Page:Oregon Exchanges.pdf/98

March, 1918

It is forty-five years since Frederic Hudson, managing director of the New York Herald, published his "Journalism in the United States." The old book, thick and squat in its blue covers, is still to be found in many newspaper offices in Oregon, although libraries are already classifying it as rare. Hudson's work is a great mine of information, not unmixed with misinformation, about the beginnings of the Press in this country, and has served for a generation and a half as the ultimate source from which most newspapermen have drawn such facts and traditions as they have known of the antecedents of their profession.

James Melvin Lee, formerly editor of the humorous weekly "Judge" and now head of the department of journalism in New York university, has just completed several years of research and now publishes the first considerable contribution to knowledge of this field since the devoted labors of Frederic Hudson. Lee's history rather completely covers the same ground as Hudson's and will for all practical purposes replace the former work. It becomes for the time at least the classic work on the history of American journalism.

Professor Lee's services to his profession are not limited, however, to verifying, checking up, rearranging and extending down to the present decade Hudson's mass of interesting but disconnected facts and fancies, anecdotes and characterizations. With the exception of a series of articles on journalism by Will Irwin, published in a national magazine half a dozen years ago, the new history contains the first attempts at a serious study of the workings of the law of cause and effect in the field of journalism. Professor Lee has been conservative throughout his work; in the main he has contented himself, as did Hudson, with setting down the bare facts, but here and there throughout the book he has undertaken to point out the general tendencies of the times of which he is treating, and to analyze the causes of new types of journalism as they appear.

No work can rank as a true history unless it illustrates general principles; unless it makes clear why in the past one course of action has led to success and another to failure-—unless, in a word, while adorning its tale it points a lesson that can be applied to the present.

"For history must convey the sense not only of succession but of evolution, and every part of the narrative must flow necessarily from what has already been related, and itself lead inevitably to what follows."

In what degree, then, is Lee's book a true history of American journalism? To a much greater extent than anything else that has been published. Far more than Hudson's. But the task of writing a compre- 5