To understand the present, immerse yourself in the past. Everything about today seems more contingent and less obvious when compared with how things used to be. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the novelist L.P. Hartley wrote in 1953 in “The Go-Between.”
I just finished reading the front page of The New York Times from Thursday, Sept. 18, 1851, which was Vol. 1, No. 1. An oversize copy of it was recently posted, along with other historic front pages, in the lobby of the Times headquarters in New York. Subscribers can view online the whole inaugural issue of what was then called The New-York Daily Times.
Boy, did they do things differently in that foreign country. Here are a few random observations from my read of the big, densely packed front page.
To me, the most shocking story was about what was described as a “fugitive slave riot” in Christiana, a town in Lancaster County, Pa.
Although Pennsylvania had long ago abolished slavery in the state, authorities there felt duty bound to obey the Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress a year earlier, arrest African Americans who had escaped from slavery in the South and return them to their enslavers. An attempted arrest in Christiana went awry when the fugitives and a large group of their supporters fought back. The enslaver, from neighboring Maryland, was shot and killed.
The Pennsylvania governor promised that justice would be done by the people of Lancaster County, by which he meant that the fugitives and their supporters would be punished. The people of Lancaster “and every Pennsylvanian love the Constitution and the Union,” the governor wrote in a letter The Times reprinted. The long item ended with a mention of a “mulatto man” believed to have been enslaved by the same Marylander. He was “seen yesterday in the hills near Lancaster, and several citizens had gone in pursuit of him,” the article said.
The newspaper’s founders were avowedly antislavery, but the article conveys how even they and others who found it morally wrong had trouble placing freedom and justice above other values such as obedience to the law and respect for perceived property rights.
Even aside from slavery, there was an acceptance of violence that seems cruel by today’s standards. The newspaper notified the readers of the time and place of a hanging the next day of two convicted murderers. A drunken woman who was found apparently lifeless was taken to jail instead of a hospital: “She was found a corpse in about two hours after.”
Daily life was more dangerous in 1851, especially at work. There was no Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The front page carried news of a city man who fell off an ice truck and got run over by it. A driver fell off a horse-drawn omnibus, fractured his skull on the pavement and died. A bricklayer died when he lost his footing and fell from the fourth floor. A cabinet shop caught fire from sparks from an adjoining blacksmith. (Why was a sawdust-filled cabinet shop next to a blacksmith, anyway?)
News traveled more slowly. Telegraph lines began to be installed in the 1840s, which knitted the United States more closely together. But news from other continents continued to arrive by ship; a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable wasn’t installed until 1858, and it quickly failed. News from Europe on the front page was about two weeks old. A dispatch from Constantinople, now Istanbul, was dated Aug. 16.
The United States was beginning to emerge as a technological power in 1851, exemplified by the victory of an American yacht — the America — in what was the first America’s Cup sailing race. The Times lavished space on dispatches from the London newspapers asking how the Americans had managed to design a faster boat. One disparaged the English competitors: “The great pleasure of these gentlemen is to swagger about in sea-toggery,” The London Examiner wrote.
The big political news from abroad was the fate of Lajos Kossuth, who had led Hungary’s struggle for independence from Austria. He was extremely popular with Americans, who identified with independence movements.
The editors of The Times must have thought their readers were deeply interested in European affairs, because the front page had separate dispatches from Britain, France, Austria, Spain, Turkey, Portugal, Bremen, Bavaria, Frankfurt, Prussia (remember, Germany was not yet united), Lombardy, Tuscany, the Papal States (ditto for Italy), Switzerland and even Iceland. A report about fresh arrivals from Europe said 1,300 people had been added to “our population” — a warm touch. The United States and its economy were smaller and in some ways more open to the world than they are today.
Things that New Yorkers of 1851 took for granted are anything but that today. The front page had two mentions of the travels of ships carrying “specie,” which was gold and silver coins that backed paper money. Today, of course, paper money is backed only by government promises.
There’s mention of a new ferry line carrying passengers to “quiet and beautiful rural districts,” by which the newspaper meant Astoria and Flushing. If you don’t think “rural” is funny, you haven’t been to Queens.
The Times gained fame not long after its founding when its reporting helped bring down the Tweed Ring, a corrupt political organization. There’s an inkling of what was to come in a passing mention of the activities of the Board of Assistant Aldermen, whose members had power over hiring police officers, licensing saloons and granting franchises to streetcar lines and ferries.
I’ll end on a happy note about fashion. Forward-thinking urban women of the day had begun to wear billowing, Turkish-style pants under their dresses that were called bloomers, after the woman who popularized them, Amelia Bloomer. In a brief item, The Times announced that bloomer costumes had been spotted on Sixth Avenue, on Broadway and in Washington Square. Conservatives had “manifested their hostility to this progressive movement by derision,” the paper said.
“‘New ideas’ are compelled to wage fierce battle in this world before they obtain recognition and favor,” the item continued. Well said.
Elsewhere: Conservatives Shrugged Off a Nudge
Before the 2020 presidential election, Twitter (now X) tried to slow the spread of misinformation by prompting its customers to use quote tweets rather than retweets, on the theory that they would think more carefully about the content if they had to quote rather than just recirculate it. It didn’t work, according to research by Daniel Ershov of the University College London School of Management and Juan S. Morales of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. “Conservative news-sharing users were less responsive to Twitter’s nudge,” they found. Traffic to news organizations’ websites fell overall, but “did so disproportionately for liberal news media outlets,” they wrote.
Quote of the Day
“At a general level, the central tenet of their research is that the wealth of nations is fundamentally shaped by political institutions. That is, there is a hierarchy of institutions, with political institutions influencing economic institutions, and economic institutions then affecting economic outcomes.”
— Scientific background to the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2024, given to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson (Oct. 14)
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