Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston Cameron Blevins For this article’s accompanying online component, see Cameron Blevins, “Min- ing and Mapping the Production of Space,” http://spatialhistory.stanford.edu/ viewoftheworld. On a rainy spring evening in 1898 the Texas newspaper editor Rienzi Johnston found himself in Chicago’s Grand Pacifc Hotel for the annual banquet of the Associated Press (ap). Johnston and eighty-seven fellow editors from across the country dined alongside two full-size printing presses built out of fowers and candy while seated at tables ar- ranged to form the initials ap. Over little-neck clams and roast snipe they listened to a series of speeches on the defning issues of the day. A prominent lawyer defended the As- sociated Press and its powerful national news syndicate from charges of monopoly, while a string of boisterous toasts celebrated the recent outbreak of war between the United States and Spain. In a ft of patriotism, one southern editor rose from his chair to declare that three decades removed from a bloody civil war, “Our People: they know no North, no South, no East, no West.” Johnston was no stranger to national integration. Tis editor of a midsize regional paper served as Texas’s delegate to the Democratic National Committee, briefy flled a vacated seat in the U.S. Senate, and was a rising leader within the ap’s ranks. Johnston moved comfortably in a web of national associations and afli- ations that extended well beyond his ofce in Houston and the carefully arranged tables of the Chicago banquet hall.1 Cameron Blevins is a doctoral candidate in history at Stanford University. Many thanks to Erik Steiner, Kathy Harris, Jake Coolidge, Zephyr Frank, and the rest of the Stanford Spatial History Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Tis project grew out of a larger partnership between the University of North Texas and Stanford University, and I extend my gratitude to Andrew Torget and Jon Chris- tensen for their support. Funding was provided by the Stanford Fund for Innovation in the Humanities and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Te article benefted from extensive feedback by the Stanford U.S. His- tory Workshop, Ed Linenthal, and the JAH reviewers. Bridget Baird and Don Blevins provided not just expertise in computer science and statistics but many years of exceptional parenting. Above all, I would like to thank my adviser Richard White for his guidance, generosity, and patience. Readers may contact Blevins at [email protected]. 1 Te Associated Press Sixth Annual Report: Te Board of Directors to the Stockholders at the Seventh Annu- al Meeting, Held at Chicago, May 17, 1899 (New York, 1899), 209–32, esp. 227, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ nyp.33433082527858. Rienzi Johnston was a former president of the Texas Press Association and would later serve as the vice president for the Associated Press. For Johnston’s involvement in the Associated Press, see American News- paper Publishers Association Bulletin, no. 1139, March 4, 1904, p. 90; “M. E. S.”: His Book, a Tribute and a Souve- nir of the Twenty-Five Years, 1893–1918, of the Service of Melville E. Stone as General Manager of the Associated Press doi: 10.1093/jahist/jau184 © Te Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. 122 Te Journal of American History June 2014 Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region 123 As Johnston raised his glass of champagne in Chicago on the evening of May 18, 1898, thousands of readers in Texas opened up the Wednesday edition of his newspaper, the Houston Daily Post. Tey were met with a furry of news items from places scattered across space: a tornado swept across Nebraska, Spanish warships docked in Puerto Rico, and Texas’s dentist association convened in Waco. Te Baltimore Orioles won both games of a doubleheader with the Philadelphia Phillies, and a fre broke out in a Houston laun- dry. Nebraska, Spain, Puerto Rico, Waco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Houston merged into a constellation of locations that readers used to craft mental maps of the world. By printing some places more than others, papers such as the Houston Daily Post continually reshaped space for nineteenth-century Americans. Johnston’s national connections and the expansive daily geography of his paper point to a larger question: How did newspa- pers construct space in an age of nationalizing forces?2 Historians have traditionally experienced an uneasy relationship with space and place. Some still operate under the old positivist paradigm of, in the geographer Edward Soja’s formulation, seeing space as an empty vessel for human action. In recent decades, how- ever, the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences has re-centered questions of space and place for historians. Te work of Henri Lefebvre stands at the heart of this shift. Te French philosopher’s Te Production of Space oriented a generation of historians to the ideas that space is socially constructed and that this process is crucial to understand- ing a society. Far from being a passive backdrop, space is constitutive, ever-changing, and strongly tied to processes of power. Other spatial thinkers from the 1970s onward simi- larly worked against geography’s positivist tradition in their articulation of place. Scholars such as Yi-Fu Tuan, Denis Cosgrove, Michel de Certeau, Doreen Massey, and Edward Casey ofer theoretical frameworks for how societies and individuals transform space into a particular, defned place by inscribing locations with meanings, values, feelings, and imaginings. Place is constructed through multiple channels, from lived experiences to emotional attachments to acts of naming.3 (New York, 1918), 307; and Richard Allen Schwarzlose, Te Nation’s Newsbrokers, vol. II: Te Rush to Institution, from 1865 to 1920 (Evanston, 1990), 256, 258. For his involvement in the Texas Press Association, see F. B. Bail- lio, A History of the Texas Press Association: From Its Organization in Houston in 1880 to Its Annual Convention in San Antonio in 1913 (Dallas, 1916), 125, 134. For his involvement in the Democratic National Committee, see Frank W. Johnson, A History of Texas and Texans, ed. Eugene C. Barker (4 vols., Chicago, 1916), IV, 2014–16; and Te Baltimore Sun, Almanac for 1901 (Baltimore, 1901), 60. For biographical information on Johnston, including his stint as a U.S. senator in 1913, see “Johnston, Rienzi Melville,” Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tshaonline .org/handbook/online/articles/fo38. 2 “A Tornado in Nebraska,” Houston Daily Post, May 18, 1898, p. 4, http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/ metapth82891/m1/4/; James Gordon Bennett, “Te Spanish Fleet,” ibid., p. 1, http://texashistory.unt.edu/ ark:/67531/metapth82891/m1/1/; “A Summary of Today’s Important News,” ibid., p. 3, http://texashistory.unt .edu/ark:/67531/metapth82891/m1/3/; “Te National League,” ibid.; “Fire in a Laundry,” ibid. On the concept of mental maps, see Peter Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps (New York, 1974); Alan K. Henrikson, “Mental Maps,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Tomas G. Paterson (New York, 1991), 177–92; and Alan K. Henrikson, “Te Geographical ‘Mental Maps’ of American Foreign Policy Mak- ers,” International Political Science Review, 1 (Oct. 1980), 495–530. 3 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: Te Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Teory (London, 1989). On the “spatial turn,” see the introductory essay for the special issue “Historical gis: Te Spatial Turn in Social Science History,” Anne Kelly Knowles, “Introduction,” Social Science History, 24 (Fall 2000), 451–70; Anne Kelly Knowles and Amy Hillier, eds., Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (Red- lands, 2008); Diarmid A. Finnegan, “Te Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of Science,” Journal of the History of Biology, 41 (Summer 2008), 369–88; and Charles W. J. Withers, “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and in History,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 70 (Oct. 2009), 637–58. Henri Lefebvre, Te Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). Other infuential works on the production of 124 Te Journal of American History June 2014 Questions of space and place appear, both explicitly and implicitly, in some of the most infuential historical scholarship of the past two decades. In Gay New York (1994) George Chauncey mapped the changing “sexual topography” of New York City as men appro- priated neighborhoods, cafeterias, and bathhouses into a gay male world. Walter John- son engaged in a rich analysis of place in Soul by Soul (1999) by arguing that southern antebellum slavery crystallized at the particular site of the slave market. Scholars such as Becky Nicolaides, Robert Self, and Tomas Sugrue led a wave of “new suburban history” to situate power and space in the connections between cities and suburbs. Essays on the theory of spatial history, a profusion of panels at major conferences, and even coverage by national news media indicate that spatial history is a thriving feld.4 My work incorporates space and place by analyzing how Johnston’s Houston Daily Post constructed an imagined geography between 1894 and 1901. Te term imagined geog- raphy operates in the tradition of Lefebvre by positing the paper’s geography as an active process of social construction rather than a passive refection of the world. Newspapers print, and thereby privilege, certain places over others. Te Houston Daily Post demon- strates how a middling regional newspaper produced space in relation to the large-scale forces reshaping late nineteenth-century America.