The Value of Political Editorials
THREE events in the political annals of the Anglo-Saxon world, all occurring within the last four years, seem to warrant the inference that the partisan newspaper has sustained an enormous loss of power. Looked at from outside a newspaper office, and disregarding the long-standing traditions of the power of the press, the general election in England in 1906, the general election in the Dominion of Canada in 1908, and the revision of the Dingley tariff at Washington in 1909, are sufficiently significant to raise the question whether it is worth while for any daily newspaper to attach itself to a political party.
Statesmen and politicians still feel the need of a partisan press — of newspaper support that they can rely upon to stand by them through thick and thin, and particularly at election times. This need is perhaps less felt at Washington than at the other political centres of the Anglo-Saxon world; for the Washington government certainly does less for newspaper proprietors and editors than any of the other Anglo-Saxon governments. The need is still felt at Westminster and Ottawa. Otherwise there would be no peerages, baronetcies, or knighthoods, for English newspaper proprietors and editors; and capitalists who incidentally control newspapers in Canada would secure fewer material rewards — tariff and bounty favors and senatorships — than go in the Dominion to men who have had the foresight to secure the control of newspapers in the large cities, and who are careful that these newspapers shall give a steady support to the government in power.
The recent experience of the Liberal government in England unmistakably suggests that in the past the Liberals have overestimated the support of a partisan press. As regards newspaper support, the Liberals were never in worse plight than they were at the general election of 1906. In the newspaper world they had at that time not even begun to recover from the demoralization and havoc that followed the split in the party on the Home Rule question in 1886. The organs of Whiggism in London, in the provinces, and in Scotland, that in 1886 fell away from Gladstone and the Liberal party, had by 1906 become the editorial exponents of the retrogressive Toryism of the Balfour administration of 1902-05. Two or three new Liberal papers had come into existence. But these new recruits were confined to London; and in January, 1906, when the Campbell-Bannerman government, which had come into power in December, 1905, made its appeal to the constituencies, the number of first-class daily newspapers supporting the Liberal party, all told, did not exceed the number of daily newspapers in London alone that were supporting the cause of Mr. Balfour and Mr. Chamberlain.
The Tories in London had the editorial support of no fewer than fourteen morning and evening newspapers. Ten of these were two-cent papers, with constituencies among the wealthier middle classes. The Liberals in London had five daily newspapers with them. Only one of these — the Westminster Gazette — is a two-cent paper.
The other four are one-cent papers. In provincial England the Liberals had no morning newspaper support in Birmingham, or anywhere in the wide extent of the Midlands that has come to be known as the Chamberlain zone. In Manchester they had one morning and two evening newspapers. In Liverpool they had a morning and an evening newspaper. In Leeds their only out-and-out supporter was a one-cent evening journal; while in Newcastle they were at this time without any newspaper support. In Scotland they were in an even worse plight; for, in 1886, the Scotsman in Edinburgh, the Herald and the Evening Times in Glasgow, and the Free Press in Aberdeen, had gone over to the Tories; and in 1906 there was only one evening newspaper in Edinburgh, one evening paper in Glasgow, and a morning paper in Dundee thirled to the Liberal party.
From 1832 to 1886 the Liberals had had an enormous advantage over the Tories as regards support by the daily and weekly press. This was the heyday of Liberal journalism; for during part of this long period it was only by the aid of subsidies from the Carlton Club that Tory newspapers in Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, could be kept on their feet. After 1886 the Tories ceased to need newspapers that required support from the party headquarters. From 1886 to 1906 the conditions of 1832-86 were reversed; and as a result of the Home Rule split it was the Liberals who had to find money to put new daily papers afoot, or to sustain existing newspapers in London, Plymouth, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, and Edinburgh. Not since the old Morning Chronicle, under the editorship of James Perry, gave the Radical party a lead in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, were the Liberals in a more distressful plight, as regards newspaper support, than they were when Campbell-Bannerman made his appeal to the constituencies in 1906. Naturally, there was much foreboding as to the effect of this preponderating advantage of the Tories, with regard to newspaper support, on the fortunes of the Campbell-Bannerman government.
But the election proved that these misgivings had been unnecessary, for it resulted in a House of Commons in which the Campbell-Bannerman government had a majority of 135 over every possible combination of Tories, Irish Nationalists, and Labor members, a majority for which there is no precedent since government by party was first established in England.
Nor was the Liberal success the only significant development in the election of 1906 so far as the newspaper press was concerned. The Independent Labor party had not then, and has not now, a single daily newspaper on whose editorial support it can rely. None the less, twenty-nine or thirty of its candidates were returned to the House of Commons; and, in spite of lack of support in the daily press, the Labor party has since 1906 increased its parliamentary strength to thirty-three or thirtyfour. Editorial support assuredly did little for the Tory party in 1906; and it accomplished even less for Toryism during the summer and autumn of 1909, when the mind of the English people was focused on the Lloyd George Budget with an intentness unequaled since public attention was riveted on the three bills of 1830-32 out of which there was developed the first great Reform Bill.
At the general election in Canada in October, 1908, the Liberals in Dominion politics were in exactly the opposite position as regards the daily press to that of the Liberals in England at the general election of 1906. Since 1896 the Tories in Canada have been at a disadvantage in the newspaper world of the Dominion. It lies within the power of the government at Ottawa to do more for its newspaper supporters than is possible for any other government in the AngloSaxon world. The Dominion government uses printing-ink lavishly. It has an enormous amount of advertising patronage in its bestowal — official notices, advertising for the Intercolonial Railway, the Department of Agriculture, and above all for the Immigration Department; and moreover the government printing-house at Ottawa can handle only part of the work required for the government. Practically all this advertising and printing goes to the newspapers whose proprietors support the Liberal party. Nor is this all the government largesse that finds its way to these newspaper proprietors; for there is a remarkable connection in Canada between the control of Liberal newspapers and directorships in companies which derive enormous advantage from the iron and steel bounties, from the protective duties in the interest of the Nova Scotia coal-mines, and from the high duties on iron and steel and on other products of industrial plants.
Cabinet positions and senatorships have also a frequent connection with the control of newspapers; and generally in Canada it is quite worth while for a capitalist who is interested in industries on which the government bestows largesse to include a daily newspaper or two among his enterprises. It is not necessary that he should know anything about newspaper production. It is no more necessary than that legislators who are at work on a tariff bill should be able to tell a blast furnace from a brewery. It is not even necessary that the capitalist should be overcareful that his newspaper venture quite pays for itself over the counter. In meal or in malt, provided he stands well with the government, he is almost certain to get an equivalent for any financial loss that his newspaper may entail upon him; and when it has served his ends and he is tired of it, some other capitalist-politician is almost sure to be ready to take it off his hands.
As a result of twelve years of conditions in the newspaper world, largely determined by these influences, the Liberal government at Ottawa, at the general election of 1908, had a great advantage over the Conservatives as regards the daily press. Especially was this the case in the Maritime Provinces, where the newspaper activities of one well-known capitalist, notorious for his part in the exploitation of the highly-protected coal industry and the bounty-supported iron and steel industry in Cape Breton, had left the Conservatives without an organ in the daily press in the city of St. John, and had bestowed on the Liberal party two mechanical thick-and-thin supporters of the Laurier government in Halifax, and a third similarly-controlled newspaper in Cape Breton.
The election in 1908 should have been an easy one for the Laurier government. The opposition in the House of Commons had been led for ten years by a man without any magnetism, who in his personal influence is poles asunder from such leaders as Macdonald and Laurier; while, as regards the Conservative party itself, not since 1896 has it had any policy except, a parrot-like cry for more protection and less British preference.
From 1896 to 1908 the opposition at Ottawa was effective to some extent in keeping a check on graft and in bringing graft into daylight. But during these years it was without a constructive policy, or indeed any policy, to offer as an alternative to that of the Laurier government. It gave the country no lead; indeed, between 1896 and 1908, His Majesty’s loyal opposition did not earn its carfare to Ottawa. With a weak opposition like this to confront, and with the press so generally on its side, the election of 1908 ought to have been a walk-over for the government. The government was returned to power, but it lost ten or eleven seats; and the remarkable fact about these losses was that the most serious inroad on the strength of the government was in the province of Nova Scotia, where the capitalist friend and patron of the government had been so careful that there should be no shortage of newspaper support for the Liberal party.
The situation in the United States during the revision of the tariff in 1909 was quite different from that in England and Canada at the general elections of 1906 and 1908. In England it was the electorate that ignored the Tory newspapers and their propaganda. To a less degree it was the same in Canada in 1908. In this country it was the President and Congress that snapped their fingers at the press, and proceeded with revision as though newspapers were non-existent. There were many remarkable facts about the revision of 1909. The one of significance here is that, with only here and there an exception, as for instance in Philadelphia and Pittsburg, all the important daily newspapers in the country — Republican as well as Democratic or independent — condemned in outspoken language the action of the Senate on the tariff. There were in the newspapers many expressions of disappointment and dissatisfaction with the Payne bill as it went from the House to the Senate. It was urged that it embodied few reductions that could by any chance reach the general consumer. But when Senator Aldrich recast the Payne bill and made some of its provisions even more protective than the Dingley rates of 1897, condemnation by the press was almost universal, without regard to party lines.
There can surely never have been a measure for which the dominant party at Washington was responsible, to which more condemnation was meted out by the press than the PayneAldrich tariff bill. From April to July the daily newspapers of both political parties teemed with condemnation, and with iterated and reiterated declarations that the bill as recast by Senator Aldrich, and complacently accepted by the Republican stand-pat senators, was not embodying the kind of revision to which the Republican party stood committed by its national platform of 1908, and by the speeches made by Mr. Taft before and after his election as President.
All this outcry was of little avail. Except for the repeal of the duty on hides, which may in time reach buyers of shoes, nothing was done for the general consumer; while, as concerns the textile schedules, and particularly as regards cottons and silks, the consumer is to-day in a worse position than under the Dingley act. It may be that the vigorous condemnation by the press of the late revision will tell at the congressional elections of 1910. It is to be hoped that it will; otherwise there never was such a waste of newspaper space on editorial pages as that between February and September, 1909.
All this editorial writing had scarcely a measurable influence on Mr. Sereno E. Payne, Mr. John Dalzell, Mr. Fordney, and the other members of the Republican majority in the Committee of Ways and Means when they were drafting the House bill. Senator Aldrich’s attitude could not have been more irresponsibly Bourbon if he had been assured that during the whole time that he was revising the tariff all the newspaper editors of the United States were at the North Pole serving as an affidavit-making body-guard for Commander Peary. Even on Mr. Taft all the editorial writing in favor of an honest downward revision had no appreciable effect while the bill was before the House and the Senate— none certainly after the President had confronted and measured Senator Aldrich, and had decided that the summer of 1909 would be more pleasant at the White House if during the hot weather he abandoned the little concern on behalf of the general consumer that he had evinced in the more exhilarating weather of December, 1908.
The question naturally arises how we are to account for these remarkable situations in the newspaper world of England, Canada, and the United States. It would need an examination of the political and social anatomy of each country to attempt a detailed explanation. All that can be offered here are a few conjectures. My impression is that President Taft and the Republican stand-pat majorities at Washington ignored the outcry of the press for six reasons: (1) the Republican leaders at Washington know that political meetings in this country are rarely called except by the men in control of the local organizations; (2) they were confident all through the summer of 1909 that no hostile popular action against the Republican majority at Washington would be initiated by men in control of the local political machines; (3) they were aware that tariff legislation in all its dishonest and insidious details can never be popularly understood; (4) they knew that people in this country have proverbially short memories for political betrayals; (5) they concluded that the Democratic newspapers would find fault with any tariff originating with the Payne and Aldrich committees of Congress; and (6) they were confident that, while Republican newspapers might be hostile to the Republican tariff when it was going through Congress in 1909, they would be back in the fold with a thickand-thin support of the Republican party before the congressional elections of 1910, and certainly would be in line long before the presidential election of 1912.
In England the explanation of the position of the Tory press in 1906 would seem to be threefold. Toryism at Westminster at the end of the Balfour administration of 1902-05 had exhausted itself, much as Toryism had exhausted itself in 1828 when Wellington was the only man in the party eligible for the premiership. From 1902 to 1905 Toryism had been reactionary. It had tied itself more closely than ever to the sacerdotalists in the Established Church, and to the distilling and brewing interests; and, to crown these reactionary movements, it had committed itself to a revival of protection, and had also permitted itself to be hamstrung on the Chinese coolie question by the mining magnates of the Rand. In 1906 it was a hopeless cause that the Tory journalists had to champion. This may be part of the explanation of the newspaper situation in England four years ago.
Another explanation is forthcoming in the fact that since the opening years of the twentieth century there has been a sweeping and general change in English methods of political propaganda. The platform as an engine of propaganda dates back to the time of Wesley. In politics it came into service soon after the American Revolution, and increasingly as the Reform acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884-85 enlarged the parliamentary electorate. It was never more in service than it has been since the turn of the century. Again, as in the eighteenth century, political propagandists adopted the methods of religious preachers. The Independent Labor party, which was organized in 1902, followed the example of the Salvation Army. It had not money to hire halls, and it accordingly took its stand on the street-corners and in the market-places. The two older political parties had to follow suit. Unlike the Labor party, the Liberal and Conservative parties had to undertake propaganda work in rural as well as urban England; and the result has been that increasingly since 1904 England has been alive with open-air political meetings, held on village greens and at the cross-roads, as well as at the streetcorners and in the market-places, the squares, and the parks of the towns and cities.
This open-air propaganda gave the election of 1906 a new significance in the political history of England; and my impression is that this direct, continuous, and personal appeal by the politicians to the people, which the newspapers of both parties were compelled to chronicle, accounts in a large measure for the extent to which political editorial writing receded into the background.
Only one explanation of the situation in Canada in 1908 suggests itself to me. Neither the Liberal nor theConservative party in the Dominion is dominated by any political convictions. Since the Liberals came to an end of their eighteen years of opposition in the House of Commons, in 1896, both parties have stood for little else than opportunism. From Confederation in 1867 to 1896 the Liberal party was a party of convictions and ideals, and in that, period of nearly thirty years it accomplished much for the political education of Canada. It bade farewell to convictions and ideals and to the work of popular political education just as soon as it came into power at Ottawa. By 1908 the difference in regard to political principles and convictions between the Liberals and the Conservatives was so extremely microscopic that the task of stimulating enthusiasm for the Laurier Government was about as hopeless for the Canadian Liberal journalists of 1908 as the somewhat similar task which confronted Tory journalists in England in 1906.