A Frenchman in America: Recollections of Men and Things

by Max O'Rell

SMITH CURED OF RATTLESNAKE BITE.

An American paper is a collection of short stories. The Sunday edition of the New York World, the New York Herald, the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Herald, and many others, is something like ten volumes of miscellaneous literature, and I do not know of any achievement to be compared to it.

I cannot do better than compare an American paper to a large store, where the goods, the articles, are labeled so as to immediately strike the customer.

A few days ago, I heard my friend, Colonel Charles H. Taylor, editor of the Boston Globe, give an interesting summary of an address on journalism which he is to deliver next Saturday before the members of the New England Club of Boston. He maintained that the proprietor of a newspaper has as much right to make his shop-window attractive to the public as any tradesman. If the colonel is of opinion that journalism is a trade, and the journalist a mere tradesman, I agree with him. If journalism is not to rank among the highest and noblest of professions, and is to be nothing more than a commercial enterprise, I agree with him.

Now, if we study the evolution of journalism for the last forty or fifty years, we shall see that daily journalism, especially in a democracy, has become a commercial enterprise, and that journalism, as it was understood forty years ago, has become to-day monthly journalism. The dailies have now no other object than to give the news—the latest—just as a tradesman that would succeed must give you the latest fashion in any kind of business. The people of a democracy like America are educated in politics. They think for themselves, and care but little for the opinions of such and such a journalist on any question of public interest. They want news, not literary essays on news. When I hear some Americans say that they object to their daily journalism, I answer that journalists are like other people who supply the public—they keep the article that is wanted.

A free country possesses the government it deserves, and the journalism it wants. A people active and busy as the Americans are, want a journalism that will keep their interest awake and amuse them; and they naturally get it. The average American, for example, cares not a pin for what his representatives say or do in Washington; but he likes to be acquainted with what is going on in Europe, and that is why the American journalist will give him a far more detailed account of what is going on in the Palace at Westminster than of what is being said in the Capitol.

In France, journalism is personal. On any great question of the day, domestic or foreign, the Frenchman will want to read the opinion of John Lemoinne in the Journal des Débats, or the opinion of Edouard Lockroy in the Rappel, or maybe that of Paul de Cassagnac or Henri Rochefort. Every Frenchman is more or less led by the editor of the newspaper which he patronizes. But the Frenchman is only a democrat in name and aspirations, not in fact. France made the mistake of establishing a republic before she made republicans of her sons. A French journalist signs his articles, and is a leader of public opinion, so much so that every successful journalist in France has been, is now, and ever will be, elected a representative of the people.

In America, as in England, the journalist has no personality outside the literary classes. Who, among the masses, knows the names of Bennett, Dana, Whitelaw Reid, Medill, Childs, in the United States? Who, in England, knows the names of Lawson, Mudford, Robinson, and other editors of the great dailies? If it had not been for his trial and imprisonment, Mr. W. T. Stead himself, though a most brilliant journalist, would never have seen his name on anybody’s lips.

A leading article in an American or an English newspaper will attract no notice at home. It will only be quoted on the European Continent.

It is the monthly and the weekly papers and magazines that now play the part of the dailies of bygone days. An article in the Spectator or Saturday Review, or especially in one of the great monthly magazines, will be quoted all over the land, and I believe that this relatively new journalism, which is read only by the cultured, has now for ever taken the place of the old one.