The American public’s fascination with the presidency and the men who have occupied that most venerated position remains as strong as when George Washington first took office in 1789. For those who might doubt the enduring nature of that curiosity, merely consult attendance figures for the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Two of the most popular exhibits continue to be those featuring the presidents and their first ladies.1 Away from the capital, the chief executives’ private residences remain national shrines, with retreats, such as Washington’s Mount Vernon, Jefferson’s Monticello, and Jackson’s Hermitage, visited by thousands every year.
It has always been thus, and the public’s original obsession was fueled through the early decades of the nineteenth century by printers and journalists anxious to chronicle both the pivotal role of the presidents in American politics as well as their individual and highly visible deeds, misdeeds, foibles, and quirks. The reward for such aggressive and often partisan reportage was the creation of an audience of readers hungry for news and information relating to the privileged few perceived to wield great power over their lives and, as a result, enhanced newspaper circulation, especially with issues hanging in the balance during political campaigns and in time of crisis.
That much of this coverage, especially during the early years of the republic, should be characterized by a sensational voice designed to “excite the emotions of the reader” or “gossip about the socially prominent” should come as no surprise.2 Under such definitions, sensational reporting appeared in the very first journal of record in the American Colonies, Benjamin Harris’s Publick Occurrences both Foreign and Domestic, which debuted in Boston in 1690. His accounts of kidnappings, suicides, murder, revenge, and infidelities by the royal family of France, all in just his very first edition, hinted at the nature of American journalism yet to come and explained a great deal about the ethics and values in place by the time the newly independent nation focused its attention upon its recently created chief executive.3
The primary reason for such journalistic standards or lack thereof, at least according to Eric Burns, who authored Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism, is that at the time Harris first published Publick Occurrences, there was no precedent in either the New World or the old for an unbiased or objective press. “In fact, insofar as there was a tradition of journalism at all, it favored bias; newspapers were printed either to indulge the whims of the owner or to serve the political causes with which he had aligned himself,” he observes.4
By the time George Washington was inaugurated as the first president almost a century later, little was changed. Washington, despite his reputation as a war hero and defender of liberty, was almost immediately set upon by hostile editors intent upon pursuing a variety of both personal and political agenda. Thus was born the complex, often tortuous relationship between the presidency and the press.
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others, such as Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and even Grover Cleveland, all came in for their share of sensational media coverage during the new nation’s first century of existence. Study of their treatment or, as the case may be, their mistreatment by the journalists of the day is a valuable exercise both in tracking the evolution of the American newspaper industry as well as the development of journalistic standards, even as the industry approached a new age marked by the fading of partisan agenda and the rise of objectivity and investigative reporting. It is also instructive in understanding how the American public’s perspectives on politics and politicians have been shaped to their present day forms.
Like a great many of his successors, George Washington expressed an ongoing exasperation with sensational coverage of his administration that accused him of everything from being a monarchist to being overly extravagant with public funds. Chief among his detractors was Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Aurora, who once went so far as to publish a series of letters, attributed to Washington during the winter of 1777–1778, that portrayed the general as lukewarm on liberty and ostensibly a loyal subject of King George III. Had they been authentic, they might have had some enduring impact upon the president’s reputation, but they were a complete fabrication and a measure of the lengths to which personal or political opponents were prepared to go in creating sensational reactions among readers.5
Washington once complained to Jefferson of newspapers printing the “grossest and most insidious misrepresentations” of his conduct. Jefferson commiserated with his colleague, perhaps unaware that his own turn with journalists would come soon enough. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” he commented. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”6
John Adams encountered his own share of vilification in the pages of the nation’s newspapers during his tenure as the country’s second president. Whether the topic was his role in the infamous XYZ Affair that prompted fears of growing French influence or the preemptive powers granted him upon passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Adams was no stranger to the sensational claims and methods of the opposition press by the time it was necessary to begin campaigning for a second term.
However much Washington and Adams may have previously suffered at the hands of journalists, who were unafraid to generate content meant to appeal to the most fundamental fears and anxieties of their readers, it was during the hotly contested election of 1800 that partisan editors, reporters, and commentators brought sensationalism to the fore in coverage of the American presidency and those who would seek its office. In this enterprise, Thomas Jefferson played a pivotal role by both encouraging and sponsoring the work of a “vicious, unscrupulous, disappointed office-seeker” by the name of James T. Callender. A Scot who had fled to the United States in the 1790s to avoid prosecution for attacks upon the British government, Callender came to enjoy the patronage of Jefferson, who found his anti-Federalist writings useful in assailing the character of his opponent, Adams. So taken with Callender’s work was the vice-president in 1799 that he paid for his services and may well have played a role in securing for him an outlet or voice on the staff of the staunchly Republican Richmond Examiner, edited by his friend, Meriwether Jones.7
While writing for Jones and, at least indirectly, for Jefferson, Callender began work on a piece entitled The Prospect Before Us. He claimed that Adams was unfit for public office, deceptive in having first gained it in 1796, a lover of “English supremacy” and a hater of “American independence.” Callender saw his toxic tract published in pamphlet form, but was eventually arrested for his unrelenting attacks upon the president under the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 and sentenced to nine months in a Richmond prison.8
Such was the tone set for the press as the campaign wore on into the summer and fall of 1800. Widely reprinted in Republican newspapers around the country, the subsequent Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams rivaled Callender for its length and “for scurrility equaled the worse assaults by the most noxious Republican scribes.” Atheism, monarchal tendencies, egotism, unethical business practice, revolution, and cowardice—all were contained in the claims and counterclaims published in Federalist and Republican journals as the two rival parties jockeyed for position as Election Day, December 3, neared.9
In the end, the Republican voice was better organized and focused than that of the Federalists, but it required a vote by the House of Representatives on February 17, 1801 to determine Jefferson the winner. The contentious campaign of 1800 was over, and for the next hundred years, press coverage of future contests for the White House and for its future occupants would be influenced by precedents set during the Jefferson-Adams contest.
Not long after taking office, Jefferson pardoned all those imprisoned under the Alien and Sedition Acts, including Callender, but if he was expecting gratitude from the bellicose Scot, he was bitterly disappointed. In what became a particularly cruel twist of irony, both the scribe he had once sponsored and the political media machinery he had helped construct to win political advantage ultimately turned against him with a savagery previously unknown in the free-for-all of the American press. In the end, Jefferson survived to win a second term as president, but both his private reputation, as well as his fundamental views of the freedom of the press, were shaken to their very foundation.
Upon his release from prison, Callender sought political appointment as a reward for his service during the campaign. Unable to gain even an audience with Jefferson let alone win the job of postmaster in Richmond, the spurned Callender secured a position with the Federalist newspaper, the Richmond Recorder, and began a campaign to discredit his former mentor. Early attempts at this included a much-distorted account of an alleged sexual advance made by Jefferson in 1768 upon the wife of a friend who had been left in his care at Monticello. While Jefferson privately admitted to poor judgment in the affair prior to the election, he continued to hold his own counsel telling a friend, “Were I to undertake to answer the calumnies of the newspapers, it would be more than all my own time, and that of twenty aids could effect, for while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented.”10
Worse was yet to come. In September 1802, the Recorder published a story in which Callender alleged Jefferson’s sexual impropriety with one of his own slaves, Sally Hemings. “It is well known that the man, whom it delightith the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves,” wrote Callender. “Her name is SALLY…. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking, although sable resemblance to those of the President himself.”11
The feeding frenzy of the Federalist press that followed continued unabated for months as the party and its editors sought to assail Jefferson and the Republicans and recover from not only the loss of the presidential election, but also continued setbacks in state contests as well. Fed by Callender’s continued assaults describing Monticello as Jefferson’s “Congo harem” and Sally as a “black Venus,” editorials in Federalist journals often deferred on such questions as source and legitimacy of the claims only to then launch into such verse as that published by the Boston Gazette and reprinted in the Philadelphia Port Folio:
Of all the damsels on the green
On mountain or in valley
A lass so luscious ne’er was seen
As Monticellan Sally.12
As it turned out, much of this versification was printed and reprinted well after Callender’s death. After initially increasing the circulation of the Recorder by a significant measure and having his name placed on the masthead alongside that of editor Henry Pace, Callender fell out with his employer over money issues and took to the bottle as he had periodically throughout his life. In July 1803, his body was found in the river. His death was ruled an accident, though Callender had been threatening to take his own life for several weeks prior to the grim discovery along the shore of the James.13
While Federalist editors and politicians sought to keep the story alive for use in the 1804 contest for the presidency, Jefferson’s protracted silence, Republican damage control, and the successes of his first term eventually crowded the Hemings story from the newspaper columns. While the scandal remained with Jefferson for the rest of his life, it did not bring him down either personally or politically as Callender and the Federalists hoped. Instead, as John Quincy Adams opined, the “scandalmongering” merely underscored the desperation of a party whose political agenda had been “completely and irrevocably, abandoned and rejected by the popular voice.”14
In his first inaugural speech, Jefferson had proclaimed that freedom of the press was essential to the health of the democracy, but emerging from the abuses of the Hemings scandal, he was not so certain. In 1803, he wrote, “Our newspapers, for the most part, present only the caricatures of disaffected minds.” Even more than that, concluded Jefferson, the misuse of the press contributed to a “scatological political culture” unchecked by journalists for whom there were no rules or ethics as to what should or should not be printed. In short, the new nation’s political process and its burgeoning press were combining to create an environment in which politicians empowered editors and, in turn, editors enfranchised politicians creating the potential for an outcome Jefferson did not care to contemplate.15
In the years following Jefferson’s presidency, successors to the office each encountered their own set of challenges associated with maintaining a relationship with the press. For the first time in the nation’s brief history, James Madison faced the question of how to deal with newspapers in times of war. James Monroe enjoyed less turbulent times during his Era of Good Feelings before John Quincy Adams’s election in 1824 set off a series of jousts with the journals of his day.
For all that, however, it was Andrew Jackson’s bid for high office during the election of 1828 that revived the truly venomous and sensational inclinations the press had displayed during Jefferson’s tenure almost three decades before, when Callender had alleged the sexual improprieties between the president and Sally Hemings. This time, the impact was exacerbated by the expansion of the partisan press and more sophisticated manipulation of it by those spearheading the campaigns of their respective candidates. In the end, the greatest victim of such journalism practice or malpractice would be neither the incumbent nor the challenger, but Jackson’s wife, Rachel.
If Callender was the thorn in the side of Jefferson, Charles Hammond, editor of the Cincinnati Gazette, was Jackson’s antagonist during the freewheeling and no-holds-barred campaign. Jackson’s handlers assailed Adams for the machinations that they believed had robbed their candidate of the presidency in 1824, and they claimed that as minister to Russia, Adams procured female companionship for Czar Alexander I. Hammond, on the other hand, was even more vicious in his efforts to discredit Jackson and returned from a fact-finding trip to Kentucky and Tennessee to level charges that Andrew and Rachel had knowingly engaged in adultery and bigamy. “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and christian land?” whined Hammond.16
While a misunderstanding over the timing of a divorce settlement between Rachel and her first husband did technically render the couple guilty of adultery, such a relationship was not entered into knowingly, and they had been legally married in 1793. However, the kernel of truth in Hammond’s allegations emboldened him even further, and he founded a special journal, Truth’s Advocate and Monthly Anti-Jackson Expositor, devoted to his ongoing character assassination of the presidential hopeful and his wife. Not content to stop with Jackson and Rachel, Hammond made additional claims about the challenger’s family that further exasperated Jackson. “And my pious Mother, nearly fifty years in the tomb, and who, from her cradle to her death had not a speck upon her character, has been dragged forth … and held to public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro, and my eldest brother sold as a slave in Carolina,” he lamented.17
Hammond and those determined to see Adams remain in the White House were not about to rely upon a single sensationalized sex scandal to ensure victory. John Binns, editor of Philadelphia’s Democratic Press, joined in the anti-Jackson frenzy and seized upon an episode from the hopeful’s service in the Creek War in which the general had ordered the execution of six militiamen alleged to have deserted. In an effort to horrify the voting public and portray Jackson as a brutal murderer, Binns published a handbill bordered in black featuring the names of the deserters with drawings of foreboding black coffins under each and entitled, Some Account of Some of the Bloody Deeds of GENERAL JACKSON. The Coffin Hand Bill, as it came to be known, featured a brief description of the incident and mournful verse portraying Jackson as cruel, sadistic, and without remorse.18
Despite such tactics, Jackson prevailed at the polls, winning 56 percent of the popular vote, the most impressive margin of victory in all of the nineteenth century, but the cost was high. Rachel Jackson, reviled in the national Republican press as that “black wench” and “profligate woman,” had taken the attacks to heart, growing more anxious and depressed as the campaign wore on to its conclusion. Shortly after the balloting was complete, she collapsed while returning from a trip and died five days later at The Hermitage on December 22, 1828.19
Jackson owed much to loyal editors who had assisted in his efforts to overcome the assaults of the Adams’s handlers and might have even hoped for a cease fire from the opposition press in the aftermath of his wife’s untimely death. In this, he was bitterly disappointed. His relationship with journalists over his two terms was unsettled at best, reflecting a subtle shift taking place within the industry. The days of editors blindly adhering to strict partisan agendas or publishing in lockstep with the campaigns of endorsed candidates or office holders were numbered. Jackson and his immediate successors entered into new and unfamiliar press relationships managed, in many cases, by the next generation of independent-thinking newspapermen who were prepared to abandon dogmatic political discourse for entrepreneurial enterprises that ultimately resulted in the rise of the penny press.
Born of the class upheaval and mobility resulting from the Industrial Revolution in both England and America, penny papers sought to appeal to an audience long neglected by the first generation of colonial and republican printers. The promise of potential profit now materialized in providing access and information to mass audiences of citizens previously excluded from newspaper circulation by virtue of cost and esoteric content. With the discovery and exploitation of this new audience came an appreciation for its tastes in news, and perceptive editors of such journals as the Sun and Herald in New York, Public Ledger in Philadelphia, and Daily Times in Boston shifted coverage to a more event-driven approach focusing upon matters of local interest. Whole new categories of news, such as crime, police, and court beats, became sensations, and the reportage necessary to effectively compete for readership needed to match. Match it did, and more, with expanded treatment of violence and crime giving rise to even more sensational reportage than that which political candidates and presidents had encountered in the previous fifty years.
Much of the sensational reporting endured by chief executives in the mid-nineteenth century stemmed from the allegiances, actions, and misdeeds of their running mates and appointed cabinet members. Time and time again, vice presidents, secretaries, and ministers drew fire upon their patron in the White House. Social snubs, nepotism, sexual preferences and indiscretions, and corruption all fueled the presses of penny newspapers and partisan journals alike, with even the distractions of the Civil War unable to save Abraham Lincoln from confronting issues ranging from his wife’s extravagant redecoration of the White House to the incompetence of his military commanders to alleged improprieties committed by various secretaries, including Simon Cameron, Salmon Chase, and Gideon Welles.
If corruption was a fossil fuel for powering sensational reporting in the press, the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant turned the headlines white hot during his two terms in office. Particularly inept in the selection of his cabinet secretaries, Grant proved as overmatched as a chief executive as he had been competent as a commanding general. The Gold Panic of 1869, alleged kickbacks to his secretary of the navy, George M. Robeson, and secretary of war, William W. Belknap, the Freedman’s and Whiskey Rings, and the Credit Mobilier scandal all populated the columns of the journals of the day and, in terms of the American press, the Grant administration marked a significant turning point in the relationship between the presidency and those reporting its triumphs and its failures.
While Grant remained consistent in his treatment of the press by rarely granting interviews, making no attempt to curry favor, and single-mindedly ignoring that which was written and said of him, those reporting and editing were no longer slaves to partisan politics in either their attacks or support. “There would always be party partisanship, of course, but Grant’s two terms demonstrated that where corruption existed, it would be exposed by a competitive, investigative press no matter which party was in power,” observe journalism historians John Tebbel and Sarah Miles Watts. “Newspapers would continue to divide according to the party leanings of their managements, but now the news came first, regardless of party.”20
For all that, the American public remained staunchly supportive of their beloved general—which may help explain the origins of perhaps the most sensational coverage of all in regard to Grant. Indeed, if reporting techniques and the lengths to which editors and publishers were willing to reach in pursuit and circulation of a story are any measure, in addition to editorial content, the deathwatch of Ulysses S. Grant in the spring and summer of 1885 remains testimony to the capacity of the American press to produce sensations in the headlines and articles of its newspapers.
GRANT IS DYING in large black type and under a grim border greeted readers of the New York Times on March 1, 1885. Similar headlines decked elsewhere in the newspaper, among articles on murder-suicides and swindlers set free from jail, lamented, SINKING INTO THE GRAVE and GEN. GRANT’S FRIENDS GIVE UP HOPE. The Times, along with its competitors, the World, Sun, Post, Journal, Daily News, and Brooklyn Eagle, all chased the dramatic story of the former president and his battle against terminal throat cancer, even as he sought to complete his memoirs in order to free his family from the poverty imposed upon them by failed financial dealings.21
For the next five months, reporters and editors never strayed far from the courageous struggle in the Grant household, first on Sixty-Sixth Street in New York City and later at Mt. McGregor, the mountain retreat upstate, where Grant passed the summer doggedly working on the manuscript of his memoirs. Initially, the New York reporters were joined by colleagues from the wire services and from papers in Washington, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Chicago and after setting up a makeshift press office on Madison Avenue south of Sixty-Sixth Street, settled in for the duration. Each local paper strung a special wire from the basement of the building to its downtown office, while three bulletin boys from Western Union, Associated Press, and United Press International initially waited in a hallway inside the Grant residence to dispatch updates to their offices as well. For the next eight weeks, this platoon of reporters competed for access to the story, first through the family and by pouncing on visitors leaving the residence and later via the daily bulletins issued by Grant’s doctors. Some posed as patients with similar symptoms to visit his physicians and get an insight into the prognosis and course of the disease. Others occupied windows across the street to peer into Grant’s study while he dozed or worked, and one enterprising scribe even vaulted the fence at the rear of the house and tried to bribe the Irish maid for access to the former president.22
The resulting coverage was sensational in its frequency and tone. Following one particular night of crisis, April 2, the Times again decked headlines that read THE END THOUGHT TO BE AT HAND and HIS CONDITION HOPELESS. Within the story, updates were quoted from every half hour, and at 9:00 p.m., one visitor leaving indicated to the swarming reporters that he did not see how the general could survive until morning.23
Miraculously, Grant rallied and eventually, on a torrid June afternoon, was transferred to Mt. McGregor near Saratoga, where he completed his memoirs on July 19. His condition grew steadily worse. On July 22, the Times headlined DEATH COMING VERY NEAR, and the World bordered its front page in black, anticipating the worst. At 8:08 a.m. on the morning of July 23, 1885, Ulysses S. Grant finally succumbed to the disease. Six minutes later, the Times posted the notice of the president’s death in its window. The deathwatch for the former president was over. The national mourning would begin.24
By the time Grover Cleveland ran for the first term of his presidency in 1884, the practice of political mudslinging in the pages of the partisan and penny press remained a well-established tactic and if the name-calling was delivered in sensational headlines so much the better. A native son of Buffalo, New York, he may have been, but he received no favoritism in the pages of the hometown newspaper when on July 21, 1884, the Evening Telegraph declared, A TERRIBLE TALE. A DARK CHAPTER IN A PUBLIC MAN’S HISTORY. The subheads were even more accusatory, proclaiming, THE PITIFUL STORY OF MARIA HALPIN AND GOVERNOR CLEVELAND’S SON.
The headlines, picked up by newspapers across the country and even more sensationalized in the days to come, were spawned by reports that during rowdier times as a young attorney in western New York, Cleveland had become romantically involved with a widow, Maria Crofts Halpin, with the result of the affair alleged to be the birth of an illegitimate son. While Cleveland cared for the child’s welfare, he never admitted paternity and, much as Jefferson had, kept his own counsel when the liaison became a topic for newspaper articles.
Before Cleveland’s political supporters could put the reports to rest, Republican boosters of his opponent in the 1884 election, Maine’s former secretary of state and congressman James Blaine, took to the streets with a chant remarkably similar to the verse to which Jefferson had been subjected decades before:
Ma! Ma!
Where’s my pa?
Gone to the White House,
Ha! Ha! Ha!
In the end, the election swung on a political error made by Blaine in New York City during the closing days of the campaign, and Cleveland won his first term by less than thirty thousand votes out of almost ten million cast across the country.25
It is, perhaps, even more important or instructive to note an incident from Cleveland’s second, nonconsecutive term. When he submitted to a secret operation for the removal of a cancerous lesion on the roof of his mouth aboard the yacht of a well-to-do friend in July 1893, the press was effectively held at bay by a series of lies and half-truths maintained by the president himself, the team of doctors performing the procedure, and Cleveland’s de facto press secretary Daniel Lamont. Eventually, one of the surgeons leaked the story to an acquaintance, and it was picked up by Elisha Jay Edwards, a reporter for the Philadelphia Press, who broke it on the front page on August 29, 1893.
THE PRESIDENT A VERY SICK MAN and THE CASE NOT UNLIKE GRANT’S exclaimed the decked headlines, but the account was different from many of its predecessors in its measured note and absence of runaway hyperbole. “The prose is simple, restrained, sober—a little flowery sometimes, but never sensational or maudlin,” observes historian Matthew Algeo. Indeed, the original version was a model of objectivity and accuracy from that which was known to Edwards at the time, but picked up by the wire services the story quickly jumped the tracks to the sensational. HE HAD A CANCER raved the San Francisco Morning Call.26
What is noteworthy, from a journalism history perspective, is that Edwards’s report drew heavy fire from its Philadelphia competitor, the Times, edited by Cleveland’s personal friend and booster, Alexander K. McClure. Never one to miss an opportunity to slam emotional headlines onto his own newspaper’s front page, he ultimately impeached the accuracy of Edwards’s story and, in a twist of irony, accused the Press of “conscienceless sensationalism.” McClure went on to excoriate both the author of the story and the editorial judgment of any journal that would run such an invention of the imagination. “It is not the writing of the sensations that we object to, but the printing of them, and for that the responsibility belongs to the paper that for weeks and months has been laboring by every device of exaggeration, misrepresentation, or suppression, by distorting news or by making it, to excite a panic among its readers …,” he wrote.27
It is a significant milestone in the evolution of the American press when those busily propagating sensational news coverage themselves took the occasion to target their competitors labeling them, and in this instance their accurate and objective reporter, everything from a “calamity howler” to a “famous falsifier” and accusing their rival of committing “crimes against public tranquility.” Whether it was political protection for a favorite son, dismay at having been scooped, or merely a case of the pot calling the kettle black, the trials of E. J. Edwards signaled the onset of yet another transition in the ongoing evolution of the industry; a natural movement forward from the partisan press to the penny press and from the sensational to the objective and crusading philosophies that would come to define the rise of the muckraking mentality early in the twentieth century.
The fact that such evolutionary progressions played out on the national stage attendant to coverage of the chief executive is fortunate for students of American journalism history. The highly visible and documented relationship between the press and the president provides a clear focal point from which to observe the various stages and phases of the editorial process of the nation’s newspapers throughout the republic’s first one hundred years. Treatment of Jefferson, Jackson, Grant, Cleveland, and other chief executives offers reflections of the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle developments within the industry and serve, not only to chronicle our history, but also inform our understanding of the current relationship between the media of today and the White House.
How we have arrived at a point, early in the twenty-first century, at which the media widely reports politically nuanced accusations of an uncertain birthright for President Barack Obama is not merely the sum of more recent experiences brought about by the Watergate scandal that doomed the presidency of Richard M. Nixon or the unprecedented manipulation of the media by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Its origins extend back much farther, all the way to the first howling headlines that caught the imagination of colonial readers and drew the ire of founding fathers and their nineteenth-century successors.
Even as news media historians continue to chart the evolution of the American press and the nature of its coverage of the presidency, it is also telling to note the continued public fascination with the dynamics of the relationship between the journalists and the politicians; even several decades removed. Consider that in the time that it has taken to complete this study, no fewer than three new popular works on nineteenth-century chief executives, William McKinley, James Garfield, and Ulysses S. Grant, have been published. Their trials and triumphs, complete with decks of sensational headlines, are once again in front of the nation’s literary consumers; testimony to an enduring fascination with even some of the least known occupants of the nation’s highest office.
Finally, in understanding the nature of sensational reporting of the US presidency and its enduring impact upon the media coverage of today, passage of more than two hundred years has not blunted some of the fundamental tensions between the press and the highest elected office in the land. John F. Kennedy enjoyed a better understanding of journalists than many who have occupied the Oval Office, and he once remarked to his speechwriter, Theodore G. Sorenson, “Always remember that their interests and ours ultimately conflict.” That an active press has resorted to sensational or emotional coverage of American presidents early and often in our nation’s history while exploiting that conflict is hardly surprising. Conflict is news and has always sold newspapers, especially when the headlines and reportage have been provocative. The fact that such still seems to be the case even now in the twenty-first century is incontrovertible evidence that the legacy of James Callender, Charles Hammond, and Alexander McClure remains intact and a not insignificant element of today’s relationship between the news media and the White House.28
1.Eric Foner, Who Owns History: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), xi.
2.Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941), 442. See also Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 123.
3.Eric Burns, Infamous Scibblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 31.
4.Ibid., 12.
5.Ibid., 324.
6.Ibid., 256.
7.Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1981), 6–7.
8.John Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 136.
9.Ibid., 140.
10.Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals, 10.
11.Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 217.
12.Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals, 11.
13.Ibid., 13.
14.Ellis, American Sphinx, 219.
15.Ibid., 220.
16.Robert V. Remini, The Election of Andrew Jackson (Phildelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1963), 152.
17.John Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2008), 4–5. See also Remini, The Election of Andrew Jackson, 152–153.
18.Remini, The Election of Andrew Jackson, 154–55.
19.Eileen Shields-West, The World Almanac of Presidential Campaigns: All the Facts, Anecdotes, Scandals, and Mudslinging in the History of the Race for the White House (New York: Pharos Books, 1992), 47. See also Meacham, American Lion, 4–6.
20.John Tebbel and Sarah Miles Watts, The Press and the Presidency: From George Washington to Ronald Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 229.
21.“Grant is Dying,” New York Times, March 1, 1885. See also Mark Perry, Grant and Twain: The Story of an American Friendship (New York: Random House, 2004), 149.
22.Richard Goldhurst, Many Are the Hearts: The Agony and Triumph of Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1975), 173.
23.“The End Thought to Be At Hand—His Condition Hopeless,” New York Times, April 2, 1885.
24.“Death Coming Very Near,” New York Times, July 22, 1885. See also Goldhurst, Many Are the Hearts, 229–230.
25.Tebbel and Watts, The Press and the Presidency, 262. See also Shields-West, Presidential Campaigns, 115.
26.Matthew Algeo, The President is a Sick Man: Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011), 145.
27.Ibid., 159.
28.Tebbel and Watts, The Press and the Presidency, 484.