Converging Assumptions

A binary is born

Robert Connors (1996) argued that the need for composition arose out of a “reformist” period, one that culminated in an “inflammatory article” by E.L. Godkin in 1897 (pp. 47-48). Disturbed by the new influx of lower class college students, Godkin worried that the growing daily newspapers, their reliance on images rather than words, and their sensationalistic nature would destroy any sense of “Literature” that the universities were trying desperately to maintain. He was afraid that, due to its huge distribution, the newspaper would become the lowest standard in American reading, dictating political and social principles to otherwise uneducated masses.

Godkin delivered his complaint most completely in an article written for the North American Review, “Newspapers Here and Abroad” (1890):

The news-gathering function, which the American press was the first to bring into prominence, has become the most important one, and the critical function has relatively declined. . . . Contemporaneously with this has been the improvement in the means of travel and of transmitting intelligence, thus literally making news-gathering and [sic] important calling. (p. 197-198)

Godkin favored the critical role that newspapers had enjoyed in the public sphere and he did not want to see that role denigrated into a service for disseminating information without critique or commentary. Habermas (1962/1998) described a similar shift in the state of U.S. literacy and polity this way: “Editorial opinions recede behind information from press agencies and reports from correspondents; critical debate disappears behind the veil of internal decisions concerning the selection and presentation of the material” (p. 169). Habermas referred to the blurring distinction between “facts” and “literature” and how the once differentiated traditions of belles lettres and journalism collapsed into the “ready-made convenience, patterned and predigested” (p. 169) format of the daily newspaper of the late nineteenth century. In fact, this is precisely where Godkin took his argument in “Newspapers Here and Abroad.” He found it disturbing that newspapers, seen as the popular form of literature, destroyed the attention spans of the country’s youth and had a degenerative effect on the book reading, or scholarly, public: “nothing can be more damaging to the habit of continuous attention than newspaper reading . . . it never requires the mind to be fixed on any topic more than three or four minutes and that every topic furnishes a complete change of scene” (p. 202). Godkin saw the literary tradition, and the critical role the editorial papers had in that tradition, slipping into a dumbed-down assimilation of stories and facts: “Even books of far-reaching sociological interest, like Darwin’s, or Spencer’s, or Mill’s, have to undergo a prolonged filtration through the newspaper press before they begin to affect popular thought or action” (p. 203). Newspapers exert, he argued, “more influence on the popular mind and the popular morals than either the pulpit or the book press has exerted in five hundred years” (p. 202).

Godkin’s objections to the disappearance of the critical voice did not only rest in his editorial pages. John Brereton (1995) refers to three separate reports on which Godkin’s name appears as a member of the Committee on Composition and Rhetoric at Harvard University. According to Brereton, Charles Francis Adams, a friend of Godkin’s, authored all three reports. However, in order to make a stronger impact, Adams added Godkin’s name: “Between 1892 and 1897, the Committee on Composition and Rhetoric published its four highly charged reports. Combining as it did some of the most eminent names in Harvard’s and Boston’s history with the prestige of highly influential journals and law firms” (Brereton, 1995, p. 74). Godkin’s name carried significant weight with the audience for those reports, the Board of Overseers at Harvard, who “stood between the faculty and the trustees” (p. 74). There is no record of any correspondence between Godkin and Adams regarding this committee; however, Harvard did extend many honors to Godkin including a Master of Arts degree, a token lectureship in free trade for the years 1884-1885, and even offered him a professorship in 1870 (Armstrong, 1974, passim). He turned down the position in favor of his more influential prestige as the editor of the Nation. He wrote to Charles Eliot: “a professor is looked on as sort of a bookish monk, of whose opinions on the affairs of the world, nobody need take any account. My friends advise me not to accept your offer, because it will be the loss of all my influence, and power, and relegation to a sort of comfortable obscurity” (Godkin, 1974, p. 153). Although Godkin lamented the loss of literature and academic influence represented by the growth of the daily newspaper, he recognized that the real power in the emerging market economy was centralized within the cultural capital of information distribution. Choosing to remain within the editorial realm of the public sphere, he held on to the critical commentary in the press as long as he could.