Monday, February 16, 2009

Hugh Gaine: Enlightenment Printer

In press:

Hugh Gaine (1726-1807) was printer-editor of the widely-circulated conservative newspaper The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury from 1752 through 1783 and one of the most important and prodigious book publishers in the late colonial era and the earliest years of America’s independence. In both roles, he served to further the American enlightenment by putting his printing press at the service of its authors. He also changed sides in the first year of the Revolution, from the Americans to the British, and thereby earned the opprobrium of many of his contemporaries and the reputation in history of being a turncoat.

Gaine was born in Portglenone, a village about thirty-four miles northwest of Belfast, and at the age of fourteen he began a five year apprenticeship at the Belfast printing house of Samuel Wilson and James Magee. On becoming a journeyman in 1744, he emigrated to New York, where he found work in the shop of James Parker.

In 1752, Gaine opened his own printing shop and on August 3 of that year he issued the first number of The New-York Mercury. According to the New York historian James Grant Wilson, The Mercury “became by far the best newspaper in the colonies.” Like other publishers of the day, Gaine was a printer-editor; he had no staff of reporters and he rarely wrote for the newspaper himself; to fill the newspaper’s columns, he reprinted items from other colonial newspapers and, especially in the early years, those from England. Readers found stories of fires, crimes and natural disasters, proclamations of the governors, reports of parliamentary debates, declarations of the king and minor court gossip. For businessmen, he printed commodity prices and a list of the latest ship arrivals and departures. He printed columns of advertising that supported the newspaper, including notices for the goods of his own shop: stationery items, medicines, and books he printed himself and those he imported from England.

A staple of Gaine’s Mercury, as for other newspapers of the day, was the familiar essay. He reprinted many that had appeared in other newspapers, both English and colonial, and printed original essays offered to him by local writers on all manner of subjects, especially scientific topics, religion, philosophy and relations between the sexes. Perhaps because of favorable reaction to those, in mind-August of 1754 he attempted to establish a literary magazine, The Plebean, but it died within the year.

Gaine originally resisted involvement in political battles, but inevitably in the charged atmosphere of the day, politics was forced upon him. In The Mercury’s first year, the colony’s Presbyterian faction attacked him for supporting the Episcopalian faction in a dispute over the financing and administration of King’s College (later Columbia University). Subsequently, however, he sold space on the front page of The Mercury to the Presbyterians to carry out a year-long propaganda assault on the Episcopalians; he was “a fickle fellow, and easily intimidated,” one of the Presbyterian writers observed. At the same time, however, he opened the pages of the newspaper to counter arguments from the Episcopalians.

In the long propaganda war on Britain that began with opposition to the Stamp Act, Gaine and The Mercury followed an erratic course. He printed essays condemning the Stamp Act, and after the act became effective on November 12, 1765, he defied it by printing his newspaper throughout the month on unstamped paper with the heading “No Stamped Paper to be Had.”
Following enactment of the Townshend Acts in 1766, he printed the eloquent series “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” by John Dickinson, and he supported the nonimportation agreement to boycott British goods. But when duties on all goods but tea were repealed, he opposed continuation of the boycott.
In 1768, he was named public printer of the province of New York. He changed the name of the newspaper to The New-York Gazette; and the Weekly Mercury and began publishing political essays with a more conciliatory tone toward Britain. As Whig responses to Britain’s efforts to tax America grew more violent, he ignored riots in New York and Boston or printed Tory versions of the incidents.
With passage of the British East India Company Act in 1773, Gaine gave perfunctory support to the resistance movement, but he reacted to the violence of “tea parties” in New York and Boston by printing essays abjuring violence and advocating an accommodation with the mother country. When the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, he carried essays that continued to argue for accommodation, but after the battles of Lexington and Concord, he filled his columns with essays that supported Whig positions.
In 1776, he was a fence-sitter on the question of independence until Congress passed the Declaration of Independence. He printed copies of the document for distribution in New York printed essays on behalf of the independence movement in The Mercury. When the British were preparing for their invasion of New York, he fled to Newark with his family and printed the newspaper there for two months before returning home. In the meantime, Ambrose Searle, secretary to Admiral Lord Richard Howe, had taken over Gaine’s shop and had been printing a pro-British Mercury, and he retained editorial control until sailing with Howe’s fleet in 1777. Gaine’s change of sides and his whole-hearted conversion to the British cause won him the hatred of Americans and he was denigrated viciously in print; even Philip Freneau satirized him in his “Hugh Gaine’s Life.” James Grant Wilson expressed succinctly the enduring view of him: “When with the Whigs, Hugh Gaine was a Whig; when with the Royalists, he was loyal; when the contest was doubtful, equally doubtful were the politics of Hugh Gaine.”
At the end of the war, Gaine ceased printing the Mercury and devoted himself to job printing and to publishing books. In 1802, he teamed with the bookseller Matthew Carey of Philadelphia in founding the American Booksellers Association and was elected its first president.

Journalism and Jesuit Mission

This piece was published in Conversations, No. 35 (Spring 2009), the bi-annual magazine of the National Seminar on Jesuit Higher Education.


Close your eyes for a moment.

Recall the faces of those hundreds of people, most of them black, whom you saw on your television screen suffering in humid August heat outside New Orleans’ Morial Convention Center in the week after Hurricane Katrina.

They had been unable to leave the city, and in the days after the storm, after the levees had burst and the deluge had flooded their homes, they had walked to the Convention Center seeking what they vainly believed would be shelter and transportation out of their devastated city.

Hear in memory the words of an uncharacteristically subdued Wolf Blitzer on CNN: “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals. . . . So many of these people. Almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.”

Questions, indeed.

Sadly enough, the first was, “Who are these people?” We who live in New Orleans knew there was poverty in the city; we had seen the dilapidated projects, the unemployed standing on the street corners; we had read the statistics. But the sight of all of those individuals in that place and all of those those crammed into the Superdome just a mile and a half up Poydras St. shocked us.

As I watched the story unfold from my air-conditioned refuge hundreds of miles away, it struck me that journalists had failed them and us by not bringing them to our attention long before. And as an educator of journalists in Jesuit universities for 36 years, at Marquette and Loyola New Orleans, I questioned what responsibility all of us who teach journalism in Jesuit institutions might share.

One is tempted to respond that our role is to teach the nuts and bolts of news reporting and writing, how to cover news when it occurs. But this is not 1920, when the philosopher and journalist Walter Lippmann sniffed dismissively in Public Opinion that schools of journalism were trade schools, “intended to prepare men and women for a career.” We have more profound responsibility.

In his 2000 address at Santa Clara University, Father General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach told us that the role of faculty members at Jesuit colleges and universities “is tirelessly to seek the truth and to form each student into a whole person of solidarity who will take responsibility for the real world.” He made no distinction between disciplines; he was directing his words at us journalism professors as well as at our colleagues in theology, philosophy and literature.

What truth do we seek as we study our field and lead our students in seeking?

Prof. David Host of Marquette’s College of Journalism came up with an excellent answer 40 years earlier, in 1960, in an essay marking the fiftieth anniversary of the college. Host stated that he and his colleagues there pursued truth in two ways: “truth about journalism as a work to be done and truth about the news media as social instruments through which the work is done.”

The same could be said of today’s journalism instruction in Jesuit institutions, as evidenced by our curricula. We all teach students the basic principles of the work and the essential techniques of gathering news and preparing it for publication; it is the grasp of those underlying principles of the work that will enable our graduates to adapt readily to changes in the field. At the same time, as did the Marquette faculty of the last century, we attempt to bring our students to a knowledge and understanding of the role of mass media as social instruments: how they have developed over time, how they are changing, how they affect the public, and journalists’ ethical responsibilities to their readers and viewers. And if we are doing our work as we should, we are bringing our students to know not only how media operate today but to view them critically and consider how they ought to operate.

We have all firmly rooted our programs in the liberal arts in order that our students have that broader knowledge and understanding of the world that is crucial to their development as human beings. For us, as for the Marquette faculty of Host’s day, it is inconceivable that journalists should not be “educated precisely in those persisting questions of the nature and end of man and of the most pressing of his common worldly circumstances with which humanistic studies are traditionally concerned.”

Fr. Kolvenbach also said at Santa Clara that university knowledge, while valuable for its own sake, is also “knowledge that must ask itself, ‘For whom? For what?’” The answer, as we are frequently reminded on our campuses, is “the service of faith and the promotion of justice.”

The year before Fr. Kolvenbach was on that campus, a Santa Clara audience had heard Joseph Daoust, S.J., president of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, take up the same theme. He pointed out that the 34th General Congregation of the Jesuit Order had specified that promotion of justice could be accomplished by direct service to the poor, social activism, or “developing awareness of the demands of justice and the social responsibility to achieve it.” Neither soup kitchens nor political mobilization campaigns, while laudable activities for our students, are central to the academic enterprise, he argued. But “developing social consciousness and conscience, or conscientization as the Latin Americans call it, is of the essence of Jesuit education. A university which does not, in its main educational activities, concern itself with this mission is not . . . in the Jesuit or Catholic tradition.”

It is here that we face our greatest challenges. How do we help shape our students to develop social consciousness and conscience for their work in the mass media—to be men and women for masses of others? How do we “form each student into a whole person of solidarity who will take responsibility for the real world” as journalists—especially, in a media environment in which the trivial is too often promoted to an audience that is increasingly indifferent, if not hostile, to serious public affairs? How can we better educate our students for the positions they ultimately will have as editors, general managers, and publishers (recalling Joseph Leibling’s book dedication, “"to the foundation of a school for publishers, failing which, no school of journalism can have meaning)? How do we adequately prepare each one to revolutionize the mass media on behalf of social justice?

We need to ask such questions in our periodic curriculum reviews, when we write our syllabuses each semester and as we craft each lecture. And I would suggest that we journalism faculty members in the Jesuit colleges and universities, perhaps under the auspices of the AJCU Communication group, collectively begin a serious and pointed conversation focused on them.