For most of this past week, the THI in New York was over 100. Yesterday, it was 107. The heat-humidity index, something I learned about when I was fourteen years old and working as a page in the New York Public Library on 42nd Street (yes, the one with the lions; no, despite Francis Coppola, we didn't have roller skates) is much more telling than a simple temperature. Back then, before they had air conditioning in the stacks, a THI over 100 was considered dangerous, and would let us go home with full pay: that soupy heat and humidity turns your limbs into cooked spaghetti and your brain into melteed ice cream. We would walk into the Library, our faces streaming, and await the official word.
It would be tempting to blame the THI, therefore, for my failure to liveblog Week 1, since any exit fom the building threatened its lassitude. I can blame equally the logistics of computing in the lecture hall space, as well as my tendency in general *not* to post small bits, but to try to make a cohesive whole, with links (like the Martin Smith portion), and the ridiculous desire to maintain some modicum of a home life despite this schedule.
The answer, I think, is to do it more in short bits, I think (a good piece of training in its own right). And I'll start now by giving you only Wednesday, and writing a second one tomorrow about the end of the week -- more impressions of the whole class, and how RW1 (my reporting class) is evolving.
First, Wednesday -- and the only thing I was required to be at was Andie Tucher's lecture, a 2-hour version of her patented intro to the history of American journalism. I'd heard a mini-version at the school's open house in April, where I first heard the anecdote about Joseph Pulitzer's 10-year fight to get Columbia to accept his $2 million, because journalism was so "disreputable." (I loved that story so much I thought of naming this blog "diseputable joe,"; I'd riffed further on the story here in the other blog, connecting it to Deep Throat.)
This time, Prof. Tucher showed us an eighteenth-century American "news sheet" -- a single page looking a little like a cross between the Pennysaver and the Wall Street Journal: four columns across of delicate squares, alternately giving polite advertisements (personals, patent medicines, horses) and news -- of government actions, financial markets and military campaigns that might disrupt trade. In other words, as she said "news for elites." These sheets were also political party organs: one for Democrats and the other for Whigs, with no pretense at objectivity - or even at trying to include a range of voices or ideas.
From that point on, Tucher gave some glimpses of he evolution (?) from those staid documents to the cacophonies of today, focusing in part on how the voice and role of the reporter keeps shifting. And as with so much else, it's been war that catalyzed and/or exemplified these shifts.
Starting with the "penny papers," like the New York Sun, newspapers claiming to appeal to "the common man," reporters wrote not to advance a specific party line but to interest readers -- and the Civil War was the first BIG THING in which all were interested. And a new invention, the telegraph, meant that for the first time correspondents could show up at the battlefield and file their stories back in New York, badgering generals and exposing scandals.
They wrote like other nineteenth-century writers, with their whole hearts and purple prose. Tucher read to us this famous, quite first-person, quite purple battlefield report from the infant New York Times:
Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly absorbing interest -- the dead body of an oldest born, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, in a building where surgeons dared not to stay…. My pen is heavy. Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh have baptized with your blood the second birth of freedom in America, how you are to be envied!
--Sam Wilkeson, filing from Gettysburg, July 4, 1863
"A reporter looking down at his dead son. Where would that be in today's Times?" Tucher asked. "The op-ed section, right." The path to the kind of neutral prose preferred by today's "serious" papers a long way off.
Tucher showed us similarly novelistic and feverish prose from Nellie Bly and the rest of the generation of "muck rakers" that followed the war, having learned from the battlefield that they could question authority. Looking at Nelly Bly, Tucher asked "Who does this remind you of?" ""Victorian novels," I said involuntarily, thinking of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, of Bronte's Villette.
As the new century rolled in, Joseph Pultzer started thinking about his legacy, and lobbying for that journalism school. This part had actually been touched on the day before, by Deborah Wassertzug, the J-school's librarian. Demonstrating a database, she'd showed us an article from the Times, October 1, 1912: " JOURNALISM SCHOOL OPENS ITS DOORS." (Blogwhore that I am, I almost put up a pdf link here, until I remembered the 90-year copyright rule and the ethics agreement I just signed and turned in. I'll instead squint at the photo-PDF and provide a few relevant quotes:
At the invocation, trustee Bishop Greer prayed that "the American journalists of the future might work toward universal peace." Then the university's president declared, a touch archly perhaps, that "It is the object of this school to train publicists who possess a distinction between a stench and a perfume." The Times then provides a delicious example of J-school students already digging up dirt: After getting assurance that they weren't "muckraking," a Democratic functionary tells them that press coverage of Democratic politics consisted of whispered one-on-one "press conferences," in which "I hand [the reporters] the canned stuff" (defined helpfully by the Times as "the colloquial name for prepared copy"). Not bad for the first day.
The 2-hour format for the lecture meant that Tucher skipped to the next big watershed for American journalism -- World War II.
The first hadn't been so, Tucher said: "We got in so late." Actually, the invocation for "universal peace" aside, World War I was a rather low point for the new craft,, Tucher said: newspapers seized, journalists jailed under the Alien & Sedition Acts, explicit xenophobia. But World War II gave citizens, all of whom had been touched by the war in some way, a communal experience -- some via writers like Ernie Pyle, some via the new medium of radio.
If Nellie Bly hearkened back to Bronte, Pyle's work sounds like someone else we've all read:
Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.
The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself, and ask others to help.
The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road.
I don't know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don't ask silly questions.
Am I the only one who whispered "Hemingway" at those words? That calm, measured accumulation if not too much grisly detail? But of course Hemingway was Pyle's competition, if not nearly as well loved -- Papa H., who according to Tucher stole the press pass for D-Day from his wife, Martha Gellhorn, died with many enemies. Pyle, by contrast, lived with and loved the guys he covered, as CBS News explains:
"He said I have gotten to the point where I can hardly stand to look at a group of fresh recruits coming in.
Why? Because, she said, he knew that half of them would soon be dead. "He lived with them, he was their friend, and he got to the point that he couldn't stand to look them in the face."
