Behold the Wicked Abominations That They Do”: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Evidentiary Approach in American Investigative Journalism
Vol. 39, No. 4, 2022
By Gerry Lanosga
An article on the anti-slavery movement may seem out of place in a special issue marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate scandal, but when I saw the call for papers about the history of investigative reporting, my thoughts went immediately to the abolitionist writers of the early nineteenth century. As a scholar who focuses on the professional practice of journalism, I have long been fascinated by precursors to the late twentieth century model that typically comes to mind when thinking about investigative journalism. To the extent people recall any precedent, most likely it would be the muckraking period of the early twentieth century, but the roots go much deeper in history. Episodic examples of investigative reporting can be found in the earliest days of the American colonies, and certainly there are European predecessors even earlier.
However, I argue in this article that it was abolition pamphleteers and journalists who fully articulated a systematic method of marshaling evidence for the exposure of hidden wrongdoing. While initial abolitionist works tended toward the polemical, making biblical-based arguments meant to appeal to the moral conscience of enslavers, a second wave of writings was more focused on broader audiences who were unaware of the awful realities of slavery. These exposés were built carefully on the authority of documents and evidence. Although the phrase “investigative reporting” would not come into common usage until more than a century later, the abolitionist writers laid the foundation for a discipline of verification that would come to define the “documents state of mind” to which multitudes of investigative journalists, from the Watergate generation and beyond, have subscribed.
Primary sources for this article were drawn first from the myriad abolitionist pamphlets, newspapers, and books, particularly the publications of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s. These were supplemented by the private correspondence among abolition writers, which contain important insights into the process behind the published works. This triangulation of evidence presents a useful study in building an argument from historical materials. It also provides opportunities for reflecting on other methodological matters related to historical periodization and the use of commemorative anniversaries in historiography. The resources and suggested exercises below could be adapted to history courses at any level.
Resources
Pamphlets and books published by abolition writers are available in print at public or university libraries, and many of them are also readily available in digital format thanks to sites such as the Internet Archive. Key texts in this article include American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, by Theodore Dwight Weld of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and Thoughts on African Colonization by William Lloyd Garrison.
The Internet Archive also maintains digitized runs of abolition newspapers such as The Genius of Universal Emancipationand The Liberator. Subscription-based collections of historical newspapers, often available through university libraries include ProQuest, Readex, Newspapers.com, and NewspaperArchive.com. And some periodical publications are available in reprinted volumes available at libraries, such as Anti-Slavery Examiner and Anti-Slavery Record. An excellent collection of publications by Black abolitionists is: The Black Abolitionist Papers, ed. C. Peter Ripley (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
Finally, a number of collections of correspondence among abolition writers and activists have been published. One such resource important for this article was Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, 1822-1844 (New York: De Capo Press, 1970).
General Discussion Questions
- What are the implications of using a contemporary concept such as investigative reporting as a prism for examining historical practices such as abolitionist advocacy?
- In terms of scholarship, what is the value of an anniversary of a specific historical event? Does it matter that something happened fifty years ago as opposed to, say, thirty-seven years ago? Should historians bother with arbitrary markers such as anniversaries?
- In what ways is the “investigative reporting” described in the article distinct from the kind of investigative work practiced by today’s journalists?
Exercise 1 – Triangulating Sources
Historical studies of journalism often focus on the output of journalistic efforts, namely newspaper articles or broadcast stories. But one can infer only so much about a historical subject from the content of a news product. This brief exercise for in-class discussion is designed to stimulate thinking about how historians work to add nuance and context to the examination of historical media artifacts. Students can be divided into small groups and asked to closely examine the footnotes, categorizing the kinds of sources cited in a specific portion of the article. Then the class as a whole can discuss their findings, which should identify at least three kinds of evidence: secondary scholarly sources, published media sources (newspapers, books, and pamphlets), and unpublished documents such as personal letters. For further discussion, the instructor can prompt students with questions about varying levels of reliability within and between these categories of sources.
For a lengthier, more in-depth exercise, students could work individually or in groups to find countervailing sources such as those produced by Southern writers and newspapers or personal letter collections of those living in the South and contrast the arguments and methods they find with those explicated in “Behold the Wicked Abominations That They Do.” Alternately, students could search for mainstream Northern news sources and examine how they wrote about slavery and/or abolition in different ways than the advocacy press of the abolition movement. This could lead to a classroom discussion or, for a longer-term assignment, to a short paper.
Exercise 2 – Reconsidering Anniversaries
Anniversaries are irresistible to historians, journalists, and people in general. But, convenient as they are, do they make for good history? Historian Lindsay Diggelmann has written about “the curious cultural imperative of big round numbers” in cautioning against the pitfalls of anniversaries for historical understanding. Some journalism organizations, for instance, have marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate scandal with triumphal retrospectives highlighting the rise of investigative reporting. But “Behold the Wicked Abominations That They Do,” argues that the importance of Watergate in the development of investigative journalism tends to be over-emphasized. This is an example of what David Hackett Fischer calls the telescopic fallacy, in which “distant origins” of an event or phenomenon are forgotten.
In what other ways might anniversaries mythologize or distort our understandings of the past? For this classroom discussion exercise, students can be assigned to work in groups to consider other prominent events or developments in media history that recently had or will soon have “big round number” anniversaries—the founding of cable news in 1980, for instance, or the debut of Fox News in 1996. As aspiring historians, how would students approach a re-assessment or retrospective of an event that is considered a seminal moment in media history? This exercise could be adapted for a same-day class discussion or follow-up group presentations.
Exercise 3 – Continuity versus Change Over Time
Historical work involves the study of change over time, but sometimes things are quite stable over time. That is called continuity, and “Behold the Wicked Abominations That They Do” essentially makes an argument for the continuity, or at least long duration, of the practice we currently call investigative reporting. That does not mean, however, that investigative reporting now is just the same as it was in the 1830s.
For this exercise, students can be asked to find contemporary examples of investigative reporting and compare and contrast them to specific abolition writings cited in the article. For contemporary examples, students might check the website of Investigative Reporters and Editors or the winners of the investigative reporting category in the Pulitzer Prizes. Working individually or in groups, students should look for similarities and differences in aspects of the reports such as tone, sourcing, evidence, and attribution. Again, depending on instructional needs, the follow-up could involve in-class discussion or a written assignment coupled with discussion in a subsequent class session.
Further Reading
James Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).
James S. Ettema and Theodore L. Glasser, Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue (New York: Columbia University, 1998).
Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976).
Jon Marshall, Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2011).
Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle Against Slavery (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2008).