Essay 68: Connection Between Associations And Newspapers (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 6)

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

The essays in our study reference the following edition of Democracy In America: University of Chicago Press – 1st edition translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Today’s essay references pages 493-495 of this edition of Democracy in America.

Modern readers who turn to any number of media options other than newspapers might find De Tocqueville’s focus on print to be archaic. But his thesis remains valid today when applied to those alternative forms of news and information gathering.

“Only a newspaper can come to deposit the same thought in a thousand minds at the same moment,” he wrote in the 1830s.

He wrote at the very moment when newspapers were beginning to boom, and just before the revolution in communication and transportation that accompanied the invention of the telegraph and the spread of railroads.

De Tocqueville tied the importance of newspapers in developing and fostering associations to his work’s main focus, the centrality of civil society to American culture.

Where groups of ordinary but active citizens matter more than elites, their ability to communicate with each other – in dependable forums with regular publication and an agreed upon idiom – was essential.

For him, this was not simply a matter of politics – of being a critical voice in defending the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. Newspapers, De Tocqueville asserted, “maintain civilization.”

In the classic construction, newspapers have never been very good at telling people what to think, but have been quite successful in telling people what to think about. “If there were no newspapers,” he wrote, “there would almost never be common action.”

In the 1830s – and, indeed, until the birth of the Yellow Press in the latter half of the 19th century — newspapers were typically party organs.

Again, De Tocqueville was writing at an opportune time, just as the Second Party System featuring the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs was forming. Newspapers chose sides and reported the news from the point of view of their sponsor party. (One could argue that we have come full circle on that account, with blatantly partisan media choosing sides rather than straining to maintain objectivity.)

What differentiated the United States from the aristocratic countries of Europe was the level of participation in public affairs by the common man. “The principal citizens who live in an aristocratic country perceive each other from afar,” he wrote, “and if they want to unite their forces, they move toward one another carrying a long a multitude in their train.”

Not so in America. Common people, “all being very small and lost in the crowd,” do not all know or know of each other as the elites usually do. They have to seek each other out. The avenue for doing so was the newspaper.

Today, that purpose is often better served by social media than by newspapers or television news. But the process described by De Tocqueville almost 200 years ago remains much the same, even as the medium has changed.

“Up comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each of them simultaneously but separately,” he wrote. “All are immediately directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who had long sought each other in the shadows finally meet each other and unite.” It is perhaps a romanticized view of X, Facebook, or TikTok to think of users as wandering spirits seeking each other in the shadows before finally uniting. But in essence, that’s what’s happening, on a much grander scale, just as it did with party-affiliated newspapers in the 1830s.

And scale matters.

“In democratic nations… it is always necessary that those associating must be very numerous in order that the association may have some power” De Toccqueville wrote.

When historians write about the “revolution” in communication and transportation, they are not overstating the case. Until the 1840s, time and distance restricted the ability of Americans to travel and communicate quickly with anyone more than a few dozen miles away.

The invention of the telegraph in 1844 and the rapid expansion of railroads – track mileage soared from 1,000 miles in 1835 to 3,000 miles in 1840 to 30,000 miles by 1860 – altered the landscape in ways de Tocqueville and few of his contemporaries could imagine.

The telegraph spread news almost instantaneously. Railroads carried ever more newspapers – from 900 in 1830 to 3,000 in 1860 – into every corner of the country. Suddenly what happened in New York or Washington could be read about within days in virtually every small town east of the Mississippi.

This resulted in a better-informed populace and provided greater opportunities for like-minded citizens to communicate and organize.

But it also began the process of nationalizing the media, a trend that continues today. The concentration of information resources in Washington and New York divorced large segments of the population from the unifying spirit of mass media, creating the need for a social media that gathers De Tocqueville’s “wandering spirits” in search of each other.

John Bicknell was a journalist for 30 years, as a reporter, editor, columnist, and opinion writer in Florida and Washington, D.C. He is the author of three books – America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion and the Presidential Election That Transformed the Nation, Lincoln’s Pathfinder: John C. Fremont and the Violent Election of 1856, and The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Fremont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation –and was a senior editor of the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 editions of The Almanac of America Politics.

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