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‘Enslaving demand of the dollar press’
Ida Tarbell, who tore into the Standard Oil monopoly, did not attend a journalism school. Nor did Lincoln Steffens — or any of the muckraking reporters of the Progressive Era who fueled political and social reform in the early 20th century. A century ago, the Daily Worker suggested journalism schools — the University of Missouri’s Continue reading
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Yesterday’s world of tomorrow
Science Service’s predictions about likely technological advances were widely published in the nation’s press in 1958. Some were spot-on; others are still being pursued. Among them: the adoption of “artificial intelligence machines that will do things people do now.” Science Service (today’s Society for Science) was launched by E.W. Scripps and zoologist William Ritter in Continue reading
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‘Die große Babylon’
An excerpt from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” released in 1927 and based on Thea von Harbou’s science fiction novel serialized in the magazine Das Illustriete Blatt in 1925. Continue reading
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Last call for the Morning Call
A patent medicine mogul who wanted to keep a seat in Congress decided the best way to fight the press was to start his own daily newspaper. It was an expensive mistake. James Henry McLean, a native of Scotland who arrived in St. Louis in 1849 at the age of 20, amassed a fortune by Continue reading
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‘Surf Solar’
Here is a collection of poorly edited random personal videos, some taken with an old phone, accompanied by the first song on the Fuck Buttons’ “Tarot Sport” album, released in 2009. Continue reading
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Dead man talking
As a young reporter, Lincoln Steffens learned that successful police officers had a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the law. Here’s how it worked in some New York City precincts in the late 19th century: Criminal syndicates did a thriving business in age-old vices (gambling, prostitution, thievery) and the police protected them, as long as they Continue reading
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The Klan and the GOP
In 1925, Post-Dispatch reporter Paul Y. Anderson took note of the Ku Klux Klan’s apparent shift from the Democratic Party to the Republicans. The Klan, he wrote, was finding itself increasingly shunned by the South’s entrenched Democratic establishment because its terrorism was fueling the mass exodus of Black workers from the region, undermining white-controlled commerce. Continue reading
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‘Violently in love with her profession’
Though Fanny Bagby was a trailblazer in her profession, her male peers, predictably, focused more on her appearance than on her achievements. The first female managing editor of a St. Louis daily newspaper* not only could turn a phrase, she turned heads. And that could prove dangerous. According to a news story by Eugene Field Continue reading
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‘Bulldog tenacity’
St. Louis reporters used to fight to get the news — each other, that is. One of the most spectacular examples of fisticuffery came in 1883, when scribes for the city’s two English-language morning papers came to blows at the old Four Courts building. John Fay, 22, of the Missouri Republican and John C. Klein, Continue reading
Roland Klose 