July/August 2000 | Contents

 

BOOK REPORTS

BY JAMES BOYLAN

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COVERING IOWA: THE HISTORY OF THE
DES MOINES REGISTER AND TRIBUNE COMPANY 1849-1985
By William B. Friedricks
Iowa State University Press.
307 pp. $49.95

In sub-zero dawns in the 1940s, I delivered the Des Moines Register to dozens of subscribers on the south side of my hometown, a town more than 120 miles from Des Moines. At mid-century, the morning Register or the evening Tribune went every day to half the households in a state of 2 million plus, roughly 300 miles across, a perhaps unique circulation achievement. (Moreover, the Register almost always had the area's high-school scores from the previous night.) This history of the newspapers by William B. Friedricks, an historian at Simpson College (not far south of Des Moines), relates how the Register and Tribune, under the guidance of Gardner Cowles and his descendants, spread across the state and maintained its dominance through most of the twentieth century -- and how, inevitably, things fell apart and the paper became another link in the Gannett chain. The history is based to a great degree on revenue and circulation statistics, with adequate attention to the Register's Republican-liberal editorial policies. But Friedricks has no feeling for the newsroom, and his account of just how the Register covered Iowa is skimpy. For some of that story, one can still turn to the ingratiating memoir by George Mills about the publisher and his first star editor, Harvey Ingham and Gardner Cowles, Sr. (1977).

 

AN AMERICAN ALBUM: ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OF HARPER'S MAGAZINE
Edited by Lewis H. Lapham and
Ellen Rosenbush. Franklin Square Press. 712 pp. $50

Harper's and The New York Times are about the same age, and in fact had the same first editor, Henry J. Raymond. Created by publishing's Harper brothers in 1850, the magazine has appeared at least 1,800 times since; this anthology is a more than generous sample of what has been published under its dozen editors (counting the incumbent, Lewis H. Lapham, twice, like Grover Cleveland). In his introduction, Lapham dispassionately tells of the century-plus of Harper ownership, the disastrous Cowles family interregnum, the rescue from extinction by the MacArthur Foundation, and the rebirth of the magazine as a self-sustaining nonprofit entity. Outstanding journalism is scattered throughout, from George F. Noyes's account of Antietam through Seymour Hersh's "My Lai 4," although the yield is thin in the half-century tenure of Henry Mills Alden (1869-1919), who was more inclined to literature. Unfortunately, the individual items are presented devoid of annotation; the reader often wishes for more -- both the significance of the selection and the historical perspective.

 

THE REMAKING OF AN AMERICAN
By Elizabeth Banks;
Introduction by Jane S.Gabin.
University Press of Florida.
297 pp. $19.95 paper

Who was Elizabeth Banks? Not easy to find out. She ordered her personal papers destroyed after her death; in her time she was just (barely) famous enough to be listed in the British Who's Who. In a forty-page introduction to this memoir, Jane S. Gabin of the University of North Carolina tells what there is to know: Banks was born in New Jersey about 1870, grew up in Wisconsin, went to London in 1893 and spent most of the rest of her life there. She gained recognition doing undercover stories (e.g., posing as a maid) and eventually became the first woman writer on the staff of Referee, a magazine of opinion. There, under her best-known pen name, "Enid," she subversively campaigned for woman suffrage without ever seeming to mention the subject. In World War I she was active in Belgian relief. Afterward, she revisited the United States and to a degree regained her pride that she had retained her American citizenship, partly because of her discomfort with England's class-bound society. She published this rambling, engaging memoir -- her tone is nervy and unintimidated but not strident -- in 1928 and then fell silent in the last ten years of her life.

 

COP KNOWLEDGE: POLICE POWER AND
CULTURAL NARRATIVE IN TWENTIETH-
CENTURY AMERICA
By Christopher P. Wilson
The University of Chicago Press.
281 pp. $42; $16 paper

An alternative title for this work might be: "Cops and Journalists: Made for Each Other." Christopher Wilson of Boston College, previously author of The Labor of Words, a fine study of Progressive-era writing, here examines the complex ways in which urban policing and changing media forms have affected each other. He ranges from an 1896 incident in New York's Tenderloin involving Stephen Crane and the arrest of a prostitute, through the Dragnet procedural era and tough-guy columnists, the paramilitary policing of the 1960s, and the era of True Crime sensationalism and police tapes. He concludes with a painstaking examination of new-style community policing, focusing on the role of The Boston Globe in a local murder case. Instead of being merely another survey of crime news in the media, the study is equally knowledgeable about the waves of reform and regression in American police departments.

 

SLANTING THE STORY: THE FORCES THAT SHAPE THE NEWS
By Trudy Lieberman
The New Press. 208 pp. $21.95

Trudy Lieberman, a contributing editor for cjr and director of the Center for Consumer Health Choices at Consumers Union, contends here that, "with help from the mainstream media, right-wing think tanks and organizations have discredited their opponents, moved their ideas to the front of the national agenda, dominated the debate, and engineered big changes in public policy." Her case studies center on conservative efforts to weaken the American Association of Retired Persons, the Food and Drug Administration, Head Start, and Medicare. She concludes that these efforts have been successful, in great part because news stories fail to penetrate beyond the "he said, she said" convention.

James Boylan is founding editor of cjr and professor emeritus of journalism and history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.