Indispensable Books

Lost Episodes | Indispensable Book
October 18, 2011

American newspaper journalist Charles Dana died on October 17, 1897. In 1839, he had entered Harvard, but the impairment of his eyesight forced him to leave college in 1841, and caused him to abandon his intention of entering the ministry. He later served as editor-in-chief of the New York Sun, and under his management it became one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the country. Dana also served as Assistant Secretary of War during the Civil War. Regarding the essential tools for a journalist, Charles Dana declared to the Wisconsin Editorial Association:

“[T]here are some books that are absolutely indispensable to the kind of education that we are contemplating, and to the profession that we are now considering; and of all these, the most indispensable, the most useful, the one whose knowledge is most effective, is the Bible. There is no Book from which more valuable lessons can be learned. I am considering it now as a manual of utility, or professional preparation, and professional use for a journalist.

There is no Book whose style is more suggestive and more instructive, from which you learn more directly that sublime simplicity which never exaggerates, which recounts the greatest event with solemnity, of course, but without sentimentality or affection, none which you open with such confidence and lay down with such reverence; there is no Book like the Bible.

When you get into a controversy and want exactly the right answer, when you are looking for an expression, what is there that closes a dispute like a verse from the Bible? What is it that sets up the right principle for you, which pleads for a policy, for a cause, so much as the right passage of the Holy Scripture?”*

The fact that there actually was a major newspaper editor who had such great respect for the Bible and even advocated its use by fellow journalists is yet another lost episode in American history.

*Source Citation: Charles Dana, The Art of Newspaper Making: Three Lectures (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1895), 48-49.