Party Rags? Politics and the News Business in Chicago's Party Press, 1831-71

Summary

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As the penny press was getting started in cities such as Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia, a thousand miles to the west Chicago's early newspapers followed a different path. The party papers of Chicago in the years from the city's founding in 1833 to the Great Fire in 1871 grew to incorporate elements more typically associated with the penny press even as penny papers that started there during the period failed. Chicago's party press by the 1850s and 1860s had begun to shed its formal ties to political patrons as journalists served larger and more diverse audiences, both earlier than has been thought and in more sophisticated ways than has previously been described. Also briefly examined in the article is the possible development in this period of the "scoop" by Chicago's post-Civil War journalists.

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Party Rags? Politics and the News Business in Chicago's Party Press, 1831-71

When Chicago banker George Green poisoned his wife, Jane, in 1854, he unleashed a chain of events that led to the unveiling of his prior criminal record under the name Oliver Gavitt, to the country's first chemical test of a corpse for strychnine poisoning, and eventually to his suicide in front of his six-year-old son, who had shared his cell.1 He was not Chicago's first murderer, but he was the city's first potentially sensational criminal.2 His story even made the New York Times. Although the case read like a contemporary crime, none of the leading-circulation, English-language newspapers reviewed for this article treated it as such. There was trial coverage, but no banner headlines or extra editions, for example, at a time that was only a decade after some of New York City's most famous early murder stories, such as the Ellen Jewett case.

This story puts into perspective the differences between the news business of the already-bustling cities along the eastern seaboard and the emerging press in a frontier town. Chicago was a long way from becoming the second city in 1854, the year of the Green case. The first trains had run just two years before, but more than 100 newspapers had already opened and, more often than not, closed. While prevailing ideas put the East Coast penny papers front and center in the development of contemporary news practice, the development of news in Chicago from the city's founding to the time of its Great Fire in 1871 followed a path that confirms in some ways, and refutes in others, what we believe about political partisanship in the news, the origins of editorial practices, and the news business in the U.S.

Building on the same publications that went before them rather than creating a whole new set of papers that competed with the old guard was an important feature of Chicago's early press. In fact, attempts to parallel too closely the "penny press" model were unsuccessful as a number of these papers failed during this period. While Chicago papers remained strongly partisan at least through the Civ...

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