News into America BOOKS OF THE DAY
By D. W. BROGAN HERE we have a series of celebrated " stories " as they first " broke " on the American reader, from the Boston tea- party and the shot heard round the world at Concord to the sinking of the ' Titanic ' and the shot heard round the world at Serajevo.
The story told in Mr. Greene's extracts is the extension of the content of printed news, until today there is com- paratively little that can be whispered in America that cannot be printed ; while, as casual readers of Time in this country learn, there is still a big difference between the two forms of news in this country. The greatest American newspaper (not the one that proclaims itself the greatest in the world) boasts that it contains " all the news that's fit to print," but fitness is moral not intellectual, and there is much even in the New York Times that would have seemed hardly worth printing to Franklin or even to Greeley or Dana, for it is no longer true that the man must bite the e■og to make news ; the treatment can make the most normal nip at the most obscure leg news, even if the leg is in trousers instead of in sheer silk hosiery.
For the English reader this book has, of course, some of the charm of the unknown. The mystery of Charley Ross, most famous of American kidnapped children before the Lind- bergh baby, is nothing here, but it is still alive in America where it has been a recurrent Tichborne case, lasting over nearly three generations, though Charley Ross, if alive, is now sixty-six. Other names, like those of Susan B. Anthony, mean little in Europe, where even Carry Nation's fame is now very dim, while other extracts deal with episodes in American history that the British mind has successfully forgotten. When the British moved out of Boston on the night of April the 18th, we learn from the Massachusetts Spy and Oracle of Liberty that "expresses set off immediately to alarm the country." To Americans this simple statement is full of meaning, for " expresses " here mean Paul Revere, and every American child has learned Longfellow's admirable ballad, but as long as American history is so little studied as it is in England, there will be sections of this book with less meaning to the educated reader than the latest news from Ur of the Chaldees. It must not be thought, however, that Mr. Greene has allowed his patriotism to run away with him. Indeed, he leans over backwards as the New Englanders say, for he gives no account of the way in which the news of the Battle of New Orleans was received when the veterans of Wellington, under Wellington's brother-in-law, were destroyed with ridiculous ease by an army of backwoodsmen, and a backwoods jack-of-all-trades did what had proved too much for Massena and Marmont and was to be too much for the Emperor, taught a British army when it was beaten. Instead of the glory of General Jackson we have the disgrace of General Winder and the burning of Washington by the British army, an event which allows Mr. Greene to quote from a leader of The Times (London) in which poor, mild Mr. Madison is treated as practically the equal in turpitude of the Corsican Ogre himself, if indeed he was not worse, as his guilt was " infinitely aggravated by the very circumstances that he was sprung of English blood." (The style of the leader is so elegant that it is not clear whether the villainy was Mr. Madison's or that of the whole American people.) The Civil War gives Mr. Greene a fine chance. Out of it he takes three episodes, the fight between the ' Monitor' and the ' Merrimac,' the surrender of Lee and the assass- ination of Lincoln. The account of the pursuit of Lee from
America' Goes to Press. The News of Yesterday. By Lawrence Greene., (Rarrap. 10s. 6d.) Petersburg to Appomattox is first-rate ; the impression of running down some formidable fugitive is brilliantly conveyed
and the suspense is real, even though we know how the chase ended, with Sherman marching with all speed to cut off the retreat and Lee pressing forward to drive through the great cavalryman's screen of horse—and then the shatter- ing disillusionment. "The musketry of the Fifth corps, joining with the carbines of the cavalry in a hoarse and savage reply that sent his men back like horses on their haunches, told him, at last, that ' all was over and done." So they wrote in that newspaper whose death American newspapermen most lament, the New York World. Equally effective is the series of telegrams, contradictory, overwhelmed, that poured in from Washington with the news that the President had been shot, poured in and were printed as they came, while the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth and his real or supposed accoin- plices was on, when Dr. Mudd (since rehabilitated by the movies) was doing his duty or betraying his country according to taste, and when the dying Booth, like Robespierre, knew in his mental and physical agony that his service to his cause was to be, to the world, a crime. But surely Mr. Greene's editorial discretion has gone wrong in including the naval fight and omitting the firing on Fort Sumter ? It is not merely that the American Civil War began and ended with a simple symbolic event, the firing on the flag and the murder of the President, but the news of Sumter, not the action in itself, was the great event. Had there been no newspapers, no telegraphs, would there have been that sudden uprising of the North ?
- As Mr. Greene gets into modem times his selections have a less grave accent. With Miss Nellie Bly who went round the world in less than eighty days to the congratulations of M. Jules Verne and the glory of the World we are in the modern age ; we remember the hectic twenties, when Broadway was made impassible every other day by young women who had swum the channel and/or flown the Atlantic, the day of the flag-pole sitters, walkathon winners, all the pride, pomp and circumstance of ballyhoo. Perhaps Nellie Bly, ancestress of the sob-sisters, was too primitive a specimen of a type since grown monstrous to be worthy of more than historical interest, and the rescue of Sefiorita Cisneros from Spanish dungeons by Mr. Hearst, with its combination of patriotism and sex, might have been given pride of place. But there is another beginning illustrated here in the account of the murder of Stanford White by Harry Thaw, not merely because it was one of the first modern causes celebres of the Hauptmann type, but because of one item in the life-story of Mrs. Thaw. She alone remained in White's touring car when his conversation took a turn that forced three other girls in the car to get out and walk home ! One other historical phenomenon startled one reader, the allusion in the Los Angeles Times' account of the San Francisco earthquake (your pardon's begged, the fire) to the latter stricken city 'as " the chief city of the West." Mr. Greene ends with 1914, with a consoling reflection of the New York Sun that the " disappearance from the scene [of Franz Ferdinand] is calculated to diminish the tenseness of the situation and to make for peace both within and without the dual empire." A second volume of this kind should have some facsimiles of front pages, but the compiler's first difficulty will b..t choice, for we are now far from the spirit of the prospectus of the first American newspapers (1690) which proposed to appear " once a moneth (or if any Glut of Occur- rences happen oftener)." Waiting till there was news to Make a story ! The true spirit of modern journalism is to make two stories grow where none grew before. The develop- ment of this spirit of enterprise is well illustrated here.
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