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Perhaps it was the sensationalism of the events that characterized the era, but The Days’ Doings’ coverage also included direct encounters with the social conflicts of the Gilded Age. As political scandals, economic busts, devastating accidents, and corresponding hardship and social unrest mounted, a sense of persistent crisis gripped readers. The sensational and profane, in short, came to define many aspects of everyday life and, while the paper’s engagement with the topical was not ubiquitous, it was common enough to view such coverage as one aspect of The Days' Doings' “mission.” Many of The Days’ Doings’ topical engravings made a first appearance in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, but in some instances The Days' Doings offered its readers (some of whom probably also read the Illustrated Newspaper) additional pictures of controversial events with a different slant—both editorially and pictorially.
     In keeping with the paper’s orientation, The Days’ Doings’ depiction of events was often filtered through a lurid lens. Coverage of analogous social turmoil abroad, particularly the 1871 Paris Commune, offered the editors the opportunity to both display shocking violence and depict usually off-limits female nudity (the exception to the latter being reproductions of fine and classical art). [11] Sexuality also imbued some of the paper’s reports on the increasing incidence of labor militance in the streets of New York. The culmination of a strike wave involving more than 100,000 workers demanding the eight-hour day (the largest combined labor action to hit an American city up to that time) elicited a full-page of engravings, the largest featuring the comely and exotic figure of Judith Marx, emissary of the International and niece of Karl Marx. (Figure 6) Although the accompanying description extolled Marx’s physical beauty (albeit as an exotic: “The Realization of an Oriental Poet’s dream”) as well as her generous spirit, the gist of the editorial, bolstered by the illustration, denounced her misconception that European-like exploitation characterized American labor. The problem was epitomized in “her inflammatory harangue”—highlighted by an oath to “’Conquer capital or die with it’”—“to a number of ‘strikers’ who had rented a cellar in Orchard Street . . . under the auspices of a ‘Secret Labor Society,’ known as ‘the Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun.’”


Figure 6. “The Great Strike—The Seed and Its Fruit. The Seed. The conclave
of the strikers.—The beautiful International, Judith Marx, initiating a number
of workmen as members of ‘the Secret Order of the Sun.’” Wood engraving,
The Days’ Doings, June 29, 1872, 16.

  True, the scene in the cellar (in which had been collected many of the implements of warfare as well as the tools of labor) was picturesque and dramatic . . . But, lovely as was the speaker, and earnest as were the actors of the occasion, the scene was sadly out of place and time. It might have served its purpose in Europe, or in the Dark Ages, but was utterly opposed to the theory and practice of the City of New York in the Nineteenth Century.
 
The seed planted by foreign agitation bore the bitter fruit of murder in New York's streets and want and neglect in the duped workers’ homes, as depicted in the two remaining engravings. (Figure 7) Encoded with sexual intrigue, according to The Days’ Doings, America’s class warfare was a European import. [12]


Figure 7. “The Great Strike—The Seed and Its Fruit. The Fruit. The striker abroad.—Shooting of James Brownlee, in Forty-first Street, New York. The striker at home.—Idleness, misery, whisky, quarreling,
and starvation. Wood engravings, The Days’ Doings, June 29, 1872, 16.

     With the onset of economic depression in 1873, The Days’ Doings discovered another outside force threatening instability: the home-grown itinerant poor that wandered the country and rode the rails in search of work. A new type appeared in the paper’s pages personifying the crisis: the tramp. Periodically, the paper reported on tramp outrages, noting in 1877 that the peripatetic idler had “become an institution in our midst,” a “dangerous character. Reckless in the extreme, desperate at times, he often commits excesses which take him entirely out of the regular category of tramps, and he becomes a highway robber.” In The Days’ Doings’ pages, however, robbery was wrapped in a garish cloak of near-rape and feisty female resistance. “The value of a pistol.—A villainous tramp repulsed by a plucky woman,” was but one of a series of almost identical stories whose pictorial narratives’ preoccupation with endangered womanhood, molestation, and assault departed from the mainstream pictorial press’s emphasis on nuisance. [13]
     But as hard times extended for years, The Days’ Doings found some sympathy for labor—although it was for the most part ensconced in its textual columns. In its pictorial coverage of union organizing, the visual codes depicting the protagonists provided a less subtle—if nonsexual—view. The coverage of the January 1874 demonstration for public relief in Tompkins Square, which escalated into a police riot, departed from the usual narrative of notorious and endangered womanhood, and seemed to provide two different perspectives on the violence. Denouncing the leaders of the demonstration as “dangerous ‘agitators’” and characterizing the assembled protesters as “dupes,” the editorial nonetheless criticized the unprovoked charge of the police on the crowd. (Figure 8) However, the scruffy and foreign physiognomies pictured fleeing the police clubs and hooves afforded readers with a compelling tableau of stalwart police dispersing an unruly alien horde. [14]


Figure 8. “The police prevent a demonstration by working-men on Tompkins’ Square, N.Y. City, January 13.—See Page 2. Charge of the mounted police on First Avenue.” Wood engraving, The Days’ Doings, January 24, 1874, 9.


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So, what do we make of this visual mish-mash of the topical and taboo? Certainly, this perplexing, promiscuous, and lurid pictorial portrait of the Gilded Age suggests that there is still much to ponder about the popular and subterranean visual culture of the era. The antebellum sporting “flash” press has received insightful attention in studies by Tim Gilfoyle, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, and most recently Jay Cook. But, surprisingly, there have been no extended considerations of its more heavily illustrated (and longer-lived) Gilded Age counterpart. In light of certain yawning gaps in that archival record—for example, the seeming loss of some of the National Police Gazette’s late-nineteenth century volumes—The Days’ Doings offers us a particularly vivid entrée into what made the visual culture of the postbellum era different: a glimpse of one way that the crises of the Gilded Age blurred tried and true visual distinctions, documenting the sensational and the profane in an era when the sensational and profane teetered into the everyday.
     Perhaps it was that uncomfortable juxtaposition that helped contribute to the publication’s demise. Following Frank Leslie’s death in 1880, which occurred as he was trying to work his way out of insolvency, the now renamed New York Illustrated Times finally and irrevocably stopped being a part of the vast publishing house. Mrs. Frank Leslie (the legal name adopted by Miriam Follin Squier Leslie after her husband’s death) finally wrested control of the house from both creditors and family rivals, and in the process pared down her list of weeklies and monthlies. A noted feminist, she seemed particularly eager to divest herself of her husband’s notorious publication, not to mention the sector of readers that went with it. William J. Ellis of 7 Frankfort Street purchased the New York Illustrated Times in 1881, but the paper would only last another four years. [15]
   
 

[11] See, for example, “The terrors of the Commune in Paris: Wholesale execution of women by the Versailles troops,” DD, July 15, 1871 (one of four engravings); “Scenes in Paris at the downfall of the Commune,” ibid., July 29, 1871 (four engravings). These illustrations were probably reprints of engravings published in either the British or European pictorial press. BACK

[12] “The Great Strike—The Seed and Its Fruit. The Seed. The conclave of the strikers.—The beautiful International, Judith Marx, initiating a number of workmen as members of ‘the Secret Order of the Sun.’ The Fruit. The striker abroad.—Shooting of James Brownlee, in Forty-first Street, New York; The striker at home.—Idleness, misery, whisky, quarreling, and starvation,” DD, June 29, 1872; “The Great Strike and its Heroine,” ibid. For other pictorial coverage of the 1872 eight-hour movement, see Brown, Beyond the Lines, 153-55 (including, throughout, the trope of the strikers’ destitute family, victimized by the male’s naïve adherence to foreign beliefs). BACK

[13] DD, June 12, 1875; “The Era of Tramps,” September 22, 1877 (accompanying “Startling interruption of a ladies’ [sic] quiet horseback ride along the banks of Lake Gorge.—Fearful encounter with desperate tramps while going for letters to nearest post office”); see also, “Another chapter in tramp history,” a page of eight cuts: “Not enough sugar in the tea; A quiet smoke after supper; The lady of the house becomes indignant; The tramp’s cipher dispatch; On the tramp; An episode in tramp life; Tramps as highwaymen—Defeated by two plucky girls; How a New Jersey householder dealt with a tramp,” September 4, 1880. On the Illustrated Newspaper’s coverage of tramps, see Brown, Beyond the Lines, 146-7. BACK

[14] “The Tompkins Square Riot. A Sharp Fight with the Police,” DD, January 24, 1874; “The police prevent a demonstration by working-men on Tompkins’ (sic) Square, N. Y. City, January 13: Charge of the mounted police on First Avenue; Murderous assault upon Police-sergeant Berghold at one of the gates of Tompkins’ (sic) Square; Searching alleged communists at the 17th precinct station-house; Rescuing a prisoner from the police,” ibid. BACK

[15] “Salutatory,” New York Illustrated Times, June 11, 1881. BACK