Partisanship and Newspapers
The Wooster Republican (top) and the Wayne County Democrat (bottom) announced Frederick Douglass’s speech at the Wooster Arcadome in 1872.
By Jake Kowall and Brittany Previte
Everyone had a party in the 1870s. Citizens embraced political activity like never before--in the 1876 election, 81.8 percent of the voting age population cast their ballot for the president. In the Midwest, political participation was particularly high, and Wooster was no exception. Rallies and parades took the streets, speakers filled halls like Wooster’s Arcadome, and readers devoured the newspapers that served as mouthpieces for political parties.
During the nineteenth century, local and state political parties subsidized local newspapers and saw them as vital mouthpieces for the party. Editors were not only active with words, they very often worked at least part-time for political figures or the party.1 The editorial stance also made its way into news coverage: consider the coverage of two events in 1872. In February of that year, former slave and African American rights activist Frederick Douglass visited Wooster and gave a lecture in the Arcadome. The Wooster Republican gave lengthy praise to his speech, calling him “one of the most remarkable men in the United States.” The Wayne County Democrat only briefly mentions his visit, and states how he “was made much of by some of the Republicans.”2 The papers’ coverage of the 1872 Eighth of January Festival, a Democratic event celebrating Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, similarly leaves readers with two very different perspectives of the same event.
Click here for a comparison of the two articles.
1 “Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections: 1828-2008,” The American Presidency Project, accessed June 19, 2014, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/turnout.php.
2 History of Wayne County, Ohio, Vol. 1. (Indianapolis Ind: B. F. Bowen & Co., 1910) 336.