In her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author Caroline Fraser repeats a claim that is, alas, rather common in the literature: nineteenth century capitalism was so cruelly cold-hearted to the poor that it even wished that they would die off. “The press encouraged such callousness,” she writes. “The Chicago Tribune once urged homeowners pestered by tramps to spike handouts with ‘a little strychnine or arsenic’ and poison men as if they were vermin.” (p. 180)
Well, that is indeed pretty nasty…if it’s true. Which of course it is not.
Fraser cites a website from 2014 which quotes from the editorial and, as she writes, claims that the article “dates from 1877.” In other words, Fraser didn’t bother to look it up. If she had—not hard to do, since it’s online, and costs $7.95 to access—she would have found that, unsurprisingly, the article is obviously a not-very-funny joke. It does indeed date from July 12, 1877, page 8. And it is plainly a satirical reference to what the author evidently considered an unduly harsh new ordinance allowing the police to arrest vagrants. Here it is.
Fraser is far from the only writer to fall for this hoax. As Lloyd Wendt writes in his extensive history of the Chicago Tribune (pp. 569-70), the article has been frequently taken at face value as if the paper were really calling for the murder of the homeless. And, to be fair, newspaper editorials did sometimes call for cruel and shocking acts in the nineteenth century—the persecution of the Chinese, for example, of which the San Francisco Chronicle was an enthusiastic advocate. But one would expect historians familiar with the deserved reputation of the era’s newspapers for over-the-top sensationalism, insensitive attempts at humor, tall-tale balderdash, and plain old shock-value nonsense—well documented in the writings of Twain and others—one would expect such historians to be a little more skeptical toward such claims as that the major paper of one of America’s greatest cities would openly seek to poison countless citizens to death on the streets. One suspects Fraser fell for this one because it served her preconceived ideas about the nineteenth century—ideas based in her leftist political ideology, which she makes little effort to conceal in her book and which, amusingly, stands at the exact opposite end of the spectrum from the politics of Laura Wilder and her daughter.
(To cite just one example of this, Fraser at one point claims that “socialism…helped” frontier farmers in the nineteenth century, and cites as examples “cooperative ventures [such as] creameries, grain elevators, and warehouses.” If one’s definition of socialism is an agricultural co-op, well, one has an interestingly mild notion of what socialism is—one far removed from that envisioned by Marx and his followers, not to mention one that omits many of the management problems co-ops have faced historically.)
I have no problem with authors writing history from their perspective. It’s what they’re supposed to do. But when it imposes blinders so strong that a writer falls for a hoax she should have immediately recognized as a too-good-to-be-true example, well, it presents a problem that I fear is pervasive in nineteenth century historiography. The era’s history is riddled with misleading stereotypes, imposed on it in retrospect by left-leaning historians who are often ignorant of economics or law, and who are eager to snatch up anything that appears to them as proof of the evils of capitalism. (Alas, this is also true of other historical eras, and yes, libertarian historians do commit the same error sometimes.)
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