Abstract
If Chicago Times editor Wilbur Storey was right that one purpose of a newspaper is to “raise hell,” then investigative reporters might be called its chief hell-raisers. In an extension of their profession’s role as a reporter of reality, investigative journalists seek to expose readers to hidden realities, often those involving corruption, injustice, and societal wrongs. Known by various names—“crusade,” “exposé,” “muckraking”—their form of journalism is as old as American journalism itself. Indeed, exposure and reform have long been integral components of the journalistic endeavor.
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Notes
A version of “Stowe’s Abolitionist Exposé” in this chapter originally appeared in the Ignatius Critical Edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Mark Canada, “News of Her Own: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Investigative Fiction,”, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Mary R. Reichardt [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009], 635–53). Used with permission.
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 338–40.
Paul N. Williams, Investigative Reporting and Editing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), xi.
James Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 19–21.
Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 107.
J. Herbert Altschull, From Milton to McLuhan: The Ideas Behind American Journalism (New York: Longman, 1990), 157
Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Prentice-Hall, 1984), 29–30.
Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 24–25; Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 107.
See also Mark Feldstein, “A Muckraking Model: Investigative Reporting Cycles in American History,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 11 (2006): 105–20.
Edward Jay Epstein, “The American Press: Some Truths About Truths,”, Ethics and the Press, ed. John C. Merrill and Ralph D. Barney (New York: Hastings House, 1975), 61.
William E. Huntzicker, The Popular Press, 1833–1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 20–28
Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 2–3.
Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,”, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 555, 538, 544. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
For a summary of the details surrounding the real murder, as well as the newspaper coverage and Poe’s own versions of the story, see John Walsh, Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1968). See also Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s introduction to “The Mystery of Marie Roget”, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 715–22.
William J. Wimsatt, Jr., “Poe and the Mystery of Mary Rogers,” PMLA 56 (1941): 230–48.
Richard Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 45–63. Wimsatt, who examined approximately 60 years’ worth of accounts, notes that the authors of these accounts were “almost unanimous in the opinion that Poe contributed little or nothing toward solving the mystery” (230).
Thomas Ollive Mabbott, introduction to “The Mystery of Marie Roget,”, Collected Works, 720, 722; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,”, Collected Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 723. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
Poe, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,”, Collected Works, 1358.
Poe, “The Balloon Hoax,”, Collected Works, 1068–69.
A number of scholars have discussed Dupin’s extraordinary reasoning powers, which operate outside the realm of pure logic. See Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 107–10.
Merrill Maguire Skaggs, “Poe’s Longing for a Bicameral Mind,” The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South 19 (1981): 56.
Donald Barlow Stauffer, “Poe as Phrenologist: The Example of Monsieur Dupin,”, Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom, ed. Richard P. Veler (Springfield, OH: Chantry Music Press, 1972), 122.
A version of this discussion of Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin originally appeared in the Ignatius Critical Edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Mark Canada, “News of Her Own: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Investigative Fiction,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Mary R. Reichardt [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009], 635–53.). Used with permission.
James M. McPherson, introduction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Vintage, 1991), xi.
Charles Dudley Warner, “The Story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”, Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 60–72.
Ann Douglas, introduction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Penguin, 1981), 13; Elizabeth Ammons, introduction to Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, xi–xviii.
Rodger Streitmatter, Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History (New York: Westview Press, 1997), 40.
E. Bruce Kirkham, The Building of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977), 46–47, 43, 49, 62–64.
Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 202.
Joan D. Hedrick, ed., The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 64.
George Goodin, The Poetics of Protest: Literary Form and Political Implication in the Victim-of-Society Novel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 1–3.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Mary R Reichardt (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2009), 259. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
Anonymous, “The Slave Bills—The Causeway—Political War—Fall Trade, &c,” New Tork Tribune, September 18, 1850, 6.
Thomas C. Leonard, News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 10–11, 22.
S. Bradley Shaw, “The Pliable Rhetoric of Domesticity,”, The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Mason I. Lowance, Jr., Ellen E. Westbrook, and R C. De Prospo (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 73–98; Mason I. Lowance. “Biblical Typology and the Allegorical Mode: The Prophetic Strain,” in ibid., 159–84; Catharine E. O’Connell, ‘“The Magic of the Real Presence of Distress’: Sentimentality and Competing Rhetorics of Authority,” in ibid., 13–36.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Preface,”, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Knopf, 1909), 7–8.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story Is Founded Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work (Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1998), 5.
Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron-Mills,”, A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 4. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
Rebecca Harding Davis, Bits of Gossip (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), 36; Davis, “Two Methods with the Negro,”, A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, 424; Davis, “Undistinguished Americans,” in ibid., 459; “The House on the Beach,” in ibid., 383; “Some Testimony in the Case,” in ibid., 393–94.
Whitney A. Womack, “Reforming Women’s Reform Literature: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Rewriting of the Industrial Novel,”, Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 114–15.
Tillie Olsen, “A Biographical Interpretation,”, Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1972), 87.
Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism, 11; Lisa A. Long, “The Postbellum Reform Writings of Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,”, The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing, ed. Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 262–83. Long has argued that Davis’s attitude toward reform was complex, saying, “Rather than offering guides to a better future, Phelps’s and Davis’s texts seem to express ineffable grief, a sense of surreality, and impotence. … Their texts are audience-oriented primarily in that they encourage self-examination of the fragmented, alienated self; social action is a fortuitous by-product of such psychological labors” (268). For the purposes of this book, we need only recognize that Davis shared the press’s crusading spirit, whether that spirit meant only exposure or also calls for action.
David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 257.
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© 2011 Mark Canada
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Canada, M. (2011). Investigative Fiction. In: Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118591_7
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