Life and Times of the American Magazine

On counting carefully and creatively

To write an effective “life and times,” one has to begin by getting the chronology of the life right. A standard history might focus on the best-known or best-remembered magazines, those published by important individuals (or their relatives), those that published authors who would become famous, or those that were associated with what would come to be important religious or social mobilizations. Haveman, by contrast, makes lists and collects data on every entry in those lists. The result is a powerful empirical demonstration of the shifting character and contours of an industry as it was located in different spaces (the largest cities, other cities, across regions), imagined by founders from a changing set of occupational and status backgrounds and catering to different audiences. This work documents the spatial dynamics of the American political economy, with magazines established in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania (or, more accurately, Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia) moving toward increasingly national framings of their audiences over the first half of the nineteenth century; by 1850 equal numbers of publications embraced localistic and universalistic titles. By contrast, magazines founded elsewhere held firmly and increasingly to local and regional identities (p. 73). These spatially distinctive patterns illustrate the uneven and shifting contests over the units of political membership and social solidarity.

Haveman also reconstructs the history of American magazines as a form of enterprise, illuminating the changing combinations of founders, technologies, and market forces that were at play. The high technical demands of early printing produced an industry with many printers-turned-publishers; technological change shifted the industry toward industrial production, and publishers came increasingly from the ranks of those with links to professional status and investment capital. Audiences also transformed. Although measures on the scale of readership are frustratingly elusive, the topical concerns signaled by magazine titles shifted from eclectic “general interest” publications toward a growing number focused on specialized topics such as agriculture or medicine. Perhaps the most compelling finding produced by this rigorous exercise in analytic description confirms a feature of the early Republic that has been widely known but rarely documented in such stark and compelling specificity. From 1790 to 1860 at least a third and often a bit more of the magazines published in the United States were religious in character (p. 48). So while “everyone knows” (or at least every American historian knows) that religious revivals and the organization of the so-called “Benevolent Empire” were central features of the first half of the nineteenth century, it is a significant accomplishment to demonstrate precisely how important religion was relative to other driving concerns of those times.

If the “life” portion of Magazines and the Making of America illuminates how and when it is possible to access resources and combine them into a new industry, the second half of the book shifts focus to the “and times.” In these chapters, Haveman seeks to distill the relationship of magazines to the processes by which America became modern: religious change, social reform, and economic activity. While rigorous demonstration of some connections eludes statistical analysis—particularly the contribution of magazines to economic change, an issue that Haveman acknowledges—data on religious and reform magazines allow for greater specification of the key relationships. Inline with a classic Weberian claim concerning the contrast of “this-worldly” and “other-worldly” religion and modernization, Haveman demonstrates the patterned relationships between doctrine, magazine formation, and the founding of anti-slavery societies. While the count of magazines (either the total number or social reform only) had a positive effect on the formation of anti-slavery societies, the number of “other-worldly” churches had a negative relationship with abolitionist mobilizing (p.220).

Although this is already a lengthy and rich study, such findings merit a deeper dive into how magazine publishers, their readers, and their critics understood the relationship between the circulation of text and projects of social reform. One of many eruptions ofanti-abolitionist politics in the 1830s involved postmasters in the southern states who refused to deliver a mass mailing of pamphlets by abolitionists from the North. Could such a conflict be mined in greater depth to reconstruct the theories of “media influence” held by those involved in the profoundly contentious politics of slavery and anti-slavery? Which magazines did and didn’t comment on the episode? Given that, as Haveman claims, “magazines had the great advantage of being able to turn reform advocates into active participants by soliciting news about protest events at home and abroad” (p. 205), a conflict sparked by the obstruction of print in the mails by postmasters themselves should have generated an eruption of commentary that would speak to the central elements of this argument. And if the printed record in magazines is relatively silent on this point, this too speaks volumes about Haveman’s central theoretical concern as signaled by her subtitle: “Print Culture, Magazines, and Community.” How does text reflect, undermine, and change the forms of social solidarity?

Forms of Social Solidarity

Just as most American historians already know that religion mattered in the early nineteenth century, most sociologists already know a standard account that links modernization and the forms of social solidarity. That model can be found in Durkheim’s argument about the trajectory from mechanical to organic solidarity as well as in the essays by Weber and Simmel on modernization and the rise of individualism. In all these cases, the arc of history goes from locally centered strong forms of solidarity to systematic individualization with its correlates of free markets and, possibly, anomie.

In tracking the history of American magazines, Haveman argues that there are interesting and consequential deviations from this stylized account of the path from tradition to modernity. First, there is no baseline of a coherent, strongly integrated traditional community. As a political project, constructed out of colonies that differed in substantial ways and were only fragile “communities” in their own right, the magnitude of making a notional “United States” into something like a community—with its density of interaction as well as sense of shared identity—overshadowed the project of escaping tradition. But that national project did not lead directly to modern individualism. By the middle of the nineteenth century, American magazines were converging on a model of translocal audiences linked by common interests or shared but partial memberships—religious, fraternal, political. To the extent that these audiences constituted community, the model of social solidarity was not local and encompassing, but neither was it individualistic and free-floating.

The argument that print culture generates community is at the core of one of the most influential books written on the topic of nationalism: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Anderson’s analysis centered not on magazines but on newspapers. The imagining of shared membership in a community was produced by the experience of co-location and simultaneity in criss-crossing flows of events. The reader thinks of himself or herself reading—along with legions of other readers that same morning—of ship arrivals and departures, the speeches of dignitaries and marriages of elites, unusual weather and freak animal births. In the second edition, Anderson added other models for imagining memberships such as maps, in which the viewer envisioned herself as embedded within a bounded and distinctively colored space, or museums, which would encourage a visitor to place himself as part of a collectivity extending through time. What kind of “imagined community” is generated by reading magazines?

One of the distinctive features of magazines, Haveman insists, is that they create the possibility of engagement between audiences and publishers. Because magazines are serial publications, articles and essays in one issue may be followed by letters to the editor in a subsequent issue. This is not only a “tie” between publisher and reader; it represents a source of “rich reciprocal interactions between editors and their readers” that cannot be produced by either books or pamphlets. Because every reader was potentially a letter writer—not to mention the author of a poem or a report on local activities—magazines encouraged active engagement, not just with an imagined publisher but also with the other readers who were likely to borrow and circulate any given issue as it arrived in a small town or rural neighborhood. These effects may have been particularly pronounced in the case of religious magazines. The rules of American Protestantism of the era privileged both explicit biblical commandments and the freedom of conscience of individual believers to reflect on issues where the text did not set forth direct requirements or prohibitions. Thus magazines, particularly American Protestant magazines, had the potential to position readers as members of active, participatory, interpretive communities in which individuals pursued debate and disagreement with moral purpose.

Haveman’s analysis asserts but does not deeply explore the changing outlines of such communities of readers. Yet one of the virtues of her careful and creative counting is that one can envision future studies that will use Magazines and the Making of America as a framework for documenting changes in the character and distribution of participatory practices as they were manifested in the pages of American magazines. Disciplined by systematic documentation of the industry as a whole, a quite different analysis might then dive into the content of the magazines themselves, tracking the shifting prominence of those letters to the editor and viewer submissions, the ratio of professional opinion to engaged debate. Such studies are needed to locate the case of the American magazine relative to other instances where shared readership and viewership have figured as seedbeds of political mobilization, whether the experience of listening to someone read a Parisian newspaper in the provinces as the Great Fear swept through rural areas, of gathering in public to watch the first television broadcasts in South Africa under apartheid, or slipping into an apartment to enjoy illicit videotapes of American action films in Romania, the topic of “Chuck Norris vs. Communism,” a recent documentary aired on PBS. Each of these cases represents a distinctive combination of print or visual culture with a way of experiencing membership in an imagined community.

These comparisons push us to think qualitatively about the specific types of imagined communities that were evoked by magazines as a genre as well as by different kinds of magazines. Were some markedly more participatory? Does this shift over time and place? If so, do changes in the character of the print culture that generates community and solidarity align with patterns of political and social engagement? These questions suggest ways of tracking more closely the extent to which magazines were literally “movement-making.” One of the many accomplishments of Heather Haveman’s powerful “life and times” of an industry is to push us to think much, much more rigorously about how different forms of culture create—as well as reflect and support—communities of shared identity and solidarity.