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 page stories highlighted with black borders outlining some purported “outrage” by African Americans.
Newspaper readers were told that Black people were preparing for a race war against whites and were planning to turn North Carolina into an independent territory for African Americans, and that Blacks were engaged in a black-on-white crimes--none of which was true.
Daniels used the 1898 Wilmington events “as one of several examples of the dangers of Black political agency.”
In the meantime, Daniels was establishing himself as a player in national politics. Christensen writes that “Daniels was an influential adviser in five of the next six democratic presidential campaigns--from 1896 to 1916.”
In the 1896 presidential campaign Daniels supported the Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, who lost to William McKinley. But Daniels did not think so.
“For the rest of his life, Daniels believed that Bryan had won and contended that the election was ‘stolen from him by padding registration, buying election officers and every method known to political chicanery.’”
Donald Trump would understand Daniels’s refusal to accept disappointing election results.
More about Daniels and the N&O in an upcoming column.