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Profs and Pints DC presents: “Democracy Born in Darkness,” on the shady, partisan, violent origins of American political media, with Jon Grinspan, award-winning curator of political history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
As Americans try to navigate a shifting media landscape at a time when objective journalism seems under assault, it’s worth looking back to the formative years of American political media for lessons from the past.
Come to Profs and Pints at DC’s Penn Social to learn about the political press of the 19th century, a time when expanding literary rates and democratic engagement went hand in hand with an aggressive, tribal media landscape. The political press fed a nation of news junkies a steady stream of rumors, accusations, personal insults, open threats, and frequent mis- and dis-information. Very often, newspapers also became targets of political violence, with editors assassinated and presses tossed into rivers by angry mobs.
We’ll discuss how this media environment demonstrated the trade-offs of mass politics in a modernizing nation. After the 1840s, the introduction of the telegraph enabled the quick, widespread dissemination of information to unprecedented swaths of society and across huge distances. No nation in history had achieved such mass popular engagement in the life of the government. At the same time, those forces powered a spiral of dark, aggressive, harmful politics. This media environment helped drive America first into Civil War, then into the divisive years of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.
Finally, we’ll explore how this media culture was reigned in or replaced in the late 19th century, giving birth to the news landscape many of us remember from the 20th century. We will end with an exploration of what this forgotten world can tell us about our political media environment today.
This history will draw from Grinspan’s award-winning book Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force that Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War and from his The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, which Politico dubbed a “cult favorite with lawmakers eager to understand this new, convulsive era of politics.” (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk begins 30 minutes later.)
Image: From a 1876 Currier and Ives print, “The Progress of the Century,” depicting a telegraph operator in front of a steam-powered printing press and other inventions (Metropolitan Museum of Art).
