'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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The short, interesting life of the Mobile Times

Mobile Times November 11, 1932

The Mobile Times existed barely seven years, but it provides an interesting chapter in Mobile’s newspaper history.

Mobile Times paperboy

Erik Overbey photo, The Doy Leale McCall

Rare Book and Manuscript Library

The six-day-a-week afternoon Times hit the streets in late October 1932. That was an even worse year during the Great Depression to start a newspaper than 1929, when the competing afternoon Mobile Press began. Earlier in 1932, after four years of a costly war for readers and advertisers, the Press absorbed its rivals, the morning Mobile Register and its companion afternoon paper Mobile News-Item. The merged operations then consisted of the afternoon Press, the morning Register, and the Sunday Press Register. The victorious Press Register discontinued the News-Item.

Thomas Enoch Sharp served as the editor of the Times and probably was one of the principal investors. Born in Butte, Montana, in 1890, Sharp started his career as a reporter, but after 1921 he edited papers in El Paso, Memphis, and Buffalo before coming to Mobile.

Staffers at the Times included the legendary Chandler sisters, Miss Nettie and Miss Mary. The sisters, who were no relation to Ralph Chandler, publisher of the Press Register, began working on the Register when it was owned by John L. Rapier. The newly formed Press Register in 1932 didn’t pick up the sisters, who went to work for the Mobile Times when it began publication later that year. Nettie served as an editor in the society department with Mary as her assistant. One reporter said the sisters reminded her of Aunt Pittypat in Gone With the Wind.

Another reporter who went to work for the Times after the Press and Register merger was William “Bill” Gormley. For the Times he covered the 1931-32 sensational trial of the Dyson brothers for the murder of Henry M. Butler, Jr., a prominent Mobile Real estate agent, who had been carrying on an affair with the wife Raymond Dyson of Fairhope.

There was plenty of news to go around for all the newspapers. Reporting on prohibition, rumrunners, criminals, and trials was the bread and butter of newspapers around the country during the 1930s. Sensational front-page headlines and stories from around the nation lured readers in Mobile and elsewhere daily to the Times, Press, and Register.

While there was plenty of news, there wasn’t a lot of money. In September 1938, the Times got an infusion of much-needed cash from Texas newspaper magnate Charles E. Marsh, who bought the newspaper along with Sharp and Carl M. Smith, who had been an advertising executive of the Mobile Press Register. Marsh brought in W.S. Zschach (or Sohach) from his other operations to take charge of circulation while Sharp directed news operations and Smith ran the business and advertising departments and served as president of the company. The new owners announced retirement of a $35,000 bond issue.

Marsh and his business partner Ephraim Silas Fentress had become millionaires by buying and operating newspapers in Texas in the early 1900s. By 1930, Marsh owned newspapers in 15 Texas cities, including the capital of Austin, and a dozen more papers in other states. From 1930 to 1934, Marsh joined forces with Eugene Pulliam, to establish General Newspapers Incorporated. Together they bought 23 newspapers in seven states.

Author Robert A. Caro points out that Marsh, “Having made money, he liked to play the patron with it.” One of those he played patron to in the late 1930s was a young, rising Texas politician named Lyndon Baines Johnson. Both Marsh and Johnson were liberal Democrats and ardent supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Marsh supplied the money to buy the support Roosevelt, Johnson, and other liberal Democrats needed to get and keep power. Whether investing in newspapers or politicians, what Marsh most wanted was for those he supported to appreciate and respect his views and submit to his wishes.

The Times styled itself as a Democrat newspaper while the Press Register listed itself as Independent. But Independent didn't mean non-partisan and both papers supported the Democrat Party.

Marsh’s money-making ways weren’t working in Mobile. In 1939, the Times had a circulation of just 12,275. The competing afternoon Press had a daily circulation of 24,604, the morning Register had 21,148, and the Sunday Press Register 42,229.

In January 1939, Frank S. Coffin, Frederick I. Thompson, who was the former publisher of the Register and News-Item and current publisher of the Alabama Journal in Montgomery, along with three other men advanced the Times $6,000. Still the Mobile Times couldn’t get the advertising and subscriptions it needed to be profitable and the newspaper suspended publication on April 3, 1940.

In the spring of 1941, Sharp bought the Prichard Printing Company and published and edited The Citizen. Incorporated only since 1925, Prichard was a town of 4,580 residents north of Mobile and the Citizen was a weekly with just 718 paid subscribers.

Interestingly enough, Sharp bought the Citizen from John Maurice Will and his partner Floyd H. Powell. After selling the Citizen, Will joined the staff of the Press Register and became one of its most esteemed reporters, best known for his coverage of religion and education.

Glimpse at an 1898 newspaper street vendor

Alabama. Department of Archives and History photo

The one-legged man with the big smile on the left in the above photo is a newspaper street vendor. This 1898 photo from the Alabama Department of Archives and History doesn’t identify the man or which newspaper he is selling. It’s likely he’s hawking the Mobile Register, but it could have been the Mobile Daily Item or another newspaper.

The man is resting the stump of his right leg on the steps of the U.S. Customs House at the southwest corner of Royal and St. Francis streets. He appears to be carrying on a lively conversation with the well-dressed older man wearing the derby. Judging from a number of photos of the Customs House, this area was a popular place for men to gather and talk.

Glennon Building

Alabama. Department of Archives and History photo

In the background is the office building of the James K. Glennon Real Estate and Insurance Company, located at 51 N. Royal St, the northwest corner of Royal at St. Francis streets. One of two wooden utility poles interrupts the view of the front edge of the Glennon building. 

Besides being a highly successful and wealthy businessman, Glennon was part owner of the Register, another reason to believe the vendor was selling that newspaper. In fact, the Register itself sat at the opposite end of the block from the Glennon building at the southwest corner of Royal and St. Michael streets.

Mobile Register

Promoting the newspaper with a 'postcard selfie'

About 100 years before the selfie image became a part of the social media culture in the early 2000s, the way you told friends and family where you were (this was before long-distance phone calling, too) was to send a postcard.

The above Mobile Register postcard promotion from 1907 is an example of turning such a "postcard selfie" into a marketing campaign. You just filled in your name on this side to let the receiver know where you were. You filled out the delivery address on the other side and applied a one-cent stamp. It's not known if this H.S. Worsham was related to the Press Register’s copyeditor Cliff Worsham.

The post card is from the Wade Hall Postcard Collection, Troy University Library, Special Collections