Reviewed by:

• Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood by James M. Lundberg
• Gregory A. Borchard

In Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood, James M. Lundberg explores the story of, arguably, the most significant and at the same time most complex newspaper personality in American history. Lundberg also provides a compelling analysis of nineteenth-century issues reflected in the content of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, suggesting Greeley was consistent to a fault in his devotion to the nationalistic ideals espoused by Henry Clay, the Whig statesman who developed an antebellum model of economic organization known as the American System. Clay, Greeley, and other Whig leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, helped make the party an essential political force during the 1840s. Unlike their rivals in the Democratic Party, the Whigs recognized that slavery would eventually tear the nation apart. With Clay as a leading political figure and Greeley as a source for widely circulated news, the Whigs offered a vision of national harmony in which regional sections cooperated to make the sum of their parts greater than the whole. In time, though, varying and conflicting regional interests made impossible compromise over the role slavery would—or would not—have in the nation’s growth, resulting in the catastrophic Civil War.

Lundberg argues that after the war, Greeley failed to read correctly the mood of the public he had in earnest previously sought to engage—Americans North and South who had no reason to believe the American System he championed in previous decades could possibly heal rifts still raw during Reconstruction. According to Lundberg, Greeley’s ill-fated 1872 presidential campaign demonstrated only a poorly judged opportunity for him to try making his vision of a truly united nation a reality one last time. “When he died in 1872, utterly humiliated and roundly drubbed by Ulysses S. Grant in that year’s presidential election, Greeley had become as disjointed as the nation he sought to embody and unify,” Lundberg writes. “He began his career wishing to be America’s oracle; he ended it as America’s prism” (2).

Lundberg succeeds in crafting a lucid and well-written narrative of Greeley’s life, but at the same time this biography also appears to overemphasize the role [End Page 58] Greeley alegedly played in the popularization of nationalist doctrine. Yes, the Tribune did promote Clay’s American System, among countless other “isms” for which the newspaper was famous and from time to time infamous. Yet, Lundberg pays very limited attention to the contents of either competing newspapers in the North and the South or newspapers that elsewhere supported the Tribune’s calls for unity. This approach would benefit from greater contextualization. In varying measures, New York’s Tribune, Herald, and Times—along with countless other newspapers scattered through the nation’s West and South—informed readers who understood the publisher’s personal opinions might at best resonate with their own. In this sense, the Tribune hardly held a monopoly on political thought before, during, or after the Civil War, and it can more clearly be studied as a sample of the nation’s mood, not necessarily the primary source of it.

Lundberg’s assessment of Greeley’s campaign places great weight on the idealistic reformer’s shoulders. “If Rutherford B. Hayes’s greatest virtue in 1876 would be that he was ‘offensive to no one,’” Lundberg writes, “a case could be made that Greeley was offensive to all in 1872” (170). Greeley did earn support from those who had aligned with Lincoln’s own desires to welcome the South back into the Union, but, as Lundberg writes, “it is hard to overstate the depth of Greeley’s failure in 1872, which went beyond mere electoral defeat. The campaign had accomplished almost precisely the opposite of what he had set out to achieve” (174). While Greeley’s bid for the presidency failed spectacularly, the suggestion that he left a legacy steeped in national failure does not quite...

审核人：

• 霍勒斯·格里利（Horace Greeley）：印刷，政治与美国民族主义的失败詹姆斯·伦德伯格（James M. Lundberg）
• 格雷戈里·A·博查德

詹姆斯·伦德伯格（James M. Lundberg）在《霍勒斯·格里利：印刷，政治与美国民族主义的失败》中探讨了美国历史上最重要，同时也是最复杂的报纸人物的故事。隆德伯格（Lundberg）还对霍拉斯·格里利（Horace Greeley）的《纽约论坛报》（New York Tribune）的内容所反映的19世纪问题进行了令人信服的分析，这表明格里利（Greeley）对辉格党政治家亨利·克莱（Henry Clay）奉行的民族主义理想的错误态度是一致的，辉格党政治家开发了一种被称为美国体系的经济组织的反战模式。克莱，格里利和其他辉格党领袖，包括亚伯拉罕·林肯（Abraham Lincoln），在1840年代帮助该党成为一支重要的政治力量。辉格党与民主党的竞争对手不同，他们认识到奴隶制最终会使国家分裂。辉格党以克雷（Clay）为主要政治人物，格里利（Greeley）为广为流传的新闻来源，提出了民族和谐的愿景，各区域部门合作，使各部分的总和大于整体。但是，随着时间的流逝，

隆德伯格辩称，战争结束后，格里利（Greeley）无法正确地阅读他曾认真寻求参与的公众情绪-北方和南方的美国人没有理由相信他在过去几十年中倡导的美国制度可能会治愈仍未解决的裂痕在重建过程中。伦德伯格认为，格里利在1872年失败的总统大选中，展示了一次试图将他对一个真正的统一国家的愿景变成现实的机会，这是一次判断不周的机会。伦德伯格写道：“当他于1872年去世时，在当年的总统大选中被尤利西斯·S·格兰特（Ulysses S. Grant）彻底羞辱和全面挫败，格里利（Greeley）变得与他试图体现和统一的国家一样脱节。” “他的职业生涯开始是希望成为美国的神谕；他把它作为美国的棱镜来终结”（2）。

隆德伯格（Lundberg）成功地完成了对格里利（Greeley）生活的清晰而准确的叙述，但与此同时，这本传记似乎也过分强调了[结束第58页]格里利在民族主义学说的普及中所扮演的重要角色。是的，《论坛报》的确促进了克莱的美国制度，在报纸声名“起且时而臭名昭著的其他“主义”之中。但是，伦德伯格很少注意北方和南方竞争报纸的内容，或者其他地方支持论坛报呼吁团结的报纸的内容。这种方法将从更大的上下文环境中受益。纽约的《论坛报》，《先驱报》和《泰晤士报》采取了不同的措施-以及遍及美国西部和南部的无数其他报纸-通知读者，他们理解出版商的个人观点最多可能会引起他们的共鸣。从这个意义上讲，《论坛报》几乎在内战之前，期间或之后都没有垄断过政治思想，可以更清楚地将其作为国家情绪的样本进行研究，而不一定是其主要根源。

伦德伯格对格里利竞选的评价非常重视理想主义改革家的肩膀。伦德伯格写道：“如果说卢瑟福·​​海斯在1876年最大的优点就是'对任何人都没有冒犯性'，那么就有可能证明格里利在1872年向所有人发脾气”（170）。格里利的确获得了那些与林肯自己的意愿相称的人的支持，这些人欢迎南方重新加入联盟，但是，正如伦德伯格写道，“很难夸大格里利在1872年的失败之深，不仅仅是失败的选举失败。该竞选活动几乎与他打算实现的目标恰好相反”（174）。虽然格里利（Greeley）竞选总统的努力失败了，但有关他留下沉浸在国家失败中的遗产的建议并不完全是...