Ever Victoria!

Part 5

James Gordon Bennett, like his father before him, has an eye for what sells newspapers. The elder Bennett pioneered the modern newspaper by founding the New York Herald in 1835. The Herald is a democratic paper for a democratic age; it gives the ordinary people of New York what Bennett presumes they want: news of life as they experience it. An early issue provides detailed coverage of the murder of a prostitute and the efforts to solve the case; competing papers shun the story as trashy sensationalism. Bennett introduces the interview as a journalistic form; readers for the first time in a regular way encounter newsmakers speaking in their own, recognizable voices. Bennett furnishes high quality illustrations, and when the telegraph becomes available he employs the new technology to deliver breaking stories from afar. He purchases a ticket on the first steamship to offer scheduled service between New York and London; arriving in London he hires reporters who become the Herald’s, and America’s, first foreign correspondents. He sells space to advertisers of products plain people want to buy; revenue from the advertisements enable him to price his paper at a penny a copy, low enough to make the Herald a daily purchase for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

            Bennett’s success compels other publishers and papers to try and match him. Horace Greeley launches the Tribune and Henry Raymond the Times; Charles Dana builds up the Sun. Additional papers follow, until by the eve of the Civil War New York’s several major dailies slug it out for readers and profits, while dozens of smaller papers target particular niches. German, Irish and other immigrant groups have their own papers; workingmen’s and fraternal organizations have papers; churches and reformers have papers.

            The Civil War gives the newspaper industry an additional boost. Readers clamor for the latest news from the front, wondering whether their cause and loved ones are winning or losing, thriving or perishing. The war democratizes the press further when a novel feature takes hold: letters from the front, written by ordinary soldiers describing this campaign or that battle. The war creates America’s first war correspondents, who approach as near to the smoke and din as safety allow—and sometimes nearer—and then race to the closest telegraph station to transmit the outcome to the offices of their papers. The rush to print sometimes leads to premature and inaccurate reports of victory or defeat; Unionists cheer early accounts of their side’s victory at Bull Run in 1861 only to be disheartened by the later corrections revealing a rout by the Confederates.

            The war’s end changes the content of the news but not its style. The spectacular growth of American business, and the conflicts among speculators for control of large corporations, are covered in much the way the papers have covered the war between North and South. The struggle for control of the Erie Railroad is reported as the “Erie war,” with readers treated to detailed accounts of the sallies, sorties, forays and feints of the opposing investors. The events surrounding Black Friday are accorded the same breathless attention paid to Gettysburg and Appomattox.

            Oldtimers lament the loss of gentility in journalism, pining for the days of small print, modest headlines and dense argument. But younger New Yorkers relish the new dispensation of news. They still expect to be educated by the press, but they now demand to be entertained as well.

            James Bennett the younger aims to meet the demand, and upon taking charge of the Herald from his father in the late 1860s he looks about for the most entertaining newsworthy subjects. Victoria Woodhull fits the bill, and Bennett Jr. offers the beautiful spiritualist-broker space in the paper’s columns. He gets even more than he expects when she chides the leaders of the women’s rights movement and pushes her way to the front. “While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence,” Victoria says. “While others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it. While others argued the equality of women with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business. While others sought to show that there was no valid reason why women should be treated, socially and politically, as being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of politics and business and exercised the rights I already possessed. I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised women of the country, and believing as I do that the prejudices which still exist in the popular mind against women will soon disappear, I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency.”

            Readers will react with shock and dismissal, she knows. Women can’t even vote; how can one become president? “I am well aware that in assuming this position I shall evoke more ridicule than enthusiasm at the outset,” she says. But the wheel of politics and social expectation is turning rapidly. “This is an epoch of sudden changes and startling surprises. What may appear absurd today will assume a serious aspect tomorrow.” The Civil War destroyed the old order; Reconstruction is erecting a new one in its place. “The blacks were cattle in 1860; a negro now sits in Jeff Davis’s seat in the United States Senate. The sentiment of the country was, even in 1863, against negro suffrage; now the negro’s right to vote is acknowledged by the Constitution of the United States. Let those, therefore, who ridiculed the negro’s claim to exercise the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ and who lived to see him vote and hold high public office, ridicule the aspirations of the women of the country for complete political equality as much as they please. They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform. The world moves.”

            But it doesn’t move fast enough for Victoria. She has hoped to strike sparks with the announcement of her candidacy, but the city, let alone the country, hardly notices. James Bennett is pleased for the fillip her column furnishes to the circulation of the Herald, but his paper gives her political ambitions the back of its editorial hand. “Mrs. Woodhull offers herself in apparent good faith as a candidate, and perhaps has a remote impression, or rather hope, that she may be elected, but it seems that she is rather in advance of her time,” it says. “The public mind is not yet educated to the pitch of universal human rights.”

            Her announcement is premature in another regard. Victoria is thirty-two years old, and will be barely thirty-four at the next election for president, in 1872. If she is by some chance elected, on inauguration day she will still lack six months of the thirty-five years required by the Constitution.

             Victoria knows this. Her candidacy is a political statement, a challenge not to the other contenders for the White House but to the system that bars women from participation in self-government. Wyoming Territory has just granted women the vote, but elsewhere in America they remained unenfranchised (or disenfranchised: women occasionally voted in the American colonies and afterward briefly in a few states). The inability of women to vote doesn’t per se prevent women from running for office or being elected; the Constitution is silent on the sex of federal officeholders. But the bar against women at the polls reveals the general belief, shared by many women as well as most men, that women don’t belong in politics.

            This is not news to Victoria, who has prepared a response no less startling than her announcement of her presidential candidacy. But she will reveal it on her own terms.