Projecting Moses Yale Beach
Publisher of the New York Sun and creator of the Associated Press, Moses Yale Beach experienced the earliest industrialization of America in a way that greatly influenced his thinking. The time in which he lived, and his relationship to it, is relevant to what we’re experiencing in media and the economy today.
Born in 1800, by his mid-twenties Beach had already tried his hand at enterprises in steamboat navigation and manufacturing rag maceration mills of his own invention. In 1826, his reputation among paper makers (as a technologist) brought him to Saugerties, New York. There, he was recruited to assemble and put into production the first Fourdrinier paper-making machines in America.
The developers of the industrialization that attracted him to Saugerties were part of America’s most influential families. His connections to them would play a part in what would later bring him to create the Associated Press. As a man having self-made wealth from being a technician and inventor, relative to the passive wealth of the backers of industry, he ran afoul of the prevailing alignment of “truths” teeming in the native landed class that had been sidelined by the hectic growth which surrounded them.
In 1831, Beach was one of the first elected officers of the village formed around this industrial growth. It was the dawn of the longest financial crisis in American history. This position immediately made him a target of ire for the government’s advocacy of its authority to advance public safety by locating streets, forming the first fire company and, in 1832, when cholera required maintaining a quarantine facility and enforcing a sanitation policy. This ended in the newspapers as a claim registered with the sheriff on him personally; claiming abuse of authority. By 1836, he had moved his family to New York City to take over The Sun. However, this unsubstantiated “attack by publication” continued with reports that he was running out on debt obligations.
These were unstable economic times. The decentralization of banking under Andrew Jackson in 1833 was the driver of everything this story will get to. It all forms a backdrop for what greeted Beach as the new owner/publisher of The Sun, creating an editorial focus for him. The newspaper would become the vehicle to express what he felt was completely unintelligible to the world view of the time — what was to emerge through the industrialization of America as the power of messaging.
For the whole decade that Beach was making his mark on Saugerties, his brother-in-law, Benjamin Day, had been putting together the idea of the penny press. When he founded The New York Sun in 1833, with Beach as a financial partner, Day’s democratizing of the readership of newspapers got its start. Under Beach, The Sun would take this in directions that would invent syndication, and the Associated Press.
Years before the telegraph initiated the era of remote communication, there had grown concerns over the source and accuracy of information. A young Benjamin Day had inadvertently created the infamous Moon Hoax in The Sun in 1835, and, when Beach took it over in 1836, it had already developed a folk reputation for selling papers that had fiction alongside factual news.
This novelty (that Day created) would be embraced by all newspapers in time and grow to support a flowering of fictional writing, but other papers of the time found that it competed with, what they felt was, their license to sensationalize the actual news.
As propaganda arms of their powerful subscribers, newspapers fabricated stories, had no respect for privacy, and generally entertained their readership with the character assassinations that their political affiliations gave them the benefit of cheap postal rates to spread. Issues such as the financial crisis, a cholera epidemic, disruptive political policies, and the factional agendas of communities and classes, were, as in media today, just opportunities to inflame indignation.
The Sun under Beach, instead, concentrated on such news topics as an editorial agenda — emphasized by printing separate fictional literature for entertainment — that called out the fake news of its competitors and critiqued the inaccuracies in their news.
Beach had experienced public media’s power to amplify misconception of information as an elected official. He was using that to turn the gullibility that led to the Moon Hoax back on his competition as something of their own making. He made their criticism of The Sun into a description of their resentment of Day ignoring what they expected of the readership, making it into the virtue of addressing an audience needing an affordable source of literature with their news at a bargain price.
A “penny” paper relying on advertising for covering its discount sales to newsstands already had a leg up on the other papers that sold for six times as much and relied on subscription support for operations. Beach added to this a discounting scheme that gave The Sun control over the value of the currency used for buying the paper it was printed on; a significant opportunity to deliver a statement about the economy in his war of the editorial columns.
The productivity from Saugerties’ water-powered industries made its banknotes much more valuable than what was in circulation through banks in unindustrialized locations; almost everyone else at the time. The relationships Beach had built over his years in Saugerties with native banking families and its industrialists made it possible for The Sun to offer an often one-to-one exchange rate to the dollar on Saugerties bucks. This level of discount rate on a currency served to decrease the value of competing currencies circulating in New York City.
Saugerties was the first producer of machine-made paper, and thus most efficient, making the price of its product the lowest. The Sun made its purchases of paper with Saugerties currency, thus giving it back through the primary account of the manufacturer of its paper, forming a symbiotic relationship that greatly benefited an economy where the cost of all raw materials was unstable. That essentially made The Sun immune to the economic conditions the its competitors suffered under. This is how the paper could charge the reader a fair price, and how Beach drew its competitors’ ire into unintentionally advertising The Sun’s brilliance.
This was appreciated by those that liked a good laugh and, by the 1840s, that gave The Sun’s reporters access to contacts in the national government. When news would break, The Sun was the first to hear, and this fell directly in line with Beach’s obsession with having provably factual information to publish. Having verifiable news on politics and events Washington controlled gave him the germ of an idea, sparked by the confidence this brought, of being able to track information to its source. This would germinate as a concept that grew into the logic and mechanic that made the Associated Press a working idea.
So, the creation of the AP has its origin as a story about the source of a news story, where knowing the writer of its content tracks it to its origins. This same process is used today in authentication of the provenance of packets of information by associating them with a logic common to all electronic communication. Instead of newspapers being printed, the content is in data banks, distributed around the world, available instantaneously with a search.
Just after President Polk signed the declaration of war with Mexico (America’s first expansion-by-force), Beach (and his 26-year-old daughter) initiated his concept by going to Mexico. There, Beach personally introduced its president to Jane McManus Storms, a correspondent for the New York Sun, who was fluent in Spanish. Simultaneously, he’d maintained relations with his previous partnerships in Saugerties — people who were associated with the war effort and expansionism in general.
Beach’s passion for building a guaranteed supply of verifiable information is ironically saddled, to this day, with the story of fake news upending the peace mission he was believed to be sent secretly to Mexico on by President Polk. Despite that, Beach actually used this for accentuating the importance of what had begun with his idea of an association of newspapers organized for sending riders on to the next member to carry forward news of the Mexican-American War to the public — a network where every publisher at a stop was a block on this Pony Express-like protocol making a copy of the news and then sending it forward to the next on this chain. Every one of these papers printed and distributed a consensus on the same AP story — with no editorializing — that could be traced verbatim back to someone like Jane McManus Storms.
Beach saw a force emerging that addressed his concerns about a behavior his detractors had taken from an antiquated value system. Today, this translates to literally cover whatever is unintelligible to those that aren’t media literate.
History repeats itself when Moses Yale Beach is projected into the current context of our forth revolution in the Industrial Age. What would Beach do?
Countering the misuse of information in electronic broadcast technology presents the same challenges and the same opportunities (again), as Beach had at the dawn of America’s Early Industrial Revolution. Here, at the dawn of the forth revolution of the Industrial Age, the motivating force that drove his innovations forward are, in every respect, responding as positively to the same moxie that Day and Beach paraded in setting the pace of history — with what they were first to do going on two centuries ago.
Beach’s journey took place over two decades, beginning when he was 26. Today the average age for those sorting through ways to make sure only verifiable information makes it into the media is the same. What drives them is still the written word needing media literacy to prevent the manipulations that benefit from ignorance being spread.
There are lessons about media literacy that make the experiences that motivated Moses Yale Beach legendary — heroic tropes from our past. There’s no reason for the parallels Beach’s experiences have to the revolution we are in, regarding decentralized autonomous organizations, to not grab onto that history as an origin story.