The Youth’s Companion unveils

“The Pledge of Allegiance”

Bellamy, a former Baptist minister, came up with: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." It was amended in 1923 to refer to the “flag of the United States of America” and in 1954 to add  “under God.”

The magazine, first on Washington Street and later on School Street, Temple Place and finally at 209 Columbus Ave., tirelessly campaigned for the establishment of a national school day honoring Columbus and on Sept. 8, 1892, it featured on its pages a model program for a national Columbus Day school celebration. It was addressed to America’s “Teachers, Superintendents, School Boards and Newspapers.” “Not one school in America should be left out in this Celebration,” the Companion said. 

The Companion proposed that on that Columbus Day, after the reading of the presidential proclamation and the raising of the flag, students were to participate in the “Salute to the Flag”:

At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute — right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all." At the words, "to my Flag," the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side.

Later the original “Bellamy Salute” was thought to be too similar to the Nazi salute and was replaced with the hand over the heart gesture. Below, a copy of the actual description in the Companion.

Long after the Companion’s closing, heirs to Bellamy and his editor, James Upham, disputed over the authorship of the “Pledge,“ but the U.S. Flag Association in 1939 and the Library of Congress in 1954 concluded that Bellamy was indeed the author. Below, Bellamy’s notes, courtesy of the University of Rochester Library.

"The Bellamy salute in 1915." New-York Tribune (via LOC).

(Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bellamy_salute_1915.jpg#/media/File:Bellamy_salute_1915.jpg

Today, the Companion building at 209 Columbus Ave. is an office/retail building. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is often referred to as The Youth’s Companion building or “The Pledge of Allegiance” building. (Photo by Kathy Breen.)

The first French language newspaper in America--Courier de Boston

Courier de Boston was the first French language newspaper in the United States. It first appeared April 23, 1789 and was edited/published by a Frenchman named Paul Joseph Guérard de Nancrède. It was printed by Samuel Hall on 53 Cornhill. In his History of Printing in America, Isaiah Thomas described Hall as “as a correct printer and a judicious editor…industrious, faithful to his engagements, a respectable citizen and a firm friend to his country” (Thomas 178).

De Nancrède sold books and stationery and taught French at Harvard University between 1787 and 1800. The newspaper was also sold in Salem, Mass., New York, N.Y. and Philadelphia, Pa.

De Nancrède wrote the Courier de Boston would help local merchants, “that numerous and wealthy part of the community,” remove obstacles to commerce. He wrote French merchants would be disadvantaged if they were not “as well informed” and had  “unfavourable proofs respecting the produce, trade and integrity of the United States.”   

Finally, he wrote, his newspaper would serve as “the stimulus to learning French” the “easy and gradual way.” “I’m well aware,” de Nancrède wrote, “that the undertaking of a paper, in a language, which is not yet prevalent in America….will be attended with difficulties,” but he said he had “reason to think that the number of foreign subscribers from Canada, the West-Indies and Europe, will by far exceed those of America.”

De Nancrède promised to start publishing “as soon as the number of subscribers will appear sufficient to defray the most necessary expenses.” The paper was started three months later and lasted six months.

In its first few issues, the paper published exchange rates and prices of commodities (such as coffee, chocolate, rum wine, butter, syrup and rice) that could be found in the “principal commercial European centers.” The July 30, 1789 issue of the paper included a house advertisement, in which the editor asked his readers to support the paper so it would “become of the utmost utility to the two worlds.” It suspended publication Oct. 15, 1789.

The first Greek newspaper in America--

New World (Νέος Κόσμος)

On March 25, 1892, an MIT student named Constantine Phassoularides from the Aegean island of Nisyros, published New World (Νέος Κόσμος). The weekly newspaper lasted a couple of months (there were about 1800 Greek immigrants living in Massachusetts at the time) and although historians regularly mention it, no copy of it has ever been found. There is a record of Phassoularides having attended MIT, but he never graduated and moved to New York where he worked for several other Greek publications until his death in 1909.

The Boston Press Club

The Boston Press Club was founded in 1886 and was located first on a loft Court Street and later on the second floor of an apartment at 14 Bosworth St. overlooking Bromfield Street in downtown Boston. The bookstore of the Massachusetts Bible Society (“the oldest ecumenical Bible Society in the United States”) occupied the first floor of the building on the Bromfield side. By 1894 the club had more than 300 members and a restaurant, which provided “wholesome and nutritious” food. Entertainment speakers included the likes of P.T. Barnum and Mark Twain.

Boston Herald’s publisher Fred E. Whiting was president in 1894 and oversaw a club that was organized as a “pure democracy. Neither ‘bigwigs’ nor ‘hightippybobs’” were recognized there. “Within its doors the man who pays the salary stands upon the same footing as he who receives it,” wrote club members J.B. Smith and E.C. Howell. In 1895 the club even had its own song, the “Boston Press Club March.” (William H. Freeman, The Press Club of Chicago: a History, with Sketches of Other Prominent Press Clubs of the United States. Chicago: The Press Club of Chicago, 1894, p. 195, accessed Oct. 9, 2017.)

Above, Dave Fitzgibbon, Folio Magazine, 1895.

Left, Boston Press Club March cover.

Click below to hear the march as performed by Tim Riley of the Journalism Department of Emerson College, Boston.

https://soundcloud.com/mparaschos/bopressclub-march-fitzgibbon-1895

The Boston Herald’s Rumor Clinic, Frances Sweeney’s anti-hate campaigns

In early 1940s Boston, Irish Catholic Frances Sweeney, daughter of a Brighton saloon owner and a graduate of Mount Saint Joseph Academy, published a small muckraking mimeographed ads-free newspaper, the Boston City Reporter. It was dedicated to exposing political corruption among the city’s powerful elites.

But as America’s involvement in WW II intensified, she noticed that Boston’s Irish Catholics, because of their hate for the British, had no stomach for the war and were becoming isolationists. She also noticed that Axis propaganda exploited this and other divisions among the American people and created a morale issue. Pro-fascist and anti-Semitic activities in Boston were on the rise.

Sweeney was particularly furious with her church’s indifference toward the hatred and violence generated by the likes of Fr. Coughlin and the Christian Front against Boston’s several ethnic minorities.

So in February 1942, Sweeney approached William G. Gavin, associate publisher of the Boston Herald, and suggested the creation of a reporting team that would collect, study and dispute these divisive rumors.

A month later, on March 1, 1942, the Boston Herald was the first newspaper in the nation to officially fight Axis rumors by starting the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic. The Sunday feature was based on information turned in by labor union “morale wardens” and produced by Gavin’s team of volunteers under Sweeney’s direction, according to a September 1942 article of The American Mercury. The team collected and assessed rumors spread in work places, bars and among members of the armed forces. At the same time it promoted the work of the Division of Propaganda Research (DPR), a subsidiary of the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety.

The Division of Propaganda Research included advisory boards with representatives from police departments, attorneys, professors, publishers, unions, and social workers, as well as members of “the Irish, Jewish and Negro sections of the population,” the Mercury said. DPR’s director was Robert Knap, a student of Prof. Gordon Allport, Harvard psychology department head and an expert in personality traits and rumor dispersing, who also assisted in the effort.

The Oct. 12, 1942, issue of Life magazine focused on the war effort and ran a lengthy story on the Herald’s Rumor Clinic, including photographs of Gavin, Sweeney and Knap at work. Sweeney’s main job was to trace a rumor to its origins, which necessitated her visiting many workers, salesmen, store clerks and union members who described how the rumor got to them. The Mercury article said more than half of the rumors reaching the Herald’s clinic were “told on the Axis short-wave radio a week or two earlier.” Soon other major metropolitan papers started their own “clinics.”

Sweeney also formed the American-Irish Defense Association of Boston and was elected vice chairman of the Massachusetts Citizens’ Committee for Racial Unity. Her tireless fight against prejudice and hate in her city infuriated Boston’s Irish political, social and religious establishments, including Cardinal O’Connell, who threatened her with excommunication.

In his 1986 autobiography, Boston Boy, historian and journalist Nat Henthoff, who worked for Sweeney’s newspaper as a teenager, wrote, “In all of Boston, the woman I most admired, sometimes feared and ridiculously loved was Frances Sweeney.” He dedicated his autobiography to her.

Henthoff said Sweeney was furious at Boston's Roman Catholic leaders' silence in the face of beatings, by Irish gangs, of Jews in the neighborhoods around Dorchester-Roxbury's Blue Hill Avenue (which was derided as "Jew Hill Avenue"). Henthoff wrote, "Catholics, especially in Boston, had reason to know what an affront to God it was to stigmatize anybody because of his religion or race.... And the pain of it. The humiliation of it," Henthoff continued, "No dogs or Irish allowed! 'Don't you remember?' she would ask those of her faith, including the priests." Sweeney was horrified, Henthoff wrote, that Boston had become "the most anti-Semitic city in the country."

In tracing the haters, Sweeney was very particular with her reporters. Henthoff was impressed with her dedication to the truth. He wrote that she charged her reporters this way:

All I want from you is facts. A fact is something that can be proved, and you will bring me the proof with each fact you bring me. Anything that is not a fact is an opinion. I do not want your opinions. In this newspaper, only the editor has opinions, but they are of no use unless they are based on facts. You understand, then, how important you are, and how much damage you can do if you are careless, if your facts turn out to be lies. That’s all our enemies will need to discredit the whole lot of us. You understand?

In his 2000 autobiography, A Life in the Twentieth Century, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who also worked for Sweeney, said she was “afraid of nothing” and “she fearlessly rebuked the formidable Cardinal O’Connell (to his face), for his failure to condemn Coughlin.”

In 1945, a year after her death at age 36, Sweeney received the Pope Leo XIII Medal from the Bishop Sheil School of Social Studies in Chicago for her work to improve race relations in Boston.

Sweeney’s sole paid employee was Constantine (Gus) Aristides Gazulis, whom Henthoff described as a “tall, cadaverous Greek” who “had a black military mustache, wore a slouch hat pulled down over his black hair and eyes, and seldom revealed anything about himself.” Henthoff wrote, “Gus was an obsessive record keeper of individuals and groups specializing in racial and religious bigotry.” After Sweeney’s death, Gazulis started the Francis Sweeney Committee to help continue fighting for the ideals of his former boss.

In a letter to The Boston Globe editor (May 29, 1948) on the occasion of Gazulis’s death, Schlesinger wrote that Gazulis fought with “selfless dedication” for the cause “of making Boston a city in which all races could live together in harmony…. Gus has set an example of civic patriotism for us all,” Schlesinger wrote. “I hope that the people of Massachusetts may be worthy of the final sacrifice Gus has made for us.”

The clinic was disbanded within two years.

Life, Oct. 12, 1942

The Remonstrance (1890-1919), first

U.S. anti-suffrage newspaper

Illustrations courtesy Library of Congress, accessed Oct. 22, 2019.

Boston women create their own journalism firsts

In addition to having the first woman editor of an American daily (Cornelia Wells Walter of The Boston Evening Transcript)(see #20), Boston has been home to several other firsts for women in American journalism.

First American woman publisher:

Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), The Christian Science Monitor

210 Massachusetts Ave., Boston, MA, 02115 (not on map)

The  first issue of The Christian Science Monitor,

Sept. 25, 1908

First American woman magazine editor:

Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879), Ladies’ Magazine

First African-American woman journalist:

Maria W. Stewart (1803-1879), The Liberator

Stewart made her living as a teacher and frequently wrote and lectured about the immorality of slavery, women’s rights, non-violence and education for African Americans, especially women. "How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?” she wrote in The Liberator in 1832. “Until union, knowledge and love begin to flow among us," she said.

Stewart is credited with being the first African-American woman journalist and the first American woman to publicly address a “promiscuous” (male and female) audience. (Stewart photo courtesy, princeamongslaves.org.)

First American woman foreign correspondent:

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), New York Tribune

First African-American woman magazine publisher/editor:

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842-1924), The Woman’s Era

Josephine St. Pierre (1842-1924) was born in Boston, the daughter of a white English woman and a successful clothes merchant from Martinique. Because Boston’s public schools were segregated, she was sent to study at the integrated Salem schools. She married George Lewis Ruffin, son of another prominent African-American family, who was Harvard Law School’s first African-American graduate and Boston’s first black municipal judge.

In 1890 St. Pierre Ruffin started the illustrated monthly journal The Woman's Era, the country's first publication by and for African-American women, which lasted seven years. The magazine challenged its black, middle class female readers to be involved in public life, and stay informed about such issues as women’s suffrage and black women’s equality.

In 1895, she organized the National Federation of Colored Women, to promote the education of women, especially African-American women. At its first meeting, she told the group:

Our women's movement is woman's movement in that it is led and directed by women for the good of women and men, for the benefit of all humanity, which is more than any one branch or section of it.  We want, we ask the active interest of our men, and, too, we are not drawing the color line; we are women, American women, as intensely interested in all that pertains to us as such as all other American women: we are not alienating or withdrawing, we are only coming to the front, willing to join any others in the same work and cordially inviting and welcoming any others to join us... we are all workers to the same end, to elevate and dignify colored American womanhood.

Her house (right) is located at 103 Charles St., Boston, and she is buried at Mt. Auburn Cemetery. (Photo: J. L. Nyberg)

The Woman’s Era (left), Vol. 1, No. 6, September 1894. Photo from BPL archives.

First U.S. commercial radio license:

1921, WBZ Radio

1170 Soldier’s Field Road, Boston, Mass. 02134 (not on map)

WBZ is New England’s leading news station, can be heard in 38 states and six Canadian Provinces, and reaches more than one million listeners every week (WBZ.com).

First regional 24-hr. cable news station:

1992, New England Cable News

Newton, Mass., a Boston suburb (not on map)

Today, NECN is the largest regional 24-hr. cable news company, servicing more than 3.7m subscribers through approximately 1,000 cities and towns  in the New England states.

Boston journalists take a strong stand in the Alien and Sedition Acts debate

The bitter debate that followed the signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798-1801) by President Adams, pitted the Federalist against the Democratic-Republican newspapers and Boston immediately became the nation’s hotbed of verbal confrontation.

As the country was contemplating war with France, the Acts aimed at providing a “series of virtual war-time measures to curb seditious utterances and deport troublesome aliens,” Mott said (147). The Sedition Act, in particular, criminalized “false, scandalous and malicious” statements against the U.S. government and its officials.

The Act was used to indict 14 journalists nationally. Five of them were from Boston, more than from any other city in America. They were:

Thomas Adams and Abijah Adams of the Boston Independent Chronicle (see #12);

John Daly Burk of the Polar Star and Boston Daily Advertiser (see #37) and later the New York Time Piece;

John S. Lillie and John Vinal of the Boston Constitutional Telegraphe.

Massachusetts had the first and largest (in 1915 it had 37,000 members) anti-suffrage association in the United States. It was founded in 1895 as the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women. It argued the separation of men and women in society was vital and voting women would threaten a fundamental societal order. Furthermore, it said low numbers of women voting in school committee elections showed women did not care that much about voting. Anti- suffragists said allowing women to vote would increase divorce rates and taxes.

MAOFESW published The Remonstrance, a national periodical that appeared annually first and then quarterly. The first paragraph of the first page of every issue stated the newspaper opposed suffrage because the majority of women “do not want the ballot, and that to force it upon them would not only be an injustice to women, but would lessen their influence for good and imperil the community.” It concluded that “The Remonstrants ask a thoughtful consideration of their views in the interest of fair discussion.”

In 1915 Massachusetts men voted two-to-one against a woman’s right to vote but in 1919 Massachusetts became the eighth state to ratify the 19th Amendment.

The New England Woman’s Press Association

The third oldest organization of women journalists in the United States was founded in Boston as the New England Woman’s Press Association (NEWPA) on Nov. 17, 1885. The group’s historian and former president, Myrna B. Lord, in her book History of the New England Woman’s Press Association, 1885-1931 (Newton, Mass., Graphic Press, 1932, 19), wrote that the founding meeting was held at the office of Sallie Jo White of the Boston Herald. The meeting was initiated by Marion A. MacBride of the Boston Post, who had instigated the founding of the National Woman’s Press Association a year earlier.

In addition to White and MacBride, rounding out the group Lord called “The Illustrious Six,” were Estelle M. Hatch of the Globe, Grace W. Soper of the Journal, Helen M. Winslow of the Advertiser and Cora Stuart Wheeler, Boston correspondent of the Kansas City Journal. At the meeting White was elected president and Hatch secretary.

The association’s mission, according to historian Elizabeth V. Burt (Women’s Press Organizations, 1881-1999, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 2000, 153), was to support  “acquaintance and good fellowship among newspaper women,” elevate “the work and the workers,” and promote “through the press such good objects in social, philanthropic and reformatory lines as may from time to time present themselves.” “Newspaper women” soon was changed to “newspaper and kindred women writers.” In 1889, NEWPA admitted its first black member, Lillian A. Lewis of the Boston Herald.

As other journalistic societies sprang up in various parts of the country, NEWPA membership declined over the years and the organization appeared to have disbanded in the middle 1980s.

The Una

The first women’s rights newspaper in America was The Una, which was started in Providence, R.I., in 1853 but soon moved to Boston. “A Paper Devoted to the Elevation of Woman, “ Una was published monthly by a well-to-do suffragist, Paulina Wright Davis. She saw it as a vehicle for the promotion of women’s rights without diluting coverage of  other issues such as domestic life, literature or fashion (Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck, Women’s Periodicals in the United States, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1996, 387). The paper’s front-page slogan was “Out of the Great Heart of Nature Seek We the Truth.”

On the front page of its first issue, Davis promised that Una’s purpose would be  “to speak clear, earnest words of truth and soberness, in a spirit of kindness. To discuss the rights, sphere, duty and destiny of woman, fully and fearlessly; and our aim will be to secure the highest good of all.” Davis wrote that “so far as our voice shall be heard it will be on the side of freedom.” “We shall not confine ourselves to any locality, set, sect, class or caste,” she continued, “for we hold to the solidarity of the race, and believe that if one member suffers, all suffer, and that the highest is made to atone for the lowest.” “Our mystical name of the Una, signifying TRUTH, will be to us a constant suggestor of fidelity to all,” she wrote.

The Una lasted two years and 10 months and its “singularly focused feminist approach” caused it to be met by public “criticism and cynicism,” wrote Endres and Lueck. But they did credit the publication for being “a landmark in suffrage history because its appearance signaled a professional approach to the battle for woman’s rights and because it served as a prototype on which later suffrage publications were based.” Below, the first issue of the publication, courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.

The Boston Investigator and the Freethought Society

The Boston Investigator (1831-1904) was the first American newspaper devoted to the philosophy of “free thought.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines “freethinker” as someone “who forms their own opinions and beliefs, especially about religion or politics, rather than just accepting what is officially or commonly believed and taught.”

The weekly newspaper’s slogan, published under its masthead, said: "Devoted to the development and promotion of universal mental liberty." The paper was founded and edited originally by Abner Kneeland and published by  J. Q. Adams, George Chapman, Josiah P. Mendum. Today the Freethought Society has chapters in most states and many foreign countries.  It describes itself as an “educational, non-profit, national forum where Freethinkers can meet, socialize and exchange ideas.”

The “freethought” movement originated in England in the 17th century and found fertile ground in the United States in the 19th century. The main proponent of the U.S. movement was orator, lawyer and political speechmaker Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), also known as “the Great Agnostic.” He was a strong and loud believer in enlightenment with reason, secularism, and in the separation of church and state. He advocated questioning the Bible and the Church and favored rational thought through science. He called the Investigator "the best of all Liberal papers." 

The Boston Investigator was originally housed in the South End’s Paine Memorial Building, 11 Appleton St., which burned down in 1940. The paper later moved to the building next to The Boston Daily Globe, 92 Washington St., in Newspaper Row downtown Boston.

In 1833 founder/editor Kneeland was charged with writing and publishing articles that alleged he had violated the state’s blasphemy law (still in the books today) about prayer and the Immaculate Conception that made clear he did not believe in God, Christ, miracles, the resurrection or immortality. More specifically, the court case summary alleged the newspaper and its editor had published “a certain scandalous, impious, obscene, blasphemous and profane libel,” in which Kneeland “did wilfully [sic] blaspheme the holy name of God, by denying and contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government, and final judging of the world, and by reproaching Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, and contumeliously reproaching the holy word of God.”

After several appeals, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on April 2, 1838, upheld the decision (Commonwealth v. Kneeland, 37 Mass. 206, 20 Pick. 206) after finding that “There is no doubt that the language cited, if used in the connexion [sic] and with the intent and purpose charged in the indictment will amount to the offence contemplated in the statute.” And “to restrain and punish acts which have a tendency to disturb the public peace….is not repugnant to, but entirely consistent with, this second article of the Declaration of Rights...” Therefore “the motion to arrest the judgment cannot be sustained…..”

The court sentenced the defendant to “sixty days’ imprisonment in the common jail,” which Kneeland served in its entirety. It was the last time a person was jailed for blasphemy in the United States.

Above left to right: The Paine Memorial Building, original home of The Boston Investigator (photo, Digital Commonwealth); The Boston Investigator of July 6, 1881 and its offices next to The Boston Daily Globe on Washington Street (photo, Lyons’ Newspaper Story).