History of Journalism: 1861–1930

A Changing Country

Between the Civil War and the turn of the century, every aspect of American life, including its media, was transformed. Continuing trends of urbanization and industrialization were at the center of this transformation. In 1850, the country was largely rural, no cities had achieved a population of a million, and only two, New York and Philadelphia, had more than half a million. As a result of the Civil War (1861–65) and postwar industrialization, however, populations began to cluster in a growing number of cities. Starting in the 1890s, an immigrant wave pushed the nation's population to 76 million by 1900. Many of these newcomers lived in the teeming cities.

Modern America rose directly from the foundations laid by such moguls as Andrew Carnegie, an immigrant from Scotland who at the age of 13 was earning $4.80 a month as a bobbin boy in a Pittsburgh textile mill. By 1901 his steel empire assured him of a guaranteed retirement income of a million dollars a month for life. Oil baron John D. Rockefeller organized a second industry, the oil business. In the middle of the Civil War, he formed a partnership that would produce 3,000 barrels of oil a day, a tenth of the industry's output. Within a decade, his Standard Oil Company controlled nine-tenths of the nation's oil-refining capacity.

However, many Americans lived in urban squalor. Most obvious among the oppressed were immigrants, southern freedmen and blacks in the North, women and child workers, and mine and factory workers. Many families were able to survive only because their children could earn money in sweat shops, businesses with inferior wages and working conditions. Child labor and similar iniquities slowly disappeared from the American scene in the twentieth century, though only after organized labor became strong enough to push political and social reforms.

Political corruption was notorious in Washington and much of the country in the post–Civil War era, and particularly flourished during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant (1869–77). City political machines became instruments to bilk the public coffers and line the pockets of those in charge. None was more notorious than William M. Tweed, whose Tammany Hall controlled New York City during and after the Civil War. Indeed, his power soon extended to the state legislature and the governor.

A new crop of writers, the muckrakers, would expose these injustices, writing primarily in the nation's first national medium, magazines. Meanwhile, newspapers reflected the urban trends of American life and the problems—especially government inefficiency and crime—of urban America. Increases in literate populations allowed urban newspapers to flourish. By the end of the century about 1,600 newspapers were published in the afternoon and nearly 600 in the morning. Joseph Pulitzer, one of the many immigrants who helped to build the new America of the post–Civil War period, and his rival, William Randolph Hearst, would capitalize on problems of the period as circulation builders, cul minating in the creation of a “new journalism.”

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