The Story of The Sun, by Frank M. O’Brien

It is truer, perhaps, of a newspaper than of most other complex things in the world that the whole may be greater than the sum of all its parts. In any daily paper worth a moment’s consideration the least fancifully inclined observer will discern an individuality apart from and in a degree independent of the dozens or hundreds or thousands of personal values entering at a given time into the composite of its grey pages.

This entity of the institution, as distinguished from the human beings actually engaged in carrying it on, this fact of the newspaper’s possession of a separate countenance, a spirit or soul differentiating it from all others of its kind, is recognised either consciously or unconsciously by both the more or less unimportant workers who help to make it and by their silent partners who support it by buying and reading it. Its loyal friends and intelligent critics outside the establishment, the Old Subscriber and the Constant Reader, form the habit of attributing to the newspaper, as to an individual, qualities and powers beneficent or maleficent or merely foolish, according to their mood or digestion. They credit it with traits of character quite as distinct as belong to any man or woman of their acquaintance. They personify it, moreover, without much knowledge, if any, of the people directing and producing it; and, often and naturally, without any particularviii concern about who and what these people may be.

On their own side, the makers of the paper are accustomed to individualise it as vividly as a crew does the ship. They know better than anybody else not only how far each personal factor, each element of the composite, is modified and influenced in its workings by the other personal factors associated in the production, but also the extent to which all the personal units are influenced and modified by something not listed in the office directory or visible upon the payroll; something that was there before they came and will be there after they go.

Of course, that which has given persistent idiosyncrasy to a newspaper like the Sun, for example, is accumulated tradition. That which has made the whole count for more than the sum total of its parts, in the Sun’s case as in the case of its esteemed contemporaries, is the heritage of method and expedient, the increment of standardised skill and localised imagination contributed through many years to the fund of the paper by the forgotten worker as well as by the remembered.

The manner of growth of the great newspaper’s well-defined and continuous character, distinguishing it from all the rest of the offspring of the printing press, a development sometimes not radically affected by changes of personnel, of ownership, of exterior conditions and fashions set by the popular taste, is a subject over which journalistic metaphysics might easily exert itself to the verge of boredom. Fortunately there has been found a much better way to deal with the attractive theme.

The Sun is eighty-five years old as this book goes to press. In telling its intimate story, from the September Tuesday which saw the beginning of Mr. Day’s intrepid and epochal experiment, throughout the daysix of the Beaches, of Dana, of Laffan, and of Reick to the time of Mr. Munsey’s purchase of the property in the summer of 1916, Mr. O’Brien has done what has never been undertaken before, so far as is known to the writer of this introduction, for any newspaper with a career of considerable span.

There have been general histories of Journalism, presenting casually the main facts of evolution and progress in the special instance. There have been satisfactory narratives of journalistic episodes, reasonably accurate accounts of certain aspects or dynastic periods of newspaper experience, excellent portrait biographies or autobiographies of journalists of genius and high achievement, with the eminent man usually in strong light in the foreground and his newspaper seldom nearer than the middle distance. But here, probably for the first time in literature of this sort, we have a real biography of a newspaper itself, covering the whole range of its existence, exhibiting every function of its organism, illustrating every quality that has been conspicuous in the successive stages of its growth. The Sun is the hero of Mr. O’Brien’s “Story of the Sun.” The human participants figure in their incidental relation to the main thread of its life and activities. They do their parts, big or little, as they pass in interesting procession. When they have done their parts they disappear, as in real life, and the story goes on, just as the Sun has gone on, without them except as they may have left their personal impress on the newspaper’s structure or its superficial decoration.

During no small part of its four score and five years of intelligent interest in the world’s thoughts and doings it has been the Sun’s fortune to be regarded as in a somewhat exceptional sense the newspaper man’s newspaper. If in truth it has merited in any degreex this peculiar distinction in the eyes of its professional brethren it must have been by reason of originality of initiative and soundness of method; perhaps by a chronic indifference to those ancient conventions of news importance or of editorial phraseology which, when systematically observed, are apt to result in a pale, dull, or even stupid uniformity of product. Mr. Dana wrote more than half a century ago to one of his associates, “Your articles have stirred up the animals, which you as well as I recognise as one of the great ends of life.” Sometimes he borrowed Titania’s wand; sometimes he used a red hot poker. Not only in that great editor’s time but also in the time of his predecessors and successors the Sun has held it to be a duty and a joy to assist to the best of its ability in the discouragement of anything like lethargy in the menagerie. Perhaps, again, that was one of the things that helped to make it the newspaper man’s newspaper.

However this may be, it seems certain that to the students of the theory and practice of journalism, now happily so numerous in the land, the chronicler of one highly individual newspaper’s deeds and ways is affording an object lesson of practical value, a textbook of technical usefulness, as well as a store of authoritative history, entertaining anecdote, and suggestive professional information. And a much wider audience than is made up of newspaper workers present or to come will find that the story of a newspaper which Mr. O’Brien has told with wit and knowledge in the pages that follow becomes naturally and inevitably a swift and charming picture of the town in which that newspaper is published throughout the period of its service to that town—the most interesting period in the existence of the most interesting city of the world.

It is a fine thing for the Sun, by all who have workedxi for it in its own spirit beloved, I believe, like a creature of flesh and blood and living intelligence and human virtues and failings, that through Mr. Munsey’s wish it should have found in a son of its own schooling a biographer and interpreter so sympathetically responsive to its best traditions.

THE STORY OF “THE SUN”

CHAPTER I
SUNRISE AT 222 WILLIAM STREET

In the early thirties of last century the only newspapers in the city of New York were six-cent journals whose reading-matter was adapted to the politics of men, and whose only appeal to women was their size, perfectly suited to deep pantry-shelves.

Dave Ramsey, a compositor on one of these sixpennies, the Journal of Commerce, had an obsession. It was that a penny paper, to be called the Sun, would be a success in a city full of persons whose interest was in humanity in general, rather than in politics, and whose pantry-shelves were of negligible width. Why his mind fastened on the Sun as the name of this child of his vision is not known; perhaps it was because there was a daily in London bearing that title. It was a short name, easily written, easily spoken, easily remembered.

Benjamin H. Day, another printer, worked beside Dave Ramsey in 1830. Ramsey reiterated his idea to his neighbour so often that Day came to believe in it, although it is doubtful whether he had the great faith that possessed Ramsey. Now that due credit has been given to Ramsey for the idea of the penny Sun, he22 passes out of the record, for he never attempted to put his project into execution.

Nor was Day’s enthusiasm for a penny Sun so big that he plunged into it at once. He was a business man rather than a visionary. With the savings from his wages as a compositor he went into the job-printing business in a small way. He still met his old chums and still talked of the Sun, but it is likely that he never would have come to start it if it had not been for the cholera.

There was an epidemic of this plague in New York in 1832. It killed more than thirty-five hundred people in that year, and added to the depression of business already caused by financial disturbances and a wretched banking system. The job-printing trade suffered with other industries, and Day decided that he needed a newspaper—not to reform, not to uplift, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of Benjamin H. Day. Incidentally he might add lustre to the fame of the President, Andrew Jackson, or uphold the hands of the mayor of New York, Gideon Lee; but his prime purpose was to get the work of printing handbills for John Smith, the grocer, or letter-heads for Richard Robinson, the dealer in hay. Incidentally he might become rich and powerful, but for the time being he needed work at his trade.

Ben Day was only twenty-three years old. He was the son of Henry Day, a hatter of West Springfield, Massachusetts, and Mary Ely Day; and sixth in descent from his first American ancestor, Robert Day. Shortly after the establishment of the Springfield Republican by Samuel Bowles, in 1824, young Day went into the office of that paper, then a weekly, to learn the printer’s trade. That was two years before the birth of the second and greater Samuel Bowles, who was later to23 make the Republican, as a daily, one of the greatest of American newspapers.

Day learned well his trade from Sam Bowles. When he was twenty, and a first-class compositor, he went to New York, and worked at the case in the offices of the Evening Post and the Commercial Advertiser. He married, when he was twenty-one, Miss Eveline Shepard. At the time of the Sun’s founding Mr. Day lived, with his wife and their infant son, Henry, at 75 Duane Street, only a few blocks from the newspaper offices.

Day was a good-looking young man with a round, calm, resolute face. He possessed health, industry, and character. Also he had courage, for a man with a family was taking no small risk in launching, without capital, a paper to be sold at one cent.

The idea of a penny paper was not new. In Philadelphia, the Cent had had a brief, inglorious existence. In Boston, the Bostonian had failed to attract the cultured readers of the modern Athens. Eight months before Day’s hour arrived the Morning Post had braved it in New York, selling first at two cents and later at one cent, but even with Horace Greeley as one of the founders it lasted only three weeks.

When Ben Day sounded his friends, particularly the printers, as to their opinion of his project, they cited the doleful fate of the other penny journals. He drew, or had designed, a head-line for the Sun that was to be, and took it about to his cronies. A. S. Abell, a printer on the Mercantile Advertiser, poked the most fun at him. A penny paper, indeed! But this same Abell lived to stop scoffing, to found another Sun—this one in Baltimore—and to buy a half-million-dollar estate out of the profits of it. He was the second beneficiary of the penny Sun idea.

William M. Swain, another journeyman printer, also24 made light of Day’s ambition. He lived to be Day’s foreman, and later to own the Philadelphia Public Ledger. He told Day that the penny Sun would ruin him. As Day had not much enthusiasm at the outset, surely his friends did not add to it, unless by kindling his stubbornness.

As for capital, he had none at all, in the money sense. He did have a printing-press, hardly improved from the machine of Benjamin Franklin’s day, some job-paper, and plenty of type. The press would throw off two hundred impressions an hour at full speed, man power. He hired a room, twelve by sixteen feet, in the building at 222 William Street. That building was still there, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge approach, when the Sun celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1883; but a modern six-story envelope factory is on the site to-day.

There is no question as to the general authorship of the first paper. Day was proprietor, publisher, editor, chief pressman, and mailing-clerk. He was not a lazy man. He stayed up all the night before that fateful Tuesday, September 3, 1833, setting with his own hands some advertisements that were regularly appearing in the six-cent papers, for he wanted to make a show of prosperity.

He also wrote, or clipped from some out-of-town newspaper, a poem that would fill nearly a column. He rewrote news items from the West and South—some of them not more than a month old. As for the snappy local news of the day, he bought, in the small hours of that Tuesday morning, a copy of the Courier and Enquirer, the livest of the six-cent papers, took it to the single room in William Street, clipped out or rewrote the police-court items, and set them up himself. A boy, whose name is unknown to fame, assisted him at devil’s work. A journeyman printer, Parmlee, helped25 with the press when the last quoin had been made tight in the fourth and last of the little pages.

The sun was well up in the sky before its namesake of New York came slowly, hesitatingly, almost sadly, up over the horizon of journalism—never to set! In the years to follow, the Sun was to have changes in ownership, in policy, in size, and in style, but no week-day was to come when it could not shine. Of all the morning newspapers printed in New York on that 3rd of September, 1833, there is only one other—the Journal of Commerce—left.

But young Mr. Day, wiping the ink from his hands at noon, and waiting in doubt to see whether the public would buy the thousand Suns he had printed, could not foresee this. Neither could he know that, by this humble effort to exalt his printing business, he had driven a knife into the sclerotic heart of ancient journalism. The sixpenny papers were to laugh at this tiny intruder—to laugh and laugh, and to die.

The size of the first Sun was eleven and one-quarter by eight inches, not a great deal bigger than a sheet of commercial letter paper, and considerably less than one-quarter the size of a page of the Sun of to-day. Compared with the first Sun, the present newspaper is about sixteen times larger. The type was a good, plain face of agate, with some verse on the last page in nonpareil.

An almost perfect reprint of the first Sun was issued as a supplement to the paper on its twentieth birthday, in 1853, and again—to the number of about one hundred and sixty thousand copies—on its fiftieth birthday, in 1883. Many of the persons who treasure the replicas of 1883 believe them to be original first numbers, as they were not labelled “Presented gratuitously to the subscribers of the Sun,” as was the issue of 1853. Hardly a month passes by but the Sun receives one of26 them from some proud owner. It is easy, however, to tell the reprint from the original, for Mr. Day in his haste committed an error at the masthead of the editorial or second page of the first number. The date-line there reads “September 3, 1832,” while in the reprints it is “September 3, 1833,” as it should have been, but wasn’t, in the original. And there are minor typographical differences, invisible to the layman.

Of the thousand, or fewer, copies of the first Sun, only five are known to exist—one in the bound file of the Sun’s first year, held jealously in the Sun’s safe; one in the private library of the editor of the Sun, Edward Page Mitchell; one in the Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, New York; and two in the library of the American Type Founders Company, Jersey City.

There were three columns on each of the four pages. At the top of the first column on the front page was a modest announcement of the Sun’s ambitions:

It was added that the subscription in advance was three dollars a year, and that yearly advertisers were to be accommodated with ten lines every day for thirty dollars per annum—ten cents a day, or one cent a line. That was the old fashion of advertising. The friendly merchant bought thirty dollars’ worth of space, say in December, and inserted an advertisement of his fur coats or snow-shovels. The same advertisement might be in the paper the following July, for the newspapers made no effort to coordinate the needs of the seller27 and the buyer. So long as the merchant kept his name regularly in print, he felt that was enough.

The leading article on the first page was a semi-humorous story about an Irish captain and his duels. It was flanked by a piece of reprint concerning microscopic carved toys. There was a paragraph about a Vermont boy so addicted to whistling that he fell ill of it. Mr. Day’s apprentice may have needed this warning.

The front-page advertising, culled from other newspapers and printed for effect, consisted of the notices of steamship sailings. In one of these Commodore Vanderbilt offered to carry passengers from New York to Hartford, by daylight, for one dollar, on his splendid low-pressure steamboat Water Witch. Cornelius Vanderbilt was then thirty-nine years old, and had made the boat line between New York and New Brunswick, New Jersey, pay him forty thousand dollars a year. When the Sun started, the commodore was at the height of his activity, and he stuck to the water for thirty years afterward, until he had accumulated something like forty million dollars.

E. K. Collins had not yet established his famous Dramatic line of clipper-ships between New York and Liverpool, but he advertised the “very fast sailing coppered ship Nashville for New Orleans.” He was only thirty then.

Cooks were advertised for by private families living in Broadway, near Canal Street—pretty far up-town to live at that day—and in Temple Street, near Liberty, pretty far down-town now.

On the second page was a bit of real news, the melancholy suicide of a young Bostonian of “engaging manners and amiable disposition,” in Webb’s Congress Hall, a hotel. There were also two local anecdotes; a paragraph to the effect that “the city is nearly full of28 strangers from all parts of this country and Europe”; nine police-court items, nearly all concerning trivial assaults; news of murders committed in Florida, at Easton, Pennsylvania, and at Columbus, Ohio; a report of an earthquake at Charlottesville, Virginia, and a few lines of stray news from Mexico.

The third page had the arrivals and clearances at the port of New York, a joke about the cholera in New Orleans, a line to say that the same disease had appeared in the City of Mexico, an item about an insurrection in the Ohio penitentiary, a marriage announcement, a death notice, some ship and auction advertisements, and the offer of a reward of one thousand dollars for the recovery of thirteen thousand six hundred dollars stolen from the mail stage between Boston and Lynn and the arrest of the thieves.

The last page carried a poem, “A Noon Scene,” but the atmosphere was of the Elysian Fields over in Hoboken rather than of midday in the city. When Day scissored it, probably he did so with the idea that it would fill a column. Another good filler was the bank-note table, copied from a six-cent contemporary. The quotations indicated that not much of the bank currency of the day was accepted at par.

The rest of the page was filled with borrowed advertising. The Globe Insurance Company, of which John Jacob Astor was a director, announced that it had a capital of a million dollars. The North River Insurance Company, whose directorate included William B. Astor, declared its willingness to insure against fire and against “loss or damage by inland navigation.” At that time the boilers of river steamboats had an unpleasant trick of blowing up; hence Commodore Vanderbilt’s mention of the low pressure of the Water Witch. John A. Dix, then Secretary of State of the State of29 New York, and later to be the hero of the “shoot him on the spot” order, advertised an election. Castleton House Academy, on Staten Island, offered to teach and board young gentlemen at twenty-five dollars a quarter.

Such was the first Sun. Part of it was stale news, rewritten. Part was borrowed advertising. It is doubtful whether even the police-court items were original, although they were the most human things in the issue, the most likely to appeal to the readers whom Day hoped to reach—people to whom the purchase of a paper at six cents was impossible, and to whom windy, monotonous political discussions were a bore.

In those early thirties, daily journalism had not advanced very far. Men were willing, but means and methods were weak. The first English daily was the Courrant, issued in 1702. The Orange Postman, put out the following year, was the first penny paper. The London Times was not started until 1785. It was the first English paper to use a steam press, as the Sun was the first American paper.

The first American daily was the Pennsylvania Packet, called later the General Advertiser, begun in Philadelphia in 1784. It died in 1837. Of the existing New York papers only the Globe dates back to the eighteenth century, having been founded in 1797 as the Commercial Advertiser. Next to it in age is the Evening Post, started in 1801.

The weakness of the early dailies was largely due to the fact that their publishers looked almost entirely to advertising for the support of the papers. On the other hand, the editors were politicians or highbrows who thought more of a speech by Lord Piccadilly on empire than of a good street tragedy; more of an essay by Lady Geraldine Glue than of a first-class report of a kidnapping.

Another great obstacle to success—one for which neither editor nor publisher was responsible—was the lack of facilities for the transmission of news. Fulton launched the Clermont twenty-six years before Day launched the Sun, but even in Day’s time steamships were nothing to brag of, and the first of them was yet to cross the Atlantic. When the Sun was born, the most important railroad in America was thirty-four miles long, from Bordentown to South Amboy, New Jersey. There was no telegraph, and the mails were of pre-historic slowness.

It was hard to get out a successful daily newspaper without daily news. A weekly would have sufficed for the information that came in, by sailing ship and stage, from Europe and Washington and Boston. Ben Day was the first man to reconcile himself to an almost impossible situation. He did so by the simple method of using what news was nearest at hand—the incidental happenings of New York life. In this way he solved his own problem and the people’s, for they found that the local items in the Sun were just what they wanted, while the price of the paper suited them well.

CHAPTER II
THE FIELD OF THE LITTLE “SUN”

How far could the little Sun hope to cast its beam in a stodgy if not naughty world? The circulation of all the dailies in New York at the time was less than thirty thousand. The seven morning and four evening papers, all sold at six cents a copy, shared the field thus:

New York was the American metropolis, but it was of about the present size of Indianapolis or Seattle. Of32 its quarter of a million population, only eight or ten thousand lived above Twenty-third Street. Washington Square, now the residence district farthest down-town, had just been adopted as a park; before that it had been the Potter’s Field. In 1833 rich New Yorkers were putting up some fine residences there—of which a good many still stand. Sixth Street had had its name changed to Waverley Place in honor of Walter Scott, recently dead, the literary king of the day.

Wall Street was already the financial centre, with its Merchants’ Exchange, banks, brokers, and insurance companies. Canal Street was pretty well filled with retail stores. Third Avenue had been macadamized from the Bowery to Harlem. The down-town streets were paved, and some were lighted with gas at seven dollars a thousand cubic feet.

Columbia College, in the square bounded by Murray, Barclay, Church, and Chapel Streets, had a hundred students; now it has more than a hundred hundred. James Kent was professor of law in the Columbia of that day, and Charles Anthon was professor of Greek and Latin. A rival seat of learning, the University of the City of New York, chartered two years earlier, was temporarily housed at 12 Chambers Street, with a certain Samuel F. B. Morse as professor of sculpture and painting. There were twelve schools, harbouring six thousand pupils, whose welfare was guarded by the Public School Society of New York, Lindley Murray secretary. The National Academy of Design, incorporated five years before, guided the budding artist in Clinton Hall, and Mr. Morse was its president, while it had for its professor of mythology one William Cullen Bryant.

Albert Gallatin was president of the National Bank, at 13 Wall Street. Often at the end of his day’s work33 he would walk around to the small shop in William Street where his young friend Delmonico, the confectioner, was trying to interest the gourmets of the city in his French cooking. Gideon Lee, besides being mayor, was president of the Leather Manufacturers’ Bank at 334 Pearl Street. He was the last mayor of New York to be appointed by the common council, for Dix’s advertisement in the first Sun called an election by which the people of the city gained the right to elect a mayor by popular vote.

A list of the solid citizens of the New York of that year would include Peter Schermerhorn, Nicholas Fish, Robert Lenox, Sheppard Knapp, Samuel Swartwout, Henry Beekman, Henry Delafield, John Mason, William Paulding, David S. Kennedy, Jacob Lorillard, David Lydig, Seth Grosvenor, Elisha Riggs, John Delafield, Peter A. Jay, C. V. S. Roosevelt, Robert Ray, Preserved Fish, Morris Ketchum, Rufus Prime, Philip Hone, William Vail, Gilbert Coutant, and Mortimer Livingston.

These men and their fellows ran the banks and the big business of that day. They read the six-cent papers, mostly those which warned the public that Andrew Jackson was driving the country to the devil. It would be years before the Sun would bring the light of common, everyday things into their dignified lives—if it ever did so. Day, the printer, did not look to them to read his paper, although he hoped for some small part of their advertising. It is likely that one of the Gouverneurs—Samuel L.—read the early Sun, but he was postmaster, and it was his duty to examine new and therefore suspicionable publications.

Incidentally, Postmaster Gouverneur had one clerk to sort all the mail that came into the city from the rest of the world. It was a small New York upon which the timid Sun cast its still smaller beams. The mass of the34 people had not been interested in newspapers, because the newspapers brought nothing into their lives but the drone of American and foreign politics. A majority of them were in sympathy with Tammany Hall, particularly since 1821, when the property qualification was removed from the franchise through Democratic effort.

New York had literary publications other than the six-cent papers. The Knickerbocker Magazine was founded in January of 1833, with Charles Hoffman, assistant editor of the American Magazine, as editor. Among the contributors engaged were William Cullen Bryant and James K. Paulding. The subscription-list, it was proudly announced, had no fewer than eight hundred names on it. The Mechanics’ Magazine, the Sporting Magazine, the American Ploughboy, the Journal of Public Morals, and the Youth’s Temperance Lecturer were among the periodicals that contended for public favour.

Bryant was a busy man, for he was the chief editor of the Evening Post as well as a magazine contributor and a teacher. Fame had come to him early, for “Thanatopsis” was published when he was twenty-three, and “To a Water-fowl” appeared a year later, in 1818. Now, in his thirties, he was no longer the delicate youth, the dreamy poet. One April day in 1831 Bryant and William L. Stone, one of the editors of the Commercial Advertiser, had a rare fight in front of the City Hall, the poet beginning it with a cowskin whip swung at Stone’s head, and the spectators ending it after Stone had seized the whip. These two were editors of sixpenny “respectables.”

Irving and Cooper, Bryant and Halleck, Nathaniel P. Willis and George P. Morris were the largest figures of intellectual New York. In 1833 Irving returned from Europe after a visit that had lasted seventeen years.35 He was then fifty, and had written his best books. Cooper, half a dozen years younger, had long since basked in the glory that came to him with the publication of “The Spy,” “The Pilot,” and “The Last of the Mohicans.” He and Irving were guests at every cultured function.

Prescott was finishing his first work, “The History of Ferdinand and Isabella.” Bancroft was beginning his “History of the United States.” George Ticknor had written his “Life of Lafayette.” Hawthorne had published only “Fanshawe” and some of the “Twice Told Tales.” Poe was struggling along in Baltimore. Holmes, a medical student, had written a few poems. Dr. John William Draper, later to write his great “History of the Intellectual Development of Europe,” arrived from Liverpool that year to make New York his home.

Longfellow was professor of modern languages at Bowdoin, and unknown to fame as a poet. Whittier had written “Legends of New England” and “Moll Pitcher.” Emerson was in England. Richard Henry Dana and Motley were at Harvard. Thoreau was helping his father to make lead-pencils. Parkman, Lowell, and Herman Melville were schoolboys.

Away off in Buffalo was a boy of fourteen who clerked in his uncle’s general store by day, selling steel traps to Seneca braves, and by night read Latin, Greek, poetry, history, and the speeches of Andrew Jackson. His name was Charles Anderson Dana.

The leading newspaperman of the day in New York was James Watson Webb, a son of the General Webb who held the Bible upon which Washington took the oath of office as first President. J. Watson Webb had been in the army and, as a journalist, was never for peace at any price. He united the Morning Courier36 and the Enquirer, and established a daily horse express between New York and Washington, which is said to have cost seventy-five hundred dollars a month, in order to get news from Congress and the White House twenty-four hours before his rivals.

Webb was famed as a fighter. He had a row with Duff Green in Washington in 1830. In January, 1836, he thrashed James Gordon Bennett in Wall Street. He incited a mob to drive Wood, a singer, from the stage of the Park Theater. In 1838 he sent a challenge to Representative Cilley, of Maine, a classmate of Longfellow and Hawthorne at Bowdoin. Cilley refused to fight, on the ground that he had made no personal reflections on Webb’s character; whereupon Representative Graves, of Kentucky, who carried the card for Webb, challenged Cilley for himself, as was the custom. They fought with rifles on the Annapolis Road, and Cilley was killed at the third shot.

In 1842 Webb fought a duel with Representative Marshall, of Kentucky, and not only was wounded, but on his return to New York was sentenced to two years in prison “for leaving the State with the intention of giving or receiving a challenge.” At the end of two weeks, however, he was pardoned.

Having deserted Jackson and become a Whig, Webb continued to own and edit the Courier and Enquirer until 1861, when it was merged with the World. His quarrels, all of political origin, brought prestige to his paper. Ben Day had no duelling-pistols. His only chance to advertise the Sun was by its own light and its popular price.

Beyond Webb, Day had no lively journalist with whom to contend at the outset, and Webb probably did not dream that the Sun would be worthy of a joust. Perhaps fortunately for Day, Horace Greeley had just37 failed in his attempt to run a one-cent paper. This was the Morning Post, which Greeley started in January, 1833, with Francis V. Story, a fellow printer, as his partner, and with a capital of one hundred and fifty dollars. It ran for three weeks only.

Greeley and Story still had some type, bought on credit, and they issued a tri-weekly, the Constitutionalist, which, in spite of its dignified title, was the avowed organ of the lotteries. Its columns contained the following card:

It must be remembered that at that time lotteries were not under a cloud. There were in New York forty-five lottery offices, licensed at two hundred and fifty dollars apiece annually, and the proceeds were divided between the public schools and a home for deaf-mutes. That was the last year of legalized lotteries. After they disappeared Greeley started the New Yorker, the best literary weekly of its time. It was not until April, 1841, that he founded the Tribune.

Doubtless there were many young New Yorkers of that period who would have made bang-up reporters, but apparently, until Day’s time, with few exceptions they did not work on morning newspapers. One exception was James Gordon Bennett, whose work for Webb on the Courier and Enquirer helped to make it the leading American paper.

Nathaniel P. Willis and George P. Morris would probably have been good reporters, for they knew New York and had excellent styles, but they insisted on being38 poets. With Morris it was not a hollow vocation, for the author of “Woodman, Spare That Tree,” could always get fifty dollars for a song. He and Willis ran the Mirror and later the New Mirror, and wrote verse and other fanciful stuff by the bushel. Philip Hone would have been the best reporter in New York, as his diary reveals, but he was of the aristocracy, and he seems to have scorned newspapermen, particularly Webb and Bennett.

But somehow, by that chance which seemed to smile on the Sun, Ben Day got clever reporters. He wanted one to do the police-court work, for he saw, from the first day of the paper, that that was the kind of stuff that his readers devoured. To them the details of a beating administered by James Hawkins to his wife were of more import than Jackson’s assaults on the United States Bank.

When George W. Wisner, a young printer who was out of work, applied to the Sun for a job, Day told him that he would give him four dollars a week if he would get up early every day and attend the police-court, which held its sessions from 4 A.M. on. The people of the city were quite as human then as they are to-day. Unregenerate mortals got drunk and fought in the streets. Others stole shoes. The worst of all beat their wives. Wisner was to be the Balzac of the daybreak court in a year when Balzac himself was writing his “Droll Stories.”

The second issue of the Sun continued the typographical error of the day before. The year in the date-line of the second page was “1832.” The big news in this paper was under date of Plymouth, England, August 1, and it told of the capture of Lisbon by Admiral Napier on the 25th of July. Day—or perhaps it was Wisner—wrote an editorial article about it:

Theatrical advertising appeared in this number, the Park Theater announcing the comedy of “Rip Van Winkle,” as redramatized by Mr. Hackett, who played Rip. Mr. Gale was playing “Mazeppa” at the Bowery. Perhaps these advertisements were borrowed from a six-cent paper, but there was one “help wanted” advertisement that was not borrowed. It was the upshot of Day’s own idea, destined to bring another revolution in newspaper methods:

Before that day there had been no newsboys; no papers were sold in the streets. The big, blanket political40 organs that masqueraded as newspapers were either sold over the counter or delivered by carriers to the homes of the subscribers. Most of the publishers considered it undignified even to angle for new subscribers, and one of them boasted that his great circulation of perhaps two thousand had come unsolicited.

The first unemployed person to apply for a job selling Suns in the streets was a ten-year-old-boy, Bernard Flaherty, born in Cork. Years afterward two continents knew him as Barney Williams, Irish comedian, hero of “The Emerald Ring,” and “The Connie Soogah,” and at one time manager of Wallack’s old Broadway Theatre.

When Day got some regular subscribers, he sent carriers on routes. He charged them sixty-seven cents a hundred, cash, or seventy-five cents on credit. The first of these carriers was Sam Messenger, who delivered the Sun in the Fulton Market district, and who later became a rich livery-stable keeper. Live lads like these, carrying out Day’s idea, wrought the greatest change in journalism that ever had been made, for they brought the paper to the people, something that could not be accomplished by the six-cent sheets with their lofty notions and comparatively high prices.

On the third day of the Sun’s life, with Wisner at the pen and Barney Flaherty “hollering” in the startled streets, the editor again expressed, this time more positively, his yearning that something would happen:

The yearner had to wait thirty years for another Waterloo, but he got his “real Moscow fire” in about two years, and so close that it singed his eyebrows.

Lacking a Napoleon to exalt or denounce, Mr. Day used a bit of that same page for the publication of homelier news for the people:

So Horace Greeley and his partner, with their tri-weekly paper, could not have been keeping all of the lottery patronage away from the Sun.

The big story on the first page of the fourth issue of the Sun was a conversation between Envy and Candor in regard to the beauties of a Miss H., perhaps a fictitious person. But on the second page, at the head of the editorial column, was a real editorial article approving the course of the British government in freeing the slaves in the West Indies:

Thus the Sun came out for the freedom of the slave twenty-eight years before that freedom was to be accomplished in the United States through war. The Sun was the Sun of Day, but the hand was the hand of Wisner. That young man was an Abolitionist before the word was coined.

“Wisner was a pretty smart young fellow,” said Mr. Day nearly fifty years afterward, “but he and I never agreed. I was rather Democratic in my notions. Wisner, whenever he got a chance, was always sticking in his damned little Abolitionist articles.”

There is little doubt that Wisner wrote the article facing the Sun against slavery while he was waiting for something to turn up in the police-court. Then he went to the office, set up the article, as well as his piece about the arrest of Eliza Barry, of Bayard Street, for stealing a wash-tub, and put the type in the form. Considering that Wisner got four dollars a week for his break-o’-day work, he made a very good morning of that; and it is worthy of record that the next day’s Sun did not repudiate his assault on human servitude, although on September 10 Mr. Day printed an editorial grieving over the existence of slavery, but hitting at the methods of the Abolitionists.

A poem on Burns, by Halleck—perhaps reprinted from one of the author’s published volumes of verse—added literary tone to that morning’s Sun.

Then, and for some years afterward, the Sun exhibited a special aversion to alcohol in text and head-lines. “Cursed Effects of Rum!” was one of its favourite head-lines.

The Sun was a week old before it contained dramatic criticism, its first subject in that field being the appearance of Mr. and Mrs. Wood at the Park Theatre in “Cinderella,” a comic opera. The paper’s first animal story was printed on September 12, recording the fact that on the previous Sunday about sixty wild pigeons stayed in a tree at the Battery nearly half an hour.

On September 14 the Sun printed its first illustration—a two-column cut of “Herschel’s Forty-Feet Telescope.” This was Sir W. Herschel, then dead some ten years, and the telescope was on his grounds at Slough, near Windsor, England. Another knighted Herschel with another telescope in a far land was to play a big part in the fortunes of the Sun, but that comes later. In the issue with the cut of the telescope was a paragraph44 about a rumour that Fanny Kemble, who had just captivated American theatregoers, had been married to Pierce Butler, of Philadelphia—as, indeed, she had.

Broadway seems to have had its lure as early as 1833, for in the Sun of September 17, on the first page, is a plaint by “Citizen”:

This was followed by uplifting little essays on “Suicide” and “Robespierre.” The chief news of the day—that John Quincy Adams had accepted a nomination from the Anti-Masons—was on an inside page. What was possibly of more interest to the readers, it was announced that thereafter a ton of coal would be two thousand pounds instead of twenty-two hundred and forty—Lackawanna, broken and sifted, six dollars and fifty cents a ton.

On Saturday, September 21, when it was only eighteen days old, the Sun adopted a new head-line. The letters remained the same, but the eagle device of the first issue was supplanted by the solar orb rising over hills and sea. This design was used only until December 2, when its place was taken by a third emblem—a printing-press shedding symbolical effulgence upon the earth.

The Sun’s first book-notice appeared on September 23, when it acknowledged the sixtieth volume of the45 “Family Library” (Harpers), this being a biography of Charlemagne by G. P. R. James. “It treats of a most important period in the history of France.” The Sun had little space then for book-reviews or politics. Of its attitude toward the great financial fight then being waged, this lone paragraph gives a good view:

Nicholas Biddle and his friends could fill other papers with arguments, but the Sun kept its space for police items, stories of authenticated ghosts, and yarns about the late Emperor Napoleon. The removal of William J. Duane as Secretary of the Treasury got two lines on a page where a big shark caught off Barnstable got three lines, and the feeding of the anaconda at the American Museum a quarter of a column. Miss Susan Allen, who bought a cigar on Broadway and was arrested when she smoked it while she danced in the street, was featured more prominently than the expected visit to New York of Mr. Henry Clay, after whom millions of cigars were to be named. For the satisfaction of universal curiosity it must be reported that Miss Allen was discharged.

On October 1 of that same year—1833—the Sun came out for better fire-fighting apparatus, urging that the engines should be drawn by horses, as in London. In the same issue it assailed the gambling-house in Park Row, and scorned the allegation of Colonel Hamilton, a British traveller, that the tooth-brush was unknown in America. Slowly the paper was getting better, printing more local news; and it could afford to, for the penny46 Sun idea had taken hold of New York, and the sales were larger every week.

Wisner was stretching the police-court pieces out to nearly two columns. Now and then, perhaps when Mr. Day was away fishing, the reporter would slip in an Abolition paragraph or a gloomy poem on the horrors of slavery. But he was so valuable that, while his chief did not raise his salary of four dollars a week, he offered him half the paper, the same to be paid for out of the profits. And so, in January of 1834, Wisner became a half-owner of the Sun. Benton, another Sun printer, also wanted an interest, and left when he could not get it.

Before it was two months old the Sun had begun to take an interest in aeronautics. It printed a full column, October 16, 1833, on the subject of Durant’s balloon ascensions, and quoted Napoleon as saying that the only insurmountable difficulty of the balloon in war was the impossibility of guiding its course. “This difficulty Dr. Durant is now endeavoring to obviate.” And the Sun added:

In the issue of October 17 a skit, possibly by Mr. Day himself, gave a picture of the trials of an editor of the period:

The day after this evidence of unrest appeared the Sun printed, perhaps with a view to making all manner of citizens gnash their teeth, a few extracts from the narrative of Colonel Hamilton, “the British traveler in America”:

The editorial suggested that the colonel “had better look wild for the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.”

The union printers were lively even in the first days of the Sun, which announced, on October 21, 1833, that the Journal of Commerce paid its journeymen only ten dollars a week, and added:

The “pork-barrel” was foreshadowed in an item printed when the Sun was just a month old:

At the end of its first month the Sun was getting more and more advertising. Its news was lively enough, considering the times. Rum, the cholera in Mexico, assassinations in the South, the police-court, the tour of Henry Clay, and poems by Walter Scott were its long suit. The circulation of the little paper was now about twelve hundred copies, and the future seemed promising, even if Mr. Day did print, at suspiciously frequent intervals, articles inveighing against the debtor’s-prison law.

The Astor House—now half a ruin—was at first to be called the Park Hotel, for the Sun of October 29, 1833, announced editorially:

An advertisement which the Sun saw fit to notice editorially was inserted by a young man in search of a wife—“a young woman who understands the use of the needle, and who is willing to be industrious.” The editorial comment was:

Sometimes the police items, flecked with poetry, and presumably written by Wisner, were tantalizingly reticent, as:

Nothing more than that. Perhaps Wisner rather enjoyed being questioned by admiring friends when he went to dinner at the American House that day.

Bright as the police reporter was, the ship-news man of that day lacked snap. The arrival from Europe of James Fenimore Cooper, who could have told the Sun more foreign news than it had ever printed, was disposed of in twelve words. But it must be remembered that the interview was then unknown. The only way to get anything out of a citizen was to enrage him, whereupon he would write a letter. But the Sun did say, a couple of days later, that Cooper’s newest novel, “The Headsman,” was being sold in London at seven dollars and fifty cents a copy—no doubt in the old-fashioned English form, three volumes at half a guinea each.

The same article called attention to the fact that the “penny” papers of England were really two-cent papers. The Sun’s price had been announced as “one penny” on the earliest numbers, but on October 8, when it was a little more than a month old, the legend was changed to read “Price one cent.”

The Sun ran its first serial in the third month of its existence. This was “The Life of Davy Crockett,” dictated or authorized by the frontiersman himself. It must have been a relief to the readers to get away from the usual dull reprint from foreign papers that had been filling the Sun’s first page. In those days the first pages were always the dullest, but Crockett’s lively stories about bear-hunts enlivened the Sun.

Other celebrities were often mentioned. Aaron Burr, now old and feeble, was writing his memoirs. Martin Van Buren had taken lodgings at the City Hotel. The Siamese Twins were arrested in the South for beating a man. “Mr. Clay arrived in town last evening and attended the new opera.” This was “Fra Diavolo,” in which Mr. and Mrs. Wood sang at the Park Theatre. “It is said that Dom Pedro has dared his brother Miguel to single combat, which has been refused.” A week later the Sun gloated over the fact that Pedro—Pedro I of Brazil, who was invading Portugal on behalf of his daughter, Maria da Gloria—had routed the usurper Miguel’s army.

On December 5, 1833, the Sun printed the longest news piece it had ever put in type—the message of President Jackson to the Congress. This took up three of the four pages, and crowded out nearly all the advertising.

On December 17, in the fourth month of its life, the Sun announced that it had procured “a machine press, on which one thousand impressions can be taken in an hour. The daily circulation is now nearly FOUR THOUSAND.” It was a happy Christmas for Day and Wisner. The Sun surely was shining!

The paper retained its original size and shape during the whole of 1834, and rarely printed more than four pages. As it grew older, it printed more and more local items and developed greater interest in local affairs. The first page was taken up with advertising and reprint. A State election might have taken place the day before, but on page 1 the Sun worshippers looked for a bit of fiction or history. What were the fortunes of William L. Marcy as compared to a two-column thriller, “The Idiot’s Revenge,” or “Captain Chicken and Gentle Sophia”?

INGRATITUDE OF A CAT.
PERSONALITY OF NAPOLEON.
WONDERFUL ANTICS OF FLEAS.
BROUGHT TO IT BY RUM.

The Sun, although read largely by Jacksonians, did not take the side of any political party. It favoured national and State economy and city cleanliness. It dismissed the New York Legislature of 1834 thus:

Nothing more. If the readers wanted more they could fly to the ample bosoms of the sixpennies; but54 apparently they were satisfied, for in April of 1834 the Sun’s circulation reached eight thousand, and Colonel Webb, of the Courier and Enquirer, was bemoaning the success of “penny trash.” The Sun replied to him by saying that the public had been “imposed upon by ten-dollar trash long enough.” The Journal of Commerce also slanged the Sun, which promptly announced that the Journal was conducted by “a company of rich, aristocratical men,” and that it would take sides with any party to gain a subscriber.

The influence of Partner Wisner, the Abolitionist, was evident in many pages of the Sun. On June 23, 1834, it printed a piece about Martin Palmer, who was “pelted down with stones in Wall Street on suspicion of being a runaway slave,” and paid its respects to Boudinot, a Southerner in New York who was reputed to be a tracker of runaways. It was he who had set the crowd after the black:

During the anti-abolition riots of that year the Sun took a firm stand against the disturbers, although there is little doubt that many of them were its own readers.

The paper made a vigorous little crusade against the evils of the Bridewell in City Hall Park, where dozens of wretches suffered in the filth of the debtors’ prison. The Sun was a live wire when the cholera re-appeared, and it put to rout the sixpenny papers which tried to make out that the disease was not cholera, but “summer complaint.” Incidentally, the advertising55 columns of that day, in nearly all the papers were filled with patent “cholera cures.”

The Sun had an eye for urban refinement, too, and begged the aldermen to see to it that pigs were prevented from roaming in City Hall Park. In the matter of silver forks, then a novelty, it was more conservative, as the following paragraph, printed in November, 1834, would indicate:

Not even abolition or etiquette, however, could sidetrack the Sun’s interest in animals. In one issue it dismissed the adjournment of Congress in three words and, just below, ran this item:

Almost every newspaper editor in that era had a theatre feud at one day or another. The Sun’s quarrel was with Farren, the manager of the Bowery, where Forrest was playing. So the Sun said:

Five hundred citizens gathered at the theatre that night, waited until nine o’clock, and then charged through the doors, breaking up the performance of “Metamora.” The Sun described it:

The supernumeraries scud from behind the scenes like quails—the stock actors’ teeth chattered—Oceana looked imploringly at the good-for-nothing Yankees—Nahmeeoke trembled—Guy of Godalwin turned on his heel, and Metamora coolly shouldered his tomahawk and walked off the stage.

The management announced that Farren was discharged. The mayor of New York and Edwin Forrest made conciliatory speeches, and the crowd went away.

The attacks of Colonel Stone, editor of the six-cent Commercial, aroused the Sun to retaliate in kind. A column about the colonel ended thus:

It must be said of Colonel Stone that he was a man of literary and political attainments. He was editor of the Commercial Advertiser for more than twenty years.

The colonel did not reform to the Sun’s liking at once, but the feud lessened, and presently it was the Transcript—a penny paper which sprang up when the Sun’s success was assured—to which the Sun took its biggest cudgels. One of the Transcript’s editors, it said, had passed a bogus three-dollar bill on the Bank of Troy. Another walked “on both sides of the street, like a twopenny postman,” while a third “spent his money at a theatre with females,” while his family was in want. But, added the Sun, “we never let personalities creep in.”

The New York Times—not the present Times—had also started up, and it dared to boast of a circulation “greater than any in the city except the Courier.” Said the Sun:

The Sun took no risk in this. By November of 1834 its circulation was above ten thousand. On December 3 it published the President’s message in full and circulated fifteen thousand copies. At the beginning of58 1835 it announced a new press—a Napier, built by R. Hoe & Co.—new type, and a bigger paper, circulating twenty thousand. The print paper was to cost four-fifths of a cent a copy, but the Sun was getting lots of advertising. With the increase in size, that New Year’s Day, the Sun adopted the motto, “It Shines for All.” which it is still using to-day. This motto doubtless was suggested by the sign of the famous Rising Sun Tavern, or Howard’s Inn, which then stood at the junction of Bedford and Jamaica turnpikes, in East New York. The sign, which was in front of the tavern as early as 1776, was supported on posts near the road and bore a rude picture of a rising sun and the motto which Day adopted.

In the same month—January, 1835—the bigger and better Sun printed its first real sports story. The sporting editor, who very likely was also the police reporter and perhaps Partner Wisner as well, heard that there was to be a fight in the fields near Hoboken between Williamson, of Philadelphia, and Phelan, of New York. He crossed the ferry, hired a saddle-horse in Hoboken, and galloped to the ringside. It was bare knuckles, London rules, and only thirty seconds’ interval between rounds:

The match lasted seventy-two minutes and ended in the defeat of Williamson. The Sun’s report contained no sporting slang, and the reporter did not seem to like pugilism:

The following day the Sun denounced prize-fighting as “a European practice, better fitted for the morally and physically oppressed classes of London than the enlightened republican citizens of New York.”

As prosperity came, the news columns improved. The sensational was not the only pabulum fed to the reader. Beside the story of a duel between two midshipmen he would find a review of the Burr autobiography, just out. Gossip about Fanny Kemble’s quarrel with her father—the Sun was vexed with the actress because she said that New York audiences were made up of butchers—would appear next to a staid report of the doings of Congress. The attacks on Rum continued, and the Sun was quick to oppose the proposed “licensing of houses of prostitution and billiard-rooms.”

The success of Mr. Day’s paper was so great that every printer and newspaperman in New York longed to run a penny journal. On June 22, 1835, the paper’s name appeared at the head of the editorial column on Page 2 as The True Sun, although on the first page the bold head-line THE SUN, remained as usual. An editorial note said:

On the following day the True Sun title was entirely missing, and its absence was explained in an editorial article as follows:

A day later (June 24, 1835) the Sun declared that in establishing the True Sun “Short, who is one of the printers of the Messenger, actually purloined the composition of his reading matter”; and it printed a letter from William Burnett, publisher of the Weekly Messenger, to support its charge of larceny.

On June 28, six days after the True Sun’s first appearance, the Sun announced the failure of the pretender. The True Sun’s proprietors, it said, “have concluded to abandon their piratical course.”

Another True Sun was issued by Benjamin H. Day in 1840, two years after he sold the Sun to Moses Y. Beach. A third True Sun, established by former employees of the Sun on March 20, 1843, ran for more than a year. A daily called the Citizen and True Sun, started in 1845, had a short life.

The editor whose sanity was questioned was the famous Mordecai Manuel Noah, one of the most versatile men of his time. He was a newspaper correspondent at fifteen. When he was twenty-eight, President Madison appointed him to be consul-general at Tunis, where he distinguished himself by his rescue of several Americans who were held as slaves in the Barbary States. On his return to New York, in 1816, he again entered journalism, and was successively connected with the National Advocate, the Enquirer, the Commercial Advertiser, the Times and Messenger, and the Evening Star. In 1825 he attempted to establish a great Jewish colony on Grand Island, in the Niagara River, but he found neither sympathy nor aid among his coreligionists, and the scheme was a failure.

Noah wrote a dozen dramas, all of which have been forgotten, although he was the most popular playwright in America at that day. His Evening Star was a good paper, and the Sun’s quarrels with it were not serious.

For their attacks on Attree, the editor of the Transcript, Messrs. Day and Wisner got themselves indicted for criminal libel. They took it calmly:

A few weeks later, when Attree, who had left the Transcript to write “horribles” for the Courier, was terribly beaten in the street, the Sun denounced the assault and tried to expose the assailants.

In February, 1835, a few days after the indictment of the partners, Mr. Wisner was challenged to a duel by a quack dentist whose medicines the Sun had exposed. The Sun announced editorially that Wisner accepted the challenge, and that, having the choice of weapons, he chose syringes charged with the dentist’s own medicine, the distance five paces. No duel!

It would seem that the Sun owners sought a challenge from the fiery James Watson Webb of the mahogany pistol, for they made many a dig at his sixpenny paper. Here is a sample:

A little later, when Colonel Webb’s paper boasted of “the largest circulation,” the Sun offered to bet the colonel a thousand dollars—the money to go to the Washington Monument Association—that the Sun had63 a circulation twice as great as that of the big sixpenny daily.

It must not be thought, however, that the Sun did not attempt to treat the serious matters of the day. It handled them very well, considering the lack of facilities. The war crisis with France, happily dispelled; the amazing project of the Erie Railroad to build a line as far west as Chautauqua County, New York; the anti-abolitionist riots and the little religious rows; the ambitions of Daniel Webster and the approach of Halley’s comet—all these had their half-column or so.

When Matthias the Prophet, the Dowie of that day, was brought to trial in White Plains, Westchester County, on a charge of having poisoned a Mr. Elijah Pierson, the Sun sent a reporter to that then distant court. It is possible that this reporter was Benjamin H. Day himself. At any rate, Day attended the trial, and there made the acquaintance of a man who that very summer made the Sun the talk of the world and brought to the young paper the largest circulation of any daily.

CHAPTER III
RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE’S MOON HOAX

The man whom Day met at the murder trial in White Plains was Richard Adams Locke, a reporter who was destined to kick up more dust than perhaps any other man of his profession. As he comes on the stage, we must let his predecessor, George W. Wisner, pass into the wings.

Wisner was a good man, as a reporter, as a writer of editorial articles, and as part owner of the paper. His campaign for Abolition irritated Mr. Day at first, but the young man’s motives were so pure and his articles so logical that Day recognized the justice of the cause, even as he realized the foolish methods employed by some of the Abolitionists. Wisner set the face of the Sun against slavery, and Day kept it so, but there were minor matters of policy upon which the partners never agreed, never could agree.

When Wisner’s health became poor, in the summer of 1835, he expressed a desire to get away from New York. Mr. Day paid him five thousand dollars for his interest in the paper—a large sum in those days, considering the fact that Wisner had won his share with no capital except his pen. Wisner went West and settled at Pontiac, Michigan. There his health improved,65 his fortune increased, and he was at one time a member of the Michigan Legislature.

When Day found that Locke was the best reporter attending the trial of Matthias the Prophet, he hired him to write a series of articles on the religious fakir. These, the first “feature stories” that ever appeared in the Sun, were printed on the front page.

A few weeks later, while the Matthias articles were still being sold on the streets in pamphlet form, Locke went to Day and told him that his boss, Colonel Webb of the Courier and Enquirer, had discharged him for working for the Sun “on the side.” Wisner was about to leave the paper, and Day was glad to hire Locke, for he needed an editorial writer. Twelve dollars a week was the alluring wage, and Locke accepted it.

Locke was then thirty-five—ten years senior to his employer. Let his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe, describe him:

Locke was nine years older than Poe, who at this time had most of his fame ahead of him. Poe was quick to recognize the quality of Locke’s writings; indeed, the poet saw, perhaps more clearly than others of that period, that America was full of good writers—a fact of which the general public was neglectful. This was Poe’s tribute to Locke’s literary gift:

The Sun’s new writer was a collateral descendant of John Locke, the English philosopher of the seventeenth century. He was born in 1800, but his birthplace was not New York, as his contemporary biographers wrote. It was East Brent, Somersetshire, England. His early American friends concealed this fact when writing of Locke, for they feared that his English birth (all the wounds of war had not healed) would keep him out of some of the literary clubs. He was educated by his mother and by private tutors until he was nineteen, when he entered Cambridge. While still a student he contributed to the Bee, the Imperial Magazine, and other English publications. When he left Cambridge he had the hardihood to start the London Republican, the title of which describes its purpose. This was a failure, for London declined to warm to the theories of American democracy, no matter how scholarly their expression.

Abandoning the Republican, young Locke devoted himself to literature and science. He ran a periodical called the Cornucopia for about six months, but it was not a financial success, and in 1832, with his wife and infant daughter, he went to New York. Colonel Webb put him at work on his paper.

Locke could write almost anything. In Cambridge and in Fleet Street he had picked up a wonderful store of general information. He could turn out prose or poetry, politics or pathos, anecdotes or astronomy.

While he lived in London, Locke was a regular reader67 of the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, and he brought some copies of it to America. One of these, an issue of 1826, contained an article by Dr. Thomas Dick, of Dundee, a pious man, but inclined to speculate on the possibilities of the universe. In this article Dr. Dick suggested the feasibility of communicating with the moon by means of great stone symbols on the face of the earth. The people of the moon—if there were any—would fathom the diagrams and reply in a similar way. Dr. Dick explained afterward that he wrote this piece with the idea of satirizing a certain coterie of eccentric German astronomers.

Now it happened that Sir John Frederick William Herschel, the greatest astronomer of his time, and the son of the celebrated astronomer Sir William Herschel, went to South Africa in January, 1834, and established an observatory at Feldhausen, near Cape Town, with the intention of completing his survey of the sidereal heavens by examining the southern skies as he had swept the northern, thus to make the first telescopic survey of the whole surface of the visible heavens.

Locke knew about Sir John and his mission. The Matthias case had blown over, the big fire in Fulton Street was almost forgotten, and things were a bit dull on the island of Manhattan. The newspapers were in a state of armed truce. As Locke and his fellow journalists gathered at the American Hotel bar for their after-dinner brandy, it is probable that there was nothing, not even the great sloth recently arrived at the American Museum, to excite a good argument.

Locke needed money, for his salary of twelve dollars a week could ill support the fine gentleman that he was; so he laid a plan before Mr. Day. It was a plot as well as a plan, and the first angle of the plot appeared on the second page of the Sun on August 21, 1835:

Nothing further appeared until Tuesday, August 25, when three columns of the Sun’s first page took the newspaper and scientific worlds by the ears. Those were not the days of big type. The Sun’s heading read:

It may as well be said here that although there had been an Edinburgh Journal of Science, it ceased to exist several years before 1835. The periodical to which Dr. Dick, of Dundee, contributed his moon theories was, in a way, the successor to the Journal of Science, but it was called the New Philosophical Journal. The likeness of names was not great, but enough to cause some confusion. It is also noteworthy that the sly Locke credited to a supplement, rather than to the Journal of Science itself, the revelations which he that day began to pour before the eyes of Sun readers. Thus he started:

After solemnly dwelling on the awe which mortal man must feel upon peering into the secrets of the sky, the article declared that Sir John “paused several hours before he commenced his observations, that he might prepare his own mind for discoveries which he knew would fill the minds of myriads of his fellow men with astonishment.” It continued:

At the end of a half-column of glorification, the writer got down to brass tacks:

And where was the Journal of Science getting this mine of astronomical revelation for its supplement? The mystery is explained at once:

Regarding the illustrations which, according to the implications of the text, accompanied the supplement, the writer was specific. Most of them, he stated, were copies of “drawings taken in the observatory by Herbert Home, Esq., who accompanied the last powerful series of reflectors from London to the Cape. The engraving of the belts of Jupiter is a reduced copy of an imperial folio drawing by Dr. Herschel himself. The segment of the inner ring of Saturn is from a large drawing by Dr. Grant.”

A history of Sir William Herschel’s work and a description of his telescopes took up a column of the Sun, and on top of this came the details—as the Journal printed them—of Sir John’s plans to outdo his father by revolutionary methods and a greater telescope.71 Sir John, it appeared, was in conference with Sir David Brewster:

Details of the casting of a great lens came next. It was twenty-four feet in diameter, and weighed nearly fifteen thousand pounds after it was polished; its estimated magnifying-power was forty-two thousand times. As he saw it safely started on its way to Africa, Sir John “expressed confidence in his ultimate ability to study even the entomology of the moon, in case she contained insects upon her surface.”

Thus ended the first instalment of the story. Where had the Sun got the Journal of Science supplement? An editorial article answered that “it was very politely furnished us by a medical gentleman immediately from Scotland, in consequence of a paragraph which appeared on Friday last from the Edinburgh Courant.” The article added:

It cannot be said that the whole town buzzed with excitement that day. Perhaps this first instalment was a bit over the heads of most readers; it was so technical, so foreign. But in Nassau and Ann Streets, wherever two newspapermen were gathered together, there was buzzing enough. What was coming next? Why hadn’t they thought to subscribe to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, with its wonderful supplement?

Nearly four columns of the revelations appeared on the following day—August 26, 1835. This time the reading public came trooping into camp, for the Sun’s reprint of the Journal of Science supplement got beyond the stage of preliminaries and predictions, and began to tell of what was to be seen on the moon. Scientists and newspapermen appreciated the detailed description of the mammoth telescope and the work of placing it, but the public, like a child, wanted the moon—and got it. Let us plunge in at about the point where the public plunged:

The article had explained that, by means of a great reflector, the lunar views were thrown upon a big canvas screen behind the telescope.

A column farther on, in a wonderful valley of this wonderful moon, life at last burst upon the seers:

So, at last, the people of earth knew something concrete about the live things of the moon. Goats with75 beards were there, and every New Yorker knew goats, for they fed upon the rocky hills of Harlem. And the moon had birds, too:

At this point clouds intervened, and the Herschel party had to call it a day. But it had been a big day, and nobody who read the Sun wondered that the astronomers tossed off “congratulatory bumpers of the best ‘East India particular,’ and named this place of wonders the Valley of the Unicorn.” So ended the Sun story of August 26, but an editorial paragraph assured the patrons of the paper that on the morrow there would be a treat even richer.

What did the other papers say? In the language of a later and less elegant period, most of them ate it up—some eagerly, some grudgingly, some a bit dubiously, but they ate it, either in crumbs or in hunks. The Daily Advertiser declared:

The Mercantile Advertiser, knowing that its lofty readers were unlikely to see the moon revelations in the lowly Sun, hastened to begin reprinting the articles in full, with the remark that the document appeared to have intrinsic evidence of authenticity.

The Times, a daily then only a year old, and destined to live only eighteen months more—later, of course, the title was used by a successful daily—said that everything in the Sun story was probable and plausible, and had an “air of intense verisimilitude.”

The Courier and Enquirer said nothing at all. Like the Journal of Commerce, it hated the Sun for a lucky upstart. Both of these sixpenny respectables stood silent, with their axes behind their backs. Their own readers, the Livingstons and the Stuyvesants, got not a line about the moon from the blanket sheets, but they sent down into the kitchen and borrowed the Sun from the domestics, on the shallow pretext of wishing to discover whether their employees were reading a moral newspaper—as indeed they were.

The Herald, then about four months old, said not a word about the moon story. In fact, that was a period in which it said nothing at all about any subject, for the fire of that summer had unfortunately wiped out its plant. On the very days when the moon stories appeared, Mr. Bennett stood cracking his knuckles in77 front of his new establishment, the basement of 202 Broadway, trying to hurry the men who were installing a double-cylinder press. Being a wise person, he advertised his progress in the Sun. It may have vexed him to see the circulation of the Sun—which he had imitated in character and price—bound higher and higher as he stood helpless.

The third instalment of the literary treasure so obligingly imported by the “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland” introduced to Sun readers new and important regions of the moon—the Vagabond Mountains, the Lake of Death, craters of extinct volcanoes twenty-eight hundred feet high, and twelve luxuriant forests divided by open plains “in which waved an ocean of verdure, and which were probably prairies like those of North America.” The details were satisfying:

The largest lake described was two hundred and sixty-six miles long and one hundred and ninety-three78 wide, shaped like the Bay of Bengal, and studded with volcanic islands. One island in a large bay was pinnacled with quartz crystals as brilliant as fire. Near by roamed zebras three feet high. Golden and blue pheasants strutted about. The beach was covered with shell-fish. Dr. Grant did not say whether the fire-making beavers ever held a clambake there.

The Sun of Friday, August 28, 1835, was a notable issue. Not yet two years old, Mr. Day’s newspaper had the satisfaction of announcing that it had achieved the largest circulation of any daily in the world. It had, it said, 15,440 regular subscribers in New York and 700 in Brooklyn, and it sold 2,000 in the streets and 1,220 out of town—a grand total of 19,360 copies, as against the 17,000 circulation of the London Times. The double-cylinder Napier press in the building at Nassau and Spruce Streets—the corner where the Tribune is to-day, and to which the Sun had moved on August 3—had to run ten hours a day to satisfy the public demand. People waited with more or less patience until three o’clock in the afternoon to read about the moon.

That very issue contained the most sensational instalment of all the moon series, for through that mystic chain which included Dr. Grant, the supplement of the Edinburgh Journal of Science, the “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland,” and the Sun, public curiosity as to the presence of human creatures on the orb of night was satisfied at last. The astronomers were looking upon the cliffs and crags of a new part of the moon:

So ended the account, in Dr. Grant’s words, of that fateful day. The editor of the supplement, perhaps a cousin of the “medical gentleman immediately arrived from Scotland,” added that although he had of course faithfully obeyed Dr. Grant’s injunction to omit “these highly curious passages,” he did not “clearly perceive the force of the reasons assigned for it,” and he added:

New York now stopped its discussion of human slavery, the high cost of living—apples cost as much as four cents apiece in Wall Street—and other familiar topics, and devoted its talking hours to the man-bats of the moon. The Sun was stormed by people who wanted back numbers of the stories, and flooded with demands82 by mail. As the text of the Journal of Science article indicated that the original narrative had been illustrated, there was a cry for pictures.

Mr. Day was busy with the paper and its overworked press, but he gave Mr. Locke a free hand, and that scholar took to Norris & Baker, lithographers, in the Union Building, Wall Street, the drawings which had been intrusted to his care by the “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland.” Mr. Baker, described by the Sun as quite the most talented lithographic artist of the city, worked day and night on his delightful task, that the illustrations might be ready when the Sun’s press should have turned out, in the hours when it was not printing Suns, a pamphlet containing the astronomical discoveries.

“Dr. Herschel’s great work,” said the Sun, “is preparing for publication at ten guineas sterling, or fifty dollars; and we shall give all the popular substance of it for twelve or thirteen cents.” The pamphlets were to be sold two for a quarter; the lithographs at twenty-five cents for the set.

Most newspapers that mentioned the discovery of human creatures on the moon were credulous. The Evening Post, edited by William Cullen Bryant and Fitz-Greene Halleck—“the chanting cherubs of the Post,” as Colonel Webb was wont to call them—only skirted the edge of doubt:

Peter Wilkins was the hero of Robert Paltock’s imaginative book, “The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man,” published in London in 1750. Paltock’s winged people, said Southey, were “the most beautiful creatures of imagination that were ever devised.”

The instalment of the discoveries printed on August 29 revealed to the reader the great Temple of the Moon, built of polished sapphire, with a roof of some yellow metal, supported by columns seventy feet high and six feet in diameter:

The conclusion of this astounding narrative, which totalled eleven thousand words, was printed on August 31. In the valley of the temple a new set of man-bats was found:

One night, when the astronomers finished work, they neglectfully left the telescope facing the eastern horizon. The risen sun burned a hole fifteen feet in circumference through the reflecting chamber, and ruined part of the observatory. When the damage was repaired, the moon was invisible, and so Dr. Herschel turned his attention to Saturn. Most of the discoveries here were technical, as the Sun assured its readers, and the narrative came to an end. An editorial note added:

Perhaps the pretended method of measuring lunar mountains was not interesting to laymen, but it may have been the cause of an intellectual tumult at Yale.85 At all events, a deputation from that college hurried to the steamboat and came to New York to see the wonderful supplement. The collegians saw Mr. Day, and voiced their desire.

“Surely,” he replied, “you do not doubt that we have the supplement in our possession? I suppose the magazine is somewhere up-stairs, but I consider it almost an insult that you should ask to see it.”

On their way out the Yale men heard, perhaps from the “devil,” that one Locke was interested in the matter of the moon, that he had handled the supplement, and that he was to be seen at the foot of the stairs, smoking his cigar and gazing across City Hall Park. They advanced upon him, and he, less brusque than Mr. Day, told the scientific pilgrims that the supplement was in the hands of a printer in William Street—giving the name and address.

As the Yale men disappeared in the direction of the printery, Locke started for the same goal, and more rapidly. When the Yalensians arrived, the printer, primed by Locke, told them that the precious pamphlet had just been sent to another shop, where certain proof-reading was to be done. And so they went from post to pillar until the hour came for their return to New Haven. It would not do to linger in New York, for Professors Denison Olmsted and Elias Loomis were that very day getting their first peep at Halley’s comet, about to make the regular appearance with which it favours the earth every seventy-six years.

But Yale was not the only part of intellectual New England to be deeply interested in the moon and its bat-men. The Gazette of Hampshire, Massachusetts, insisted that Edward Everett, who was then running for Governor, had these astronomical discoveries in mind when he declared that “we know not how soon86 the mind, in its researches into the labyrinth of nature, would grasp some clue which would lead to a new universe and change the aspect of the world.”

Harriet Martineau, who was touring America at the time, wrote in her “Sketches of Western Travel” that the ladies of Springfield, Massachusetts, subscribed to a fund to send missionaries to the benighted luminary. When the Sun articles reached Paris, they were at once translated into illustrated pamphlets, and the caricaturists of the Paris newspapers drew pictures of the man-bats going through the streets singing “Au Clair de la Lune.” London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow made haste to issue editions of the work.

Meanwhile, of course, Sir John Herschel was busy with his telescope at the Cape, all unaware of his expanded fame in the north. Caleb Weeks, of Jamaica, Long Island, the Adam Forepaugh of his day, was setting out for South Africa to get a supply of giraffes for his menagerie, and he had the honour of laying in the great astronomer’s hand a clean copy of the pamphlet. To say that Sir John was amazed at the Sun’s enterprise would be putting it mildly. When he had read the story through, he went to Caleb Weeks and said that he was overcome; that he never could hope to live up to the fame that had been heaped upon him.

In New York, meanwhile, Richard Adams Locke had spilled the beans. There was a reporter named Finn, once employed by the Sun, but later a scribe for the Journal of Commerce. He and Locke were friends. One afternoon Gerard Hallock, who was David Hale’s partner in the proprietorship of the Journal of Commerce, called Finn to his office and told him to get extra copies of the Sun containing the moon story, as the Journal had decided, in justice to its readers, that it must reprint it.

Perhaps at the Sun office, perhaps in the tap-room of the Washington Hotel, Finn met Locke, and they went socially about to public places. Finn told Locke of the work on which he was engaged, and said that, as the moon story was already being put into type at the Journal office, it was likely that it would be printed on the morrow.

The next day the Journal, instead of being silently grateful for the warning, denounced the alleged discoveries as a hoax. Mr. Bennett, who by this time had the Herald once more in running order, not only cried “Hoax!” but named Locke as the author.

Probably Locke was glad that the suspense was over. He is said to have told a friend that he had not intended the story as a hoax, but as satire.

“It is quite evident,” he said, as he saw the whole country take the marvellous narrative seriously, “that it is an abortive satire; and I am the best self-hoaxed man in the whole community.”

But while the Sun’s rivals denounced the hoax, the Sun was not quick to admit that it had gulled not only its own readers but almost all the scientific world. Barring the casual conversation between Locke and Finn, there was no evidence plain enough to convince the layman that it was a hoax. The Sun fenced lightly and skilfully with all controverters. On September 16, more than two weeks after the conclusion of the story, it printed a long editorial article on the subject of the authenticity of the discoveries, mentioning the wide-spread interest that had been displayed in them:

The New York showmen of that day were keen for novelty, and the moon story helped them to it. Mr. Hannington, who ran the diorama in the City Saloon—which was not a barroom, but an amusement house—on Broadway opposite St. Paul’s Church, put on “The Lunar Discoveries; a Brilliant Illustration of the Scientific Observation of the Surface of the Moon, to Which Will Be Added the Reported Lunar Observations of Sir John Herschel.” Hannington had been showing “The Deluge” and “The Burning of Moscow,” but the wonders of the moon proved to be far more attractive to his patrons. The Sun approved of this moral spectacle:

Not less popular than Hannington’s panorama was an extravaganza put on by Thomas Hamblin at the Bowery Theatre, and called “Moonshine, or Lunar Discoveries.” A Sun man went to review it, and had to stand up; but he was patient enough to stay, and he wrote this about the show:

Thus the moon eclipsed the regular stars of the New York stage. Even Mrs. Duff, the most pathetic Isabella that ever appeared in “The Fatal Marriage,” saw her audiences thin out at the Franklin Theatre. Sol Smith’s drolleries in “The Lying Valet,” at the Park Theatre, could not rouse the laughter that the burlesque man-bats caused at the Bowery.

All this time there was a disappointed man in Baltimore; disappointed because the moon stories had caused him to abandon one of the most ambitious stories he had attempted. This was Edgar Allan Poe, and the story he dropped was “Hans Pfaall.”

In the spring of 1835 the Harpers issued an edition of Sir John Herschel’s “Treatise on Astronomy,” and Poe, who read it, was deeply interested in the chapter on the possibility of future lunar investigations:

Poe spoke of this ambition to John Pendleton Kennedy, of Baltimore, already the author of “Swallow Barn,” and later to have the honour of writing, as the result of a jest by Thackeray, the fourth chapter of the second volume of “The Virginians.” Kennedy91 assured Poe that the mechanics of telescope construction were so fixed that it would be impossible to impart verisimilitude to a tale based on a superefficient telescope. So Poe resorted to other means of bringing the moon close to the reader’s eye:

Poe wrote the first part of “Hans Pfaall,” and published it in the Southern Literary Messenger, of which he was then editor, at Richmond, Virginia. Three weeks afterward the first instalment of Locke’s moon story appeared in the Sun. At the moment Poe believed that his idea had been kidnapped:

Nor can any unbiassed person who reads, for purpose of comparison, the “Astronomical Discoveries” and “Hans Pfaall” suspect that Locke based his hoax on the story of the Rotterdam debtor who blew his creditors to bits and sailed to the moon in a balloon. Chalk and cheese are much more alike than these two products of genius.

Poe may have intended to fall back upon “a style half plausible, half bantering,” as he described it, but there is not the slightest plausibility about “Hans Pfaall.” It is as near to humour as the great, dark mind could get. “Mere banter,” as he later described it, is better. The very episode of the dripping pitcher of water, used to wake Hans at an altitude where even alcohol would freeze, is enough proof, if proof at all were necessary, to strip the tale of its last shred of verisimilitude. No child of twelve would believe in Hans, while Locke’s fictitious “Dr. Grant” deceived nine-tenths—the estimate is Poe’s—of those who read the narrative of the great doings at the Cape of Good Hope.

Locke had spoiled a promising tale for Poe—who tore up the second instalment of “Hans Pfaall” when he “found that he could add very little to the minute and authentic account of Sir John Herschel”—but the poet took pleasure, in later years, in picking the Sun’s moon story to bits.

“That the public were misled, even for an instant,” Poe declared in his critical essay on Locke’s writings, “merely proves the gross ignorance which, ten or twelve years ago, was so prevalent on astronomical topics.”

According to Locke’s own description of the telescope,93 said Poe, it could not have brought the moon nearer than five miles; yet Sir John—Locke’s Sir John—saw flowers and described the eyes of birds. Locke had an ocean on the moon, although it had been established beyond question that the visible side of the moon is dry. The most ridiculous thing about the moon story, said Poe, was that the narrator described the entire bodies of the man-bats, whereas, if they were seen at all by an observer on the earth, they would manifestly appear as if walking heels up and head down, after the fashion of flies on a ceiling.

And yet the hoax, Poe admits, “was, upon the whole, the greatest hit in the way of sensation—of merely popular sensation—ever made by any similar fiction either in America or Europe.” Whether Locke intended it as satire or not—a debatable point—it was a hoax of the first water. It deceived more persons, and for a longer time, than any other fake ever written: and, as the Sun pointed out, it hurt nobody—except, perhaps, the feelings of Dr. Dick, of Dundee—and it took the public mind away from less agreeable matters. Some of the wounded scientists roared, but the public, particularly the New York public, took the exposure of Locke’s literary villainy just as Sir John Herschel accepted it—with a grin.

As for the inspiration of the moon story, the record is nebulous. If Poe was really grieved at his first thought that Locke had taken from him the main imaginative idea—that the moon was inhabited—then Poe was oversensitive or uninformed, for that idea was at least two centuries old.

Francis Godwin, an English bishop and author, who was born in 1562, and who died just two centuries before the Sun was first printed, wrote “The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo94 Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger.” This was published in London in 1638, five years after the author’s death.

In the same year there appeared a book called “The Discovery of a World in the Moone,” which contained arguments to prove the moon habitable. It was written by John Wilkins—no relative of the fictitious Peter of Paltock’s story, but a young English clergyman who later became Bishop of Chester, and who was the first secretary of the Royal Society. Two years later Wilkins added to his “Discovery of a World” a “Discourse Concerning the Possibility of a Passage Thither.”

Cyrano de Bergerac, he of the long nose and the passion for poetry and duelling, later to be immortalized by Rostand, read these products of two Englishmen’s fancy, and about 1650 he turned out his joyful “Histoire Comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune.” But Bergerac had also been influenced by Dante and by Lucian, the latter being the supposed inspiration of the fanciful narratives of Rabelais and Swift. Perhaps these writers influenced Godwin and Wilkins also; so the trail, zigzagged and ramifying, goes back to the second century. It is hard to indict a man for being inspired, and in the case of the moon story there is no evidence of plagiarism. If “Hans Pfaall” were to be compared with Locke’s story for hoaxing qualities, it would only suffer by the comparison. It would appear as the youthful product of a tyro, as against the cunning work of an artist of almost devilish ingenuity.

Is there any doubt that the moon hoax was the sole work of Richard Adams Locke? So far as concerns the record of the Sun, the comments of Locke’s American contemporaries, and the belief of Benjamin H. Day, expressed in 1883 in a talk with Edward P. Mitchell, the answer must be in the negative. Yet it must be set down, as a literary curiosity at least, that it has been95 believed in France and by at least one English antiquary of repute that the moon hoax was the work of a Frenchman—Jean Nicolas Nicollet, the astronomer.

Nicollet was born at Cluses, in Savoy, in 1786. First a cowherd, he did not learn to read until he was twelve. Once at school his progress was rapid, and at nineteen he become preceptor of mathematics at Chambry. He went to Paris, where in 1817 he was appointed secretary-librarian of the Observatory, and he studied astronomy with Laplace, who refers to Nicollet’s assistance in his works. In 1823 he was appointed to the government bureau of longitudes, and at the same time was professor of mathematics in the College of Louis le Grand.

He became a master of English, and through this knowledge and his own mathematical genius he was able to assemble, for the use of the French life-insurance companies, all that was known, and much that he himself discovered, of actuarial methods; this being incorporated in his letter to M. Outrequin on “Assurances Having for Their Basis the Probable Duration of Human Life.” He also wrote “Memoirs upon the Measure of an Arc of Parallel Midway Between the Pole and the Equator” (1826), and “Course of Mathematics for the Use of Mariners” (1830).

In 1831 Nicollet failed in speculation, losing not only his own fortune but that of others. He came to the United States, arriving early in 1832, the very year that Locke came to America. It is probable that he was in New York, but there is no evidence as to the length of his stay. It is known, however, that he was impoverished, and that he was assisted by Bishop Chanche, of Natchez, to go on with his chosen work—an exploration of the Mississippi and its tributaries. He made astronomical and barometrical observations, determined96 the geographical position and elevation of many important points, and studied Indian lore.

The United States government was so well pleased with Nicollet’s work that it sent him to the Far West for further investigations, with Lieutenant John C. Frémont as assistant. His “Geology of the Upper Mississippi Region and of the Cretaceous Formation of the Upper Missouri” was one of the results of his journeys. After this he tried, through letters, to regain his lost standing in France by seeking election to the Paris Academy of Sciences, but he was black-balled, and, broken-hearted, he died in Washington in 1843.

The Englishman who believed that Nicollet was the author of the moon hoax was Augustus De Morgan, father of the late William De Morgan, the novelist, and himself a distinguished mathematician and litterateur. He was professor of mathematics at University College, London, at the time when the moon pamphlet first appeared in England. His “Budget of Paradoxes,” an interesting collection of literary curiosities and puzzles, which he had written, but not carefully assembled, was published in 1872, the year after his death.

Two fragments, printed separately in this volume, refer to the moon hoax. The first is this:

In his remark that “there seems to have been a French edition, the original,” Augustus De Morgan was undoubtedly misled, for every authority consultable agrees that the French pamphlets were merely translations of the story originally printed in the Sun; and De Morgan had learned this when he wrote his second note on the subject.

The M. Arago whom De Morgan believes Nicollet sought to entrap was Dominique François Arago, the celebrated astronomer. In 1830, as a reward for his many accomplishments, he was made perpetual secretary99 of the Paris Academy of Sciences, and in the following year—the year of Nicollet’s fall from grace—he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. As to the intimation that Arago was really misled by the moon story, it is unlikely. W. N. Griggs, a contemporary of Locke, insists in a memoir of that journalist that the narrative was read by Arago to the members of the Academy, and was received with mingled denunciation and laughter. But hoaxing Arago in a matter of astronomy would have been a difficult feat. Surely the discrepancies pointed out by Poe would have been noticed immediately.

It is, however, easy to understand De Morgan’s belief that Nicollet was the author of the moon story. Much of the narrative, particularly parts which have here been omitted, is made up of technicalities which could have come only from the pen of a man versed in the intricacies of astronomical science. They were not put into the story to interest Sun readers, for they are far over the layman’s head, but for the purpose of adding verisimilitude to a yarn which, stripped of the technical trimmings, would have been pretty bald.

It was plain to De Morgan that Nicollet was one of the few men alive in 1835 who could have woven the scientific fabric in which the hoax was disguised. It was also apparent to him that Nicollet, jealous of the popularity of Arago, might have had a motive for launching a satire, if not a hoax. And then there was Nicollet’s presence in America at the time of the moon story’s publication, Nicollet’s knowledge of English, and Nicollet’s poverty. The coincidences are interesting, if nothing more.

Let us see what the French said about Nicollet and the story that came to the Sun from “a medical gentleman100 immediately from Scotland.” In a sketch of Nicollet printed in the “Biographie Universelle” (Michaud, Paris, 1884), the following appears:

Cruel, consistent Locke, never to have written down the details of the conception and birth of the best invention that ever spoofed the world! He leaves history to wonder whether it be possible that, with one word added, the French biographer was right, and that101 it was “a hoax written by a learned and a mischievous person.” Certain it is that Nicollet never wrote all of the moon story; certain, too, that Locke wrote much, if not all of it. The calculations of the angles of reflection might have been Nicollet’s, but the blue unicorn is the unicorn of Locke.

No man can say when the germ of the story first took shape. It might have been designed at any time after Herschel laid the plans for his voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, and that was at least two years before it appeared in the Sun. Was Nicollet in New York then, and did he and Locke lay their heads together across a table at the American Hotel and plan the great deceit?

There was one head full of figures and the stars; another crammed with the imagination that brought forth the fire-making biped beavers and the fascinating, if indecorous, human bats. If they never met, more is the pity. Whether they met, none can say. Go to ask the ghosts of the American Hotel, and you find it gone, and in its place the Woolworth Building, earth’s spear levelled at the laughing moon.

Whatever happened, the credit must rest with Richard Adams Locke. Even if the technical embellishments of the moon story were borrowed, still his was the genius that builded the great temple, made flowers to bloom in the lunar valleys, and grew the filmy wings on the vespertilio-homo. His was the art that caused the bricklayer of Cherry Street to sit late beside his candle, spelling out the rare story with joyous labour. It must have been a reward to Locke, even to the last of his seventy years, to know that he had made people read newspapers who never had read them before; for that is what he really accomplished by this huge, complex lie.

“From the epoch of the hoax,” wrote Poe, “the Sun shone with unmitigated splendor. Its success firmly established the ‘penny system’ throughout the country, and (through the Sun) consequently we are indebted to the genius of Mr. Locke for one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress.”

103

CHAPTER IV
DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT

The usefulness of Richard Adams Locke as a Sun reporter did not end with the moon hoax. Far from expressing regret that its employee had gulled half the earth, the Sun continued to meet exposure with a calm and almost flippant front, insisting that it would never admit the non-existence of the man-bats until official contradiction arrived from Edinburgh or the Cape of Good Hope. The paper realized the value, in public interest, of Locke’s name, and was proud to announce, in November of 1835, that it had commissioned Locke to write another series of articles, telling the story of the “Life and Adventures of Manuel Fernandez, otherwise Richard C. Jackson, convicted of the murder of John Roberts, and to be executed at the Bellevue Prison, New York, on Thursday next, the 19th instant.”

This was a big beat, for the young men of the Courier and Enquirer, and perhaps of the Herald, had been trying to get a yarn from the criminal, a Spaniard who had served in foreign wars, had been captured by savages in Africa, and had had many other adventures. Fernandez was convicted of killing another sailor for his attention to Fernandez’s mistress, a Mrs. Schultz;104 and for about three weeks Locke spent several hours a day in the condemned man’s cell. The “Life and Adventures,” which was printed on the first page of the Sun, ran serially from November 14 to November 25, and was read with avidity.

It was ironical that the hero of the story, who had expressed to Locke an eagerness to have his career set before the public in its true light, was prevented from reading the later instalments; for the law, taking no cognizance of the literary side of the matter, went about its business, and Fernandez was hanged in the Bellevue yard on the 19th, a morning when the Sun’s narrative had wrecked the sailor off the coast of Wales. Mr. Locke reported the execution and drew upon the autopsy to verify the “Adventures.”

The mere word of a “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland” was no longer to be relied upon!

The Sun’s story of the great fire of December, 1835, sounds like Locke, but it may have been written by one of the other bright young men who worked for Benjamin H. Day. Among them were William M. Prall, who succeeded Wisner as the court reporter, and Lucius Robinson.

“Robinson seemed to be a young man of excellent ideas, but not very highly educated,” Mr. Day remarked about fifty years later.

Perhaps the Day standards were very high. Robinson was twenty six when he worked on the Sun. He had been educated at an academy in Delhi, New York, and105 after that had studied law and been admitted to the bar. He was too poor to practise at once, and went into newspaper work to make a living. After leaving the Sun he was elected district attorney of Greene County, and in 1843 was appointed master of chancery in New York. He left the Democratic party when the Republican party was organized, but returned to his old political allegiance after the Civil War. In 1876 he was elected Governor of New York—an achievement which still left him a little less famous than his fellow reporter, Locke.

“Give us one of your real Moscow fires,” sighed the Sun in the first week of its existence.

The prayer was answered a little more than two years later, when about twenty blocks south of Wall Street, between Broad Street and the East River, were consumed. The fire started late in the evening of Wednesday, December 16, and all that the Sun printed about it the next morning was one triple-leaded paragraph:

On Friday morning the Sun had two and a half columns about the fire, and gave an approximately correct estimate that seven hundred buildings had been burned, at a loss of twenty million dollars. The calamity provided an opportunity for the fine writing then indulged in, and the fire reporter did not overlook it; nor did he forget Moscow. Here are typical extracts:

On the afternoon of the following day the Sun got out an extra edition of thirty thousand copies, its normal morning issue of twenty-three thousand being too small to satisfy the popular demand. The presses ran without stopping for nearly twenty-four hours.

On Monday, the 21st, the Sun had the enterprise to print a map of the burned district. Copies of the special fire editions went all over the world. At least one of them ran up against poetic justice. When it reached Canton, China, six months after the fire, the English newspaper there classed the story of the conflagration with Locke’s “Astronomical Discoveries,” and begged its readers not to be alarmed by the new hoax.

The Sun had grown more and more prosperous. In the latter part of 1835 its four pages, each eleven and one-half by eighteen inches, were so taken up with advertising that it was not unusual to find reading-matter in only five of the twenty columns. Some days the publisher would apologize for leaving out advertisements,107 on other days, for having so little room for news. He promised relief, and it came on January 4, 1836, when the paper was enlarged. It remained a four-page Sun, but the pages were increased in size to fourteen by twenty inches. In announcing the enlargement, the third in a year, the Sun remarked:

In the first enlarged edition Mr. Day made the boast that the Sun now had a circulation more than double that of all the sixpenny respectables combined. He had a word, too, about the penny papers that had sprung up in the Sun’s wake:

The exception to the general rule of early mortality was of course the Herald. In spite of this broad attitude toward his only successful competitor, Day could108 not keep from swapping verbal shots with Bennett. The Sun said:

Day had a dislike for Colonel Webb, of the Courier and Enquirer, almost as great as his enmity toward Bennett; so when Webb assaulted Bennett on January 19, 1836, it was rather a hard story to write. This is the Sun’s account of the fray:

Webb’s quarrel with Bennett grew out of the Herald’s financial articles. Bennett was the first newspaperman to see the news value of Wall Street. When he was a writer on the Courier and Enquirer, and one of Webb’s most useful men, he made a study of stocks, not as a speculator, but as an investigator. He had a taste for money matters. In 1824, five years after his arrival in America from the land of his birth, Scotland, he tried to establish a commercial school in New York and to lecture on political economy. He could not make a go of it, and so returned to newspaper work as reporter, paragrapher, and poet.

In 1828 he became Washington correspondent of the Enquirer, and it was at his suggestion that Webb, in 1829, bought that paper and consolidated it with his own Courier. Bennett was a Tammany Society man, therefore a Jacksonian. He left Webb because of Webb’s support of Nicholas Biddle, and started a Jackson organ, the Pennsylvanian, in Philadelphia. This was a failure.

Meanwhile Bennett had seen the Sun rise, and he felt that there must be room for another penny paper in New York. With his knowledge of stocks he believed that he could make Wall Street news a telling feature. In his second issue of the Herald, May 11, 1835, he printed the first money-market report, and three days later he ran a table of sales on the Stock Exchange. At this time, and for three years afterward, Bennett visited Wall Street daily and wrote his own reports.

His flings at the United States Bank, of which Webb’s friend Biddle was president, and his stories of alleged stock speculations by the colonel himself, were the cause110 of Webb’s animosity toward his former associate. Bennett took Webb’s assault calmly, and even wrote it up in the Herald, suggesting at the end that Webb’s torn overcoat had suffered more damage than anything else.

Day’s quarrel with Bennett, which never reached the physical stage, was the natural outcome of an intense rivalry among the most successful penny papers of that period—the Sun, the Herald, and the Transcript. Against the sixpenny respectables these three were one for all and all for one, but against one another they were as venomous as a young newspaper of that day felt that it had to be to show that it was alive.

Day’s antagonism toward Webb was sporadic. Most of the time the young owner of the Sun treated the fiery editor of the Courier and Enquirer as flippantly as he could, knowing that Webb liked to be taken seriously. Day’s constant bête noire was the commercial and foreign editor of Webb’s paper, Mr. Hoskin, an Englishman.

On January 21, 1836, the Sun charged that Webb and Hoskin had rigged a “diabolical plot” against it. The sixpenny papers had formed a combination for the purpose of sharing the expense of running horse-expresses from Philadelphia to New York, bringing the Washington news more quickly than the penny papers could get it by mail. The Sun and the Transcript then formed a combination of their own, and in this way saved themselves from being beaten on Jackson’s message, sent to Congress in December, 1835.

In January, 1836, Jackson sent a special message to Congress. It was delivered on Monday, the 18th, and on Wednesday, the 20th, the Sun published a column summary of it. Webb made the charge that his messenger from Washington had been lured into Day’s offices, and that the Sun got its story by opening the111 package containing the message intended for the Courier and Enquirer. The Sun replied that it received the message legitimately, and that the whole thing was a scheme to discredit Mr. Day and his bookkeeper, Moses Y. Beach:

Webb went to the police and to the grand jury, and for a few days it looked as if the hostile editors might reach for something of larger calibre than pens. Thus the Sun of January 22:

The specification of “mahogany stock” referred to Colonel Webb’s own supposed predilection for pistols of that description. Mr. Day and his aids may have carried these handsome weapons, but it is not on record that they made use of them, or that they had occasion to do so. Persons gunning for editors seemed to neglect Mr. Day in favour of Mr. Bennett.

No sooner was this fierce clash with Webb over than the Sun found itself bombarded from many sides in the war over Maria Monk. This woman’s “Awful Disclosures” had just been published in book form by112 Howe & Bates, of 68 Chatham Street, New York. They purported to be “a narrative of her sufferings during a residence of five years as a novice and two years as a black nun in the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery at Montreal.” On January 18, 1836, the Sun began to publish these shocking stories, in somewhat condensed and expurgated form. It did not vouch for their truth, but declared that it printed them from an “imperative sense of duty.” “We have no better means than are possessed by any reader,” it cautiously added, “to decide upon their truth or falsehood.”

The “Disclosures” ran in the Sun for ten days, during which time about one-half of the book was printed. Maria Monk herself was in New York, and so cleverly had she devised the imposture that she was received in good society as a martyr. Such was the public interest that it was estimated by Cardinal Manning, in 1851, that between two hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand copies of the volume were sold in America and England. The Know-Nothing Party used it for political capital, and anti-Catholic riots in several cities were the result of its publication.

Its partial appearance in the Sun, while it may have helped the circulation of the book, undoubtedly hastened the exposure of the fraud. The editor of the Commercial Advertiser, William Leete Stone, liked nothing better than to show up impostors. He had already written a life of Matthias the Prophet, and he decided to get at the truth of Maria Monk’s revolting story.

Stone was at this time forty-four years old. He had been editor of the Herkimer American, with Thurlow Weed as his journeyman; of the Northern Whig, of Hudson, New York; of the Albany Daily Advertiser, and of the Hartford Mirror. In 1821 he came to New York and succeeded Zachariah Lewis as editor of the Commercial113 Advertiser. As a Mason he had a controversy with John Quincy Adams, who was prominent in the anti-Masonic movement.

Stone was prominent politically. In 1825 he and Thurlow Weed accompanied Lafayette in his tour of the United States. In 1841 President William Henry Harrison appointed him minister to The Hague, but when Harrison died he was recalled by President Tyler. He was also the first superintendent of the New York public schools—an office which he held at the time of his death, in 1844.

Stone went to Montreal, visited the Hôtel Dieu, and minutely compared the details set down by the Monk woman in regard to the inmates of the nunnery and the plan of the building. The result of his investigation was to establish the fact that the “Awful Disclosures” were fiction, and he exposed the impostor not only in his newspaper, but in his book, “Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hôtel Dieu.” The adherents of the woman abused Stone roundly for this, and the general belief in her fake was not entirely dissipated for years; not even after her own evil history was told, and after the Protestant residents of Montreal had held a mass-meeting to denounce her. Maria Monk died in the city prison in New York fourteen years after she had created the most unpleasant scandal of the time.

News matters of a genuine kind diverted the types from Maria Monk. There was the celebrated murder of Helen Jewett, a case in which Mr. Bennett played detective with some success, and the Alamo massacre. Crockett, Bowie, and the rest of that band of heroes met their death on March 6, 1836, but the details did not reach New York for more than a month; it was April 12 when the Sun gave a column to them.

Texas and the Seminole War kept the news columns114 full until May 10, when Colonel Webb again pounced upon James Gordon Bennett. Said the Sun:

The Sun beat the town on a great piece of news that spring. “Triumphant News from Texas! Santa Anna Captured!” the head-lines ran.

This appeared on May 18, four weeks after Sam Houston had taken the Mexican president; but it was the first intimation New York had had of the victory at San Jacinto.

During the investigation of the murder of Helen Jewett and the trial of Richard P. Robinson, the suspect, the Sun attacked Bennett for the manner in which the Herald handled the case. Bennett saw a good yellow story in the murder, for the house in which the murdered girl had lived could not be said to be questionable; there was no doubt about its character. Bennett’s interviewing of the victim’s associates did not please the Sun, which pictured the unfortunate women “mobbed by several hundred vagabonds of all sizes and ages—amongst whom the long, lank figure of the notorious Bennett was most conspicuous.”

When it was not Bennett, it was Colonel Webb or one115 of his men. The Sun went savagely after the proprietor of the Courier and Enquirer because he led the hissing at the Park Theatre against Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wood, the English opera-singers. The offence of the Woods lay in giving a performance on an evening when a benefit was announced for Mrs. Conduit, another popular vocalist. The town was divided upon the row, but as the Woods and Mrs. Conduit were all English-born, it was not a racial feud like the Macready-Forrest affair. The Sun rebuked Colonel Webb particularly because, after booing at the Woods, he had refused Mr. Wood’s offer to have it out over pistols and coffee.

Wood was not a lily-finger. He had been plain Joe Wood, the pugilist, before he married the former Lady Lennox and embraced tenor song in a serious way. Society rather took the part of the Woods, for after the Park Theatre row a dinner in their compliment was arranged by Henry Ogden, Robert C. Wetmore, Duncan C. Pell, John P. Hone, Carroll Livingston, and other leading New Yorkers.

The fearlessness of the Sun did not stop with saucing its contemporaries. When Robinson was acquitted of the Jewett murder, after a trial which the Sun reported to the extent of nearly a page a day, the Sun editorially declared:

Robinson’s acquittal was credited largely to Ogden Hoffman, whose summing up the Sun described as “the116 most magnificent production of mind, eloquence, and rhetorical talent that ever resounded in a hall of justice.” This was the Ogden Hoffman of whom Decatur said, when Hoffman left the navy in 1816, that he regretted that the young man should have exchanged “an honourable profession for that of a lawyer.” Hoffman and his partner Maxwell, who shared in this tremendous fee of fifteen hundred dollars, had been district attorneys of New York before the time of the Jewett murder, and the Sun inquired what would have been Robinson’s fate if Hoffman, and not Phenix, had been the prosecutor.

On August 20, 1836, the Sun announced that its circulation averaged twenty-seven thousand copies daily, or fifty-six hundred more than the combined sale of the eleven six-cent papers. Of the penny papers the Sun credited the Herald with thirty-two hundred and the Transcript with ten thousand, although both these rivals claimed at least twice as much. Columns were filled with the controversy which followed upon the publication of these figures. The Sun departed from a scholarly argument with the Transcript over the pronunciation of “elegiac,” and denounced it as a “nestle-tripe,” whatever that was.

There was a little room left for the news. Aaron Burr’s death got a stick; Marcy’s nomination for Governor of New York, an inch; Audubon’s arrival in America, four lines. News that looks big now may not have seemed so imposing then, as this Sun paragraph of September 22, 1836, would show:

Richard Adams Locke left the Sun in the fall of 1836, and on October 6, in company with Joseph Price,117 started the New Era, a penny paper for which the Sun wished success. In less than a month, however, Locke and his former employer were quarrelling about the price of meals at the Astor House. That famous hotel was opened in May, 1836, with all New York marvelling at the wonders of its walnut furniture, so much nicer than the conventional mahogany! Before it was built, it was referred to as the Park Hotel. When it opened it was called Astor’s Hotel, but in a few months it came to be known by the name which stuck to it until it was abandoned in 1913.

Locke wanted to make the New Era another Sun, but he failed. His second hoax, “The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park,” which purported to tell hitherto unrelated adventures of the Scottish explorer, fell down. The public knew that the New Era was edited by the author of the moon story. When the New Era died, Locke went to the Brooklyn Eagle, just founded, and he succeeded Henry C. Murphy, the proprietor and first118 editor, when that famous lawyer and writer was running for mayor of Brooklyn. Locke afterward was a custom-house employee. He died on Staten Island in 1871.

Squabbling with his former friend Locke over hotel service was no such sport for Day as tilting at the owner of the Herald. The Sun attacked Bennett in the fall of 1836 for his attitude toward the Hamblin benefit. Thomas Sowerby Hamblin was made bankrupt by the Bowery Theatre fire on September 22, for the great fires of the previous December had ruined practically all the fire-insurance companies of New York, and there was not a policy on the theatre which this English actor-manager, with James H. Hackett, had made the leading playhouse of America. Hamblin did not like Bennett’s articles and the Sun thus noted the result of them:

When the Sun’s advertising business had increased until its income from that source was more than two hundred dollars a day, it bought two new presses of the Napier type from Robert Hoe, at a cost of seven thousand dollars. These enabled Mr. Day to run off thirty-two hundred papers an hour on each press. On the 2nd of January, 1837, the size of the Sun was slightly increased, about an inch being added to the length and width of each of its four pages.

In February, 1837, the price of flour rose from the normal of about $5.50 a barrel to double that amount.119 The Sun declared that the increase was not natural, but rather the result of a combination—a suspicion which seems to have been shared by a large number of citizens. The bread riots of February 13 and later were the result of an agitation for lower prices.

The Journal of Commerce denounced the Sun as an inciter of the riots, and suggested that the grand jury should direct its attention toward Mr. Day. The Sun not only refused to recede from its stand, but suggested that the foreman of the grand jury, the famous Philip Hone, had himself incited a riot—the riot against the Abolitionists, July 11, 1834—which had a less worthy purpose than the Sun’s stand on the matter of flour prices. The Sun was virtuously indignant, even more than it had been a short time before, when the Transcript charged the Sun’s circulation man, Mr. Young, with biting two of the Transcript’s carriers!

The beginning of regular transatlantic steamship service did not find in the Sun a completely joyous welcome—thanks, perhaps, to the temperament of Lieutenant Hosken, R.N. He was an officer of the Great Western, a side-wheeler of no less than thirteen hundred and forty tons, with paddles twenty-eight feet in diameter. This new ship, built at Bristol, and a marvel of its time, reached New York, April 23, 1838, after a passage of only sixteen days! The Sirius, another new vessel, got in a few hours ahead of the Great Western, after a voyage of eighteen days. The Sun said of this double event:

So the Sun was not obsequiously grateful for the arrival of a ship whose speed enabled it to announce on April 24 that Queen Victoria had issued, on the 6th, the proclamation of the details of her coronation at Westminster on June 26, and that O’Connell was taking steps to remove the civil disabilities from the Jews.

All this time the Sun was not neglecting the minor local happenings about which its patrons liked to read. The police-courts, the theatres, and the little scandals had their column or two.

121

CHAPTER V
NEW YORK LIFE IN THE THIRTIES

No dull city, that New York of Ben Day’s time! Almost a dozen theatres of the first class were running. The Bowery, the first playhouse in America to have a stage lighted with gas, had already been twice burned and rebuilt. The Park, which saw the American début of Macready, Edwin Forrest, and James H. Hackett, was offering such actors as Charles Kean, Charles and Fanny Kemble, Charles Mathews, Sol Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wood, and Master Joseph Burke, the Irish Roscius. Forrest, then talked of as a candidate for Congress, was the favourite of New York. On his appearance, said a Sun review of his acting in “King Lear,” the audience uttered “the roar of seven thunders.”

There was vaudeville to be enjoyed at Niblo’s Garden, a circus at Vauxhall Garden. Drama held the boards at the Olympic and the National. The Franklin was one of the new theatres. It was in Chatham Street, between James and Oliver, and it was there that Barney Williams, the Sun’s pioneer newsboy, made his first stage appearance, as a jig-dancer, when he was about fifteen years old.

Charlotte Cushman, Hackett, Forrest, and Sol Smith122 were the leading American actors of that day, although Junius Brutus Booth had achieved some prominence. Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, William J. Florence, and Maggie Mitchell were children, all a little older than the Sun. John T. Raymond was born at Buffalo in 1836, John E. McCullough in Ireland the next year, and Lawrence Barrett at Paterson, New Jersey, in 1838.

The hotels were temples of plenty. English travellers, going to the new Astor, the American, Niblo’s, or the New York House, recoiled in horror at the appetite of the Yankee. At breakfast they saw the untutored American break two or three boiled eggs into a tumbler and eat them therefrom—and then they wrote letters to the London Times about it. At dinner, served in the hotels about noon—three o’clock was the fashionable hour in private houses—the hungry New Yorker, including Mr. Day and his brother-in-law, Mr. Beach, would sit down to roast beef, venison, prairie-chicken, and a half-dozen vegetables. Bottles of brandy stood in the centre of the table for him who would; surely not for Mr. Day, who printed daily pieces about the effects of strong drink!

There was gambling on Park Row—Chatham Row, it was called then—games in the Elysian Fields of Hoboken on Sundays, and duels there on week-days; picnickings in the woods about where the Ritz-Carlton stands to-day; horse-racing on the Boulevard, now upper Broadway, and rowing races on the Harlem. Those who liked thoroughbred racing went to the Union Course on Long Island, or to Saratoga.

Club life was young. Cooper, Halleck, Bryant, and other literary moguls had started the Bread and Cheese Club in 1824. The Hone Club, named for Mayor Hone, sprang up in 1836, and gave dinners for Daniel Webster,123 William H. Seward, and other great Whigs. In that same year the Union Club was founded—the oldest New York club that is still in existence.

The Sun was not as popular in the clubs as it is to-day. A clubman of 1837 caught reading any newspaper except the Courier and Enquirer, the Evening Post, or one of their like, would have been frowned upon by his colleagues.

“We write,” it boasted, “more original editorial matter than any other paper in the city, great or small.”

It poked with its paragraphs at the shinplaster, that small form of currency issued by private bankers. It made fun of phrenology, then one of the fads. It jeered at animal magnetism, another craze. It had the Papineau rebellion, the Patriot War, Indian uprisings, and the belated news from Europe. It printed extracts from the “Pickwick Papers.” Dickens was all the rage.

The Sun’s comment on “Nicholas Nickleby,” when Dickens’s fourth book reached New York in 1838, was that it was as well written as “Oliver Twist,” and “not so gloomy.” Yet the grimness of the earlier novel had a fascination for the youth of that day. It was this book, read by candle-light after the store was closed, that so weakened the eyes of Charles A. Dana—still clerking in Buffalo—that he believed he would have to become a farmer.

The Sun did not mention, in its report of the Patriot War, that Dana was a member of the Home Guard in Buffalo, and had ideas of enlisting as a regular soldier. The Sun did not know of the youth’s existence; nor is it likely that he read Mr. Day’s paper.

A piece of “newspaper news” was printed in the Sun of June 1, 1837—a description of the first so-called endless paper roll in operation. Day still printed on124 small, flat sheets, but evidently he was impressed with the novelty. The touch about the rag-mill, of course, was fiction:

No display advertising was printed in the Sun of those years, but there was a variety of “liners.” These were adorned with tiny cuts of ships, shoes, horses, cows, hats, dogs, clocks, and what not. For example—

That is nearly five miles north of the City Hall, on the West Side—a region where now little grows except the rentals of palatial apartment-houses. Here are two other advertisements characteristic of the time:

On June 15, 1837, the name of Benjamin H. Day, which had appeared at the masthead of the Sun since its beginning, disappeared. In its place was the legend: “Published daily by the proprietor.” This gave rise to a variety of rumours, and about a week later, on June 23, the Sun said editorially:

Day’s name never went back. The reason for its disappearance was a libel-suit brought by a lawyer named Andrew S. Garr. On May 3, 1837, the Sun printed a report of a case in the Court of Chancery, in which it was incidentally mentioned that Garr had once been indicted for conspiracy to defraud. The reporter neglected to add that Garr had been acquitted. At the end of the article was the quotation:

Garr sued Day for ten thousand dollars, and Day not only took his name from the top of the first column of the first page, but apparently made a wash sale of the newspaper.

The case was tried in February, 1838, and on the 16th of that month Garr got a verdict for three thousand dollars—“to be extracted,” as the Sun said next morning, “from the right-hand breeches-pocket of the defendant, who about a year since ceased replenishing127 that fountain of the ‘needful’ from the prolific source of the Sun’s rays by virtue of a total, unconditional, and unrevisionary sale of the same to its present proprietor.”

The name of that “present proprietor” was not given; but on June 28, 1838, the following notice appeared at the top of the first page:

Day was really out of the Sun then, after having been its master for five years lacking sixty-seven days, and the paper passed into the actual ownership of Beach, who had married Day’s sister, and who had acted as the bookkeeper of the Sun almost from its inception. There were those, including Edgar Allan Poe, who believed that Beach was the boss of the Sun even in the days of the moon hoax, but they were mistaken. The paper, as the Sun itself remarked on December 4, 1835, was “altogether ruled by Benjamin H. Day.”

“I owned the whole concern,” said Mr. Day in 1883, “till I sold it to Beach. And the silliest thing I ever did in my life was to sell that paper!”

And why did Day sell, for forty thousand dollars, a paper which had the largest circulation in the world—about thirty thousand copies? The answer is that it was not paying as well as it had paid.

There were a couple of years when his profits had been as high as twenty thousand dollars. The net return for the six months ending October 1, 1836, as announced by the Sun on April 19, 1837, was $12,981.88; but at the time when Day sold out, the Sun was about breaking even. The advertising, due to general dulness in business—for which the bank failures and the big128 fire were partly to blame—had fallen off. It was costing Day three hundred dollars a week more for operating expenses and materials than he got for the sales of newspapers, and this loss was barely made up by the advertising receipts. With what he had saved, and the forty thousand paid to him by Beach, he would have a comfortable fortune. He was only twenty-eight years old, and there might be other worlds to conquer.

From nothing at all except his own industry and common sense Day had built up an enterprise which the Sun itself thus described a few days before the change of ownership:

As for the influence of the paper among the people, the Sun dealt in no vain exaggeration when it said of itself, a year before Day’s departure:

Day found New York journalism a pot of cold, stale water, and left it a boiling caldron; not so much by what he wrote as by the way in which he made his success. There were better newspapermen than Day before and during his time, plenty of them. They had knowledge and experience, they knew style, but they did not know the people. In their imagination the “gentle reader” was a male between the ages of thirty-five and ninety, with a burning interest in politics, and a fancy that the universe revolved around either Andrew Jackson or Daniel Webster. Why write for any one who did not have fixed notions on the subject of the United States Bank or Abolition?

To the mind of the sixpenny editor, the man who did not have six cents to spend was a negligible quantity. Nothing was worth printing unless it carried an appeal to the professional man or the merchant.

The Courier and Enquirer, under Colonel Webb, belched broadsides of old-fashioned Democratic doctrine, and Webb hired the best men he could find to load the guns. He had Bennett, Noah, James K. Paulding, and, later, Charles King and Henry J. Raymond. These were all good writers, most of them good newspapermen; but so far as the general public was concerned, Colonel Webb might as well have put them in a cage.

The Journal of Commerce was a great sixpenny, but it was not for the people to read. From 1828 until the Civil War its editor was Gerard Hallock, an enterprising journalist who ran expensive horse-expresses to Washington to get the proceedings of Congress, but would not admit that the public at large was more interested in a description of the murdered Helen Jewett’s gowns than in a new currency bill. The clipper-ships that lay off Sandy Hook to get the latest foreign news from the European vessels cost Hallock and Webb, who combined in this enterprise, twenty thousand dollars a year—probably more than they spent on all their local news.

In the solemn sanctum of the Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant and William Leggett wrote scholarly verse and free-trade editorials. They were live men, but their newspaper steed was slow. Leggett could urge Bryant to give a beating to Stone, the editor of the Commercial Advertiser, and he himself fought a duel with Blake, the treasurer of the Park Theatre; but these great men had little steam when it came to making a popular newspaper. The great editors were of a cult. They revolved around one another, too far aloft for the common eye.

Charles King was the most conservative of them all. He was a son of Rufus King, Senator from New York and minister to England, and he was editor of the131 American, an evening sixpenny, from 1827 to 1845. He lacked nothing in scholarship, but his paper was miserably dull, and rarely circulated more than a thousand copies. He remained at his editorial desk for four years after the American was absorbed by the Courier and Enquirer, and then he became president of Columbia College, a place better suited to him.

Such were the men who ruled the staid, prosy, and expensive newspapers of New York when Day and his penny Sun popped up. Most of them are better known to fame than Day is, but not one of them did anything comparable to the young printer’s achievement in making a popular, low-priced daily newspaper—and not only making it, but making it stick. For Day started something that went rolling on, increasing in size and weight until it controlled the thought of the continent. Day was the Columbus, the Sun was the egg. Anybody could do the trick—after Day showed how simple it was.

Bennett and his Herald were the first to profit by the example of the young Yankee printer. It should have been easy for Bennett, yet he had already failed at the same undertaking. He was at work in the newspaper field of New York as early as 1824, nine years before Day started the Sun. He failed as proprietor of the Sunday Courier (1825), and he failed again with the Philadelphia Pennsylvanian. He had a wealth of experience as assistant to Webb and as the Washington correspondent of the Enquirer.

It was no doubt due to the success of the Sun that Bennett, after two failures, established the Herald. He saw the human note that Ben Day had struck, and he knew, as a comparatively old newspaperman—he was forty when he started the Herald—what mistakes Day was making in the neglect of certain news fields, such as Wall Street. But the value of the penny paper Day132 had already proved, and Day had established, ahead of everybody else, the newsboy system, by which the man in the street could get a paper whenever he liked without making a yearly investment.

Bennett may have written the constitution of popular journalism, but it was Day who wrote its declaration of independence. If it had not been for the untrained Day, fifteen years younger than Bennett, it is possible that there would have been no Herald to span nearly a century under the ownership of father and son; and the two James Gordon Bennetts not only owned but absolutely were the Herald from May 10, 1835, when the father started the paper, until May 14, 1918, when the son died.

It had been said of Bennett that he discovered that “a paper universally denounced will be read.” Day learned that much a year before the Herald was started. Day was sensational, and he seemed to court the written assaults of the sixpenny editors. Bennett also sought abuse, and did not care when it brought physical pain with it. He was still more sensational than Day. If there was nothing else, his own personal affairs were made the public’s property. He was about to marry, so the Herald printed this:

James Parton described Bennett as “a man of French intellect and Scotch habits.” Bennett was not of Scottish blood, his parents being of French descent, but his youth in Scotland, where he was born, probably impregnated him with the thrift of his environment. He established the no-credit system in the Herald business office. Probably he had observed that Colonel Webb had lost a fortune in unpaid subscriptions and advertisements.

Bennett was a good business man and an energetic editor. He used all the ideas that Day had proved profitable, and many of his own. Perhaps the most valuable thing he learned from Day was that it was unwise to be a slave to a political party. But his own experience with the luckless Pennsylvanian, a Jackson organ, may have convinced him of the futility of the strictly partisan papers, which neglected the news for the sake of the office-holders.

Day’s success with the Sun was responsible for the birth, not only of the Herald, but of a host of American penny papers, which were established at the rate of a dozen a year. Of the New York imitators the Jeffersonian, published by Childs & Devoe, and the Man, owned by George H. Evans, an Englishman who was the Henry George of his day, were not long for this world. The Transcript, started in 1834, flashed up for a time as a dangerous rival of the Sun. Three compositors, William J. Stanley, Willoughby Lynde, and Billings Hayward, owned it. Its editor was Asa Greene, erstwhile physician and bookseller and always humorist. He wrote “The Adventures of Dr. Dodimus Duckworth,”134 “The Perils of Pearl Street,” and “The Travels of Ex-Barber Fribbleton in America”—this last a travesty on the books of travel turned out by Englishmen who visited the States.

William H. Attree, a former compositor, wrote the Transcript’s lively police-court stories, the Sun’s rival having learned how popular was crime. The Transcript lasted five years, the earlier of them so prosperous that the proprietors thought they were going to be millionaires. But Reporter Attree went to Texas with the land-boomers, and Lynde, who wrote the paragraphs, died. When the paper failed, in 1839, Hayward went to the Herald, where he worked as a compositor all the rest of his life.

The other penny papers that sprang up in New York to give battle—while the money lasted—to the Sun, the Transcript, and the Herald, were the True Sun, started by some of Day’s discharged employees; the Morning Star, run by Major Noah, of the Evening Star; the New Era, already mentioned, which Richard Adams Locke started in 1836 in company with Jared D. Bell and Joseph Price; the Daily Whig, of which Horace Greeley was Albany correspondent in 1838; the Bee, the Serpent, the Light, the Express, the Union, the Rough Hewer, the News Times, the Examiner, the Morning Chronicle, the Evening Chronicle, the Daily Conservative, the Censor, and the Daily News. All these bobbed up, in one city alone, in the five years during which Ben Day owned the Sun.

Most of them were mushrooms in origin and morning-glories by nature. They could not stand the Sun’s rays.

Notable exceptions were two evening papers, the Express and the Daily News. The Express was established in June, 1836, under the editorship of James135 Brooks and his brother Erastus, graduates of the Advertiser, of Portland, Maine. It was devoted to Whig politics and the shipping of New York. The Daily News took no considerable part in journalism until twenty-five years later, when Benjamin Wood bought it.

In other parts of the country the one-cent newspaper, properly conducted, met with the favour which the public had showered upon Ben Day. William M. Swain, who has been mentioned as a fellow compositor with Ben Day, and who tried to dissuade his friend from the folly of starting the Sun, saw the wisdom of the penny paper, and saw, also, that the New York field was filled. He went to Philadelphia and established the Public Ledger, the first issue appearing on March 25, 1836. The Ledger was not the first penny sheet to be published in Philadelphia, the Daily Transcript having preceded it by a few days. These two newspapers soon consolidated, however.

Swain’s Ledger was at once sensational and brave. It came out for the abolition of slavery, and its office was twice mobbed. It was mobbed again in 1844, during the Native American riots. Swain was a big, hard-working man. George W. Childs, his successor as proprietor of the Ledger, wrote of him that for twenty years it was his habit to read every paragraph that went into the paper. Swain made three million dollars out of the Ledger; but when, during the Civil War, the cost of paper compelled nearly all the newspapers to advance prices, he tried to keep the Ledger at one cent, and lost a hundred thousand dollars within a year. Childs, who had been a newsdealer and book-publisher, bought the paper from Swain in 1864, and raised its price to two cents.

When Swain went to Philadelphia he had two partners, Arunah S. Abell and Azariah H. Simmons, both136 printers, and, like Swain, former associates of Day. Simmons remained with Swain on the Ledger until his death in 1855, but Abell—the man who poked more fun than anybody else at Day for his penny Sun idea—went to Baltimore and there established a Sun of his own, the first copy coming out on May 17, 1837. It was a success from the start. How well it paid Abell to follow Ben Day’s scheme may be judged by the fact that thirty years later Abell bought Guilford, a splendid estate near Baltimore, and paid $475,000 for it.

Both Swain and Abell were friends of S. F. B. Morse, and they helped him to finance the electric telegraph. The Baltimore Sun published the famous message—“What hath God wrought?”—sent over the wire from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844, when the telegraph first came into practical use. Abell was the sole proprietor of the Baltimore Sun from 1837 to 1887. He died in 1888 at the age of eighty-two.

Other important newspapers started in the ten years that followed Day’s founding of the Sun were the Detroit Free Press, the St. Louis Republic, the New Orleans Picayune, the Burlington Hawkeye, the Hartford Times, the New York Tribune, the Brooklyn Eagle, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

In 1830 there were only 852 newspapers in the United States, which then had a population of 12,866,020, and these newspapers had a combined yearly circulation of 68,117,000 copies. Ten years later the population was 17,069,453, and there were 1,631 newspapers with a combined yearly circulation of 196,000,000 copies. In other words, while the population increased 32 per cent. in a decade, the total sale of newspapers increased 187 per cent. The inexpensive paper had found its readers.

In his report on newspapers for the Census of 1880, S. N. D. North says that from 1830 to 1840—

As Charles H. Levermore wrote in an article on the rise of metropolitan journalism in the American Historical Review:

Thus Ben Day’s Sun remade American journalism—more by accident than design, as he himself remarked at a dinner to Robert Hoe in 1851.

It is evident that Day soon regretted the sale of the Sun, for in 1840 he established a penny paper called the True Sun. This he presently sold for a fair price, but his itch for journalism did not disappear. He started138 the Tatler, but it was not a success. In 1842, in conjunction with James Wilson, he founded the monthly magazine, Brother Jonathan, which reprinted English double-decker novels complete in one issue. This later became a weekly, and Day brought out illustrated editions semi-annually.

This was a new thing, at least in America, and Day may be called the originator of our illustrated periodicals as well as of our penny papers. His right-hand men in the editing of Brother Jonathan were Nathaniel P. Willis, the poet, and Horatio H. Weld, who was first a printer, next an editor, and at last a minister.

Day sold Brother Jonathan for a dollar a year. When the paper famine hit the publishing business in 1862, he suspended his publication and retired from business. He was well off, and he spent the remaining twenty-seven years of his life in ease at his New York home. He died on December 21, 1889. His son Benjamin was the inventor of the Ben Day process used in making engravings.

Day always watched the fortunes of the Sun with interest, but he did not believe that his immediate successors ran it just the right way. When the paper passed into the hands of Charles A. Dana, in 1868, Day—then not yet threescore—said:

And it was then he added that the silliest thing he himself ever did was to sell the Sun.

139

CHAPTER VI
MOSES Y. BEACH’S ERA OF HUSTLE

The second owner of the Sun, Moses Yale Beach, was, like Ben Day, a Yankee. He was born in the old Connecticut town of Wallingford on January 7, 1800. He had a little education in the common schools, but showed more interest in mechanics than in books. When he was fourteen he was bound out to a cabinet-maker in Hartford. His skill was so fine that he saw the needlessness of serving the customary seven years, and his industry so great that he was able, by doing extra work in odd times, to get together enough money to buy his freedom from his master. He set up a cabinet-shop of his own at Northampton, Massachusetts.

When Beach was twenty, he made the acquaintance of Miss Nancy Day, of Springfield, the sister of Benjamin was the inventor of the Ben Day process used in Day were married in 1821, and as the business at Northampton was not prospering, they settled down in Springfield.

The young man was a good cabinet-maker, but his mind ran to inventions rather than to chests and high-boys. Steamboat navigation had not yet attained a commercial success, but Beach was a close student of the advance made by Robert Fulton and Henry Bell. First, however, he devoted his talents as an inventor140 to a motor in which the power came from explosions of gunpowder. He tried this on a boat which he intended to run on the Connecticut River between Springfield and Hartford. When it failed, he turned back to steam, and he undoubtedly would have made a success of this boat line if his money resources had been adequate.

Beach then invented a rag-cutting machine for use in paper-mills, and he might have had a fortune out of it if he had taken a patent in time, for the process is still used. As it was, the device enabled him to get an interest in a paper-mill at Saugerties, New York, where he removed in 1829. This mill was prosperous for some years, but in 1835 Beach found it more profitable to go to work for his young brother-in-law, Mr. Day, who had by this time brought the Sun to the point of assured success.

Beach was a great help to Day, not only as the manager of the Sun’s finances, but as general supervisor of the mechanical department. In the three years of his association with Day he picked up a good working knowledge of the newspaper business. He recognized the features that had made the Sun successful—chiefly the presentation of news that interested the ordinary reader—and saw the neglect of this policy was keeping the old-fashioned sixpenny papers at a standstill.

He did not underestimate other news. “Other news,” in that day, meant the proceedings of Congress and the New York State Legislature, the condensed news of Europe, as received from a London correspondent or rewritten from the English journals, and such important items as might be clipped from the newspapers of the South and West. Many of these American papers sent proof-sheets of news articles to the Sun by mail.

When Beach bought the paper there was no express service. There had been, in fact, no express service in141 America except the one which Charles Davenport and N. S. Mason operated over the Boston and Taunton Railway. But in March, 1839, about a year after Beach got the Sun, William F. Harnden began an express service—later the Adams Express Company—between New York and Boston, using the boats from New York to Providence and the rail from Providence to Boston.

This was a big help to the New York papers, for with the aid of the express the English papers brought by ships landing at Boston were in the New York offices the next day. To a city which still lacked wire communication of any kind this was highly important, and there was hardly an issue of the Sun in the spring of 1839 that did not contain a paragraph laudatory of Mr. Harnden’s enterprise.

The steamship, still a novelty, was the big thing in newspaperdom. While the Sun did not neglect the police-court reports and the animal stories so dear to its readers, the latest news from abroad usually had the place of honour on the second page. The first page remained the home of the advertisement and the haunt of the miscellaneous article. It was by ship that Sun readers learned of Daguerre and his picture-taking device; of Cobden and the Anti-Corn-Law League; of the war between Abd-el-Kader and the French; of Don Carlos and his ups and downs—mostly downs; of the first British invasion of Afghanistan. There was the young queen, Victoria, always interesting, and there were the doings of actors known to America:

On June 1, 1839, the Sun got out an extra on the arrival, at three o’clock that morning, of the Great Western, after a passage of thirteen days—the fastest trip up to that time—and fifty-seven thousand copies of the paper were sold. The Sun’s own sailing vessels met the incoming steamships down the bay. The Sun boasted:

The Sun had woodcuts made of all the leading ships, and these, with their curly waves, lit up a page wonderfully, if not beautifully. When the British Queen arrived on July 28, 1839, there was a half-page picture of her. She was the finest ship that had ever been built in Great Britain, with her total length of two hundred and seventy-five feet—less than one-third as much as some of the modern giants—and her paddle-wheels with a diameter of thirty-one feet. Small wonder that the Sun favoured New York with a Sunday paper in honour of the event, and that the Monday sale, with the same feature, was forty-nine thousand. Quoth the Sun:

In January, 1840, when the packet-ships United States and England arrived together, the Sun gave the story a front-page display, and actually used full-faced type for the subheads of the article.

A tragedy is recalled in one paragraph of the Sun’s143 account of the arrival of the Great Western on April 26, 1841:

The President never arrived, and her fate is one of the secrets of the sea. She sailed from New York on March 11, 1841, with thirty-one passengers, including Tyrone Power, the Irish actor, who had just concluded his second American tour. It is conjectured that the President sank during the great gale that sprang up her second night out.

In getting news from various parts of the United States, the Sun took a leaf from the book of Colonel Webb and other journalists who had used the horse express. In January, 1841, on the occasion of Governor William H. Seward’s message to the Legislature, the Sun beat the town. The Legislature received the message at 11 A.M. on January 5:

Nowadays a Governor’s message is in the newspaper-offices days before it is sent to the Legislature, and there, treated in the confidence that is never betrayed by a decent newspaper, it is prepared for printing, so that it may be on the street five minutes after it is delivered, if its importance warrants. In the old days the message, borne by relays of horse vehicles down the snow-covered post-road from Albany to New York,144 was more important to the newspapers than the messages of this period appear to be. With newspapers, as with humans, that which is easy to get loses value.

In October, 1841, the Sun spent money freely to secure a quick report of the momentous trial of Alexander McLeod for the murder of Amos Durfee. War between the United States and Great Britain hinged on the outcome. During the rebellion in Upper Canada, in 1837, the American steamer Caroline was used by the insurgents to carry supplies down the Niagara River to a party of rebels on Navy Island. A party of loyal Canadians seized and destroyed the Caroline at Grand Island, and in the fight Durfee and eleven others were killed. The Canadian, McLeod, who boasted of being a participant, was arrested when he ventured across the American border in 1840.

The British government made a demand for his release, insisting that what McLeod had done was an act of war, performed under the orders of his commanding officer, Captain Drew. President Van Buren replied that the American government had several times asked the British government whether the destruction of the Caroline was an act of war, and had never received a reply; and further, that the Federal government had no power to prevent the State of New York from trying persons indicted within its jurisdiction.

The whole country realized the hostile attitude of the British ministry, and accepted its threat that war would be declared if McLeod were not released. The trial took place at Utica, New York, and the Sun printed from two to five columns a day about it. It ran a special train from Utica to Schenectady. There a famous driver, Otis Dimmick, waited with a fine team of horses to take the story to the Albany boat, the fastest means of transportation between the State capital145 and the metropolis. The Sun declared that one day Dimmick and his horses made the sixteen miles between Schenectady and Albany in forty-nine minutes.

And the end of it all was proof that McLeod, who had boasted of killing “a damned Yankee,” had been asleep in Chippewa on the night of the Caroline affair, and was nothing worse than a braggart. So the war-cloud blew over.

Beach was a man of great faith in railroads and all other forms of progress. When the Boston and Albany road was finished, the Sun related how a barrel of flour was growing in the field in Canandaigua on a Monday—the barrel in a tree and the flour in the wheat—and on Wednesday, transformed and ready for the baker, it was in Boston.

The Sun had faith in Morse and his telegraph from the outset. The invention was born in Nassau Street, only a block or two from the Sun’s office. Morse put the wire into practical use between Baltimore and Washington on May 24, 1844. That was a Friday. The Sun said nothing about it the next day, and had no Sunday paper; but on Monday it said editorially:

It is hardly necessary to say that the convention referred to was the Democratic national convention at Baltimore, that Van Buren’s stock, high early in the proceedings, fell again, and that James K. Polk was the nominee.

But as New York was not fortunate enough to have the first commercial telegraph-line, the Sun had to rely on its own efforts for speedy news from the convention. It ran special trains from Baltimore, “beating the United States mail train and locomotive an hour or two.”

The Sun soon afterward expressed annoyance at a report that it was itself a part of a monopoly which was to control the telegraph, and that it had bought a telegraph-line from New York to Springfield, Massachusetts. It insisted that there should be no monopoly, and that the use of the telegraph must be open to all. There was no suggestion that Morse intended to control his invention improperly, but the Sun was not quite satisfied with the government’s lassitude. Morse had offered his rights to the government for one hundred thousand dollars, and Congress had sneered.

It was not until 1846 that the telegraph was extended to New York, and in the meantime the New York papers used such other means as they could for the collection of news. Besides trains, ships, horses, and the fleet foot of the reporter, there were pigeons. Beach went in for pigeons extensively. When the Sun moved from 156 Nassau Street, in the summer of 1842, it took147 a six-story building at the southwest corner of Nassau and Fulton Streets, securing about three times as much room as it had in the two-story building at Spruce Street. On the top of the new building Beach built a pigeon-house, which stood for half a century.

The strange, boxlike cote attracted not only the attention of Mr. Bennett, whose Herald was quartered just across the street, but of all the folk who came and went in that busy region. So many were the queries from friends and the quips from enemies concerning the pigeon-house that the Sun (December 14, 1843), vouchsafed to explain:

Speed and more speed was the newspaper demand of the hour, particularly among the penny papers. The Sun and the Herald had been battling for years, with competitors springing up about them, usually to die within the twelvemonth. Now the Tribune had come to remain in the fray, even if it had not as much money to spend on news-gathering as the Sun and the Herald.

Edgar Allan Poe saw the fever that raged among the rivals. He had just returned to New York from Philadelphia with his sick wife and his mother. He was a recognized genius, but his worldly wealth amounted to four dollars and fifty cents. He had written “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold Bug,” and other immortal stories, but his livelihood had been precarious. He had149 been in turn connected with the Southern Literary Messenger, the Gentleman’s Magazine, and Graham’s Magazine, and had twice issued the prospectuses for new periodicals of his own, fated never to be born.

His fortunes were at their lowest when he arrived in New York on April 6, 1844. He and his family found rooms in Greenwich Street, near Cedar, now the thick of the business district. “The house is old and looks buggy,” he wrote to a friend, but it was the best he could do with less than five dollars in his pocket.

He had to have more money. The newspapers seemed to be the most available place to get it, and the Sun the livest of them. Speed—that was what they wanted. They had been having ocean steamers until they were almost sick. Railroads were unromantic. Horses were an old story. The telegraph was still regarded as theory, and it hardly appealed to the imagination.

Pigeons? Perhaps there was inspiration in the sight of Sam Patch preening himself on a cornice of the Sun’s building. A magnified pigeon would be an air-ship. Poe sat him down, wrote the “balloon hoax,” and sold it to Mr. Beach. It appeared in the Sun of April 13, 1844.

Beneath a black-faced heading that was supplemented by a woodcut of three race-horses flying under the whips of their jockeys and the subtitle “By Express,” was the following introduction:

The promised extra bore a head of stud-horse type, six banks in all, and as many inches deep.

“Astounding News by Express, via Norfolk!” it announced. “The Atlantic Crossed in Three Days!—Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason’s Flying-Machine!!!—Arrival at Sullivan’s Island, Near Charleston, of Mr. Mason, Mr. Robert Holland, Mr. Henson, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and Four Others in the Steering Balloon Victoria, after a Passage of Seventy-Five Hours from Land to Land—Full Particulars of the Voyage!!!”

The story that followed was about five thousand words in length. To summarize it, Monck Mason had applied the principle of the Archimedean screw to the propulsion of a dirigible balloon. The gas-bag was an ellipsoid thirteen feet long, with a car suspended from it. The screw propeller, which was attached to the car, was operated by a spring. A rudder shaped like a battledore kept the air-ship on its course.

The voyagers, according to the story, started from Mr. Osborne’s home near Penstruthal, in North Wales, intending to sail across the English Channel. The mechanism of the propeller broke, and the balloon, caught in a strong northeast wind, was carried across the Atlantic at the speed of sixty or more miles an hour. Mr. Mason kept a journal, to which, at the end of each day, Mr. Ainsworth added a postscript. The balloon landed safely on the coast of South Carolina, near Fort Moultrie.

The names of the supposed voyagers were well chosen by Poe to give verisimilitude to the hoax. Monck Mason and Robert Holland, or Hollond, were of the small party which actually sailed from Vauxhall Gardens, London, on the afternoon of November 7, 1836, in the balloon Nassau and landed at Weilburg, in Germany, five hundred miles away, eighteen hours later. Harrison Ainsworth, the novelist, was then one of the shining stars of English literary life. The others named by Poe were familiar figures of the period.

Poe adopted the plan, used so successfully by Locke in the moon hoax, of having real people do the thing that they would like to do; but there the resemblance of the two hoaxes ends, except for the technical bits that Poe was able to inject into his narrative. The moon hoax lasted for weeks; the balloon hoax for a day. Even the Sun did not attempt to bolster it, for it said the second day afterward:

About a week later, when the Sun was still being pounded by its contemporaries, a few of which had been gulled into rewriting the story, another editorial article on the hoax appeared:

The “pleasant satire” of which the Sun spoke was evidently meant to hold up to view the craze of the day for speed in the transmission of news and men. Yet the Sun itself, as the leader of penny journalism, had been to a great extent the cause of this craze. It had taught the people to read the news and to hanker for more.

There was another story which Poe and the Sun shared—one that will outlive even the balloon hoax. Almost buried on the third page of the Sun of July 28, 1841, was this advertisement in agate type:

The fears were well grounded, for the dead girl was Mary Cecilia Rogers, the “beautiful cigar-girl” who had been the magnet at John Anderson’s tobacco-shop at Broadway and Duane Street; the tragic figure of Poe’s story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” a tale which served to keep alive the features of that unsolved riddle154 of the Elysian Fields of Hoboken. To the Sun, which had then no Poe, no Sherlock Holmes, the murder was the text for a moral lesson:

The Sun and the other papers might have pursued the Mary Rogers mystery further than they did had it not been that in a few weeks a more tangible tragedy presented itself, when John C. Colt, a teacher of bookkeeping, and the brother of Samuel Colt, the inventor, killed Samuel Adams, one of the leading printers of New York. Adams had gone to Colt’s lodgings at Broadway and Chambers Street to collect a bill, and Colt, who had a furious temper, murdered him with a hammer, packed the body in a box, and hired an innocent drayman to haul it down to the ship Kalamazoo,155 for shipment to New Orleans. This affair drove the Rogers murder out of the types, and left it for Poe to preserve in fiction with the names of the characters thinly veiled and the scene transferred to Paris.

The great social event of the town in 1842 was the visit of Charles Dickens. He had been expected for several years. In fact, as far back as October 13, 1838, the Sun remarked:

The Sun got out an extra on the day when Dickens landed, but it was not in honour of Boz, but rather because of the arrival of the Britannia with a budget of foreign news. Buried in a mass of Continental paragraphs was this one:

The ship-news man never even thought to ask Dickens how he liked America. But society was waiting for Boz, and he was tossed about on a lively sea of receptions and dinners. The Sun presently thought that the young author was being exploited overmuch:

When Dickens sailed for home, in June, the Sun bade him bon voyage with but a paragraph. It was more than a year afterward that it came to him again; and meanwhile he had trodden on the toes of America:

The Sun itself was doing very nicely. On its tenth birthday, September 3, 1843, it announced that it employed eight editors and reporters, twenty compositors, sixteen pressmen, twelve folders and counters, and one hundred carriers. The circulation of the daily paper was thirty-eight thousand, of the Weekly Sun twelve thousand.

Mr. Beach owned the Sun’s new home at Fulton and Nassau Streets and the building at 156 Nassau Street which he had recently vacated, and which was burned down in the fire of February 6, 1845. He had a London correspondent who ran a special horse express to carry158 the news from London to Bristol. A Sun reporter went to report Webster’s speech on the great day when the Bunker Hill Monument was finished. He got down correctly at least the last sentence: “Thank God, I—I also—am an American!”

With a circulation by far the largest in the world, the Sun was obliged to buy a new dress of type every three months, for the day of the curved stereotype plate was still far off. Early in 1846 two new presses, each capable of six thousand Suns an hour, were put in at a cost of twelve thousand dollars.

The size of the paper grew constantly, although Beach stuck to a four-page sheet because of the limitations of the presses. Instead of adding pages, he added columns. From Day’s little three-column Sun the paper had grown, by April of 1840, to a width of seven columns. Of the total of twenty-eight columns in an issue twenty-one and a half were devoted to advertising, three to mixed news and editorials, two and a half to the court reports, and one column to reprint.

With the page seven columns wide, Beach thought that the two words—“The Sun”—looked lonely, and to fill out the heading he changed it to read “The New York Sun.” This continued from April 13 to September 29, 1840, when the proprietor saw how much more economical it would be to cut out “New York” and push the first and seventh columns of the first page up to the top of the paper. Then it was “The Sun” once more in head-line as well as body.

The paper is never the New York Sun, Eugene Field’s poem to the contrary notwithstanding. It is the Sun, universal in its spirit, and published in New York by the accident of birth.

Three years after that the Sun became an eight-column paper, and there were no more sneers at the159 blanket sheets, for the Sun itself was getting pretty wide.

It was in the reign of Moses Y. Beach as owner of the Sun, that Horace Greeley came to stay in New York journalism. He had been fairly successful as editor of the New Yorker, and his management of the campaign paper called the Log Cabin, issued in 1840 in the interest of General Harrison, was masterly. With the prestige thus obtained, he was able, on April 10, 1841, to start the Tribune.

In the first number he announced his intention of excluding the police reports which had been so valuable to “our leading penny papers”—meaning the Sun and the Herald—and of making the Tribune “worthy of the hearty approval of the virtuous and refined.” It was a week before the Sun mentioned its former friend, and then it was only to say:

But Greeley was a lively young man, in spite of his eccentric ways and his habit of letting one leg of his trousers hang out of his unpolished boots. Only thirty160 when he started the Tribune, he had had a lot of experience, particularly with politicians and with fads. He still believed in some of the fads, including temperance—which was then considered a fad—vegetarianism, and Abolition. He had been, too, a poet; and his verses lived to haunt his mature years. He had to give away most of the five thousand copies that were printed of the first number of the Tribune, but in a month he had a circulation of six thousand, and in two months he doubled this.

Greeley had the instinct for getting good men, but not always the knack of holding them. One of his early finds was Henry J. Raymond, who attracted his attention as a boy orator for the Whig cause. Raymond worked for Greeley’s New Yorker and later for the Tribune. He was a good reporter, using a system of shorthand of his own devising.

On one occasion, at least, he enabled the Tribune to beat the other papers. He was sent to Boston to report a speech, and he took with him three printers and their cases of type. After the speech Raymond and his compositors boarded the boat for New York, and as fast as the reporter transcribed his notes the printers put the speech into type. On the arrival of the boat at New York the type was ready to be put into the forms, and the Tribune was on the street hours ahead of its rivals.

Greeley paid Raymond eight dollars a week until Raymond threatened to leave unless he received twenty dollars a week. He got it, but Greeley made such a fuss about the matter that Raymond realized that further increases would be out of the question. Presently he went to the Courier and Enquirer, and from 1843 to 1850 he tried to restore some of the glory that once had crowned Colonel Webb’s paper.

In this period Raymond and his former employer, Greeley, fought their celebrated editorial duel—with pens, not mahogany-handled pistols—on the subject of Fourierism, that theory of social reorganization which Greeley seemed anxious to spread, and which was zealously preached by another of his young men, Albert Brisbane, now perhaps better remembered as the father of Arthur Brisbane. But Colonel Webb’s paper would not wake wide enough to suit the ambitious Raymond, who seized the opportunity of becoming the first editor of the New York Times.

Other men who worked for Greeley’s Tribune in its young days were Bayard Taylor, who wrote articles from Europe; George William Curtis, the essayist; Count Gurowski, an authority on foreign affairs; and Charles A. Dana.

Beach soon recognized Greeley as a considerable rival in the morning field, and there was a long tussle between the Sun and the Tribune. It did not content itself with words, and there were street battles between the boys who sold the two papers. Stung by one of Beach’s articles, Greeley called the Sun “the slimy and venomous instrument of Locofocoism, Jesuitical and deadly in politics and grovelling in morals.” The term Locofoco had then lost its original application to the Equal Rights section of the Democratic party and was applied—particularly by the Whigs—to any sort of Democrat.

Moses Y. Beach had no such young journalists about him as Dana or Raymond, but he had two sons who seemed well adapted to take up the ownership of the Sun. He took them in as partners on October 22, 1845, under the title of “M. Y. Beach & Sons.” The elder son, Moses Sperry Beach, was then twenty-three years old, and had already been well acquainted with the162 newspaper business, particularly with the mechanical side of it. Before his father took him as a partner, young Moses had joined with George Roberts in the publication of the Boston Daily Times, but he was glad to drop this and devote himself to the valuable property at Fulton and Nassau Streets.

If a genius for invention is inheritable, both the Beach boys were richly endowed by their father. Moses S. invented devices for the feeding of rolls of paper, instead of sheets, to flat presses; for wetting news-print paper prior to printing; for cutting the sheets after printing; and for adapting newspaper presses to print both sides of the sheet at the same time.

Alfred Ely Beach was only nineteen when he became partner in the Sun. After leaving the academy at Monson, Massachusetts, where he had been schooled, he worked with his father in the Sun office, and learned every detail of the business. The inventive vein was even deeper in him than in his brother. When he was twenty he formed a partnership with his old schoolmate, Orson D. Munn, of Monson, and they bought the Scientific American from Rufus Porter and combined its publishing business with that of soliciting patents.

Alfred Beach retained his interest in the Sun for several years, but he is best remembered for his inventions and for his connection with scientific literature. In 1853 he devised the first typewriter which printed raised letters on a strip of paper for the blind. He invented a pneumatic mail-tube, and a larger tube on the same principle, by which he hoped passengers could be carried, the motive power being the exhaustion of air at the far end by means of a rotating fan.

He was the first subway-constructor in New York. In 1869 he built a tunnel nine feet in diameter under Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street, and163 the next year a car was sent to and fro in this by pneumatic power. A more helpful invention, however, was the Beach shield for tunnel-digging—a gigantic hogs-head with the ends removed, the front circular edge being sharp and the rear end having a thin iron hood. This cylinder was propelled slowly through the earth by hydraulic rams, the dislodged material being removed through the rear.

Mr. Beach was connected with the Scientific American until his death in 1896. His son, Frederick Converse Beach, was one of the editors of that periodical, and his grandson, Stanley Yale Beach, is still in the same field of endeavour.

164

CHAPTER VII
“THE SUN” IN THE MEXICAN WAR

The Beaches, father and sons, owned the Sun throughout the Mexican War, a period notable for the advance of newspaper enterprise; and Moses Yale Beach proved more than once that he was the peer of Bennett in the matter of getting news.

Shortly before war was declared—April 24, 1846—the telegraph-line was built from Philadelphia to Fort Lee, New Jersey, opposite New York. June found a line opened from New York to Boston; September, a line from New York to Albany. The ports and the capitals of the nation were no longer dependent on horse expresses, or even upon the railroads, for brief news of importance. Morse had subdued space.

For a little time after the Mexican War began there was a gap in the telegraph between Washington and New York, the line between Baltimore and Philadelphia not having been completed; but with the aid of special trains the Sun was able to present the news a few hours after it left Washington. It was, of course, not exactly fresh news, for the actual hostilities in Mexico were not heard of at Washington until May 11, more than two weeks after their accomplishment.

The good news from the battle-fields of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma was eighteen days in reaching165 New York. All Mexican news came by steamer to New Orleans or Mobile, and was forwarded from those ports, by the railroad or other means, to the nearest telegraph-station. Moses Y. Beach was instrumental in whipping up the service from the South, for he established a special railroad news service between Mobile and Montgomery, a district of Alabama where there had been much delay.

On September 11, 1846, the Sun uttered halleluiahs over the spread of the telegraph. The line to Buffalo had been opened on the previous day. The invention had been in every-day use only two years, but more than twelve hundred miles of line had been built, as follows:

England had then only one hundred and seventy-five miles of telegraph. “This,” gloated the Sun, “is American enterprise!”

The Sun did not have a special correspondent in Mexico, and most of its big stories during the war, including the account of the storming of Monterey, were those sent to the New Orleans Picayune by George W. Kendall, who is supposed to have put in the mouth of General Taylor the words—

Moses Yale Beach himself started for Mexico as a166 special agent of President Polk, with power to talk peace, but the negotiations between Beach and the Mexican government were broken off by a false report of General Taylor’s defeat by Santa Anna, and Mr. Beach returned to his paper.

The more facilities for news-getting the papers enjoyed, the more they printed—and the more it cost them. Each had been doing its bit on its own hook. The Sun and the Courier and Enquirer had spent extravagant sums on their horse expresses from Washington. The Sun and the Herald may have profited by hiring express-trains to race from Boston to New York with the latest news brought by the steamships, but the outflow of money was immense. The news-boats—clipper-ships, steam-vessels, and rowboats—which went down to Sandy Hook to meet incoming steamers cost the Sun, the Herald, the Courier and Enquirer, and the Journal of Commerce a pretty penny.

With the coming of the Mexican War there were special trains to be run in the South. And now the telegraph, with its expensive tolls, was magnetizing money out of every newspaper’s till. Not only that, but there was only one wire, and the correspondent who got to it first usually hogged it, paying tolls to have a chapter from the Bible, or whatever was the reporter’s favourite book, put on the wire until his story should be ready to start.

It was all wrong, and at last, through pain in the pocket, the newspapers came to realize it. At a conference held in the office of the Sun, toward the close of the Mexican War, steps were taken to lessen the waste of money, men, and time.

At this meeting, presided over by Gerard Hallock, the veteran editor of the Journal of Commerce, there were represented the Sun, the Herald, the Tribune—the167 three most militant morning papers—the Courier and Enquirer, the Express, and Mr. Hallock’s own paper. The conference formed the Harbour Association, by which one fleet of news-boats would do the work for which half a dozen had been used, and the New York Associated Press, designed for cooperation in the gathering of news in centres like Washington, Albany, Boston, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. Alexander Jones, of the Journal of Commerce, became the first agent of the new organization. He had been a reporter on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was he who invented the first cipher code for use in the telegraph, saving time and tolls.

Thus in the office where some of the bitterest invective against newspaper rivals had been penned, there began an era of good feeling. So busy had the world become, and so full of news, through the new means of communication afforded by Professor Morse, that the invention of opprobrious names for Mr. Bennett ceased to be a great journalistic industry.

As an example of the change in the personal relations of the newspaper editors and proprietors, the guests present at a dinner given by Moses Y. Beach in December, 1848, when he retired from business and turned the Sun over to his sons Moses and Alfred, were the venerable Major Noah, then retired from newspaper life; Gerard Hallock, Horace Greeley, Henry J. Raymond, of the Courier and Enquirer, and James Brooks, of the Express. All praised Beach and his fourteen years of labour on the Sun, but there was never a word about Benjamin H. Day. Evidently that gentleman’s re-entry into the newspaper field as the proprietor of the True Sun had put him out of tune with his brother-in-law. Richard Adams Locke was there, however—the only relic of the first régime.

What the Sun thought of itself then is indicated in an editorial printed on December 4, when the Beach brothers relieved their father, who was in bad health:

The Sun that Ben Day had turned over to Moses Y. Beach was no longer recognizable. Fifteen years had wrought many changes from the time when the young Yankee printer launched his venture on the tide of chance. The steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph had made over American journalism. The police-court items, the little local scandals, the animal stories—all the trifles upon which Day had made his way to prosperity—were now being shoved aside to make room for the quick, hot news that came in from many quarters. The Sun still strove for the patronage of the People, with a capital P, but it had educated them away from the elementary.

The elder Beach was enterprising, but never rash. He made the Sun a better business proposition than ever it was under Day. Ben Day carried a journalistic sword at his belt; Beach, a pen over his ear. Perhaps Day could not have brought the Sun up to a circulation of fifty thousand and a money value of a quarter of a169 million dollars; but, on the other hand, it is unlikely that Beach could ever have started the Sun.

Once it was started, and once he had seen how it was run, the task of keeping it going was fairly easy for him. He was a good publisher. Not content with getting out the Sun proper, he established the Weekly Sun, issued on Saturdays, and intended for country circulation, at one dollar a year. In 1848 he got out the American Sun, at twelve shillings a year, which was shipped abroad for the use of Europeans who cared to read of our rude American doings. Another venture of Beach’s was the Illustrated Sun and Monthly Literary Journal, a sixteen-page magazine full of woodcuts.

Mr. Beach had for sale at the Sun office all the latest novels in cheap editions. He wrote a little book himself—“The Wealth of New York: A Table of the Wealth of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City Who Are Estimated to Be Worth One Hundred Thousand Dollars or Over, with Brief Biographical Notices.” It sold for twenty-five cents.

Perhaps Beach was the father of the newspaper syndicate. In December, 1841, when the Sun received President Tyler’s message to Congress by special messenger, he had extra editions of one sheet printed for twenty other newspapers, using the same type for the body of the issue, and changing only the title-head. In this way such papers as the Vermont Chronicle, the Albany Advertiser, the Troy Whig, the Salem Gazette, and the Boston Times were able to give the whole text of the message to their readers without the delay and expense of setting it in type.

Through conservatism, good business sense, and steady work, Moses Y. Beach amassed from the Sun what was then a handsome fortune, and when he retired he was only forty-eight. His last years were spent at the town of his birth, Wallingford, where he died on July 19, 1868, six months after the Sun had passed out of the hands of a Beach and into the hands of a Dana.

Beach Brothers, as the new ownership of the Sun171 was entitled, made but one important change in the appearance and character of the paper during the next few years.

Up to the coming of the telegraph the Sun had devoted its first page to advertising, with a spice of reading-matter that usually was in the form of reprint—miscellany, as some newspapermen call it, or bogus, as most printers term it. But when telegraphic news came to be common but costly, newspapers began to see the importance of attracting the casual reader by means of display on the front page. The Beaches presently used one or two columns of the latest telegraph-matter on the first page; sometimes the whole page would be so occupied.

In 1850, from July to December, they issued an Evening Sun, which carried no advertising.

On April 6, 1852, Alfred Ely Beach, more concerned with scientific matters than with the routine of daily publication, withdrew from the Sun, which passed into the sole possession of Moses S. Beach, then only thirty years old. It was reported that when the partnership was dissolved the division was based on a total valuation of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the paper which, less than nineteen years before, Ben Day had started with an old hand-press and a hatful of type. Horace Greeley, telling a committee of the British parliament about American newspapers, named that sum as the amount for which the Sun was valued in the sale by brother to brother.

172

CHAPTER VIII
“THE SUN” DURING THE CIVIL WAR

In 1852, when Moses Sperry Beach came into the sole ownership of the Sun, it was supposed that the slavery question had been settled forever, or at least with as much finality as was possible in determining such a problem. The Missouri Compromise, devised by Henry Clay, had acted as a legislative mandragora which lulled the United States and soothed the spasms of the extreme Abolitionists. Even Abraham Lincoln, now passing forty years, was losing that interest in politics which he had once exhibited, and was devoting himself almost entirely to his law practice in Springfield, Illinois.

The Sun had plenty of news to fill its four wide pages, and its daily circulation was above fifty thousand. The Erie Railroad had stretched itself from Piermont, on the Hudson River, to Dunkirk, on the shore of Lake Erie. The Hudson River Railroad was built from New York to Albany. The steamship Pacific, of the Collins Line, had broken the record by crossing the Atlantic in nine days and nineteen hours. The glorious yacht America had beaten the British Titania by eight miles in a race of eighty miles.

Kossuth, come as the envoy plenipotentiary of a Hungary ambitious for freedom, was New York’s hero.173 Lola Montez, the champion heart-breaker of her century, danced hither and yon. The volunteer firemen of New York ran with their engines and broke one another’s heads. The Young Men’s Christian Association, designed to divert youth to gentler practices, was organized, and held its first international convention at Buffalo in 1854. Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, of the United States army, was in California, recently the scene of the struggle between outlawry and the Vigilantes, and was not very sure that he liked the life of a soldier.

Messrs. Heenan, Morrissey, and Yankee Sullivan furnished, at frequent intervals, inspiration to American youth. The cholera attacked New York regularly, and as regularly did the Sun print its prescription for cholera medicine, which George W. Busteed, a druggist, had given to Moses Yale Beach in 1849, and which is still in use for the subjugation of inward qualms. The elder Beach, enjoying himself in Europe with his son Joseph Beach, sent articles on French and German life to his son Moses Sperry Beach’s paper.

Literature was still advancing in New England. Persons of refinement were reading Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” and “The House of Seven Gables,” Ik Marvel’s “Reveries of a Bachelor,” Irving’s “Mahomet,” and Parkman’s “Conspiracy of Pontiac.” Marion Harland had written “Alone.” Down in Kentucky young Mary Jane Holmes was at work on her first novel, “Tempest and Sunshine.” But brows both high and low were bent over the instalments in the National Era of the most fascinating story of the period, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The writing of news had not gone far ahead in quality. Most of the reporters still wrote in a groove a century old. Every chicken-thief who was shot, “clapped174 his hand to his heart, cried out that he was a dead man, and presently expired.” But the editorial articles were well written. On the Sun John Vance, a brilliant Irishman, was turning out most of the leaders and getting twenty dollars a week. In the Tribune office Greeley pounded rum and slavery, while his chief assistant, Charles A. Dana, did such valuable work on foreign and domestic political articles that his salary grew to the huge figure of fifty dollars a week.

Bennett was working harder than any other newspaper-owner, and was doing big things for the Herald. Southern interests and scandal were his long suits. “We call the Herald a very bad paper,” said Greeley to a Parliamentary committee which was inquiring about American newspapers. He meant that it was naughty; but naughtiness and all, its circulation was only half as big as the Sun’s.

Henry J. Raymond was busy with his new venture, the Times, launched by him and George Jones, the banker. With Raymond were associated editorially Alexander C. Wilson and James W. Simonton. William Cullen Bryant, nearing sixty, still bent “the good grey head that all men knew” over his editor’s desk in the office of the Evening Post. With him, as partner and managing editor, was that other great American, John Bigelow.

J. Watson Webb, fiery as ever in spirit, still ran the Courier and Enquirer, “the Austrian organ in Wall Street,” as Raymond called it because of Webb’s hostile attitude toward Kossuth. Webb had been minister to Austria, a post for which Raymond was afterward to be nominated but not confirmed. The newspapers and the people were all pretty well satisfied with themselves. And then Stephen A. Douglas put his foot in it, and Kansas began to bleed.

Douglas had been one of the Sun’s great men, for the Sun listed heavily toward the Democratic party nationally; but it did not disguise its dislike of the Little Giant’s unhappily successful effort to organize the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska on the principle of squatter sovereignty. After the peace and quiet that had followed the Missouri Compromise, this attempt to bring slavery across the line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes by means of a local-option scheme looked to the Sun very much like kicking a sleeping dragon in the face.

After Douglas had been successful in putting his bill through Congress, the Sun still rejected its principles. Commenting on the announcements of certain Missourians that they would take their slaves into the new Territory, the Sun said:

It was at this time that the germs of Secession began to show themselves on the culture-plates of the continent. The Sun was hot at the suggestion of a division of the Union:

The Sun saw that Douglas’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise was a smashing blow delivered by a Northern176 Democrat to the Democracy of the North; but the sectional hatred was not revealed in all its intensity until 1856, when Representative Preston S. Brooks, of South Carolina, made his murderous attack on Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, in the Senate Chamber. This and its immediate consequences were well covered by the Sun, not only through its Associated Press despatches, but also in special correspondence from its Washington representative, “Hermit.” It had a report nearly a column long of Sumner’s speech, “The Crime Against Kansas,” which caused Brooks to assault the great opponent of slavery.

That year was also the year of the first national convention of the Republican party, conceived by the Abolitionists, the Free Soilers, and the Know-nothings, and born in 1854. The Sun had a special reporter at Philadelphia to tell of the nomination of John C. Frémont, but the paper supported Buchanan. Its readers were of a class naturally Democratic, and although the paper was not a party organ, and had no liking for slavery or Secession, the new party was too new, perhaps too much colored with Know-nothingism, to warrant a change of policy.

On the subject of the Dred Scott decision, written by Chief Justice Taney and handed down two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, the Sun was blunt:

John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry was found worthy of a column in the Sun, but space was cramped that morning, for four columns had to be given to a177 report of the New York firemen’s parade. The firemen read the Sun.

But Mr. Beach sent a special man to report Brown’s trial at Charlestown, Virginia. The editorial columns echoed the sense of the correspondence—that the old man was not having a fair show. Besides, the Sun believed that Brown was insane and belonged in a madhouse rather than on the gallows. It printed a five-thousand-word sermon by Henry Ward Beecher on Brown’s raid. Beecher and the Beaches were very friendly, and there is still in Beecher’s famous Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, a pulpit made of wood brought from the Mount of Olives by Moses S. Beach.

In the Illinois campaign of 1858 the Sun was slow to recognize Abraham Lincoln’s prowess as a speaker, although Lincoln was then recognized as the leading exponent of Whig doctrine in his State. Referring to the debates between Lincoln and Douglas in their struggle for the Senatorship, the Sun said:

Two years later, when Lincoln was nominated for178 President, the Sun saw him in a somewhat different light:

But the time for the Sun to speculate came only three days later (May 22, 1860), when it frankly stated:

That was written before the Democratic national convention. The Sun wanted the Democrats to nominate Sam Houston. It saw that Douglas had estranged the anti-slavery Democrats of the North. When Douglas was nominated, the Sun remarked:

The Sun had no illusions as to the candidacy of John C. Breckinridge, the Vice-President under Buchanan, when he was nominated for President by the Democrats of the South, who refused to flock to the colours of Douglas:

“The Union cannot be dissolved,” the Sun declared on August 4, “whosoever shall be elected President!”

And on the morning of Election Day the Sun, which had taken little part except to criticise the conduct of the Democratic campaign, said prophetically: “History turns a leaf to-day.” Its comment on the morning after the election was characteristic of its attitude during the canvass:

In a paragraph of political gossip printed a week later the Sun said that Horace Greeley could have the collectorship of the port of New York if he resigned his claims to a seat in the Cabinet, and that—

That was probably the first time that Charles A. Dana got his name into the Sun.

Although unqualifiedly opposed to Secession, the Sun did not believe that military coercion was the best way to prevent it. It saw the temper of South Carolina and other Southern States, but thought that it saw, too, a diplomatic way of curing the disorder. South Carolina, it said, had a greater capacity for indignation than any other political body in the world. Here was the way to stop its wrath:

This was somewhat on a plane with Horace Greeley’s advice in the Tribune—“Let the erring sisters go in peace.” The Sun, however, was more Machiavellian:

This was printed on December 8, 1860, some weeks before the fate of the Crittenden Compromise, beaten by Southern votes, showed beyond doubt that the South actually preferred disunion.

With mingled grief and indignation the Sun watched the Southern States march out of the Union. It poured its wrath on the head of the mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, when that peculiar statesman suggested, on January 7, 1861, that New York City should also secede. “Why may not New York disrupt the bonds which bind her to a venal and corrupt master?” Wood had inquired.

The Sun had more faith in Lincoln than most of its Democratic contemporaries exhibited. Of his inaugural speech it said:

The day after the fall of Fort Sumter the Sun found a moment to turn on the South-loving Herald:

Shortly afterward the Sun charged that the Herald181 had had in its office a full set of Confederate colours, “ready to fling to the breeze of treason which it and the mayor hoped to raise in this city.” Later in the same year the Sun accused the Daily News and the Staats-Zeitung of disloyalty, and intimated that the Journal of Commerce and the Express were not what they should be. The owner of the Daily News was Ben Wood, a brother of Fernando Wood. In its youth the News had been a newspaper of considerable distinction. It was an offshoot of the Evening Post, and one of its first editors was Parke Godwin, son-in-law of William Cullen Bryant. Another of its early editors was Samuel J. Tilden.

Wood, who was a Kentuckian by birth, made the News a Tammany organ and used it to get himself elected to Congress, where he served as a Representative from 1861 to 1865, constantly opposing the continuation of the war. The Sun’s accusation of disloyalty against the News was echoed in Washington, and for eighteen months, early in the war, the News was suppressed. The Staats-Zeitung, also included in the Sun’s suspicion, was then owned by Oswald Ottendorfer, who had come into possession of the great German daily in 1859, by his marriage to Mrs. Jacob Uhl, widow of the man who established it as a daily.

Presence in the ranks of the copperhead journalists was disastrous to the owner of the Journal of Commerce, Gerard Hallock, who had been one of the great figures of American journalism for thirty years. In the decade before the war Hallock bought and liberated at least a hundred slaves, and paid for their transportation to Liberia; yet he was one of the most uncompromising supporters of a national proslavery policy. When the American Home Missionary Society withdrew its support from slave-holding churches in the182 South, Hallock was one of the founders of the Southern Aid Society, designed to take its place.

In August, 1861, the Journal of Commerce was one of several newspapers presented by the grand jury of the United States Circuit Court for “encouraging rebels now in arms against the Federal government, by expressing sympathy and agreement with them.” Hallock’s paper was forbidden the use of the mails. He sold his interest in the Journal of Commerce, retired from business, never wrote another line for publication, and died four years later.

Another contemporary of the Sun which suffered during the war was the World, then a very young paper. It had first appeared in June, 1860, as a highly moral daily sheet. Its express purpose was to give all the news that it thought the public ought to have. This meant that it intended to exclude from its staid columns all thrilling police reports, slander suits, divorce cases, and details of murders. It refused to print theatrical advertising.

The World had a fast printing-press and obtained an Associated Press franchise. It hired some good men, including Alexander Cummings, who had made his mark on the Philadelphia North American, James R. Spalding, who had been with Raymond on the Courier and Enquirer, and Manton Marble. But the World, stripped of lively human news, was a failure. After two hundred thousand dollars had been sunk in a footless enterprise, the religious coterie retired, and left the World to the worldly.

Its later owners were variously reported to be August Belmont, Fernando Wood, and Benjamin Wood; but it finally passed entirely into the hands of Manton Marble, who made it a free-trade Democratic organ. Marble had learned the newspaper business on the Journal and183 the Traveler in Boston, and in 1858 and 1859 he was on the staff of the Evening Post. In July, 1861, the World and the Courier and Enquirer were consolidated, and Colonel J. Watson Webb, who had owned and edited the latter paper for thirty-four years, retired from newspaper life.

During the Civil War the World was strongly opposed to President Lincoln’s administration. Perhaps this fact accounts for the punishment which befell it through the misdeed of an outsider.

In May, 1864, there was sent to most of the morning-newspaper offices what purported to be a proclamation by the President, appointing a day of fasting and prayer, and calling into military service, by volunteering and draft, four hundred thousand additional troops. This was a fake, engineered by Joseph Howard, Jr., a newspaperman who had been employed on the Tribune, and who put out the hoax for the purpose of influencing the stock-market. The Sun, the Tribune, and the Times did not fall for the hoax, but the Herald, the World, and the Journal of Commerce printed it, stopping their presses when they learned the truth.

General John A. Dix seized the offices of the Herald, the World, and the Journal of Commerce, put soldiers to guard them, and suppressed the papers for several days—all this by order of the President. Howard, the forger, was arrested, and on his confession was sent to Fort Lafayette, where he was a prisoner for several weeks. Manton Marble wrote a bitter letter to Lincoln in protest against what he considered an outrage on the World. Marble remained at the head of the paper until 1876.

The Sun took the setback of Bull Run with better grace than most of the papers—far better than Horace Greeley, who yelled for a truce. It seemed to see that184 this was only the beginning of a long conflict, which must be fought to the end, regardless of disappointments. On August 15, 1861, it declared:

This was printed when the war was very young; when no man dreamed that it would cost the Federal government six times five hundred millions.

The Sun’s editorial articles were not without criticism of the conduct of the war. It was one of the many papers that demanded the resignation of Seward at a time when the Secretary of State was generally blamed for what seemed to be the dilly-dallying of the government. Lincoln himself was still regarded as a politician as well as a statesman—a view which was reflected in the Sun’s comment on the preliminary proclamation of emancipation, September 22, 1862:

The inference in this was that Lincoln had deliberately made his great stroke on the eve of the Republican State convention in New York.

The Tribune declared that the proclamation was “the185 beginning of the end of the rebellion.” “The wisdom of the step is unquestionable,” said the Times; “its necessity indisputable.” The businesslike Herald remarked that it inaugurated “an overwhelming revolution in the system of labour.” The World said that it regretted the proclamation and doubted the President’s power to free the slaves. “We regard it with profound regret,” said the Journal of Commerce. “It is usurpation of power!” shouted the Staats-Zeitung.

Such was the general tone of the New York morning newspapers during the war. Only three—the Sun, the Tribune, and the Times—could be described as out-and-out loyalists. The Sun was for backing up Lincoln whenever it believed him right, and that was most of the time; yet it was free in its criticism of various phases of the conduct of the war.

Like most of the Democrats of New York, the Sun was an admirer of General McClellan, and it believed that his removal from the command of the army was due to politics. But when the election of 1864 came around, the Sun refused to join its party contemporaries in wild abuse of Lincoln and Johnson. On the morning after the Republican nominations it said:

The Sun supported McClellan, praising him for his repudiation of the plank in the Democratic platform which declared the war a failure; but in the last days of the campaign it was frank in its predictions that Lincoln would be elected. On the morning after election it had this to say:

The Sun’s attitude toward the copperheads and deluded pacifists of the North is reflected in an editorial article published on June 5, 1863. The North was then in its worst panic. Only a month previously Lee had defeated Hooker at Chancellorsville, and the victorious Confederates were marching through Maryland into Pennsylvania. At a mass-meeting in Cooper Union, George Francis Train and other copperheads denounced the war, praised Vallandigham, of Ohio, who had been banished into the South for his unpatriotic conduct, and declared for “peace and reunion.” It was largely a Democratic meeting, but the Sun would not stomach the disloyal outburst:

The methods of gathering war news, early in the conflict, were haphazard. The first reports to reach New York from Southern fields were usually the government bulletins, but they were not as trustworthy as the official bulletins of the European war.

On the morning after the first battle of Bull Run, the Sun’s readers were treated to joyous head-lines:

As a matter of fact, only about eighteen thousand troops were engaged on each side.

The Sun had no famous correspondents at the front. It sent three reporters to Virginia in 1861, and these sent mail stories and some telegraph matter, which was of value in supplementing the official bulletins, the Associated Press service, the specials from “Nemo” and “Hermit,” the Sun correspondents in Washington, and the matter rewritten from the Philadelphia and Western newspapers.

The Sun was still a local paper, with a constituency hungry for news of the men of the New York regiments. To the Sun readers the doings of General Meagher, of the Irish Brigade, or Colonel Michael Corcoran, of the Sixty-Ninth Regiment, were more important than the strategic details of a large campaign.

The Sun, like all the Northern papers, was frequently deceived by false reports of Union victories. Federal troops were in Fredericksburg—on the front page—weeks before they were in it in reality; in Richmond, years too soon. But there was no doubt about Gettysburg, although the North did not get the news until the 5th of July. The Sun came out on Monday, the 6th, with these head-lines:

On April 10, 1865, the head-lines were sprinkled with American flags and cuts of Columbia, and the types carried the welcome news for which the North had waited for four long years:

The “etc., etc., etc.,” suggests that the head-writer was too wild with joy to go into more details.

It was not until May, 1862, that the Sun abandoned the ancient custom of giving a large part of the first page to advertising. This reform came late, perhaps because Moses S. Beach was out of the Sun in the early months of the war.

On August 6, 1860, the control of the paper had passed from Mr. Beach to Archibald M. Morrison, a rich young man of religious fervour, who was prompted by other religious enthusiasts to get the Sun and use it for evangelical purposes. Mr. Morrison gave Mr. Beach one hundred thousand dollars for the good-will of the paper, and agreed to pay a rental for the material. Mr. Beach retained the ownership of the building, of the presses, and, indeed, of every piece of type.

The new proprietors of the Sun held a prayer-meeting at noon every day in the editorial rooms. They also injected a bit of religion into the columns by printing on the first page reports of prayer-meetings in the Sailors’ Home and of the doings of missionaries in Syria and elsewhere. In spite of the new spirit that pervaded the office, however, it was still possible for the unregenerate old subscriber to find some little space devoted to the fistic clashes of Heenan and Morrissey. Flies are not caught with vinegar.

The new management made a sort of department paper of the Sun, the front page being divided with the headings “Financial,” “Religious,” “Criminal,” “Calamities,” “Foreign Items,” “Business Items,”190 and “Miscellaneous.” It was not a bad newspaper, and it was quite possible that some business men would prefer it to the Beach kind of sheet; but it is certain that the advertisers were not attracted and that some readers were repelled. One of the latter climbed the stairs of the building at Fulton and Nassau Streets early one morning and nailed to the door of the editorial rooms a placard which read: “Be ye not righteous overmuch!”

During the Morrison régime the Sun refused to accept advertisements on Sunday. Of course, the printers worked on Sunday night, getting out Monday’s paper, but that was something else. The Sun went so far (July 23, 1861) as to urge that the Union generals should be forbidden to attack the enemy on Sundays. “Our troops must have rest, and need the Sabbath,” it said.

William C. Church, one of the rising young newspapermen of New York, was induced to become the publisher under the Sun’s new management. He was only twenty-four years old, but he had had a good deal of newspaper experience in assisting his father, the Rev. Pharcellus Church, to edit and publish the New York Chronicle. After a few weeks in the Sun office, however, Mr. Church saw that the paper, though daily treated with evangelical serum, was not likely to be a howling success; and on December 10, 1860, four months after he took hold as publisher, it was announced that Mr. Church had “withdrawn from the publication of the Sun for the purpose of spending some months in European travel and correspondence for the paper.”

Mr. Church wrote a few letters from Europe, but when the Civil War started he hurried home and went with the joint military and naval expedition headed by General T. W. Sherman and Admiral S. F. Dupont. He was present at the capture of Port Royal, and wrote191 for the Evening Post the first account of it that appeared in the North. Later he acted as a war-correspondent of the Times, writing under the pseudonym “Pierrepont.” In October, 1862, he was appointed a captain of volunteers, and toward the close of the war he received the brevets of major and lieutenant-colonel.

During the war Mr. Church and his brother, Francis Pharcellus Church, established the Army and Navy Journal, and in 1866 they founded that brilliant magazine, the Galaxy—later merged with the Atlantic Monthly—which printed the early works of Henry James. Colonel Church owned the Army and Navy Journal, and was its active editor, until his death, May 23, 1917, at the age of eighty-one. He was the biographer and literary executor of John Ericsson, the inventor, and he wrote also a biography of General Grant. He and his brother Francis were the most distinguished members of a family which, in its various branches, gave no less than seventeen persons to literature.

Francis P. Church’s connection with the Sun was longer and more pleasant than William’s. His writings for it ranged over a period of forty years. He was one of the Sun’s greatest editorial writers, and was the author of the most popular editorial article ever written—“Is There a Santa Claus?” But that comes in a later and far more brilliant period than the one in which William C. Church served the Sun all too briefly.

At the end of 1861, what with the expense of getting war news, and perhaps with the reluctance of the readers to absorb piety, the Sun’s cash-drawer began to warp from lack of weight, and Mr. Beach, who had never relinquished his rights to all the physical part of the paper, took it back. This is the way he announced his resumption of control on New Year’s morning, 1862:

John Vance, who is said to have worked twelve years without a vacation, left the Sun about that time because Mr. Beach refused to name him as editor-in-chief. Vance was a good writer, but he and Beach were often at odds over the Sun’s policies. It probably was Vance’s influence that kept the paper in line for Douglas in the Presidential campaign of 1860—a campaign in which the Sun was run for two months by Beach and for three months by the Morrisonites. Vance, in spite of his leaning toward Douglas, was an intimate friend of Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith, who was an Abolitionist and an advocate of universal brotherhood.

On Beach’s return to the Sun he set out to recover its lost advertising and to restore some of the livelier news features that had been suppressed by the Morrison group. Early in the summer of 1862 he began to shift advertising from the front page, to make room for the big war head-lines that had been run on the second page. He also used maps and woodcuts of cities, ships, and generals. The Sun’s pictures of the Monitor and the Merrimac were printed in one column by deftly standing the gallant iron-clads on their sterns.

It was in this summer that Beach reduced expenses193 and speeded up the issue of the paper by adopting the stereotyping process, one of the greatest advances in newspaper history:

That was rapid work for 1862, but the stereotypers of the present day will take a form from the composing-room, make the papier-mâché impression, pour in the molten metal, and have the curved plate ready for the press in twelve minutes.

The new process saved Beach a lot of money as well as much precious time. Before its coming, when the paper was printed directly from the face of the type, the Sun had to buy a full new set of type six or eight times a year, at an annual cost of six thousand dollars.

The war played havoc with newspaper finances. The price of news-print paper rose to twenty-four cents a pound. All the morning papers except the Sun raised their prices to three or four cents in 1862. The Sun stayed at its old penny.

On January 1, 1863, in order to meet advancing costs and still sell the Sun for one cent, Beach found it necessary to “remove one column from each side of the page”—a more or less ingenuous way of saying that the Sun was reduced from seven columns to five. The columns were shortened, too, and the whole paper was set in agate type. The Sun then looked much as it had appeared twenty years before.

With these economies Beach was able to keep the price at one cent until August 1, 1864, when the Sun slyly said:

Of course nobody had one cent in gold, so the Sun readers grinned and paid two cents in copper.

From that day on the price of the Sun was two cents until July 1, 1916, when Frank A. Munsey bought the Sun, combined his one-cent newspaper, the New York Press, with it, and reduced the price to one cent. On January 26, 1918, by reason of heavy expenses incidental to the war, the Sun, with all the other large papers of New York, increased its price to two cents a copy. In its eighty-five years the Sun has been a penny paper thirty-two years, a two-cent paper fifty-three years.

The Sun was constantly profitable in the decade before the Civil War. The average annual profits from 1850 to 1860 were $22,770. The high-water mark in that period was reached in 1853, when the advertising receipts were $89,964 and the net profits $42,906. Its circulation in September, 1860, was fifty-nine thousand copies daily, of which forty-five thousand were sold on the island of Manhattan.

One of the secrets of the Sun’s popularity in the years when it had no such news guidance as Bennett gave to the Herald, no such spirited editorials as Greeley put into the Tribune, no such political prestige as Raymond brought to the Times, was Moses S. Beach’s belief that195 his public wanted light fiction. The appetite created by Scott and increased by Dickens was keen in America. True, the penny Sun’s literary standards were not of Himalayan height. Hawthorne was too spiritual for its readers, Poe too brief. They wanted wads of adventure and dialogue, dour squires, swooning ladies, hellish villains, handsome heroes, and comic character folk. The young mechanic had to have something he could understand without knitting his brows. For him, “The Grocer’s Apprentice; a Tale of the Great Plague,” and “Dick Egan; or, the San Francisco Bandits,” written for the Sun by H. Warren Trowbridge.

In the days before the Civil War, wives snatched the Sun from husbands to read “Maggie Miller; or, Old Hagar’s Secret,” “written expressly for the Sun” by Mary J. Holmes, already famous through “Lena Rivers” and “Dora Deane.” Ephemeral? They are still reading “Lena Rivers” in North Crossing, Nebraska.

Horatio Alger, Jr., wrote several of his best tales for Mr. Beach, who printed them serially in the Sun and the Weekly Sun. To the New York youth of 1859, who dreamed not that in three years he would be clay on the slope at Fredericksburg, it was the middle of a perfect day to pick up the Sun, read a thrilling news story about Blondin cooking an omelet while crossing the Niagara gorge on a tight rope, and then, turning to the last page, to plunge into “The Discarded Son; or, the Cousin’s Plot,” by the author of “The Secret Drawer,” “The Cooper’s Ward,” “The Gipsy Nurse,” and “Madeline the Temptress”—for all these were written expressly for the Sun by young Mr. Alger. He was only twenty-five then, with the years ahead when, a Unitarian minister, he should see fiction196 material in the New York street-boy and write the epics of Ragged Dick and Tattered Tom.

What did the women readers of the Sun care about the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania or the wonderful trotting campaign of Flora Temple, when they could devour daily two columns of “Jessie Graham; or, Love and Pride”? The Sun might condense A. T. Stewart’s purchase of two city blocks into a paragraph, but there must be no short measure of “Gerald Vane’s Lost One,” by Walter Savage North.

When the religious folk held the reins of the Sun they tried to compromise by printing “Great Expectations” as a serial, but the wise Mr. Beach, on getting the paper back, quickly flung to his hungry readers “Hunted Down,” by Ann S. Stephens. Later in the war he catered to the martial spirit with “Running the Blockade,” by Captain Wheeler, United States army.

One column of foreign news, one of city paragraphs, one of editorial articles, one of jokes and miscellany, one of fiction, and nineteen of advertising—that was about the make-up of Beach’s Sun before the Civil War; that was the prescription which enabled the Sun to sell nearly sixty thousand copies in a city of eight hundred thousand people. It was a fairly well condensed paper. In February, 1857, when it printed one day two and a half columns about the mysterious murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell, the rich dentist of Bond Street, it broke its record for length in a police story.

It was in Moses S. Beach’s time that the Atlantic cable, second only to the telegraph proper as an aid to newspapers, was laid. On August 6, 1858, when Cyrus W. Field telegraphed to the Associated Press from Newfoundland that the ends of the cables had reached both shores of the sea, the Sun said that it was “the greatest197 triumph of the age.” Eleven days later the Sun contained this article:

Perhaps that was written by John Vance, the Irish exile. And perhaps the editorial article which appeared the following day was written by Beach himself:

New York had a great celebration over the laying of the cable that week. The Sun’s building bore a sign illuminated by gaslight:

The first piece of news to come by cable was printed in the Sun of August 27, 1858, and ran:

It will be remembered that this first cable was not a success, and that permanent undersea telegraph service did not come until 1866; but the results produced in 1858 convinced the world that Field and his associates were right, and that perseverance and money would bring perfect results.

After the war, when paper became cheaper, Beach preferred to enlarge the Sun rather than reduce its price to one cent. He never printed more than four pages, but the lost columns were restored, with interest, so that there were eight to a page. Even at two cents a copy it was still the cheapest of the morning papers; still the beloved of the working classes and the desired of the politicians. Just after the war ended the Sun declared that it was read by half a million people.

On January 25, 1868, when the Sun had been in the possession of the Beaches for about thirty of its thirty-five years, a new editor and manager, speaking for a new ownership of the Sun, made this announcement at the head of the editorial column:

Beneath this announcement was a farewell message from Moses Sperry Beach to the readers whom he had served for twenty years:

So Moses S. Beach retired from journalism at forty-five. With the $175,000 paid to him for the Sun, and the profits he had made in his many years of ownership, he was easily rich enough to realize his dream of quiet rural life—a realization that lasted until his death in 1892.

But who was this Dana who was taking up at forty-eight the burden that a younger man was almost wearily laying down?

It is very likely that he was not well known to the readers of the Sun. The newspaper world knew him as one who had been the backbone of Greeley’s Tribune in the turbulent period before the Civil War and for a year after the war was on. The army world knew him as the man who had been chosen by Lincoln and Stanton for important and confidential missions. Students201 knew him as one of the editors of the “New American Encyclopedia.” By many a fireside his name was familiar as the compiler of the “Household Book of Poetry.” Highbrows remembered him as one of the group of geniuses in the Brook Farm colony.

In none of these categories were many of the men who ran with the fire-engines, voted for John Kelly, and bought the Sun. But the Sun was the Sun; it was their paper, and they would have none other; and they would see what this Dana would do with it.

202

CHAPTER IX
THE EARLIER CAREER OF DANA

Day and Dana each did a great thing for the Sun and incidentally for journalism and for America. Day made humanity more intelligent by making newspapers popular. Dana made newspapers more intelligent by making them human.

Day started the Sun at twenty-three and left it at twenty-eight. Dana took the Sun at forty-eight and kept it for thirty years. Each, in his time, was absolute master of the paper.

“The great idea of Day’s time,” wrote E. P. Mitchell on the Sun’s fiftieth birthday, fifteen years after Dana took hold, “was cheapness to the buyer. The great idea of the Sun as it is, was and is interest to the reader.”

Of the nine men who have been owners of the Sun, seven were of down-east Yankee stock, and six of the seven were born in New England. Of the editors-in-chief of the Sun—except in that brief period of the lease by the religious coterie—all have been New Englanders but one, and he was the son of a New Englander.

Dana was born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, on August 8, 1819. His father was Anderson Dana, sixth in descent from Richard Dana, the colonial settler; and his mother, Ann Denison, came of straight Yankee stock.203 The father failed in business at Hinsdale when Charles was a child, and the family moved to Gaines, a village in western New York, where Anderson Dana became a farmer. Here the mother died, leaving four children—Charles Anderson, aged nine; Junius, seven; Maria, three, and David, an infant. The widower went to the home of Mrs. Dana’s parents near Guildhall, Vermont, and there the children were divided among relatives. Charles was sent to live with his uncle, David Denison, on a farm in the Connecticut River Valley.

There was a good teacher at the school near by, and at the age of ten Charles was considered as proficient in his English studies as many boys of fifteen. When he was twelve he had added some Latin to the three R’s. In the judgment of that day he was fit to go to work. His uncle, William Dana, was part owner of the general store of Staats & Dana, in Buffalo, New York, whither the boy was sent by stage-coach. He made himself handy in the store and lived at his uncle’s house.

Buffalo, a distributing place for freight sent West on the Erie Canal, had a population of only fifteen thousand in 1831. Many of Staats & Dana’s customers were Indians, and young Charles added to the store’s efficiency by learning the Seneca language. At night he continued his pursuit of Latin, tackled Greek, read what volumes of Tom Paine he could buy at a book-shop next door, and followed the career, military and political, of the strenuous Andrew Jackson. When he had a day off he went fishing in the Niagara River or visited the Indian reservation.

He was a normal, healthy lad, even if he knew more Latin than he should. When war threatened with Great Britain over the Caroline affair, Dana joined the City Guard and had a brief ambition to be a soldier. He204 was of slender build, but strong. He belonged to the Coffee Club, a literary organization, and he made a talk to it on early English poetry.

Staats & Dana failed in the panic of 1837, and Charles, then eighteen, and the possessor of two hundred dollars saved from his wages, decided to go to Harvard. He left Buffalo in June, 1839, although his father did not like the idea of letting him go to Harvard.

“I know it ranks high as a literary institution, but the influence it exerts in a religious way is most horrible—even worse than Universalism.”

Anderson Dana had a horror of Unitarianism, and had heard that Charles was attending Unitarian meetings.

“Ponder well the paths of thy feet,” he wrote in solemn warning to his perilously venturesome son, “lest they lead down to the very gates of hell.”

Dana entered college without difficulty, and devoted much of his time to philosophy and general literature. He wrote to his friend, Dr. Austin Flint, whom he had met in Buffalo, and who had advised him to go to Harvard.

This was not strange, for besides hearing Unitarian discourse, young Dana was attending Emerson’s lectures at Harvard and reading Carlyle.

In his first term Dana stood seventh in a class of seventy-four. In the spring of 1840 he left Cambridge, but pursued the university studies at the home of his205 uncle in Guildhall, Vermont. Here, at an expense of about a dollar a week, he put in eight hours a day at his books, and for diversion went shooting or tinkered in the farm shop. His sister, then fifteen years old, was there, and he helped her with her studies.

Dana returned to Harvard in the autumn, but not for long. His purse was about empty, and he found no means of replenishing it at Cambridge. In November the faculty gave him permission to be absent during the winter to “keep school.” Dana went to teach at Scituate, Massachusetts, getting twenty-five dollars a month and his board.

His regret at leaving college was keen, for it meant that he would miss Richard Henry Dana’s lectures on poetry, and George Ripley’s on foreign literature.

Young Dana’s mind was full in those days. There was the eager desire for education, with poverty in the path. He thought he saw a way around by going to Germany, where he could live cheaply at a university and be paid for teaching English. There was also a religious struggle.

But the immediate reality was teaching school in a little town where most of the pupils were unruly sailors, and Dana faced it with good-natured philosophy. At the end of a day’s struggle to train some sixty or seventy Scituate youths, he went back to the home of Captain Webb, with whose family he boarded, and read Coleridge for literary quality, Swedenborg for religion, and “Oliver Twist” for diversion. Candles and whale-oil206 lamps were the only illuminants, and Dana’s eyes, never too strong, began to weaken.

He returned to college in the spring of 1841, but his eyes would stand no more. He was about to find work as an agricultural labourer when Brook Farm attracted him. Through George Ripley he was admitted to that association, which sought to combine labour and intellect in a beautiful communistic scheme. He agreed to teach Greek and German and to help with the farm work.

Dana subscribed for three of the thirty shares—at five hundred dollars a share—of the stock of the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, as the company was legally titled. Brook Farm was a fine place of a hundred and ninety-two acres, in the town of Roxbury, about nine miles from Boston. It cost $10,500 and, as most of the shareholders had no money to pay on their stock, mortgages amounting to eleven thousand dollars were immediately clapped on the place—a feat rare in the business world, at once to mortgage a place for more than its cost. Dana, now twenty-three years old, was elected recording secretary, one of the three trustees, and a member of the committees on finance and education.

He remained as a Brook Farmer to the end of the five years that the experiment lasted. There he met Hawthorne, who lingered long enough to get much of the material for his “Blithedale Romance”; Thoreau, who had not yet gone to Walden Pond; William Ellery Channing, second, the author and journalist; Albert Brisbane, the most radical of the group of socialists of his day; and Margaret Fuller, who believed in Brook Farm, but did not live there.

Brook Farm was the perfect democracy. The members did all the work, menial and otherwise, and if there207 was honour it fell to him whose task was humblest. The community paid each worker a dollar a day, and charged him or her about two dollars and fifty cents a week for board. It sold its surplus produce, and it educated children at low rates. George Ripley, the Unitarian minister, was chief of the cow-milking group, and Dana helped him. Dana, as head waiter, served food to John Cheever, valet to an English baronet then staying in Boston.

“And it was great fun,” Dana said, in a lecture delivered at the University of Michigan forty years afterward. “There were seventy people or more, and at dinner they all came in and we served them. There was more entertainment in doing the duty than in getting away from it.”

It was at Brook Farm that Dana first made the acquaintance of Horace Greeley, who, himself a student of Fourier, was interested in the Roxbury experiment, so much more idealistic than Fourierism itself.

Dana took Brook Farm seriously, but he was not one of the poseurs of the colony. No smocks for him, no long hair! He wore a full, auburn beard, but he wore a beard all the rest of his life. He was a handsome, slender youth, and he got mental and physical health out of every minute at the farm. By day he was busy teaching, keeping the association’s books, milking, waiting on table, or caring for the fruit-trees. He was the most useful man on the farm. At night, when the others danced, he was at his books or his writings.

He wrote articles for the Harbinger, and for the Dial, which succeeded the Harbinger as the official organ of the Transcendentalists. Dr. Ripley was the editor of the Harbinger, and he had such brilliant contributors as James Russell Lowell and George William Curtis; but Dana was his mainstay. He wrote book-reviews,208 editorial articles and notes, and not a little verse. His “Via Sacra” is typical of the thoughtful youth:

A Mrs. Macdaniel, a widow, came to Brook Farm from Maryland with her son and two daughters. One of the daughters brought with her an ambition for the stage, but her destiny was to be Mrs. Dana. On March 2, 1846, in New York, Charles A. Dana and Eunice Macdaniel were married. That day, coincidentally, the fire insurance on the main building at Brook Farm lapsed, perhaps through the preoccupation of the recording secretary; and the next day this building, called the Phalanstery, was burned.

That was the beginning of the end of Brook Farm and of Dana’s secluded life. He went to work on the Boston Daily Chronotype for five dollars a week. It was a Congregational paper, owned and edited by Elizur Wright. When Wright was absent, Dana acted209 as editor, and on one of these occasions he caused the Chronotype to come out so “mighty strong against hell,” that Mr. Wright declared, years afterward, that he had to write a personal letter to every Congregational minister in Massachusetts, explaining that the apparent heresy was due to his having left the paper in the charge of “a young man without journalistic experience.”

In February, 1847, Dana went to New York, and Horace Greeley made him city editor of the Tribune at ten dollars a week. Later in that year Dana insisted on an increase of salary, and Greeley agreed to pay him fourteen dollars a week—a dollar less than his own stipend; but in consideration of this huge advance Dana was obliged to give all his talents to the Tribune.

Dana still nursed his desire to see Europe, but he had given up the idea of teaching in a German university. Newspaper work had captured him. Germany was still attractive, but now as a place of news, for the rumblings against the rule of Metternich were being heard in central Europe. And in France there was a sweep of socialism, a subject which still held the idealistic Dana, and the beginning of the revolution in Paris (February 24, 1848).

Dana told Greeley of his European ambition, but Greeley threw cold water on it, saying that Dana—not yet thirty—knew nothing about foreign politics. Dana asked how much the Tribune would pay for a letter a week if he went abroad “on his own,” and Greeley offered ten dollars, which Dana accepted. He made a similar agreement with the New York Commercial Advertiser and the Philadelphia North American, and contracted to send letters to the Harbinger and the Chronotype for five dollars a week.

“That gave me forty dollars a week for five letters,”210 said Dana afterward; “and when the Chronotype went up, I still had thirty-five dollars. On this I lived in Europe nearly eight months, saw plenty of revolutions, supported myself there and my family in New York, and came home only sixty-three dollars out for the whole trip.” Not a bad outcome for what was probably the first correspondence syndicate ever attempted.

The trip did wonders for Dana. He saw the foreign “improvers of mankind” in action, more violent than visionary; saw theory dashed against the rocks of reality. He came back a wiser and better newspaperman, with a knowledge of European conditions and men that served him well all his life. There is seen in some of his descriptions the fine simplicity of style that was later to make the Sun the most human newspaper.

Social experiments still interested Dana after his return to New York in the spring of 1849, but he was able to take a clearer view of their practicability than he had been in the Brook Farm days. He still favoured association and cooperation, and every sane effort toward the amelioration of human misery, but he now knew that there was no direct road to the millennium.

Once home, however, and settled, not only as managing editor, but as a holder of five shares of stock in the Tribune, Dana was kept busy with things other than socialistic theories. Slavery and the tariff were the overshadowing issues of the day.

Greeley was the great man of the Tribune office, but Dana, in the present-day language of Park Row, was the live wire almost from the day of his return from Europe. When Greeley went abroad, Dana took charge. Greeley now drew fifty dollars a week; Dana got twenty-five, Bayard Taylor twenty, George Ripley fifteen. Dana’s five shares of stock netted him about two thousand dollars a year in addition to his salary.

Here is a part of a letter which Dana wrote in 1852 to James S. Pike, the Washington correspondent of the Tribune:

The solemn phrases of transcendentalism had vanished from the tip of Dana’s pen.

In the fight over slavery in the fifties, the effort of Greeley and Dana was against the further spread of the institution over new American territory, rather than for its complete overthrow. When Greeley was at the helm, the Tribune appeared to admit the possibility of secession, a forerunner of “Let the erring sisters depart in peace.” But when Dana was left in charge, the editorials pleaded for the integrity of the Union at any cost. Greeley was heart and soul for liberty, but his fist was not in the fight. Of the political situation in 1854, Henry Wilson wrote, in his “Rise and Fall of the Slave Power”:

Dana went farther than Greeley cared to go, particularly in his attacks on the Democrats; so far, in212 fact, that Greeley often pleaded with him to stop. Greeley wrote to James S. Pike:

Greeley wrote to Dana from Washington, where Dana’s radicalism was making his colleague uncomfortable:

With all Dana’s editorial work—and he and Greeley made the Tribune the most powerful paper of the fifties, with a million readers—he found time for the purely literary. He translated and published a volume of German stories and legends under the title “The Black Ant.” He edited a book of views of remarkable places213 and objects in all countries. In 1857 was published his “Household Book of Poetry,” still a standard work of reference. He was criticised for omitting Poe from the first edition, and at the next printing he added “The Raven,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee.” Poe and Cooper were among the literary gods whom Dana refused to worship in his youth, but in later life he changed his opinion of the poet.

With George Ripley, his friend in Harvard, at Brook Farm, and in the Tribune office, Dana prepared the “New American Encyclopedia,” which was published between 1858 and 1863. It was a huge undertaking and a success. Dana and Ripley carefully revised it ten years afterward. In 1882, with Rossiter Johnson, Dana edited and published a collection of verse under the title “Fifty Perfect Poems.”

Although Dana persisted that the Union must not fall, Greeley still believed, as late as December, 1860, that it would “not be found practical to coerce” the threatening States into subjection. When war actually came, however, Greeley at last adopted the policy of “No compromise, no concessions to traitors.”

The Tribune’s cry, “Forward to Richmond!” sounded from May, 1861, until Bull Run, was generally attributed to Dana. Greeley himself made it plain that it was not his:

As a matter of fact, “Forward to Richmond!” was214 phrased by Fitz-Henry Warren, then head of the Tribune’s correspondence staff in Washington. He came from Iowa, where in his youth he was editor of the Burlington Hawkeye. He resigned from the Tribune late in 1861 to take command of the First Iowa Cavalry, which he organized. In 1862 he became a brigadier-general, and he was later brevetted a major-general. In 1869 he was the American minister to Guatemala. From being one of the men around Greeley he became one of the men with Dana, and in 1875–1876 he did Washington correspondence for the Sun, and wrote many editorial articles for it.

In 1861 Dana was an active advocate of Greeley’s candidacy for the United States Senate, and almost got him nominated. If Greeley had gone to the Senate, Dana might have continued on the Tribune; but it became evident, before the war was a year old, that one newspaper was no longer large enough for both men. The sprightly, aggressive, unhesitating, and practical Dana, and the ambitious, but eccentric and somewhat visionary Greeley found their paths diverging. The circumstances under which they parted were thus described by Dana in a letter to a friend:

That was the undramatic and somewhat disappointing end of Dana’s fourteen years on the Tribune. He was forty-three years old and not rich. All he had was what he got from the sale of his Tribune stock and what he had saved from the royalties on his books.

From the literary view-point he was doubtless the best-equipped newspaperman in America, but there was no great place open for him then.

Dana’s work on the Tribune had attracted the attention of most of the big men of the North, including Edwin M. Stanton, who in January, 1862, was appointed Secretary of War in place of Simon Cameron. Stanton asked Dana to come into the War Department, and assigned him to service upon a commission to audit unsettled claims against the quartermaster’s department. While in Memphis on this work he first met General Grant, then prosecuting the war in the West.

In the autumn of 1862, Stanton offered to Dana a post as second Assistant Secretary of War, and Dana, having accepted, told a newspaperman of his appointment.216 When the news was printed, the irascible Stanton was so much annoyed—although without any apparent reason—that he withdrew the appointment. Dana then became a partner with George W. Chadwick, of New York, and Roscoe Conkling, of Utica, in an enterprise for buying cotton in that part of the Mississippi Valley which the Union army occupied.

Dana and Chadwick went to Memphis in January, 1863, armed with letters from Secretary Stanton to General Grant and other field commanders. But no sooner had their cotton operations begun than Dana saw the evil effect that this traffic was having. It had aroused a fever of speculation. Army officers were forming partnerships with cotton operators, and even privates wanted to buy cotton with their pay. The Confederacy was being helped rather than hindered.

Disregarding his own fortunes, Dana called upon General Grant and advised him to “put an end to an evil so enormous, so insidious and so full of peril to the country.” Grant at once issued an order designed to end the traffic, but the cotton-traders succeeded in having it nullified by the government.

Then Dana went to Washington, saw President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton, and convinced them that the cotton trade should be handled by the Treasury Department. As a result of Dana’s visit, Lincoln issued his proclamation declaring all commercial intercourse with seceded States to be unlawful. Thus Dana patriotically worked himself out of a paying business.

Yet his unselfishness was not without a reward. It reestablished his friendly relations with Stanton, and won for him the President’s confidence.

Just then there was an important errand to be done. Many complaints had been made against General Grant. Certain temperance people had told Lincoln that Grant217 was drinking heavily, and although Lincoln jested—“Can you tell me where Grant buys his liquor? I would like to distribute a few barrels of the same brand among my other major-generals”—he really wished to have all doubts settled.

The President and Mr. Stanton chose Dana for the mission. It was an open secret. If Grant did not know that Dana was coming to make a report on his conduct, all the general’s staff knew it. General James Harrison Wilson, biographer of Dana—and, with Dana, biographer of Grant—wrote of this situation:

Wilson was at this time the inspector-general of Grant’s army. He consulted with John A. Rawlins, Grant’s austere young adjutant-general and actual chief of staff, and the two officers agreed that Dana must be taken into complete confidence. Wilson wrote:

Dana and Wilson and Rawlins made the best of a delicate, difficult situation. Dana was taken into headquarters “on the footing of an officer of the highest rank.” His commission was that of a major of volunteers, but his functions were so important that he was called “Mr. Dana” rather than “Major Dana.” Dana himself never used the military title.

Dana sent his first official despatches to Stanton in218 March, 1863, from before Vicksburg. Grant’s staff made clear to him the plan of the turning movement by which the gunboats and transports were to be run past the Vicksburg batteries while the army marched across the country, and Dana made most favourable reports to Washington on the general’s strategy.

Dana saw not only real warfare, but a country that was new to him. After a trip into Louisiana he wrote to his friend, William Henry Huntington:

Under a flag of truce Dana went close to Vicksburg, where he was met by a Confederate major of artillery:

Dana was with Grant on the memorable night of April 16, 1863, when the squadron of gunboats, barges, and transports ran the Vicksburg forts. From that time on until July he accompanied the great soldier. It was Dana who received and communicated Stanton’s despatch giving to Grant “full and absolute authority to enforce his own commands, and to remove any person who, by ignorance, inaction, or any cause, interferes with or delays his operations.”

Dana was in many marches and battles. Like the officers of Grant’s staff, he slept in farmhouses, and ate pork and hardtack or what the land provided. The move on Vicksburg was a brilliant campaign, and in ten days Dana saw as much of war as most men of the Civil War saw in three years. Dana sent despatches to Washington describing the battles at Champion’s Hill and the Big Black Bridge, the investment of Vicksburg, and the establishment of a line of supply from the North. Through Dana’s eyes the government began to see Grant as he really was.

Dana, with either Grant or Wilson, rode over all the country of the Vicksburg campaign, often under fire. He was present at Grant’s councils, and rode into Vicksburg with him after its surrender. Dana’s view of the great soldier’s personality is given in something he wrote many years later, long after their friendship was ended:

Here is Dana’s picture of Rawlins, sent to Stanton220 on July 12, 1863—eight days after the fall of Vicksburg:

In spite of this criticism, Dana admired Rawlins. Without him, he said, Grant would not have been the same man.

After Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Dana returned to Washington. He was now an Assistant Secretary of War, and his success as an official reporter on the conduct of the Army of the Tennessee had been so great that Stanton sent him to cover, in the same way, the operations of the Army of the Cumberland, going first to General Rosecrans at Chattanooga. Dana saw the hottest of the great fight at Chickamauga, and galloped twelve miles to send his despatches about it to Stanton. He made blunt reports to the government on the unfitness of Rosecrans:

After a conference at Louisville between Stanton and Grant, Rosecrans was relieved and Thomas became commander of the Army of the Cumberland. A fine soldier and a modest man, Thomas was disinclined to supplant a superior.

“You have got me this time,” he said to Dana, “but221 there is nothing for a man to do in such a case but obey orders.”

Dana’s despatches had made Stanton realize the importance of holding Chattanooga, and the Secretary of War ordered Thomas to defend it at all hazards.

Dana was not only a useful eye for the government, but he was a valued companion for General Wilson and other officers who went with him on his missions. He knew more poetry than any other man in the army except General Michael Lawler, an Illinois farmer, whose boast it was that on hearing any line of standard English verse he could repeat the next line. Dana, the compiler of the “Household Book of Poetry,” would try to catch Lawler, but in vain. Dana was not so literal as the Illinois general, but General Wilson says that he “seemed never to forget anything he had ever read.”

The great advantage of Dana’s despatches to Stanton was that they gave a picture of the doings in his field of work that was not biased by military pride or ambition. He wrote what he saw and knew, without counting the effect on the generals concerned. For one illuminating example, there was his story of the final attack in the battle of Missionary Ridge. To read Grant or Sherman, one would suppose that the triumphant assault was planned precisely as it was executed; but Dana’s account of that fierce day is the one that must be relied upon:

No wonder that even when Lincoln was confined to his chamber by illness, Dana’s despatches were brought to him; “not merely because they are reliable,” as Assistant Secretary of War Watson wrote to Dana, “but for their clearness of narrative and their graphic pictures of the stirring events they describe.” A conservative tribute to the best reporter of the Civil War.

Dana returned to Washington about the beginning of 1864 to take up office tasks, and particularly the reorganization of the Cavalry Bureau. Dishonest horse-dealers were plundering the government, and Dana never rested until he had sent enough of these rogues to prison to frighten the rest of the band. Dana was a good office man; he worked, says James Harrison Wilson, “like a skilful bricklayer.” And as he relieved Stanton of much of the routine of the War Department, the Secretary supported him in his assaults on dishonest contractors, even when the political pressure brought to bear for their protection was at its highest.

Lincoln sent Dana to report Grant’s progress in the Virginia campaign that opened in May, 1864. On the 26th, three weeks after the march began, he was able223 to notify Washington of an entire change in the morale of the contending armies:

In the eventful weeks of that early summer Dana became an observer for Grant as well as for the government. It was evident to Dana that the great soldier, and not Washington, must decide what was to be done. In a despatch from Washington, whither he had returned at Grant’s request, Dana said to the general:

Longstreet’s Confederates were coming down the Shenandoah Valley, and Grant, taking heed of Dana’s significant message, sent Sheridan to dispose of them. Then, as Grant himself was stationed in front of Petersburg, Dana resumed his activities in the office at Washington.

“It has fallen to the lot of no other American,” says General Wilson, “to serve as the confidential medium of communication between the army and the government and between the government and the general-in-chief, as it did to Dana during the War of the Rebellion.”

One pleasant errand which fell to Dana was the delivery to Sheridan, after his victory over Early at Cedar Creek, of his promotion to major-general. This entailed a journey on horseback through the Valley of Virginia, and the constant danger of capture by Mosby’s guerrillas;224 but Dana, who greatly admired Sheridan, was glad to take the chance.

When the news came to Washington of the fall of Richmond, in April, 1865, Secretary Stanton sent Dana to the Confederate capital to gather up its archives. Many of these historically valuable papers had been removed and scattered, but Dana collected what he could and sent them to Washington. He wanted to be present with Grant at Lee’s surrender, but fate kept him in Richmond, for Lincoln was there, and needed him. When at last he got away, Grant had left Appomattox. Dana joined him en route, and together they reached Washington on the day before the President’s assassination.

It was on the day of his arrival that Dana went to the President to ask him whether it would be well to order the arrest of Jacob Thompson, a Confederate commissioner who was trying to go from Canada to Europe through Maine. Lincoln returned the historic reply:

A few hours after the President’s death, however, Stanton ordered Dana to obtain Thompson’s arrest.

Dana was active in unearthing the conspiracy that led to the assassination. A month later, acting under Stanton’s injunctions, he wrote the order to General Miles authorizing him to manacle and fetter Jefferson Davis and Clement C. Clay, Jr., whenever he thought it advisable, the Secretary of War being in fear that some of the prisoners of state might escape or kill themselves.

Dana then and afterward resented the suggestion that225 the president of the fallen Confederacy had met with cruelty or injustice while he was confined in Fortress Monroe. In his “Recollections of the Civil War,” he said:

A new newspaper, the Daily Republican, was started in Chicago, a few weeks after the close of the Civil War, by Senator Trumbull and other prominent Illinoisans. They asked Dana to become its editor. His work in the War Department was done, and he had hoped to go into business, for his own estimate of his power as a journalist was not as flattering as the opinions of those who knew him. Yet the Chicago proposition was attractive on paper, for its capital was fixed at the large sum of five hundred thousand dollars—an amount sufficient, in those days, to carry on any intelligently managed journal.

Dana resigned as Assistant Secretary of War on July 1, 1865, went to Chicago, and became editor of the Republican. No man was more intellectually fit for the editorship of a newspaper in that hour of reconstruction. He had been a real Republican from the founding of the party. He cared little for the new President, Andrew Johnson, and the Republican was more inclined toward the side of Stanton, who differed with Johnson as to the methods which should be used226 in the remaking of the South. Of Johnson, Dana wrote to General Wilson:

The statement that the capital stock of the Republican was fixed at half a million dollars must now be qualified. It was fixed on paper, but not in the banks. Little of the money was actually paid in, and some of the subscribers were not solvent. Dana worked hard with his pen, but the Republican had not enough backing to hold it up. After one year of it Dana resigned and came East, determined to start a paper in New York.

He had friends of influence and wealth who were glad to be associated with him. These included:

Thomas Hitchcock
Isaac W. England
Charles S. Weyman
John H. Sherwood
M. O. Roberts
George Opdyke
E. D. Smith
F. A. Palmer
William H. Webb
Roscoe Conkling
A. B. Cornell
E. D. Morgan
David Dows
John C. Hamilton
Amos R. Eno
S. B. Chittenden
Freeman Clarke
Thomas Murphy
William M. Evarts
Cyrus W. Field
E. C. Cowdin
Salem H. Wales
Theron R. Butler
Marshall B. Blake
F. A. Conkling
A. A. Low
Charles E. Butler
Dorman B. Eaton

The most eminent of this distinguished group was, of course, William M. Evarts, then the leader of the American bar. He had been counsel for the State of New York in the Lemmon slave case, pitted against Charles O’Connor, counsel for the State of Virginia.227 He became chief counsel for President Johnson in the impeachment proceedings of 1868, and later was Johnson’s Attorney-General. He was chief counsel for the United States in the Alabama arbitration, senior counsel for Henry Ward Beecher in the Tilton case, Secretary of State under Hayes, and a United States Senator from 1885 to 1891.

Roscoe Conkling was a United States Senator from New York at the time when Dana bought the Sun. He was one of Grant’s strongest supporters, and led the third-term movement in 1880. His brother, Frederick Augustus Conkling, was the Republican candidate for mayor of New York in the first year that Dana controlled the Sun, although later he changed his politics, supporting Tilden in 1876, and Hancock in 1880.

Edwin D. Morgan was Conkling’s colleague in the Senate, where he served from 1863 to 1869. He was Governor of New York from 1858 to 1862. He, like most of Dana’s associates, was a Grant man, and it was Morgan who managed Grant’s second Presidential campaign.

Alonzo B. Cornell, then only thirty-six years old, had risen from being a boy telegrapher to a directorship in the Western Union. He was already prominent in the Republican politics of New York State, and was afterward Governor for three years (1880–1882).

George Opdyke, a loyal Lincoln man, had been mayor of New York in the trying years of 1862 and 1863.

Cyrus W. Field had won world-wide distinction as the Columbus of modern times, as John Bright called him. Two years before Dana bought the Sun Field had succeeded, after many reverses, in making the Atlantic cable a permanent success.

Amos R. Eno, merchant and banker, was the man who had made New York laugh by building the Fifth228 Avenue Hotel so far north—away up at Twenty-Third Street—that it was known as Eno’s Folly. This he did nearly ten years before Dana went to the Sun, and in 1868 the hotel was not only the most fashionable in the United States, but the most profitable.

A. A. Low was a merchant and the father of Seth Low, later mayor of New York. William H. Webb was a big ship-builder. Thomas Murphy was a Republican politician whom Grant made collector of the port of New York, and who gave Grant his place at Long Branch as a summer home.

At least three of the men in the list were active in the Sun office. Thomas Hitchcock was a young man of wealth and scholarship who had become acquainted with Dana when both were interested in Swedenborgianism. He wrote, among other books, a catechism of that doctrine. For many years he contributed to the Sun, under the name “Matthew Marshall,” financial articles which appeared on Mondays, and which were regarded as the best reviews and criticisms of their kind.

Charles S. Weyman got out the Weekly Sun, and edited that delightful column, “Sunbeams.”

Salem H. Wales was a merchant whose daughter became Mrs. Elihu Root. Dorman B. Eaton was one of the pioneers of civil-service reform. Marshall O. Roberts, F. A. Palmer, David Dows, and E. C. Cowdin were great names in the business and financial world.

Why Dana and his friends did not start a new paper is explained in the following letter, written by Dana to General Wilson:

The “Tammany Hall real estate” was the building at the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets, where Tammany kept its headquarters from 1811, when it moved from Martling’s Long Room, at Nassau and Spruce Streets, to 1867, when Dana and his friends bought the building with the expectation of starting a new paper. If Moses S. Beach had attracted Dana’s attention to the Sun in time, he might have sold him, as well as the paper, his own building at Nassau and Fulton Streets. But the Tammany Hall building was a better-placed home for the Sun than its old quarters. It faced City Hall Park and was a part of Printing-House Square. Dana was right about the productiveness of the real estate, for no spot in New York sees more pedestrians go by than the Nassau-Frankfort corner. The Sun lived there for forty-three years, and its present home, taken when the old hall became too small and ancient, is only a block away.

The first number of the Sun issued under Dana—Monday, January 27, 1868—contained a long sketch of Tammany Hall and its former home, concluding:

Dana changed the appearance of the Sun overnight. He kept it as a folio, for he always believed in a four-page paper, even when he was printing ten pages, but he reduced the number of columns on a page from eight to seven, widening each column a little.

The principal head-lines, which had been irregular in size and two to the page, were made smaller and more uniform, and four appeared at the top of the front page. The editorial articles, which had been printed in minion, now appeared a size larger, in brevier, and the heads on them were changed to the simple, dignified full-face type of the size that is still used.

Dana changed the title-head of the Sun from Roman, which it had been from the beginning, to Old English, as it stands to-day. He also changed the accompanying emblem. It had been a variation of the seal of the State of New York, with the sun rising in splendour behind mountains; on the right, Liberty with her Phrygian cap held on a staff, gazing at an outbound vessel; on the left, Justice with scales and sword, so facing that if not blindfolded she would see a locomotive and a train of cars crossing a bridge. These classic figures were kept, but the eagle—the State crest—which brooded above the sunburst in Beach’s time, was removed, so that the rays went skyward without hindrance.

Dana liked “It Shines for All,” the Sun’s old motto—everybody liked it, but only one newspaper, the Herald, ever had the effrontery to pilfer it—but he took it from231 the scroll in the emblem and replaced there the State motto, “Excelsior.”

The Sun, under its new master, rose auspiciously—master, not masters, for in spite of the number of his financial associates, Dana was absolute. The men behind him realized the folly of dividing authority. The Sun, whether under Day or one of the Beaches, had always been a one-man paper. Therefore it succeeded, just as the Herald, another journal governed by an autocrat, went ahead; but with the Tribune, where the stockholders ruled and argued, things were different.

Dana was a man whose natural intellectual gifts had been augmented by his travels, his experience on the Tribune, his exploits in the war, and his association with the big men of his time. Add to all this his solid financial backing and his acquirement of a paper with a large circulation, and the combination seemed an assurance of success. Yet, had Dana lacked the peculiarly human qualities that were his, the indefinable newspaper instinct that knows when a tom-cat on the steps of the City Hall is more important than a crisis in the Balkans, the Sun would have set.

Only genius could enable a lofty-minded Republican,232 with a Republican aristocracy behind him, to take over the Sun and make a hundred thousand mechanics and tradesmen, nearly all Democrats, like their paper better than ever before. And that is what Dana did, except that he added to the Sun’s former readers a new army of admirers, recruited by the magic of his pen.

233

CHAPTER X
DANA: HIS “SUN” AND ITS CITY

When Dana came into control of the Sun, the city of New York, which then included only Manhattan and the Bronx, had less than a million population, yet it supported, or was asked to support, almost as many newspapers as it has to-day. That was the day of the great personal editor. Bennett had his Herald, with James Gordon Bennett, Jr., as his chief helper. Horace Greeley was known throughout America as the editor of the Tribune. Henry J. Raymond was at the head of the Times. Manton Marble—who died in England in 1917—was the intellectual chief of the highly intellectual World.

The greatest Republican politician of that day, Thurlow Weed, was the editor of the Commercial Advertiser. He had just changed his political throne from the Astor House to the comparatively new Fifth Avenue Hotel. Weed was seventy-one years old, but not the Nestor of New York editors, for William Cullen Bryant was three years his senior and still the active editor of the Evening Post. The Evening Express, later to be incorporated with the Mail, was ruled by the brothers Brooks, James as editor-in-chief and Erastus as manager. David M. Stone ran the Journal of Commerce. Ben Wood owned234 the only penny paper in town—the Evening News. Marcus M. Pomeroy, better known as Brick Pomeroy, had just started his sensational sheet, the Democrat, on the strength of the reputation he had won in the West as editor of the La Crosse Democrat. Later he changed the title of the Democrat to Pomeroy’s Advance Thought.

These were the men who assailed or defended the methods of the reconstruction of the South; who stood up for President Johnson, or cried for his impeachment; who supported the Presidential ambitions of Grant, then the looming figure in national politics, or decried the elevation of one whose fame had been exclusively military; who hammered at the wicked gates of Tammany Hall, or tried to excuse its methods.

Tweed had not yet committed his magnificent atrocities of loot, but he was practically the boss of the city, at the same time a State Senator and the street commissioner. John Kelly, then forty-six—two years the senior of the boss—was sheriff of New York. Richard Croker, who was to succeed Kelly as Kelly succeeded Tweed at the head of the wigwam, was then a stocky youth of twenty-five, engineer of a fire-department steamer and the leader of the militant youth of Fourth Avenue. He was already actively concerned in politics, allied with the Young Democracy that was rising against Tweed. In the year when Dana took the Sun, Croker was elected an alderman.

A slender boy of ten played in those days in Madison Square Park, hard by his home in East Twentieth Street, just east of Broadway. His name was Theodore Roosevelt.

New York’s richest man was William B. Astor, with a fortune of perhaps fifty million dollars. He was then seventy-six years old, but he walked every day235 from his home in Lafayette Place—from its windows he could see the Bowery, which had been a real bouwerie in his boyhood—to the little office in Prince Street where he worked all day at the tasks that fell upon the shoulders of the Landlord of New York. He probably never had heard of John D. Rockefeller, a prosperous young oil man in the Middle West.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, only two years younger than Astor, was president of the New York Central Railroad, and was linking together the great railway system that is now known by his name, battling the while against the strategy of Jay Gould and his sinister associates. By far the most imposing figure in financial America, Vanderbilt had everything in the world that he wanted—except Dexter, and that great trotter was in the stable of Robert Bonner, who was not only rich enough to keep Dexter, but could afford to pay Henry Ward Beecher thirty thousand dollars for a novel, “Norwood,” to be printed serially in the Ledger.

Only one other New Yorker of 1868 ranked in wealth with Astor and Vanderbilt—Alexander T. Stewart, whose yearly income was perhaps greater than either’s. He was then worth about thirty million dollars, and he had astonished the business world by building a retail shop on Broadway, between Ninth and Tenth Streets—now half of Wanamaker’s—at a cost of two millions and three-quarters.

In Wall Street the big names were August Belmont, Larry Jerome, Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, and Jim Fisk. Gould and Fisk were doing what they pleased with Erie stock. They and the leaders of Tammany Hall, like Tweed and Peter B. Sweeny and Slippery Dick Connelly, hatched schemes for fortunes as they sat either in the Hoffman House, where Fisk sometimes lived, or at dinner in the house in West Twenty-Third236 Street, where the only woman at table was Josie Mansfield.

Of the great hotels of that day not more than one or two are left. The Fifth Avenue then took rank not only as the finest hostelry in New York, but perhaps in the world. The Hoffman House was running as a European-plan hotel. It had not yet become a Democratic headquarters, for the Democrats still preferred the New York, on the American plan. The other big “everything included” hotels were the St. Nicholas, where Middle West folk stayed, and the Metropolitan, where the exploiter of mining-stock held forth. Among the smaller and European-plan hotels were the St. James, the St. Denis, the Everett, and the Clarendon, all more or less fashionable, and the Brevoort and the Barcelona, patronized largely by foreigners.

The restaurants were limited in number, for New York had not acquired the restaurant habit as strongly as it has it now. When you have mentioned Delmonico’s, Taylor’s, Curet’s, and the Café de l’Université, you have almost a complete list of the places to which fashion drove in its brougham after the theatre.

The playhouses were plentiful enough, considering the size of the city. None was north of Twenty-Fourth Street. Wallack’s, at Broadway and Thirteenth Street, was considered the best theatre in America. The Grand Opera House, at Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, was called the handsomest. Surely it was costly enough, for Jim Fisk, who had his own way with Erie finances, paid eight hundred thousand dollars of the railroad stockholders’ gold for it, to buy it from the railroad later with some of its own stock, of problematical value.

The Academy of Music, at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, housed Italian opera. The Théâtre Français,237 also on Fourteenth Street, but near Sixth Avenue, was the original home in this country of opera bouffe. Opera burlesque prevailed at the Fifth Avenue Opera House, on West Twenty-Fourth Street. The Olympic, on Broadway near Houston, had been built for Laura Keene; it was there that Edward A. Sothern first appeared under his own name. Barney Williams, the Sun’s first newsboy, was managing the Broadway Theatre, in Broadway near Broome Street. Edwin Booth was building a fine theatre of his own at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street—destined to score an artistic but not a financial success.

Club life was well advanced. In the house of the Century Club, then in East Fifteenth Street, the member would come upon Bayard Taylor, George William Curtis, Parke Godwin, William Allen Butler, Edwin Booth, Lester Wallack, John Jacob Astor, August Belmont. The Union League was young, and was just about to move from a rented home at Broadway and Seventeenth Street to the Jerome house, at Madison Avenue and Twenty-Sixth Street, where it remained until 1881, then to go to its present home in Fifth Avenue at Thirty-Ninth Street. In the Union League could be seen John Jay, Horace Greeley, William E. Dodge, and other enthusiastic Republicans. Upon occasion Mr. Dana went there, but he was not an ardent clubman.

All in all, the New York of Dana’s first year as an absolute editor was an interesting island, with just about as much of virtue and vice, wisdom and folly, sunlight and drabness, as may be found on any island of nine hundred thousand people. He did not set out to reform it. He did not try to turn the general journalism of that day out of certain deep grooves into which it had sunk. He had his own ideas of what news was, how it should be written, how displayed; but they238 were ideas, not theories. He was not perturbed because the Sun had not handled a big story just the way the Herald or the Tribune dished it up; nor was it of the slightest consequence to him what Mr. Bennett or Mr. Greeley thought of the way the Sun used the story.

Dana made no rules. Other newspapers have printed commandments for their writers, but the Sun has never wasted a penny’s worth of paper on rules. If there ever was a rule in the office, it was “Be interesting,” and it was not only an unwritten rule, but generally an unspoken one.

Dana’s realization that journalism was a profession which could be neither guided nor governed by set rules was expressed in a speech made by him before the Wisconsin Editorial Association at Milwaukee, in 1888:

In other words, don’t loaf, don’t cheat, don’t dissemble, don’t bully, don’t be narrow, don’t grouch. Mr. Dana’s maxims were as applicable to any other business as to his own. In a lecture delivered at Cornell University in 1894—three years before his death—Mr. Dana uttered more maxims “of value to a newspaper-maker”:

All these maxims were quite as useful to the merchant as to the newspaperman. They related to the broad conduct of life. They counselled against folly, so far as the making of newspapers was concerned, but they did not convey the mysterious prescription with which Dana revived American journalism from that trance in which it had forgotten that everybody is human and that the English language is alive and fluid.

If there had been rules by which a living newspaper240 could be made from men and ink and wood-pulp, Dana would have known them; but there were none, nor are there now. The present editor of the Sun, E. P. Mitchell, who knew Dana better than any other man knew him, said in an address at the Pulitzer School of Journalism a few years ago:

Mr. Dana had no regard for typographical gymnastics. To him a head-line was something to fill the mind rather than the eye. He knew the utter impossibility of trying to startle the reader eight times in as241 many adjacent columns—a feat which Mr. Bennett and some of his imitators seemed to consider feasible. Surprise is not the only emotion upon which a newspaper can play. The Sun stretched all the human octaves from horror to amusement, but the keys of horror were only touched when it was necessary.

Make rules for news? How is it possible to make a rule for something the value of which lies in the fact that it is the narrative of what never had happened, in exactly the same way, before? John Bogart, a city editor of the Sun who absorbed the Dana idea of news and the handling thereof, once said to a young reporter:

“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”

A belief has been accepted in some quarters that the Sun of Dana’s time preferred college men for its staff. This was in a way false, but it is true that a great242 many of the Sun’s young men came from the colleges. Mr. Dana’s views on the matter of educational equipment were quite plainly expressed by himself:

Dana saw the usefulness to a reporter of certain qualities which are acquired neither at school nor in the office:

Dana was catholic not only in his taste for news, but in his idea of the manner of writing it. Nothing gave him more uneasiness than to find that a Sun man was drifting into a stereotyped way of handling a news story or writing an editorial article. Even as he advised young men to read everything from Shakespeare and Milton down, he repeatedly warned them against the imitation, unconscious or otherwise, of another’s style:

If a writer could not keep on without aping the literary fashion of another, then he was not for the Sun. Dana wanted good English always, but a constant spice of variety in the treatment of a subject, and in the style itself; therefore he chose a variety of men.

If he believed that the best report of a ship-launching could be written by a longshoreman, he would have hired the hard-handed toiler and assigned him to the job. He wanted men who would look at the world with open eyes and find the new things that were going on. Dana knew that they were going on. His vision had not been narrowed by too close application to newspaper offices where editors and managing editors had handled the stock stories year in and year out in the same wearisome way.

To Dana life was not a mere procession of elections, legislatures, theatrical performances, murders, and lectures. Life was everything—a new kind of apple, a crying child on the curb, a policeman’s epigram, the exact weight of a candidate for President, the latest style in whiskers, the origin of a new slang expression, the idiosyncrasies of the City Hall clock, a strange four-master in the harbour, the head-dresses of Syrian girls, a new president or a new football coach at Yale, a vendetta in Mulberry Bend—everything was fish to the great net of Dana’s mind.

Human interest! It is an old phrase now, and one245 likely to cause lips to curl along Park Row. But the art of picking out the happenings of every-day life that would appeal to every reader, if so depicted that the events lived before the reader’s eye, was an art that did not exist until Dana came along. Ben Day knew the importance of the trifles of life and the hold they took on the people who read his little Sun, but it remained for Dana to bring out in journalism the literary quality that made the trifle live. Whether it was an item of three lines or an article of three columns, it must have life, or it had no place in the Sun.

Dana did not teach his men how to do it. If he taught them anything, it was what not to do. His men did the work he wanted them to do, not by following instructions, but by being unhampered by instructions. He set the writer free and let him go his own way to glory or failure. There were no conventions except those of decency, of respect for the English language. Because newspapermen had been doing a certain thing in a certain way for a century, Dana could not see why he and his men should go in the same wagon-track. With a word or an epigram he destroyed traditions that had fettered the profession since the days of the Franklin press.

One day he held up a string of proofs—a long obituary of Bismarck, or Blaine, or some celebrity who had just passed away.

“Mr. Lord,” he said to his managing editor, “isn’t that a lot of space to give to a dead man?”

Yet the next day the same Dana came from his office to the city editor’s desk to inquire who had written a certain story two inches long, and, upon learning, went over to the reporter who was the author.

“Very good, young man, very good,” he said, pointing to the item. “I wish I could write like that!”

Names of writers meant nothing to Dana. He judged everything that was printed in the Sun, or offered to it for publication, on its own merits. He went through manuscript with uncanny speed, the gaze that seemed to travel only down the centre of the page really taking in the whole substance. A dull article from a celebrity he returned to its envelope with the note “Respectfully declined,” and without a thought of the author’s surprise, or possibly rage. But over a poem from an up-State unknown he might spend half an hour if the verses contained the germ of an idea new to him.

One clergyman who had come into literary prominence offered to write some articles for the Sun. Dana told him he might try. The clergyman evidently had a notion that the Sun’s cleverness was a worldly, reckless devilishness, and he adapted the style of his first article to what he supposed was the tone of the paper. Dana read it, smiled, wrote across the first page “This is too damned wicked,” and mailed it back to the misguided author.

He was a patient man. A clerk in the New York post-office copied by hand Edward Everett Hale’s story, “The Man Without a Country,” and offered it to the Sun—as original matter—for a hundred dollars. It was suggested to Mr. Dana that the poor fool should be exposed.

“No,” said Dana, “mark it ‘Respectfully declined,’ and send it back to him. He has been honest enough to enclose postage-stamps.”

247

CHAPTER XI
DANA, AS MITCHELL SAW HIM

The English historian, Kinglake, wrote a description of John T. Delane, the most famous editor of the London Times, which Mr. Dana’s associate, Mr. Mitchell, liked to quote as a picture of what Mr. Dana was not. It is a fine limning of the great editor, as great editors were supposed to be before Dana showed his disregard for the journalistic dust of the ages:

That, mark you, was Delane, not Dana. When Mr. Dana counselled the young men at Cornell never to be in a hurry, he meant it. Fury was never a part of his system of life and work. Probably he viewed with something like contempt the high-pressure editor of his own and former days. There was no agony in the daily birth of the Sun. Mr. Mitchell said of his chief:

That office in Nassau Street, of which every reader of the Sun, and surely every newspaperman in America, formed his own mental picture! To some imaginations it probably was a bare room, with a desk for the editor and, close by, the famous cat. To other imaginations, whose owners were familiar with Mr. Dana’s love for the beautiful, the office may have been a studio unmarred by the presence of a single unbeautiful object. Both visions were incorrect.

Surroundings were nothing to Dana. To him an office was a place to work, to convert ideas into readable form. What would works of art be in such a place to a man who took more interest in the crowds249 that went to and fro on Park Row beneath his window? Let the room itself be described by Mr. Mitchell, who set down this picture of it after he had spent hours in it with Mr. Dana almost daily for twenty years:

Such were Mr. Dana’s surroundings, with nothing to indicate, as Mr. Mitchell remarked, that the occupant “knew Manet from Monet, or old Persian lustre from Gubbio.”

It is twenty years since Dana went out of that room for the last time, and the room and the old building are no more, but the stuffed owl is still at his post in the office of the editor of the Sun. He is an older if not wiser bird, and he is no longer subjected to the revolutions of the bookcase, for Mr. Mitchell has given him a firmer perch beside his door. From a nearby wall Mr. Dana’s pictures of the four Harpers keep vigil, too.

Dana was interested in everything, read everything, saw almost everybody. His own office was almost as free as the great main office of the Sun, where sat everybody from the managing editor down to the office-boy. One day Dana, coming into the big room, saw carpenters building a partition between the room and the head of the stairs that led to the street. It was explained to him that the public was inclined to be unnecessarily intrusive at times.

That this was not always a desirable plan is illustrated in a story about Dana, probably apocryphal, but characteristic. One night the city editor rushed into his chief’s room.

“Mr. Dana,” he said, “there’s a man out there with a cocked revolver. He is very much excited, and he insists on seeing the editor-in-chief.”

“Is he very much excited?” inquired Mr. Dana, returning to the proof that he was reading. “If you think it is worth while, ask Amos Cummings if he will see the gentleman and write him up.”

Persons in search of alms would enter Mr. Dana’s room without ceremony. If they were Sisters of Charity, as often was the case, Mr. Dana would walk up and down, telling them of his visit with the Pope, and would finish by giving them one of the silver dollars of which his pocket seemed to have an endless supply. Almost every day, when he despatched a boy to a nearby restaurant for his sandwich and bottle of milk, he would give him a five-dollar bill and instruct him to bring back the change all in silver. He liked to jingle the coins in his pocket and to have them ready for alms-giving.

Dana was never fussy, never overbearing with his men. He bore patiently with the occasional sinner, and tried to put the best face on a mistake.

The Dana patience extended also to outsiders. On one occasion William M. Laffan, then the dramatic critic and later the owner of the Sun, wrote a severe criticism of a performance by Miss Ada Rehan. Augustin Daly hurried to Mr. Dana’s office the next afternoon.

“Mr. Dana,” he said, “I have called to try to convince you that you should discharge your dramatic editor. He has—”

“I see,” said Dana, smiling. “Well, Mr. Daly, I will speak to Mr. Laffan about the matter, and if he thinks that he really deserves to be discharged, I will most certainly do it!”

Thirty or forty years ago the belief was not uncommon, among those ignorant of editorial methods and the limitations of human powers, that Mr. Dana wrote every word that appeared on the editorial page of the Sun. It is likely that this flattering myth came to his ears and caused him more than one chuckle. Dana wrote pieces for the Sun, many of them, but he never essayed the superhuman task of filling the whole page with his own self. Nobody knew better than he what a bore a man becomes who flows opinion constantly, whether by voice or by pen.

For Dana, not the eternal verities in allopathic doses, but the entertaining varieties, carefully administered. He might be immensely interested in the destruction of the Whisky Ring, and in writing about that infamy articles which would scorch the ears of Washington; but he knew that not every man, woman, and child who read the Sun was furious about the Whisky Ring or cared to read columns of opinion about it every day. They must have pabulum in the form of an article about the princely earnings of Charles Dickens, or the identification of Mount Sinai, or the mysterious murder of a French count.

So he hired men who could compare Dickens’s lectures with Thackeray’s, or were familiar with the controversy over Mount Barghir, or who knew a murder mystery when they saw it. They wrote, and he read and sometimes edited, but usually approved, for he knew that newspaper success lay not so much in a choice of topics as in a choice of men. He knew that the success of an editorial page came less from inside opinions than from254 outside interest. Dana’s remarkable success in the exaltation of journalism to literary heights was won not so much through what he wrote, but through what he left other men free to write.

His own work as a writer for the Sun took but a fraction of his busy day. He dictated his articles to Tom Williams, his stenographer, a Fenian and a bold man.

“Can you write as fast as I talk?” asked Dana when Williams applied for the job.

“I doubt it, Mr. Dana,” said Williams; “but I can write as fast as any man ought to talk.”

For twenty years Tom Williams transcribed articles that absorbed the readers of the Sun, but his own heart was down the bay, near his Staten Island home, where he spent most of his spare time in fishing and sailing. It was always a grief to Williams to enter the office on an election or similarly important night, and to find that no one paid any attention to his stories about how the fish were biting.

Dana had no doubt—nor had any one, least of all those who came under his editorial condemnation—of his own ability as a trenchant writer. The expression of thought was an art which he had studied from boyhood. Whatever of the academic appeared in his early work had been driven out during his service on the Tribune and in the war, particularly the latter, for as a reporter for the government he learned to avoid all but the salients of expression. But as the editor of the Sun he found less delight in his own product than in the work of some other man whose literary ability answered his own standards of terseness, vigour, and illumination. The new man would help the Sun, and that was all that Dana asked.

That another man’s work should be mistaken for his own, or his own for another man’s, was to Dana255 nothing at all, except perhaps a source of amusement. The anonymity of the writers on the Sun was so complete that the public knew their work only as a whole; but whenever anything particularly biting or humorous appeared, the same public instantly decided that Dana must have written it.

That line, born in the Sun’s editorial page, will live as long as Shakespeare. In eight words it embodied the protest of New York against the arrogance and stupidity of machine political rule. Ten thousand times, at least, it has been credited to Dana, but as a matter of fact it was written by W. O. Bartlett.

Bartlett was one of those great newspaper writers whose fate—or choice—it is never to own a newspaper and never to attract public attention through the writing of signed articles or books. Writing was not primarily his profession, and by the older men of New York who remember him he is recalled as a brilliant lawyer rather than as a writer. He met Dana through Secretary Stanton, and he was the Sun’s attorney soon after Dana and his friends bought the paper. His law-offices were in the Sun Building, directly below Mr. Dana’s own offices. There, and also at the Hoffman House, where he lived when he was not on his estate at Brookhaven, Long Island, Mr. Bartlett wrote his articles for the Sun.

Bartlett was a writer of the school of simplicity. His style of reducing a proposition to its most elementary form, so that it was clear to even the Class B intellect, was the admiration and envy of all who knew his articles. It was an inspiration, too, to many young newspapermen of his day.

The manner of Mr. Arthur Brisbane of the Evening Journal, luring the reader into a sociological dissertation by first inquiring whether he knows “Why a Flea Jumps So Far,” is the Bartlett manner, with such modifications as are necessary to reach the attention of a group intellectually somewhat different from Bartlett’s readers. Only Bartlett did not spend too much time on the flea. Of the three men whose articles have most distinguished the first column of the Sun’s editorial page, each has had his own weapon when leading to attack. Dana struck with a sword. Mitchell used—and uses—the rapier. Bartlett swung the mace. It was jewelled with the gems of language, but still it was a mace; and if it crushed the skull of the enemy at the first blow, so much the better. It was Bartlett, for instance, who wrote the article in which the Democratic candidate for President in 1880, General Hancock, was referred to as “a good man, weighing two hundred and forty pounds.”

W. O. Bartlett wrote for the Sun from 1868 until his death in 1881. He was the foremost figure in the group of older men around Dana—the men who had been prominent in political and literary life before the Civil War. Other notable men of middle age who were chosen by Mr. Dana to write editorial articles were James S. Pike, Fitz-Henry Warren, Henry B. Stanton, and John Swinton.

James Shepherd Pike’s articles appeared more frequently in the columns of the Sun than Pike himself appeared in the office, for most of his work was done in Washington. He was about eight years older than Mr. Dana, but they were great friends from the earliest days of Dana’s Tribune experience. For five years, beginning in 1855, Pike was a Washington correspondent and one of the associate editors of the Tribune. During257 the Civil War he was United States minister to the Netherlands, a reward for his services in his home State, Maine, where he was useful in uniting the anti-slavery forces. He was a brother of Frederick A. Pike, a war-time Representative from Maine, whose “Tax, fight, emancipate!” was the Republican watchword from its utterance in 1861.

Pike was one of the group that supported Greeley for the Presidency in 1872. He was one of the really great publicists of his day. He wrote “The Restoration of the Currency,” “The Financial Crisis,” “Horace Greeley in 1872,” “A Prostrate State”—which was a description of the Reconstruction era in South Carolina—and “The First Blows of the Civil War,” this last a volume of reminiscent correspondence, some newspaper, some personal. The friendship and literary association of Pike and Dana lasted more than thirty years, and ended only with Pike’s death in 1882, just after he had passed threescore and ten.

Fitz-Henry Warren, who has been already referred to in this narrative as the author of the Tribune’s cry, “On to Richmond!” wrote many editorial articles for Dana, who had conceived a great admiration for Warren when both were in the service of the Tribune, Dana as managing editor and Warren as head of the Washington bureau. Warren emerged from the Civil War not only a major-general, but a powerful politician, and it was not until several years later, after he had served in the Iowa Senate and as minister to Guatemala, that Dana was able to bring the pen of this transplanted New Englander to the office of the Sun. Once there, it did splendid work.

It is not easy to identify the editorials that appeared in the Sun under the Dana régime; not so much because of the lapse of years, but because the spirit of Dana so258 permeated everything that was printed on his page that it is difficult to say with certainty, “This Dana wrote, this Bartlett, this Mitchell, this Warren, and this Pike.” But, for the purpose of giving some small idea of the grace and magnificence of Warren’s style, here is a paragraph from an editorial article known to have been written by him on the death of Charles Sumner in March, 1874:

General Warren continued to write for the Sun until 1876, and he died two years afterward, when he was only sixty-two years old, in Brimfield, Massachusetts, the town of his birth.

Although Henry Brewster Stanton was a comparatively old man when he began writing for the Sun, his activities in that line lasted for nearly twenty years. In 1826, when he was twenty-one years old, he entered259 newspaper work on Thurlow Weed’s Monroe Telegraph, published in Rochester. Soon afterward he became an advocate of the anti-slavery cause. In 1840 he married Elizabeth Cady, and with her went abroad, where in Great Britain and France they worked for the relief of the slaves in the United States. It was during that journey that Elizabeth Cady Stanton signed the first call for a woman’s rights convention.

On his return to America Stanton studied law with his father-in-law, Daniel Cady. After his admission to the bar he practised in Boston, but he returned to New York and politics in 1847. He left the Democratic party to become one of the founders of the Republican party.

Dana met Stanton when the latter was a writer for the Tribune, and when Dana came into the control of the Sun he secured the veteran as a contributor. Stanton knew politics from A to Z, and his brief articles, filled with political wisdom and often salted with his dry humour, were just the class of matter that Dana wanted for the editorial page. Stanton was also a capable reviewer of books. He wrote for the Sun from 1868 until his death in 1887. Henry Ward Beecher said of him:

“I think Stanton has all the elements of old John Adams—able, staunch, patriotic, full of principle, and always unpopular. He lacks that sense of other people’s opinions which keeps a man from running against them.”

John Swinton was one of the few of Dana’s men who might be described as a “character.” He lived a double intellectual life, writing conservative articles in his newspaper hours and making socialistic speeches when he was off duty. Yet it was a double life without duplicity, for there was no concealment in it, no hypocrisy,260 and no harm. When he had finished his day in the office of the Sun, perhaps at writing some instructive paragraphs about the possibilities of American trade in Nicaragua, he would take off his skull-cap, place a black soft hat on his gray head, and go forth to dilate on the advantages of super-Fourierism to some sympathetic audience of socialists.

There was a story in the office that one evening Mr. Swinton, making a speech at a socialistic gathering, referred hotly to the editor of the Sun as one of the props of a false form of government, and added that “some day two old men will come rolling down the steps of the Sun office,” and that at the bottom of the steps he, Swinton, would be on top.

This may be of a piece with the story about Mr. Dana and the man with the revolver; but the young men in the reporters’ room liked to tell it to younger men. It probably had its basis in the fact that on the morning after a particularly ferocious assault on capital, John Swinton would poke his head into Mr. Dana’s room to tell him how he had given him the dickens the night before—information which tickled Mr. Dana immensely. And Dana never went to the bottom of the Sun stairs except on his own sturdy legs.

Swinton was a Scotsman, born in Haddingtonshire in 1830. He emigrated to Canada as a boy, learned the printer’s trade, and worked at the case in New York. After travels all over the country, he lived for a time in Charleston, South Carolina, and there acquired an abhorrence for slavery. He went to Kansas and took part in the Free Soil contest, but returned to New York in 1857 and began the study of medicine.

While so engaged he contributed articles to the New York Times, and Henry J. Raymond, who liked his work, took him as an editorial writer. He was the261 managing editor of the Times during the Civil War, and had sole charge during Raymond’s absences. At the end of the war Swinton’s health caused him to resign from the managing editorship, but he continued to write for the editorial page. He went to work on the Sun about 1877.

His specialty was paragraphs. Dana liked men who could do anything, but he also preferred that every man should have some specialty. Swinton had the imagination and the light touch of the skilful weaver of small items. Also, he was much interested in Central America, and his knowledge of that region was of frequent use to the Sun.

Swinton left the Sun in 1883 to give his whole time to John Swinton’s Paper, a weekly journal in which he expounded his labour-reform and other political views. He was the author of many pamphlets and several books, including a “Eulogy of Henry J. Raymond” and an “Oration on John Brown.”

Such were the editorial writers of what may be called the iron age of the Sun; the men who helped Dana to build the first story of a great house. As they passed on, younger men, some greater men, trained in the Dana school, took their places and spanned the Sun’s golden age—such men as E. P. Mitchell, Francis P. Church, and Mayo W. Hazeltine.

Meanwhile, on the other side of a partition on the third floor of the old brick building at the corner of Frankfort Street, another group of men were doing their best to advance Dana’s Sun by making it the best newspaper as well as the best editorial paper in America. These, too, were giants.

262

CHAPTER XII
DANA’S FIRST BIG NEWS MEN

Managing editors did not come into favour in American newspaper offices until the second half of the last century. As late as 1872 Frederic Hudson, in his “History of Journalism in the United States,” grumbled at the intrusion of a new functionary upon the field:

That historian (he was a Herald man, and Bennett would have no managing editor) had not been reconciled to the fact that between the editor of a newspaper—the director of its policies and opinions and general style and tone—and the subeditors to whose various desks comes the flood of news there must be some one who will act as a link, lightening the labours of the editor and shouldering the responsibilities of the desk men. He may never write an editorial article; may never turn out a sheet of news copy or put a head on an item; may never make up a page or arrange an assignment list—but he must know how to do every one of these things and a great deal more.

A managing editor is really the newspaper’s manager of its employees in the news field. He is an editor to the263 extent that he edits men. He may appear to spend most of his time and judgment on the acceptance or rejection of news matter, the giving of decisions as to the length or character of an article, its position in the paper, and, more broadly, the general make-up of the next day’s product; but a man might be able to perform all these professional functions wisely and yet be impossible as a managing editor through his inability to handle newspapermen.

The Tribune was the first New York paper to have a managing editor. He was Dana. Serene, tactful, and a man of the world, he was able by judicious handling to keep for the Tribune the services of men like Warren and Pike, who might have been repelled by the sometimes irritable Greeley. The title came from the London Times, where it had been used for years, perhaps borrowed from the directeur gérant of the French newspapers.

The Sun had no managing editor until Dana bought it, Beach having preferred to direct personally all matters above the ken of the city editor. The Sun’s first managing editor was Isaac W. England, whom Dana had known and liked when both were on the Tribune. England was of Welsh blood and English birth, having been born in Twerton, a suburb of Bath, in 1832. He worked at the bookbinding trade until he was seventeen, and then came to the United States and made his living at bookbinding and printing. He used to tell his Sun associates of his triumphal return to England, when he was twenty, for a short visit, which he spent in the shop of his apprenticeship, showing his old master how much better the Yankees were at embossing and lettering.

England returned to America in the steerage and saw the brutal treatment of immigrants. This he described264 in several articles and sold them to the Tribune. Greeley gave him a job pulling a hand-press at ten dollars a week, but later made him a reporter. He was city editor of the Tribune until after the Civil War, and then he went with his friend Dana to Chicago for the short and profitless experience with the Chicago Republican. In the period between Dana’s retirement from the Republican and his purchase of the Sun, England was manager of the Jersey City Times.

England was managing editor of the Sun only a year, then becoming its publisher—a position for which he was well fitted. An example of his business ability was given in 1877, when Frank Leslie went into bankruptcy. England was made assignee, and he handled the affairs of the Leslie concern so well that its debts were paid off in three years. This was only a side job for England, who continued all the time to manage the business matters of the Sun. When he died, in 1885, Dana wrote that he had “lost the friend of almost a lifetime, a man of unconquerable integrity, true and faithful in all things.”

The second managing editor of the Sun was that great newspaperman Amos Jay Cummings. He was born to newspaper work if any man ever was. His father, who was a Congregational minister—a fact which could not be surmised by listening to Amos in one of his explosive moods—was the editor of the Christian Palladium and Messenger. This staid publication was printed on the first floor of the Cummings home at Irvington, New Jersey. Entrance to the composing-room was forbidden the son, but with tears and tobacco he bribed the printer, one Sylvester Bailey, who set up the Rev. Mr. Cummings’s articles, to let him in through a window. Cummings and Bailey later set type together on the Tribune. They fought in the same regiment in the Civil War.265 They worked together on the Evening Sun, and they are buried in the same cemetery at Irvington.

The trade once learned, young Amos left home and wandered from State to State, making a living at the case. In 1856, when he was only fourteen, he was attracted by the glamour that surrounded William Walker, the famous filibuster, and joined the forces of that daring young adventurer, who then had control of Nicaragua. The boy was one of a strange horde of soldiers of fortune, which included British soldiers who had been at Sebastopol, Italians who had followed Garibaldi, and Hungarians in whom Kossuth had aroused the martial flame.

Like many of the others in Walker’s army, Cummings believed that the Tennessean was a second Napoleon, with Central America, perhaps South America, for his empire. But when this Napoleon came to his Elba by his surrender to Commander Davis of the United States navy, in the spring of 1857, Cummings decided that there was no marshal’s baton in his own ragged knapsack and went back to be a wandering printer.

Cummings was setting type in the Tribune office when the Civil War began. He hurried out and enlisted as a private in the Twenty-Sixth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry. He fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg. At Marye’s Hill, in the battle of Fredericksburg, his regiment was supporting a battery against a Confederate charge. Their lines were broken and they fell back from the guns. Cummings took the regimental flag from the hands of the colour-sergeant and ran alone, under the enemy’s fire, back to the guns. The Jerseymen rallied, the guns were recovered, and Cummings got the Medal of Honor from Congress. He left the service as sergeant-major of the regiment and266 presently appeared in Greeley’s office, a seedy figure infolded in an army overcoat.

Cummings said nothing, but turned his back on the great editor, lifted his coat-tails and showed the sad, if not shocking, state of his breeches. He got work. In 1863, when the Tribune office was threatened by the rioters, Amos helped to barricade the composing-room and save it from the mob.

Cummings served as editor of the Weekly Tribune and as a political writer for the daily. This is the way he came to quit the Tribune:

John Russell Young, the third managing editor of the Tribune, got the habit of issuing numbered orders. Two of these orders reached Cummings’s desk, as follows:

The result of this multiplicity of numbered orders was267 that shortly afterward Cummings presented himself to the editor of the Sun.

“Just the man for me!” replied Dana, according to the version which Cummings used to tell.

At any rate, Amos went on the Sun as managing editor, and he continued to swear. The compositors now in the Sun office who remember him at all remember him largely for that.

The union once set apart a day for contributions to the printers’-home fund, and each compositor was to contribute the fruits of a thousand ems of composition. Cummings, who was proud of being a union printer, left his managing-editor’s desk and went to the composing-room.

“Ah, Mr. Cummings,” said Abe Masters, the foreman, “I’ll give you some of your own copy to set.”

“To hell with my own copy!” said Cummings, who knew his handwriting faults. “Give me some reprint.”

Green reporters got a taste of the Cummings profanity. One of them put a French phrase in a story. Cummings asked him what it meant, and the youth told him.

“Then why the hell didn’t you write it that way?” yelled Cummings. “This paper is for people who read English!”

In those days murderers were executed in the old Tombs prison in Centre Street. Cummings, who was full of enterprise, sought a way to get quickly the fall of the drop. The telephone had not been perfected, but there was a shot-tower north of the Sun’s office and east of the Tombs. Cummings sent one man to the Tombs, with instructions to wave a flag upon the instant of the execution. Another man, stationed at the top of the268 shot-tower, had another flag, with which he was to make a sign to Cummings on the roof of the Sun Building, as soon as he saw the flag move at the prison.

The reporter at the Tombs arranged with a keeper to notify him just before the execution, but the keeper was sent on an errand, and presently Cummings, standing nervously on the roof of the Sun Building, heard the newsboys crying the extras of a rival sheet. The plan had fallen through. No blanks could adequately represent the Cummings temper upon that occasion.

Cummings was probably the best all-round news man of his day. He had the executive ability and the knowledge of men that make a good managing editor. He knew what Dana knew—that the newspapers had yet to touch public sympathy and imagination in the news columns as well as in editorial articles; and he knew how to do it, how to teach men to do it, how to cram the moving picture of a living city into the four pages of the Sun. He advised desk men, complimented or corrected reporters, edited local articles, and, when a story appealed to him strongly, he went out and got it and wrote it himself.

In such brief biographies of Cummings as have been printed you will find that he is best remembered in the outer world as a managing editor, or as the editor of the Evening Sun, or as a Representative in Congress fighting for the rights of Civil War veterans, printers’ unions, and letter-carriers; but among the oldest generation of newspapermen he is revered as a great reporter. He was the first real human-interest reporter. He knew the news value of the steer loose in the streets, the lost child in the police station, the Italian murder that was really a case of vendetta. The Sun men of his time followed his lead, and a few of them, like Julian Ralph, outdid him, but he was the pioneer; and a thousand269 Sun men since then have kept, or tried to keep, on the Cummings trail.

It was Cummings who sent men to cover the police stations at night and made it possible for the Sun to beat the news association on the trivial items which were the delight of the reader, and which helped, among other things, to shoot the paper’s daily circulation to one hundred thousand in the third year of the Dana ownership.

The years when Cummings was managing editor of the Sun were years stuffed with news. Even a newspaperman without imagination would have found plenty of happenings at hand. The Franco-Prussian War, the gold conspiracy that ended in Black Friday (September 24, 1869), the Orange riot (July 12, 1871), the great Chicago fire, the killing of Fisk by Stokes, Tweedism—what more could a newspaperman wish in so brief a period? And, of course, always there were murders. There were so many mysterious murders in the Sun that a suspicious person might have harboured the thought that Cummings went out after his day’s work was done and committed them for art’s sake.

When men and women stopped killing, Cummings would turn to politics. Tweed was the great man then; under suspicion, even before 1870, but a great man, particularly among his own. The Sun printed pages about Tweed and his satellites and the great balls of the Americus Club, their politico-social organisation. It described the jewels worn by the leaders of Tammany Hall, including the two-thousand-dollar club badge—the head of a tiger with eyes of ruby and three large diamonds shining above them.

Everybody who wanted the political news read the Sun. As Jim Fisk remarked one evening as he stood proudly with Jay Gould in the lobby of the Grand Opera270 House—proud of his notoriety in connection with the Erie Railroad jobbery, proud of the infamy he enjoyed from the fact that he owned two houses in the same block in West Twenty-third Street, housing his wife in one and Josie Mansfield in the other; proud of his guilty partnership in Tweedism—

The Sun reporter who chronicled this—it may have been Cummings himself—had gone to ask Fisk whether he and his friends had hired a thug to black-jack the respectable Mr. Dorman B. Eaton, a foe of the Erie outfit; but he took down and printed Fisk’s tribute to the Sun’s enterprise. As there was scarcely a morning in those days when the Sun did not turn up some new trick played by the Tweed gang and the Erie group, their anxiety to get an early copy was natural.

Tweed and his philanthropic pretences did not deceive the Sun. On February 24, 1870—a year and a half before the exposure which sent the boss to prison—the Sun printed an editorial article announcing that Tweed was willing to surrender his ownership of the city upon the following terms:

Tweed was liked by many New Yorkers, particularly those who knew him only by his lavish charities. One of these wrote the following letter, which the Sun printed on December 7, 1870, under the heading “A Monument to Boss Tweed—the Money Paid In”:

Ten days later the Sun carried on the editorial page a long news story headed “Our Statue of Boss Tweed—the Readers of the Sun Going to Work in Dead Earnest—The Sun’s Advice Followed, Ha! Ha!—Organisation of the Tweed Testimonial Association of the City of New York—A Bronze Statue Worth Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars to Be Erected.”

Sure enough, the ward politicians had taken the joke seriously. Police Justice Edward J. Shandley, Tim Campbell, Coroner Patrick Keenan, Police Commissioner Smith, and a dozen other faithful Tammany men were on the list of trustees. They decided upon the space then known as Tweed Plaza, at the junction of East Broadway and New Canal and Rutgers Streets as the site for the monument.

The Sun added to the joke by printing more letters from contributors. One, from Patrick Maloy, “champion eel-bobber,” brought ten cents and the suggestion that the statue should be inscribed with the amount of money that Tweed had made out of the city. This sort of thing went on into the new year, the Sun aggravating the movement with grave editorial advice.

At last the jest became more than Tweed could bear, and from his desk in the Senate Chamber at Albany, on March 13, 1871, he sent the following letter to Judge Shandley, the chairman of the statue committee:

This letter appeared in the Sun the next day under the facetious heading: “A Great Man’s Modesty—The Most Remarkable Letter Ever Written by the Noble Benefactor of the People.” Editorial regret was expressed at Tweed’s declination; and, still in solemn mockery, the Sun grieved over the return to the subscribers of the several thousand dollars that had been sent to Shandley’s committee. William J. Florence, the comedian, had put himself down for five hundred dollars.

Was it utterly absurd that the Tweed idolaters should have taken seriously the Sun’s little joke? No, for so serious a writer as Gustavus Myers wrote in his “History of Tammany Hall” (1901) that “one of the signers of the circular has assured the author that it was a serious proposal. The attitude of the Sun confirms this.” And another grave literary man, Dr. Henry Van Dyke, set this down in his “Essays on Application” (1908):

Of course Mr. Myers and Dr. Van Dyke had never read the statue articles from beginning to end, else they would not have stumbled over the brick that even Tweed, with all his conceit, was able to perceive.

In July, 1871, when the New York Times was fortunate enough to have put in its hands the proof of what everybody already suspected—that Senator Tweed, Comptroller Connolly, Park Commissioner Sweeny, and their associates were plundering the city—the Sun was busy with its own pet news and political articles, the investigation of the Orange riots and the extravagance and nepotism of President Grant’s administration.

The Sun did not like the Times, which had been directed, since the death of Henry J. Raymond, in 1869, by Raymond’s partner, George Jones, and Raymond’s chief editorial writer, Louis J. Jennings; but the Sun liked the Tweed gang still less. It had been pounding at it for two years, using the head-lines “Boss Tweed’s Legislature,” or “Mr. Sweeny’s Legislature,” every day275 of the sessions at the State capital; but neither the Sun nor any other newspaper had been able to obtain the figures that proved the robbery until the county bookkeeper, Matthew J. O’Rourke, dug them out and took them to the Times.

The books showed that the city had been gouged out of five million dollars in one item alone—the price paid in two years to a Tweed contracting firm, Ingersoll & Co., for furniture and carpets for the county court-house. Enough carpets had been bought—or at least paid for—to cover the eight acres of City Hall Park three layers deep. And that five million dollars was only a fraction of the loot.

In September, 1871, after the mass-meeting of citizens in Cooper Union, the Sun began printing the revelations of Tweedism under the standing head, “The Doom of the Ring.”

Tweed engaged as counsel, among others, William O. Bartlett, who was not only counsel for the Sun but, next to Mr. Dana, the paper’s leading editorial writer at that time. The boss may have fancied that in retaining Bartlett he retained the Sun, but it is more likely that he sought Bartlett’s services because of that lawyer’s reputation as an aggressive and able counsellor. If Tweed had any delusions about influencing the Sun, they were quickly dispelled. On September 18, in an editorial article probably written by Dana, the Sun said:

A good picture of Tweed’s popularity, which he still retained among his own people, was drawn in an editorial article in the Sun of October 30, 1871, three days after the boss had been arrested and released in a million dollars’ bail:

The great robber-boss was a source of news from his rise in the late sixties to his death in 1878. As early as March, 1870, the Sun gave its readers an intimate idea of Tweed’s private extravagances under the heading: “Bill Tweed’s Big Barn—Democratic Extravagance Versus That of the White House—Grant’s Billiard Saloon, Caligula’s Stable, and Leonard Jerome’s Private Theatre Eclipsed—Martin Van Buren’s Gold Spoons Nowhere—Belmont’s Four-in-Hand Overshadowed—a Picture for Rural Democrats.”

Tweed was, in a way, responsible for the appearance of a Sun more than four pages in size. Up to December, 1875, there was no issue of the Sun on Sundays. In November of that year it was announced that beginning on December 5 there would be a Sunday Sun, to be sold at three cents, one cent more than the week-day price, but nothing was said, or thought, of an increase In size.

On Saturday, December 4, Tweed, with the connivance of his keepers, escaped from his house in Madison Avenue. This made a four-column story on which Mr. Dana had not counted. Also, the advertisers had taken advantage of the new Sunday issue, and there were more than two pages of advertisements. There was nothing for it but to make an eight-page paper, for which Dana,278 who then believed that all the news could be told in a folio, apologised as follows:

But the Sunday issue of the Sun never went back to four pages, for the eight-page paper had been made so attractive with special stories, reprint, and short fiction that both readers and advertisers were pleased. It was ten years, however, before the week-day Sun increased its size. Even during the Beecher trial (January, 1875) when the Sun’s reporter, Franklin Fyles, found himself unable to condense the day’s proceedings within a page of seven columns, the Sun still gave all the rest of the day’s news.

Cummings’s right-hand man in the news department of the Sun was Dr. John B. Wood, the Great American Condenser. All the city copy passed through his hands. He was then nearing fifty, a white-haired man who wore two pairs of glasses with thick lenses, these crowned with a green shade. He had been a printer on several papers and a desk man on the Tribune, whence Dana brought him to the Sun. Wood’s sense of the value of words was so acute that he could determine, as rapidly as his eye passed along the pages of a story, just what might be stricken out without loss. It might be a word, a sentence, a page; sometimes it would be ninety-eight per cent of the article.

Even when his sight so failed that he was unable to279 read copy continuously, Dr. Wood performed the remarkable feat of condensing through a reader. Willis Holly read copy to him for months, six hours a night. Holly might read three pages without interruption, while Wood sat as silent as if he were asleep. Then——

“Throw out the introduction down to the middle of the second page, begin with ‘John Elliott killed,’ and cut it off at ‘arrested him.’”

Joseph C. Hendrix, who became a member of Congress and a bank president, was a Sun cub reporter. One night he was assigned to read copy to Dr. Wood. He picked up a sheet and began:

“‘The application of Mrs. Jane Smith for divorce from her husband, John Smith—’”

“‘—who alleges cruelty,’” Hendrix continued, “‘in that he—’” Here the reporter’s writing was blurred, and Hendrix, who could not decipher it, said “Damn!”

In keeping news down to the bone Wood was of remarkable value to the Sun in those years when Dana showed that it was possible to tell everything in four pages. New York was smaller then, and display advertising had not come to be a science. The Sun got along nicely on its circulation, for the newsdealers paid one and one-third cents for each copy. With the circulation receipts about fourteen hundred dollars a day, the advertising receipts were clear profit. Amos Cummings had such a fierce disregard for the feelings of advertisers that often, when a good piece of news came in late, he would throw out advertising to make room for it.

The city editors of the Sun under Cummings were, in order, John Williams, Lawrence S. Kane, Walter M. Rosebault, William Young, and John B. Bogart. Williams, who had been a Methodist preacher, left the Sun280 in 1869 to become religious editor of the Herald. Kane, a big blond Irishman with mutton-chop whiskers, held the city desk until the summer of 1870 and then returned to the reportorial staff. Rosebault, who had been one of the Sun’s best young reporters, resigned from the city editorship late in 1870 in order to study law. He afterward went to San Francisco to be principal editorial writer of the Chronicle, but soon returned to New York and for many years, while practising law, he contributed editorial and special articles to the Sun. Mr. Rosebault, who is still an active lawyer, told the present writer, in July, 1918, that of all the reporters who served on his staff when he was city editor of the Sun only one, Sidney Rosenfeld, later a dramatist and the first editor of Puck, was still alive.

The first telegraph editor of the Sun was an Episcopalian clergyman, Arthur Beckwith, afterward connected with the Brooklyn Eagle and the Brooklyn Citizen as a law reporter. When he left the telegraph desk of the Sun his place was taken by Colonel Henry Grenville Shaw, a Civil War veteran. Colonel Shaw left the Sun to become night editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and was succeeded by Amos B. Stillman, a ninety-pound man from Connecticut. He was a newspaperman in his native state until the Civil War, and after Appomattox he went back to Connecticut. He went on the Sun in 1870 as telegraph editor, and stayed on the same desk for forty-five years.

In the early days of Dana’s Sun there were no night editors, for it had not been found necessary to establish a central desk where all the news of all the departments could be gathered together for judgment as to relative value. Each desk man sent his own copy to the composing-room, and the pages were made up by the managing editor or the night city editor after midnight. Leisurely281 nights, those, with no newspaper trains to catch and no starting of the presses until four o’clock in the morning!

One evening in that period the other desk men in the news department of the Sun observed that Amos Stillman was extraordinarily busy and more than usually silent. He scribbled away, revising despatches and writing subheads, and it was after twelve o’clock when he got up, stretched, and uttered one sentence:

That was the October evening in 1871 when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started the blaze that consumed seventeen thousand buildings. To Deacon Stillman it was just a busy night.

Deacon Stillman was born only eighteen months after the Sun—Ben Day’s Sun; but even as this is being written he is strolling up and down a corridor in the Sun office, waiting for another old-timer, some mere lad of sixty, to come out and have dinner with him.

Under Cummings was developed a young man who turned out to be one of the great city editors of New York—John B. Bogart, of whom Arthur Brisbane wrote that he was the best teacher of journalism that America had produced. He was in most respects the opposite of Cummings. He had all of Cummings’s love for the business, but not his tremendous rush. Cummings was an explosion, Bogart a steady flame. Cummings roared, Bogart was gentle.

Like Cummings and Stillman, Bogart was a Union veteran. In 1861, when he was only sixteen years old, he left the New Haven store where he was a clerk and enlisted in the Seventh Connecticut Volunteers. After serving three years in the army, he returned home to become a bookkeeper in a dry-goods store. He went on the Sun February 21, 1871, as a general reporter. On282 March 17, 1873—his twenty-eighth birthday—he was made city editor, the former city editor, William Young, having been promoted to the managing editor’s desk to take the place of Cummings, whose health was poor.

John Bogart remained at the city desk for seventeen years of tireless work. He was a master of journalistic detail, a patient follower-up of the stories which, like periscopes, appear and reappear on the sea of events.

“He was a whole school of journalism in himself,” Brisbane wrote of Bogart years afterward. “He could tell the young men where to go for their news, what questions to ask, what was and what was not worth while. Above all, he could give enthusiasm to his men. He worked by encouraging, not by harsh criticism.”

Bogart always asked a young reporter whether he had read the Sun that morning. If one confessed that he had read only part of it, Bogart would invite him to sit down, and would say:

“Mr. Jones, it is one of the salutary customs of this paper that every reporter shall read everything in it before appearing for duty. Don’t even skip the advertisements, because there are stories concealed in many of them. The Sun is good breakfast-food.”

The custom of Bogart’s time is the custom still, but a reporter has to go harder at his reading than he did in the days of the four-page Sun.

If a new reporter had not absorbed the Sun style, Bogart gently tried to saturate him with it.

“I notice,” he said to a man who had covered a little fire the night before, “that you begin your story with ‘at an early hour yesterday morning,’ and that you say also that ‘smoke was seen issuing from an upper window.’”

“It is excellent English,” Bogart replied calmly,283 “and it has been indorsed by generations of reporters and copy-readers. If you look in the other papers you will find that some of them also discovered smoke issuing from an upper window at an early hour yesterday morning. We do not deny that it is good English; but it is not good Sun English.”

Under Cummings and Bogart the Sun turned out Sun men. A young man from Troy, Franklin Fyles, was one of their first police-station reporters. He did not know as many policemen as did Joseph Josephs, who wore a silk hat and a gambler’s mustache, and who covered the West Side stations, but he wrote well. He did not know as many desperate characters as were honoured with the acquaintance of David Davids, the East Side police reporter, but he knew a Sun story when he saw it. In 1875, five years after Fyles came on the Sun, he was the star reporter, and he reported the Beecher trial. Ten thousand words a day in longhand was an easy day’s work for the reports of that great scandal. Fyles became the dramatic critic of the Sun in 1885, and continued as such until 1903. In that period he wrote several plays, including “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” in which David Belasco was his collaborator; “Cumberland ’61,” and “The Governor of Kentucky.” Fyles died in 1911 at the age of 64.

Another police-station reporter of the Sun was Edward Payson Weston, who had been an office-boy in various newspaper offices until about the beginning of the Civil War and had then become a reporter. Before Dana bought the Sun Weston had walked from Portland, Maine, to Chicago—thirteen hundred and twenty-six miles—in twenty-six days. Forty years later he walked it in twenty-five days.

Cummings liked Weston. Whatever faults there may have been in his literary style, his knee action was a perfect poem. He could bring a story down from the Bellevue morgue faster than all the horse-cars. He was the best “leg man” in the history of journalism. In 1910, more than four decades after the Sun first took him on, Weston, then a man of seventy years, walked from Los Angeles to New York in seventy-seven days.

Henry Mann, a Civil War veteran, was the Sun’s principal court reporter. He covered the Tweed and Stokes trials and the impeachment of Judge Barnard. Later he was exchange editor and he is remembered also as the author of “The History of Ancient and Medieval Republics.”

Other Sun reporters were Tom Cook, who came from California, had the shiniest silk hat on Park Row, and knew Fisk and the rest of the Erie crowd; Big Jim Connolly, one of the best news writers of his day; the McAlpin brothers, Robert and Tod; and Chester S. Lord, who was to become the managing editor of the Sun and serve it in that capacity for a third of a century.

William Young, who was city editor when Lord went on the paper, gave him his first assignment—to get a story about the effect of the Whisky Ring’s work on the liquor trade. Lord wrote a light and airy piece which indicated that the ring’s operations would bring highly moral results by decreasing the supply of intoxicants; but when the copy-reader got through with the story this is the way it read:

Mark Maguire, the celebrated “Toppy,” was the chief of the sporting writers. He was about the oldest man in the Sun office, born before Napoleon went to Elba. He was the first king of the New York newsboys, and Barney Williams, the boy who first sold Ben Day’s Sun, once worked for him.

Maguire had as customers, when they visited New York, Jackson, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. When prosperity came to him he opened road-houses that were the resorts of horse-owners like Commodore Vanderbilt and Robert Bonner. His Cayuga House, at McComb’s Dam, was named after his own fast trotter, Cayuga Girl. Maguire’s intimacy with Bonner was such that the hangers-on in the racing game believed that Bonner owned the Sun and transmitted his views to Dana through “Toppy.” Maguire worked for the Sun up to his death in 1889.

When Amos Cummings had an evening to spare from his regular news work he would go with Maguire to a prize-fight and write the story of it. Maguire invented the chart by which a complete record of the blows struck in a boxing match is kept—one circle for the head and one for the body of each contestant, with a pencil-mark for every blow landed. After an evening in which Jem Mace was one of the entertainers, Maguire’s chart looked like a shotgun target, but Cummings, who watched the fighters while Mark tallied the blows, would make a live story from it.

The Sun of that day had women reporters; indeed, it had the first real woman reporter in American journalism,286 Mrs. Emily Verdery Battey. She worked on fashion stories, women’s-rights stories, and general-news stories. She was one of the Georgia Verderys, and she went on the Sun shortly after Mr. Dana took hold. Her brother, George Verdery, was also a Sun reporter. Another Sun woman of that time was Miss Anna Ballard, who wrote, among other things, the news stories that bobbed up in the surrogates’ court.

The dramatic criticisms of the Sun, in the first three or four years of the seventies, were written by two young lawyers recently graduated from the law school of New York University, Willard Bartlett and Elihu Root. Bartlett was a year the younger, but he ranked Root as a critic because of his acquaintance—through his father, W. O. Bartlett—with newspaper ways. If Lester Wallack was putting on “Ours,” that would be Mr. Bartlett’s assignment, while Mr. Root went to report the advance of art at Woods’s Museum, where was the Lydia Thompson troupe. If it befell that on the same evening Edwin Booth produced “Hamlet” in a new setting and George L. Fox appeared in a more glorious than ever “Humpty Dumpty,” Critic Bartlett would see Booth; Assistant Critic Root, Fox.

In time these young journalists passed on to be actors in that more complex and perhaps equally interesting drama, the law, which for fourteen years they practised together. Mr. Bartlett figured as one of Mr. Dana’s counsel in several of the Sun’s legal cases. After thirty years on the bench, retiring from the chief judgeship of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York through the age statute in 1916, Judge Bartlett is still actively interested in the Sun, and many of its articles on legal and literary topics are contributed by him.

As for Mr. Root, his friendship with the Sun has been unbroken for almost fifty years, and he has made more287 news for it than most men. Under such circumstances even the most jealous newspaper is willing to forgive the desertion of an assistant dramatic critic.

It was Willard Bartlett, incidentally, who was the inventor of the Sun’s celebrated office cat. One night in the eighties the copy of a message from President Cleveland to Congress came to the desk of the telegraph editor. It was a warm evening, and the window near the telegraph desk was open. The message fluttered out and was lost in Nassau Street. The Sun had nothing about it the next morning, and in the afternoon, when Mr. Bartlett called on Mr. Dana, the matter of the lost message was under discussion. The editor remarked that it was a matter difficult to explain to the readers.

Dana chuckled and dictated a paragraph creating the cat. Instantly the animal became famous. Newspapers pictured it as Dana’s inseparable companion, and the Sun presently had another, and longer, editorial article about the wonderful beast:

The cat may have contracted his hatred of the dull and prosy from the men who worked in the Sun office when Amos Cummings smiled and swore and got out the greatest four-page paper ever seen, singing the while the song of Walker’s filibusters:

Cummings worked so hard that in 1873 he broke down and the Sun sent him to Florida. There he wandered about, exploring rivers, studying the natives, and writing for the Sun, over the signature of “Ziska,” a series of travel letters as interesting as any that ever appeared in a newspaper. When he returned to New York in 1876, John Kelly, then endeavouring to raise Tammany from the mire into which Tweed had dropped it, persuaded Cummings to become managing editor of the New York Express. Cummings did not stay long on the Express, being disgusted with Kelly’s hostility toward Tilden’s candidacy for the presidential nomination, and he went back to the Sun.

For the next ten years his efforts were mostly in the direction of improving the weekly issue. In 1886 he was elected to the House of Representatives from a West Side district, but he maintained his connection with the Sun, and in 1887 he became editor of the Evening Sun, then just started. In 1888 Cummings resigned from the House, saying that he was too poor to be a Congressman, but on the death of Representative Samuel Sullivan (“Sunset”) Cox he consented to take the vacant place and continue Cox’s battles for the welfare of the letter-carriers. His service in the House lasted fifteen years. Cummings was a great labour advocate, not only in behalf of letter-carriers, but of printers,291 navy-yard employees, and musicians. He had the last-named in mind when he said in a speech on an alien-labour bill:

That was Amos’s convincing, if inelegant, style. When he introduced a bill to compensate navy-yard men for labour already performed, but not paid for, Representative Holman, of Indiana, asked:

“None of your business!” snapped Cummings. “The government must pay its just debts.”

While he was in the House, Cummings wrote a series of articles on the big men of Washington. He was a delegate to the Democratic national conventions of 1892 and 1896. He died in Baltimore May 2, 1902, and a Republican House of Representatives voted a public funeral to this militant Democrat.

Greater news men than Cummings followed him, undoubtedly, but there was no newspaperman in New York before his time who knew better what news was or how to handle it; not even the elder Bennett, for that great man knew only the news that looked big. Cummings was the first to know the news that felt big.

It was Cummings and his work that Henry Watterson had in mind when he one day remarked to Mr. Dana:

That statement undoubtedly pleased the editor of the Sun, for it was evidence from an expert that he had292 carried his theory to success. He had set men free to write what they saw, as they saw it, in their own way. It was the Sun way, and that was what he wanted. As Dana himself handed down this heritage of literary freedom in his editorial page to Mitchell, so he gave to the men on the news pages, through Amos Cummings and Chester S. Lord and their successors, the right to watch with open eyes the world pass by, and to describe that parade in a different way three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

293

CHAPTER XIII
DANA’S FAMOUS RIVALS PASS

Four years after he became the master of the Sun, and a quarter of a century before death took him from it, Dana found himself the Nestor of metropolitan journalism. Of the three other great New York editors of Dana’s time—three who had founded their own papers and lived with those papers until the wing of Azrael shut out the roar of the presses—Raymond had been the first, and the youngest, to go; for his end came when he was only forty-nine, eighteen years after the establishment of his Times.

Bennett, the inscrutable monarch of the Herald, died in 1872, three years after Raymond, but Bennett, who did not establish the Herald until he was forty, had owned it, and had given every waking hour to its welfare, for thirty-seven years. The year of Bennett’s death saw the passing of the unfortunate Greeley, broken in body and mind from his fatuous chase of public office, within three weeks of his defeat for the presidency. As the sprightly young editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Colonel Henry Watterson, wrote in his paper in January, 1873:

“There will never be an end to the personality of journalism.” It is curious to note in passing that Henry Watterson, who retired from the active editorship of the Courier-Journal on August 7, 1918, after fifty years’ service, was the last of the men who, according to the measure of forty years ago, were “personal journalists.” “Dana says,” “Greeley says,” “Raymond says”—such oral credits are no longer given by the readers of the really big and reputable newspapers of New York to the men who write opinions. “Henry Watterson says” was the last of the phrases of that style.

Dana believed in personal journalism and thought it would not pass away. A few days after the death of Horace Greeley, the editor of the Sun printed his views on the subject:

For all that, Dana must have felt lonely, for at that moment, at any rate, the new chiefs of the Sun’s rivals did not measure up to the heights of their predecessors. To Dana, the trio that had passed were men worthy of his steel, and worthy, each in his own way, of admiration. Toward Greeley, in spite of the circumstances under which Dana left the Tribune, the editor of the Sun showed a kindly spirit; not only in his support of Greeley for the presidency, which may have sprung from Dana’s aversion to Grantism, but in his general attitude toward the brilliant if erratic old man. As for Bennett, Dana frankly believed him to be a great newspaperman, and never hesitated to say so.

What Dana thought of the three may be judged by his297 editorial article in the Sun on the day after Greeley’s funeral:

Louis J. Jennings succeeded Raymond as the editor of the Times, and acted as such until 1876, when he returned to England, his desk being taken by John Foord. Jennings went into politics in England, and was elected a member of Parliament. He also wrote a life of Gladstone and edited a collection of Lord Randolph Churchill’s speeches.

Bennett was followed in the possession of the Herald by his son and namesake. Whitelaw Reid took Greeley’s place at the head of the Tribune. Dana did not like Reid in those days. In a “Survey of Metropolitan Journalism” which appeared in the editorial columns of the Sun on September 3, 1875—the Sun’s forty-second birthday—Dana dismissed his neighbour of the then “tall tower” with—

The Sun was as frank in discussing its own theories and ambitions as it was in criticising its contemporaries for dulness and poor writing. Dana’s dream, never to be realized, was a newspaper without advertisements. He300 believed that by getting all the news, condensing it into the smallest readable space, and adding such literary matter as the readers’ tastes demanded, a four-page paper might be produced with a reasonable profit from the sales, after paper and ink, men and machinery, had been paid for.

An editorial article in the Sun on March 13, 1875, was practically a prospectus of this idea:

It must be remembered, in recalling the failure of Dana’s dream of a paper sans advertising, that his mind was not usually the port of vain dreams. He was a practical man, with more business sense than any other editor of his time, Bennett alone excepted. In him imagination had not swallowed arithmetic, and there is no possible doubt that he had good reason to believe in the practicability of the program he so candidly outlined to his readers. It was part and parcel of his faith in a four-page newspaper—a faith so strong, so well grounded on results, that for the first twenty years of the Dana régime the Sun never appeared in more than four pages, except in emergencies.

In the end, of course, the scheme was beaten by the very excellence of its originator’s qualities. The Sun, by its popularity, drew more and more advertising. By its good English, its freedom from literary shackles, and the spirit of its staff, it attracted more and more writers of distinction, each unwilling to be denied his place in302 the Sun. Dana always had unlimited space for a good story, just as the cat had an insatiable appetite for a bad one; and thus, through his own genius, he destroyed his own dream, but not without having almost proved that it was possible of realisation.

Dana believed that most of the newspapers of his day—particularly in the seventies—were tiring out not only the reader, but the writer. Commenting on a decline in the newspaper business in the summer of 1875, the Sun said:

Dana himself had that peculiar faculty, as indescribable as instinct, of knowing, when he saw an article in the paper, just how much work the author of it had put in—particularly in cases where the labour had been in leaving out, rather than in writing. As a result of this intuition he never drove his men. He would accept three lines or three columns for a day’s work, and his admiration might go out more heartily to the three lines. As for the appearance of characteristics in men’s writing, that was as necessary, in Dana’s opinion, as it was wicked in the judgment of the ancient editors.

304

CHAPTER XIV
“THE SUN” AND THE GRANT SCANDALS

The first ten years of Dana’s service on the Sun were marked by the uprooting of many public evils. To use the mild phrasing of the historian John Fiske, “Villains sometimes succeeded in imposing upon President Grant, who was an honest, simple-hearted soldier without much knowledge of the ways of the world.” To say it more concretely, hardly a department of the national government but was alive with fraud. The Sun, which had supported Grant in the election of 1868, turned against his administration in its first months, and for years it continued to keep before the public the revelations of corruption—which were easily made, so bold were the scoundrels, so coarse their manner of theft.

Among the scandals which the Sun either brought to light or was most vigorous in assailing, these were the principal:

The Crédit Mobilier Scandal—This involved the names of many Senators and Representatives who were accused of accepting stock in the Crédit Mobilier of America, the fiscal company organised to build the Union Pacific Railroad, as a reward for using their influence and votes in favour of the great enterprise.

The Navy Department Scandal—In this the Sun accused George M. Robeson, Secretary of the Navy, of305 having permitted double payment to contractors and of violating the law in making large purchases without competitive bidding. Mr. Dana appeared as a witness in the Congressional investigation of Robeson, who, in the end, while not convicted of personal corruption, was censured for the laxity of his official methods.

The Whisky Ring—This evil combination cheated the government out of millions of dollars. It was made up of distillers, wholesale liquor-dealers, and employees of the internal revenue office, these conspiring together to avoid the payment of the liquor tax. The first attack on the corrupt alliance was made in the Sun of February 3, 1872, in an article by “Sappho,” one of the Sun’s Washington correspondents. Other great newspapers took up the fight, but the Sun was the chief aggressor. As a result of the exposure, two hundred and thirty-eight men were indicted and many of them, including the chief clerk of the Treasury Department, were sent to prison.

“Addition, Division, and Silence”—On March 20, 1867, W. H. Kemble, State Treasurer of Pennsylvania and one of the Republican bosses, wrote the following letter to Titian J. Coffey, a lawyer and claim-agent in Washington:

When this letter fell into the hands of the Sun, which had already made war on the ring formed for the collection of war claims, it saw in Kemble’s last four words306 the sententious platform of wide-spread fraud. It printed the letter, and kept on printing it, with that iteration which Dana knew was of value in a crusade. In a few months the whole country was familiar with the phrase so suggestive of plunder.

Kemble was a politician with a thick skin, but he at last became so enraged at the repetition of “addition, division, and silence,” whether uttered by street urchins or printed all over America as the watchword of corruption—“honest graft,” he would have called it, if that phrase had then been common—that he sued out a writ of criminal libel against Mr. Dana and had him arrested as he was passing through Philadelphia. The only result of this was to make the phrase more common than before.

Kemble was afterward convicted of trying to bribe Pennsylvania legislators, and was sent to prison for a year.

The Post-Trader Scandal—William W. Belknap, Grant’s Secretary of War, was charged with receiving from Caleb P. Marsh fifteen hundred dollars in consideration for the appointment of John S. Evans to maintain a trading-establishment at Fort Sill, in the Indian Territory. The scandal came to the surface through the remark of Mrs. Belknap that Mrs. Evans would have no place in society, “as she is only a post-trader’s wife,” and the retort of Mrs. Evans, upon hearing of this, that “a post-trader’s wife is as good as the wife of an official who takes money for the appointment of a post-trader.”

The Sun laid the story of bribery wide open, and the Senate proceeded to impeach the Secretary of War. He escaped punishment by resigning his office, twenty-five Senators voting “not guilty” on the ground that Belknap’s resignation technically removed him from the Senate’s jurisdiction. Thirty-five Senators voted307 “guilty,” but a two-thirds vote was necessary to punish.

The Salary Grab—This was the act of Congress of March 3, 1873, which raised the President’s salary from twenty-five thousand dollars to fifty thousand, and the salaries of Senators and Representatives from five thousand to seventy-five hundred. Its evil lay not in the increases, but in the retroactive clause which provided that each Congressman should receive five thousand dollars as extra pay for the two-year term then ending. The assaults of the Sun and other newspapers so aroused public indignation that Congress was obliged to repeal the act in January, 1874, and many Members returned their share of the spoil to the Treasury.

The Boss Shepherd Scandal—The Sun printed an article from Washington accusing Alexander Shepherd, vice-president of the Board of Public Works of the District of Columbia, and Henry D. Cooke, governor of the District, with having a financial interest in the Metropolitan Paving Company, which had many street contracts in the national capital. Shepherd and Cooke laid a complaint of criminal libel against Mr. Dana, and an assistant district attorney of the District of Columbia came to New York and procured from United States Commissioner Davenport a warrant for the editor’s arrest.

It was the intent of the prosecution to hale Dana to a Washington police-court, where he would be tried without a jury. Dana had gone willingly, even eagerly, to Washington when summoned in the Robeson case, but the Shepherd strategy was so manifestly an attempt to railroad him that an appeal was taken to the Federal court for the southern district of New York. The historic decision of the district judge—Samuel Blatchford, subsequently promoted to the United States Supreme Court—may be summed up in one of its paragraphs:

As the Sun said of this decision, important to the freedom of the individual as well as to that of the press:

The Safe Burglary Conspiracy—Columbus Alexander, a reputable citizen of Washington, was active in the movement to smash the Washington contractors’ ring. He sought to bring certain contractors’ books into court and exposed the false set that was produced. The ringsters hired a man to go to Mr. Alexander with a story that he could bring him the genuine books. Then the gang, which included men in the secret-service departments of the government, placed some of the genuine books in the safe of the district attorney’s office and employed three professional burglars to blow open the safe.

The books, taken from the safe, were carried to Alexander’s home by the man who had approached him. Close behind came police, who were prepared to arrest Alexander as soon as he received the “stolen property.” He was to be accused of hiring the burglars to crack the district attorney’s safe. But the hour was early in the morning, Alexander was sleeping the deep sleep of the just, and the criminal rang his doorbell in vain.

The ringsters then “arrested” the “thief,” and caused him to sign a false confession, accusing Alexander; but the failure of their theatricals had broken the hireling’s nerve as well as their own, and the conspiracy collapsed. Two of the hired criminals turned309 state’s evidence at the trial, but the powerful politicians of the ring were able to bring about a disagreement of the jury.

These were the greatest of the scandals which the Sun exposed in its news columns and denounced on its editorial page. It was the cry of the ringsters, and even of some honest men, that the Sun’s assaults on the evils that marred Grant’s administration were the result of Dana’s personal dislike of the President. More specifically it was declared that Dana was a disappointed office-seeker, and that the place of collector of customs at the port of New York was the office he sought.

We have it on the unimpeachable testimony of General James Harrison Wilson, the biographer of Dana, and, with Dana, a biographer of Grant, that General Rawlins, Grant’s most intimate friend, told Dana’s associates, and particularly General Wilson, that Dana was to be appointed collector. There is no evidence that Dana ever asked Grant, or any other man, for public office. One place, that of appraiser of merchandise at the port of New York, was offered him, and he refused it. The Sun said editorially, replying to an insinuation made by the Commercial Advertiser that if Dana had been made collector his paper would not denounce the administration:

Dana and the Sun lost friends because of the assaults on Grantism. The warfare was bitter and personal. In the case of Belknap, for instance, the Sun was attacking a man whom Dana, having known him as a good soldier, had recommended for appointment as Secretary of War. But it must be recalled that at the very height of his antagonism to Grant, the President, Dana never receded from his opinion that Grant, the general, was the Union’s greatest soldier. And the Sun was quick to applaud him as President when, as in currency matters, he took a course which Dana considered right.

The friends of Grant, nevertheless, turned against Dana and his paper. Some of them, stockholders in the Sun Printing and Publishing Association, quit the concern when they found themselves unable to turn Dana from his purpose. All their pleadings were vain.

“A few years from now,” Dana would reply, “I shall be willing to accept whatever judgment the nation passes on my course of action; but now I must do as I think right.”

So far as the material prosperity of the Sun was concerned, the desertion of Grant’s friends hurt it not a whit. For every reader lost, four or five were won. Men may stop reading a paper because it disgusts them; they rarely quit it because it is wounding them.

“I don’t read the Sun,” said Henry Ward Beecher during his trial, “and don’t allow anybody to read it to me. What’s the good of a man sticking pins into himself?”

In Beecher’s case, as in Grant’s, the Sun believed that it was doing a public service in laying open wrongful conditions. In answer to one who criticised its brutal candour about the Plymouth Church scandal the Sun said:

Perhaps Beecher’s thanks were not due to Dana, but Grant’s surely were. It is impossible that scandals like312 those of the Whisky Ring could have lain hidden forever. If they had not been exposed when they were, they would have come to the top later, perhaps after Grant went out of office, and when his cry, “Let no guilty man escape!” would have been in vain.

The Sun’s fights against the scandals of the Grant period were no more bitter than its attacks on the frauds attending the Presidential election of 1876, although Dana had no cause for personal animosity toward Hayes. The Sun’s chief Washington correspondent, A. M. Gibson, who handled many of the Grant scandals, wrote most of the news stories about the theft of the Presidency by Mr. Hayes’s managers. He also published in book form an official history of the fraud.

Joseph Pulitzer, then newly come from the West, was assigned by Dana to cover the proceedings of the Electoral Commission in semieditorial style. Pulitzer was later, in 1878, a European correspondent of the Sun.

313

CHAPTER XV
“THE SUN” AND “HUMAN INTEREST”

The political scandals made good reading, but the Sun was not content to feed its readers on investigations. It put a little bit of everything on their breakfast-plates—the Moody and Sankey revivals, Mr. Keely’s motor, which didn’t work, and young Edison’s multiple telegraph, which did; the baseball games of the days when Spalding pitched for Boston and Anson and Reach were at first and second base, respectively, for the Philadelphia Athletics; the presentation of a cup to John Cable Heenan, the prize-fighter, as the handsomest and best-dressed man at the ball of the Shandley Association; an interview with Joaquin Miller on Longfellow; the wiggles of the sea-serpent off Swampscott; a ghost-story from Long Island, with a beautiful spook lashed to the rigging of a spectral bark; the arrival of New York’s first Chinese laundryman; Father Tom Burke’s lectures on Ireland; the lectures of Tyndall on newly-discovered phenomena of light; the billiard-matches between Cyrille Dion and Maurice Daly; a tar-and-feathers party in Brooklyn—the Sun skimmed the pan of life and served the cream for two cents.

The familiar three-story head-line, which was first used by the Sun on the day of Grant’s inauguration, and which stayed the same until long after Mr. Dana’s314 death, attracted readers with the magic of the head-writers’ art. “The Skull in the Chimney,” “Shaved by a Lady Barber,” “A Man Hanged by Women,” “Burned Alive for $5,000,” “The Murder in the Well,” “Death Leap in a Theatre,” “An Aged Sinner Hanged,” “The Duel in the Bedroom,” “Horrors of a Madhouse,” “A Life for a Love-Letter”—none could glance at the compelling titles of the Sun stories without remaining to read. They are still fascinating in an age when lady barbers would attract no attention.

A typical Sun of 1874 might contain, in its four pages, six columns about the Beecher-Tilton case; four columns of editorial articles; a letter from Eli Perkins (Melville DeLancey Landon) at Saratoga, declaring that the spa was standing still commercially because of its lack of good drinking-water; a column, also from Saratoga, describing the defeat of Preakness by Springbok; the latest in the strange case of Charley Ross; a column headed “Life in the Metropolis—Dashes Here and There by the Sun’s Reporters”; a column of “Sunbeams,” a column about trout-fishing, two columns of general news, and five columns of advertisements.

Instead of Eli Perkins’s letter, there might be a critique by Leopold Damrosch, from Baireuth, of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” just presented; or a dissection, by “Monsieur X,” of E. A. Sothern’s Dundreary. “Monsieur X” was Napoleon Leon Thiéblin, who was for years one of the Sun’s most distinguished critics and essayists. He was that kind of newspaperman who could—and did—write on Saturday of the political news of Bismarck and on Sunday of the crowd at Coney Island.

Thiéblin, who was of French blood, was born in St. Petersburg in 1834. He was graduated at the Russian Imperial Academy of Artillery, and commanded forty315 pieces of cannon at the siege of Sebastopol. At the close of the Crimean War he went to London and became a member of the staff of the Pall Mall Gazette, reporting for that journal the French side of the war with Germany in 1870–71, and the atrocities of the Commune, over the pen-name of “Azamet Batuk.” He reported the Carlist War in Spain for the New York Herald, and then came to America to lecture, but Dana persuaded him to join the Sun staff. He contributed to the Sun many articles on foreign affairs, including a series on European journalism; “The Stranger’s Note-Book,” which was made up of New York sketches; letters from the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia; and the Wall Street letters signed “Rigolo.”

In the “Sunbeams” column were crowded the vagrant wit and wisdom of the world. The items concerned everything from great men in European chancelleries to organ-grinders in Nassau Street:

The interview, invented by the elder Bennett, was becoming more and more popular. The Sun used it, not only as the vehicle of acquired information, but sometimes as the envelope of humour. Take, for example, this bit, printed in 1875, but as fresh in style and spirit as if it were of the product of a reporter of 1918:

How did the Sun reporters of the seventies compare with those of later years? As no two reporters are alike in vision and style, no two occasions identical in incident, no two dramatic moments twin, it is better to make comparison by choosing arbitrarily scenes far apart in years, but set on similar stages, and to lay before the reader the work of the Sun reporter in each case. Let us take, because of their resemblance in public interest and the similarity of physical surroundings, the close of the trials, twenty years apart, of Edward S. Stokes for the murder of James Fisk, Jr.; of Lizzie Borden for the killing of her father and step-mother, and of Charles Becker for the assassination of Herman Rosenthal.

The following was printed in the Sun of June 21, 1893, under date of New Bedford, Massachusetts:

If comment were needed, it would be that the Sun reporter in the court-room at New Bedford had the advantage of describing a protagonist who, by her sex and by the very mystery that was left unsolved at her acquittal, was a far more dramatic figure than Stokes or the police lieutenant. The climaxes quoted are useful as an illustration of the advance of reporting from 1873, when the Sun style was still forming, to 1893 and 1914, when it was fully formed; not as a comparison between what may not have been the best work of the reporter of the Stokes trial, Henry Mann, and the stories by Julian Ralph, who saw Lizzie Borden fall, and Edwin C. Hill, who wrote the Becker article.

The Sun omitted the weary introductions that had been the fashion in newspapers—leading paragraphs which told over again what was in the head-lines and were merely a prelude to a third and detailed telling. The Sun reporter began at the beginning, thus:

In the longer and more important stories, the rule was adhered to as closely as possible. Prolixity, fine writing, and hysteria were taboo. Mark the calmness with which the Sun reporter began his story of the most sensational crime of the late seventies:

The human lights of life were caught by the Sun men and transferred to every page of every issue. In 1878 a Sun reporter was sent to Menlo Park, New Jersey, to see how a young inventor there, who had just announced the possibility of an incandescent electric light, worked:

Nearly forty years later Sun reporters still went to see Mr. Edison borrow white magic from nature and323 chewing-tobacco from his employees, and to describe both interesting processes.

With Dana’s knowledge of what people wanted to read was mixed a curiosity, sometimes frankly expressed in the Sun, as to just why they wanted to read some things a great deal more than other things. It must be remembered that even in the seventies and eighties not everybody read a newspaper every day; some reserved their pennies and their eyes for great climaxes. The Sun, a paper which paid much attention to political matters, naturally found its circulation sharply affected by important political happenings. It sold ninety-four thousand extra copies on the morning after the Tilden-Hayes election—two hundred and twenty-two thousand copies, in all, being disposed of before eight o’clock in the morning. In 1875, when the pugilist, John Morrissey, who was supported by the Sun for the State Senate because he was anti-Tammany, defeated Fox, the Sun sold forty-nine thousand extra copies on the day after the election.

The assassination of the Czar Alexander II of Russia did not sell an extra paper, but the hanging of Foster, the “car-hook murderer,” sent the sales up seventeen thousand. The deaths of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Alexander T. Stewart had no effect on the Sun’s circulation, the passing of Napoleon III raised it only one thousand for the day, and the death of Pius IX caused only four thousand irregular readers to buy the paper; but the execution of Dolan, a murderer now practically forgotten, sent the sales up ten thousand. The beginning of coercive measures in Ireland by the arrest of Michael Davitt sold no extra papers in a city full of Irishmen, but the Fenian invasion of Canada meant the sale of ten thousand copies more than usual.

Tweed’s death caused an increase of five thousand; the death of President Garfield, of seventy-four thousand. Only thirteen thousand extras were sold after the Brooklyn Theatre fire, while the Westfield steamboat explosion sold thirty-one thousand. Twenty-one thousand irregular readers bought the Sun to read about the first blasting of Hell Gate in 1876, while only eight thousand were interested in the fact that Tilden had been counted out by the Electoral Commission. The flare-up of the Beecher scandal, in August, 1874, sold as many extras—ten thousand—as the shooting of Fisk.

The beginning of the Crédit Mobilier exposé added only a thousand to the normal circulation, but on the morning after a big walking-match the presses had to run off forty thousand more than their usual daily grist. The resignation of Roscoe Conkling and Thomas C. Platt from the United States Senate hoisted the circulation only two thousand, but the fight between John L. Sullivan and Paddy Ryan meant a difference of eleven thousand. The opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia caused extra sales of three thousand; an international rifle-match at Creedmoor, ten thousand.

In 1882 the Sun made the calculation that the average effect of certain sorts of news in increase of circulation was about as follows:

On its fiftieth birthday—September 3, 1883—the Sun printed a table showing the high-tide marks of its circulation:

In the same article, a page review written by Mr. Mitchell, the reasons for the Sun’s success were succinctly given:

By this time Dana had framed a newspaper organisation more nearly perfect than any other in America. Grouping about him men suited to the Sun, to himself, and to one another, he had created a literary world of his own—a seeing, thinking, writing world of keen objective326 vision. Men of a hundred various minds, each with his own style, his own ambition, his own manner of life, the Sun staff focused their abilities into the one flood of light that came out every morning. It was a bohemia of brightness, not of beer; unconventional in its manner of seeing and writing, but not in its collars or its way of living. The Sun spirit, unquenchable then as now, burned in every corner of the shabby old rooms. It was the spirit of unselfish devotion, not so much to Dana or his likable lieutenants as to the invisible god of a machine in which each man was a pinion, meshing smoothly with his neighbour.

That these pinions did mesh without friction was due, in largest part, to Dana’s intuitive faculty of choosing men who would “fit in” rather than men who could merely write. It was by his choosing that the Sun came to have for its editorial page writers like W. O. Bartlett and E. P. Mitchell, M. W. Hazeltine and N. L. Thiéblin, Henry B. Stanton and John Swinton, James S. Pike and Fitz-Henry Warren, Paul Dana and Thomas Hitchcock, Francis P. Church and E. M. Kingsbury. It was by his choosing that the Sun had managing editors like Amos J. Cummings and Chester S. Lord, city editors like John B. Bogart and Daniel F. Kellogg, and night city editors like Henry W. Odion, Ambrose W. Lyman, and S. M. Clarke.

Managing editors and city editors hired men, hundreds of them, but always according to the Dana plan—first find the man, then find the work for him. Chester S. Lord, who took more men on the Sun than any other of its executives, was fully familiar with the Dana method when he began, in 1880, a career as managing editor that lasted for thirty-two years of brilliant achievement; and he followed it until he retired. He had been on the Sun since 1872, shortly after he came327 out of Hamilton College, and he had served as a reporter, as editor of suburban news, as assistant night city editor under Lyman, and as assistant managing editor in the brief period when Ballard Smith succeeded Cummings and Young as chief of the Sun’s news department.

At the beginning of his service as managing editor Lord found himself with a staff which included Bogart, Dr. Wood, Stillman, Odion, E. M. Rewey, Garrett P. Serviss, and Cyrus C. Adams, all trained desk men and most of them good reporters as well; and such first-class reporters and correspondents as Julian Ralph, S. S. Carvalho, Willis Holly, and E. J. Edwards. To these, by the time the Sun reached its half-century mark, had been added the great night city editor Clarke and reporters like John R. Spears and Arthur Brisbane. Other great newspapermen were soon to join the army of Mr. Lord in that long campaign of which the editor of the Sun said, on the occasion of Mr. Lord’s retirement:

328

CHAPTER XVI
“SUN” REPORTERS AND THEIR WORK

There is an unconventional club which has no home except on the one night each year when it holds a dinner in a New York hotel. Its members are men who have been writers on the Sun, and who, though they have left the paper, love it. They meet for no purpose except to toast the Sun of their day and this. They call themselves the Sun Alumni.

From the ranks of the novelists and magazine editors and writers come men like Will Irwin, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Robert Welles Ritchie, Albert W. Atwood, Henry James Forman, Cameron Mackenzie, Kirk Munroe, Charles Mason Fairbanks, Robert R. Whiting, James L. Ford, E. J. Edwards, Arthur F. Aldridge, George B. Mallon, Gustav Kobbé, and Frederick Kinney Noyes.

From the lists of newspaper owners and editors come Arthur Brisbane, of the Washington Times; Edward H. Mott, of the Goshen Republican; Frank H. Simonds, of the New York Tribune; Martin J. Hutchins, of the Chicago Journal; C. L. Sherman, of the Hartford Courant.

From the staffs of other New York newspapers come Charles Selden, Carr V. Van Anda, and Richard V. Oulahan, of the Times; William A. Willis, of the Herald; Rudolph E. Block, of the American; J. Arthur329 Seavey, of the Tribune; and Lindsay Denison, of the Evening World.

From the bench come Judges Willard Bartlett, Warren W. Foster, and Willard H. Olmsted; from government work, Stephen T. Mather, Robert Sterling Yard, and E. W. Townsend; from business, Edward G. Riggs, Willis Holly, Collin Armstrong, Oscar King Davis, Robert Grier Cooke, John H. O’Brien, and Roy Mason. If the racing season is over in Cuba, C. J. Fitzgerald is present. If business on the San Diego Sun is not too brisk, its editor, Clarence McGrew, crosses the continent to be at the feast. Until his death in 1917, Franklin Matthews, associate professor of journalism at Columbia University, who was with the Sun from 1890 to 1909 in many capacities, was one of the leading spirits of the Alumni. Dr. Talcott Williams, chief of the school of journalism, is another enthusiastic alumnus.

These men, the outsider observes, gather and talk in groups. The men of the eighties recall the wonders of the four-page Sun and its Bogarts, Ralphs, and Cummingses. Men of the nineties chat of the feats of “Jersey” Chamberlin and “Commodore” Spears. The alumni who matriculated in the present century speak of Riggs and Irwin, Denison and O’Malley and Hill. But all talk of the Sun, and of Dana and Mitchell and Lord and Clarke.

It is only when they speak of reporters that there is a grouping of heroes. That is because it is a natural and pleasant practice, if an illogical one, for newspapermen of the present and previous decades to look back to this or that period of a paper and say:

An old Sun man will point, for instance, to the Sun’s roster of reporters in 1893, when the local staff included:

Julian Ralph
John R. Spears
Oscar K. Davis
C. J. Fitzgerald
Carr V. Van Anda
David Graham Phillips
George B. Mallon
Samuel Hopkins Adams
Daniel F. Kellogg
C. M. Fairbanks
Lawrence Reamer
W. J. Chamberlin
Edward G. Riggs
E. W. Townsend
Rudolph E. Block
Samuel A. Wood
E. D. Beach
E. O. Chamberlin
Victor Speer
Joseph Vila
W. A. Willis
Collin Armstrong

The weak place in this sort of retrospection is that after twenty-five years the observer’s focus is twisted. Julian Ralph was a great reporter in 1893, but W. J. Chamberlin, whose name is linked with Ralph’s among great Sun reporters, was only just arriving. John R. Spears had made his reputation, but Riggs’s fame as a political writer was not yet established. Townsend had tickled New York with his “Chimmie Fadden” stories, but Sam Adams was a cub. Wood, Vila, and Reamer were not as important to the Sun in 1893 as they are at this writing.

The men of 1893 probably agreed that there was no staff like the staff of 1868, just as the men of 1942 may gaze with proud regret at the staff list of 1917. Distance, like pay-day, lends enchantment; and newspaper history is a little more hazy than most other kinds of history, because the men who write what happens to other people have no time to set down what happens to themselves.

The anonymity of the Sun reporter has been almost complete. If Julian Ralph had never gone into the field of books and magazines, he would have been as little known to the general public as the Sun’s best reporter is to-day; but newspapermen would not have undervalued him. There is better quality in the things he331 wrote hastily and anonymously for the Sun than in some of the eight or nine published volumes that bear his name, and the reason for this is that he was primarily a newspaperman.

He entered the game at fifteen, as an apprentice in the office of the Red Bank (New Jersey) Standard. At seventeen he was a city editor and a writer of humour. At eighteen he had founded the Red Bank Leader—a failure. At nineteen he was one of the editors of the Webster (Massachusetts) Times, and at twenty he was a reporter on the New York Graphic. At twenty-two he was on the Sun, where he remained from 1875 to 1893.

Ralph was a news man who lacked none of the large reportorial qualities. He enjoyed seeing new places and new people. He liked to hunt news—an instinct missing in some good writers who fail to be great reporters. He liked to write—a taste found too seldom among men who write well, and too frequently among the graphomaniacs who fancy that everything is worth writing, and that perfection lies in an infinite number of words.

Some one said of Ralph that he “could write five thousand words about a cobblestone.” If he had done that, it would have been an interesting cobblestone. He had a passion for detail, but it was not the lifeless and wearisome detail of the realistic novelist. When he wrote half a column about a horse eating a woman’s hat, the reader became well acquainted with the horse, the woman, and the crowd that had looked on.

Ralph was untiring in mind, legs, and fingers. He liked the big one-man news story, such as an inauguration or a parade, or the general introduction of a national convention. His quiet, easy style, his ability to cover an event of many hours and much territory, were332 shown to good advantage in his description of the funeral of General Grant in August, 1885. He wrote it all—a full front page of small type—in about seven hours, and with a pencil. It began:

That was the beginning of a story of about eleven thousand words, all written by Ralph in one evening. It told everything that was worth reading about the burial—the weather, the crowded line of march, the people from out of town, the women fainting at the curbs, the uniforms and peculiarities of the Union and Confederate heroes who rode in the funeral train; told everything from eight o’clock in the morning, when the sightseers began to gather, until the bugler blew taps and the regiments fired their salute volleys. It was a story typical of Ralph, who saw everything, remembered333 everything, wrote everything. In detail it is unlikely that any reporter of to-day could surpass it. In dramatic quality it has been excelled by half a dozen Sun reporters, including Ralph himself.

For example, there is the story of a similar event—Admiral Dewey’s funeral—written in January, 1917, by Thoreau Cronyn, of the Sun, with a dramatic climax such as Ralph did not reach. This is the end of Cronyn’s story—the incident of the old bugler whose art failed him in his grief:

Julian Ralph saw more of the world, and made more copy out of what he saw, than any other newspaperman.334 While still on the Sun he was making books out of the material he picked up on his assignments. In the early nineties, while still on the Sun staff, he made two tours for Harper’s Magazine and wrote “On Canada’s Frontier,” “Our Great West,” and “Chicago and the World’s Fair,” the last of which was the official book of the Columbian Exposition. After his experiences in the Boer War he wrote “Towards Pretoria,” “War’s Brighter Side” (with Conan Doyle), and “An American with Lord Roberts.” His other books are “Alone in China,” “Dixie; or, Southern Scenes and Sketches,” “People We Pass,” and a novel, “The Millionairess.” He was the author of the “German Barber” sketches, which appeared almost weekly in the Sun for a long time, and which are remembered as among the genuine examples of real humour in dialect. During the Boer War, Ralph joined the staff of the London Daily Mail, and after returning from South Africa he made his home in London until his death in 1903.

A tradition about Ralph, indicating the pleasure that his articles gave to his own colleagues as well as to the public, concerns one of the great football-games of the eighties. John Spears discovered the picturesqueness of the Yale-Princeton games, usually played on Thanksgiving Day, and the Sun featured them year after year. Reporters hungered for the job, for it meant not only money, but the opportunity to write a fine story.

When Ralph’s turn came he wrote such a good article that the copy-desk let it run for five columns. Lord admired it, Clarke was enthusiastic over it, and the other men in the office took turns in reading the story in the proofs, so happily was it turned. It was not until the first edition was off the press that an underling, who cared more for football than for literature, suggested that the story ought to contain the score of335 the game. Ralph had forgotten to state it, and all the desks, absorbed in the thrill of the article itself, had overlooked the omission.

Ralph reported for the Sun the outrages of the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coal-fields. After the execution of two of the outlaws for murder, he was bold enough to follow their bodies back to their village where they had lived, in order to describe the wake. He was warned to leave the place before sunset, on pain of death, and he went, for there was nothing to be gained by staying.

On another assignment, a murder mystery, the relatives of the victim, who were ignorant and superstitious people, suspected Ralph of being the murderer. When he came into their house to see the body, they demanded that he should touch it, their belief being that the body would turn over, or the wounds reopen, if touched by the murderer. There was an implied threat of death for the reporter if he refused, but Ralph walked out without complying.

Ralph was a believer in the sixth sense of journalists, that inexplicable gift by which a man, and particularly a newspaperman, comes to a clairvoyant knowledge that something is about to happen—in other words, an exalted hunch. John B. Bogart, city editor in Ralph’s Sun days, had this sense, and he called it a “current of news.” He thus described its workings to Ralph:

While acting as the legislative correspondent of the Sun at Albany, Ralph was in the habit of walking to one of the local parks to enjoy the view across a valley southwest of the city. One day, while gazing across the valley, he was seized with a desire to go to the mountains in the distance beyond it. The impulse remained with him for two days, and then, on the third day, he read of a news happening that had occurred in the mountains on the very day when the current of news had thrilled him.

Ralph reported the Dreyfus court-martial at Rennes, in France. One morning he could not sleep after five o’clock. As he was on his way to court he said to George W. Steevens, of the London Daily Mail, who was walking with him:

“Wait a moment while I go into the telegraph office and wire my paper that I expect exciting news to-day.”

At that hour there was no apparent reason to expect any news out of the ordinary, but it was only a few hours later that Maître Labori, Dreyfus’s counsel, was shot down on his way to court.

Young newspapermen who are fortunate enough to be possessed of—or by—the sixth sense must remember, however, that it cannot be relied upon to sound the alarm on every occasion. Mr. Bogart, who felt that he had a friend in the current of news, kept close track of the assignment-book. As a city editor he was unsurpassed for his diligence in following up news stories. One day he assigned Brainerd G. Smith, afterward professor of journalism at Cornell, to report the first reception given by Judge Hilton after the death of the judge’s partner, A. T. Stewart.

“And above all,” Mr. Bogart wound up, “don’t leave the house without asking Judge Hilton whether they’ve found Stewart’s body yet.”

Julian Ralph attributed his success as a journalist chiefly to three things—a liking for his work, the ability to get what he was sent for, and good humour. He omitted mention of something which distinguished him and Chamberlin and all other great reporters—hard work. Ralph himself gives a brief but complete picture of a day’s hard work in his description, in “The Making of a Journalist,” of the way in which he reported the inauguration of a President:

As Ralph remarked, that was hard work, but it was nothing when compared with the job of reporting a338 national convention. “One needs only to see an inauguration,” he said. “In a national convention one must know.”

Wilbur J. Chamberlin’s name is not in any book of American biography. In library indexes his name is found only as the author of “Ordered to China,” a series of letters he wrote to his wife while on the assignment to report the Boxer rebellion—one of the many pieces of Sun work which he did faithfully and well. He never found time to write books, although he wished to do so. He was a Sun man from the day he went on the staff, in 1890, until the day of his death, August 14, 1901.

Chamberlin was born in Great Bend, Pennsylvania, March 12, 1866. While he was still a boy he went to Jersey City, where he worked in newspaper offices and became the local correspondent of several newspapers, including the Sun. He came to be known as “Jersey” Chamberlin to the Sun men who did not know how much he detested the nickname. His intimates called him Wilbur, and the office knew him generally as “W. J.”—an easy way of distinguishing him from other Chamberlins and Chamberlains. He lacked Ralph’s rather distinguished personal appearance, but his strong personality, his courage, ability, and industry overshadowed any lack of fashion.

Like Ralph, he was indefatigable. Like his brother, E. O. Chamberlin, he let nothing stop him in the pursuit of news. Like Henry R. Chamberlain, he had the gift of divining rapidly the necessary details of any intricate business with which his assignment dealt. If a bank cashier had gone wrong, “W. J.” was the man to describe how the sinner had manœuvred the theft; to wring from usually unwilling sources the story which appeared in the bank only in figures, but which must appear in the Sun in terms of human life. The world339 of finance was more dumb then than it is now, for Wall Street had not learned the wisdom of uttering its own pitiless publicity.

Chamberlin had one idiosyncrasy and one hatred. The mental peculiarity was a wish to conceal his own age. Unlike most successful men, he wished to be thought older than he was; and he looked older. He was only thirty-five when he died in Carlsbad, on his way home from China; yet he had packed into that brief life the work of an industrious man of fifty.

His single enmity was directed against cable companies, and he had good reason to dislike them. One day, during the Spanish-American War he boarded the Sun boat, the Kanapaha, and ran to Port Antonio, Jamaica, with an exclusive story. The women clerks in the telegraph office took his despatch and counted the words three times before they would start sending it. They told Chamberlin the cost, about a hundred dollars, which he promptly paid in cash.

Three or four days later he went back to Port Antonio with another important despatch. The cable clerk told him that on his previous visit their count had been one word short.

“That’s all right,” said Chamberlin, and he threw down a shilling to pay for the one word.

The cable hoodoo pursued Chamberlin to China. As soon as he arrived in Peking he began sending important news stories by telegraph to Tientsin, where he had left a deposit of three hundred dollars with the cable company that was to forward the messages to New York. After working in Peking for two weeks, he discovered that all his stories were lying in a pigeonhole at Tientsin; not one had been relayed.

A third time an important despatch was held up overnight because it had not been written on a regular telegraph-blank. But Chamberlin’s most bitter grudge against the cable companies was the result of his adding to a message sent to the Sun on Christmas Eve, 1900, the words “Madam Christmas greeting.” This was a short way of saying, “Please call up Mrs. Chamberlin and tell her that I wish her a Merry Christmas.” Under the cable company’s rules nothing could be sent at the special newspaper rate except what was intended for publication. Chamberlin got a despatch from the manager of the cable company as follows:

There was nothing for Chamberlin to do but assure the cable manager that if the Sun had wished to print “Madam Christmas greeting” in its columns it was welcome to do so.

In spite of his cable misfortunes Chamberlin got more news to the Sun about the Boxer troubles than any other correspondent obtained. He was the first reporter in China who told the truth about the outrageous treatment of the Chinese by some of the so-called Christians. He was particularly frank in describing the brutality of Count von Waldersee’s German soldiers. In November, 1900, he wrote to his wife:

Chamberlin had a reputation for possessing the ability to write any kind of a story, no matter how technical341 or how delicate. Edward G. Riggs was sitting beside him in the Populist convention of July, 1896, when the suspenders of the sergeant-at-arms of the convention, who was standing on a chair, cheering, surrendered to cataclasm. Riggs turned to his colleague and said triumphantly:

The number of Chamberlains and Chamberlins in the history of American journalism is enough to create confusion. The Sun alone had four at one time. They342 were Wilbur J. Chamberlin and his almost equally valued brother, Ernest O. Chamberlin, who later became managing editor of the Evening World; Henry Richardson Chamberlain, and Henry B. Chamberlin.

E. O. Chamberlin went on the Sun’s local staff while Wilbur was still engaged in small work in Jersey City. In the late eighties he was a colabourer with reporters like Daniel F. Kellogg, Edward G. Riggs, William McMurtrie Speer, Charles W. Tyler, Robert Sterling Yard, Samuel A. Wood, Paul Drane, and Willis Holly.

Henry Richardson Chamberlain, who was born in Peoria, Illinois, became a Sun reporter in May, 1889. He was then thirty years old, and had had twelve years’ experience in Boston and New York. In 1888 he had served as managing editor of the New York Press. He was particularly valuable to the Sun on the stories most easily obtained by reporters of wide acquaintance, such as business disasters. In 1891 he returned to Boston to become managing editor of the Boston Journal, but he was soon back on the Sun.

In 1892 he was sent to London as the Sun’s correspondent there, and it was at this post that he won his greatest distinction. He had a news eye that looked out over political Europe and an imagination that compelled him to concern himself as much with the future of the continent as with its past and present. The Balkans and their feuds interested him strongly, and he was forever writing of what might come from the complications between the little states through their own quarrels and through their tangled relations with the powers. It was the habit of some newspapermen, both in London and New York, to stick their tongues in their cheeks over “H. R. C.’s war-cloud articles.”

“H. R. is always seeing things,” was a common remark, even when the logic of what he had written was343 undeniable. There couldn’t be a general war in Europe, said his critics, kindly; it was impossible.

Besides having general supervision over the Sun’s European news, Chamberlain personally reported the Macedonian disturbances, the Panama Canal scandal in France, the Russian crisis of 1906, and the Messina earthquake. He was the author of many short stories and of one book, “Six Thousand Tons of Gold.” He died in London in 1911, while still in the service of the Sun; still believing in the impossibility of putting off forever the great war which so often rose in his visions.

Henry B. Chamberlin’s service on the Sun was briefer than that of the Chamberlin brothers or H. R. Chamberlain. He came to New York from Chicago, where he had been a reporter on the Herald, the Tribune, the Inter-Ocean, the Times, and the Record. After 1894, when he left the Sun, he was again with the Chicago Record, and in that paper’s service he saw the Santiago sea-fight from his boat—the only newspaper boat with the American squadron.

Nor must any of these Chamberlins and Chamberlains be confused with some of their distinguished contemporaries not of the Sun—Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, who was the Cuban correspondent of the New York Evening Post in 1898, and later an editorial writer on the New York Evening Mail and the Boston Transcript; Eugene Tyler Chamberlain, one-time editor of the Albany Argus; and Samuel Selwyn Chamberlain, son of the famous Ivory Chamberlain of the New York Herald, founder of the Matin of Paris, and at various times editor of the San Francisco Examiner and the New York American.

Edward G. Riggs, who left the Sun on February 1, 1913, to become a railroad executive, had been a Sun reporter and political correspondent for twenty-eight344 years. He joined the staff in 1885 as a Wall Street reporter. Though he never lost interest in the world of finance and its remarkable men, he soon gravitated toward politics. He became, indeed, the best-known writer of political news in America. He wrote at every national convention from 1888—when Ambrose W. Lyman, then the Washington correspondent of the Sun, was at the head of a staff that included Julian Ralph and E. O. Chamberlin—until 1912. In 1892 Ralph was in charge of the Sun’s national convention work, with Riggs as his first lieutenant; but Riggs was the Sun’s top-sawyer at the conventions of 1896, 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912.

Riggs had a closer view of the wheels of the political machines of New York State than any other political writer. His intimate acquaintance with Senators Platt and Hill, Governors Odell and Flower, and the other powers of the State brought to him one hundred per cent of the political truths of his time—the ten per cent that can be printed and the ninety per cent that can’t.

Riggs never became a regular correspondent at either Washington or Albany. He preferred to rove, going where the news was. In Washington he knew and was welcomed by Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft; by Senators like Hanna and Quay; by Cabinet members like Hay and Knox; by House leaders like Reed and Bland. He knew J. P. Morgan and William C. Whitney as well as he knew William J. Bryan and Peffer, the Kansas Populist.

Between Presidential elections, when political affairs were quiet in New York, Riggs acted as a scout for the Sun with the whole country to scan. Mr. Dana had an unflagging interest in politics, and he relied on Riggs to bring reports from every field from Maine to California.

It was through Riggs that Thomas C. Platt, then the Republican master of New York State, sent word to Dana that he would like to have the Sun’s idea of a financial plank for the Republican State platform of 1896. The plank was written by Mr. Dana and the Sun’s publisher—afterward owner—William M. Laffan. It denounced the movement for the free coinage of silver and declared in favour of the gold standard. The State convention, held in March, adopted Dana’s plank, and the national convention in June accepted the same ideas in framing the platform upon which Major McKinley was elected to the Presidency.

It was Riggs who carried a message from Dana to Platt, in 1897, asking the New York Senator to withdraw his opposition to the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Platt complied, and Roosevelt got the position.

Some years ago, in response to a question as to the difference between a political reporter and a political correspondent, Riggs wrote:

Writing of Riggs as the dean of American political correspondents, Samuel G. Blythe said in the Saturday Evening Post:

One of Mr. Riggs’s last great pieces of newspaper work was a twenty-thousand-word history of national conventions which appeared in the Sun in 1912—the first history of its kind ever written. Mr. Riggs was also a frequent contributor to the editorial page.

Arthur Brisbane, when he became a Sun reporter in347 1882, was almost the youngest reporter the Sun had had; he went to work on his eighteenth birthday. He had been intensively educated in America and abroad. In his first three or four months he was a puzzle to his superiors, his colleagues, and perhaps to himself.

“He sat around,” said one of his contemporary reporters, “like a fellow who didn’t understand what it was all about—and then he came out of his trance like a shot from a gun and seemed to know everything about everything.”

Brisbane was well liked. He was a handsome, athletic youth, interested in all lines of life and literature, cheerful, and eager for adventurous assignment. After two years of reportorial work he went to France to continue certain studies, and while he was there the Sun offered to him the post of London correspondent, which he accepted.

In March, 1888, when John L. Sullivan and Charley Mitchell went to Chantilly, in France, for their celebrated fight, Brisbane went with them and wrote a good two-column story about it—a story that contained never a word of pugilistic slang but a great deal of interest. He saw the human side:

And, when other reporters were deafened by the battle, Brisbane heard the plaintive appeal of Baldock, Mitchell’s tough second:

Not but what the correspondent paid conscientious attention to the technique of the fray:

A couple of years after the establishment of the Evening Sun Brisbane was made its managing editor—a big job for a man of twenty-three years. In 1890 he went to the World, where he became the editor of the Sunday magazine and the most illustrious exponent of that startling form of graphic art which demonstrates to the reader, without calling upon his brain for undue effort, how much taller than the Washington Monument would be New York’s daily consumption of dill pickles, if piled monumentwise.

Seven years later Mr. Hearst took Brisbane from Mr. Pulitzer and made him editor of the Evening Journal—a position eminently suited to his talents, for here he was able to write as he wished in that clear, simple style which had endeared him to the Sun.

Brisbane’s newspaper style goes directly back to the writing of William O. Bartlett. It has its terse, cutting qualities, the avoidance of all but the simplest words, and the direct drive at the object to be attained. Brisbane, too, adopted the Dana principle that nothing was more valuable in editorial writing, for the achievement of a purpose, than iteration and reiteration. This was the plan that Dana always followed in his political battles—incessant drum-fire. Brisbane uses it now as proprietor of the Washington Times, which he bought from Frank A. Munsey, the present owner of the Sun, in June, 1917.

John R. Spears was one of the big Sun men for fifteen years. He, like Amos Cummings and Julian Ralph, was brought up in the atmosphere of a printing-office as a small boy; but in 1866, when he was sixteen years old, he entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis and spent a couple of years as a naval cadet. His cruise around the world in a training-ship filled him with a love of the sea that never left him. His marine knowledge helped him and the Sun, for which he wrote fine stories of the international yacht-races between the Mayflower and the Galatea (1886) and the Volunteer and the Thistle (1887).

Spears liked wild life on land, too, and the Sun sent him into the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky to tell of the feuds of the Hatfields and the McCoys. He went into the Ozarks to write up the Bald Knobbers, and he sent picturesque stories, in the eighties, from No Man’s Land, that unappropriated strip between Kansas and Texas which knew no law from 1850, when it was taken from Mexico, until 1890, when it became a part of the new State of Oklahoma.

Spears was a hard worker. They said of him in the Sun office that he never went out on an assignment without bringing in the material for a special article for the Sunday paper. He wrote several books, including “The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn,” “The Port of Missing Ships,” “The History of Our Navy,” “The Story of the American Merchant Marine,” “The Story of the New England Whalers,” and “The History of the American Slave Trade.” He now lives in retirement near Little Falls, New York. His son, Raymond S. Spears, the fiction-writer, was a Sun reporter from 1896 to 1900.

Park Row knows Erasmus D. Beach chiefly through the book-reviews he wrote for the Sun during many350 years, but he was a first-class reporter, too. The Sun liked specialists, but no man could expect to stick to his specialty. When Gustav Kobbé went on the Sun in March, 1880, it was for the general purpose of assisting William M. Laffan in dramatic criticism and Francis C. Bowman in musical criticism; but his first assignment was to go to Bellevue Hospital and investigate the reported mistreatment of smallpox patients—a job which he accepted like the good soldier that every good Sun man is.

Mr. Beach was a clever all-round writer and reporter, with a leaning toward the purely literary side of the business, and he had no special fondness for sports; but the Sun sent him, with Christopher J. Fitzgerald and David Graham Phillips, to report the Yale-Princeton football-game at Eastern Park, Brooklyn, on Thanksgiving Day, 1890—that glorious day for Yale when the score in her favour was thirty-two to nothing. It was the time of Heffelfinger and Poe, McClung and King. Beach wrote an introduction which Mr. Dana classed as Homeric. Here is a bit of it:

Dana liked Beach’s introduction because the reader need not be a football fan to enjoy it. For the technique of the game he who wished to follow the plays could find all that he wanted in the stories of Fitzgerald and Phillips.

In connection with Beach’s literary accomplishments, there is a tradition that another famous Sun reporter of the eighties, Charles M. Fairbanks, was assigned to report one of the great games at Princeton, and, although entirely unacquainted with punts and tackles, came back with a story complete in technical detail, having learned the fine points of football in a few hours. Later, in the early nineties, Fairbanks was night editor of the paper.

A Sun man who has been a Sun man from a time to which the memory of man goeth back only with a long pull, is Samuel A. Wood, who has been the Sun’s ship-news man for more than thirty-five years. He is a good example, too, of the Sun man’s anonymity, for although he was the originator of the rhymed news story and his little run-in lyrics have been the admiration of American newspapermen for more than a generation, few persons beyond Park Row have known Wood as the author of them.

Although a first-class general reporter, Wood has stuck closely to his favourite topics, the ships and the weather. He made weather news bearable with such bits as this:

Wood writes rhymeless sea-stories with the grace of a Clark Russell. He turns to prose-verse only when the subject particularly suits it, as for instance in the story upon which Mr. Clarke, the night city editor, wrote the classic head—“Snygless the Seas Are—Wiig Rides the Waves No More—Back Come Banana Men—Skaal to the Vikings!” This is the text:

The Sun’s handling of the news of the brief war with Spain, in 1898, has an interest beyond the mere brilliance of its men’s work and the fact that this was the last war in which the newspaper correspondents had practically a free hand.

For years “Cuba Libre” had been one of the Sun’s fights. From the first days of his control of the paper Mr. Dana had urged the overthrow of Spanish dominion in the island. His support of the revolutionists went354 back, as E. P. Mitchell has written, “to the dark remoteness of the struggles a quarter of a century before the war—the time of the Cespedes uprising, the Virginius affair, and the variegated activities of the New York Junta.” Mr. Mitchell adds:

Nor was free Cuba ungrateful to the Sun. A few years after the war, when Mr. Mitchell was walking about the interior Cuban town of Camaguey, formerly355 Puerto Principe, he came upon a modest little public square, the lamp-posts of which were labelled “Plaza Charles A. Dana.” At the corner of the church of Las Mercedes was a tablet with the following inscription:

TRIBUTO DEL PUEBLO A LA MEMORIA DE
CHARLES A. DANA
ILLUSTRE PUBLICISTA AMERICANO
DEFENSOR INFATIGABLE DE LAS
LIBERTADES CUBANAS
ABRIL 10 DE 1899

Dana was dead, without having seen the blooming of the flower he had watered, but Cuba had not wholly forgotten.

When the Maine was blown up in February, 1898, the Sun began preparations to cover a war. The managing editor, Chester S. Lord, assisted by W. J. Chamberlin, worked out the preliminary arrangements. John R. Spears, then thirty-eight years old and a reporter of wide experience, particularly in matters of the sea—he had already written “The History of Our Navy”—was sent to Key West, the headquarters of the fleet which was to blockade Havana. He was at Key West some weeks before war was declared.

The Sun chartered the steam yacht Kanapaha and sent her at once to Key West, under the command of Captain Packard, to take on Spears and his staff, which included Harold M. Anderson, Nelson Lloyd, Walstein Root, Dana H. Carroll, and others. Besides the men named, who were to go with the Kanapaha on her voyage with Sampson’s fleet, the Sun sent Oscar King Davis with Schley’s squadron, and Thomas M. Dieuaide on board the Texas. Dieuaide got a splendid view of the great sea-fight of July 3, when Cervera came out of the356 harbour of Santiago, and he wrote the Sun’s first detailed account of the destruction of the Spanish fleet.

The Sun men ashore in Cuba were captained by W. J. Chamberlin, who succeeded Mr. Spears some time before the battle of Santiago. His force included H. M. Anderson, Carroll and Root of the Sun, and Henry M. Armstrong and Acton Davies of the Evening Sun. Armstrong, who was with Shafter, covered much of the attack and investment of Santiago and the surrender of that city. It was Chamberlin who sent to the United States the first news of the formal surrender of Santiago, but the message was not delivered to the Sun. The government censorship gently commandeered it and gave it out as an official bulletin. Chamberlin wrote the story of the battle of San Juan Hill on board a tossing boat that carried him from Siboney to the cable station at Port Antonio.

The first American flag hoisted over the Morro at Santiago was the property of the Sun, but in this case there was no government peculation. Anderson and Acton Davies gave the flag, which was a boat ensign from the Kanapaha, to some sailors of the Texas, and the sailors fastened it to the Morro staff.

When Schley’s squadron was united with Sampson’s fleet, some time before the battle of Santiago, O. K. Davis was ordered to Manila. He had the luck to sail on the cruiser Charleston, which, on June 21, 1898, made the conquest of the island of Guam. That famous but bloodless victory was described by Davis in a two-page article which was exclusively the Sun’s, and of which the Sun said editorially on August 9, 1898:

Dieuaide, who wrote the Sun’s story of the Santiago sea-fight, is also distinguished as the author of the first published description of St. Pierre—or, rather, of the ashes that covered it—after that city and all but two persons of its thirty thousand had been buried by the eruption of Mont Pelée. The introductory paragraph of Dieuaide’s article gives an idea of his graphic power:

Will Irwin’s great page story, printed beside the straight news of the San Francisco earthquake, is another Sun classic. Irwin had the fortune to be familiar with San Francisco, and he was able, without reference to book or map, to give to New York, through the Sun, a most vivid picture of “The City That Was.” It is a literary companion-piece of Thomas M. Dieuaide’s gray drawing of St. Pierre, but only the introduction must do here:

There were less than five columns of the article, but it told the whole story of San Francisco; not in dry figures of commerce and paved streets, but of the people359 and places that every Eastern man had longed to see, but now never could see.

Writers like Ralph and Chamberlin, Dieuaide and Irwin, are spoken of as “star” reporters, yet the saying that the Sun has no star men is not entirely fictional. Its best reporters are, and will be, remembered as stars, but no men were, or are, treated as stars. Big reporters cover little stories and cubs write big ones—if they can. A city editor does not send an inexperienced man on an assignment that requires all the skill of the trained reporter, yet it is Sun history that many new men have turned in big stories from assignments that appeared, at first blush, to be inconsequential. There are always two or three so-called star men in the office, but the days when there are two or three star assignments are comparatively few.

Let us take, arbitrarily, one day twenty-five years ago—February 1, 1893—and see what some of the Sun reporters did:

To gain an impression of the variety of work which comes to a Sun reporter, take the assignments given to David Graham Phillips in the last days of his service with the Sun in 1893:

Phillips was then one of the Sun’s best reporters; not as large a figure in the office as Ralph, or Chamberlin, or Spears, but one entitled to assignments of the first class. A list of his assignments soon after he joined the staff in the summer of 1890 would be monotonous—Jefferson Market police-court day after day; the kind of work with which the Sun broke in a new man. Once on space, with eight dollars a column instead of fifteen dollars a week, Phillips got what he wanted—a peep at every corner of city life. In a little more than two years as a space man he picked up much of the material that is seen in his novels.

A Sun man takes what comes to his lot. When W. J. Chamberlin returned from Cuba, his first assignment was a small police case. But a really good reporter361 finds his opportunity and his “big” stories for himself.

It would take a small book to give a list of the “big” stories that the Sun has printed, and a five-foot shelf of tall volumes to reprint them all. Some of them were written leisurely, like Spears’s stories of the Bad Lands, some in comparative ease, like Ralph’s stories of Presidential inaugurations and the Grant funeral, or W. J. Chamberlin’s eleven-column report of the Dewey parade in 1899. In these latter the ease is only comparative, for the writer’s fingers had no time to rest in the achievement of such gigantic tasks. And the comparison is with the work done by reporters on occasions when there was no time to arrange ideas and choose words; when the facts came in what would be to the layman hopeless disorder.

Such an occasion, for instance, was the burning of the excursion steamer General Slocum, the description of which—in the end a marvellous tale of horror—was taken page by page from Lindsay Denison as his typewriter milled it out. Such an occasion was Edwin C. Hill’s opportunity to write his notable leads to the stories of the Republic wreck in 1909 and the Titanic disaster in 1912. But the Sun and Sun men never have hysterics. Tragedy seems to tighten them up more than other newspapers and newspapermen.

Introductions to big stories tell the pulse of the paper. Read, for example, the Sun introduction to the great ocean tragedy of 1898:

This was more detailed, but not more calm than the opening of Edwin C. Hill’s story on the loss of the Titanic:

Probably the most restrained lead on a Sun account of a great disaster was the introduction to the article on the Brooklyn Theatre fire of 1876:

Of a more literary character, yet void of excitement, was the way Julian Ralph began his narrative of the blizzard of March, 1888:

While on this subject, it is as well to say that the Sun, in ordinary stories, does without introductions. “Begin at the beginning” has been one of its unwritten rules; or, as a veteran copy-reader remarked to a new reporter who told it all in the first paragraph:

“For the love of Mike, can’t you leave something for the head-writer to say?”

Every young newspaper man hears a good deal about “human-interest stories.” Some of the professors of journalism tell their pupils what human-interest stories are; others advise the best way to know one, or to get one. It is not evident, however, that any one has devised an infallible formula for taking a trivial or commonplace event and, by reason of the humour, pathos, or liveliness thereof, lifting it to a higher plane.

Amos Cummings is believed to have been the first newspaperman to see the news value of the lost child or the steer loose in the street. Amos himself wrote a story about the steer. Ralph wrote another one, and got his first job in New York on the strength of it. Frank W. O’Malley wrote one recently, and made New York laugh over it. But your newspaperman needs something besides a frightened steer and some streets; he must have “something in his noddle,” as Mr. Dana used to say.

Every reporter gets a chance to write a story about a lost child, but there are perhaps only two lost-child stories of the last thirty years that are remembered, and both were Sun stories. David Graham Phillips found his lost child in the Catskills and wrote an article over which women wept. The next time a child was lost, Phillips’s city editor sent him on the assignment, and he fell down. The child was there, and the woods,364 and the bloodhounds, but the reporter’s brain would not turn backward and go again through the processes that made a great story. Hill’s story, which is remembered by its head—“A Little Child in the Dark”—will never be repeated—by Hill.

The tear-impelling article is the most difficult thing for a good reporter to write or a bad reporter to avoid trying to write. It might be added that good reporters write a “sob story” only when it fastens itself on them and demands to be written; and then they write the facts and let the reader do the weeping. O’Malley’s story of the killing of Policeman Gene Sheehan, which has been reprinted from the Sun by several text-books for students of journalism, is good proof of this. Practically all of it—and it was a column long—was a straightforward report of the story told by the policeman’s mother. This is a part:

The Sun has been richly fortunate in the humour that has tinged its news columns since its very beginning. Even Ben Day, with all the worries of a pioneer journalist, made the types exact a smile from his readers. With Dana, amusing the people was second only to instructing them. Julian Ralph and Wilbur Chamberlin both had the trick of putting together the bricks of fact with the mortar of humour. Chamberlin had several characters, like his Insec’ O’Connor, whose strings he pulled and made to dance. Hardly a sea-story of Sam Wood’s—except where there is tragedy—does not contain something to be laughed over. Samuel Hopkins Adams was an adept at the comic twist. Lindsay Denison once wrote a story of a semipublic celebration of an engagement so delightfully that the bride’s father, perhaps the only person in New York who did not see the humour of the affair, threatened to break the pledge of troth, although the groom was a public character who had courted publicity all his life.

Charles Selden, as grave a reporter as ever glowered at a poor space-bill, had a vein of structural humour perhaps unsurpassed by any reporter. His account of a press reception at the home of Miss Lillian Russell has been approached in delicacy only by O’Malley’s interview with Miss Laura Jean Libbey. Selden’s story of the occasion when creditors took away all the furniture of John L. Sullivan’s café—except the one chair upon which the champion snoozed—was a model of dry, unlaboured humour.

As an example of the drollness with which O’Malley has delighted Sun readers for ten years, take this extract from his report of the East Side Passover parade of 1917, referring to Counselor Levy, the Duke of Essex Street, whose title was conferred by the Sun twenty years ago:

There is hardly a man who has lived five years as a Sun reporter but could write his own story of the Sun just as he has written stories of life. Here but a few of these men and their work have been touched. It has been a long parade from Wisner of 1833 to Hill of 1918. Many of the great reporters are dead, and of some of these it may be said that their lives were shortened by the very fever in which they won their glory. Some passed on to other fields of endeavour. Others are waiting to write “the best story ever printed in the Sun.”

What was the best story ever printed in the Sun? It may be that that story has been quoted from in these articles; and yet, if a thousand years hence some super-scientist should invent a literary measure that would answer the question, the crown of that high and now unbestowable honour of authorship might fall to some man here unmentioned and elsewhere unsung. Perhaps it was an article only two hundred words long.

369

CHAPTER XVII
SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM

For forty-seven years the city or news room of the Sun was on the third floor of the brick building at the south corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets, a five-story house built for Tammany Hall in 1811, when that organization found its quarters in Martling’s Tavern—a few doors south, on part of the site of the present Tribune Building—too small for its robust membership.

In the days of Grand Sachems William Mooney, Matthew L. Davis, Lorenzo B. Shepard, Elijah F. Purdy, Isaac V. Fowler, Nelson J. Waterbury, and William D. Kennedy, and the big and little bosses, including Tweed, this third-floor room had been used as a general meeting-hall. It was here, in 1835, that the Locofoco—later the Equal Rights—party was born after a conflict in which the regular Tammany men, finding themselves in the minority, turned off the gas and left the reformers to meet by the light of locofoco matches. It was a room from which many a Democrat was hurled because he preferred De Witt Clinton to Tammany’s favourite, Martin Van Buren. Two flights of long, straight stairs led to the ground floor. They were hard to go up; they must have been extremely painful to go down bouncing.

It was a long, wide, barnlike room, lighted by five windows that looked upon Park Row and the City Hall. The stout old timbers were bare in the ceiling and in them were embedded various hooks and ring-bolts to which, once upon a time, was attached gymnasium apparatus used by a turn verein, which hired the room when the Tammanyites did not need it.

It was not a beautiful room. Mr. Dana never did anything to improve it except in a utilitarian way, and from the time when he bought the building from the Tammany Society, in 1867, until it was torn down in 1915, the old place looked very much the same. Of course, new gas-jets were added, these to be followed by electric-light wires, until the upper air had a jungle-like appearance, and there were rude, inexpensive desks and telephone-booths.

The floor was efficient, for it was covered with rubber matting that deadened alike the quick footstep of Dana and the thundering stride of pugilistic champions who came in to see the sporting editor. But the city room’s only ornaments were men and their genius. Here wrote Ralph and Chamberlin, Spears and Irwin, and all the rest of the fine reporters of the old building’s years.

Near the windows of this shabby room were the desks of the men who planned news-hunts, chose the hunters, and mounted their trophies. Six desks handled all the news-matter in the old city room of the Sun. The managing editor sat at a roll-top in the northwest corner, near a door that led to Mr. Dana’s room. A little distance to the east was the night editor’s desk. At the large flat-top desk near the managing editor three men sat—the cable editor, who handled all foreign news; the “Albany man,” who edited articles from the State and national capitals and all of New York State; and371 the telegraph editor, who took care of all other wire matter.

In the southwest corner of the room was a double desk at which the city editor sat from 10 A.M. until 5 P.M., when the night city editor came in. Next to the city editor’s desk was the roll-top of the assistant city editor, also used by the assistant night city editor. Beyond that was the desk of the suburban or “Jersey” editor. Nearest the door, so that the noise of ten-thousand-dollar challenges to twenty-round combat would not disturb the whole room, was the desk of the sporting editor.

In the fifty years that have passed since Dana bought the Sun, the changes in the heads of the news departments have been comparatively few. True, the news office has not been as fortunate as the editorial rooms, where only three men, Charles A. Dana, Paul Dana, and Edward P. Mitchell, have been actual editors-in-chief; but the list of managing editors and night city editors is not long. Before the day of Chester S. Lord, the managing editors were, in order: Isaac W. England, Amos J. Cummings, William Young, and Ballard Smith. Since Lord’s retirement the managing editors have been James Luby, William Harris, and Keats Speed.

The city editors have been John Williams, Larry Kane, W. M. Rosebault, William Young, John B. Bogart (1873–1890), Daniel F. Kellogg (1890–1902), George B. Mallon (1902–1914), and Kenneth Lord, the present city editor, a son of Chester S. Lord.

The night city editors before the long reign of Selah Merrill Clarke—of whom more will be said presently—were Henry W. Odion, Elijah M. Rewey, and Ambrose W. Lyman, all of whom had previously been Sun reporters, and all of whom remained with the Sun, in various capacities, for many years. Rewey was the372 exchange editor from 1887 to 1903, and was variously employed at other important desk posts until his death in 1916. Since Mr. Clarke’s retirement, in 1912, the night city editors have been Joseph W. Bishop, J. W. Phoebus, Eugene Doane, Marion G. Scheitlin, and M. A. Rose.

The night editors of the Sun, whose function it is to make up the paper and to “sit in” when the managing editors are absent, have been Dr. John B. Wood, the “great American condenser”; Garret P. Serviss, now with the Evening Journal; Charles M. Fairbanks, Carr V. Van Anda (1893–1904), now managing editor of the New York Times; George M. Smith (1904–1912), the present managing editor of the Evening Sun; and Joseph W. Bishop.

In the eighties, the nineties, and the first decade of the present century the front corners of the city room were occupied, six nights a week, by two men closely identified with the Sun’s progress in getting and preparing news. These, Chester S. Lord and S. M. Clarke, were looked up to by Sun men, and by Park Row generally, as essential parts of the Sun.

Lord, through his city editors, reporters, and correspondents, got the news. If it was metropolitan news—and until the latter days of July, 1914, New York was the news-centre of the world, so far as American papers were concerned—Clarke helped to get it and then to present it after the unapproachably artistic manner of the Sun. In the years of Lord and Clarke more than a billion copies of the Sun went out containing news stories written by men whom Lord had hired and whose work had passed beneath the hand of Clarke.

Chester Sanders Lord, who was managing editor of the Sun from 1880 to 1913, was born in Romulus, New York, in 1850, the son of the Rev. Edward Lord, a373 Presbyterian clergyman who was chaplain of the One Hundred and Tenth Regiment of New York Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War. Chester Lord studied at Hamilton College in 1869 and 1870, and went from college to be associate editor of the Oswego Advertiser. In 1872 he came to the Sun as a reporter, and covered part of Horace Greeley’s campaign for the Presidency in that year. After nine months as a reporter he was assigned by the managing editor, Cummings, to the suburban desk, where he remained for four years.

In the fall of 1877 he bought the Syracuse Standard, but in six weeks he returned to the Sun and became assistant night city editor under Ambrose W. Lyman, the predecessor of S. M. Clarke. Ballard Smith, who succeeded William Young as managing editor in 1878, named Lord as his assistant, and Lord succeeded Ballard Smith as managing editor on December 3, 1880.

For thirty-three years Lord inspected applicants for places in the news departments of the Sun, and decided whether they would fit into the human structure that Dana had built. Edward G. Riggs, who knew him as well as any one, has written thus of him:

One of Lord’s notable performances as managing374 editor was the perfecting of the Sun’s system of collecting election returns. Before 1880 the correspondents had sent in the election figures in a conscientious but rather inefficient manner—by towns, or cities. Lord picked out a reliable correspondent in each county of New York State and gave to the chosen man the responsibility of sending to the Sun, at nine o’clock on election night, an estimate of the result in his particular county. This was to be followed at eleven o’clock, if necessary, with the corrected figures.

“Don’t tell us how your city, or township, or village went,” he said to the correspondents. “Let us have your best estimate on the county. Don’t spare the telephone or the telegraph, either to collect the returns or to get them into the Sun office.”

The telephone was just coming into general use for the transmission of news, and Lord saw its possibilities on an election night.

As a result of the new system, improved from year to year, the Sun became what it is—the election-night authority on what has happened. So confident was the Sun of its figures on the night of the Presidential election of 1884 that it, alone of all the New York papers, declared the next morning that Mr. Cleveland had defeated Mr. Blaine, although the Sun had been one of the most strenuous opponents of the Democratic candidate. Blaine, who had wired to the Sun for its estimates, got the first news of his defeat from Lord. Eight years later, when Mr. Cleveland defeated President Harrison, the winner’s political chief of staff, Daniel S. Lamont, received the first tidings of the great and unexpected victory from Mr. Lord.

In the late eighties the Sun was supplementing its Associated Press news service with a valuable corps of special correspondents scattered all over America and375 Europe. The news received from these Sun men led to the establishment, by William M. Laffan, then publisher of the Sun, of a Sun news agency which was called the Laffan Bureau. This service, originated for the purpose of covering special events in the live way of the Sun, was suddenly called upon to cover the whole news field of the world in a more comprehensive way.

Lord’s part in this work, when Dana decided to break with the Associated Press, has been graphically described by Mr. Riggs:

The Laffan Bureau, which assimilated the old United Press, became a news syndicate the service of which was sought by dozens of American papers whose editors admired the Sun’s manner of handling news. The Laffan Bureau lasted until 1916, when the Sun, through its purchase by Frank A. Munsey, absorbed Mr. Munsey’s New York Press, which had the Associated Press service.

Among Mr. Lord’s fortunate traits as managing editor were his ability to choose good correspondents all over the world and his entire confidence in them after they were selected. No matter what other correspondents wrote, the Sun stood by its own men. They were on the spot; they should know the truth as well as any one else could.

Months before Aguinaldo’s insurrection the Sun man at Manila, P. G. McDonnell, kept insisting that the Filipino chieftain would revolt. The other New York newspapers laughed at the Sun for seeing ghosts, but McDonnell was right.

Newspaper readers will remember that in 1904 the fall of Port Arthur was announced three or four times in about as many months, and each time the Sun appeared to be beaten on the news until the next day, when it was discovered that the Russians were still holding out. All the Sun did about the matter was to notify its Tokyo correspondent, John T. Swift, that when Port Arthur really fell it would expect to hear from him by cable at “double urgent” rates. At midnight377 of January 1, 1905, four months after these instructions were given to Swift, the Sun got a “double urgent” message:

No other paper in New York had the news. The Sun rubbed it in editorially on January 3:

Soon after the election of Woodrow Wilson, in 1912, the head of the Sun bureau in Washington, the late Elting A. Fowler, made the prediction that William Jennings Bryan would be named as Secretary of State. Nearly every other metropolitan newspaper either ignored the story, or ridiculed it as absurd and impossible. The Sun never made inquiry of Fowler as to the source of his information. He had been a Sun man for ten years, and that was enough. Fowler repeated and reiterated that Bryan would be the head of the new Cabinet, and sure enough, he was.

The Sun correspondent in a city five hundred miles from New York was covering a great murder mystery. Every other New York newspaper of importance had sent from two to five men to handle the story; the Sun sent none. The correspondent saw that the New York men were getting sheaves of telegrams from their newspapers, directing them in detail how to tell the story, and to what length; so he sent a message to the Sun advising it of the large numbers of New York reporters engaged on the mystery, and of the amount of matter378 they were preparing to send. Had the Sun any instructions for him? Yes, it had. The reply came swiftly:

That was the Sun way, and the Sun printed the correspondent’s stories, whether they were one column long, or six. The Sun could not see how an editor in New York could know more about a distant murder than a correspondent on the spot.

It was the Sun’s way, once a man was taken on, to keep him as long as it could. One day Mr. Lord sent for Samuel Hopkins Adams, then a reporter, and asked him whether he would like to go away fishing.

“No, not exactly,” said Mr. Lord. “A vacation, rather. You’ve been fired. Go away, but come back, say, next Tuesday, and go to work, and it’ll be all right. Don’t worry!”

Adams learned that a suit for libel had been brought against the paper by an individual who had been made an unpleasant figure in a police story which Adams had written.

A few days after Adams returned to his duties Mr. Dana came out of his room and asked the city editor, Mr. Kellogg, the name of the reporter who had written an article to which he pointed. Kellogg told Dana that Adams was the author, and Dana strode across the room and bestowed upon the reporter one of his brief and much prized commentaries of approval. Then he looked at Adams more closely, and, with raised eyebrows, walked to the managing editor’s desk.

“Who is that young man?” he asked Mr. Lord, indicating Adams with a movement of the head.

Another but more prolonged murmur from Mr. Lord. Adams got up from his desk to efface himself, but as he left the room he caught the voice of Mr. Dana, a trifle higher and a bit plaintive:

“Why is it, Mr. Lord, that I never succeed in discharging any of your bright young men?”

This story, while typical of Lord, is not typical of Dana. For every word of censure he had a hundred words of praise. He read the paper—every line of it—for virtues to be commended rather than for faults to be condemned.

“Who wrote the two sticks about the lame girl? A good touch; that’s the Sun idea!”

If a new man had written something he liked—even a ten-line paragraph—the editor of the Sun would cross the room to shake the man’s hand and say:

The spirit he radiated was contagious. The men, encouraged by Dana, spread faith to one another. The “Sun” spirit—the envious of other newspapers were wont to refer to those who had it as “the Sun’s Mutual Admiration Society”—did and does much to make the Sun. The men lived the socialism of art. If a new reporter received a difficult assignment, ten older men were ready to tell him, in a kindly and not at all didactic way, how to find the short cut.

Perhaps some part of the democracy of the Sun office has come from the fact that men have rarely been taken in at the top. It was Dana’s plan to catch young men with unformed ideas of journalism and make Sun men of them. They went on the paper as cubs at fifteen dollars a week—or even as office-boys—and worked their380 way to be “space men,” if they had it in their noddles.

All space men were free and equal in the Jeffersonian sense. Their pay was eight dollars a column. That one man made one hundred and fifty dollars in a week when his neighbour made only fifty was usually the result, not of the system, but of the difference between the men. Some were harder workers than others, or better fitted by experience for more important stories; and some were born money-makers. If a diligent reporter, through no fault of his own, was making small “bills,” the city editor would see to it that something profitable fell to him—perhaps a long and easily written Sunday article.

Through changed conditions in newspaper make-up and policies, the space system in the payment of reporters is now practically extinct. It had good points and bad ones. Undoubtedly it developed a large number of men to whom a salary would not have been attractive. Some, to whose style and activities the space system lent itself, remained in the profession longer than they would otherwise have stayed. On the other hand, it was not always fair to reporters with whom a condensed style was natural. The dynamics of a two-inch article, the very value of which lies in its brevity, cannot be measured with a space-rule.

The Sun’s ideas of fairness do not end with itself and its men. It has always had a proper consideration for the feelings of the innocent bystander. It never harms the weak, or stoops to get news in a dishonourable or unbecoming way. It would be hard to devise a set of rules of newspaper ethics, but a few examples of things that the Sun doesn’t do may illuminate.

Soon after one of the Sun’s most brilliant reporters had come on the paper, he was sent to report the wedding of a noted sporting man and a famous stage beauty,381 the marriage ceremony being performed by a picturesque Tammany alderman. The reporter returned to the office with a lot of amusing detail, which he recited in brief to the night city editor.

“Just the facts of the marriage, please,” said Mr. Clarke. “The two most important events in the life of a woman are her marriage and her death. Neither should be treated flippantly.”

Another reporter wrote an amusing story about a fat policeman posted at the Battery, who chased a tramp through a pool of rain-water. The policeman fell into the water, and the tramp got away. No report of the occurrence was made at police headquarters, but a Sun man saw the incident and wrote it.

“It’s an amusing story,” said Clarke to the reporter, “but they read the papers at police headquarters, and this policeman may be put on trial for not reporting the escape of the hobo. Suppose we drop this classic on the floor?”

A telegraph messenger-boy once wrote a letter to the police commissioner, telling him how to break up the cadets (panders) of the East Side. A Sun man found the lad and got an interesting interview with him.

“Leave my name out, won’t you?” the messenger said to the reporter. “If you print it, I may lose my job.”

He was told that his name was known in the Sun office, but that the reporter would present his appeal.

The Sun man replied that he had found him, and that the interview was interesting and exclusive. Before he had an opportunity to repeat the boy’s plea for anonymity, Clarke said:

“Is it going to hurt the boy if we print his name?382 If it is, leave it out, and refer to him by a fictitious number.”

Two reporters, one from the Sun and one from another big daily, went one night to interview a famous man on an important subject. The Sun man returned and wrote a brief story containing none of the big news which it had been hoped he might get. The other newspaper came out with some startling revelations, gleaned from the same interview. Mr. Lord showed the rival paper’s article to the Sun reporter, with a mild inquiry as to the reason for the Sun’s failure to get the news.

“We both gave our word,” said the reporter, “that we would keep back that piece of news for three days, even from our offices.”

One of the big occurrences in the investigation of the life-insurance companies in 1905 was a report which was read to the investigating committee in executive session. Every newspaper yearned for the contents of the document. After the committee adjourned, a member of it whispered to a Sun reporter:

“There is a bundle of those reports just inside the door of the committee room. I should think that five dollars given to a scrub-woman would probably get a copy for you.”

The Sun man, knowing the value of the report, and not content to act on his own estimate of Sun ethics, telephoned the temptation to the city editor, Mr. Mallon.

“A Sun man who would do that would lose his job,” was the instant decision.

A couple of days after Stephen Tyng Mather, recently First Assistant Secretary of the Interior, went on the Sun as a reporter, the city editor, Mr. Bogart, called him to his desk.

“Mr. Mather,” said Bogart, “an admirer of the Sun has sent me a turkey. Of course, I cannot accept it. Please take it to his house in Harlem and explain why; but don’t hurt his feelings.”

Mather had just come from college, where he had never learned that the ethics of journalism might require a reporter to become a deliverer of poultry, but he took the turkey. It does not detract from the moral of the story to say that Mather and another young reporter, neither quite understanding the Sun’s stern code, took the bird to the Fellowcraft Club and had it roasted—a fact of which Mr. Bogart may have been unaware until now.

The best news-handler that journalism has seen, Selah Merrill Clarke, was night city editor of the Sun for thirty-one years. He came to the paper in 1881 from the New York World, where he had been employed as a reporter, and later as a desk man. In the early seventies he wrote for the World a story of a suicide, and one of the newspapers of that day said of it that neither Dickens nor Wilkie Collins, with all the time they could ask, could have surpassed it. His story of the milkman’s ride down the valley of the Mill River, warning the inhabitants that the dam had broken at the Ashfield reservoir, near Northampton, Massachusetts (May 16, 1874), was another classic that attracted the attention of editors, including Dana.

Clarke never thought well of himself as a reporter, and often said that in that capacity he was a failure. As a judge of news values, or news presentation, or as a giver of the fine literary touch which lent to the Sun’s articles that indescribable tone not found in other papers, Clarke stood almost alone.

The city editor of a New York newspaper sows seeds; the night city editor re-seeds barren spots, waters wilting384 items, and cuts and bags the harvest. The city editor sends men out all day for news; the night city editor judges what they bring in, and decides what space it shall have. In the handling of a big story, on which five or fifteen reporters may be engaged, the night city editor has to put together as many different writings in such a way that the reader may go smoothly from beginning to end. Chance may decree that the poorest writer has brought in the biggest news, and the man on the desk must supply quality as well as judgment.

At such work Clarke was a master. It has been said of him that by the eliding stroke of his pencil and the insertion of perhaps a single word he could change the commonplace to literature. No reporter ever worked on the Sun but wished, at one time or another, to thank Clarke for saving him from himself. Clarke had the faculty of seeing instantly the opportunity for improvement that the reporter might have seen an hour or a day later.

Clarke got about New York very little, but he knew the city from Arthur Kill to Pelham Bay; knew it just as a general at headquarters knows the terrain on which his troops are fighting, but which he himself has never seen. He had the map of New York in his brain. When an alarm of fire came in from an obscure corner, he knew what lumber-yards or oil-refineries were near the blaze, and whether that was a point where the water pressure was likely to fail.

Clarke’s memory was uncanny; it seemed to have photographed every issue of the Sun for years. It was a saying that while Clarke stayed the Sun needed neither an index nor a “morgue”—that biographical cabinet in which newspapers keep records of men and affairs.

Twenty-five years after the Beecher-Tilton trial a three-line death-notice came to Clarke’s desk. He read the dead man’s name and summoned a reporter.

“This man was a juror in the Beecher case,” said Clarke. “Look in the file of February 6 or 7, 1875, and I think you’ll find that this man stood up and made an interruption. Write a little piece about it.”

A Sun man who reported the funeral of Russell Sage at Lawrence, Long Island, in July, 1906, returned to the office and told Mr. Clarke that an acquaintance of the Sage family had told him, on the train coming back, the contents of the old man’s will—a document for which the reading public eagerly waited. The reporter laid his informant’s card before the night city editor. Clarke studied the name on it for a minute, and then said:

“We won’t print the story. Dig out the file for June, 1899, and somewhere on the front page—I think it will be in the third or fourth column—on the 1st or 2nd of June you’ll find a story telling that this man was sent to Sing Sing for forgery.”

Clarke’s memory was right. Although it is anti-climactic to relate it, the ex-convict’s description of what the will contained was also correct.

Will Irwin, while reporting a small war between two Chinese societies, wrote an article one night about the arrest of two Hip Sing tong men who were wearing chain armour under their blouses. Clarke, much interested, asked Irwin all about the armour.

“It reminds me of ‘King Solomon’s Mines,’” remarked Irwin, “and the chain armour that the heroes had made in Sheffield to wear in Africa.”

“Yes,” replied Clarke, who had not read the Haggard novel in fifteen years; “but it wasn’t Sheffield—it was Birmingham.”

Clarke had a sense of responsibility that showed itself in nervousness. On a night when news was breaking, that nervousness was exhibited in his trips, every ten minutes, to the ice-water tank; in the constant lighting and relighting of his pipe; in the quick turn of his head at the approach of a reporter. Yet his nervousness was not contagious. So long as Clarke was nervous, the men under him felt that they need not be. He did all the worrying, and, unlike most worriers, got results from it.

Let him know that something had happened in the city, and his drag-net system was started. No matter how remote the happening, how apparently hopeless the clue, he let neither man nor telephone rest until every possible corner had been searched for the guilty news item. Once the situation was in hand he would return to the adornment of a head-line or the working out of some abstruse problem in mathematics—perhaps the angles of a sun-dial, for Clarke’s hobby was gnomonics, and he knew dials from Ptolemy’s time down. As a rest from mathematics he might write a limerick in Greek, and then carefully tear it up.

Almost every newspaper in New York tried, at one time or another, to take Clarke from the Sun. One night an emissary from one of the apostles of the then new journalism entered the Sun office and sent his card to Mr. Clarke. When the night city editor appeared, he whispered:

“Mr. —— says that if you’ll ascertain the highest salary the Sun will pay you to stay, he’ll double it.”

Clarke uttered the strange sound that was his indulgence when disagreeably disturbed—a cross between a growl and a grunt—and turned back toward his desk.

Although Clarke heard the words, he kept on to his387 desk, and not only never mentioned the matter, but probably never thought of it again.

On another occasion he made a notable trip to the gate at the entrance to the big room. A drunken visitor was making the place ring with yells, and the office-boys could not stop him. Clarke bore the noise for ten minutes, and then, remarking, “This is unendurable!” went and threw the man down the stairs.

“Do you know, Mr. Clarke,” said a reporter who did not know how shy “the boss” was, “that Blank has put you into a short story in Space’s Magazine?”

“Oh, Lord!” said Clarke. “I can’t be expected, can I, to remember all the geniuses that come and go?”

There was a mild ferocity about him that caused more than one cub to think that the night boss was unfriendly, but this attitude had a good effect. No young reporter ever made the same mistake twice.

“If you mean ‘child,’ write it so,” he would say. “Don’t write it ‘tot.’ And please have more variety in your motor cars. I have seen several that were not large and red and high-powered.”

The head-lines of the Sun have been well written since the first days of Dana, and Clarke, for thirty years, was the best of the head-line writers. He wrote rhyming heads for Sam Wood’s prose verse, satirical heads for satires, humorous heads for the funny men’s articles. A Sun reader could gauge almost exactly the worth of an article by the quality of the heading. A Sun reporter could tell just what Clarke thought of his story388 by the cleverness of the lines that the night city editor wrote above it.

Clarke would put the obvious heading on a long, matter-of-fact yarn in two minutes, but he might spend half an hour—if he had it to spare—polishing a head for a short and sparkling piece of work. Two architects who did city work pleaded poverty, but admitted having turned over property to their wives. Clarke headed the story:

A brief item about the arrest of some boys for stealing five copies of “The Simple Life” he headed “Tempted Beyond Their Strength.” Over a paragraph telling of the killing of a Park Row newsboy by a truck he wrote: “A Sparrow Falls.”

Clarke had a besetting fear that Russell Sage would die suddenly late at night, and that the Sun would not learn of it in time. Again and again false “hunches” caused him to send men to the Sage home on Fifth Avenue to discover the state of the old millionaire’s health. When Mr. Sage became seriously ill, reporters were sent in relays to watch the house. One man who had such an assignment turned up at the Sun office at one o’clock in the morning.

“I left Mr. Sage’s house,” he explained to Clarke, “because Dr. Blank just came out and I had a little talk with him. He asked me if S. M. Clarke was still night city editor of the Sun; and when I told him that you were, he said:

“‘Tell Selah for me that I will call him personally on the ’phone if there is the least change in Mr. Sage’s condition. Selah and I are old friends; we used to be room-mates in college.’”

“Blank always was a darn liar!” said Mr. Clarke. “Go back to the house and sit on the door-step.”

On February 28, 1917, five years after Clarke retired, the Sun Alumni Association gave a dinner in his honour, with Mr. Lord presiding. Men came five hundred miles for the event, and the speeches were entirely about Clarke and his work. Mr. Clarke himself, who was only five miles away, sent a kindly letter to say that he was pleased, but that he could not imagine anything more absurd than a man’s attending a dinner given in his own honour.

Clarke was a factor in that nebulous institution so frequently referred to as the “Sun school of journalism,” a college in which the teaching was by example rather than precept. Clarke occasionally told the young reporters how not to do it, but his real lessons were given in the columns of the Sun. There, in cold type, the man could see that Clarke had thrown his beautiful introduction on the floor, had lifted a word or a phrase from the middle of the article and put it to the fore, or had, by one of the touches which marked the great copy-reader’s genius, breathed life into the narrative. Clarke had no rules for improving a story, but he had a faculty, not uncommon among the finest copy-readers, of seeing an event more clearly than it had appeared to the reporter who described it, even when the desk man’s information came entirely from the reporter’s screed.

If a reporter found his story in the paper almost untouched by Clarke’s pencil and adorned with a typical Clarkean head, it was a signal to him that he had done well. He was sure not to get verbal approbation from Clarke. There is a legend that Clarke once cried “Fine!” after skimming over a sheet of well-written copy, but it is only a legend. With a reporter who390 never wrote introductions and never padded his articles Clarke would sometimes crack a joke. Sun traditions have it that once, after a reporter had turned New York inside out to dig out a particularly difficult piece of news, the night city editor remarked to his assistant that that reporter “was a handy man to have around the office.” Although Clarke has been referred to by an excellent judge, Will Irwin, as “the greatest living schoolmaster of newspapermen,” his methods could never be adapted to the academies of journalism.

As a schoolmaster of a more positive type, Sun men remember the late Francis T. Patton, who edited suburban news for twenty years. Staff men on assignments in New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island, and other places just beyond the city turned in their copy to “Boss” Patton, a cultured man who spent his spare hours reading old Latin works in the original or working out chess problems. It was to him that the bewildered cub turned in his hour of torment, and Patton would tell him how long his story ought to run, how he might begin it, how end it.

“I know it isn’t right to fake, Mr. Patton,” said a new reporter; “but is exaggeration never permissible?”

“It is,” said Patton. “You may use exaggeration whenever it is needed to convey to the reader an adequate but not exaggerated picture of the event you are describing. For instance, if you are reporting a storm at Seabright, and the waves are eight and one-half feet high by the tape which you surely carry in your hip-pocket for such emergencies, it will hardly do to inform the reader that the waves are eight and one-half feet high; his visualization of the scene would not be perfect. Yet, if you write that the waves ran mountain-high,391 I shall change your copy if it comes to me. The expression would be too stale. Hyperbole is one of the gifts.”

Patton’s droll humour was one of the delights of the Sun office. One night Charles M. Fairbanks was writing, for the Herald, a story about “The Men Who Make the Sun Shine.” He asked Patton for something about himself.

“You may say,” replied the boss of the suburban desk, “that my characteristics are brilliancy, trustworthiness, accuracy, and poetic fervour.”

“Boss,” said a young reporter to Mr. Patton, “I often think you and I could run this paper better than the men who are running it.”

“How strange!” said Mr. Patton, looking surprised. “I know that I could, but it has never occurred to me that you would not do worse than they do.”

The sports department has been one of the Sun’s strongholds since Mr. Dana’s first years. Dana would let Amos Cummings give half a page to a race at Saratoga or Monmouth Park, and would encourage Amos to neglect his executive duties so that the paper might have a good report of a boxing-match. When William I lay dead in Berlin, the Sun’s principal European correspondent, Arthur Brisbane, was concerned, not with the future of the continent, but with the aftermath of the Sullivan-Mitchell fight at Chantilly.

The stories of the international yacht-races have always been told best in the Sun, whether the reporter was John R. Spears or William J. Henderson. Mr. Henderson, who is the ablest musical critic in America, is probably the best yachting reporter, too. While the world of music knows him through his distinguished critiques, particularly of opera, the Sun knows him as a great reporter—one who would rank high among392 the best it has ever had. Another Sun man who wrote yachting well is Duncan Curry, later of the American.

In turf matters the Sun has long been looked upon as an authority. In the heyday of racing the paper enjoyed the services of Christopher J. Fitzgerald, since then familiar as a starter on many race-tracks, and of Joseph Vila, now sporting editor of the Evening Sun. Fitzgerald, although a specialist in sports, was also a first-class general reporter. He is the hero of a story of the proverbial “Sun luck,” which in this case might better be called Sun persistence and activity.

In the latter part of December, 1892, the steamship Umbria, the fastest transatlantic boat of her day, was two weeks overdue at New York. Every newspaper had tugs out to watch for her first appearance. On the night of December 28 Fitzgerald was assigned to tug duty. The first tug he took down the moonlit bay broke her propeller in the ice; with the second tug he ran twenty miles beyond Sandy Hook. Presently an inward-bound liner appeared in the dark, and the other newspaper boats followed her; but this was not the Umbria, but the Britannic. An hour later a tank steamer came along, and Fitzgerald hailed her on the chance that she knew something about the missing ship.

“The Umbria,” came back the answer, “is about five miles astern, coming in slowly.”

The Sun’s tug raced to sea and soon came alongside the overdue steamer. On board was Frank Marshall White, the Sun’s London correspondent, and he had, all ready written, a story telling how the Umbria broke her machinery, and how the chief engineer lay on his back for five days trying to mend the break. Fitzgerald393 took White’s story and raced to Quarantine, where there was a telegraph-station, but, at that hour, no operator. Fitzgerald, himself an expert telegrapher, pounded the Sun’s call, “SX,” for ten minutes, but the Sun operator had gone home.

Fitzgerald returned to the tug and went under full speed to the Battery, landing at 3.35 A.M. Running to Park Row, he found an assistant foreman of the Sun composing-room enjoying his lemonade in Andy Horn’s restaurant. This man rounded up four or five printers, and they began setting up the story at 4 A.M. The Sun had a complete and exclusive story, and twenty thousand copies were sold of Fitzgerald’s extra.

Vila, like Fitzgerald a man of large physique and a former athlete, wrote the descriptions of a dozen Suburban Handicaps and Futurities, of a score of great college rowing-matches, of a thousand baseball and football games. Damon Runyon, the poet and sporting editor, once remarked that “Vila is the only sporting writer I have ever seen who knows exactly, at the end of a sporting event, just what he is going to write, when he is going to write it, and how much he is going to write.”

When John W. Gates and John A. Drake came to the New York race-tracks and made bets of sensational magnitude, Vila was the only turf reporter able to give the exact figures of the amounts bet by the Western plungers. The printing of these in the Sun so aroused the Jockey Club that a curb was put on big betting.

The present sports staff includes some of the writers, like Nat Fleischer, “Daniel,” Frederick G. Lieb, and George B. Underwood, who were on the big sports staff of the New York Press when that paper was amalgamated with the Sun.

Returning to the big, bare room in the old Sun Building,394 cast the eye of memory through the thin forest of chandeliers entwined with lianas of electric wiring, and across the dull desks. Boss Lord has come in from dinner and is reading telegraphic bulletins from out-of-town correspondents or glancing at a growing pile of proofs. At the Albany desk Deacon Stillman is editing a batch of Congress news from Walter Clarke or Richard V. Oulahan in Washington, or of legislative news from Joseph L. McEntee in Albany, or is trying to think out an apt head for a double murder in Herkimer County. At the cable desk Cyrus C. Adams, long secretary of the American Geographical Society, is looking in a guide-book to discover whether the name of a street in Naples has not been distorted by the operators while in transit between the Rome correspondent and New York. The telegraph editor is telling the night editor, Van Anda or Smith, that he has “nothing much but yellow fever,” and the night editor is replying that “three-quarters of a column of yellow fever will be plenty.”

At the city desk Clarke, who has half finished the heading on a bit about a green heron seen in Bronx Park, picks up the telephone to tell an East Side police-station reporter to investigate the report of an excursion boat gone aground on Hart’s Island, and then turns away to tell Ralph, or Chamberlin, or Joseph Fox, or Irwin, or Hill, or O’Malley, that a column and a half lead will do for the police investigation, or the great public dinner, or whatever his task may have been. As he finishes, a reporter lays on his desk a long story, and Clarke, reading the substance of the first page of it in an instant, hands it over to his assistant to edit.

At the Jersey desk Boss Patton has polished the disquisitions of a suburban correspondent on the antics of a shark in Barnegat Bay, and is explaining to a space395 man, almost with tears, why it was necessary to cut down his article about the picnic of the Smith family at Peapack.

The sporting editor, John Mandigo, has just bade good night to some distinguished visitor—say Mr. Fitzsimmons—and is bending over some copy from Fitzgerald or Vila. Perhaps Henry of Navarre and Domino are nose-and-nose in the stretch at Gravesend, or Amos Rusie has struck out seventeen opposing batters, or Kid Lavigne has lambasted Joe Walcott quite properly at Maspeth.

At a side desk a copy-reader on local news is struggling with a mass of writing from various youthful reporters. “At seven ten o’clock last evening, as Policeman McGuffin was patrolling his beat, his attention was attracted by a cry of fire,” etc. The copy-reader knows that smoke will presently issue from the upper windows; knows, too, that he presently will boil the seven pages down to three lines and gently tell the reporter why he did it.

The chess expert is turning a cabalistic cablegram from St. Petersburg into a detailed story of the contest between a couple of the masters of the game. The bowling man is writing a description, which may never see the light, of a desperate struggle between the Harlem Pin Kings and the Bensonhurst Alley Scorchers. H. L. Fitzpatrick is writing a golf story with such magnificent technique that Mandigo will not dare to cut a line out of it.

A dozen reporters, great and small, are at the desks in the middle of the room, busy with pencils. In a side room three or four others, converts to the typewriter, are pounding out copy. In another room Riggs is dictating to a stenographer the day’s doings in political life.

Four or five “rewrite men,” the “long wait” and his helpers, the “short waits,” are slipping in and out of the telephone-booths, taking and writing news articles from twenty points in the city where the Mulberry Street reporter, the police-station reporters, the Tenderloin man—who covers the West Thirtieth Street police-station, the Broadway hotels, and the theatrical district—and the Harlem man are still busy gathering news.

From a room wisely distant comes the rattle of the telegraph. Half a dozen wires are bringing in the continent’s news. Half a dozen boys, spurred by their chief, Dan O’Leary, carry the typed sheets to the proper desks.

The dramatic critic comes in and sits down at his desk to write two-thirds of a column about a first performance. The music critic has sent down a brief notice of the night’s opera.

Most of the reporters finish their work and go out. One or two remain to write special articles for the Sunday papers. A sporting reporter is spinning a semi-fictional yarn of life in Chinatown. A police reporter is composing little classics of life in Dolan’s Park Row restaurant.

At one o’clock there is a rumbling of the presses in the basement, and soon copies of the first edition come to the desks of the news-masters. Lord suggests to the night editor a shift of front-page articles. Clarke, his pencil flashing, marks in additions to the story of a late accident. A cub waits patiently for a discarded paper, to see whether his piece has got in. An older reporter, who wrote the story in the first column of the first page, does not look at his own work, but turns to the sporting page to read the racing entries for the next day—his day off.

At 1.27 A.M. Clarke rises and goes home. At two o’clock Lord closes his desk. Most of the desk men397 disappear; the work is done. The night editor—Van Anda or the imperturbable Smith—remains at his desk, with the “long wait” reporter to bear him company. At half past three they also go, and the watchman begins to turn out the lights. Down below, the presses are tossing forth the product of a night’s work in the big, bare, old room.

A story of the Sun would be incomplete without a sketch of its little sister. The Evening Sun was established by Mr. Dana nearly twenty years after he bought the Sun. He saw a place for a one-cent evening newspaper, for the only journal of that description then published in New York was the Daily News, which was largely a class publication. The leading evening newspapers were the Evening Post, the Commercial Advertiser, and the Mail and Express, selling for three cents and catering to a highbrow or a partisan clientele.

The first Evening Sun was issued on March 17, 1887, at an hour when the St. Patrick’s Day parade was being reviewed by Mayor Hewitt. With its four pages of six columns each, its brief, lively presentation of general news, and its low price, the paper was an immediate success—though not the success that it is to-day, with its sixteen pages, its wealth of special articles, and the many features that make it one of America’s best evening newspapers.

The new paper had no titular editor-in-chief. Mr. Dana was the editor of the Sun and had the general guidance of the evening paper. Dana’s associate, the publisher of the Sun, William M. Laffan, took a deep interest in the welfare of the new venture, and the Evening Sun was often referred to as his “baby.”

The first managing editor of the paper was Amos J. Cummings, with Allan Kelly as city editor and John McCormick as sporting editor. When Cummings went398 to Congress, E. J. Edwards took his place and remained as managing editor until August, 1889, when Arthur Brisbane returned from the post of London correspondent of the Sun to manage the evening paper.

It was Brisbane who induced Richard Harding Davis, then a young reporter in Philadelphia, to come to New York. As Davis was walking up from the ferry one morning in October, 1889, on his way to take up his new duties, he was taken in hand, in City Hall Park, by a bunco-steerer. Davis listened to the man’s wiles, turned him over to the police of the City Hall station, and then hurried to the Evening Sun office to write a story about it for the paper. Davis’s Van Bibber stories, the first of his fiction to attract wide attention, were originally printed in the Evening Sun, in 1890. As a reporter under Brisbane, Davis picked up much of the information and experiences that coloured his fiction.

When Brisbane went to the Pulitzer forces, he was succeeded as managing editor by W. C. McCloy, who had been city editor, and who remained at the head of the news department for more than twenty years.

Jacob A. Riis, who had been the police-headquarters reporter of the Tribune since 1877, went to the Evening Sun in 1890, coincident with the publication of his first popular work, “How the Other Half Lives.” Other of his works, including “The Children of the Poor” and “Out of Mulberry Street,” were written while he was the chief police reporter of the Evening Sun. Riis’s work was valuable, not only to the paper, but to the city itself. His writings attracted the attention of Theodore Roosevelt when the future President was head of the police board of New York (1895–1897), and the men became close friends. Together they worked to improve conditions in the tenement districts, and Roosevelt called Riis “New York’s most useful citizen.”

Thomas M. Dieuaide, whose work for the Sun in the Spanish War has been referred to in this volume, and who became city editor of the Evening Sun, was one of Riis’s colleagues. Dieuaide was the author of the Evening Sun’s broadside against the black vice of the East Side. Printed in 1901, shortly before the beginning of a mayoralty campaign, it was a prime factor in the election of a reforming administration.

Richard Harding Davis was not the only fiction-writer to graduate from the Evening Sun’s school. Irvin S. Cobb got his start in the North as an Evening Sun reporter. He came to New York from Paducah, Kentucky, rented a hall room, and sat down and wrote to the managing editor of the Evening Sun a letter of application so humorous that he was employed immediately. His report of the peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, following the Russo-Japanese War, attracted wide attention. Stephen French Whitman and Algernon Blackwood, the novelists, were also Evening Sun men.

The Evening Sun’s list of former dramatic critics includes Acton Davies and Edward Fales Coward, both playwrights, and Charles B. Dillingham, the theatrical manager. Arthur Woods, recently police commissioner of New York, and Robert Adamson, recently fire commissioner, were old Evening Sun men. Frederick Palmer, Associated Press correspondent with the British forces in the great war, and Arthur Ruhl, a special correspondent at the front, are Evening Sun alumni.

In the early years of the Evening Sun the chief editorial writer was James T. Watkins, whom Mr. Laffan had known in California as a man of wide scholarship and an economic expert. He was so prolific that it400 was a common saying in the office that, with Watkins at his desk, the Evening Sun needed no other writers of editorial articles. Frank H. Simonds, who had been an editorial writer for the Sun since 1908, became chief editorial writer for the Evening Sun in 1913. In 1914 his war articles attracted wide attention. He was afterward editor of the Tribune.

Other writers for the editorial page were Edward H. Mullin, an Irishman from Dublin, and Frederic J. Gregg. The chief editorial writer is now James Luby, who is assisted by an Evening Sun veteran, Winfield S. Moody.

The managing editors since W. C. McCloy have been Charles P. Cooper, James Luby, and the present incumbent, George M. Smith, for many years night editor of the Sun, and its managing editor in the absence of Mr. Lord.

After Allan Kelly, the city editors were W. C. McCloy, Charles P. Cooper, Ervin Hawkins, Nelson Lloyd, and T. M. Dieuaide. Mr. Lloyd, who left the paper to write fiction, had served as city editor from 1897 to 1904.

The Evening Sun has always had a particular appeal to the woman reader. Its first woman reporter, Miss Helen Watterson, of Cleveland, Ohio, was induced to come East in Brisbane’s régime to write a column called “The Woman About Town,” and ever since 1890 the staff of women writers on the paper has been increasing. The Evening Sun has a page or two a day of feature articles written for women, by women, about women.

The financial and sports departments of the Evening Sun make it a man’s paper, too. No home-going broker would dare to board the subway without a copy of the Wall Street edition of the Evening Sun. A large staff401 of sporting writers, captained by Joseph Vila, provides each day a page or two of authoritative athletic news.

The Sun and the Evening Sun are run as separate publications, each with a complete staff, but their presses and purposes are one.

402

CHAPTER XVIII
THE FINEST SIDE OF “THE SUN”

The Sun’s association with literature, particularly with fiction, has been more intimate than that of any other daily American newspaper. Ben Day had a taste for fiction, else the moon hoax, a bit of good writing as well as the greatest of fakes, would not have appeared. In the time of Moses Y. Beach the balloon hoax and other writings of Poe were in the Sun. Moses S. Beach, who owned or controlled the paper for twenty years, brought popularity and profit to it through stories written exclusively for the Sun by Mary J. Holmes, Horatio Alger, Jr., and a dozen other authors whose tales compelled readers to burn the midnight gas.

Under Dana the Sun’s interest in literature became broader, more intense. Dana’s knowledge that the most avid appetite of the public was for the short story and the novel, led him to encourage his men to adopt, when feasible, the fiction form in news writing. In his four-page daily there was not much room for romance proper, but when the Sunday Sun was under way, its eight pages afforded space for tales of fancy.

In the first few years of Dana’s ownership the walks of American literature were not crowded. As late as 1875 the Sun lamented:

Harte, having written his most famous short stories, had come East. Howells, then thirty-eight, had published three or four novels, but “The Rise of Silas Lapham” was ten years ahead. John Hay, then on the Tribune editorial staff, had written his “Pike County Ballads” and “Castilian Days.” Henry James had put forth only “Watch and Ward.” To these budding geniuses the general public was rather inclined to prefer Augusta Evans’s “St. Elmo,” E. P. Roe’s “Barriers Burned Away,” and Edward Eggleston’s “Hoosier Schoolmaster.”

Notwithstanding the expressed doubt as to Harte’s fecundity, Dana admired his work and printed his stories in the Sun for years afterward. Late in the seventies he bought Harte’s output and syndicated it—probably the first successful application of the newspaper syndicate system to fiction. About the same period Robert Louis Stevenson’s earlier successes, such as “The Treasure of Franchard” and “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door,” were having their first American printing in the Sun, their original appearance having been in Temple Bar and other English magazines.

The files of the Sun for 1891 contain writings of Stevenson that are omitted from most, if not from all of the collections of his works. These are parts of his articles on the South Seas, an ambitious series which he was unable to finish. Some of them were printed404 in the London Black and White. All of them appeared in the Sun. Through the Sun’s literary syndicate the American public gained some of its earliest acquaintance with Harte and Henry James. Kipling’s “Light That Failed” had its first American appearance in the Sun in the autumn of 1890. It may interest Mr. James’s admirers to know that one of the Middle Western newspapers, having bought a James novel from the Sun, played it up with a gingery head-line:

Among the literary men given less to fiction and more to history, sociology, and philosophy who have yielded to the Sun’s columns from their treasure, sometimes anonymously, were Jeremiah Curtin, the translator of Sienkiewicz and Tolstoy and an authority on folk-lore; George Ticknor Curtis, jurist and writer on the Constitution; Goldwin Smith, whose views on the subject of the destiny of Canada coincided with Dana’s, and who contributed to the Sun hundreds of articles from his store of philosophical and political wisdom; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who wrote on railway management; General Adam Badeau, one of Grant’s biographers; William Elliot Griffis, probably the most authoritative of all American writers upon Japanese affairs; and Francis Lynde Stetson, the distinguished authority on corporation and railway law.

Of the more strictly journalistic writers who, although405 not attached permanently to the Sun’s staff, contributed to its news and editorial columns, the names rise of James S. Pike, of Joseph Pulitzer and his predecessor as editor of the World, William Henry Hurlbut; of James F. Shunk and his brother-in-law, Chauncey F. Black, both of Pennsylvania and both humorists; of Edward Spencer, a writer of fiction who displayed splendid imaginative qualities, and of Oliver Dyer, whose range of ability was so great that while one day he wrote for Bonner’s Ledger advice to distressed lovers, the next day would find him penning for the Sun an exhaustive article on the methods employed in building a railroad across the Andes!

Dana encouraged the men who wrote exclusively, or almost entirely, for the Sun, to write fiction. Edward P. Mitchell, whom Mr. Dana attracted to the Sun from the Lewiston (Maine) Journal in 1875, when Mr. Mitchell was twenty-three years old, wrote for the Sun at least a score of short stories of between two thousand and six thousand words. Two of his tales—“The Ablest Man in the World” and “The Tachypomp,” both scientific fantasies of remarkably ingenious construction, were included in the Scribner collection of “Short Stories by American Authors,” Mr. Mitchell being the only writer doubly represented in those volumes. “The Ablest Man in the World” also has its place in Stedman and Hutchinson’s distinguished “Library of American Literature.”

Other short stories of Mr. Mitchell’s, like “The Man Without a Body” and “The Balloon Tree,” are remembered by older Sun readers for their ingenious form and delightful narrative. Mr. Mitchell’s smaller sketches, numbering perhaps three hundred, included not only fancy but humour, and particularly little burlesques delicately picturing the weaknesses of the406 great or quasi-great men of the day. As a change from his strictly editorial work he might write a description of Mark Twain in his observatory, armed with a boat-hook and preparing to fend off a comet; or, becoming Mr. Dana’s reporter, he would expose a spiritualistic séance of the Eddy Brothers somewhere up in Vermont, or go to Madison Square to record the progress of George Francis Train toward world dictatorship by self-evolution on a diet of peanuts; or he would write a dramatic criticism of the appearance of the Sun’s droll friend, George, the Count Joannes, as Hamlet.

These few instances, a dozen out of twenty thousand articles that Mr. Mitchell wrote for the Sun, are not mentioned as a key to the general tenor of his work—which has covered everything from the definition of a mugwump to the interpretation of a President’s Constitutional powers—but rather as an indication of the Sun’s catholicity in subjects. If incidentally they serve to counteract the impression that the editorship of a great newspaper is gained through mere erudition, as opposed to a fine understanding of the very human reader, so much the better.

From his first day with the Sun Mr. Mitchell absorbed his chief’s lifelong belief that the range of public interest was infinite. As he said in 1916, in an address to the students of the Pulitzer School of Journalism on “The Newspaper Value of Non-Essentials”:

In that speech the Sun’s judgment of what the people want, whether it be in news, editorial, or fiction, is restated exactly as it might have been stated at any time within the last fifty years. And Dana and Mitchell are found in agreement not only upon the subject of what the reader wishes, but upon the necessity for the preservation in newspapers, as well as in books, of the ideals of the language. Speaking at a conference held at Princeton University in 1917, Mr. Mitchell said:

Mr. Mitchell was born in Maine in 1852, and was graduated from Bowdoin in 1871. It is curious to note, scanning the names of the editors and proprietors, how the Sun has drawn upon New England.

Any grouping of Sun men on the purely literary side brings the name of Hazeltine to stand with those of Dana and Mitchell. Mayo Williamson Hazeltine was a fine example of the scholar in newspaper work; an example of the way in which Dana, with his intellectual magnificence, found the best for his papers.

Educated at Harvard and Oxford and in continental Europe, Hazeltine came to the Sun in 1878, and was its literary critic until his death in 1909. During the same period he was also one of its principal writers of articles on foreign politics and sociology. His book-reviews, published in the Sun on Sundays, which made the initials “M. W. H.” familiar to the whole English-reading world, were marvels of comprehension. Many a publisher of a three-volume historical work lamented when it attracted Hazeltine’s attention, for his review, whether two columns or seven, usually compressed into that space all that the average student cared to know about the book, reducing the high cost of reading from six or eight dollars to a nickel.

Hazeltine enjoyed, under both Dana and Mitchell, practically his own choice of subjects, a free hand with them, and a generous income; and in return, for more than thirty years, he poured into the columns of the Sun a wealth of the erudition which was his by right of education, travel, an intense interest in all things intellectual, and a wonderful memory.

In the list of writers of editorial articles which includes Dana, Mitchell, William O. Bartlett, and Hazeltine, are found also the names of Frank P. Church, E. M. Kingsbury, Napoleon L. Thiéblin, James Henry Wilson, John Swinton, Henry B. Stanton, Fitz-Henry Warren, William T. Washburn, Harold M. Anderson, Frank H. Simonds, and Henry M. Armstrong. Of these Church stands alone as the writer in whose case the Sun broke its rule that the anonymity of editorial writers is absolute. After Mr. Church’s death on April 11, 1906, it was announced in the Sun that he was the author of what for more than twenty years has been regarded as the most popular editorial article ever written. It appeared on September 21, 1897:

Church, as one intimate wrote upon his death, after more than thirty years with the Sun, had all the literary gifts, “the tender fancy, the sympathetic understanding of human nature, the humour, now wistful, now joyous, the unsurpassed delicacy of touch.”

In dramatic criticism, where the Sun has required from its writers somewhat more than the mere ability to praise or blame, its roster bears such names as Frank Bowman, Willard Bartlett, Elihu Root, William Stewart (“Walsingham”), who was the first of the dramatic critics to adopt an intimate style; Andrew Carpenter Wheeler, better known to the public under his pen-name of “Nym Crinkle,” whose reviews were a feature of the Sunday issue of the Sun; William M. Laffan, the always brilliant and sometimes caustic; Franklin Fyles, who wrote plays as well as reviews of plays; John Corbin, the scholarly analyst; Walter Prichard Eaton, author of “The American Stage of To-day,” and Lawrence Reamer, who has been with the Sun, as reporter or critic, for a quarter of a century.

In criticism of opera and other musical events the Sun, through the writings of William J. Henderson, has pleased the general public as well as the musicians, and has added many sound and scholarly chapters to newspaper literature.

In book-reviewing a hundred pens have served the Sun. Hazeltine, E. P. Mitchell, Willard Bartlett, Erasmus D. Beach, George Bendelari, Miss Dana Gatlin, H. M. Anderson, and Grant M. Overton are but a few of the men and women who have told Sun readers what’s worth while.

For Sun reporters the Sunday paper has been a favourable field for an excursion into fiction-writing. In its columns a man with a tale to tell has every chance. There William Norr gave, in his “Pearl of Chinatown,” the real atmosphere of a little part of New York that once held romance. It was for the Sunday Sun that Edward W. Townsend created his celebrated characters, Chimmie Fadden, Miss Fanny, Mr. Paul, and the rest of that happy, if slangy, family. Clarence L. Cullen412 laid bare the soul of alcoholic adventurers in his “Tales of the Ex-Tanks.” Ed Mott made famous the bears of Pike County, Pennsylvania. David A. Curtis related the gambling ways of Old Man Greenlaw and his associates. Charles Lynch conferred the title of the Duke of Essex Street upon an obscure lawyer, and made him the talk of the East Side. Joseph Goodwin brought to the notice of an ignorant world the ways of Sarsaparilla Reilly and other Park Row restaurant heroes. David Graham Phillips, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and other men destined to be known through their books, ground out, for glory and eight dollars a column, the yarns—sometimes fact turned into fiction, sometimes fiction masked as fact—that kept the readers of the Sunday Sun from getting out into the open air.

413

CHAPTER XIX
“THE SUN” AND YELLOW JOURNALISM

Of such things as we have mentioned here, putting into the necessary news, attractively written, a proper seasoning of regional colour and atmosphere, humour and pathos, the Sun has been made since Dana came to it. He created a new journalism, but it was a decent and distinct kind, appealing to the intellect rather than to the passions. It gave room for the honest expression of everybody’s opinion, from Herbert Spencer to Chimmie Fadden. Because of this, because he had lifted American newspaper work out of the dust of tradition, Dana had a holy anger when a newer journalism tried to throw it into the mud.

When Henry Watterson was called as an expert witness in proceedings to appraise the estate of Joseph Pulitzer, in 1914, the veteran editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal made an interesting statement on this subject:

Mr. Watterson did not define yellow journalism. Perhaps he considered it broadly as sensational journalism. The elder Bennett was sensational to the extent that he printed things which the sixpenny papers of his time did not print. He made the interview popular, and he was the first editor to see the value of paying attention to financial news.

So far as printing human news is concerned, Benjamin H. Day worked that field before Bennett started the Herald. If Mr. Watterson considered Dana a yellow journalist, what else was Day, with his stories about the sodden things of the police-courts, or his description of Miss Susan Allen smoking a cigar and dancing in Broadway?

Printing a diagram of the scene of a murder, with a big black X to mark the spot where the victim was found, did not make the World a yellow newspaper, for Amos Cummings began to print murder charts as soon as he became managing editor of the Sun. Putting black-faced type over a story on the front page did not make the World or the Journal yellow, for Cummings, when he was on the Tribune, was the first to use big type in head-lines, and the Tribune was never accused of yellowness.

If pictures made a paper yellow, Dana was not yellow, for he used few illustrations in the news pages of the paper. Again, if head-lines indicate yellowness, Dana must be acquitted of being a yellow journalist; for the head-lines of the Sun, from the first year of Dana’s control415 until after his death, remained practically unchanged, and were conservative to the last degree.

Head-lines and pictures, so far as their sensational attraction was concerned, meant nothing to Dana. He was not yellow, but white and alive. The distinction was clearly explained by Mr. Mitchell:

No yellow journalist he, Dana! To paraphrase Webster, he smote the rock of humanity, and abundant streams of literature rushed forth. If he startled, he startled the intellect, not the eye. His appeals were to the intelligence, the soul, the risibilities of man, and not to his primitive passions. He believed that all the information, the philosophy, and the humour of the world could be conveyed through the type of a daily newspaper as surely as and much more broadly than they had been conveyed through the various mediums of the old newspapers, the encyclopedias, the novels, the pulpit, and the lecture platform.

When Dana attacked yellow journalism—the expressive phrase was fastened in the language by Ervin Wardman, in the Press—it was in the firm belief that416 this new journalism, the “journalism that did things,” was doing the wrong thing; that it was breaking down the magnificent structure that had been reared by himself and Greeley and Raymond and Bennett and Hurlbut. This group had been possessed of all the newspaper faculties and facilities. If yellow journalism had been right, they would have raised it to its highest peak. Dana, who knew better than any editor of his time what the public wanted, could have produced a perfect yellow Sun; but he chose to print a golden one. He wrought more genuine journalistic advance than any other man in history. As Mr. Mitchell wrote of him in McClure’s Magazine in October, 1894, three years before Mr. Dana’s death:

The assaults which Dana made upon yellow journalism were not actuated by the jealous envy of one who has himself overlooked an opportunity. Everything that the Sun attacked in yellow newspapers was something to which the Sun itself never would have stooped—the faked or distorted interview, the product of the thief or the eavesdropper, the collection of back-stairs gossip, the pilfered photograph, the revelation of personal affairs beyond the public’s business, the arrogation of official authority, the maudlin plea for sympathy in a factitious cause, the gross exaggeration for sensation’s sake of a trifling occurrence, the appeal to sensualism, and the demagogic attack upon the rich.

Right endures, and where is yellow journalism? Gone where the woodbine twineth. Its prototype, the wild ass, stamps o’er its head and cannot break its sleep. The “journalism that does things” doesn’t do anything any more except to try and teach its men to write articles the way the Sun has been printing them since 1868. In a chart of new journalism the largest, blackest418 X-mark would show where the body of new journalism, slain by public taste, lies buried forever.

The New York World, once the most ingenious exponent of yellow journalism, has become as conservative as the Sun was in the days when Joseph Pulitzer worked for Dana. Mr. Hearst’s papers, once the deepest of all yellows, now hold up their hands in horror when they see, beside them on the news-stands, the bold, black head-lines of the Evening Post!

“This way to the big show! We have a mutilated corpse, a scandal in high life, divorce details that weren’t brought out in court, a personal attack on the mayor, lifelike pictures of dead rats, the memoirs of a demented dressmaker, some neatly invented prison horrors, and a general denunciation of everybody who owns more than five hundred dollars. Don’t miss it!”

“Come, let me show you the clean stream of life; the newsboy with the trained dog, the new painting at the Metropolitan Museum, an Arabian restaurant on the East Side, the new Governor at Albany, the latest theory of planetary control, one book by Old Sleuth and another by Henry James, a ghost in a Berkshire tavern and an authentic recipe for strawberry shortcake, a clown who reads Molière and a king who plays pinochle, a digest of ten volumes of history and the shortest complete poem (“This bliz knocks biz”) ever written, a dark tragedy in the Jersey pines and a plan for a new subway, a talk with the Grand Lama and a home-run by Roger Connor, a panic in Wall Street and a poor little girl who finds a quarter.”

In the long run—and it did not have to be very long—the more attractive offering was permanently chosen by newspaper-readers.

The curious effect on American journalism of the conflict between Sun methods and the so-called new journalism was referred to, in an address delivered at Yale University on January 12, 1903, by Frank A. Munsey, then owner of the New York Daily News and now proprietor of the Sun:

Mr. Munsey did not say, because it was not germane to his subject, that for fourteen years before the advent of Pulitzer, Dana had been demonstrating the news value of the human-interest story, and that it was almost entirely upon the human-interest story, twisted and exaggerated, that yellow journalism was founded. Mr. Munsey did not say, for he could not know, that fifteen years after his address at Yale the new journalism420 would be extinct and the Sun would be still the Sun. The editors of to-day do not ask a reporter whether he can climb a porch or photograph an unwilling person, but whether he can see news and write it.

An adequate history of the Sun’s political activities during Dana’s time would fill volumes. Rather than the editor of an organ of the opposition, Dana was usually an opposition party in himself; not merely for the sake of opposition, but because the parties in power from 1869 to 1897 usually happened to have practices or principles with which he, as the editor of the Sun, was in disagreement. His attacks on the Grant administration for the thievery that spotted it, and on the Hayes administration because of the circumstances under which Mr. Hayes came to the Presidential chair, were bitter and without relent. His opposition to Grover Cleveland, an intellectual rather than a personal war, began before Mr. Cleveland was a national figure. In September, 1882, when the hitherto obscure Buffalonian was nominated for Governor of New York, the Sun said:

In the Presidential campaign of 1884 the Sun would not support Cleveland and could not support Blaine, whose conduct in Congress the Sun had frequently condemned; so it advocated the hopeless cause of General Benjamin F. Butler, who had been elected Governor of Massachusetts in 1882, the year when Cleveland was chosen Governor of New York. Dana was not an admirer of Butler’s spectacular army career, or of his general political leanings, but he admired him for his421 attitude in the Hayes-Tilden scandal, and he believed that Butler, if elected President, would shake things up in Washington. The Sun supported him “as a man to be immensely preferred to either of the others and as a protest against such nominations.” Dana personally announced that sooner than support Blaine he would quit work and burn his pen.

In 1885, opposing Cleveland’s free-trade policy, the Sun vigorously supported Samuel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania, a protectionist Democrat, for speaker of the House, as against John G. Carlisle, of Kentucky, a free-trader; but Randall was beaten.

The Sun ridiculed Cleveland’s theories of civil-service reform, although it believed that real reforms were needed. On this point Dana wrote, in a letter:

For all of its opposition to Cleveland, whom it dubbed the “stuffed prophet,” the Sun preferred him to General Harrison in the campaign of 1888. It feared a return to power of the influences which it had combated during the administrations of Grant and Hayes. Four years afterward, however, the Sun was strongly against the third nomination of Cleveland.

In Mr. Cleveland’s second term the Sun supported his course when Dana believed it to be American. While422 at first it considered the President too mild and conciliatory in matters of foreign policy, it praised him and his Secretary of State, Richard Olney, for their stand against Great Britain in the Venezuela boundary dispute; praised them just as heartily as it had condemned Mr. Cleveland’s earlier action in the Hawaiian matter, when the President withdrew the treaty of annexation which his predecessor had sent to the Senate.

The Sun’s most deadly weapon, ridicule, was constantly in play in the years of the Hawaiian complications. It found vulnerable spots in Mr. Cleveland’s re-establishment of the deposed Queen Liliuokalani and in the President’s sending of a commissioner—“Paramount” Blount, as the Sun called him—without the advice and consent of the Senate. As jealous then as it is to-day of any raid by the Executive upon the Constitution or the powers of Congress, the Sun had the satisfaction of a complete victory in the Hawaiian matter.

On the other hand, the Sun applauded Mr. Cleveland’s attitude on the money question and his brave stand against the mob in the Chicago railway strikes of 1894, when the President used troops to prevent the obstruction of the mails by Eugene V. Debs and his followers.

Dana was seventy-seven years old when William J. Bryan—whom the Sun had already immortalized as the Boy Orator of the Platte—was nominated for the Presidency in 1896, but the veteran editor went at the task of exposing the free-silver fallacy with the same blithe vigour that he had shown twenty years before. His opinion, printed in the Sun of August 6, 1896, is a good example of Dana’s clear style:

Dana’s opinions on political questions were more eagerly sought than those of any other editor after Greeley’s death, and the Sun’s political news was complete; yet with Dana, and with the Sun, politics was, after all, only one small part of life. The whole world, with its facts and fancies, not the political problems of one continent, was the real field to be covered.

Dana’s curiosity was all-embracing. After the Sun’s financial success was assured he went abroad frequently, and saw not only western Europe, but Russia and the Levant. Of these he wrote in his “Eastern Journeys.” He knew a dozen languages. He conversed with the Pope about Dante and with Russian peasants about Tolstoy. His knowledge of Spanish, acquired early in life, made easy his travels in Mexico and Cuba. Everywhere he went he talked of freedom with its friends, and encouraged them. He knew Kossuth, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Clémenceau, Marti, and Parnell.

At home, Dana’s amusements were chiefly literary and artistic—the study of languages, history, and belles-lettres, the collection of pottery and pictures. His Chinese porcelains were perhaps the best, in point of quality, in the Occident.

“I am persuaded,” one critic said of them, “that Mr. Dana must have had a most profound instinct in relation to the whole subject.”

After Mr. Dana’s death these porcelains, about four hundred in number, were sold at auction for nearly two hundred thousand dollars.

In winter Dana lived in a large house which he built in 1880 at the corner of Madison Avenue and Sixtieth Street, and which held the art treasures that he began to gather in the first days of his prosperity. Here he kept his pictures, notably some fine specimens of the Barbizon school, and his books, which included some rare volumes, but which in the main were chosen for their usefulness.

Dana’s happiest days were spent at his country place, Dosoris, an island near Glen Cove, on the north shore of Long Island. There, around a large, old-fashioned, square frame house, he made roads and flower-beds and planted trees from many parts of the world. He grew an oak from an acorn that was brought from the tomb of Confucius. He knew Gray’s “Botany” almost by heart, and could give an intimate description of every flower in the Dosoris gardens. His interest in plants was so deep that once, while travelling in Cuba with an eminent painter, he led his companion for hours through the hot hills of Vuelta Abajo in order to satisfy himself that a certain variety of pine did not grow in that region.

Dana’s was a normal, healthy life. He was a good horseman and swimmer and a great walker. When he was seventy-five years old he climbed to the top of Croyden Mountain, in New Hampshire, with a party of younger men puffing behind him. He found pleasure in all of life, whether it was at the office, where he worked steadily but not feverishly, or with his family among the rural delights of Dosoris, or surrounded by congenial literary spirits at the dinner-table.

He knew no illness until his last summer. Up to425 June, 1897, the sturdy figure and the kindly face framed in a white beard were as familiar to the Sun office as they were in the seventies. With Dana there was no slow decay of body or mind. He died at Dosoris on October 17, 1897, in the thirtieth year of his reign over the Sun.

A few years before, on observing an obituary paragraph which Mr. Dana had written about some noted man, John Swinton asked his chief how much space he (Swinton) would get when his time came.

“For you, John, two sticks,” said Mr. Dana. Turning to Mr. Mitchell, then his chief editorial writer, he added: “For me, two lines.”

On the morning after Mr. Dana’s death every newspaper but one in New York printed columns about the career of the dean of American journalism. The Sun printed only ten words, and these were carried at the head of the first editorial column, without a heading:

Mr. Swinton perhaps believed that Mr. Dana was joking when he said “two lines,” but Mr. Mitchell knew that his chief was in earnest. The order was characteristic of Dana. It was not false modesty. Perhaps it was a certain fine vanity that told him what was true—that he and his work were known throughout the land; that the Sun, in its perfection the product of his genius and vigour, would continue to rise as regularly as its celestial namesake; that all he had done would live on. He had made the paper so great that the withdrawal from it of one man’s hand was negligible.

Dana was gone, but his son remained as principal owner, and his chief writer and most intimate intellectual associate for twenty years was left to form the426 Sun’s policies as he had moulded them in Dana’s absences and as he shapes them to-day. His publisher, the astute Laffan, was still in charge of the Sun’s financial affairs. Other men whom he had found and trained, like Frank P. Church, Mayo W. Hazeltine, and Edward M. Kingsbury in the editorial department, and Chester S. Lord and Daniel F. Kellogg in the news department, continued their work as if Dana still lived.

With their grief doubt was not mingled. The Sun’s success resulted from no secret formula that died with the discoverer. Half of Dana’s victory came by his attraction to himself of men who saw life and literature as he saw them; and so, in a magnificent way, he had made his work dispensable.

And Dana’s was always the magnificent way. To him journalism was not a means of making money, but of interesting, elevating, and making happy every one who read the Sun or wrote for it. He raised his profession to new heights. As Hazeltine wrote in the North American Review:

Shortly after the death of his father, Paul Dana, who was then forty-five years old, and who had been on the Sun editorial staff for seventeen years, was made editor by vote of the trustees of the Sun Printing and Publishing Association. In the following year (1898) the younger Dana bought from Thomas Hitchcock, who was one of Charles A. Dana’s associates both in a financial427 and in a literary way, enough shares to give him the control of the paper.

Paul Dana continued in control of the property for several years and held with credit his father’s title of editor until 1903. William Mackay Laffan, who had been associated with the elder Dana since 1877, next obtained the business control. His proprietorship was announced on February 22, 1902, and it continued until his death in 1909.A

Among the makers of the Sun who best knew the paper and the intellectual demands of its readers, Laffan must be included with Dana and Mitchell. At the time when he came to be master of the paper, his career had covered the entire journalistic field, and he was, moreover, a thorough Sun man, sympathetic with all the ideals of his old friend Dana.

Laffan, who was born in Dublin, Ireland, and had a light and delightful brogue, was educated at Trinity College and at St. Cecilia’s School of Medicine. When he was twenty he went to San Francisco, where, beginning as a reporter, he became city editor of the Chronicle and managing editor of the Bulletin. In 1870 he went428 to Baltimore, to be a reporter on the Daily Bulletin, and of this newspaper he became editor and part owner. Eventually he became the full owner of both the Daily Bulletin and the Sunday Bulletin, and in this capacity he endeared himself to the citizens of Baltimore by his fight against political rings.

He left newspaper work for a short time to become general passenger-agent of the Long Island Railroad; but in 1877, on Mr. Dana’s invitation, he went on the Sun as a general writer. Himself an artist who modelled in clay, painted in oils and water-colours, and etched, his judgment made him valuable to the paper as an art critic.

Like Mr. Dana, he was interested in Chinese porcelains, and he made a deeper study of them than did his employer. When a catalogue was needed for the Chinese porcelains in the Morgan collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mr. Laffan, who was an active trustee of the museum, was called upon to edit the work. He also edited a book on “Oriental Porcelain.” He was the author of “American Wood Engravers,” published in 1883. For these things he is remembered in the world of art. The men of the stage remember him as one of the most distinguished dramatic critics that New York has seen. Even to-day, in the comparison of the styles of critics old and new, Laffan’s incisive reviews are recalled as standards.

In the business world of journalism Laffan is thought of chiefly as the publisher of the Sun from 1884 on, and as the live spirit of the Evening Sun for many of its years. As the actual director of the Sun—although his editorial powers were almost entirely delegated to Mr. Mitchell—Mr. Laffan was a picturesque and powerful figure. Beneath an inscrutable exterior he was distinctly a likable person.

One day Laffan wrote a ten-line item, a bit about an exhibition of a friend’s painting, and asked the city editor to print it. He never commanded, even when he controlled the paper; he asked. The item was lost in the shuffle that night. The next day he rewrote it and again asked a place for it. It was printed in the first edition and left out of the city edition. For the third time he carried the article to the city editor, and without a sign of anger.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that anybody can get anything printed in this paper—except the owner.”

A millionaire advertiser asked Laffan to print an article about his pet charity.

“Take it to Clarke,” said Laffan. “If he’ll print it for you, he’ll do more for you than he’ll do for me.”

A New York newspaper once remarked of Laffan that “he never drove any man to drink, but he drove many a man to the dictionary.” That was a commentary on the unusual words which Laffan, whose vocabulary was wide, would occasionally use in an editorial article. His articles were never involved, however. They were not frequent, they were generally short, never without important purpose, and they drove home.

Patient as Laffan was with lost items of his own, he was a man of fine human temper. One morning, on arriving at the office, he found that a Wall Street group of rich scoundrels had sued the Sun for several hundred thousand dollars for its exposure of their methods. He called the city editor.

“Mr. Mallon,” he said, “tell your young man who wrote the articles to go ahead and give these men better cause for libel suits!”

The Sun was making a vigorous war on a great railroad magnate. One day an attaché of the office informed Laffan that a man was waiting to see him who430 bore a contract which would bring to the Sun four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of advertising from the magnate’s railroads.

There was a keen humour in the big Irish head. Laffan was opposed to the amendment to the New York State constitution which provided for an expenditure of more than a hundred millions in improving the Erie Canal. Under his direction a Sun reporter, John H. O’Brien, wrote a series of articles intended to shatter public faith in the huge investment. The amendment, however, was approved by a great majority.

“Mr. O’Brien,” said Mr. Laffan to the reporter, a few days after the election, “I think it would be a very graceful thing on your part to give a little dinner to all those gentlemen who voted against the canal project.”

Upon Mr. Laffan’s death, in November, 1909, the trustees of the Sun Printing and Publishing Association asked Mr. Mitchell, who had been made editor of the Sun on July 20, 1903, to take up the administrative burden as well as the editorial. This Mr. Mitchell did for a little more than two years, although his personal inclinations were toward the literary construction and supervision of the paper rather than toward the business detail incident to the presidency of so large a corporation. The double load was lightened in December, 1911, when control of the Sun was gained through stock purchase by William C. Reick, who became the president of the company, Mr. Mitchell being permitted to return to the editorial functions which have now engrossed him, either as Mr. Dana’s aid or as editor-in-chief, for more than forty years.

Mr. Reick, who was born in Philadelphia in 1864, entered newspaper work in that city when he was nineteen years old. A few years later he removed to Newark, New Jersey, where he became the correspondent of the New York Herald. He attracted the attention of Mr. Bennett, the owner of the Herald, and in 1888 he was made editor of the Herald’s London and Paris editions. A year later he returned to America to become city editor of the Herald, the highest title then given on a newspaper which refuses to have a titular managing editor. In 1903 he was elected president of the New York Herald Company, and he remained in that position until 1906, when he left the Herald to become associated with Adolph Ochs in the publication of the New York Times and with George W. Ochs in the publication of the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

When Mr. Reick assumed the control of the Sun properties, he devoted much care to the improvement of the Evening Sun, putting it under the managing editorship of George M. Smith, who had served for many years as news editor of the Sun under Chester S. Lord. As Mr. Munsey said when he acquired the Sun and the Evening Sun from Mr. Reick:

Among the events of the Reick régime were the retirement of Chester S. Lord from the managing editorship and of George B. Mallon from the city editorship, and the removal of the newspaper from its old home at Nassau and Frankfort Streets to the American Tract432 Society Building, one block farther south, at Nassau and Spruce Streets.

It was during Mr. Reick’s control of the Sun that Mr. Munsey, in the autumn of 1912, bought the New York Press, a one-cent Republican morning daily holding an Associated Press membership. The Sun had lacked the Associated Press service since the fateful night when Mr. Dana bolted from that organization and started the Laffan News Bureau.

Mr. Munsey bought the Sun from Mr. Reick on June 30, 1916, and four days later, on July 3, the Press, with its Associated Press service, its best men, and some of its popular features, was absorbed by the Sun. As the Press had been a penny paper, the price of the Sun was reduced to one cent, after having stood at two cents since the Civil War. It remained a penny paper until January 26, 1918, when the pressure of production-costs forced the price of all the big New York dailies to two cents.

The amalgamation of the Sun and the Press wrought no change in the editorial department of the Sun, Mr. Mitchell remaining as its chief. Ervin Wardman, long the editor of the Press, became the publisher of the Sun and vice-president of the Sun Printing and Publishing Association. Mr. Reick remained with the organization in an advisory capacity. Keats Speed, the managing editor of the Press, became managing editor of the Sun, Kenneth Lord remaining as city editor.

The Sun has had five homes—at 222 William Street, where Benjamin H. Day struck off the first tiny number; at 156 Nassau Street, rented by Day in August, 1835, when the paper began to pay well; at the southwest corner of Nassau and Fulton Streets, to which Moses Y. Beach moved the Sun in 1842; at Nassau and Frankfort Streets, the old Tammany Hall, which Dana and his433 associates bought; and at 150 Nassau Street, whither the Sun moved in July, 1915. It is expected that the Sun will presently move to another and a fine home, for in September, 1917, Mr. Munsey bought the Stewart Building, at the northeast corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, just north of City Hall Park. The site is generally admitted to be the most desirable building site downtown, so large is the ground space, so fine is the outlook over the spacious park, and so close is it to three subways, three or four elevated-railroad lines, and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Should the criticism be made that this book is not all-inclusive, let it be remembered that there can be no really complete history of the Sun except itself—the tons of files in which for eighty-five years Sun men have drawn their pictures of life’s procession. In a narrative like this only the outlines of the Sun’s course, margined with incidents of the men who made it great by making it as human as themselves, can find room.

It is easy to begin a story of the Sun, because Ben Day and that uncertain morning in 1833, the very dawn of popular journalism, make a very real picture. Try to end it, and the roar of the presses in the basement is remindful of the fact that there is no end, except the arbitrary closing. This Sun, like Richmond’s—

“The Life of Charles A. Dana,” by James Harrison Wilson, LL.D., late Major General, U. S. V. Harper & Bros., 1907.

“Journalism in the United States from 1690 to 1872,” by Frederic Hudson. Harper & Bros., 1873.

“Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press for Thirty Years,” by Augustus Maverick. A. S. Hale & Co., Hartford, Conn., 1870.

“Ordered to China; Letters of Wilbur J. Chamberlin.” Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1903.

“Mr. Dana of the Sun,” by Edward P. Mitchell. McClure’s Magazine, October, 1894.

“The Men Who Make the New York Sun,” by E. J. Edwards. Munsey’s Magazine, October, 1893.

439

INDEX

Abell, Arunah S., associate of Day, 23
establishes Baltimore Sun, 136
buys Guilford estate, 136
helps S. F. B. Morse, 136
death of, in 1888, 136
Abolition of slavery, article on, 54
Wisner’s editorial on, 42
Actors of the early 30’s, 121
Adams, Cyrus C., cable editor, 394
Adamson, Robert, Evening Sun reporter, 399
Adams, Samuel Hopkins, Dana finds it hard to discharge, 378, 379
writes Sunday Sun fiction, 412
Adams, Samuel, murdered by John C. Colt, 154
“Addition, Division, and Silence,” 305, 306
Advertising, fashions of, in 1833, 26
specimens of early “liners,” 125
the Sun takes off the first page in 1862, 189
the Sun, under Morrison, refuses advertisements on Sunday, 190
Alamo massacre, 113
Alexander, Columbus, escape of, in the Safe Burglary Conspiracy, 308, 309
Alger, Horatio, Jr., writes fiction for the Sun, 195
Allen, Miss Susan, smokes a cigar on Broadway, 45
Alumni, of the Sun, 328
Anderson, Harold M., Spanish war correspondent, 355, 356
Arago, D. F., alleged deception of, by the Moon Hoax, 97–99
Armstrong, Henry M., Spanish war correspondent, 356
Associated Press, Dana’s break with, 374
formed in Sun office, 167
Astor House, 49
Astor, William B., New York’s richest man, 234
Attree, William H., 61–62
reporter on the Transcript, 133, 134
Aviation, prophetic editorial comment on, 46
“Azamet Batuk.” See Thiéblin, N. L.
Badeau, General Adam, a Sun contributor, 404
Ballard, Anna, reporter, 286
Balloon Hoax, Poe’s, referred to by De Morgan, 98
Bartlett, Willard, dramatic critic, counsel for Dana, editorial contributor, 286
invents the Sun Cat, 287
Bartlett, William O., writes “No king, no clown, to rule this town!”, 255
style of, compared with Dana’s and Mitchell’s, 256
reference of, to General Hancock’s weight, 256
counsel for Tweed, 275
Battey, Emily Verdery, first real woman reporter, 285, 286
appears in the Sun on April 13, 1844, 149–153
Beach, Alfred Ely, becomes partner in the Sun, 161, 162
invents first typewriter for the blind, 162
builds first New York subway, 162, 163
withdraws from the Sun April 6, 1852, 171
dies in 1896, 163
Beach Brothers, name of ownership, 170, 171
issue Evening Sun, 171
Beach, Erasmus D., book reviewer, 349
writes classic football story, 350
440Beach, Frederick Converse, 163
Beach, Joseph, son of Moses Y. Beach, 173
Beach, Moses Sperry, becomes a partner in the Sun, 161, 162
part owner Boston Daily Times, 162
invents printing devices, 162
becomes sole owner of the Sun, 171
brings wood from the Mount of Olives for Beecher’s pulpit, 177
absence of, from the Sun in the early months of the Civil War, 189
takes the Sun back, 191
sells the Sun to Dana, 198, 199
bids readers farewell, 200
Beach, Moses Yale, enters Sun office as bookkeeper, 111
buys the Sun, 127
youth and marriage of, 139
inventions of, 140
joins Benjamin H. Day, 140
owns two buildings where the Sun had its home, 157
takes sons as partners, 161
enterprise of, in Mexican War, 164, 165
starts for Mexico as President Polk’s special agent, 166
retires from the Sun, 167
dinner in his honour, 167
issues various editions of the Sun, 169
publishes “The Wealth of New York,” 169
father of the newspaper syndicate, 169
Dana’s estimate of, 169, 170
amasses a fortune and retires, 170
writes European articles for the Sun, 173
Beach, Stanley Yale, 163
Becker, Charles, conviction of, reported by E. C. Hill, 320, 321
Beckwith, Arthur, telegraph editor, 280
Beecher, Henry Ward, John Brown speech of, in the Sun, 177
tribute to H. B. Stanton, 259
trial of, 278
“I don’t read the Sun,” 310
denounced by the Sun, 311
Belknap, William W., accused by the Sun in Post-trader scandal and impeached, 306, 307
Bell, Jared D., part owner, New Era, 134
Bendelari, George, book-reviewer, 411
Bennett, James Gordon, thrashed by Col. Webb, 36
work of, for the Courier and Enquirer, 37
editor Philadelphia Courier, 53
the Sun replies to charge of, that Day is an infidel, 108
early career of, 109
treats Helen Jewett’s murder sensationally, 114
second assault on, by Webb described, 114
early failures of, 131
debt of, to Day’s example, 132
announcement of coming marriage of, 132
establishes the no-credit system, 133
works harder than other proprietors, 174
dies in 1872, 293
“the first yellow journalist,” 413
Bennett, J. G., Jr., takes his father’s place, 298
death of, 132
Bigelow, John, associate of Bryant, 174
Bishop, Joseph W., night city editor, 372
night editor, 372
Black, Chauncey F., a Sun contributor, 405
Blackwood, Algernon, Evening Sun reporter, 399
Blatchford, Judge Samuel, historic decision of, in the Shepherd case, 307, 308
Blizzard of March, 1888, 362, 363
Blythe, Samuel G., describes E. G. Riggs, 346
Bogart, John B., “If a man bites a dog, that is news,” 241
“a whole school of journalism,” 281
possesses “sixth sense,” 335, 336
441persistence of, 336
Bonner, Robert, pays $30,000 for “Norwood,” 235
sagacity of, commented on by Dana, 300
Book-reviewers, Sun’s, list of, 411
Borden, Lizzie, acquittal of, reported by Julian Ralph, 318, 319
Bowery Theatre Fire, ruins Hamblin, 118
first American playhouse lighted with gas, 121
Bowles, Samuel, employs B. H. Day, 22–23
Bowman, Frank, dramatic critic, 411
Bread riots, the Sun’s part in, 118, 119
Brewster, Sir David, appears in Moon Hoax, 71
Brisbane, Albert, association of, with Greeley, 161
Brisbane, Arthur, son of Albert Brisbane, 161
style of, like W. O. Bartlett’s, 256
becomes reporter at 18, 346, 347
becomes London correspondent, 347
reports Sullivan-Mitchell fight, 347
is managing editor Evening Sun, 348
becomes editor Sunday World magazine, 348
becomes editor Evening Journal, 348
becomes proprietor Washington Times, 348
takes Richard Harding Davis on Evening Sun, 398
Brook Farm, Dana enters, 206
Brooklyn Theatre fire, 362
Brooks brothers, James and Erastus, establish New York Express, 134, 135
Brown, John, the Sun’s attitude toward, 177
Bryant, William Cullen, editor and poet in 1833, 34
conflict of, with W. L. Stone, 34
Buchanan, James, supported by the Sun, 176
Burdell, Dr. Harvey, murder of, 196
Burnett, Wm., 60
Burr, Aaron, 51
Butler, Stephen B., 60
Cady, Elizabeth, marries Henry B. Stanton, 259
Caroline case, the Sun’s enterprise in reporting, 144, 145
Carroll, Dana H., Spanish war correspondent, 355
Cat, the Sun’s, his invention and reputation, 287–289
Chadwick, George W., in business with Dana, 216
Chamberlains and Chamberlins, 341–343
Chamberlain, Henry Richardson, covers Europe for the Sun, 342
visions by, of a great war, 342
Chamberlin, Wilbur J., takes charge of the Sun staff in Cuba, 356
eleven-column report by, 361
known as “Jersey,” 338;
cable hoodoo of, 339, 340
describes German soldiers’ brutality in China, 340
describes the Deacon’s broken suspenders, 341
Chamberlin, E. O., reporter, 342
Chamberlin, Henry B., reporter, 343
Childs, George W., tells of W. M. Swain’s industry, 135
buys Public Ledger, 135
Cholera, in New York, 1832, 22
Church, Francis P., a Sun editorial writer for forty years, 191
“Is There a Santa Claus?,” 409
Church, William C., publisher of the Sun, 190
war correspondent, 190, 191
owns Army and Navy Journal, 191
Circulation in November, 1833, 2,000, 50
in December, 1833, 52
April, 1834, 54
in November, 1834, 57
Day offers to bet on it, 62–63
in August, 1835, it becomes the largest in the world, 78
in August, 1836, 27,000, 116
in September, 1843, 38,000, 157
442in December, 1848, 50,000, 168
in September, 1860, 59,000, 194
Dana’s estimate of 50,000 to 60,000 in 1868, 228
in 1871, 100,000, 269
in March, 1875, 120,000, 300
day after Tilden-Hayes election, 220, 390, 323, 325
after other interesting events, 323–325
high-tide marks, 325
Civil War, the Sun in the, 172 et seq.
the Sun declares “the Union cannot be dissolved,” 179
the Sun charges the Herald, the Daily News, and the Staats-Zeitung with disloyalty, 180, 181
the Sun, the Tribune, and the Times entirely loyal, 185
the Sun’s news from Bull Run, 187;
from Gettysburg, 188
the Sun protests against Sunday battles, 190
attitude of Greeley and Dana, 211
Clarke, Selah Merrill, night city editor, 1881–1912, 383
story of the Northampton disaster by, 383
remarkable memory of, 384, 385
head-lines written by, 387, 388
gifts of, as copy reader, 389
Cleveland, Grover, Dana’s opposition to, 421, 422
Clubs: Bread and Cheese, Hone, Union, 122, 123
Cobb, Irvin S., reports Portsmouth peace conference for Evening Sun, 399
Coffey, Titian J., recipient of the “addition, division, and silence” letter, 305
Collins, E. K., an advertiser in the first Sun, 27
Colt, John C., murders Samuel Adams, 154
Conkling, Roscoe, in business with Dana, 216
Connolly, James, reporter, 284
Conventions, national, Sun men reporting, 344
history of, written by E. G. Riggs, 346
Cook, Tom, reporter, 284
Cooper, Charles P., city editor, Evening Sun, 400
Cooper, James Fenimore, 50
Corbin, John, dramatic critic, 411
Coward, Edward Fales, Evening Sun dramatic critic, 399
Crédit Mobilier scandal, 304
Crockett, David, memoirs of, in the Sun, 51
Cronyn, Thoreau, Dewey’s funeral, report by, 333
Cuba, Dana’s interest in struggle of, 353–355
Cullen, Clarence L., writes “Tales of the Ex-Tanks,” 411
Cummings, Alexander, writes for the World, 182
Cummings, Amos Jay, secretly learns typesetting, 264
goes with Filibuster Walker, 265
wins Medal of Honor at Fredericksburg, 265
holds Tribune office against rioters, 266
conflicts with John Russell Young, 266
“They say I swear too much,” 267
“To hell with my own copy,” 267
best news man of his day, 268
is first human interest reporter, 268
reports prize fights, 285
Nicara-goo Song of, 289, 290
“Ziska” letters of, 290
is managing editor of the Express, 290
returns to the Sun, 290
is elected to House of Representatives, 290
becomes editor Evening Sun, 290
returns to Congress, 290, 291
death and funeral of, 291
prints murder charts, 414
Curtin, Jeremiah, a Sun contributor, 404
Curtis, David A., Sunday Sun writer, 412
Curtis, George Ticknor, a Sun contributor, 404
443Curtis, George William, writes for the Tribune, 161
Daly, Augustin, tries to have Dana dismiss Laffan, 252
Damrosch, Leopold, music critic, 314
Dana, Charles A., a boy in Buffalo when Day founded the Sun, 35
reading “Oliver Twist” weakens eyes of, 123
draws $50 a week on Tribune, 174
named by the Sun as a possible postmaster, 179
buys the Sun and announces its policy, 198, 199
absolute master of the Sun, 202
birth and ancestry, 202
brothers and sisters of, 203
boyhood and life of, in Buffalo, 203, 204
goes to Harvard, 204
teaches school at Scituate, 205
religious indecision of, 205
sight of, impaired, 206
joins Brook Farm, 206
milks cows and waits on table, 207
meets Horace Greeley, 207
writes for the Harbinger and the Dial, 207
writes poetry, 208
marries, 208
goes to Boston Daily Chronotype, 208
comes out “strong against hell,” 209
becomes city editor of the New York Tribune, 209
goes to Europe, 209
returns to be managing editor of the Tribune, 210
his pay and income, 210
literary works of, before Civil War, 213
leaves the Tribune, 214, 215
induces Grant to stop the cotton speculation, 216
convinces Lincoln of needed reforms, 216
is chosen to report on complaints against Grant, 216, 217
writes of his “new insight into slavery,” 218
is with Grant at Vicksburg, 218
brings Grant full authority, 218
sees much of war, 219
estimate of Grant by, 219
estimate of Rawlins by, 219, 220
reports on Rosecrans, 220
poetry contest of, with General Lawler, 221
describes the storming of Missionary Ridge, 221, 222
reports Grant’s Virginia campaign, 222, 223
goes to Richmond to gather Confederate archives, 224
talks with Lincoln about Jacob Thompson, 224
authorizes Miles to manacle Jefferson Davis, 224
quoted on Davis’s imprisonment, 225
becomes editor of Chicago Republican, 225
assails President Johnson, 226
quits Chicago Republican, 226
determines to have a New York newspaper, 226
his backers, 226
decides to buy the Sun, 228, 229
changes its appearance, 230
moves “It Shines for All,” 230, 231
“Dana was the Sun and the Sun Dana,” 231
makes no rules for the Sun, 238
editorial principles of, 238, 239
lectures at Cornell, 239
defines news, 241
on college education, 242
on reporting, 242
“The invariable law is to be interesting,” 243
“Do not take any model,” 243, 244
not impressed by names of writers, 246
“This is too damned wicked,” 246
refuses to expose a silly literary thief, 246
methods and surroundings of, 246–251
interest of, in everything and everybody, 251
“Take the partition down,” 251
love of, for variety of topics, 253
delight of, in other men’s work, 254
tact of, in handling men, 263
444death of great rivals of, 293
quoted on “personal journalism,” 296
quoted on Greeley, Raymond, and Bennett, 297
“We pass the Tribune by”, 298
advises World reporters to read the Bible, 299
kindly feeling of, toward the younger Bennett, 299
belief of, in a newspaper without advertising, 299–301
objects to “heavy chunks of news,” 302
“our contemporaries exhaust their young men,” 302
is a witness against Secretary Robeson, 305
defeats Shepherd’s attempt to railroad him, 307
denies wishing to be collector of the port, 309, 310
loses friends because of attacks on Grantism, 310
refuses to be turned, 310
retains opinion of Grant’s military ability, 310
“First find the man,” plans of, 326
frames gold plank for New York convention of 1896, 345
asks Platt not to oppose Roosevelt, 345
affection of, for Cuba, 353–354
memorial to, in Camaguey, 354, 355
breaks with Associated Press, 374
encouraged Sun men to write fiction, 405
“The second yellow journalist,” 413
not a yellow journalist, 415
attacks yellow journalism, 413, 415, 416, 417
revolutionizes journalism, 416
“An opposition party in himself,” 420
attacks Hayes, 420
opposition of, to Cleveland, 420
supports B. F. Butler, 420
would burn his pen rather than support Blaine, 421
opinion of, on civil service reform, 421
opposes Bryan, 422
continental travels, 423
knowledge of languages, 423
porcelain collection of, 423
country home of, 424
death of, 425
the Sun’s announcement of death of, 425
elevation of journalism by, 426
Dana, Paul, succeeds his father as editor, 426
chief owner, 427
Davids, David, reporter, 283
Davies, Acton, Spanish war correspondent, 356
Evening Sun dramatic critic, 399
Davis, Oscar King, goes with Schley’s squadron, 355
describes capture of Guam, 356, 357
Davis, Richard Harding, experiences and work of, on Evening Sun, 398
writes Van Bibber stories for Evening Sun, 398
Day, Benjamin H., decides to publish the Sun, 22
birth and ancestry of, 22
issues the first Sun, 25
issues a True Sun, 60
is indicted for attacking Attree, 61
welcomes an attack by Col. Webb, 111
quarrels with Bennett, 110
attacks the service at the Astor House, 117
name of, taken from the Sun’s masthead, 125
sells the Sun to Moses Y. Beach, 127
period of ownership by, of the Sun, 127
profits from the Sun, 127, 128
influence of, upon journalism, 129
influence of, on Bennett’s success, 131, 132
success of, responsible for the founding of many one-cent papers, 133
says the Sun’s success was “more by accident than design,” 137
establishes True Sun, 137
445starts the Tatler, 137, 138
founds Brother Jonathan, 138
retirement and death of, 138
remarks on Dana’s purchase of the Sun, 138
son of Benjamin H. Day, 138
contrasted with Dana, 202
was he a yellow journalist?, 414
Delane, John T., pictured by Kinglake, 247
De Morgan, Augustus, notes of, on the Moon Hoax, 96–99
Denison, Lindsay, covers Slocum disaster, 361
Dick, Dr. Thomas, 66
Dickens, Charles, “Nicholas Nickleby” criticized, 123
The Sun’s comments on American visit of, 155, 156, 157
Dieuaide, Thomas M., writes story of the Santiago sea fight, 355, 356
describes the destruction of St. Pierre, 357, 358
Dillingham, Charles B., Evening Sun dramatic critic, 399
Dix, John A., an advertiser in the first Sun, 28
Dix, John A., Governor, seizes three New York newspapers in 1864, 183
Douglas, Stephen A., the Sun’s attitude toward, 175, 177, 178
Draper, Dr. John W., 35
Dyer, Oliver, versatility of, 405
Eaton, Walter P., dramatic critic, 411
Edison, Thomas A., thanks the Sun for chewing tobacco, 322
Editorial writers, list of, 326
England, Isaac W., first managing editor of the Sun, 263, 264
Dana’s tribute to, 264
Evans, George O., “He understands addition, division, and silence,” 305
Evening Sun, first issued by Beach Brothers, 171
issued by Dana, March 17, 1887, 397
“Laffan’s baby,” 397
Cummings first managing editor of, 397
later managing editors of, 398, 400
list of editorial writers, managing editors, and city editors of, 399, 400
Express service, usefulness to the Sun, 140, 141
Fairbanks, Charles M., reporter and night editor, 351
Fernandez, the murderer, 103–104
Field, Eugene, obtains Dana’s shears, 249
Fire, New York conflagration of 1835, 105–106
Fisk, James, Jr., pays $800,000 for a theatre, 236
tells of Sun enterprise, 269, 270
Fitzgerald, Christopher J., finds the lost Umbria, 392, 393
Flaherty, Bernard. See Williams, Barney.
Flint, Dr. Austin, youthful friend of Dana, 204
Florence, William J., subscriber to the Tweed statue fund, 273
Foord, John, editor of the Times, 298
Football, Ralph’s story without a score, 334, 335
Beach’s Homeric introduction, 350, 351
Forks, the Sun’s conservative attitude toward, 55
Forrest, Edwin, 55–56
Fowler, Elting A., predicts Bryan’s appointment as Secretary of State, 377
Fuller, Andrew S., agricultural editor, 199, 200
Fyles, Franklin, reports Beecher trial, 278
reporter, dramatic critic, and playwright, 283
Garr, Andrew S., sues Day for libel, 126
Gibson, A. M., Washington correspondent, 312
Godwin, Parke, edits Daily News, 181
Goodwin, Joseph, creates Sarsaparilla Reilly, 412
446Gould, Jay, is blackballed in the Blossom Club, 270
Grant, Ulysses S., the Sun’s support of, in 1868, announced, 199
imposed upon, 304
opposed by the Sun, 304
Grant scandals, 304–310
Greeley, Horace, founds Morning Post, 23
fails with Morning Post, 37
Albany correspondent Daily Whig, 134
starts the Tribune, 159
is scorned by the Sun, 159
hires Henry J. Raymond, 160
attacks the Sun, 161
tells British legislators the Sun was cheap at $250,000, 171
mentioned for the collectorship, 179
hires Dana, 209
timidity of, toward slavery, 211
writes pleas to Dana, 212
denies writing “Forward to Richmond!”, 213
hires Cummings on the state of his breeches, 266
Gregg, Frederic J., editorial writer, Evening Sun, 400
Griffis, William Elliot, a Sun contributor, 404
Gurowski, Count, writes for the Tribune, 161
Hackett, James H., 39
Hallock, Gerard, sympathy of, with slavery forces him to retire from the Journal of Commerce, 181, 182
Hamblin, Thomas S., ruined by fire of 1836, 118
beats Bennett, 118
Hamilton, Captain, aspersions of, relative to tooth brushes, 45
Harbour Association, formed by six newspapers, 167
Harnden, William F., starts express service, New York to Boston, 141
Harte, Bret, stories by, syndicated by the Sun, 403
Hawkins, Ervin, city editor, Evening Sun, 400
Hayward, Billings, part owner of the Transcript, 133, 134
Hazeltine, Mayo W., writes on Dana’s elevation of journalism, 426
“M. W. H.,” 408
literary critic for thirty-one years, 408
Head-lines, the Sun’s second, 44
examples of (1833), 52
example of, in Dana’s time, 314
Hearst, William R., “the fourth yellow journalist,” 413
Henderson, William J., musical critic and yachting writer, 391
Hendrix, Joseph C., “Cut out the damn,” 279
“Hermit,” writes Washington letters for the Sun, 176
Herschel, Sir John F. W., 66
Hill, Edwin C., reports Becker trial, 321
style of, in disaster stories, 361, 362
Hitchcock, Thomas, author of “Matthew Marshall” financial articles, 228
Hoaxes. See Moon Hoax, Balloon Hoax, Mungo Park.
Hoe, Robert, Day’s remark at dinner to, 137
Holmes, Mary J., writes novels for the Sun, 195
Hone, Philip, as a writer, 37
Horse expresses: the six-cent papers combine to use, 110
Hotels, huge noon dinners in the thirties, 122
Howard, Joseph, Jr., issues a false Presidential proclamation, 183
Hudson, Frederic, opposes managing editorships, 262
“Human interest,” 244, 245, 313, 363
Humour, 366, 367
Hurlbut, William Henry, a Sun contributor, 405
Illustrations, the Sun’s first, 43
Interviews, invented by Bennett, 316
Introductions, the Sun’s objection to, 363
Irving, Washington, 34–35
Irwin, Will, “The City That Was,” 358
447“It Shines for All,” 58
Jackson, Andrew, message of, printed in full, 51
James, Henry, flashy head-lines on a novel by, 404
Jennings, Louis J., chief editorial writer of the Times, 274
becomes editor of the Times, 298
returns to England, 298
Jewett, Helen, murder of, 113, 114
trial of Robinson for murder of, 115, 116
Jones, Alexander, becomes first agent of Associated Press, 167
invents telegraph cipher, 167
Jones, George, partner of H. J. Raymond, 274
Journalism, the earliest dailies, 29
advance of, between 1830 and 1840, 136, 137
great editors of 1868, 233
managing editors, 262, 263
first women reporters, 285, 286
Watterson’s review in 1873, 293–295
“Personal journalism,” 295, 296
Dana’s dream of a paper without advertisements, 299–301
interviewing, 316
What do people read?, 323
“Sixth sense,” 335, 336
Journal of Commerce, the Sun’s only surviving morning contemporary of 1833, 25
Josephs, Joseph, reporter, 283
Kane, Lawrence S., city editor, 279
reporter, 280
Kellogg, Daniel F., city editor 1890–1902, 371
Kelly, John, marriage of, reported, 321, 322
Kemble, Fanny, 44, 59
Kemble, W. H., author of the “addition, division, and silence” letter, 305
causes Dana’s arrest, 306
is sent to prison, 306
Kendall, George W., despatches of, to the New Orleans Picayune used by the Sun, 165
King, Charles, editor of the American, 130, 131
Know-Nothing Party, uses Maria Monk’s “Disclosures” as political capital, 112
Kobbé, Gustav, dramatic and musical critic, 350
Laffan Bureau, established, 375
growth, 376
Laffan, William M., becomes proprietor of the Sun, 427
thorough newspaper training of, 427
art expert, 427, 428
dramatic critic, 428
“Anybody can get anything printed, except the owner,” 428
death of, in 1909, 430
Landon, M. D. See Eli Perkins.
Leggett, William, fights duel with Blake, 130
Levermore, Charles H., describes victory of the Sun and the Herald over old-fashioned journalism, 137
Lincoln, Abraham, “No match for the Little Giant,” 177
“A man of the people,” 178
is elected, “and yet the country is safe,” 179
Sun comments on re-election of, 182;
on death of, 182
New York newspapers’ comment on emancipation proclamation, 184
assigns Dana to Virginia campaign, 222
Literature, in the fifties, 173
serial novels contracted for by M. S. Beach, 196
“The finest side of the Sun,” 402, et seq.
Literary men, list of, in 1833, 34–35
Lloyd, Nelson, Spanish war correspondent, 355
city editor, Evening Sun, 400
Locke, Richard Adams, goes on Sun as a reporter, 64
Poe’s sketch of, 65, 66
early life of, 66
confesses the Moon Hoax, 86–87
life of the murderer, Fernandez, by, 103–104
448starts the New Era, 116–117
writes “The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park,” 117
becomes editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, 117, 118
death of, 118
attends dinner to Moses Y. Beach, 167
Lord, Chester S., Whisky Ring story by, 284, 285
long service of, 326, 327
first staff of, 327
“Ten thousand battles of,” 327
managing editor, 1880–1913, 372
studies at Hamilton College, 373
goes on the Sun as a reporter, 373
buys Syracuse Standard, 373
returns to the Sun, 373
assistant managing editor, 373
managing editor, 373
described by E. G. Riggs, 373
perfects collection of election returns, 374
sends Blaine first news of his defeat, 374
establishes a news service in a night, 375
selection of correspondents by, 376
“Use your own judgment,” 377, 378
“You’ve been fired, but come back,” 378
Lord, Kenneth, city editor, 371, 432
Lotteries, list of numbers drawn, in the Sun, 40
Lottery advertising, 37
Luby, James, chief editorial writer, Evening Sun, 400
Lyman, Ambrose W., night city editor, 371
Lynch, Charles, Sunday Sun writer, 412
Lynde, Willoughby, part owner of the Transcript, 133, 134
Magazines, New York periodicals in 1833, 34
Maguire, Mark, newsboy and sports writer, 285
invents boxing chart, 285
Mallon, George Barry, city editor, 1902–1914, 371
Mandigo, John, sporting editor, 395
Mann, Henry, reporter, exchange editor and author, 284
reports Stokes trial, 321
Mansfield, Josephine, 236, 270
Marble, Manton, joins the World, 182
controls it, 182
protests to Lincoln when the World is suppressed, 183
Maria Monk, the Sun prints “Disclosures” of, 111, 112
exposed by W. L. Stone in the Commercial Advertiser, 112, 113
Martineau, Harriet, comments of, on the Moon Hoax, 86
“Matthew Marshall.” See Hitchcock, Thomas.
Matthias the Prophet, trial of, for murder, 63
McAlpin, Robert, reporter, 284
McAlpin, Tod, reporter, 284
McClellan, George B., supported by the Sun in 1864, 185
McCloy, W. C., city editor and managing editor, Evening Sun, 398, 400
McDonnell, P. G., predicts Aguinaldo’s revolt, 376
McEntee, Joseph, Albany correspondent, 394
Mexican War, Sun’s news of, 164, 165
costly to newspapers, 166
Mitchell, Edward P., owns a copy of the first Sun, 26
is quoted on Dana’s freedom from ancient journalistic rules, 240
describes Dana’s methods and surroundings, 247–251
describes Dana’s encouragement of Cuba Libre, 354
finds “Plaza Charles A. Dana” in Camaguey, 355
writes short stories of distinction, 405
breadth of his fancy and humour, 405, 406
address on “The Newspaper Value of Non-essentials,” 406
champions the classics, 407
449defines yellow journalism and white, 415
describes Dana’s revolution of journalism, 416
receives Dana’s instructions as to length of death notice, 425
becomes editor-in-chief, 430
president of the Sun Printing and Publishing Association, 1909–1911, 430
remains as editor, 432
“Monsieur X.” See Thiéblin, Napoleon L.
Moon Hoax, 64–101
reacts on the Sun’s big fire story, 106
Morris, George P., 37
Morrissey, John, pugilist, is supported for the Senate by the Sun, 323
Morrison, Archibald M., gains control of the Sun to use it for evangelical purposes, 189
Morse, Samuel F. B., assisted by W. M. Swain and A. S. Abell to finance the telegraph, 136
Motto, “It Shines for All” appears, origin of, 58
Mullin, Edward H., editorial writer, Evening Sun, 400
Munn, Orson D., buys Scientific American with Alfred E. Beach, 162
Munsey, Frank A., sells Washington Times to Brisbane, 348
remarks of, at Yale on the influence of the Sun and the World, 419
buys New York Press, 431
buys the Sun, 431
consolidates the Sun and the Press, 431
buys Stewart Building, 432
“M. W. H.” See Hazeltine, M. W.
“Mystery of Marie Roget.” See Rogers, Mary.
Navy Department scandals, 304, 305
“Nemo,” a Sun correspondent in the Civil War, 188
News boats, 166
Newsboys, Day originates street sales by, 39–40
Sam Messenger, 40
Newspapers, Courrant, the first English daily, 29
London Times the first English paper to use a steam press, 29
Pennsylvania Packet, the first American daily, 29
the Globe, oldest New York paper, 29
the Evening Post, second oldest New York paper, 29
the Courier and the Enquirer amalgamated, 35
New York Tribune, founding of, 37
New York Times is started, 57
the Transcript is started, 57
the True Sun, 59–60
Courier and Enquirer, its huge size, 62
attitude of the Sun’s contemporaries toward the Moon Hoax, 75, 76, 82, 87
the Sun’s penny imitators, editorial reference to, 107
New York Herald prints the first report of Stock Exchange sales, 109
Herald’s circulation in 1836, 116
the Journal of Commerce denounces the Sun as an inciter of riots, 119
paper rolls, a new invention, described, 123, 124
Courier and Enquirer’s writers under Webb, 130
Journal of Commerce, enterprise under Gerard Hallock’s editorship, 130
the Transcript’s early success, 133, 134
list of penny papers started in New York, 1833–1838, 134
New York Express established, 134, 135
New York Daily News established, 134, 135
the Daily Transcript, the first Philadelphia penny paper, 135
Philadelphia Public Ledger, office mobbed, 135
list of great dailies founded, 1833–1843, 136
the Herald called “a very bad paper,” by Greeley, 174
450New York World, appearance of, as a highly moral sheet, 182
the New York Times and the Tweed exposure, 274, 275
Orange Postman, the first penny paper, 29
Newspaper feuds, Day and Webb, 54
Sun and Journal of Commerce, 54
New York, size and life of, in 1833, 32–34
life in the thirties, 121–123
rich and powerful figures of Dana’s first Sun year, 234, 235
clubs, hotels, and theatres of the sixties, 236, 237
New York Press, sports staff of, transferred to the Sun, 393
Nicollet, Jean Nicolas, supposed connection of, with the Moon Hoax, 94–101
Noah, Mordecai M., 61
establishes Morning Star, 134
“No king, no clown, to rule this town,” 255
Norr, William, writes “The Pearl of Chinatown,” 411
North, S. N. D., describes the influence of the penny press, 137
North, Walter Savage, writes fiction for the Sun, 196
circulation of New York dailies in 1833, 31
“Nym Crinkle.” See Andrew C. Wheeler.
O’Brien, John H., Laffan’s jest with, 429, 430
Odion, Henry W., night city editor, 371
O’Hanlon, Virginia, asks the Sun if there is a Santa Claus, 409
O’Malley, Frank W., story by, on Policeman Sheehan’s death, 364
describes Passover parade, 367
Overton, Grant M., book-reviewer, 411
Palmer, Frederick, Evening Sun reporter, 399
Paragraphs, quotations from, in 1834, 52–53
Park, Mungo, Locke writes the “Lost Manuscript” of, 117
Patton, Francis T., rules for exaggeration by, 390, 391
Penny newspapers, failure of, before the Sun was established, 23
Perkins, Eli (Melville De Lancey Landon), Sun correspondent, 314
Philip Hone, the Sun suggests that he incited a riot, 119
Phillips, David Graham, last assignments of, 360
finds material for novels, 360
Pigs in City Hall Park, the Sun objects to, 55
Pigeons, the Sun uses, to carry ship news, 146, 147
editorial explaining presence of, on the Sun’s roof, 147, 148
Pike, James S., Dana advises, to get “Black Dan drunk,” 211
career of, as journalist and diplomat, 256, 257
Poe, Edgar Allan, describes R. A. Locke, 65, 66
his “Hans Pfaall” spoiled by the Moon Hoax, 90–93
belief of, that the Moon Hoax firmly established penny newspapers, 102
returns to New York, 148
writes the Balloon Hoax for the Sun, 149
inspiration of, for “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” 153, 155
Post-Trader scandal, 306
Prall, William M., 104
Press, the Sun’s first, 24
the Sun’s second, 52
the Sun’s third, 58
Presses, Day buys two Napiers, 118
Price, Joseph, partner of R. A. Locke in New Era, 116
part owner New Era, 134
Price of the Sun changed from “one penny” to “one cent,” 51
Printers, union, in 1833, 48
Prize-fighting denounced, 59
Pulitzer, Joseph, is assigned by Dana to report the electoral controversy, 240
451correspondent of the Sun, 312
“The third yellow journalist,” 413
influence of, on journalism, 419
Railroads, extent of, in 1833, 30
Ralph, Julian, reports Borden trial, 321
long service of, on Sun, 331
Grant’s funeral, report by, 332
books written by, 334
a football classic by, with the score left out, 334, 335
Molly Maguires, reported by, 335
is gifted with “sixth sense,” 335
describes reporting an inauguration, 337
Ramsey, Dave, originates the idea of a penny Sun, 21
Rawlins, General John A., part of, in Dana’s assignment to report on Grant, 218
Raymond, Henry J., goes to the Tribune, 160
performs a great reporting feat, 160
leaves Greeley, 160
becomes the first editor of the New York Times, 161
calls Webb’s paper “the Austrian organ in Wall Street,” 174
Reamer, Lawrence, dramatic critic, 411
Reick, William C., becomes proprietor, 430
early career of, 430, 431
improves Evening Sun, 431
sells the Sun to Frank A. Munsey, 431
Reid, Whitelaw, succeeds Greeley, 298
Reporters, comparison of styles, 315–322
Sun staff in 1893, 330
Sun, anonymity of, almost complete, 330
“The Sun has no ‘stars,’” 359
a typical assignment list in 1893, 359
Rewey, Elijah M., night city editor, 371
exchange editor, 372
Riggs, Edward G., reports seven national conventions, 343, 344
wide acquaintance of, 344
Dana’s reliance on, 344
“Riggs is my Phil Sheridan,” 345
defines political correspondents, 345, 346
described by Samuel G. Blythe, 346
writes history of national conventions, 346
describes Lord’s discernment, 373
tells how Lord built up the Laffan bureau, 375, 376
“One story you [Chamberlin] can’t write,” 341
“Rigolo.” See Thiéblin, N. L.
Riis, Jacob A., chief police reporter, Evening Sun, 398
writings of, attract Roosevelt, 398, 399
Riots, the Bowery Theatre, 55–56
Ripley, George, lectures, 205
helps Dana to enter Brook Farm, 206
is chief of the cow-milking group, 207
editor of the Harbinger, 207
prepares, with Dana, the “New American Encyclopedia,” 213
Robeson, George M., accused by the Sun in the Navy scandal, 304, 305
Robinson, Lucius, Sun reporter and governor, 104–105
Rogers, Mary, disappearance of, announced in the Sun, 153
editorial comment on murder of, 154
Poe’s uses case of, in fiction, 153, 155
Root, Walstein, Spanish war correspondent, 355
Rosebault, Walter M., city editor and reporter, 280
Rosenfeld, Sidney, Sun reporter in 1870, 280
Ruhl, Arthur, Evening Sun reporter, 399
Rum, the Sun’s aversion to, 43
Safe Burglary Conspiracy, 308
Salary Grab, 307
452Sam Patch, the Sun’s pigeon, 147, 149
Santa Claus editorial article, 409, 410
Scientific American, interest in, bought by Alfred E. Beach, 162
Secession, the Sun’s plan to emasculate, 179, 180
Serviss, Garret P., night editor, 372
Shaw, Henry Grenville, telegraph editor, 280
Shepherd, Alexander, accused by the Sun in the Washington paving scandal, 307
tries to hale Dana to Washington, 307
Short, Wm. F., 60
Shunk, James F., a Sun contributor, 405
Siamese Twins, arrest of, 51
Simonds, Frank H., editorial writer, the Sun and the Evening Sun, 400
Simonton, James W., associate of Raymond, 174
“Six-penny respectables,” 110
“Sixth sense,” examples of, 335, 336
Slavery, Missouri Compromise and Dred Scott decision rejected by the Sun, 175, 176
Smith, George M., night editor, 1904–1912, 372
managing editor Evening Sun, 400
Smith, Goldwin, a Sun contributor, 404
Space rates, 380
Spalding, James R., a World writer, 182
Spanish War, Sun’s news service in, 353–356
Sports, the Sun’s first prize-fight story, 58
Sports department, 391–393
Spears, John R., cruises around the world, 349
reports America’s Cup races, 349
covers Hatfield-McCoy feuds, 349
books written by, 349
Spears, Raymond S., reporter, 349
Speed, Keats, becomes managing editor, 432
Spencer, Edward, a writer of fiction for the Sun, 405
Stanley, William J., part owner of the Transcript, 133
Stanton, Henry Brewster, a Sun writer from 1868 to 1887, 258, 259
Beecher’s tribute to, 259
Stanton, Edwin M., asks Dana to enter War Department, 215
withdraws appointment, 216
Steamships, Great Western arrives at New York, 119
Sirius arrives at New York, 119
the Sun’s extras on arrival of, 142
loss of the President, 143
Stephens, Ann S., writes fiction for the Sun, 196
Stereotyping, adopted by the Sun, 193
Stetson, Francis Lynde, a Sun contributor, 404
Stevenson, Robert Louis, early successes of, first appear in the Sun, 403, 404
South Seas articles of, complete only in the Sun, 403, 404
Stewart, Alexander T., grave robbery of, 322
Stewart, William (“Walsingham”), first dramatic critic to adopt intimate style, 411
Stillman, Amos B., telegraph editor for forty-five years, 280
“Quite a fire in Chicago,” 281
Stokes, Edward S., conviction of, reported by Henry Mann, 317, 318
Stone, William L., conflict of, with Bryant, 34
the Sun’s quarrel with, 56
sketch of, 112
exposes Maria Monk, 113
Sullivan-Mitchell fight, Arthur Brisbane’s report of, 347, 348
Sun, the, reprints of the first issue, 25
size of the first issue, 25
extant copies of first issue, 26
second issue, contents of, 38
attacks shinplasters and phrenology, 123
sold by Day to Beach, 127
453plant, expenses, and circulation of, June, 1838, 128
Day’s period of ownership of, 127
editorial comment in 1837 on popularity of, 129
issues extras on the arrival of the Great Western, the British Queen, and other steamships, 142
uses horse expresses to bring Governor Seward’s message from Albany, 143
uses train, trotting horses, and boat to get the news of the steamer Caroline case, 144, 145
uses carrier pigeons to get ship news, 146, 147
moves to Nassau and Fulton streets, 1842, 146, 147
second home of, burned after it had moved, 157
buys a new dress of type every three months, 158
is seven columns wide in 1840, 158
title of, reads “The New York Sun” for a few months, 158
is eight columns wide in 1843, 158
Weekly Sun, 169
American Sun, for Europeans, 169
Illustrated Sun, 169
syndicates President Tyler’s Message in 1841, 169
value of, $250,000 in 1852, 171
becomes a two-cent paper August 1, 1864;
a one-cent paper, July 1, 1916;
a two-cent paper January 26, 1918, 194
size of, reduced to five columns in 1863, 193
Weekly Sun, continued by Dana, 199
Semi-Weekly Sun announced, 199
Dana and his associates pay $175,000 for, 228, 229
apologizes for issuing more than four pages, 278
city editors under Cummings, 279
telegraph editors, 280
Office Cat of, 287–289
only four pages for twenty years, 301
extraordinary sales, 323–325
success of, explained by E. P. Mitchell, 325
the Sun spirit, 326, 379
home of, for forty-seven years, 369
editors-in-chief, only three in fifty years, 371
managing editors, list of, 371
city editors, list of, 371
night city editors, list of, 371
night editors, list of, 372
news system, 372
ethics, 380–383
list of editorial writers, 409
price of, 431, 432
homes of, 432
“Sunbeams” column, 315
Sun cholera cure, 173
Swain, Wm. M., predicts Day’s ruin, 24
founds Philadelphia Public Ledger, 135
industry of, 135
makes $3,000,000, 135
Swift, John T., sends the Sun a beat on Port Arthur’s fall, 376, 377
Swinton, John, double intellectual life of, 259
makes speeches attacking Dana, 260
is managing editor of the Times, 261
starts John Swinton’s Paper, 261
Tammany Hall, old home of, bought by Dana for the Sun, 229
Taylor, Bayard, European correspondent of the Tribune, 161
Telegraph, comments on Morse’s new invention, 145
a report that the Sun tried to control, 146
extended to New York in 1846, 146
is opened from New York to Philadelphia, Boston, and Albany, 164
lines completed in 1846, 165
drives reprint from first page, 171
454first cable messages, 197, 198
Theatres, the Bowery riot, 55–56
attractions of the thirties, 121, 122
“Footlight Flashes,” 315, 316
list of Sun critics, 411
Thiéblin, Napoleon L., critic and essayist, 314, 315
uses pen names of “Monsieur X,” “Azamet Batuk,” and “Rigolo,” 314, 315
Tilden, Samuel J., editor of Daily News, 181
Townsend, Edward W., writes Chimmie Fadden stories, 330
fiction characters created by, 411
Trains, special news, used by Sun and Herald, 166
Trowbridge, H. Warren, writes fiction for the Sun, 195
Tweed, William M., is boss of the city, 234
as a source of news, 269
statue of, a Sun joke, 271–274
declination by, 273
retains W. O. Bartlett as counsel, 275
denounced by the Sun, 275, 276
absolute power of, 276
stable of, described by the Sun, 277
escapes from keepers, 277
Van Anda, Carr V., night editor, 1893–1904, 372
Van Buren, Martha, 51
Vance, John, writes editorials, 174
leaves the Sun, 192
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, an advertiser in the first Sun, 27
opposes Jay Gould, 235
a Sun interview with, in 1875, 316
Van Dyke, Dr. Henry, deception of, by Tweed statue joke, 274
Vila, Joseph, sports editor, Evening Sun, 400
Damon Runyon’s tribute to, 393
exposes huge betting, 393
Wall Street news, Bennett appreciates value of, 109
“Walsingham.” See William Stewart.
Wardman, Ervin, first used phrase “Yellow Journalism,” 415
becomes publisher of the Sun, 432
Warren, General Fitz-Henry, writes the phrase, “Forward to Richmond!”, 213, 214
career of, 214
Sun writer, soldier, and politician, 257, 258
article of, on Sumner’s death, 258
Watkins, James T., editorial writer, Evening Sun, 399
Watterson, Henry, “You [Dana] don’t make the Sun,” 291
“Mr. Dana is left alone,” 293–295
predicts no end to the “personality of journalism,” 295
first woman reporter of Evening Sun, 400
Webb, James Watson, journalist and a duellist, 35–36
editorial articles on, 61, 62
the Sun’s story of attack by, on Bennett, 108
charges the Sun with stealing a President’s message, 110, 111
second assault on Bennett described, 114
refuses Joseph Wood’s challenge, 115
retires from newspaper work, 183
Webster, Daniel, Bunker Hill speech of, reported by the Sun, 158
Weeks, Caleb, carries the Moon Hoax to Herschel in Africa, 86
Weston, Edward Payson, the best “leg man” in journalism, 283
feats of, in pedestrianism, 283, 284
Weyman, Charles S., editor of the “Sunbeams” column, 228
Wheeler, Andrew Carpenter, (“Nym Crinkle”), dramatic critic, 411
Whisky Ring scandal, 305
White, Frank Marshall, brings the Sun a beat on the missing steamer Umbria, 392, 393
455Whitman, Stephen French, Evening Sun reporter, 399
Wild pigeons, 43
Williams, Barney (Bernard Flaherty), the Sun’s first newsboy, 40
makes first stage appearance, 121
Williams, John, city editor, 279
Willis, Nathaniel P., 37
Wilson, Alexander C., associate of Raymond, 174
Wilson, General James Harrison, quoted on Dana’s assignment to report on Grant, 217
says Grant declared Dana would be appointed collector, 309
Wisner, George W., the Sun’s first reporter, 38
becomes half owner of the Sun, 46
indicted for attack on Attree, 61
challenged to a duel, 62
retires from the Sun, 64
Wood, Benjamin, buys Daily News, 135
owns Daily News, 181
Wood, Fernando, proposes New York’s secession, 180
Wood, Dr. John B., “The Great American Condenser,” 278
condenses through a reader, 279
Wood, Joseph, feud over, and wife, challenge of, to Col. Webb, 115
Wood, Samuel A., originates rhymed news stories, 351
spring poem by, 352
“Snygless the Seas Are,” 352
Yale University, students of, investigate the Moon story, 84–85
Yellow Journalism, Col. Watterson’s statement on, 413
defined by E. P. Mitchell, 415
phrase, first used by Ervin Wardman, 415
Young, John Russell, orders of, enrage Cummings, 266
Young, Mr., charged by the Transcript with biting two of its carriers, 119
Young, William, city editor, 279
managing editor, 282

BENJAMIN H. DAY, FOUNDER OF “THE SUN”	Frontispiece
	PAGE
BENJAMIN H. DAY, A BUST	22
THE FIRST ISSUE OF “THE SUN”	28
THE FIRST HOME OF “THE SUN”	34
THE SECOND HOME OF “THE SUN”	34
BARNEY WILLIAMS, THE FIRST NEWSBOY	50
RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE, AUTHOR OF THE MOON HOAX	68
THE FIRST INSTALMENT OF THE MOON HOAX	96
A MOON SCENE, FROM LOCKE’S GREAT DECEPTION	96
MOSES YALE BEACH, SECOND OWNER OF “THE SUN”	124
AN EXTRA OF “THE SUN”	136
THE THIRD HOME OF “THE SUN”	136
MOSES SPERRY BEACH	166
ALFRED ELY BEACH	170
CHARLES A. DANA AT THIRTY-EIGHT	204
MR. DANA AT FIFTY	224
THE FIRST NUMBER OF “THE SUN” UNDER DANA	236
THE HOME OF “THE SUN” FROM 1868 TO 1915	236
MR. DANA IN HIS OFFICE	248
JOSEPH PULITZER	258
ELIHU ROOT	258
JUDGE WILLARD BARTLETT	258
MR. DANA AT SEVENTY	270
AMOS JAY CUMMINGS	280
DANIEL F. KELLOGG	290
AMOS B. STILLMAN	290
JOHN B. BOGART	290xx
JAMES GORDON BENNETT, SR.	300
HORACE GREELEY	300
HENRY J. RAYMOND	300
JULIAN RALPH	316
ARTHUR BRISBANE	330
EDWARD G. RIGGS	350
CHESTER SANDERS LORD	370
SELAH MERRILL CLARKE	380
SAMUEL A. WOOD	390
OSCAR KING DAVIS	390
THOMAS M. DIEUAIDE	390
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS	390
WILL IRWIN	398
FRANK WARD O’MALLEY	398
EDWIN C. HILL	398
PAUL DANA	404
WILLIAM M. LAFFAN	410
WILLIAM C. REICK	416
FRANK A. MUNSEY	422
EDWARD PAGE MITCHELL	430

Morning Courier and New York Enquirer	4,500
Democratic Chronicle	4,000
New York Standard	2,400
New York Journal of Commerce	2,300
New York Gazette and General Advertiser	1,500
New York Daily Advertiser	1,400
Mercantile Advertiser and New York Advocate	1,200

New York to Boston	265
New York to Albany and Buffalo	507
New York to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington	240
Philadelphia to Harrisburg	105
Boston to Lowell	26
Boston toward Portland	55
Ithaca to Auburn	40
Troy to Saratoga	31
Total	1,269

Presidential elections	82,000
State and city elections	42,000
Last days of walking-matches	25,000
October State elections in Presidential years	21,000
Great fires	10,000
Notable disasters	9,000
Hangings in or near New York	8,000

November 8, 1876—Presidential election	222,390
Sept. 20, 1881—Garfield’s death	212,525
Nov. 3, 1880—Presidential election	206,974
July 13, 1871—Orange riots	192,224
Sept. 21, 1881—Second day after Garfield’s death	180,215
Nov. 3, 1875—State and city election	177,588
July 3, 1881—Garfield shot	176,093

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918

The Story of
The Sun

AN INTRODUCTION
BY THE EDITOR OF THE SUN

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE STORY OF “THE SUN”

CHAPTER I
SUNRISE AT 222 WILLIAM STREET

CHAPTER II
THE FIELD OF THE LITTLE “SUN”

CHAPTER III
RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE’S MOON HOAX

CHAPTER IV
DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT

CHAPTER V
NEW YORK LIFE IN THE THIRTIES

CHAPTER VI
MOSES Y. BEACH’S ERA OF HUSTLE

CHAPTER VII
“THE SUN” IN THE MEXICAN WAR

CHAPTER VIII
“THE SUN” DURING THE CIVIL WAR

CHAPTER IX
THE EARLIER CAREER OF DANA

CHAPTER X
DANA: HIS “SUN” AND ITS CITY

CHAPTER XI
DANA, AS MITCHELL SAW HIM

CHAPTER XII
DANA’S FIRST BIG NEWS MEN

CHAPTER XIII
DANA’S FAMOUS RIVALS PASS

CHAPTER XIV
“THE SUN” AND THE GRANT SCANDALS

CHAPTER XV
“THE SUN” AND “HUMAN INTEREST”

CHAPTER XVI
“SUN” REPORTERS AND THEIR WORK

CHAPTER XVII
SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM

CHAPTER XVIII
THE FINEST SIDE OF “THE SUN”

CHAPTER XIX
“THE SUN” AND YELLOW JOURNALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHRONOLOGY

INDEX

Transcriber’s Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

CHAPTER I
SUNRISE AT 222 WILLIAM STREET
	PAGE
Benjamin H. Day, with No Capital Except Youth and Courage, Establishes the First Permanent Penny Newspaper.—The Curious First Number Entirely His Own Work	21
CHAPTER II
THE FIELD OF THE LITTLE “SUN”
A Very Small Metropolis Which Day and His Partner, Wisner, Awoke by Printing Small Human Pieces About Small Human Beings and Having Boys Cry the Paper	31
CHAPTER III
RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE’S MOON HOAX
A Magnificent Fake Which Deceived Two Continents, Brought to “The Sun” the Largest Circulation in the World and, in Poe’s Opinion, Established Penny Papers	64xiv
CHAPTER IV
DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT
The Success of “The Sun” Leads to the Founding of The “Herald.”—Enterprises and Quarrels of a Furious Young Journalism.—The Picturesque Webb.—Maria Monk	103
CHAPTER V
NEW YORK LIFE IN THE THIRTIES
A Sprightly City Which Daily Bought Thirty Thousand copies of “The Sun.”—The Rush to Start Penny Papers.—Day Sells “The Sun” for Forty Thousand Dollars	121
CHAPTER VI
MOSES Y. BEACH’S ERA OF HUSTLE
“The Sun” Uses Albany Steamboats, Horse Expresses, Trotting Teams, Pigeons, and the Telegraph to Get News.—Poe’s Famous Balloon Hoax and the Case of Mary Rodgers	139
CHAPTER VII
“THE SUN” IN THE MEXICAN WAR
Moses Y. Beach as an Emissary of President Polk.—The Associated Press Founded in the Office of “The Sun.”—Ben Day’s Brother-in-Law Retires with a Small Fortune	164xv
CHAPTER VIII
“THE SUN” DURING THE CIVIL WAR
One of the Few Entirely Loyal Newspapers of New York.—Its Brief Ownership by a Religious Coterie.—It Returns to the Possession of M. S. Beach, Who Sells It to Dana	172
CHAPTER IX
THE EARLIER CAREER OF DANA
His Life at Brook Farm and His Tribune Experience.—His Break with Greeley, His Civil War Services and His Chicago Disappointment.—His Purchase of “The Sun”	202
CHAPTER X
DANA: HIS “SUN” AND ITS CITY
The Period of the Great Personal Journalists.—Dana’s Avoidance of Rules and Musty Newspaper Conventions.—His Choice of Men and His Broad Definition of News	233
CHAPTER XI
DANA, AS MITCHELL SAW HIM
A Picture of the Room Where One Man Ruled for Thirty Years.—The Democratic Ways of a Newspaper Autocrat.—W. O. Bartlett, Pike, and His Other Early Associates	247xvi
CHAPTER XII
DANA’S FIRST BIG NEWS MEN
Amos J. Cummings, Dr. Wood, and John B. Bogart.—The Lively Days of Tweedism.—Elihu Root as a Dramatic Critic.—The Birth and Popularity of “The Sun’s” Cat	262
CHAPTER XIII
DANA’S FAMOUS RIVALS PASS
The Deaths of Raymond, Bennett, and Greeley Leave Him the Dominant Figure of the American Newspaper Field.—Dana’s Dream of a Paper Without Advertisements	293
CHAPTER XIV
“THE SUN” AND THE GRANT SCANDALS
Dana’s Relentless Fight Against the Whisky Ring, the Crédit Mobilier, “Addition, Division, and Silence,” the Safe Burglary Conspiracy and the Boss Shepherd Scandal	304
CHAPTER XV
“THE SUN” AND “HUMAN INTEREST”
Something About Everything, for Everybody.—A Wonderful Four-Page Paper.—A Comparison of the Styles of “Sun” Reporters in Three Periods Twenty Years Apart	313xvii
CHAPTER XVI
“SUN” REPORTERS AND THEIR WORK
Cummings, Ralph, W. J. Chamberlin, Brisbane, Riggs, Dieuaide, Spears, O. K. Davis, Irwin, Adams, Denison, Wood, O’Malley, Hill, Cronyn.—Spanish War Work	328
CHAPTER XVII
SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM
Lord, Managing Editor for Thirty-Two Years.—Clarke, Magician of the Copy Desk.—Ethics, Fair Play and Democracy.—“The Evening Sun” and Those Who Make It	369
CHAPTER XVIII
THE FINEST SIDE OF “THE SUN”
Literary Associations of an Editorial Department That Has Encouraged and Attracted Men of Imagination and Talent.—Mitchell, Hazeltine, Church, and Their Colleagues	402
CHAPTER XIX
“THE SUN” AND YELLOW JOURNALISM
The Coming and Going of a Newspaper Disease.—Dana’s Attitude Toward President Cleveland.—Dana’s Death.—Ownerships of Paul Dana, Laffan, Reick, and Munsey	413
Bibliography	435
Chronology	437
Index	439

Evening Post	3,000
Evening Star	2,500
New York Commercial Advertiser	2,100
New York American	1,600
Total	26,500

Jefferson Market Court	S. H. Adams
Essex Market Court and Meeting of Irish Federalists	Rudolph E. Block
With R. Croker at Lakewood	George B. Mallon
Custom-House News	E. G. Riggs
City Hall News	W. H. Olmsted
Police Headquarters	Robert S. Yard
Ship News	S. A. Wood
Coroners and Post-Office	W. A. Willis
Subway Project and Murder at East Eighty-Eighth Street	W. J. Chamberlin
Magic Shell Swindle	E. W. Townsend
Condition of Police Lodging-Houses	D. G. Phillips
Carlyle Harris Case	F. F. Coleman
Fire at Koster & Bial’s	John Kenny
Bishop McDonnell’s Trip to Rome	Evans

March	1—Joseph Jefferson’s Lecture on the Drama
”	2—Bear Hunt at Glen Cove
”	3—Special Stories for the Sunday Sun
”	6—Obituary of W. P. Demarest
”	7—Meeting of Russian-Americans
”	8—Mystery at New Brunswick, New Jersey
”	9—Special Stories for Sunday
”	10—Accident in Seventy-First St. Tunnel
”	11—More Triplets in Cold Spring
”	12—Services in Old Scotch Church
”	13—Furniture Sale
”	14—Opening of Hotel Waldorf
”	15—Married Four Days, Then False
”	17—Dinner, Friendly Sons of St. Patrick
”	18—Parade and Show, Barnum & Bailey
”	19—Church Quarrel, Rutherford, N. J.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918

The Story of The Sun

AN INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR OF THE SUN

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE STORY OF “THE SUN”

CHAPTER I SUNRISE AT 222 WILLIAM STREET

CHAPTER II THE FIELD OF THE LITTLE “SUN”

CHAPTER III RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE’S MOON HOAX

CHAPTER IV DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT

CHAPTER V NEW YORK LIFE IN THE THIRTIES

CHAPTER VI MOSES Y. BEACH’S ERA OF HUSTLE

CHAPTER VII “THE SUN” IN THE MEXICAN WAR

CHAPTER VIII “THE SUN” DURING THE CIVIL WAR

CHAPTER IX THE EARLIER CAREER OF DANA

CHAPTER X DANA: HIS “SUN” AND ITS CITY

CHAPTER XI DANA, AS MITCHELL SAW HIM

CHAPTER XII DANA’S FIRST BIG NEWS MEN

CHAPTER XIII DANA’S FAMOUS RIVALS PASS

CHAPTER XIV “THE SUN” AND THE GRANT SCANDALS

CHAPTER XV “THE SUN” AND “HUMAN INTEREST”

CHAPTER XVI “SUN” REPORTERS AND THEIR WORK

CHAPTER XVII SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM

CHAPTER XVIII THE FINEST SIDE OF “THE SUN”

CHAPTER XIX “THE SUN” AND YELLOW JOURNALISM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHRONOLOGY

INDEX

Transcriber’s Notes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Story of
The Sun

AN INTRODUCTION
BY THE EDITOR OF THE SUN

CHAPTER I
SUNRISE AT 222 WILLIAM STREET

CHAPTER II
THE FIELD OF THE LITTLE “SUN”

CHAPTER III
RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE’S MOON HOAX

CHAPTER IV
DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT

CHAPTER V
NEW YORK LIFE IN THE THIRTIES

CHAPTER VI
MOSES Y. BEACH’S ERA OF HUSTLE

CHAPTER VII
“THE SUN” IN THE MEXICAN WAR

CHAPTER VIII
“THE SUN” DURING THE CIVIL WAR

CHAPTER IX
THE EARLIER CAREER OF DANA

CHAPTER X
DANA: HIS “SUN” AND ITS CITY

CHAPTER XI
DANA, AS MITCHELL SAW HIM

CHAPTER XII
DANA’S FIRST BIG NEWS MEN

CHAPTER XIII
DANA’S FAMOUS RIVALS PASS

CHAPTER XIV
“THE SUN” AND THE GRANT SCANDALS

CHAPTER XV
“THE SUN” AND “HUMAN INTEREST”

CHAPTER XVI
“SUN” REPORTERS AND THEIR WORK

CHAPTER XVII
SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM

CHAPTER XVIII
THE FINEST SIDE OF “THE SUN”

CHAPTER XIX
“THE SUN” AND YELLOW JOURNALISM