The Passing News
by Jeff Gammage
JUNE 7, 2009 TAGS:
The two have gone together for so long, it seems like they’ve always been a couple:
Death and newspapers.
Writing about the passing of strangers, friends and relatives has been part of American journalism since the first Continental papers arose in Colonial times. But it took a hundred years more for journalists to develop the formal, elegantly rendered telling we now recognize as the obituary.
It turns out that the familiar obit, seemingly so eternal and ever-present, is actually a fairly modern invention, organized and formalized around the time of the Civil War. I learned this while examining a raft of obituaries published in the early years of The Philadelphia Inquirer, research conducted for a special keepsake section on the newspaper’s 180th anniversary, a celebration conducted in the shadow of what some fear is a dying industry.
Big-city papers are struggling to transform themselves, to remain muscular, authoritative sources of news even as they become more web-savvy and -friendly. If they succeed — and the betting here is that most of them will — then one of things they’ll continue to publish is obituaries, which consistently rank among the most-read sections of the paper.
Janice Hume isn’t a journalist, she’s a University of Georgia associate professor. But she knows more about obituaries than practically anyone.
Hume read more than 8,000 obituaries — oh, the humanity — while researching her first book, Obituaries in American Culture. Her second book, Journalism in a Culture of Grief, written with Temple University associate professor Carolyn Kitch, looked at the role of news coverage on public mourning.
In the 1820s, as growing literacy and improved paper-making techniques made publishing more lucrative, newspapers sprang up by the handful. The Inquirer was at least the seventh daily operating in Philadelphia when it revved to life in 1829. The Inquirer was typical of its time in the way it reported local deaths. It didn’t gather that news on the same page, or even the same general area, of the paper. Instead, death news was tucked within longer, larger reports on an event or place, or scattered around the paper in short, two- or three-line stories.
“On Friday morning,” the Inquirer wrote in 1829, “Mr. Jonathon Russel of Brockport put a period to his existence by shooting himself through the head with a musket, loaded with powder and shot. Mr. R. was about 50 years of age - he left a wife and seven children in Salem, Ashtabula County, Ohio; and another wife in Brockport.”
A period to his existence indeed.
By the 1850s, newspaper stories about death were becoming more organized — and writers were striving to convey the reality of death without having to state the unpleasant truth that somebody had actually died. So readers learned of decedents who had been scathed by the wing of the destroying angel, or erased by the omnipotent author.
What changed that? The Civil War. Its outbreak meant that healthy young men were dying, suddenly, far from home, usually violently and often alone. They weren’t being summoned to the reward of the righteous — they were being slaughtered in armed conflict.
All at once, thousands upon thousands of families lost loved ones, a roll call that forced newspapers to call death what it was:
The enormity of the carnage pushed newspapers to develop a regular way to write and display the stories of individual deaths: the obituary. From then on, obituaries became a regular feature of most newspapers, even as they continued to change with the times.
During the late 19th century, Hume told me, people were remembered most for their character. Men were patriotic or brave; women patient and resigned. In the early 20th century, when moneymaking became paramount, obituaries tended to describe people in terms of their employment.
Indeed, Hume recalled how the death of a child merited the headline, “Career Cut Short.”
Today the language of obituaries is changing again, growing more flowery and offering more frequent descriptions of the dead having been called home to heaven, meeting the Lord or resting with the angels.
Temple’s Kitch cites a couple of reasons:
One is that, given their present economic hardships, more newspapers are willing to accept family-written obituaries, which tend to be more emotional. Another is that, today, more people are willing if not eager to openly proclaim their faith, particularly Christian faith.
What hasn’t changed, Kitch said, is the value of the printed newspaper obituary. Black ink on white paper, delivered to your doorstep, conveys a solemnity and finality that the internet has yet to duplicate.
To a family member, to a friend, to a grieving loved one, a newspaper obituary is “a physical object that they're going to save, that they’re going to clip out, that they’re going to send to somebody,” she said. “It has a sense of proof that online versions do not.”
Jeff Gammage is a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of China Ghosts: My Daughter's Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood.
Death and newspapers.
Writing about the passing of strangers, friends and relatives has been part of American journalism since the first Continental papers arose in Colonial times. But it took a hundred years more for journalists to develop the formal, elegantly rendered telling we now recognize as the obituary.It turns out that the familiar obit, seemingly so eternal and ever-present, is actually a fairly modern invention, organized and formalized around the time of the Civil War. I learned this while examining a raft of obituaries published in the early years of The Philadelphia Inquirer, research conducted for a special keepsake section on the newspaper’s 180th anniversary, a celebration conducted in the shadow of what some fear is a dying industry.
Big-city papers are struggling to transform themselves, to remain muscular, authoritative sources of news even as they become more web-savvy and -friendly. If they succeed — and the betting here is that most of them will — then one of things they’ll continue to publish is obituaries, which consistently rank among the most-read sections of the paper.
Janice Hume isn’t a journalist, she’s a University of Georgia associate professor. But she knows more about obituaries than practically anyone.
Hume read more than 8,000 obituaries — oh, the humanity — while researching her first book, Obituaries in American Culture. Her second book, Journalism in a Culture of Grief, written with Temple University associate professor Carolyn Kitch, looked at the role of news coverage on public mourning.
In the 1820s, as growing literacy and improved paper-making techniques made publishing more lucrative, newspapers sprang up by the handful. The Inquirer was at least the seventh daily operating in Philadelphia when it revved to life in 1829. The Inquirer was typical of its time in the way it reported local deaths. It didn’t gather that news on the same page, or even the same general area, of the paper. Instead, death news was tucked within longer, larger reports on an event or place, or scattered around the paper in short, two- or three-line stories.
“On Friday morning,” the Inquirer wrote in 1829, “Mr. Jonathon Russel of Brockport put a period to his existence by shooting himself through the head with a musket, loaded with powder and shot. Mr. R. was about 50 years of age - he left a wife and seven children in Salem, Ashtabula County, Ohio; and another wife in Brockport.”
A period to his existence indeed.By the 1850s, newspaper stories about death were becoming more organized — and writers were striving to convey the reality of death without having to state the unpleasant truth that somebody had actually died. So readers learned of decedents who had been scathed by the wing of the destroying angel, or erased by the omnipotent author.
What changed that? The Civil War. Its outbreak meant that healthy young men were dying, suddenly, far from home, usually violently and often alone. They weren’t being summoned to the reward of the righteous — they were being slaughtered in armed conflict.
All at once, thousands upon thousands of families lost loved ones, a roll call that forced newspapers to call death what it was:
“... killed in the battle of Antietam.”
“... died of wounds received at battle of Fredericksburg.”
“ ... in battle, at Gettysburg.”
The enormity of the carnage pushed newspapers to develop a regular way to write and display the stories of individual deaths: the obituary. From then on, obituaries became a regular feature of most newspapers, even as they continued to change with the times.
During the late 19th century, Hume told me, people were remembered most for their character. Men were patriotic or brave; women patient and resigned. In the early 20th century, when moneymaking became paramount, obituaries tended to describe people in terms of their employment.
Indeed, Hume recalled how the death of a child merited the headline, “Career Cut Short.”
Today the language of obituaries is changing again, growing more flowery and offering more frequent descriptions of the dead having been called home to heaven, meeting the Lord or resting with the angels.
Temple’s Kitch cites a couple of reasons:
One is that, given their present economic hardships, more newspapers are willing to accept family-written obituaries, which tend to be more emotional. Another is that, today, more people are willing if not eager to openly proclaim their faith, particularly Christian faith.
What hasn’t changed, Kitch said, is the value of the printed newspaper obituary. Black ink on white paper, delivered to your doorstep, conveys a solemnity and finality that the internet has yet to duplicate.
To a family member, to a friend, to a grieving loved one, a newspaper obituary is “a physical object that they're going to save, that they’re going to clip out, that they’re going to send to somebody,” she said. “It has a sense of proof that online versions do not.”
Jeff Gammage is a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of China Ghosts: My Daughter's Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood.
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COMMENTS (1)
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John DeMetropolis wrote on June 9, 2009 5:22am
Enjoyed the piece, and certainly the topic. The article gives me some more sources to check out on the subject. For another example of a succintly stated cause of demise check out www.onofframp.blogspot.com; the Herman Melville Slept Here... entry, June 8th. [Report Comment]
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