circulation newspapers first appeared in the mid-1830s. Robert Hoe’s new industrial presses permitted newspaper proprietors to print tens of thousands of fairly small, easy-to-carry papers (fig. I.1). They sold for one or two pennies, an amount affordable to almost anyone in a period when a journeyman printer—a skilled artisan or mechanic—made about fourteen dollars a week, more than most newspaper writers. These papers as a group were quickly called, often with contempt for their vulgar, that is, working-class, readers, the penny press. The first successful one was the New York Sun in 1833, followed in that city by a host of others, most notably the Herald (1835), Tribune (1841), and Times (1851). These papers all adopted a new business model, one that relied on charging high prices for short-term advertising in widely circulated papers, instead of income from subscriptions, as had been the practice of the older, more expensive sixpenny papers. Suddenly, circulation mattered. In 1839, the Herald estimated its daily circulation at 15,000, the Sun’s at 25,000, and the total circulation of the cash or cheap press at 60,000 (versus a total of 14,000 for the sixpenny papers).¹ An army of newsboys bought the penny papers at discount from the downtown press buildings, near City Hall, then vended them to passersby on nearby streets, docks, and hotels, shouting the headlines—which were accordingly dramatic.

This sales model had consequences both for how penny editors determined what was news and for the style in which they wrote the news. Before considering how they transformed coverage of the arts, however, it’s important to note some of the consequences of the ways in which their business model diverged from the practices of older, established dailies, like the Commercial Advertiser or Evening Post. These Wall Street papers—an epithet reflecting their location and readership—relied for income on ten-dollar annual subscriptions from a small circulation base of 600 to 5,000. These papers were huge: two feet high and three feet wide (fig. I.2). This was partly because of the constraints of technology. Rather than adding pages, it was more practical—given the presses available and the way postage was calculated—to enlarge the paper by adding or lengthening columns whenever an increase in advertisements dictated. Penny papers did the same until the 1850s, when they started adding pages instead. But the size of these so-called blanket papers, with their dense sleepy columns of two-line ads, meant they were best read on a large table or desk. Even when folded, the sixpenny papers were not designed for a pocket or street sales, as were the penny papers. And to some extent, one did not need to subscribe to more than one Wall Street paper, as the basic information about auctions, markets, ship arrivals, and even election results did not vary greatly from one to another. Even the same advertisers appeared every day for a year.

Figure I.1. Sun, February 17, 1834, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Public domain; image provided by National Museum of American History. Most penny papers were small: three to six columns wide, fifteen to twenty inches high, four pages (one sheet, folded, front and back).

The wealth of the subscribers to the Wall Street papers was reflected in the advertisements that dominated their pages. Up to 75 percent of their pages were ads, and these ads were not primarily aimed at consumers. They represented import and export merchants, shipping companies, and auction houses, and they targeted commercial buyers and investors. One reason for subscribing to an Advertiser—a name that, like Commercial, Commerce, or Gazette, usually indicated a Whig affiliation for a newspaper—was to obtain the ads’ information on commercial goods. By contrast, the penny papers targeted consumers with ads for housing, jobs, and patent medicines, often with eye-catching pictures and verses. In sixpenny papers, an ad cost forty dollars a year; the same advertisement would cost about $1,000 in a penny paper like the Herald, which gave only about half the paper’s columns over to them. All the papers—except in instances of editorial religious objections—carried changing daily ads for theater and entertainment, the latter including book and magazine publishers, art galleries, and exhibitions, often with brief editorial notices or reviews, many of which were press releases or, as the period termed them, puffs.

But the penny papers emphasized their resistance to advertiser influence, especially to press releases masquerading as editorials. They claimed that unlike the sixpenny papers, which depended on large advertisers, they had no inducements to this disgusting practice. Their patrons were the readers, and so the penny press could claim to be the sworn enemy of humbug in every shape, humbug implying any notices or promotions that verged on imposture or false pretences. The penny workingman’s Transcript drew attention to Whig editor Colonel William L. Stone’s amusing review of his own book Tales and Sketches in his Commercial Advertiser. By contrast, the Transcript’s very organization reprobated such practices as advertisers paying for editorial publicity or concealing favoritism, practices that the sixpennies dare not notice.²

Similarly, the penny papers presented themselves as free from corrupting political influence. Because it was typical for a third of the annual subscriptions to the Wall Street dailies to go unpaid, to cover costs these papers also sought political subsidies. The penny papers, however, to attract the broadest sales and circulation possible, claimed to be nonpartisan: The Sun shone for all. This claim of manly independence of party was important for the penny papers. Neutrality was part of what permitted them to claim that they represented the ordinary man on the street rather than political or financial interests. In the first issue of the cheap weekly Sunday Dispatch, the editors promised bold, manly opinions and accordingly noted that they would not seek party patronage. As added support for their claim to manliness, they also pointed out that each of the three coeditors was over six feet tall.³

Figure I.2. Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, April 24, 1854, Library of Congress. Photographs provided by author. This influential Whig blanket sheet, or wet blanket, had eleven columns and was about five feet high.

The subscription papers fought back against charges of bias. The ten-dollar Whig Express argued that the penny press, rather than being able to advocate for the best political policy independently, in giving up partisanship had given up moral power, by trying to be all things to all men. It then rather weakened its own argument by saying that the penny press was only read by the poor and thus had no influence anyways.⁴ Their argument was further disabled when the Express, like almost all of the subscription papers, shifted to the penny-press cash model in the 1840s and 1850s.

A more effective criticism of the penny papers’ pose as neutrals was to accuse them of merely feigning impartiality. Horace Greeley, the editor of the most influential Whig penny paper, the Tribune, accused the Herald of pretending to adulate the Whigs while actually attacking them and described the Sun’s writings as imbued with locofoco (radical Democratic) spirit.⁵ And Greeley was right: though they were not dependent on party subsidies like the Wall Street papers, the penny papers—located on less elite downtown streets like Ann or Nassau—still had strong political allegiances. Their editors and writers, like those at the subscription papers, jockeyed for government office and influence as well as patronage, the latter in the form of post office and government advertising, which was awarded both to papers belonging to the current administration’s party and to papers with the highest circulations.

The cheapness of the penny papers meant that one could buy several papers or choose ones to purchase on a day-to-day basis. Accordingly, there was an explosion of cheap dailies and weeklies, the latter costing three or four cents. In 1839 there were forty-six papers, and by 1850 the Evening Post counted 106.⁶ As will be discussed in Chapter 1, because it required increasing amounts of capital to compete successfully, the artisanal printers who invented the concept were increasingly shut out; $500 was enough to start a paper like the Herald in the 1830s, but by the 1850s it took $100,000 to start the Times. Inevitably, many undercapitalized papers were short-lived, such as the Inveterate (edited by an inveterate punster), the Bubble (its very name ephemeral), the Regenerator (Associationist—that is, promoting communal living), the Broadway Belle (an example of what was called the flash press, a genre more scandalous than the penny papers, as indicated by its choice of a name closely tied to women on the street), the Splifincator (dedicated to mirth and sarcasm), the all-encompassing and cosmopolitan Universe (there was also the Globe, World, and New World, naturally), the White Man’s Newspaper (started in opposition to the colored man’s paper the Ram’s Horn), and on and on—even a Humbug.⁷ The number of relatively stable papers in New York in any given year probably ranged from ten to thirty, the higher number including the weeklies and the foreign-language (French, German, Celtic, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian) presses. As contemporaries observed, this outstripped any British or European city, despite their larger size.

Such media diversity gave expression to the fault lines among New York’s rapidly growing population. In 1833, the same year the first penny newspaper appeared, disgruntled Democrats founded the Whig Party. For the next thirty years, the Whigs operated as something of an omnibus party, united more by their opposition to Democratic policies of territorial expansion, laissez-faire economics, and expanded rights for working-class white men than by a coherent philosophy. In 1837, a financial panic occurring under the Democratic president and New Yorker Martin Van Buren gave oppositional Whig views a considerable boost. About 60 percent of newspapers were Whig, reflecting the varied character of that party and, perhaps, its greater wealth.⁸

Newspapers in every city, but especially in New York, emerged to cater to every possible faction: the Daniel Webster Whigs in the influential sixpenny Courier and Enquirer; the William Henry Harrison Whigs in Greeley’s cheap campaign paper the Log Cabin; the John Tyler Whigs, who were nearly Democrats, in Walter Whitman’s inexpensive Aurora; the Van Buren and then free-soil Democrats in fellow poet William Cullen Bryant’s sixpenny Evening Post; the locofocos in the suitably named penny Plebeian; the John Calhoun or Workingmen’s Democrats in the weekly Subterranean; the nativist Whigs in the Express; the Sabbatarian but free-trade Whigs in the Journal of Commerce; the proslavery Whigs in the Day Book; the hardest of hard or conservative Democrats in the Sunday Mercury; and so on. Factionalization led to similar diversity in the foreign-language presses, too. In the buildup to the European civil revolutions of 1848, for example, the more radical Franco-Américain emerged to compete with the monarchical Courrier des États-Unis.

Journalists at the extremely competitive penny papers pioneered circulation-boosting strategies for covering the news and directed them toward a readership that they represented as a broad public: They tried to speak for the people. Typically the white, male, urban journalist promised to uncover sensational (in the sense of corrupt, pandering, self-promoting, or licentious) behavior among powerful people or institutions, in the name of benefiting the ordinary person. Indeed, the journalist, despite himself often being employed by a wealthy and powerful media corporation, writes and acts as a representative of this common man. Art, with its umbilical cord of gold linking it to wealthy patrons, including the government and elite institutions, was one of the subjects, along with crime, high society, literature, and theater, exploited by the penny press in its quest to increase sales and advance society along lines congenial to each newspaper’s social agenda.⁹ Art critics too framed themselves as exposing humbug, insider agreements, and manipulated appearances for the benefit of the common man.

Editorial rivalries, which were inherently rivalries with opposing political positions, further spurred coverage of art along with other local affairs that promised an opportunity to uncover the true character of their opponents. As the first penny paper in the United States wrote, it was a period when every incident of a public character is made an instrument for political purposes, as fondness for politics is the national character.¹⁰ Typically an elite weekly frowned on the resulting lack of decorum in the writing of the penny papers, observing that each paltry cabal in the press gave personal abuse to its political adversaries. The implication was that controversies over art or street cleaning or any issue were motivated or manufactured by political agendas; without such agendas, there would be an agreeable harmony over what was good and right. A cheap weekly put it differently, though they too acknowledged political interests were at play in newspaper coverage of most of issues: Party [partisan] editors look at a political document as party artists look at a picture—in different lights. The results are amusingly absurd. They followed this up with their conviction that there nevertheless was a true light in which to survey both pictures and documents: the light of the good of the nation, a light that in their case happened mostly to illuminate Whig policies.¹¹ In this society that all agreed was saturated by politics, a saturation that reached new levels in the years leading up to the Civil War, one journal suggested that only women were fit to be art critics, as it was precisely their status as nonvoters that made them capable of writing without prejudice.¹²

Compared to Britain and Europe, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the influence of a politicized press on art in the United States.¹³ Some of this work, though, has been done for antebellum literature and theater. Scholars who focus on definitive moments such as the Astor Place Opera House riot of 1849, in which city police killed unarmed citizens in a controversy over a British actor’s appearance on stage, have delineated how the press framed preference for opera or melodrama as a statement of political allegiance.¹⁴ Historians and art historians have studied the political intent of patrons and art institutions with explicit nation-building agendas, such as the American Art-Union.¹⁵ There have also been a few studies of individual art critics, particularly the editors of the art journal Crayon, because of their association with the Pre-Raphaelites.¹⁶ Other scholars have positioned art making as one of a range of new metropolitan practices, including press criticism and a variety of popular entertainments, that together defined a modern urban identity. This approach often sets aside political divisions as factional disputes within an otherwise unified middle or upper class.¹⁷ Nevertheless, the urbanites who supported more than a hundred papers and periodicals in New York City in any given year did not dismiss politics as irrelevant.¹⁸ Art historians who rely on newspapers for insights into American cultural attitudes, including attitudes toward artistic styles, ought similarly to bear in mind that criticism in any one paper—rather than reflecting a broad consensus—was often motivated by personal, which is to say political, infighting. Even more importantly, that infighting so characteristic of the penny press shaped how art was assessed.

The Civil War, while it did not close all the fissures in the two parties, did force them into new political alignments and greater social solidarity. After Fort Sumter, crowds (mobs, to some) took to the street in front of the penny papers and forced those with Democratic, pro-Southern sympathies to raise the stars and stripes. One formerly Democratic paper in response claimed that the war has obliterated all traces of party politics in the North. Perhaps not coincidentally, in the same paper’s review of a painting that had just been renamed The North, it said that opinion of it must wait until the Mutual Admiration Society have given their verdict.¹⁹ That mocking phrase had been in use since the 1840s, when it referred to a Democratic circle of editors, but by 1861 it pointed to a Republican coalition. Antislavery Democrats and Whigs had formed the Republican Party, and their penny papers, the Tribune and Times, along with weeklies like Harper’s and monthlies like Putnam’s or, farther afield, Boston’s Atlantic Monthly, had a new economic grip on the market. Many former competitors folded.

But even in the 1850s, the merger that led to the Republican Party’s dominance in the North was already visible in the demand for a more professional and less politicized press, including its art criticism. The Crayon, the first successful art journal edited by professional artists, in 1861 published a burlesque of just this politicization. In the satire, the newspaper critic is a journalist who writes without specialized knowledge of the arts to attract an equally uninformed audience. He finds in a genre painting’s interior—its crockery and clapboards—the cardinal principles that support the Union. The artist denies it, instead crediting his gal Sally for telling him to put in these various elements (once again, women secure the nonpolitical character of art).²⁰ The point of the article is of course to mock critical overreaching for meaning. But the very idea that the Crayon artists, who disliked low or comic pictures like the one described anyways, felt impelled to defend a version of art for art’s sake—crockery for crockery’s sake—is telling of how common it was for newspaper criticism, explicitly or implicitly, to serve or invoke political agendas.

The demand for depoliticized criticism in fact extended back to the penny press’s origins. Part of the penny papers’ rhetoric from the start was the position they assumed as outsiders who fearlessly roved the streets (or parlors) and recorded matters that decorum—or a more sinister desire to conceal upper-class wrongdoing—prevented the Wall Street press from printing. Often in alliance with Democratic doctrines that attacked state-chartered corporations and monopolies, the penny papers promised to expose insider trading, open up closed social and business circles, and call out corruption that led to favoritism for jobs and other prizes.²¹ Their style in doing so horrified the members of those closed circles, who saw the attacks as a form of class warfare. One fairly mild critique at the time said they relied on balderdash, ribaldry, obscenity, and disgusting details of misery and crime. Blackmail was another common accusation, but as the penny press rebutted, this was more a matter of them not protecting or concealing the names and positions of wealthy miscreants and instead exposing their misdeeds and callousness while advocating for the just claims of the poor.²²

The style of the penny press and what it identified as newsworthy was thus itself political. Its panache was deliberately popular or at least more dramatic and satirical, especially in its approach to local events and actors, than the sixpenny press. That dramatic character often correctly conveyed that a controversy was staged. The narrator of an 1838 stage play about life in New York promised audiences that they would see tricks and capers, / Such as you look for daily in the papers.²³ That same year, Scotsman James Gordon Bennett, editor of the Herald, a paper so famous for its style that its reporters were specifically satirized in another city-life play, articulated this strategy for giving art in particular new—newsworthy—meaning. In an editorial, he described greeting the Providence, Rhode Island, steamer at the wharf, only to be surrounded by a dozen ragged hatless urchins offering him his own Morning Herald, with all the particulars of the pictures in the ’cademy. This referred to the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition. Bennett responds to this come-on that he’s no painter and don’t care a cent for pictures. "But maybe you’d give two cents for an account on ’em is the answer.²⁴ The penny press is not, in this self-presentation as an exchange between streetwise youths and a shrewd businessman, addressing an audience of connoisseurs; its role is to give art value even to those—such as the man on the street"—with no interest in pictures. To make art news is to replace the private or familial consumption of luxury goods with a more public and popular—dramatic—accounting.

These tricks and capers were in turn, like stage plays, frequently adapted from British and continental journals. Criticism in the foreign press, as one New York journal explained, distinguishing it from the American press’s mere indiscriminate puffery, was biased wholly by personal or political considerations, controlled by sordid and interested, corrupt and venal organs of coteries, factions, and cliques, whether literary or political, in order to promote friends and punish enemies.²⁵ Many of the editors and writers of the cheap papers, like Bennett, were indeed foreign-born, something the Wall Street papers, typically edited by native-born, college-educated Protestant men, held against them. To Whigs at the more expensive papers, their style was Cockney, so not just working class but with a vulgar accent to boot. These editors’ slashing style of criticism, which was pioneered by partisan (Tory) British journals like Blackwood’s or Fraser’s, often depended on billingsgate’s crudities. One Herald editor counted forty-five adjectives for villain in a rival newspaper’s column describing Bennett, the Herald’s chief editor.²⁶ As this indicates, the penny press employed the personal, whether for abuse, or when pioneering I instead of the more magisterial editorial we, or when interviewing criminals. Local stories, because they often featured specific noted individuals, had more prominence (the most insignificant events can be swelled to matters of great moment, if they are traced up eternity to their causes).²⁷ To acquire personal information, editors sought tips and information from the public, not just from preselected correspondents.

When these papers have their strategies simply dismissed as sensational ploys for wider circulation, their significance is lost. The self-proclaimed Napoleon of the press James Gordon Bennett, a target because of his success with the penny Herald, was whipped in the street by politicians and editors, regularly sued for libel, had his family socially and publicly isolated, and was the subject of an organized economic boycott. The Wall Street press’s violent attacks on him, like its milder denunciations of the other penny papers, had to do with his willingness to publish individual misdeeds (embezzlement, adultery, bankruptcy) on the part of the wealthy, but it was also a reaction to the real threat that penny-press stories posed to the city’s governing elites.²⁸ For example, Bennett early turned to images to supplement his muckraking, as in a cartoon of the Devil on Wall Street (fig. I.3). One of his favorites, he used the cartoon repeatedly, varying the identification of the devil’s allies as necessary for the particular situation. In this instance, he recommends that stock investors would be better served if the Board of Brokers allowed the public, in the form of the press, to monitor their meetings. The penny press’s verbal and visual strategies of self-promotion, scandal, and even blasphemy were sometimes warranted forms of critique, and they helped shape taste and feeling against the real power of these elites.

Figure I.3. Herald, October 19, 1837, p. 4, Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

The cliques described by the penny press were not imaginary, and they controlled many parts of public life. As late as 1854, Columbia University’s trustees rejected a chemistry professor because he was Unitarian. One paper that reviewed the candidates before the decision was made had noted that the Jewish scientist would likely not be considered but had given the Unitarian a chance. As the Evening Post, whose editor, Bryant, was Unitarian too, observed, the problem with the trustees was not simply their violation of the university’s state charter barring religious tests. The real problem was, in modern parlance, the lack of diversity of the trustees, who, like the university’s president, were not just Episcopalian but belonged to the same wealthy church, Trinity. The episode highlights not the prevalence of religious bigotry (though it was prevalent) but how closed New York’s various boards, trustees, and managing committees were. Nor were these close circles of religion and politics limited to private institutions. When Theodore Frelinghuysen, the future Whig vice-presidential candidate, was inaugurated as New York University’s president in 1839, the Whig Commercial Advertiser enthusiastically reproduced his warning that the desire for knowledge may become inordinate and dangerous. Stone, the editor of the Commercial Advertiser, was committed to keeping the Protestant Bible in the public schools; his chief associate editor, John Inman, served on charitable boards with Frelinghuysen. It was the Democratic penny Sun that criticized his speech as inappropriate for a university president, and it was the threepenny Democratic weekly Sunday Mercury that outright accused Frelinghuysen of fostering religious fanaticism. For Catholics, Jews, and anticlericalists like Bennett and many others in the cheap press, exposing the machinations of such exclusive institutions served the public good as well as their self-interest.²⁹

The penny press’s construction of art exhibitions as news according to the same model by which it represented universities, Congress, or society balls—namely, in terms of favoritism and conflict between old fogies and young contenders—reflects this penny-press style of dramatization, with its accompanying attack on cliques and their interests. So, for example, when Bennett finally got from the docks to his desk in the story quoted earlier and was casting about for copy to comprise the day’s paper, he dismissed a proposed story that Young Bleecker has painted some beautiful pictures, now in the Academy because Everyone knows that. The implication is that the public (everyone) has good judgment and knows the truth about art. So the critic must either investigate the possibly hidden production of this agreement by interested parties or discover overlooked genius, in either case manufacturing conflict and creating a sensation. At the same time, revealing this editorial process, exposing the humbug or artifice behind coming up with news, shores up the image of an independently critical press, one capable of speaking for everyone.

This anecdote, at the same time, points to the relationships between artists and editors and how they decided whom to promote or condemn in their columns. John R. Bleecker was a scion of the Whig auctioneer and advertiser James W. Bleecker. It was James W. Bleecker, in his Wall Street office, who showed his son’s caricature of a Democratic rally to Bennett in 1838.³⁰ In his design, the energy of the crowd of Wall Street shinbones, roarers, busters, convicts, loafers, and pickpockets is fuel for the buoyant leaders of the radical Democrats, who include Slam, Levi Slamm, another penny-paper editor. John R. Bleecker’s Loafers and locofoco meeting in the Park actually appeared in the Sunday Morning News: The editor Samuel Jenks Smith, like Bennett a former Democrat turned Whig, pirated it from the engraver (fig. I.4).

Figure I.4. J. J. Butler, after John R. Bleecker, Meeting of the Locofocos in the Park, Sunday Morning News, April 8, 1838, New York Public Library. Public domain; image provided by New York Public Library.

But Bennett continued to praise Young Bleecker, as an amateur, outside the National Academy of Design, often pairing him with the stockbroker and amateur artist Walter M. Oddie, who with a few brushstrokes could produce an exquisitely clever little landscape. In their pictures, quiet, unpretending is the true spirit of the artist; they are praised for not seeking the brilliant (presumably commercially motivated) effects chosen by the Academy professional (fig. I.5). But because Bleecker lacked a friend inside the Academy, his pictures were hung too low, and his genius was compelled to make room for self-satisfied, superficial dogmatists who follow the supposed rules of art.³¹ This division that the press created between insiders and outsiders, professionals and amateurs, gave the newspaper authenticity. It backed not the principle of representing (authentic) nature so much as the nature of the authentic self. Bleecker’s sketchier style signals his honest, unpretending self, as the spectacle of a newsboy’s rags certifies his authenticity as an outsider—and that of the penny newspaper he carries. That paper, often in the working-class boy’s voice, speaks for them (and for the man on the street) against the rulebound.

Figure I.5. Walter Mason Oddie, A View across the Catskills, 1838, oil on canvas, 36 × 50 inches, private collection. Public domain; image provided by Butterfield & Butterfield.

Understandably, then, in papers with close personal ties to the Academy’s artists and considerable enmity toward the encroaching Herald, Bleecker was dismissed as gross and vulgar, void of merit, and not worth his place in the show.³² Horace Greeley’s inexpensive Whig New-Yorker said Bleecker’s American Scenery would do considerable discredit to a Miss of fourteen, equating amateur status with a less desirable sort of outsider status, femininity. H, a contributor to the Whig sixpennies, offered mild praise to an artist whose family was well known to the expensive Episcopalian papers: His work is promising, as good as anything we ever saw from him. A letter from Plain Common Sense in the Democratic Evening Post, however, says that H’s art criticism reveals that a woman wrote it, and she ought to have stuck with just showing her work to her governess. This neatly aligns the sixpenny Post, which hadn’t mentioned Bleecker in its reviews, with more businesslike, practical, beef-eating and money-making male professionals.³³ The Whig Evening Star, despite having had Bleecker and Oddie as subscribers, was by 1840 a profound enemy to the Herald; thus, genre paintings by Bleecker that the Herald had called excellent in effect, pleasing as a whole, with fine touches by an uncommonly clever young artist, were disparaged as beneath criticism, with no merit that we can perceive. The five-dollar Mirror, which hired Whig subeditors, warned about young artists who want to produce a flashy effect by superficial means to win public approval and considered Bleecker as painting an implausible and very flashy hill. Like his backer the upstart Herald, his pictures were guilty of too much self-promotion.³⁴

The criticism of Bleecker during the few years he was in the public eye (1837–1845) doesn’t quite divide along partisan lines. He came from a prominent family and shared the Whig taste for satirizing working-class Democrats as rowdy and uncontrolled, but few Whig critics praised his pictures. Having the Herald back