Rob Christensen’s new book, “Southern News, Southern Politics: How a Newspaper Defined a State for a Century,” comes out March 4. It could be two separate books.
The first might be titled, “Josephus Daniels and his family from 1865 to the present.”
The second, “The Rise and Fall of The Raleigh News and Observer (N&O), 1865 to the present”
These two possible books are brought into one by Christensen, who knows both topics well. First, as a long serving and trusted reporter for the N&O, he worked during much of the paper’s most successful times and learned about its history from those who had earlier lived it.
At the same time, he got to know members of the Daniels family, most of whom treasured their connections to the newspaper.
First, Christensen concentrates on Josephus Daniels who, after owning several smaller papers and working in Washington, D.C., bought the N&O in 1894.
Christensen writes, “It is hard to overstate Daniels’s political influence.”
He became the state's Democratic National Committeeman and was a pivotal figure for the out-of-power party that had no governor or U.S. senator. “It is hard to decide whether Daniels was a newspaper man heavily involved in politics or politician who owned a newspaper.”
Christensen explains Daniel’s racist views. “Just as crucial as Democratic loyalty was Daniels’s segregationist world-view. Daniels, who had been born during the waning days of slavery, raised in the cotton culture of the coastal plain, and spoon-fed tales of the Lost Cause and who had interacted with a partially illiterate Black population still emerging from generations of shackles, had views that firmly were rooted by the time he reached adulthood.”
Thus, Christensen writes, “Daniels left little doubt how he would use his newly acquired N&O. He immediately launched white supremacy campaigns that covered six years and reshaped North Carolina politics, resulting in the rise of a rigid Jim Crow system of segregation and sixty years of one-party Democratic control of the state.”
The N&O used two main devices to stir racial prejudice. In August 1898, it began running powerful racist cartoons on the front page and beginning in September it also ran front