Today in 1805, Alexis de Tocqueville was born.
Tocqueville is best known for Democracy in America, based on his travels in the United States in 1831-2, an analysis of “the vitality, the excesses, and the potential future of American democracy,” says Britannica.
Discussing the “reasons for which the press is less powerful in America than in France,” Tocqueville wrote:
It has been demonstrated by observation, and discovered by the innate sagacity of the pettiest as well as the greatest of despots, that the influence of a power is increased in proportion as its direction is rendered more central. In France the press combines a twofold centralization; almost all its power is centered in the same spot, and vested in the same hands, for its organs are far from numerous. The influence of a public press thus constituted, upon a skeptical nation, must be unbounded. It is an enemy with which a Government may sign an occasional truce, but which it is difficult to resist for any length of time.
Neither of these kinds of centralization exists in America. The United States have no metropolis; the intelligence as well as the power of the country are dispersed abroad, and instead of radiating from a point, they cross each other in every direction; the Americans have established no central control over the expression of opinion, any more than over the conduct of business. These are circumstances which do not depend on human foresight; but it is owing to the laws of the Union that there are no licenses to be granted to printers, no securities demanded from editors as in France, and no stamp duty as in France and formerly in England. The consequence of this is that nothing is easier than to set up a newspaper, and a small number of readers suffices to defray the expenses of the editor…
In America there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper.
After paying a visit to the United States, Charles Dickens described (in Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844) the newsboys greeting a ship in New York Harbor:
“Here’s this morning’s New York Stabber! Here’s the New York Family Spy! Here’s the New York Private Listener! … Here’s the full particulars of the patriotic loco-foco movement yesterday, in which the whigs were so chawed up, and the last Alabama gauging case … and all the Political, Commercial and Fashionable News. Here they are!” …
“It is in such enlightened means,” said a voice almost in Martin’s ear, “that the bubbling passions of my country find a vent.”
Another visitor from abroad, the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, could discern (in Portrait of America, 1876) in the mass circulation of newspapers, the American belief about the universal need for information:
In Poland, a newspaper subscription tends to satisfy purely intellectual needs and is regarded as somewhat of a luxury which the majority of the people can heroically forego; in the United States a newspaper is regarded as a basic need of every person, indispensable as bread itself.
Basic need for information, of all kinds, as Mark Twain observed (in Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1897):
The old saw says, “Let a sleeping dog lie.” Right. Still, when there is much at stake, it is better to get a newspaper to do it.