It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is rapidly
changing, in troubling ways. Memphis’s remaining daily, the Commercial Appeal, was purchased by
Gannett in 2016 and just last month was reorganized—with a considerable layoff
of staff—into a Tennessee “network” involving the Commercial Appeal and the dailies in Nashville and Knoxville. The executive
editor of the Commercial Appeal, Louis
Graham, who has been with the paper for thirty-eight years, announced in a
letter that the “historic” changes “position each news organization, working
collectively, to support a continued, aggressive expansion of digital content.”
The message was essentially addition by subtraction and consolidation: yes, we
are becoming smaller, and yes we are now part of a statewide consortium, but we
will nevertheless bring you all the news you care to read and maintain an
“intense” local focus.
It’s little consolation, but Thomas Harrison Baker’s
marvelous 1971 history of the Commercial
Appeal reminds us that the newspaper industry has always been rapidly
changing. In the early days of Memphis, before the Civil War, it was not
uncommon for newspapers to be founded and then cease operations only a short
time later. The Commercial Appeal—which
began life as the Weekly Appeal—was
founded in 1841 to replace a failed newspaper, the Western World and Memphis Banner of the Constitution—which was
founded to replace the Gazette, which
was founded to replace the Memphis
Advocate and Western District Intelligencer, Memphis’s first newspaper. All
of those newspapers were organs of the Democratic Party, and the last three
were founded, and foundered, between 1827 and 1840.
Another period of frequent change occurred during the Great
Depression, when ownership of the Commercial
Appeal (its name starting in 1894) changed hands no fewer than four times. In
1927, the paper was purchased by a new publishing company called Memphis
Commercial Appeal, Inc., which was led by the publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, a man named Luke Lea. In
fact, Lea soon acquired ownership of no fewer than four Tennessee newspapers:
in addition to the Nashville Tennessean
and the Commercial Appeal, he owned
the Knoxville Journal and another
Memphis paper, the Evening Appeal.
The depression brought down Lea’s empire, and in 1931 the Commercial Appeal became the property of the Minnesota and Ontario
Paper Company. But that company became a victim of hard economic times too, and
in 1933 the Commercial Appeal was
purchased by James Hammond Jr., who, since 1932, had been the publisher of
William Randolph Hearst’s Detroit Times.
Then, in 1936, the paper was sold yet again, this time to the Scripps-Howard
organization. Scripps-Howard and its successor organization, the Journal Media
Group, owned the Commercial Appeal
until 2016, when it was sold to Gannett.
Change in the form of mergers is nothing new either. As
early as 1847, the Daily Appeal
absorbed another Memphis paper and Democratic organ, the Monitor. In 1890, the Appeal
(long since a daily) joined forces with the Avalanche
to form a single paper, the Appeal-Avalanche.
Then, in 1894, an upstart newspaper in the city, the Commercial, purchased the Appeal-Avalanche,
and thus the Commercial Appeal was
born.
Readers should be reminded as well that, after 1936, Scripps-Howard
owned not just the Commercial Appeal
but the city’s major afternoon daily, the Press-Scimitar,
which itself was the product of a merger, between the News-Scimitar and the Press,
ten years before.
***
The newspaper that last month underwent a “historic” reorganization
was founded by a newcomer to Memphis, Henry Van Pelt, who quickly decided that
the young city needed a local organ for the Democratic Party. It began as a weekly. Each edition of the new
paper—known as the Weekly Appeal until 1847, when it became a
daily and changed its name to the Appeal—contained
four pages; each page contained seven columns and measured twenty-four inches
wide and thirty-seven inches long. A subscription was $3 a year—roughly the equivalent,
I would estimate, of $125 today. (As a point of comparison, a yearly print
subscription to the Commercial Appeal
today is just under $240.) In its first few decades, the Appeal obtained most of its news from “exchanges,” that is,
newspapers from other cities. The exchanges were supplemented with news from
two additional sources: the telegraph and “correspondence,” letters from
professional journalists and especially local residents.
Quite remarkably, the newspaper survived. Not even the Civil
War put it out of business, although it did put it out of Memphis, first to
Grenada and then to Jackson, Mississippi, then to Atlanta, then to Montgomery,
Alabama, then back into Georgia, finding itself at war’s end with some of its
supplies and equipment in Columbus and the rest in Macon—all the while
publishing new editions as regularly as it could. Its staff returned to Memphis
in the summer of 1865, and the paper kept going, its editors announcing that
the outcome of the war had been decided—and accepted: “We recognize and abide
by the logical sequence of the late, unhappy Civil War in the destruction, now
and forever, of the institution of African slavery,” the paper announced in its
edition of November 5, 1865.
The paper survived as well the yellow fever epidemic of
1878—even though many of its employees did not. Indeed, almost half of the
staff of forty-one died, and most of the others fell ill. One staff member who
managed to not only survive but to carry on the work of the newspaper to an
extent nearly impossible to believe was the editor, John McLeod Keating, who,
in fifty to seventy items a day, chronicled life in Memphis during the
epidemic. Keating, perhaps not incidentally, published in 1888 a three-volume
history of the city.
By the early 1880s, the Appeal
was trumpeting the promise of the “New South,” a South committed to progress
and prosperity, “not weeping over the past” and “not chanting jeremiads over
times that are gone,” but “full of renewed vigor abandoning old sloth, and
gone-by apathy.”
In 1894, the Appeal
was purchased by a new Memphis paper, the Commercial,
and the two merged to become the Commercial
Appeal. At the time, one of the major national issues was silver. The
economy was still reeling from the Panic of 1893, and silver miners and struggling
farmers in the West and South clamored for the government to put more money in
circulation by allowing the free coinage of silver. The issue sharply divided
the ownership of the new paper and eventually caused the editor, Edward Ward
Carmack, to resign.
In 1908, the paper brought back a former managing editor, C.
P. J. (Charles Patrick Joseph) Mooney, to be the editor. Mooney would run the Commercial Appeal for the next eighteen
years, turning it into very much his own. Rather than focusing on the workings
of national political parties, Mooney directed the paper to devote more space
to local issues—agriculture, especially crop diversification; commercial
development; and the mayoralty of E. H. Crump, whom Mooney mistrusted. He also
stressed that the paper’s first duty was to report the news objectively and
accurately; he agonized over the slightest error, and he urged his reporters to
relate events to local points of reference.
Mooney died in 1926, and then followed the ten years of
changing ownership during the depression, ending with the purchase of the Commercial Appeal in 1936 by
Scripps-Howard, a purchase that was, in retrospect, the beginning of a long
period of relative stability.
Aside from a brief epilogue, Baker’s account ends in 1941,
with the one hundredth anniversary of the newspaper, an occasion marked by the
publication of a special edition of no fewer than 328 pages. (Let that sink in.) One can reasonably wonder
if the Commercial Appeal will still
exist when the calendar turns to 2041, in what would be the newspaper’s
bicentennial.
***
Baker tells the history of the Commercial Appeal mainly through the newspaper’s editorials. What
did the paper have to say about the major issues of the day? I’ll deal with
three of them here: prohibition, agriculture, and race.
The Commercial Appeal
generally opposed prohibition and, once prohibition was the law of the land,
favored its repeal. Its basic position was that morality cannot be legislated.
Rather than ban alcohol, society should regulate it: temperance, not prohibition,
was the practical course to take. After Tennessee instituted statewide
prohibition in 1909, the Commercial
Appeal argued that the law should be followed—not because the paper had had
a change of heart, which it had not, but because, as the editors wrote in
December of that year, “the way to secure the repeal of a bad law is to enforce
it.” For a brief period, Mooney did change his position, less out of opposition
to alcohol per se and more out of opposition to the lawless behavior it seemed
to cause. Yet by the early 1930s, the paper was again squarely in favor of
repeal.
Agriculture became a focus of the paper when Mooney became
editor, in 1908. The new editor urged farmers in the Mid-South to stop relying
on cotton and to diversify instead. Mooney was especially bothered by the fact
that the South did not grow and raise its own food. The price of cotton was
never enough to cover the costs of importing corn, pork, and other foodstuffs
from the North, and “no section of our country can be truly prosperous that
buys its food for man and beast,” the editors wrote in October 1909. In 1934,
the paper began what Baker calls “the newspaper’s most successful continuing
promotion”: the Plant to Prosper contest. The contest gave cash awards to
farmers who best used their land for purposes other than cotton. At its peak,
in the late 1940s, one hundred thousand people, black and white, were participating
every year. The contest lasted until 1965 and was, Baker writes, “undoubtedly
the newspaper’s most effective contribution to Mid-South agriculture.”
The paper’s position on race on the whole upheld white
supremacy. Quite surprisingly, in 1851 there was in Memphis a Sunday school for
blacks. (Baker provides no details about the school.) The Appeal found this outrageous, a “direct blow at [slavery] itself,
as well as at the peace and security of Southern society,” read an editorial in
August of that year. During the Civil War, the paper found it “revolting” that
the Union army enlisted blacks—“men of low instincts, and whose brutal passions
are easily aroused,” as the editors wrote in 1863—to fight against the South.
After the war, during the enthusiasm for the New South, the Appeal accepted that blacks could vote
but was dumbfounded by their support for Republican candidates. By the early
twentieth century, the paper seemed intent on maintaining a social order that
had whites on top, calling the assertion in the Declaration of Independence
that “all men are created equal” a “platitudinous absurdity.” In 1933, the
editors offered, in reference to the Scottsboro rape case, that “the preservation
of racial purity is a much more vital need than the preservation of racial
equality.”
Of a piece with race was lynching, on which the paper’s
position shifted over the years. Lynching, the editors said in 1900, was
sometimes justified, sometimes not. Yet by 1913, Mooney was stating his
unqualified opposition to the practice—though maintaining that blacks and
whites would never be equal. It is quite possible, Baker suggests, that the
paper knew of plans to lynch a black man in the spring of 1917 yet did nothing
to stop it, other than offering a “brief and general condemnation of mob
action.” Four years later, and for reasons Baker does not investigate, the
paper became concerned about the increased activities of the Ku Klux Klan and
began running articles opposing the organization and lynching. The articles,
along with cartoons by J. P. Alley, won for the paper a Pulitzer Prize, in 1923.
In the late 1930s, the paper opposed a federal anti-lynching law while
maintaining its opposition to lynching itself.
***
During the entire thirty years they lived in Memphis, my
parents subscribed to the Commercial
Appeal. They read it at the kitchen table every morning. My mother read the
paper backwards, starting from the last page of a section and working her way
to the first.
I read the paper too—if reading the sports section counts as
reading the paper. Perhaps my favorite time with the paper came on Sundays in
the fall of 1981. I would take the sports section to the Danver’s on Sycamore
View, and there over an all-I-could-eat breakfast, I’d read about Herschel
Walker and the college football games from the day before.
I appeared in the paper once. It was the summer of 1973, and
I was attending a day camp at Gaisman Park. I was playing chess with a friend
when an athlete from Memphis State University dropped by. A reporter took our
picture; it ran in the paper the next day.
