1. Collier’s Weekly, 18 February 1911, 7.
2. Letter from Egmont H. Arens in Collier’s Weekly, 30 September 1911, 34. Arens’s essay, along with many others, appeared in a series of Collier’s columns titled “The American Newspaper” that ran through the summer and fall of 1911. The magazine commissioned articles by journalists for the series, too, some of which also appeared under the title “The American Newspaper.”
3. Letter from Curtis C. Brown in Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 23.
4. Letter from O. H. Chamberlain in Collier’s Weekly, 19 August 1911, 18.
5. Ibid.
6. Letter from Edward Broderick in Collier’s Weekly, 18 November 1911, 6.
7. Letter from May V. Godfrey in Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 22.
8. Ibid.
9. Letter from Curtis C. Brown in Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 23.
10. Letter from O. H. Chamberlain in Collier’s Weekly, 19 August 1911, 18.
11. Letter from Marjorie Van Horn in Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 22. When I have quoted Marjorie Van Horn’s essay here and elsewhere, I have kept the original spelling and syntax.
12. Ibid.
13. Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism and Its Relation to the Public,” pt. 5, “What Is News?” Collier’s Weekly, 18 March 1911, 16. Irwin started as a feature writer at the New York Sun and during the 1920s wrote syndicated pieces for Metropolitan Features.
14. Collier’s Weekly, 8 April 1911, 9, and Collier’s Weekly, 18 February 1911, 7.
15. Thomas C. Leonard, News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 178, drawn from U.S. Census reports and Editor & Publisher.
16. Carl F. Kaestle, Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, and Katherine Tinsley, Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 164. The census indicates high literacy rates among most U.S. populations by the late nineteenth century. In 1880, 9 percent of native-born whites over the age of ten reported that they could not write. Among foreign-born whites, the number was 12 percent. An astonishing 70 percent of black respondents reported that they could not write, but that percentage declined rapidly over the next few decades. Carl F. Kaestle, “Seeing the Sites: Readers, Publishers, and Local Print Cultures in 1880,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 4, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 28–29.
17. William R. Merriman, director, prepared under the supervision of S. N. D. North, Twelfth Census of the United States, Taken in the Year 1900, vol. 9, Manufactures, pt. 3: Special Reports on Selected Industries (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Office, 1902), 1051.
18. John L. Given, Making a Newspaper (New York: Henry Holt, 1907), 1–2.
19. The role that newspapers played in creating nations was famously outlined by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991) and has been debated ever since. For discussions of newspapers’ roles (nation-building and otherwise) in the early national United States, see David Paul Nord, “Newspapers and American Nationhood, 1776–1826,” in Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), pt. 1; Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); and Carol Sue Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic, 1783–1833 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). In speaking about the public sphere, I am joining the many media historians who have adopted and worked with Jurgen Habermas’s term. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). For an incisive discussion of how the idea of a public sphere relates to media and journalism history, see Michael Schudson, “News, Public, Nation,” American Historical Review 107, no. 102 (April 2002): 481–95. Richard Butsch analyzes media audiences as “publics” in The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, and Individuals (New York: Routledge, 2007).
20. On 1830s and 1840s penny papers and their local urban reporting, see James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s “New York Herald” and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989); Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), chap. 1; John D. Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1–53; and Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
21. On the diversifying readership of turn-of-the-century newspapers, see Leonard, News for All; Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); and David Paul Nord, “Working-Class Readers: Family, Community, and Reading in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” in Communities of Journalism. On women’s increasing presence on newspaper staffs, see Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); and Jan Whitt, Women in American Journalism: A New History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). There has been little written on immigrant journalists as a group, but their ranks include Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the New York World; S. S. McClure, founder of the McClure syndicate; Prosper Fiorini (pen name: Maurice Ketten) and Valerian Gribayedoff, New York World cartoonists; and Rudolph Dirks, creator of the Katzenjammer Kids comic strip.
22. The most concrete evidence of this special influence comes from a sociologist’s survey performed after the scope of this study, in 1945. New Yorkers described what they missed about their daily newspapers during a seventeen-day news carriers’ strike; many of them spoke most passionately about features, columnists, and listings rather than specific current events. Bernard Berelson, “What ‘Missing the Newspaper’ Means,” in Communications Research, 1948–1949, ed. Paul Felix Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 111–29. Most journalism histories mention the birth of features such as the women’s page and the comic strips, but few delve into the actual content of those features. Among the journalism histories that incorporate discussions of feature news are Gerald J. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); George Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); and Peter Conolly-Smith, Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1890–1918 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004). Gunther Barth, though he writes in general ways about newspapers, does claim that features were some of the most important innovations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century news. See Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 58–109.
1. William T. Stead, The Americanization of the World (New York: Horace Markley, 1901), 290.
2. Ibid., 292.
3. Whitelaw Reid, Some Newspaper Tendencies: An Address Delivered Before the Editorial Associations of New-York and Ohio (New York: Henry Holt, 1879), 5.
4. On nineteenth-century Americans’ distrust of advertising, see Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Steven Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: Morrow, 1984), 15–19; and Frank Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1929), 211–26, 289–301.
5. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage, 1974), 138.
6. On nineteenth-century reading habits, see Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006); William J. Gilmore-Lehne, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Thomas C. Leonard, News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13, 20–21; and Ellen Gruber Garvey, “The Power of Recirculation: Scrapbooks and the Reception of the Nineteenth-Century Press,” in New Directions in American Reception Study, ed. Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 211–31.
7. Glenn S. Williamson, “The Mechanical Department,” in Journalism: Its Relation to and Influence upon the Political, Social, Professional, Financial, and Commercial Life of the United States of America, ed. New York Press Club (New York: New York Press Club, 1905), 48. On nineteenth-century methods of newsprint processing, see Joel Munsell, Chronology of the Origin and Progress of Paper and Paper Making (Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1876; reprint, New York: Garland, 1980); and David C. Smith, “Wood Pulp and Newspapers, 1867–1900,” Business History Review 38 (1964): 328–45.
8. Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 323.
9. Williamson, “The Mechanical Department,” 47–49. The New York Tribune operated the first commercial linotype in 1886, and the machines became commonplace in metropolitan newspapers over the next decade.
10. Ibid., 47.
11. Thorin Tritter, “Paper Profits in Public Service: Money Making in the New York Newspaper Industry, 1830–1930” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2000), 191.
12. M. A. Steigers to Joseph Pulitzer, 19 July 1902, Pulitzer Papers, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts.
13. Will C. Conrad, Kathleen F. Wilson, and Dale Wilson, The Milwaukee Journal: The First Eighty Years (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 45.
14. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 42. This ratio of advertising to national income would stay the same for the next sixty years.
15. Among the most useful studies on the growth of the advertising industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are Leach, Land of Desire; Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Pamela Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising. On advertising agencies in particular, see Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 112–82; Fox, The Mirror Makers; and Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 338–53.
16. M. M. Gilliam, “The Wanamaker Advertising Idea,” Printers’ Ink: A Journal for Advertisers 6, no. 1 (January 6, 1892): 4–7.
17. On experiments within newspapers’ advertising rules, see Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising, 227–52; and Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, 137–48.
18. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and the Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996), 29. Also on the magazines of this era, see Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promise of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880–1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); and Mark J. Noonan, Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870–1893 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010).
19. Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising, 473–74, and Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (Pasadena, CA: published by the author, 1919), 295–96.
20. Willard Holcomb, The Merry-Go-Round: A Volume of Verse Suitable for the Silly Season, vol. 2, no. 6 of Bauble (July 1896): 83, as quoted in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. 4, 1885–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 150. On readers clipping advertisements, see Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 16–50.
21. William R. Scott, Scientific Circulation Management for Newspapers (New York: Ronald Press, 1915), 36.
22. Richard L. Kaplan, “From Partisanship to Professionalism: The Transformation of the Daily Press,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 4, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 125.
23. Tritter, “Paper Profits in Public Service,” 167.
24. A few slogans predated this era; since 1833, New York Sun readers had seen in the nameplate, “It Shines for All.” Some newspaper nameplates had included small illustrations since the eighteenth century, but pictures became more common and typefaces became more distinctive over the course of the nineteenth century.
25. Scott, Scientific Circulation Management, 17–23.
26. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 283.
27. Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising, 507.
28. This practice started in the 1830s but only became common by the turn of the century. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 282. Examples include New York Herald ad in the New York Sun, 20 August 1893, 8; Philadelphia Inquirer ad in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 21 March 1916, 12; and ad for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, 26 March 1916, 12.
29. These posters survive in “Circulation Department General” series, Chicago Tribune Departmental Papers, Col. McCormick Research Center, Wheaton, IL.
30. The onlooker was describing the electric sign over the New York Times building entrance, erected in 1895. Unattributed quote taken from Printer’s Ink, in Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising, 507.
31. For a study of the chaotic visual and textual world of American cities in the antebellum era, see Henkin, City Reading (n. 6 above, this chap.).
32. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 283. Twelve cents was the Philadelphia Public Ledger’s rate from 1880 through the early 1900s.
33. Scott reprints an example of this kind of list in Scientific Circulation Management for Newspapers, 104–5.
34. New Orleans States-Item, 8 November 1885, quoted in John Wilds, Afternoon Story: A Century of the New Orleans States-Item (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976). Newsboys’ shouting grew so loud and alarming during World War I that some publishers and city governments put bans on the practice. Leonard, News for All, 155.
35. Don C. Seitz, Training for the Newspaper Trade (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1916), 139.
36. Tritter, “Paper Profits in Public Service,” 146, 160; John L. Given, Making a Newspaper (New York: Henry Holt, 1907), 9.
37. Given, Making a Newspaper, 59, 61, 62.
38. Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism and Its Relation to the Public,” pt. 7, “The Reporter and the News,” Collier’s Weekly, 22 April 1911, 21. The only time editors had commissioned such thorough reporting during the mid-nineteenth century was during the Civil War. By the 1890s and 1900s, however, the crush of newspaper competition within big cities inspired editors to devote as much time and money to urban events as they had to war zones.
39. Dana calculated these numbers in 1882. Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, New York, 1833–1918 (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 180. On the importance of scoops, see Lincoln Steffens, “The Business of a Newspaper,” Scribner’s Magazine, October 1897, 461–62; “Morning and Evening Newspapers,” in Journalism, ed. New York Press Club, 173.
40. Tritter, “Paper Profits in Public Service,” 146, 160.
41. Given, Making a Newspaper, 64–65.
42. Ibid., 302–3.
43. “Morning and Evening Newspapers,” 173. Given mentions the same process in Making a Newspaper, 303.
44. Harold A. Williams, The Baltimore Sun, 1837–1987 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 227, and the Philadelphia Evening Item, 20 June 1902, 4.
45. Charles D. Platt, “The Circulation Department,” in Journalism, ed. New York Press Club, 173. Posters publicizing upcoming Sunday editions often advertised these special inserts; see newspaper posters in the Art and Architecture Collection, New York Public Library, and in the Art Posters Collection, New-York Historical Society.
46. This reporter was Elizabeth Cochrane, writing as “Nellie Bly.” She traveled around the world in seventy-three days in 1889 and 1890.
47. Letter from Marjorie Van Horn in Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 2.
48. See John Henry Hepp, The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 140; Charles Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates, 1860–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 187–92; and Zboray and Zboray, Everyday Ideas.
49. William Dean Howells, “What Should Girls Read?” Harper’s Bazaar 36, no. 11 (November 1902): 960.
50. Nathaniel Fowler, “Reaching the Men through the Women,” Printer’s Ink, 22 July 1892, quoted in Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising, 317.
51. New York World, 27 October 1889, 21. This suggestion was one of many submitted (and then printed) during a contest in which the World asked readers how it could improve itself and gave cash prizes for the best ideas.
52. Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising, 480–81.
53. Platt, “The Circulation Department,” 171–72.
54. Evening Wisconsin, 22 March 1893, front page. For an older overview of the birth of women’s pages in U.S. daily newspapers, see George Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), xi, 132–72; for a new one, see Julie Golia, “Courting Women, Courting Advertisers: The Woman’s Page and the Transformation of the American Newspaper, 1895–1935,” Journal of American History 103, no. 3 (December 2016), 606–28.
55. On the working-class readership of these penny papers, see Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press,” American Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 211–34.
56. Kaplan, “From Partisanship to Professionalism,” 121. Kaplan also notes that afternoon papers accounted for 74 percent of dailies in 1910. This figure can be a bit misleading, since morning newspapers’ circulations were often larger. The morning field, by 1910, was dominated by a few mass-readership papers; the afternoon offered smaller and more locally based papers. For more on the differences in audience and content between morning and afternoon papers, see Steffens, “The Business of a Newspaper,” 449–50, and “Morning and Afternoon Newspapers,” in Journalism, ed. New York Press Club, 30–32.
57. Ross Gregory, ed., Almanacs of American Life: Victorian America, 1876–1913 (New York: Facts on File, 1996), 80.
58. Mark S. Littman, A Statistical Portrait of the United States: Social Conditions and Trends (Lanham, MD: Bernan Press, 1998), 15.
59. The illiteracy rate among foreign-born Americans ranged between 12 and 13.1 percent from 1880 to 1920. The illiteracy rate among native-born whites dropped from 8.7 to 2 percent over this span. Don Dodd, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1790–1970 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1973), 1:382. Literacy and newspaper habits also varied widely from one ethnic group to another. Germans were some of the most avid newspaper readers, while Italians often picked up the habit years or even generations after emigrating.
60. Quote is from Gerald J. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 124.
61. I draw my description of Pulitzer’s newspapers from my own research and from Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, 30, 94–115.
62. For a sampling of the New York World’s spectacular color Sunday sections, see Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano, eds., The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898–1911) (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2005).
63. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, 133, 158.
64. Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, 96, 115–17. On the history of the newspaper comic strip, see Judith O’Sullivan, The Great American Comic Strip: One Hundred Years of Cartoon Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990); Jerry Robinson, The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse, 2011); Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams, eds., Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (1977; repr., Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984); and Brian Walker, The Comics: The Complete Collection (New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2011).
65. Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1978), 247.
66. Seitz, Training for the Newspaper Trade, 89–90.
67. Ralph Berengren, “The Humor of the Colored Supplement,” Atlantic, August 1906, reprinted in Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, ed., The Profession of Journalism: A Collection of Articles on Newspaper Editing and Publishing, Taken from the Atlantic Monthly (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1918), 238, 242.
68. Platt, “The Circulation Department,” 172.
69. On the strike, see Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 402. On other criticisms, see James Edward Rogers, The American Newspaper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1909), 157–58.
70. Philadelphia Public Ledger, 26 March 1916, 5.
71. On these tactics, see Given, Making a Newspaper, 3–4, and Jason Rogers, Newspaper Building: Application of Efficiency to Editing, to Mechanical Production, to Circulation and Advertising (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918), 143. For examples of color-printed cut-out games, dioramas, and activities in the turn-of-the-century New York World, see Baker and Brentano, eds., The World on Sunday, 28, 42, 51, 53, 54, 90, 92, 94, 100.
72. Leonard, News for All, 163.
73. Ibid., 165.
74. Given, Making a Newspaper, 308.
75. Philadelphia North American, 20 June 1909, news section, page 5.
76. As quoted in Kaplan, “From Partisanship to Professionalism,” 128.
77. An exchange in the files of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch makes this logic clear; the managing editor mentions that the paper’s new music column will not run if the paper cannot enlist enough advertisers to support it. Don C. Seitz, memorandum on Post-Dispatch Music, 13 September 1899, Pulitzer Papers, September 1899, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts.
78. Scott, Scientific Circulation Management for Newspapers, 206.
79. Advertising World (Columbus, Ohio), 14 June 1897, 1. I owe this reference to Gerald J. Baldasty and Jeffrey Rutenbeck, “Money, Politics, and Newspapers: The Business Environment of Press Partisanship in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journalism History 15 (1988): 66.
80. “Morning and Afternoon Newspapers,” 29–30.
81. Hepp, The Middle-Class City, 101. On changing leisure habits in the late nineteenth century, see John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
82. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 396.
83. Scott, Scientific Circulation Management for Newspapers, 199. Lincoln Steffens says the same in “The Business of a Newspaper,” 464. On the rise of the Sunday newspaper, see Arthur Benington, “The Sunday Newspaper,” in Journalism, ed. New York Press Club; Emery and Emery, The Press and America, 246; Robert Ezra Park, “The Natural History of the Newspaper,” in The City, ed. Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Watson Burgess, Roderick Duncan McKenzie, and Louis Wirth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 96; Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 79; Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 122; and Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 380–404.
84. New York World, 27 October 1889, 13.
85. As indicated by masthead circulation statistics pre-1914 and by Audit Bureau of Circulations numbers post-1914.
86. Lloyd Wendt, Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1979), 456.
87. Given, Making a Newspaper, 313.
88. Philadelphia Record, 4 November 1907, 8. For other ads that illustrated why and how to use classifieds, see the New York World, 16 March 1885, cartoons at the top of the front page; Philadelphia Public Ledger, 6 May 1908, 14; and the Evening Wisconsin, 28 June 1913, 5.
89. Quote from New York World, 13 August 1905, Manhattan section, page 1. Two cents was the rate that the Philadelphia Public Ledger offered in 1908.
90. W. Ward Damon, “Advertising,” in Journalism, ed. New York Press Club; and Wendt, Chicago Tribune, 454.
91. Nathaniel Fowler, How to Sell, Being a Series of True-to-Life Dialogues between Salesmen and Customers, Covering Many Classes of Wholesale and Retail Selling and Buying in the Store, the Office, and on the Road (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1915), 201–7. Other books that advised these space salesmen include Marco Morrow, Things to Tell the Merchant (Lawrence: University of Kansas, Department of Journalism Press, 1914); and Joseph E. Chasnoff, Selling Newspaper Space (New York: The Ronald Press, 1913).
92. Fowler, How to Sell, 194.
93. Chicago Defender, 5 April 1913, 2.
94. Philadelphia North American, 26 October 1913, third news section, 15.
95. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 235, 355.
96. These were all ideas suggested by Truman DeWeese in Keeping a Dollar at Work: Fifty “Talks” on Newspaper Advertising Written for the N.Y. Evening Post (New York: New York Evening Post, 1915).
97. R. Roy Shuman, “Filling the ‘Ad’ Columns,” in Practical Journalism: A Complete Manual of the Best Newspaper Methods, ed. Edwin L. Shuman (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903), 192. For another source on the roles newspapers played in advertising in the first decades of the twentieth century, see Nathaniel Fowler, How to Sell, chap. 22.
98. Address of Frank Munsey before the Sphinx Club at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, 12 October 1898, 16, William Thompson Dewart Collection of Frank A. Munsey and New York Sun Papers, New-York Historical Society.
99. Edward C. Drew, “The Merchants and the Press,” Journalism, ed. New York Press Club, 138.
100. Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 22.
101. That year, the Scripps-McRae chain refused $500,000 worth of ad copy. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 328. Also on ad censorship, see Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising, 474, 481, 531; Scott, Scientific Circulation Management for Newspapers, 33; and Shuman, “Filling the ‘Ad’ Columns,” 198–99.
102. Letter from Curtis C. Brown in Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 23.
103. Magazines set the standard here, too. Warren wrote in his letter to Lawson: “That is one reason the L. H. Journal can get their price for advertising—they have a clean publication which everybody loves to look over.” Victor Freemont Lawson Papers, Newberry Library.
104. Rogers, Newspaper Building, 243. Lincoln Steffens claimed that the most profitable papers were those who were strictest with their advertisers; Steffens, “The Business of a Newspaper,” 465.
105. Stead, The Americanization of the World, 290.
106. Ibid., 290.
107. Both the New York World building, completed in 1890, and the San Francisco Call building, completed in 1898, had baroque domes; the Milwaukee Germania building, completed in 1896, sported turrets; both the San Francisco Chronicle building, completed in 1889, and the New York Herald building, completed in 1893, had signature clocks. Many of these structures were much larger than they needed to be to house a newspaper; they rented the extra space to other firms.
108. On the Tribune’s marble top, see Mona Domosh, “A Method for Interpreting Landscape: A Case Study of the New York World Building,” Area 21, no. 4 (1989): 328–29; on the World’s view and brochure, see Angela M. Blake, How New York Became American, 1890–1924 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 49, 53–55; and for the Evening Wisconsin print, see “Newspapers” file, Milwaukee Historical Society. For more on newspaper buildings, see Mona Domosh, “The Symbolism of the Skyscraper: Case Studies of New York’s First Tall Buildings,” Journal of Urban History 14, no. 3 (May 1988): 321–45; and Aurora Wallace, Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
109. Chauncey Depew, quoted in the New York World, 11 October, 1889. I owe this reference to Mona Domosh’s article “A Method for Interpreting Landscape,” 348.
110. Photos of this practice include an image of the Milwaukee Journal office, by J. Robert Taylor, Classified File “Newspapers,” 876 A, Wisconsin Historical Society, and one of the New York Journal building, in Bill Blackbeard, ed., R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995), 62. Mary Antin mentions the crowd studying the bulletin board outside the Boston Herald in her memoir The Promised Land (1912; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 236.
111. Hy B. Turner, When Giants Ruled: The Story of Park Row, New York’s Great Newspaper Street (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 127. The Herald would do something similar for baseball games between 1911 and 1913, setting up a diamond and moving the ball according to reports. Wallace, Media Capital, 77.
112. The estimate of freelancers comes from Steffens, “The Business of a Newspaper,” 447. On the numbers and types of newspaper employees, see Tritter, “Paper Profits in Public Service,” 136, 164; Directory of Public Ledger Employees, 1902, in Notes and References Relating to the History of Philadelphia Newspapers, 1937, 6:823, Philadelphia Public Library; and Chicago Daily News Staff List, 1895, folder 60, “Administrative and Operations,” Chicago Daily News Collection, MMS Field Enterprises, Newberry Library.
113. “Art in Printers’ Ink,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 22 May 1892, 10.
114. Steffens, “The Business of a Newspaper,” 463.
115. For a sampling of these behind-the-scenes articles, see Harold King, “Four and Twenty Hours in a Newspaper Office,” Once a Week Magazine, 26 September 1863; “The Metropolitan Newspaper,” Harper’s Monthly 56 (December 1877): 43–59; and Elizabeth G. Jordan, “The Newspaper Woman’s Story,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, March 1893, 340–47.
116. Newsboy training became common in the 1880s; Scott, Scientific Circulation Management for Newspapers, 289.
117. Tritter, “Paper Profits in Public Service,” 200.
118. Scott, Scientific Circulation Management for Newspapers, 100.
119. These tactics are suggested in James Philip MacCarthy, The Newspaper Worker: A Manual for All Who Write (New York: The Press Guild, 1906; repr., New York: Frank-Maurice, Inc., 1925), 10.
120. Kaplan, “From Partisanship to Professionalism,” 137; and Given, Making a Newspaper, 272–73.
121. Shuman, ed., Practical Journalism, 28.
122. Given, Making a Newspaper, 272–73. Manuals and articles consistently discouraged young hopefuls from even trying to write for newspapers; see Given, Making a Newspaper; Shuman, ed., Practical Journalism; Edwin L. Shuman, Steps into Journalism: Helps and Hints for Young Writers (Evanston, IL: Evanston Press, 1894); Jordan, “The Newspaper Woman’s Story”; and Flora McDonald, “The Newspaper Woman: One Side of the Question,” Journalist, 26 January 1889, 13.
123. I take this John Reed quote from Richard O’Connor, Heywood Broun: A Biography (New York: Putnam, 1975), 22, and I owe the reference to Kaplan, “From Partisanship to Professionalism,” 137.
124. Theodore Dreiser, “Out of My Newspaper Days,” pt. 5, “I Quit the Game,” Bookman 54, no. 8 (April 1922): 118, 124.
125. Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism and Its Relation to the Public,” pt. 6, “The Editor and the News,” Collier’s Weekly, 1 April 1911, 29.
126. These writers began working for newspapers in the 1840s through the 1860s. Croly mostly wrote domestic reflections and advice; Greenwood often worked as a correspondent; and Fern wrote about women’s lives, sometimes with a feminist bent. For a survey of women journalists of the 1870s and 1880s, see the “Women’s Issue” of the trade magazine the Journalist, 26 January 1889.
127. Shuman, ed., Practical Journalism, 148.
128. In 1880, 288 out of 12,308 journalists in the United States were women, and in 1900, 2,193 out of a total of 30,098 were women. By 1920 the numbers had risen, with women making up 16.8 percent of the nation’s reporters and editors. U.S. census data, cited in Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner, and Carole Fleming, Women and Journalism (London: Routledge, 2004), 15.
129. For histories of women journalists in this era, see Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, “Grit Your Teeth, Then Learn to Swear: Women in Journalistic Careers, 1850–1926,” American Journalism 18, no. 1 (2001): 53–72; Jean Marie Lutes, Front Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Jan Whitt, Women in American Journalism: A New History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Barbara Belford, Brilliant Bylines: A Biographical Anthology of Notable Newspaperwomen in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
130. A New York Sun code of conduct from 1894 needed to explicitly state that spitting on the floor, using obscene language, and arriving at work intoxicated were all prohibited. “Some Rules of Style for the Guidance of Compositors and Proof Readers Employed on The Sun,” Broadside, New-York Historical Society.
131. Flora McDonald, “The Newspaper Woman: One Side of the Question,” 13.
132. Jordan, “The Newspaper Woman’s Story,” 342.
133. Isabel Worrell Ball as quoted in Ida Husted Harper, “The Training of Women Journalists,” in The International Congress of Women of 1899, vol. 4, Women in the Professions (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), 54.
134. Journalist, 26 January 1889; quote taken from Gottlieb, “Grit Your Teeth, Then Learn to Swear,” 53.
135. James H. Collins, “The American Grub Street,” Atlantic, November 1906. On the rise of freelance writing, also see Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 404, 588.
136. On some women’s preference for freelance writing, see Collins, “The American Grub Street,” 261–62.
137. Lewis V. Bogy, How to Be a Newspaper Correspondent and Feature Story Writer (Washington, DC: Press Correspondence Bureau, 1910).
138. Fred L. Wenner, of Guthrie, Oklahoma, in the Journalist, 2 April 1892, 15.
139. See New York Herald ad in New York Sun, 20 August 1893, 8.
140. On newspaper workers’ hours, see Louis M. Lyons, Newspaper Story: One Hundred Years of the Boston Globe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971), 214–15; Tritter, “Paper Profits in Public Service,” 125, 127, 215; and Shuman, ed., Practical Journalism, 18.
141. On the practice of issuing many daily editions, see Given, Making a Newspaper, 19; and Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 276–81. In my research I encountered morning editions, “Home” editions, five o’clock editions, “Night Special” editions, “Final Night Extras,” and “Tenth Extra Racing” editions.
142. Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 22. On the increasing amount of work done during the night in this time, see Peter C. Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
143. For an overview of how the partisan-paper model worked, see David M. Ryfe, “News, Culture, and Public Life: A Study of Nineteenth-Century American Journalism,” Journalism Studies 7, no. 1 (2006): 60–77.
144. On newspapers’ evolution toward the joint-stock corporation model, see Tritter, “Paper Profits in Public Service,” 101–16, 143–61. On newspapers’ expenses outpacing the ability of political parties to cover them, see Baldasty and Rutenbeck, “Money, Politics, and Newspapers,” 65.
145. Shuman, ed., Practical Journalism, 16–17.
146. Tritter, “Paper Profits in Public Service,” 143.
147. Steffens, “The Business of a Newspaper,” 458–59.
148. MacCarthy, The Newspaper Worker, 16.
149. Nelson Antrim Crawford, The Ethics of Journalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924). The pamphlet was issued in several earlier editions as well. On reporters who refused to register with a party, see Michael Schudson, “Persistence of Vision: Partisan Journalism in the Mainstream Press,” in A History of the Book in America, ed. Kaestle and Radway, 4:140–50. On the rise of a new standard of objectivity, see Richard L. Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Ted Curtis Smythe, The Gilded Age Press, 1865–1900 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Emery and Emery, The Press and America, 219–36; and Hazel Dicken Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
150. Melville E. Stone, Fifty Years a Journalist (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1921), 53.
151. Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism and Its Relation to the Public,” pt. 12, “The Foe from Within,” Collier’s Weekly, 1 July 1911, 17.
152. For example, railroad magnate Jay Gould bought stock in the New York Tribune in the 1870s, and John D. Rockefeller, owner of Standard Oil, invested $10,000 in the Cleveland Herald in 1879. Linda Lawson, Truth in Publishing: Federal Regulation of the Press’s Business Practices 1880–1920 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 15–16.
153. Sinclair, The Brass Check, 236.
154. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 667–68; Editorial, Journalist, 18 August 1888, 8.
155. John A. Cockerill credited press clubs with boosting professional morale and standards in “The Newspaper of the Future” (Journalist Series), Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, August 1892. On press clubs, see William H. Freeman, The Press Club of Chicago: A History (Chicago: Press Club of Chicago, 1894); Journalist, 29 March 1884, 3; and Journalist, 4 December 1897. For a reminiscence about the socializing among reporters at such a press club, see Charles H. Dennis, “Whitechapel Nights,” Chicago Daily News, 29 July 1936.
156. On press clubs, see Hamilton Holt, Commercialism and Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 77–78; and Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, vol. 3, The Rise of a Modern City, 1871–1893 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 410.
157. Invitation from Milwaukee Press Club to John Goadby Gregory, 11 July 1906, “Correspondence,” John Goadby Gregory Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society.
158. For these and similar examples of careers that spanned news and business, see the personal notes in issues of the trade journal the Journalist in the 1890s, as well as Ethel M. Colson Brazelton, Writing and Editing for Women: A Bird’s-Eye View of the Widening Opportunities for Women in Newspaper, Magazine and Other Writing Work (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1927), 85; Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 460; Lyons, Newspaper Story, 83; and Fanny Butcher, Many Lives—One Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 112.
159. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 443.
160. Collins, “The American Grub Street,” 252; Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism and Its Relation to the Public,” pt. 10, “The Unhealthy Alliance,” Collier’s Weekly, 3 June 1911, 17–19, 28–29, 31, 34; and Genevieve Jackson Boughner, Women in Journalism: A Guide to the Opportunities and a Manual of the Technique of Women’s Work for Newspapers and Magazines (New York: D. Appleton, 1926), 165.
161. Collins, “The American Grub Street,” 263.
162. For a list of journalism schools and their founding dates as well as program offerings, see Editor & Publisher, International Yearbook Number for 1926, 30 January 1926, 218–20.
163. How-to books that covered both journalism and copywriting include Arnold Bennett, Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide (New York: J. Lane, 1898); Shuman, ed., Practical Journalism; Boughner, Women in Journalism; and Robert Cortes Holliday and Alexander Van Rensselaer, The Business of Writing: A Practical Guide for Writers (New York: George H. Duran, 1922).
164. Anonymous, “Confessions of a Managing Editor,” Collier’s Weekly, 28 October 1911, 19.
165. Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism and Its Relation to the Public,” pt. 9, “The Advertising Influence,” Collier’s Weekly, 20 May 1911, 16, 23–24; Holt, Commercialism and Journalism, 76, and Anonymous, “Confessions of a Managing Editor,” 19, 20, 24, 26.
166. Sinclair, The Brass Check, 213.
167. The Day Book ran from 1911 to 1917. Duane C. S. Stoltzfus, Freedom from Advertising: E. W. Scripps’s Chicago Experiment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
168. F. D. Corley to Victor Lawson, 7 December 1918. Victor Freemont Lawson Papers, Newberry Library. For a list of sums that companies spent on newspaper advertising, see Holt, Commercialism and Journalism, 13.
169. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 438.
170. Joseph Pulitzer’s files contain multiple railroad passes; Joseph Pulitzer Papers, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts. Also see Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 434 and 459. For journalists’ stories about pushy press agents, see T. Campbell-Copeland, The Ladder of Journalism: How to Climb It (New York: Allan Forman, 1893), 31–33; and Stone, Fifty Years a Journalist, 55.
171. Sinclair, The Brass Check, 285.
172. Given, Making a Newspaper, 309–10. See also Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism and Its Relation to the Public,” pt. 11, “Our Kind of People,” Collier’s Weekly, 17 June 1911, 17–18; Anonymous, “Confessions of a Managing Editor,” 20, 24; and Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 463.
173. Jason Rogers, editorial, Editor & Publisher 6:46, 4 May 1907, 4. Other sources on the press agent include Anonymous, “Confessions of a Managing Editor,” 18; Baldasty, The Commercialization of News, 70–71; Given, Making a Newspaper, 309–10; Irwin, “The American Newspaper,” pt. 10, “The Unhealthy Alliance,” 13; and Sinclair, The Brass Check, 282–85.
174. “What Milwaukee Merchants Are Offering,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 29 January 1903, front page.
175. Sinclair, The Brass Check, 213.
176. Gilliam, “The Wanamaker Advertising Idea,” 4–7.
177. On Wanamaker’s newsy strategy, see Joseph Appel, Growing Up with Advertising (New York: Business Bourse, 1940), 25, 43, 92, 97. Appel served as an advertising manager with Wanamaker.
178. Wanamaker’s ad, Philadelphia Record, 19 April 1887, 3.
179. Shuman, ed., Practical Journalism, 186.
180. This talk was given at the University of California and reprinted in Holt, Commercialism and Journalism.
181. Anonymous, “Confessions of a Managing Editor,” 20, 24, 26.
182. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 436, 444.
183. Ibid., 445–46.
184. Lawson, “When Publishers Invited Federal Regulation to Curb Circulation Abuses,” Journalism Quarterly 71 (1994): 114. Also on the Newspaper Publicity Act see Lawson, Truth in Publishing; and Timothy E. Cook, Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 43–44.
185. Philadelphia North American, 20 March 1909, as quoted in Holt, Commercialism and Journalism, 92.
186. Scott, Scientific Circulation Management for Newspapers, 34.
187. Unnamed correspondent, Collier’s Weekly, 19 August 1911, 18.
188. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, 133, 147–48.
189. Hearst’s papers held larger circulations than Scripps’s papers in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Baldasty, E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers, 152.
190. The New York World claimed the biggest circulation in the country in this era; it reached 1,500,000 readers every day by 1898. Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, vii.
1. Ad for the Inquirer Almanac, Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 February 1899, 13.
2. I draw this background on advice literature from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books (New York: MacMillan, 1946), and Judy Hilkey, Character Is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
3. Clara S. J. Moore, Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society, 10th rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1878).
4. Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave, 34.
5. Good Manners: A Manual of Etiquette in Good Society (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1870), iii. I owe this quote to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave, 34.
6. Among the scholars who have considered newspapers as assimilators are Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 59–61; and Robert Ezra Park, “The Natural History of the Newspaper,” in The City, ed. Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Watson Burgess, Roderick Duncan McKenzie, and Louis Wirth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923). For an overview of the foreign-language press in America, see Robert Ezra Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922); Peter Conolly-Smith, Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1890–1918 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004); and Janet E. Steele, The Sun Shines for All: Journalism and Ideology in the Life of Charles A. Dana (Syracuse University Press, 1993), 119–20.
7. Barbara Mary Klaczynska, “Working Women in Philadelphia, 1900–1930” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1975).
8. The port reached its peak in the early twentieth century, between trade and new demands for ships for the post–Spanish American War navy; it was fading by the 1920s. Domenic Vitiello, Engineering Philadelphia: The Sellers Family and the Industrial Metropolis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 154, 208.
9. Lincoln Steffens, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented,” McClure’s Magazine, July 1903, 249–63.
10. Caroline Golab, “The Immigrant and the City: Poles, Italians, and Jews in Philadelphia, 1870–1920,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 203; and Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies, “The Iron Age, 1876–1905,” in Philadelphia: A 300 Year History, ed. Nicholas B. Wainwright and Edwin Wolf (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 488.
11. Background on Philadelphia populations comes from Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age, 1876–1905”; Davis and Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia; and Fredric M. Miller, Morris J. Vogel, and Allen F. Davis, Still Philadelphia: A Photographic History, 1890–1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).
12. Vitiello, Engineering Philadelphia, 144; and Miller, Vogel, and Davis, Still Philadelphia, 66.
13. Klaczynska, “Working Women in Philadelphia,” 5.
14. Ibid., 74–76; Miller, Vogel, and Davis, Still Philadelphia, 97.
15. Ray H. Abrams, “Residential Propinquity as a Factor in Marriage Selection,” American Sociological Review 8 (June 1943): 292.
16. Rowell’s & Ayer’s American Newspaper Directory (New York: Geo. P. Rowell, 1891).
17. John F. Sutherland, “Housing the Poor in the City of Homes: Philadelphia at the Turn of the Century,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia, ed. Davis and Haller, 182; and Miller, Vogel, and Davis, Still Philadelphia, 223.
18. Fourteen of those papers were in English, five in German. Newspaper numbers come from Geo. P. Rowell & Co.’s American Newspaper Directory (New York: George P. Rowell, 1880. This chapter does not study the advice material in the foreign-language press. The role of that press in immigrant assimilation deserves separate studies. Existing scholarship includes Conolly-Smith, Translating America; and Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control. See also Isaac Metzker, ed., A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the “Jewish Daily Forward” (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1971), for translations of advice columns that appeared in New York City’s largest Yiddish-language newspaper.
19. “The Fashions,” Philadelphia Record, December 9, 1882, 2. This article was reprinted from a women’s magazine, The Delineator.
20. As recounted by Childs in a later anniversary edition of the paper, Philadelphia Public Ledger, 24 April 1893, 15. The Ledger’s claim to have run the first women’s column is reinforced by various journalism histories, but newsweeklies and magazines were working along similar lines. One year before the Ledger began its “Women’s Interests” column, Cyrus Curtis assembled clippings for a four-page magazine published out of Philadelphia, the Tribune and Farmer. The column “Woman and the Home” was the magazine’s most popular feature and inspired him to found the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1883. This column of clippings likely inspired the Ledger’s own.
21. Philadelphia Public Ledger, 30 November 1889, 5.
22. Within Philadelphia, the North American syndicated the advice column “Marion Harland Advises on Matters of Etiquette” in 1901 and ran a regular column “Advice on Social Customs” in 1909. A column titled “Social Problems” appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin by 1902, and a more specific “Points in Etiquette” column ran there by 1916. The Public Ledger printed the column “Good Form” by 1916.
23. “Dear Household,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 3 November 1902, 7.
24. On the mapping (and policing) of respectable urban space for women, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Mona Domosh, “Those ‘Gorgeous Incongruities’: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century New York City,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88, no. 2 (1998): 209–26. John Hepp writes about public transit creating middle-class female space in Philadelphia: The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 25–47.
25. For a study of single women’s city lives in this era, see Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Women also had to leave the house more often for errands because fewer vendors traveled from door to door in turn-of-the-century urban neighborhoods. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
26. “Luncheon and Soups,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 7 February 1880, 2.
27. The face-washing routine is described in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, 2 November 1902, 10.
28. “In the Household,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 28 February 1880, supplement section, 1.
29. “Always Wear, for Beauty,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 24 April 1893, 15.
30. “The Fashionable Figure,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 1 March 1900, 7.
31. “Women’s Interests,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 22 December 1892, 6. The column gathered this information from sources like the London Daily News and women’s periodicals, such as the Woman’s Journal and the Woman’s Tribune.
32. On settlement houses in Philadelphia, see John F. Sutherland, “Origins of Philadelphia’s Octavia Hill Association: Social Reform in the ‘Contented City,’” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 99, no. 1 (January 1975): 20–44; and Rosina McAvoy Ryan, “Settlement Houses,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/settlement-houses/, accessed 27 May 2014. On the Civic Club, see Cary Hutto, “Civic Club,” Question of the Week (blog), Historical Society of Pennsylvania website, September 12, 2011, https://hsp.org/blogs/question-of-the-week/organized-in-1894-by-prominent-philadelphia-women-what-club-sought-to-promote-%E2%80%9Cby-education-and-acti.
33. “Women’s Interests,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 22 December 1892, 6.
34. “The Interesting Sex” was running by 1895.
35. The Philadelphia Call, another working-class paper, shut down in 1895. The Item closed in 1912; the Record published through 1947.
36. Miller, Vogel, and Davis, Still Philadelphia, 77; and Philip Scranton and Walter Licht, Work Sights: Industrial Philadelphia, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 133–35.
37. Classified ad, Philadelphia Record, 25 September 1895, 3.
38. “In the Swim,” Philadelphia Evening Item, 3 April 1898, 5.
39. Ibid.; and Philadelphia Record, 20 April 1887, 2.
40. Philadelphia Evening Item, 20 June 1902, 6.
41. Philadelphia Evening Item, 20 June 1902, front page.
42. Circulation records do not exist to document any specific audience for turn-of-the-century Philadelphia papers. Classified ads, though, help piece together readership. In classified columns in all of the major Philadelphia dailies, employers posted ads for “colored” workers, and workers seeking positions identified themselves as colored.
43. The Philadelphia Tribune did not write for an audience far beyond the city itself and did not discuss behavior very openly. African American papers that circulated from northern cities through southern communities—especially the Chicago Defender—spoke more explicitly about urban life and gave more guidance on how to adjust. On this process, see James Grossman, “Blowing the Trumpet: The Chicago Defender and Black Migration during WWI,” Illinois Historical Journal 78 (1985): 84.
44. Society column, Philadelphia Record, April 23, 1887, 7.
45. Ad for picture series “The Paris Salon,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 18 May 1895, 3. On self-cultivation in middle-class culture, see Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Andrew C. Rieser, The Chautaqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 101–26.
46. List of subjects is from the Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 February 1899, 9. The Inquirer bought the “Home Study Circle” from the Chicago Record, which syndicated the series for over a dozen newspapers. The Chicago Record reported forty thousand attendees at a series of seventy-five lectures that it hosted in connection with the series. Donald I. Abramoski, “The Chicago Daily News: A Business History, 1875–1901” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1963), 181–85.
47. Examples of classified ads come from the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 25 and 30 September 1895, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, 2 October 1907, 14.
48. For one example, see the ad for “The Record” School Information Bureau, Philadelphia Record, 12 May 1915, 12.
49. “The Well-Bred Girl,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 20 September 1892, 7.
50. The Philadelphia Inquirer was more demure, refraining from printing letters it deemed “purely personal” and sending individual responses to those questions. This was the policy both for “Everybody’s Column” and for “Womanly Answers to Womanly Questions,” found in the early 1900s’ Inquirer.
51. Letter from John W. F. W., Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 10 October 1906, 8.
52. Letter from Edna Holloway, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 1 July 1902, 10, and letter to “Everybody’s Column,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 July 1903, 8.
53. Philadelphia Inquirer, 15 May 1895, 3.
54. Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 March 1911, sec. 3, 7.
55. James J. Flink, in America Adopts the Automobile, 1895–1910 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), reports that the Inquirer and the North American were the first newspapers to use automobiles for delivery, when they took newspapers to the Jersey shore in 1901. For department store delivery, see Strawbridge & Clothier advertisement in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 12 July 1910, 5.
56. “Don’ts for Travellers,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 12 July 1910, 7.
57. Ibid.
58. For an example of a feature that showcased summer adventures, see “Leaves from the Diary of a Summer Girl,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 12 July 1910, 7. For an example of illustrations modeling vacation behavior, see the Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 May 1895, 14.
59. On the rise of this aspirational, visually alluring consumer culture in turn-of-the-century cities, see William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993); T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Pamela Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
60. “Right and Wrong Way of Watering Plants,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 6 October 1907, 2, women’s magazine; and “Do You Know How to Sweep?” Philadelphia Inquirer, 15 May 1895. The rise of home economics and domestic science partly account for the new precision expected in homemaking; see Janice Williams Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003); Megan Elias, Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Helen Zoe Veit, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); and Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986).
61. Quoted in Marian Martineau, “How to Have Lily White Hands in Spite of a Hot July Sun,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 5 July 1902, 3.
62. Women’s magazine, Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 March 1911, 3.
63. “Harmony in Homecraft,” Philadelphia Record, 16 May 1915, sec. 4, 3.
64. For fashion show, see Leach, Land of Desire, plate 13; on cooking classes, see Philadelphia Public Ledger, 7 November 1920, women’s section, 2. Few papers kept records on the number of letters they received on questions of beauty, but a few 1920s sources indicate high numbers. For example, the Chicago Tribune, which kept tallies for the year 1926, received the most letters (24,047) asking for health advice; beauty was the second-largest category, with 14,570 letters. Chicago Tribune, Book of Facts, 1927: Data on Markets, Merchandising, Advertising, with Special Reference to the Chicago Territory and Chicago Newspaper Advertising (Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1927), 170.
65. For example, see Philadelphia Record, 26 March 1911, magazine section, 10.
66. Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 10 October 1906, 16. The title “Nicckel-out Magazine” suggests that the Bulletin borrowed this joke from a foreign newspaper. Newspaper humor sections—both print and illustrated—often borrowed from other publications, both American and foreign.
67. “Dorothy Dix: Reminds Us That with Success There Is a Price,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 25 March 1916, 7.
68. The decline in the Ledger’s share of the market is evident in statistics from George P. Rowell’s Newspaper Directory, years 1880–1901, and Pettingill & Company’s Newspaper Directory, 4th ed. (Boston: Pettingill & Co., 1896), 280. A reporter in Printer’s Ink told potential advertisers that “the Public Ledger holds a small conservative clientele among the business and moneyed classes, making it an excellent medium for financial and high grade real estate advertising.” Printer’s Ink 48, no. 1 (July 6, 1904): 2–3.
69. Information about the North American under Thomas Wanamaker comes from Harry B. Whitcraft, “Fifty Years of Journalism in Philadelphia,” pt. 3, “The North American under the Ownership and Management of Thomas B. Wanamaker and Edward A. Van Valkenburg,” Beehive: A Monthly Magazine of Germantown, Philadelphia’s Richest Suburb 25, no. 3 (July 1934): 3–7, 20–21. The Philadelphia Press was considered a newspaper for “the classes” as well. I concentrated on the Ledger and the North American because the Press did not last quite as long as they did (the Ledger bought it in 1920) and because the Press’s circulation dwindled between 1900 and 1920.
70. “Peggy Shippen’s Letter,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 26 March 1916, 6: “These Americans are marvelous.” The real Peggy Shippen was a prominent Philadelphian in the time of the Revolutionary War who had married Benedict Arnold.
71. “University Activities. News Notes of Campus and Classroom and Philadelphia’s Big Educational Center,” Philadelphia North American, 26 October 1913, 7.
72. The “College Notes” column appeared in 1896. It chronicled new courses, college budgets, and professors’ research trips at top-tier colleges across the nation. For an example, see Philadelphia Public Ledger, 10 November 1896, 16.
73. Scranton and Licht, Work Sights, 133–35.
74. “Guide for Americans Abroad,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 6 May 1908, 7. The North American ran a bureau with resort information; see Philadelphia North American, 18 June 1909, 9.
75. For examples, see advertisements for J. E. Caldwell, the Chestnut Street jewelers, in every day’s Philadelphia Public Ledger during the 1910s.
76. The Philadelphia Public Ledger occasionally used the heading “Women’s Interests” after 1900 but no longer ran notes about women’s professional and political achievements under that heading.
77. On the history of such columns, see Julie Golia, “Advising America: Advice Columns and the Modern American Newspaper, 1895–1955” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011); David Gudelunas, Confidential to America: Newspaper Advice Columns and Sexual Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008); Harnett T. Kane, with Ella Bentley Arthur, Dear Dorothy Dix: The Story of a Compassionate Woman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1952); Laura Claridge, Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners (New York: Random House, 2009); and Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave.
78. One Chicago reader occasionally bought working-class papers “to gratify a low taste for Mutt, Jeff, the Katzenjammer Kids, and the others. I class my reading the Hearst papers with my occasional eating of pig’s feet.” Letter from O. H. Chamberlain Jr., Collier’s Weekly, 19 August 1911, 18.
79. In 1880, one Philadelphia newspaper copy circulated for every four city residents. By 1900, there were five dailies issued for every six Philadelphians. Hepp, The Middle-Class City, 99. Because not all Philadelphians read a newspaper (due to poverty, illiteracy, youth, or lack of interest), these statistics indicate that those city residents who did read sometimes took multiple papers.
80. Truman DeWeese, Keeping a Dollar at Work: Fifty “Talks” on Newspaper Advertising Written for the N.Y. Evening Post (New York: New York Evening Post, 1915), 49, 29–30.
81. On these changes in food supply, see Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 3. On the nineteenth-century meatpacking industry, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 207–59.
82. “Hot-Weather Soup,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 7 July 1902, 7.
83. Horn & Hardart Baking Company ad, Philadelphia Daily News, 8 September 1925, 14.
84. Baker’s Sugar Corn ad, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 3 July 1902, 7.
85. Heckers’ Old Homestead Pancake Flour ad, Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 November 1915, 4.
86. General Electric refrigerator ad, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, 8 March 1928, 8. On the new household technologies of the era and their impact on women’s lives, see Cowan, More Work for Mother; and Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
87. “Mrs. Scott’s Food Talks,” Philadelphia North American, 12 May 1925, 8.
88. Oysterettes ad, Philadelphia Inquirer, 2 October 1907, 9. For more on the changing food rituals in the Progressive era, see Shapiro, Perfection Salad.
89. United Gas Improvement Company ad, Philadelphia Tribune, 10 January 1920, 6.
90. Philadelphia Gas Works Company ad, Philadelphia Daily News, 24 April 1929, 18.
91. Miller, Vogel, and Davis, Still Philadelphia, 173.
92. See the Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 March 1911, sec. 2, 10, and the Philadelphia Public Ledger, 7 November 1920, sec. 1, 16.
93. For example, see “Laws and Facts for Motorists,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 March 1911, sec. 2, 10. On early regulation of automobiles, see Flink, America Adopts the Automobile, chap. 6. On the history of the automobile in early twentieth-century America, see Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
94. On the Bush Hill auto district, see Vitiello, Engineering Philadelphia, 199–215. On the construction of the parkway, see Miller, Vogel, and Davis, Still Philadelphia, 201.
95. The first three examples come from the 1923 Philadelphia Inquirer, the last from the 1925 Philadelphia North American.
96. “Answers to Radio Questions,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 18 October 1922, 31.
97. “The Home-Maker’s Page,” ed. Gertrude M. O’Reilly, Philadelphia Public Ledger, 21 March 1916, 10.
98. Wanamaker’s ad, Philadelphia Record, 17 February 1899, 10.
99. While few scholars have investigated the ways that advertisements schooled readers on how to shop, a number have looked at the ways that stores’ environments guided shoppers’ behavior. See Leach, Land of Desire, 72–75; Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 130–35; Jan Whitaker, Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class (New York: Macmillan, 2006); and Susan Porter-Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Departments Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), chaps. 2 and 3.
100. The Lit Brothers’ department store, for example, printed a directory of its fifty-seven departments in its full-page ad; Philadelphia Evening Item, 20 June 1902, 3.
101. Lit Brothers department store ad, Philadelphia Daily News, 7 September 1925, 5.
102. Hepp, The Middle-Class City, 133.
103. On Philadelphia’s early trend toward deindustrialization and service jobs, see Domenic Vitiello, “Machine Building and City Building: Urban Planning and Industrial Restructuring in Philadelphia, 1894–1928,” Journal of Urban History 34, no. 3 (March 2008): 399–434; Miller, Vogel, and Davis, Still Philadelphia; and Scranton and Licht, Work Sights.
104. Richard L. Kaplan, “From Partisanship to Professionalism: The Transformation of the Daily Press,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 4, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 127. For specific operations and startup costs, see Given, Making a Newspaper, 306–7. On the broader trend of mergers and acquisitions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Naomi Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977).
105. For a chronicle of these mergers, see Hepp, The Middle-Class City, 129–38.
106. Cyrus Curtis started another tabloid in Philadelphia, the Illustrated Sun, but it lasted only from 1925 to 1928.
107. Hepp, The Middle-Class City, 127.
108. “Mrs. Scott’s Food Talks,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 August 1927, 10.
109. The best evidence that Philadelphians read the Pittsburgh Courier is the space the paper devoted to Philadelphia news. Patrick Washburn also reports that the Courier’s national edition rose in popularity in the 1920s, as the Chicago Defender declined. Patrick S. Washburn, The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 126. The Baltimore Afro American also pitched itself as a national weekly and would seem like a logical (nearby) choice for Philadelphians, but that paper devoted little if any space to Philadelphia news.
110. Statistics on chains come from Miller, Vogel, and Davis, Still Philadelphia, 228; and Stephen Nepa, “Automats,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/automats-2/, accessed 2 June 2014.
111. Fruit-Nut cereal ad, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 14 October 1922, 9.
112. “Phila. Society Women to Restrict Meals,” Philadelphia North American, 17 April 1917, 3.
113. Ross Gregory, ed., Almanacs of American Life: Modern America, 1914–1945 (New York: Facts on File, 1995), 113, 117, 122. Farm incomes rose in this era, too, but did not keep pace with growth in other sectors.
114. Klaczynska, “Working Women in Philadelphia,” 41, 88.
115. Gimbels ad, Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 January 1923, sec. 2, 14.
116. Integrity Trust Company ad, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 21 January 1930, 30. On the spread and democratization of investing in the early twentieth century, see Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006).
117. These questions are from “Money Problems of Women,” Philadelphia Record, 10 August 1927, 7, and 12 August 1927, 7.
118. “M’Liss Explains Mysteries of Society’s Inner Circle,” Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, 23 March 1916, 6.
119. Deborah Rush, “Good Form,” Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, 21 March 1916, 8.
120. “How’s Your Grammar?” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 27 December 1926, 15.
121. Deborah Rush, “Good Form,” Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, 21 March 1916, 8. Letter-writing templates had appeared in early nineteenth-century American manuals; see The Fashionable Letter Writer; or, Art of Polite Correspondence with Forms of Complementary Cards and a New and Easy English Grammar (New York: George Long, No. 71, Pearl-Street, 1818).
122. See Manheim Rising Academy ad, Philadelphia North American, 9 October 1921, sports section, 3, and “Revue des Deux Mondes” ad, Philadelphia Public Ledger, 21 September 1924, literary review section, 11.
123. Rolls-Royce ad, Philadelphia Public Ledger, 21 September 1924, sec. 4, 16.
124. See Gimbels ad, Evening Ledger, 6 April 1928, 10.
125. Bourjois cosmetics ad, Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 August 1927, 3.
126. “Adventures with a Purse,” Philadelphia Evening Ledger, 16 September 1924, 12.
127. The feature was called “Modish Mitzi”; for an example, see Philadelphia North American, 2 May 1925, 21.
128. Eleanor Gilbert, “The Business Girl,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 15 July 1917, 10.
129. Philadelphia School of Filing ad, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 18 October 1922, 26.
130. These columns ran in 1905. The Philadelphia North American consistently offered advice for working women earlier than Philadelphia’s other newspapers; this is partly because it drew a larger percentage of female readers. On the North American’s audience, see Printer’s Ink 48, no. 1, 6 July 1904.
131. “Vivian Shirley,” Philadelphia Evening Ledger, 5 April, 1928, 4, and 6 April, 1928, 4.
132. For an in-depth analysis of another of these strips, Winnie Winkle, the Breadwinner, see Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 118–27. On women’s entrance into office work, see Margery W. Davies, Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Sharon H. Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of American Office Work, 1900–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); and Jerome P. Bjelopera, City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
133. “The Modern Well-Dressed Woman of Business,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 January 1923, 5.
134. For example, see “Getting On at the Office,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 19 October 1922, 7.
135. Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 January 1923, 20.
136. For “The Woman Citizen,” see the Public Ledger, 6 April 1928, 20; for “Money Problems,” see the Philadelphia Record, 11 August 1927, 7.
137. For example, see the “Women of Mark” column, Philadelphia North American, 26 October 1913, magazine, 7.
138. For examples, see “The Story of My First Job,” Philadelphia Record, 8, 9, 10, 11 August 1927, all on page 8.
139. Philadelphia Public Ledger, 16 September 1924, 4.
140. Egalitarian rhetoric in political news articles could also obscure class differences among male readers. See Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press,” American Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 211–34.
141. “You and Your Habits Are Masters of Your Fate,” Philadelphia Evening Ledger, 23 March 1916, 13. This was a syndicated feature. On models of American male success in this era, see Hilkey, Character Is Capital (n. 2 above, this chap.); Brian Luskey, On the Make: Clerks and Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2010); and Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
142. “You and Your Habits are Masters of Your Fate,” Philadelphia Evening Ledger, 23 March 1916, 13.
143. Ovaltine ad, Philadelphia Evening Ledger, 6 April 1928, 15.
144. Louis Mark Shoes ad, Philadelphia Public Ledger, 5 November 1920, 16.
145. On men’s relationship to consumer culture in this era, see Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900–1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). Lisa Jacobson argues that advertisements constructed the ideal boy consumer as rational and economical as compared with fanciful and fickle girls; see Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), chap. 3.
146. On working-class culture and political radicalism in the same era, see Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Francis Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877–1919 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984). On male culture more broadly in this era, see Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1994). On corporate efforts to shape male leisure time, see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 4; and Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 194–205.
147. “Tremendous Stamina Alone Saved Tilden,” Philadelphia Daily News, 11 September 1925, 22.
148. For examples, see: George H. Brooke, “How to Play Football,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 6 October 1907, 12; series of articles by John F. Moakley, Cornell track coach, in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, 26 March 1916, sports magazine, 2; series on swimming strokes in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 9 July 1910, 15; Chic Evans, “Golf Simplified,” Philadelphia Daily News, 8 September 1925, 19; Press Publishing Co., “Expert Tells How to Play Basketball,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 January 1923, 19.
149. Young women in the comic strips did not get the same treatment; they were usually drawn similarly to women in fashion illustrations or advertisements, perhaps appearing even more beautiful or buxom. Only henpecking housewives were drawn in caricature.
150. The critique leveled in comic strips perhaps most resembled the one that surfaced in the male counterculture investigated by Todd DePastino in Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), chaps. 3–5.
151. These two examples are from “What Does Your Husband Do?” and “What Does Your Wife Do?” Philadelphia Record, 26 January 1923, 6, and 25 January 1923, 7, respectively.
152. “The Marriage Game,” Philadelphia Daily News, 8 September 1925, 8, and “The Marriage Game,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, 6 April 1928, 21. Other strains in 1920s’ culture, from Freudian analysis to True Story magazine, also encouraged the airing of personal details.
153. Philadelphia Evening Ledger, 23 March 1916, 15.
154. Philadelphia Tribune, 17 January 1920, 6.
155. Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams, eds., The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (1977; repr., Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984), 52.
156. “The Padded Cell,” Philadelphia Evening Ledger, 23 March 1916, 15.
157. Marriage age statistic from Gregory, ed., Almanacs of American Life: Modern America, 1914–1945, 68. The “raised expectations” argument about marriage in the 1920s and its relationship to popular culture was first made by Elaine Tyler May in Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
158. Cobbett S. Steinberg, Film Facts (New York: Facts on File, 1980), 40–41. On the cultural impact of movies in the 1910s and 1920s, see Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), pts. 1 and 2; and David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), chaps. 12–16.
159. Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York: Macmillan Company, 1933), 149.
160. Beatrice Fairfax, “Marriage Vacations,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 27 December 1926, 10.
161. From column “Listen World,” by Elsie Robinson, Philadelphia Daily News, 7 September 1925, 10.
162. “The Psychometer” in the Philadelphia Record, 14 January 1923, magazine section, 4. Also see questions printed in “Legal Queries” in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 25 March 1916, 11, and 14 October 1922, 22. On divorce in the early twentieth century, see May, Great Expectations, and J. Herbie Difonzo, Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).
163. “Dorothy Dix Thinks the One-Man Woman and the One-Woman Man are Extremely Rare Specimens,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 20 October 1922, 7.
164. World Wide News Service, “The ‘Next Best’ Husband,” Philadelphia Record, 21 January 1923, magazine section, 5.
165. The column was written by Edna Ewing; these topics appeared on the women’s page in August 1927.
166. These topics appeared in the syndicated feature “Our Children,” by Angelo Patri, in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 27 December 1926, 9, and 29 December 1926, 9.
167. Letter from “Anna” to Deborah Rush, “Good Form,” Philadelphia Evening Ledger, 23 March 1916, 6. Edward Bok, working in both newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth century, picked up on the demand for such articles early on. According to his autobiography, he “divined the fact that in thousands of cases the American mother was not the confidante of her daughter, and reasoned if an inviting human personality could be created on the printed page that would supply this lamentable lack of American family life, girls would flock to such a figure. But all depended on the confidence which the written word could inspire.” Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok, 169.
168. Jay V. Jay, “Modish Mitzi,” Philadelphia North American, 12 May 1925, 14.
169. Letter from “Twenty-Six” to “Please Tell Me What to Do, by Cynthia,” Philadelphia Evening Ledger, 16 September 1924, 12. On changing dating practices in the 1920s, see Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); and Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
170. Ad for Book of Good Manners, Pittsburgh Courier, national ed., 18 October 1924, 10.
171. Letter from “Fiance” to Mary Strong, “Friendly Advice to Girls,” Pittsburgh Courier, national ed., Saturday 22 September 1928, sec. 1, 6.
172. Letter to by Mary Strong, “Friendly Advice to Girls,” Pittsburgh Courier, national ed., Saturday 22 September 1928, sec. 1, 6.
173. Letter from “Brokenhearted, G. B.” to Mary Strong, “Friendly Advice to Girls,” Pittsburgh Courier, national ed., Saturday 11 August 1928, sec. 1, 6.
174. Letter to Mary Strong, “Friendly Advice to Girls,” Pittsburgh Courier, national ed., Saturday 11 August 1928, sec. 1, 6.
175. Unprinted letters to advice columns also show what was excluded, but very few of those letters survive. Julie Golia has mined the collection of letters—some printed in the newspaper, some not—sent to Beatrice Fairfax, “Advice to the Lovelorn,” in the 1930s. Golia, “Advising America,” chap. 2.
176. James Edward Rogers, The American Newspaper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1909), 145. Rogers also worked as a leader in the movement for playgrounds and supervised recreation, one of Progressives’ main avenues of reform.
177. Ibid., 151. Several turn-of-the-century editors also spoke about their newspapers as vehicles for education and uplift. See Alexander K. McClure, former editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, “Foreword” in Journalism: Its Relation to and Influence upon the Political, Social, Professional, Financial, and Commercial Life of the United States of America, ed. New York Press Club (New York: New York Press Club, 1905), iii–v; editorial, New York Sun, 18 August 1893, 4; and Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper: A Study of Journalism and Its Relation to the Public,” pt. 5, “What Is News?” Collier’s Weekly, 18 March 1911, 16.
178. “The Woman’s Hour” began in 1881; women’s material later ran under the headings “Housekeeper’s Column” and later, in the 1920s, “Confidential Chat.” Louis M. Lyons, Newspaper Story: One Hundred Years of the Boston Globe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971), 40, 115.
179. George Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 148. The series began in November 1883.
180. An announcement for this series of articles ran in the Atlanta Constitution, 12 April 1903, 42.
181. Summer School at Home ad, Rocky Mountain News, 9 May 1897, 20.
182. “A Five O’clock Tea in Town,” New York Sun, 6 January 1889, 9.
183. Letter from Frederick Thomas Bowers in Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 22.
184. Letter from Edward Broderick in Collier’s Weekly, 18 November 1911, 6.
185. Advertiser’s Handy Guide 1896 (New York: Lyman D. Morse Advertising Agency, 1896), 669.
186. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America, 272–73.
187. Kaplan, “From Partisanship to Professionalism,” 127. Other articles cite slight variations on this number and date; see Moses Koenigsberg, King News: An Autobiography (Philadelphia: F. A. Stokes Company, 1941), 365; and Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, 4th ed (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1978), 430.
188. “Evening Journal Investors’ Service,” New York Journal, 15 May 1930, 36.
189. Peggy Hoyt Hats ad, New York Times, 28 March 1920, 10.
190. “Husbands under Scrutiny,” Chicago Tribune, 4 November 1928, pt. 6, 12.
191. Golia, “Advising America,” 127, 128, 140.
192. Harold A. Williams, The Baltimore Sun, 1837–1987 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 140.
193. Chicago Tribune, Book of Facts, 1927, 170.
1. Charles H. Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 83–84.
2. Ibid., 192. A handful of other observers noticed newspapers updating what they portrayed as old-fashioned, small-town community in the early decades of the twentieth century. Frank L. Blanchard wrote in 1905 that the newspaper had replaced the church as the central source of local gossip. Blanchard, “Pulpit and Press,” in Journalism: Its Relation to and Influence upon the Political, Social, Professional, Financial, and Commercial Life of the United States of America, ed. New York Press Club (New York: New York Press Club, 1905), 177. Sociologist Robert Park noted in 1925 that newspapers allowed readers to get to know their cities the way that people once knew their villages. Robert Ezra Park, “The Natural History of the Newspaper,” in The City, ed. Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Watson Burgess, Roderick Duncan McKenzie, and Louis Wirth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), 84–85.
3. There is a varied literature on the idea of print community, with the scale of that community ranging from global diasporas to small groups devoted to a hobby or a cause. Only a few scholars have looked at print community in the United States on a city-wide level. These include David Paul Nord, “The Public Community: The Urbanization of Journalism in Chicago” and “Readership as Citizenship in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” in Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Gunther Barth, “Metropolitan Press,” in City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Park, “The Natural History of the Newspaper.”
4. Scholars who have examined the link between American journalism and civic identity include Neil Harris, “Covering New York: Journalism and Civic Identity in the Twentieth Century,” in Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870–1930, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994); Neil Harris, “Introduction,” in The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, ed. Neil Harris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Richard Junger, Becoming the Second City: Chicago’s Mass News Media, 1833–1898 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
5. Population statistics drawn from 1890 and 1900 census numbers.
6. Charles Lockwood, Manhattan Moves Uptown: An Illustrated History (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1995); and Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 56–57, 294.
7. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1890; repr., New York: Dover, 1971).
8. Contours of Harlem taken from 1920, 1925, and 1930 boundaries mapped at the website Digital Harlem: Everyday Life 1915–1930, http://heuristscholar.org/digital_harlem/.
9. See Clifton Hood, 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
10. Information about New York’s neighborhoods comes from Deborah Dash Moore, “Class and Ethnicity in the Creation of New York City Neighborhoods: 1900–1930,” in Budapest and New York, ed. Bender and Schorske, 139–60.
11. Between 1880 and 1900, New York City printed more than one daily newspaper for every two residents. New York shared this level of newspaper saturation with four other cities in 1880 and with twelve others in 1900. William S. Rossiter, Printing and Publishing, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, vol. 9, Manufactures, pt. 3, Special Reports on Selected Industries, ser. no. 79 (Washington: U.S. Census Office, 1902), 1053.
12. Hy B. Turner, When Giants Ruled: The Story of Park Row, New York’s Great Newspaper Street (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 119.
13. On the distinctive readerships of this era, see ibid.; Phyllis Kluger and Richard Kluger, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (New York: Knopf, 1986); George Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Janet E. Steele, The Sun Shines for All: Journalism and Ideology in the Life of Charles A. Dana (Syracuse University Press, 1993); Frank Michael O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, New York, 1833–1918 (New York: George H. Doran, 1918); Elmer Holmes Davis, The History of the New York Times, 1851–1921 (New York: New York Times, 1921); William R. Scott, Scientific Circulation Management for Newspapers (New York: Ronald Press, 1915), 163–69; and Jason Rogers, Newspaper Building: Application of Efficiency to Edition, to Mechanical Production, to Circulation and Advertising (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918), 242–45.
14. This description comes from listings in N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual (Philadelphia, various years.) The foreign language count comes from 1882; the number of foreign-language dailies increased through the 1910s.
15. Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Vintage, 1998). On the penny papers that were the first to break from the partisan mold, see O’Brien, The Story of the Sun; Steele, The Sun Shines for All; and James J. Crouthamel, Bennett’s “New York Herald” and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989).
16. Lincoln Steffens, “The Business of a Newspaper,” Scribner’s Magazine, October 1897, 461.
17. See New York Evening Journal, “Night Special” edition, 3 August 1898, front page; the New York World, 27 October 1901, front page; and photographs of the Journal building in Bill Blackbeard, ed., R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid: A Centennial Celebration of the Kid Who Started the Comics (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995), 62.
18. This quote first appeared in the New York World on 10 May 1883. The World printed it at the top of its editorial page every day during the 1910s and 1920s.
19. The New York Herald adopted a populist, independent political stance even before the World and the Journal, but it was the latter two papers that turned this stance mainstream in New York. See Crouthamel, Bennett’s “New York Herald.” Midwestern newspapers were also writing in a more populist, politically independent mode during the late nineteenth century; see David Paul Nord, Newspapers and New Politics: Midwestern Municipal Reform, 1890–1900 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979).
20. Note soliciting letters for a future column called “The Grumbler,” New York World, 16 October 1889, 5.
21. Examples come from New York World, 20 October 1889, 13, and 27 October 1889, 21.
22. Partisan papers did occasionally expose problems within the opposing party, as when the Republican New York Times and Harper’s Weekly took on the Democratic political machine, Tammany Hall, in the 1870s. Thomas C. Leonard, The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 97–131.
23. On muckraking campaigns, see Juergens, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World, chaps. 8 and 9; Harris, “Covering New York”; Leonard, The Power of the Press, chaps. 3 and 4; and John M. Harrison and Harry H. Stein, eds., Muckraking: Past, Present, and Future (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973).
24. Loren Ghiglione, The American Journalist: The Paradox of the Press (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1990), 49.
25. On Jacob Riis’s reporting, his photographs, and his influence on the Progressive movement more broadly, see Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: The Reformer, His Journalism, and His Photographs (New York: New Press, 2008); and Peter B. Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), chap. 4.
26. “Drag Up the Slums,” New York World, 6 June 1897, main news section, 6.
27. On the trend of viewing cities as interconnected organisms, see Keith D. Revell, Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1978); Robert Hamlett Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1956); and Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 24–27. For discussions of new models of engagement and citizenship encouraged by newspapers’ muckraking journalism, see Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free Press, 1998), chap. 4; Nord, Newspapers and New Politics; and Leonard, The Power of the Press.
28. See Leonard, The Power of the Press, chaps. 3 and 4, and Harrison and Stein, eds., Muckraking.
29. Crandall A. Shifflett, Almanacs of American Life: Victorian America, 1876 to 1913 (New York: Facts on File, 1996), 78.
30. The Fresh Air Fund first campaigned in the Brooklyn Daily Union, in 1877, and moved to the Tribune in 1882. See Julia A. Guarneri, “Changing Strategies for Child Welfare, Enduring Beliefs about Childhood: The Fresh Air Fund, 1877–1926,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11, no. 1 (January 2012): 27–70.
31. Clipped articles from 1 July 1900, Fresh Air Fund scrapbook, Fresh Air Fund Papers, Fresh Air Fund headquarters office, New York City.
32. The New York Times’s Neediest Cases campaign started in 1912; the Brooklyn Eagle’s campaign was in operation by the 1920s. Other drives focusing on New York’s needy included the New York Evening Mail’s Save-a-Home Fund; the New York Post’s Old Folks Christmas Fund; the New York Journal’s Christmas baskets campaign, and the New York American’s Playgrounds Fund. See also Charles O. Burgess, “The Newspaper as Charity Worker: Poor Relief in New York City, 1893–1894,” New York History 43, no. 3 (July 1962): 249–68; and John W. Perry, “Newspaper Funds Alleviate Suffering,” Editor & Publisher, 21 December 1929, 9, 10, 48, 50.
33. For an example of a newspaper collection fund for an officer’s widow and children, see the “Guarnieri Hero Fund” in the New York American, 26 April 1914, L-11.
34. “New York’s 100 Neediest Cases,” New York Times, 15 December 1918, 75. The nose description could well have been meant to communicate that Jimmy Sharp was white.
35. New York Tribune, 11 August 1890, 6.
36. New York Tribune, 17 July 1890, 7.
37. New York Times, 14 December 1924, sec. 8, front page.
38. “100 Neediest Cases after 3 Months’ Aid,” New York Times, 21 April 1918, 25.
39. Editorial, New York Tribune, 27 May 1890, 6.
40. I owe this image reference to Joseph W. Campbell, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001).
41. On Brace and the operations of his Newsboys’ Lodging House, see Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work among Them (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872), 101–13. On Horatio Alger, see Edwin P. Hoyt, Horatio’s Boys: The Life and Works of Horatio Alger, Jr. (Radnor, PA: Chilton Book Co., 1974), 80–89.
42. Mrs. Louisa Baker to Joseph Pulitzer, 7 February 1886, Pulitzer Papers, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts. “Begging letters” from the poor to the rich were in fact fairly common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York; see David Huyssen, Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), chap. 6. The requests sent to Pulitzer, however, more often asked for publicity than for money.
43. Irving Dillard, “Foreword,” in Muckraking, ed. Harrison and Stein, 4.
44. Neil Harris, “Covering New York,” 250–51.
45. Tribune Fresh Air Fund annual reports, New York Public Library.
46. New York Herald, 11 May 1835, as quoted in Helen MacGill Hughes, “Human Interest Stories and Democracy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 1 (1937): 73–83.
47. The New York Sun ran a version of this column from roughly 1874 to 1889. The Sun’s reporters relied so often on an interview-based method of reporting that some called it the “Sun style.” O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, chap. 15.
48. “What Is Going on To-Day,” New York Tribune, 19 April 1887, 8. Benedict Anderson was the first to claim that simultaneity bound the events in a newspaper’s pages together and could ultimately bind readers together, too, though Anderson was discussing national ties, not civic ones. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 33, 63.
49. “Fun in the Holland Society,” New York Sun, 7 April 1897, 3.
50. “The Life-Savers at Work,” New York World, 27 October 1889, 15.
51. “Baldness in New York,” New York Tribune, 8 July 1883, 4.
52. “The Life-Savers at Work,” New York World, 27 October 1889, 15.
53. “Stage News of the Week,” New York American and Journal, 14 January 1906, 38.
54. The New York American started this practice in its Sunday paper around 1910 and continued it through the 1920s. In 1910 the paper also ran a column titled “Best Jokes at New York’s Theaters” and attributed each joke to the show it was taken from. New York American, 2 October 1910, 5M.
55. Letter from May V. Godfrey, printed in “The American Newspaper,” Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 22.
56. Titles taken from the New York Times, 3 September 1896, 8, and the New York American, 2 October 1910, 8CE.
57. “Selecting Figurantes,” New York Sun, evening edition, 2 January 1889, 5; “How Tully Marshall Starts Hysterics in the Second Act of ‘The City,’” New York World, 19 December 1909, metropolitan section, 2; “The Gentle Art of Faking,” New York Times, 21 January 1912, Part 7, 7.
58. “Opera Season Will Have a Brilliant Opening,” New York Times, 20 November 1904, magazine section, 3.
59. “New York’s Real First-Nighters,” New York World, 30 March 1913, magazine section, 10.
60. A few publications printed colorful, in-depth sports news in the mid-nineteenth century. For discussions of this sports journalism, see Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Gene and Jane Barry Smith, eds., The National Police Gazette (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972); and John A. Dinan, Sports in the Pulp Magazines (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1998). The reporting in these weeklies likely inspired mainstream daily newspapers to expand and alter their coverage.
61. “Courtney Breaks Down, and Is Therefore Compelled to Forfeit the Handball Match,” New York Sun, evening edition, 2 January 1889, 6.
62. Ibid., 6.
63. For example see “New York’s Joy, Brooklyn’s Sorrow,” New York World, 19 October 1889, 1–2, and “Story of Fight Told by Rounds,” New York Evening Journal, tenth extra racing ed., 20 January 1906, 7.
64. George B. Underwood, “St. Nicks Triumph in Extra Period,” New York Sun, 22 February 1917, 10.
65. “Giants Earn Victory in Tenth Inning Rally,” New York Times, 14 June 1908, sec. 4, front page.
66. For individual statistics and photographs, see “Yankees? Giants? Take your Pick,” New York American, 9 October 1910, sec. L II, 5. For portrait illustrations of the Yankees, see the New York World, 23 April 1893, 32. “How the Stars of the Brooklyn Superbas, National League Winners, Handle Ball and Bat,” New York Daily News, 28 September 1920, 9.
67. These nicknames (for Dodgers coach Wilbert Robinson and for Babe Ruth) appeared in the “Giants Get Even Break; Brooklyn Clinches Pennant,” New York Daily News, 28 September 1920, 14.
68. “A Tale of Sister Cities!” New York World, 19 October 1889, 1.
69. “What Brokers Think of the Market Outlook,” New York American and Journal, 14 January 1906, 73.
70. “Topics of the Day in Wall Street,” New York Times, 3 June 1930, 42. The “Chat from Wall Street” column ran in the New York World in 1885, and changed into “Business and Financial Matters Talked about on Wall Street,” which ran at least until 1901. “Gossip from Wall Street” ran in the New York Sun from roughly 1909 to 1917.
71. “New York Photographed by Steeple Jacks from the Spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” New York World, 11 May 1902, magazine section, 12, as reprinted in Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano, eds., The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898–1911) (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2005), 52; “Times Square and the Theatrical District as Seen from the Air, Looking Northward,” New York Times, 28 March 1920, picture section, 2; “Unfamiliar New York from the Air, No. 3,” New York Herald Tribune, 23 August 1927, rotogravure section, 10.
72. “Unfamiliar New York from the Air, No. 3,” New York Herald Tribune, 23 August 1927, rotogravure section, 10. On the history of urban views in the United States, see John W. Reps, Bird’s Eye Views: Historic Lithographs of North American Cities (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998); and Hales, Silver Cities, chaps. 2 and 3.
73. I draw some of these concepts and this vocabulary from Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 1–10. Though Lynch intended his book for city planners and mostly discusses the visual experience and design of cities, newspapers feed his idea that people integrate new information into their preexisting “image” of the city.
74. “Adventures in Sewers,” New York Sun, 31 March 1901, sec. 4, page 8; “Under the Hudson River,” New York Tribune, 8 July 1883, 10; “New River Bed under City Is a Marvel of Boring,” New York World, 30 March 1913, second news section, 2.
75. Special subway supplement, New York World, 2 October 1904. John Kasson and others have written about recurring “mole’s eye” and “bird’s eye” depictions of city life. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990), 72–80.
76. Hype Igo, “New Madison Square Garden Is Greatest of All Arenas,” New York World, 22 November 1925, second news section, 21.
77. Dreiser, “Out of My Newspaper Days,” pt. 5, “I Quit the Game,” Bookman 54, no. 8 (April 1922): 118.
78. John L. Given, Making a Newspaper (New York: Henry Holt, 1907), 160.
79. Dreiser, “Out of My Newspaper Days.”
80. George P. Rowell & Co., Centennial Newspaper Exhibition, 1876 (New York: George P. Rowell & Co., 1876), 199.
81. Given, Making a Newspaper, 169.
82. Letterbook, The World Papers, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts.
83. “One Minute, Please!” ran regularly in the New York Tribune from February 1915 to April 1916.
84. Julia McNair Wright, Practical Life; or, Ways and Means for Developing Character and Resources (Philadelphia: Bradley, Garretson, 1882), 214–19, 218–19. As quoted in Thomas C. Leonard, News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 92.
85. “Home News,” New York Tribune, 8 July 1883, 12. Castle Garden was New York’s immigration center before Ellis Island.
86. “One Year’s ‘Eats’ of New York Dwellers,” New York World, 30 March 1913, sec. 2, 2, and “763,574,085 on ‘L’ and ‘Sub’ in a Year,” New York World, 3 September 1917, 7.
87. New York World, 7 June 1897, 3.
88. “Open a Boulevard over Jamaica Bay; City Officials Take Part in Exercises at New $5,000,000 Causeway,” New York Times, 12 October 1924, 25.
89. On the proliferation of printed words in the urban streetscape in the antebellum era, see David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). This sensory overload was one of the main subjects of several neo-Romantic and Weimar German writers; for a start, see Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 155–20; and Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1902), in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 174–86.
90. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925; repr., New York: Penguin, 1986), 334.
91. “Murder in New York 15 Minutes After 1889 Began,” New York Sun, 2 January 1889, front page.
92. “Starved for Family,” New York Tribune, 7 June 1903, front page.
93. “The American Sky-Scraper Is a Modern Tower of Babel” (cartoon), New York World, 20 February 1898, front page of comic weekly.
94. First printed in the New York World, 7 July 1895, and reprinted in Blackbeard, ed., R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, Plate 4.
95. On the movement toward more “scientific” reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the birth of social sciences that used surveying techniques to define and assess urban problems, see Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977); Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), chaps. 3 and 4; and Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chaps. 4–6.
96. “Cupid’s Work with an Egg,” New York Sun, 18 July 1881, front page.
97. Grant Milnor Hyde, Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence: A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of Newspaper Writing (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1924), 236. On the history of the human interest genre, see Frank Luther Mott, The News in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), chap. 7; Hughes, “Human Interest Stories and Democracy”; and Helen MacGill Hughes, News and the Human Interest Story (1940; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1980).
98. “Pussy Obstructs the Streets,” New York Sun, 17 November 1885, 4.
99. New York World, 18 October 1901, 9.
100. “Hetta Holst Has a Good Time,” New York Sun, 8 April 1897, 4.
101. This series is discussed and quoted in H. F. Harrington, Chats on Feature Writing, by Members of the Blue Pencil Club of Professional Writers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925), 310–13.
102. “Interesting Gossip of the Day,” New York Sun, 2 January 1889, 4; “She Left $5,000 in Her Satchel on ‘L’ Train,” New York World, 14 December 1909, front page; and “Mrs. Gray Gets Back her $5,000 Pearl,” New York Sun, 17 November 1913, 3.
103. “The Hofstatters, ‘Coffee and Sandwich Angels’ of New York Firemen,” New York World, 31 January 1904, magazine section, 3. On a selfless rescue worker, see “Life-Saving Chaplain Is a Modest Hero,” New York World, 27 October 1901, 27, and on a socialite who became a nurse, see “From the Gayeties of Fifth Avenue . . . to the Slums of Water Street,” New York World, 13 June 1897, 34.
104. “This Shows New York Is Not So Black as Its Painted,” New York Times, 14 June 1908, magazine section, 11.
105. Hyde, Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence, 235.
106. I draw my basic definition of cosmopolitanism from much more detailed definitions that appear in Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2001): 721; and Bruce Robbins, “Introduction, Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3.
107. “Little Paris in Gotham,” New York Sun, 27 August 1893, pt. 2, 6.
108. Jane Dixon, “New York Night’s Entertainments Off Beaten Track,” New York Sun, 4 March 1917, sec. 5, 11.
109. “New ‘Bohemia’ Discovered on East Side,” New York Times, 13 November 1904, magazine section, 3.
110. “Three Year Old Boy Gone; Search for Him in Vain,” New York Times, 8 June 1908, 5.
111. “Sealed Grocer in His Own Barrel,” New York World, 2 August 1905, 8.
112. “New ‘Bohemia’ Discovered on East Side,” New York Times, 13 November 1904, magazine section, 3.
113. “New York Night’s Entertainments off Beaten Track,” New York Sun, 4 March 1917, sec. 5, 11.
114. On the “travelogue” style and exoticism, see Sabine Haenni, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), chaps. 1, 4, and 5; and Esther Romeyn, Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–1924 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), chap. 1.
115. T. Thomas Fortune Scrapbooks, Manuscripts and Archives, The Schomberg Center, New York Public Library. Fortune wrote for the Sun, with varying frequency, from 1884 through 1900. Emma Lou Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); and Shawn Leigh Alexander, ed., T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880–1928 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008).
116. Patrick S. Washburn, The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 126; and Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 134.
117. See Horace Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot: A Study of American Nationality,” pts. 1 and 2, Nation (February 18, 1915), 190–94, and (February 25, 1915), 217–20, respectively; and Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 86–97. On debates over citizenship and diversity in the early twentieth-century United States, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), chap. 5; and Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), chap. 4.
118. New York Daily News, 28 September 1920, 20.
119. For examples, see the church news page, New York World, 28 January 1929, 4; and “Topics of the Preachers in the Pulpits of the City and Suburbs Yesterday,” New York Times, Brooklyn/Queens edition, 9 June 1930, 24.
120. “Chinatown’s Last Pigtail,” New York Times, 28 March 1920, sec. 7, 9.
121. Jean Piper, “30,000 Boro Lithuanians Toy with Their Beads and Long for Trees of Homeland,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 22 February 1925, A9.
122. New York City, unlike most other U.S. cities, had its own weekly society newspaper, Town Talk. Daily papers certainly catered to elite readers, but their society pages drew a high proportion of curious middle-class and working-class readers as well.
123. The “Chat from Wall Street” column gave similar profiles of a handful of powerful businessmen. New York World, 22 March 1885, 18. For a history of the field of celebrity journalism, see Charles L. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
124. For example, see photographs in “Mrs. Whitelaw Reid a Distinguished Hostess,” New York Times, 21 January 1912, pt. 7, 1.
125. See the article on Broadway “Progressive supper,” New York World, 19 December 1909, metropolitan section, 2; “Bankers of Manhattan at the Banquet Table,” the New York Times, 7 February 1900, front page; and “Cholly Knickerbocker,” New York American, 2 October 1910, 12L.
126. Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 226.
127. “The Bridal Romance of the Largest Private House in New York,” New York World, 6 June 1897, metropolitan section.
128. “Every House and Every Foot of the Astor Real Estate on Manhattan Island,” New York World, 27 March 1898, magazine section, pages 34–35, as reprinted in Baker and Brentano, eds., The World on Sunday, 20–21.
129. “Reconciliation between Mrs. Roche and Her Father a Tacit Admission That a ‘400’ Leader Must Spend $375 A DAY,” New York American and Journal, 14 January 1906, 54.
130. Stephen Crane is one of the most famous of these writers; he covered the Tenderloin for the New York Journal. On the genre of the urban travelogue that delved into poor neighborhoods, see Stuart Blumin’s introduction to George Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 121–27; and Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
131. “Murderers’ Alley to Go,” New York World, 6 June 1897, main news section, 8. This article pictured people and buildings around the alley. A second article on the same subject, “Murderers’ Alley to Be Wiped Out,” New York World, 13 June 1897, 38, included a map.
132. For mafia article, see “Red-Handed Mafia Lurks in New York,” New York World, 20 March 1898, magazine section, 2, as reprinted in Baker and Brentano, eds., The World on Sunday, 6. For gambling terminology, see the New York Evening Journal, “Night Special” ed., 3 August 1898, 3. For the “Moll” article, see John T. Quimby, “The Moll and the Mob,” New York World, 3 April 1921, magazine section, 4–5.
133. “Red-Handed Mafia Lurks in New York,” New York World, 20 March 1898, magazine section, 2, as reprinted in Baker and Brentano, eds., The World on Sunday, 6; “The Ordeal of New York’s ‘Black Path,’” New York World, 11 October 1908, front page of magazine section; “Inmates of Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary Play Ball at the Celebration of the First Anniversary of John J. Murtha as Warden,” New York Times, 6 August 1916, picture section, 7.
134. For example, see “Doctor Lowered by Rope into Shaft to Save Woman Who Fled from Husband,” New York Evening Journal, tenth extra racing ed., 18 January 1906, 2.
135. “Gangsters Buy Death in Pills ‘Good as Coke,’” New York Tribune, 14 April 1915, front page. For an earlier example, see New York Evening Journal, “Night Special” ed., 3 August 1898, 3. These articles built on a long tradition of using printed dialect, meant to signal region, class, ethnicity, or race, as entertainment. On the use of dialect in American literature at this time, see Gavin Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Michael North, Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Similar dialect-based passages appeared in a few other metropolitan newspaper features, such as Peter Finley Dunne’s Irish “Mr. Dooley,” and Dorothy Dix’s African American “Mirandy.”
136. Examples come from “Catching the Criminals of the Railroads,” New York Times, 14 June 1908, magazine section, 9, and “How the ‘House Men’ Guard the Hotels,” New York Times, 21 January 1912, pt. 7, 14.
137. New York American and Journal, 14 January 1906, 75.
138. M. B. Levick, “Our Town and Its Folk,” New York Times, 12 October 1924, sec. 9, 2.
139. “Mickey at a Recital,” New York World, 14 April 1895, as reprinted in Blackbeard, ed., R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, 138.
140. “Chinamen at the Natural History Museum,” New York World, 7 June 1897, 3.
141. For an example of such a scandal in turn-of-the-century New York, see Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Until recently, scholars defined cosmopolitanism as a trait only possible through choice—and hence as a quality often limited to elite groups. More recently, scholars have shifted the definition, claiming that poor and working-class people, immigrants, and refugees can be just as fluent in different cultures as any prosperous world travelers or scholars. Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 582; and Robbins, “Introduction, Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” 2–3.
142. For an array of comics that, similarly, lampooned society with glee, see Peter Maresca, ed., Society Is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, 1895–1915 (Palo Alto, CA: Sunday Press, 2013).
143. The first titled “metropolitan” section of the New York World that I have seen ran in 1905. Smaller, earlier columns set a precedent: the World ran a column called “The Metropolis Day by Day” in the 1890s, and the Sun printed a column of local news called “Life in the Metropolis” in the 1880s.
144. The Sunday editor for the New York World, Herbert Bayard Swope, was at the center of one such urban circle, and he employed friends to write feature material for the World. Harris, “Covering New York,” 258–59.
145. For chronicles of New York’s more flamboyant, less political culture in the 1920s, see Ann Douglass, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); and Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
146. The city’s largest paper in the 1920s, the New York Daily News, did less of this kind of urban branding. It tended to involve readers by printing personal stories, covering neighborhood news, and inviting reader participation rather than by offering a burnished image of the city that readers belonged to. Even so, common themes emerged in the Daily News and the rest of the city’s dailies. Neil Harris also discusses these qualities in “Covering New York,” 261–65.
147. On this process, see Angela M. Blake, How New York Became American, 1890–1924 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
148. See Wanda Corn, “The Artist’s New York, 1900–1930,” in Budapest and New York, ed. Bender and Schorske, 275–303; and Thomas Bender, “Modernist Aesthetics and Urban Politics,” in The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York: New Press, 2002).
149. Ad for Sunday edition, New York American, 18 May 1930, 14-M.
150. The Tribune section appeared beginning in 1919. M. B. Levick wrote “Our Town and Its Folk,” which started around 1924, and “Listen, Folks Listen” appeared under the name Jim Hayseed, starting in 1928.
151. From the regular column by Leo T. Heatley, “Wit and Without,” New York Journal, 15 May 1930, 7.
152. Jean B. Quant weaves this theme through From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970). It appears in a handful of other autobiographies and biographies of these reformers as well.
153. Examples from “One Year’s ‘Eats’ of New York Dwellers,” New York World, 30 March 1913, second news section, 3, and “Auto Drivers Increased 110,000 Here in Year,” New York Times, 3 June 1930, front page. Newspapers’ habit of reporting these aggregate statistics became common enough that the 1920 World parodied it; a cartoon showed the city’s total raisin consumption and the city’s collective wad of gum. New York World, 9 May 1920, metropolitan section, front page.
154. Facts about New York, with a Complete Index, 6th ed. (New York: The Sun, 1928).
155. Igo, “New Madison Square Garden Is Greatest of All Arenas,” 21.
156. “Mirror of City Life” and “Bits of Life in the Metropolis” both appeared in the metropolitan section in the 1920s New York World and the feature “Our Town and Its Folk” in the 1920s’ New York Times.
157. Eva Weinstein’s letter to the editor appearing in the New York Tribune, 13 October 1919, 8; and Charles Romm’s letter to the editor appearing in the New York Tribune, 11 October 1919, 10.
158. Many historians have investigated the reality and the cultural trope of the threatening nineteenth-century city. See Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), and A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Kasson, Rudeness and Civility; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), chap. 8; and Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), chap. 4.
159. New York Times, 17 November 1904, 7; New York World, 20 March 1898, 2, as reprinted in Baker and Brentano, eds., The World on Sunday; New York American, 26 April 1914, 4CE.
160. New York American and Journal, 14 January 1906, 70.
161. “Once a Waiter, Now to Be an Operatic Star,” New York World, 13 June 1897, 38; New York World, 20 October 1901, magazine section, 5.
162. New York World, 2 August 1905, 8; and “Every House and Every Foot of the Astor Real Estate on Manhattan Island,” New York World, 27 March 1898, magazine section, 34–35, as reprinted in Baker and Brentano, eds., The World on Sunday, 20–21.
163. “The White Collar Squad,” New York Times, 19 October 1919, magazine section, 8.
164. Karl K. Kitchen, “Protesting against New York’s New Neighborly Spirit That Co-Operative Apartments Are Bringing About,” New York World, 27 March 1921, metropolitan section, front page.
165. Ad for Weber and Heilbroner, New York World, 27 March 1913, 5.
166. Ad for New York American, New York American, 18 May 1930, 14M. For a sampling of scholarship treating New York’s identity as capital of the modern world in the early twentieth century, see Corn, “The Artist’s New York, 1900–1930,” 275–303; Douglass, Terrible Honesty; and Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2000).
167. New York Tribune, 4 September 1899, 7. In a similar vein, Angela Blake found that New York’s 1923 “Silver Jubilee,” organized by a business bureau, had trouble mustering local enthusiasm or support, because New Yorkers felt that such self-celebration was unnecessary. Blake, How New York Became American, chap. 5.
168. The Journalist, 26 January 1889, 2.
169. Letter from Curtis C. Brown in Collier’s Weekly, 2 September 1911, 23.
170. Letter from E. S. Hull in Collier’s Weekly, 14 October 1911, 35.
171. “North American Porch Parties for Crippled Children,” Philadelphia North American, 9 October 1921, 4.
172. John W. Perry, “Newspaper Funds Alleviate Suffering,” Editor & Publisher, 21 December 1929, 9–10.
173. Roy D. Pinkerton letter to Collier’s Weekly, 30 September 1911, 34.
174. One of the more extreme and famous cases of demonizing is the way that California newspapers depicted Chinese immigrants. Yet the depictions of the “yellow peril” often coexisted with articles that treated Chinese Californians as colorful additions to the social landscape. See Jules Becker, The Course of Exclusion, 1882–1924: San Francisco Newspaper Coverage of the Chinese and Japanese in the United States (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991).
175. Theodore Dreiser, “Out of My Newspaper Days,” pt. 2, “St. Louis,” Bookman 54, no. 5 (January 1922): 431.
176. Society column, Milwaukee Journal, 23 December 1919, 8.
177. Letter from R. F. Walker in Collier’s Weekly, 30 September 1911, 33.
178. “Found $1,000 Pin. Liveryman Picked up Piece of Jewelry Where He Lost It,” Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 9 July 1910, 9.
179. Letter from “Opinion” to Collier’s Weekly, 16 Sept 1911, 30.
180. “Girard’s Topics of the Town,” “Peggy Shippen’s Diary,” and “Anne Rittenhouse” all appeared in the Philadelphia Public Ledger in the 1910s and 1920s.
181. Harold A. Williams, The Baltimore Sun, 1837–1987 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 140.
182. Ibid., 227.
1. James Edward Rogers, The American Newspaper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1909), 37.
2. As shown in circulation statistics for major city dailies in Editor & Publisher in the 1920s, when the trade journal first broke circulations down into “city,” “suburban,” and “country” categories.
3. I draw this background largely from William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, vol. 3, The Rise of a Modern City, 1871–1893 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957); Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); and Jon Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
4. Chicago played a leading role in realist urban novels such as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), and Frank Norris’s The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1902). Chicago journalists specializing in human interest reporting included George Ade, Ben Hecht, Henry Justin Smith, and Robert Casey.
5. For example, see an 1884 Chicago Tribune column by “Urban” that complained about the practice of tying up horses in the city streets. Chicago Tribune, 12 October 1884, 23.
6. From census figures, as cited in Neil Harris, ed., The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2.
7. Because of its unparalleled expansion around the turn of the century, Chicago has generated a rich body of scholarship on urban development and suburban growth. Among these works are Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Ann Durkin Keating, Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988), and Chicagoland: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Michael Ebner, Creating Chicago’s North Shore: A Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1969).
8. Examples include Chicago Tribune editor Robert McCormick, who lived at his Wheaton estate, Cantigny, for most of his publishing career; Washington Post owner John R. McLean, who owned a seventy-five-acre estate called Friendship outside of Washington DC; Frank Munsey, owner of the New York Sun and of a Long Island estate; and St. Louis Post-Dispatch publisher Joseph Pulitzer II, who spent his time on a hundred-acre estate called Lone Tree Farm.
9. Chicago’s largest annexation, in 1889, added 125 square miles and 225,000 people, but the city annexed smaller pieces of land both before and after. Louis P. Cain, “Annexation,” in the Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/53.html, accessed 3 December 2010.
10. For detailed descriptions of suburban neighborhoods’ landscapes, see Keating, Chicagoland; and Dominic Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett, Chicago, City of Neighborhoods: Histories and Tours (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986). In this chapter I define “suburb” as a densely populated area adjacent to a large city, taking my cue from 1910 and 1920 census definitions of metropolitan districts.
11. This argument about the suburban dream, and my description of working-class suburbs more generally, is drawn from Richard Harris, “Chicago’s Other Suburbs,” Geographical Review 84, no. 4 (October 1994): 394–410.
12. Samuel E. Gross ad, Chicago Daily News, 26 October 1889, supplement section, 8.
13. Realtor ad, Sunday Record-Herald, 4 May 1913, 5.
14. “Some of the Many Phases of the Annual Mayday Hegira,” Chicago Tribune, 25 April 1897, 37. I owe this reference to Perry Duis, who uses it in Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 79.
15. Ad for real estate classifieds, Sunday Record-Herald, 4 May, 1913, sec. 2, 8. On the gradual spread of the norm of homeownership in Chicago, see Margaret Garb, City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Joseph C. Bigott, From Cottage to Bungalow: Houses and the Working Class in Metropolitan Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
16. For examples, see ads in Chicago Herald, 27 April 1889, 10, and Chicago Tribune, 10 October 1884, 7.
17. Ad for Edgewater development, Chicago Tribune, 15 April 1888, 29.
18. Ad for real estate classifieds, Sunday Record-Herald, 4 May, 1913, sec. 2, 8.
19. Ad for Auburn Park, Chicago Tribune, 15 April 1888, 31.
20. Samuel E. Gross ad, Chicago Daily News, 26 October 1889, supplement section, 8.
21. Ad for West Side properties, Chicago Herald, 28 April 1889, 23.
22. Ad for Auburn Park, Chicago Herald, 28 April 1889, 13; ad for Home Addition, Chicago Tribune, 27 June 1920, pt. 1, 10.
23. Chicago Record, September 18, 1890. I owe this source to Duis, Challenging Chicago, 32.
24. Ad for Washington Boulevard lots, Chicago Herald, 27 April 1889, 10. This idea became more entrenched in later decades and was formalized in the property codes of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation.
25. For example, see ad for Samuel Gross’s Avondale subdivision on the front page of the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, 7 July 1891, and for the Lucy M. Green Addition in the Illinois Staats-Zietung, 8 July 1891, 8.
26. These groups would get their suburban chance only later, during the boom in construction after World War II.
27. For an advertisement for a subdivision full of such standard-issue homes, see ad for Portage Park in the Chicago Daily News, 5 September 1925, 14. On developers’ processes in the region in this era, see Keating, Building Chicago, chaps. 3 and 4.
28. Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 41–42, 64. In its news columns, the Chicago Defender occasionally waged battles against discrimination in housing and real estate. For examples, see Chicago Defender, 21 April 1917, 1, and “South Shorers in Move to Bar ‘Undesirables;’ Seek Signers for Old Illegal Pact,” Chicago Defender, 6 April 1929, pt. 1, 6. For an article on this issue in a suburban paper, see “Negroes Unable to Secure Homes Here,” Evanston Index, 2 January 1918, front page.
29. “Lilydale ‘The Beautiful,’” Chicago Defender, 5 April 1913, 3.
30. W. M. Farrow, “Art and the Home,” Chicago Defender, 19 September, 1925, pt. 2, 4.
31. Ibid., 4.
32. In Chicago’s dailies, properties for sale equaled or outnumbered rentals, from the 1890s onward. In the Defender, rental listings far outnumbered for-purchase listings in the same period. Black homeownership rates were much lower than white rates in Chicago in this era; see Garb, City of American Dreams, chap. 7; and Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward, chap. 6.
33. For ads for African American developments, see Chicago Defender, 5 February 1921, 6 (Gary, Indiana), and Chicago Defender, 18 May 1929, pt. 1, 3 (the far South Side). For a broader history of African Americans and suburbanization, see Wiese, Places of Their Own.
34. Ad for South Side real estate, Chicago Defender, 5 April 1913, 6.
35. Classified ad for South Side real estate, Chicago Daily News, 20 June 1921, 29. I.C.R.R. stands for Illinois Central Railroad.
36. The Chicago Tribune printed regular real estate news starting in the 1880s; the Herald in the 1890s; and the Daily News in the 1920s.
37. Ad for Englefield, Chicago Tribune, 17 September 1916, Sec. I, 11.
38. “Chicago Building Pace Called Dizzy,” Chicago Daily News, 5 September 1925, 15.
39. Ad for Frederick H. Bartlett Realty Company, Chicago Herald, 29 April 1917, 8.
40. For more on the history of consumer credit—for both homes and household purchases—see Lendol Caldor, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
41. Advertisement for Frederick H. Bartlett Realty Company, Chicago Herald and Examiner, 5 May 1929, pt. 1, 4.
42. Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune Book of Homes: Containing Nineteen Prize Winning Plans and Eighty Other Plans Submitted in the $7,500 Competition, conducted by the Home Builders’ Department of the Chicago Tribune (Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1927), 6.
43. Louise Bargelt, “Home Building and Remodeling,” Chicago Tribune, 11 November 1928, sec. 3, 3.
44. Chicago Tribune, Book of Facts, 1927: Data on Markets, Merchandising, Advertising, with Special Reference to the Chicago Territory and Chicago Newspaper Advertising (Chicago: Chicago Tribune, 1927), 17, 103. On the birth and expansion of the home-improvement industry, see Richard Harris, Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Carolyn M. Goldstein, Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-Century America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998).
45. In the Chicago Tribune, 20 April 1924, pt. 7, 4, a question-and-answer column titled “The Home Harmonious” advised readers on coordinating living room upholstery and choosing colors for a bedroom. Roland Marchand discusses the “ensemble” as a 1920s sales technique in Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
46. “Novel Hints for Furnishing Homes,” Chicago Times-Herald, 7 November 1897, 47.
47. Pirie Scott & Company ad, Chicago Daily News, 5 September 1925, 15.