| Review | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.3

Book Reviews

Read All About It: Rediscovering Henry Watterson

MARGOLIES, DANIEL S. Henry Watterson and the New South: The Politics of Empire, Free Trade, and Globalization. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. xii + 340 pp. Illustrations, forward, preface, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0-8131-2417-4.

In Henry Watterson and the New South: The Politics of Empire, Free Trade, and Globalization, Daniel S. Margolies, associate professor of history at Virginia Wesleyan College, chronicles Henry Watterson's career, from 1868 to 1919, as the founding editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, a leading Kentucky newspaper and nationally recognized voice of the South. Much of Watterson's tenure at the Courier-Journal overlapped the era of personal journalism, the period in the mid to late nineteenth century during which fiercely opinionated and larger-than-life editors published their unabashedly partisan positions on issues of the day with hard-hitting, confrontational, and grandiloquent rhetoric. Their words, often direct responses to other journalists and politicians, sold newspapers, shaped national discourse, and frequently launched or furthered their political and commercial careers.

Today, we remember some personal journalists more than others. Horace Greeley (New York Tribune), Henry Raymond (New York Times), James Gordon Bennet (New York Herald), and Joseph Pulitzer (New York World) are legendary; others, including Henry Watterson, are familiar only to select historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (and commuters on the twenty-three-mile stretch of Interstate 264—the Henry Watterson Expressway—that surrounds Louisville).

In this important and very readable biography, Margolies rediscovers Watterson, whose access to and influence within the Democratic Party around the turn of the century were significant. His story casts important light on the period's internal conflicts and compromises that spawned and, in some instances, later crippled some of the party's most-remembered economic and international policy platforms (tariff reform, free silver, and isolationism) and candidates (Tilden, Cleveland, and Bryan).

The Wattersons were wealthy and well-connected Jacksonian Democrats. Henry's father, Harvey, served Tennessee for four terms in the House of Representatives. Margolies writes, "As a child, Henry bounced on Andrew Jackson's knee at Hermitage, had his curls stroked by Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Lewis Cass, and Franklin Pierce, and was even on the floor of the House when [in 1848] John Quincy Adams fell dead" (18).

Not surprisingly, these deep political roots opened doors for Henry Watterson, who attributed an early sinecure at the Daily States to "the strength of being [his] father's son" (20) and an abiding self-confidence, as if the two were separable. However, Henry's words and deeds belied any such tidy characterization. This self-proclaimed lifelong Unionist, Democrat, and isolationist fought for the Confederacy, advocated conservative economic policies, supported permanent U.S. foreign occupations, praised Lincoln, preached reconciliation, and read in the Constitution a protection of slavery, which he described as "the clumsiest and costliest labor system on earth" (23).

For some, these seemingly incongruous positions render Watterson an opportunist at best and a bigoted crank at worst. Nonetheless, Margolies argues that Watterson was, for the most part, neither. In particular, he demonstrates persuasively that Watterson's conservative positions on economic policies and about-face on U.S. imperialism reflected an immutable underlying conviction, common among many New South editors, that the region could only achieve prosperity through home rule—an end to federal intrusions, including Reconstruction—and unrestricted access to international markets. Essentially, Watterson believed that because insufficient demand had hampered southern economic growth, the United States should look to international markets to absorb the South's surplus production. Until the late 1890s, Watterson believed that the United States could best access these markets through free trade and political isolationism. Indeed, he praised what he saw as the symbiotic relationship between the two: Free trade fostered economic codependence and thus restrained expansionist tendencies. He argued consistently and vehemently for "revenue-only" rather than protective tariffs.

By the late 1890s, Watterson also argued for the gold standard, war with Spain, and occupation of the Philippines. He believed that the gold standard bolstered U.S. exports—and the South's economy—because gold was a relatively stable and internationally accepted medium of exchange. He contended that a gold-and-silver standard would hamper trade—and, most important, U.S. exports—because it would destabilize the currency and limit its acceptability. Moreover, he manifestly discounted the Populist notion that a bimetallic standard would essentially expand the money supply and, along with it, real incomes in the South. Margolies offers an excellent, detailed, and rare account of Watterson's vicious editorial attacks on William Jennings Bryan and the free-silver movement, including how Watterson split the Democratic Party and nearly destroyed the Courier-Journal when he all but endorsed McKinley in 1896.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Watterson had concluded that U.S. imperialism—or, as he preferred to call it, national expansionism—would best garner foreign markets for southern surpluses. Strictly speaking, he suspended his support for free trade, voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange, and argued instead that U.S. foreign policy should coerce an expansion of its free-trade zone through annexation and statehood. Watterson's personal voyage from free-trade isolationist to imperialist began in early 1895 with the Cuban insurrection. Initially, Watterson, the isolationist and ex-Confederate, sympathized with the insurrectionists but believed that the United States should remain neutral. On May 28, 1897, however, "Watterson fused all of his usual political agendas into one strident call for action that thoroughly contradicted his earlier statements on Cuba" (145). Margolies suggests that Republican vulnerability on the issue, which created an opportunity for Democrats to claim this and future aggressive foreign policies as their own, prompted the about face. By the start of the Spanish-American War, "[t]he old Confederate and even older unionist realized that war as a process and an end was not something to be feared but, rather, embraced" (157). Regrettably, although Watterson's arguments for imperialism were driven for the most part by materialist rather than, say, racial concerns, his rhetoric at times took on jingoistic, misogynistic, and racist tones. He once argued that expansionism was a means to rid the South of its surplus production, as well as its "encroaching femininity" (183) and its African Americans. Meanwhile, race clearly complicated Watterson's initial resistance to the annexations of Hawaii and the Philippines. Not surprisingly, his arguments for expansionism were sometimes small minded and exhausting. Margolies's treatment of Watterson in this regard, however, is anything but. On the contrary, the author chronicles with exquisite detail and penetrating interpretation the twists and turns of Watterson's complicated reversal on U.S. isolationism.

As the election of 1900 approached, Watterson recognized that U.S. expansionism was, for much of the U.S. body politic, a fait accompli around which he had to unite the Democratic Party if it were to defeat McKinley. And so he grudgingly supported Bryan's nomination for the sake of the party. On the Democrats' defeat that year, Margolies remarks that Watterson "was not surprised...by the results of the election....He approved, after all, of most of the Republicans' policies" (240). In any case, Watterson's political influence fell precipitously after 1900, in large part because "he proved incapable of moving beyond the fundamental free trade formula...toward a broader conception of America's evolving hegemony" (249). To be sure, this excellent body of scholarship adds to our understanding of how and to what extent Watterson shaped that hegemony.


	Joseph M. Santos South Dakota State University

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