Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting
By John Maxwell Hamilton
Louisiana State University Press
655 pages, $45

This tome has the heft of a doorstop and contains more than 200,000 words plus notes, but do not be deterred: Journalism’s Roving Eye is an alluring and enlightening piece of work. Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent and public servant who is currently dean at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication, spurns plodding narrative in favor of an intelligent tour, full of unexpected pleasures and plums. Where else might we stumble across a reporter’s account of the Battle of New Orleans? Or the senior James Gordon Bennett’s sharp-edged view of the coronation of Queen Victoria? Or Jack Belden’s story of lying wounded and abandoned while covering the landing at Salerno in 1943?

The author includes plenty of room for offbeat characters. There is the exotic Lafcadio Hearn, who transplanted himself to Japan from New Orleans; James Keeley of the Chicago Tribune, who tracked an embezzler to the Moroccan desert; and even a cameo by Benjamin Franklin, who expended some of his prodigious energies during his tenure in London by cranking out dispatches for the audience at home. (“Although he employed at least forty-two different pseudonyms,” we read, “Franklin also knew that colonists knew he was the author. One of his regular signatures, ‘N. N’ for non nominatus, seems to have been reserved for him by other Colonial printers.”)

In his central narrative, meanwhile, Hamilton adroitly traces the rise of the correspondents’ corps from its scattered beginnings to what he calls its golden age, the time between the wars when American journalists abroad warned of the gathering world crisis, and the correspondents themselves assumed the status of ambassadors or generals. Celebrities sprang from among them: Richard Harding Davis, Dorothy Thompson, John Gunther, Edward R. Murrow. But more to Hamilton’s taste are such figures as the brothers Paul Scott and Edgar Ansel Mowrer, and their employer, the Chicago Daily News, exemplifying as they did both enterprise and gravitas.

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.