Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/19

14 rights. This struggle through the fifties and early sixties, and for many years after, for that matter, was the sort of thing neither the citizens nor the newspapers could avoid discussing. They couldn't be neutral. Certainly it wasn't neutrality, in the eyes of the northerners, to favor as did some, a so-called Pacific Republic, which, out here on the west coast, would be immune from the strife of the North and the South. That was treason, or near-treason. So every body was on one side or the other.

The cleavage between Democrats and Whigs and, later, Republicans, was close. The political war was no less bitter than the strife on the battlefields of the South. The effect on the papers was what you would expect. They played up politics. There were other reasons for this than mere preference on the part of the editors. It was what the reader wanted—a point considered then too. It was easier to get. Uppermost in the people's minds, that's what they talk ed about. The eastern papers were doing the same thing. When they reached the coast, weeks after their publication in East or South or Middle West, they supplied European wars and politics; and Eastern politics, without the war as yet, loomed large and prominent in their columns. Headlines, on the whole, were still small, but in position and in column-inches these subjects, and crime, pretty well monopolized the emphasis.

What could the pioneer western editor do? Mostly, he followed along the same line. We have said that this was the line of least resistance. As a matter of fact, the hardest place for the pioneer news paper man to get news was right across the so-called street, in his home town. Eastern newspapers had only recently—thanks more or less to the James Gordon Bennett influence and more, perhaps, to the natural growth of local interest and the development of reporting ability—pulled out of the rut of filling their papers with the news from Europe to the virtual exclusion of their own local happenings. The identity between printer and editor was still close; the editor's job was, more or less, to get something for the printer to set up—and, left alone, many of the printers could do as well themselves. Re porting was hardly as yet a discovered art. Defoe, of course, seemed to have discovered it more than a hundred years before; but the follow-up had been slow. The immortal author of Robinson Crusoe could have given a good many nineteenth-century reporters pointers on enterprise, as witness the occasion when he galloped up to the scene of an execution, public in the England of those days, and, having arranged beforehand, took from the hand of the convicted prisoner his confession, giving him in return for the scoop for his paper a ten-pound note, the fate of which the newspaper historian of that day did not relate.

But this enterprise was not typical of eighteenth or early nineteenth century reporters or editors.