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Horace Greeley

 


My recent reading includes HORACE GREELEY, a biography of the famed editor-publisher of that name, written by James M. Lundberg of the University of Notre Dame. 

Much about Greeley I am just learning as I go along. 

Greeley was born in February 1811, in New Hampshire, though he did most of his growing up in Vermont. He went to New York City to seek his fortune in 1831. So it wasn't "go west young man" for him -- it was head south. Like a lot of young men from the provinces who have headed toward the nearest metropolis over millennia, he had a high opinion of himself and big plans to effectuate that opinion.

It took him a decade to find his footing and to create the vehicle with which he will be forever associated. Greeley created the New-York Tribune in 1841. (Yes, the hyphen was standard then). This was a vehicle for a reform-oriented Whiggery associated also with William Seward and Thurlow Weed in the context of New York state's politics and beyond it that of the nation.

Indeed, Greeley pioneered the idea that a  municipal paper could at the same time speak to the nation. This was the era when telegraph lines were connecting the east coast and the midwest. Telegraph wires trailed the westward moving frontier, but didn't trail it by much. Greeley created a weekly edition of the Tribune, an abridgement of each week's full municipal edition. that is what was distributed in the Midwest and what made him a totemic figure there. 

And beyond, apparently, Heck, Mark Twain got tired of hearing about him. Twain writes in a memoir that when he was "roughin' it" in the west he kept hearing the same story about a westward tour that Greeley had taken before him. Greeley was in a stagecoach travelling rough roads and his head ended up crashing through the roof of his carriage. His frontier admirers loved telling this story to each other, it appears. Twain had had too much of it and when someone started talking about Greeley and the stagecoach, Twain would stop him and demand to be told about Washington and the cherry tree instead. 

That will get us started. I'm sure I'll have more to say about Greeley in the near future. 



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