Book description
Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal during the
tumultuous decades between the Civil War and World War I, was one of the
most influential and widely read journalists in American history. At the
height of his fame in the early twentieth century, Watterson was so well
known that his name and image were used to sell cigars and whiskey. A
major player in American politics for more than fifty years, Watterson
personally knew nearly every president from Andrew Jackson to Woodrow
Wilson. Though he always refused to run, the renowned editor was
frequently touted as a candidate for the U. S. Senate, the Kentucky
governor's office, and even the White House. Shortly after his arrival
in Louisville in 1868, Watterson merged competing interests and formed
the Courier-Journal, quickly establishing it as the paper of record in
Kentucky, a central promoter of economic development in the New South,
and a prominent voice on the national political stage. An avowed
Democrat in an era when newspapers were openly aligned with political
parties, Watterson adopted a defiant independence within the Democratic
Party and challenged the Democrats' consensus opinions as much as he
reinforced them. In the first new study of Watterson's historical
significance in more than fifty years, Daniel S. Margolies traces the
development of Watterson's political and economic positions and his
transformation from a strident Confederate newspaper editor into an
admirer of Lincoln, a powerful voice of sectional reconciliation, and
the nation's premier advocate of free trade. Henry Watterson and the New
South provides the first study of Watterson's unique attempt to guide
regional and national discussions of foreign affairs. Margolies details
Watterson's quest to solve the sovereignty problems of the 1870s and to
quell the economic and social upheavals of the 1890s through an
expansive empire of free trade. Watterson's political and editorial
contemporaries variously advocated free silverism, protectionism, and
isolationism, but he rejected their narrow focus and maintained that the
best way to improve the South's fortunes was to expand its economic
activities to a truly global scale. Watterson's New Departure in foreign
affairs was an often contradictory program of decentralized home rule
and overseas imperialism, but he remained steadfast in his vision of a
prosperous and independent South within an American economic empire of
unfettered free trade. Watterson thus helped to bring about the eventual
bipartisan embrace of globalization that came to define America's
relationship with the rest of the world in the twentieth century.
Margolies' groundbreaking analysis shows how Watterson's authoritative
command of the nation's most divisive issues, his rhetorical zeal, and
his willingness to stand against the tide of conventional wisdom made
him a national icon. Daniel S. Margolies is assistant professor of
history at Virginia Wesleyan College.
