Lincoln and the power of the press : the war for public opinion
Record details
- ISBN: 9781439192719 (hardcover)
- ISBN: 1439192715 (hardcover)
- ISBN: 9781439192726 (softcover)
- ISBN: 1439192723 (softcover)
- ISBN: 9781439192740 (ebook)
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Physical Description:
print
xxix, 733 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm - Edition: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
- Publisher: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Content descriptions
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 665-697) and index. |
Formatted Contents Note: | The types are in our glory -- Not like any other thunder -- That attractive rainbow -- A position we cannot maintain -- A mean between two extremes -- The prairies are on fire -- The perilous position of the union -- I cannot go into the newspapers -- Lincoln will not talk with anyone -- Wanted: a leader -- No such thing as freedom of the press -- Slavery must go to the wall -- Sitting on a volcano -- No time to read any papers -- Long Abraham a little longer -- Epilogue: We shall not see again the like. |
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Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at Kirtland Community College.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Kirtland Community College Library | E 457.2 .H659 2014 | 30775305478753 | General Collection | Available | - |
CHOICE_Magazine Review
Lincoln and the Power of the Press : The War for Public Opinion
CHOICE
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
This prodigiously researched and deftly argued book breaks new ground in Lincoln scholarship. From his early days in politics through his tumultuous presidency, Lincoln developed close if not always easy relations with editors in Illinois and such media titans as the New York troika of James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, and Henry Raymond. No politician of his era more effectively utilized the media to parry opponents or motivate supporters. Lincoln's patience with the editors he patronized, counseled, and, on various occasions, outmaneuvered was extraordinary. Forbearing of political attacks on himself or his party, Lincoln as president proved less willing to tolerate commentary that belittled the troops or sought to subvert the Union cause. Holzer does not soft-pedal the ongoing suppression of anti-Republican and anti-war presses, though he suggests Lincoln was one step removed from most of such measures. He also emphasizes that the opposition press had its full say during the 1864 presidential campaign. This epic-scale work, replete with vivid contemporary quotes and insightful commentary on the symbiosis between journalists and politicians in Lincoln's US, is the most full-bodied account now available of Lincoln's practical genius in shaping public opinion. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --Michael J. Birkner, Gettysburg College
New York Times Review
Lincoln and the Power of the Press : The War for Public Opinion
New York Times
January 6, 2019
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company
ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAS been portrayed in many roles - as emancipator, politician, military leader, orator, self-made man and others - but his canny manipulation of the popular press has received little attention. Harold Holzer, a prominent authority on America's 16th president, opens many vistas on this fascinating topic in his new book, "Lincoln and the Power of the Press," a monumental, richly detailed portrait of the world of 19th-century journalism and Lincoln's relation to it. Holzer demonstrates that even as Lincoln juggled many war-related demands, he kept a close eye on American newspapers and tried to influence them however he could. Lincoln declared that "public sentiment is everything," and in his era nothing shaped public sentiment more powerfully than journalism. Advances in printing technology and newspaper distribution caused a rapid rise in the number and circulation of American papers. As the lexicographer Noah Webster commented, "In no other country on earth, not even in Great Britain, are newspapers so generally circulated among the body of the people, as in America." By the eve of the Civil War, America's 4,000 newspapers and periodicals, more than three-quarters of which were political in nature, had a strong impact on voters. Newspaper editors were a brazen, contentious lot. Holzer focuses on the so-called Big Three of American journalism - James Gordon Bennett of The New York Herald, Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune and Henry J. Raymond of The New York Times. These editors, Holzer writes, "loved their profession as passionately as they loathed each other, and each believed, in his own way, that he was all but ordained to chart the course for the future of civilization." The three took different stances on Lincoln and the Civil War. Raymond, a moderate Republican, was the most supportive of Lincoln, while Bennett, a racist Democrat, was the least. Greeley, an important antislavery voice and a promoter of faddish reforms, swung between glowing praise and harsh criticism of the president, even as he battled his rival editors. The popular press, therefore, was slippery, making Lincoln's efforts to deal with it immensely challenging. Deal with it he did, in masterly fashion. Sometimes he used his "rustic charm," as with Raymond, who during the war turned against Lincoln but was won back to the president's side after a relaxed chat at the White House. At other times, Lincoln wisely backed off from confrontation, as when his fruitless efforts to fight and woo the belligerent Bennett led him to realize that responding publicly to the nation's leading newspaperman was a losing proposition. With the unpredictable Greeley, Lincoln exhibited patience and tact. When in 1864 Greeley arranged a peace conference at Niagara Falls with Southern representatives, to whom he offered lax terms for ending the war, Lincoln confided to a friend that Greeley was causing him "almost as much trouble as the whole Southern Confederacy." But instead of interfering with the quixotic editor, Lincoln let him go on his peace mission, knowing it would fail; the Southern agents, it turned out, had no authority to negotiate for the Confederacy, and Greeley's toothless proposals made him appear craven. As tricky as handling the Big Three editors was for Lincoln, counteracting the effects of uniformly hostile ones was even more so. Most Americans today forget that Lincoln in his time was despised by a substantial number of Northerners who saw him as dictatorial, or overly sympathetic to African-Americans. Anti-Lincoln emotions ran high in newspapers like The Chicago Times, The Brooklyn Eagle and The New York World. Some of the attacks on the president were merely clueless, as when a Chicago reporter described the Gettysburg Address as a string of "silly, flat and dishwatery utterances" that would make "the cheek of every American ... tingle with shame." More damaging were hoaxes concocted by Democratic journalists intent on derailing Lincoln's bid for a second term in 1864. Correspondents for The New York World published a 90-page tract, "Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races," that claimed that if Lincoln were re-elected he would ruin the nation by making blacks socially equal to whites and by encouraging interracial marriage. This pamphlet caused a stir, as did another fraudulent document, allegedly by Lincoln, that pointed in warning to "the general state of the country" as the reason for proclaiming a national day of "fasting, humiliation and prayer" and for calling up 400,000 new troops. The latter ruse impelled Lincoln to sign an order for the arrest and imprisonment of the editors who had published the document. Although this was the only time Lincoln got directly involved in the suppression of a newspaper, strong-arm tactics against hostile journalists were not uncommon during his administration. In what Holzer calls "the 'Salem Witch' hunt of the Civil War," a summer-long hysteria seized the North in 1861, when some 200 newspapers and their editors were subjected to scattershot menacing by federal agencies, civilian mobs or Union troops. A number of Democratic editors were imprisoned at Fort Lafayette in Brooklyn, which came to be known as the American Bastille. This suppression fever ebbed during the war, but it did not disappear; in 1864, more than 30 papers were attacked by mobs. Lincoln had to harness animosity against the press on the part of some of his generals. When Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside ordered that The Chicago Times be "padlocked and its gun-toting editor arrested," Lincoln revoked Burnside's order, and the newspaper resumed publication. When Gen. John M. Schofield arrested a St. Louis editor for publishing a letter by Lincoln without identifying his source, the president secured the editor's release, cautioning Schofield not "to unnecessarily harass and persecute the people." As Holzer notes, such acts of clemency signaled a remarkable tolerance on the part of Lincoln, who let most journalistic attacks roll off his back. Actually, the president was adept at exploiting editors while courting their political influence. Known for his liberal use of patronage, he frequently gave plum governmental posts to friendly newspapermen, including the editor of a German-language Republican newspaper in Illinois of which Lincoln was a co-owner in 1859-60. Holzer also reveals that Lincoln prepared the American public for the Emancipation Proclamation by performing a pas de deux with Greeley in competing newspaper pronouncements on slavery in which the president played the sensible conservative to Greeley's flaming radical. Having outmaneuvered one editor, Lincoln adopted the strategy of another when he pragmatically offered the controversial proclamation as a military measure - an echo of Henry Raymond, who had advised him that the proclamation should be couched as "a military weapon purely and exclusively." And one of Lincoln's most famous lines may have been lifted from a newspaper: His paean to "a new birth of freedom" in the Gettysburg Address was anticipated by a New York Times reporter who had lost a son at the Battle of Gettysburg, which the reporter hailed as "the second birth of Freedom in America." Full of fresh information and superb analysis, Holzer's engaging, deeply researched book is destined to be recognized as a classic account of Civil War-era journalism and the president who both swayed it and came under its sway. A reporter said the Gettysburg Address consisted of 'silly, flat and dishwatery utterances.' DAVID S. REYNOLDS is a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include "Walt Whitman's America," "John Brown, Abolitionist" and, most recently, "Lincoln's Selected Writings."
BookList Review
Lincoln and the Power of the Press : The War for Public Opinion
Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
*Starred Review* Although the majority of the American population was probably illiterate at the end of the eighteenth century, even the Founders recognized the power of the press and tried to manipulate, embrace, and sometimes completely control journals of opinion. Journals influenced or controlled by Federalists and anti-Federalists waged war over ratification of the Constitution; Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams used surrogates in the press to savage their political opponents. Holzer, the acclaimed Lincoln scholar, illustrates that the often symbiotic relationship between the press and various politicians and parties had reached an unprecedented level during the era of the Civil War. He tracks these relationships by highlighting the activities of Lincoln, his political opponent Stephen Douglas, and journalistic power brokers, especially Horace Greeley and James Gordon Bennett. Well before he was known nationally, Lincoln knew how to cultivate Illinois pundits and even covertly purchased a German-language newspaper, hoping to garner support from the immigrant population. Greeley, like Lincoln, came from humble origins; was convinced he had a special destiny; and saw his close association with the Republican Party as a way to achieve it. Bennett was flamboyant, bigoted, but a brilliant entrepreneur who played both ends of the political street to further his ambitions. This is a well-written reminder that the independence of the press, then as now, has its limits.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2014 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Lincoln and the Power of the Press : The War for Public Opinion
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Starred Review. Holzer's latest work details the often antagonistic relationship between Lincoln and the press throughout his political career. The author relays how each used the other to manipulate public opinion, public policy, and the Civil War. (LJ 9/15/14) (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Lincoln and the Power of the Press : The War for Public Opinion
Kirkus Reviews
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Hefty study of partisan journalism as vigorously embraced by Abraham Lincoln and the warring New York dailies. Lincoln knew the power of the press ("public sentiment is everything," he declared in 1858), and he made sure his views were published in supportive journals and even secretly purchased the newspaper for the German-American community in Springfield, the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger. In this engaging history of one of the most divisive periods in American politics, the buildup to the Civil War, Lincoln historian Holzer (The Civil War in 50 Objects, 2013, etc.) tracks how the great political clashes played out in the lively press of the day, creating not-so-delicate marriages between politicians and the journalists writing the "news" (which was more opinion than actual news). From the early penny presses emerged the New York Herald, published by the formidable Scotsman James Gordon Bennett, a scandalmonger and disputatious contrarian who regularly skewered both parties, Democratic or Whig (Republican), while remaining anti-abolition and a fierce critic of Lincoln; the New York Tribune, founded by Horace Greeley, crusader for faddish causes from utopian socialism to gender equality, who regularly ran for office and both supported Lincoln and later tried to unseat him; and the New York Times, established by Henry Jarvis Raymond as a "mean between two extremes," promising a more "sober" and "mature" approach yet unabashedly pro-Lincoln, especially as Raymond became head of the Republican Party. The newspapermen bristled at the others' successes and unloosed competitive salvos in their respective pages over the Mexican War, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Compromise of 1850, the roaring 20-year rivalry between Stephen Douglas and Lincoln, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferryand, especially, the contentious presidential elections of 1860 and '64. Other regional newspapers establishing fierce positions on slavery struggled for survival, such as William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator and Frederick Douglass' Paper (later Monthly). An exhaustive feat of research with a focused structure and robust prose. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.