------------------

	From: 	H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
	Subject: 	H-Net Review Publication:  'Voice in the Wilderness: J. W.
Gitt'
	Date: 	November 6, 2009 10:58:13 AM EST
	To: 	Jhistory <jhistory@h-net.msu.edu>


Mary A. Hamilton.  Rising from the Wilderness: J. W. Gitt and His
Legendary Newspaper: The Gazette and Daily of York, Pa.  York  York
County Heritage Trust, 2007.

Reviewed by Bill Huntzicker (St. Cloud State University)
Published on Jhistory (November, 2009)
Commissioned by Donna Harrington-Lueker

Voice in the Wilderness: J. W. Gitt

Retired journalism professor Mary A. Hamilton ends her biography of
Josiah W. Gitt and his newspaper with a four-page epilogue discussing
the Pennsylvania editor's FBI and CIA files. In December 1986, the
FBI released seventy-three of the eighty-one pages in the file it had
opened on the small-city newspaper editor in 1949. The bureau
concluded that Gitt was not a member of the Communist Party, as an
anonymous Republican informant had alleged, but it continued to
monitor him and his newspaper, _The Gazette and Daily_ of York, Pa.,
for possible subversive activity. The CIA started a file in 1963
after receiving a memo from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The brief
CIA file contained Hoover's memo and four other pages with no
indication that Gitt was a Communist or posed a threat to the nation.
Nonetheless, the FBI file had entries until 1972, two years after
Gitt sold his newspaper and one year before his death in 1973 at the
age of 89.

All the while, the editor and his wife, Elizabeth ("Betty"), were
subjected to endless attacks and accusations of subversive
activities. Local residents routinely characterized the two York
newspapers as yellow and red--the red for Gitt's left-leaning _The
Gazette and Daily _and yellow for the conservative afternoon
_Dispatch_. Hamilton quotes a local pastor who said: "I feel that the
Gitts were the most biased, pinko propagandists that there ever was"
(p. xiv).

Biographer Hamilton demonstrates her fondness for her subject. She
worked for _The Gazette and Daily_ from 1963 to 1966 covering civil
rights and local courts, schools, and politics. After receiving a
doctorate from Michigan State in 1980, she taught at St. Bonaventure
University from which she retired to her family's homestead in north
central Pennsylvania. The postwar decade covered in the book had been
the subject of her doctoral dissertation.

Despite her fondness, however, Hamilton finds contradictions and even
some flaws in Gitt's character. An advocate of social justice, he
clearly was not poor. He came from an established Hanover,
Pennsylvania family and spent much time away from his newspaper. His
grandfather and namesake had owned a dry-goods store and encouraged
the younger Gitt to get an education.

At thirty-one, after becoming a lawyer, Gitt purchased his newspaper
in hopes of supplementing his income. To his surprise, he took to
journalism, dropped his law practice, ran his newspaper for
fifty-five years, and developed a relationship through correspondence
with nationally renowned liberal leaders, including physicist Albert
Einstein, conservationist Gifford Pinchot, Progressive presidential
candidate Henry Wallace, and journalists I.F. Stone and George
Seldes--the latter often citing _The Gazette and Daily _as a model
local newspaper.

Hamilton took her title from a biblical passage (Isaiah 40:3) and
said the wilderness refers to both Gitt's lonely voice for social
justice in his conservative region and the rolling Pennsylvania hills
surrounding Gitt's hometown of Hanover and the newspaper's home of
York. "He would rise above the wilderness of his own environment,"
she writes, "and create a newspaper that would stand out from the
plethora of small town/city dailies mainly interested in reflecting
the local power structure, with little commentary about national or
international events" (p. 6).

Throughout the book, Hamilton provides ample evidence that the
partisan press didn't end in the nineteenth century. Gitt began as a
Democrat but flirted with third-party efforts, especially the
Progressive Party when it ran Wallace for president in 1948. Like the
Republicans and Democrats, the Progressives held their national
convention in Philadelphia because it was the city most wired for
television. Because of his proximity to Philadelphia, Gitt ran a
special supplement celebrating the Progressive Party and its
standard-bearer. In 1964, he refused to run advertising for
Republican candidate Barry Goldwater because of the candidate's
advocacy of increasing American violence in Vietnam. As President
Lyndon Johnson escalated the war, Gitt attacked him as well.

Gitt thought that education was important and that an educated person
should think properly--that is, liberally. "A man or woman who has
knowledge and is honest won't be anything but a liberal--a person who
puts human rights above property rights," Gitt wrote. "Education,
knowledge, and the milk of human kindness--they're the hope" (p. xv).
Gitt fought for liberal causes, including the struggles to stop
proliferation of nuclear weapons, to promote civil rights, and to
encourage labor unions. As a progressive, the editor tried to live up
to his own principles. He refused to advertise alcoholic beverages
because his father, who died when Gitt was twelve, had problems with
the drink. (Gitt thought his father was an alcoholic, but other
family members disagree.) Gitt encouraged his employees to join
unions, including the International Typographical Union and the
Newspaper Guild, but he felt betrayed when negotiations became
difficult, especially in the 1970s as he began thinking of selling
the paper. Nonetheless, he often shared the profits when he had
profits to share, and he offered a retirement plan that paid workers
full salary after ending a career on his paper. He was a strong
supporter of civil rights, but when his daughter married an African
American man whom she met while working for the cause, a schism
opened in the family. His wife cut off her relations with her
daughter and grandchildren for many years, but Gitt continued to meet
alone with them.

Hamilton's book highlights the career of an influential journalist--a
liberal William Allen White--to the extent that the American
Journalism Historians Association named it the outstanding media
history book of 2007. Nevertheless, this reviewer would like to know
more about Gitt's journalism than his golf game, genealogy and the
love story within the family. Hamilton's emphasis on the family,
however, helps us feel the pain of racial conflict at home, and she
solidly roots her book in local history, a reflection of her
publisher. Nonetheless, this reader would like to see how Gitt's
journalism fit within the community for those issues without
controversy. Reading between the lines, one could conclude that the
paper was tediously political but Hamilton says that was not the
case.

Hamilton notes that Gitt won awards for writing and newspaper design,
but her book could benefit from a few more examples of Gitt's
journalism and the newspaper's award-winning design, which included a
daily contribution from local cartoonist Walt Partymiller. Her
biography says she covered local stories so she should be able to
tell more about the paper's roots in community news. She also
establishes that Gitt was among the creators of an op-ed page (where
he ran commentaries by leading Progressive columnists).

Hamilton highlights Gitt's courage in standing firm on
principle--whether on environmental or civil rights causes or against
the anticommunist hysteria of his community, despite financial losses
he took for his principles. We can hope that she has whetted our
appetite for more work on Gitt's career.

Citation: Bill Huntzicker. Review of Hamilton, Mary A., _Rising from
the Wilderness: J. W. Gitt and His Legendary Newspaper: The Gazette
and Daily of York, Pa._. Jhistory, H-Net Reviews. November, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25593

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

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