The stakes of the presidential election are also peculiar and personal, especially for me. The results may determine which of two old friends—my fellow editors on our high school newspaper—ends up being the next Californian on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mine is a strange circumstance. I spent my high school years, 1988 through 1991, at Polytechnic, a small (my graduating class had just 85 students) and academically rigorous private school in Pasadena. Late in my freshman year, I joined a group of students and a popular history teacher, Greg Feldmeth, in starting a school newspaper. We called it The Paw Print.

I became the paper’s first editor-in-chief, a job I shared with a classmate named Jim Ho, a doctor’s son from San Marino. Jim grew up to become, in 2017, a judge on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Last month, President Trump added Jim’s name to the short list of judges he would appoint to the Supreme Court.

One of our smartest Paw Print reporters, and one of our successors as editor-in-chief, was Leondra Kruger, a doctor’s daughter from South Pasadena. Leondra grew up to become, in 2015, a justice on the California Supreme Court. Multiple press reports now identify Leondra as one of the top contenders to be Joe Biden’s first appointee to the Supreme Court.

Over the years, I’ve kept in touch with both Jim and Leondra, rooting them on as they rose through the legal ranks (while never missing a chance to tease them for wasting their journalistic chops on careers as legal functionaries). Since they became judges, I’ve read their opinions and marveled at what has changed, and what hasn’t, since I edited their raw copy.

But now that they’re real contenders for the highest court in the land, I’ve developed mixed feelings at the prospect of the ascent of either, especially in this frightening moment in American history.

When I turn on the news and see the toxic stew of American politics and the ugliness of a court confirmation hearing, I’m filled with fear for any friend of mine who might be thrust into such awfulness. And while I’m proud to know two people as great as Jim and Leondra, I also recognize that having two of the top two dozen high court prospects come from the same elite San Gabriel Valley school is not exactly an advertisement for American equality.

But my biggest fears are selfish. I’ve read of how the bitter political battles over the Supreme Court nominations of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh ruined old friendships and divided the alumni community at the private school they both attended, Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown Prep. Their classmates were deluged with media inquiries, and I’m writing this column defensively, as a public statement to which I can point as I turn down the interview requests I’ve started to get about Jim and Leondra.

I’m also offering this as a prayer that our nation’s political and legal civil wars won’t eclipse my memories of high school days and divide my high school friends.

Those memories are mostly sweet. Poly mixed old-line Pasadena families with hyper-ambitious kids who had either fled (as I did) or avoided Pasadena’s struggling public schools. Immigrant families produced many of the best students, including Jim (born in Taiwan) and Leondra (whose mother is Jamaican). My AP chemistry teacher once dubbed me and the three other white kids in his class “the Caucasian Corner.”

Teachers were tough, and writing was emphasized; my fellow students included not only these two future judges but the screenwriters of Ocean’s 11 and School of Rock. Poly also had a softer side: It allowed you to try just about anything you could imagine. Jim and I were among those who imagined a school paper.

In that pursuit, we became fast friends. We ran the paper by rough consensus, with about a dozen editors deciding what to publish, often with Mr. Feldmeth’s counsel. Jim and I enjoyed stirring the pot, from arguing that the school tolerated too much underage drinking to investigating the ethics of water balloon attacks on freshmen. Jim made trouble by compiling a feature called “Paws and Claws”—a list of one-paragraph blasts of student praise and complaints.

Jim Ho’s Polytechnic yearbook page from 1991.

Jim was super-intense; he walked fast, laid out pages fast, and drove too fast, in a Ford Probe with so many extra options that The Paw Print’s car critic, whom I assigned to review student and teacher vehicles, called it the “Fordari Probarossa.” Jim loved arguing with our classmates and wrote with a passionate, sometimes over-the-top style. As his editor, I tried, and mostly failed, to tone him down as he campaigned to strip graduating seniors of the right to vote on the following year’s student government (since they wouldn’t live with the consequences of their choice).

I didn’t anticipate his judicial career, but I should have. He never missed an episode of NBC’s L.A. Law (he had a major crush on Susan Dey’s litigator). He had a strong sense of justice and helped crusade against what we saw as an unfair regime of student discipline. “Tardiness is treated as a more serious crime than cheating on exams,” the future Judge Ho wrote in his final Paw Print editorial. “Punishments must fit the crime, not the criminal.”

Leondra, a sophomore when we were seniors, was as cool and calm as Jim was hot and polarizing. One of the youngest people in her class, she could be funny and gossipy with friends, but she chose her words with great care, which made you listen more closely.

Leondra was deeply interested in the world outside Poly’s cloistered gates. She wrote for us about a Poly student who had left to go to public school and interviewed local teachers about California’s problems with education. As editor-in-chief, she published smart pieces about the school’s library, diversity, drugs, and even student sex. She also gracefully handled all the stories about the most traumatic event in our school’s life: the shooting death of a beloved student, Ochari D’Aiello, during summer break.

The Paw Print became smarter and more serious, with sharper editing and shorter stories, once Leondra took over. She ruled by consensus, in The Paw Print tradition, but had a strong backbone—she didn’t back down when people complained about coverage. When one student-contributor complained about his piece being cut, she replied: “When it comes to writers, sometimes people think their articles will only reflect on them, but in The Paw Print articles reflect on the newspaper as a whole.”

Leondra and I both went to Harvard, and we worked together again on the student newspaper, The Crimson. There she mostly resisted the urge to tell embarrassing stories about me to my girlfriend, another Crimson editor, now my wife. Leondra wasn’t the only future Supreme Court contender at the college paper; we became friends with Steve Engel, now a top Justice Department official who, like Jim, was recently added to President Trump’s Supreme Court list.

Leondra Kruger’s Polytechnic yearbook page from 1993.

After graduation, I became a newspaper reporter, which would rob me of most respect for the law (I’ve seen too much legislation written by the people and interests with money). But I kept tabs on the legal careers of Leondra and Jim with grudging envy. I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between the haphazard ways that careers advanced in the disintegrating media business, and the systematic ways my high school friends touched the different stations of the cross for would-be justices.

Leondra found her way to Yale Law (applying her Paw Print skills to serving as editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal), clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens, and worked in the U.S. solicitor general’s office, eventually arguing cases before the Supreme Court. She married a distinguished lawyer, and I’d thought California lost her to D.C. for good—until Gov. Jerry Brown unexpectedly called her home to take a seat on the state supreme court. Back in California, she has displayed her quiet intelligence and sense of duty—the L.A. Times reported that, just a few weeks after giving birth to her second child, she traveled to L.A. to hear cases.

Jim went to Stanford and worked briefly for state Sen. Quentin Kopp, a rare elected independent, before enrolling at the University of Chicago Law School, where his conservatism forcefully emerged. We kept in touch, and served as groomsmen in each other’s weddings. He worked in all three branches of the federal government—for Congress under Texas Sen. John Cornyn, in the Bush Justice Department, and as clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. (I dutifully reported his high school driving to the FBI when interviewed for his background checks.)

Despite political differences, we stayed friends; he even got me into a Federalist Society event, where, despite aggressive reporting, I failed to spot anyone eating children or selling Supreme Court seats. Jim married a distinguished Texas lawyer—a dead-ringer for Dey—and followed her home to the Lone Star State, where he served as the state’s solicitor general, argued cases before the Supreme Court, and, to your columnist’s dismay, dropped his Southern California roots from official bios. The support of Sen. Ted Cruz, who had been Jim’s predecessor as Texas solicitor general, was crucial to Jim’s appointment to the federal bench three years ago.

If appointed to the Supreme Court, each of my high school newspaper buddies would be celebrated as a history-maker—Leondra as the first Black woman justice, Jim as the first Asian American justice. But, of course, they come from the same place, and I can’t help but see the familiar in their stories.

Profiles of Leondra sometimes include progressive activists and legal scholars complaining that she’s cautious, moderate, too grounded in the facts—just like the student journalist she was at The Paw Print. Jim, meanwhile, has gotten national attention for writing provocative, argumentative, and accessible judicial opinions, just like the pieces he authored as a student journalist. Critics say he writes too much like a columnist, offering opinions about policy and politics and morality, rather than just deciding cases. I confess that some of his rulings—like an opinion suggesting that giving police more leeway to use force would somehow stop mass shootings—make me wish I still had the power to edit him.

The overwhelmingly liberal majority of our old schoolmates would prefer to see Leondra on the court. I’ve watched her on the bench, and she is certainly the kind of judge I’d want with my fate in a court’s hands—smart, kind, and carefully even-handed.

On group texts, classmates sometimes grow angry at decisions made by Jim. (“Jimmy Crow Ho” was the theme of one bitter thread after he joined a decision making it harder to vote in Texas.) But our country, and the politicians who choose judges, seem to prefer jurists like Jim—attention-getting and forthrightly ideological figures who, like Antonin Scalia or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, can infuriate or inspire political bases.

We also prefer our judges young, which is why both my high school contemporaries are on short lists simultaneously. This is not because younger judges are better. It’s because these are lifetime appointments, and because those in power today want to lock their preferred judges onto the bench for as long as possible. Leondra and Jim are hot prospects since they’re in their mid-40s; in another 10 years, they might be considered too old for serious consideration.

This is a rotten state of affairs, both for the judges and the judged. I can’t imagine a more stressful time in life to ascend to a huge, high-profile job than in these sandwich years, when you’re both raising young children and taking care of older relatives. And for the country, giving such power to younger, less experienced judges is sub-optimal. Judges are supposed to consider long-term impacts and timeless principles, the sort of thinking that is better informed by age and experience. Ideally, America would have wise old judges who can check the excesses of young and energetic elected officials. Instead, America has things upside down. Our judges are younger and precious, while our most powerful politicians are tired, geriatric cases.

My biggest worry, though, is not about the ages of new justices, but about the court that Jim or Leondra might join. The sheer power of the U.S. Supreme Court is frightening, and growing. As our faltering republic finds it harder to resolve disputes and make progress, just five justices will have the power to make major decisions to cancel the democratic and life choices that we Americans make.

I have the deepest affection for these two judges I’ve known for more than half my life. There is no doubting their intelligence and their integrity. I would trust Leondra and Jim with that most precious of things, my children’s lives. And if I could reform the Supreme Court, I’d require its justices to operate more like The Paw Print editors of our day, with all nine required to reach a consensus before they publish any decision.

But, alas, our high court is not my high school newspaper. And I find it impossible to fully trust Leondra or Jim or any other living soul with the vast and unaccountable powers of a U.S. Supreme Court justice seat.

The post Two Would-Be Supreme Court Justices and Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet to refer to any 20th-century daily paper as a “local paper” hides an important truth: the proportion of newspaper content that was written, designed, and printed locally decreased in the early 20th century. Aided by a new technology called the stereotype, syndicates began to sell the same articles and illustrations to hundreds of different newspapers around the country. Meanwhile, publishers like William Randolph Hearst and E. W. Scripps bought up multiple papers to form chains, which shared content among themselves.

These syndicate and chain systems rendered local papers far less local, homogenizing Americans’ news diets and spreading a consumer culture that retains its hold on Americans today.

The rise of a telegraph network, in the middle of the 19th century, first enabled companies to sell content to multiple papers. Wire services such as the Associated Press offered breaking news by telegraph, with the understanding that editors would cut, embellish, or otherwise alter the text for their own pages.

When it came to entertainment, 19th-century newspaper editors had simply reprinted material they found elsewhere, running jokes from magazines or serializing entire novels. But by the early 20th century, a series of copyright lawsuits had ended the era of free material and created an opening for companies, called feature syndicates, that offered entertaining articles at an affordable price.

Feature syndicates commissioned articles and fiction from well-known authors such as Jack London, Frederick Douglass, and John Muir, and required that all papers purchasing the stories print them on the same date, so all could claim to be printing “fresh” or “first run” material. Receiving stories by telegraph or via paper “proofs” spared local publishers the trouble of hiring writers and reporters for all of the material that filled their pages.

But the system still required a lot of labor from local papers. Workers at each paper would set casts of the type into columns using a linotype machine, and from those casts another set of workers would fabricate a metal printing plate. Eventually syndicates began providing thin metal stereotype plates, or the lightweight casts used to make them, called matrices, which let publishers skip the typesetting process altogether. Using prepared stereotypes also allowed syndicates to sell illustrations, setting the stage for one of their top sellers: the comic strip.

Stereotype technology made the printing process less labor-intensive and more streamlined. Courtesy of Public.Resource.Org/flickr.

Business boomed. In 1913, there were 40 syndicates in operation; by 1931, there were more than 160. Some were small and specialized, offering only science articles or fiction; others sold a full array of features to thousands of newspapers. Local editors ordered syndicated features out of catalogs, choosing their paper’s sports column, women’s page, cooking feature, children’s page, and comic strips. Some purchased their paper’s entire Sunday magazine from a syndicate.

The same printing technologies—stereotype plates and matrices—drove the expansion of newspaper chains in the early 20th century. Once multiple papers could share material efficiently, the benefits of chain ownership multiplied, and so did chains themselves. By 1930 there were 59 different newspaper chains operating in the U.S. The Hearst chain owned 23 daily papers; the Scripps-Howard chain had grown to 25. Many chains ran their own feature syndicates, and would sell their material to any non-competitor newspaper.

So, by the 1920s, most of the articles that Americans read in their local papers had been bought, sold, or shared on the national news market. These articles had tremendous appeal. Syndicates that sold Sunday magazines or “rotogravure” photo sections offered higher-quality images than most independent papers could produce. Syndicates also enriched many papers’ international coverage. While local papers could buy breaking news from wire services (or send their own reporters), feature syndicates provided detailed illustrated articles on topics like politics in the Balkans, archaeology in Egypt, or diamond mining in Brazil.

Syndicates identified and showcased some of the best in the business: from John T. McCutcheon’s cartoons to Mark Sullivan’s commentary on national politics. They commissioned features from famous politicians (Winston Churchill wrote an international affairs column), sports stars (boxer Jack Dempsey and tennis player Helen Wills offered tips on technique), and royalty (Queen Marie of Romania wrote a beauty column). Columns by comedian Will Rogers, sports writer Grantland Rice, and gossip columnist Walter Winchell all earned devoted followings. Syndicated advice columnist “Beatrice Fairfax” and health columnist “Dr. Evans” received tens of thousands of reader questions each year. Robert LeRoy Ripley, author and illustrator of the weekly “Believe it or Not,” boasted of millions of fan letters.

When sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd studied the town of Muncie, Indiana, they found that everyone read and talked about Dorothy Dix’s advice columns; ministers even used her words as the basis for their sermons. During a 1945 strike in which New York news carriers refused to deliver for 17 days, a team of researchers asked New Yorkers what they most missed about the news. Very few could name a specific news story that they wanted to follow; instead they named features—mostly syndicated—that they missed.

The average American reader didn’t necessarily notice the way syndicates and chains had come to dominate the news. Syndicates were careful to sell their material to only one newspaper per city. While syndicated features usually carried a small copyright symbol, the name that followed that symbol could be deliberately opaque. Readers wouldn’t automatically know that “King Features” denoted Hearst material, or that “NEA” indicated content from the Scripps chain. Local papers sometimes purposely disguised syndicated material. The Milwaukee Sentinel bought a comic strip from the New York World syndicate in 1918, for example, but retitled it “Somewhere in Milwaukee.” The same paper told readers to send in their letters for Dorothy Dix as though she could be reached in Milwaukee, and not in New York City, where she lived and sold her work to the Ledger syndicate.

Journalists, on the other hand, definitely noticed the growing power of syndicates and chains—and many were not happy about it. H. L. Mencken lamented that newspapers “now clump into miserable chains, like filling-stations and grocery-stores” and no longer cultivated hard-hitting local journalism. Syndicates could turn successful writers into national celebrities, but they ultimately cut down the total number of journalists, since one writer could provide the sports column for a hundred papers. While syndicated writers could potentially work from anywhere, in actuality this new system concentrated the profession into just a few cities: New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago. Formerly robust journalism scenes in other cities—San Francisco, Cleveland, Buffalo, Denver—withered.

Journalists worried, too, that syndicated news catered to the lowest common denominator. Syndicate managers urged their writers to stick to proven topics: mystery, romance, adventure, children, and animals. Writers purposely crafted placeless and politically bland features that could be sold to any newspaper, anywhere in the country. Within the industry, syndicated material was often referred to as “canned news” or even “canned junk.” Journalist Will Irwin, who wrote a series of exposés on the newspaper business for Collier’s Weekly, thought all of this amounted to newspapers full of “triviality—too much frosting and too little cake.” Irwin wondered whether standardized news might ultimately create a standardized culture, writing in 1924:

Traveling across the continent, you have the impression that you have seen morning after morning and evening after evening all the way only the same newspaper, merely in cheaper or more expensive form. Continued over a generation this process must work to unify the national psychology—to make the next generation—East, South, West, and North—think and feel alike.

Ultimately, syndicated news did not create the entirely homogenous nation that Irwin predicted—but it did have long-lasting impacts on American life. Like other mass media that boomed around the same time—radio, movies, monthly magazines—syndicated news diverted people’s energies and attention from local culture with alluring, slickly-produced entertainment. And like those other media, newspapers became a conduit for a shared commercial culture.

When they opened up their papers, Americans laughed at the same jokes, read the same advice, and learned the same vocabularies. Americans began to talk about “keeping up with the Joneses,” using the title of a successful syndicated comic strip about a family obsessed with appearing as prosperous and happy as the neighbors. Readers followed the antics of Buster Brown in his weekly comic strip, and then purchased the children’s shoes named after the character. Through syndicated columns that sold mail-order patterns, newspaper readers around the country built the same houses and sewed the same dresses.

Syndicates and chains shrank the number of American dailies—including, significantly, newspapers that catered to minority and immigrant groups. Syndication posed particular problems for African-American newspapers. For current events, the Associated Negro Press provided a wire service specifically for black papers. But purchasing stock features from syndicates meant that black papers’ women’s pages sometimes sported mass-produced images of white women, or that their fiction illustrations pictured white protagonists.

Pressure from syndicates was especially tough on the foreign-language press. At the turn of the century, American cities published daily newspapers in German, Yiddish, Spanish, Chinese, and Polish, among other languages. But incorporating syndicated material proved awkward or impossible for these papers, who couldn’t translate the dialogue in a syndicated comic strip or the text in an illustrated beauty column, since the words were forged right into the ready-to-print stereotype plate. The absence of colorful, mass-appeal syndicated content became one more element pushing second- and third-generation immigrants away from the foreign-language press and towards English-language dailies.

In fact, immigrants and people of color were hard to find in syndicated material at all, apart from offensive caricatures in humor sections. As the American population diversified through massive immigration and black migration out of the South, syndicates and chains churned out features that reflected only white, middle-class norms, and made caricatures of all other populations.

We still call these caricatures “stereotypes.”

The post When Newspaper ‘Stereotypes’ Got Americans Laughing at the Same Jokes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Although we’ve forgotten his name, Klopsch and the Christian Herald fostered a popular movement of faith-based philanthropy that rivaled the achievements of competing humanitarian agencies like the American Red Cross and provided a sharp contrast to another trend in American giving at the time: the rise of scientific philanthropy, championed by Andrew Carnegie. During its heyday, the Christian Herald engaged ordinary citizens from across the U.S. in efforts to assuage all kinds of adversity: from homelessness among New York City’s unemployed to poverty among formerly enslaved people in the American South; from disease and destitution among survivors of massacres in Armenia to hardships following natural disasters in India, China, Scandinavia, Macedonia, Japan, Italy, and Mexico. By the time Klopsch died in 1910, Christian Herald subscribers had donated over $3.3 million (equivalent to approximately $89 million in 2019) to domestic and international causes. No other relief organization in this period came close to matching its fund-raising record or ability to arouse popular concern for suffering.

Key to Klopsch’s success in making the Christian Herald “a medium of American bounty to the needy throughout the world” was his insistence that philanthropy was not the province of the privileged elite but a popular practice in which all citizens ought to participate. In a humanitarian crisis, each dollar made a difference—even a nickel could buy a loaf of bread. Every person who could spare a penny should share with sufferers in distress.

By democratizing philanthropy, the Christian Herald’s campaigns made charity a distinguishing mark of American character, Klopsch contended, and helped unify an increasingly diverse population. The common enterprise of serving others, he argued, let people overcome political disagreements, social prejudices, economic antagonisms, regional animosities, cultural conflicts, and religious discord—all of which were on the rise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as Americans argued over immigration, race, income inequality and labor unrest, imperialism, women’s rights, evolution, and the Bible. Whatever their differences in these arenas, Klopsch insisted, surely American citizens could unite around the commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The Christian Herald was particularly well-positioned to build solidarity, Klopsch asserted, because the newspaper avoided controversial subjects, attracted subscribers from all across the U.S., and appealed to adherents of many different denominations. Although the overwhelming majority of readers were white Protestants, the editors took pains to include stories about African American churches and charities, to report on the plights of Native Americans and Asian immigrants, to highlight the work of Jewish philanthropists, and to build bridges with Catholics. At a time when many Protestant leaders supported racial segregation, expressed anti-Semitism, and accused the Pope of conspiring to take over the United States, the Christian Herald’s ecumenism was noteworthy.

Klopsch’s sympathy for the downtrodden “whatever their color, race, or religion” stemmed from his own experiences. As a young man, he was forced to quit school to help support his struggling immigrant family. When run-ins with the law landed him in jail, he came face-to-face with men of many different backgrounds for whom crime had seemed the only means of providing food for their wives and children. These encounters prompted Klopsch to empathize with those whose misfortunes contributed to their distress, dissipation, or even delinquency.

“There is no depth of human misery and degradation so low that it cannot be reached by the love of Christ,” he concluded. Everyone deserved a second chance.

After his release from prison, Klopsch strove to put these convictions into practice. While working to establish himself in the newspaper industry, he began teaching Sunday School at Talmage’s church. He soon formed a friendship with the popular minister, and the two devised a plan to acquire the Christian Herald and accomplish “many good works” by publicizing humanitarian crises and urging readers to help the poor. Klopsch landed at “the front in almost every national and international enterprise of benevolent or humane character,” his biographer wrote; his energetic outreach and innovative methods “gave the man and his journal the highest imaginable prestige, and put the Christian Herald upon a pinnacle of popularity as an organ of wide-spread humanitarianism.”

Yet even as Klopsch persuaded many that being American meant serving those in need, not everyone agreed with his ideas. Klopsch faced criticism from those who believed that charity perpetuated poverty. Many of his contemporaries insisted that indigence was the product of indolence, intemperance, or iniquity. Wealth came to the worthy who worked hard, stewarded resources wisely, and lived virtuously. Although mishaps might sometimes cause unmerited hardship, most often the destitute were responsible for their distress. According to this logic, providing disaster assistance was permissible (as long as the damage could not have been avoided through better preparation), but aiding the poor ought to be prohibited. Helping those who refused to help themselves encouraged a “vicious and willful pauperism” that would only “increase in proportion to the relief provided.”

One of the most prominent advocates of this position was industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie. In a series of essays published just prior to Klopsch’s purchase of the Christian Herald, Carnegie chastised practitioners of “so called charity” who gave assistance to “the slothful, the drunkard, the unworthy.” Aiding such reprobates, he argued, interfered with “the survival of the fittest” and posed a “serious obstacle to the improvement of our race.” Rather than risk abetting “irreclaimably destitute, shiftless, and worthless” beggars through “the practice of indiscriminate giving,” philanthropists should distinguish between the deserving and the derelict—or, even better, avoid almsgiving altogether and instead invest in institutions that would place “within reach ladders upon which the aspiring can rise”: public parks, free libraries, universities, music halls, art galleries, bathhouses, and churches.

Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” inspired the growth of scientific philanthropy, an influential movement that developed systematic processes for segregating the meritorious from the miscreants. Charitable organizations that adopted this approach required the needy to apply for aid. Investigators interviewed candidates, asking about their work habits, health, spending patterns, housekeeping, children’s education, and even religious practices. Sometimes “Friendly Visitors” would call on supplicants in their homes to confirm that the information they provided was accurate and their needs were genuine. Petitioners judged worthy might receive monetary assistance. Those found wanting were offered training in self-reliance, or deemed intractable and cut off from any support.

As scientific philanthropy gained authority, the Christian Herald’s work came under increasing attack. When the Quito sailed for India, critics questioned sending aid to people who might be responsible for their own plight. The famine, some suggested, was the product of “improvident” choices made by “backward” peasants who failed to adopt modern irrigation techniques or “sow their seed at the proper season.” The Christian Herald’s sponsorship of domestic charities also troubled detractors. The newspaper’s support for New York City’s Bowery Mission—an organization that provided food and shelter for the hungry and homeless—drew especially virulent condemnation from “professional philanthropists” who charged that breadlines, soup kitchens, and “indiscriminate doles” attracted “tramps, panhandlers, and vagrants” who refused honest work in favor of free handouts.

Klopsch refuted these allegations. Although he and his colleagues at the Christian Herald acknowledged that modernizing agricultural methods might mitigate food shortages in India and elsewhere, they insisted that providing emergency relief to famine sufferers was a moral and spiritual duty. And while they conceded that scientific methods could improve efficiency in philanthropy, they repudiated the claim that charity encouraged delinquency. Klopsch knew from personal experience how difficult it was to get by in a volatile economy with few social safety nets. “What ‘pauperizes the people,’” he proclaimed, “is not the helping hand they occasionally get at a pinch from their sympathetic brothers and sisters, but low sweatshop wages, exorbitant rents, high prices for food … wholesale enforced idleness, privation and sickness. For how much or how little of this the poor themselves are responsible any fair-minded person can judge.”

Rather than blaming the needy for their penury or condemning the Christian Herald for trying to help, Klopsch argued, proponents of scientific philanthropy ought to recognize that the “real root of the problem” of poverty lay in structural inequalities. If anyone was to be held accountable for suffering, it was greedy industrialists who amassed colossal fortunes by extracting resources from colonized peoples, paying employees a pittance, and inflating prices. Instead of building colleges, libraries, and other institutions designed to “uplift the masses,” Klopsch and his associates suggested, millionaires like Carnegie should expand employment opportunities, offer higher salaries, and support legislation to ensure fair labor and living conditions.

Throughout his tenure at the Christian Herald, Klopsch endorsed social reforms, legal regulations, and religious enterprises designed to redress the adverse effects of laissez-faire capitalism. In his later years, he promoted the platform of “Christian Socialism” put forward by the Rev. Charles Sheldon, who coined the slogan “What Would Jesus Do?” This ambitious program called for substituting cooperation for competition in commercial enterprises and instituting “common ownership of … common needs” such as transportation facilities, heating and electric utilities, water and food sources, and health care in order to create “a new and different order of social life” based on “the teaching of the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.”

None of these proposals came to fruition during Klopsch’s lifetime—and after his death, the establishment of large philanthropic foundations, the professionalization of social work, the expansion of the welfare state, and the federalization of foreign aid diminished the Christian Herald’s stature as a premier humanitarian aid agency.

The newspaper ceased publication in the 1990s, but the issues it raised persist. Today’s debates about poverty assistance, immigration, and global inequality reveal that Americans remain divided over who deserves help and the best ways to create a just society. Still, Klopsch’s legacy lives on among the millions who believe that alleviating affliction is the moral obligation of every individual and carry forward Klopsch’s conviction that the gospel of grace trumps the gospel of wealth.

The post The Crusading Newsman Who Taught Americans to Give to the Poor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To: Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk
From: Joe Mathews
Re: Acquisition and Reputation

Have you two lost your minds?

Both of you are suffering through long-running, self-inflicted public relations crises. Mark, Facebook’s self-serving and ever-shifting policies, the way its platform polarizes politics, and growing alarm about the health effects of social media, have turned you into a lightning rod.

Elon, you are over a barrel for strange behavior, including attacking financial analysts, crying during a New York Times interview (which included the revelation that you use Ambien and recreational drugs), and tweeting yourself into a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation.

Neither of your predicaments is really surprising, given the way the two of you combine planet-sized ambition with questionable management. What is puzzling is your failure to escape these crises.

Why haven’t you taken advantage of the obvious, cheap, and proven way to launder your reputations and curry favor with the media?

That method is straightforward:

Buy your local newspaper!

There’s no better balm for a billionaire’s press clippings than saving a newspaper.

Exhibit A is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who was known for tax avoidance and cold-blooded ruthlessness in remaking the American retail landscape until he purchased The Washington Post for some loose change ($250 million). Despite being the world’s richest person—the sort of thing that used to make you a target of media types—Bezos is now described as a defender of democracy (“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the Post’s Bezos-era motto) against the madness of President Trump.

In California, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong is taking the reputation-burnishing possibilities of media ownership to the next level. Soon-Shiong has long received bad publicity—for questions about the drug business that made him a billionaire, for self-dealing in his philanthropic and cancer test endeavors, for a troubled L.A. hospital chain he bought, and for allegations of financial improprieties lodged by people including his brother and Cher.

But then the good doctor rescued the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune from the clutches of a Chicago-based entity called Tronc. Now Soon-Shiong is being celebrated by hard-bitten reporters for restoring local ownership and investing in investigative reporting.

Sure, buying a paper isn’t free, but it’s cheap for billionaires, and can even pay for itself. Soon-Shiong had to overpay—$500 million—to wrest the Times and the Union-Tribune away from their Chicago owners. But the purchase has provided him a valuable ballast of virtue that could reduce questions about his other businesses.

In Boston, billionaire John Henry—who was educated in California, and built his investment company in Orange County—purchased The Boston Globe essentially for nothing, since he made back more than its $70 million purchase price by selling its headquarters land for more than $80 million.

Likewise, owning the Post sure hasn’t hurt Bezos’s business. The state government of Maryland, which the Post reports on, has offered an astounding $8.5 billion in tax incentives to convince Amazon to build a second headquarters there.

Of course, there are other rewards for buying newspapers, if you care: namely, that you’ll be doing a public service. Today’s newspapers are in deep trouble, struggling for revenue and constantly shedding staff. By buying papers, you two—if you’re willing to spend a little on the product—would provide stability to vital if weakened institutions that still try to get the facts and bind communities together.

Think of the opportunity—you could do a good deed, and help your public image in the process.

Now, to be fair, you’re still rich and famous and will face public scrutiny. And if you too blatantly deploy your newspapers to serve your other interests, you could run into trouble. (Soon-Shiong’s reported habit of using his philanthropy to serve his business ventures suggests that conflict with journalists at his papers is likely.) But once you own the paper you’re likely to be less of a target. Journalists have limited time and money to go after subjects; they’re not keen to devote precious resources to biting the hand that feeds.

So what should you buy? For you, Zuck, the obvious target is your hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle. You once told the paper’s editor, Audrey Cooper—according to an open letter she wrote to you—“how important The Chronicle’s work is in the Bay Area and how invested Facebook was in helping us to do it.”

Of course, in that same letter, Cooper called you out for not dealing honestly and consistently with the Chronicle and other publishers, and abdicating your responsibility to improve the public discourse. The good news is that, by buying the paper, you could work with her to show your commitment to said discourse. It would be a chance to demonstrate that the days of “move fast and break things” are behind you.

Since your press is even worse, Elon—your nasty habit of attacking reporters and suggesting you’d produce a rating system for journalists has predictably backfired—you’ll need to buy a tougher target: Digital First Media. That’s a newspaper group owned by Alden Global Capital, a New York-based hedge fund.

You don’t have to buy the whole chain. It would be enough to grab the pieces of the chain from Southern California, where you live; this means everything from the Orange County Register to the Los Angeles Daily News.

Alden, which has ruthlessly cut its staffs and newspaper offerings, is one of the few institutions with a worse reputation among journalists than yours. That’s good news for you. If you bought the papers and restored staffing and investment in the news product (maybe your Saudi buddies could help), you’d find yourself transformed overnight into a journalistic hero.

And if the papers lose money, well, they’ll fit in well with other pieces of your portfolio, like Tesla, which still isn’t profitable.

Yes, I know that newspapers are not the business you want to be in, but they still shape public narratives. So, Mark and Elon, you face a choice. You can keep complaining about all the bad press you get. Or you can buy your own newspapers, and, in the process, give a boost to media and civic life in your own state of California.

If you two are as smart as you’re supposed to be, your next moves are obvious.

The post Why Two California Billionaires Should Buy Newspapers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.