Opinion: Journalism snapshots of the past - which looks like the present

Journalism is by nature an art – or a craft, depending on your take – of the present, that old cliché about it being the first draft of history. I see it more as snapshots of time, and it’s interesting sometimes to go back through some of the photo albums, as it were, to revisit different times and places.

The New Republic, celebrating its centennial, has been republishing some of the better pieces in its archives, from a remarkable look at the Dachau concentration camp in 1934 when the Nazis were targeting political opponents (its role in the Holocaust was yet to come) to a 1916 interview with an Irish survivor of World War I trench warfare (while the war was still on) to a 1957 piece on Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” a book so controversial the writer had to review the work based on a bowdlerized excerpt.

Monday’s reprint was from poet Langston Hughes, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, who also was a pretty good columnist and journalist. The piece follows the 1943 race riot in Harlem, sparked when a white cop shot and wounded a black soldier (sound familiar?). The article stands as testimony to the timelessness of American race and class distinctions, and relations, as Hughes depicted the gaps between white and black New York, and between upper class African Americans living in doorman apartment buildings in the Sugar Hill neighborhood, and the slum dwellers elsewhere in Harlem:

“But under the hill on Eighth Avenue, on Lenox, and on Fifth there are places like this — dark, unpleasant houses with steep stairs and narrow halls, where the rooms are too small, the ceilings too low and the rents too high. There are apartments with a dozen names over each bell. The house is full of roomers. Papa and mama sleep in the living room, the kids in the dining room, lodgers in every alcove, and everything but the kitchen is rented out for sleeping. Cooking and meals are rotated in the kitchen.

“In vast sections below the hill, neighborhood amusement centers are dark are gin mills, candy stores that sell King Kong (and maybe reefers), drug stores that sell geronimoes — dope tablets — to juveniles for pepping up cokes, pool halls where gambling is wide open and barbecue stands that book numbers. Sometimes, even the grocery stores have their little side rackets without the law. White men, more often than Negroes, own these immoral places where kids as well as grown-ups come.

“The kids and the grown-ups are not criminal or low by nature. Poverty, however, and frustration have made some of them too desperate to be decent. Some of them don’t try any more. Slum-shocked, I reckon.”

The series reminds me of a book Cornell University Press published in 1992, “These United States: Stories from the 1920s,” edited by Daniel H. Borus, which drew together a series of old articles The Nation magazine had commissioned by leading writers of the Jazz Age to chronicle their home states. California’s entry was by George P. West, a journalist and aide to progressive politician Hiram Johnson.

The Nation makes West’s piece available online, but one of the standout observations is this:

“[O]nly the mapmakers and politicians still think of California as an entity. In its human aspects it is sharply divided into north and south. There is San Francisco and there is Los Angeles, each with a million people within an hour’s travel. Between the two stretch nearly 500 sparsely settled miles of mountain and valley and desert, and a spiritual gulf wider still. The two communities are the state, in a cultural sense, and they are farther apart, in background and mental habits, than New York and San Francisco, or Chicago and Los Angeles. For ten years there has been a movement to write southern California with a capital S. Its people are as different from the older Californians up San Francisco way as Cromwell’s Roundheads were different from the Cavaliers and the seventeenth century successors of Falstaff. It is a difference of origins.”

Sometimes the present feels an awful lot like the past.

Follow Scott Martelle on Twitter @smartelle.