In early August 1852, the Sacramento Daily Union published a story headlined âFatal DuelâDeath of the Hon. E. Gilbert.â The article appeared on page two. That a duel did not merit front page treatment is hardly surprising. Newspaper front pages in the mid-19th century were dominated by advertisements for butter, lamp oil, and tooth repair. As news, a duelâeven a fatal oneâwas hardly novel. Back then, if two men were having a dispute it was customary to settle it in an open field, standing back-to-back, then walking an agreed upon number of paces before turning and opening fire.
What does seem novel about this particular duel are the participants: James W. Denver, a decorated war general, and Edward Gilbert, editor of the weekly Alta California who despised corruption. How did these two wind up in a death match? The Daily Union, in reporting âthe deplorable termination of a duel,â didnât shed much light, taking a too-soon approach in describing the dispute. âThis is not the time or place to speak,â the paper wrote. âThe community has lost a gentlemanly and honorable member.â
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What happened, it turns out, is what happens every day in journalism: The subject of an article did not like how a piece turned out. Denver took issue with how Gilbert had reported the generalâs efforts to aid starving and downtrodden immigrants in Carson Valley. âThe article charged Gen. Denver with negligence and gross mismanagement in the distribution of provisions,â according to the California Newspaper Hall of Fame, describing how âsome of the supplies were sold to Denverâs subordinates who pocketed the receipts.â To Denver, this was blasphemy.
So the two men resolved to settle the matter with honor, agreeing to meet at a lush field called Oak Grove. They arrived at sunrise. âThe weapons selected were Wessonâs rifles,â the Daily Union reported, âand the distance forty paces.â Gilbert was clumsy. He was not a good shot. Denver had been a soldier. Perhaps the old general felt bad for his rival because after they stepped 40 paces, Denver shot but badly missed Gilbert. To the gathered crowd, this looked intentional. Gilbert missed, too. Technically, the men could have parted ways. But Gilbert insisted they go again. âDenver then became angry,â the Hall of Fame account continued, âand muttered something about not going to stand around all day being shot at.â
They reloaded, then stepped off 40 paces again. âMr. Gilbert fell almost instantly,â the Daily Union reported, âhaving received the shot of Gen. Denver in the left side just above the hip bone.â Gilbert didnât move. âFour or five minutes after the occurrence, and without a word or scarcely a groan, his spirit passed from the earth,â the Daily Union said. âMany a manly tear was shed.â
In Gilbertâs time, and for many decades afterwards, physical attacks on the press werenât just acceptable, they were expected.
No doubt these are dangerous times for reporters. Donald Trump has declared war on the media. Supporters at his rallies scold and threaten reporters, in person and through T-shirt slogans. (âRope. Tree. Journalist,â one shirt reads. âSome assembly required.â) And while much of the chatter amounts to empty threats from trolls, there has been violence. In 2016, a Trump campaign staffer grabbed a female reporterâs arm so tightly that she was bruised. Last year, Montana congressional candidate Greg Gianforte body-slammed a Guardian reporter during tough questioning, an attack the Committee to Protect Journalists said âsends an unacceptable signal that physical assault is an appropriate response to unwanted questioning.â
At least no one whipped out a gun. In Gilbertâs time, and for many decades afterwards, physical attacks on the press werenât just acceptable, they were expected. Gilbertâs killer was not arrested. In fact, not long after shooting the editor, Denver was appointed Secretary of State in California. The city of Denver was named after him. âThe mid-nineteenth-century California community did not see anything abnormal in the circumstances surrounding Gilbertâs demise,â writes historian Ryan Chamberlain in his book, Pistols, Politics and the Press.
It is a point worth reflecting on in our chaotic, mean-spirited moment that the First Amendment has never been a magical forcefield protecting the press, even from violence. Besides duels, journalists over the years have been attacked by angry mobs, kidnapped, beaten, even tarred and feathered. Their homes were egged, presses set on fire, horses stolen. Covering Congress was at times so hazardous that in addition to pencils and notebooks, some reporters carried daggers. The violence wasnât just between journalists and those who didnât like their reporting. Reporters and editors used to fightâeven duelâamong themselves. (Some still do; see Twitter.)
It may be comforting to know that times have actually been worse for journalists. But re-examining past attacks is also instructive, historians say, because the political, social, and journalistic forces that sparked violence against reporters in the countryâs early days can resemble the disputes of today. Battles over class, immigration, and the countryâs place in the world get at the core principles of America. News sites like Breitbart News and HuffPost are akin to the 19th-century partisan press. And social media acts as kindling just as the telegraph did a century ago, quickly and widely spreading controversy.
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âIn a sense, people say that the current media situation is reminiscent of the highly partisan journalism of the 19th century,â says John Nerone, a University of Illinois journalism professor. âAnd what you see reappearing are some of the forms of violence associated with that 19th-century journalism.â
Nerone, in his book Violence Against the Press: Policing the Public Sphere in U.S. History, writes that physical attacks on the press have been âcommon enough to become part of the mythology of US journalism.â Mark Twain, in âJournalism in Tennessee,â one of his less well-known short stories, describes errant shots being fired at the editor of a fictional paper called the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop. The editor returns fire, then goes back to work. A short time later, a grenade is dropped down the newsroom stovepipe. âThe explosion shivered the stove into a thousand fragments,â the narrator says. âHowever, it did no further damage, except that a vagrant piece knocked a couple of my teeth out.â
Satire, of course, only works if the details are plausible. âThe hyperbolic violence that characterizes the daily routine of the chief editor of the War-Whoop is funny,â Nerone writes, âbecause it is an exaggeration of the familiar. Nineteenth-century editors were expected to counter violence.â
Physical attacks on the press have been âcommon enough to become part of the mythology of US journalism.â
Before Twain, around the time of the American Revolution, newspapers served the function of a town meeting. âThe purpose of the paper was to allow citizens irrespective of class or party to communicate freely and deliberate rationally,â Nerone writes. Of course, not all opinions were equally valued by all parties, particularly those with any whiff of support for the British. Publishers and printers let authors write anonymouslyâoften under silly pseudonymsâto encourage lively debate, which sold more papers. (This is somewhat analogous to todayâs reporters granting anonymity to let sources âspeak freelyâ on controversial topics.)
Those impugned in print were prone to violent retaliation, if they could get the authorâs name. This often put printers on the wrong end of a club. Nerone writes of William Goddard, the forgotten newspaperman who ran the Pennsylvania Chronicle, along with a less forgettable character of historyâBenjamin Franklin. In 1767, the paper ran a letter signed by âLex Talionis,â Latin for retaliation. The target of this letter, a Mr. Hicks, approached Goddard a few days later at a tavern, but Goddard wouldnât give up Lexâs identity.
âI was immediately surrounded by a number of persons unknown to me, with Mr. Hicks at their head, who became grossly abusive, and treated me with great insolence,â Goddard wrote in his own paper. âHe repeated the designs he had formed to break my bones, and that he had prepared a suitable weapon for his purpose.â Hicks walked away. Goddard thought it was over and he went on drinking. But it was not. A friend of Hicks approached him to express his own displeasure with the letter, ordering him to leave. âI told him I had as much business there as himself,â Goddard wrote, âand refused to be turnâd out of doors. Without further ceremony, he struck me.â
Such attacks were daily events, as reliable as early-morning Trump tweets. They persisted in part because there was no discernible infrastructureâsocial or governmentalâto prevent them. If a man was wronged or publicly insulted, he was obligated, out of a sense of honor, to retaliate. âIt would be hard to overstate the importance of personal honor to an eighteenth-century gentleman,â Yale historian Joanne B. Freeman writes in Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. âHonor was the core of a manâs identity, his sense of self, his manhood. A man without honor was no man at all.â
Violence against the press escalated both in frequency and viciousness as the stakes increased, particularly during the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The press had First Amendment rights, but this was before the honor culture abated and court rulings solidified the press freedoms in place today. âFreedom was understood as a middle ground between tyranny (no freedom) and licentiousness (too much freedom),â Nerone writes in a 1998 collection of scholarly essays.
Anti-abolitionists were particularly dangerous. Nerone cataloged more than 100 mob attacks against papers that supported abolishing slavery, the most infamous of which was the attack on Elijah Lovejoy in 1837. The minister-turned-newspaper man was killed in a gun battle with anti-abolitionists. At the Newseum in Washington, DC, on a memorial to slain journalists, Lovejoyâs name is listed first. There were dozens of other less high-profile attacks. Newspaper buildings were set on fire. Editors were egged and attacked physically by ideological opponents, as well as in print by other papers. A 1987 scholarly paper that analyzed coverage of attacks against abolitionist newspapers found that âthe papers with the most demonstrable ties to established parties ignored freedom of the press issues and fervently blamed and opposed the abolitionist editors.â
During the Civil War, more than a hundred papers in the north were mobbed, egged, or set on fire. The attacks were led either officially or unofficially by Union troops upset over criticism of battlefield strategy, anger at any sign of sympathy for the South, or out of fear that reporters were disclosing too much information about internal politics and decision-making. General William Tecumseh Sherman held the most extreme hatred toward the press. âNapoleon himself,â he once said, âwould have been defeated with a free press.â Nerone fact-checked Shermanâs bold assertion in a rather hilarious footnote: âOddly, Napoleon was defeated without a free press.â
Journalists didnât fold easily. If their presses were burned, they didnât walk awayâthey would find other printers, open new newsrooms, and go right back to reporting the news. They also found clever ways of dealing with bullies, particularly those in government who threatened them with violence. A classic example is how two reporters from the Congressional Globe dealt with Representative Waddy Thompson of South Carolina.
Thompson was a real rascal. He owned slave plantations and opposed just about everything in the North. Thompson also had a temper and the physical capacity to intimidate. One account described him like this: âThompson, whose physique was alarming, and whose spirit was thought to be like that of fiery hotspur.â In the winter of 1839, Thompson become upset with Globe reporters Lund Washington, Jr. and William W. Curran. According to an account in the annual report of the National Shorthand Reportersâ Association, the reporters âhad failed to give him a larger space in the proceedings than his calibre merited.â Thompsonâs recourse: âHe made a tongue attack upon them in the House, and was prepared to attack them with arms elsewhere.â
The reporters armed themselves for self-defense. âMr. Washington, a gentleman of much strength, carried with him a heavy bludgeon into the reporterâs box,â the shorthand association account said. âMr. Curran was provided with a dagger or knife, sharpened especially for use.â Nobody came to blows. Though the reporters were prepared to stab and beat the congressman, they settled on a more passive-aggressive response. âNo matter what Waddy Thompson said in debate, the reporters made no note of it,â according to the association. âThey treated him as a blank. This brought the South Carolinian to terms. He made an open apology to the reporters, with the effect of restoring peace.â The power of the press, at least back then, included the power to make an egotistical nitwit disappear.
Still, violent attacks continued well into the Civil War. But in many ways, the warâs end also marked the end of routine violence against the press. For one, the war brought stable governments to many cities and towns, with laws, policing, and town halls that normalized sensible, nonâviolent political debate. Also, according to Nerone, the ensuing years gave rise to a more professional press, particularly as industrialization took hold. Newspapers became viable, even lucrative businesses. To attract the broadest possible audience for advertisers, newspapers dropped their highly partisan postures.
Into the 20th century, news outlets targeting minority readers were sometimes subjected to violence. So were labor reporters. However, as newspapers competed with each other for scoops, and as radio and TV news came on strong, the freedom of the press we think of today took shape. Court decisions no doubt cemented this culture, particularly the Supreme Courtâs 1971 decision in the Pentagon Papers case. The press now had real institutional and agenda- setting power, the bedrock of which was objectivity, taste, and fairness.
Then the internet came along. For a while, media scholars saw this as a public good. Big corporations no longer had a monopoly on the free flow of information. New voices could be heard. But as the internet ate up the mainstream press, what emerged, historians and other scholars say, were volatile, partisan voices similar to the partisan press of Mark Twainâs time. Partisan outlets have become as dominant as the objective mainstream outlets of yore, if not more so. âThe ability of the press to set the public agendaââpublishing nuanced, non-inflammatory contentââhas become hacked,â Nerone says. And not just by partisan US outlets. Foreign powers, like Russia, have found a way into the conversation with fake, inflammatory news posted to social networks. The president himself has referred to reporters as âenemies of the state.â
Letâs remember what happened last May in Montana. Greg Gianforte, the Republican then running for the House of Representatives, was confronted by a Guardian US reporter with tough questions about health care. The topic isnât slavery, yet as divisiveness goes, itâs just about the most controversial subject in the United States. In what realm is Gianforteâs responseâto body-slam the reporterâeven remotely expected? In Waddy Thompsonâs day, perhaps. But if history truly does repeat itself, if the conditions of discourse in the United States appear even remotely similar to Thompsonâs day, then maybe Gianforteâs response isnât shocking after all. A commenter on the Washington Post article describing the body slam wrote this: âJournalists who donât toe the party line need to get punished.â
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âI am shot!â
By Michael Rosenwald
In 1883, with Twitter not yet a viable option for settling scores, the editors of two Richmond newspapers met in an open field to resolve their differences by shooting at each other.
Though duels were the gold standard in those days for defending oneâs honor, rival journalists typically never went that far, settling for a bop on the nose or a brick through a window.
But those options werenât appropriate for the level of animus between Richard F. Beirne, the editor of the Richmond State, and William C. Elan, editor of the Richmond Whig.
Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves, but civil rights still vexed the country. Newspapers took sides. Long story short: Beirne thought Elanâs support of blacks in his paperâs editorials was not genuine. The Whigâs retort: âWe laugh at the Stateâs vituperation and vaporing, and beg to remark that not only does the State lie, but its editor and owner lies.â
Fighting words.
Beirne, as The New York Times later reported, âdemanded satisfactionâ from Elan, putting him on notice for a duel. Representatives for the editors cordially made the arrangements, even agreeing that Elanâs nearsightedness made it necessary to shorten the standard 10 paces to eight.
âThe weapons chosen were navy six-shooters,â writes Ryan Chamberlain in Pistols, Politics and the Press, âthe largest of their kind.â
The confrontation came as duels were on their way out. Virginia had recently prohibited them. A detective got wind of the plans and showed up at the appointed time on his horse, arresting Beirne. Elan got away.
Both men remained committed to the idea of a shooting each other. The Times, for its part, stoked interest, covering the impending duel as if it were a prize fight.
âThe excitement over the expected duel between Beirne and Elan has not abated,â the paper said. âAll day anxious inquiries have been made as to where the principals are.â
Chamberlain, in his history of violence in journalismâs early days, writes that with papers on opposite sides of the civil rights question, âthe sensational and national coverage of the rival editors started to have broader political implications.
âThe duelists began to represent more than their personal quarrel,â he continues. âBecause each editor was a strong advocate for his own political party, they began to symbolize opposing political ideals.â
Who might be maimed, however, was still of paramount interest to readers.
Finally, after using coded messages, the editors agreed to meet in West Virginia, where dueling was still legal.
âNeither had met before that day as they stared at one another from across their marks,â Chamberlain writes. âBoth editors gripped their pistols and stared at each other in preparation for the first shot.â
They fired.
They missed.
The terms of the duel called for a second round.
They fired.
This time, Beirne stood tall.
Elan staggered, then fell to the ground, declaring the obvious: âI am shot!â
He had been hit in the leg. The wound, even in those days, wasnât enough to kill him. While a doctor examined him, Elan smoked a cigar.
âBeirne declared that he was satisfied,â Chamberlain writes, âtipped his hat to Elan and left in a carriage.â
Michael Rosenwald is a reporter at the Washington Post. He has also written for The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Economist. Follow him on Twitter @mikerosenwald.