Kansas City News Blog

​One of the books on my summer reading list was Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1854-1858, by Wichita State University professor Craig Miner. I wanted to study up on area history, and Miner's research was interesting from a journalistic perspective, too.

I never knew this, but for a few years in the 1850s, the national media was obsessed with Kansas. "Hundreds of thousands of articles and editorials -- 4,500 in the New York Herald alone -- were published about Bleeding Kansas," Miner's book jacket notes.

As the nation split into the two sides that would go on to fight the Civil War -- and Kansans debated among themselves about whether theirs would be a free state or a slave state -- Kansas was "the single matter to which the most ink was devoted by the national press," Miner writes. "This importance played out more in the media and opinion capitals of the eastern United States than in the tiny towns on the plains of Kansas."

What's astonishing to a modern reader is how the name-calling, lies and distortions back then sound the same as they do today -- just swap out "slavery" or "abolition" for "abortion" or "health-care reform."

Arguments over the Kansas-Nebraska Act's repeal of the Missouri Compromise blew up everywhere. The Richmond Enquirer's account of debates surrounding the proposed legislation sounds a lot like what happened at this summer's health-care town hall meetings:

The opponents of the ... bill have set in motion every engine of popular agitation. The public press, popular meetings, the pulpit and the State Legislatures have been employed as a means for kindling the passions of the mob and coercing the actions of Congress.

As arguments intensified in the media, Miner details the name-calling on both sides. From the Southern perspective, for example:

The "Molochs" who controlled the North were the "wizards" who invoked the tempest in Kansas. They wanted to "impale" the U.S. Constitution on "faggots" and plunge the Union into civil war from their safe desks in New York City. The Northerners in Kansas were painted as insatiable beasts, "godless and insane," deaf to reason, insensitive to pity -- bedlamites, tigers who, tasting a drop of a victim's blood, howled for the whole carcass.

Which makes today's insult of "socialist" sound pretty tame -- though it was around back then, too:

"I know no Abolitionist," wrote a journalist in Charleston, "that is not a socialist, and prepared to modify or destroy the right of property."

Then as now, the truth suffered most. "The manufacturing of opinion was key," Miner concludes. "The true events were far less vivid and compelling, and also less emotional and polarizing, than the media-filtered version. Reality was more complex, more ambiguous." And though there were plenty of moderate voices, they "did not compete well in currency or mass quotability."

It is a current popular myth that nineteenth-century newspapers, being pre-Watergate and therefore supposedly in an innocent time before investigative reporting, were boosters and cheerleaders for party, section, or nation. News-gathering was more primitive, indeed. But then, as now, it was tempting, even mandatory, to pillory public figures .... Such activity often went beyond responsible criticism into circulation-building invective.

Anyone who thinks Americans have grown meaner and nastier to each other under the cover of Internet anonymity will be surprised by this book. And probably depressed. After all, it's hard to choke down the idea that talk-radio blowhards or wedge-pounding political strategists might not be to blame for the great divide in American society.

It might just be the way we are.

After the jump, a conversation with Professor Miner about today's rhetoric compared to that of the 1850s -- and how close he thinks we might be to another Civil War.

The Pitch: It seems like there are a lot of parallels between the rhetoric back then and the rhetoric now.

​Craig Miner: I agree. There are lots of parallels. That was the point of doing the book. I didn't go so far as to say that the Civil War could have been avoided with more responsible rhetoric, but it didn't help, because people get mad when you call them names. I think there's such a thing as civil discourse, although you don't see much of it. But when you don't have the ability to exchange different views with some respect, you get real disaster.

We're in kind of a soundbite era and people are advertising themselves, and I think that was true in the 1850s as well. People wanted their little moment of fame, wanted to be paid attention to, and publishers wanted to sell newspapers. I think newspapers have always had conflict of interest -- all the media does -- because irresponsible reporting does sell newspapers. Sensationalism, exaggeration, making a minority position look like a big deal -- that's sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy. People start to believe that those voices are just as important as any other, and in reality they really aren't.

Much of the language seems the same today as it was in the 1850s.

There are the same appeals to the same kind of emotion, and it continues to work. I'm writing a book right now about a real estate panic in 1837 -- there was a bubble and a crash and a panic -- and people were talking about irresponsible credit, Wall Street manipulators, people buying houses they can't afford, spending too much money chasing investments that aren't very good. We've had these [real estate crashes] regularly and they are all the same. It's discouraging to a historian because we could have learned something.

It's kind of like looking at the Vietnam War and wondering whether we learned anything about insurgencies and getting entangled in other countries. In 1991, during the first Iraq war, I thought, gee, we have learned something: We're not going in by ourselves, we have an international alliance, and a specific goal of getting Iraq out of Kuwait. We applied overwhelming force to a limited objective, which the whole civilized world agreed with. But now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, it looks like we haven't learned anything.

People ask me, does history predict the future. You can learn a lot and avoid a lot of problems by studying, for example, the Great Depression or any of these things. It's the same with the rhetoric. Some people think the rhetoric isn't that important. But it's very significant, how things get spun. Every side has its version of the story and is pitching it in a different way. They're giving a different version of reality -- none of the versions are close to actual reality. People act on that. They don't have any capability of knowing about things beyond what they read, so as you see in the health-care debate, people will believe all kinds of things and then they'll act on that.  

The country's so polarized now, it seems like the red-state/blue-state divide is intractable.

That was one of the scary things I argued in the book: They didn't think it was that serious, either. People thought they could make outrageous statements but nothing terrible would happen. And of course the Civil War happened. Differences become irreconcilable and people become fixed in their positions and eventually people start shooting at each other.

Slavery was an issue that was so emotional and deep-seated in people's psychology that you couldn't deal with it in an ordinary way. In the chapter on voting, I write about how, in the first place it was hard to have an honest election. In the second place, people wouldn't accept an election's conclusion. In the case of abortion, for example, the majority favors one position, and the courts favor another position, but people in the minority are not going to accept that because there's a higher law -- God is saying something different. It's the same thing with health care. If someone believes that someone is going to take away their right to a doctor, or a committee that's going to say their grandmother's going to die, it's so emotional that the political process gets dangerous when people talk about it. 

How close do you think we are to another Civil War?

I think it can happen in a surprisingly quick way. In a democracy, being able to discuss things respectfully is important.

Yes, politics is certainly the art of compromise and people are compromising all the time, but we are getting polarized into a bunch of ideologues and no matter what side, we can't compromise. When people give up on the process, when they don't believe any longer that they can change the system through the political process, there's a tendency to want to resolve it in some violent way.