Editors left their mark on American literature

Between about 1910 and 1920, the Mobile Register’s staff included two editors, Rice Gaither and Henry Herschel Brickell, who would become prominent in the Southern Renaissance literary movement that began in the late 1920s. Gaither’s wife Frances gained even more recognition for her fiction than did her husband for his. Brickell is considered one of the greatest literary critics of the first half of the 20^th century and his book reviews made the careers of many Renaissance-era writers.

Two other Register editors on the staff at the time, Garrard Harris and David Rankin Barbee, also became well-known writers. They don’t strictly fit the description for the Southern Renaissance, but they can be considered along with their colleagues. The roots of the Renaissance perhaps can be seen in Harris’ writing. Barbee, who went by his middle name Rankin, is best known for writing about Southern history. While the Southern Renaissance included historians, Barbee’s contempt for African Americans put him outside the character of the movement.

During the Renaissance, Southern literature gained considerable energy as writers, whose works would become American classics, began their careers after World War I. The period marked the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Zora Neale Hurston among others.

Writers of the movement broke from common Southern cultural literary themes, notably glorifying the antebellum South and the Confederacy. They addressed the burden of slavery and racism. They were highly critical of contemporary life in the South. Their works concerned the loss of personal identity in a region where family, religion, and community were more highly valued than a personal life. Here is a look at each of the writers:

Rice and Frances Gaither

Rice Gaither

Rice Gaither was born June 9, 1888, in La Grange, Tennessee. When Rice was about 12 years old, his family moved to Corinth, Mississippi. There his physician father opened a practice and his mother played organ for the Methodist Church.

The woman who would become Rice’s wife, Frances “Frankie” Ormond Jones, also was born in Tennessee, about 16 miles north of La Grange in Somerville, on May 21, 1889. Her family also moved to Corinth and in high school Frankie became attracted to Rice “because he too wanted to be a writer.” Frankie earned a bachelor’s degree from the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College, now the Mississippi University for Women, in 1909.

Frances Gaither

Rice, meanwhile, attended the University of Mississippi. There, according to the Ole Miss annual, he worked toward both a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Science. An active student, Rice joined Phi Kappa Psi Greek fraternity, the YMCA, and sang tenor in the Glee Club. He served as the editor of alumni news for Varsity Voice, a “weekly journal of college life,” in ’08 and a year later was the editor-in-chief. Rice graduated from Ole Miss in 1910.

Rice seems to have joined the Mobile Register staff soon after graduating from Ole Miss and he and Frankie married on April 25, 1912. Rice became city editor by 1914, and then the managing editor.

Though Rice worked in Mobile, he and Frankie invested in considerable tracts of land in Baldwin County, including a house on Pomelo Street in Fairhope that they called “home.” Rice’s job at the Register didn’t provide a salary that could afford those kind of investments, which indicated that the couple could call on a good deal of family wealth.

For many years, the Gaithers used their Fairhope home as a writing retreat. They wrote from 9 o’clock in the morning until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. A sign on the front door said “No visitors until after 4 p.m.”

But during the weekends and in the late evenings, the Gaithers opened their home to many of the South’s leading writers and artists. The Gaithers’ hospitality was the subject of the Register’s society editor Nettie Chandler in her popular column “Betty letters,” letters from the fictitious Betty Bienville lavishly chronicling the goings on of Mobile society. The columnist wrote that the Gaithers were “really old timey in their congeniality,” meaning that they entertained people in their home rather than going out for excitement.

Those who visited with the Gaithers included artist and muralist John Roderick Dempster MacKenzie; popular journalist, novelist, and short story writer Roark Bradford; and successful businessman and author of numerous novels and short stories Williams March Campbell.

The Gaithers kept their Fairhope home even after Rice became the managing editor of the Meridian Dispatch in Mississippi in late 1916. In October 1917, Gaither became a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and in 1929 the New York Times hired him as a reporter and feature writer. Gaither worked for the Times until his death in 1953.

The Gaithers’ move to New York was designed to aid their literary careers more than Gaither’s journalistic ambitions. While Rice reported widely for the Times and had his short stories published in leading literary magazines, it was Frankie’s writing that found the most success and notice.

Working as a freelance writer, she published many short stories and reviews, wrote one major biography, authored four children’s books during the 1930s, and three novels in the 1940s.

As a novelist, Frankie belonged to a school of white Southern writers who used literature to influence politics and advance black rights. They viewed black characters and themes as part of American history and literature and won praise for their sensitive treatments of these characters. One side of Frances Gaither’s family hailed from Maine and the other Tennessee, where her grandfather worked his cotton plantation with slaves. She pointed to this family mix as the reason for her deep concern for the plight of blacks.

Gaither’s novels portrayed the antebellum South without mint juleps, white columns, or contented slaves, a sharp contrast to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, which was published in 1936.

Reviewers for the New Yorker, New York Times, and the Saturday Review of Literature highly praised her novel Follow the Drinking Gourd, published in 1940, and re-issued in paperback in 1968. Her last novel, Double Muscadine, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and also garnered praise from reviewers. One of those reviewers happened to be the Gaithers’ old friend and former colleague, Herschel Brickell. In his review for the New York Times, Brickell proclaimed Double Muscadine “a novel of unmistakable  distinction.”

Frances Gaither died two years after her husband Rice at the home of relatives in Rockledge, Florida, on October 28, 1955.

Henry Herschel Brickell

Henry Herschel Brickell was born September 13, 1889, in Senatobia, Mississippi, but grew up in Yazoo City. With an insatiable appetite for reading, Brickell spent hours in the Ricks Memorial Library and consumed one or two books a day after the school year ended. In high school, he played right guard on the Yazoo Public School No. 1 football team and played in the state’s first interscholastic football match. He graduated valedictorian of his class.

Herschel Brickell

Brickell enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1906, the same time Rice Gaither was there, and majored in English. Brickell quickly became involved in the school’s Hermean Literary Society. In 1908, he became a member of Sigma Kappa Beta, composed of students awarded the Marcus Elvis Taylor Memorial medal. The medal is the university’s highest academic award, recognizing students with at least a 3.90 grade-point average.

In 1909, Brickell served as editor-in-chief of the University of Mississippi Magazine. Here he began encouraging such writers as Arthur Palmer Hudson, whose first poem appeared in the magazine. Brickell also reported “Locals,” one-sentence snippets on students’ comings and goings, for Varsity Voice. Brickell’s fellow students elected him as president of his junior class, but in 1910, after repeatedly failing math, Brickell left Ole Miss without graduating and joined his friend Rice on the staff of the Mobile Register. By 1914, he was the telegraph editor.

A battalion sergeant major of the 4^th Alabama Infantry, Brickell was called to Montgomery with 3,200 members of other units of the National Guard on May 18, 1916. The troops were nationalized in June and ordered in October to join regular Army troops along the border with Mexico to guard against the raids of Poncho Villa. The Alabama units didn’t fight or even cross the border.

[Note: Brickell’s biographers offer a confusing timeline of Brickell’s life. During this period, for example, the Lives of Mississippi Authors says that Brickell worked as a reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser after leaving Ole Miss and was editor of a paper in Pensacola, Florida, in 1914 before going with the Alabama National Guard to Mexico. None of Brickell’s biographers mention his time at the Register. Also Brickell wouldn’t have been in the Alabama National Guard if he was working in Florida at the time. Lives also says Brickell served in the First Regiment, but it is more likely he was in the Fourth.]

After the Mexico expedition, Brickell returned to Mississippi and became editor of the Jackson Daily News. In 1918, he married Norma Long of Jackson, and the following year the couple moved to New York where Brickell worked on the copy desk of the Evening Post. From 1919 to 1923 he reported news stories and wrote editorials.

He found his passion in 1923 reviewing new books by Southern authors in his daily column, “Books on Our Table.” Among the authors he encouraged were Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Margaret Mitchell, Stark Young, Langston Hughes, and William Alexander Percy. Over the next 30 years, Brickell contributed reviews and essays to the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Saturday Review of Literature, Atlantic Monthly, and many other major publications. Brickell became recognized as one of the country’s most influential book critics.

In 1928, Brickell became an editor for book publisher Henry Holt and Company, where he sought out new literary talent. Brickell returned to the Post as literary editor in 1934. He favorably reviewed Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, published in 1936. Taken with the book, Brickell traveled to Georgia that summer to meet Mitchell and they became friends, writing and visiting over the years.

Edwin Grandberry, Margaret Mitchell,
and Herschel Brickell

In 1939, Brickell received a Julius Rosenwald Foundation award to study the history of Natchez and a Guggenheim fellowship to study in Spain. Both projects were to lead to books, but neither did.

During World War II, Brickell worked as senior cultural relations assistant to the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Columbia, returning to the States in 1943 and working for the State Department until 1947. His government service overlapped his literary work.

Brickell had his greatest influence on American literature as editor of the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Short Stories yearly series from 1941 to 1951. These collections of the best short stories published in U.S. magazines introduced talented young fiction writers to a world audience. Authors Brickell presented included Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger, and Ray Bradbury. Yazoo City historian Sam Olden said, “Eudora Welty once told me that the first real recognition she ever got was when he was editor of the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories and he selected her for an award.”

After a trip to research the state of humanities in South America for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1952, Brickell and his wife returned to their home, Acorn Cottage, in Ridgefield, Connecticut. One of his fellow Mississippians, a fellow writer, and friend Stark Young lived nearby.

In 1952, Brickell and his wife Norma had begun preparing to edit the next O. Henry short stories anthology. When Norma awoke on the morning of May 29, she noted Herschell’s absence. She discovered their garage door closed and her husband’s pajama-clad body inside the running car. 

Brickell left no message. “Hard work and a tendency to despondency were the reasons suggested by police and physicians to account for Mr. Brickell’s death,” the Ridgefield Press reported.

At the 1938 Bread Loaf Writers Conference, from left in chairs, historian
Bernard DeVoto, poet Robert Frost, Herschel Brickell, and conference director
Theodore Morrison. On steps, Frost's secretary Kay Morrison
and writer Helen Everitt.

Garrard Harris

Garrard Harris was born May 14, 1876, in Columbus, Georgia. He attended the University of Georgia and North Georgia Agricultural College before earning a law degree in 1902 from Millsap College in

Jackson, Mississippi. He edited one of the capital’s newspapers for a time, married Mary Lou Sykes on November 14, 1906, and practiced law in Jackson until 1911.

Harris’ official biographies show a gap in his career between 1911 and 1914, which must have been the time he was the associate editor at the Register. He’s included among the staff listed in the One Hundredth Anniversary & Seventy-third Annual Trade Review of the Register issued in late 1914.

Harris also took on work with the government, some of which may have overlapped his job at the Register but at some point became full-time. He served as a special agent to Latin America with the U.S. Department of Commerce from 1914-1917. For two years after that he served as a specialist and editor with the Federal Board of Vocational Education, which had state offices. Then he became a commissioner with the U.S. Department of Commerce until 1920.

In the spring 1920, Birmingham News publisher Victor H. Hanson hired Harris as associate editor, a job he held until his death in 1927.

Harris had shown an interest in writing fiction from an early age. The magazine Short Stories published one of his stories in November 1893 and he continued writing short stories until his death. Argosy All-Story Weekly magazine also published his short stories. He wrote three novels, Joe the Book Farmer, Trail of the Pearl, and Treasure of the Land, all published by Harper and Brothers.

David Rankin Barbee

David Rankin Barbee was born on October 15, 1874, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His father, a Methodist minister, was the first chaplain commissioned by Jefferson Davis as Confederate president. It was highly unlikely, then, that Rankin would reject his rebel heritage. Barbee viewed himself as an “unreconstructed” Southerner.

Barbee attended Emory and Henry College in Emory, Virginia, about 1892 and studied medicine 1895-96 at Vanderbilt University, without receiving a degree. He once said he “never was graduated from anything from kindergarten to the university.” He also never stayed at any one newspaper very long:

• 1896-1899: reporter, Nashville Banner
• 1901: reporter, Nashville American
• 1901-1908: telegraph editor, Memphis Commercial Appeal
• 1908: editor, Chattanooga Star
• 1908-1910: news editor, Memphis Commercial Appeal
• 1910-1911: managing editor, Montgomery Advertiser
• 1911-1918: managing editor, Mobile Register
• 1918-1926: news editor, New Orleans States
• 1926-1928: managing editor, Asheville Citizen
• 1928-1932: feature writer, Washington Post

While at the Register Barbee found some time to get married to Elina Guzman in 1913, which may be why he lingered at newspaper longer than he did at most.

In 1928, the Washington Post hired Barbee as a feature writer. His column “Profiles” earned a large and loyal audience.

Barbee joined the Roosevelt administration in 1933 as a public relations writer and moved around in departments as he had newspapers. He started as an assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, then for the Federal Alcohol Administration, followed by the Treasury Department.

From his retirement in 1942 until his death in 1958, Barbee devoted his time to historical research. He had wide-ranging interests but mainly focused on Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, confederate spy Rose O'Neil Greenhow, and Southern history.

Barbee was a member of a generation of Southern historians and writers who took seriously the need to present their understanding of the South’s role in the growth of the national.

His articles appeared in such journals as Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine and the Southern Churchman. Barbee also wrote about his research in letters to editors of newspapers and periodicals. Barbee published two major works: Washington: City of Mighty Events and An Excursion in Southern History.

Historian Terry A. Barnhart found that Barbee sometimes confused different facts, indulged in hearsay evidence, and was prone to overstatement. Barnhart also thought that Barbee let his Southern loyalties cloud his judgment.

Barbee’s judgment embroiled him in controversy in 1935. Barbee claimed in an AP interview that Elizabeth Keckly, a formerly enslaved woman who became dressmaker to First Mary Todd Lincoln, wasn’t the author of an 1868 memoir about the Lincolns’ lives in the White House. Barbee had a deeply held belief that no black woman in 1868 “had enough culture to have written such a book.”

Further research by the AP and amateur historian John E. Washington proved Barbee wrong and resulted in Washington’s book They Knew Lincoln published in 1941.

Barnhart accurately observed that “Barbee had a journalist’s nose for a good story, wrote well, and compiled valuable source materials, but he was still fighting the Civil War—self-consciously and fearlessly.”

Barbee died in Orange, Texas, on March 7, 1958.

Auction sales put consumer goods on merchants' shelves and sale ads supported Mobile newspapers

Mobile Gazette ad 1819

Auction house advertising was an important source of income for the Mobile Register and other newspapers in the early 1800s. Auctioneers controlled vast amounts of credit and served as virtual banks. These roles gave auctioneers considerable influence in Mobile’s business community between 1815, when the War of 1812 ended, and 1837, when an economic recession began and the auction system started to fade away.

The War of 1812 ground U.S. commerce nearly to a standstill. The British blockade of Atlantic ports didn’t affect Mobile for most of the war because the town was a small Spanish outpost on the Gulf frontier and Spain was allied to Britain. The Americans took possession of Mobile in 1813. With the end of the war in 1815, Mobile folded into the American marketplace and began to grow as settlers poured into the Alabama territory.

British warehouses bulged with unsold goods during the war. With peace, English manufacturers soon flooded U.S. Atlantic ports with chinaware, textiles, hardware, and all manner of other goods. New York benefitted most from this trade. Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other Atlantic ports received lesser amounts of trade.

Mobile Gazette ad 1820

Enterprising American auctioneers at the Atlantic ports learned they could sell more of the goods faster than regular merchants and auctions became a major means British manufacturers sold their goods into the American market. Auctioneers sold their stock quickly for cash and restocked quickly with the newest and most stylish items. Because the Early Republic didn’t have a well formed wholesale distribution system, auctions helped fill the need of getting goods to retailers.

Mobile benefited from this import trade indirectly for the most part. Agents in U.S. Atlantic ports shipped the English goods to Mobile and New Orleans. Auctioneers, brokers, and commission merchants disposed of the goods from there.

Auctioneers could only sell at an open auction. Brokers brought buyers and sellers together and could make private sales. They were paid by either the buyer or seller. Commission merchants, also called factors, acted for the seller. They could receive goods for sale, exchange, or dispose of them by other means and were paid either by the seller or from a commission on the sales.

Mobile Register ad 1827

Even before Alabama became a state in 1819, the territorial government regulated auctions, unlike other forms of trade. The Territorial Legislature required auctioneers to have a license, issued for two years, from the governor. Auctioneers had to provide a surety bond, between $500 and $3,000, at the discretion of the governor. They paid to the county tax collector a $1 state sales tax on every $100 of goods they sold. The law limited auctioneers to a commission of $1 for every $100 of sales. The Mobile city government also licensed auctioneers, unlike regular merchant trade. The newspaper editor with the most political influence at City Hall usually obtained the profitable auction-room advertising.

Scholars have focused a great deal of attention on the auction system of New York City. That’s because there are extensive records and statistics regarding New York auctions, which dominated the U.S. market. Records for other cities, such as Mobile, are wanting and we know little about their auction systems. But some facts about Mobile auctions and auctioneers can be gleaned from advertisements and news stories on the pages of the Register.

George Davis, Sr., one of Mobile’s most colorful auctioneers, arrived in the Port City around 1824 from Tuscaloosa, where he had operated a store and hotel since 1820. His business interests in Mobile included an inn, a store, and a livery stable, and he also speculated in real estate. He served as the Mobile agent for New Orleans slave dealer Levy Jacobs. Because Davis was a common name, George gave himself the title of “the ORIGINAL George Davis.”

Davis lived up to his billing. “A quick shrill voice, a flexible manner, ready wit, and free and exhaustless humor, made his sales attractive as well as effective, and rendered him an agreeable companion for all the lovers of mirth and jovial social intercourse,” the Register said.

The paper noted of Davis that, “Large sums of money passed through his hands but they were always accounted for with scrupulous fidelity.” In their business, auctioneers mostly insisted on cash, but cash was hard to come by on the frontier. In its place, auctioneers accepted endorsed promissory notes. They might extend credit for 6 to 8 months to large buyers. A merchant who could establish credit with an auctioneer gained a solid business reputation. Davis reminded his customers that if they could not pay in cash, a promissory note “in case of mortality would save much trouble to Administrators. . . .”

These financial services made the auction houses a hub of commercial activities and gave auctioneers a great deal influence in the Mobile business community. The Port City in 1830 was still only a small town of about 3,200 people and many of those were slaves. By 1840, the population had grown to around 13,000, including about 4,500 slaves. Although Mobile’s population was more than four times larger, it was still a small community.

Auctioneers stood out for their wealth. They often served as bank directors and received extensive lines of credit. Philip McLoskey, a principal in McLoskey, Hagan & Co., served as president of the Planters’ and Merchants’ Bank in Mobile.

Auctioneers took part in the community in other ways as well. Davis performed comic songs on the Mobile theater sage. He sponsored Democrat Party gatherings and even ran for alderman in 1838, but then quickly withdrew. His candidacy may have been intended as a joke, as was the case when he ran for mayor three years later.

Auctioneer Solomon I. Jones volunteered in the Neptune Engine Company No. 2, served several terms on the Board of Aldermen, and became a lieutenant colonel in the Alabama State Militia. He joined the Odd Fellows fraternal organization and became a trustee of the Congregation Shaarai Shomayim.

Jones also served for a time as a port warden. This political appointment aided his business interests. Warden’s jobs differed from port to port and from time to time. They often examined vessels to make sure they were seaworthy. They also inspected cargo, which gave Jones some control over goods being sold in Mobile and an advantage over competitors.

Most of Mobile’s auction houses were located close to one another on Water Street, from Government Street to St. Michael Street, or on a side street. That was only about a block from the Mobile River wharves and within easy reach of any incoming vessel.

The auction and commission merchant firm of Robertson, Beal & Co. conducted its business from the corner of Water and St. Francis streets. John Wylie, also an auctioneer and commission merchant, operated from Water Street between Government and Conti streets. Davis, meanwhile, had his auction stand at the corner of Royal and Conti streets, a block west of Water. All of these businesses were within a block or two of the Register and other newspapers located around Royal and Dauphin streets.

Auctioneers could deal in all sorts of goods but after a while they tended to specialize. Davis handled livestock such as horses, mules, asses, and cattle, but also traded in humans—slaves. Still conducting auctions at age 70 in 1840, Davis said that the other auctioneers in Mobile, except for two, agreed to give him a monopoly on the sale of animals and slaves, “in consequence of the great age and exemplary character of the ORIGINAL.”

By the time Davis announced his near monopoly, the auction system had already declined as a distribution system. Auctions returned to their more traditional purposes and auctioneers branched out in their businesses.

In 1837, Sol Jones and his younger brother Israel Jones opened an auction house and store in Mobile. The brothers specialized in tobacco, but also offered general commission services. By the 1840s, the Jones brothers had higher dollar sales than Davis and had become wealthy citizens.

Ralph Canter moved to Mobile from New Orleans and in 1840 opened an auction and commission business. Along with his wife Sara and her widowed sister-in-law Jane Da Costa, Canter also opened a dry goods and fancy store on Dauphin Street, between Royal and Water streets.

The growing sophistication of the national wholesale distribution network, the rise in domestic importers, and new forms of credit proved more efficient than the auction system in getting goods into the hands of merchants. Auction houses could still make plenty of money, but they played a smaller part in the local and national economy.

'EtaoinShrdlu' once a part of newspapering life

A short penny paper sidebar to the career of a partisan political editor

The Mobile Ledger founded in 1841

John Forsyth, called by his biographer “a key figure in the golden age of partisan newspapers,” took one of the oddest steps in his journalism career in late 1841. After four years as one of the Democrat Party’s most vocal partisan editors, Forsyth announced he was no longer going to be a party man.

Forsyth and his editorial partner Hamilton Ballentyne launched the independent Mobile Daily Ledger on December 6, 1841. They told readers the paper was “neither devoted to the support of any particular political party . . .  nor yet confined to a strait-laced neutrality.”

Since 1837, Forsyth had been co-owner of the daily Mobile Commercial Register and Patriot, which supported the Democrat Party. Starting the Ledger raises a lot of questions such as:

• Why did Forsyth start the Ledger when he still owed for the purchase of the Register?
• Where did the money come from to start the new publication?
• Did he intend the Ledger to be an additional paper, or did he intend to sell the Register?
• The Ledger must have been in the planning for several months, so was there some significance to the timing?
• Forsyth and the Democrats had just come through the bruising 1840 election against the Whigs, why abandon the partisan path now?

Answers to some of those questions may be found in Forsyth’s and Ballentyne’s plan to conduct the

John Forsyth Jr., Courtesy of Library of Congress

Ledger on “what is known in the Northern cities as ‘the penny system.’” The two men said the penny system reaps “harvests of rich rewards” for newspaper owners, the “best evidence of its utility and favor with the public.” Forsyth and Ballentyne were looking to make money.

Forsyth and Ballentyne wrote that their new publication’s “chief aim . . . will be to become a sprightly, and useful newspaper—to avoid heavy matter and long articles, to afford a compendium of news, foreign and domestic political, religious and literary, and to promote the instruction and amusement of all classes of readers.” This style of content was characteristic of the New York penny papers the editors referred to.

Benjamin Day launched his New York Sun in 1833 and sent newsboys out on the city’s streets to sell them to the public for a penny. At a time when most conventional dailies sold for 6 cents, Day’s cheap paper not only proved successful but seemed revolutionary. Other publishers followed his lead.

Since then, penny papers, especially those in New York, have achieved mythical status among most journalism historians. These historians have claimed that penny paper publishers essentially created the first modern commercial papers, independent from politically parties. They also credit penny papers with inventing the modern concept of news, and then of using newsboys to hawk it on the streets when most papers relied on yearly subscriptions.

The trouble with this portrayal is that it is misleading and occasionally flat wrong. As journalism historian Julie Hedgepeth Williams pointed out, Benjamin Mecom produced the first penny paper in America, the Penny Post of Philadelphia, in 1769. The Post was not a long-term success. Other attempts at selling newspapers for a penny followed: The Cent of Philadelphia, the Bostonian, and the New York Morning Post, which started out at two cents a copy and quickly went to a penny. None of these papers proved successful in the long term, either. So it is accurate to say that Day’s Sun proved more successful than the earlier penny papers.

Most historians also credit penny papers with adopting new technologies, such as the telegraph and high-speed presses. They also claim that the penny papers introduced new jobs such as reporters and new sources of income from advertising.

Again, there are flaws in this depiction. Earlier newspapers, including the Mobile Register until about 1834, exercised neutrality and objectivity in presenting information. The Register and other conventional newspapers also used reporters, took steps to speed up transmitting news by mail on land and water, as well as rapidly acquiring faster presses.

The penny papers were just one class of newspapers in New York, Mobile, and elsewhere. Mobile had nonpartisan papers, political party papers, commercial papers, agricultural papers, literary papers, humor papers, and others. They published as weeklies, bi-weeklies, tri-weeklies, and dailies. Dailies were not the most common form of newspapers. These publications experienced varying degrees of success, especially in Mobile, still a frontier town in the 1820s and 1830s.

Communications researcher John C. Nerone has pointed out that the rise of popular partisan politics and the market economy in the early 1800s affected every class of newspaper in different ways. Cheaper prices and growing circulation, faster presses, street sellers, reporters, and newsy content can be found in all newspapers to one degree or another. Penny papers also adopted existing newspaper formats and some of them printed on antiquated hand presses.

Both Richmond and New Orleans claim to have had penny papers before they appeared in Mobile. The accuracy of that claim depends on how you define a penny paper. Defining a penny paper would seem to be simple and straightforward. It cost a reader one cent. But contemporaries seemed to define penny papers more by their business practices and content than by their street price.

The Library of Virginia asserts that James A. Cowardin and William H. Davis published the first penny paper south of Baltimore, the four-page Daily Dispatch of Richmond, on October 19, 1850. And it was priced at one cent and had content typically found in penny papers.

Francis Asbury Lumsden and George Wilkins Kendall, a former typesetter on the Mobile Register in 1833, began the New Orleans Picayune on January 25,1837. New Orleans’ historians say that it was patterned after the penny press. The Picayune took its name from a Spanish half-real silver coin then in circulation, a picayune, worth about 6 ¼ cents. At 6 ¼ cents, the Picayune was 5 ¼ cents too much to be a penny paper pricewise.

A picayune

For the Picayune, being patterned after the penny papers seems to refer to its business and news practices. This includes contracting with newsboys for street sales, hiring reporters, and setting up a pony express system to get news faster from the East.

Back in Mobile, Solomon Child published the Mobile Times “upon the plan of the Penny Papers” in July 1837. Child also said the Times would be Democrat and mercantile. The Times sold for 6 ¼ cents a copy, the same single-issue price as the Picayune and the Ledger.

What the Ledger, Times, and the Picayune seem to have meant by being patterned after the penny press was not their single-issue price, but a cash system of circulation. The newspapers sold their editions for cash to distributors who then sold the papers to readers however they deemed best, either subscription or street sales.

Subscriptions for the Mobile papers brought their single-issue cost down. The Ledger didn’t take subscriptions for longer than a month at 75 cents. That brought the single-issue price down to about 3 cents. A subscription for one week cost 25 cents, or about 3.5 cents a copy. The Times sold three-month subscriptions for $2.50, about 3.5 cents a copy.

The Ledger contracted with about 10 carriers, or newsboys, “to serve customers in every part of the City.” But a focus on street sales is misleading. Even in New York, carriers sold the overwhelming number of penny newspapers by subscription. Carriers sold only about one out of every 10 papers on the street. Not surprisingly, newsboys who bought their papers in bulk in cash from the publisher preferred to sell to regular customers by subscription. And any start-up newspaper needed a subscription list to begin publishing and selling advertising.

The penny system was significant not for single-issue street sales but because it eliminated the common newspaper problem of unpaid subscriptions. “It will be perceived at once that the cheapness of the Ledger and its system of distribution and sales by a large corps of active news boys,” Forsyth and Ballentyne said, “will give it a wide circulation and render it the best medium of public advertising. Circulation will be the great object to which the study and industry of the undersigned will be directed; and to render it agreeable to the tastes, and useful to the pursuits of all classes, other pens and other talents than those of the editors will be pressed into the service.”

The real barrier to a large circulation for the Ledger or any other paper in Mobile was the city’s slim population. In 1840, Mobile had just 12,672 people and nearly half them were slaves, who couldn’t buy newspapers.

Even before the Ledger published its first issue, Forsyth suffered a personal setback that affected his ambitions for the new paper. His father died unexpectedly on October 21, 1841, in Washington, D.C. Forsyth left Mobile for Columbus, Georgia, to settle his father’s estate.

Forsyth had apparently planned to return to Mobile and the Ledger, but legal issues dragged on. In 1842, the owners’ names on the Ledger masthead changed from Forsyth and Ballentyne to Ballentyne and Company. In 1845, Forsyth retuned to Mobile to sell his Summerville home. He had decided to stay in Columbus and it would take him until 1850 to settle his father’s estate.

Because Forsyth still owed Thaddeus Sanford for the purchase of the Register, Sanford resumed ownership of the paper as the easiest means of settling accounts. The change in owners may have been in the works before Forsyth’s father died and before the Ledger began publication.

Upon returning to the helm of the Mobile Daily Commercial Register and Patriot, Sanford combined it with his former partner S.F. Wilson’s Merchants & Planters Journal, begun just three years before. Sanford changed the combined papers’ name to the Mobile Register and Journal on December 1, 1841.

Without Forsyth’s guiding hand, the Ledger eventually failed and so ended its experiment with the penny paper system. Little is known about the Times, but it also proved short-lived.

NOTES

Lonnie A. Burnett, The Pen Makes a Good Sword: Joh Forsyth of the Mobile Register. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 2; 34

“Prospectus,” The Mobile Daily Ledger, December 8, 1841 1:1

Julie Hedgepeth Williams, “The Founding of the Penny Press: Nothing New Under The Sun, The Herald, or The Tribune.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Journalism Historians Association (Salt Lake City, Utah, October 6-9, 1993)

John C. Nerone, “The Mythology of the Penny Press.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 4:4 (1987), 376-404

“James Andrew Cowardin,” Library of Virginia. Online: https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/online_classroom/union_or_secession/people/james_cowardin; Accessed October 5, 2019

Mobile Daily Commercial Register and Patriot, August 9, 1837 2:6

“The Press,” Historical New Orleans. Online: http://www.storyvilledistrictnola.com/newspapers.html.

Earliest Photograph of Register Full of Detail

The Register Building
Photo Courtesy Historic Mobile Preservation Society

Enlarged Balcony Section

Enlarged Sidewalk Section

This photo of the Mobile Register building at the southwest corner of Royal and St. Michael streets is probably the earliest image of the newspaper and is full of interesting detail. What’s most interesting, though, are the things that aren’t known about the photo.

The Mobile Register bought the building in 1872 and remained there until 1932. The building is believed to have been constructed in 1804, and that the city entertained the Marquis de Lafayette there on his visit to Mobile in 1825.

During its ownership by William R. Hallett in 1830s, the building was known as the Lafayette Hotel. In 1861, the title passed to Caroline Roper who changed the name of the building to the Roper House. The building continued as a hotel until purchased by the Mobile Register in July 1872.

Before the newspaper moved into the building, workmen gutted the building and then braced it with iron beams and pillars. On the first floor, accountants occupied the front rooms and the printing presses the rear. On the second floor were the offices of the publisher and editorial staff. Compositors, who sat at type cases 20 hours a day in shifts, occupied the entire third floor, one great room facing Royal Street. The news and telegraph room occupied a third-floor wing. The paper’s Agricultural Department worked in small rooms under the roof dormers.

A fire in January 1876 destroyed most of the block in which the Register was located. The Register and the Bank of Mobile were the only two buildings left standing in the block. The south wall of the Register cracked and buckled in the fire, leaving the newspaper with about $32,500 in damages. The Register removed the iron work and remodeled the exterior before 1920.

We don’t know who the photographer was, when the photo was taken, or what kind of photo process the cameraman used. The answers to those questions would help explain why the photo was taken and who the people in the photo are.

The photo appears to have been staged by the photographer. All of the men on the second-floor balcony, except for the man on the right with his back to the camera, are looking directly at the camera. They were aware that they were being photographed. The man with his back turned seems to be deliberately ignoring the camera, another indication the men knew they were being photographed. Also, if they had not remained still, their images would have been blurred like that of some of the men on the first floor. So they had been told to hold still.

Because the Register’s publisher, editors, and newsmen worked from offices on the second floor of the building, these men are probably the paper’s news managers. Of the seven men on the balcony all but two are wearing top hats.

The men outside the first floor of the building also are posing and looking at the camera. They may have worked in the accounting rooms behind them. The photo isn’t sharp enough to clearly make out the hat types. There seems to be a variety of styles, Cahill, low John Bull, and perhaps low derbies.

The workman with the wheeled dolly appears to be dropping off fresh packages of blank newsprint sheets for the presses. But it’s not clear why he’d stack them on the sidewalk rather than take them into the building. The Register probably also did job printing on smaller presses and these packages may have been for that service.

If those packages on the sidewalk are blank newsprint sheets, then that would indicate the Register was still using it double-cylinder, sheet-fed Hoe steam press. In December 1888, the Register installed a $10,000 Goss web-perfecting press. This press used rolls of newsprint rather than sheets and could print 20,000 four-page newspapers an hour. Newsprint sheets indicate the photo was made before December 1888.

The Register installed incandescent light bulbs in the building in February 1884. The paper had quickly converted to electric lights because the old gas lights were often blown out by a breeze from the open windows. The windows had to be kept open because more than 80 gas burners illuminated the building’s rooms, creating a great deal of heat and smoke.

The Register ran more than a mile of wire through the building, suspended a light bulb above each work area, installed its own eight-horsepower engine to run a dynamo and at 6 o’clock each night turned on the engine to light the building.

It’s impossible to tell whether the electric lights had been installed in this photo. The windows on the third floor, where the composition room was located, are closed, as are all the windows in the building except for one in the center of the second floor. The men may have climbed out on the balcony from that window. The closed windows may be an indication this photo was taken after 1884. Certainly, there are no power lines from outside going into the building, so this would be before there was a central power plant and poles carrying electric wires in Mobile.

In all likelihood, then, this photo was taken between 1884 and 1888.

A block of Mobile newspaper history

Enlarged view of newsies in front of the Van Antwerp Building.

Van Antwerp Building, Royal and Dauphin streets about 1900.

Though a viewer may not realize it, this photo from the Historic Mobile Preservation Society tells a lot about Mobile’s newspaper history.

Mobile photographer William E. Wilson took this photo of the G. Van Antwerp & Sons building and others at the southwest corner of Royal and Dauphin streets about 1900. Druggist Garrett Van Antwerp (1833-1911) had been in business on this corner since 1888. As can be seen from the painting and signs on the walls, Van Antwerp sold drugs, seeds, and sundries, an interesting mix of offerings. Van Antwerp became wealthy from his pharmacy businesses.

The east side of the Van Antwerp building faces Royal Street and the north side faces Dauphin Street. The block of buildings on Royal Street running south from Dauphin to Conti Street formed something of a newspaper row in the late 1800s.

During the Civil War, the Mobile Advertiser and Register, two separate newspapers that combined in 1861, occupied the corner building at 4 S. Royal. A few doors south in one of the buildings with the ironwork balconies at 12 S. Royal, the Mobile Register had offices before the war. After the war, a Yankee named E.O. Haile first took over the Register but then was forced to return it to owner John Forsyth. Haile then issued his own newspaper the Mobile Daily News from 12 S. Royal.

By the time Wilson took this photo, the News had moved to 59 St. Michael Street and in 1872 the Register had moved two blocks north to the southwest corner of Royal and St. Michael streets. Across Royal Street from the Register was the office of the Mobile Tribune.

But a bit of newspaper history is still visible in this photo. Standing on the sidewalk corner are eight boys all about the same age and similarly dressed. At least three of the boys, and maybe four, are clutching a bundle of newspapers. These boys are newsies, newspaper street sellers. Most associated with newsies is the flat cap, sometimes called a newsboy cap. The newsies in the early 1900s usually wore knee pants and knicker suits with black long stockings. Some of older boys wore long pants. All of those clothing styles can be seen in this photo.

The boys without newspapers may have sold out of their copies and were hanging out with their comrades. Or perhaps they sold different newspapers issued at a different time of day. At any rate, the intersection of the two streets where streetcar routes crossed and passengers loaded and unloaded was a good place to peddle papers.

Van Antwerp Building about 1908
Erik Overbey photo
Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library
University of South Alabama

In a few short years, this entire scene changed drastically. In 1906, Van Antwerp demolished the building on the corner and the next couple of buildings with ironwork balconies on Royal Street. Then the company broke ground for a new Van Antwerp Building. At 11 stories, it was the city’s first skyscraper. Completed in 1908, the building, covered in gleaming white terra-cotta tiles, became an instant landmark.

In 1911, S.H. Kress & Co. announced it had bought L-shaped properties on Dauphin and Royal streets that abutted at the rear and would build a new structure for its retail store with frontage on both streets. The purchase included the Yeend & Potter building at 115 and 117 Dauphin Street and the property owned by Mrs. Harry Chapman at 18 and 20 Royal Street. Two more of Mobile’s 19^th century buildings gave way to modern construction.

In October 2014, newspapering returned to this Royal Street block. The Press Register moved to new offices in the renovated historic Kress building at 18 S. Royal Street, celebrating with a Mardi Gras-style party that included local seafood, wine, beer, and the sounds of the Excelsior Band.

Mobile Press Register, Alabama Media Group office
in the restored Kress building on Royal Street. In the
background is the restored Van Antwerp building. 

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