Letters To The Editor: Comparative And Historical Perspectives 3030264793, 9783030264796, 9783030264802

Table of contents :
Foreword......Page 5
Letters to the Editor as Vital Forum for Public Debate......Page 6
Letters to the Editor as Carefully Crafted and Curated Texts......Page 8
References......Page 10
Contents......Page 11
Notes on Contributors......Page 13
List of Figures......Page 17
List of Tables......Page 18
Introduction......Page 19
References......Page 25
Introduction: Audience Participation in the Twenty-First Century......Page 26
Letter-Writers......Page 29
Letter Writing......Page 31
Portuguese Media Landscape and Regular Letters-Writers......Page 34
Online Comment......Page 35
Conclusion......Page 37
References......Page 38
Introduction......Page 41
The Scottish Context Post-1918......Page 43
The General Election of December 1918......Page 45
The Choice of a Pen Name......Page 48
Considering ‘Women’s Issues’......Page 49
Temperance and Bolshevism......Page 54
The Perfect Candidate......Page 56
Dissenting Voices......Page 57
Conclusion......Page 59
References......Page 62
Introduction......Page 64
Why Study Letters to the Editor?......Page 66
Why the Defender?......Page 68
Method......Page 69
Discussion of Findings......Page 71
Conclusion......Page 79
References......Page 81
Introduction......Page 83
Colombian Cultural Traits and Emotions......Page 85
Emotional Repertoires: Silhouetting the Colombian Soul......Page 88
Emotional Repertoires: Patriotism in the Midst of Chaos......Page 92
Emotional Repertoires: Coping with Adversity......Page 94
Emotional Repertoires: Living in Sadness......Page 96
Conclusion......Page 98
References......Page 101
Introduction......Page 103
Newspapers as Empowered Spaces......Page 107
Writers as Empowered Citizens......Page 110
The Constitution of ‘Public Issues’......Page 112
Conclusion......Page 119
References......Page 120
Periodisation: A Growing Community of Interest......Page 123
Letters Contributing to a Political Package......Page 128
Women as Active Readers......Page 132
Analysing Letters......Page 134
The ‘Tyranny of Poverty’......Page 135
Conclusion......Page 138
References......Page 139
Chapter 8: Readers’ Letters to Victorian Local Newspapers as Journalistic Genre......Page 142
Readers’ Letters as Highly Mediated Journalistic Genre......Page 144
The Letters......Page 148
The Writers......Page 151
Pseudonyms as Rhetorical Devices......Page 154
References......Page 156
Introduction......Page 160
Participatory Journalism and Reader Comment Sections......Page 162
Research Focus, Design, and Method......Page 164
Volume and Frequency of Commenting Below the Line......Page 166
Where Are Journalists Commenting Below the Line?......Page 168
How Do Journalists Behave Below the Line?......Page 170
Conclusion......Page 175
References......Page 178
Author Index......Page 183
Subject Index......Page 189

Citation preview

Letters to the Editor Comparative and Historical Perspectives Edited by

a l l i son c ava n agh joh n s t e e l

Letters to the Editor

Allison Cavanagh  •  John Steel Editors

Letters to the Editor Comparative and Historical Perspectives

Editors Allison Cavanagh Institute of Communication Studies University of Leeds Leeds, UK

John Steel Department of Journalism Studies University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-26479-6    ISBN 978-3-030-26480-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: estudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

A volume offering a historical take on letters to the editor is both long overdue and welcome. Letters to the editor have historically formed a vital site for participation, capturing the preoccupations and views of ordinary citizens, as well as the tenor of the large and small debates animating local and national communities. The distinctive nature of letters renders them an indispensable source of information for scholars across social sciences and humanities fields. Here, I will discuss two key reasons why this is so. First, for much of the history of mass media, letters to the editor were the main forum for debate in the public sphere, and therefore constitute a rich source of vernacular social and political history. Second, letters constitute carefully crafted contributions which are selected and curated by news organisations. This suggests that they represent what news organisations judge to be the most valuable contributions to debate, and makes them qualitatively different from digitally facilitated forms of participation as a genre and a practice. These features have methodological and conceptual implications which point to the continued relevance of the study of letters. At the same time, they highlight both continuity and change in relation to practices of mediated public participation.

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Letters to the Editor as Vital Forum for Public Debate The digital era has brought about a wealth of opportunities for participation in debate. If anything, the plethora of participatory opportunities afforded by digital platforms makes it easy to forget the vital role played by letters over hundreds of years of mediated public debate. It is therefore worth recalling that newspapers, ever since their emergence as the first mass medium, have always served as a vehicle for publishing letters (Wahl-­ Jorgensen 2007). The early history of newspapers was characterised by relatively small-scale operations run by a printer or editor, who brought together materials drawn from a range of external sources—including contributors sending in materials remotely. As a result, the line between the journalist and “correspondent” was often a blurry one. Early print publications made little distinction between opinion and news content, and, correspondingly, between letters to the editor and journalistic contributions. Indeed, some early newspapers were comprised almost entirely of letters to the editor (see Hobbs’ chapter in this volume). The genre of the letter was sometimes used as a vehicle for the publication of anonymous letters on contentious political issues. For example, the emerging British political press of the early eighteenth century, represented by publications such as The Spectator, made the critical opinion essay, in the form of a letter to the editor, a centre-piece of the newspaper. This included contributions such as the famous Cato’s letters, which took a radical approach by raising issues such as “the responsibilities of the government in protecting citizens, liberty and rights of citizens, representative government, and freedom of expression” (Hart 1970, p. 91). However, the use of letters by professional writers for particular political purposes should not detract from their importance as a source of vernacular history, capturing the concerns of citizens in local communities. For example, as historian David Nord has documented, in late eighteenth-­ century Philadelphia, local residents wrote letters to the Federal Gazette, sharing their experience of a city in the grips of a yellow fever epidemic (Nord 2001, p. 199). The newspaper was seen as a crucial source of information necessary for survival. Readers—ordinary people, city officials and elite officials alike—created a discursive community, as a practice of active citizenship, by writing to the newspaper in their fight against the epidemic, “passing along rumors, offering folk cures and remedies, ­speculating

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on the religious meaning of the disease, sharing their fears and their sorrows” (Nord 2001, pp. 200–201). This example highlights the role of letters as a uniquely valuable resource for vernacular history. They not only can tell us about the dominant debates or prevailing public opinion in a particular time and place, but can also give access to the voices of individuals and groups who have been marginalised in historical accounts. For example, Thornton, Perkins and Varma, in their chapter for this volume, analyse responses to the 1929 stock market crash in the African-American newspaper, the Chicago Defender. The newspaper, described by the poet Langston Hughes as “the journalistic voice of a largely voiceless people,” enabled the construction of a discursive community premised on the sharing of experiences of racism, and of everyday lives occupied by concerns over survival over and above worries about the whims of the stock market. Throughout the history of newspapers, letter-writing has been used as a political strategy by social movements and activists, including abolitionists, feminists and anti-war protesters—a strategy that persists to this day. Pedersen’s chapter for this volume examines women’s letters to Scottish newspapers in the important decade between 1918 and 1928. Newly enfranchised women were given voice and allowed to assert their claims to citizenship, generating a “feminine public sphere,” as Pedersen argues. For Chapman, writing on contributions to Labour Woman in the post-­ World War I era, the publication provided an opportunity for the cultivation of “gendered awareness” in the context of wide-ranging discussion which linked “politics to economic and class concerns.” Similarly, Cavanagh’s chapter, in examining the tone and topics of Victorian newspaper, showed that “the nineteenth century press provided a space in which the personal could become political.” Writing letters launched citizens into what they perceived as a sphere of empowerment, based on a view of newspapers as advocates for the people and vehicles for making claims to accountability. Letters allow us to catch what are sometimes surprising and always revealing glimpses of how ordinary people make sense of major events and crises unfolding around them. As Milena Barrios and Gill document in their chapter on letters to the editor in Colombia from 1999 to 2008, the genre allowed for the public expression of emotion at a time of intense violence and disruption in the country. Letters served as a therapeutic “safety valve,” allowing citizens to vent their feelings (e.g. Davis and Rarick 1964; Lander 1972; Romanow et al. 1981). Beyond mere venting,

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however, “emotional repertoires,” drawing on love, fear, anger, and sadness, emerged within the letters, and were “accompanied by a wide repertoire of terms used for characterizing and evaluating social events.” That is, talking about emotions in public created new ways of coming to terms with dramatic ongoing events, while making claims for social justice. For historians, journalism scholars and others interested in accessing documentation of public debate, letters therefore constitute a distinctive source for accessing both dominant debates and marginalised voices; for understanding the impact of major social events across society, and for dramatising the ways in which ordinary people made sense of these events. This, in turn, also entails contestation of their meaning and attempts at bringing about justice and social change in the process.

Letters to the Editor as Carefully Crafted and Curated Texts At the same time, we cannot understand letters as a straightforward representation of public opinion. Rather, they should be seen as carefully crafted and curated products of editorial processes (see also Wahl-Jorgensen 2004). They are brought into being through the co-creation of news workers and letter writers. As such, they are highly mediated through journalistic routines (Gregory and Hutchins 2004, p.  188), including those of editorial selectivity (Wahl-Jorgensen 2002). Such selectivity privileges letters that relate to content already on the news agenda, rather than those introducing radically new topics or ideas. Those selected for publication are “moulded” to fit journalistic criteria (see Hobbs’ chapter for this volume). Editorial processes including editing for language and length, with newsroom professionals occasionally going to great lengths to sharpen the contribution of letters they consider particularly important (e.g. Wahl-Jorgensen 2007). This mediation of letters through editorial processes means that they cannot be seen as a straightforward reflection of the prevailing public opinion, even if they have frequently been taken as such (e.g. Sigelman and Walkosz 1992, p. 938). On the other hand, letters editors have always been careful to represent a balance of opinions in published letters so that the section comes across as a legitimate forum for public debate (Wahl-Jorgensen 2007). The curated and co-produced nature of letters distinguishes their form from that of more recently emerging opportunities for participation. The

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emergence of online comments and discussion forums, user-generated content (UGC), followed by the arrival of social media have radically enhanced and transformed the ways that ordinary citizens can intervene. While these new forms, like letters, provide the opportunity for non-professionals to shape public debate, they differ dramatically in their form. Contemporary participatory interventions such as social media posts and below-the-line comments tend to provide immediate reactions and frequently come in the form of brief, off-the-cuff remarks. As Graham, Jackson and Wright note in their chapter for this volume, below-the-line comments on newspaper stories may be moderated, but do not tend to be selected and subject to the quality control and scrutiny shaping letters sections in newspapers. These features open up for more spontaneous reaction, debate and exchange, but also mean that such contributions should be understood as radically different types of interventions in the public sphere. By contrast, letters to the editor are best understood not merely as reactions to ongoing debates, but rather as attempts at staking out particular positions, often in great detail and with significant rhetorical flourish. The Victorian letter writers that are the subject of Cavanagh’s chapter cultivated a distinctive form of epistolary civility, frequently combined with performative theatricality. This points to the idea that newspaper audiences in general, and letter writers in particular, understand letters to the editor a particular genre with normalised (if dynamic) conventions, as a “stylistic and substantive responses to perceived situational demands” (Campbell and Jamieson 19). These rules are embodied in “recurrent patterns of language use” (Miller 1981, p. 163), including features such as the use of a “distanced, depersonalised tone” (see Cavanagh’s chapter in this volume) which mirrors the style of objective journalism and suggests an alignment with rational understandings of citizenship. Along those lines, as de Silva’s contribution to this book suggests, contemporary letter writers continue to see their role as one of generating thoughtful interventions to public debate. The goal of letter-writing is not merely to voice grievances, but also to demand a response and, ultimately, bring about social change (see also Cavanagh, Hobbs and de Torres Silva’s chapters in this volume). This suggests that letters to the editor are understood, by readers and news organisations alike, as a privileged site for forms of public deliberation that might influence broader social, cultural and political developments. Because of the distinctive nature of letters to the editor as a genre and resource of vernacular history, they are a veritable gold mine for scholars

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across humanities and social sciences fields. This book takes the invaluable first step towards tapping into this ore and, in doing so, transforming our understanding of some of the most important political and social debates of times present and past, and the ways in which they are brought to life in letters to the editor. Cardiff, UK

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen

References Campbell, K.  K., & Jamieson, K.  H. (1978). Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction. In K.  K. Campbell and K.  H. Jamieson (Eds.), Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action (pp.  9–32). Falls Church, VA: Speech Communication Association. Davis, H., & Rarick, G. (1964). Functions of Editorials and Letters to the Editor. Journalism Quarterly, 47, 108–109. Hart, J. A. (1970). The Developing Views on the News Editorial Syndrome 1500– 1800. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Lander, B.  G. (1972). Functions of Letters to the Editor: A Re-examination. Journalism Quarterly, 49, 142–143. Miller, C.  R. (1984). Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 151–167. Nord, D. (2001). Communities of Journalism. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Romanow, W. I., Soderlund, W. D., Wagenberg, R. H., & Briggs, E. D. (1981). Letters to the Editor in a Canadian Federal Election: Hard News, Editors’ Cues and Readers’ Views. Journalism Quarterly, 58, 57–68. Sigelman, K., & Walkosz, B. J. (1992). Letters to the Editor as a Public Opinion Thermometer: The Martin Luther King Holiday Vote in Arizona. Social Science Quarterly, 73, 938–946. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2002). Understanding the Conditions for Public Discourse: Four Rules for Selecting Letters-to-the-Editor. Journalism Studies, 3, 69–81. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2007). Journalists and the Public. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Allison Cavanagh and John Steel 2 Regular Letters-Writers: Meanings and Perceptions of Public Debate  9 Marisa Torres da Silva 3 Speaking as Citizens: Women’s Political Correspondence to Scottish Newspapers 1918–1928  25 Sarah Pedersen 4 Letters to the Editor in the Chicago Defender, 1929–1930: The Voice of a Voiceless People 49 Stephynie C. Perkins, Brian Thornton, and Tulika Varma 5 Letters to the Editor in Colombia: A Sanctuary of Public Emotions 69 Marta Milena Barrios and Luis Manuel Gil 6 Letters to the Editor as a Tool of Citizenship 89 Allison Cavanagh

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7 The Struggles and Economic Hardship of Women Working Class Activists, 1918–1923109 Jane L. Chapman 8 Readers’ Letters to Victorian Local Newspapers as Journalistic Genre129 Andrew Hobbs 9 The Possibilities and Limits of “Open Journalism”: Journalist Engagement Below the Line at the Guardian 2006–2017147 Todd Graham, Daniel Jackson, and Scott Wright Author Index171 Subject Index177

Notes on Contributors

Marta Milena Barrios  is Associate Professor of Journalism at the undergraduate and graduate programmes of Communications at Universidad del Norte in Colombia. Her academic interests include the study of the relationship between society and informative media. Her research focuses mainly on the study of texts produced as a result of that relationship, including areas such as disaster coverage, political conflict, gender stereotypes and risk management. She is the author and co-author of journal articles and book chapters on these topics. Prior to joining academia, she was a radio and television reporter. Allison  Cavanagh  works in the field of reader responses to media, in both contemporary and historical perspectives. She has worked with the BBC examining reader feedback on news and has written extensively on Victorian and Edwardian letters to the editor in UK newspapers, with a particular focus on issues of class, gender and the mediatisation of the public sphere. Some of her recent publications on these topics include Cavanagh, A. (2016) Ladies of the Times: Elite Women’s Voices at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Journalism Studies, and Cavanagh, A. (2013) “Barbarous cruelty at the British Museum”: Mediatization, authority and reputation in nineteenth century England. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communications Research, 28(54). Jane  L.  Chapman is Professor of Communications, University of Lincoln, UK, and Research Associate, Wolfson College Cambridge. Author of 12 books and 30 articles/book chapters, she is an editorial board member for several international journals. Previous awards include xiii

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the Colby Prize for Victorian Literature, and Emerald Publishing best academic article of the year. Chapman specialises in the comparative, transnational history of newspapers and illustrative satire, especially relating to newspaper communications by women and ethnic minorities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and her collaborative research in relation to the World Wars is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Luis  Manuel  Gil  has a BA in Communications and Journalism from Universidad del Norte, with an Erasmus Mundus MA degree in Journalism, Media and Globalization from Aarhus University/Danish School of Media and Journalism (Denmark) and Hamburg University (Germany). He has experience in qualitative research of media and virtual communities, journalism, public relations and creation of digital content. In Colombia, he participated in the Colciencias Young Researcher programme and was a Colfuturo Scholar; and in Europe, he was awarded the Erasmus+ grant from the European Commission. Todd  Graham  is a University Academic Fellow in Political Communi­ cation and Journalism at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on (1) the use of new media in representative democracies; (2) the intersections between popular culture and formal politics; (3) online election campaigns; (4) social media and journalism; (5) forms of online deliberation and political talk; (6) online civic engagement; (7) and public sphere and deliberative democratic theory. Andrew Hobbs  is a senior lecturer in the School of Journalism, Media & Performance at the University of Central Lancashire. He is interested in English provincial print cultures and local and regional identities, particularly newspapers and magazines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent publications include the open-access book, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The provincial press in England, 1855–1900 (2018), and a chapter on provincial periodicals in the award-winning Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers (2016). He is a former journalist. Daniel Jackson  is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. His research broadly explores the intersections of media, power and democracy, including news coverage of politics, the construction of news, political communication and the dynamics of civic culture in online environments. He has edited five books and is co-­editor

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of the election analysis reports, published within ten days of major electoral events. Jackson is former convenor of the Political Studies Association’s Media and Politics Group and convenor of the Journalism Research Group at Bournemouth University. Sarah  Pedersen  is Professor of Communication and Media at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. The focus of her research is women’s engagement with the media, using both contemporary and historical sources. She researches and publishes on women’s use of both contemporary social media and daily newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century and is particularly interested in women’s use of media for political purposes. Her book, The Scottish Suffragettes and the Press, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017 and she is working on a book entitled The Politicisation of Mumsnet. She is Associate Editor of the academic journal Women’s Studies International Forum. Stephynie  C.  Perkins is an associate professor in the School of Communication at University of North Florida. She also directs the graduate programme in communication. She holds a PhD from University of Florida. John Steel  is a senior lecturer in the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield. Since completing his PhD in 2001, Steel has produced more than 30 publications with leading international publishers and in major peer-reviewed journals. Broadly, Steel’s work spans Media History, Journalism Studies and Political Communication. He is a Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded project examining press freedom and journalism ethics across thirteen European countries. Brian  Thornton is a professor in the School of Communication at University of North Florida. He holds a PhD from the University of Utah. He has published 15 academic articles studying the history and content of letters to the editor. Marisa Torres da Silva  is an assistant professor of journalism and audience studies at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, NOVA University of Lisbon (NOVA FCSH), Portugal. Her master and doctoral dissertations (both published as books, 2007 and 2014) focused on letters to the editor in the Portuguese press. Her research interests include the relationship between journalism, democracy and audiences, news

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consumption and audience research, media diversity and pluralism, gender and journalism and cultural journalism. Tulika Varma  is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at University of North Florida. She holds a PhD from Louisiana State University. Scott  Wright  is Associate Professor in Political Communication at the University of Melbourne. His research is interested in everyday online political talk, moderation and interface design, super-participation, online activism, e-democracy and how technology is impacting journalism practice. His most recent work explores tech journalism. He has published in journals such as New Media & Society, Press/Politics, Information, Communication & Society and the Journal of Computer-­ Mediated Communication amongst many others.

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Word cloud for emotional words in El Tiempo and El Heraldo75 Fig. 8.1 Percentage of pseudonymous letters to Preston Herald, 1860– 1900 (n = 230)141 Fig. 9.1 Frequency of comments posted by journalists’ per year (2006–2017)154 Fig. 9.2 Where was the comment posted? News section (%) 155 Fig. 9.3 Where was the comment posted? Genre (%) 156 Fig. 9.4 What is the dominant function of the comment? (%) 157

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 8.3 Table 8.4 Table 9.1

Frequencies: issues Frequencies: sections Issues covered most frequently in each section Answers to correspondents, 1890 and 1900, Lancashire Evening Post, Preston Number of letters published in September and October for selected years, Preston Herald, Preston Guardian, Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Evening Post, 1860–1900 Topics of letters, Preston Herald 1860–1900 Orientation of readers’ letters, Preston Herald 1860–1900 Rate and distribution of comments

56 56 60 135 136 136 138 154

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Allison Cavanagh and John Steel

Introduction As Wahl-Jorgensen (2007) has noted, letters are often disregarded by editors as peripheral to the main business of newspapers, their role often to signal a connection with the public and provide an, albeit sometimes limited, platform for their views and opinions. Despite the blurring of identities in early print publications and newspapers, letters have more recently been used to reinforce professional boundaries between journalists and the public—to demarcate the boundaries of the professional and amateur communicator. However, letters also contribute to the identity of the publication by expanding the varieties of argumentation and playing a role in defining the scope of readers’ responses to news; morally orientating the reader with the editorial position of the newspaper, while also serving as a space for a wide variety of opinion. Letters therefore provide a window on the reflexive relationship between editorial identity and readership— scoping out the legitimate discursive parameters of both readers and the identity of the publication. Letters are also of course a forum through A. Cavanagh (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Steel (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Cavanagh, J. Steel (eds.), Letters to the Editor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2_1

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which the personal and the political intersect, a space where the implications of contemporaneous events are worked out by citizens and public figures alike. Letters can therefore be understood as a space in which the meaning and significance of unfolding narratives and events are contested. They can be used to understand the continuity of concerns over time, the multiple and overlapping ways in which particular concerns and issues recur over sometimes widely removed periods, and the changes in the ways those concerns have been articulated and framed. All of these concerns shaped our sense that there are still significant stories to tell about the role, function and impact of letters to the editor within the public discursive realm. The intellectual seeds for this edited collection were initially laid at a seminar organised by the editors at the University of Sheffield in July 2015. The seminar brought together a number of leading scholars of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century press to evaluate the current state of research into letters to the editor and to develop new ways of exploring this aspect of newspaper history. The seminar was timely, given that large scale digitalisation of these sources has opened up this potential field for further research and scholarship. The seminar therefore also sought to showcase approaches to the use of letters to the editor as a resource and consider new empirical and theoretical applications of this rich resource. The workshop was intended to explore the terrain of research in this area up to that time and to consolidate and re-think ways in which questions relating to letters to the editor might be explored further. Following the success of the workshop, a panel proposal was put together which was based around the themes emerging from the workshop for the International Communication Association conference in Fukuoka, Japan, in 2016. The panel proposal took a similar approach to the initial seminar in seeking to explore the current state of research on letters to the editor but broadening out the scope to include wider international perspectives. We were particularly happy to include work that provided cross-national or cross-­ cultural perspectives on letters to the editor, and work which interrogated the changing role and function of letters, situating them within the context of other social institutions and practices. We were also concerned to understand the ways in which news environments, political systems and readerships interact in the production of rival understandings of the affordances of letters to the editor as a component of the public sphere, all of which are key concerns which inform this collection.

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The chapters in this edited collection therefore follow on from this earlier collaborative work and are an attempt to showcase current work on letters to the editor from a range of different national, cultural, conceptual and methodological perspectives. The volume begins with Marisa Torres da Silva’s analysis of regular or ‘professional’ letter writers in the Portuguese press and draws on survey research to explore letter writers’ motivation and intentions in their letter-writing activity. This chapter deals with notions of participation and engagement as feedback loop towards professional journalism. Considering the changing environment for audience and reader feedback, in relation to digital news, the chapter highlights the continued significance and importance of letters to the editor as a component of, or ‘hybrid’ notion of citizen engagement and participation in public discourse as differentiated from online comment. Engagement here is demonstrated not solely in terms of letter writers reacting to events in the press. For so-called professional letter writers, da Silva emphasises how such activities can stimulate collective action and real-world political participation as the letter writers organise themselves collectively in their endeavours. Civic participation is also a key theme in Sarah Pedersen’s chapter which focusses on how the issue of women’s suffrage in Scotland was articulated in letters to Scottish newspapers between 1918 and 1928. Pedersen foregrounds how this period saw women’s citizenship became validated through partial access to voting rights—something not complete until 1928. The chapter emphasises the complex nature of political and civic participation through letters to the editor and how a range of different political constituencies sought to shape the nature of their citizenship through political action that was supplemented and justified in these letters. The chapter puts forward the notion that the letters created and constituted a ‘feminine public sphere’ which sought to fully establish women as part of the whole political and civic community. It also emphasises the extent to which letters were also about women speaking to each other, rather than just to men, within their own public sphere. Perkins, Thornton and Varma’s chapter examines issues of marginalisation and race through their exploration of letters to the editor in the Chicago Defender during the great financial crash of 1929/1930. The chapter highlights how Robert S.  Abbott’s Defender, one of America’s leading black newspapers of the time, sought to make the case for African Americans in the South to leave the brutal racism of the southern states and head north to make a new life for themselves. The chapter focusses on the responses to this call in the letter’s pages in the midst of the crash and

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its aftershocks. Signalling letters here as the ‘voice of a voiceless’ constituency, their chapter explores readers responses to the financial crash after the promise of a better life in the north. Instead of escaping racism, the letters examined here emphasise that the racism they experienced in the south was also present in the north. Yet the authors indicate that letters in this chapter also highlight how constituencies can come together in times of great adversity. Chapter 5 in our collection explores how letters to the editor can represent a range of emotional repertoires amongst national publics at times of national crisis and hardship. Focussing on letters to the editor in two major Colombian newspapers—El Heraldo and El Tiempo, Barrios and Gil explore how national identity and a collective patriotic spirit is configured through letters to the editor in ways that express a range of emotional sentiments and concerns. By drawing on Ekman’s (2008) notion of afflictive and non-afflictive emotions, their chapter signals how letters to the editor provided space for Colombians to reflect on the complex social and political issues of the day, and in doing so, foreground an aspiration for justice and desire for peace in highly turbulent times. Allison Cavanagh’s chapter returns to the notion of civic engagement and how such engagement emerges with conceptions of citizenship during the Victorian era in Britain with letters working as an ‘operative public space’ in which multiple forms of empowerment are expressed and performed. Drawing on digital archives of The Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, Cavanagh examines the ways in which letters to the editor in these newspapers provided a formal ‘modes of public engagement’ and positioning themselves as forming an explicit political citizenry at that time. Jane Chapman focusses on a specific period following the Great War when the various struggles of working-class women were made more visible through the pages of Labour Woman, originally the organ of the National Women’s Labour League. Chapman highlights how letters to Labour Woman signal both a ‘genuine idealism’ as well as significant anguish amongst women at this time. Moreover, these grounded accounts of women who, whilst on the one hand were full of optimism given the newly gained political empowerment some women enjoyed, also found themselves experiencing economic hardship following their ‘dismissal’ from the roles they took up during the war. Chapman’s chapter therefore details the ways in which the women of the Labour movement sought to express their growing political agency alongside deepening social and economic hardship following the war.

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Clearly, the provenance of letters and their authenticity as meaningful articulations of a public voice or a form of social agency can only really be verified by the letters’ authors and the editors in whose newspapers they appear. We have to take letters at face value as a genuine expression of the newspapers’ voice. As such, regional letters in the Victorian era, as Andrew Hobbs’s chapter emphasises, are highly mediated forms of expression and exist as a ‘distinct type of journalism’ which signal aspects of ‘performativity’ in the identity of the publication. Rather than readers’ letters to the editor representing a form of political agency or growing sense of civic identity, Hobbs’s chapter addresses the sometimes confected nature of readers’ letters and their role in shaping the identity of the publication to its readership. The final chapter in our collection also engages with questions of journalistic intervention, this time in the deliberative spaces that online journalism provides. Drawing on their longitudinal study of below the line comment in the Guardian online, Todd Graham, Daniel Jackson and Scott Wright highlight how the traditional gatekeeping role of the journalist, in this newspaper at least, briefly opened up opportunities for a more participatory and active engagement with its readers. Rather than a focus on readers’ responses to journalistic content, this chapter examines how journalists have conceived and engaged within these spaces and the factors that shape their engagement with their readers over time. As such, this concluding chapter addresses questions of the changing nature of deliberation within online journalism and the way in which journalistic ‘boundary work’ itself has been reconfigured, albeit briefly, to encompass a more open and deliberative environment. However, the authors go on to highlight how online engagement has placed new pressures on journalists and, more saliently, the growing role that Twitter has as a platform for journalists to respond, though not necessarily engage with, their audiences. Contemporary interest in changes wrought by a shift towards multiple overlapping and disjointed news environments, concerns for example around authenticity and ‘fake news’, the shift from traditional models of journalism and the breakdown of barriers both between mainstream and niche journalism and those between audience and journalist, have foregrounded complexity in the ways participation in news cultures can be understood. We recognise that in evaluating reader participation, we have to bracket off ideas around what constitutes ‘matters of common interest’ for example, and how we theorise modes and forms of interaction and engagement. Yet one of the central concerns uniting the pieces in this volume is with regard to broadening our understanding the nature of

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deliberation and what it means to engage and be a participant within distinctive temporal and geographical news cultures. In reflecting on the varieties of engagement within this broader empirical framework, these chapters address an area of increasing significance in modern journalism scholarship and provide further nuance, diversely grounded historically, geographically and culturally. In classic approaches, often dominated by Habermassian ideals, there is assumed to be stability both around what constitutes ‘public opinion’ and ‘participation’. Common interest is understood directly in terms of a critique of power. The expression “public opinion” refers to the tasks of criticism and control which a public body of citizens informally … practices vis-à-vis the ruling structure organized in the form of a state. (Habermas et al. 1974, p. 49)

Here public opinion is defined by its separation from matters merely private, or else questions proposed by institutional interests. Participation likewise is the rational exercise of disinterested reason. In the work of Fraser (1990) and Mouffe (2009; Laclau and Mouffe 2001) we find reasons to question the ease of these assumptions. Accounts such as these argue against the delimitation of the sphere of legitimate engagement, since this takes for granted exactly what should be an object of study in assuming an ease of connection between predefined matters of ‘common interest’, modes of, and motivations for, engaging. For Fraser, Habermas and his followers failed to account for the tension within the categories of public and private interest, rendering the identification of the general interest an exercise in social power. For Mouffe, on the other hand, accounts such as these overstate the role of ‘rationality’ and ‘disinterest’ in interventions in the public sphere. Instead, Mouffe emphasises the significance of ‘passion’, the mobilisation of common affect, and communality in creating the preconditions for the emergence of common interest in the first place. As Mihai explains It is an idea’s power to inspire fantasies and to relate to citizens’ desires that moves them to engage with one another in the public sphere … this does not mean that reasoned argument does not have a role to play … It just does not constitute the only mode of engaging legitimately in politics. (Mihai 2014, p. 34)

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Scholars of contemporary media have taken these concerns to heart, broadening ideas around the validity of more extensive phenomenal forms of participation. However, these have not previously been applied to Letters to the Editor to the same degree. In this volume scholars have taken on board this task, looking at the role of emotion (Barrios and Gil; Cavanagh) the political imaginary (Chapman, Thornton) and professional self-identification (Torres da Silva) in motivating reader letters. These analyses decentre the ideal of the rationally debating citizen whose interests and modes of engagement in discussion are presumed to pre-exist their interventions. Rather we see a concern with the ways that people take and structure positions within a discursive public sphere. Finally, in addition to making a modest contribution to the debate about forms of reader engagement and their status and role within news cultures and the public sphere more generally, it is worth stressing that the curation of chapters in this volume is intended to extend and expand scholarship on letters to the editor and provide new insights into the role and function of letters and reader commentary within distinctive modes of public communication. In doing so, the volume engages with notions of public voice and the varieties of responses to this from journalism and news production within geographically and historically distinct boundaries with a view to stimulating new inquiries and explorations of journalism and its relationship to and with its publics.

References Ekman, P. (2008). Emotional awareness: Overcoming the obstacles to psychological balance and compassion. Macmillan. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, (25/26), 56–80. Habermas, J., Lennox, S., & Lennox, F. (1974). The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964). New German Critique, (3), 49–55. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (2001). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (2nd ed.). London and New York: Verso (Previous Edition 1985). Mihai, M. (2014). Theorizing Agonistic Emotions. Parallax, 20(2), 31–48. Mouffe, C. (2009). The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. Previously Published: London and New York: Verso, 2005. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2007). Journalists and the Public: Newsroom Culture, Letters to the Editor and Democracy. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

CHAPTER 2

Regular Letters-Writers: Meanings and Perceptions of Public Debate Marisa Torres da Silva

Introduction: Audience Participation in the Twenty-­ First Century This chapter hopes to provide an insight into Portuguese regular letters-­ writers’ perspectives and motivations for participation, through a survey questionnaire sent to readers that show a very high degree of activity in letter writing, in order to understand the role that they attribute to letters’ sections and also other spaces of participation, such as online comments. Besides adding knowledge to the already distinctive Portuguese media landscape, as it will be explained later on, this study aims to contribute to one of the less researched areas within journalism studies—letter-writers and letter writing, what drives them and what do they expect to accomplish, mobilizing scholarly notions of “participation” and “engagement”, and also reflecting upon the relationship between audience feedback and professional journalism. News media reliance upon audience feedback and publicly expressed opinions of readers is a mutually constitutive relationship and a living reality of modern journalism (Cavanagh and Dennis 2013; Reader 2015, p. 26). As such, newsrooms’ interest in the audience is not a trendy phenomenon based on the rise of the Internet and social M. Torres da Silva (*) NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH), Lisbon, Portugal © The Author(s) 2019 A. Cavanagh, J. Steel (eds.), Letters to the Editor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2_2

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media. Instead, we can trace the fostering of ordinary citizen’s public engagement in the appearance of correspondence sections within nineteenth-­century newspapers which for many years were the only form of audience feedback in the context of mass media. More recently, traditional media outlets are facing new challenges in the way they are accommodating audience participation, which in turn may entail serious questions about the boundaries of journalism and new “concerns for all involved, from the author-editors who manage such forums to the individual participants who turn to them as outlets for their expression” (Reader 2015, p. 26). From citizen blogs to citizen stories, from readers’ comments to discussion forums to social networking, participatory journalism, defined as the “processes and effects of ordinary citizens’ contributions to gathering, selecting, publishing, distributing, commenting on and discussing the news that is contained within an institutional media product” (Hermida 2011, p. 15), is nowadays challenging both conventional newsroom practice and the hegemony of journalism as gatekeeper (Singer et al. 2011). Letters to the editor and online comments constitute two of the most recognized public forums where readers work out current events and issues of common concern. Letters served as a pre-digital genre of user-­ generated content (Millioni et al. 2012; Robinson 2010) but even in the context of newer forms of engagement they (nowadays mainly submitted by email) remain an important vehicle of readers’ expression in mainstream media publications around the world (Perrin 2016; Silva 2014). Although letters have received less scholarly attention than other subjects in journalism studies, authors have underlined their relevance to democracy (Gregory and Hutchins 2004), insofar as they broaden public communication and debate while allowing the entrance of new topics of discussion besides the established news agenda (Silva 2014). Other scholars consider letters as a mid-range form of political participation or “a hybrid form of civic engagement related both to political participation (because it involves choosing to act in public) and to the public sphere (because it consists of seeking voice on matters of public importance)” (Perrin 2016, p.  55). As such, letters exist “somewhere between a private life devoid of politics, and a political life devoid of citizens. It constitutes a fragmented, contentious, sparsely and selectively populated zone that gives a few readers the chance to participate in particular, individual, and mainly expressive ways in ‘the media’ and occasion-

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ally perhaps beyond that in ‘politics’—two of the main coordinating complexes of our human existence” (Nielsen 2010, pp. 33–34). Providing one of the newest (and most popular) ways of audience participation, online comments also offer potential for critical discussion of public matters and for extensive exchange of ideas. Readers’ comments can add “perspectives, insights, and personal experiences that can enrich a news story as well as enabling the tracking of user interests or getting sources and tips for future stories” (Diakopoulos and Naaman 2011, p. 134). They allow audiences to discuss news content with each other and with journalists (Graham and Wright 2015, p. 319). Journalists can therefore consider these spaces for comments as a “community-­building and engagement tool, as a place to help people connect, as conversation about the news story or news topic, as a product feature with monetizing potential, as a source of information, and as a way to extend the story” (Robinson 2010, p. 132), besides providing “opportunities for journalists to reflect on their writing, test arguments in the case of commentary pieces, receive feedback on stories, and can be a source for new leads” (Graham and Wright 2015, p. 319). As Bill Reader fairly highlights, in the twenty-first century, “audience feedback forums do not stand alone” (Reader 2015, p.  148), as letters to the editor may prompt discussion in online forums and, in turn, online comments can be shared within social platforms. This chapter investigates letters-writers’ perspectives and attitudes on public communication, participation and debate. Taking previous research findings on letters and online comments in Portugal (Silva 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015; Brites and Silva 2017), our goal is to uncover the meanings that the so-called professional letter-writer—the identified group of regular writers, some writing more than one letter a day on the widest variety of subjects—attributes to correspondence sections and online comments. The letters from these so-called regular customers or “habitués” are frequently selected for publication by some newspapers, although others may be reluctant in choosing their texts due to excessive frequency of writing (Silva 2009). In order to fulfill this purpose, a survey questionnaire (Google forms) was sent by email to 74 previously identified frequent letters-writers in February 2018, using a non-probability sampling method. In terms of survey distribution, I chose to send the questionnaire by email due to a higher chance of response and to the possibility of targeting the respondents. As an invited speaker in the Fourth National Meeting of Letter-­ Writers and also subscriber of a 2017 online public petition aimed at

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defending letters sections in the Portuguese mainstream press, I had access to the email addresses of a set of 46 letters-writers and also to the 28 readers that responded to a previous questionnaire on motivations and expectations of letter writing (Silva 2014). The response rate was of 52%, with 29 valid answers.1 These readers were considered to be frequent letter-­ writers since they wrote at least between 6 and 12 letters per year (12 readers), with 11 readers stating to write letters between once a month and once a week and 6 readers that have declared to write between once a week and daily. The survey was available online from February to March 2018 and aimed to understand the role and functions that frequent letter-writers attribute to correspondence sections and to other mediated participation spaces, as well as their motivations and expectations, among other aspects. The questionnaire included a set of socio-demographic questions (gender, age, city, education and work status), a letter-writing frequency question, open-ended questions on motivations for writing, expectations and functions attributed to letters to the editor (including a section for additional notes), and open-ended questions on online comments (role of comments, opinion on moderation systems, and, if applicable, frequency of posting, motivations for participation, expectations, including also a section for additional notes).

Letter-Writers Who participates and why they participate in correspondence sections is a key question. Studies about the demographics of letters-writers in print news media emerged in the form of case studies of local American newspapers between 1950 and 1970. These empirical studies trace a similar profile for letters-writers—predominantly male, elderly or middle-aged, white, with a stable job and well-educated (e.g. Vacin 1965; Singletary and Cowling 1979; Tarrant 1957). More recently, in 2003, a national telephone survey of 1017 American adults to ask them about their letter-­ writing habits and to collect demographic information, such as age, sex, race, income or level of education confirmed the previous profile of letters-­ writers (Reader et al. 2004). If participation in the letters section “follows a pattern similar to other forms of public sphere participation, we would 1  In the first question of the survey, four people stated that they didn’t usually write letters to press publications, therefore ending their participation in the questionnaire.

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expect to observe inequality on the basis of race, education, age, and especially social class” (Schlozman et  al. apud Perrin 2016, p.  58), and, we may add, gender (Williams and Medina 2001; Silva 2007). In terms of socio-demographic characteristics, our survey also shows that most of the 29 inquired readers are male (21) and have more than 65 years old (18), are predominantly from the capital city district Lisbon (12) or from Oporto (12), have a university-level education, with a bachelor degree (12) or a master degree or Ph.D. (6) and more than half are retired (16). Although this survey is not meant to be representative of Portuguese frequent letters-writers socio-demographic profile, it’s interesting to notice that the predominant features of our small sample coincide with the letter-writers’ profile found in previous studies (Reader et  al. 2004; Hill 1981; Vacin 1965; Singletary and Cowling 1979; Tarrant 1957; Williams and Medina 2001; Silva 2007; Perrin 2016). The letters-­writers inquired in the study usually write specifically about national and international politics (10) and/or current events and subjects (6), althouh many indicate that the issues they write about are very diverse (8). This widespread socio-demographic profile has built skepticism about the representativeness of opinions expressed in correspondence sections, “based largely on the perception that persons who write letters-to-the-­editor are a tiny and atypical group of citizens” (Hill 1981, p.  384). Studies on online comments-writers also suggest they are not representative of the broader public, tending to be more educated and younger than average (Reader 2015, pp. 23–24). Nevertheless, empirical research on 632 letters to the editor which commented on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and compared them with public opinion surveys about the subject to determine the representativeness of letters, found that the opinions expressed by letters-writers were very similar to those of the general population (Hill 1981, p. 390). Although letters-writers have been considered to be a minority by scholars, their opinions “are often shared in the mass and all social and economic and educational levels” (Grey and Brown 1970, p. 455). We might say that the case may be very different for online comments, which may be “highly susceptible to the construction of narratives that can create illusions of false majorities, misleading or exaggerated exemplifications, and the perpetuation of unfair stereotypes and common myths” (Reader 2015, pp. 23–24).

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The skepticism around the lack of representativeness of letters-writers in terms of demographic characteristics is reinforced by the presence of groups of regular letter-writers, who sometimes write more than one letter a day. In fact, newspapers may “perceive these individuals as ‘strange’, ‘mad’ or even ‘dangerous’. These writers expect their letters to be published as frequently as possible, and go as far as ‘stalking’ the letters editor” (Raeymaeckers 2005, p.  211). Journalism studies scholars have largely shown that journalists have negative views of their audiences (Sorlin 1992), seeing them also as unrepresentative of the general population (Gans 1980). As shown by Wahl-Jorgensen (2007), Raeymaeckers (2005) and Silva (2014), in respect to letters to the editor journalists used an “idiom of insanity”, labeling some readers as “crazy” or “insane”. “The idiom of insanity journalists use to discuss commentators has taken its toll on modern journalistic practice. Assuming most commenters are ‘crazy’ not only builds an accretion of disdain journalists have toward their audiences in general (Wahl-Jorgensen termed it ‘hating the public’), but also serves as a way for journalists to rationalize their unhealthy and anti-social detachment from the publics they serve” (Reader 2015, p. 112).

Letter Writing Writing a letter to the editor can be triggered by several motives. To influence public opinion, to participate in public discourse, to express personal views and defend interests and causes, to complain or praise about newspapers, to fill gaps in media coverage, or to shape policy, as well as ego-­ boosting or letting off steam are the most commonly identified of these (Wahl-Jorgensen 2007; Vacin 1965; Singletary and Cowling 1979; Hall et al. 1978). More particularly, why do regular letters-writers do it? What motivations lead them to send letters so frequently to newspapers and press publications? “As with most aspects of audience feedback, the individual agency dimension is complicated and multi-faceted, but it is perhaps the least understood (and least considered) dimension within professional journalism and journalism studies” (Reader 2015, p.  128). Reasons can include criticism, protest, correction of an error, vent frustration, request for information, raise a concern, advocate a course of action or simply prestige, particularly for regular writers (Pounds 2006, p. 32; Reader 2015, p. 128).

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But while we can look at letter writing in its subjective dimension, anchored in the individual, we can examine that not only frequent letter-­ writers surveyed are engaged (in the sense they have a mobilized attention on some object) but also they actively seek to politically and collectively participate as their engagement and participation are predicated on them being connect to others, by civic bonds. In this sense, we may question whether participation through letters is simply individual participation or merely self-expression. As we will see ahead in the chapter, Portuguese frequent letter-writers are a very interesting case study in terms of collective activity. In our survey, the inquired regular letter-writers gave a myriad of reasons for sending texts to press publications: to react and to correct a journalistic news piece; to fulfill the pleasure of writing; to give an opinion and to influence public opinion; to fulfill the duty of citizenship; to protest and to praise (although less frequently); and to alert to and discuss social, political and daily problems and/or issues. “I usually react to a journalistic work that I consider to be deficient, with incorrect information” “I have several reasons for writing letters: the pleasure of writing, the pleasure of commenting and a will to influence” “Because I like to know what is going on in the world, and at the same time to give opinions on matters that tell me something. On the other hand because I have the habit of reading newspapers and also writing” “Call attention to community problems and try to intervene in many problems of our daily lives”

My previous research on letters to the editor in the Portuguese press not only observed newsroom practices around the correspondence section (Silva 2012), but also tried to grasp the understandings and perceptions of letters-writers toward this means of participation through open-ended email questionnaires (Silva 2009, 2014). The great majority of letters-­ writers stressed the relevance of the correspondence section, in different ways. “It is a vehicle for participation, sharing ideas and, mainly, make them visible to the other readers; it is a place where ideas flourish spontaneously, and are not constrained by economic, political or institutional goals; it is a part of the newspaper that has readership value and may interest to many people; it creates a sense of ‘belonging’ to the newspaper, as it is a forum dedicated to all readers who want to participate; and it can be a place

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where alternative approaches of issues can appear” (Silva 2009, p. 100). However, due to the behavior of newspapers toward the letters’ forum (for instance, the reduced amount of space, selection and editing criteria), some letters-writers didn’t feel that news organizations gave them enough credit, which could undermine the effectiveness of the section. The devaluation and consequent marginalization of audience contributions in terms of letter writing was clearly present in my past research about correspondence sections in four Portuguese press publications: although professionals seemed to view the correspondence section as an open and necessary forum for public debate, some of them assumed that letters are simply not valued by journalists, being understood as something absolutely secondary or as a sort of second-level opinion, contrary to the op-ed articles, seen as “major” opinion (Silva 2014). Similarly, the results of our 2018 survey show that the great majority of the inquired letter-writers find the correspondence sections in newspapers to be very important, mainly as a means of civic participation, opinion expression on diverse issues of common concern, public debate and communication and critical view on current events and subjects. “Letters are an important means of intervention in the sense of giving an opinion on diverse subjects of society” “Letters to the editor are an act of citizenship, a vehicle of civic participation which can be more important than elected political representatives” “Letters show what has not been said or written, and a way that readers have to say that the newspapers they read are also theirs”

Three letter-writers, however, underline the lack of attention and/or importance attributed to letters by journalists and editors. Therefore, some of them suggest that correspondence sections should be placed and viewed by journalists at the same level of importance and prestige as “op-­ ed” articles. However, irrespective of their motivations of writing letters, letters-writers surveyed inquired sought visibility and reciprocity, wishing to be read by a larger audience and, ultimately, to influence public opinion in general. In respect to expectations when sending a letter to a newspaper, most readers surveyed expect to be published (17), making publicity of their writings essential to the activity of letter writing (Silva 2009, p. 97). Other expectations include to be read (by news staff, by other readers), to influence other readers, to start a debate and to receive comments by other readers.

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Portuguese Media Landscape and Regular Letters-Writers The Portuguese media landscape is plural and diverse (Correia and Martins 2017) and is currently experiencing a moment of change: while traditional media and particularly television still play a central role in news consumption practices, social media have been gaining ground in daily lives and routines (Silva et al. 2017, p. 195). In a country historically characterized by very poor newspaper habits in comparison to other European countries, print journalism has been in decline for several years, judged in terms of circulation, advertising revenue and number of copies sold, while populist press continues to be preferred by readers (Correia and Martins 2017) rather than “highbrow” or intellectual press. Additionally, Portugal has low rates of political and civic participation, due to an array of factors, such as a late democracy and a weak civic culture (Cabral apud Gonçalves 2007, p.  259). However, audiences’ perception of journalists and media is strongly positive in what concerns credibility, trust and role in democracy. According to Digital News Report 2018, Portugal is ranked (jointly) highest for trust in news across the 37-country survey, with 62% claiming that they trust in news in general, tending to trust specific media brands instead of search and social media, which show much lower levels of trust. Although they express concern about the quality of journalism, citizens “stay faithful to their preferred journalist and brands in terms of trust” (Newman et al. 2018, p. 95). Also, in a report on audiences and media consumption, a national survey of a representative sample of 1035 people demonstrated that media brands and journalists were considered to be very important in what concerns media trust and credibility (Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social—ERC 2015, p. 10). According to the data gathered by the European Media Systems Survey in 2014, media outlets are perceived by the public as actors that contribute positively to the quality of democracy (Santana-Pereira 2016, p. 793). Besides presenting a unique case study in its social, political and media landscape (Santana-Pereira 2016, p. 786; Silva et al. 2017, p. 182; Hallin and Mancini 2017), the activity of frequent letters-writers is another interesting (although much less visible) particular feature of Portuguese media audiences. Our case study of a Portuguese newspaper of record, Público, noted that around 23% of letters were written by these kinds of letters-­ writers (Silva 2007, p. 94). We also found a significant presence of regular letters-writers in a more extensive research on letters to the editor in

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diverse Portuguese press publications (Silva 2014, p. 268). However, the relevance of Portuguese frequent letters-writers is not limited to academic boundaries. In 2013, 12 readers-writers, who for several years sent letters to diverse press publications, decided to publish a collection of texts published in daily national scope newspapers, with the explicit aim of motivating “greater civic participation through the most varied forms available to every citizen” (Catita et al. 2013). The initiative of this group of letters-­ writers prompted, on March 22, 2014, the accomplishment of the First National Meeting of Letter-Writers in Coimbra, Portugal. In 2018, the Fifth National Meeting of Letters-Writers took place in Porto. Some of these letter-writers created in 2013 a blog (“A voz da girafa”), updated regularly, where they post published letters in newspapers and press publications but also perspectives and opinions around newsworthy and current events. Moreover, in mid-2017, some regular letters-writers subscribed an online public petition (later signed by 94 people) in order to “defend and value the correspondence section” in the Portuguese press, in the sequence of the end of the letters section in the daily newspaper Diário de Notícias (born in 1864) from January 2017. This public petition was then analyzed by the Culture, Communication, Youth and Sport Commission of the Assembly of the Republic (Petition n. 368/XIII/2), which solicited more information to the National Regulator (ERC), the Journalists’ Union and the Professional Journalist License Commission (CCPJ). While CCPJ indicated that the subject was outside its competences, ERC stated that editorial decisions such as ending a correspondence section, no matter how disputable they can be, are legitimate within its editorial autonomy. The petition was archived on January 31, 2018.2 Although the online public petition didn’t have any concrete effects, the initiative shows the high degree of public activity of frequent letter-writers.

Online Comment Portuguese internet news consumers comment more than users from other countries (such as France or Germany) surveyed by the Digital News Report 2014 both on social media (36%) and on news websites (16%) 2  http://www.parlamento.pt/ActividadeParlamentar/Paginas/DetalhePeticao. aspx?BID=13049, accessed on October 22, 2018.

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(Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social—ERC 2015, p.  76). From these, there is a significant proportion of users that comment on news several times a day, on either social media (20%) or news websites (27%). According to the Portuguese data of the Digital News Report 2017, it is people aged over 55 that most share and comment news in news websites and social media (Cardoso et al. 2017, p. 56). This means that, in respect to news, younger people are not the heavier influencers on the flow of online comments, despite their intensive use of online social media. The idea that older people interact most with the online news goes against the notion shared by a number of authors that youngsters communicate more online than other age groups (Quintanilha 2018, p. 297). Besides letters to the editor, our survey also included questions about online comments in news. The answers of frequent letter-writers show ambivalence on the importance they attribute to the online comments sections: while some consider them to be a more up-to-date means of opinion expression, dialogue and citizenship (as opposed to the so-called obsolete correspondence sections in print newspapers), others show a very critical stance on this participation space, considering it to be not important, not useful or even negative or bad, due to anonymity, hate speech and lack of accountability of readers that decide to express themselves in online comments’ sections. Indeed, readers’ comments have proved to be a locus of concern within newsrooms as abusive, uncivil and inappropriate speech may turn these participatory spaces away from democratic and ideal forms of public debate, while posing serious challenges to moderation strategies and policies. Readers surveyed are also divided on the moderation system they find more adequate to the online comments sections (post-moderation/open system vs. pre-moderation/closed system), and about a third don’t have an opinion. However, the majority agree that news organizations should intervene more in the space and give answers/dialogue with readers, which goes along with the results of a previous research on online comments and commenters in a Portuguese news organization (Silva 2015). From the 29 surveyed readers only nine stated to comment in news, and six do it on a daily basis. They post online comments in news mainly to intervene publicly, to share an opinion, to disagree with other commenter and/or the news piece, to provoke and to influence either journalists or readers.

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Conclusion Taking the singularities of Portuguese media landscape as a case study, as well as findings of previous academic research on letters to the editor and online comments in the country, this chapter had the aim to uncover regular letter-writers’ perceptions on mediated vehicles of news organizations’ audience participation and identify motivations for participation. In a country characterized by very low newspaper reading habits and very high levels of media and journalists trust, the significance and activity of Portuguese frequent letters-writers adds an interesting feature to this media landscape. These readers represent a very dynamic set of people that are willing to participate in public debate within news organizations, in order to express their views on issues of collective interest and eventually to influence public opinion while gaining visibility through publication. But they also transcend media barriers while organizing national meetings or promoting petitions in order to defend correspondence sections. We may state that letter writing by the inquired frequent letter-writers constitutes a subjective means of self-expression but mainly a means of political participation, a collective endeavor that links them together, a shared passion that generates civic bonds and trust (Dahlgren 2009, p. 86). However, if we look to a more restrictive or minimalist approach of the notion of participation, where participation is seen as a power-sharing and not merely taking part in a given process, media organizations retain a high degree of control over process and outcome (Carpentier 2016, p. 84), selecting, excluding and editing letters to the editor, and also giving them (or not) credit and prestige. Mainstream news media do not allow letters-writers to co-decide, influence, affect and take decisions to the degree that one can wonder whether the concept of participation (in its full or strong sense) is appropriate (Carpentier 2011, p. 69) in correspondence sections. This may fuel some kind of disappointment or even resentment by frequent letter-writers, who expect to be taken seriously and be valued as any other “legitimate” opinion maker. The results of this small questionnaire also show that a rather low proportion of regular letter-writers post online comment in news—we might say that most of the frequent letters-writers in the study prefer the affordances of correspondence sections rather than more modern feedback forums such as online comments. As letters to the editor—and particularly letter writing and letters-writers—are a much less visible and researched area within journalism studies, this chapter may give a somewhat valuable

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insight into audiences from the perspective of the regular letter-writer, while showing, once again, the disconnection and distance between newsrooms and their publics.

References Brites, M. J., & Silva, M. T. (2017). The Portuguese News Industry’s Perspectives and Roles on the Making of Active Citizens: Readers’ Skills to Comment on the News. Estudos em Comunicação/Communication Studies, 1(25), 137–152. Cardoso, G., Mendonça, S., Paisana, M., & Martinho, A. P. (2017). Digital News Report 2017: Portugal. Lisbon: Obercom. Carpentier, N. (2011). Media and Participation. A Site of Ideological-Democratic Struggle. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. Carpentier, N. (2016). Beyond the Ladder of Participation: An Analytical Toolkit for the Critical Analysis of Participatory Media Processes. Javnost—The Public, 23(1), 70–88. Catita, A., Moreira, M. C., Amaral, J., Rodrigues, F. C., Oliveira, J. F., Ramalho, F., … Mota, C. (2013). Os leitores também escrevem. Lisbon: Edições Vieira da Silva. Cavanagh, A., & Dennis, A. (2013). Having Your Say: The Social Organisation of Online News Commentary. Sociological Research Online, 18(2), 1–10. Correia, F., & Martins, C. (2017). Portugal—Media Landscape. Retrieved October 12, 2018, from European Journalism Centre (EJC): https://medialandscapes. org/country/pdf/portugal. Dahlgren, P. (2009). Media and Political Engagement. Citizens, Communication, and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diakopoulos, N., & Naaman, M. (2011). Towards Quality Discourse in online Comments. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 133–142). China. Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social—ERC. (2015). Públicos e Consumos de Media. Lisbon: ERC. Gans, H. (1980). Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Vintage Books. Gonçalves, M. E. (2007). Os Portugueses e os Novos Riscos. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. Graham, T., & Wright, S. (2015). A Tale of Two Stories from ‘Below the Line’. Comment Fields at the Guardian. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 20(3), 317–338. Gregory, L., & Hutchins, B. (2004). Everyday Editorial Practices and the Public Sphere: Analysing the Letters to the Editor Page of a Regional Newspaper. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 112, 186–200.

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Grey, D. L., & Brown, T. (1970). Letters to the Editor: Hazy Reflections of Public Opinion. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 47, 450–456. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hallin, D., & Mancini, P. (2017). Ten Years After Comparing Media Systems: What Have We Learned? Political Communication, 34(2), 155–171. Hermida, A. (2011). Mechanisms of Participation. How Audience Options Shape the Conversation. In J.  Singer, A.  Hermida, D.  Domingo, A.  Heinonen, S.  Paulussen, T.  Quandt, et  al. (Eds.), Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers (pp. 13–33). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Hill, D.  B. (1981). Letter Opinion on ERA: A Test of the Newspaper Bias Hypothesis. Public Opinion Quarterly, 45(3), 384–392. Millioni, D.  L., Vadratsikas, K., & Papa, V. (2012). ‘Their Two Cents Worth’: Exploring User Agency in Readers Comments in Online News Media. Observatorio (OBS*), 6(3), 21–47. Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Kalogeropoulos, A., Levy, D.  A., & Nielsen, R.  K. (2018). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Nielsen, R. K. (2010). Participation Through Letters to the Editor: Circulation, Considerations, and Genres in the Letters Institution. Journalism, 11(1), 21–35. Perrin, A. J. (2016). Since This Is the Editorial Section I Intend to Express My Opinion: Inequality and Expressivity in Letters to the Editor. The Communication Review, 19(1), 55–76. Pounds, G. (2006). Democratic Participation and Letters to the Editor in Britain and Italy. Discourse & Society, 17(1), 29–63. Quintanilha, T. L. (2018). A Contribution to the Debate on the Redefinition of the Networked Public Sphere Based on Portuguese Public Participation in Cyberspace. Comunicação e Sociedade, 34, 287–304. Raeymaeckers, K. (2005). Letters to the Editor: A Feedback Opportunity Turned into a Marketing Tool. European Journal of Communication, 20(2), 199–221. Reader, B. (2015). Audience Feedback in the News Media. New York: Routledge. Reader, B., Stempel, G. H., III, & Daniel, D. K. (2004). Age, Wealth, Income Predict Letters to the Editor. Newspaper Research Journal, 25(4), 55–66. Robinson, S. (2010). Traditionalists vs. Convergers. Textual Privilege, Boundary Word, and the Journalist-Audience Relationship in the Commenting Policies of Online News Sites. Convergence, 16(1), 125–143. Santana-Pereira, J. (2016). The Portuguese Media System and the Normative Roles of the Media: A Comparative View. Análise Social, 221(4), 780–801. Silva, M. T. (2007). A voz dos leitores na imprensa. Um estudo de caso sobre as “cartas ao director” no jornal Público. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte. Silva, M. T. (2009). Portuguese Press and Its Public. Perceptions and Motivations. Revista Media e Jornalismo, 8(14), 85–107.

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Silva, M. T. (2012). Newsroom Practices and Letters-to-the-Editor. An Analysis of Selection Criteria. Journalism Practice, 6(2), 250–263. Silva, M. T. (2014). As cartas dos leitores na imprensa portuguesa: uma forma de comunicação e debate do público. Covilhã: Livros LabCom. Silva, M. T. (2015). What Do Users Have to Say About Online News Comments? Readers’ Accounts and Expectations of Public Debate and Online Moderation: A Case Study. Participations. Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 12(2), 32–44. Silva, M. T., Brites, M. J., Figueiras, R., Santos, S. C., Amaral, I., Marôpo, L., … Pacheco, L. (2017). Between Traditional and Social Media: News Repertoires in Portugal. Participations. Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 14(2), 283–300. Singer, J. B., Hermida, A., Domingo, D., Heinonen, A., Paulussen, S., Quandt, T., … Vujnovic, M. (2011). Participatory Journalism. Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Singletary, M. W., & Cowling, M. (1979). Letters to the Editor of the Non-Daily Press. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 56(1), 165–168. Sorlin, P. (1992). Le mirage du public. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 39, 86–102. Tarrant, W. D. (1957). Who Writes Letters to the Editor? Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 34, 501–502. Vacin, G. L. (1965). A Study of Letter-Writer. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 42(3), 464–465. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2007). Journalists and the Public. Newsroom Culture, Letters to the Editor, and Democracy. Cresskill: Hampton Press, Inc. Williams, B., & Medina, D. (2001). Why Women Don’t Write: Time, Fear, and Society Get the Blame for Lack of Letters from Women Writers. The Masthead, 53(2), 8–10.

CHAPTER 3

Speaking as Citizens: Women’s Political Correspondence to Scottish Newspapers 1918–1928 Sarah Pedersen

Introduction Scholars investigating those who write letters to the editor on the subject of politics agree that the typical correspondent is middle-aged or older, male, well educated, with an above-average income and frequently conservative in his politics (Buell 1975; Singletary and Cowling 1979; Cooper et  al. 2009). While the majority of research into newspaper correspondence columns has focused on contemporary newspapers, this dictum holds true for historical examples as well. Newspaper correspondence columns in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were dominated by male, elite voices. However, this does not mean that no women are to be found writing about politics. Women made good use of letters to the editor during their campaign for the vote in order to give detailed explanations of the reasons behind the demand for women’s suffrage and, later, to justify the turn to militancy (Pedersen 2017). Anti-suffrage campaigners also used newspaper correspondence columns to rehearse their arguments and ask for support. In this way, pro-suffrage material was published in S. Pedersen (*) Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Cavanagh, J. Steel (eds.), Letters to the Editor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2_3

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anti-suffrage newspapers and vice versa. For example, conservative and generally anti-suffrage newspapers such as the Dundee Courier and Aberdeen Daily Journal frequently carried pro-suffrage correspondence while the more sympathetic Dundee Advertiser and Aberdeen Free Press would publish letters from members of the Anti-Suffrage League. In 1918, some women—those over the age of 30 and with a property qualification—achieved the Parliamentary vote in the UK. Others had to wait until 1928 before achieving complete equality with men as far as suffrage was concerned. This chapter investigates women’s correspondence on political issues to Scottish newspapers during this decade. The new focus for many of those who had campaigned for women’s suffrage was now to teach women how to be citizens. Women used newspaper correspondence columns to assert their new claims to citizenship and to support and encourage some women to claim political office. However, there were also clear continuities between the suffrage campaign in Scotland before the war and correspondence on subjects relating to ‘women’s issues’ during the 1920s. This chapter also identifies another group of women—some of them veterans of the anti-suffrage movement—who continued to use the correspondence columns to assert their own ideas about the place of women, ironically using the public sphere of the mass media to suggest that women’s place was in the private sphere of the home. This chapter suggests, however, that women correspondents to newspapers did not fully enter the public sphere with their letters to the editor. Instead, it argues that they mostly inhabited a smaller feminine public sphere within the correspondence columns. Using Hartley’s (1992) concepts of ‘We’-dom and ‘They’-dom, Richardson (2006, p. 149) describes a newspaper’s correspondence column as an important site for the (re) production and/or resistance of discourse on and around such notions, with the elite ‘We’ establishing rules for membership and exclusion. It is argued that, during the first decade after World War I, women’s correspondence to Scottish newspapers demonstrates an attempt to persuade readers that women citizens were now part of the ‘We’-dom that was only partially successful, often because the correspondents themselves continued to situate themselves in a separate feminine public sphere. Habermas (1989) suggests that the mass media is one of the institutions that makes up a public sphere, within which the problems of a society can be opened to the scrutiny of a critical public and some sort of consensus achieved. Public opinion is therefore formed by conversation and discussion among citizens, facilitated by institutions such as newspaper

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correspondence columns (Wahl-Jorgensen 1999, 2002). Feminist scholars, however, have suggested a more nuanced approach to the gendering of the public sphere. For example, Fraser (1992) conceives of many different public spheres, including one overarching one in which participants can deliberate as peers across lines of difference about policy concerning them all. She suggests late-twentieth-century US feminism as one such ‘subaltern counterpublic’. Smitley (2009) also identifies a different, ‘feminine public sphere’ in her work on middle-class women in Scottish civic life, 1870–1914, arguing that this sphere was carved by more affluent women out of a hostile, male-oriented ‘public’ through heterodox interpretations of the concept of separate spheres. This chapter identifies a similar feminine public sphere in the correspondence columns of Scottish newspapers in the decade after some women had achieved the Parliamentary vote. These women were now citizens, and thus had a claim to a voice in the public sphere. However, analysis of their correspondence in relation to politics demonstrates that, while asserting their roles as citizens and electors, they nevertheless tended to only address other female citizens in their correspondence. They mostly entered into debate and discussion with other women and generally focused on what might be deemed ‘women’s issues’ in their letters. Women might also receive appeals to ignore such issues for the (assumed) greater good of the country by other women.

The Scottish Context Post-1918 Recent work on the post-1918 women’s movement in the UK has challenged previous assessments of the movement as divided and in decline. In Scotland, work by scholars such as Sue Innes, Jane Rendall, Esther Breitenbach and Valerie Wright has demonstrated that this period was marked by increasing participation by women in public and political life, particularly at a local government level (Breitenbach and Wright 2014; Innes 2004; Innes and Rendall 2006). They argue that women were active in many different types of organisations, some but not all party political, and campaigned on a range of issues across the equal rights and social welfare spectrum. Women’s organisations such as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship and the Women’s Co-operative Guild sought to become influential in local and national politics, educate women in order to foster a sense of citizenship, support women to stand for office and make women voters’ voices heard. Gaining the vote for some women

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was not the signal to stop campaigning, but rather to use the power of those women who had the suffrage to progress an agenda of social reform and to campaign for equality. However, rather than a movement united around the gaining of the vote for some women, partial women’s suffrage meant that energies were now spread over a wide range of issues, from birth control to pacifism (Hilson 2001), and class differences became increasingly apparent. Despite censorship, the war had increased the demand for news, which continued post-1918. As Bingham (2018, p.  153) argues, newspapers were critical to British political and popular culture in this period, particularly before the advent of radio, and played a significant role in setting the political agenda and framing public discussion. In his study of the British press and the 1918 Representation of the People Act, Bingham argues that the press played an important role in legitimising the Parliamentary system and celebrating a more inclusive politics—presenting this model of democracy as a key part of what the allies had been fighting for. It must be remembered that the central achievement of the 1918 Act was to enfranchise all men over 21—and over the age of 19 for any man who had seen military service during the war. Additional clauses enfranchised some women—those over the age of 30 with a property qualification, which in practice meant middle-and upper-class women. The press generally defended the new democracy, although some commentators expressed anxiety that some of these new voters lacked the capacity or the inclination to properly exercise their political responsibilities. Breitenbach and Wright (2014, p. 413) also note that, after achieving partial suffrage, many women’s organisations were treated respectfully by the press, with a level of coverage that made them highly visible to their contemporaries. Hutchison (2011) argues that the Scottish press has played an important role in the construction of national identity over the past 200 years. Scotland has a distinct set of institutions, such as the law, education and religion, from England, but until recently no Parliament in which to debate related issues. He therefore argues that, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the press played a valuable part in providing such a venue. In common with English newspapers, Scottish papers benefited from the repeal of the three ‘Taxes on Knowledge’—advertisement duty, newspaper stamp duty and paper duties—in the mid-nineteenth century. In addition, the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act brought in compulsory education for all children between 5 and 13, producing a growing potential readership for both local and national titles. The Scottish press also

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benefited from the limitations of the railways, which meant that Londonbased morning newspapers arrived too late in Scotland to compete with local morning newspapers, and therefore Scottish newspapers, such as The Scotsman, The Herald, Aberdeen Press & Journal and Dundee Courier, had sufficient time to build up customer loyalty (Blain and Hutchison 2008). Each daily was associated with a particular city—The Scotsman with Edinburgh and The Herald with Glasgow—but each aimed to become the pre-eminent newspaper in Scotland and reported local, Scottish, British and international news. Nearly 8.5 million women were enfranchised by the Representation of the People Act of 1918. In Scotland the electorate expanded from 760,000 in 1910 to 2.2 million in 1918 (Cameron 2018). In addition, the redistribution of seats in the country led to a profound shift in representation from the rural areas of the north and south to the industrial areas of west central Scotland and the city of Glasgow. These changes created new political conditions in Scotland that favoured the Labour party and led to the demise of the dominance of the Liberals (Cameron 2018). Newspapers across the political spectrum joined women’s organisations in urging all new voters to gain a political education and use their vote, while political parties debated how to appeal to these new working-class and female voters (Jarvis 1994).

The General Election of December 1918 Women electors had their first experience of voting during the General Election of December 1918. The war had only been over for a month and not all soldiers had yet returned home, which meant that many new electors, both men and women, were unable to register in time. There was also some confusion about who was and was not qualified to vote. ‘Why Not’ wrote in confusion to the Aberdeen Evening Express (13 December 1918) when she discovered that she had no vote because she lived with her parents. ‘Why a rent restriction should prevent any woman having the right to vote is something I should like explained, as I do not think the average woman’s ability to vote, or her loyalty to the Government, can be regulated by the amount of rent her parents pay.’ However, it was not loyalty, or her war work, that qualified a woman to vote, as ‘Why Not’ had learned. Despite the government’s rhetoric and press enthusiasm for the idea of rewarding women for their contribution to the war, it was older women rather than the young nurses and ‘munitionettes’ who achieved

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the vote in 1918. ‘Over Thirsty’ was equally nonplussed to discover that, because she occupied furnished apartments, ‘I am … apparently to be deprived of a vote because I do not provide my own furniture’ (Aberdeen Daily Journal, 3 May 1918). The lesson she took from this was ‘The sooner women are into Parliament the better. The new man-made Act seems to be as badly made as men could make. We certainly need a strong Women Citizens Association, as there are no doubt many other Acts as unfair to women as this one is.’ New organisations such as the Women Citizens Associations (WCAs) sprang up to help the new women citizens understand their responsibilities and to suggest subjects they might want to consider when using their vote. Many of these WCAs grew out of suffrage associations in the towns and cities of Scotland. For example, in Aberdeen, a meeting in March 1918 celebrated the formation of the Aberdeen WCA and was addressed by its new honorary President, Mrs. Trail, who was the only surviving member of the original Aberdeen Women’s Suffrage Society founded in the 1870s. Other office bearers came from the city’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) branch. As Helen R.  Macdonald suggested in her letter to the Daily Record on 2 May 1918: ‘The Citizens Association is out to … teach women the value of their vote, their responsibilities as citizens, how to have, not only the courage of their convictions, but also to have convictions.’ She also suggested that ‘the issues of housing reform, child welfare, temperance, education, day nurseries and national purity are peculiarly women’s topics’. However, not all women voters were impressed with such suggestions. A letter from ‘Mrs M.C.W.’ a few days later scorned the suggestions of the Glasgow WCA that ‘only women can understand and deal with questions like housing reform, temperance, national purity’ (Daily Record, 4 May 1918). In her opinion, ‘If women are going to revolutionise things, it shouldn’t need a Citizens Association to show them how. It’s not when they have got the vote that they should begin to be taught how to use it; they should have come equipped, prepared for the responsibility for which they have been clamouring.’ It should also be noted that ‘Mrs M.C.W.’ saw the woman voter as helping her husband ‘discharge his responsibilities as parent and citizen’ [my emphasis] rather than showing any particular initiative herself. She firmly placed the woman in a secondary role and in the home rather than as a citizen in her own right—although ironically her feelings on this matter had led her to write to a newspaper, thus stepping into the public sphere of the mass media.

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‘Mrs M.C.W.’ was, however, in the minority in considering that women needed no guidance in the use of their new votes. Newspapers throughout the country published a plethora of columns and editorials advising women on how to vote, and WCAs arranged meetings to address what they considered to be the questions women ought to consider. On 5 September 1918, for example, Lady Edith Baxter of the Dundee WCA wrote to the Courier to advertise a meeting to address the question of housing, ‘a question with which women are particularly concerned’. However, Hilson (2001) and Jarvis (1994) agree that, in 1918, new women voters were pressured to vote as proxies for male members of their family still on service overseas or dead, rather than considering the issues raised by WCAs or those more nearly relating to their own experiences on the home front such as housing and food shortages. Women’s correspondence to the Scottish press concerning their voting intentions in 1918 agreed that the main issue for these new electors was the war, and in particular men’s experience at the front. In her investigation of the election campaign in Plymouth, Hilson (2001) argues that women’s own wartime experiences were largely marginalised. In particular, she notes a narrowing focus on the candidates themselves, and particularly their war service, and therefore their ability to serve as representatives of soldiers and sailors. Much of the women’s correspondence to Scottish newspapers supports Hilson’s argument with its focus on the war service of individual candidates. ‘A Woman Elector’ wrote to the Aberdeen Daily Journal on 12 December 1918 hoping that ‘women electors specially will … give their vote for the Coalition candidate, Mr Thomson, who has so splendidly done his bit to help preserve for us for all time our liberty and freedom’. ‘A Woman Voter’ agreed and praised Lieutenant Thomson’s leadership in wartime: ‘As an officer he was simply worshipped by the men under him, and I learn that he has fought with credit and distinction.’ The lack of such a military career was also used to denigrate other candidates. In the Dundee Courier on 7 December ‘A Woman Voter’ stated that she would like to ask the Opposition candidate, Mr. Gardiner, ‘what he has done for the gallant boys who fought and died for him’, pointing out that while General Stirling, who was also standing, ‘was bravely doing his bit in Gallipoli, Mr Gardiner was safely home, with “Business as usual” for his battle-cry.’ Hilsom suggests that Conservative candidates and the Portsmouth press made connections between Labour candidates and pacifism and bolshevism. Similarly, ‘A Working Woman’ wrote to the Falkirk Herald on 7 December to warn her ‘sister women’ not to vote for the Co-operative

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candidate because ‘when we see the Bolshevists of our district backing him up, we smell powder and remember Russia’. Thus, in the first election in which they were allowed to vote, women correspondents fell into line with a focus on candidates’ wartime experiences and military performance dictated by the male Coalition government and Coalition candidates, rather than discussing these candidates’ pledges regarding issues about which the women themselves might have experience, such as housing, food rationing, health and education. Even while addressing other women, and despite the urging of the WCAs, women correspondents focused on male achievement on the warfront rather than what these candidates could do for their homes and families. It is important to note that women’s correspondence to Scottish newspapers on the subject of the General Election was aimed at other women voters rather than all electors—women did not presume to advise men on how to vote. While it is true that much newspaper editorial on the subject of how women should use their votes was written by men, women correspondents did not offer advice to male electors on how to use their vote, despite the fact that many of these male voters were just as new to elections as the women were themselves. WCAs were formed so that middleclass women could advise and support other women in using their vote correctly. In this way, women voters continued to exist within the feminine public sphere identified by Smitley (2009).

The Choice of a Pen Name Note the choice of pen names from these correspondents, many of which emphasised their role as women voters or electors, thus justifying these women’s letters to the press. Their achievement of citizenship was used to support these women stepping into the public sphere of political debate, although they still preferred to use a pen name rather than give their own. Anonymity offered them the opportunity of presenting their opinion on the first election in which women were allowed to vote without revealing their identity, a step they were not yet ready to take. Indeed, Reader et al. (2004) suggest that the requirement by modern newspapers that letters are published with their writer’s full details reduces the number of people who write letters to the editor, especially among women, racial minorities and urban residents. In fact, the particular pen names used by the correspondents quoted above gave more weight to their argument than their own name would. I have argued elsewhere that maternal pen names were

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frequently used by female correspondents to Scottish newspapers before and during the war to justify their correspondence on issues related to local government or the conduct of the war as mothers (Pedersen 2004). Equally, ‘Suffragette’ was a popular pseudonym for those who wished to support the cause without outing themselves to family and friends before the war (Pedersen 2002). Other pen names used by women in their correspondence regarding the 1918 election emphasised the correspondent’s familial associations to members of the armed forces, such as ‘A Soldier’s Mother’ who wrote to the Dundee Courier on 10 December 1918 asking women to use their votes to return Lloyd George and his government to power since they had ‘brought this war … to an honourable end’. Again, she attacked one candidate for telling electors ‘that a poor, miserable “conchie” is far more of a hero than the brave, gallant boys who went and nobly did their best to keep him and his kind at home in comfort and safety’. Bingham (2018) suggests that the framing of women’s enfranchisement as a reward for their service to the nation during wartime impacted how woman voters were viewed and notes that Gullace (2002) argues that citizenship was redefined around notions of patriotism, duty and sacrifice, and thus women’s private suffering as wives and mothers enabled them to be included within this new concept of the citizen. As Bingham points out, however, this muted the language of democratic rights and equality.

Considering ‘Women’s Issues’ The new focus for many of those who had campaigned for women’s suffrage was now to teach women how to be citizens. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies changed its name to the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC) and, throughout Scotland, many Women Citizens Associations were founded by women who had been suffragists or suffragettes. For example, the vice-presidents of the Edinburgh WCA were Sarah Elizabeth Siddons Mair, the president of the Edinburgh National Society for Women’s Suffrage, and Louisa Innes Lumsden, president of the Aberdeen branch of the NUWSS, both constitutional suffragist societies. They were joined by ex-suffragettes such as Lilias Mitchell, Agnes Macdonald, Alexia Jack and Mona Chalmers Watson, who had been members of the  Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and Women’s Freedom League (Innes 2004). By the end of its first year, the Edinburgh WCA had over a thousand members and was a large and well-organised group with

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a clear idea of women’s role in public life and the influence that ‘organised women’ could wield (Innes 2004, p. 622). At the same time, local government in Scotland acquired greater powers in terms of housing, education, poor relief and hospital provision, all of which might be argued to fall into the realm of women’s special interests, which reinforced the demand for women to be represented in local government (Breitenbach and Wright 2014). ‘Housekeeper’ wrote to the Edinburgh Evening News on 1 January 1920 calling for women to replace those responsible for housing in Edinburgh since ‘the selfishness of the Edinburgh authorities responsible for housing is a disgrace’. Similarly, the ex-WSPU organiser Phyllis Ayrton wrote to the Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser calling for women to be appointed to the Housing Committee in Coatbridge and arguing that ‘if ever the advice and help of women were needed, surely it would be in connection with housing’ (12 February 1921), while A.  P. Taylor of the Dundee WCA sent a letter to the Dundee Courier asking owners of country cottages to sub-let them at this time of need (19 March 1920). Dealing with the housing crisis was clearly seen as a matter for which women, and WCAs, were suitably equipped. WCAs claimed to be non-party and aimed to include women from all parties. However, the wish to be neutral soon clashed with a desire to support suitable women candidates in elections. The Edinburgh WCA claimed early success in its support for women to be elected to the city council, with Ella Morison Millar returned for the Morningside ward in January 1919. By 1930, six of Edinburgh’s city councillors were women (Baxter 2010). Glasgow also had female councillors from 1920. However, in November 1922 the Edinburgh WCA faced severe disruption over the campaign of the Liberal candidate Catherine Buchanan Alderton for the seat of Edinburgh South. The committee of the South Division branch resigned in protest over official WCA support for Mrs. Buchanan Alderton because she was campaigning for the seat of a local MP who had been supportive of their work for women. The correspondence pages of The Scotsman were filled for several days with letters from women supporting and condemning the decision of the Edinburgh WCA executive to actively campaign for the Liberal candidate. On one side were women such as the Unionist Minna Galbraith Cowan, who had become convenor of the city’s new education authority in 1919, and who blamed the Executive Committee of the Edinburgh WCA for adopting a policy of active support for all women candidates. She was supported by the educationist Louisa Innes Lumsden, who deplored the decision of the Association to support

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Mrs. Buchanan Alderton because she was a woman rather than because of her policies: ‘What is this but to create a special women’s party?’ (The Scotsman, 15 November 1922). Lumsden stated that ‘nobody in Scotland did more than I … for the political enfranchisement of women’, but now she entreated ‘all women, to whatever political party they belong at this moment, when dangers of all kinds confront their country, to think first of country and not of the special interests of women’. In their defence, members of the Edinburgh WCA executive, such as the President Mary Chalmers Watson, Honorary Secretary Helen McLachlan, and Convenor of the Parliamentary Committee D. L. Rees, rejected the accusation that they were attempting to form a ‘woman’s party’ and argued that the action of the Association was in full accord with its constitution. Whilst acknowledging that Mrs. Buchanan Alderton was a Liberal candidate, they argued that they would have happily supported any other suitable woman from the Unionist party if one could be persuaded to stand, and portrayed themselves as eager to send Mrs. Buchanan Alderton to Westminster so that she could support the work of the Unionist Lady Astor and Liberal Margaret Wintringham as they worked together ‘for the reforms in which women are especially interested’ (13 November 1922). There was a clear statement here that women politicians were assumed to cooperate to campaign around ‘women’s issues’ irrespective of party, which was in clear contrast to Lumsden’s demand that women think first of their country and not the special interests of women. It also suggests a continuing fissure between suffragists such as Lumsden and suffragettes such as Chalmers Watson, who might be more interested in rejecting the constitutional approach of traditional party politics. During the campaign for votes for women, constitutional suffragists had been criticised by militant suffragettes for being willing to work within traditional party-based approaches to politics rather than embracing a different, more womanfocused approach. The suffragettes claimed, with some justification, that trusting political parties to address woman suffrage was doomed to failure. It should be noted that it was a coalition war government that eventually gave (some) women the vote. While not forming a ‘Woman’s Party’, elected female representatives were assumed to have particular interest in ‘women’s issues’ such as housing, health and children. Such an assumption is not surprising given that the campaigning of both suffragists and suffragettes for the vote had stressed the need for a woman’s voice in politics because women had experience in social welfare matters. The assumption that women politicians

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would work together for the betterment of women was shared by the correspondent ‘Woman Citizen’ who wrote to the Edinburgh Evening News on 25 April 1923 to encourage women who were concerned about the lack of women’s lavatories in the city to write to Ella Morrison Millar and Euphemia Somerville: Both these ladies are members of the Edinburgh Women Citizens Association. Therefore, I take it that our two women councillors will not resent the assumption that they stand not only for the women of the wards which elected them, but for the interests of all the women of Edinburgh and districts.

Both women were independents on the council, which presumably made it easier for the Edinburgh WCA to support their campaigns, but also for the assumption to be made that they had a special interest in women’s issues as opposed to party politics. In its defence of its support for Mrs. Buchanan Alderton, the Edinburgh WCA executive described her as standing ‘for the whole programme of the Association, which is by no means purely feminist’ (The Scotsman, 13 November 1922). The post-war women’s movement is often depicted as splitting between the feminists who wished to campaign for equality with men, for example in the professions, and those who saw women’s politics as different and wished to focus on specific women’s issues (Bingham 2004). As Innes (2004) points out, ‘citizenship’ was described as different from feminism, allowing mainstream organisations such as WCAs to distinguish themselves from feminist organisations. WCAs focused on improving social conditions, and had success in campaigns regarding children’s welfare, social housing and other health and welfare issues. In 1927 the 15 Scottish WCAs worked together to raise funds to establish a ­‘colony scheme for the mentally deficient’ (Aberdeen Press & Journal, 9 February 1927). However, as Innes (2004) argues, WCAs cannot be dismissed simply as welfare or social feminists: they also campaigned on equality issues, such as supporting women candidates in elections, although, as noted above, this was not always well received. Indeed, even when WCAs campaigned on issues that were seen to fall under their aegis, they could be criticised. The Dundee WCA was criticised by a correspondent calling herself ‘Municipia’ for hosting a speaker who advocated the reinstitution of women police to the city. She mocked the way in which

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By means of the Women Citizens Association the benighted inhabitants of Dundee and district are occasionally made the recipients—free, gratis and for nothing—of announcements brimming over with wise counsel concerning civic administration. (Dundee Courier, 28 February 1923)

Similarly, ‘One of the Women Citizens’ criticised the Edinburgh WCA for its ‘profoundly disappointing’ pronouncements on slum conditions in the city. While calling for the appointment of a qualified woman house property manager by the council, the correspondent suggested that the most convincing proof the WCA could give of its concern in connection with the grave conditions in the city would be the erection of a ‘carefully thought-out demonstration house’ (The Scotsman, 21 July 1926). Comparable controversy was caused in St Andrews in 1925 when the president of the local WCA wrote to the St Andrews Citizen to remind members that ‘one woman member, Miss Warrack, will require every vote we can give her or get for her’ (31 October 1925). This implies much more than a request to members to vote for a woman candidate—it also suggests that they should campaign for the votes of others. ‘Woman Citizen and Elector’ wrote to protest ‘against the individual liberties of the members to vote as their judgments tell them being interfered with in this way’, describing it as ‘Trade Union tyranny with a vengeance’ (St Andrews Citizen, 31 October 1925). The St Andrews WCA was on safer ground with its campaign in 1926 against the Town Council’s decision to ‘erect a public convenience on the north wall of the East Infant School in close proximity to the class-room windows’ (St Andrews Citizen, 15 May 1926). WCAs clearly had to tread a careful line between campaigning for a female voice on matters that were judged to be relevant to women, such as ­housing and public conveniences, without stepping into the realm of party politics, even if there was a woman on the slate. It is clear, however, from the correspondence to be found on the subject of WCAs in Scottish newspapers that the topic was seen as relevant to women only. Women debated WCA politics with other women, and called on members of WCAs who had achieved elected office to work for other women, whether or not they had elected them. In this they followed the example of their mothers and grandmothers in the creation of a middle-class civic identity through participation in philanthropic and local government bodies (Smitley 2009).

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Temperance and Bolshevism Breitenbach and Wright (2014) note that patterns of women’s activism generally followed class lines. While the Edinburgh WCA argued about supporting Unionist or Liberal candidates, the Glasgow WCA was closely associated with the Glasgow Good Government Committee set up to combat the growth of socialism in the city. Dundee offers an interesting contrast to the politics of Glasgow or Edinburgh. As Baxter (2010) points out, whilst the city was often described as a women’s town in the earlytwentieth century, with high numbers of married women workers and active female unions, and had been one of the main centres for suffragette action before the war, it was also the last of Scotland’s four cities to have a female councillor. It was not until 1924 that a woman even stood for election to Dundee Council and 1935 before Lily Miller became the city’s first female councillor. Baxter (2010) suggests that the fact that Dundee had little involvement from the Scottish Co-operative Women’s Guild meant that working-class women in particular had no clear way into party politics. The Dundee WCA, which might have been expected to work with Moderate parties, had a leadership that included both members of the Independent Labour Party and the Conservatives and therefore worked at being a non-party and non-political association until 1924 when it campaigned for Edwin Scrymgeour, who became the only British Prohibition Party MP. As has been seen in correspondence related to the 1918 election, temperance was assumed to be an issue particularly important to women voters. As ‘Woman Citizen’ pointed out in the Aberdeen Press & Journal on the subject of ‘The nation’s drink bill’ on 4 April 1925: ‘A woman’s point of view is probably different from that of most men.’ Like many temperance reformers, her letter focused on the consequences of drinking on the home: ‘higher mortality among babies, a greater number of neglected children, a heavier burden for many wives and mothers, who are already putting up a brave fight against overwhelming odds’. In contrast, one correspondent to the Dundee Courier on 10 November 1923, describing herself as ‘A Moderate Drinker’s Wife’ argued that ‘No one has the right to ram teetotalism down our throats.’ She hoped that ‘every woman will turn out for the poll’ and ‘Give the teetotaller this time a smash he won’t get over.’ Her wish was not fulfilled and Edwin Scrymgeour was returned for Dundee in both 1924 and 1929.

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Neighbouring St Andrews also had women who campaigned for prohibition in the correspondence columns of the local newspaper. In 1920 a series of letters to the Citizen debated the question of St Andrews becoming ‘dry’. ‘Seven Women Electors’ argued that a dry town would become more popular than ever as a holiday resort while ‘Citizen’ called on women to ‘protect your own homes by voting “no license”!’ (St Andrews Citizen, 23 October 1920 and 1 November 1920). Writing to the Citizen in March 1922, the temperance campaigner Helen Barton defended the advice given to women voters by the British Women’s Temperance Association to vote for men or women who favoured their principles (11 March 1922). Interestingly, women correspondents to the Dundee newspapers on the subject of women’s votes tended to focus on warning women electors not to support the Labour party rather than discussing the temperance candidate. Jarvis (1994) suggests that Conservative and Unionist party propaganda aimed at women stressed that women’s interest in issues of personal morality such as temperance meant that women should also consider the moral dangers of socialism. In 1920, ‘Bonnie Dundee’ warned women voters that ‘the spirit of avarice and Bolshevism’ had ‘crept’ into the Labour party (Dundee Courier, 1 November 1920). She was, however, happy to support Rev. Mr. Nelson, who she described as a ‘Labour man of the best type’ because of his war service record: ‘when our country was in need he gave of his best, while some of the so-called Labour party went to prison for safety’. In 1923 one correspondent sent a warning to the women electors of Dundee about the ‘importance of giving their serious attention to the treatment of women, the denial of all religion, the debasement of childhood, and the destruction of home life—at present being practised in Russia under Socialism’ (Dundee Courier, 22 October 1924). ‘Bonnie Dundee’ again agreed with her that ‘Communism in its worst form is being camouflaged as Labour’ and demanded that the women of Dundee awake and ‘remember that on the issue of this election the fate of the British Empire possibly hangs’ (29 October 1924). Women were thus appealed to using both imperial arguments and the image of their own homes under Communist rule, and urged to be aware of the subterfuges with which socialists might lead people astray and introduce immorality into the home.

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The Perfect Candidate Similar to Dundee, it was not until 1930 that a woman councillor was elected in Aberdeen. Correspondents to the Aberdeen Press & Journal suggested that one reason women candidates did not stand for election to the council was because of the selectiveness of the local WCA. ‘An Ordinary Woman’ suggested that the requirements imposed by the WCA for ‘a splendid and quite exceptional woman’ to step forward meant that more ordinary women were discounted (Aberdeen Press & Journal 7 December 1928), while ‘An Interested Listener’ blamed the President of the WCA in particular for the inactivity of the Association in promoting the interests of women (ibid). It is true that the standard demanded of a woman candidate in order to be supported by the Aberdeen WCA was high. In October 1926 a letter in the Aberdeen Press & Journal from the headquarters of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, signed by Dorothy Balfour of Burleigh, appealed for suitable women to step forward as candidates in the upcoming city council elections. We recognise that the word ‘suitable’ is a question-begging phrase. We feel that women candidates should not only be women of experience and judgment in public matters, but that they should be prepared also to champion the cause not only of their women constituents, but also of women employees of the Town Council. Many Town Councils now refuse to employ married women, and there is discrimination against the employment of women such as doctors, etc., unless they can be employed on cheaper terms than men; in many localities, educational facilities, especially as regards trade schools, are far fewer in the case of girls than in that of boys. For these and for many other reasons we appeal to women to play their part and to help return women interested in these matters in the forthcoming elections. (Aberdeen Press & Journal, 14 October 1926)

Such a summary of the requirements of a woman councillor demonstrates that women were expected to serve as both a representative of their constituents but also of women in general—both electors and those who worked for the council. The letter also demonstrates that, at least in Aberdeen, a WCA candidate was expected to be involved in wider issues relating to equality, particularly in relation to employment. Having been selected to stand for office, women candidates might also face problems at the hustings, demonstrating the physical issues related to stepping into the public sphere. These were identified by correspondents

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to various newspapers as being particularly caused by Labour party supporters. In a letter to The Scotsman on 21 December 1922. ‘Woman Speaker’ noted the ‘hooligan practices of Socialists where women speakers are concerned’ while the Aberdeen Press & Journal received a number of letters debating the treatment of the Unionist candidate Dr. Laura Sandeman by Labour supporters in October 1924. While the majority of letters deplored the ‘rowdyism’ of ‘small noisy groups who deliberately attend for the express purpose of obstructing the speakers’, other correspondents opined that, ‘as women are aspiring to Parliamentary honours that it is impossible for them to expect treatment different to men. They must be prepared to face the music.’ The newspaper’s editor commented after this particular letter that ‘Women candidates are prepared to face the music, but the conduct of Labourists at Kittybrewster shows that they … were determined their brazen music would prevent the candidate from being heard—Ed.’ (16 October 1924). Other women correspondents reported problems in engaging in political life themselves because of the attitudes of men. ‘Disgusted’ reported being shouted at by a parish councillor and accused of being a member of Sinn Fein when she approached the polling station in December 1918. She suggested to the Bellshill Speaker that the solution to such behaviour was that women should have separate polling stations (20 December 1920). Similarly, ‘Eppie’ wrote to the Arbroath Herald to describe how she had tried to attend a ward meeting ‘but preferred to wait outside until a few of my sex arrived on the scene. After waiting half an hour and more I left for home disappointed.’ Eppie felt that women should take more of an interest in local politics so that they could ‘pick and choose the man whom they think can speak and act intelligently and does his best for the good of the town’ (7 November 1919). Interestingly, Eppie made no mention of the possibility of a woman standing for election to the ward.

Dissenting Voices Whilst women workers had been mostly accepted during the wartime emergency, once the war was over and men returned to Scotland, these women workers found themselves surplus to requirements and pressured to return to their home. Some fought back. ‘An NACB Employee’ wrote in defence of her fellow female employees at the Navy and Army Canteen Board, pointing out that experience during the war had found that women were more suitable for these jobs, ‘especially in coffee bars’ (Edinburgh

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Evening News, 24 March 1920). She argued that many of these women were single and therefore had to work for their living, and that the employment of women was good from an economic point of view, because women could be paid less than men. This was, of course, one of the main reasons why some unions had fought against the dilution of the workforce by women during the war and why pressure was now put on women to give up their jobs. As Dorothy Balfour’s letter quoted above suggested, it was not just coffee bar workers who were expected to give up their jobs for returning men. A letter to the Dundee Courier on 3 June 1919 complained about the ‘recent extraordinary action of a majority of the committee in ousting women doctors from the staff’ of the Dundee Infant Hospital. The correspondent argued that ‘it will be best for the larger homes of city and state when … man sees woman as coadjutor, not competitor, in life and the guardianship of life!’ However, women might also be criticised by others for working. ‘A Widow’ wrote in complaint to the Motherwell Times arguing that school cleaner jobs should only be given to returned soldiers or widows who needed to support a family and that it was a ‘downright shame … having women working who have got their husbands working every day’ (10 December 1920). Some women returned to more traditional jobs for women, such as domestic service. An ex-munitions worker from Motherwell reported that she had worked on munitions for over a year, but after being paid off had returned to domestic service to make way for returning men, ‘which I thought was my duty’ (Motherwell Times, 31 January 1919). However, even girls who returned to domestic service were changed. ‘A Scunnert Slavey’ wrote to the Dundee Courier on 10 February 1920 suggesting that domestic servants should have a union to improve the servants’ lot while ‘A Perfectly Satisfied Domestic’ revealed that she was perhaps not that satisfied by suggesting that employers make domestic service more attractive by raising the wages (Dundee Courier, 12 February 1920). Individual women correspondents might also use the newspaper’s correspondence column to let off steam about inequalities within the family circle and to suggest that women work together to campaign for better conditions. These plans seem to be situated outside the party political system and suggest more the ‘consciousness raising’ meetings of women in the 1970s. ‘M. M.’ wrote to the Dundee Courier on 1 September 1919 to describe the ‘slavery’ of the married woman. Having compared her

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working week with that of her husband, who spent his day off watching the football, she demanded ‘Something ought to be done to compel our husbands to share the burden of household management.’ She suggested married women stay in bed when their husbands had a day off to force them to work in the home and that women ‘should insist on having two evenings to ourselves each week, when we could visit each other and compare notes’. Similarly, ‘M. A.’ wrote to the Edinburgh Evening News asking ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ (27 February 1920). She outlined a variety of ‘injustices’ the average working woman had to deal with and suggested ‘Let every British working woman, married and single, organise herself. Let us have meetings and demonstrations.’ Just as not all women had been enthusiastic about the campaign for women’s suffrage—branches of the Anti-Suffrage League had been established in cities and towns throughout Scotland before the war—not all women correspondents were supportive of the campaign to encourage women to take leadership roles in public life. ‘One of Them’ wrote to the Aberdeen Daily Journal on 30 January 1919 to criticise proposals to admit women to membership of the Representative Church Council of the Episcopal Church on the grounds that ‘women are neither very good nor very trustworthy financiers and … not suitable for the proposed honour the bishops wish to bestow on them.’ There was also an underlying understanding that the most important role for a woman was still as a wife and mother. One of the leaders of the anti-suffrage campaign in Scotland had been Lady Griselda Cheape, who wrote to the Southern Reporter in 1921 to encourage young women to enter domestic service where they would be well trained—and ‘when she marries she will be an example as a good wife and mother, and her house will be well kept’ (4 August 1921). ‘An Old-Fashioned Mother’ agreed, arguing in the Dundee Courier on 29 July 1922 that ‘A married woman and a mother may be forced by circumstances to go out to work, but it is always regrettable.’

Conclusion Between 1918, when some women achieved the Parliamentary vote, and 1928, when all women over 21 achieved franchise equality with men, the correspondence columns of Scottish newspapers were used as a place—a ‘public sphere’—within which women could perform their new role as citizens. Many used gender-neutral pen names that asserted their rights to citizenship in their letters to the newspapers, such as ‘elector’, ‘citizen’ or

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‘voter’. While these women correspondents were tempted to step into the public sphere and engage in political debate, many were still not ready to reveal their personal identities. The pen names they chose, however, added gravitas to their letters by emphasising their legitimacy as citizens to enter into such debate. Women were encouraged and supported in their first steps into politics by organisations such as the Women Citizens Associations, which had grown out of suffrage societies and were led by women who had once been leading suffragists and suffragettes in Scotland. These organisations were also keen to assist prospective women candidates in achieving elected positions in either local or national government and aimed to work with such women to achieve the social welfare and equality improvements that suffrage was hoped to deliver. However, women correspondents on political issues did not step directly into a wider public sphere of debate that contained all members of the newspaper’s public. Instead, their letters demonstrate that, for the most part, they stayed within a ‘feminine public sphere’ with which they were already familiar—one established by their mothers and grandmothers in their own carving out of a civic identity through philanthropy and local government positions during the later nineteenth century. Women corresponded with other women, both in encouragement and criticism, rather than with men. The expectation was that women who became involved in politics would represent both their constituents but also a much larger constituency of women, however they had voted. They were expected to be interested in ‘women’s issues’ such as housing, temperance and the welfare of women and children. However, at the same time, women were urged not to set up ‘women’s parties’ and to put the welfare of the country before that of themselves. Thus in 1918 women correspondents urged other women to follow the lines of campaign established by male politicians and focus on men’s war records rather than their pledges relating to welfare issues. Similarly, constitutional women suffrage campaigners such as Louisa Innes Lumsden urged women to vote for political party candidates rather than a woman candidate who might champion women’s issues in the House of Commons and who was supported by Edinburgh’s suffragettes. Hartley (1992) conceptualises newspaper correspondence columns as helping to identify a ‘We’-dom and a ‘They’-dom: those whose voices are allowed to be heard in public debate and those who are not. I would argue that women correspondents to Scottish newspapers in the 1920s were neither ‘We’ nor ‘They’, as far as the wider public sphere was concerned.

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They might be addressed by the newspapers or male correspondents directly, particularly in terms of political guidance. However, this was not reciprocal. Women correspondents offered advice primarily to other women, not to men. Instead, they created their own ‘We’-dom within a particularly feminine public sphere. Other women entered into this feminine public sphere, but only to urge their sisters to return to the domestic sphere. Immediately at the end of the war and the start of the return of the armed forces, women were urged to return to their homes or at least to approved employment such as domestic service to make way for the returning men. Female correspondents grappled with wider questions of equality—at work and in the home, but again mainly writing to and for other women rather than engaging with men. The appeals of ‘M. A.’ and ‘M. M.’ for women to meet together to ‘compare notes’ and ‘organise’ themselves suggest proto consciousness raising events in women’s own homes that would be key to the second wave of feminism a generation later. Fraser (1992) describes late-­twentieth-­ century US feminism as a ‘subaltern counterpublic’. This chapter demonstrates that a similar feminine public sphere can be identified in women’s correspondence to Scottish newspapers 50 years earlier. In terms of wider scholarship on the subject of letters to the editor, this chapter argues both for a wider use of such correspondence in women’s history and a more nuanced understanding of the concept of the newspaper correspondence page as an important part of the public sphere. The analysis of women’s letters to local newspapers allows a better appreciation of the different voices and points of view that formed the feminine public sphere in the decade after the achievement of partial suffrage. Many accounts of women’s fight for the vote finish at 1918, despite the fact that all women did not achieve the vote until 1928. The suffragists and suffragettes did not just go away when they had achieved the vote for some women. They had been fighting for a place at the political table, and now that women had it, they intended to use it. It is clear, however, that political women were more confident addressing other women rather than men, and discussing political matters between themselves rather than in the wider public sphere. Thus there is a need for the incorporation of the concept of the ‘counterpublic’ when discussing correspondence pages as part of the public sphere, and an acknowledgement of the continuation of a feminine public sphere within which women learned—or were told— which issues were deemed to be legitimate ‘women’s issues’, and the terms within which they should be discussed.

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References Baxter, K.  J. W. (2010). ‘Matriarchal’ or ‘Patriarchal’? Dundee, Women and Municipal Party Politics in Scotland c. 1918–c. 1939. International Review of Scottish Studies, 35, 97–122. Bingham, A. (2004). ‘An Era of Domesticity’? Histories of Women and Gender in Interwar Britain. Cultural and Social History, 1(2), 225–233. Bingham, A. (2018). The British Press and the 1918 Reform Act. Parliamentary History, 37(1), 150–167. Blain, N., & Hutchison, D. (Eds.). (2008). Media in Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Breitenbach, E., & Wright, V. (2014). Women as Active Citizens: Glasgow and Edinburgh c. 1918–1939. Women’s History Review, 23(3), 401–420. Buell, E. H., Jr. (1975). Eccentrics or Gladiators? People Who Write about Politics in Letters to the Editor. Social Science Quarterly, 56, 440–449. Cameron, E.  A. (2018). The 1918 Reform Act, Redistribution and Scottish Politics. Parliamentary History Year Book, 37(1), 101–115. Cooper, C., Knotts, H.  G., & Haspel, M. (2009). The Content of Political Participation: Letters to the Editor and the People Who Write Them. PS: Political Science & Politics, 42(1), 131–137. Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. In H. A. Giroux & P. McLaren (Eds.), Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies (pp. 74–98). New York: Routledge. Gullace, N. (2002). The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity. Hartley, J. (1992). The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the Public in the Age of the Popular Media. London: Routledge. Hilson, M. (2001). Women Voters and the Rhetoric of Patriotism in the British General Election of 1918. Women’s History Review, 10(2), 325–347. Hutchison, I.  G. C. (2011, August). Scottish Newspapers and Scottish National Identity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In Newspapers in International Librarianship: Papers presented by the Newspapers at IFLA General Conferences, 107. Innes, S. (2004). Constructing Women’s Citizenship in the Interwar Period: The Edinburgh Women Citizens’ Association. Women’s History Review, 13(4), 621–647. Innes, S., & Rendall, J. (2006). Women, Gender and Politics. In L. Abrams et al. (Eds.), Gender in Scottish History Since 1700 (pp.  43–83). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Jarvis, D. (1994). Mrs Maggs and Betty. The Conservative Appeal to Women Voters in the 1920s. Twentieth Century British History, 5(2), 129–152. Pedersen, S. (2002). The Appearance of Women’s Politics in the Correspondence Pages of Aberdeen Newspapers, 1900–14. Women’s History Review, 11(4), 657–673. Pedersen, S. (2004). What’s in a Name? The Revealing Use of Noms de Plume in Women’s Correspondence to Daily Newspapers in Edwardian Scotland. Media History, 10(3), 175–185. Pedersen, S. (2017). The Scottish Suffragettes and the Press. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Reader, B., Stempel, G. H., & Daniel, D. K. (2004). Age, Wealth and Education Predict Letters to the Editor. Newspaper Research Journal, 25(4), 55–66. Richardson, J. (2006). Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. New York: Palgrave. Singletary, M. W., & Cowling, M. (1979). Letters to the Editor of the Non-Daily Press. Journalism Quarterly, 56(1), 165–168. Smitley, M. (2009). The Feminine Public Sphere: Middle-Class Women in Civic Life in Scotland, c.1870–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (1999). Letters to the Editor. Peace Review, 11(1), 53–59. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2002). The Normative-Economic Justification for Public Discourse: Letters to the Editor as a ‘Wide Open’ Forum. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 79(1), 121–133.

CHAPTER 4

Letters to the Editor in the Chicago Defender, 1929–1930: The Voice of a Voiceless People Stephynie C. Perkins, Brian Thornton, and Tulika Varma

Introduction In November 1929 the publisher of the Chicago Defender a 50-year-old black lawyer named Robert S. Abbott faced two existential crises that threatened to end his African-American newspaper. The first crisis was the great stock market crash. It caused many businesses to slash their advertising in newspapers. It also forced thousands of readers to cancel their subscriptions for a “luxury” product, a newspaper they could no longer afford. But a second problem was perhaps even worse—Abbott was in danger of losing the faith of his remaining loyal African-American readers. Many had left their home and families in the South and moved half way across the country at Abbott’s urging, seeking to escape the brutality of the South and find a better life in Chicago and other Northern climes. Abbott’s Defender was the most widely read and influential African-­ American newspaper in the country. In response to decades of frequent lynchings of black people in the South, Abbott used his editorial pages to preach Northern migration non-stop for the previous 24 years, ever since he created the paper in 1905 (Thornton 2014). His Defender was not alone. A number of prominent black newspapers joined in. But the S. C. Perkins • B. Thornton (*) • T. Varma University of North Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Cavanagh, J. Steel (eds.), Letters to the Editor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2_4

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Defender was arguably the loudest voice, with the largest circulation and most consistent campaigning for Northern migration (DeSantis 1998, p. 474). Abbott said he started the Defender to give African Americans a place to learn about themselves and their community and take pride in their accomplishments (Michaeli 2016, p. 20). Although the paper was published in Chicago, its influence and readership had extended far beyond the Midwest. The paper was carried by train porters throughout the South. These porters, many working on commission, were in close contact with Southern black communities and seemed to know the best barbershops, churches or street corners to covertly distribute the paper (Michaeli 2016, p. 31). It seemed at times Abbott was almost ignoring Chicago and instead preaching directly to Southern readers with what he called his “Great Northern Drive,” urging them to escape the South. Week after week, the Defender used giant banner headlines, sometimes written in red ink, to extol the virtues of Northern life and the great opportunities awaiting African Americans in cities such as Chicago. The Defender also printed dozens of letters on the front pages from people who had happily moved from the South to the North. Abbott even offered cheap train fares on his editorial pages for groups of ten or more African Americans willing to move up North and escape brutal conditions in the South that Abbott described as often no better than slavery. He wrote about white mobs in the South frequently attacking black people simply for the color of their skin, castrating, hanging and burning them with impunity. To further incentivize readers, the Defender printed advertisements on its front pages for well-paid jobs in Northern cities. All these persuasive techniques promoted major Northern cities as the “Promised Land” where black people could escape racism and live prosperously, with dignity (Marks 1989, p. 2). As a result, hundreds and thousands of black people left the South, moving by train and busloads to big Northern cities in hopes of finding a better life in the booming economies there. Between 1920 and 1929, it is estimated that at least 400,000 African Americans moved from Southern to Northern cities (Michaeli 2016, p. 76). Abbott promised a land of milk and honey—but by October 30, 1929, the milk soured from the stock market crash. The closest many newly relocated African Americans got to honey was the sting of long unemployment lines, soup kitchens and bread lines (Favreau 2018, p. 3). It seems logical then to conclude that Abbott had to worry in 1929, and with good reason, that his readers were about to complain that he and

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his paper had sold them a bill of goods. The Defender had figuratively promised black people they would find streets paved with gold in Chicago. This chapter examines what people wrote to the Chicago Defender in the letters to the editor section of the paper from October 30, 1929, to October 30, 1930, to find out what they said and how they responded to the great crash and start of the Great Depression. To add balance and context to this research, editorials in the Defender were also examined as well as front-page news stories from the paper.

Why Study Letters to the Editor? There is a growing body of literature about the African-American press from such researchers as Martin Dann, Charles Simmons, Felicia Jones Ross, Joseph McKerns and Stanley Nelson (Dann 1971; Simmons 1998; Ross and McKerns 2004; Nelson 1998). But what is missing is a systematic study of the history and content of published letters to the editor in African-American newspapers. This void in knowledge and research is puzzling since coverage of the history of the black press is flourishing as more historians and academicians have come to recognize the historical importance of African-American newspapers in the life and community of African Americans (Nelson 1998; Simmons 1998; Jordan 2001). This work begins to ameliorate this lack of knowledge of how black audiences reacted to news in the black press by analyzing letters to the editor, editorials and front pages published in the Chicago Defender. The historian Robert S. McElvaine writes that the history of a people in a given historical period must begin with the testimony of the people themselves. He argues historians must let people speak for themselves. He wrote: “If you want Negro history you will have to get it from somebody who wore the shoe, and by and by, from one to the other, you will get a book” (McElvaine 2008, p. xi). What is unique about the research is an attempt to analyze and categorize the voice of at least some African Americans, that is, some of the people who McElvaine said “wore the shoe”—that is letters-to-the-editor writers, in a time of economic crisis. To paraphrase McElvaine, the voice of these people has been forgotten for so long, not because they were silent, but because their stories were not valued. Until recently, the voice of the newspaper audience as expressed in the historical record of letters to the editor has been largely ignored, yet letters to the editor offer an important narrative: They reveal the thoughts of a

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small group of literate readers brave enough to express their views at a particular point in time. In his 1998 book, the African-American Press, Charles Simmons wrote that the black press provided an essential record of the efforts of a people to recover from the horrors of slavery and deal with subsequent generations of hatred and discrimination. Stanley Nelson’s 1998 documentary, The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords noted that for 150 years, African-­ American newspapers have been “among the strongest institutions in black America.” Nelson argues the black press and black editors helped create and stabilize communities. African-American newspapers were advocates for the political and economic interests of black people while also creating and maintaining thousands of jobs for African Americans. Black editors told their readers about the struggles and triumphs of black communities. They told readers about black marriages and graduations and business achievements and provided an optimistic voice and record of accomplishments. However, this was not a one-way conversation—simply from editors to readers. Over the years, thousands of readers of the African-American press talked back through letters to the editor. They scolded editors when they thought they were too timid, reminded them of the need of victimized people to finally fight back and argued about tactics. Letters to the editor, then, are the chronicle of some of public responses, debates and discussions, conducted within the editorial pages of the African-­ American press. An ancient Kenyan proverb says that when mighty elephants clash the lowly grass is trampled and suffers the most (Simpson and Speake 2008, p. 3). Essentially that means when powerful beings clash, the powerless pay the cost. In this case, when millionaire Wall Street speculators recklessly gamble on the stock market and crash it like the latest sports car, common people at the bottom of the economy feel the most pain. Letters to the editor tell stories from common people, in this case, readers of African-American newspapers, who responded to big events. In short, this research seeks to discover the “grass’s point of view.” This history from the black perspective offers a multi-dimensional view of the Depression, one that has been largely overlooked and is needed to get a clearer picture of how deep the economic problems extended. One historical study says many African Americans living in Harlem were already destitute at the height of the nation’s prosperity in the late 1920s, well before the stock crash. But with the national financial collapse of October

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1929 and the subsequent “almost complete unemployment of Negro men,” across the nation, the situation deteriorated rapidly and a large mass of African Americans faced starvation (Ottley and Weatherby 1970, pp. 106, 109). A 1930 editorial in the African-American Pittsburgh Courier summed up the situation well: “The depression means more to the Negro than anybody. He is the first man fired and last man hired. So he feels the depression first and is the last to feel relief when the depression ends” (Pittsburgh Courier, 1930, p. 14). It makes good sense and fills a void in the historical record to seek African-American response to this massive national job loss in letters to the editor and editorials in the Chicago Defender.

Why the Defender? There is a mythology surrounding the Chicago Defender, one of the largest and most influential black newspapers in the United States. The poet Langston Hughes called the newspaper “the journalistic voice of a largely voiceless people” (Berry 2015, p.  18). Abbott started the Defender in 1905 out of frustration when he couldn’t get hired as a lawyer. He was originally from St. Simons, Georgia. But he moved to Chicago to attend law school. After graduation near the top of his class, no law firm would hire a black man so he started a newspaper he said would be “a defender of his race.” He was inspired by Frederick Douglass, who he met at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and Ida B. Wells, a crusading journalist and leading spokeswoman against lynching, who also attended the same Fair (Michaeli 2016, p. 20). The Defender had humble beginnings. Abbott was broke. But nonetheless, he managed to talk a printer into giving him credit so he could print the first press run of 300 copies for $13.75. He also talked a black real estate broker into renting him enough space in a Southside tenement building for a card table, a kitchen chair and used typewriter. Even that was too expensive so Abbott was forced to move his operations into the small apartment he was renting. Dreaming large, however, Abbott immediately and modestly dubbed his paper “The World’s Greatest Weekly.” Amazingly enough, the little paper that could soon took off. In its heyday after World War I, with a paid circulation of 250,000, the Defender was a “must read” for many African Americans, not just in the Midwest, but also throughout the country, especially in the Deep South (Michaeli 2016, pp.  200–201). Most Southern newspaper vendors refused to sell the

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Defender. So the paper was often smuggled into the Deep South by train porters and then read in barbershops, social clubs and churches, and selectively passed along from one reader to another. It is estimated that more two-thirds of its readers in the late 1920s were in the Deep South (Thornton 2014). The paper militantly demanded racial justice and social change. It used sensational, bold red headlines and graphic images to expose crimes against black people, especially in the South, and to denounce racism, lynchings and social injustice. Researcher Roi Ottley wrote that “with the exception of the Bible, no publication was more influential upon the Negro masses than the Defender” (1955, p. 190). Before analyzing how letters-to-the-editor writers responded to the stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression of 1929 it is helpful to summarize briefly the effects of the crash. To review: Some 16 million stock shares were traded in less than eight hours. The market lost more than 12% of its value in just one day. But that was only the start. Within days, credit was frozen for nearly everyone. Banks called in mortgages and home loans, demanding that outstanding loans be paid off immediately. This meant thousands of people lost their homes and farms. Many small businesses collapsed. Ironically, this included many banks themselves after people rushed to their banks and demanded the immediate withdrawal and return of their non-existent savings. Unemployment jumped from 5% to 25%. The Dow Jones average dropped from 400 to 145 (Burg 2005, p. 41). For the average person this meant that hundreds, if not thousands, of department stores, grocery stores, diners, farms, factories and even schools, closed overnight, not just in big cities but in small towns and nearly everywhere across the United States (Meltzer 1973, p. 6).

Method The primary method of research used here was qualitative textual analysis (Jackson et al. 2007, pp. 21–22). To understand the papers in their full context, the researchers examined issues of the Defender published from October 29, 1929, to October 29, 1930. This 12-month period coincides with the first, full year of the crash. Because photocopies were difficult to read, the researchers ordered microfilm that captured the issues from cover-to-cover. This was important to understand the full context of the letters to the editor. The microfilm, unlike files from databases, reveals the page layout, article placement, headlines and many other journalistic

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t­echniques that helped the newspaper frame the issues for readers. Reese et al. (2010) explained this framing is a “moment in a chain of signification” (p. 15), which means the elements collectively provide meaning and give events context. Reasoning that front-pages stories reflect what editors believe are the most important events of the day, the researchers cataloged the headlines from the front pages and entered the information in a database. The headlines of the editorials and each letter to the editor were also cataloged and arranged by date. Each item was coded according to the categories Abbott outlined in his “nine-point plan for America” to determine whether the articles reflected those values. In the first issue of the Defender in 1905, Abbott wrote in his mission statement that the Defender had a “nine-point plan,” that is nine specific actions the paper and Abbott intended to campaign for. These nine points were: 1. The opening up of all trades and trade unions to black people as well as whites. 2. Representation in the president’s cabinets 3. Engineers and firemen on all American railroads and government-­ controlled industries 4. Representation in all departments of the police forces over the entire United States 5. Government schools open to all American citizens in preference to foreigners 6. Conductors on all railroads throughout the United States 7. Motormen and conductors on surface, elevated and motorbus lines throughout America 8. Federal legislation to abolish lynching 9. Full enfranchisement of all American citizens. Abbott seemed to like this nine-point plan since he reprinted it on the top of each and every editorial page of the Defender until he died in 1940. After reading the articles, letters and editorials carefully, it became clear that other topics were present in the text. The coding, therefore, allowed the information to be categorized, reordered and re-examined, as Coffey and Atkinson (2013) suggested, and it also allowed the researchers to “expand, transform and reconceptualize data, opening up more diverse and analytical possibilities” (Coffey and Atkinson 2013, p. 29).

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Discussion of Findings A total of 2422 articles were coded. The most frequently covered issues among news stories, editorials and letters to the editor were: crime and violence 20.3%, discrimination 16.2%, education 7.9%, politics 7.6%, economy 6.8 %, military 5.3%, religion 4.3%, full enfranchisement of all American citizens 3.3% and federal legislation to abolish lynching, 2.4%. The other issues were covered less than a percent and therefore were not included in Table 4.1. The top issues on the front page were crime (25%), discrimination (10.6%), education (7.6%), politics (7.6%) and the economy (6%). Among editorials, the top issues were crime/violence (22.4%), discrimination (16.9%), education (10.3%), politics (9.1%), the economy (8.9%) and the military (7.8%). Letters from readers discussed discrimination (31.9%), education (7.9 %), the economy (6.4%), the military (6.0%) and politics (5.5%). Table 4.2 outlines the frequencies.

Table 4.1  Frequencies: issues Issues

Number of articles

Percentages (%)

493 393 192 185 164 129 105 22 21 680

20.3 16.2 7.9 7.6 6.8 5.3 4.3 3.3 2.4 28.1

Crime or violence Discrimination Education Political Economy Military Religion Full enfranchisement of all American citizens Federal legislation to abolish lynching Other

Table 4.2  Frequencies: sections Section Front page Letter to the editor Editorial Cartoon

Number of articles

Percentage (%)

1479 452 439 59

60.9 18.6 18.1 2.4

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The expectation then was that the country’s devastating economic woes would be the number one topic discussed in both letters to the editor as well as in editorials. Yet, surprisingly, from October 29, 1929, through October 29, 1930, only 17 letters, out of a total of 452 published letters, directly discussed the economy. The Defender also published a total of 439 editorials during that same time frame, with only four editorials referring to troubles in the economy. After almost a year of enduring the Great Depression, readers rarely used that term in their letters. Instead, readers referred to the country’s economic meltdown obliquely. In an October 4, 1930, letter, for instance, E. H. Hughes of Tulsa, referred to the general “depression” and tough times African Americans had been suffering, especially in the last year. Hughes noted “the repeated lynching, home burning, unemployment and many other things of misery” that particularly bedeviled African Americans, were becoming unbearable. Hughes urged African Americans to pool their financial resources. He said if they did, they could end their poverty “within a year” (p. 14). If a ten-cent tax were levied on 10 million African Americans, he reasoned, black citizens could raise $12 million in a year to buy tracts of lands on which to build factories that could produce the products they consumed most often (Hughes 1930). Sixteen other letters from readers also pinpointed the need for access to better jobs and more education. Some readers, such as Alberta Banks, noted her efforts to better herself economically had been thwarted by overt discrimination. Banks, who identified herself as a Chicago native, said in a February 22, 1930, letter: While trying to get into some of the business colleges this semester, I was told by the Chicago Business College that they do not cater to our race of people. The Englewood Business College will not take Colored; the Luther Business college said they only take Lutheran students, and the Metropolitan, of all schools, will deliberately tell you that it is against the rules to take Colored people. (p. 14)

Other references to the economy were also made in the October 11 issue when a letter writer named Frank R. Crosswaith, who identified himself as a socialist, wrote that America’s capitalistic system was at a “crossroads”: An enlightened social consciousness is growing up among the people everywhere and every department of human activity is being invaded by the irrepressible logic of co-operation. Federal farm relief boards, public service

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commissions, federal tax laws, health laws, etc. are but straws indicating the end of individualism and unbridled competition. (1930, p. 14)

So why did so few readers and editorials discuss the stock market crash and subsequent Depression? And what is the significance of these findings? One of the most difficult challenges for a historian is to not merely explain what happened but also to answer why and what it means. The absence of comments may shed light on the collective mindset of the Defender’s readers, along with editor Abbott himself. It is often quite easy to reach for the simplest answer and hope it suffices. And that simplest answer here is to argue that owning the most widely read and highest circulation black newspaper made Abbott a millionaire many times over, long before the stock market crashed and he remained quite wealthy (Michaeli 2016, p. 163). A sign of this wealth was his multi-part series, published in 1929, in which he described to his readers his luxurious extended four-month journey to Europe and his meeting and partying with the movers and shakers of European high society. Abbott urged his readers in news stories and editorials to follow his lead and visit Europe soon and consider moving there permanently. His message was that black people had many options—they could escape what Abbott called the “Race problem” in America by moving to Europe where they would be treated as human beings (Michaeli 2016, p.  177). One would think letter writers would complain in response. Wouldn’t readers feel that Abbott’s extravagant European trip at a time when the country was in economic collapse was in bad taste? However, once again, assumptions are shattered by reality—many readers congratulated Abbott on his trip and his glowing coverage of his exploits around the world, including Charles H. Matton of Morgan, Pennsylvania: I am proud to know we have some Race men among us that are willing to adventure and see the old world and bring good news to their Race brothers in the United States. I enjoy reading of your trip to Europe just as if I had been a member of the party. By reading of the great trip you had I will try to tour Europe in the early future myself. (1929, p. 14)

It’s tempting to further argue that since Abbott was not personally ruined by the Great Depression he was simply unaware of its severe impact and thus considered it unimportant. And then maybe since it was not important to him, Abbott also decided not to publish subsequent letters

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about the Depression. But that notion is contradicted by an editorial by Abbott published December 7, 1929, in which he suggested that Southern readers “contemplating moving from one city to another, coming from small towns into the cities of the North,” might consider staying where they were because “it is a poor time to make a change.” The editorial advised readers that the “only way to stabilize industrial conditions is for each of us to anchor ourselves where we are” (Chicago Defender 1929, p. 14). Furthermore, even though Abbott accrued tremendous personal wealth as early as 1909 from the great success of his paper and thus had a well-­ established fortune seemingly insulated from the ups and downs of the stock market (Michaeli 2016, p. 166), the Defender’s circulation numbers were in sharp decline by 1930—dropping from 225,000 to 110,000 (Walker 1996, pp. 40–41). Abbott was known to be a meticulous bookkeeper obsessed with circulation numbers who kept a careful eye on his bottom line. So he must have known the Depression was seriously hurting his business and his readers. Despite the dire circumstances, the crash and the Great Depression were not front and center on the editorial page. There are several different ways to think about the Defender and its journalistic mission that might explain the shortage of Depression-related editorials. First, Abbott wrote on day one of his Defender that he intended to focus on his nine-point plan. So he vowed, among other things, to open the trades and trade schools to black people, get black representation in the president’s cabinet, get black representation in the military and police, get federal legislation to end lynching and demand full enfranchisement of all Americans, especially black citizens. The textual analysis showed the paper covered these topics, and many others, as reflected in Table 4.3. Abbott also had a slogan printed on the top of each editorial page: “American Race Prejudice Must Be Destroyed.” It makes sense to argue then that Abbott decided not to focus on the failing stock market, which was totally beyond his control. Instead, he zeroed-in on crime and violence against black people, the effects of racial discrimination and the need for black people to get an education to better themselves. There are other possible reasons why the stock market crash got short shrift: Louis Liebovich argued in his 1994 book Bylines In Despair that reporters in 1929 had recently cast off the shackles of political partisanship and were obsessed with reporting just the facts. The press wanted to show independence by not interpreting events and instead printing only verifiable facts.

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Table 4.3  Issues covered most frequently in each section Front Opinion Letter to the Cartoon page (%) editorial (%) editor (%) (%) Opening up of all trades to black people Representation in the President’s Cabinet Hire black people as engineers & fireman on railroad and govt. controlled industries Black people represented in all dept. of police force Govt. schools open to all Black conductors on railroads across the U.S. Federal legislation to abolish lynching Full enfranchisement of black people Crime Education Military Economy Discrimination Politics Religion

52.4 85.7

19 14.3

66.7

33.3

66.7

33.3

100 50 61.9 63.6 74.4 58.3 47.3 54.3 39.7 60.5 60

23.8

50 23.8 13.6 19.9 23.4 26.4 23.8 18.8 21.6 18.1

18.2 17.7 20.9 17.7 36.6 13.5 21

12.1

Since business tycoons, academic experts and government spokesmen were all saying the crash was simply a minor problem and the economy was actually in great shape, reporters were afraid to contradict them for fear of being labeled partisans (Liebovich 1994, p. 103). There were also selfish reasons for publisher Abbott to downplay the Depression: He didn’t want readers to panic and decide they could no longer afford to buy his newspaper. He was supported in this desire by his advertisers, some of whom were taking out full-page ads in various newspapers, including the Defender, assuring the nation that the country was recovering from the crash. In addition, there was the steady drum beat from the White House that “happy days are here again.” After the crash, President Herbert Hoover pressed many newspapers to report good news about the economy. But Hoover singled out the Defender, in particular, for attention. He pleaded with Defender reporters and editors and reminded them that the Republican Party had repeatedly pledged to ­support black people through tough times. He told them to remember

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the old adage that for the colored people “the Republican Party is the ship, all else is the sea” (Michaeli 2016, pp. 196, 197). Historians John F. Bauman and Thomas H. Coode (1989) also argue that most reporters, with at best a high-school education, had a tenuous grasp on the complexities of Wall Street and high finance in 1929. Thus, they did a terrible job covering the long-range implications and effects of the stock market crash. Bauman and Goode maintain that because few reporters really understood what was happening, even fewer readers understood the crash was serious and marked the start of an economic depression that was to last more than a decade (Bauman and Coode 1989, p.  85). Liebovich maintains that since the Depression was not a visible event, such as a fire or a tornado, it could not be easily described by reporters or editorial writers in a few succinct paragraphs. Liebovich says instead, the Depression was like a noxious fog: “Its monoxides crept in under the doors. Gradually Americans breathed and choked on the unrelenting fumes, unable to escape the paralyzing but invisible poisons” (Liebovich 1994, pp. 103, 106). All these reasons might explain why Abbott and his editorials did not comment much on the crash and the Depression between 1929 and 1930. But do these explanations apply equally to readers and their letters to the editor? Before unpacking that question, it is important to note what readers chose to comment on most often in the Defender—racism. Letter writers talked repeatedly how racism reared its ugly head in many ways, starting most urgently with regular physical, brazen and public attacks on black people in the so-called Promised Land of the North. Many readers described how they feared for their lives every day. Dennis Bethea, for instance, of Chicago, wrote in a November 23, 1929, letter that white men regularly assault “colored people” for no reason in the streets of Chicago without fear of either arrest or prosecution. Bethea said it was time for black people to learn from insurrectionist Nat Turner who armed himself “with a meat cleaver or some serviceable weapon” and cut a “red swath” through the residents of white slaveholders.” Black men must “stand up for their rights,” Bethea wrote. “For if a white man smites them on the cheek, they do not turn the other. They hit him back” (p. 14). Violence against African Americans was not uncommon in 1929. But usually unprovoked attacks such as the ones Bethea wrote about happened in small, primitive, rural Southern communities in places such as Money, Mississippi or Brooks County, Georgia (Pfeifer 2004, p. 16). The National

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Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reports, for instance, that lynching was most prevalent right after the Civil War in small towns in Mississippi, Georgia and Texas. But it was still common in the 1920s, especially in the Deep South (Raper 1933, p. 67). In several issues published in May and June 1930, the Defender described a particularly brutal lynching in Sherman, Texas in which the mob also burned the victim. Editorials, editorial cartoons and letters to the editor decried the egregious attack on a black man accused of assaulting a white woman. Robert L.  Fambrough Jr., a resident of Los Angeles wrote: The Sherman atrocity is one of the most brazen and contemptable demonstrations of lawlessness I have ever read. If such as exhibition of contempt for law and order is permitted to pass unnoticed and without punishment, then I say down with the judicial departments throughout this country. Surely, we have no need for them. Since our government refuses to protect our people, then for God’s sake, permit us to protect ourselves. (1930, p. 14)

A letter from George Schuyler of New  York said he was concerned about increased violence against black people in this modern age, even in integrated major metropolises. “There is absolutely no guarantee that any individual Negro will not get into brawl, through no fault of his own, that may end in serious injury,” even in the big Northern cities of New York and Chicago, he explained. Schuyler wrote that “recently Negro riders in the subway were set upon by white sailors,” because of “color prejudice and discrimination.” He urged black people to band together under the banner of the NAACP to protect themselves as a form of insurance and expose the violence of “white hoodlums” (Schuyler 1930, p. 14). Over the years, Abbott repeatedly told his readers that such violence was uncommon in the haven of the North, especially in sophisticated, big cities such as Chicago. But Bethea strongly disagreed. He described many acts of racist violence he said he witnessed in Chicago. Other letter writers also reported being victimized by whites in the “Windy City,” sometimes with beatings, but other times by more covert means. Many letter writers said they were discriminated against daily, for example, when they applied for jobs or tried to get an education or applied for the military or to become police officers, or even just tried to buy groceries, eat at restaurants or purchase clothes in neighborhood stores. Some letter writers urged black people to stop oppressing themselves first, before

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stopping white oppression. Writers urged black people to free themselves and recognize their own beauty and self-worth, independent of any white approval. “Many of us are kept from achievements because of that inferiority complex that has been embedded within us as the dark shadow of the institution of human slavery of which we are victims”, wrote B.  W. Gallman of Newberry, South Carolina, Gallman (1929). Black people need to learn their own history of great accomplishments, including the works of luminaries such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and Crispus Attucks, wrote J.  L. Horace of Nashville—“Our people should know more about themselves and our great achievements. Not to turn backwards and survive on past records, but to cause them to gain confidence in themselves and to realize their possibilities”. For example, he said he was surprised to learn during his military service in WWI that black men were playing key roles in aviation in the war. They were often in charge, he said, and giving orders to commanders of the allied army (Horace 1929, p. 14). Only 11 years had passed between the close of World War I and the start of the Great Depression. During those intervening years, the U.S. military remained segregated. The war department continued separating servicemen by race until July 1948 when President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981. As a result, servicemen and their families found that the prejudice that separated them in life followed them into death. The inequitable treatment of black service families was reflected in 7% of the Defender’s editorials and 6% of letters to the editor. It was also reflected in the paper’s editorial cartoons. For example, on April 5 the Defender published an editorial cartoon entitled “Gold Star Turns to Brass,” which depicted a Gold Star mother, head hung low, left at the dock as a segregated ship ferried white families to France. In a letter to the editor on April 12, 1930, George F. Miller, a resident of New Brunswick, New Jersey responded: If there has been anything in recent years to cause my blood to boil it is the report of the decision of the war department to send Gold Star Colored mothers to Europe in a Jim-Crow ship. It is an outrage to suffer such upon the mothers of those lying dead in France in the cause of making the world “safe for democracy.” In my opinion if any one of these boys could lift his voice from the grave he would entreat his mother to stay home, rather than view his grave under such humiliating circumstances. (1930, p. 14)

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Ada D. Jones, who lived in Springfield, Ohio, said African Americans would fare better on all fronts, if there were better leadership amongst the black communities: We shall continue to have such insults heaped upon us such as “the pilgrimage of the Gold Star Mothers” and such as the employment situation and lack of rights of citizenship. (1930, p. 14)

Conclusion Looking back with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, most historians agree the stock market crash marked a pivotal point in the economy. It started a downturn that essentially lasted until World War II. Perhaps on the day of the crash it didn’t feel so significant and life-changing, however, to those at the bottom of the economic ladder, living through it one day at a time, especially in the first year of the Great Depression. Unlike the top 1% of wealthy white people, many of whom lost millions overnight, many black people did not go from plutocrats to paupers on October 29, 1929. Instead, they simply tightened their belts a notch or two and struggled to move on, not realizing the belt tightening was going to get much worse. From a historical point of view, it seems the letter writers show how difficult it is to recognize and respond to threats, even existential ones that creep up slowly over time. The pain of the Great Depression began when the stock market crashed, but few had any idea how much worse it was to become in the coming months and years. Loyal readers of the Defender wrote letters in 1929 that acknowledged times were tough for black people—but nothing new there, since many were already living hand to mouth. What letter writers indicated, both men and women, was of more immediate concern to them was being afraid to walk the streets of the “Promised Land” of Chicago without being accosted and beaten by white people while police turned a blind eye. Letter writers wrote vivid and passionate accounts of all manner of racism, discrimination and violence they faced each day in the “Canaan of the North,” as Abbot called Chicago (Ottley 1955, p. 167). Many letters were very specific in telling the date, times, place and manner of discrimination and racism they witnessed. It is hard to remember that simply bearing witness to such events took great courage, all in itself, since black people were still nonchalantly lynched and beaten in the United States in 1929

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(Gonzalez-Day 2006, p. 8). Those who wrote letters complaining about racism were often putting a target on their own backs. Yet letters to the editor in the Defender were more than simply a place to air complaints about racism—the letters pages also served as a supportive community. Here readers could think aloud about thorny issues such as self-reliance, self-respect and self-love. The letters discussed how the Defender was putting a needed spotlight on black achievements. Many wrote how inspiring it was to see Abbott succeed, setting an example of a black man rising from poverty and then traveling in style to Europe to hobnob with kings and queens. Long before the singer James Brown, these letter writers were in effect saying “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” What has been missing from the historical record is this voice of common people, especially those printed in African-American newspapers such as the Defender. It took courage for letter writers such as Ada Jones, Dennis Bethea and George Miller to publicly voice their opinions. It’s easy to take such public discussions for granted today in an age of social media and Facebook over-sharings. But these letter writers were unsung trail-­ blazing heroes. They pleaded the cause of black people, wrestled with what it meant to be a black American in 1929 and expressed their deepest worries and fears about daily life. A final post-script to end where this chapter began: Abbott and his Defender survived his two crises. The first, the Depression, was a tough opponent. Abbott wrestled it constantly for the next 11  years until his death in 1940 from a series of long-term health issues, including Bright’s disease and tuberculosis. By then the paper’s circulation slumped to roughly 70,000 and Abbott had transferred some $261,000 of his personal wealth to the Defender to keep it afloat. But the paper survived and went on to prosper under the control of Abbott’s nephew, John Sengstacke. During World War II the Defender was a major voice of black America. It remains so today, according to a rather famous reader, Barack Obama. He described the Defender in 2006 as “the best of American journalism which has always had a function of not just reporting but also of advocacy and having a point of view” (Michaeli 2016). As for the second crisis, it appears Abbott never really lost the faith of most of his readers. A November 9, 1929, letter from Mrs. Annie Hardaway summed up the apparent feeling of many readers when she wrote: “Colored people should feel highly favored to have a publishing company like the Defender to their honor.”

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References Banks, A. (1930, February 22). Segregation in Chicago. Chicago Defender, p. 14. Bauman, J. F., & Coode, T. H. (1989). In the Eye of the Great Depression: New Deal Reporters and the Agony of the American People. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press. Berry, S. L. (2015). Langston Hughes. Mankato, MN: Creative Paperbacks. Bethea, D. A. (1929, November 23). Nat Turner. Chicago Defender, p. 14. Burg, D. (2005). The Great Depression. New York: Facts on File. Coffey, A., & Atkinson, P. (2013). Making Sense of Qualitative Data Complementary Research Strategies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Crosswaith, F. (1930, October 11). Communism vs. Capitalism. The Chicago Defender, p. 14. Dann, M. E. (1971). The Black Press, 1827–1890 (p. 14). New York: G.P. Putnams and Sons. DeSantis, A. D. (1998). Selling the American Dream Myth to Black Southerners, The Chicago Defender and the Black Migration of 1915–1919. Western Journal of Communication, 62(4), 474–511. Fambrough, R. L., Jr. (1930, June 7). The Mob at Work. Chicago Defender, p. 14. Favreau, M. (2018). Crash: The Great Depression and the Fall and Rise of America. New York: Little, Brown Books. Gallman, B. W. (1929, November 30). Know Your People. Chicago Defender, p. 14. Gonzalez-Day, K. (2006). Lynching in the West, 1850–1935 (p. 12). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Horace, J. L. (1929, November 30). Congratulates Editor R. S. Abbott. Chicago Defender, p. 14. Hughes, E. H. (1930, October 4). The Only Solution. Chicago Defender, p. 14. Jackson, R.  L., Drummond, D.  K., & Camara, S. (2007). What Is Qualitative Research? Qualitative Research Reports in Communication, 8(1), 21–28. Jones, A. D. (1930, April 12). We Need Leadership. Chicago Defender, p. 14. Jordan, W. G. (2001). Black Newspapers and America’s War for Democracy, 1914–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Liebovich, L. W. (1994). Bylines in Despair: Herbert Hoover, the Great Depression, and the U.S. News Media. Westport, CT: Praeger. Marks, C. (1989). Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (pp. 2–3). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Matton, C.  H. (1929, December 7). Mr. Abbott’s Trip to Europe. Chicago Defender, p. 14. McElvaine, R. S. (2008). Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters From the Forgotten Man. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Meltzer, M. (1973). Brother, Can You Spare a Dime: The Great Depression, 1929– 1933. New York: Random House.

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Michaeli, E. (2016). The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America: From the Age of the Pullman Porter to the Age of Obama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Miller, G. F. (1930, November 12). America’s Disgrace. Chicago Defender, p. 14. Nelson, S. (Producer and Director). (1998). The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords [Film]. San Francisco: California Newsreel. Ottley, R. (1955). The Lonely Warrior, the Life and Times of Robert S.  Abbott. Chicago: H. Regnery, pp. 160, 167, 190. Ottley, R., & Weatherby, W. (1970). The Depression in Harlem. In B. Sternsher (Ed.), Hitting Home: Great Depression in Town and Country. Chicago: Quadrangle. Pfeifer, M. J. (2004). Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society (pp. 1874– 1947). Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Raper, A.  F. (1933). The Tragedy of Lynching. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Reese, S.  D., Gandy, O.  H., & Grant, A.  E. (2010). Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World. New York: Routledge. Ross, F. G. J., & McKerns, J. P. (2004). Depression in the Promised Land: The Chicago Defender Discourages Migration, 1929–1940. American Journalism, 21(1), 55–73. Schuyler, G. S. (1930, January 11). Making Our Breaks. Chicago Defender, p. 14. Simmons, C. A. (1998). The African American Press: A History of News Coverage During National Crises with Special Reference to Four Black Newspapers, 1827– 1965. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Simpson, J., & Speake, J. (Eds.). (2008). Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thornton, B. (2014). The ‘Dangerous’ Chicago Defender. Journalism History, 40(1), 40–50. Walker, J. (1996). The Promised Land, The Chicago Defender and the Black Press in Illinois. In H. L. Suggs (Ed.), The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865–1985. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

CHAPTER 5

Letters to the Editor in Colombia: A Sanctuary of Public Emotions Marta Milena Barrios and Luis Manuel Gil

Introduction Brimming with emotions, personal narratives, religious diatribes, and complex analyses of the intricate reality of the nation, Colombian letters to the editor have been an important part of the relationship between the newspapers and their public for more than a century. Letters to the editor are a testimony that many of the country’s population choose to make their point with words and not violence. They also embrace an agenda of their own that means that many of the letters, especially those to local newspapers, include content that has little to do with current news. They include references to legends or popular myths, love stories and calls to action from citizens’ associations in forgotten municipalities throughout the country looking to solve practical problems while for much of the history of Colombia, the language that a minority of the population has used is that of bullets—a noisier form of expression that is amplified exponentially in the media and fosters an imaginary of fear and hopelessness. Letters to the editor hold a generally more constructive tone. In Colombia, the first letter to the editor was written at the beginning of the last century. Since then, correspondence has been maintained at the M. M. Barrios (*) • L. M. Gil Universidad del Norte, Colombia, Barranquilla, Colombia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Cavanagh, J. Steel (eds.), Letters to the Editor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2_5

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rate of 100,000 letters each year (Barrios 2013). The authors studied letters that were sent during a frantic and politically turbulent decade, 1999– 2008. Issues of public concern fostered heated debates in the private and public realms, which media took on in the form of news coverage and opinion pieces. Moreover, it was the period before the signing of the Peace Accord between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla to end five decades of armed conflict, which dominated Colombia’s recent history, self-image, and international standing.1 This gave an impulse to significant participation in relation to social and political affairs by the public via letters to the editor. These texts also provide an insight into the main concerns of ordinary citizens as a significant share of the population, many of those who identified themselves as “good Colombians”, “good neighbors”, or “respectable citizens” (Barrios 2015) tried to encourage their fellow countrymen to respectfully engage in public debate through the medium of letters to the editor. In the midst of the convulsion which seized the country during this decade, letters to the editor became a means by which civil society expressed their thoughts and opinions in the midst of the mayhem. Through discourse analysis, this chapter aims to provide an account of Colombians’ public emotions via our analysis of the emotional repertoires of the letters to the editor of two emblematic newspapers: El Tiempo and El Heraldo with El Tiempo being the most important daily broadsheet newspaper in Colombia, with national coverage which is edited in the Andean Region and El Heraldo the newspaper with the largest circulation figures among almost ten million people in the Caribbean region. Potter and Wetherell (1987, p. 149) define repertoire as “recurrently used systems of terms used for characterizing and evaluating actions, events, and other phenomena” and “the building blocks used for manufacturing versions of actions, self, and social structures” (Wetherell and Potter 1992, p. 90). Similarly, Sampson and Atkinson (2013) use the expression ‘emotional repertoires’ to describe how scientists’ memories are recalled and relayed. Meanwhile, Edwards (1999) described the usefulness of emotional repertoires and suggests that “the conceptual repertoire of emotions provides for extraordinary flexibility in how actions, reactions, dispositions, motives and other psychological characteristics can be assembled in narratives and explanations of human conduct” (Edwards 1999, p. 288). 1

 The final Peace Accord was signed in November 2016.

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For our analysis we also follow Ekman’s (2008) notion of afflictive and non-afflictive emotions—“[i]f they are afflictive, there is a distortion; they are not in tune with reality (…), and if they are non-afflictive they are appropriate to reality; no distortion” (Ekman 2008, p. 24). In this way, the expression of public emotions such as anger is considered unhelpful. In an ideal situation, daily life should encourage warm and affectionate relationships to avoid conflict as much as possible. We present a macro mixed-methods study that analyzed letters to the editor published by the newspapers El Tiempo and El Heraldo during 1999–2008. About 90% of the data processed was taken from El Tiempo and the remaining 10% from El Heraldo, taking into consideration circulation criteria (see Barrios 2013, pp. 137–141). A total of 5425 published letters to the editor were explored both quantitatively and qualitatively, finding keywords associated with specific emotions, and using a combination of techniques, to construct an in-depth picture of the emotional condition surrounding the public who wrote letters to the Colombian newspapers. In this case, the word soul (alma in Spanish) and others with similar meaning were used as keywords to describe a collective sense of unity among readers. Mixed data analysis software—QDA Miner and WordStat—was used to process data, using its various functions such as searching for keywords in context. Following Krippendorff’s (2013) criteria, the computer aid offered by QDA was considered interactive-hermeneutic. Interactive, since the categories were not previously fixed and hermeneutic because the analysis process was guided through the analysts’ growing understanding of the texts. This was followed by a deeper analysis into the description of the emotional repertoires of the audience of El Tiempo. In the same way, we studied the letters of El Heraldo. We also identified the specific triggers of the emotional repertoires—that is, the events that elicited such emotions within the public—and focused on how those who wrote letters shared emotions.

Colombian Cultural Traits and Emotions Disciplines such as psychology and psychiatry led studies on emotions throughout the twentieth century. However, in the last 30 years of that century and so far in the twenty-first, interest spread to disciplines such as sociology, political science, linguistics, and journalism, among others, which makes its definition complex. Besides, despite the individual nature of emotions, they are frequently expressed in social life associated with

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events of common interest, which are reported by the mass media. According to Oatley et al. (2006, pp. 28–29), scholars studying emotions present them as “multi-component responses to challenges or opportunities that are important to the individual’s goals, particularly social ones”. One of the recognized values of emotions is their ability to connect with others with whom we relate, understand them, and promote the knowledge of ourselves. Also, emotions are capable of prioritizing our concerns (Oatley and Jenkins 1996). That is why when studying emotions expressed in the letters to the editors of Colombian newspapers we learn about the topics that are important for the public and identify the events that elicited such emotions. As Nussbaum (2014, p. 168) mentions: “human beings experience emotions in ways modeled by their individual history as by social norms.” Studies of emotions are scarce in Colombia. Therefore, it is useful to briefly identify some particular cultural characteristics common to countries in the Americas that can bring us closer to understanding the expression of emotions in the country. In such a way, North American culture is regarded—according to Hofstede et al. (2010)—as a highly individualistic culture, while Latin American culture is considered collectivistic. These scholars report differences among countries in this subcontinent, but as a whole, they state that in this region, “conformity and observance are valued, as well as support for the autocratic and authoritarian attitude of those in charge of organizations and institutions” (Hofstede et al. 2010, p. 4), among other social characteristics that make these Latin language speaking countries a cultural entity. Another study includes Colombia in the group of Latin American countries that privilege the male gender, as characterized by “the need for achievement, assertiveness, the use of force and the importance given to material success” (Zubieta et al. 1998, p. 4). Colombia, along with Mexico, Ecuador, and Venezuela, are among nations where gender roles are well differentiated, and emotions are expressed in an explicit manner. This contrasts with what the authors call “female countries”, which value modesty, submissiveness, and little expression of emotions. In a study of organizational practices, Hofstede et al. (2010) found Colombians to be competitive, status-oriented, and masculine, with competition directed toward people from groups or society levels different from their own. They stated that in Colombia inequalities in all social strata are inherent to society, with individuals having little if any control over them. Regarding the degree of interdependence that this society maintains among its members, their study showed that Colombia

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is one of the most collectivistic societies of the world, meaning that group membership, group opinions, and interpersonal relations are highly valued. Those outside the group are conceived as adversaries. Other scholars have indicated the differences between Colombian emotional repertoires and those of other countries, such as France. Palacio and Gosling (1997) identified some differences between what they called the “active-emotional” aspect of the French, in contrast to the “passive-­ intellectual or rational” aspect of the Colombian. During their research on Colombian migrants in Paris, they found opposing characteristics between people born in France and in Colombia: “reason against emotion, passivity against activity, intellectual work against manual work” (Palacio and Gosling 1997, p. 88). In addition to this, they found that joy is a prevailing identity feature among Colombians. A Gallup International Survey on Happiness, Hope and Economic Optimism (2017) ranked Colombia in the second position. The country also made it to the highest index of happiness in the world in 2015 and 2016 (Global Barometer of Hope and Happiness 2016). This emotion is present both inside and outside families, thus leading to a strong interdependency among communities, which favors empathy and edifying emotions such as solidarity. Hofstede et al. (2010) also affirmed that people in Colombia scored very highly in their disposition to have fun and enjoy life. In other words, they found this to be an optimistic and indulgent country. Experts on Colombian national identity, such as Literature Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez (1996), have made similar comments. He outlined the particular characteristics of Colombians’ emotional repertoire. García Márquez saw Colombia as a dense and indecipherable nation where unlikeness is the only measure of reality. […] We are intuitive, self-taught, spontaneous and agile people, as well as vigorous workers, but the mere idea of easy money drives us mad. Our heart bears as much political rancor as historical amnesia. […] For the same reason, we are a sentimental society where a gesture prevails over reflection, impetus over reason, and human warmth over distrust. We feel this almost irrational love for life, but kill one another because of our eagerness to live. The perpetrator of the most outrageous crime is betrayed by sentimental weakness. In other words: a heartless Colombian is betrayed by his heart. (Márquez 1996, pp. 3–4)

Another aspect that has permanently triggered emotions throughout the whole country is the long political conflict with the guerrilla groups.

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Bolívar (2006) found a wide range of emotional repertoires that “coexist and give rise to a moral order in society where exclusion of countrymen is condemned, violence is regarded as a resource to be protected and respected, fair treatment by dominant sectors in society is desired, and an effort to fraternize with poor sections of the country is made” (p. 129). In general terms, Colombians have a strong sense of belonging to their country and a strong patriotism, which usually lasts a lifetime, in spite of the adverse circumstances they have experienced for several generations and will be studied within the letters to the editor. As Nussbaum (2013, p.  206) notes: “any account of public emotion must grapple with the complexities of patriotism.”

Emotional Repertoires: Silhouetting the Colombian Soul The results of this study describe the emotional repertoires of the readers of El Tiempo and El Heraldo newspapers through excerpts of letters which provide an expression of public emotion. The authors found that when connecting the analysis of emotions in letters with events in the recent history of Colombia, a wide and varied repertoire emerges. The data highlights a politically aware community, ready to express its most profound emotions in search of solidarity with fellow citizens. Previous studies (Barrios 2012, 2015) demonstrated how Colombian letter-writers acted as a very close-knit community. Through the letters, the readers convey national feeling. They used the metaphor of the Colombian Soul to communicate their desire for profound social changes that would lead to peace and stability as it was used frequently to describe the emotional connection among and between them. In order to emphasize the range and scope of the emotional repertoire, Fig.  5.1 highlights common emotions in the two newspapers studied. Love emerged as a pervasive emotion: love for the nation and for their fellow citizens. Colombians seem to have a very strong spirit to cope with adversity. Even in the worst of times, emotions exhibiting love for the nation were dominant in the letters. Non-afflictive words were more present in the Caribbean region’s newspaper where manifestations of armed conflict violence were relatively scarce; and afflictive emotions prevailed in the Andean paper, located in a city badly affected by violence during the ten years of the study. As a result, afflictive emotions such as sadness, surprise, anger, and fear, were present in the letters to the editor here.

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sadness

El Tiempo ashamed dishonor

surprise

compassionrage

enjoyment envy hurt wounded

love

angry laugh

fear

distaste

weep

El Heraldo Fig. 5.1  Word cloud for emotional words in El Tiempo and El Heraldo

Common and unique words across newspapers are shown in Fig.  5.1. Black expressions refer to words appearing in El Tiempo and outlined expressions are from El Heraldo. As we have suggested, letters to the editor were suitable vehicles to express the emotions that act as a sanctuary for the Colombian Soul. Letters show a politically aware community ready to express their most profound emotions to try to find solidarity with their fellow citizens. By writing letters redolent with emotion, readers reacted to social events that astonished them good or bad. The most emotive letters were reactions to episodes of violence, mostly those that had been orchestrated by the guerrillas. However, it is worth noting that letters included expressions of pain and sorrow, as well as words of hope and patriotism at the same time. Public letters to the press expressed civil society’s collective feeling of frustration with social events that seemed beyond their control. The opportunity to share their emotions with their fellow countrymen may have brought some relief to the

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public. In one of the letters, a reader expressed his frustration with El Tiempo for the coverage given to a story regarding one of the top leaders of the FARC, Manuel Marulanda Vélez, arguing that: You people from El Tiempo are not the best guidance of public opinion, as you have always believed, but its greatest deceivers. I know you will not publish opinions like this, but I feel that by protesting I am relieving my conscience as a Colombian. (El Tiempo, March 10, 2002)

In the following texts, Colombians affirmed that their collective soul was being harmed yet it was filled with courage, allowing them to strive for the peace the country desires and deserves. More than 38 million Colombians have had their spirit and soul pulverized, like the image of destruction caused by a blast. The only difference is that we are fortunately recomposed immediately and ready to give the final battle that should lead us to peace. We must reject terrorism and all manifestations of violence. We cannot let the disastrous days we had ten years ago come back. (El Tiempo, November 13, 1999) With much appreciation, I would like to share the camaraderie, fraternity, and brotherhood of us, the good Colombians, with all the people who want to live in peace and conviviality. (El Heraldo, February 5, 2007)

This letter, laden with patriotism, was written two days after the explosion of a car bomb in Bogotá. Seven people died, and 30 were wounded. This violent episode occurred after the Supreme Court authorized the extradition to the United States of Orlando Lara, who was accused of drug trafficking. Civil society was frightened because, during the 1980s, bombs exploded repeatedly in the country. The following is also a letter replete with similar sentiments. Again, the writers highlight the condition of their (collective) spirit and soul rejecting violence. Let every woman, child, elderly, peasant, worker, student, displaced person, etc., say how much they want peace. We are tired; we are sore from so much death and suffering of our brothers. Let every corner of the country reflect the desire for a change of each and every Colombian; either with a flower or a paper with the footprint smeared with the soil of a peasant in the land of this country that we love and do not want to see stained with blood. Let all of us use our force to move Colombia to peaceful shores. Let it resonate to the world the plea of the people for guns to be silenced. Let it not be said

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that they have killed our soul and our dreams of seeing Colombia at peace. (El Tiempo, May 15, 1999)

In those days, several newspapers published news of links between the IRA (the Irish Republican Army) and the FARC. Three men were arrested in mid-2001 for providing the guerrilla group with explosive material. The fact that this action occurred during a negotiation process increased, even more, the outrage among Colombians. In letters to the editor, they mentioned the Colombian Soul frequently. Statements by the FARC commander “Mono Jojoy” saying in a radio message intercepted by the media: “we need to shake up the cities. There are many ways to make a lot of noise,” were widely rejected. This letter was an invitation to invoke the soul of Colombians for the purposes of peace. In that year, the country was in the midst of a frustrating negotiation process with the FARC, which took place between 1998 and 2002. In 1999, hope rested on the Caguán, the demilitarized zone and place of negotiation. However, increased subversive activity by the guerrillas as well as failures from government did not allow the process to bear fruit. It has not been enough to raze the field. Now the IRA teaches FARC how to build Napalm bombs. “We need to shake cities,” threatens Jojoy with impunity. Let us all shake off the Jojoys and their partners in crime in the cities. Let solidarity prevail. Leave selfishness and ancestral hatred aside that the Colombian soul can be fed with might and not with destruction. Whoever sees, feels, smells a “move” of the guerrillas, and should contact the authorities without cowardice: call, yell, and signal. If we cover their “moves” with connivance and coward silences, we will be accomplices to crimes and national destruction. (El Tiempo, August 25, 2001)

In that sense, despite being such a deeply negative and traumatic experience, the Colombian political conflict has been a powerful factor of social cohesion within civil society. This horror story, lasting over 50  years, resulted in a wide range of emotions narrated in the letters to the editor. It has also served to deepen the common experience of Colombians, ­providing input for rich collective memory, packed with detail and insight. Other social issues such as institutional corruption, negligence in public office, rampant criminality, and environmental problems have triggered the public’s afflictive and non-afflictive emotions as expressed in letters to the editor.

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Emotional Repertoires: Patriotism in the Midst of Chaos As a universal emotion, love for the nation prevails in the letters to the editor. Patriotism emerged strongly, including those texts where readers referred to the most sorrowful social events. There was a larger presence of non-afflictive compared to afflictive emotions in the letters, despite the harsh reality Colombia faced during the period under study. In 1999, authorities registered 238 cases of enforced disappearance and 664 cases in 2000. In early 2001, 26 massacres occurred in 11 departments, and more than 170 people died (CIDH 2000). Although there were victims of the attacks in every corner of the country, affective words conveying love for the nation predominated in letters to the editor, especially in tough times such as 2005–2006, where combat between the military and the guerrillas and war crimes, escalated to levels of maximum intensity. In the letters, the nation had a particular importance as connected more often with emotions of love. Letters to the editor adhered to collective desire to express the public’s hope for a better future, and the pursuit of happiness despite difficulties. This asserts and upholds the capabilities of Colombians as individuals to find the solution to the political conflict afflicting them, without resorting to violence. This also shows the capacity of civil society to actively participate in the process of building sustainable peace. In this endeavor, the community formed by the readers of the newspapers had a very constructive role. As Nussbaum (2013) holds, love is the main driving force that connects us with others. It is the bond of civic ethics. El Heraldo had the highest frequency of the word ‘love’ during the ten years of the study, followed by non-afflictive emotions such as laugh, laughter, happiness, among others. Below are some excerpts from the texts regarding this. Colombia is standing up! Those who would like to leave the country may leave right away. Colombia should extradite anyone, when necessary. Even if a thousand bombs are planted; even if the guerrilla groups continue to sow death; even if corruption reaches a maximum level; if some of us have to die, we will but, we are not going to surrender. It is necessary to hit rock bottom until those who survive can see this country revive with dignity. Only then will we be able to have a future and peace and love and families and a Country! So, no matter what, from now until the end! With tears and distress, a hug to Colombia. (El Tiempo, November 13, 1999)

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There is no doubt that the situation was very difficult in the country at the beginning of the new century. The excerpt from the letter above shows the author’s courageous response to the crisis. The writer affirms that love for the nation stands as the ultimate solution against violence. But not everything was bad news. On February 23, 2001, Shakira—a renowned singer, songwriter, and performer—became the first Colombian to win a Grammy award. At a time when the country needed heroes, she became an icon of joy for Colombians. Sports and artistic triumphs usually trigger enthusiastic expressions in the country. Similar reactions occur after sporting triumphs, which often produce collective expressions of happiness culminating in mass-marches in the streets. Positive events like these seem to keep the country momentarily away from the harsh reality. Like any good Colombian, I was very happy about Shakira’s most recent success. Not only because it is good for us to receive news like this in the midst of so many misfortunes, but also because thanks to her, the world can see that Colombia is not only about terrorism and drugs. It is a pity that this joyful moment will not last long, because I am afraid that in one or two days, we will be lamenting another massacre, another subversive attack or, in the best-case scenario, another case of public funds looting by white-collar thieves. (El Heraldo, February 24, 2001)

Meanwhile, in La Guajira peninsula, the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), another insurgent group, was dedicated to kidnapping to finance their illegal activities. In this context, religion emerged as a means to restore hope. This feature of including religious beliefs in the letters to the editor was a characteristic of the readers of El Heraldo, the newspaper published in the Colombian Caribbean, of which La Guajira makes up the northeastern-most part. As a community leader in La Guajira, I urge all of them to reflect and be aware of the internal suffering they have been causing fathers and mothers. I invite them to become aware so that they put themselves in the shoes of those parents who have been affected. Then, let’s replace sadness by that well-deserved happiness, and let’s say once and for all, no more kidnapping. (El Heraldo, July 7, 2000)

During 2007, images of the former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, kidnapped in 2002, were published, showing her with long hair and staring blankly at the ground. Pictures of her and other rebel-held hostages chained in the jungle seized by the guerrilla were severely criti-

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cized worldwide. Collective outrage increased as well as the pressure of public opinion for the government to act. Colombia is in mourning because of Ingrid’s pictures and the other abductees, but in spite of that, we have not lost hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Romans 5. (El Heraldo, February 5, 2007)

A year later, the army freed 15 people: Betancourt, three US contractors and members of the army and police. The so-called Operation Jaque was considered one of the most important operations of military intelligence in recent history and the inspiration of many letters full of patriotism.

Emotional Repertoires: Coping with Adversity When the armed conflict was the central theme in the letters, the prevailing emotion was fear. Many events in Colombian society gave rise to fear and worry among those who wrote letters. As Nussbaum (2014) says, this emotion arises when the loved one is under threat. Readers of the press also felt frustration, rage, and anger at those aspects of social reality they had to endure in their daily lives but did not feel they could change. For example, while the FARC attempted to negotiate with the government without reaching a peace agreement, the National Liberation Army (ELN) continued their criminal actions. As stated by Echandía (2013), the largest number of armed actions recorded in the history of the ELN was carried out between 2000 and 2001. At that time, the group pressured the government to have a demilitarized zone, as had been granted to the FARC. However, readers continued expressing their rejection of this plan because the government proposed to give the guerrillas larger parts of the territory. These letters address the aforementioned: We Colombians are afraid, are at war, but even more now, because granting a demilitarized area to ELN is almost a reality. Geographically, even though they are present in several places, we would be between two fires: FARC in the south and ELN in the north of the country. In the middle of two political and military settlement areas of the subversive groups, will that really be the best solution? I am asking the President not to grant that request. The area granted to FARC proves that demilitarization does not work. Someone has to listen to our demands; our lives are at risk here. (El Tiempo, December 20, 2000)

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But paradoxically, on a very rainy night, peace is interrupted in any town or unprotected place by an armed group that forces old people, children, and pregnant women out of their homes; and who are displaced, dominated by fear, and leave all their belongings behind to give way to those who need their land to grow things that generate a lot of money. (El Heraldo, March 2, 2006)

Forced displacement also terrorized Colombians. In rural areas, especially between 1985 and 2008, forced displacement affected 4,629,190 people, or 925,838 families, comprising more than 10% of the country’s population, according to the Information System on Forced Displacement and Human Rights (CODHES 2009). The following letter was a passionate call to action. If we are over thirty million Colombians, why are some people free to do as they wish? The rest of us, for fear and apathy, get accustomed to the headlines but do not do anything to help find a solution to our conflicts. Please, let’s not just show rejection, let’s take action; people in favor of peace in this country outnumber people in favor of war. Let’s start to raise awareness. NO MORE, not just through demonstrations, but also through action. (El Tiempo, March 9, 2009)

During 2008 and 2009, the country raised its voice in a series of protests in response to the effects of war. For example, the protests called “A million voices against FARC” and the “World March for Peace and Nonviolence” in 2008 and 2009 respectively were public demonstrations of courage. Despite the violence and painful events in Colombia, anger and disgust were predominantly absent in letters to the editor. The letters also included rage and frustration. Readers expressed anger related to problems which they felt there was no political will to solve. One of the events that triggered anger was public official’s negligence. The following letter is indicative of this type of emotional response: There cannot be peace as long as people in public office earn “corbata” salaries2 without serving society, which makes the ordinary citizen feel angry before such inertia. (El Heraldo, July 7, 1999)

Likewise, some unresolved environmental problems caused anger among Colombians. For instance, when the guerilla contaminated rivers 2

 Due to corruption, some people in public office earn a salary whether they work or not.

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by bombing oil pipelines, destroyed forests to plant illicit crops such as coca and opium poppy, or when national and international mining companies damaged the environment for purely economic reasons. The following letter addresses the hunting and the destruction of the natural habitat of the spectacled bear, one of the symbolic mammals of the Andes mountain range. It is with great sadness and rage that I read the piece of news about the hunting of spectacled bears still carried out by peasants in Santander. This wonderful animal, an emblem of our native fauna, should be cared for by our environmental authorities, already aware that it is an endangered species, but it appears that very little has been done about it. Let us hope the new Environment Minister takes action on this matter. (El Tiempo, July 16, 2002)

Finally, another cause of collective rejection was the violent death of journalists in the country, as expressed by this reader: It is with rage that we have received the sad news of the murder of another colleague [journalist]. On this occasion, it is Luis Eduardo Alfonso, EL TIEMPO staff member in Arauca. How painful it is to add one more colleague to the list of dead Colombian journalists. It is distressing because of them, because of their families, because of the fact they were young (…). But it also hurts very much because of what is happening to the media outlets. (El Tiempo, March 22, 2003)

Luis Eduardo Alfonso and seven other journalists were murdered in 2003. As can be seen in the previous letter, anger is constantly combined with other emotions like sadness and sorrow. An analysis of such emotions continues in the next section.

Emotional Repertoires: Living in Sadness As mentioned before, for Colombian readers the object of love was mostly the nation. Therefore, sadness was related to the damages they perceived were caused to the nation through expressions such as triste, tristeza, dolido, dolor, llanto, llorar, compasión (sad, sadness, hurt, pain, crying, cry, and compassion). Many letters to the editor reflected dreadful pain, by describing the horrible circumstances that people of this country experienced. One of the

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most terrifying situations was kidnapping. More than 39.058 Colombians were victims of this crime between 1970 and 2010 (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2013). Civilians, soldiers, landlords, and politicians were among the most affected citizens. The case of Gloria Polanco, a member of the Congress taken from her house along with her two young sons by command of 100 guerrilla men, mentioned in the following letter, was one of the most heartbreaking stories. She was treated as a political hostage, and her kidnap was considered a high profile one, subject to a prisoner exchange with the government. Gloria Polanco was kidnapped along with her two young children. Criminals demanded money from her husband, and when he had already finished paying for his children, he was vilely murdered. She, by herself in the middle of the jungle, underwent an indescribable sorrow. (El Tiempo, March 3, 2008)

Another emotional repertoire found in the letters was sorry, ashamed, and shame (‘apenado’, ‘avergonzado’, and ‘vergüenza’ in Spanish). People expressed shame in their letters to the editor with regard to the general condition of the country: rampant institutional corruption and public officials’ negligence. All this resulted in a generalized feeling of hopelessness, as this letter affirms. It is a shame that they have to push and beg senators and representatives to go to work. When and who will be able to reform Congress in order to bring indolence and corruption to an end? All the presidential candidates should make a pact. Meanwhile, they should at least pass the regulatory law for the political reform so that it is in force from the next elections. Make the best of a bad job. (El Tiempo, November 26, 2011)

The following letter to the editor accounts for the widespread feeling of despair, as some Colombians had little hope that the country’s situation would improve or change. It is unbelievable that a government emboldened for some custom-made polls has divided the country between good people and bad people (…) unemployment has reached twenty percent, recession does not give in, opportunities close, companies continue going bankrupt, credit is not being offered, uncertainty increases, hope is lost and the light at the end of the tunnel cannot be seen. (El Tiempo, May 5, 2000)

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In summary, after reviewing the emotional repertoires as a whole, a group of triggers and core values emerged. On the one hand, with regards to the events of Colombian social reality that elicited emotions within the public, we found that the strongest emotional elicitor was the internal armed conflict. Criminal actions due to the political conflict such as internal displacement, car bombings in the cities, terrorist’s attacks targeting police and military personnel and facilities, killing and ambushing of soldiers, civilians and journalists, abduction and other violations of international humanitarian law, brought out quite large repertoires of emotions, as we argued earlier. Other elicitors of emotions among the public were institutional corruption, public officials’ negligence, and environmental issues. On the other hand, how emotions were related to social virtues shared by the individuals writing letters to the editor, the evidence revealed the central values of the community: patriotism, solidarity, bravery, pacifism, resilience, consciousness, faith, hope, honesty, trustworthiness, fairness, loyalty, and leadership. The value of human life, and the need to defend it as universal human right, emerged with great force and energy.

Conclusion This chapter traced the emotional repertoires of the audience of two Colombian newspapers through a selected sampling and analysis of their letters to the editor. Our study shows that these texts were a suitable vehicle to reveal strong emotions about the complex social problems of the country. As Alexander (2006, p. 5) has stated, communication organizations operating within civil society are “in fact ‘feeling thermometers’ to register, in numeric terms, just how strongly are the passions of civil life. It is no wonder that public opinion has a real, if nonbinding, force”. These letters to the editor were a preferred shelter, devoted to protecting people’s most profound emotions toward their nation and their fellow countrymen. As Hofstede et al. (2010) asserted, emotions are expressed widely and openly in this nation. The internal armed conflict and other social concerns such as State corruption, high criminality, and environmental problems were the most frequent triggers of emotions among the public. These social events that stimulated their reflections showed the public’s appreciation for their common history, culture, and traditions. Ekman (2008) affirms that identifying the factors that elicit collective emotions

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may stimulate the emergence of constructive emotions. We hope that this research becomes a contribution in that direction. In this study, love, fear, anger, and sadness repeatedly emerged within the letters, and each one of those universal emotions was accompanied by a wide repertoire of terms used for characterizing and evaluating social events (Potter and Wetherell 1987). These repertoires were more abundant when concerning non-afflictive emotions. Nouns and adjectives such as laugh, laughter, happy, happiness, joy, optimism, elated, bliss, love, devoted, affection, and hope, emerged consistently in the letters. The predominant expression of constructive emotions in the texts was accompanied by a strong collective aspiration to achieve justice and a burning desire to live in peace. The fact that love was the predominant emotion within the letters and that the prevailing object of that love was the nation, inevitably leads us to reflect on patriotism. Nusbaum (2013) affirmed: “patriotism is a strong emotion taking the nation as its object (…) this love involves the feeling that the nation is one’s own and its rituals usually make reference to that idea” (p. 208). The public expression of patriotism included references to the self, duties toward others and “inviting those who consider ‘good’ or ‘true’ to distinguish themselves from outsiders and subversives and then excluding those outsiders” (p. 206). In other words, the letters to the editor made explicit a clear sense of patriotism using expressions such as ‘we the decent Colombians’, ‘we the good people’, ‘we the respectable folks’, ‘our country’, and other similar ones that frequently invited their fellow countrymen to act constructively. These statements were found to be associated with universal emotions in the public discourse, especially love and sadness, as a clear rejection of the dominant violence and corruption. In the martyred society of the time, the letters to the editor seemed to fill the great void of wisdom, decency, and rational deliberation that other institutions in the country lacked. It constituted an example of the strength of democracy and community within Colombia, which has been maintained throughout its history despite both internal and external threats. The richness of the emotional repertoires found herein seems to be in tune with Gabriel García Márquez’s (1996) remarks. He considered that Colombia is a sentimental society, where human warmth prevails over distrust. Hofstede et al. (2010) also found that there is a strong positive and optimistic propensity in Colombian culture. The findings of this study are also consistent with reflections of Palacio and Gosling (1997), who affirmed that joy is a prevailing identity feature among Colombians, which

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is why they have achieved the highest scores of happiness in the world (Global Barometer of Hope and Happiness 2016; Gallup International Survey on Happiness, Hope and Economic Optimism 2017). This is an interesting feature that is worth examining closely. Many of the themes in the letters to the editor reflected very difficult social situations (Barrios 2012). In fact, the decade under study was one of the most violent in the country’s recent history. However, sometimes, readers’ letters had a general constructive tone or called for action, which could be seen as messages of hope for a change. According to philosophers, the social character is defined by social virtues (Ferrater-Mora 1994). Letters to the editor studied here, portrayed a strong community character based on core virtues identified by ancient philosophers as Plato: temperance, strength, and justice. These seem to be the qualities that determine the very essence of the Colombian Soul, the public emotions of a whole country. We suggest that the main contribution of this chapter is to highlight the special role that letters to the editor have played in the context of a society experiencing intractable armed conflict. Letters to the editor, therefore, were not only a preferred medium for people to vent their anxieties; they were also the peaceful path the press and its readers chose to express their desire to finally reaching peace in Colombia, after having experienced violence in its multiple manifestations. In this sense, the letters provided shelter for a wide repertoire of public emotions and helped in defining the character of the society at that time. This research contributed to picture the readers’ emotional profile and explored the connection between emotions and social virtues in Colombia; a matter that future studies could further analyze. In this sense, having a collective consciousness of the ethical foundations of the nation such as what civil society showed through letters to the editor, may have helped prevent Colombia from becoming a failed state. Readers told personal stories and cultivated a sense of community identity through commonly defining values, under the premise that being conscious of what unites them as a community may also inspire them to shape a better future. This bears testimony of the importance of the letters to the editor in the country as a way to promote a well-argued debate on public discussions. What Bar-Tal (2001) calls a “collective orientation of hope and peace” is imperative for a society to achieve a stable and lasting peace. Therefore, journalists should attempt to contribute in “the formation of new goals of living in peaceful coexistence and cooperation with yesterday’s enemy” (p. 620). That task ought to be of paramount importance in Colombia

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since the signing of the final Peace Accord to end more than 50 years of conflict with the leftist FARC rebels in November 2016. By observing the expressions from civil society portrayed in the letters to the editor, news media might continue to help democracy to be strengthened, conveying the message that Colombians ought to resolve their differences in a civilized manner.

References Alexander, J. C. (2006). The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrios, M. M. (2012). Cartas a los Editores de la Prensa en Colombia: indignación, razón y corazón. Memorias del V Congreso Latinoamericano de Opinión Pública WAPOR. Bogotá, 19 de Septiembre de 2012. Barrios, M. M. (2013). ‘Las cartas a los editores de la prensa en Colombia: escenario de solidaridad y acción ciudadana’/‘Letters to the Editors of the Press in Colombia: Scenario for Citizen Action’. Comunicación y Sociedad, 26(3), 130. Barrios, M. M. (2015). Colombian Cries: Internal Armed Conflict and Emotions in Letters to the Editor. Journalism, 18(2), 1559–1575. https://doi. org/10.1177/1464884915605030. Bar-Tal, D. (2001). Why Does Fear Override Hope in Societies Engulfed by Intractable Conflict, as It Does in the Israeli Society? Political Psychology, 22(3), 301–627. https://doi.org/10.1111/0162-895X.00255. Bolívar, I. J. (2006). Discursos emocionales y experiencias de la política: las FARC y las AUC en los procesos de negociación del conflicto (1998–2005). Universidad de Los Andes, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales-CESO, Departamento de Antropología y Ciencia Política. Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. (2013). Una sociedad secuestrada. Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional. Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos. (2000). Informe anual de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos 2000. Capítulo IV. Desarrollo de los Derechos Humanos en la Región, Colombia. Retrieved from https:// www.cidh.oas.org/annualrep/2000sp/cap.4a.htm. Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement CODHES. (2009). Boletín Informativo No. 75, Bogotá. Echandía, C. (2013). Auge y declive del Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN). Análisis de la evolución militar y territorial de cara a la negociación. Bogotá, Fundación Ideas para la Paz. Retrieved from http://cdn.ideaspaz.org/media/ website/document/529debc8a48fa.pdf. Edwards, D. (1999). Emotion Discourse. Culture & Psychology, 5(3), 271–291. Ekman, P. (2008). Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion. New York: Macmillan.

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Ferrater-Mora, J. (1994). Diccionario de Filosofía. Buenos Aires: Sud Americana. Gallup International. (2017). Happiness, Hope, Economic Optimism (41). Retrieved from http://www.gallup-international.com/surveys/happinesshope-economic-optimism/. Global Barometer of Hope and Happiness. (2016). Barómetro Global de Felicidad y Esperanza en la Economía. Centro Nacional de Consultoría. Retrieved from http://www.centronacionaldeconsultoria.com/attachments/article/348/ CNC_Barometro_2016.pdf. Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J., & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (Revised and Expanded, 3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. Krippendorff, K. (2013). Commentary: A Dissenting View on So-Called Paradoxes of Reliability Coefficients. Annals of the International Communication Association, 36(1), 481–499. Márquez, G. G. (1996). Por un país al alcance de los niños. Villegas Editores. Nussbaum, M. (2013). Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2014). Emociones politicas. ¿Por qué el amor es importante para la justicia? Equipo Editorial, p. 147. Oatley, K., & Jenkins, J. (1996). Understanding Emotions. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Oatley, K., Keltner, D., & Jenkins, J. M. (2006). Understanding Emotions. Malden: Blackwell publishing. Palacio, J., & Gosling, P. (1997). La imagen de Colombia y su influencia en la identidad social de los inmigrantes colombianos. Investigación & desarrollo, 6, 77–96. Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage Publications. Sampson, C., & Atkinson, P. (2013). The Golden Star: An Emotional Repertoire of Scientific Discovery and Legacy. The Sociological Review, 61(3), 573–590. Wetherell, M., & Potter, J. (1992). Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation. New York: Columbia University Press. Zubieta, E., Fernández, I., Vergara, A. I., Martínez, M. D., & Candia, L. (1998). Cultura y emoción en América. Boletín de Psicología, 61, 65–89.

CHAPTER 6

Letters to the Editor as a Tool of Citizenship Allison Cavanagh

Introduction This chapter looks at how an examination of nineteenth-century letters to the editor in Britain allows us to reinterpret ideas of civic engagement. Such letters are most often approached through the lens of a Habermassian (Habermas 1989) formation of the ‘public sphere’ (Hampton 2004: Dahlgren 2013; Garnham 1986; Curran 1991). In such a perspective, ‘civic engagement’ is understood as an appraisal of issues which are pre-­ selected as of ‘public’ significance, sharp divisions are maintained between information (and information providers) and ‘opinion’, and an ideal of objectivity is used as a reference point (if often honoured only in its breach). This kind of approach has dominated historical approaches to reader correspondence. When Jones (1996), for example, sought to rescue nineteenth-­ century reader letters from the condescension of historical accounts—which treated them as merely ‘an inexpensive space-filler conveniently provided by the passionate or the vain’—he described them instead as ‘the very health element in the English newspaper’, an essential means of ‘feeling the national pulse’, and ‘a form of political representation which, if not so decisive as the casting of a vote, was more sensitive and complex’ (1996, pp. 187–188). Such an intervention was, of course, A. Cavanagh (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Cavanagh, J. Steel (eds.), Letters to the Editor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2_6

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timely, but it still positioned reader commentary as a manifestation of ­pre-­existing conversations already occurring elsewhere, a view shared by mid-­Victorian editors. As Hampton has argued, there is a neat fit between this Habermassian ‘depiction of a rational space between individuals and the state … (and) … an ideal that permeated mid-Victorian elite society … an ideal of politics by public discussion … on the “questions of the day”’ (2004, pp. 8–9). The model of the rationally debating citizen was central in the creation of discourses of journalism (Chalaby 1998; Wahl-Jorgensen 2007) in the early nineteenth century, giving way to the ‘journalism of representation’ towards the end of the century (Hampton 2004). There are, then, good reasons to begin with this version of the public sphere when looking at nineteenth-century letters to the editor. Scholars examining our own era, however, question the ease of this fit, and find instead a need to reimagine the concept of civic engagement. Quite apart from wider critiques of Habermas’ public sphere more generally (cf. Fraser 1990; Curran 1991; Örnebring 2007), there has been a growing concern with how Habermassian ideas trade on common sense identifications of ‘public issues’. Papacharissi, for example, argues that the era of social media is characterised by an emergent tension between the public and the private, where the private threatens to overtake the public in social and political significance. ‘The citizen in a representative democracy, previously enabled within the public sphere and through civic deliberation, is now enabled via a private sphere and through the use of private media environments’ (Papacharissi 2009, p.  39). Accounts such as this tend to see the transition from public issues to private ones as an artefact of technological change, sometimes imagined positively as a form of empowerment. This runs counter to Habermas’ argument that the increasing emphasis on the personal represents the retreat of the political from the public mind through the commercialisation of media. However, as Papacharissi also points out, ‘(a)rguments that connect civic engagement, the public sphere, and the commercialization of mass media frequently rest on a premise that overestimates and romanticizes political activity in previous eras’ (2009, p. 32). They also underestimate the historical ‘political-ness’ of the ‘mundane’. As Dumitrica and Bakardjieva have argued, ‘(m)undane communication and action are the “pre-political” domain where citizens work out their positions by means of interaction with others’ (2018, p.  819). Defining engagement, they argue, is intimately tied up with evaluating the legitimacy and ‘worth’ of its different forms (ibid., p. 819). Nineteenth-century newspapers played

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a pivotal role in this evaluative process, in a manner that was both classed (Hampton 2004) and gendered (Chapman 2013; Lonsdale 2015; Bingham 2009). In this chapter, I examine three issues that are central to applying contemporary construals of citizen participation to nineteenth-century media. Firstly, I will describe the ways in which readers’ letters constituted public issues, and how the platform of letters to the editor provided a space for both the expression of private concerns and their crystallisation into matters of wider significance. Letters to the editor are often dismissed as expressions of private grievance, but here I argue that the nineteenth-­ century press provided a space in which the personal could become political. I will discuss this with reference to a case study of letters concerning the Victorian Post Office. Although it is important to see reader letters as ‘pre-political’, rendering issues of communal concern visible, visibility is not in itself influence, as we can see in our own era. The space of ‘appearances’ is distinct from the space of influence. In his analysis of the mechanisms of deliberative democracy, Dryzek explores this tension, arguing that political systems are democratic only to the degree that they build deliberative capacity, that is ‘the extent to which a political system possesses structures to host deliberation that is authentic, inclusive and consequential’ (Dryzek 2009, p. 1382). An ideal-typical deliberative system requires five elements: (1) an operative public space, that is an arena in which opinion is unrestricted; (2) an empowered space, ‘a deliberative space for actors, recognizably part of institutions producing collective decisions’ (Dryzek 2009, p. 1385); (3) transmission, the means by which public space can influence empowered space, formally or informally, critically or supportively; (4) accountability, including mechanisms of justification; and finally, (5) decisiveness, ‘some means whereby these first four elements are consequential in influencing the content of collective decisions’ (Dryzek 2009, p. 1386). This emphasises the idea that a public sphere must be a forum for opinion that is consequential as well as open, safeguarding it from a decline into mere spectacle. Only where debate is seen as consequential can a public sphere be invested with meaning for those who participate in it, preventing it from degenerating into an imagined anomic space of political apathy and disengagement. For this to hold, then, the public sphere has to face onto formal institutions of power. Secondly, then, I will show that Victorian letter-writers understood the papers as just such an empowered sphere.

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Finally, I will explore how letters pages show how readers learned to perform citizenship as writers. I will argue, in line with recent approaches to mediated citizenship that Victorian writers learned to ‘perform’ citizenship through engagement with the press. As Edwards (2018) has argued in the context of modern public relations systems, people learn to be citizens not abstractly and theoretically but concretely through encountering themselves and others in contexts which emphasise public relevance. Edwards argues that ‘individuals learn to distinguish different relations between themselves and others, and recognise their own responsibilities as members of society’ (Edwards 2018, p. 321) through being part of, and by being recognised as a member of, the public. In media-centric societies such as our own validation and recognition are achieved through engagement with and participation in mediated spaces, and part of becoming a ‘full’ citizen is learning to present effective mediated personae. In the nineteenth century, however, such processes of cultural mediatisation were in their infancy. By looking at letters to the editor, however, we can discern early manifestations of how citizens learned to interact with the press in the performance of cultural citizenship. This work is based on analyses of a set of archival data of nineteenth-­ century newspapers made available through Gale/Cengage, including The Times digital archive, The Daily Telegraph historical archive (1855 onwards), The Daily Mail historical archive (1896 onwards), and selected newspapers accessed through the database Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals. The archives are searchable using filters for document types within publications and categories. The method may be imprecise, and variations in useful results are an artefact of different forms of data classification, but an overall trend is clear: that the space for letters increased over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The archives were sampled at intervals covering the period from 1845 through to the end of the century. There are wide variations in the numbers of letters published annually. The weekly John Bull, for example, published between 230 and 463 letters annually in the period between 1845 and 1875, while The Daily Telegraph returns results of between 221 and 891 over the period 1867 to 1890. The Times remained the most consistent publisher, offering between 2380 and 3213 letters a year between 1867 and 1890. The Daily Mail published 576 letters in 1896, a figure that had risen to 1710 a decade later in 1906. The papers were chosen to reflect a spectrum of national audiences and to provide for continuity over the period, with The Times representing the voice of a largely metropolitan

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elite, as against the broader audience for the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.

Newspapers as Empowered Spaces The first issues to be addressed are the extent to which we can see newspapers, and the public sphere created by correspondence within them, as ‘empowered spaces’ and what the nature of this empowerment might be. Nineteenth-century letters to newspapers potentially play two roles within the formal classification proposed by Dryzek (see above). First, unproblematically enough, they are clearly a space of transmission, porting ideas between the public and formally empowered spaces. However, insofar as they form an element within an arena which is empowered in its own right, they are also part of the formal sphere. This can be seen in two key respects. Firstly, and most obviously, reader letters themselves instantiate the category of the empowered sphere in their own right insofar as they form a publicly legible part of an ongoing empowered process occurring elsewhere. Letter ‘pages’ give ample testament of the extent to which politicians and officials spoke through the letters pages to each other, carrying on deliberations that were already occurring behind closed doors or in more formal settings of decision making. The Times especially is a rich source for correspondence of this nature. See, for example, a letter from A. G. Jeans which opens, Sir- Mr Arnold Morley’s answer to Mr Jackson in the House of Commons last night on the subject of my recent letter in the Times begs the question. (The Times, 9 April 1895)

Such letters are clearly in a category that amplifies the voices of the elite, something which is troubling for accounts of the public sphere in which access is seen as the key factor in its operation. It is for this reason that readers’ letters are often disregarded as being a mere elaboration or confirmation of more definitive evidence available elsewhere. We can see some degree of diversification, however, even within this category. Public conversations, as carried out through the letters sections, often took on a technical as well as a specifically political character, as matters of expertise were deliberated through multiple successive letters on a range of issues. Here the nature of ‘empowerment’ of the citizen writer is through their

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expertise rather than their status, mirroring wider shifts in nineteenth-­ century society (Perkin 1989; Hampton 2004). Of broader significance is the orientation by readers who had more restricted access to formal channels of power, whether through direct representation or what we might now call ‘cultural capital’, towards the newspapers. They clearly understood the letters pages as spaces which opened out onto formal power. It is true, of course, that the conventions of letter writing for publication imposed the persona of the supplicant upon the letter writer. Thus, letters commonly open with deferential salutations: ‘Dear Sir, kindly allow me space in your valuable paper for the insertion of the following’, for example. ‘Sir,—most humbly and gratefully I beg to thank you for your kindness in laying my case before the public’ opens one letter from William Brightwell (The Times, 8 January 1886). ‘I am sure if I can once more enlist your most valuable assistance … we shall again succeed’ begins another (The Times, 14 January 1890). Nevertheless, it is also clear that this went beyond mere polite forms of address. Readers perceived the publications with whom they corresponded as possessing a power of recognition and validation (see below), and corresponding with the editor was understood as accessing a gateway to power. Two examples here serve to illustrate this point. Firstly, the case of ‘An Honest Cabman’ wherein a correspondent, J.P., relates the experience of losing a purse in a cab and having the money returned to him: I gave him 5l, and much commendation for his honesty, and before he went away he said that he had a little favour to ask, and that was to have it put in The Times that “there really was such a thing as an honest cabman.”

The editor responded to this with a note to the effect that he had confidence in the honesty of the London cabmen as a body (The Times, 6 April 1867). Here The Times is construed as a formal space of adjudication of reputation, here of the class of cabmen as a whole both by J.P. but also, and significantly (if we can take this at face value) by the cabman himself. Similar to the case of William Brightwell, who I have discussed elsewhere (Cavanagh 2013), the cabman is a media literate metropolitan who, though not of the ‘imagined’ audience of The Times, is nevertheless a sophisticated interpreter of newspaper power. By contrast, in a second example, from The Telegraph (3 September 1867), the author, R Parrot, Vicar of Amwell, protests at the enclosure of common land by ‘avaricious landlords’.

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No meeting of the parishioners was called to ask their sanction to the enclosure; and, as vicar of the parish and guardian of the poor, I protest against it and want to ascertain where redress can be obtained, and whether such wanton robbery—for robbery it is—can be allowed.

Here, likewise, there is a call to the newspaper as a court of appeal. The vicar, though himself a man of status in his role as ‘guardian of the poor’, finds himself excluded from a sphere of local power (Dryzek 2009, see above) but identifies The Telegraph as a likely conduit to, if not representative of, a wider empowered sphere. For ‘ordinary’ readers, then, the space provided by newspapers allowed them to access what they saw as a broader and more legitimate sphere of power than those encountered in daily life. Moreover, whilst nineteenth-century writers clearly saw newspapers as possessing power, they also tended to see the editor as one who was empowered against vested interest, potentially one of ‘us’ rather than one of ‘them’. Consider, for example, this letter from E. J. Kibblewhite, editor of English Mechanic, who wrote to The Times to protest at the ‘high-­ handed and unwarrantable interference on the part of the Post-Office authorities’ in judging whether a publication was ‘news’. If ‘discretion is left to the Postmaster-General to interpret the will of parliament, it is only fair and reasonable that that discretion should be exercised with consideration. Surely, even if the Postmaster-General is to refuse at his sole pleasure to admit newly-started journals to the benefits of registration, it was never intended that he should be enabled autocratically to withdraw them from papers like ours’. This he sees as leading to underhanded censorship of the press and as ‘another instance of the vexatious persistence with which St-Martin’s-le-Grand has always harassed newspaper publishers’ (The Times, 14 January 1890). Kibblewhite was not alone in his concerns. The publisher of the weekly magazine John Bull also took to The Times to protest the vagaries of the postal service in delaying delivery of newspapers such that their currency was undermined (The Times 19 November 1873 and 2 October 1873). In both of these cases, The Times letters are seen as space for reining in the power of that most visible sign and concrete embodiment of state power: the Post Office (Joyce 2013). The Times, as a newspaper of record, was regarded as an empowered space, possessing powers greater than a mere ability to publicise and amplify the views of representatives of nineteenth-­ century elite and literary culture.

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In part, this identification derived from a sense of familiarity which letter writing for publication engendered. As Brant (2006) pointed out, one formal feature of letters is an intimate mode of address. ‘Familiarity was the price paid for that singleness of epistolary voice … which dissociated the genre from dangerous mass politics’ (Brant 2006, p. 176). Newspapers cultivated exactly this sense of personal involvement and identification with their readership (Warren 2000; Conboy 2010; Chapman 2013). As Warren points out, with regard to women’s magazines in the nineteenth century, a publication’s success ‘was in large part due to its formulation of a textual or “corporate” identity—inextricably linked to its successful appeal to its targeted audience’ which ‘the appearance of the reader … serves … to specify and consolidate’ (Warren 2000, p. 123). The adoption of a mode of discourse which promoted this identification (Conboy 2010), and a sense of membership of a newspaper community—the ‘we’—was key to market success. However, this identification underpinned the sense of the paper being separate from more abstract institutions of authority.

Writers as Empowered Citizens There is a sense in which letters provided, for some writers, an education and training in citizenship centred on recognition. Recent analyses of letter writing as a textual practice emphasise its transformative nature. Chartier (1997) and Vincent (1993, cited in Joyce 2013: 80–81), for example, link the rise of the letter writer and that of the citizen, seeing in epistolary practice a technology of individuality, bringing into being the notion of an ‘interior self’. Letter writing for publication complicates this ‘self’. Brant, in her work on eighteenth-century epistolary culture, argues that letter writing for publication was key to the development of the political citizen. Letters, she argues, mirrored the format of political debate, insofar as the ‘dialogical nature of correspondence matched the interrogatory nature of political exchange’ (Brant 2006, p.  171). Letters encoded participation insofar as they presupposed and demanded a response. There is abundant evidence of this kind of responsive two-way communication between the letter writers and newspaper editors, in addition to that between one letter writer and another. Thus, for example, Daily Mail correspondents like ‘Liberty Hall’ wrote to ‘express my hearty concurrence with the letter in yesterday’s issue, signed “Common Sense”’ (Daily Mail, 5 August 1896), whilst ‘A Widow’ responded to a letter

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published previously from ‘A Woman’ criticising the Daily Mail’s position on women as wives and mothers I do not quite agree with “A Woman” who writes that “women do not need to trouble to be useful to a country that denies them a voice in its government, but robs them to pay its debts.” (Daily Mail, 12 August 1902)

There are ample examples of conversations between correspondents and editors over extended periods as issues evolved in character. Thus, ‘Justice’ wrote to John Bull in 1875: Some little time back you kindly inserted in your valuable newspaper a letter from me on Vivisection. Since then I have been gratified by finding that this practice is more extensively known and condemned than I imagined. (John Bull, 9 October 1875)

Likewise, former MP Edward Norris continued his correspondence with the Times: I should hardly have ventured to address you again on the impropriation of tithes, respecting which you have done me the favour to insert two letters, but for a very significant and important announcement. (9 December 1905)

More significantly though, such letters demand a specific type of response, which foregrounds civility and the generation of agreement, or at least polite disagreement. As Brant argues about the eighteenth century, the ‘fantasy of irrational citizens becoming rational readers was less wild in the context of letters where persuasion was often fictionalised as polite … Civility and citizen shared a common etymology in civis, hence epistolary civility helped define civil society’ (2006, p. 175). Nineteenth-century letters often blurred this ‘civility’ into theatricality, as an elaborate performance of deference and courteousness. As Ackroyd has noted, in a different context, historians ‘have often been amazed by the prolixity and ardour of the members of the nineteenth-century parliament … Never has a period been so concerned to give the right impression’ (2018, p.  11). Letter writers were no more immune. Brant also observed this of eighteenth-century writers who drew on satirical and theatrical conventions in the creation of anonymised epistolary personae. Such writers, she argues, used a ‘cultural shorthand’, blending high and

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low culture, and using iconic national and historical figures as resources. In so doing, they simultaneously ‘resemble masquerades’ in which wider social tensions of class are enacted and ‘project an identity in possession of something authentic’ (2006, p. 181). Such personae, she argues, encoded distance, allowing writers to take ‘a middle ground between organised interests and populist disorder’ (2006, p. 174), in speaking ‘for the people’, and by assuming a ‘universal identity’ (Brant, ibid.). In these letters, similar adoptions and borrowings are evidenced by the uses of universalised and dramaturgical noms de plume. References to virtues or abstract qualities—‘Justice’, ‘A Sympathiser with the Oppressed’, ‘Veritas’, ‘Citizen’, ‘A Lover of Liberty’, ‘A Friend of Liberty’, ‘Temperance’—are often used as pen-names, in addition to the more prosaic use of expertise as a source of identity, for example, ‘A Physician of Forty Years Standing’, ‘An M.P.’, ‘A Life Governor’, ‘An Old Whip’. It is also noteworthy that ‘Tax Payer’, ‘Rate Payer’, ‘One Who Pays Income Tax’, and ‘One who already pays a house tax’ are also used as key identifiers. The ready adoption of ‘John Bull’ or ‘An Admirer of John Bull’ as pseudonyms is also relevant in this context. Letter writers were often at pains to assume a distanced, depersonalised tone in letters. Mateus (2018), drawing on Chalaby (1998), points to the significance of the performative in creating the ‘truthiness’ of journalism and, in particular, the central role played by the eclipse of the self from the journalistic voice. ‘Outside the editorial we rarely see the journalist pronouncing himself as a subject or an individual subjectivity in order to ensure there is a mimetic effect between what he (re) presents and what is actually happening’ (Mateus 2018, p.  70). The depersonalised tone of many letters is an affectation of this mimesis. In these senses, letters provided a way for citizens to demonstrate knowledge of the conventions of the use of public reason. Rationality was enacted as civility, and citizenship as impartiality and universality.

The Constitution of ‘Public Issues’ Securing recognition was about more than modes of address. It was tied to speech on issues which provoked a public response. One characteristic of correspondence was the appearance of multiple time delimited ‘rallies’ of letters and overlapping replies which flared briefly but passionately (cf. Cohen 1972). One particularly dramatic example of this is recorded in the work of Robson (1995) on The Telegraph and the question of marriage

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versus celibacy. Whilst sometimes such outbursts of concern are of great consequence, feeding into wider social and political agenda, in the majority of cases such rallies spark and die quickly leaving little but the record of their own occurrence behind. Nevertheless, the passions mobilised by these rallies showed a degree of public investment. A key index used to examine such letters is the extent to which they were initially reactive or proactive (see Nord 1995): whether writers advocated for their own agendas as opposed to responding to editorials and news items within the publication. Such considerations allow us to gain a sense of direction of leadership and reaction. There is another sense in which letters brought to the fore the idea of public issues, which is how people mobilised their own concerns into claims to be speaking on behalf of a broader group. This is foregrounded in letters which deal with those most commonplace of subjects of grievance, encounters between everyday citizens and the mechanisms of an abstract state. Unsurprisingly, considered as a body, letters show a consistent concern with the everyday ‘grudge’. In the nineteenth-century press, from magazines to newspapers, regional to national, populist, or elite, letters give testament to a deeply held wrath against ‘the insolence of office’ and a desire to use the platform of the press to call it to account. Letters on the iniquities of train services, the inefficiency of government offices, and the abject state of transport are common themes. Nowhere, it seems, did passions flare so brightly as in the case of complaints about the Post Office. Over the period after the introduction of the Penny Post (1840), we see an array of public concerns expressed over a large range of issues, from the variability of postal deliveries, Post Office mismanagement, the trustworthiness of postal employees, inconvenient hours of operation, the nature of Post Office employment and personnel, and the incomprehensibility of postage rates. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise. As De Quincey noted the postal system and exaltation of privilege had long been connected in the public mind. He writes, No dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the mysterious. The connexion of the mail with the state and the executive government—a connexion obvious, but yet not strictly defined—gave to the whole mail establishment an official grandeur which did us service on the roads, and invested us with seasonable terrors. … We, on our parts (we, the collective mail, I mean), did our utmost to exalt the idea of our privileges by the insolence with which we wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon

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law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious power that haughtily dispensed with that sanction, equally it spoke from a potential station; and the agent, in each particular insolence of the moment, was viewed reverentially, as one having authority. (De Quincey 1912, pp. 8–9)

As Joyce (2013) argues, the Post Office became, over the course of the nineteenth century, the central institution of the state, gradually extending its reach later by taking key roles in the emergent technologies of broadcasting, tucking telegraphy and telephony into its remit, as well as providing financial services and insurance. In the UK, lacking a large army, it was the ‘face’ of the state, collecting revenues from animal, gun and later car licences and having (after 1868) its own volunteer army division (The Post Office Rifles). After 1908, the Post Office also paid out state benefits and pensions. Its visibility (Joyce 2013, p. 131) served to warrant its power, with its recognisable insignia of office. In key respects, the Post Offices were ‘a good part of the social and economic management of everyday life in fact, were the state, the state performed’ (2013, p. 85). This performance was not limited to the office itself. The arrival of the Penny Post revolutionised the relationship between citizen and state. It initially universalised postal provision—which had otherwise been patchy and inconsistent—but by so doing, displaced more traditional modes of connection and communication, interpolating the individual into an impersonal social-technical system (Joyce 2013, p. 70). The individual was collapsed into their address, becoming a fixed geographical point in a network which, as a by-product, collapsed citizenship rights into the address; being of no fixed address came to mean being ‘outside the realm of civil rights and civil identity’ (Joyce 2013, p. 90). At the same time, this new hybrid of person and place extended the experience of integration within a broader national entity by inducing a sense of permanent connectedness, the Post Office network was always available, thus the citizen was also likewise accessible, even when not being directly addressed (Joyce 2013, p. 121). All ‘addressed’ citizens may not have been on a level of equality, but the fact of being equally an addressee at least introduced a level of parity. The Post Office, then, reconfigured the citizen into a fixed point in a system and ‘(l)earning to live in a system involved … blurring of boundaries between inner and outer selves’ (Joyce 2013, p. 41). ‘(J)ust as the electricity system of modern France took on the aura of French national identity, so too did the British Post Office take on that of Britain as a

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nation, an empire, and later on a state that belonged to the “people”, as in the ideas of the “People’s Post”’ (Joyce, ibid.). This sense of ownership and identification is made clear in many letters. As one correspondent to The Times wrote, ‘pray what other government office is of one-tenth the importance to the public that the Post-office is? Post-office clerks are, therefore, more immediately the servants of the public’ (31 October 1845). Walter Coote, speaking for those who have not ‘fallen down and worshipped the golden image’ of the Post Office, nevertheless acknowledged the central place the institution occupied in the public imaginary; ‘the public I know regard this institution as something almost sacred in its efficiency and virtue’ (The Times, 14 January 1890). With ownership came an equal sense of injustice, often coming to a head around lack of equality in coverage. A letter on ‘The Post Office in the Provinces’ concerning the poor quality of service in North Wales was signed ‘An Inhabitant of the Aggrieved District’ (The Times, 1 May 1860). The lack of a nationally effective service was also a grievance for the ‘29,000 Victims of the Post Office’ for whom the writer of a letter on ‘Post to the Hebrides’ claimed to speak. ‘We hear of hundreds of thousands contributed by the Post Office to the national funds. Can it not do its duty at home first, and supply the wants of a number of Her Majesty’s Income tax paying subjects?’ (The Times, 18 November 1873). Concerns with the over-layering of the personal by the abstract, the local by the systemic, were made legible in, and animated the writers of, these letters. One correspondent questioned whether the Post Office was ‘not playing à l’empereur?’ ‘What law’, he queried, ‘is there obliging the public to submit notens volens to orders from the Post Office on pain of summary punishment?’ (The Daily Telegraph, 19 September 1859). For others, the blurring of boundaries of bureaucratic and private selves was experienced more sharply. W.F. Mack and co. expressed bafflement at the overlaying of geography by bureaucracy, bemoaning the need to pay a guinea registration fee to have post redirected, when ‘the postman is at no trouble in sorting and delivering’ to the two registered business premises since they were on the same postal round (Daily Mail, 23 March 1898). Likewise, ‘H.G.B.’ wrote: Sir-does the Post Office exist for the benefit of those who write and receive letters, or to draw out of our pockets the maximum of revenue for the minimum of service? I have just changed my residence. On giving the usual notice at the Post Office here, I was informed that it could not be received

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because my previous address was the College of which I am a Fellow. Inquiry at the G.P.O elicited the reply that ‘it is contrary to the practice of the department to redirect letters officially when they can be redirected at the place of address’ … I would ask (1) what right the department has to impose on a reasonable convenience to the public an arbitrary distinction which destroys most part of its value … Meanwhile I am to be punished for having once lived within the walls of a college by having my correspondence delayed until every one who has occasion to write to me has learned my new address. (The Times, 17 September 1895)

More poignantly, from ‘A.W.’: I removed two years ago, leaving my new address at the Post Office, expecting that some day my dear boy, if he is living, would write to me. A few weeks ago a Post-Office official called upon me, asking for a guinea for the address to be renewed. A guinea! I work a fortnight for that amount, and have three children to keep. I now learn that a letter was received at my old address from America. It would be from my own dear, dear boy. He left his home four years ago, and I shall never, never hear from him again. I understand the letter was sent to the dead-letter office, opened there and sent back to America. What will the poor boy think and suffer? (Daily Mail, 10 May 1898)

These letters express concerns that what is seen as a service is actually an abstract set of rules and practices which constrain the individual. The concerns are expressed in highly emotive terms: rage in the case of H.B.G. and grief in that of A.W. In an era dominated, as Joyce further notes, by the fantasy of a state abstracted from emotion ‘rooted in the belief that calculation, standardisation and abstraction provide rational answers to rationally conceived “problems”’ (Joyce 2013, p.  12), the language of emotion, sometimes theatrically enacted (see above) is rhetorically effective in ‘speaking back to power’, contrasting with the depiction of the post office as a machinery of bureaucracy. Correspondents struggled with the impersonal in a further sense: the requirement to place their trust in an abstract institution. Writers frequently expressed fears that the contents of letters were read or purloined by workers at the Post Office: that letters might be ‘Grahamed’, a term coined after the Mazzini affair to refer to the activities of Sir James Graham in opening letters—which itself became a byword for ‘Post Office tyranny and mismanagement’ (New York Herald, 5 August 1844). One editor

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replied to a correspondent protesting at the non-delivery of copies of the newspaper in particularly fervid terms, showing a certain degree of common cause with his readers: We have to inform our Correspondent that the English Post-office at St. Martin’s-le-Grand has, we fear, recommenced Grahaming letters and newspapers … we will raise a hornet’s nest about Mr Rowland Hill’s head, the Postmaster-General’s and the Government, which they little contemplate­Ed. (The Daily Telegraph, 2 August 1855)

Other readers protested against the danger, whether experienced or merely feared, of goods going missing in transit. ‘Saint Mungo’, writing to The Daily Telegraph, applauded the paper’s editorial line on increasing the pay of Post Office clerks: If another argument was needed it is supplied in the frequent convictions for theft of letters containing coin, &c—a manifest proof that the “pay” does not place the men above temptation—and which ought to convince the government of the impolicy of underpaying (them). (9 August 1861)

An ‘Ex-auxiliary sorter’, meanwhile, added fuel to the fire by explaining the Post Office ‘joke’ of damaging packages containing wedding cake slices, commonly sent to extended kin and friends after weddings, in order to surreptitiously consume the contents, with: two or three sorters each doing a little damage in turn to a box, until … a hole is made in the box sufficient for the extraction of the greater part of the cake, which is passed along the line of sorters and eaten with great relish … My object in writing is to show that there are many officials at the G.P.O. who cannot possibly be ignorant of this state of things, which has been going on for years. (Daily Mail, 10 December 1896)

Pity for the recipient of such an abused cake, passed through numerous unsanitary hands, was mixed with anger at the official dereliction which made it possible. Such concerns rendered visible the affront to dignity in being obliged to invest trust in the unknown and unseen. The Post Office as an institution for the distribution of newspapers was also under fire. E. J. Kibblewhite’s broadside against Post Office censorship (see above) was by no means a unique concern. The power of the Post Office to mediate on the question of what publications qualified as

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newspapers was a key element in its dominance of the information spheres of nineteenth-century Britain, a dominance further secured by its control of telegraphy later in the century. A. G. Jeans, for example, disputed statements from the Postmaster-General (The Times 19 March, 1895; 9 April, 1895) to the effect that cheaper rates for press telegrams were a burden on the Post Office, pointing to the likelihood that such telegrams were taking up telegraphy ‘space’ at times when the service was least in use (overnight) and costs were additionally offset by revenues to the Post Office from letters responding to newspaper advertisements. In so doing Jeans acknowledged the extent to which the expanding press and the Post Office were entwined as public institutions in ways increasingly uncomfortable to both parties. Other letter writers equally expressed concern at the personal and business implications of the Post Office being late with the delivery of newspapers. For many these anxieties were prompted by the increasing centrality of timely ‘news’ to trade. For others the offence was more in the seeming partisanship of the Post Office. Thus, ‘A country parson’ requires to know why the Post Office should delay the transmission of newspapers while it is so wonderfully punctual in the delivery of the daily plague of prospectuses, stockbrokers’ circulars, pamphlets, and all kinds of advertisements? (The Times, 15 January 1873)

Here the postal service is an intrusion into the domestic sphere, obliging the Victorian householder to accept an uncomfortable intimacy with ‘trade’. Others saw in the Post Office the possibility of moralising the populace. Walter James for example, writes of Post Office Savings Banks in 1878: It is a great pity that these useful institutions should not be open at all hours, and particularly on Friday nights, when they might intercept the working man on his way to the publichouse (sic.) They should be marked by some conspicuous sign so as to speak eloquently to his conscience—Here is the path, the narrow path of thrift and safety. (The Times, 16 November 1878)

The transformation of the Post Office thus presented a set of challenges to citizens and their self-conceptions. These raised questions around the directedness of accountability between the new ‘always on’ citizen and an increasingly involved, if also increasingly removed, ‘central’ state;

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t­ raditional statuses and their role in a new socio-technical system; the basis on which rights to privacy were founded; the nature and extent of ‘abstract’ trust; and the role of the Post Office in the dissemination of news and political opinion. All these issues were foregrounded by the reform and expansion of Post Office services. It is clear that just as it is reasonable to argue that ‘the state actively helps make the spheres of the public and the private in the first place’ (Joyce 2013, p. 5), so too did the press and its correspondents. Citizens wrote to the newspapers here on issues of ‘merely’ personal concern, but they were ones directly connected to a wider sense of ‘public engagement’ through their critique of such a visible public institution. Of course, such a shaping of the public/private spheres is a profoundly political act. As Verstraeten points out Defining the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres has always been one of the most efficient political-ideological classifications to legitimize or delegitimize certain problematic issues. The old women’s liberation slogan ‘personal affairs are also political’ pithily illustrates this constantly shifting field of tension of inclusion and exclusion. (Verstraeten 1996, p. 351)

In universalising from their own experience, and using their private lives as a basis for a critique of public institutions, the correspondents were drawing on a different sense of publicness and public issues, one in which the personal is already political. Publicness can then be read not only as legibility (presence of an issue), but also as the ways in which the personal is made political. It is not the case that the mundane and everyday pollute the public sphere as strictly Habermassian accounts might suggest, but rather that these activities create the ‘common ground’ of ‘common interest’ to begin with. In this process, as the above discussion has demonstrated, the validation that readers receive through having their letters published—and interactions subsequent on these—plays a key role in the creation of empowered citizens.

Conclusion This chapter has examined the ways in which formal features of letters to the editor in nineteenth-century society opened up specific modes of public engagement, allowing people to understand themselves as citizens, and positioning the press as an alternate sphere of power. I have attempted to

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look at the case of nineteenth-century media through the lens of accounts of citizen engagement, which are more open to the broader contexts in which people exercise ‘voice’ in mediated societies. As Edwards argues, ‘(v)oice emerges in the mediapolis as simultaneous possibilities of connection and separation between people and organisations who wish to act politically by engaging as citizens in mediated spaces of appearance’ (2018, p. 320). Voice presumes a relation between the speaker and their audience which is reciprocal and collective in nature. I have here argued that to a degree, constrained and limited as it may be, the nineteenth-century press enabled this sense of collectivity. By taking a place on a national media stage, Victorian letter-writers saw themselves reflected as citizens, and saw their own lives and life experiences as political and national questions.

References Ackroyd, P. (2018). Dominion: The History of England from the Battle of Waterloo to Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. New York: Thomas Dunne/St Martin’s Press. Bingham, A. (2009). Family Newspapers: Sex, Private Lives and the British Popular Press 1918–1978. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brant, C. (2006). Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cavanagh, A. (2013). Barbarous Cruelty at the British Museum: Mediatization, Authority, and Reputation in Nineteenth-Century England. MedieKultur, 29(54), 87–103. Chalaby, J. (1998). The Invention of Journalism. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Chapman, J. (2013). Gender, Citizenship and Newspapers: Historical and Transatlantic Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chartier, R. (1997). Introduction: An Ordinary Kind of Writing: Model Letters and Letter-Writing in Ancient Regime France. In R.  Chartier, A.  Boreau, & C. Dauphin (Eds.), Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Age to the Nineteenth Century (pp. 1–23). Oxford: Polity. Cohen, S. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Conboy, M. (2010). The Language of Newspapers: Socio-Historical Perspectives. London: Continuum. Curran, J. (1991). Rethinking Media as a Public Sphere. In P.  Dahlgren & C. Sparks (Eds.), Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere (pp. 27–56). London and New York: Routledge. Dahlgren, P. (2013). The Political Web: Media, Participation and Alternative Democracy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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De Quincey, T. (1912). The English Mail-Coach and Other Essays. London: Dent. Dryzek, J. (2009). Democratization as Deliberative Capacity Building. Comparative Political Studies, 42(11), 1379–1402. Dumitrica, D., & Bakardjieva, M. (2018). The Personalization of Engagement: The Symbolic Construction of Social Media and Grassroots Mobilization in Canadian Newspapers. Media, Culture and Society, 40(6), 817–837. Edwards, L. (2018). Public Relations, Voice and Recognition: A Case Study. Media, Culture and Society, 40(3), 317–332. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, (25/26), 56–80. Garnham, N. (1986). The Media and the Public Sphere. In G.  Murdock, P.  Golding, & P.  Schlesinger (Eds.), Communicating Politics (pp.  37–54). Leicester: Leicester University Press. Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity. Hampton, M. (2004). Visions of the Press in Britain 1850–1950. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Jones, A. (1996). Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth Century England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Joyce, P. (2013). The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State Since 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lonsdale, S. (2015). Roast Seagull and Other Quaint Bird Dishes. Journalism Studies, 16(6), 800–815. Mateus, S. (2018). Journalism as a Field of Discursive Production – Performativity, Form and Style. Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies, 10(1), 63–77. Nord, D. (1995). Reading the Newspaper; Strategies and Politics of Reader Response, Chicago 1912–1917. Journal of Communication, 45(3), 63–93. Örnebring, H. (2007). A Necessary Profession for the Modern Age?: Nineteenth Century News, Journalism and the Public Sphere. In R. Butsch (Ed.), Media and Public Spheres. London: Macmillan. Papacharissi, Z. (2009). The Citizen Is the Message: Alternative Modes of Civic Engagement. In Z.  Papacharissi (Ed.), Journalism and Citizenship: New Agendas in Communication (pp. 29–43). New York and London: Routledge. Perkin, H. (1989). The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall. Robson, J. (1995). Marriage or Celibacy? The Daily Telegraph on a Victorian Dilemma. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Verstraeten, H. (1996). The Media and the Transformation of the Public Sphere: A Contribution for a Critical Political Economy of the Public Sphere. European Journal of Communication, 11(3), 347–370.

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Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2007). Journalists and the Public: Newsroom Culture, Letters to the Editor and Democracy. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Warren, L. (2000). ‘Women in Conference’: Reading the Correspondence Columns in Woman 1890–1910. In L. Brake, B. Bell, & D. Finkelstein (Eds.), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (pp.  122–134). Basingstoke: Palgrave.

CHAPTER 7

The Struggles and Economic Hardship of Women Working Class Activists, 1918–1923 Jane L. Chapman

Introduction: Context of Letters Periodisation: A Growing Community of Interest1 During World War I, 1,200,000 women worked for the first time in their lives, and 750,000 of them joined trades unions,2 but the end of war saw a dramatic about-turn in social attitudes, with public campaigns d ­ emonising 1  All references to the newspaper Labour Woman are taken from monthly editions between May 1918 and  December 1923, The  Women’s Library, London School of  Economics and Political Science (LSE DS/329). 2  For further bibliographical information, see the section on women and the labour movement in Hannam et al. (1996). For press cuttings on trade unionism more generally, see The Gertrude Tuckwell collection of press cuttings and papers, 1890–1920, at the British Library (Index RAM331.4). Tuckwell became President of the Women’s Trade Union League in 1905, and President of the National Federation of Women Workers in 1908. Unions representing large numbers of women, such as clerical workers, had already predicted mass redundancies.

J. L. Chapman (*) University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Cavanagh, J. Steel (eds.), Letters to the Editor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2_7

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female workers only months after they had previously been hailed as wartime heroines.3 Mass dismissals of women, with the intention of ceding much needed jobs to returning male veterans during a post-war recession, were now the order of the day. Yet as women in Britain over the age of 30 were given the vote for the first time, the aftermaths of World War I also witnessed an unprecedented phenomenon in the then pioneering Labour Party. A surge in female membership introduced new participants into public life, and these voices were given confidence by their own newspaper, Labour Woman—originally the organ of the National Women’s Labour League.4 With a front page tag of ‘The Monthly Journal for Working Women’, it was first launched in 1913, and ran until September 1971, when it was super ceded by Labour Weekly, the party’s official newspaper, catering for both sexes.5 Labour Woman had its roots in Labour Leaflet that described itself with a tag: ‘Being a Paper to Interest and to Help Members of the Women’s Labour League and Other Friends of the Labour Party’ (sic, Harrison et al. 1977, p. 278). This four-page leaflet ran from January 1911 with 28 editions through to April 1913, when it expanded into the fully fledged journal Labour Woman, launched on 1 May 1913. During these early years, the journal consisted of district news on the League’s work organising women workers on issues of wages and conditions, and on suffrage. Britain’s first female cabinet minister and Privy Counsellor, Margaret Bondfield was a contributor, along with Katherine Bruce Glazier, an Independent Labour Party6 (ILP) activist, and Dr. Marion Phillips, who became editor and is further referred to later. Although the labour movement more generally looked to the Daily Herald as its mouthpiece in the mainstream press, improvements in style and production values also provide evidence of an expanding women’s newspaper, growing in importance and circulation as the women’s section of the Labour Party also grew. Apart from lacking the Fleet Street tag, 3  For cultural demobilisation and more on opposition to women more generally, see Kingsley Kent (1993). On modernism and women see Watson (2004), on motherhood, see Grayzel (1999); for women in politics and international perspectives, see Sharp and Stibbe (2011). For representation of women in the mainstream media, see Bingham (2004). 4  For more on the Women’s Labour League, 1906–1918, see Collette (1989). 5  There appears to have been a concentration of the party’s publishing efforts in 1971, as Economic Brief, International Briefing, Labour Organiser, and Talking Points This Week were also super ceded by Labour Weekly (Harrison et al. 1977). 6  For more on the ILP, see Cohen (2007).

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there was another difference: Labour Woman focused more obviously on a gendered perspective. Catalogue entries for the archive list the newspaper’s subjects as ‘working class women’, employment, the labour movement and women’s rights (Harrison et  al. 1977, p.  278). Such specific women’s interests were not an isolated phenomenon at the time. Tusan claims that between 1856 and 1930 there were 150 ‘women-run’ political newspapers serving as communications vehicles for gendered communities of activists and inspiring women to, ‘affect social change by creating a new gender-based political culture’ that commandeered public space’ (2005, p. 4). What is important here is to establish the precise contribution that women’s letters made within this broader environment, which also needs to be defined more closely. Academics have reflected on the effects of this female interest in politics, and concluded that it brought an accompanying revalorisation of the domestic (Hannam and Hunt 2002, p. 134; Thane 1990), especially when discussions centred on welfare issues, amounting to a challenge to existing (male) priorities in politics. Yet letter writing as empirical evidence of this trend has been overlooked and in particular the class aspects of this activity. This is surprising, because both timing and context are propitious for such a case study: during the inter-war period, Labour replaced the Liberals as the second party of government. This growth was facilitated structurally in 1917 when the party decided to establish an organisational network of constituency parties with individual membership, introducing a new and hitherto unavailable opening for women to participate in party politics. Yet writers such as Hannam and Hunt have tended to favour radical feminism, overlooking the Labour party’s gendered movement, probably because they quite correctly note that power still remained with the (largely male dominated) trades unions. Nevertheless, party propaganda stressed new equality of the sexes (Graves 1994, p.  25) and letters to Labour Woman were composed against a backdrop of women’s need to increase their visibility at all levels in the public sphere. Hence, a letter headed ‘Women in Western Australia’ (October 1919) from Alice Hogarth, a party member from Middlesborough who had emigrated to Australia, complained that despite the vote in that country, women still lacked access to public bodies. Certainly, contemporaries noted the moment in history. At a time when the increase in trade union influence during the war and the Bolshevik revolution combined to inspire left-wingers with hope for the future, George Lansbury (then a labour councillor in Poplar) wrote: ‘It is the

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simple and dazzling fact that 1919 can be, and must be, the beginning of a veritable New Order’ (Daily Herald, 4 January 1919, p. 1). In the case of women, his enthusiasm is backed by quantitative evidence. Total party membership of women swiftly rose from 100,000 in 1922 to an estimated 150,000 by 1924 (Pugh 1992, p. 51) and by 1928, the estimated female membership was 250,000 to 300,000 (Thackeray 2013, p.  38). This growth can be compared to earlier statistics. In 1906 the Labour Representative Committee’s election campaign, as the forerunner to the Labour party, had consisted of 50 candidates who received 250,000 votes out of a total cast nationally of 5.2 million (Harrison et al. 1977, p. 278).7 Candidates had run under local banners, and this early emphasis on local activities had also been reflected in the League Leaflet and in early editions of Labour Women. By contrast, the impressive rise in membership figures for 1922 through to 1924 indicated a new national phenomenon: the majority of individual members (as opposed to trade union, cooperative and socialist society affiliates), were women. Graves appreciates this significant moment for women: ‘In 1918 British social democracy had an opportunity to embrace the cause of women. By the thirties, if not earlier, the moment had passed’ (1994, p. 223). The moment is also important within the trajectory of print media history: Thackeray considers that the main innovation in British party appeal to women at the time (not just Labour) was ‘the proliferation of popular political magazines aimed at the female voter’ (ibid.). Amongst these, letters to the editor of Labour Woman offer a specifically working class female perspective, providing a much needed historical source during a period when women under 30 still did not have the vote. Analysis focuses on gendered class attitudes to work and to poverty: the research question aims to discover the nature of the specific gendered class attitudes to work and living standards. The argument posed is that, through the direct voices, frequently neglected, of working class women, reader letters offer a crucial contribution to the bigger picture of gender as it relates to class during the crucial period of Labour party growth in the aftermaths of war. For example, Labour Woman’s letter contributions provide a gendered angle on themes that appeared in the main party programme, but when 7  By 1945, the Labour Party presented almost a full slate of candidates, receiving almost half of all votes cast, with 393 members elected to the House of Commons. Votes included ‘millions of women’ (Beers 2010) newly enfranchised not only in 1918, but also by (the final) 1928 electoral reform for women in the UK.

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referred to in letters, a personal, individual experience emerges that adds a human dimension to an otherwise abstract policy concept. For example, the somewhat impersonal main party policy of the country’s need for improved public health comes alive in April 1919 with a letter on the need for more pit head baths for miners. The female writer’s logic is clear and succinct: improved provision would benefit wives as well as the men themselves, because it would mean that that the miner’s wife would have more time for politics (instead, presumably, of having to boil and carry endless buckets of water into the living room for her husband’s daily tub). Graves, presenting a longer view, not confined solely to letters, points out that: ‘The main thrust of women’s activities in  local parties and co-operative societies was to transform labour politics from an adult male preoccupation to a more inclusive family and neighbourhood concern’ (Graves 1994, p. 223).8 Labour’s policy approach to the challenge of replacing the Liberals in Britain’s two-party system was to argue during this period for a national minimum standard of living for everyone, with public works intended to alleviate unemployment, abolition of the anachronistic Poor Law, and the development of health services at municipal level. Campaigns called for state provision to combat poverty, sickness and to alleviate suffering during old age. As rapid post-war change became part of their discourse of economic survival, letter contributors demonstrated concern for health issues, including public health and poverty. Empowering discourse was seen as a form of citizenship and is well illustrated by the fact that the newspaper devoted a large number of pages to the concept of a ‘women’s parliament’ (March 1920), a women-only policy forum. For research, every monthly edition during a period indicative of the ‘aftermaths’ of war—between November 1918 and June 1923—has been scrutinised. Some editions had no letters, but where they exist, in half of the total number of editions, each letter was noted, along with a summary of content theme and date. A note was also made of how newspaper style evolved and of the main themes that were featured as front page campaigning slogans, as well as important inside features, in order to provide an indication of the policy context within which letters appeared. 8  Lonsdale (2014) has also pointed out that mainstream feature journalism during the Great War ‘helped undermine traditional boundaries between the domestic and public realms’ (p. 800). This chapter demonstrates how that trend was manifested during the aftermaths of war in a specific class way through letters in a women’s only activist newspaper.

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Considering attitudes in London’s East End at this time, Graves claims that, more generally, ‘Joining a national union and supporting Labour, the workers’ party, reinforced the idea of citizenship and added a class identity’ (2009, p. 183). Accordingly, the concept and development of gendered and class orientated citizenship can be specifically defined through the study of newspapers (Chapman 2013).9 Women’s sections in the party focused particularly on state social welfare reforms aimed at improving conditions for working women, and on standards of living. At a time when the mainstream press were emphasising domesticity and motherhood, the class perspective of Labour Woman meant that these same themes—and others such as the world of work and class solidarity—were addressed in a different way, as identified in the analysis of letters (see later). The new ascendancy of a social agenda in Britain during such a changing and febrile climate, naturally begs the question: what was the discursive function of this particular women’s labour movement newspaper and of its letter contributors within the new post-war context? The newspaper’s engagement with social policy was clearly timely, for the early 1920s seemed to present a string of legal breakthroughs for women, introduced by the Coalition government. In 1918 a Maternity and Child Welfare Act which provided for a range of services, followed in 1919 by a Housing Act for subsidised local authority house building, a War Pensions Act aimed at veterans and war widows, and a Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act that was supposed to prevent discrimination. Although such legislation represented a development in state thinking about peacetime welfare, the period also saw a resurgence of an ideology of domesticity, which contrasted with Labour Woman’s emphasis on work and working class living standards from the female standpoint. Letters Contributing to a Political Package In the case of the Labour Party, a community of interest forms part of a larger collective network of party members. Thus editor Marion Phillips encouraged, as part of an aim to increase political awareness, a discrete and shared community of ideological interest through the inclusion of letters, especially at times when the political calendar did not entail allocating a large amount of the newspaper’s space to extensive reporting on annual conferences or election activities, or national women’s section events. 9

 See also Canning and Rose (2001).

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Letters in Labour Woman therefore need to be interrogated as part of an organisational network: letters were just one aspect of a membership package that provided a structured environment aimed at creating and enhancing a shared motivational ideology. The network consisted of women’s sections in constituency parties, a separate hierarchy of regional Women’s Advisory Councils, a women’s national annual conference, and a central bureaucracy of eight organisers, headed by Chief Women’s Officer Dr. Marion Phillips, who also edited the newspaper. In addition, the party’s National Executive comprised four female statuary members out of the total of 20 seats. Christopher Howard, in his study of local labour parties in the early 1920s, reaches negative conclusions on the party’s local strength. Not mentioning women members at all, he believes that: ‘Labour’s opportunism after 1917 had carried the party too far too fast, and it was structurally unprepared for the role it was now destined to play. There was no real basis for expansion, no real basis for confidence, only a recipe for disappointment and bitterness.’ His point is that economic recession made it impossible to expand the working class base, yet the party’s ‘taste for power’ combined with an awareness of its own weakness ‘generated a pusillanimity of thought and action which was disseminated through many agents, organisers and elected representatives to all levels of the party. … The image of a vibrant, expanding new party was an illusion. Labour was fortunate that its opponents were deceived’ (1983, pp.  80–81). As the analysis below indicates, such a harsh judgement is not supported in reader letters for Labour Women. In fact, the main motivation of Marion Phillips, reflected in the emphasis of the newspaper, was to encourage women who were new to politics to build their confidence and policy awareness through participation in women’s sections, then eventually to become active in the mainstream Labour Party and electoral politics. The battleground where new women members could make most impact for this was at local level. According to Pamela Graves (1994, pp. 35, 221), during the 1920s women made up for loss of influence at national level by exerting power at constituency level, where they were sometimes in the majority, achieving success in raising discussion topics such as maternal caring, children, the elderly and sick. Phillips and her regional agents encouraged a range of targeted electioneering techniques, accompanied by a variety of discourses aimed at different groups. Using articles in the newspaper, they reported the various views of other labour women, as well as supporting readers’ letters,

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although such an approach had its limitations, at election time. For instance, the December 1918 edition was a ‘bumper’ election edition in which letters from the labour leadership took preference to such an extent that, with limited resources, the subsequent edition (January 1919) consisted of a scaled down size of only eight pages, with no space for readers’ letters. To some degree, the content of letters and the themes with which Labour Woman engaged reflected a wider political strategy that identified sections of the electorate as targeted interest groups for discrete attention. In 1923, Phillips urged canvassers to tailor their discussion to the needs of different categories of working class women—a way of thinking that resonates with today’s marketing industry, and was reflected in the pages of Labour Woman. If she is suffering from unemployment, tell her about the Labour Party and the right to work or maintenance. If she is a housewife, tell her how much money she pays for tea or sugar is tax that the Labour Party wants to do away with. If she has a little baby, tell her about the Labour Party’s fight for free or cheap milk. (Phillips and Tavener 1923, p. 11)

How did letters fit within this strategy? In a context within which female organisers were encouraged to orchestrate specific meetings of cooperative women, or the wives of trade unionists, and to distribute literature outside women’s church and chapel meetings (ibid., p. 6), a letter to Labour Woman helped build the strategy. Sometimes ‘cottage’ meetings, held in the afternoon in a neighbour’s house, provided an opportunity for discussion of ideas and newspaper articles over a cup of tea, and with young children present (Thackeray 2013, p. 41). Such events could be used to encourage letter writing and other future activities. ‘Cottage’ meetings were a practice that both Conservatives and Liberals also employed, but Labour Women paid comparatively more attention to working women as wage earners, with regular features on working conditions and the difficulties of unemployed women. Again, editorial articles— on for instance ‘The domestic worker and the unemployed woman’ (March 1919)—were likely to prompt letters on the same themes, all adding to the impact of political communications on any given topic. Labour women championed widows’ pensions, more and better maternity clinics and other health facilities that would help improve infant mortality rates. Other letter topics are examined later.

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The view of Phillips as editor was that women who had no previous experience of party work needed to be encouraged in separate sections, using, inter alia, their own newspaper as a forum for political education. Without this, there was a danger that women could be attracted by the competition presented by other voluntary groups, including non-political organisations. Her concerns are reiterated by present day academic research that points to a growth in active public engagement through voluntary associations as well as democratic politics (McCarthy 2007, p. 891). Membership activities were reported in the newspaper, and readers’ letters could connect policy to individual examples or experiences. The newspaper was also particularly anxious about a whole new younger generation of post-war women who had never had a job, arguing that the government was neglecting unemployed women. The ‘triple alliance’ between teachers, mothers, and young women that labour women championed was important to women readers as an expression of gendered solidarity in the face of the formalisation of a marriage bar—and hence loss of a job if they married. A letter from a teacher with five children, whose husband did not earn enough to provide for the whole family, prompted much sympathy, and was referred to by others later in the paper (January 1923). In fact, with the introduction of a marriage bar for women teachers, letter protest increased: one letter supported the National Conference of Labour Women who opposed a decision by the London County Council to dismiss all women on their marriage in future appointments of teachers (March 1923). The newspaper saw teacher redundancies10 as an educational cut, but nurses and civil servants were also affected, ironically at a time when the trend was for an increase in clerical work appealing to women.11 A letter from Edith M.  Donald, Employment Secretary, Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries, rightly commented: ‘More things are needed to satisfy unemployed women than efforts to make them efficient domestics’ (June 1919).

 For more on the marriage bar, see Oram (1996).  See Anderson (1988).

10 11

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Women as Active Readers Labour women defended the right of married comrades to work, whereas in redundancy situations, many male trade unionists demanded the sacking of married women first. Labour Woman saw it differently—there was a particular concern for the material conditions of working class women. In the month of the Armistice—November 1918—reports of the National Conference of Women were headlined by a call for equal pay for equal work, while letters stressed the needs of ‘civil widows’ who ‘struggled to keep kids and do a job’ demonstrated that ‘equal pay for equal work’ was required (November 1918). In harmony with such letters, the newspaper viewed even the basics of women’s dress and femininity as economically based political issues. Thus the same edition also drew attention to how profiteers were exploiting a crisis in the supply of corsets: whilst imports from the U.S. were banned, supplies from France had also been disrupted, leading ‘the public’ (that is, women) to pay 10s6d for an article worth 4s11d that would normally be imported from France. In fact, examples of international political analysis, encapsulated in a November 1919 front page headline ‘Peace! Peace! When There is No Peace’ appear in the newspaper alongside practical issues such as debate by the party’s women’s councils on what constituted luxury building, and in particular wooden houses. Activities that the newspaper featured, such as children’s Christmas parties, classes, jumble sales, family outings, choirs, and peace marches all supported a community environment that encompassed both utopian thinking (December 1919 front page headline ‘What Nationalisation Means’) and dystopian thought in the same edition (‘High Price of Milk’ reported how petitions were being organised on this issue), as well as the everyday practicalities of survival. Thus, two letters in March 1921 showed lively interest in the issue of whether sweets should be allowed for children, although the front page of this edition inclined instead to the issue of unemployment, with a headline ‘Women Out of Work’. Similarly, in June 1921 three letters discussed ‘Daylight Saving and Health’, while in July 1921 two further letters were introduced as ‘More about Daylight Saving’, an important issue for working class houses without electricity, for shift workers and for those working long hours. As Thackeray points out, the Labour Party in its publications paid more attention to waged workers than other parties (op. cit., p.  45). Letters expressed concern about unemployment (March 1921, February 1923).

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Of equal reader interest were the issues of holidays such as a newspaper competition for letters on the topic ‘What I am going to do on my holiday’ (August 1921), the introduction of daylight saving, and domestic service. In the world of work, the survival and continuation of domestic service as women’s employment caused concern. Labour Woman saw domestic employment as a class issue. Accordingly, a letter in July 1919 discussed, ‘The Work of Domestic Servants in the Small House’, as a sequel to the March 1919 edition when two letters had been published critical of domestic service, in response to an article on ‘The Domestic Worker’. Other letters were also concerned about ‘sweated rates’ for women, and the need for trade union organisation in hat and cap making (June 1919). The argument here is that although letters formed part of a broader political strategy, they still provided a range of content within a clearly defined framework of engagement that required individual participation in a collective, gendered effort. By extension, the newspaper had a remit to encourage public sphere representation of women, thus readers’ discourse held the potential to contribute to this wider aspect of citizenship. The newspaper argued that only working women could speak for working women—a claim to authenticity that was difficult to refute during the early 1920s when Labour candidates made more specific appeals to women voters than their competitor parties. Indeed, they referred to their organisation as the ‘Women’s Party’ (Pugh 1992, p. 108). By February 1923, the newspaper was going so far as to encourage specialist knowledge in female employment issues, through debate on the kind of remit the new training centres were adopting. The editor responded to a letter with a factual correction on a new government training scheme that aimed to impart domestic skills. The downside, this letter and comments stated, was that if women went on the scheme, they did not qualify for unemployment money. At this time policy makers defined women’s economic position by their relationships within the family, not by their position in the paid workforce: unemployed spinsters, for instance, were regarded as ‘superfluous’ and encouraged to emigrate. Yet in the pages of Labour Woman, readers’ own debates provided a certain comfort from this hostile environment, exemplified by articles such as ‘What the Miners’ Strike Means to Women’ (November 1920), for instance. During the hardship endured by the 1926 General Strike, women organised local support networks for families affected by the strike.

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The newspaper and its letters attached great importance to local activities. Women councillors concentrated on small scale reforms rather than power politics, aiming to improve the quality of life locally, through improved public baths, libraries, baby clinics and secondary school scholarships for working class children (Graves, op. cit., p. 224). In the pages of Labour Woman and especially through their letters, readers could share ideas, tips for survival, information about various parts of the movement in other localities—as a community of interest. Phillips saw the newspaper as a means of communicating and sharing political awareness, which in turn was seen as an essential prerequisite for greater political engagement by women who had no previous experience of involvement in the public sphere.

Analysing Letters An analysis of letter topics in Labour Woman shows gendered awareness emerging from a whole range of topics, all of them linking politics to economic and class concerns. Indeed, prior to the 1924 general election, both editorial and letters in the newspaper Labour Woman engaged with a range of class based economic policies. Labour also appealed to women as consumers, by promoting what was referred to as ‘the free breakfast table’, whilst Philip Snowden as Chancellor in 1924, claimed that he had introduced a ‘housewife’s budget’ that reduced food duties by £30  million, including tariffs on essentials such as tea and sugar (Thackeray 2013, p. 45). As editor, Marion Phillips wanted to encourage discussion around the official party agenda. In line with party policy, most letter subject matter was therefore about material needs. The list of topics is an indication of the range of campaigning issues for female activists, under the following categories (November 1918 to June 1923): • Economic—especially the poverty of unemployed women, including low income married women with children. • Housing and how to provide low cost dwellings, for example, wooden construction. Reader participation was prompted by a front page banner headline ‘Working Women Talk on Housing’ and the question ‘What is the Ideal Home?’ Labour Woman argued that the newspaper had set a higher standard for its readers than the Ideal Home Exhibition (March 1920).

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• Labour—saving devices12—how to minimise domestic toil, training, wage levels and liberation for women in service. • Working and factory conditions, shift systems, sweated labour. • Education—for all ages—and child-rearing. • Prohibition. • International issues, for example, exploitation of women in India. • Organisational, representational and policy discussions in branches, districts, regions and election work, including encouragement of women in public office. Some organisational debates in the letters page were very practical, for instance, should labour women have their own badge? The ‘Tyranny of Poverty’ The scope of grass roots discussion widened as the economy worsened— to rural areas and policy, but most importantly, to discourses on poverty— tackling what one letter heading referred to as ‘the tyranny of poverty’ (see later). This became a priority as members felt that the argument for state provision still had to be made. In this respect, readers did not see a binary between home and work: in both, there were economic issues. In November 1920 a feature article by Winifred Moore was headlined ‘Women in the Industrial World—a Fair Field’, and argued for equality of opportunity against what the writer saw as attempts to divide women from men in industry, ‘divide and rule’—an article that resonated with the post-­ war competition for jobs. Although the newspaper adopted a title (after its name) of ‘The Monthly Journal for Working Women’ and campaigned for ‘equal pay for women’s wages’, letters were frequently concerned, as the earlier example of pit head baths demonstrated, with women’s labour in the home, which was clearly perceived as just another form of toil, and hence exploitation of women. The need for labour saving devices (mentioned earlier) provoked much discussion13 and as unemployment increased, and the newspaper’s real binaries emerged more strongly: they were between rich and poor, not between workplace and/or home.  For more on the significance of this aspect, see Bowden (1996).  For coverage of this issue in the popular press, see Bingham (2004). The difference between reader letters in Labour Woman, and discussion in mainstream publications is that the latter tended to be written by professional journalists about the joys of new technology (washing machines, for instance), whereas the former were testimonials by the women themselves who were doing the hard labour without such devises. 12 13

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The main struggle was a class one against poverty, as manifested in housing, for example, and lack of money to improve the quality of domestic life. In fact, frequent debates and articles about the undesirable politics of women working as ‘domestics’ commanded much attention. Thus, one page of the paper was regularly entitled ‘Women as Wage Earners’, whilst this was followed by another regular page entitled ‘The Housewife’. In the latter, a December 1920 article advised ‘Don’t Do the Washing at Home’. Readers were advised to follow the ‘example of Fulham’ where a communal wash house service cost 1s9d. Similarly, under the heading ‘The Tyranny of Poverty’ referred to above, a textile worker from Yorkshire and a student at Beckenham College for Working Women, Miss Robinson, wrote a letter about how she gave up her Easter vacation to canvas for the party in the Brigg division of Lincolnshire. Although she was able to sign up 98 members who were able to pay their subscription, a further 40 ‘did not possess a shilling to pay. Many of them belonged to the unemployed. It hurt me to canvas many of the people, they were so poor and helpless. I only regretted I could not give more time to help them. I realised there was a great deal of work to be done for the Labour Movement: a large number who refused to become members of the group, told me they were Labour, but lack of moral courage hindered them joining up; fear of their position and businesses seemed to be the chief reason. Shame that we live in a Free (sic) country and yet these people have not freedom of action’ (April 1921). On the same page, Lillie S. Turner from Bletchley, Bucks writes about the ‘dire distress of the agricultural worker and his family. When we know hundreds are existing upon a wage of £1 to 25s, we realise that there is real and acute distress upon the countryside … to find work upon the countryside would relieve unemployment and the growing congestion in the towns. … Let us as women, too, make this a burning question. It vitally affects town dwellers as well as those living upon (sic) the countryside’ (ibid.). The October 1921 edition symbolises many of the functions of consciousness-­raising political education, as a perceived prerequisite for social change. It contains the first photo used in the paper, of a large demo in support of 30 women councillors from the East End of London— Poplar—who went to jail for refusing to support an increase in community charge—or rate increase, on the grounds that the levy by the Conservative-­ controlled London County Council—the LCC—would hit poor people disproportionately, compared to richer parts of the capital like Westminster

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with a much higher income base. The same edition also contains the first ever cartoon in the paper—about a central government cut in milk allowance to mothers with babies—an ironic cut, given the fact that the government were trying to encourage a population increase after the losses of the Great War. Party women wanted the authorities to have more control over the supply of milk so that it would reach working class women and their children (ibid.). Again, in this edition, letters continued on ‘The Question of Prohibition’—although contributors avoided mention of drunken husbands or domestic violence. The perennial ‘More About Daylight Saving’ (sic) reappeared, presumably because of its significance for poor households without electricity. One concern was that women should campaign for an improvement in the quality and design of houses. Labour saving devises, plus better housing design and conditions would all help alleviate the housewife’s burden of hard work and long hours. Labour had used questionnaires to survey women about their priorities in terms of larger kitchens, more bedrooms, proper bathrooms, hot water and other basics that are taken for granted in twenty-first-century Britain (March 1920). Under the heading ‘The Work of the Woman in the Home’, and in response to an article entitled ‘Shorter Hours for the Woman at Home’ (January 1919) two reader letters discussed how to best achieve results, using less labour. The second of the letters, from a reader with eight children, listed ten things that a man could do to help. (February 1919). As the post-war economic recession began to bite, children, for instance, would have to learn to like homemade soup: the newspaper gave advice on soups without meat stock (March 1921). Meanwhile, on children, who now had their own page in the newspaper, further letters debated whether or not it was acceptable to give children sweets, under a heading: ‘Sweets for Children—should they be allowed?’, and in an edition with a front page headline ‘Women Out of Work’ (March 1921).

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Conclusion During this tense period of specific hardship for working class people transnationally, and of post-conflict readjustment more generally (Cabanes 2014)14 the class loyalties and sense of community of female Labour Party membership clearly emerges as a form of genuine idealism. This is important, because what such readers have to say remains one of the most under-­ exploited resources in journalism history. Peer-to-peer communications, especially letters and features by volunteer activists, provide a bottom-up perspective with testimonials of individual lived experiences of hardship— that clearly needs to be differentiated from professional journalism. The space that existed at the time for differing contemporary discourses demonstrates a confidence and empowerment achieved through democratic participation. Social movement newspapers are frequently a reflection of the health of the movement, and their development as publications runs parallel to the development of the movement they represent. Letters formed part of a wider strategy with the purpose of extending and stimulating discourses at an important moment in the Labour Party’s history. It is the women’s community of interest that deserves further consideration, as the total antithesis of Howard’s ‘pusillanimity of thought and action’. The party’s female community of interest had economic motivation. Working class women were burdened with the labours of domesticity, family, and work, in an environment which they themselves perceived should be changed. The authenticity of working class voices is significant for the evidence it provides of the everyday concerns of readers whose concerns were gendered, every day ‘bread and butter’ issues of hardship, exemplified by work and toil, lack of time and money and a poor quality of life. The discursive function of this newspaper was to provide political answers to everyday economic concerns, with a clear class agenda. Letters reflect practical details of individual observations about and attempts at survival. These act as human interest testimonial from ordinary people at the receiving end of recession, and government policy during the post-war economic slump. Labour Woman helped create a collective confidence, at a time when working women were under attack at the workplace, and under economic pressure at home: letter writing, along with other party activities became a proactive way to connect with other 14  Arendt has commented on the period: ‘Hatred … began to play a central role in public affairs everywhere’ (1951, p. 136).

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members of this particular community. Within this community, there was no overt or obvious tension in reader letters between class and gender. Although labour leaders ousted feminists in the party, grass roots working women perceived tensions differently: conflict was between privileged wealth on the one hand, and lack of rights and empowering state support, on the other hand. In short, any policy obfuscation over married women workers, women’s wages and mothers, was underwritten by a broader class agenda. It should be noted that this campaigning newspaper was more progressive than the main Labour Party. The newspaper had organised support for the major pre-1914 strikes and later in 1926 was to actively support the miners. As a postscript, during the Depression, many labour women could no longer afford to buy the newspaper, and did not even have enough money for bus fares to travel to party events. Poverty undermined women’s separate but equal status. Nevertheless, by 1932, the year that Phillips passed away, it would be fair to say that she and her readers had achieved a proud record of campaigning, especially at local level. This provided a structure and a legacy for subsequent women’s participation. The contexts outlined here indicate that reader contributions in writing represent a postcard within a bigger landscape. Yet the fact that these letters formed part of a wider organisational strategy does not diminish their value as individual voices within social history. Women’s letter talk about building a better future for all by escaping the constraints of pecuniary struggle provides a humbling reminder that ordinary female voices had to prioritise everyday efforts to survive.

References Anderson, G. (Ed.). (1988). The White Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers Since 1870. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books. Beers, L. (2010). Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bingham, A. (2004). Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bowden, S. (1996). The Technological Revolution that Never Was: Gender, Class and the Diffusion of Household Appliances in Interwar England. In V. de Grazia & E. Furlough (Eds.), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (pp. 244–274). Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Cabanes, B. (2014). The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918– 1924. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Canning, K., & Rose, S. O. (2001). Gender, Citizenship and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations. Gender and History, 13(3), 427–443. Chapman, J.  L. (2013). Gender, Citizenship and Newspapers: Historical and Transnational Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, G. (2007). The Failure of a Dream: The Independent Labour Party from Disaffiliation to World War II. London: Tauris Academic Studies. Collette, C. (1989). For Labour and For Women: The Women’s Labour League, 1906–1918. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Graves, P.  M. (1994). Labour Women: Women in British Working Class Politics 1918–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graves, P.  M. (2009). A Blessing or a Curse? Working Class Attitudes to State Welfare Programmes in Britain 1919–1939. Labour History Review, 74(2), 160–184. Grayzel, S. R. (1999). Women’s Identities at War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hannam, J., & Hunt, K. (2002). Socialist Women. London: Routledge. Hannam, J., Hughes, A., & Stafford, P. (1996). British Women’s History: A Bibliographical Guide. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harrison, R., Woolven, G. B., & Duncan, R. (1977). The Warwick Guide to British Labour Periodicals, 1790–1970: A Check List. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Howard, C. (1983). Expectations Born to Death: Local Labour Party Expansion in the 1920s. In J. Winter (Ed.), The Working Class in Modern British History: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling (pp.  65–81). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kingsley Kent, S. (1993). Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lonsdale, S. (2014). ‘Roast Seagull and Other Quaint Bird Dishes’. The Development of Features and ‘Lifestyle’ Journalism in British Newspapers During the First World War. Journalism Studies, 16(6), 800–815. McCarthy, H. (2007). Parties, Voluntary Associations, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Britain. The Historical Journal, 50(1), 891–903. Oram, A. (1996). Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Phillips, M., & Tavener, G. (1923). Women’s Work in the Labour Party; Notes for Speakers’ and Workers’ Classes. London: The Labour Party. Pugh, M. (1992). Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain Since 1914 (3rd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sharp, I., & Stibbe, M. (2011). Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918–1923. Leiden: Brill.

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Thackeray, D. (2013). From Prudent Housewife to Empire Shopper: Party Appeals to the Female Voter, 1918–1928. In J. V. Gottlieb & R. Toye (Eds.), The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1918–1945 (pp. 37–53). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thane, P. (1990). The Women of the British Labour Party and Feminism, 1906– 45. In H. L. Smith (Ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Tusan, M.  E. (2005). Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Watson, J. S. K. (2004). Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Readers’ Letters to Victorian Local Newspapers as Journalistic Genre Andrew Hobbs

Letters to the editor in English local newspapers in the second half of the nineteenth century were a journalistic genre, although presented as if written by non-journalists. They were journalistic in that they were selected, edited and occasionally written by journalists. This high degree of mediation limits their use in assessing public opinion, although quantitative analysis reveals suggestive patterns, and analysing them in aggregate offers more reliable conclusions than placing too much weight on any individual letter. These letters were mainly on local matters, overwhelmingly negative, and usually ‘talked past each other’ (Wahl-Jorgensen 2007, p. 198), although there was some genuine debate. In the sample of letters analysed here, most were written pseudonymously at mid-century, but this changed rapidly so that by the end of the nineteenth century, most were signed. While pseudonyms cause problems for historians, they had two advantages for the writers: an added rhetorical resource, and the freedom of a­ nonymity, Electronic supplementary material: The online version of this chapter (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2_8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. A. Hobbs (*) University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Cavanagh, J. Steel (eds.), Letters to the Editor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2_8

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especially for women and working-class letter-writers. The public sphere probably became more bourgeois, despite growing working-class readership. However, there is no sign that the public sphere was in decline, rather it was splintering. This is the first systematic study of readers’ letters in the mainstream Victorian press (i.e. newspapers produced outside London). Local weekly newspapers have been chosen because they were the most popular mass media product of the second half of the nineteenth century (more popular than London newspapers and magazines, more numerous than books); thousands of individual titles across Britain and Ireland came and went, and all offered space for letters to the editor, every week—an enormous platform, when viewed nationally (Hobbs 2018, pp.  4–6; Eliot 1994, p. 83; North 2003). The period, too, has wider significance—production routines and reading habits were rapidly being formed in these decades, many of them lasting into the twenty-first century. The smaller circulation of each local title, in comparison with the handful of London titles with larger circulations, meant that it was easier for readers to have their letters accepted. This lower level of mediation and the genuinely national spread of the local press make letters in local papers more valuable as historical evidence. This study uses content analysis and close reading of letters in newspapers in Preston, Lancashire, combined with evidence from the trade press, memoirs, company histories of newspapers and private correspondence. Most of this chapter’s themes can be found in an 1871 article in the newspaper trade magazine, Press News. The anonymous writer explains how readers’ letters were central to the revitalisation of an unnamed small-­ town paper: As a sort of sky-rocket we let off a sharp letter on the bad playing of the parish organist, and the noise of the charity children in the gallery of the parish church, by a parishioner of thirty years’ standing. This was followed up by firebrand number two, in the shape of an angry remonstrance from a railway passenger as to the want of punctuality in the trains, and the absence of fires in the waiting room … the contents of this first number got talked about by everybody from one end of the parish to the other—so much so, that nearly every one of the inhabitants rushed to the printing-office to get a copy for themselves … better still if you can get a few of the leading people to write and cut you up for your presumption, for rest assured they will buy to see if their letter is in, and when they are once satisfied on that point, they will buy more copies to give away … Then there is the universal advertising—all

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cheap too—which is promoted by the conversation on the correspondence of your last number. The curate goes to the barber’s … he is there asked what he thinks of the letter … on the church organ and the charity children. He is astonished at the audacity, buys a copy, and takes it at once to the vicar, who directly orders two more for the bishop, and one for his own solicitor … The curate is ordered to reply to the vile calumny, but not being equal to the task, he takes it to the schoolmaster, who concocts a letter to order, and signs it “A Seat-holder.” (London, Provincial, and Colonial Press News 1871, p. 10)

The first two letters were written by a journalist, at the extreme end of a spectrum of mediation of letters, with, at the other end, letters written by readers with no connection to the newspaper, published with little or no editing; a more typical level of mediation would have been applied to the third letter, from the schoolmaster, involving selection and editing. The editor used the popularity of letters, especially controversial ones, to encourage further letters and to increase readership (what we would call ‘sockpuppeting’ nowadays). All three letters are pseudonymous, and all three pretend to be from someone other than the actual writer. The importance of letters from high-status readers (‘influencers’, we might call them today) is acknowledged, as is the level of cultural capital required to successfully write a letter for publication, leading the well-educated curate to ask the schoolmaster to do this task for him. The first two letters are complaints—the default setting for newspaper correspondence—and all are probably written by middle-class men. Finally, the letters ‘got talked about’: they had created a circuit of oral and print debate, a local public sphere.

Readers’ Letters as Highly Mediated Journalistic Genre The accuracy of the Press News anecdote is confirmed by Victorian journalists’ memoirs. William Hunt, editor of the Hull daily, the Eastern Morning News (1864–1929), admitted that ‘some of the early discussions in the correspondence columns of the paper owed a good deal to the energy and ability of members of our own staff’ (Hunt 1887, p.  94). When J.W. Robertson Scott joined the Birmingham Gazette as an editorial assistant in the late 1880s, he was asked to write ‘one or two short “Letters to the Editor”’; Scott saw this as a sign of his editor’s ‘sound journalistic

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appreciation of the value of correspondence’ (Scott 1951, pp. 256–257). In Devon another editor, Robert Were, who founded the Tiverton Gazette (1858–), ‘was considerably helped by a somewhat animated correspondence between the Vicar of St Paul’s Church and the Priest of the Chapel of St John’ (Gregory 1932, p. 40). Readers’ letters, then, are one among many journalistic genres. ‘What seems to be the least mediated, most open and most democratic compo­ nent of a newspaper is in practice as highly mediated, closed, and undemo­ cratic as other aspects’ (Ericson et al. 1989, p. 338). Gregory and Hutchins (2004, pp.  187–188) go further, arguing that ‘the letters to the editor page is not an open channel of communication between individuals in a public space of rational, two-way debate, but a complex social space mediated by the routine practices of editorial staff.’ Lobato et al. (2011, p. 902) include readers’ letters in a discussion of ‘user-generated content’ (UGC), placing letters at the most formal, mediated end of the spectrum, the opposite of family photographs and fanzines. They see UGC as a ‘boundary object’ (citing Strathern 2003, p. 45) straddling the border between formal and informal media sectors, ‘exposing points of tension, sparking frontier conflicts, and becoming, in some cases, sites for accommodation and negotiation’ (Lobato et  al. 2011, p.  909). This is a helpful way of understanding how the first newspapers consisted entirely of letters (Sommerville 1996, p. 6), but over the centuries letters became a boundary object, sitting on the border between material produced by professional journalists and that produced by their ‘other’ (Wahl-Jorgensen 2007, p. 5), the public. Beyond the continuum of informal/formal media systems, letters to the editor are part of other continua: the proportion of UGC to be found in a particular publication, with those publishing no correspondence at one end, such as the London Journal, Household Words, Punch, the Illustrated London News and Blackwood’s Magazine, and publications like Notes and Queries or the English Mechanic at the other, consisting almost entirely of readers’ contributions (Mussell 2007, p. 29). There was also variation between publications in the degree of selection and editing of letters, and perhaps variation between issues, depending on staff time available. Raeymaeckers (2016, p.  218) found that twenty-first-century Flemish popular newspapers worked hard to make ‘badly written letters readable … to give a voice to ordinary citizens’. This may well have been true in the nineteenth century, but I have found no evidence of it. Such editing was time-consuming, according to Frederic Carrington, editor of

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the Gloucestershire Chronicle, describing the duties of a local editor: ‘there are … the letters of correspondence to be licked into shape, and great is the labour and small the profit’ (Carrington 1855, p. 147). The Preston Herald claimed it had no time for such labour in 1868, telling a rejected contributor: ‘Your letter would require re-writing entirely to make it at all presentable, and we cannot spare the time just now to do so’ (‘Notices to Correspondents’, 17 October 1868). However, journalists were expected to take the time. An 1894 instruction manual advised that the editor needs to be generous as well as just—helpful and kindly in the way of emendation or omission. Occasionally, as a means of deserved punishment or for greater effect, the epistle of the unskilled writer may fitly be published verbatim et literatim; but, as a rule, editorial amendment is welcomed rather than resented by the illiterate writer and is appreciated by the readers. (Mackie 1894, p. 78)

Note that the literary judgement of ‘effect’ is one of the considerations in editing a letter. Although usually written by readers, letters were moulded according to journalistic criteria. Other reasons for rejection included ‘Too strong in style’, ‘Too long’, and sometimes party political considerations (‘Notices to Correspondents’, Preston Chronicle, 8 September 1860; ‘Editorial Notices’, Preston Chronicle, 25 February 1871; Buckley 1987, p. 23). However, these comments also suggest that the majority of correspondence came from readers, rather than journalists. Journalists exerted the most editorial control when they wrote letters themselves, or commissioned them. I can attest from personal experience that, at least in the 1980s, journalists occasionally wrote letters themselves, passing them off as written by readers. Journalists sometimes chose to ventriloquise through a reader’s letter because of the particular meanings of that genre. As Dallas Liddle notes when applying Bakhtin’s ideas of genre to journalism, ‘genres contain and encode meaning … genres perform the complex and language-like function of limiting and shaping the terms and available meanings of texts … working to make the text they contain reflect the genre’s own worldview’ (Liddle 2009, p. 5). Edward Baines chose to promote the idea of a philosophical and literary society for Leeds through a letter, signed ‘Leodiensian’, in his own newspaper, the Leeds Mercury, instead of using the editorial voice, believing the idea was more likely to be taken up if it appeared to come from the public (Hood 1978, p.  163). Similarly, in Hull, William Hunt, editor of the Eastern

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Morning News, wrote in his own paper ‘under a nom de plume’ against smoking at public events. ‘The correspondence was kept up with great spirit for some time’, leading to a ban at the next annual flower show, widely attributed to the letters in his newspaper (Hunt 1887, p. 95). Some readers were aware of the connotations of these genres. One gave the following advice to the editor of the new Birmingham Daily Post in 1857: ‘Never introduce minor subjects into your leaders … Rather than small subjects should occupy your leading space, I would treat such subjects in letters written under fictitious names; then they would not spoil the dignity of your leaders’ (Whates 1957, p. 59). The next step along the continuum of editorial mediation was a genre related to readers’ letters, but distinct, usually appearing in a short section before the leader column, entitled ‘Notices to Correspondents’, ‘Editorial Notices’ or similar. Wilkie Collins and others have noted the attraction of such columns, rather like overhearing one side of a conversation ([Collins] 1858). In the Preston papers, this section was used to acknowledge receipt of letters and articles, to explain why such contributions had been rejected or held over, and to answer factual queries and give advice. These answers to queries offered a level of reader involvement below that of the correspondence column; here the editorial voice was dominant, but in direct response to readers (Warren 2000, p. 123, although such columns never consisted ‘solely’ of the editorial voice) The most gnomic type of reply was a bare ‘No’ (Preston Chronicle, 1 October 1870). Readers sometimes needed some examples to set them off—the Jesuit priest in charge of the ‘Answers to Correspondents’ section of Liverpool’s Northern Press and Catholic Times, ‘with the view of drawing on real enquiries … used to concoct and then answer questions on points of doctrine, etc.’ (Denvir 1972, p. 154). Readers’ queries covered slightly different subjects than their letters, most notably in the case of sport, seen as a topic of low status, especially in Liberal newspapers. The difference in status (and perhaps in authors) between the correspondence column and replies to correspondents is brought out by the absence of football in the letters column of the Lancashire Evening Post in 1890 (none in September and October of that year), while football dominated the readers’ queries, with 12 answers making it the most popular subject. The queries were about dates, scores, and other match statistics, mainly concerning Preston North End, occasionally about their Blackburn rivals. Even in the early days of football, fans needed facts, as fuel for discussion and argument, and they turned to the local

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Table 8.1  Answers to correspondents, 1890 and 1900, Lancashire Evening Post, Preston Topic Football Acknowledging receipt/explaining rejection Politics Non-local other Local other Unknown Local history Geography

1890

1900

12 11 1 1 3 1 0 0 29

4 8 18 9 7 6 7 4 63

Source: LEP, Sept–Oct 1890 and 1900

press (Holt 1989, pp. 168–169). The number of answers to correspondents roughly doubled between 1890 and 1900 in the Lancashire Evening Post (see Table  8.1), probably due to rising circulation, but also due to the Boer War, a General Election campaign and the Taff Vale trades union case in 1900 arousing more reader curiosity and comment. The number of readers’ queries was in inverse proportion to the number of letters published in these years (see Table 8.1), raising the possibility that pressure on space from war news forced the editor to merely acknowledge correspondence in 1900, rather than print it in full.

The Letters Between one and 20 letters were published in each issue of Preston’s main newspapers. Table 8.2 shows how the number of letters rose and then fell during the period (high numbers in 1868 were due to a general election and controversy over the Irish Church). Without a wider sampling than two months every ten years, it is hard to interpret this downward trend in correspondence during the period. A fall in letters in the Herald could be the result of falling circulation, but the same decline is seen in the Lancashire Evening Post, which almost certainly increased its readership in the last decade of the century. Numbers of letters were greatly influenced by the currency of particular topics, such as the 1868 Irish Church debate, which more than doubled the number of letters, or the campaign for a half-day holiday for shop assistants in September 1890, which partly explains the high number of Evening Post letters in that year. Conversely,

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Table 8.2  Number of letters published in September and October for selected years, Preston Herald, Preston Guardian, Preston Chronicle and Lancashire Evening Post, 1860–1900

Preston HeraldBi-weekly except 1860 (weekly) Preston GuardianBi-weekly except 1900 (weekly) Preston ChronicleWeekly except 1860 (bi-weekly) Lancashire Evening PostDaily

1860

1867

34

76

59 56

1868

1870

1880

1890

1900

190

66

86

23

21

68

78

52

58

8

6

39

73

51

69

30 117

37

Table 8.3  Topics of letters, Preston Herald 1860–1900 1860 Complaints over local administration & responses 3 Politics, general 1 Religion, local Complaints over public nuisance & responses Call for improvements 10 Politics, local 6 Inter-personal disputes 1 Observations 1 Announcements, advice 1 Religion, general 3 Fund-raising 1 Corrections 2 Other 29

1870

1880

1890

1900

13 23 4 3 1 3 2 2 2 2 1 2 3 61

16 3 16 12 2 6 6 8 3 2 1 1 2 78

7 1 1 3 5 1

4 2

2 1 1 22

1 2 6 1 3 2 1

43 30 21 19 18 18 15 12 11 7 6 6 6

22

bigger stories such as the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 or the General Election in 1900 could actually reduce the space available for letters, as seen in the Lancashire Evening Post during the Boer War in 1900. The popularity of readers’ correspondence was due in large part to its local focus, with local topics accounting for the majority of letters in the Preston Herald in all but one of the sampled years (Table 8.3). The only exception was 1870, when the Franco-Prussian war dominated the correspondence columns. This British preference continues into the twenty-­ first century, when readers’ letters are still more likely to be about ‘specific and localised topics’ such as the quality of Bury black puddings, whereas

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Italian letters ‘tend to deal with issues of more general interest such as the meaning of life’ (Pounds 2006, p. 53). Correspondents debated the state of the town, compared it to other places, looked back on its history and tried to characterise it. Writers occasionally used local metaphors, for example arguing that one could ‘as well try to stop the flow of the Ribble as to stop the advance of public opinion’ (letter from ‘W.W.’, Preston Guardian, 11 April 1868). Lancashire dialect was used in letters, particularly in the 1870s (Hobbs 2018, ch. 8), for example, a writer using the pen-name ‘A Fisicee’ wrote a letter entitled ‘Doins I Fisic Werd’ [Doings in Fishwick Ward], addressed ‘To Th’ Hedditur o’th Preston Kronicle’, entirely in dialect, about the dismissal of a curate (assistant priest) in the local parish church (Preston Chronicle, 30 January 1875, 6). Similarly, in the late twentieth century in the US, Wahl-Jorgensen (2002, p.  187) found that the letters page was ‘an important part of The Bay Herald’s attempt to carve out a distinct local identity for itself’. While most of the newspaper’s content was shared with four other titles in the same group, each title had its own unique letters page. Most letters in Victorian local newspapers were complaints. ‘Lumbaginiensis’, moaning about uncomfortable trains (Preston Guardian, 12 October 1872, p. 6) claimed ‘that proud prerogative of the Englishman … to thrust his grievances into the columns of newspapers’, and grievance was indeed the default register, typically complaints about Preston corporation, or public nuisances. Jackson (1971, p. 153) identified ‘exasperation’ as the chief motive for writing to the local paper, while Pounds argues that complaint is central to the genre (Pounds 2006, p.  55). Content analysis of the Preston Herald (weekly in 1860, bi-weekly thereafter) during September and October every ten years from 1860 to 1900 found that negative letters about Preston outweighed positive ones by a ratio of four to one, compared to two to one in reported speech and a slight preference for the positive in leader columns and other forms of direct editorial address (25 positive, 18 negative: Hobbs 2018, p. 289). The correspondence column was the most likely part of the newspaper to include expressions of conflict (defined as two opposing viewpoints in the same article), containing 31 of 49 instances of conflict over Preston identity in the Preston Herald (Hobbs 2018, p. 294). Most letters were part of a dialogue, either with other correspondents or with newspaper content. The 298 letters to the Preston Herald sampled between 1860 and 1900 were categorised as either proactive (setting their own agenda, rather than responding to someone else’s) or reactive, with

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Table 8.4  Orientation of readers’ letters, Preston Herald 1860–1900 Proactive (setting own agenda) Reactive Response to news report, same publication Response to letter, same publication Response to news report, other publication Response to letter, other publication Response to leader column Response to advert Total

112 186 84 73 15 7 6 1 298

the second category sub-divided according to what they were responding to. Some 186 letters were reactive, 112 were proactive (Table 8.4; similar categories are used by Pedersen 2002 and Nord 2001). A small proportion of writers responded to letters and articles published in other newspapers, suggesting, to some extent, a unified local public sphere. But comparison between the topics of letters in rival newspapers suggests a splintering of this public sphere. Earlier in the period, in September and October 1860, 72 per cent of letters in the Liberal Preston Guardian and the Conservative Preston Herald were on the same topics (62 out of a total of 86). But by the last decade of the century, this common ground had reduced from 72 per cent to 29 per cent (58 out of 198 letters), in a comparison of letters published in the Herald, still Conservative, and the Liberal Lancashire Evening Post for September and October 1890 and 1900. The same story is told in a decline in the number of readers’ letters responding to other papers. In September and October 1860, the Preston Herald published nine responses to material in other papers, and in 1868, the Preston Chronicle and Preston Guardian each published ten letters in response to other papers. But by 1900, the Herald published only one such letter in the same two months, and the Evening Post only three. At the end of the period, there were two distinct readerships, members of politically differing interpretive communities, who probably bought a copy of their favourite paper, rather than reading it in a newsroom alongside rival titles (Hobbs 2018, pp. 361, 370, Table 10.1).

The Writers The readers who wrote probably had more in common with the publishers and journalists than with the readership as a whole, so we should be careful not to generalise too much from their evidence. Letter-writers were

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members of what Stanley Fish called ‘interpretive communities’ (Fish 1976) from which each local paper sprang, rather than the wider readership. The public sphere of the local newspaper letters page was overwhelmingly bourgeois and male, and the trend away from pen-names and towards signed letters actually made it more difficult for women and working-­class readers to take part. Writing a letter for publication, to be read by family, friends and neighbours, also required a certain level of confidence and literary ability—higher than that possessed by the curate in the Press News anecdote so he sub-contracted the task to the schoolmaster. Letter-writers were mainly middle-class. Most occupations and offices held by Preston letter-writers who volunteered such information show a consistent bias to the professions, followed by tradesmen (16 professionals, six tradesmen and only two working-class writers in the Preston Herald sample). Where writers used occupational pseudonyms, only a tiny minority were avowedly working-class, although they became more frequent when this lent authority to letters because of the topic, as in 1880, when a textile strike loomed. The six letters about the dispute all used working-­ class pseudonyms (‘A Cotton Operative’, ‘A Weaver’, ‘A Factory Lad’, ‘An Overlooker’) and there was a similar surge of working-class occupational pseudonyms during the 1890 campaign for a shop assistants’ half-day holiday, but these were exceptions. Peter Lucas (1971, p. 61) found that less than 10 per cent of letters to newspapers on the Furness peninsula in north Lancashire, between 1846 and 1880, could be identified as coming from working-class writers. It was generally unacceptable for women to write letters, in Preston’s papers at least. Women began to take a more active part in the public life of Preston during this period, with single women gaining the municipal franchise in 1869, the right to stand for the Board of Guardians from 1875, and the right to vote for and serve on parish, urban and rural district councils in 1894, but this broadening public sphere was not reflected in local correspondence columns (Hollis 1987, pp. 207, 357, 392). Only 12 out of some 900 letters in the sample purported to be from women, and only three carried a woman’s full name (two were writers of circular charity appeals, Lancashire Evening Post, 24 October 1900; Preston Herald, 3 September 1870), the third was the sister of a local landowner (Preston Chronicle, 18 May 1878). Seven letters used female pseudonyms, but only four appear genuine—those from ‘A Wife And A Liberal’, ‘A Housekeeper’, ‘Lucretia Nettle’ and ‘A Dressmaker’, the first and third of these calling for women to have the vote (Preston Guardian, 1 June 1867,

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5 October 1867; Preston Herald, 24 September 1867; Lancashire Evening Post, 27 October 1890). The other three—from Mary Ann, Polly, and Mariana—were probably written by men, judging by the subject matter. ‘Mariana’, meaning ‘Star of the Sea’, was the signature on a letter about a Fleetwood boat accident (Preston Chronicle, 22 June 1878); the other two letters, from ‘Mary Ann’ (Preston Chronicle, 12 September 1868) and ‘Polly’ (Preston Guardian, 24 October 1868) both appear to be using a female persona for comic effect. Two other writers identified themselves as mothers in their letters, but not in their initials (EE and CE), in a debate about Preston’s high infant mortality figures (Lancashire Evening Post, 23 and 25 October 1890). However, what was published may not reflect what was submitted—the Ulverston Advertiser reported ‘a deluge of letters from Miss A or Miss B requesting a few words’ in support of women’s suffrage in 1872, but none of them were published (Lucas 2002, p. 293). Mary Smith of Carlisle (1822–1889), an impoverished schoolteacher, governess, and frustrated poet, is an unusual but instructive example of a woman of the ‘lower orders’ who did write letters to local newspapers, using a wide vocabulary of pseudonyms. The daughter of a shoemaker and a cook, she was nevertheless well educated, served as a governess to Nonconformist families and ran a succession of schools. She became part of national networks of Nonconformist preachers and radical journalists, which gave her a high level of cultural capital. She read books, periodicals and newspapers avidly, and had poetry, news reports, feature articles and letters published in national and local periodicals, and in local newspapers. This made her part of the same discursive community as the newspaper publishers and editors, and probably gave her confidence and an understanding of how to get published. In the early 1850s, she ‘wrote letters to the newspapers, advocating anti-capital punishment views’ in protest at a public execution in Carlisle (Smith 1892, p.  198). Inspired by Lydia Becker, she formed a local women’s suffrage society in the 1860s and ‘wrote whenever I could in favour of the Married Women’s Property Bill, and against that disgrace to humanity, the “C.  D. Acts”’ [Contagious Diseases Acts, which allowed the arrest and compulsory medical examination of women suspected of prostitution]. She sometimes used her initials for ‘letters and other papers’ but ‘in writing on politics, which I often did, I used some other initial, “Z” very often, or other signature. I considered that if men knew who the writer was, they would say, “What does a woman know about politics?”’ (Smith 1892, pp.  258, 259). Without Smith’s memoir, we would not know that a woman had written these letters, rais-

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ing doubts over the historian’s ability to assess the proportion of anonymous and pseudonymous letters written by women and other less powerful groups. Higher-status letter-writers did not face the barriers encountered by women and working-class writers. Indeed, editors sometimes collaborated with them, treating them like paid contributors rather than members of the public, thus showing again that readers’ letters were a journalistic category. Preston Guardian publisher George Toulmin enabled fellow Liberal Edward Ambler (a printer) to publish a series of letters in support of a prospective Parliamentary candidate (Ambler 1864), and one Preston Chronicle correspondent, Edward Foster (a chemist), was able to correct a proof of his letter (3 September 1864). Wahl-Jorgensen (2007, pp. 201– 204) found that some modern-day newspapers invited or commissioned local elites to write letters, to combat the perceived ‘insanity’ of the letters section.

Pseudonyms as Rhetorical Devices Letter-writers’ use of pseudonyms declined rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century (Fig.  8.1), cutting off a rhetorical resource and possibly reducing the opportunities for women and working-class letter-­

% of pseudonymous letters

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1860

1870

1880

1890

1900

Fig. 8.1  Percentage of pseudonymous letters to Preston Herald, 1860–1900 (n = 230)

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writers, who had previously been judged on the merits of their letters rather than their class or gender. Correspondence in the Preston Herald was fairly typical, with 60 per cent of letters pseudonymous in 1860, rising to a peak in 1880, when 80 per cent were signed with pseudonyms, before declining rapidly to around 10 per cent by 1900 (Fig. 8.1). It is harder to explain the growth of the pseudonym in the 1860s and 1870s than its decline after 1880, which follows the trend in metropolitan journalism from anonymous to signed journalism (Liddle 1997). Many writers used multiple pseudonyms. George Salisbury, an auctioneer in Blackburn, Lancashire, had letters published in newspapers in Blackburn, Preston, and Bury, using pen-names including ‘John Smith’, ‘Fan Smith’, ‘Cottonicus’, ‘Jeremiah Jinks’ and ‘Betsy Jinks’ (Hull 1902). His pseudonyms crossed gender boundaries, but readers probably understood the rules of the genre, and did not necessarily believe that the writer signing as ‘Betsy Jinks’ was a woman. Mary Smith of Carlisle also used various assumed identities, as when some working men asked her to write on behalf of their candidate in an election. One pen-name was ‘Burns Redivivus’, parodying popular Scotch ballads (Smith 1892, p. 260). Most pseudonyms were related to the topic of the letter, influencing trends in choice of pseudonym, and differences between papers. They were carefully chosen as a rhetorical device, enabling writers to continue their argument into the signature, and end on a pithy high note. When compiled as a list (see Supplementary Tables 1 and 2), these pseudonyms become found poetry, so dense are they in meaning, in linguistic playfulness and creativity. In a few terse words, they reveal the concerns, divisions, obsessions and humour of provincial Victorian society. Only a small minority were completely anonymous to other readers, such as those signing their letters ‘XYZ’, and yet fewer were unknown to the editor, who insisted that correspondents supply their real names, as bona fides. Letter-writers often chose a pseudonym that would justify to other readers (and perhaps to the editor) why their correspondence deserved to be published. Similarly, Pedersen (2004) believes that women’s pen-names in early twentieth-century Aberdeen newspapers were used to ‘construct a civic identity’, to justify the women writers’ intrusion into the public sphere. About half of the 300 or so pseudonyms sampled from correspondence columns in Preston’s four main papers claimed, or pleaded, entitlement to speak publicly on the topic in question, suggesting that publication was seen as something to be earned or granted, a privilege not a right. Pseudonyms pleaded for this privilege either on the basis of occupation

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(‘A Tradesman’, ‘An Operative’), position (‘A Sunday School Teacher’, ‘A Tenant’) or citizenship and membership (‘A Large Ratepayer’, ‘One Of The Parishioners’), often appealing to length of residence or membership, as in ‘a parishioner of thirty years’ standing’. A subset of these claims to citizenship was explicitly Preston-related names, such as ‘A Prestonian’. Surprisingly, this type of pseudonym was also used in the new town of Barrow as early as 1863 (‘Barrowite’ and ‘Barrovian’; e.g. Lucas 1971).

Conclusions This chapter has argued that letters to the editor in Victorian English local newspapers were a highly mediated genre of journalism, rather than a simple open forum. Selection, or rather self-selection and self-censorship, began even before letters were written, as many readers, rightly or wrongly, believed they lacked the cultural capital, or the literacy, to successfully write a letter to the local paper—the Carlisle working men and the curate in the Press News anecdote at the start of this chapter all commissioned a schoolteacher as their ghost-writer. Genres have their own rules, followed by journalists and letter-writers, and understood by readers, for example, that the main purpose of a letter was complaint. We cannot trust any one letter as evidence, unless we know its provenance from other sources, because some letters were written by journalists or ghost-writers. However, made-up letters only work if they tap into something genuine, and most ‘readers’ letters’ probably were written by readers. This means that we can use content analysis to assess patterns and trends, such as the topics of letters, the splintering of local public spheres or the decline in anonymity. The rules of the genre were also historically and geographically specific— they varied between newspapers (and possibly between regions) and changed over time. Letters to the editor were a distinct type of journalism, and the rich use of pseudonyms reminds us of their performativity, like modern social media (Cover 2012). And like social media, or Victorian fiction, they give us a distinctive insight into a society’s concerns.

References Ambler, E. (1864). Letters to George Melly, 23 and 30 March 1864. George Melly Collection, Liverpool Archives. 920 MEL 13 Vol. IX, 1990 and 1991. Buckley, C. (1987). The Search for ‘a Really Smart Sheet’: The Conservative Evening Newspaper Project in Edwardian Manchester. Manchester Region History Review, 1, 21–28.

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Carrington, F. (1855). Country Newspapers and Their Editors. New Monthly Magazine, 105(418), 142–152. Collins, W.] (1858). The Unknown Public. Household Words, 18(21 August), 217–222. Cover, R. (2012). Performing and Undoing Identity Online: Social Networking, Identity Theories and the Incompatibility of Online Profiles and Friendship Regimes. Convergence, 18(2), 177–193. Denvir, J. (1972). The Life Story of an Old Rebel. Shannon: Irish University Press. Eliot, S. (1994). Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800–1919. London: Bibliographical Society. Ericson, R. V., Baranek, P. M., & Chan, J. B. L. (1989). Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fish, S. E. (1976). Interpreting the Variorum. Critical Inquiry, 2(3), 465–485. Gregory, A. T. (1932). Recollections of a Country Editor. Tiverton Gazette. Gregory, L., & Hutchins, B. (2004). Everyday Editorial Practices and the Public Sphere: Analysing the Letters to the Editor Page of a Regional Newspaper. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 112(1), 186–200. Hobbs, A. (2018). A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900. Cambridge: Open Book. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0152. Hollis, P. (1987). Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government 1865–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holt, R. (1989). Sport and the British: A Modern History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hood, J. B. (1978). The Origin and Development of the Newsroom and Reading Room from 1650 to Date, with Some Consideration of Their Role in the Social History of the Period. Library Association. Hull, G. (1902). The Poets and Poetry of Blackburn. Blackburn: G & J Toulmin. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20161023203937/http:// gerald-massey.org.uk/hull/b_blackburn_poets.htm Hunt, W. (1887). Then and Now: Or, Fifty Years of Newspaper Work, with an Appendix. Hull, London: Hamilton, Adams & Co. Retrieved from http:// archive.org/details/thenandnoworfif00huntgoog. Jackson, I. (1971). The Provincial Press and the Community. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Liddle, D. (1997). Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors: Anonymity and Mid-Victorian Theories of Journalism. Victorian Studies, 41(1), 31–68. Liddle, D. (2009). The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Lobato, R., Thomas, J., & Hunter, D. (2011). Histories of User-Generated Content: Between Formal and Informal Media Economies. International Journal of Communication, 5(May), 899–914.

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London, Provincial, and Colonial Press News. (1871). How to Improve a Country Business; or, Hints to a Young Beginner. 16 January 1871. Lucas, P.  J. (1971). The First Furness Newspapers: The History of the Furness Press from 1846 to c. 1880. M.Litt, University of Lancaster. Lucas, P.  J. (2002). The Regional Roots of Feminism: A Victorian Woman Newspaper Owner. Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, Series, 3(2), 277–300. Mackie, J. B. (1894). Modern Journalism, a Handbook of Instruction and Counsel for the Young Journalist. London: Crosby, Lockwood and Son. Mussell, J. (2007). Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types. Aldershot: Ashgate. Nord, D.  P. (2001). Reading the Newspaper: Strategies and Politics of Reader Response, Chicago, 1912–1917. In Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (pp. 246–277). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. North, J. (2003). The Significance of This Reference Tool. Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals. Retrieved from http://www.victorianperiodicals.com/series2/purchaseinformation.asp. Pedersen, S. (2002). Within Their Sphere? Women Correspondents to Aberdeen Daily Newspapers 1900–1914. Northern Scotland, 22, 159–166. Pedersen, S. (2004). What’s in a Name? The Revealing Use of Noms de Plume in Women’s Correspondence to Daily Newspapers in Edwardian Scotland. Media History, 10(3), 175–185. Pounds, G. (2006). Democratic Participation and Letters to the Editor in Britain and Italy. Discourse and Society, 17(1), 29–64. Raeymaeckers, K. (2016, July). Letters to the Editor: A Feedback Opportunity Turned into a Marketing Tool: An Account of Selection and Editing Practices in the Flemish Daily Press. European Journal of Communication. https://doi. org/10.1177/0267323105052298. Scott, J. W. R. (1951). The Day Before Yesterday: Memories of an Uneducated Man. London: Methuen. Smith, M. (1892). The Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist, a Fragment of a Life (Volume 1); With Letters from Jane Welsh Carlyle and Thomas Carlyle. Carlisle: Wordsworth Press. Retrieved from http://archive.org/details/autobiographyma00smitgoog. Sommerville, C. J. (1996). The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strathern, M. (2003). Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge. Oxon: Sean Kingston Publishing. Retrieved from https://epdf.tips/commons-and-borderlands-working-papers-on-interdisciplinarity-accountibility-and946a5df72aa476fc386761726501ef7018057.html.

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Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2002). The Construction of the Public in Letters to the Editor: Deliberative Democracy and the Idiom of Insanity. Journalism, 3(2), 183–204. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2007). Journalists and the Public: Newsroom Culture, Letters to the Editor, and Democracy. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Warren, L. (2000). ‘Women in Conference’: Reading the Correspondence Columns in ‘Woman’ 1890–1910. In L. Brake, B. Bell, & D. Finkelstein (Eds.), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Whates, H.  R. G. (1957). The Birmingham Post, 1857–1957. A Centenary Retrospect. Birmingham: Birmingham Post & Mail.

CHAPTER 9

The Possibilities and Limits of “Open Journalism”: Journalist Engagement Below the Line at the Guardian 2006–2017 Todd Graham, Daniel Jackson, and Scott Wright

Introduction Deliberative democracy and public sphere theory maintain that a core function of journalism is to act as both a platform and facilitator of public debate. In an age of information abundance, the job of the press is to encourage public debate in order to foster the kinds of information that are a product of rational discussion in open and free public forums. The press should act as an extension of public discussion by transferring and amplifying the rational-critical debate of private people (Habermas 1989,

T. Graham University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] D. Jackson (*) Bournemouth University, Poole, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Wright University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 A. Cavanagh, J. Steel (eds.), Letters to the Editor, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26480-2_9

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p. 188). Dating as far back as colonial America (Hart 1970), the letters-­ to-­the-editor section for many years was one of the few forums for public debate open to regular citizens. Thus, in the past, the letters-to-the-editor section has represented one of the central institutions of the public sphere. Journalists and editors too have viewed letters to the editor as an important democratic forum for public debate, placing discussion and deliberation at the heart of democracy (Wahl-Jorgensen 2001, 2002a). However, research has shown that access to letters to the editor by regular citizens has been restricted, privileging particular types of letters, due to editors/ journalists’ biases resulting from newsroom rules and procedures, and journalism practice and culture more broadly (see, e.g., Kapoor 1995; Lemert and Larkin 1979; Wahl-Jorgensen 2001). Wahl-Jorgensen’s (2002c) study, for example, found that editors have developed four rules for selecting letters: “the rules of relevance, entertainment, brevity, and authority”. Such rules “determine what kind of debate occurs on the letters pages” (p. 70). Research too has found that because letter writers are not representative of the general public—they tend to be white, male, older, and better educated—their views are not an accurate reflection of public opinion (see, e.g., Buell 1975; Grey and Brown 1970). That said, over the years, letters to the editor have been popular news sections among readership (Hynds 1994; Pritchard and Berkowitz 1979), and news organizations have viewed them as both revenue boosters and community builders (Wahl-Jorgensen 2002a). Over the past two decades with the rise of digital media, newspapers across Western democracies have been increasingly adopting new forms of online participatory journalism. During this time, “below the line” comment spaces have grown to be one of the most popular forms of user-­ generated content. Comment spaces are thought to perform a multitude of functions. However, much has been made about their potential as spaces for public debate that could act as a new form of the public sphere where journalists can hear from, and directly engage with, their readers (Graham 2013; Graham and Wright 2015). Reader comment spaces offer a more deliberative alternative to letter-to-the-editor sections, as they break down some of the barriers to access and participation discussed above. First, comment spaces allow readers to bypass media gatekeepers who have in the past filtered opinions. For the most part, the editorial processes developed for selecting letters are not at work in reader comment sections. Newspapers do moderate reader comments, typically for abusive language, but each comment is not put under the same scrutiny as letters-to-the-­

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editor. This is because, unlike letters-to-the-editor sections, space is not an issue with regard to publishing reader comments. Digital media allows for unlimited space at little cost unlike the pages of a newspaper. Thus, the number and length of contributions is no longer a barrier to publication. Second, though some newspapers have recently moved their comment sections to Facebook, comment spaces tend to allow for anonymous contributions, making it easier and less threatening for some to participate. Finally, reader comment sections potentially open up journalism and allow journalists to engage directly with their readers. This is part of a broader theoretical and empirical literature assessing whether the internet is facilitating a shift towards dialogical (Deuze 2003), participatory (Domingo et  al. 2008) or reciprocal journalism (Lewis et  al. 2014), and it is here where this chapter hopes to contribute to our understanding of reader comment sections. Debates about the extent and impact of journalistic interaction persist, particularly with regard to reader comments. Survey and interview research has suggested that some journalists do read, and sometimes engage in, comment sections (Garden 2016; Graham and Wright 2015; Nielsen 2014; Santana 2010). However, no study has systematically analysed how journalists actually engage in comment spaces; what factors shape such engagement; and how this has evolved over time. In this chapter, we begin to fill in these gaps by investigating how Guardian journalists behave below the line. The Guardian is an interesting case as it was an early adopter and has been a pioneer in reader comment sections through its Open Journalism project (Rusbridger 2012). Our research, which draws upon a multi-method approach and longitudinal research dataset, included a manual content analysis of all comments made (2006–2017) by 26 journalists (n = 5448) and 18 semi-structured interviews conducted in two phases (13 in 2012 and 5 repeated in 2017– 2018). Our chapter sheds light on how journalists behave below the line and what this might mean for journalism practice in the digital age.

Participatory Journalism and Reader Comment Sections Reader comment sections are inexorably tied to broader debates around audience participation in the news. Aided by technological advances there are myriad ways for audiences to participate in the production and dis-

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semination of news. But the extent to which this transforms the relationship between audiences and journalists to the benefit of journalism’s normative roles is an issue of ongoing debate. Based on a genealogical analysis of 119 journal articles on participatory journalism between 1995– 2011, Borger et al. (2013) outline four normative dimensions of how participatory journalism is constructed in the field: “enthusiasm about new democratic opportunities”, “disappointment with professional journalism’s obduracy”, “disappointment with economic motives to facilitate participatory journalism”, and “disappointment with news users’ passivity”. The literature on reader comments is similarly marked by hype and potential (Wright 2012), and often framed within the reinvigoration of democratic practices (e.g., Pavlik 2001; Gillmor 2004)—often leading to disappointment with the practice (e.g., Domingo 2008a). Empirical studies have found that while news organizations now offer an array of opportunities for the public to participate in the news, journalists often remain reluctant to engage below the line (e.g., Domingo 2008a; Martin 2015; Singer et al. 2011), even though they might consider it normatively desirable (e.g., Domingo et al. 2008; Ihlebæk and Krumsvik 2015). Journalistic professional norms and conceptions of authority and expertise largely drive resistance to “meaningful” participation (Domingo 2008a; Nielsen 2014). Journalists often pursue “minimalist” and instrumental manifestations of participation, often driven by commercial imperatives that commodify their audiences (Witschge 2013). A closer look at the empirical findings of previous research offers a more nuanced picture than this, however, with different newsrooms adopting different practices. For example, Santana (2010) reports that 69% of US journalists often or sometimes read online comments, while Nielsen’s (2014) survey of 583 US journalists found that 36% read them frequently or always. Similarly, when it comes to interacting with readers below the line, one study of US news blogs found that 80% of journalists (52 of 65) never replied at all, and of those that did, they were barely replying (Dailey et al. 2008). In contrast, Garden’s (2016, pp. 338–339) analysis of political news blogs on Australian mainstream media found that some journalists were extremely active in responding to comments, making up to 18% of all the comments. Beyond journalistic norms, there is a range of factors that limit journalist participation in comment sections. First, the nature of comments and commenters can be a significant barrier. Commenters are atypical—the

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vocal minority: 20% of online news consumers report having made a comment on a website, and 25% have commented on social media (Newman and Levy 2014, p.  73), with a significant male gender bias and a small number of dominant posters (Martin 2015; Pierson 2015) or super-­ participants (Graham and Wright 2014, 2015). Given they are atypical, should journalists bother to engage? A second potential barrier is the tone of debate and abuse of journalists. Numerous studies have found that online comments are uncivil (Erjavec and Kovačič 2012; Santana 2014). For example, Coe et al.’s (2014) study on one local US newspaper found that one in five comments were uncivil, with name-calling prevalent. There have also been significant issues with trolling and harassment, often towards journalists (Gardiner et al. 2016; Binns 2012; Hare 2014). This has led journalists to stop participating or change how they participate (Chen et al. 2018; Gardiner 2018). A smaller group of studies have found that some comment sections—including the Guardian—are of a reasonably high deliberative quality (Graham and Wright 2015; Ruiz et  al. 2011), and this might facilitate more engagement by journalists. Despite a growing interest in reader comment sections, research remains in its infancy and many questions still remain. Most studies that examine journalism practice and reader comments use surveys or interviews. The one study to analyse the actual practices of journalists below the line was based on basic frequency counts (Garden 2016). No study has yet applied meaningful content analysis to how journalists actually comment below the line.

Research Focus, Design, and Method This chapter aims to extend the analytical depth of the field by investigating how Guardian journalists behave below the line and seek to answer four research questions: RQ1: How often do journalists post comments/participate below the line? RQ2: How are their comments distributed over time? RQ3: Where do they post comments (e.g., news section, genre)? RQ4: How do they behave below the line; what functions do their comments serve?

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To achieve this, we draw upon a multi-method approach and longitudinal research dataset. Specifically, this chapter reports the findings of a manual content analysis of all the comments made by 26 Guardian journalists from 2006 to 2017 (N = 5448), which is supplemented by 18 semi-­ structured interviews with the journalists conducted in two phases (13 in 2012 and 5 were repeated in 2017–2018). The 26 journalists are based on an earlier study (Graham and Wright 2015) that analysed the nature of reader comments, along with the perceptions of and their use by Guardian journalists assigned to the environment beat during the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. During the 12 years of this study, the journalists have covered a number of beats including the environment, politics, science, business, money, and health, which makes it more representative than if all were from a single beat. Five of the journalists were female, though it was not possible to interview any of them. Combined, our 26 journalists have written a total of 56,618 articles from 2006 through 2017 (M = 2177; Mdn = 1429; SD = 2554) with 44% of these articles opened to reader comments (N  =  24,929). These articles received a total of 8,262,305 comments. For the content analysis, we coded all the comments made by our 26 journalists from when comment sections were introduced at the Guardian in 2006 through 2017. The unit of analysis was the comment, and the context unit of analysis was the article and comment thread in which the comment was made. First, we coded what can broadly be described as context variables: the genre of the article (e.g., news article, feature, blog post); the section in which the article was placed (e.g., environment, politics, UK); and whether the comment occurred under an article they had authored or was under another journalist’s article. Next, we coded for reciprocity: is the journalist’s comment a direct reply to another commenter?1 Finally, we coded for the dominant function of the comment. Building on functions of communicative behaviour identified from public figures (i.e., politicians and journalists) on digital platforms in previous literature (see Brems et  al. 2017; Graham et  al. 2016) alongside those identified in the online deliberation literature (see, e.g., Graham 2015; Graham and Wright 2015), we developed 13 comment functions, which were tested through a pilot study. In those cases where a comment 1  The Guardian only introduced threaded comments in recent years and focusing on threading is often inaccurate as it does not always capture real replies. Thus, we coded all comments in context by reading the comments and determining if they were a reply.

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contained multiple functions, coders were trained to use a set of rules and procedures for identifying the dominant function. All data was coded by the three authors and met satisfactory standards of inter-coder agreement. The semi-structured interviews were conducted by Skype or phone and lasted between 20 and 60 minutes. They explored why journalists engaged (or not) below the line, their experiences engaging below the line, as well as institutional support and rewards for such engagement.2

Findings In this section, our findings are divided into three parts based on the RQs outlined above. We use the findings from the interviews to supplement the content analysis; the interview data helps us understand and explain the commenting behaviour identified by the content analysis. In order to provide more depth to the analysis presented below, the quantitative findings from the content analysis will be supplemented by qualitative examples to demonstrate key tendencies among journalists. Volume and Frequency of Commenting Below the Line The first two research questions (RQ1 and RQ2) examined the volume and frequency of commenting by journalists. First, the 26 journalists were responsible for 5448 comments posted under 2594 articles. The average number of comments posted was 209.54 (Mdn = 24.00; SD = 405.13). As the standard deviation suggests, there was significant variability in the ­frequency of commenting. In Table 9.1, we break this down by providing an overview of the rate and distribution of commenting. As indicated, there were four journalists who posted no comments while 73% of journalists accounted for only 7.3% of the total comments made. Put differently, our data shows that a small group of journalists were responsible for posting most of the comments with seven journalists accounting for more than 92% of the comments made. When we look at the distribution of comments over time (Fig. 9.1), we find that commenting peaked and plateaued between 2010–2013, representing nearly two-thirds (64.1%) of the total comments made by our journalists. In 2014, 2015, and again in 2017, there were sharp decreases. 2  For the 2017–2018 interviews, we also explored how and why below the line practices have changed, but this is not the core focus of this chapter.

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Table 9.1  Rate and distribution of comments Journalists (N = 26) Comments

Frequency

0 1–9 10–49 50–99 100–500 >500 Total

4 5 7 3 4 3 26

% 15.4 19.2 26.9 11.5 15.4 11.5 100.0

Comments (N = 5448) Cumulative %

Frequency

15.4 34.6 61.5 73.0 88.5 100.0

0 25 170 201 1276 3776 5448

% 0.0 0.5 3.1 3.7 23.4 69.3 100.0

Cumulative % 0.0 0.5 3.6 7.3 30.7 100.0

Fig. 9.1  Frequency of comments posted by journalists’ per year (2006–2017)

The reasons for this emerge from the interview data and are discussed at length in our other work (Wright et al. 2019) but can be summarized as follows. First, the change in the editor (from Alan Rusbridger to Katharine Viner in 2015) led to a change in approach towards reader comments, with more attention to the abuse journalists routinely experienced online. Second, from a pragmatic standpoint, journalists complained about the sheer scale and popularity of reader comments, which meant that it was very hard for them to follow and lead the discussion in a meaningful way. At the same time, some journalists told us how the tone of comments had

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40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

155

36.5 28

24.7

3.5

2.5

1.4

1.2

0.8

0.7

0.6

Fig. 9.2  Where was the comment posted? News section (%)

deteriorated and was now increasingly polarized and abusive, and this took an emotional toll on them. As a result, many journalists disengaged from comments and shifted their audience-engagement energies towards Twitter, which was considered more useful. Where Are Journalists Commenting Below the Line? Next, we investigated where journalists posted their comments (RQ3). We begin first by looking at which news sections were popular among journalists. Journalists posted two or more comments across 14 different news sections. However, as Fig. 9.2 shows, a bulk of commenting took place in the environment, UK, and opinion news sections, accounting for 89.2% of comments.3 This is a logic of our original sample, which focused on the environment section. It is also worth noting that journalists were much more likely to comment under opinion pieces (especially Comment is Free) rather than news stories. Our interview data suggests the opinion section is seen by journalists as a place for public debate, a place where they can express their opinions and open themselves up for discussion. As

3  In Fig. 9.2, note that the money, business, travel, and technology sections were collapsed together under the other section. Our news section codes are based on the organizing and labelling done by the Guardian. We should note that over the years the Guardian has made slight changes to the number and naming of news sections. Sections also have been merged while, more recently, they have been arranged into subsections within four broader main sections. Our presentation of the findings here is based on how the sections were organized during the main coding phase, which took place during the summer/autumn of 2016.

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60 50

49.1

40 30

23.4

20

16

10 0

6.3 Blog/Column

CiF/Opinion

News Article/Feature

Q&A

3.7 Reader input

1.5 Other

Fig. 9.3  Where was the comment posted? Genre (%)

we will discuss in more detail below, arguing and debating was particularly prominent among journalists in the opinion section. We also looked at the genre of articles where journalists participated below the line. The genre is an important characteristic of the form of news as it structures the news content and indicates to the reader what can be expected of an article (see Broersma 2010). As Fig. 9.3 reveals, blog posts and column pieces accounted for nearly half (49.1%) of all comments made by journalists. This was especially true during the peak period (2010–2013); more than a third (36.8%) of all comments were posted under blogs and columns during this time. This can partly be attributed to the fact that the seven most active posters (as described above) were often in more editorial roles or combined news and commentary. Comment is Free (CiF) articles accounted for nearly a quarter (23.4%) of comments made by journalists. The findings here suggest that journalists were more willing to engage in genres where the structure of news discourse is driven by the expression of opinions and commentary; nearly three-quarters (72.5%) of comments were posted under blogs, columns, CiF articles, or opinions pieces. Finally, we analysed whether journalists were commenting on their own articles, or under someone else’s piece. One might assume that most comments would be under their own articles, given time and other pressures. Indeed, 83.5% of comments were under their own articles. When we look at the comments posted under another journalist’s article (16.5%), we find that the majority of this was editorial staff responding to comments on behalf of journalists (particularly under blog and column pieces) or ­journalists expressing their opinions and engaging in public debate (especially under CiF/opinion articles).

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22.4 18.2 14.3

12.9

12.3 5.2

3.9

3.5

2.8

2.6

0

0.7

0.7

0.4

Fig. 9.4  What is the dominant function of the comment? (%)

How Do Journalists Behave Below the Line? We looked next at how journalists behaved below the line (RQ4). First, we coded for reciprocity: to what extent are journalists interacting with the audience via direct replies to commenters as opposed to broadcast-­ forms of communication? In the case of our 26 Guardian journalists, 84.8% of all comments were coded as direct replies, indicating the dominance of reciprocity and dialogic commenting behaviours. Moreover, as will be discussed under the function category below, much of the behaviour exhibited by journalists here required them to actually have read reader comments in order to engage in a dialogic exchange with them. Finally, we analysed the dominant function of each comment made by journalists. That is, what do journalists say/do when they comment? As Fig. 9.4 shows, there was a diverse range of activities that journalists were undertaking in comment sections, ranging from quick, low-cost acknowledgements (e.g., “Very many thanks, such nice words have made my evening!”) to higher threshold activities requiring cognitive investment such as arguing and debating. Arguing and debating was narrowly the most common behaviour, accounting for nearly a quarter of all comments (22.4%). It refers to the act of defending one’s own claim (or claims made by sources in the article) or challenging opposing claims made by other commenters. As indicated above, this was most common under opinion-based articles (83.7%). Such articles often ignited heated debates, which journalists then engaged in. In such an atmosphere, journalists retained a role of authority source, typically defending their position, and adding further analysis and information

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to their argument. At times, journalists were faced with quite aggressive, ad hominem attacks. As a result, journalists also took on more adversarial and aggressive behaviours, as the example below shows4: Oh dear, you really do seem determined to show you know nothing about the subject you’ve blundered into. @Anonymized—if by that you mean natural selection leading to speciation (I suspect though that you have no idea what you mean)—generally takes place over millions of years. […] So yes, we are arguing about science, but because you know sod all about it, you haven’t grasped even that. You do need to read Sokal’s satirical paper, and his marvellous book Impostures Intellectuelles. They perfectly describe the mess you’ve got yourself into.

However, not all arguing and debating was as adversarial and aggressive. It seems that journalists responded to the spirit of audience comments, the atmosphere of the debate. Journalists also noted in the interviews that the tone of the debate would markedly improve if they would participate below the line. One thing I have noticed that does improve the tone of comments markedly is if you get involved. So, if someone says something to you—the writer—in terms of the criticism, the writer goes in and says something, corrects something, accepts it or makes a comment—but does so in a calm and collected way. Generally speaking, that can set the tone for the following comments quite well—people are less likely it seems to want to shout at you if you’re not a faceless person. (Guardian journalist, Environment section)

However, not all journalists felt comfortable engaging in arguing and debating. Our interview data shows that a handful of journalists took a more normative view of journalist engagement, preferring more traditional journalistic behaviours such as analysis and interpretation of events and providing background and contextual information, as one journalist explains: My philosophy is I will engage if it feels like I can add some facts—if it’s like a continuation of the journalism—if I can offer some facts from my notepad or my interviews or whatever, that I didn’t get in the piece for reasons of word count or trying to be succinct and not going off on tangents … I don’t think they want my opinion. (Guardian journalist, Environment section) 4  We removed all the names of the commenters and replaced them with the name “@ anonymized”.

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As Fig. 9.4 shows, Q&A and additional information and analysis and interpretation represented 18.2% and 14.3% of journalists’ comments. Q&A and additional information included comments where journalists provided information (background and contextual information, additional sources, etc.): Some readers have asked to see the agenda of the two-day “training course” put on by Shell for Whitehall civil servants. The article above contains a link at the beginning of the second paragraph to the. Zip file on the Decc website, which contains the relevant files. But here’s the link again… http:// www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc-foi/decc-corporate-information/221121133-training-courses-provided-by-energy-compan.zip You will see that over the two-day course held this year 17 consecutive presentations were made by senior Shell staff without any input from anyone outside Shell, or not affiliated to the company. As Decc confirmed, Shell is the only company or organization providing such “training” to civil servants.

Q&A and additional information also included more interactive behaviours such as answering (specific) questions from and helping and giving advice to commenters. Another key function is where journalists use reader comment sections to publicly reflect upon and improve their journalism. Three connected function codes directly address this point and together accounted for 28% of all comments: correction/clarification/retraction (12.3%), journalism practice (12.9%), and requesting reader input (2.8%). Corrections, clarifications, and retractions, for us, mirror one of the historic functions of letters to the editor, where the eagle-eyed reader corrects the newspaper on a matter of fact. With digital news, of course, this process is both instantaneous and personalized (through the journalists rather than the editor), as the following example illustrates: Hi all I’ve come late to this thread—only just spotted it. I’ve amended the article to fix two errors (thanks to you all for pointing them out). 1. the laboratory is in Surrey, not Kent. 2. the figures for energy use should have been in kilowatt hours (kWh) not kilowatts (kW).

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Any further questions, please let me know.

The number of corrections/clarifications/retractions tells us something about the process of digital news itself, which is marked by the increased speed with which news and information is transmitted (Domingo 2008b), associated concerns with the accuracy and quality of the information (Karlsson 2011; Usher 2014) (where some would lament the demise of the sub-editor), but greater opportunities for accountability in journalism, through the participation of news consumers (Joseph 2011). The affordances of the digital news platform also facilitate reader input (2.8% of comments). On multiple occasions, particularly within environmental or science beats, experts (often scientists, academics, or policy-­ makers) appeared below the line to offer further (or contrary) evidence to that of the journalist. Here, journalists would typically ask them for further information and/or sources: @Anonymized great idea, we were just talking about the same thing on the desk here. Do you know any academics or other people who are looking at this? We are currently looking for people, and are specifically thinking about contrails, noise pollution and air pollution.

Particularly in the environment section, engaging below the line was part of the journalism itself. That is, the page/story was handed over to the readers themselves via Q&A with experts and articles asking readers what stories journalists should cover. But more than gaining reader input on the current story, we also see evidence of journalists networking with potential news sources below the line, in order to develop future stories: @anonymized Thanks for your updates. I’m keen to talk to you, perhaps you could email me direct … In the meantime you offered to answer some question so here are a few. The International Crisis Group described reports of soldiers being shot for disobeying orders to shoot protesters as “implausible”. But you said on Monday that your family knows of two army defectors, who saw colleagues shot for refusing to shoot protesters. So can you provide more details? Where were they and what happened to the defectors?

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Do you have more details on the number of Alawites joining the opposition in Homs. Why are there such large demonstrations in Hama and Deir Ezzor compared to other cities?

A final function of this cluster is journalism practice (12.9%). Much of the audience debate below the line is either implicitly or explicitly about journalism practice—such as accusing journalists of bias, questioning what makes the story newsworthy, or challenging the journalists’ argument in an opinion piece. Below the line, then, journalists take on such challenges and talk about their journalism practice. Sometimes this is in quite adversarial terms, where the journalist is defending their practice, as this example illustrates: @anonymized and @anonymized, I have answered the Gina story several times. It was all over within a day. I had three reputable sources, all of whom were apparently taken in. Speed was of the essence and, as the facts—or alleged facts—emerged, the postings were suitably amended. The warnings were taken to heart, not least by the sources themselves. I was not involved in ruining anyone’s reputation. It was not a libellous falsehood. It was not a great journalistic error, as you both wish to portray it.

Other times, journalists (such as this example from a political columnist) seem to display genuine reflection in their interaction with readers: Interesting point from @anonymized about gap between theory and practice in Oz.; Just wanted to say that the phenomenal argument both here on the post, in correspondence and on twitter has certainly raised some points I had not thought of before, and when I have a quiet moment I will either do a fresh post or append an extra bit to the original…

For some journalists, then, there is a clear value in engaging below the line for the development of their journalism practice. This was a theme that ran through the interviews too: I’ve always argued that I think it’s been a tremendously positive thing for journalism per se, not just at the Guardian but generally … Cause I really felt that it rather brutally dragged journalists out of the ivory tower and … it put everyone on a levelized footing, rather than having this position where there was a great distance between the journalists and the reader. And cer-

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tainly in real time, and in a one to one, on the same level basis, you were having sometimes quite brutal exchanges with readers. Which I personally think it really lifted the game or made journalists really sit up and think, “I’ve really gotta really, really think through everything I say now.” I can’t be complacent or assume that readers know what I’m saying, in fact many readers know more than what I do about a particular subject. I think it did lift the game, even though it was a quite bruising experience in the first few years of it. (Guardian journalist, Environment section)

Though it is important to add that this was not a universal sentiment. But even with some sceptics, scanning reader comments has its uses in terms of monitoring audience sentiment, which influences their future practice: A lot of what I do now is blog-oriented. So, I’ve got to understand the audience to an extent—understand how they’re going to respond and react to particular kinds of stories because that will shape the way I structure the pieces that I do in some respects. (Guardian journalist, UK section)

Conclusion Previous literature tells us that despite the many new opportunities for citizen participation in the news that digital technologies afford, existent journalistic norms and professional values (alongside the political economies behind these) shape the way such participation is routinized into newsmaking practices. Here, on the whole, journalists continue to boundary mark, preferring to control user engagement within carefully bounded parameters (Hermida 2011), and engaging only reluctantly with readers below the line. As Borger et al.’s (2013) genealogy of participatory journalism demonstrated, much of this research is framed by techno-evangelist hype, which then leads to disappointment when actual newsroom practices are empirically investigated. Adopting the hype as the yardstick by which to assess interaction is, we argue, problematic because it can lead us to dismiss or undervalue the importance of the (often incremental) changes that actually are occurring. There are good reasons as to why many journalists choose not to participate in comment spaces. If we start from the expectation that this makes participation unlikely and limited, evidence of engagement in comment sections might be refracted in a more positive light (see Wright 2012).

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In this spirit, we now return to our key findings. Our study is the first to apply a longitudinal lens to journalist commenting behaviour below the line and to examine it via content analysis; thus allowing us to understand the function of journalist comments, not just their presence or absence. Our object of study (Guardian) is—importantly—a pioneer of digital news innovation and open journalism, and our findings should be viewed in that light. First, far from using comments fields to broadcast (one-way) or impose their way of thinking upon their readers, those Guardian journalists who did engage below the line were highly reciprocal in their behaviours. This can be evidenced through the high level of direct replies as a proportion of all comments (84.8%), but also through looking at the functions of comments: the vast majority of which involved intensive interaction with readers. As research in a range of online and offline settings has found, reciprocity is a key facet of community development and perpetuation (Molm 2010; Wellman and Gulia 1999). Applied to journalism, Lewis et al. (2014, p. 238) identify direct (journalist to reader, or journalist to journalist) and indirect (reader to reader) forms of reciprocity as capable of realizing some of the “full potential of participatory media frameworks”, where journalists connect with and cement their roles within communities. For us, comments spaces at the Guardian are one site where reciprocal journalism is evident. We know from research on letters to the editor that editors/journalists are keen to create a public forum for deliberation that fosters a sense of community, which they believe increases circulation and advertising revenue (Wahl-Jorgensen 2001, 2002b). This is what Wahl-Jorgensen (2002a, p.  122) has called the “normative-economic justification for public discourse, which captures the idea that what is good for democracy is also good for business”. Guardian journalists similarly see comment spaces as a public forum for deliberation that fosters an engaged community, which might become paying members at the Guardian; increase advertising revenue through the use of meta-data; and increase the visibility of the website via search engines. However, unlike letters to the editor, where journalists’ primary role is that of gatekeeper (selecting letters to be ­published), comment spaces allow them to actually participate in public debates with readers, which leads us to our second key finding. When journalists participate below the line, they often engaged in the public debate by defending their own claims or challenging those of others, such behaviour accounted for nearly a quarter of all comments. They

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were not only hosting and facilitating public debate but were engaging in the debate itself with readers, creating a new form of the public sphere (Graham 2013). But further to this, our study suggests that reader comment sections also constitute a space where journalism practice is itself publically and transparently discussed. Since the emergence of digital platforms, blogging, and social media, transparency has emerged as a pivotal transformative and re-legitimizing feature of journalism (Hellmueller et  al. 2013; Hermida 2010; Lasorsa 2012). Here, we found journalists engaged in “participatory transparency” (Karlsson 2010), in which they were defending and explaining their journalism, as well as drawing from the collective expertise of their audience. Such behaviours invoke a shift in the site of the authority of news, from the opaqueness and dissociation from its constructedness, to an open embrace of its inner workings (Revers 2014). Of course, this transformation is an ongoing site of tension in many newsrooms, where transparency clashes with professional control (see Revers 2014), but is evidently routinized into the Guardian’s working practices (see Rusbridger 2012). Whilst our data illustrate some of the unique contributions of comment spaces for journalistic practice in light of debates around participatory journalism and online deliberation, we cannot ignore the fact that (a) journalistic engagement below the line declined quite markedly between 2013–2017 at the Guardian and (b) engagement was always uneven, with a small number of journalists responsible for the bulk of comments. Despite the Guardian’s position as a leader of digital journalism innovation, its story of journalist engagement below the line offers something of a cautionary tale for participatory journalism. In recent years, the scale of audience participation has overwhelmed journalists to the point where the transaction costs of engaging below the line increasingly outweigh the benefits; an unintended consequence of creating a successful space for audience engagement. At the same time, journalists seem increasingly aware (and jaded by) the steady torrent of abuse they receive online (not just below the line), particularly directed towards female and minority ethnic journalists (Chen et al. 2018; Gardiner 2018; Gardiner et al. 2016). Now, our journalists talked of directing their participatory journalism practices towards Twitter, which has seemingly “won over” journalism (Hedman and Djerf-Pierre 2013; Revers 2014). As one journalist stated, Twitter is a “revolution” that is “redefining everything that the industry does and how it behaves”.

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Without question, Twitter is the undisputed platform for journalistic engagement, as it both satisfies the journalist’s desire to engage audiences with their work, whilst satisfying news corporations’ desire for (monetised) consumer loyalty (Revers 2014). However, the prevailing logic of journalistic culture on Twitter is of building the personal brand (Brems et  al. 2017; Bruns 2012), reducing journalists to credentialized agents. While Twitter places journalists and audiences on the same platform, journalists in mainstream media outlets largely cultivate elite networks (Lasorsa et al. 2012) that do not include ordinary readers, except for when they can be used for sourcing audience material in the news (see Broersma and Graham 2015). Further, for all of its utility as a platform for public discourse, Twitter is not a platform that encourages deliberation (see Wright et al. 2015). For us—should it continue in this direction—the decline of journalist participation below the line at the Guardian is, therefore, to be regretted.

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Author Index1

A Abbott, R., 3, 49, 50, 53, 55, 58–62, 65 Ackroyd, P., 97 Alexander, J. C., 84 Alfonso, L. E., 82 Amaral, I., 17 Amaral, J., 18 Anderson, G., 117n11 Anderson, I., 151, 164 Arendt, H., 124n14 Atkinson, P., 55, 70 B Baines, E., 133 Baranek, P. M., 132 Barrios, M. M., vii, 4, 7, 70, 71, 74, 86 Bar-Tal, D., 86 Bauman, J. F., 61 Baxter, K. J. W., 34, 38 Beers, L., 112n7

Berkowitz, D., 148 Berry, S. L., 53 Betancourt, I., 79, 80 Bingham, A., 28, 33, 36, 91 Binns, A., 151 Blain, N., 29 Bolívar, I. J., 74 Bondfield, M., 110 Borger, M., 150, 162 Bowden, S., 121n12 Brant, C., 96–98 Breitenbach, E., 27, 28, 34, 38 Brems, C., 152, 165 Briggs, E.D., vii Brites, M. J., 11 Broersma, M., 156, 165 Brown, T., 13 Brown, T. R., 148 Bruns, A., 165 Buckley, C., 133 Buell, E. H., Jr., 25, 148 Burg, D., 54

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AUTHOR INDEX

C Cabanes, B., 124 Camara, S., 54 Cameron, E. A., 29 Campbell, K. K., ix Candia, L., 72 Canning, K., 114n9 Cardoso, G., 19 Carpentier, N., 20 Carrington, F., 132, 133 Catita, A., 18 Cavanagh, A., vii, ix, 4, 7, 9, 94 Chalaby, J., 90, 98 Chan, J. B. L., 132 Chapman, J., 4, 91, 96 Chapman, J. L., 114 Chartier, R., 96 Chen, G. M., 151, 164 Chen, V. Y., 151, 164 Clarke, J., 14 Coddington, M., 163 Coe, K., 151 Coffey, A., 55 Cohen, G., 110n6 Cohen, S., 98 Collette, C., 110n4 Collins, W., 134 Conboy, M., 96 Coode, T. H., 61 Cooper, C., 25 Correia, F., 17 Costera Meijer, I., 162 Cover, R., 143 Cowling, M., 12–14, 25 Critcher, C., 14 Curran, J., 89, 90 D Dahlgren, P., 20, 89 Dailey, L., 150

Daniel, D. K., 12 Davis, H., vii De Quincey, T., 99, 100 Demo, L., 150 Dennis, A., 9 Denvir, J., 134 DeSantis, A. D., 50 Diakopoulos, N., 11 Díaz-Noci, J., 151 Djerf-Pierre, M., 164 Domingo, D., 149, 150, 160 Drummond, D. K., 54 Dryzek, J., 91, 93, 95 E Edwards, D., 70 Edwards, L., 92, 106 Eliot, S., 130 Ericson, R. V., 132 Erjavec, K., 151 F Favreau, M., 50 Fernández, I., 72 Ferrater-Mora, J., 86 Figueiras, R., 17 Fish, S. E., 139 Fletcher, R., 17 Fraser, N., 6, 27, 45, 90 G Gandy, O. H., 55 Gans, H., 14 Garden, M., 149–151 Gardiner, B., 31, 151, 164 Garnham, N., 89 Gillmor, D., 150 Gonçalves, M. E., 17

  AUTHOR INDEX 

Gonzalez-Day, K., 64 Gosling, P., 73, 85 Graham, T., ix, 5, 11, 148, 149, 151, 152, 164, 165 Grant, A. E., 55 Graves, P., 111–115, 120 Grayzel, S. R., 110n3 Gregory, A. T., 132 Gregory, L., viii, 10 Grey D. L., 13, 148 Gulia, M., 163 Gullace, N., 33 H Habermas, J., 6, 26, 89, 90, 147 Hall, S., 14 Hallin, D., 17 Hampton, M., 89–91, 94 Hannam, J., 109n2, 111 Hare, K., 151 Hart, J. A., vi, 148 Hartley, J., 26, 44 Haspel, M., 25 Hedman, U., 164 Heinonen, A., 10, 150 Hellmueller, L., 164 Hermida, A., 10, 162, 164 Hill, D. B., 13 Hilson, M., 28, 31 Hobbs, A., vi, viii, ix, 5, 130, 137, 138 Hofstede, G., 72, 73, 84, 85 Hofstede, G. J., 72, 73, 84, 85 Holder, J. Hollis, P., 139 Holt, R., 135 Holton, A. E., 151, 164 Hood, J. B., 133 Hoover, H., 60 Howard, C., 115, 124

Hughes, A., 109 Hughes, L., vii, 53 Hull, G., 131, 133, 142 Hunt, W., 131, 133, 134 Hunter, D., 132 Hutchins, B., viii, 10, 132 Hutchison, D, 29 Hutchison, I. G. C., 28 Hynds, E. C., 148 I Ihlebæk, K., 150 Innes, S., 27, 33, 34, 36 J Jackson, D., ix, 5 Jackson, I., 137 Jackson, R. L., 54 Jamieson, K. H., ix Jarvis, D., 29, 31, 39 Jefferson, T., 14 Jenkins, J., 72 Jenkins, J. M., 72 Jones, A., 89 Joseph, N. L., 160 Joyce, P., 95, 96, 100–102, 105 K Kalogeropoulos, A., 17 Kapoor, S., 148 Karlsson, M., 160, 164 Keltner, D., 72 Kingsley Kent, S., 110n3 Knotts, H. G., 25 Kovačič, M. P., 151 Krippendorff, K., 71 Krumsvik, A. H., 150

173

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AUTHOR INDEX

L Lander, B. G., vii Lara, O., 76 Larkin, J., 148 Lasorsa, D., 164 Lasorsa, D. L., 165 Lemert, J. B., 148 Levy, D., 151 Levy, D. A., 17 Lewis, S. C., 149, 163 Liddle, D., 133, 142 Liebovich, L. W., 59–61 Lobato, R., 132 Lonsdale, S., 91, 113n8 Louter, D., 164 Lucas, P. J., 139, 140, 143 M Mackie, J. B., 133 Mancini, P., 17 Mansfield, M., 164 Marks, C., 50 Marôpo, L., 17 Márquez, G. G., 73, 85 Martin, F., 150, 151 Martínez, M.D., 72 Martinho, A. P., 19 Martins, C., 17 Marulanda Vélez, M., 76 Masip, P., 151 Mateus, S., 98 McCarthy, H., 117 McElvaine, R. S., 51 McKerns, J. P., 51 Medina, D., 13 Mekelburg, M., 151, 164 Meltzer, M., 54 Mendonça, S., 19 Meso, K., 151 Michaeli, E., 50, 53, 58, 59, 61, 65 Micó, J. L., 151 Miller, C. R., ix Millioni, D. L., 10

Minkov, M., 85 Molm, L. D., 163 Moore, W., 121 Moreira, M. C., 18 Mota, C., 18 Mussell, J., 132 N Naaman, M., 11 Nelson, S. (director), 51, 52 Newman, N., 17, 151 Nielsen, C., 149, 150 Nielsen, R. K., 11 Nord, D., vi, vii, 99, 138 North, J., 130 Nussbaum, M., 72, 74, 78, 80 O Oatley, K., 72 Obama, B., 65 Oliveira, J. F., 18 Oram, A., 117n10 Örnebring, H., 90 Ottley, R, 54 P Pacheco, L., 17 Pain, P., 151, 164 Paisana, M., 19 Palacio, J., 73, 85 Papa, V., 10 Papacharissi, Z., 90 Paulussen, S., 10, 150 Pavlik, J., 150 Pedersen, S., vii, 3, 25, 33, 138, 142 Perkin, H., 94 Perrin, A. J., 10, 13 Pfeifer, M. J., 61 Phillips, Dr. M., 110, 114–117, 120, 125 Pierson, E., 151

  AUTHOR INDEX 

Poepsel, M. A., 164 Polanco, G., 83 Potter, J., 70, 85 Pounds, G., 14, 137 Pritchard, J. C., 148 Pugh, M., 112, 119 Q Quandt, T., 10, 150 Quintanilha, T. L., 19 R Raeymaeckers, K., 14, 132 Rains, S. A., 151 Ramalho, F., 18 Raper, A. F., 62 Rarick, G., vii Reader, B., 9–14, 32 Reese, S. D., 55 Rendall, J., 27 Revers, M., 164, 165 Richardson, J., 26 Roberts, B., 14 Robertson Scott, J.W., 131 Robinson, S., 10, 11 Robson, J., 98 Rodrigues, F. C., 18 Romanow, W. I., vii Rose, S. O., 114n9 Ross, F. G. J., 51 Ruiz, C., 151 Rusbridger, A., 149, 154, 164 S Sampson, C., 70 Sanders, J., 162 Santana, A. D., 149–151 Santana-Pereira, J., 17 Santos, S. C., 17 Scott, J. W. R., 131, 132

Sharp, I., 110n3 Sigelman, K., viii Silva, M. T., ix, 3, 7, 10–19, 132 Simmons, C. A., 51 Simpson, J., 52 Singer, J. B., 10, 65, 150 Singletary, M. W., 12–14, 25 Smith, M., 140, 142 Smitley, M., 27, 32, 37 Soderlund, W. D., vii Sommerville, C. J., 132 Sorlin, P., 14 Speake, Jennifer, 52 Spillman, M., 150 Springer, N., 151, 164 Stafford, P., 109 Stempel III, G. H., 13 Stibbe, M., 110n3 Strathern, M., 132 T Tarrant, W. D., 12, 13 Tavener, G., 116 Temmerman, M., 152, 165 Thackeray, D., 112, 116, 118, 120 Thane, P., 111 Thomas, J., 132 Thornton, B., 49, 54 Troger, F., 151, 164 Truman, Harry S, 63 Tusan, M. E., 111 U Ulmanu, M., 164 Usher N., 160 V Vacin, G. L., 12–14 Vadratsikas, K., 10 van Hoof, A., 162

175

176 

AUTHOR INDEX

Vergara, A. I., 72 Verstraeten, H., 105 Vos, T. P., 164 Vujnovic, M., 150 W Wagenberg, R. H., vii Wahl-Jorgensen, K., vi, viii, 1, 14, 27, 90, 129, 132, 137, 141, 148, 163 Walkosz, B. J., viii Warren, L., 96, 134 Watson, J. S. K., 110n3

Wellman, B., 163 Were, R., 132 Wetherell, M., 70, 85 Whates, H. R. G., 134 Williams, B., 13 Witschge, T., 150 Wright, S., ix, 5, 11, 148–152, 154, 162, 165 Wright, V., 27, 28, 34, 38 Z Zubieta, E., 72

Subject Index1

A A voz da girafa, 18 Aberdeen Daily Journal, 26, 30, 31, 43 Aberdeen Evening Express, 29 Aberdeen Free Press, 26 Aberdeen Press & Journal, 29, 36, 38, 40, 41 Aberdeen Women’s Suffrage Society, 30 Activists, vii, 109–125 Aftermaths of war, 112, 113, 113n8 Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser, 34 Anonymity, 19, 32, 129, 143 Anti-suffrage campaigners, 25 Arbroath Herald, 41 Audience engagement, 164 Authenticity, 5, 119, 124 B Below the line, ix, 5, 147–165 Birmingham Daily Post, 134

Birmingham Gazette, 131 Blackwood’s Magazine, 132 Blogs, 10, 18, 150, 152, 156 Bolshevism, 31, 38–39 C Caguán, 77 Chicago Defender, vii, 3, 49–65 Circulation, 17, 50, 53, 58, 59, 65, 70, 71, 110, 130, 135, 163 Citizen participation, 91 Citizenship, vi, vii, ix, 3, 4, 15, 16, 19, 26, 27, 32, 33, 36, 43, 64, 89–106, 113, 114, 119, 143 Civic culture, 17 Civic ethics, 78 Class, vii, 13, 28, 38, 53, 94, 98, 109–125, 142 Colombian Soul, 74–77, 86 Comment is Free (CiF), 155, 156 Communism, 39 Community-building, 11

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SUBJECT INDEX

Conservative Party, 39 Content analysis, 130, 137, 143, 149, 151–153, 163 Correcting letters, 119, 141 Corrections, clarifications and retractions, 159, 160 Counterpublic, 45 Cultural capital, 94, 131, 140, 143 D Daily Herald, 110, 112 Daily Mail, 4, 92, 93, 96, 97, 101–103 Daily Record, 30 Daily Telegraph, 4, 92, 93, 101, 103 Deliberative democracy, 91, 147 Democracy, 10, 17, 28, 85, 87, 90, 91, 112, 147, 148, 163 Dialect, 137 Dialogical journalism, 149 Dialogue, 19, 137 Diário de Notícias, 18 Digital news, 3, 159, 160, 163 Discrimination, 40, 52, 56, 57, 59, 62, 64, 114 Dundee Advertiser, 26 Dundee Courier, 26, 29, 31, 33, 34, 37–39, 42, 43 E Eastern Morning News, 131, 133–134 Edinburgh Evening News, 34, 36, 41–43 Edinburgh National Society of Women’s Suffrage, 33 Edinburgh Women Citizens Association, 33–38 Editorial bias, 148 Education, 12, 13, 28–30, 32, 34, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 96, 117, 121, 122

El Heraldo, 4, 70, 71, 74–76, 78–81 El Tiempo, 4, 70, 71, 74–78, 80–83 ELN, 80 Emotion, vii, viii, 4, 7, 69–87, 102 Emotional repertoires, viii, 4, 70, 71, 73–85 Enfranchisement, 33, 35, 55, 56, 59 English Mechanic, 95, 132 Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social (ERC), 17–19 Epistolary personae, 97 EPL, 79 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 13 European Media Systems Survey, 17 Everyday concerns, 124 F Facebook, 65, 149 Falkirk Herald, 31 FARC, 70, 76, 77, 80, 81, 87 Feminists, vii, 27, 36, 125 Framing, 28, 33, 55 G Gallup International Survey, 73, 86 Gatekeepers, 10, 148, 163 Gender, 12, 13, 72, 112, 125, 142, 151 General Strike (1926), 119 Genre, v–vii, ix, 10, 96, 129–143, 152, 156 Genre, news as, 156 Global Barometer of Hope and Happiness, 73, 86 Gloucestershire Chronicle, 133 Grahaming’ letters, 103 Great Depression, 1929, 54 Grievance, ix, 91, 99, 101, 137 The Guardian, 5, 163

  SUBJECT INDEX 

H The Herald, 29, 135, 138 Household Words, 132 Hype, 150, 162 I Idiom of insanity, 14 Illustrated London News, 132 Inequality, 13, 42, 72 Influence, ix, 14–16, 19, 20, 34, 50, 91, 111, 115, 162 Influencers, 19, 131 Internet, 9, 18, 149 Interviews, semi-structured, 149, 152, 153 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 77 J John Bull, 92, 95, 97, 98 Journalistic norms, 150, 162 L Labour Leaflet, 110 Labour Party, 29, 39, 41, 110–112, 112n7, 114–116, 118, 124, 125 Labour Weekly, 110, 110n5 Labour Woman, vii, 4, 109n1, 110–112, 114–116, 118–120, 121n13, 124 Lancashire Evening Post, 134–136, 138–140 Leeds Mercury, 133 Legitimacy, 44, 90 Liberal party, 111, 113 Local identity, 137 Local topics, 136 London County Council (LCC), 117, 122 London Journal, 132

179

Love, viii, 69, 73, 74, 76, 78–80, 82, 85 Lynching, 49, 53–57, 59, 62 M Marginalisation, 3, 16 Marriage bar, 117 Mediapolis, 106 Mediation, viii, 129–131, 134 Microfilm, 54 Mono Jojoy, 77 Motherwell Times, 42 Motivation of letter writers, 3, 9, 12, 14, 16 N National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 62 National Conference of Labour Women, 117 National Meeting of Letter-Writers, 11, 18 National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), 27, 33, 40 National Women’s Labour League, 4, 110 Newsrooms, viii, 9, 10, 15, 19, 21, 138, 148, 150, 162, 164 New York Herald, 102 Northern Press and Catholic Times, 134 Notes and Queries, 132 Notices to Correspondents, 133, 134 O Open Journalism project, 149 Operation Jaque, 80

180 

SUBJECT INDEX

P Participation, v, vi, viii, 3, 5–7, 9–12, 15–20, 27, 37, 70, 91, 92, 96, 115, 119, 120, 124, 125, 148–150, 160, 162, 164, 165 Participatory journalism, 10, 148–151, 162, 164 Patriotism, 33, 74–76, 78–80, 84, 85 Pen-names, 32–33, 43, 44, 98, 137, 139, 142 Penny Post, 99, 100 Pittsburgh Courier, 53 Portugal, 11, 17, 18 Post Office, 95, 99–105 Poverty, 57, 65, 112, 113, 120–122, 125 Press News, 130, 131, 139, 143 Preston Chronicle, 133, 134, 136–141 Preston Guardian, 136–141 Preston Herald, 133, 136–142 Professional letter writer, 3, 11 Pseudonyms, 33, 98, 129, 139–143 Public emotion, 69–87 Público, 17 Public opinion, vii, viii, 6, 13–16, 20, 26, 76, 80, 84, 129, 137, 148 Public sphere, v, ix, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 12, 26, 27, 30, 32, 40, 43–45, 89–91, 93, 105, 111, 119, 120, 130, 131, 138, 139, 142, 143, 147, 148, 164 Public sphere, local, 131, 138, 143 Punch, 132 Q QDA Miner, 71 Questionnaire, 9, 11, 12, 12n1, 15, 20, 123 R Racism, vii, 3, 4, 50, 54, 61, 64, 65 Rational deliberation, 85

Rationality, 6, 98 Readership, 1, 2, 5, 15, 28, 50, 96, 130, 131, 135, 138, 139, 148 Readers’ sophistication, 62 Reciprocal journalism, 149, 163 Representation of the People Act, 1918, 28, 29 Representativeness of letter-writers, 13, 14 Reputation, 94, 161 Research design, longitudinal, 149, 152 Rhetoric, 29 S The Scotsman, 29, 34–37, 41 Shakira, 79 Slavery, 42, 50, 52, 63 Social character, 86 Socialism, 38, 39 Socialist, 39, 41, 57, 112 Social media, ix, 9–10, 17–19, 65, 90, 143, 151, 164 Social welfare, 27, 35, 44, 114 Socio-demographic profile of letter-­ writers, 13 Sockpuppeting, 131 Southern Reporter, 43 Spectacled bear, 82 Suffrage, 3, 25, 26, 28, 30, 33, 35, 43–45, 110, 140 Suffragette, 33, 35, 38, 44, 45 Suffragist, 33, 35, 44, 45 Super-participants, 151 Survey, 3, 9, 11–13, 12n1, 15–17, 19, 123, 149–151 T Tax/taxation, 57, 58, 98, 101, 116 Taxes of knowledge, 28 Temperance, 30, 38–39, 44, 86, 98 The Times, 4, 92–95, 97, 101, 102, 104

  SUBJECT INDEX 

Tiverton Gazette, 132 Topics of letters, viii, 55, 57, 72, 116, 119, 120, 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 143 Trades union, 37, 55, 109, 109n2, 111, 112, 119, 135 Transparency, 164 Trust in the media, 17, 20 Twitter, 5, 155, 161, 164, 165 U Ulverston Advertiser, 140 User-generated content (UGC), ix, 10, 132, 148

181

V Validation, 92, 94, 105 W We’-dom/’they’-dom, 26, 44, 45 Women Citizens Associations (WCAs), 30–34, 36, 37, 40, 44 Women’s Co-operative Guild, 27 WordStat, 71 World War I, 26, 53, 63, 109, 110