Fanatics and Fire-eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War.

By Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter Jr. The History of Communication. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2003. Pp. xvi, 138. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-252-07221-9; cloth, $34.95, ISBN 0-25202787-6.)

Why did the American genius for compromise fail to save the Union in 1861? For Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter Jr., the key to this familiar historiographical problem lies in the emergence and dynamics of a democratic press in the decade before the Civil War. During the period from Jackson's inauguration to Lincoln's, technological innovations transformed subscription-driven, "relatively expensive, small-output products of printing shops" into a genuine mass media (p. 8). Telegraph lines conveyed news instantaneously, steam-driven presses facilitated reproduction, and railroads distributed newspapers to an ever-growing market. This increasingly capitalized trade fostered furious competition for readers and profits, and with it, a tendency toward sensational reporting.

Ratner and Teeter document press coverage of six landmark events that sharpened sectional animosities in the course of the 1850s: the Sumner-Brooks confrontation in Congress; the Dred Scott decision; the furor over Kansas's Lecompton Constitution; John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry; Lincoln's election in 1860; and the firing on Fort Sumter. The authors argue that in each case, sectional partisans in the media served as "both messenger and participant," polarizing public opinion beyond repair (p. 117). On the one hand, Republican sympathizers portrayed southerners collectively as violent, lawless "bullies" intent on subverting the Constitution to secure their economic interests (p. 118). Pro-southern editors, on the other hand, identified the party of Lincoln with abolitionist "fanatics" committed to upholding black equality at the expense of southerners' constitutional right to their slave property. Each side saw the other as nothing less than a threat to the future of the American Republic and itself as the true guardian of revolutionary principles. The parties became stand-ins for entire peoples who perceived each other as the "enemy" rather than as a "legitimate political" opposition, making it impossible to forge intersectional compromises (p. 118).

The authors "wonder what might have happened had the press been fairer, more balanced, and less strident in describing and explaining events ..." (p. 118). Would calmer heads have prevailed and fratricidal conflict been averted? I cannot help but wonder whether this formulation does not make too much of the power of representation to affect the course of history. Alter all, the consumption of news is never a passive exercise. As reader-response theorists have argued, readers actively make meaning in interaction with the texts they read. In Civil War America, such meaning was surely shaped by very real differences over slavery that influenced the intensity with which particular media positions resonated with different segments of the voting public. Thus, "objective" reporting of a deeply subjective issue, namely black bondage, is unlikely to have kept bloody hostilities at bay indefinitely.

Still, this is a very valuable book that offers impressive insights into the diversity of journalistic opinions--North, South, and West--that greeted each new sectional crisis in the 1850s. And it is a timely reminder of the role of the modern media in interpreting the world in which we live by bringing far-flung conflicts to our doorsteps and into our homes.

Brooklyn College, City University of New York

GUNJA SENGUPTA