*This article first saw the light of day as a paper presented at the 1990 American Historical Association Annual Meeting. With the subsequent support of a Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, it became the basis of my doctoral dissertation, "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper: The Pictorial Press and the Representations of America, 1855-1889" (Columbia University, 1993). For their crucial advice in my first consideration of the illustrated press, I want to belatedly thank Jean-Christophe Agnew, Jeanie Attie, Carol Berkin, Betsy Blackmar, Steve Brier, Peter Buckley, Bret Eynon, Roy Rosenzweig, Herbert Sloan, and Rebecca Zurier. The comments of issue editors Pamela Haag and Dewar MacCleod, and reviewers Molly McGarry and Daniel Czitrom were invaluable in revising the article for publication.
1"Anarchy in the coal regions of Pennsylvania.--Scenes about Pottsville among the 'Molly Maguires,'" Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (hereafter cited as FLIN), February 6, 1875; see also "Pennsylvania.--The last loaf--A scene in the coal region during the recent strike," ibid., March 13, 1875. On "special artist" Joseph Becker, who later that year became the superintendent of Frank Leslie's art department (a position he maintained until 1900), see Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850-1900 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), 89-93, and Joseph Becker, "An Artist's Interesting Recollections of Leslie's Weekly," Leslie's Weekly, December 14, 1905 (in which Becker relates his experiences covering the Long Strike including his alliance with a Pinkerton operative.)
2"Editorial Notes," FLIN, April 8, 1875. The author of the editorial reply is difficult to determine. Clear indication of editorial responsibility ends with the departure of Ephraim G. Squier as managing editor around 1873, his twelve-year professional and personal relationship with Frank Leslie destroyed in acrimonious divorce proceedings that involved his wife's affair with the publisher. For possible editorial candidates, see "A Tribute of Respect," ibid., January 31, 1880, which, in a report on a memorial meeting following Frank Leslie's death, lists the personnel comprising the editorial department (although specific responsibility for which Frank Leslie publications is not revealed).
3Neil Harris, "Iconography and Intellectual History: The Half-Tone Effect," in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul K. Conkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 196-211. Extending the pioneering work of William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1974; new ed., 1983) is the most comprehensive formalist consideration of the transformation in engraved visual codes, primarily concerned with how other media were "translated" into engravings; see also the many studies of "high-toned" monthly-magazine illustration, including Arthur John, The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner's Monthly, and the Century Magazine, 1870-1909 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), and Jo Ann Early Levin, "The Golden Age of Illustration: Popular Art in American Magazines, 1850-1925 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1980). Works that address news illustration, such as Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984) and Emily Bardeck Kies, "The City and the Machine: Urban and Industrial Illustration in America, 1880-1900" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1971), begin only with imagery produced after 1880. Significantly, Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978) barely acknowledges the pictorial press until the New York World's commercially-successful daily news illustration in the mid-1880s (and then considers the innovation as a form of advertising). A recent valuable corrective is Rebecca Zurier's chapter, "Toward a History of the Illustrated Press" in her "Picturing the City: New York in the Press and the Art of the Ashcan School, 1890-1917" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1988), 71-126.
4Budd Leslie Gambee, Jr., "Frank Leslie and His Illustrated Newspaper, 1855-1860: Artistic and Technical Operations of a Pioneer Pictorial News Weekly in America" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1963); Madeleine Bettina Stern, Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953); Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Volume II: 1850-1865 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), 43-45, 437-41, 452-65; Volume III: 1865-1885, 41-44; John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741-1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 17-20 passim. For the vast expansion of the pictorial marketplace in the 1850s, see Thomas C. Leonard, The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 57-59, 90-96.
5When Leslie arrived in the United States, the closest publication to the Illustrated London News was Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (started in 1851, purchased and renamed Ballou's Pictorial from 1855 to 1859). Leslie worked for this weekly Boston "family miscellany," which included a smattering of illustrations devoted to the news, from 1851 to 1852.
6P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years' Recollections (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 234-35. Barnum co-owned the short-lived Illustrated News with the New York Sun's H. D. and A. E. Beach.
7Lest the above criticism about the scholarship's neglect of the wood-engraved record seems arcane, it is worthwhile to consider how the scholarship's limited approach has affected public history, particularly the presentation of the Civil War. Ken Burns's 1990 public television series has been celebrated for its utilization of the conflict's vast photographic record; in the course of its eleven-hour length, however, it presents only a handful of the thousands of engravings that conveyed news of the war to the (largely northern) public, not to mention the battlefield sketches upon which they were based, instead often relying on postbellum paintings and prints. For an apt critique, see Jeanie Attie, "The Civil War," Radical History Review, 52 (Winter 1992), 95-104.
8On Frank Leslie's broad readership, see editorials on January 23 and November 20, 1869, commenting on the role of the illustrated press in popular education. See also, the New York Express's remark (cited in FLIN, March 21, 1868): "It is difficult to find out what Mr. Leslie's personal politics are, since his serials all seem to have a different way of thinking; but no one can doubt the ability he bestows in at least hitting all around." J. C. Derby, Fifty Years among Authors, Books and Publishers (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1889), 692-93. My consideration of a "middling" reading public departs from recent historiography of popular culture in the nineteenth century that proposes a rapid bifurcation into "high" and "low" constituencies, most notably Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
9"How Illustrated Newspapers Are Made," FLIN, August 2, 1856; "How an Illustrated Newspaper is Made," ibid., July 7, 1866 (a reprint of a New York Evening Post article); "The Home of Illustrated Literature," Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, 16 (August, 1883), 130-38, 140-41. For the deleterious impact of the process on engravers' craft status, see William J. Linton, "Art in Engraving on Wood," Atlantic Monthly, 43 (June 1879), 708.
10FLIN, April 2, 1859, cited in Budd Leslie Gambee, Jr., Frank Leslie and His Illustrated Newspaper, 1855-1860 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Department of Library Science, 1964), 41. On wood-engraving's narrative, in contrast to lithography's at-a-glance message, see Beatrice Farwell, The Cult of Images (Le Culte des Images): Baudelaire and the 19th-Century Media Explosion (Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara Art Museum, 1977), 9-10; on wood-engraving's explicit narrative in conjunction with the publication's text, see Roger B. Stein, "Picture and Text: The Literary World of Winslow Homer" in Winslow Homer: A Symposium, ed. Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 26 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 33-59. On photography's distinctive time-sense, see Estelle Jussim, "The Eternal Moment: Photography and Time" in The Eternal Moment: Essays on the Photographic Image (New York: Aperture, 1989), 49-60. Michael L. Carlebach, The Origins of Photojournalism in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992) delineates the genesis of photojournalism in the weekly illustrated press, but assumes that engravings were based on photographs.
11Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, from Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 21-70.
12FLIN, April 1, 1871.
13Valerian Gribayedoff, "Pictorial Journalism," The Cosmopolitan, 11:4 (August 1891), 479; Leonard, The Power of the Press, 103-05. The above observation should not negate how readers derived a significant amount of information from such engravings. Aside from presenting a new range of "illustrious Americans"--including, significantly, African-American legislators--pictorial information was often displayed with only cursory captions or brief descriptions in the expectation that readers could identify many of the unnamed assembled faces as well as gain a qualitative sense of the context of news events through the painfully detailed rendering of interiors, scenery, etc.
14The political caricatures appearing in Frank Leslie's never achieved the impact obtained by the work of Thomas Nast in the rival Harper's Weekly. Leslie imported British cartoonist Matthew Somerville Morgan in 1870 to counter Nast's pro-Republican cartoons. Coming in a distant second in his competition with his rival during the 1872 presidential campaign and the subsequent off-year election, by 1876 Morgan had moved on, replaced by Joseph Keppler. Keppler would soon leave to start the satirical weekly Puck, replaced by James Albert Wales. See Thomas Milton Kemnitz, "The Cartoon as a Historical Source," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (Summer, 1973), 81-93; see Leonard, The Power of the Press, 97-131, and Roger A. Fischer, Them Damned Pictures: Explorations in American Political Cartoon Art (North Haven: Archon Books, 1996), 1-23 for the most illuminating recent analyses of Nast's impact.
15Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 1-23; Joshua C. Taylor, America as Art (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976), 37-94. Johns (197-203) locates the device's decline with the Civil War; while her conclusion no doubt characterized the turn in the art market, consideration of postbellum popular print culture suggests a contrary interpretation. For a self-conscious instance of typification, see "Citizens of the United States, according to popular impressions," Harper's Weekly, January 12, 1867.
16Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 3-81; Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 87-120; L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971), 1-15. See Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October, 39 (Winter, 1986), 3-64, on how the intersection of physiognomic codes with the practice of photography contributed to the construction of a vast normative "archive" of criminal types.
17Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
18Karen Haltunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Guy Szuberla, "Ladies, Gentlemen, Flirts, Mashers, Snoozers, and the Breaking of Etiquette's Code," Prospects, 15 (1990), 169-96; David Scobey, "Anatomy of the Promenade: The Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-Century New York," Social History, 17:2 (May 1992), 203-27. My interpretation of the role of the pictorial press departs from these authors' emphasis on the new bourgeoisie's anxiety over the unreliability of appearances; in this view the city ultimately remained unreadable for the uneasy middle class.
19"The Cities of New York," FLIN, October 24, 1874. On the segmented, polarized city as displayed in city guides in the period, see Stuart M. Blumin, "Explaining the New Metropolis: Perception, Depiction, and Analysis in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City," Journal of Urban History, 11 (November, 1984), 9-38; "Introduction: George G. Foster and the Emerging Metropolis" in George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart M. Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1-61.
20On urban boosterism and images of the ideal city, see David M. Scobey, "Empire City: Politics, Culture, and Urbanism in Gilded-Age New York" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1989); Hales, Silver Cities, 67-130.
21FLIN, July 14, 1866. The standard segmentation is clearly elucidated in Frank Leslie's series such as "Life Sketches in the Metropolis," published during 1872. For other contrasts, see the numerous sentimentalized portraits of Christmas in New York (e.g. "Rich and poor; or, the two Christmas dinners.--A scene in Washington Market, sketched from real life," FLIN, January 4, 1873; "Character sketches in the metropolis--Lights and shades of holiday week," ibid., January 1, 1876). Other exceptions proving the rule of segmentation include scenes displaying picturesque street-types, and the mixing of social types in cautionary-tale cuts depicting respectability succumbing to vice (e.g., "The progressive steps in a gambler's career," ibid., June 8, 1867; "An argument against whisky drinking," ibid., March 14, 1874).
22In contrast, the illustrated literary monthlies eschewed unpleasant urban themes, favoring the ideal and the picturesque: Robert J. Scholnick, "Scribner's Monthly and the 'Pictorial Representation of Life and Truth' in Post-Civil War America," American Periodicals, 1:1 (Fall 1991), 59. On the British pictorial press: Michael Wolff and Celina Fox, "Pictures from the Magazines," in The Victorian City: Images and Reality, ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 559-82; Celina Fox, "The Development of Social Reportage in English Periodical Illustration during the 1840s and Early 1850s," Past and Present, 74 (February 1977), 90-111.
23The twofold utility of the illustrated press both to shield and educate was espoused by the directors of the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor when they hired an artist to illustrate the 1884 Annual Report to show contributors how and where the poor lived without requiring them to suffer the hardship of personal exploration. Robert H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 116.
24FLIN, February 2, 1867.
25FLIN, December 8, 1866. The 1866 cut was reprinted in James D. McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life; or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1872), 543, as "The Rough's Paradise." Early on, Frank Leslie's tried to have it both ways, depicting rough sports accompanied by descriptions extolling reform; this tack especially characterized bare-knuckle boxing, where coverage exploited curiosity and interest in the demimonde sport while bristling with moral indignation (e.g., "The arrest of Joe Coburn by detectives Woods and Quinton, while approaching the ring, near Cold Springs Station, Indiana, May 27th, 1868," FLIN, June 13, 1868; "Testimonial to Mr. Ned O'Baldwin, the Irish giant and prize fighter, at the Casino, East Houston Street, New York, on Friday Evening, 3rd inst.," ibid., January 25, 1868). However, boxing soon disappeared from Frank Leslie's pages, giving way to races, regattas, and baseball (see the series of portraits published in 1866, and the declaration in the edition of August 11, 1866, in response to letters, that the paper represented only sports figures of good character). On boxing and sports coverage in the early years, see Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 150-51.
26Other forms of disorder, of course, threatened urban society, notably the corruption of machine politics: see, for example, the representation of the rough members of the 7th District political clubs depicted in "The night before the election at a 'political headquarters' in the Bradley and O'Brien district--Distributing money to the workers," FLIN, November 25, 1871.
27Ibid., March 8, 1873. This engraving ("Drawn from life by Matt. Morgan.") was part of an extended series (see also ibid., March 13, 22, and 29, 1873), culminating in action by the Italian government to curb the "traffic" in child musicians--noted in the edition of April 14, 1875, accompanied by excessive self-congratulation for the paper's pivotal role in the reform. However, Harper's Weekly had also devoted space to Italian child musicians; in fact, the two papers often mirrored coverage of urban poverty and corruption. On reformers' indictment of parental neglect, which fell most heavily upon the shoulders of poor women, and policies to retrieve children from their vicious influence, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986; reprint ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 193-216.
28See, for example, "New York City.--The Italian crone preparing the evening meal," FLIN, March 22, 1873; "Reformation of 'the Wickedest Man in New York'--The noon prayer meeting at John Allen's late dance house, Water Street, N.Y., Sept. 1st," ibid., September 19, 1868; "'The Wickedest Man in New York'--Scene at John Allen's Dance House, 304 Water Street, New York City," ibid., August 8, 1868. See also "The dance-hall at the 'Wickedest Man's' house," Harper's Weekly, August 8, 1868.
29See Figures 3 and 5 above; "Waiting for breakfast--Scene at the door of the Howard Mission, Five Points, New York," FLIN, March 6, 1869; "New York City.--Among the poor--A summer evening scene at the Five Points," ibid., August 16, 1873. Even the hardened features of lost women like the wretched Mrs. McMahan and John Allen's prostitutes bore stories of male seduction and abandonment. Images portraying poor women in the pictorial press were a departure from the domestic tranquility displayed in conventional American genre painting: see Johns, American Genre Painting, 157; on women in genre art, 19-20, 137-75, 201-02.
30FLIN, May 16, 1874. On the gendered boundaries of the streets and the etiquette of female public performance, see Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 69-71, and 58-94 passim; Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, 112-46; Szuberla, "Ladies, Gentlemen, Flirts, Mashers, Snoozers," 169-96. For another type of cut depicting the public threat to endangered women, see "'Found drowned.'--Scene at a coroner's inquest . . . on the Hudson River, New York City," FLIN, July 18, 1874.
31Until 1880, when Georgina A. Davis was first listed as a member of Leslie's art staff, the paper's corps of sketch artists appears to have been only composed of men. For changes in the representation of women after the paper passed under Mrs. Frank Leslie's aegis (the legal name acquired by Miriam Florence Follin after her husband's death in 1880), see Joshua Brown, "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper: The Pictorial Press and the Representations of America, 1855-1889" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1993), 316-26.
32"New York City.--Friday morning in the Fourth Ward--The women's fish-market in Oak Street," FLIN, August 14, 1875. This engraving (along with the 1874 "Running the gauntlet") is reminiscent of Joseph Becker's 1869 depiction of a respectable white woman passing through a "gauntlet" of black marketwomen: see, "The market at Charleston, South Carolina --The season of early vegetables," ibid., June 19, 1869.
33Ibid., December 19, 1874. The "varied crowd" also constituted the "sewing-girls" who manufactured garments on the fourth floor of A. T. Stewart's department store: "New York City.--The sewing-room at A. T. Stewart's, between Ninth and Tenth Streets, Broadway and Fourth Avenue," ibid., April 24, 1875. On the "Bowery Gal," see Stansell, City of Women, 89-100.
34Raymond Williams, Culture (Glasgow: Fontana, 1981), 99.
35FLIN, July 21, 1877; "The Tramp Nuisance," ibid., August 5, 1876 (editorial). As Michael Davis has shown, this view coincided with the labor movement's denunciation of the tramp in the 1870s: "Forced to Tramp: The Perspective of the Labor Press, 1870-1900," in Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790-1935, ed. Eric H. Monkkonen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 141-70.
36FLIN, February 10, 1877. For old types in markedly worse conditions: "Waiting for the second table.--Inmates of the poor-house on Randall's Island, East River, at New York City, forming in line for dinner," ibid., February 13, 1875. For new types in straitened circumstances: "Out of work.--Saturday night at the iron mills during the crisis," ibid., November 15, 1873; "The crisis--The dining hall of St. Barnabas Home, Nos. 304, 306 and 308 Mulberry Street, adjoining police headquarters, an institution for the relief of poor women," ibid., November 15, 1873; "Hard times in New York.--The soup-house No. 110 Centre Street, one of the number instituted by Commodore James Gordon Bennett, and superintended by L. Delmonico," ibid., March 7, 1874 (its description noting the depiction of the presence of many children because their parents were too ashamed to appear in person). See also critical views of the conditions to which the new poor were subjected: "The Tombs prison.--Midnight scene--The matron going the rounds," ibid., May 16, 1874. For Frank Leslie's reluctant editorial recognition of the depression's impact, see the arch comment and cartoon "Twelve Hundred a Year," November 1, 1873 (regarding a clerk's incapacity to support his family on his salary); cf., "The Problem of the Crowd," ibid., July 15, 1876 (an interesting corrective to the paper's infatuation with the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition); "Snow and the Poor," ibid., January 20, 1877 (remaining consistent in its denunciation of the those who willfully refuse to work, the editorial nonetheless now recognized the extremity of destitution). It should be mentioned that Frank Leslie, himself, felt the impact of hard times: although his publishing house weathered the depression, bad investments and ostentatious living led to his bankruptcy and the reorganization of his business in 1877.
37Ibid., September 4, 1875.
38Despite general opprobrium over the Irish Catholic attack on the Protestant march that precipitated the July 12th violence, Frank Leslie's pictorial coverage betrayed an interesting ambivalence toward the troops' suppressive actions, some cuts rendering the victims as blameless as the refugees of the Chicago Fire would shortly be portrayed: compare the engraving of the 1867 St. Patrick's Day riot, ibid., April 6, 1867, with the Orange Riot cuts, ibid., July 29, 1871 (although in the following week, undoubtedly responding to some readers' complaints, Frank Leslie's vociferously back-pedalled to portray the funerals of militia casualties: ibid., August 5, 1871). On the Orange Riot and press coverage, see Michael Gordon, "Studies in Irish and Irish-American Thought and Behavior in Gilded Age New York City" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1977), 289-352.
39The repeated theme of financial panic changes over twenty years. Although the range of Wall Street types remains fairly consistent, the sense of disorder becomes progressively stronger. Compare "The panic in Wall Street," Harper's Weekly, October 10, 1857, with "The great financial panic.--Closing the doors of the Stock Exchange on its members, Saturday, Sept. 20th," FLIN, October 4, 1873 (supplement): the former cut seems to mainly afford readers an opportunity to discern the social types of Wall Street; in the latter cut, chaos is the subject.
40"The shoemakers' strike in Lynn, Mass.--Procession, in the midst of a snow-storm, of eight hundred women operatives joining in the strike, with banners, inscriptions, and working tools, preceded by the Lynn City Guards with music, and followed by four thousand workmen, firemen, &c., March 7, 1860," FLIN, March 17, 1860. For sympathetic treatment of city strikes, see "The strike of the car drivers--Scene in front of the Astor House, New York--A car, moderately-full, escorted off by drivers," ibid., May 5, 1866; "The sailors' strike--Scene on Peck Slip wharf, New York City," ibid., February 20, 1869; "Great eight-hour labor demonstration--The procession of workingmen as it appeared on passing the Cooper Institute," ibid., September 30, 1871. Among anti-eight-hour editorials, see "Eight Hours' Labor Bill," ibid., May 4, 1867; "The Eight Hour Humbug," ibid., July 11, 1868; "Creation and Recreation," ibid., July 15, 1871. On the eight-hour movement and its press coverage, see most recently Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 237-57; Stanley Nadel, "Those Who Would Be Free: The Eight-Hour Day Strikes of 1872," Labor's Heritage, 2 (April, 1990), 70-77. Miners were long a favored subject, but during the Long Strike and its aftermath Frank Leslie's increasingly characterized strikers and unionists as degraded or, under the epithet "Molly Maguires," criminals.
41FLIN, June 29, 1872; "The riot on St. Patrick's Day--The attack on the police at the corner of Grand and Pitt Streets, New York City," ibid., April 6, 1867 (a similar figure appears in Thomas Nast's "'The Day We Celebrate,'" Harper's Weekly, April 6, 1867).
42FLIN, January 31, 1874. See the editorial "'Bread or Blood,'" ibid., January 31, 1874, describing the crowd as composed of "several thousands of the lower grades of workingmen of New York City, most of them Germans, Frenchmen and Poles . . . incited to enthusiasm by leaders who think radically about the antagonism of labor to capital; and many of them knew no alternative to getting bread by the fairest means but that of obtaining it by force, even to the shedding of blood." On press coverage of the Tompkins Square Riot, see Herbert G. Gutman, "The Tompkins Square 'Riot' in New York City on January 13, 1874: A Re-examination of Its Causes and Its Aftermath," Labor History, 6 (Winter 1965), 44-70. For other representations of continental types, see FLIN, December 30, 1871; ibid., June 13, 1874; ibid., June 20, 1874.
43For a typical Grange engraving, see "The farmers' movement in the west.--Meeting of Grangers in the woods near Winchester, Scott County, Illinois," ibid., August 30, 1873. For one editorial recognizing the role of the railroads in exacerbating class tensions, while only granting workers the recourse of the strike as a last, and probably ruinous, choice, see "Lessons 'Long Shore," ibid., December 26, 1874.
44Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959) and Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York: Monad Press, 1977) are the most comprehensive studies of the strike.
45FLIN, August 4, 1877 (supplement); Pittsburgh Leader, July 31, 1877, quoted in "Notes and Comments: OUR RIOT PICTURES," FLIN, August 18, 1877. On John Donaghy (1837-1931), see New-York Historical Society, Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564-1860, ed. George C. Groce and David Wallace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 183. On the 1877 railroad strike as treated in the contemporary press, see Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 475-98. Consideration of Leslie's visual reportage revises Slotkin's interpretation that the militant worker was characterized as "savage" in the aftermath of the strike.
46On "systems of reading," see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (London and New York: Verso, 1987). The move toward visual "realism" would also promote "multi-accentuality" in the narratives of individual engravings (as well as between cuts): the range of types remained, but varied readers could engage in different, interpretational "systems of viewing," no longer confronted by invidious, physiognomic comparisons.
47For new African-American types, see "Plowing in South Carolina," FLIN, October 20, 1866; "A remarkable event in the history of the National Congress--The Hon. John Willis Menard, colored representative from Louisiana, receiving the congratulations of his friends on the floor of the House, Dec. 7th, 1868," ibid., December 26, 1868; "Virginia.--The colored population of Richmond celebrating the anniversary of the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment," ibid., April 20, 1872 (depicting a range of black types).
48See "Philadelphia--Centennial Exposition--Statue of the 'Freed Slave' in Memorial Hall," FLIN, August 5, 1876; "Virginia.--The fatal explosion at the Midlothian coal mine, February 3d--Carrying from the shaft-cage a rescue party overcome by gas," ibid., February 18, 1882; "Virginia.--Tenth Annual Convention of the Knights of Labor, at Richmond--Frank J. Farrell [sic], colored delegate of District Assembly No. 49, introducing General Master Workman Powderly to the Convention," ibid., October 16, 1886.
49See, for example, "The Tilton-Beecher trial.--Portraits and incidents," FLIN, April 3, 1875. On the Beecher-Tilton scandal and its contemporary representations, see Richard Wightman Fox, "Intimacy on Trial: Cultural Meanings of the Beecher-Tilton Affair," in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 103-32; on the scandal's relationship to social conflict, particularly in the volatile nature of a middle class in formation, see Altina L. Waller, Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982).
50FLIN, February 24, 1877.
51The process of photoxylography was perfected by Scribner's Monthly art superintendent Alexander W. Drake, inaugurating the largely formalist "golden age" of art wood engraving. See Levin, "The Golden Age of Illustration," 49-55; James Watrous, American Printmaking: A Century of American Printmaking, 1880-1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 20-26.
52See "A Social Revival," FLIN, July 31, 1875, and the discussion of this Leslie's editorial in Fox, "Intimacy on Trial," 131-32.
If there is any doubt about the aim of such images to report "reality," note the following comment in the description accompanying the 1866 engraving: "On our outside pages we present some of the contrasts that exist in our city, and make up its distinctive character. And these, so far from being exaggerations or caricatures, barely afford an idea of what would strike even the casual observer."
Images of disaster and disease sometimes elicited criticism about the abuses of sensationalism; see the spirited (and characteristically self-serving) editorial response, citing the uses of unpleasant imagery in pursuit of reform, in "Horrible Pictures. The Duties of the Illustrated Press," FLIN, February 15, 1868.
One distinctive public realm defied the prescribed repertoire of public activities. The spectacle of respectable women actively asserting the right to vote was greeted by Leslie's with a certain amount of editorial caution. See, for example, "Washington, D.C.--The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives receiving a deputation of female suffragists, January 11th--A lady delegate reading her argument in favor of woman's voting, on the basis of the 14th and 15th Constitutional Amendents," ibid., February 4, 1871. Notwithstanding occasional images that (along with editorials) heralded women's achievements in new fields (emphasizing education, albeit largely in sex-segregated institutions), Leslie's interpreted women's intervention in politics as promoting, in the title of a March 16, 1872 editorial, a "New Order of Amazons." Suffragist agitation represented yet one instance of freakish behavior lately exhibited by women, including the maraudings of female murderers, husband-beaters, and the women communards of Paris. "The New Order of Amazons," ibid., March 16, 1872. Still, Frank Leslie's could not ignore the persistent public activism of reform-minded women, exemplified most spectacularly in the militant Ohio temperance campaigns of 1874. While Leslie's endorsed such efforts--indeed the campaign provoked illustrated reports on alcoholism in New York, as well as a series of special-supplement temperance cartoons--it could not refrain from portraying the activity of the female protagonists, however laudable, in a comical light. See, "Women's whisky war in Ohio.--Open-air prayer-meeting in front of Dotze's Saloon, Springfield, Ohio," ibid., February 28, 1874; "The Ohio whisky war.--The ladies of Logan singing hymns in front of barrooms in aid of the temperance movement," ibid., February 21, 1874. For other farcical images of women's public intervention, see "Congressional pests--Laddy lobbyists importuning senators, at the Capitol, Washington, D.C.," ibid., March 6, 1869; "Ladies' dress reform meeting at Freeman Place Chapel, Boston, Mass.," ibid., June 20, 1874.
The Orange Riot raises the issue of ethnic physiognomic stereotyping. The acute observations of the many studies of ethnic typing--notably Curtis, Apes and Angels--nevertheless tend to freeze the device; if Frank Leslie's is any indication, social typing of Irish-Americans is volatile in the period: aside from the untyped "illustriousness" of famous Irish faces, one can observe a range of distinctive Irish physiognomies across type in certain engravings (e.g., in the numerous cuts of Fenian activities in 1866). Frank Leslie's seemingly contradictory treatment of Irish types reflected its general coverage of the Catholic Church, leading to endorsements like the following by the New York Catholic Total Abstinence Union: "While the Harpers are blackguarding us at every turn, it is pleasant to have this able journal animated by the spirit of even-handed justice and fair play toward our Church." FLIN, October 12, 1875.
With the above said, it must be noted that Frank Leslie's devoted a surprising amount of coverage to the New York branch of the International Workingmen's Association, perhaps responding to the interest of the readers of the paper's German edition. An editorial and cartoon critical of police suppression of an orderly memorial procession for the Paris Commune (ibid., December 30, 1871) was quickly followed by a sober and unthreatening engraving of the march (ibid., January 6, 1872).
The use of troops against citizenry, in and of itself, possibly contributed to the ambivalence and contradiction within and among the engravings. General suspicion of arbitrary military and constabulary conduct runs through Frank Leslie's. See, for example, editorials critical of police brutality in FLIN, November 3, 1866; ibid., September 21, 1867; ibid., October 19, 1867. Belief in the blamelessness of victims in violent and disastrous incidents seems to have been a contributing factor in the lessening of typification (as indicated in the engravings depicting the Chicago fire: see ibid., November 18, 1871).
Realism, in this context, does not denote any coherent school of art as much as, in Alan Trachtenberg's phrase, "a tendency . . . to depict contemporary life without moralistic condescension." Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 182. A similar turn toward realism in British illustrated journalism can be seen in engravings published in the Graphic during the 1870s; see Julian Treuherz, Hard Times: Social Realism and Victorian Art (London: Lund Humphries, 1987), 53-64. On photography and realism, see Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts; cf., Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 73-102, which discusses nineteenth-century photographic realism's balancing of mimesis and artifice. See also Dan Schiller, "Realism, Photography and Journalistic Objectivity in 19th Century America," Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, 4 (Winter 1977), 86-95; idem, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 76-95. Although Schiller overstates the impact of photography on literary and journalistic realism, his critical evaluation of the culturally-constructed limits of photographic representation suggests how Leslie's variegated readership might undermine a unitary notion of "objectivity."
In the wake of the Civil War, Frank Leslie's dispatched James E. Taylor and Joseph Becker to report on the South, a terra incognito to much of its readership. Although the resulting engravings presented admiring depictions of the work of the Freedmen's Bureau and gruesome evidence of the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan, Frank Leslie's grew increasingly dismissive of charges of racial terrorism. Reflecting a self-proclaimed "independent" political position, which would lead to alignments with the Liberal-Republicans in 1872 and the Democratic Party in 1876, Frank Leslie's conflated the corruption of the Grant Administration with its maintenance, however half-hearted, of Reconstruction policies in the South.
Recent studies of the visual representation of African Americans tend to emphasize "high art," dismissing the popular realm entirely or ignoring news images that complicate the general view of a seamless racism. See Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art. Volume Four: From the American Revolution to World War One: 1. Slaves and Liberators; 2. Black Models and White Myths (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940 (Washington, D.C.: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1990). An exception is Francis John Martin, "The Image of Black People in American Illustration from 1825 to 1925" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1986), although the overall interpretation aligns with the above studies. An unusually nuanced work is Peter H. Wood and Karen C. C. Dalton, Winslow Homer's Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988).