Moira Dann is a writer and former Globe and Mail editor living in Victoria, currently working on a project about British Columbia’s Dunsmuir family.
George Brown – the Scottish-born father of Confederation who founded the Globe, which would go on to form this very newspaper – may have been born two centuries too early.
His provocative, debate-defining editorials and retorts were nothing compared with today’s social-media trollery, but he was not a man to duck a rhetorical scrap.
The Globe noted the reactions it received to its takedowns. “… All we get is just some reply as this – ‘You poor, paltry, villainous, foul-mouthed, ignorant, blaspheming ruffians’ – why do you call names? Why do you not maintain the bearing of gentlemen and simply argue as we do?” The Globe went on to invite legal action if anything it said was libellous. “And what is the answer? ‘You are a set of low, mean scoundrels!’ ”
Where one rival, The North American, called The Globe “such a mass of putridity – we feel as if we have been cutting up a dead dog,” Mr. Brown called his competitor, the British Colonist, “the literary common sewer of Toronto.” Because of this bon mot and others, Mr. Brown was accused by those he bested in print of introducing “journalistic terrorism” to his new country.
In short, Mr. Brown would’ve thrived in the age of Twitter.
Globe trotting for 175 years: A short history of our newspaper’s nameplate
But, summing him up through tweet-length bursts wouldn’t capture the full legacy of Mr. Brown, who took the Globe from a small press to a publication of influence, not just through the use of clever invective but because his arguments “… were carefully considered [and] exhaustively supported," wrote his biographer J.M.S. Careless, and expressed his “burning sense of justice.”
And with the adversarial relationship between journalists and politicians making it hard to serve as both, Mr. Brown was able to manage the two roles through the principled clarity that fuelled those pugnacious rhetorical shivs – and it’s tempting to think that in Mr. Brown, the former did its best to keep the latter honest.
He was only 25 when he hived off the political content from the “Secular Department” of The Banner, a four-page journal focused on Presbyterianism and religious freedom his father Peter had founded in August, 1843, not long after the Brown family had decamped from New York to Toronto.
In Canada, Mr. Brown encountered one of his first political foes: governor-general Sir Charles Metcalfe, who was thwarting the progress of responsible government in Canada West by appointing men to public service positions without the approval of elected assembly members, particularly Reform Party ministers.
When coverage of this imbroglio consumed most of the space allotted for news in the January 26, 1844, edition of the Banner, the idea of the Reform Party starting its own journal in Tory Toronto, with Mr. Brown at the helm, started to take root. The resulting newspaper grew and flourished in a field of politically partisan journals and publications representing different religious denominations because of one thing: Brown’s willingness to take on political foes.
Still, despite the financial backing of the Reform Party, Brown drew a clear and hard line over political interference: “The Globe will … strenuously support the party which shall advocate the measures believed best for the country." As he often said when the Banner, and later the Globe, stood accused of being a mouthpiece for a Reform position, “We write for no man." And on its front page, from that very first edition, is the motto Brown had chosen for the paper, quoting the pseudonymous 18th-century political critic Junius: “The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.”
So, it was on Mar. 5, 1844, that Brown published the first edition of the Globe in Toronto – predating The New York Times, which was founded seven years later.It comprised a single sheet, folded to make four pages, with six columns of tiny text crammed in, and was printed on a small hand-press that could make 200 copies an hour. It sold for five pence a copy; you could get an annual subscription for a pound.
Brown sought to offer advertisers a wider audience than his competitors; he did so by pursuing and presenting the news so the paper appealed to more people than just partisans who read the editorials. It helped, too, that he made it a priority to be the first to get his paper on the street: “The early bird gets the early worm and so does the early newspaper,” Brown later wrote.
Within a few months, Brown had purchased a better press, able to spit out 1,250 copies an hour; within 18 months, the Globe was publishing twice weekly.
The Globe went on to merge with the Mail and Empire in 1936, but that Junius quote is on the masthead to this day, inspiring an independent, inquiring and upending spirit at this paper 175 years later.
He’d be proud. He might even tweet about it.