One of the most familiar dramas of late nineteenth-century journalism is that of the epic battle for circulation between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The role of the yellow press in aggravating what Theodore Roosevelt called the "splendid little war" with Spain has been taught to generations of journalism students as an object lesson on the dangers of sensationalism and the need for editorial responsibility.

For cultural historians, however, a much more important battle took place a decade earlier. It was not Pulitzer versus Hearst that ushered in a new era in American journalism, but rather Joseph Pulitzer versus Charles A. Dana, the editor of the New York Sun. At stake in this circulation war was the very definition of the reading public. Pulitzer's victory over Dana marked the creation of a consumer society; it signified the erosion of traditional American values such as hard work, thrift and self-sacrifice, and the emergence of a value system that increasingly celebrated consumption, leisure, and self-indulgence.

Metropolitan newspapers at the turn of the 20th century were unique in their relation to the culture of consumption. As the most important medium of communication that city dwellers had for learning about the abundance of consumer goods, the daily press took on an expanded identity as a vehicle for advertisers. This was evident in the development of sporting news, the women's page, and the paid advice column—as well as in the growing cooperation between newspapers and department store managers.

Yet, by the turn of the century, newspapers were not merely important vehicles for advertising new forms of mass-produced culture, they were themselves mass-produced and mass-marketed. By as early as the 1870's, newspapers had become big businesses worth several million dollars—larger than all but a few manufacturing concerns. The metropolitan press underwent a technological and managerial revolution at the turn of the century, which coincided with the breakdown of "producer" values. Both of these transitions were indicative of the broader changes in American culture that led to the creation of a consumer society.

While many historians have described Joseph Pulitzer's enticing vision of the metropolis, less attention has been paid to the values of the late 19th century newspapers that the World displaced. For the 15 years before Joseph Pulitzer bought the New York World in 1883, the paper with the largest circulation in the city was the New York Sun, edited by Charles A. Dana. Significantly, Dana's paper neither relied on advertisements for revenues nor devoted much space to consumer goods and leisure activities.

The competing styles of the New York Sun and the New York World (both democratic, working class newspapers) reflected the cultural orientations of their editors. The ways in which Dana and Pulitzer viewed their readers—as producers on the one hand and as consumers on the other—accounted not only for the differences in the content of the two papers, but also for the ways in which the editors used the technologies available to them. Analysis of these differences will shed new light on what may have been the most culturally significant newspaper drama of the late nineteenth century—the phenomenal rise of the New York World, and the partial eclipse of the Sun.

DANA AND THE SUN

When Charles Dana bought the Sun from Moses Beach in 1868, the paper had a strong tradition as a Democratic, working class newspaper. Founded in 1833 by Benjamin Day, the Sun was New York's first "penny paper." Like the imitators that would follow it, the Sun made money from street sales and classified advertising, rather than from subscriptions and political subsidies. Popular with the mostly Democratic working class (though nominally "independent" of politics) the early Sun revolutionized the definition of news, emphasizing timeliness, human interest, and sensational accounts of vice and crime.

Dana drew upon the Sun's antebellum roots to create a new version of urban, Jacksonian Democracy. Ever mindful of the paper's pre-existing working class readership, Dana announced that the Sun would be "an uncompromising advocate of the laboring masses." This was no idle promise. On a typical day in July, 1868, the Sun reported on strikes by the journeymen bakers and the Singer machine iron moulders, fund raising efforts by the Coach Makers' Union, and the activities of Typographical Union #6, the union of the Sun's printers. During the first year that Dana owned the Sun, he called for the repeal of the Conspiracy Law, an ordinance that forbade union members to act together in a manner injurious to trade. Sun editorials argued that workingmen combinations were no worse than those of stock market manipulators who "plunder[ed] the public." Of the two, in fact, the paper asserted that the capitalists were the "greater criminals."

The Sun offered its working class readers the same ideas of cooperation and self-help that had been prevalent in the 1840's: "by the concentration of a number of small sums into one definite channel, they can produce very remarkable results." The paper advocated cooperative associations of workingmen that would build housing, establish reading rooms, and provide lectures and self-help programs. It also pledged to do what it could to assist these organizations, for example embarking on a crusade to fight Sabbath laws that would close the reading rooms on the only day that most workingmen and women were at liberty to use them.

While Dana was sympathetic towards the interests of the working class, he found no serious fault with capitalism. The editor distrusted monopolies, but the only alternative he raised was greater competition. Propelled by a sentimental notion of labor as "the noblest duty of life," he argued that higher wages for labor would add to the prosperity of all.

Dana's understanding of his readers was also reflected in the Sun's expanded use of the human interest story, a genre which sociologist Robert Park credited Dana's paper with developing. Dana believed his readers were interested in more than stories of vice and crime. When a 1919 anniversary issue of the Sun looked back on Dana's achievements, it recalled that the editor had believed the public would "enjoy a discourse upon the architecture of the tombs of the Pharaohs as much as it liked a description of the Tombs of Centre Street." The Sun reflected Dana's belief that an editor was obliged to print all the news, whether or not it would be acceptable to polite society. This contrasted sharply with the views of his peers in New York's literary establishment, who held that editors should censor and sanitize the news before they published it. In Dana's words:

The newspaper must be founded upon human nature … It must furnish the [news] which the people demand, or else it never can be successful … by news I mean everything that occurs, everything which is of human interest … There is a great disposition in some quarters to say that the newspapers ought to limit the amount of news they print; that certain kinds of news ought not to be published … I have always felt that whatever the Divine Providence permitted to occur I was not too proud to print.

Though Dana eventually made quite a fortune at the New York Sun—one 1884 estimate placed his income at $150,000 annually—he remained sympathetic with the experiences and desires of his largely working class readers. This accounted for his allegiance to the Democratic party, his friendliness towards Tammany Hall, and his dislike of genteel reformers (such as Henry Ward Beecher, E. L. Codkin, and George William Curtis) who achieved a political triumph in the 1884 presidential election of Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland. Dana was convinced that the Independent Republicans (whom he named the Mugwumps) were motivated by distrust of the people, and that their crusade for reform of the civil service masked issues of ethnicity and class. As the Sun jeered:

[the Mugwump] would as soon think of parting his hair elsewhere than in the middle as of voting for the 'Bobs,' Mikes,' and 'Pats' of politics.… He is very anxious to cast a 'clean ballot' all by himself, and wants it generally understood that he has none of the enthusiastic devotion to party manifested by the ungenteel publics … for Tammany Hall especially he has unutterable loathing. The thought that the 'common people' are in the majority and have as much right to vote as he has almost drives him into exile. He would have the polls fumigated and perfumed before he entered to deposit his dainty ballot."

A PULITZER CHALLENGE

Despite the great successes of Dana's Sun, the paper nearly collapsed in 1884. The circulation of the Sun plummeted by 70,000 readers within six months, a development that caught Dana completely by surprise. While historians of journalism have generally concluded that Dana's 1884 rejection of Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland caused this startling drop in circulation, Dana's bad political judgment did not alone explain the suddenly declining sales. It was the revolutionary kind of newspaper that Joseph Pulitzer was creating in the New York World that sent the Sun's fortunes reeling.

The rapid growth of the New York World came at the direct expense of the New York Sun. Dana and Joseph Pulitzer competed for the same market in the mid 1880's. Both papers were read by the city's skilled and semi-skilled laborers, factory workers, immigrants, and small merchants. This raises an interesting question: what did the World's readers find in their paper that was not available in Dana's Sun?

The readers of the New York Sun and the New York World may have been the same, but the two editors viewed them very differently. In 1884, Dana saw the Sun's working class readers as he always had: as producers. While Dana championed the interests of workingmen, he defined those interests in the rhetoric of antebellum workingmen's associations, emphasizing cooperation and self-help. Pulitzer, on the other hand, knew that the World's readers spent their leisure hours window-shopping, seeing vaudeville shows, and saving for weekend excursions to Coney Island. By defining New York's working class as consumers, with leisure time and dollars to spend, Joseph Pulitzer helped to create markets that were vital to the health of a rapidly expanding capitalist economy. The New York World depicted—and advertised—a city rich with excitement and commercial amusements. The paper's explosive growth was testimony to the success of this new outlook.

Pulitzer bought the World in 1883, paying what many considered the exorbitant sum of $346,000 for a newspaper with a circulation of about 15,000. Almost immediately, the Hungarian immigrant attracted attention by his willingness to exploit modern technology. Pulitzer recognized that New York's increasing dependence on rapid transit provided an opportunity to grab the attention of the commuter at the newsstand. Illustrations and alliterative headlines drew in new readers, and made the paper appealing even to the illiterate. Before his purchase of the World, newspapers had been staid, conservative-looking blanket sheets, neatly divided into columns headed by modest titles. Pulitzer caused an explosion of pictures, advertisements and headlines to rip through the New York newspaper industry. Building on the tradition of sensationalism established by penny papers like the ante-bellum Sun, the World published titillating stories of sex, vice, crime, and disaster. Like twentieth-century supermarket tabloids, the World used sensationalism as bait; the underlying message was prim enough to satisfy rigid Victorian mores.

The visual impact of Pulitzer's World was remarkable. Just as revolutionary was his use of the "crusade" for social justice. Though other Democratic newspapers (particularly Dana's Sun) had long championed the working class, Pulitzer outflanked them by transforming the World into a paper that was—at a glance—unmistakably the people's. Brilliantly, Pulitzer endowed traditional Democratic views with a class-based appeal. When the editor called for reform and social justice, he responded to widely-held fears of concentrated power and authority. Like Dana, Pulitzer defended both labor's right to organize, and the right of capital to run its own enterprises. In the best tradition of reform-minded journalists like Jacob Riis, Pulitzer believed he could end the problems of the poor by turning the glare of publicity onto their suffering.

Pulitzer was adept at mixing city with self-promotion. The World gave Thanksgiving dinners to hundreds of newsboys, clothes and special holiday matinee tickets to needy children at Christmas-time, and summer beach excursions to the city's working boys and girls. While these cities helped to sell newspapers, that subtlety was lost on the happy beneficiaries. If competitors sneered at this as ingenious advertising, it made no difference to the World's readers, who apparently found in Pulitzer's style and message heartening evidence that the newspaper really cared about them.

Pulitzer was one of the creators of an American consumer culture. The World offered its readers a guide to the abundance of the metropolis. Pulitzer understood and exploited the connections between text, advertisements, and illustrations. The paper would, for example juxtapose helpful articles such as the "Rage for Decollete" with sketches of the latest ready-to-wear, and advertisements pointing out where these garments could be purchased. Foreign-born readers, wanting to adapt to American ways, eagerly turned to the pages of the World for guidance. Many of these readers were women. Pulitzer's World was the first newspaper to experiment with a women's page that included society items and gossip columns. When Carrie Meeber, the Midwestern-born heroine of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, was invited by wealthy friends to dine at Sherry's, she knew what to expect. Like thousands of others she had, in Dreiser's words "read of it often in the Morning and Evening World."

In short, the World radiated an energy and enthusiasm that shook newspaper readers out of their settled habits and made an immediate hit at the newsstand. The paper promoted itself with frequent announcements of its growing circulation. At first these additional sales came from a new market of the foreign-born who had never before purchased English language papers. But before long Pulitzer's aggressive promotions began to threaten the established dailies.

A COMPARISON

There is an asymmetry to any comparison of the producer outlook of Dana and the consumer orientation of Pulitzer. The Sun's producer orientation was reflected in the paper's political outlook; in its championing of labor organizations, producer's cooperatives, and Democratic Tammany Hall. The World's consumer orientation was not reflected in the paper's political leanings, (which were only slightly to the left of the Democratic Sun) but rather in its advertisements, illustrations, and emphasis on leisure activities.

Dana's producerism was evident, for example, in his wellknown antipathy towards advertisers. Dana considered advertising to be a waste of valuable space, arguing that a newspaper ought to be able to support itself on sales alone. It was beyond Dana's comprehension that some readers might actually enjoy reading ads. Dana frequently expressed the hope that one day the Sun would "politely decline to have any of our space used by advertisers." Despite this, approximately one-fourth of the four-page New York Sun was devoted to advertising during the 1870's and early 1880's. Nearly all of these were classified, and, incidently, provide a good indication of the newspaper's working class readership. Most of the advertisements were either "Help Wanted" or "Situation Wanted," and referred to domestic, skilled, or semi-skilled work. While a few theatres, dry goods retailers, and manufacturers of patent medicines advertised in the Sun, they were overshadowed by the classifieds.

Likewise, Dana believed that illustrations added little of value to a newspaper. As late as 1894, after newspaper illustrations had become common even in the Sun, Dana insisted that they were nothing but a "passing fashion." He stated, "I don't believe so many pictures are going to be required for the next century."

By the late 1880's distinctions between the Sun and the World become more difficult to find, because by then Dana—along with the rest of the New York press—had begun to imitate Pulitzer's techniques. (The group of editors who self-consciously modeled themselves on Joseph Pulitzer would soon include William Randolph Hearst, who bought the New York Journal in 1895.)

In 1886, Dana abandoned the Sun's traditional four-page length in order to compete with the eight-page World. Critics claimed that at eight pages the tightly-edited Sun lost its characteristic brightness, and became "puffed up" with extra material such as serialized fiction and sporting news. According to the trade weekly The Journalist, when the Sun imitated the World and expanded its use of illustrations, the result was clumsy and haphazard.

The Sun's new length and more modern look stopped the hemorrhaging of daily circulation, however. By the end of 1887 sales leveled off at 80,000. No longer willing to watch Pulitzer steal his readers out from under him, Dana reoriented his newspaper in the 1890's, and appealed to a new audience, probably the city's rapidly expanding white collar class. Abandoning its role as the workingman's "uncompromising advocate," the Sun grew increasingly conservative and hostile towards labor, a tendency that culminated in the paper's support of Republican Presidential candidate William McKinley in 1896.

In spite of the Sun's strengthened alliance with business interests, the paper never completely lost its producer orientation while Dana was alive. For example, the Sun remained steadfastly loyal to the union of its own typesetters, New York Typographical Union #6. Under Dana, the Sun had always paid its typesetters the Union scale, at a time, according to the Union, when "the proprietor had the power to dictate his own terms." The Union Printer, a labor weekly, frequently quoted Dana as declaring that Union men were well worth the higher wages "because they were the most skillful as well as the most trustworthy."

Dana's continued friendliness to the workers in Typographical Union #6 was not inconsistent with his growing hostility to labor in general, given the extent to which most of his actions were determined by personal loyalty. The Sun's "Chapel," or local, had been faithful to the interests of the paper's editor; he defended it in turn. This loyalty contributed to his refusal to install the linotype machine in the Sun offices. Furthermore, Dana liked the look of a handset page. At a Founder's Day speech at Cornell University Dana explained in 1894:

I have never taken to [the Mergenthaler linotype] … because it didn't seem to me to turn out a page as handsome, in a typographical point of view, as a page set up by hand. The difference of expense is something considerable, however. I have been told by one large newspaper publisher who employs that machine that he gets his typesetting done for one-half the cost of typesetting done by hand.

In the broadest sense, Dana ran aground on the shoals of mechanization in the late 1880's and 1890's. New typesetting and printing technologies, spurred in part by the changing material underpinnings of the newspaper industry, greatly increased the relative importance of the business office. As publishing became more business-oriented, the opinions of iconoclastic individuals became a liability. For Dana, the issue of "independence" was entwined with the business organization of the newspaper. According to the memoirs of Sun reporter Charles Rosebault, Dana believed mat the Sun was his paper, "the organ to express his will, his wishes, his views." As proof, Rosebault pointed to Dana's readiness to adopt editorial policies that resulted in great pecuniary loss, noting mat "millions of dollars were sacrificed by the exuberant indulgence of his will." In 1876, Dana dismissed as "twaddle" the idea that the day for this kind of journalism had passed. He asserted:

Whenever in the newspaper profession a man rises up who is original, strong and bold enough to make his opinions a matter of consequence to the public, there will be personal journalism; and whenever newspapers are conducted only by commonplace individuals whose views are of no interest to the world and of no consequence to anybody, there will be nothing but impersonal journalism.

Despite Dana's strong words, by the 1890's there was considerable agreement that "the day … of the editorial is past." The trade weekly the Journalist attributed this to a desire to give readers the "facts" and let them make up their own minds. What had at one time been the province of, as Dana put it, "strong" individuals with "bold" and "original" opinions, was being encroached upon by accountants, advertising salesmen, and production experts. Little wonder, then, that "virile comment" was increasingly relegated to signed columns, where it played second fiddle to the far less controversial factual reporting of the news.

The ways in which Dana and Pulitzer viewed their readers were closely connected both to the contents of the Sun and the World, and to the business strategies pursued by the two editors. In the case of the New York Sun, Dana's producer orientation contributed to his disdain for illustrations and advertisements, his refusal to use the linotype machines and his maintenance of a management style that rejected corporatism and the lack of independence it entailed. For most of his career, Charles Dana had been sensitive to the interests of his readers—this had been crucial to the success of the New York Sun. Yet the Sun's circulation fell in the late 1880's and 1890's precisely because Dana lost touch with the experiences and desires of ordinary people. By contrast, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World—with its more vivid display of consumer goods, excitement and leisure—met with greater success among New York City's largely immigrant working class. It ushered in a new era in metropolitan journalisms and set the stage for the great circulation battles of the next decade. Not only did Pulitzer's self-promotions and crusading Democratic reforms earn readers, they were also a means of mass-marketing a product. That product was a newspaper that, in turn, promoted the culture of consumption. Pulitzer sold more than a newspaper, he promoted a newspaper that advertised a way of life.