The terrors of the press

 The first mass medium sweeps America and does what new media always do: shapes a new generation and frightens a poweful few....

Keller’s first pulping machines reached the market in 1848. His timing was perfect, for just a year before year a young New York printer named Richard March Hoe had reinvented the wheel: a rotary printing press, a colossal spinning drum that could shoot out not four thousand pages an hour like the fastest of the steam-driven flatbed presses, but four hundred thousand. At first, not enough paper could be found to meet its capacity, but then Keller’s wood pulp hit the market. The huge, endlessly spinning drums of Hoe’s presses turned publishing into an inexhaustible fount. And from the moment those drums began to roll, New York became the publishing center of the western hemisphere. Boston, Philadelphia, and Montreal became instant backwaters.

By the beginning of the Civil War, American publishing had become a giant industry. Fat, prosperous newspapers battled for circulation and political power. Fiction publishers began to organize the production of content along industrial lines. Story papers were increasingly replaced by “dime novels” and “five-cent novelettes” produced by in-house writers to fit a uniform format. A couple of New York printers still in their thirties, Francis Scott Smith and Francis Shubael Street, kept costs down and production smooth by developing a “fiction factory”: on the top floor, clever young men scribbling novels in pencil, every one a hodgepodge of formula and plagiarism; editors at neighboring desks, plowing rapidly through pages to catch the most incomprehensible passages and the most egregious violations of audience expectations; on the floor belong them the typists and typesetters; and on the ground floor the ceiling-high stacks of paper the ever-whirling presses, and the stitching machines that bound the books. No plot or word left the building between the time it left the writer’s brain and the time it went on sale. And so the American popular-culture factory was born.

The largest audience for such products were young people, adolescents and yet-unmarried adults of that most broadly literate generation in history, that first generation raised on mass publications. They poured into the towns and cities, putting their rustic backgrounds behind them, filling the ranks of a fast-growing and volatile class: the skilled mechanics and semi-skilled laborers, the clerks and copyists, the  delivery boys, the seamstresses—and the newspaper and print-company employees. Literate and often ambitious, aware of greater economic and social possibilities through promotion or marriage, vastly more cosmopolitan and invested in the future and the greater world than the farmers and manual laborers who sired them, and yet still shut out from affluence, property, and social power, they were a complex and heterogeneous, an optimistic and restless bunch.

They shared a vast appetite for news of social scandal and sensational crime, and for loud, simple fiction that could be ingested in a few gulps on ferry rides, during lunch breaks, and in the brief evenings after long, exhausting workdays. They liked stories of the criminal underworld and the wild west; they liked tales of lethal jeopardy and last-minute rescues, fistfights and wrestling matches with innocent lives at stake, death and tears offset by romantic awakenings, fires and raging rivers, depravity banished by virtue, occasionally the crack of a gun or the thunder of cannons. They liked their heroes young, brave, and forward-looking; in the wake of the Civil War they especially loved stories of young men coming to the city to seek their fortunes.

So, as the children of American farms and the escapees of impoverished Europe flowed into the cities, as the city of New York surged like dirty floodwaters up the length of Manhattan, a great wave of printed words and images rose with them.  Booksellers sprang up everywhere. A new institution, the newsstand, peddling newspapers, magazines, and cheap books, began popping up on the street corners like mushrooms.

A few voices rose in alarm, mostly the same voices that expressed fears of immigration, unbridled growth, epidemic disease, the growing armies of the poor, and moral decay, the voices of those invested in a more homogeneous and less volatile America. With sensation and titillation as selling points, they knew that much of what saw print must violate the bounds of decency.