Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-08T19:51:55.438Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Visible States and Invisible Nation: Newspaper Coverage of Nineteenth-Century Lawmaking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2019

Emily Pears
Emily Pears*
Affiliation:
Claremont McKenna College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

Researchers and the public alike have long recognized that in American politics visibility matters. To claim credit for policies, to recruit supporters, and to maintain democratic legitimacy, the lawmaking process must be visible to the American public. Yet little is known about how the public perceived the legislative process during the nineteenth century. This article uses systematic qualitative and quantitative analysis of newspapers in Baltimore, Maryland, Portland, Maine, and Charleston, South Carolina, to measure the comparative visibility of lawmaking at the state and federal levels between 1830 and 1880. The research demonstrates how analysis of newspaper coverage can be used to better understand public perceptions of state and federal lawmaking during time periods without polling data. The visibility of congressional lawmaking varied greatly from one state to the next, and competition for coverage between state legislatures and Congress remained strong across the country throughout the studied period.

Keywords

visibilitylawmakingCongressstate legislaturenineteenth-century newspapers
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , July 2019 , pp. 354 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No. 27,” 25 December 1787.

2. See, for example, Morgan, Edmund S., Inventing the People (New York, 1988);Google Scholar Murrin, John M., “A Roof Without Walls,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity , ed. Beeman, Richard and Carter, Edward C. (Williamsburg, and Chapel Hill, 1987), 333;Google Scholar Bradburn, Douglas, The Citizenship Revolution (Charlottesville, 2009), 9.Google Scholar

3. Brooke, John L., Columbia Rising (Williamsburg and Chapel Hill, 2010), 4.Google Scholar

4. Minicucci, Stephen, “The ‘Cement of Interest’: Interest-Based Models of Nation-Building in the Early Republic,” Social Science History 25, no. 2 (2001): 254.Google Scholar

5. Lawson, Melinda, Patriot Fires (Lawrence, Kans., 2005), 3.Google Scholar

6. See, for instance, Cornwell, Elmer E. Jr., “Presidential News: The Expanding Public Image,” Journalism Quarterly (Summer 1959): 275–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Kernell, Samuel and Jacobson, Gary, “Congress and the Presidency as News in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Politics 49, no. 4 (1987): 1016–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Mayhew, David, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, 2004).Google Scholar

9. Mettler, Suzanne, The Submerged State (Chicago, 2011), 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Mettler, Submerged State, 7.

11. See, for example, Hacker, Jacob S., The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York, 2002);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Howard, Christopher, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 2001);Google Scholar Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).Google Scholar

12. Soss, Joe, “Lessons of Welfare: Policy Design, Political Learning, and Political Action,” in American Political Science Review 93, no. 2): <au: month/year?>363;CrossRef363;>Google Scholar Hibbing, J. R. and Theiss-Morse, E., What Is It About Government That Americans Dislike? (New York, 2001).Google Scholar

13. Mettler, Suzanne and Milstein, Andrew, “American Political Development from Citizens’ Perspective: Tracking Federal Government’s Presence in Individual Lives over Time,” in Studies in American Political Development 21 (2007): <au/month/year?>110–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. See John, Richard R., Spreading the News (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).Google Scholar

15. See Larson, John Lauritz, Internal Improvement (Chapel Hill, 2001).Google Scholar

16. Larson, Internal Improvement, 4.

17. Balogh, Brian, A Government Out of Sight (Cambridge, 2009), 42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Ibid., 4.

19. Kernell, Samuel, “The Early Nationalization of Political News in America,” Studies in American Political Development 1 (1986): 255–78, at 261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Richard John, Spreading the News, 7.

21. Pasley, Jeffrey, The Tyranny of Printers (Charlottesville, 2001), 3.Google Scholar

22. Shudson, Michael, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York, 1978), 18.Google Scholar

23. Shudson, Discovering the News, 18.

24. Ibid., 22.

25. See, for example, Emery, E., The Press and America, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972);Google Scholar Mindich, D. T. Z., Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (New York, 1998);Google Scholar Starr, P., The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York, 2004);Google Scholar Stephens, M., A History of News: From the Dum to the Satellite (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

26. Cornwell, Elmer E. Jr., “Presidential News: The Expanding Public Image,” Journalism Quarterly (Summer 1959): 275–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Kernell and Jacobson, “Congress and the Presidency as News in the Nineteenth Century.”

28. Ibid., 1016.

29. One could ask whether focusing on Democratic-leaning papers biases these results in favor of a focus on state rather than federal politics—and it may. For the purposes of comparison across the three states this bias shouldn’t matter, but future work should seek to compare papers from multiple political background within the same city or state to better understand how political leanings within the penny press impacted choices about coverage of political events.

30. This restriction also means that there are no dates for which all three newspapers were available and sampled.

31. Appendix 2 lists the number of issues sampled from each paper for the years studied.

32. Appendix 1 includes the complete coding strategy and rules for assigning articles to the state and federal level.

33. Johnson, Gerald W., Kent, F. R., Mencken, H. L., and Owens, H., The Sunpapers of Baltimore (New York, 1937), 6.Google Scholar

34. Griffin, Joseph, History of the Press in Maine (Brunswick: The Press, 1872), 51–52.Google Scholar

35. Willis, William, The History of Portland, From 1632 to 1864, 2nd ed., rev. and enl. (Portland, Maine, 1865).Google Scholar

36. Kernell’s findings vary greatly from these. While his data codes articles on the basis of their geographic location, his findings show a dramatic and early increase in national news, a decline in state news, and fairly static coverage of local news events.

37. Williams, Harold A., The Baltimore Sun, 1837–1987 (Baltimore, 1987), 43.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., 52.

39. “Unsigned Editorial,” Charleston Courier, 8 December 1854 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).

40. “North and South,” Charleston Courier, 17 December 1859 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).

41. “The Welcome to the Republican Members of Congress,” Charleston Courier, 7 December 1866 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).

42. J.A.B., “For the Argus,” Portland Eastern Argus, 9 February 1860 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).

43. “Prospectus,” Portland Eastern Argus, 3 February 3, 1863 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).

44. “Unsigned editorial,” Portland Eastern Argus, 11 January 1877 (accessed through Library of Congress Microfilm).