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.
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