Charles H.Jones, Journalist and Politician of the Gilded Age

In the course of a combustible journalistic career, newspaper writer and editor C.H. Jones (1848-1913) edited a New York magazine at the age of 21, brought success and controversy to newspapers from Florida to New York and Missouri, drafted three Democratic national platforms, cofounded the National Editorial Association and the American Newspaper Publishers Association, and leaped with equal vigour into fistfights, backroom political deals, and newspaper wars. Biographer Thomas Graham traces Jones's development in three broad areas: ideas, jounalism, and politics. Drawn to two great intellectual movements of the late 1800s, Jones espoused first a conservative Social Darwinism , later a Bryanist progressivism. One of a vanishing breed of politician-journalists, he was a force in both business and state politics. Graham details, for example, Jones's machinations in the 1884 Florida election (a case study in preprimary election politics) as well as his problems at Jacksonville's "Florida Times-Union" with news gathering, and competing newspapers.