The Santa Fe New Mexican

The New Mexican was only one of several hundred newspapers that sprang up in New Mexico’s Territorial days. It outlasted other Santa Fe papers, although publication probably wasn’t continuous. A fire in the newspaper’s offices in the 1880s destroyed back copies, so little is known about the publication in early Territorial days.

In the first edition, the founders E.T. Davies and W.T. Jones wrote “THE NEW MEXICAN in Politics and Religion will maintain a strict neutrality, regarding partizanship as utterly unnecessary and a barrier to the general good of our Territory.”

The paper didn’t live up to its promises of neutrality. Most existing issues exude partisanship in politics, although not concerning religion.

Throughout most of its history, the paper has been moderately liberal, starting out backing the Republican Party of Lincoln and excoriating Southern Democrats. Later it became a publication that supports more progressive Democrats. It is also an institution that cares about history.

Robin McKinney Martin, current owner of The New Mexican, donated the paper’s bound volumes of early editions to the State of New Mexico. Electronic copies of most of these are available on the newspaper’s website.

The same topics — politics, crime, health, education, business — have been staples of the paper through the decades.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist ("Laughing Boy," 1929) and New Mexican writer Oliver La Farge compiled more than 400 pages of quotes from the paper ("Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town," 1959.)

His book shows that as much as things change, they remain the same.

Today the paper complains about trash in parks and weeds in highway medians. In 1914, a writer opined: “The New Mexican does not want to be unpleasantly or unduly critical, but there is a dead rooster at the corner of Palace and Lincoln Avenues which has lain there unburied for three consecutive days … Let no visitor to the Oldest-Newest city in the United States see unburied roosters on street corners. It is the little things that go to make big impressions. Every rooster removed and buried makes Santa Fe one rooster cleaner, one rooster the brighter and more attractive.”

As we all remember, during the COVID pandemic the newspaper urged all New Mexicans to be vaccinated. In 1872 it urged: “The small pox has been declared epidemical in nearly every large city in North America … Some odd day it will drop down upon us, and when this pest does strike us here — unless the ignorant are urged to vaccination — it will be simply horrible.”

Just a few decades ago the paper railed against cigarettes, explaining they contain harmful substances. This is nothing new.

In 1895 the paper wrote: “Young men, ye who dally with the innocent-looking cigarette, stand up. Do you know what scientific research has taught the people of this enlightened age about the cigarette?” The paper recounted a chemical analysis, showing the tobacco contained opium and the cigarette paper arsenic.

Throughout the paper’s history, it has written about violent and famous deaths — accounts no doubt well-read — of Billy the Kid in 1881, Arthur Manby in 1929. That kind of reporting continues.

In less sensational news, artists are still having exhibitions. Museums are opening. Plays are performed. Schools continue to lack funds. The hospital is expanding. Politicians are arguing. Neighbors are suing each other.

Of course, other things have changed. There are no longer lynchings to report. Stories about local witches being hanged or beaten are absent. The paper no longer rails against Pueblo religious dances.

Editorials such as one that ran in 1900, saying Indian reservations should be abolished, no longer represent the paper’s philosophy.

By the 1920s, the paper was reporting extensively on Pueblo land claims, siding against squatters on Indian reservations. It spoke favorably of Pueblo lifestyle and religion, praising the efforts of Anglo newcomers to revive traditional Indigenous arts.

Then as now, newspaper readers refused to follow national trends. Artists and writers organized against brick buildings. Tall buildings were banned. In 1927, the Daughters of the American Revolution tried to give Santa Fe a $10,000 statue representing the “Madonna” of the Santa Fe Trail. Again, local artists and writers objected. One said, “none of them wanted the monument here, that it was not artistic and Santa Fe did not want something unloaded on it that it didn’t want.” Another complained that “the so-called Pioneer Woman monument did not represent the real pioneers of this region at all, that the real pioneers were Spanish people and that they had not been consulted and were not represented at all.” The statue went to Albuquerque.

Local opinions in The New Mexican have always been colorful. An important part of the current paper’s editorial pages are excerpts from old issues, ably compiled by the paper’s editorial writer Inez Russell Gomez. These “clippings” show that Santa Fe has changed — but mostly hasn’t changed — in its newspaper’s 175-year history. We are hoping for another 175 years of stability and interesting news.