[On June
1st, 1980, the Cable News Network (CNN) aired its first
broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy cable news and four other
significant evolutions in American mass media, leading up to a special post on
one of the best
scholarly studies of media and the Revolution!]
On four New York-based
periodicals through which the early 19th
century author (about whom I first learned in Gore
Vidal’s Burr) helps illustrate an
evolving era in American media.
1)
The Critic:
After stints at Georgetown College and in the U.S. Navy (out of which he was court
martialed for dueling!), Leggett (1801-1839) returned to his hometown of
New York to try his hand at journalism. He worked as a theater critic for the New York Mirror
and an editor for the very short-lived Merchants’ Telegraph,
and then in 1828 started his own literary journal, the Critic: A
Weekly Review of Literature, Fine Arts, and the Drama. Critic was also short-lived, as Leggett
was only able to publish it through June 1829. But it, like all of these
early-career ventures of Leggett’s, reflects the active and exciting nature of
New York and American media and publication in this 1820s moment, a community
and era in which established titans like Washington
Irving and William Cullen Bryant worked alongside young writers like
Leggett, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lydia
Maria Child.
2)
The New
York Evening Post: It was Bryant
who helped Leggett move into the next, more stable stage of his journalistic
career. In the late 1820s Bryant was editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post,
a newspaper that had been founded
as a broadsheet by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 and that by this period was
one of the nation’s preeminent daily papers. Bryant invited Leggett to write
for the Post in 1829, and over the
next few years Leggett contributed a number
of literary reviews and political editorials; he became so closely linked
to the paper that when Bryant traveled to Europe through much of 1834 and 1835,
he made Leggett the editor in his absence. Compared to the other periodicals I’ll
highlight here, the Post has endured
as thoroughly as any American periodical (indeed, it describes itself as the nation’s
longest-running paper), and it also reflects the way in which, in Early
Republic America, virtually every prominent creative author (and writer of any
kind, including political ones like Leggett) was closely linked to one or more
periodicals.
3)
The
Plaindealer and The Examiner: Leggett’s
outspoken political
opinions on Jacksonian America, as well as his generally antagonistic
nature (remember that court martial for dueling!), eventually got him and the
paper in sufficient trouble that in 1836 Bryant returned from Europe and removed
Leggett as editor (and from the Post’s
roster entirely). Over the next two years Leggett founded two more periodicals
of his own, the Plaindealer in 1836 and the
Examiner
in 1837; both were intended to offer him space to share his voice and perspective
freely, but both struggled to find an audience and folded within a few months. The
resulting poverty didn’t help Leggett’s longstanding health problems (he had
suffered from yellow fever while in the navy), and in 1839, just 38 years old,
he died. While these failed papers likewise reflect the activity and variety of
Early Republic periodicals, they also illustrate the era’s limits, perhaps especially
for writers with strong, controversial perspectives like that of William
Leggett.
Next mass media
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other mass media moments or movements you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment