What they believed

AT a time when newspapers around the nation, including this one, are trying to reinvent or reinvigorate their editorial pages, they would do well to consider the passion and personal touch so evident in the New York Sun’s response to 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon’s plaintive query: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist.... Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias.... The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”

The famous 1897 editorial does what many current ones do not -- it informs as well as inspires, veteran newspaper editor Michael Gartner argues in “Outrage, Passion & Uncommon Sense” (National Geographic: 224 pp., $30). This handsomely illustrated collection of 150 years of opinion writing in U.S. newspapers includes Horace Greeley’s 1862 plea to President Lincoln to put an end to slavery and the Wall Street Journal’s turnabout on the Vietnam War in February 1968, when it wrote: “We think the American people should be getting ready to accept ... the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed; it may be falling apart beneath our feet.”

Although the book, assembled in collaboration with the Freedom Forum’s Newseum in Washington, D.C., has precious few examples of recent opinion writing in the nation’s press, it eloquently underscores Gartner’s contention that “[t]he editorial is the soul of the newspaper.”

These editorials are also windows on the time and place in which they were written. In 1937, the Delta Star took on local critics of its positive coverage of Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens’ visit to nearby Mound Bayou, Miss. In 1942, the San Francisco News offered an apologetic editorial urging Japanese Americans to “demonstrate their loyalty to the United States” by cooperating with the military in evacuating “coastal combat areas.” In 1943, The Los Angeles Times apologized to rattlesnakes for comparing them to the Japanese “once or twice since Pearl Harbor.” And in 1975, the Philadelphia Daily News noted the passing of Spain’s dictator this way: “They say only the good die young. Generalissimo Francisco Franco was 82. Seems about right.”

Gartner, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for editorials in the Daily Tribune of Ames, Iowa, believes that in this day of “fractious television bellowers, fact-free radio talkers, Internet bloggers and political befoggers,” strong, contextual editorials are more vital than ever. “Democracy needs their passion, their outrage and, especially, their uncommon sense.”

-- Kristina Lindgren