SOURCE: Tebbel, John. “How the General Magazines Began” and “Periodicals as a Political Platform.” In The American Magazine: A Compact History, pp. 47-65. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969.

[In the following excerpt, Tebbel recounts the rise of the general magazine between 1825 and 1850 and the importance of new periodicals as forums for political debate during this period.]

HOW THE GENERAL MAGAZINES BEGAN

The year 1825 was a turning point in both Europe and America. Abroad there was a rising wave of revolutionary movement in many countries, and a strong tide of reform was running. Change was the order of the day. It was also the primary fact of life in America as well, where the House of Representatives' denial of the Presidency to Andrew Jackson after he had won both the popular vote and the electoral vote, although by insufficient margins, paved the way for the coalition of South and West that sent him triumphantly to the White House four years later.

Jackson's accession was more than a Populist triumph, a grass-roots revolt that momentarily broke the hold of Easterners on national political life. It was the beginning of a new era in American politics, with large and far-reaching consequences that were not immediately foreseen. The nation had asserted itself as a nation for the first time. There was a suddenly awakened public consciousness of the continent—“the land was ours before we were the land's,” as Robert Frost put it so many years later at another inauguration. The Erie Canal was a symbol of the change. It was finished in 1825, as hardworking immigrant laborers began to lay the rails westward for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

Out of this ferment—and particularly the rapid spread of education, the reduction of illiteracy, the improvements in printing machinery, and the rise of the cities—came the nearly incredible expansion of the magazine business from its modest beginnings to mass market size. America itself was expanding in every direction, but no aspect of it was growing faster than magazines.

“These United States are fertile in most things, but in periodicals they are extremely luxuriant,” said the New-York Mirror in November 1828. “They spring up as fast as mushrooms, in every corner, and like all rapid vegetation, bear the seeds of early decay within them. … They put forth their young green leaves in the shape of promises and prospectuses—blossom through a few numbers—and then comes a ‘frost, a killing frost,’ in the form of bills due and debts unpaid. This is the fate of hundreds, but hundreds more are found to supply their place, to tread in their steps, and share their destiny. The average age of periodicals in this country is found to be six months.”

While the New-York Mirror may have underrated the general durability of the new magazines, it did not exaggerate the state of their proliferation. Figures for the period are as incomplete as they are unreliable, but there were about six hundred periodicals existing in 1850 where less than a hundred had been published in 1825, and in that quarter century it seems probable that somewhere between four and five thousand were published. Nothing like this gigantic wave of publication has ever been seen since.

In a time of highly significant changes and innovations in the business, perhaps the most important was the dramatic rise of the general monthly magazines. They had existed before, of course, but now they would climb to a preeminence of which their earlier entrepreneurs had not dared to dream.

One of the first ventures in this field proved to be also one of the most important. It began with the founding in 1826 of The Casket: Flowers of Literature, Wit and Sentiment by Samuel C. Atkinson and Charles Alexander, publishers of the Saturday Evening Post. (“Casket,” it may be added, was a favorite name for magazines; the word was used in the sense of being a repository, with no somber connotations of funerals unless one considered that “literature, wit and sentiment,” or whatever else editors had to offer, was “laid out” in these repositories.) As a sister publication of the Post, the Casket continued for a dozen years, with frequent interchanges of material between the two publications, until 1839, when Atkinson, who had remained as publisher after Alexander left the partnership, decided to sell it to a hustling young man named George R. Graham.

Graham altered the Casket's character by changing it from a rather cheap-looking miscellany to a well-printed, entertaining magazine. Then, in another year, he bought the Gentleman's Magazine, which had been edited as an offstage amusement by the noted actor William E. Burton, who now needed the money for his real career. Combining the two, Graham in 1840 began issuing his new periodical, which he forthrightly if immodestly called Graham's Magazine. As Dr. Mott says of it in his History, it “not only became one of the three or four most important magazines in the United States but, in the five years 1841-45, displayed a brilliance which has seldom been matched in American magazine history.” (More will be said of it in Chapter 9.)

In Boston a new magazine emerged, the New-England Magazine, edited by Joseph Dennie's youthful admirer, Joseph T. Buckingham, and his son Edwin. This venture became notable if for no other reason than its publication of fifteen pieces by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

A more enduring periodical, which became successful and famous after a rocky start in 1833, was the Knickerbocker Magazine, edited after 1834 by Lewis Gaylord Clark, who became known to generations of New Yorkers as “Old Knick.” Drawing on the rich pool of literary talent then in the city—writers like Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Bryant, Halleck, Paulding, and Nathaniel P. Willis—Clark added such notable New England names as Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Holmes until he was producing a magazine difficult to surpass.

Clark introduced something new in magazine format—a section titled “Editor's Table,” in which he talked in a light fashion about topics of the day, and especially happenings in New York City, for whose citizens the magazine was intended. This department was the ancestor of the present-day New Yorker magazine's opening “Notes and Comment” section, and, in a more general way, of the “Editor's Easy Chair” department in Harper's magazine and similar sections in many other magazines. It gave the magazine a more personal voice, besides providing the editor with a platform for his views and observations about contemporary life.

Of equivalent importance in the development of periodicals during this exuberant Golden Age was the rapid rise of magazines for women. Earlier attempts to reach this audience were dwarfed by the giants that now arose, challenging the general magazines and arousing not only their competitive antagonism but also the ire of those who thought it preposterous to serve women with magazines at all. Charles A. Dana, soon to be one of the most famous of newspaper publishers, deplored in the Harbinger for August 8, 1846, the assumption these magazines “constantly put forth of being designed for ladies, and of representing in some way the women of the country. … Heaven protect us from such literature!”

The women for whom the magazines were intended disagreed. Though some of the material in the new periodicals might be appallingly bad, there was plenty of good reading, too, and women were delighted with the idea of large, well-printed magazines directed especially to them.

After a few tentative starts in that direction, the first really successful women's magazine was produced in Boston, in 1828, by Sarah Josepha Hale, a formidable woman who left an imprint in more ways than one on national life. Mrs. Hale looked like everybody's mother—an ample, full-bosomed, pleasant lady who yet had a no-nonsense air of efficiency about her. She called her new publication the Ladies' Magazine. It was meant not only to entertain but to promote Mrs. Hale's deeper interests, which lay in the direction of “female education.” Perhaps that was why her publishing efforts sometimes met with such savage attacks. In an era when men did not regard women as having any legitimate interest in life other than keeping house and raising children, Mrs. Hale wanted them to be trained as teachers, and to educate them in “female seminaries.” Other magazines for women had been sickly and sentimental and domestic. The Ladies' Magazine boldly campaigned for women's rights.

After nine annual volumes but only an indifferent financial success, Mrs. Hale merged her magazine with its chief rival, Godey's Lady's Book, going along with it as an editor. In its issue for March 1837, the American Annals of Education noted the deal with disapproval: “The Ladies' Magazine, which has been for nine years devoted, in part, to female education, has recently lost its identity, and, like many a ‘better half,’ assumed the name of a worse one. It is united with the Lady's Book, a periodical of much interest; but far less important, in its tendencies on sound literature, morals, and education.”

In its feminist zeal, the American Annals sadly underrated Louis Godey's excellent magazine, which was certainly the best of the women's magazines before the Civil War. Its contributors numbered the finest writers in the country, and it did what other magazines had not done, except for Graham's, by paying them liberally. By 1850 it was selling 40,000 a month—the highest any magazine had yet achieved.

The influence of Godey's Lady's Book on other magazines was substantial. Publishers and editors were made to realize that the female market was more important than they had realized and that reaching this market would substantially increase the circulation of any magazine, particularly the general monthlies. Consequently the astute George Graham, for one, changed the content of his magazine until half of it, or more, was intended for women. Others did likewise, and went even further by copying Godey's directly, to the annoyance of its proprietor. It was even imitated as far away as London.

Of these many imitations, the most successful was Peterson's Ladies' National Magazine, founded in Philadelphia in 1842 by a Saturday Evening Post editor, Charles J. Peterson. The editor of Peterson's was Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, one of those tireless ladies who wrote endless fiction serials for the magazines and who now turned a good part of her efforts toward her own periodical. Both Peterson's and Godey's continued until 1898, when they died simultaneously; by that time Peterson's had passed its rival in circulation, if not in prestige.

There were other imitators of a minor kind. The most successful were those monthlies intended to be bound at the end of the year as gift-book annuals, usually under such titles as Ladies' Wreath or Lady's Wreath or Ladies' Garland, and selling for a dollar. A few weeklies for women were also published, but they were of little consequence.

In sheer numbers, the literary weeklies outnumbered the women's magazines and the general monthlies. They were cheap, and most of them soon died. One of the best, and therefore able to survive for a time, was the New-York Mirror, begun in 1823. Before it died in 1846, it presented to its readers a fascinating running commentary on the morals and manners of the times, done with wit, grace, and style.

Another weekly, which forecast a style of the future, was Paul Pry, edited in Washington, D.C., by an eccentric, witty woman, Mrs. Anne Royall, who wrote down her observations of Washington life in a way that has survived to our own time in the gossip columns and society columns of newspapers, and in magazines like Confidential and Whisper. Mrs. Royall may not have been as sensational as these later successors, but in the context of the times she was fully as outspoken about politics and society in Washington, about which she had few illusions. Paul Pry began in 1831. Five years later, when the energetic editor was seventy-one, she dropped her successful magazine for no special reason and began a new one, The Huntress, which continued to shoot its barbed shafts until 1854.

As many stories, most of them apocryphal, were told about Mrs. Royall as appeared in her magazines. A favorite, repeated for years, was her alleged pursuit of the elusive President Madison for an interview. She was said to have happened upon him while he was swimming alone on a hot day in a secluded part of the Potomac, and sat on his clothes while he stood up to his neck in water and submitted to the interview.

If true, this maneuver at least demonstrated original enterprise at a time when the lack of international copyright made literary piracy highly profitable. It was practiced by magazine and book publishers alike, by most quite openly. The talented Nathaniel Parker Willis, with his friend Dr. T. O. Porter, launched in 1839 a magazine boldly called the Corsair; Willis had wanted to call it The Pirate. In his prospectus Willis declared frankly that he meant “to take advantage, in short, of the privilege assured to us by our piratical law of copyright; and, in the name of American authors (for our own benefit) ‘convey’ to our columns, for the amusement of our readers, the cream and spirit of everything that ventures to light in England, France and Germany.” In spite of Willis's own brilliant efforts, and a trip to Europe to comb piratical possibilities there (he obtained some travel letters of Thackeray, but had to pay for them), the magazine ended a year after it started.

Piracy was made to pay, however, in a historic series of episodes beginning in 1839, with consequences going far beyond the periodicals themselves. Two young men, Park Benjamin and Rufus W. Griswold, who had learned their trade as editors on Horace Greeley's New-Yorker, begun in 1834, started a cheap fiction weekly called Brother Jonathan in July 1839. It contained a little original material, but most of it was given over to serials pirated from the works of Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Captain Marryat, Paul de Kock, and others. Even the woodcut illustrations were stolen from other magazines.

Six months later, Griswold and Benjamin had to relinquish their venture to the printer-publishers Wilson and Company, but they immediately began another publication of the same stripe, which they called New World. It was first issued on June 6, 1840. The format was unusual: pages four feet long and eleven columns wide on occasion, although in six months or so the magazine began to appear in a quarto edition as well.

The struggle between these two competing pirates was an epic one. They quickly swallowed up available English fiction, and soon were competing fiercely to beat each other on the street with novels fresh off the boat from England. Book-publishing houses and some of the other periodicals were playing the same game, but Brother Jonathan and New World beat them by publishing complete novels in a single issue. They were called “extras.” Taken off the boat in their original hard-cover form or in sheets, they were rushed into print by day-and-night shifts in sweating composing rooms, then hawked in the streets like newspapers at ten cents a copy. They were difficult to read in closely set type on quarto pages, but readers seemed not to mind when they could get for ten cents what would cost them a dollar from the book publishers.

The method soon spread to Boston and Philadelphia, but the two New York papers were more energetic than any rival. To those who protested the morality of the piracies, New World replied piously that its “ample pages are unsoiled by profane or improper jests, vulgar allusions, or irreligious sentiments.”

Benjamin and Griswold had discovered a way to make a great deal of money, until the Federal government noticed that both magazines had been going through the mails at newspaper rates. In April 1843, the post office ordered much higher pamphlet rates applied to the publications, and two months later they lost their Canadian distribution when British copyright laws were invoked against them. Within a year, both had expired, although Brother Jonathan resumed later as a twenty-five-cent monthly.

It had been an amazing episode. Assessing it with some indignation, E. A. Duyckinck, writing in the American Whig Review for February 1845, observed: “Native authors were neglected, despised, insulted; foreign authors were mutilated, pillaged, and insulted besides. … The good writers were not only taken possession of, their works altered and thrown upon the public without their just honor and responsibility, but they were made the cover for the worst licentiousness. … The cupidity of the publishers over-stocked the market, and the traffic fell. … Doubtless a taste for reading was diffused. …”

Not only was the taste diffused, but the “extras” showed book publishers the way to new publics and larger profits. In competing with the magazines, they began to issue series of paperbound books of their own, sometimes complete, sometimes long novels in parts at prices ranging generally from twenty-five cents to fifty cents. Thus was the paperback book born, and this first “revolution” flourished before the Civil War, and has recurred in tremendous surges four times since. Today paperbound volumes are an industry, and the racks upon racks of these books we see owe their origins to Brother Jonathan and the New World.

There were other cheap magazines, however, with a different purpose. These were the so-called “knowledge magazines,” offering all kinds of factual information. The first was the Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, a monthly published during 1830-1831 by N. Sargent and Abraham Halsey, members of the New York Lyceum of Natural History. Imitators followed, until there was a profusion of “family” and “penny” periodicals with titles often containing the phrase “Cabinets of Instruction.”

How well they instructed was doubted by their contemporaries. Summarizing them in 1835, the Family Magazine deplored these “cheap publications,” and continued: “… In the zeal of competition … many stale and useless works were imprudently admitted into some of the publications, and the smallness of the type and bad quality of the paper rendered many of them unsatisfactory and almost worthless. Many of the cheap magazines, also, became satisfied with making up their pages with fragments of ephemeral news, rather than with substantial Knowledge, alleviating their dullness by introducing here and there a worthless tale, and only taking care to impose the trash upon the world with the catch-penny glare of engravings.”

Among the quarterlies before 1850, the North American Review continued upon its majestic way, although it suffered from the editorship of men who, though brilliant in other ways, were not good editors. Its principal rival was the New York Review, edited successively by its 1837 founder, the Reverend Francis L. Hawks; Caleb S. Henry, professor of philosophy at New York University; and the Astor librarian J. G. Cogswell. It nearly matched the North American Review in scholarship, and stood well ahead of its other competitors.

No doubt the most famous of the quarterlies, although it made no particular attempt to compete with its contemporaries, was The Dial, Margaret Fuller's journal of transcendental opinion and writing which she began to publish in July 1840. Ralph Waldo Emerson edited it during the second part of its four-year existence. It was not a magazine for the general public. As Dr. Mott puts it, it was “a mystification to the uninitiated, caviare to the general, and a butt of ridicule for the irreverent.” Nonetheless, it contained work by some of the best minds in New England, much of which later emerged in book form.

Church periodicals before 1850 were inclined to be quarterlies, and while they naturally devoted much of their space to theological argument, since it was a time of the most intense religious controversy, some at least devoted their columns to secular interests, and a few could hardly be distinguished from the magazines published by and for the laity.

More and more, as churches discovered what an ideal platform magazines could be for dissemination of the faith, they turned to this medium as a primary outlet, while also starting their own book-publishing houses. Thus the religious press became one of the most rapidly growing and active in the entire publishing business. The Congregationalists alone had at least twenty-five periodicals, and the Catholics as many as forty or fifty. The Biblical Repository asserted in January 1840 that “of all the reading of the people three-fourths is purely religious … of all the issues of the press three-fourths are theological, ethical and devotional.” Eight years later, New York City alone could boast fifty-two religious magazines. According to the census of 1850, there were 191 religious publications in the United States, about half of them newspapers.

The use of magazines as a platform for theological argument led to their use as platforms for secular interests. It was in magazines that the great issues of the day were debated before the Civil War engulfed the nation.

PERIODICALS AS A POLITICAL PLATFORM

In the turbulence of the Jackson Era, with the menacing cloud of the slavery debate moving ever closer, Americans were preoccupied with politics. As Timothy Flint observed in the Western Monthly Review for May 1830, “In travelling through our land, little interest or excitement is seen in any thing, but electioneering and politics. … The columns of our newspapers are occupied with little else. …”

The columns of the magazines, however, were not so single-minded, primarily because those intended for women and children were not at all politically oriented, and the religious press was nonpartisan, at least for a time. But the political struggles of the period were so fundamental that they inevitably overflowed into the pages of the periodicals, existing side by side in uncomfortable juxtaposition with belles-lettres. There was little attempt to be neutral. The magazines were partisan, sometimes violently so.

Wherever one looked, there was controversy. There was the question of the National Bank, and economic issues raised by the Panic of 1837. The Mexican War was as bitterly opposed as it was supported. A nation pushing its boundaries outward was certain to run headlong into disputes, like the arguments over the annexation of Texas and the boundaries of Oregon. South Carolina raised the issue of nullification. And with swiftly increasing momentum, the debate over abolition began to overshadow everything else.

Both sides of political issues often found powerful supporters in the magazines. Advocates of a National Bank, fiercely opposed by the states'-rights believers, were grateful for the aid of so influential an organ as the North American Review and writers like George Bancroft to argue the case. When the Mexican War became a national issue, much of the opposition to it found its voice in the magazines, where a respected thinker like Ralph Waldo Emerson could say bluntly, as he did in the Massachusetts Quarterly in December 1847, “We have a bad war. …”

The argument over the war was strikingly like the national division over Vietnam in our own time. “It seems surprising all men cannot see that such a glory is only shame,” Theodore Parker said in the same issue that carried Emerson's uncompromising statement. “Poor, unhappy Mexico!” an article began in the Knickerbocker of July 1847. The Whig Review declared that the war “might and should have been avoided,” while the same magazine carried an article by Daniel D. Barnard, just retired from Congress, who asserted: “We have been plunged into this war by the blunders, or the crime, of those who administer the public affairs of our own country.”

On the other hand, some of the influential magazines were purposefully silent on the issue, whether out of patriotism or in deference to the known sympathies of their audiences, it is difficult to say. Whatever reticence there may have been in some periodicals about the slavery question, however, disappeared in time under the heat of controversy. On the other hand William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, founded in 1831, was by far the most eloquent, and served as the voice of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, begun in 1832 and a year later changing its name to the American Anti-Slavery Society. Other abolitionist organizations had their magazines or newspapers, but none of the others, of course, had Garrison's fiery pen to command it. Few magazines had ever been so ardently loved or hated as The Liberator; today scholars regard it as a publication of both literary and historical importance.

In spite of those who despised it, The Liberator was safe enough in Boston at first. The abolitionist journals nearer the South, in the border states, were not so fortunate. The office of the Cincinnati Philanthropist was raided twice by an irate mob in 1837, and yet again four years later. Its editor, Dr. Gamaliel Bailey, started another abolition paper in Washington in 1847, the National Era, and this magazine soon gained a wide reputation for itself, first because of the literary work it carried by Nathaniel Hawthorne, including “The Great Stone Face,” and then for its serialization of Uncle Tom's Cabin from June 5, 1851, to April 1, 1852. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for whom the writing of the book was a great emotional experience, found herself unable to stop, while her Boston publisher fretted at its growing length because he wanted to bring it out in a single volume, for reasons of economy. Mrs. Stowe at last wanted to end it with Tom's death, but when the question was put to the readers who were following the tale with utter absorption, they begged her to go on. Jewett finally had to publish the book in two volumes.

Some magazines, like Bailey's and Garrison's, were devoted to the slavery question. Others, both the general and the specialized, discussed it more and more, especially the religious reviews and weeklies. They were far from uniformly abolitionist, of course. The debate was dividing the churches, north and south, as it was the rest of the nation. The Presbyterian Biblical Repository, for example, quoted the Scriptures to attack the abolitionists and defend the institution of slavery, even after the war began. On the other hand, the North American Review, which ordinarily spoke in a calm and reasoned voice, printed in capitals the Jacksonian battle cry: the federal union—it must be preserved. That was as early as January 1833, during the early argument over South Carolina's nullification action.

But it was The Liberator's strong voice that stirred passions more than any other magazine. “We hold slavery to be a blot upon our national escutcheon,” it declared sternly, “a libel upon the Declaration of Independence, a sin against god which exposes us to his tremendous judgments, and which ought to be immediately repented of and forsaken.” Such talk began to stir up those who thought the abolitionists were going too far, and there were mass meetings in New York and Boston to protest what was regarded by many as an unwarranted revolutionary provocation. The result of the tumultuous meeting in Boston was mob violence against Garrison and the destruction of his press, while in Charleston another mob rifled the mailbags and burned the northern antislavery papers they found there.

At least some of the magazine press believed that the newspapers, reflecting the interests of the businessmen who were generally in favor of the status quo, were inciting the mobs. After the sacking of The Liberator, the great Methodist organ Zion's Herald, a newspaper itself, came flying to Garrison's defense with an outraged cry: “And this is the land of LIBERTY! Our soul is sick at such hypocrisy! … Who are the authors of this riot? The daily press of this city. …”

Oddly enough, there was less passion in the articles supporting slavery that appeared in such southern magazines as the Southern Quarterly and Southern Literary Messenger, which felt they could hardly avoid the question but did not often raise their voices when they were discussing it. Their reserve began to wear thinner, however, toward 1850, as the number of abolitionist journals continued to increase in the North, although most of the leading magazines there still opposed abolition, and prominent editors refused to believe that the question would not be resolved peacefully before long.

When they were not discussing slavery, the magazines found other political questions to occupy their pages. Tariffs were always good for columns of argument, and for many the Oregon question was of more moment than abolition. Some even favored fighting England for the territory, if it proved necessary, while others were inclined to share a Boston magazine's verdict, “The territory of Oregon is not worth much,” separated as it was from the rest of the country by a “desert two thousand miles broad and a range of lofty and precipitous mountains.” Many of the periodicals that held this view, however, changed their minds after gold was discovered in California in 1848. The West was seen to have some value after all. In fact, gold fever filled the pages of a good many magazines for a time.

The physical problem of getting westward stimulated articles by the hundreds, as the frenzy to extend the rail ribbons reached a peak in the 1840s, with nearly three thousand new miles of track being laid every year. This was a relatively nonpolitical subject that stirred everyone's imagination, and the editors took full advantage. “Even if the art of flying should be invented,” exclaimed the Illinois Monthly in 1830, “who would endure the trouble of wearing a pair of wings and the labor of flapping them, when every gentleman may keep his own ‘locomotive’ and travel from the Mississippi to the Atlantic with no other expenditure than a teakettle of water and a basket of chips!” Some southern writers even saw in the linking of the Ohio River and the Atlantic by rail a force that would unite North and South “by the endearing bonds of mutual sympathies and common interests.”

The railroads soon had their own periodical, the American Rail-Road Journal, published in New York as a weekly beginning in 1832, later a semimonthly and finally a monthly, existing today as Railway Locomotives and Cars. It was not the first in the field, however. A year earlier, in Rogersville, Tennessee, the Rail-Road Advocate had a brief life. Two other railroad magazines were founded before 1850, and half a dozen others had emerged by 1865.

Once slavery, politics, and transportation were disposed of, the magazines before 1850 gave rather short shrift to such other problems of the day as immigration, poverty, and labor conditions. A few writers were becoming concerned about the social problems of the new society being created, but there were few who shared the Democratic Review's alarm in 1849 over the fact that “fortunes of ＄1,000,000 are now not rare, and some reach ＄20,000,000, while thousands of starving beggars throng the streets and crowd the public charities.” There were many more editors who preferred to cite the favorable situation of American labor as compared with the lot of workingmen in Europe. The French Socialists were quoted and written about, but infrequently read with any ardor. Nevertheless, there were some who could not look upon the thriving New England factories without fear of what they might be doing to the structure of society.

There was a good deal of trivia in the magazines, too—endless prose dealing with the fads and fancies of the day, as well as with the innumerable attempts at “reform.” It sometimes appeared that the entire American society was split into groups intent on improving the morals and manners of every other group. Temperance at times excited as much passion as slavery; there were nearly a hundred temperance societies by 1828. Most editors, however, sympathized with the opinion of the Knickerbocker writer who confessed: “I for one have drank moderately, when it suited my feelings and caprice, for twenty years. I feel in no danger.”

Smoking was also debated, pro and con, but it was easier to argue the merits of chewing, where feelings on both sides were stronger. Nevertheless, there was a continuing agitation against tobacco, strongly supported by some magazines, and in 1851 Boston, at least, made it an offense to smoke on the streets and specified a fine for violators. The mayor, however, a smoker himself, made an exception of Boston Common and provided a circle of seats there in a special corner where tobacco lovers could puff away in peace.

In rapidly growing New York, magazines like the Mirror and the Knickerbocker were complaining about obscene pictures, the rudeness of omnibus riders, wandering pigs in the streets, and traffic. Most of all—a familiar cry echoing down the centuries—they were perennially upset about the continuous destruction and rebuilding of the city, making it, as one complained, “a city of ruins”—as it remains today.

Another mild crusade carried on in the magazines was the effort to get Americans to take baths more often. “Of all the inhabitants of the globe,” the Mirror complained, “we Americans are, as a people, the least addicted to bathing; and among all the Americans we of New York have the least claim to the character of a self-washing race. … Here the bath is merely a summer luxury for a vast majority of the citizens, enjoyed perhaps once a week during the hottest weather, and it may be some half dozen times during the rest of the year. How many houses are there in this city furnished with bathing rooms? …”

The ladies' magazines declined to join in this crusade. As the Christian Parlor Book warned, “It is quite certain that the practice, in extremely cold weather, of leaping from a warm bed and suddenly extracting all the caloric by cold water has been ruinous to multitudes of delicately organized ladies.”

Still another issue discussed in the magazines has a familiar ring today. The subject was hair—beards, to be specific. Before the early 1840s they had been absent for a long time, almost a century, but suddenly they revived and became a fad. The Secretary of the Navy eventually had to take notice of it, and issued his celebrated “Whisker Order,” defining the limits of hair on the face and thereby nearly precipitating a mutiny.

One of the specializations beginning to develop in the periodical press was the sports magazine. The Turf Register appeared in Baltimore in September 1829, reflecting an American interest in racing, a sport that dated from colonial times. Racing had been brought over from England, where it was as passionately followed in the seventeenth century as it is today.

A sporting paper of more dubious reputation, although it has survived into our own time, was the National Police Gazette, begun in 1845 in New York. Its specialty at the beginning was not sport but crime, promising “a most interesting record of horrid murders, outrageous robberies, bold forgeries, astounding burglaries, hideous rapes, vulgar seductions, and recent exploits of pickpockets and hotel thieves.” Along with these juicy attractions, the Gazette also printed some sporting news, but its readers, which included criminals and those in the city government who protected them, were often outraged, and not infrequently wrecked its offices. Later the Gazette was bought by a former police chief, and as the decades went on it passed through various metamorphoses, although always retaining its special, fragrant blend of sex, scandal, and sports. A staple of barbershops at the turn of the century, it lost ground steadily as the present century advanced and introduced periodicals that made it look like a Sunday-school journal.

Of all the reformers, major and minor, who argued and fought in the magazines before the Civil War, probably those who were for or against women's rights were the most vociferous. Women were emerging from domestic slavery. They were in the thick of the abolitionist battle; they were writing for the magazines, and contributing many of the hugely popular novels of the day; and they were struggling openly, in and out of their magazines, for some kind of parity with men. The first Woman's Rights Convention took place in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York.

Seven years before that event, when women abolitionists had been refused admittance to the World's Antislavery Convention in London, Sophia Ripley summarized the conflict in the Dial: “There have been no topics for the last two years more generally talked of than women, and ‘the sphere of women.’ In society, everywhere, we hear the same oft-repeated things said upon them by those who have little perception of the difficulties of the subject; and even the clergy have frequently flattered ‘the feebler sex’ by proclaiming to them from the pulpit what lovely beings they may become if they will only be good, quiet and gentle, and attend exclusively to their domestic duties, and the cultivation of religious feelings, which the other sex kindly relinquish to them as their inheritance. Such preaching is very popular.”

It is difficult today for us to believe that the idea of women voting should ever have shocked Americans, especially the educated, cultivated men who edited the best magazines. Yet the New-York Mirror protested, “The eternal wrangling of discordant opinions about men and offices, and the petty details of elections and caucuses can have little charm for the refined taste or polished judgment, and lend no charm to the intercourse of the domestic circle. … No, there can be no excuse for a female deserting her allotted privacy and volunteering to encounter gladiators in the political arena.” Even most of the women's magazines were opposed to suffrage for their sex.

Those women content to stay at home with their children found that the mania for starting magazines had extended to periodicals designed for the young, and while many of these journals were dreary moralizers, the new trend toward entertainment that had already begun in books was also evident in the periodicals. The indefatigable Nathaniel Willis began The Youth's Companion in Boston in 1827, and served as its editor for three decades while it established its just reputation as one of the best and most popular periodicals for young people of all time. It survived into the twentieth century and died in 1929, a victim of the Crash.

In 1833, that mountain of energy Samuel G. Goodrich, who was equally successful as publisher and writer, began his Parley's Magazine in New York. Goodrich had to sell it a year later because of ill health, but “Peter Parley,” as he signed himself, continued to delight generations of children with the books he produced for them. In 1844 Parley's was merged with another magazine Goodrich had started in 1841, Merry's Museum for Boys and Girls. It was distinguished because it was edited by Louisa May Alcott, who also contributed to it.

Magazines, proliferating as they were, by 1850 had become a national platform for every kind of argument and reform movement. They were more affluent and varied than ever, and for the first time they offered a career to writers.