Jane Cunningham (“Jennie June”) Croly

• David Goodman Croly
• Born: November 3, 1829
• Died: April 29, 1889

• Jane Croly
• Born: December 19, 1829
• Died: December 23, 1901

Journalists and activists, were married on February 14, 1856, in New York City. Both had been born abroad.

David Croly was brought by his Protestant parents, Patrick Croly and Elizabeth Croly, from Cloghnakilty, County Cork, Ireland, to New York City when he was a young child. The family was poor, and as a teenager he was apprenticed to a silversmith. Saving his money, he gave himself a year of formal higher education at the college that later became New York University. He then worked briefly as a reporter for The New York Evening Post before joining The New York Herald as city editor (a minor position then).

Jane Cunningham was born in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, England, the fourth child of Joseph Howes Cunningham, a controversial Unitarian activist, and Jane (Scott) Cunningham. Forced by religious hostility to leave England in 1841, the family settled first in Poughkeepsie, New York, later in nearby Wappingers Falls. Jane Cunningham may have attended Central College in Geneva, New York, but no other formal education is known. In her early twenties, she was housekeeper for her brother John, a Unitarian minister in Southbridge, Massachusetts. In 1855 she went to New York City and began a career in journalism with an article for The New-York Tribune. Shortly thereafter, she obtained a job on the Sunday Times and Noah’s Weekly Register and adopted the pseudonym “Jennie June,” which she used for most of her career. She also wrote for the Herald, and it was at the Herald that she met Croly.

In 1858 the Crolys moved to Rockford, Illinois, to take over a local newspaper owned by Jane Croly’s brother-in-law. The enterprise failed, and by I860 they were back in New York City, both occupying substantial positions. Jane Croly was editor of Democrat’s Monthly, a women’s fashion magazine, from 1860 to 1887. During that period, she was also associated with Godey’s Lady’s Book and The Homemaker. She founded The Cycle for clubwomen and wrote for Graham’s Magazine, Frank Leslie’s, and, as New York correspondent, for The Baltimore American, pioneering in the practice of syndication. David Croly, meanwhile, had joined The New York World as city editor in 1860. When Manton Marble reorganized the paper as a Democratic organ in 1862, David Croly became managing editor. He broke with Marble in 1872 and helped found the Daily Graphic, which he edited from 1873 to 1878. He then devoted himself to The Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, a successful trade paper that he had helped launch in 1868.

The Crolys’ careers illustrated a growing professionalization and democratization of journalism that were themselves significant types of reform. David Croly’s break with the World, for example, came more over his editorial control and the target readership of the paper than over issues of substance. His major grievance was that Marble was trying to make the paper too high-toned to attract popular readership and that the paper took inconsistent editorial stands for the sake of party loyalties. By all accounts, he was a remarkable editor, a warm, good-humored man, with a good understanding of the masses, a wealth of free-flowing ideas, and an eye for the best reporter for a particular story.

David Croly’s desire to use sensationalism to attract the public and then to educate it—a practice brought to fruition by Joseph Pulitzer—occasionally merged with a more overt reformism, as in a series of articles in the 1870s exposing food adulteration in New York. A dedicated iconoclast, he tossed out ideas that challenged traditional social, political, and religious practices. At one time or another, he proposed polygamy, stirpiculture (the scientific breeding of people), miscegenation, easier acceptance of sexuality, arbitration of labor disputes and international conflicts, the free coinage of silver, the elimination of political parties in favor of rule by moralized capitalists, and the substitution of science for religion as the guide to social conduct. In all but the last area, the ideas were intended only to provoke discussion. “The man,” as his friend J. Elderkin said in eulogy, “lived monogamy, voted Democracy, and believed Positivism.”

Promoting positivism in America was probably David Croly’s major long-range contribution to reform. Founded by the French philosopher Auguste Comte between 1830 and 1854, positivism argued that by examining history one could discover scientific laws of society similar to the Newtonian laws of physics and that the laws could be used to reconstruct social life. Comte also argued for a religion of humanity that would enforce self-sacrifice and good behavior while the scientific laws were still being sought. This religion, with its worship of woman as the symbol of humanity, exposed positivism to some ridicule, but the philosophy’s anti-individualistic and anticompetitive thrust and its belief in a “social physics” had a wide and deep influence on early sociologists and reformers seeking to control the plutocratic capitalism of the late nineteenth century.

Jane Croly assisted her husband in his promotion of positivism, primarily by means of a weekly salon that attracted some of the most active people in New York society. But she seems ultimately to have disagreed with its anti-Christian bias. Jane Croly’s life, more than her ideas, was radically innovative. A career professional when women were being restricted to the home, she was an early example of the “new woman.” She and David Croly had five children: three daughters and two sons—Herbert, founder of The New Republic, and another, who died in infancy; she was reported to have gone back to work a week after each birth. Her journalism was directed toward middle-class women, and it supported them in their home roles; she praised department stores (Lord & Taylor and B. Altman, for example) for making shopping easier. But she also frequently decried men, marriage, and child-rearing as repressing talented women’s potential; and, late in her career, she wrote works guiding women in supporting themselves independently. In that, her life and her writings coincided, since she regarded work as the basic human function.

Though not an ardent advocate of women’s political rights, Jane Croly worked actively to promote social and economic equality. In March 1868, in New York City, she was a founder of Sorosis, the first important general women’s club. Women’s groups were expected to be temporary and devoted to a specific cause, but Sorosis asserted women’s freedom: it was founded with no circumscribed objective but rather with the general aim of giving professional women an arena for recognition and a network of social and business contacts, just as men’s clubs did for men. Jane Croly was also one of the organizers of the Woman’s Parliament, a short-lived association established in New York in 1869 to promote reforms of interest to women. In 1889 she helped found the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and in 1894 she organized the New York State Federation. Also in 1889, she founded the Woman’s Press Club of New York, and she served as president for the club’s first ten years.

David Croly died in 1889 at fifty-nine, probably of nephritis. Jane Croly died in 1901 at seventy-two, partly from the aftereffects of a fractured hip suffered in 1898. The unusually candid eulogies for both of them suggest a household of intellectual tensions and temperamental differences, though each may simply have had a separate circle of friends. In any case, together they formed an influential team whose professional activities, social contacts, and private example served as instruments of rising awareness and reform.

David Croly wrote two books for presidential campaigns— Miscegenation (1864) and Seymour and Blair (1868)—and three books that advocated positivism, including The Truth about Love (1872), which proposed a revised basis for conventional sexual morality. He also edited the positivist journal The Modern Thinker (1870, 1873). Jane Croly wrote or edited nine books for women, the most important ones being those that supported the idea of independence: For Better or Worse (1875) and Thrown on Her Own Resources (1891). She also wrote an important historical work, History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (1904). There are no major collections of private papers. Biographical information may be found in The Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, May 4, 1889, and May 18, 1889, and in Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, “Jenny June” (1904). The most detailed treatment of both is in D. W. Levy, “The Life and Thought of Herbert Croly, 1869-1914” (unpublished dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1967). Also useful are E. Schlesinger, “The Nineteenth-Century Woman’s Dilemma and Jennie June,” New York History, October 1961, and W. Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (1980). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1930) and Notable American Women (1971).