| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Copper Chorus: Mining, Politics, and the Montana Press, 1889–1959. By Dennis L. Swibold. (Helena: Montana Historical Society, 2006. xx, 408 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 978-0-9721522-8-0. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-9759196-0-6.)
There are few characters in the history of the American West more intriguing than the titans of its mining industries, often portrayed as swaggering and even corrupt in their use of political and financial power. Dennis L. Swibold's sweeping history of Montana journalism evokes that image in its depiction of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company's control of public opinion in the state through newspapers it owned or influenced from 1889 to 1959.	1
Montana's "copper press," Swibold concedes, was a particularly enduring instance of what Daniel J. Boorstin called "the booster press," journalism that built communities by self-promotion (The Americans: The National Experience, 1965). Montana boosterism, however, was a manipulative, corporate variety. Swibold clearly agrees with muckraker Will Irwin's 1911 assessment that the industry's silent ownership of newspapers in major communities had a "pernicious influence" on democracy in Montana well into the twentieth century.	. . .

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