[Find the Mercury's 25th Anniversary Issue (in print) near you by using this handy-dandy map, and read all of our anniversary stories here.—eds.]
Little known fact: The Portland Mercury takes its name from one of the most notorious weeklies from the dawn of Oregon history. During the latter half of the 1800s, the Sunday Mercury was widely known and beloved for its devotion to scandal and sensationalism. In 1893, the apparently jealous Oregonian went as far to call it “a particularly disagreeable enemy of public order,” a tradition the present-day Mercury is proud to carry forward.
The late 1800s was the Wild West for Oregon journalism. It was also literally the Wild West for everything else.
In the 1800s you didn’t need a huge investment to start a newspaper. “Papers did not have a high barrier of entry,” says Randy Stapilus, a writer for the Oregon Capital Chronicle and co-author of New Editions: The Northwest’s Newspapers As They Were, Are, and Will Be. “Early on the cost of setting up a paper basically equated to the cost of a printing press, which was not a large item at the time.”
With the low cost of setting up publications, the relatively new state of Oregon was swarming with daily and weekly newspapers.
“There were a lot more of them [than today],” says Stapilus. “Even very small communities would have two, or even three newspapers.” This included immigrant communities. According to Richard Engeman, a retired archivist and author of The Oregon Companion: An Historical Gazetteer of the Useful, the Curious, and the Arcane, Oregon in the 1800s had newspapers in many languages, including German, Swedish, and Chinese.
Engeman is quick to note that this diversity of publications isn’t reflected in what’s been preserved. “Much of that has not survived. We have a full microfilm and digitized record of the Oregonian,” he says, “but that wasn’t the only newspaper people were looking at.”
These publications tended to be openly partisan.
“There were many cases where political parties, or business people aligned with these parties, would underwrite newspapers,” says Stapilus. Engeman also notes that most newspapers were political to an extent that exceeds almost all modern media, and emphasizes that there was not even the pretence of objectivity.
One of the papers was called The Sunday Mercury, and it was a delightfully trashy rag with a bad reputation—one that would eventually send their editor and publisher to jail.
Violent barbers, nudity, and getting eaten by sharks.
The Sunday Mercury first started in Salem in 1869 as a weekly newspaper. According to amateur historian and blogger Dan Hackenow, it was strongly affiliated with the Oregon Democratic party.
Unlike today, Democrats at the time were in favor of segregation and generally aligned with the old Confederacy. They also tended to oppose the capital and industrial interests that Republicans favored. According to amateur historian and blogger Dan Hackenow, the Mercury was supported by Democratic interests who wanted a paper that would work contrary to Republican-aligned publications like the Oregonian, which supported establishment members of the GOP, and the Bulletin, which was aligned with Radical Republicans—who confusingly are more aligned with the progressives of today.
The Mercury might have started as a Democratic mouthpiece, but its day-to-day reporting was all about sensationalism, lurid stories, gossip, and—frankly—some really weird shit. This is just a small sample of their typical reporting:
•••
“Mrs. Gourly of Albany put strychnine in dough and left the stuff where rats could help themselves. Her little son, Sammy, played rat and came very near dying.”
•••
“In passing up Ninth Street near B the other evening a Mercury reporter and several other gentlemen glanced up at a chamber window…. In the room within stood a woman in perfect nudity.”
•••
BREAKING NEWS HEADLINE: “A Steamboat to Run 25 Miles Per Hour!”
•••
“A Newport man captured a sea serpent last week and has put it alive in a glass jar. It falls far short of the descriptions usually given to the mysterious animal.” (Editor’s note: It was most likely an eel.)
•••
“A young man... is serving a sentence of 250 days in the county jail for exposing an obscene picture.”
•••
“Townsend, the Ashland barber, who chewed a Frenchman's nose, is under $400 bonds. The Frenchman is recuperating at the hospital.”
•••
“Van Tassell the balloonist… dropped from his balloon with his parachute at Honolulu, alighting in the ocean. He was eaten by sharks.”
•••
All of this, plus daily updates on gossip and goings-on—or, as the Mercury put it, “News of a Busy People.” It seems like just about every affair, argument, infidelity, or instance of a shitty husband pawning his wife’s clothes to buy gin, ended up in the Mercury.
Dirty laundry and gossip wasn’t just limited to ordinary citizens. According to Hackenow, the Mercury also started publishing a serialized satire of a local wealthy industrialist called “The Life of Ben Holladay,” which lampooned the robber baron and put his various personal peccadillos on display for all to see. The Merc of the day never finished the series, however. Hackenow speculates it was because Holladay paid off Eugene Semple, the then-editor, to stop the column in its tracks—or that’s the rumor anyway.
Libel, raids, and obscenity.
The problem with being a trashy, lurid, paper that airs everyone’s dirty laundry is that sometimes you piss off the wrong people, and it gets you convicted of libel.
In 1893 the Mercury ran a racy story about prominent attorney C.E.S. Wood, which Wood alleged was libelous. He sued the paper, and the legal battle went all the way to the Oregon Supreme Court. The court found in favor of Wood. The Mercury’s management was sentenced to a year in jail and the publication was turned over to a receiver who promised to “make a decent paper of it.”
He did not.
According to George Turnbull’s 1939 book, History of Oregon Newspapers, cops raided the Mercury’s office later that same year. The district attorney at the time said he found several obscene articles, including one called “Under the Teacups” that ran afoul of Oregon law. Police attempted to keep the offending publication away from the public. But, Turnbull writes: “Three newsboys managed to get through the police with nearly 100 papers, which they sold at 75 cents to $1 a copy.”
Once again the Mercury’s management was thrown in jail—and according to research conducted by the current Mercury’s editor, this time they were joined in the hoosegow by the circulation manager, the pressmen, and all 56 of the aforementioned newsboys.
The Oregonian crowed at the time at the Mercury’s legal entanglements. A November 1893 editorial called the paper “a particularly disagreeable enemy of public order” and “insidiously demoralising as well as unspeakably offensive. It is not probable that the Mercury will ever resume publication.”
But? The Oregonian was proven wrong. The Mercury limped along in one form or another into the twentieth century until it gradually faded away. Until….
New Century, New Mercury.
Obviously, the Mercury still exists. It sprang back to life 25 years ago, lurching from its coffin at the start of the millennium and—carrying on the name and “take no prisoners” style of its predecessor—ready to once again spit trash and obscenity at Portland… but with a few changes.
Is the Mercury still blatantly political? Obviously. But this time around it’s because they’re actually principled, as opposed to being underwritten by old-timey Democrats.
Do they still air everyone’s dirty laundry? My dears, there’s literally a column called The Trash Report.
Do they tell you where to view “perfect nudity?” Absolutely: At the HUMP! pornographic film festival! But that now includes people of all genders, and is 100 percent less weird than creeping on naked ladies in windows.
Will they still report on sea serpents and balloonists getting eaten by sharks? Of course! The Mercury is your number one, and most reliable, source for oceanic peril here in the Great Pacific Northwest.
And if any local rich guys want to pay them off so they won’t write mean things about them…well, have you ever read the Mercury? It’s not the 1800s anymore, and there are some things money just can’t buy.
