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FINAL EDITION Twilight of the American Newspaper by Richard Rodriguez the INTELLIGENCE FACTORY How America Makes Its Enemies

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FINAL EDITION Twilight of the American Newspaper by Richard Rodriguez the INTELLIGENCE FACTORY How America Makes Its Enemies November CAN Subs cover Final2rev 9/29/09 8:19 AM Page 1 ANDREW J. BACEVICH: THE UNWINNABLE AFGHAN WAR HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2009 $7.95 ◆ FINAL EDITION Twilight of the American Newspaper By Richard Rodriguez THE INTELLIGENCE FACTORY How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear By Petra Bartosiewicz PROSPEROUS FRIENDS A story by Christine Schutt Also: Frederick Seidel and Mark Kingwell ◆ ESSAY FINAL EDITION Twilight of the American newspaper By Richard Rodriguez scholar I know, a woman who is ninety- postwar California suburbs. Herb Caen, whose six years old, grew up in a tin shack on column I read immediately—second section, Athe American prairie, near the Cana- corner left—invited me into the provincial cos- dian border. She learned to read from the pages mopolitanism that characterized the city’s out- of the Chicago Tribune in a one-room school- ward regard: “Isn’t it nice that people who prefer house. Her teacher, who had no more than an Los Angeles to San Francisco live there?” eighth-grade education, had once been to Chi- cago—had been to the opera! Women in Chi- ewspapers have become deadweight cago went to the opera with bare shoulders and commodities linked to other media long gloves, the teacher imparted to her pupils. Ncommodities in chains that are coupled Because the teacher had once been to Chicago, or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and ex- she subscribed to the Sunday edition of the ecutive vice presidents and boards of directors in Chicago Tribune, which came on the train by offi ces thousands of miles from where the man Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. bit the dog and drew ink. The San Francisco Chronicle is owned by the Hearst Corporation, Several generations of children learned to read once the Chronicle’s archrival. The Hearst Cor- from that text. The schoolroom had a wind-up poration has its headquarters in New York City. phonograph, its bell shaped like a morning glo- According to Hearst, the Chronicle has been los- ry, and one record, from which a distant female ing a million dollars a week. In San Francisco voice sang “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” there have been buyouts and fi rings of truck driv- ers, printers, reporters, artists, editors, critics. Is it better to have or to want? My friend says With a certain élan, the San Francisco Chronicle her teacher knew one great thing: There was has taken to publishing letters from readers who something out there. She told her class she did remark the diminishing pleasure or usefulness of not expect to see even a fraction of what the the San Francisco Chronicle. world had to offer. But she hoped they might. When a newspaper dies in America, it is not I became a reader of the San Francisco Chronicle simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; when I was in high school and lived ninety miles a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco inland, in Sacramento. On my way home from Chronicle is near death—and why else would school, twenty-fi ve cents bought me a connec- the editors celebrate its 144th anniversary? and tion with a gray maritime city at odds with the why else would the editors devote a week to Richard Rodriguez is an editor at New America Media in San Francisco. His most recent essay for Harper’s Magazine, “The God of the Desert,” appeared in the January 2008 issue. 30 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2009 RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3rev.inddFinal3rev.indd 3030 99/29/09/29/09 88:03:14:03:14 AMAM feature articles on fog?—it is because San Fran- Nineteenth-century newspapers draped bunting cisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing. about their mastheads and brandished an in- fl ated diction and a Gothic type to name them- Most newspapers that are dying today were born selves the Herald, the Eagle, the Tr ibune, the in the nineteenth century. The Seattle Post- Mercury, the Globe, the Sun. With the passage Intelligencer died 2009, born 1863. The Rocky of time, the name of the city was commonly at- Mountain News died 2009, born 1859. The Ann tached to the name of the newspaper, not only Arbor News died 2009, born 1835. It was the to distinguish the Alexandria Gazette from the pride and the function of the American newspa- New York Gazette but because the paper described per in the nineteenth century to declare the the city and the city described the paper. forming congregation of buildings and services a city—a place busy enough or populated enough he Daily Dramatic Chronicle, precursor to to have news. Frontier American journalism pre- the San Francisco Chronicle, was founded served a vestige of the low-church impulse to- Tin 1865 by two teenage brothers on a bor- ward universal literacy whereby the new country rowed twenty-dollar gold piece. Charles and Mi- imagined it could read and write itself into exis- chael de Young (a third brother, Gustavus, was tence. We were the Gutenberg Nation. initially a partner in the publishing venture) had come west with their widowed mother from St. Louis. In Califor- nia, the brothers invented them- selves as descendants of French aristocracy. They were adolescents of extraordinary gumption at a time when San Francisco was a city of gumption and of stranded young men. Karl Marx wrote that Gold Rush California was “thickly populated by men of all races, from the Yan- kee to the Chinese, from the Ne- gro to the Indian and Malay, from the Creole and Mestizo to the European.” Oscar Wilde seconded Karl Marx: “It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be in San Francisco.” What must Gold Rush San Francisco have been like? Melville’s Nantucket? Burning Man? An arms bazaar in Yemen? There were Russians, Chileans, Frenchmen, Welshmen, and Mexicans. There were Aus- tralian toughs, the worst of the lot by most accounts—“Sydney Ducks”—prowling the waterfront. There were Chinese opium dens beneath the streets and Chinese opera houses above them. Histo- rians relish the old young city’s foggy wharves and alleyways, its frigates, fl eas, mud, and hazard. Two words attached to the lawless city the de Young brothers moved about in. One was “vigilante,” from the Spanish. The other was “hoodlum”—a word coined in San Francisco to name the young men loitering about corners, threaten- ing especially to the Chinese. Illustrations by Andrea Dezsö ESSAY 31 RRodriguezodriguez EssayEssay Final3.inddFinal3.indd 3131 99/24/09/24/09 22:23:25:23:25 PMPM The de Young brothers named their newspaper natural echo in the canyons of the Sierra Ne- the Daily Dramatic Chronicle because stranded vada. The miners loved opera. (Puccini reversed young men seek entertainment. The city very the circuit and took David Belasco’s melodrama early developed a taste for limelight that was as of the Gold Rush back to Europe as La Fanciulla urgent as its taste for red light. In 1865, there were del West.) competing opera houses in the city; there were six or seven or twelve theaters. The Daily Dra- In 1860, San Francisco had a population of 57,000. matic Chronicle was a theatrical sheet delivered By 1870, the population had almost tripled, to free of charge to the city’s saloons and cafés and 149,000. Within three years of its founding, by reading rooms. San Francisco desperately ap- 1868, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle would evolve preciated minstrel shows and circuses and melo- with its hormonal city to become the Daily Morn- deons and Shakespeare. Stages were set up in ing Chronicle. The de Young brothers were in their gambling halls and saloons where Shakespearean early twenties. Along with theatrical and oper- actors, their velvets much the worse for wear, atic listings, the Chronicle then published news of ships sailing into and out of the bay and the dollar equivalents of treasure in their holds, and bank robberies, and saloon shootings, and gold strikes and drownings, an extraordinary number of sui- cides, likewise fi res, for San Fran- cisco was a wooden city, as it still is in many of its districts. It is still possible, very occasion- ally, to visit the Gold Rush city when one attends a crowded the- ater. Audiences here, more than in any city I know, possess a wit in common and can react as one—in pleasure, but also in derision. I often think our impulse toward hoot and holler might be related to our founding sense of isolation, to our being “an oasis of civiliza- tion in the California desert,” in the phrase of Addison DeWitt (in All About Eve), who, though a Hollywood fi gment, is about as good a rendition as I can sum- mon of the sensibility (“New York pointed to a ghost rising at the back of the house: critics”) we have courted here for one hundred Peace, break thee off. Look where it comes again. and fi fty years. And deplored. An Italian who came to San Francisco to study The nineteenth-century city felt itself surrounded medicine in 2003 swears he saw the ghost of a by vacancy—to the west, the gray court of the forty-niner, in early light, when he slept and then Pacifi c; to the east, the Livermore Valley, the San woke in an old house out by the ocean. The Joaquin Valley, the Sierra Nevada range. Shipping forty-niner was very young, my friend said, with and mining were crucial to the wealth of the city, a power of sadness about him.
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