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Tuchinsky, Adam. Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010. 312 pp. $59.95.
It is appropriate that I finished this book on Labor Day. Besides newspaper editor Horace Greeley, it partly focuses on nineteenth-century labor problems, and it was a labor to get through a few of its chapters. That is not to say that the book is not worthwhile. It provides a thoughtful analysis of politics and labor problems during America's early years and also offers insights into one of the most-influential journalists of the 1800s.
Greeley, born on a New Hampshire farm in 1811, was mostly self-educated and moved around in his early career as a printer, settling in 1831 in New York City, where he opened a print shop. In 1834, he made his first foray into publishing with a literary periodical, the New-Yorker, in which, alongside reprinted jokes and popular songs, he opined on such topics as slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, and labor. A reformer, he became involved in Whig politics and, after the New-Yorker folded during a financial crisis in 1 837, he worked as editor of a campaign newspaper, The...