A "human spider" planned to scale a bank building in downtown Little Rock that day — Nov. 20, 1919 — and nobody was trying to stop him. The fly, one Bill Strother, was not the biggest news on the front page of the Arkansas Gazette. That news was the Gazette, its own self.
One hundred years ago, the Arkansas Gazette declared itself 100 years old. It dated its founding from the first edition of The Arkansas Gazette by William Woodruff in the Arkansas Territory.
I think today most of us take it for granted that Nov. 20, 1819, marks the inception of an entity known as the Arkansas Gazette. Having spent the past year reading 200 years of the various, discontinuous newspapers that self-identified as guises of the Gazette, I know that this is an idea. I would not add "just" an idea. This idea is historic. It was developed by Woodruff — a slave-holding supporter of slavery who adhered to the profit motive so firmly he only loaned out his books for a fee — in collaboration with his son, an unreconstructed Confederate artillery officer — and agreed to by a parade of unrelated newspaper owners who came after them and, therefore, the Gazette's history tracks the history of its state.
If to be 100 requires maintaining the same title for a century, the Gazette did not qualify. If the main thing is to have been owned by one person or one family, the Gazette didn't qualify on those grounds either. If it's about espousing a particular point of view, no, the Gazette was not a consistent voice. And I say thank goodness: After Reconstruction, its ownership shuttled through boards of directors and a few major shareholders whose prime motives included enforcing segregation.
But then came 1902 and the Heiskell family. The journalistic ambition of the Gazette to be a modern newspaper and the voice of civic conscience begin to evolve under them.
BIG DEAL
To celebrate Nov. 20, 1919, John Netherland Heiskell's 100-year-old Gazette published a 244-page special section full of stories about its, and its state's, history and resources, as well as ads, ads, ads -- from counties, towns, businesses, schools, politicians. These ads congratulated the paper on its longevity and touted the wonderful wonders of whoever placed the ads.
It took the ad department most of the year to sell those ads. It took the circulation department two days to lug or ship 37,963 copies to the subscribers. November 20 was a Thursday that year. They started delivering the sections Wednesday evening and finished Thursday night. The rest of the 75,000-copy run was put out for single-copy sales or offered to the public as a Christmas gift idea.
You would think, with that many copies, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette library would have a box left today, but no, there are two (2) copies in-house. One has shattered along its brittle edges, and each browned page tries to split when you lift it with your white-gloved, careful fingers; but the cover remains clear and readable. The other copy is so out of register the art makes your eyes hurt, but at least it's not falling apart.
There is another, better known, Gazette "Centennial Edition" in the world, and copies of it are not hard to find. But that was published in 1936, for the centennial of the state.
The Gazette's 1919 Centennial Edition is a trove. There's a bit of romanticizing about Territory days and the Civil War written by eyewitnesses, and a ton of boosterism. There's a never-before published essay on the Bowie knife by J.N. Smithee — the Arkansas Democrat founder who was also a former Gazette editor and who committed suicide in 1902 at the Merchants Hotel.
There's creative writing by Charles T. Davis, the Gazette editorial paragrapher and daily poet who would become the state's first poet laureate in 1923.
Davis wrote quite a poem. Here's a snippet:
One lit a rushlight in the ages gone,
Bearing it through the night with tireless hand,
And saw its flicker steady into flame
Spreading the Light, that men might understand.
And when it faltered in his failing grasp
Another took it up and bore it on.
Today we serve in priesthood on the fire
Clear and as constant as in years agone.
Behind our service lies a century,
Swift, stalwart days that have gone on before,
And out beyond us unprobed, pregnant years ...
The paper's ad department began its campaign in January by announcing that Frank N. Henderson, former editor of the England Democrat, had resigned from the YMCA on Camp Pike to head a centenary team. June 8, his six-man delegation fanned out to pitch the project. But they weren't salesmen. They were "special representatives," and their mission was to help communities update the nation — and the world — about their local magnificence.
From small items that popped up in the paper from June through late October, we know the team included Henderson, Will Kavanaugh, J.L. Hinckley, L.M. Olsen, Herbert V. Rose, J.F. Sweezy and others. For instance, Misses Mary and Celia Murphy represented the Gazette centennial edition "movement" to the Chamber of Commerce in Russellville, and that city "subscribed" to a full-page ad.
Bentonville Community Club subscribed for a page June 12.
June 16, Sevier County would take eight pages, please. Henderson made his pitch there accompanied by Graham Burnham of Glenwood, a friend of the big edition, as well as Charles Strange of the International Creosoting and Construction Co. of Texarkana, who had been "captivated" by the resources of southwestern Arkansas:
De Queen's businessmen thought so well of the proposition that they wanted to let their neighbors have an opportunity to get into the band wagon. The visitors were accompanied to Horatio, also in Sevier County, over the Jefferson highway. They marveled at the smoothness of the surface of the road, and marveled again as they beheld the miles of strawberry and cantaloupe patches, the green fields of corn and cotton and the pretty new farm houses on either side of the highway which the intelligent cultivation of these crops has made possible.
Monette signed up in five minutes and paid upfront. Prescott and Nevada County would be represented on a page filled with pertinent facts about opportunities in the county for home-seekers who wished to ... blah blah blah.
LATE TO THE PARTY
The success of this campaign stands in contrast to another fundraising effort that set out upon its heels.
On June 6, Gov. Charles Brough called 55 citizens into his reception room at the Capitol to plan a November celebration for the founding of the Arkansas Territory. March or June might have been more appropriate, but June 1919 was already underway, so ... never mind.
Soon this effort had captains in 60 counties. Brough declared a fund drive July 21-26. But that week came and went without much luck, so he extended the drive.
By September, they didn't even have half the $75,000 goal.
On Sept. 7, the Gazette reported that the Public Health Department had voiced a worry that gathering thousands of Arkansans in one place could prove disastrous should there be another outbreak of influenza like the epidemic of 1918. The committee, reluctantly, quickly, canceled the whole idea.
But the Gazette ad campaign went on. The result was a stellar centennial keepsake worthy of the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi.
Email:
cstorey@adgnewsroom.com
Style on 11/18/2019