Shaping Chicago's Sense of Self: Chicago Journalism in The

Richard Junger. Becoming the Second City: Chicago's Mass News Media, 1833-1898. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. xiv + 235 pp. $25.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-252-07785-2. Reviewed by Jon Bekken Published on Jhistory (August, 2011) Commissioned by Donna Harrington-Lueker (Salve Regina University) In this book, Richard Junger explores the de‐ sensibilities that often dominated local politics. velopment of the Chicago press in the nineteenth This is a particularly valuable study because it century (from 1833, when the city’s frst newspa‐ leads Junger to focus on a period that has re‐ per appeared, until 1898), looking at several key ceived relatively little attention, particularly from moments to understand the press’s role in shap‐ journalism historians, and once again reminds us ing the city’s development and its sense of itself. that the practice of journalism by no means uni‐ The jacket copy calls attention to Junger’s discus‐ formly followed the progressive narrative that sion of the 1871 fre, the Haymarket Square inci‐ still too often shapes our approaches. dent, the Pullman Strike, and the World’s My major criticism of this very useful work is Columbian Exposition--all from the fnal two the extent to which it persists in treating Chicago decades of the study--but this material occupies journalism as a singular entity, and one distinct less than half the book, and is not its most signifi‐ from other centers of social power. Junger’s subti‐ cant contribution. Junger’s key focus is the path tle refers to “Chicago’s Mass News Media,” per‐ that led Chicago to become America’s second city-- haps in recognition of the fact that his focus on a campaign of civic boosterism that obviously English-language daily newspapers excludes the aimed significantly higher, but nonetheless played vast majority of titles published in the city. Refer‐ a central role in elevating a small frontier town ences to “mass news media” pepper the opening into a leading city over the course of several pages, but I looked in vain for a definition. Junger decades. Junger asserts that this newspaper cru‐ gives his most extensive discussion to the Chicago sade “creat[ed] a unifying force among Chicago’s Daily News (1876-1978), Chicago Democrat disparate population and classes” (p. x), though I (1833-61), Chicago Evening Journal (1840-1929), have seen little evidence for this in the labor and Chicago Inter-Ocean (1865-1914), and especially immigrant press, or in the seemingly parochial the Chicago Times (1854-95) and Chicago Tribune H-Net Reviews (1844?–present). While he does discuss the Chica‐ could benefit from more engagement with the goer Arbeiter-Zeitung (1874-1924) and the Illinois ways particular newspapers spoke to and on be‐ Staats-Zeitung (1848-1921), the New York Times half of particular classes and cultural formations. receives more extensive attention, judging from It is a far more nuanced and comprehensive ap‐ the length of the index entries. proach to nineteenth-century Chicago journalism Junger has read widely, often using databases than anything we have seen previously. (I leave to to facilitate the work, consulting the fles of the the side David Nord’s body of work, which also leading Chicago dailies but also online archives of suffers from too exclusive a focus on the English- African American periodicals and other newspa‐ language press but better appreciates the varied pers from across the country that mentioned nature of the journalistic ideologies operating in Chicago (some hardly the leading papers of their the Chicago newspaper scene and the niches dif‐ day). His bibliography lists ffteen Chicago news‐ ferent papers served; while Nord’s work begins papers, though some have evidently been consult‐ with the closing decades of the nineteenth centu‐ ed much less thoroughly (there are only a handful ry, it continues well into the twentieth, and so he of references to the two German-language dailies is fundamentally dealing with a later period, in his list), and eleven out-of-town papers, heavily when Chicago was well established as a major ur‐ weighted to the New York City press. Junger also ban center.) consulted surviving archival records, particularly Junger’s blinkered approach is perhaps most for the Daily News and Tribune (although there jarring when he discussed the Haymarket inci‐ are archival records for the Democrat and other dent, which he sees almost entirely through the early papers that might also have proved useful). eyes of the hysterical English-language press. While frontier Chicago was a predominantly Chicago’s anarchist movement was not an entirely Anglophone community, by the 1870s the city had marginal affair in the 1880s--it published a daily developed a substantial German-speaking com‐ newspaper, weeklies in two other languages, munity and press, and other foreign-language dominated the city’s predominantly German- communities and newspapers played a prominent speaking Central Labor Union, and regularly orga‐ role by the 1890s. Indeed, the Chicago Daily News, nized marches and picnics with thousands of par‐ the city’s new journalism pioneer which is cited ticipants. And it has been reasonably well docu‐ extensively in the study, was founded in a corner mented by historians, several of whom Junger of the Skandinaven (1866-1941) newspaper of‐ cites in his notes. However, Junger treats this fices. This vibrant foreign-language press is per‐ movement with disdain, referring to its press haps less relevant to Junger’s larger discussion of “coming ... under the editorial control of August how the press shaped Chicago’s image nationally, Spies” (p. 111; Spies was an upholsterer and labor but it certainly played a major role in shaping the activist who became editor of the daily Chicagoer city’s own understandings of itself. Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1880 and hanged by the state of Illinois in 1887 on the basis of articles pub‐ This narrowed focus is unfortunate, as Junger lished in the paper), a formulation that ignores in many ways offers a useful corrective to our the significant fact that the editors and managers field’s tendency to tell media history in isolation, of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and its sister papers were and through a quasi-biographical approach. Be‐ elected to six-month terms by the community in‐ coming the Second City is a serious attempt at cul‐ stitutions that owned the papers. Similarly, Junger tural history, and one that draws on an impres‐ refers to “a lack of success in the local political sive array of sources. Junger clearly recognizes arena” (p. 111) radicalizing Spies, when the that the press was not monolithic, even if his book record is clear that many German workers turned 2 H-Net Reviews to anarchism after Chicago officials refused to re‐ legal lynching against people they saw as a men‐ spect the results of elections in which labor candi‐ ace to their continued power. dates won the vote in some districts but were not While Junger sometimes writes as if the press seated. was an independent actor in all of this, the lead‐ While it is but an offhand remark, Junger ing English dailies were in fact part and parcel of refers to the working-class Lehr und Wehr Verein the ruling order. In the decades leading up to militia as among “the same type of organizations Chicago’s emergence as an industrial and trans‐ that would aid the growth of Adolf Hitler’s Nation‐ portation powerhouse, the press was not merely al Socialist Party during the 1920s” (p. 111, no boosterish, as Junger establishes in his opening footnote is provided for this claim). There is not chapters. Like most journalism historians, Junger the slightest basis for such a characterization. The tends to treat newspapers as independent actors, Verein (the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court deci‐ shaping more than shaped by the society they sion that workers did not have Second Amend‐ serve. Like John Nerone (who frst raised this ar‐ ment rights after Illinois outlawed the group) was gument in his The Culture of the Press in the Early organized to provide security at movement Republic: Cincinnati, 1793-1848 [1989]), I believe events, to provide training and recreational op‐ the media are best understood ecologically, em‐ portunities to its members, and to serve as a coun‐ bedded in a network of relationships, and in the terweight to the organized violence being visited context of those relationships. Take Long John against Chicago’s labor movement on a daily ba‐ Wentworth, for example. He was indeed a pioneer sis. There is not a single documented instance of when he took charge of the weekly Democrat in Verein members attacking opponents or fring 1836 and built it up into a political powerhouse their weapons outside of organized presentations and the city’s frst successful daily, even if his and target practice. The rest of Junger’s discussion Democrat was redolent of a bygone era of person‐ of Haymarket is more even-handed, noting the al political organs just twenty-five years later regular incitements to violence in the mainstream (when he sold it to the Tribune). But Wentworth press and the lynch mob atmosphere it helped was simultaneously an editor, a politician (serv‐ sustain, even if (like Paul Avrich’s The Haymarket ing six terms in Congress and two as mayor), and Tragedy [1984] before him; Avrich offers a differ‐ a real estate speculator. None of these can be un‐ ent candidate in Dave Roediger and Franklin derstood in isolation from one another, or in iso‐ Rosemont’s Haymarket Scrapbook [1986] he gives lation from the political machine he built and rather more attention to theories about who which continued to exercise significant influence threw the bomb than either the evidence or the is‐ years after Wentworth’s Democrat no longer pub‐ sue merits.

Load more