The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918
Date: 2021-07-18T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Sun (New York; N.Y. : 1833)

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Title: The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918

Author: Frank Michael O'Brien

Author of introduction, etc.: Edward Page Mitchell

Release date: July 18, 2021 [eBook #65868]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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The Story of
The Sun

THE FIRST HEAD-LINE OF THE NEW YORK SUN

THE SECOND HEAD-LINE OF THE NEW YORK SUN

BENJAMIN H. DAY, FOUNDER OF “THE SUN”

THE STORY OF
The Sun.

NEW YORK, 1833–1918

BY
FRANK M. O’BRIEN

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EDWARD
PAGE MITCHELL, EDITOR OF “THE
SUN”—ILLUSTRATIONS AND FACSIMILES

NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1918,
By George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1917, 1918, The Frank A. Munsey Company

Copyright, 1918, The Sun Printing and Publishing Association

Printed in the United States of America

TO
FRANK A. MUNSEY

AN INTRODUCTION
BY THE EDITOR OF THE SUN

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 particular 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 days 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 degree 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 worked 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.

Edward P. Mitchell.

CONTENTS

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

64

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

164

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

247

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

313

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

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 | 290
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

THE STORY OF “THE SUN”

CHAPTER I
SUNRISE AT 222 WILLIAM STREET

Benjamin H. Day, with No Capital Except Youth and Courage, Establishes the First Permanent Penny Newspaper.—The Curious First Number Entirely His Own Work.

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, he 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 to make the Republican, as a daily, one of the greatest of American newspapers.

BENJAMIN H. DAY

A Bust in the Possession of Mrs. Florence A. Snyder, Summit, N. J.

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, also 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, helped 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 of 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:

The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY, and at the same time afford an advantageous medium for advertising.

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 seller 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 of 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 of 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.

THE FIRST ISSUE OF “THE SUN”

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”

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.

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:

MORNING PAPERS

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

EVENING PAPERS

Evening Post | 3,000
Evening Star | 2,500
New York Commercial Advertiser | 2,100
New York American | 1,600
Total | 26,500

New York was the American metropolis, but it was of about the present size of Indianapolis or Seattle. Of 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 work 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 the 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.”

THE FIRST HOME OF “THE SUN,” 222 WILLIAM STREET

(Under the Arrow)

THE SECOND HOME OF “THE SUN”

Nassau Street, from Frankfort to Spruce, in the Early Forties. “The Sun’s” Second Home Is Shown at the Right End of the Block. The Tammany Hall Building Became “The Sun’s” Fourth Home in 1868.

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. 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 Courier 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 just 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:

Greeley & Story, No. 54 Liberty Street, New York, respectfully solicit the patronage of the public to their business of letterpress printing, particularly lottery-printing, such as schemes, periodicals, and so forth, which will be executed on favorable terms.

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 being 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:

To us as Americans there can be little of interest in the triumph of one member of a royal family of Europe over another; and although we can but rejoice at the downfall of the modern Nero who so lately filled the Portuguese throne, yet if rumor speak the truth the victorious Pedro is no better than he should be.

The editor lamented the general lack of news:

With the exception of the interesting news from Portugal there appears to be very little worthy of note. Nullification has blown over; the President’s tour has terminated; Black Hawk has gone home; the new race for President is not yet commenced, and everything seems settled down into a calm. Dull times, these, for us newspaper-makers. We wish the President or Major Downing or some other distinguished individual would happen along again and afford us material for a daily article. Or even if the sea-serpent would be so kind as to pay us a visit, we should be extremely obliged to him and would honor his snakeship with a most tremendous puff.

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:

TO THE UNEMPLOYED—A number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy to sell again.

Before that day there had been no newsboys; no papers were sold in the streets. The big, blanket political 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:

We newspaper people thrive best on the calamities of others. Give us one of your real Moscow fires, or your Waterloo battle-fields; let a Napoleon be dashing with his legions through the world, overturning the thrones of a thousand years and deluging the world with blood and tears; and then we of the types are in our glory.

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:

The following are the drawn numbers of the New York consolidated lotteries of yesterday afternoon:

62 6 59 46 61 34 65 37 8 42

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.

Over in the police column Mr. Wisner was supplying gems like the following:

A complaint was made by several persons who “thought it no sin to step to the notes of a sweet violin” and gathered under a window in Chatham Street, where a little girl was playing on a violin, when they were showered from a window above with the contents of a dye-pot or something of like nature. They were directed to ascertain their showerer.

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:

We supposed that the eyes of men were but half open to this case. We imagined that the slave would have to toil on for years and purchase what in justice was already his own. We did not once dream that light had so far progressed as to prepare the British nation for the colossal stride in justice and humanity and benevolence which they are about to make. The abolition of West Indian slavery will form a brilliant era in the annals of the world. It will circle with a halo of imperishable glory the brows of the transcendent spirits who wield the present destinies of the British Empire.

Would to Heaven that the honor of leading the way in this godlike enterprise had been reserved to our own country! But as the opportunity for this is passed, we trust we shall at least avoid the everlasting disgrace of long refusing to imitate so bright and glorious an example.

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.

These early issues were full of lively little “sunny” pieces, for instance:

Passing by the Beekman Street church early this morning, we discovered a milkman replenishing his lacteous cargo with Adam’s ale. We took the liberty to ask him, “Friend, why do ye do thus?” He replied, “None of your business”; and we passed on, determined to report him to the Grahamites.

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.

In the next issue was some verse by Willis, beginning:

Look not upon the wine when it

Is red within the cup!

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 paragraph 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”:

They talk of the pleasures of the country, but would to God I had never been persuaded to leave the labor of the city for such woful pleasures. Oh, Broadway, Broadway! In an evil hour did I forsake thee for verdant walks and flowery landscapes and that there tiresome piece of made water. What walk is so agreeable as a walk through the streets of New York? What landscape more flowery than those of the print-shops? And what water was made by man equal to the Hudson?

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 the “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:

The Globe of Monday contains in six columns the reasons which prompted the President to remove the public deposits from the United States Bank, which were read to his assembled cabinet on the 18th instant.

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 penny 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:

May we not therefore look to the time, in perspective, when our atmosphere will be traversed with as much facility as our waters?

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:

SCENE—An editor’s closet—editor solus.

“Well, a pretty day’s work of it I shall make. News, I have nothing—politics, stale, flat, and unprofitable—miscellany, enough of it—miscellany bills payable, and a miscellaneous list of subscribers with tastes as miscellaneous as the tongues of Babel. Ha! Footsteps! Drop the first person singular and don the plural. WE must now play the editor.”

(Enter Devil)—“Copy, sir!”

(Enter A.)—“I missed my paper this morning, sir, I don’t want to take it—”

(Enter B.)—“There is a letter ‘o’ turned upside down in my advertisement this morning, sir! I—I—”

(Enter C.)—“You didn’t notice my new work, my treatise on a flea, this morning, sir! You have no literary taste! Sir—”

(Enter D.)—“Sir, your boy don’t leave my paper, sir—I live in a blind alley; you turn out of —— Street to the right—then take a left-hand turn—then to the right again—then go under an arch—then over a kennel—then jump a ten-foot fence—then enter a door—then climb five pair of stairs—turn fourteen corners—and you can’t miss my door. I want your boy to leave my paper first—it’s only a mile out of his way—if he don’t, I’ll stop—”

(Enter E.)—“Sir, you have abused my friend; the article against Mr. —— as a candidate is intolerable—it is scandalous—I’ll stop my paper—I’ll cane you—I’ll—”

(Enter F.)—“Mr. Editor, you are mealy-mouthed, you lack independence, your remarks upon Mr. ——, the candidate for Congress, are too tame. If you don’t put it on harder I’ll stop my—”

(Enter G.)—“Your remarks upon profane swearing are personal, d——n you, sir, you mean me—before I’ll patronize you longer I’ll see you in ——”

(Enter H.)—“Mr. ——, we are very sorry you do not say more against the growing sin of profanity. Unless you put your veto on it more decidedly, no man of correct moral principles will give you his patronage—I, for one—”

(Enter I.)—“Bad luck to the dirty sowl of him, where does he keep himself? By the powers, I’ll strike him if I can get at his carcass, and I’ll kick him anyhow! Why do you fill your paper with dirty lies about Irishmen at all?”

(Enter J.)—“Why don’t you give us more anecdotes and sich, Irish stories and them things—I don’t like the long speeches—I—”

(Devil)—“Copy, sir!”

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”:

In America there are no bells and no chambermaids.

I have heard, since my arrival in America, the toast of “a bloody war in Europe” drank with enthusiasm.

The whole population of the Southern and Western States are uniformly armed with daggers.

At present an American might study every book within the limits of the Union and still be regarded in many parts of Europe, especially in Germany, as a man comparatively ignorant.

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 proprietors of other morning papers cheerfully pay twelve dollars. Therefore, the office of the Journal of Commerce is what printers term a rat office—and the term “rat,” with the followers of the same profession with Faust, Franklin, and Stanhope, is a most odious term.

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

At the close of the present year the Treasury of the nation will contain twelve million dollars. This rich and increasing revenue will probably be a bone of contention at the next session of Congress.

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:

THE PARK HOTEL—Mr. W. B. Astor gives notice that he will receive proposals for building the long-contemplated hotel in Broadway, between Barclay and Vesey Streets.

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:

The advertisement was handed to us by a respectable-looking young man, and of course we could not refuse to publish it—though if we were in want of a wife we think we should take a different course to obtain one.

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

Maria Jones was accused of stealing clothing, and committed. Certain affairs were developed of rather a singular and comical nature in relation to her.

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 Sun blew its own horn for the first time on November 9, 1833:

Its success is now beyond question, and it has exceeded the most sanguine anticipations of its publishers in its circulation and advertising patronage. Scarcely two months has it existed in the typographical firmament, and it has a daily circulation of upward of two thousand copies, besides a steadily increasing advertising patronage. Although of a character (we hope) deserving the encouragement of all classes of society, it is more especially valuable to those who cannot well afford to incur the expense of subscribing to a “blanket sheet” and paying ten dollars per annum.

In conclusion we may be permitted to remark that the penny press, by diffusing useful knowledge among the operative classes of society, is effecting the march of intelligence to a greater degree than any other mode of instruction.

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.”

From the Collection of Charles Burnham

BARNEY WILLIAMS, THE COMEDIAN, WHO WAS THE FIRST NEWSBOY OF “THE SUN”

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”?

The head-lines were all small, and most of them italics. Here are samples:

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

The news paragraphs were sometimes models of condensation:

PICKPOCKETS—On Friday night a Gentleman lost $100 at the Opera and then $25 at Tammany Hall.

The Hon. Daniel Webster will leave town this morning for Washington.

John Baker, the person whom we reported a short time since as being brought before the police for stealing a ham, died suddenly in his cell in Bellevue in the greatest agony—an awful warning to drunkards.

James G. Bennett has become sole proprietor and editor of the Philadelphia Courier.

Colonel Crockett, it is expected, will visit the Bowery Theater this evening.

RUMOR—It was rumored in Washington on the 6th that a duel would take place the next day between two members of the House.

SUDDEN DEATH—Ann McDonough, of Washington Street, attempted to drink a pint of rum on a wager, on Wednesday afternoon last. Before it was half swallowed Ann was a corpse. Served her right!

Bayington, the murderer, we learn by a contemporary, was formerly employed in this city on the Journal of Commerce. No wonder he came to an untimely fate.

DUEL—We understand that a duel was fought at Hoboken on Friday morning last between a gentleman of Canada and a French gentleman of this city, in which the latter was wounded. The parties should be arrested.

LAMENTABLE DEATH—The camelopard shipped at Calcutta for New York died the day after it was embarked. “We could have better spared a better” crittur, as Shakespeare doesn’t say.

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:

The Legislature of this State closed its arduous duties yesterday. It has increased the number of our banks and fixed a heavy load of debt upon posterity.

Nothing more. If the readers wanted more they could fly to the ample bosoms of the sixpennies; but 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:

The man who will do this will do anything; he would dance on his mother’s grave; he would invade the sacred precincts of the tomb and rob a corpse of its winding-sheet; he has no SOUL. It is said that this useless fellow is about to commence a suit against us for a libel. Try it, Mr. Boudinot!

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 advertising 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:

EXTREME NICETY—The author of the “Book of Etiquette,” recently printed in London, says: “Silver forks are now common at every respectable table, and for my part I cannot see how it is possible to eat a dinner comfortably without them.” The booby ought to be compelled to cut his beefsteak with a piece of old barrel-hoop on a wooden trencher.

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:

THE ANACONDA—Most of those who have seen the beautiful serpent at Peale’s Museum will recollect that in the snug quarters allotted to him there are two blankets, on one of which he lies, and the other is covered over him in cold weather. Strange to say that on Monday night, after Mr. Peale had fed the serpent with a chicken, according to custom, the serpent took it into his head to swallow one of the blankets, which is a seven-quarter one, and this blanket he has now in his stomach. The proprietor feels much anxiety.

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:

DAMN THE YANKEES—We are informed by a correspondent (though we have not seen the announcement ourselves) that Farren, the chap who damned the Yankees so lustily the other day, and who is now under bonds for a gross outrage on a respectable butcher near the Bowery Theater, is intending to make his appearance on the Bowery stage THIS EVENING!

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:

He was then again cowskinned by Mr. Bryant of the Post, and was most unpoetically flogged near the American Hotel. He has always been the slave of avarice, cowardice, and meanness.... The next time he sees fit to attack the penny press we hope he will confine himself to facts.

A month later the Sun went after Colonel Stone again:

The colonel ... for the sake of an additional glass of wine and a couple of real Spanish cigars, did actually perpetrate a most excellent and true article, the first we have seen of his for a long time past. Now we have serious thoughts that the colonel will yet become quite a decent fellow, and may ultimately ascend, after a long course of training, to a level with the penny dailies which have soared so far above him in the heavens of veracity.

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:

If the daily circulation of the Sun be not larger than that of the Times and Courier both, then may we be hung up by the ears and flogged to death with a rattle-snake’s skin.

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 of 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:

At the end of three minutes Williamson fell. (Cheers and cries of “Fair Play!”) After breathing half a minute, they went at it again, and Phelan was knocked down. (Cheers and cries of “Give it to him!”) In three minutes more Williamson fell, and the adjoining woods echoed back the shouts of the spectators.

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:

And this is what is called “sports of the ring!” We can cheerfully encourage foot-races or any other humane and reasonable amusement, but the Lord deliver us from the “ring.”

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:

We have changed our inside head to True Sun for reasons which will hereafter be made known.

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

Having understood on Wednesday (June 21) that a daily paper was about being issued in this city as nearly like our own as it could be got up, under the title of The True Sun, for the avowed purpose of benefitting the proprietors at our expense, we yesterday changed our inside title, being determined to place an injunction upon any such piratical proceedings. Yesterday morning the anticipated Sun made its appearance, and at first sight we immediately abandoned our intention of defending ourselves legally, being convinced that it is a mere catchpenny second-hand concern which (had it our whole list and patronage) would in one month be among the “Things that were.” It is published by William F. Short and edited by Stephen B. Butler, who announces that his “politics are Whig.”... Mr. Short, with the ingenuity of a London pickpocket, though without the honesty, has made up his paper as nearly like ours as was possible and given it the name of The (true) Sun for the purpose of imposing on the public.... We hereby publish William F. Short and Stephen B. Butler to our editorial brethren and to the printing profession in general as Literary Scoundrels.

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.

When a contemporary did not fail the Sun poked fun at it:

MAJOR NOAH’S SINGULARITY—The Evening Star of yesterday comes out in favor of the French, lottery, gambling, and phrenology for ladies. Is the man crazy?

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:

Bigger men than we have passed through that ordeal. There is Major Noah, the Grand Mogul of the editorial tribe, who has not only been indicted, but, we believe, placed at the bar. Then there’s Colonel Webb; no longer ago than last autumn he was indicted by the grand jury of Delaware County. The colonel, it is said, didn’t consider this a fair business transaction, and, brushing up the mahogany pistol, he took his coach and hounds, drove up to good old Delaware, and bid defiance to the whole posse comitatus of the county. The greatest men in the country have some time in the course of their lives been indicted.

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:

OUTRAGEOUS—The Courier and Enquirer of Saturday morning is just twice as large as its usual size. The sheet is now large enough for a blanket and two pairs of pillow-cases, and it contains, in printers’ language, 698,300 ems—equal to eight volumes of the ordinary-sized novels of the present day. If the reading matter were printed in pica type and put in one unbroken line, it would reach from Nova Zembla to Terra del Fuego. Such a paper is an insult to a civilized community.

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 had 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

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.

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, 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:

He is about five feet seven inches in height, symmetrically formed; there is an air of distinction about his whole person—the air noble of genius. His face is strongly pitted by the smallpox, and, perhaps from the same cause, there is a marked obliquity in the eyes; a certain calm, clear luminousness, however, about these latter amply compensates for the defect, and the forehead is truly beautiful in its intellectuality. I am acquainted with no person possessing so fine a forehead as Mr. Locke.

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:

His prose style is noticeable for its concision, luminosity, completeness—each quality in its proper place. He has that method so generally characteristic of genius proper. Everything he writes is a model in its peculiar way, serving just the purposes intended and nothing to spare.

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 reader 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:

CELESTIAL DISCOVERIES—The Edinburgh Courant says—“We have just learnt from an eminent publisher in this city that Sir John Herschel, at the Cape of Good Hope, has made some astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.”

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:

GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES.

LATELY MADE
BY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL, LL.D., F.R.S., &c.

At the Cape of Good Hope.

[From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science.]

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:

In this unusual addition to our Journal we have the happiness of making known to the British public, and thence to the whole civilized world, recent discoveries in astronomy which will build an imperishable monument to the age in which we live, and confer upon the present generation of the human race proud distinction through all future time. It has been poetically said that the stars of heaven are the hereditary regalia of man as the intellectual sovereign of the animal creation. He may now fold the zodiac around him with a loftier consciousness of his mental supremacy.

RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE, AUTHOR OF THE MOON HOAX

From an Engraving in the Possession of His Granddaughter, Mrs. F. Winthrop White of New Brighton, S. I.

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:

And well might he pause! From the hour the first human pair opened their eyes to the glories of the blue firmament above them, there has been no accession to human knowledge at all comparable in sublime interest to that which he has been the honored agent in supplying. Well might he pause! He was about to become the sole depository of wondrous secrets which had been hid from the eyes of all men that had lived since the birth of time.

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

To render our enthusiasm intelligible, we will state at once that by means of a telescope, of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle, the younger Herschel, at his observatory in the southern hemisphere, has already made the most extraordinary discoveries in every planet of our solar system; has discovered planets in other solar systems; has obtained a distinct view of objects in the moon, fully equal to that which the unaided eye commands of terrestrial objects at the distance of one hundred yards; has affirmatively settled the question whether this satellite be inhabited, and by what orders of beings; has firmly established a new theory of cometary phenomena; and has solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy.

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

We are indebted to the devoted friendship of Dr. Andrew Grant, the pupil of the elder, and for several years past the inseparable coadjutor of the younger Herschel. The amanuensis of the latter at the Cape of Good Hope, and the indefatigable superintendent of his telescope during the whole period of its construction and operations, Dr. Grant has been able to supply us with intelligence equal in general interest at least to that which Dr. Herschel himself has transmitted to the Royal Society. For permission to indulge his friendship in communicating this invaluable information to us, Dr. Grant and ourselves are indebted to the magnanimity of Dr. Herschel, who, far above all mercenary considerations, has thus signally honored and rewarded his fellow laborer in the field of science.

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. Sir John, it appeared, was in conference with Sir David Brewster:

After a few minutes’ silent thought, Sir John diffidently inquired whether it would not be possible to effect a transfusion of artificial light through the focal object of vision! Sir David, somewhat startled at the originality of the idea, paused a while, and then hesitatingly referred to the refrangibility of rays and the angle of incidence. Sir John, grown more confident, adduced the example of the Newtonian reflector, in which the refrangibility was corrected by the second speculum and the angle of incidence restored by the third.

“And,” continued he, “why cannot the illuminated microscope, say the hydro-oxygen, be applied to render distinct and, if necessary, even to magnify, the focal object?”

Sir David sprang from his chair in an ecstasy of conviction, and, leaping half-way to the ceiling, exclaimed:

“Thou art the man!”

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:

The portion which we publish to-day is introductory to celestial discoveries of higher and more universal interest than any, in any science yet known to the human race. Now indeed it may be said that we live in an age of discovery.

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 specimen of lunar vegetation, however, which they had already seen, had decided a question of too exciting an interest to induce them to retard its exit. It had demonstrated that the moon has an atmosphere constituted similarly to our own, and capable of sustaining organized and, therefore, most probably, animal life.

“The trees,” says Dr. Grant, “for a period of ten minutes were of one unvaried kind, and unlike any I have seen except the largest class of yews in the English churchyards, which they in some respects resemble. These were followed by a level green plain which, as measured by the painted circle on our canvas of forty-nine feet, must have been more than half a mile in breadth.”

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

Then appeared as fine a forest of firs, unequivocal firs, as I have ever seen cherished in the bosom of my native mountains. Wearied with the long continuance of these, we greatly reduced the magnifying power of the microscope without eclipsing either of the reflectors, and immediately perceived that we had been insensibly descending, as it were, a mountainous district of highly diversified and romantic character, and that we were on the verge of a lake, or inland sea; but of what relative locality or extent, we were yet too greatly magnified to determine.

On introducing the feeblest achromatic lens we possessed, we found that the water, whose boundary we had just discovered, answered in general outline to the Mare Nubicum of Riccoli. Fairer shores never angel coasted on a tour of pleasure. A beach of brilliant white sand, girt with wild, castellated rocks, apparently of green marble, varied at chasms, occurring every two or three hundred feet, with grotesque blocks of chalk or gypsum, and feathered and festooned at the summits with the clustering foliage of unknown trees, moved along the bright wall of our apartment until we were speechless with admiration.

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

In the shade of the woods on the southeastern side we beheld continuous herds of brown quadrupeds, having all the external characteristics of the bison, but more diminutive than any species of the bos genus in our natural history. Its tail was like that of our bos grunniens; but in its semicircular horns, the hump on its shoulders, the depth of its dewlap, and the length of its shaggy hair, it closely resembled the species to which I have compared it.

It had, however, one widely distinctive feature, which we afterward found common to nearly every lunar quadruped we have discovered; namely, a remarkable fleshy appendage over the eyes, crossing the whole breadth of the forehead and united to the ears. We could most distinctly perceive this hairy veil, which was shaped like the upper front outline of the cap known to the ladies as Mary Queen of Scots cap, lifted and lowered by means of the ears. It immediately occurred to the acute mind of Dr. Herschel that this was a providential contrivance to protect the eyes of the animal from the great extremes of light and darkness to which all the inhabitants of our side of the moon are periodically subjected.

The next animal perceived would be classed on earth as a monster. It was of a bluish lead color, about the size of a goat, with a head and beard like him, and a single horn, slightly inclined forward from the perpendicular. The female was destitute of the horn and beard, but had a much longer tail. It was gregarious, and chiefly abounded on the acclivitous glades of the woods. In elegance of symmetry it rivaled the antelope, and like him it seemed an agile, sprightly creature, running with great speed and springing from the green turf with all the unaccountable antics of the young lamb or kitten.

This beautiful creature afforded us the most exquisite amusement. The mimicry of its movements upon our white-painted canvas was as faithful and luminous as that of animals within a few yards of a camera obscura when seen pictured upon its tympan. Frequently, when attempting to put our fingers upon its beard, it would suddenly bound away into oblivion, as if conscious of our earthly impertinence; but then others would appear, whom we could not prevent nibbling the herbage, say or do what we would to them.

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

On examining the center of this delightful valley we found a large, branching river, abounding with lovely islands and water-birds of numerous kinds. A species of gray pelican was the most numerous, but black and white cranes, with unreasonably long legs and bill, were also quite common. We watched their piscivorous experiments a long time in hopes of catching sight of a lunar fish; but, although we were not gratified in this respect, we could easily guess the purpose with which they plunged their long necks so deeply beneath the water. Near the upper extremity of one of these islands we obtained a glimpse of a strange amphibious creature of a spherical form, which rolled with great velocity across the pebbly beach, and was lost sight of in the strong current which set off from this angle of the island.

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:

No article has appeared for years that will command so general a perusal and publication. Sir John has added a stock of knowledge to the present age that will immortalize his name and place it high on the page of science.

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 New York Sunday News advised the incredulous to be patient:

Our doubts and incredulity may be a wrong to the learned astronomer, and the circumstances of this wonderful discovery may be correct.

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 in 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:

Dr. Herschel has classified not less than thirty-eight species of forest trees and nearly twice this number of plants, found in this tract alone, which are widely different to those found in more equatorial latitudes. Of animals he classified nine species of mammalia and five of oviparia. Among the former is a small kind of reindeer, the elk, the moose, the horned bear, and the biped beaver.

The last resembles the beaver of the earth in every other respect than its destitution of a tail and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries its young in its arms, like a human being, and walks with an easy, gliding motion. Its huts are constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages, and from the appearance of smoke in nearly all of them there is no doubt of its being acquainted with the use of fire.

The largest lake described was two hundred and sixty-six miles long and one hundred and ninety-three 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:

But whilst gazing upon them in a perspective of about half a mile we were thrilled with astonishment to perceive four successive flocks of large winged creatures, wholly unlike any kind of birds, descend with a slow, even motion from the cliffs on the western side and alight upon the plain. They were first noticed by Dr. Herschel, who exclaimed:

“Now gentlemen, my theories against your proofs, which you have often found a pretty even bet, we have here something worth looking at. I was confident that if ever we found beings in human shape it would be in this longitude, and that they would be provided by their Creator with some extraordinary powers of locomotion. First, exchange for my Number D.”

This lens, being soon introduced, gave us a fine half-mile distance; and we counted three parties of these creatures, of twelve, nine, and fifteen in each, walking erect toward a small wood near the base of the eastern precipices. Certainly they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared, and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified.

Having observed them at this distance for some minutes, we introduced lens H.z., which brought them to the apparent proximity of eighty yards—the highest clear magnitude we possessed until the latter end of March, when we effected an improvement in the gas burners.

About half of the first party had passed beyond our canvas; but of all the others we had a perfectly distinct and deliberate view. They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of the shoulders to the calves of the legs.

The face, which was of a yellowish flesh-color, was a slight improvement upon that of the large orang-utan, being more open and intelligent in its expression, and having a much greater expanse of forehead. The mouth, however, was very prominent, though somewhat relieved by a thick beard upon the lower jaw, and by lips far more human than those of any species of the Simia genus.

In general symmetry of body and limbs they were infinitely superior to the orang-utan; so much so that, but for their long wings, Lieutenant Drummond said they would look as well on a parade-ground as some of the old cockney militia. The hair on the head was a darker color than that of the body, closely curled, but apparently not woolly, and arranged in two curious semi-circles over the temples of the forehead. Their feet could only be seen as they were alternately lifted in walking; but from what we could see of them in so transient a view, they appeared thin and very protuberant at the heel.

Whilst passing across the canvas, and whenever we afterward saw them, these creatures were evidently engaged in conversation; their gesticulation, more particularly the varied action of the hands and arms, appeared impassioned and emphatic. We hence inferred that they were rational beings, and, although not perhaps of so high an order as others which we discovered the next month on the shores of the Bay of Rainbows, that they were capable of producing works of art and contrivance.

The next view we obtained of them was still more favorable. It was on the borders of a little lake, or expanded stream, which we then for the first time perceived running down the valley to the large lake, and having on its eastern margin a small wood. Some of these creatures had crossed this water and were lying like spread eagles on the skirts of the wood.

We could then perceive that their wings possessed great expansion, and were similar in structure to those of the bat, being a semi-transparent membrane expanded in curvilineal divisions by means of straight radii, united at the back by the dorsal integuments. But what astonished us very much was the circumstance of this membrane being continued from the shoulders to the legs, united all the way down, though gradually decreasing in width. The wings seemed completely under the command of volition, for those of the creatures whom we saw bathing in the water spread them instantly to their full width, waved them as ducks do theirs to shake off the water, and then as instantly closed them again in a compact form.

Our further observation of the habits of these creatures, who were of both sexes, led to results so very remarkable that I prefer they should be first laid before the public in Dr. Herschel’s own work, where I have reason to know that they are fully and faithfully stated, however incredulously they may be received....

The three families then almost simultaneously spread their wings, and were lost in the dark confines of the canvas before we had time to breathe from our paralyzing astonishment. We scientifically denominated them the vespertilio-homo, or man-bat; and they are doubtless innocent and happy creatures, notwithstanding some of their amusements would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.

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:

From these, however, and other prohibited passages, which will be published by Dr. Herschel with the certificates of the civil and military authorities of the colony, and of several Episcopal, Wesleyan, and other ministers who, in the month of March last, were permitted under the stipulation of temporary secrecy to visit the observatory and become eye-witnesses of the wonders which they were requested to attest, we are confident his forthcoming volumes will be at once the most sublime in science and the most intense in general interest that ever issued from the press.

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 demands 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:

That there should be winged people in the moon does not strike us as more wonderful than the existence of such a race of beings on earth; and that there does or did exist such a race rests on the evidence of that most veracious of voyagers, Peter Wilkins, whose celebrated work not only gives an account of the general appearance and habits of a most interesting tribe of flying Indians, but also of those more delicate and engaging traits which the author was enabled to discover by reason of the conjugal relations he entered into with one of the females of the winged tribe.

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:

It was open on all sides, and seemed to contain neither seats, altars, nor offerings, but it was a light and airy structure, nearly a hundred feet high from its white, glistening floor to the glowing roof, and it stood upon a round, green eminence on the eastern side of the valley. We afterward, however, discovered two others which were in every respect facsimiles of this one; but in neither did we perceive any visitants except flocks of wild doves, which alighted on its lustrous pinnacles.

Had the devotees of these temples gone the way of all living, or were the latter merely historical monuments? What did the ingenious builders mean by the globe surrounded with flames? Did they, by this, record any past calamity of their world, or predict any future one of ours? I by no means despair of ultimately solving not only these, but a thousand other questions which present themselves respecting the object in this planet; for not the millionth part of her surface has yet been explored, and we have been more desirous of collecting the greatest possible number of new facts than of indulging in speculative theories, however seductive to the imagination.

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:

We had no opportunity of seeing them actually engaged in any work of industry or art; and, so far as we could judge, they spent their happy hours in collecting various fruits in the woods, in eating, flying, bathing, and loitering about upon the summits of precipices.

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:

This concludes the supplement with the exception of forty pages of illustrative and mathematical notes, which would greatly enhance the size and price of this work without commensurably adding to its general interest. In order that our readers may judge for themselves whether we have withheld from them any matter of general comprehension and interest, we insert one of the notes from those pages of the supplement which we thought it useless to reprint; and it may be considered a fair sample of the remainder. For ourselves, we know nothing of mathematics beyond counting dollars and cents, but to geometricians the following new method of measuring the height of the lunar mountains, adopted by Sir John Herschel, may be quite interesting.

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. 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 soon 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.

“Don’t print it right away,” said Locke. “I wrote it myself.”

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:

Most of those who incredulously regard the whole narrative as a hoax are generously enthusiastic in panegyrizing not only what they are pleased to denominate its ingenuity and talent, but also its useful effect in diverting the public mind, for a while, from that bitter apple of discord, the abolition of slavery, which still unhappily threatens to turn the milk of human kindness into rancorous gall. That the astronomical discoveries have had this effect is obvious from our exchange papers. Who knows, therefore, whether these discoveries in the moon, with the visions of the blissful harmony of her inhabitants which they have revealed, may not have had the effect of reproving the discords of a country which might be happy as a paradise, which has valleys not less lovely than those of the Ruby Colosseum, of the Unicorn, or of the Triads; and which has not inferior facilities for social intercourse to those possessed by the vespertiliones-homines, or any other homines whatever?

Some persons of little faith but great good nature, who consider the “moon story,” as it is vulgarly called, an adroit fiction of our own, are quite of the opinion that this was the amiable moral which the writer had in view. Other readers, however, construe the whole as an elaborate satire upon the monstrous fabrications of the political press of the country and the various genera and species of its party editors. In the blue goat with the single horn, mentioned as it is in connection with the royal arms of England, many persons fancy they perceive the characteristics of a notorious foreigner who is the supervising editor of one of our largest morning papers.

We confess that this idea of intended satire somewhat shook our own faith in the genuineness of the extracts from the Edinburgh Journal of Science with which a gentleman connected with our office furnished us as “from a medical gentleman immediately from Scotland.”

Certain correspondents have been urging us to come out and confess the whole to be a hoax; but this we can by no means do until we have the testimony of the English or Scotch papers to corroborate such a declaration. In the mean time let every reader of the account examine it and enjoy his own opinion. Many intelligent and scientific persons will believe it true, and will continue to do so to their lives’ end; whilst the skepticism of others would not be removed though they were in Dr. Herschel’s observatory itself.

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:

Hannington forever and still years afterward, say we! His panorama of the lunar discoveries, in connexion with the beautiful dioramas, are far superior to any other exhibition in this country.

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:

It is quite evident that Hamblin does not believe a word of the whole story, or he would never have taken the liberties with it which he has. The wings of the man-bats and lady-bats, who are of an orange color and look like angels in the jaundice, are well contrived for effect; and the dialogue is highly witty and pungent. Major Jack Downing’s blowing up a whole flock of winged lunarians with a combustible bundle of Abolition tracts, after vainly endeavoring to catch a long aim at them with his rifle, is capital; as are also his puns and jokes upon the splendid scenery of the Ruby Colosseum. Take it altogether, it is the most amusing thing that has been on these boards for a long time.

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:

The theme excited my fancy, and I longed to give free rein to it in depicting my day-dreams about the scenery of the moon; in short, I longed to write a story embodying these dreams. The obvious difficulty, of course, was that of accounting for the narrator’s acquaintance with the satellite; and the equally obvious mode of surmounting the difficulty was the supposition of an extraordinary telescope.

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.” Kennedy 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:

I fell back upon a style half plausible, half bantering, and resolved to give what interest I could to an actual passage from the earth to the moon, describing the lunar scenery as if surveyed and personally examined by the narrator.

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:

No sooner had I seen the paper than I understood the jest, which not for a moment could I doubt had been suggested by my own jeu d’esprit. Some of the New York journals—the Transcript, among others—saw the matter in the same light, and published the moon story side by side with “Hans Pfaall,” thinking that the author of the one had been detected in the author of the other.

Although the details are, with some exceptions, very dissimilar, still I maintain that the general features of the two compositions are nearly identical. Both are hoaxes—although one is in a tone of mere banter, the other of down-right earnest; both hoaxes are on one subject, astronomy; both on the same point of that subject, the moon; both professed to have derived exclusive information from a foreign country; and both attempt to give plausibility by minuteness of scientific detail. Add to all this, that nothing of a similar nature had even been attempted before these two hoaxes, the one of which followed immediately upon the heels of the other.

Having stated the case, however, in this form, I am bound to do Mr. Locke the justice to say that he denies having seen my article prior to the publication of his own; I am bound to add, also, that I believe him.

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, 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 Domingo 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 been 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, determined 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.

THE FIRST INSTALLMENT OF THE MOON HOAX

A MOON SCENE, FROM LOCKE’S GREAT DECEPTION

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

“Some Account of the Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope.”—Second Edition, London, 12mo, 1836.

This is a curious hoax, evidently written by a person versed in astronomy and clever at introducing probable circumstances and undesigned coincidences. It first appeared in a newspaper. It makes Sir J. Herschel discover men, animals, et cetera, in the moon, of which much detail is given. There seems to have been a French edition, the original, and English editions in America, whence the work came into Britain; but whether the French was published in America or at Paris I do not know. There is no doubt that it was produced in the United States by M. Nicollet, an astronomer, once of Paris, and a fugitive of some kind.

About him I have heard two stories. First, that he fled to America with funds not his own, and that this book was a mere device to raise the wind. Secondly, that he was a protégé of Laplace, and of the Polignac party, and also an outspoken man. That after the Revolution he was so obnoxious to the republican party that he judged it prudent to quit France; which he did in debt, leaving money for his creditors, but not enough, with M. Bouvard. In America he connected himself with an assurance office. The moon story was written, and sent to France, chiefly with the intention of entrapping M. Arago, Nicollet’s especial foe, into the belief of it. And those who narrate this version of the story wind up by saying that M. Arago was entrapped, and circulated the wonders through Paris until a letter from Nicollet to M. Bouvard explained the hoax.

I have no personal knowledge of either story; but as the poor man had to endure the first, it is but right that the second should be told with it.

The second fragment reads as follows:

“The Moon Hoax; or, the Discovery That the Moon Has a Vast Population of Human Beings.” By Richard Adams Locke.—New York, 1859.

This is a reprint of the hoax already mentioned. I suppose “R. A. Locke” is the name assumed by M. Nicollet. The publisher informs us that when the hoax first appeared day by day in a morning newspaper, the circulation increased fivefold, and the paper obtained a permanent footing. Besides this, an edition of sixty thousand was sold off in less than one month.

This discovery was also published under the name of A. R. Grant. Sohnke’s “Bibliotheca Mathematica” confounds this Grant with Professor R. Grant of Glasgow, the author of the “History of Physical Astronomy,” who is accordingly made to guarantee the discoveries in the moon. I hope Adams Locke will not merge in J. C. Adams, the codiscoverer of Neptune. Sohnke gives the titles of three French translations of “The Moon Hoax” at Paris, of one at Bordeaux, and of Italian translations at Parma, Palermo, and Milan.

A correspondent, who is evidently fully master of details, which he has given at length, informs me that “The Moon Hoax” first appeared in the New York Sun, of which R. A. Locke was editor. It so much resembled a story then recently published by Edgar A. Poe, in a Southern paper, “Adventures of Hans Pfaall,” that some New York journals published the two side by side. Mr. Locke, when he left the New York Sun, started another paper, and discovered the manuscript of Mungo Park; but this did not deceive. The Sun, however, continued its career, and had a great success in an account of a balloon voyage from England to America, in seventy-five hours, by Mr. Monck Mason, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and others.

I have no doubt that M. Nicollet was the author of “The Moon Hoax,” written in a way which marks the practised observatory astronomer beyond all doubt, and by evidence seen in the most minute details. Nicollet had an eye to Europe. I suppose that he took Poe’s story and made it a basis for his own. Mr. Locke, it would seem, when he attempted a fabrication for himself, did not succeed.

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 secretary 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 gentleman immediately from Scotland.” In a sketch of Nicollet printed in the “Biographie Universelle” (Michaud, Paris, 1884), the following appears:

There has been attributed to him an article which appeared in the daily papers of France, and which, in the form of a letter dated from the United States, spoke of an improvement in the telescope invented by the learned astronomer Herschel, who was then at the Cape of Good Hope. It has been generally and with much probability attributed to Nicollet.

With the aid of this admirable improvement Herschel was supposed to have succeeded in discovering on the surface of the moon live beings, buildings of various kinds, and a multitude of other interesting things. The description of these objects and the ingenious method employed by the English astronomer to attain his purpose was so detailed, and covered with a veneer of science so skilfully applied, that the general public was startled by the announcement of the discovery, of which North America hastened to send us the news.

It has even been said that several astronomers and physicists of our country were taken in for a moment. That seems hardly probable to us. It was easy to perceive that it was a hoax written by a learned and mischievous person.

The “Nouvelle Biographie Générale” (Paris, 1862), says of Nicollet:

He is believed to be the author of the anonymous pamphlet which appeared in 1836 on the discoveries in the moon made by Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope.

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 that 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.”

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.

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; 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.”

It is an interesting fact that the corpse of Fernandez exhibited marks of all those serious injuries which are recorded in the course of our narrative of his life, more particularly that dreadful fracture of his vertebræ which he suffered in Leghorn.

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, and 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:

POSTSCRIPT—HALF PAST 1 O’CLOCK—A TREMENDOUS CONFLAGRATION is now raging in the lower part of the city. The Merchants’ Exchange is in flames. Nearly all the blocks in the triangle bounded by William and Wall Streets and the East River are consumed! Several hundred buildings are already down, and the firemen have given out. God only knows when the fire will be arrested.

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:

Where but thirty hours since was the rich and prosperous theater of a great and productive commerce, where enterprise and wealth energized with bold and commanding efforts, now sits despondency in sackcloth and a wide and dreary waste of desolation reigns.

It seemed as if God were running in his anger and sweeping away with the besom of his wrath the proudest monuments of man. Destruction traveled and triumphed on every breeze, and billows of fire rolled over and buried in their burning bosoms the hopes and fortunes of thousands. Like the devouring elements when it fed on Moscow’s palaces and towers, it was literally a “sea of fire,” and the terrors of that night of wo and ruin rolling years will not be able to efface.

The merchants of the First Ward, like Marius in the ruins of Carthage, sit with melancholy moans, gazing at the graves of their fortunes, and the mournful mementoes of the dreadful devastation that reigns.

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, 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:

We are now enabled to print considerably more than twenty-two thousand copies, on both sides, in less than eight hours. No establishment in this country has such facilities, and no daily newspaper in the world enjoys so extensive a circulation.

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:

One after another they dropped and fell in quick succession as they had sprung up; and all, with but one exception worth regarding, have gone to the “receptacle of things lost upon earth.” Many of these departed ephemerals have struggled hard to keep within their nostrils the breath of life; and it is a singular fact that with scarcely an exception they have employed, as a means of bringing a knowledge of their being before the public, the most unlimited and reckless abuse of ourselves, the impeachment of our character, public and private; the implications, moral and political; in short, calumny in all its forms.

As to the last survivor of them worth note, which remains, we have only to say, the little world we opened has proved large enough for us both.

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 could not keep from swapping verbal shots with Bennett. The Sun said:

Bennett, whose only chance of dying an upright man will be that of hanging perpendicularly upon a rope, falsely charges the proprietor of this paper with being an infidel, the natural effect of which calumny will be that every reader will believe him to be a good Christian.

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:

Low as he had fallen, both in the public estimation and his own, we were astonished to learn last evening that Colonel Webb had stooped so far beneath anything of which we had ever conceived it possible for him to be guilty, as publicly, and before the eyes of hundreds who knew him, to descend to a public personal chastisement of that villainous libel on humanity of all kinds, the notorious vagabond Bennett. But so it is.

As the story is told to us by an eye-witness, the colonel met the brawling coward in Wall Street, took him by the throat, and with a cowhide striped the human parody from head to foot. For the space of nearly twenty minutes, as we are told, did the right arm of the colonel ply his weapon with unremitted activity, at which time the bystanders, who evidently enjoyed the scene mightily, interceded in behalf of the suffering, supplicating wretch, and Webb suffered him to run.

Had it been a dog, or any other decent animal, or had the colonel himself with a pair of good long tongs removed a polecat from his office, we know not that we would have been so much surprised; but that he could, by any possibility, have so far descended from himself as to come in public contact with the veriest reptile that ever defiled the paths of decency, we could not have believed.

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 cause 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 the 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:

The insinuation of Webb that we violated the sanctity of a seal we hurl back in proud defiance to his own brow.

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:

We were informed yesterday at the police office, and subsequently by a gentleman from Wall Street, that Webb, of the Courier and Enquirer, had openly threatened to make a personal assault upon us. It was lucky for him that we did not hear this threat; but we can now only say that if such, or anything similar to it, be his intention, he will find each of the three editors of the Sun always provided with a brace of “mahogany stock” pistols, to accommodate him in any way he likes, or may not like.

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 by 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 Commercial 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 columns full until May 10, when Colonel Webb again pounced upon James Gordon Bennett. Said the Sun:

Upon calculating the number of public floggings which that miserable scribbler, Bennett, has received, we have pretty accurately ascertained that there is not a square inch of his body which has not been lacerated somewhere about fifteen times. In fact, he has become a common flogging property; and Webb has announced his intention to cowskin him every Monday morning until the Fourth of July, when he will offer him a holiday. We understand that Webb has offered to remit the flogging upon the condition that he will allow him to shoot him; but Bennett says:

“No; skin for skin, behold, all that a man hath will he give for his life!”

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 one 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:

Our opinion, calmly and dispassionately formed from the evidence, is that Richard P. Robinson is guilty of the wilful and peculiarly atrocious murder of Helen Jewett.... Any good-looking young man, possessing or being able to raise among his friends the sum of fifteen hundred dollars to retain Messrs. Maxwell, Price, and Hoffman for his counsel, might murder any person he chose with perfect impunity.

Robinson’s acquittal was credited largely to Ogden Hoffman, whose summing up the Sun described as “the 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:

Two more States are already spoken of for addition to the Union, under the names of Iowa and Wisconsin.

Richard Adams Locke left the Sun in the fall of 1836, and on October 6, in company with Joseph Price, 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.

But to return to our meal. Said Mr. Locke’s New Era:

A paragraph is going the rounds of the papers abusing the Astor House. Nothing can be more groundless. Where the arrangements are complete, the charges, of course, must be corresponding. We suppose the report has been set afloat by some person who was kicked out for not paying his bill.

To this horrid insinuation Day replied:

The report they speak of was set afloat by ourselves, after paying $1.25 for a breakfast for a lady and her infant a year and a half old, served just one hour and seven minutes after it was ordered, with coffee black as ink and without milk, and that, too, in a room so uncleanly as to be rather offensive.

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 first 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:

Alas, poor Bennett! He seems destined to be flogged into immortal fame, and become the common buffet-block of all mankind. Mr. Hamblin paid him a complimentary visit last evening [November 17] in his editorial closet and lathered him all into lumps and blotches, although the living lie was surrounded by his minions and had a brace of loaded pistols lying on his desk when the outraged visitor first laid hands on him.

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. 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:

Of the conduct of the officers in command of the Great Western, we regret that we are compelled by reports to place it in no very favorable contrast with the gentlemanly demeanor of the officers of the Sirius. Every attention has been paid her, citizens have turned out to welcome her arrival, she was saluted by the battery on Ellis’s Island, et cetera, et cetera, and thousands of other demonstrations of courtesy were made, which proved only throwing pearls before swine. A news boat was ordered to keep off or be run down, and the hails of that boat and others were answered through a speaking-trumpet in a manner which would have done toward the savage of Nootka Sound, but is not exactly the style in which to meet the courtesies of members of a community upon which the line of packets depends in a large part for success. One would have thought that all the impudence of Europe was put on board a vessel built of large tonnage expressly for its embarkation. By the time our corporation officers have run the suspender-buttons off their breeches in chase of Lieutenant Hosken, R. N., they will discover that they have been fools for their pains.

Reverse this account entirely, and it will apply to the Sirius—testimony which we are happy to make.

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.

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.

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 Smith 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, 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.

The Sun found plenty to print.

“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 on small, flat sheets, but evidently he was impressed with the novelty. The touch about the rag-mill, of course, was fiction:

We have been shown a sheet of paper about a hundred feet in length and two feet wide, printed on both sides by a machine at one operation. This extraordinary invention enables a person to print off any length of paper required for any number of copies of a work or a public journal without a single stop, and without the assistance of any person except one to put in the rags at the extremity of the machine.

This wonderful operation is effected by the placing of the types on stereotype plates on the surface of two cylinders, which are connected with the paper-making machinery. The paper, as it issues from the mill, enters in a properly moistened state between the rollers, which are evenly inked by an ingenious apparatus, and emerges in a printed form. The number of copies can be measured off by the yard or mile. The work which we have seen from this press is “Robinson Crusoe,” and consists of one hundred and sixty duodecimo pages.

The Bible could be printed off and almost disseminated among the Indians in one continuous stream of living truth. The Sun would occupy a roll about seven feet in diameter, and our issue to Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities would be not far from a quarter of a mile long, each. The two cents postage on this would be but a trifle. The whole length of our paper would be about seventy-seven thousand feet, a papyrus which it must be confessed it would take Lord Brougham a longer time to unroll than the vitrified scrolls of Herculaneum and Pompeii.

All that it is necessary for a man to do on going into a paper-mill is to take off his shirt, hand it to the devil who officiates at one extremity, and have it come out “Robinson Crusoe” at the other. We should like to exchange some of our old shirts in this way, as we cannot afford the expense, during these hard times, of getting them washed.

Mr. Thomas French, the inventor, is from Ithaca, and is now in this city. He has one roll about six inches in diameter which is six hundred feet long.

(From a Picture in the Possession of Mrs. Jennie Beach Gasper)

MOSES YALE BEACH, SECOND OWNER OF “THE SUN”

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—

Came to the premises of F. Reville, Gardener, on the 16th inst., a COW, which has since calved. The owner is requested to call, prove property, and pay expenses. Bloomingdale, between fifth and sixth mile-stones.

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:

A CARD—TO BUTCHERS—Mr. Stamler, having retired to private life, would be glad to see his friends, the Butchers, at his house, No. 5 Rivington Street, this afternoon, between the hours of 2 and 5 P.M., to partake of a collation.

SIX CENTS REWARD!—Run away from the subscriber, on the 30th of May, Charles Eldridge, an indented apprentice to the Segar-Making business, about 16 years of age, 4 feet high, broken back. Had on, when he left, a round jacket and blue pantaloons. The above reward and no charges will be paid for his delivery to

JOHN DIBBEN, No. 354 Bowery.

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:

Several of our contemporaries are in a maze of wonder because we have taken our beautiful cognomen from the imprint of the Sun. Some of the loafers among them have even flattered themselves that our humble self in person had consequently disappeared. Not so, gentlemen—for though we may not be ambitious that our thirty thousand subscribers should daily pronounce our name while poring over advertisements on the first page, we nevertheless remain steadily at our post, and shall thus continue during the pleasure of a generous public, except, perchance, an absence of a few months on a trip to Europe, which we purpose to make this season.

With regard to a certain report that we had lost twenty thousand dollars by shaving notes, we have nothing to say. Our private business transactions cannot in the least interest the public at large.

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:

When rogues get quarreling, the truth will out.

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 replenishing 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:

Communications intended for the Sun must be addressed to Moses Y. Beach, 156 Nassau Street, corner of Spruce.

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 big 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:

Some idea of the business done in the little three-story building at the corner of Nassau and Spruce Streets occupied by the Sun for the publication of a penny paper may be formed from the fact that the annual outlay for material and wages exceeds ninety-three thousand dollars—very nearly two thousand a week, and more than three hundred a day for the six working days. On this outlay we circulate daily thirty thousand papers. Allowing the other nine morning papers an average of three thousand circulation—which may fall short in two or three cases, while it is a large estimate for all the rest—it will appear that the circulation of the Sun newspaper is daily more than of all the others united.

That this is not mere gasconade, but susceptible of proof, we refer the curious to the paper-makers who furnish the stock for this immense circulation; to the type-founders who give us a new dress three times a year, and to the Messrs. Hoe & Co., who built our two double-cylinder Napier presses, which throw off copies of the Sun at the rate of four thousand per hour. We invite newspaper publishers to visit our establishment when the presses are in operation, and we shall be happy to show them what would have astonished Dr. Faust, with all his intimacy with a certain nil admirari potentate.

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:

Since the Sun began to shine upon the citizens of New York there has been a very great and decided change in the condition of the laboring classes and the mechanics. Now every individual, from the rich aristocrat who lolls in his carriage to the humble laborer who wields a broom in the streets, reads the Sun; nor can even a boy be found in New York City or the neighboring country who will not know in the course of the day what is promulgated in the Sun in the morning.

Already can we perceive a change in the mass of the people. They think, talk, and act in concert. They understand their own interest, and feel that they have numbers and strength to pursue it with success.

The Sun newspaper has probably done more to benefit the community by enlightening the minds of the common people than all the other papers together.

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 the 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 Day 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:

TO THE READERS OF THE HERALD—Declaration of Love—Caught at Last—Going to be Married—New Movement in Civilization.

My ardent desire has been through life to reach the highest order of human excellence by the shortest possible cut. Association, night and day, in sickness and in health, in war and in peace, with a woman of the highest order of excellence must produce some curious results in my heart and feelings, and these results the future will develop in due time in the columns of the Herald. Meantime I return my heartfelt thanks for the enthusiastic patronage of the public, both of Europe and of America. The holy estate of wedlock will only increase my desire to be still more useful. God Almighty bless you all—JAMES GORDON BENNETT.

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,” “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 James 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, both 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.

AN EXTRA OF “THE SUN”

These Special Editions Were Issued on the Arrival of Every Mail Ship from England.

THE THIRD HOME OF “THE SUN”

Beach and Bennett, Rival Publishers, Had Offices Opposite Each Other at Fulton and Nassau Streets.

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

By the sheer force of its superior circulation, the penny press exerted the most powerful newspaper influence that was felt in the United States, and during this interval its beneficial influence was the most apparent. It taught the higher-priced papers that political connection was properly subordinated to the other and higher function of the public journal—the function of gathering and presenting the news as it is, without reference to its political or other effect upon friend or foe.

The advent of the penny press concluded the transition period in American journalism, and had three effects which are easily traceable. It increased the circulation, decreased the price of daily newspapers, and changed the character of the reading-matter published.

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

Independent journalism, as represented first by the Sun and the Herald, won a complete victory over old-fashioned partizan journalism. The time had forever departed when an Albany regency could tune the press of the State as easily and simply as Queen Elizabeth used to tune the English pulpits. As James Parton said, “An editorial is only a man speaking to men; but the news is Providence speaking to men.”

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 started 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:

“He’ll make a newspaper of it!”

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

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 Rogers.

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 inventor 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 in 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:

At the queen’s desire, her tutor, Dr. Davys—father to the Miss Davys whose ears the queen boxed—has been appointed Bishop of Marlborough.

Charles Kean’s friends say he has been offered the sum of sixty pounds a night for sixty nights in New York.

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:

In consequence of our news-boat arrangements we receive our papers more than an hour earlier than any other paper in this city. On the arrival of the Liverpool [July 1, 1839], we proceeded to issue an extra, which will reach Albany with the news twelve hours before it will be published in the regular editions of their evening papers, and twenty-four hours ahead of the morning papers.

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:

Who will wonder, after this, that the lazy, lumbering lazaroni of Wall Street stick up their noses at us?

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’s account of the arrival of the Great Western on April 26, 1841:

Up to the closing of the mail from Liverpool to London on the 7th, the steamer President had not arrived.

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:

An express arriving exclusively for the Sun then started, it being one o’clock, and at six this morning reached our office, thus enabling us to repeat the triumph achieved by us last year over the whole combined press of New York, large and small. It is but just to say that our express was brought on by the horses of the Red Bird Line with unparalleled expedition, in spite of wind, hail, and rain.

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, 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 capital 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.

Sperm candles manufactured by Mr. Penniman at Albany on Wednesday morning were burning at Faneuil Hall and at the Tremont, in Boston, on the evening of the same day.

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:

MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH—The new invention is completed from Baltimore to Washington. The wire, perfectly secured against the weather by a covering of rope-yarn and tar, is conducted on the top of posts about twenty feet high and one hundred yards apart. The nominations of the convention this day are to be conveyed to Washington by this telegraph, where they will arrive in a few seconds. On Saturday morning the batteries were charged and the regular transmission of intelligence between Washington and Baltimore commenced.... At half past 11 A.M., the question being asked, what was the news at Washington, the answer was almost instantaneously returned: “Van Buren stock is rising.” This is indeed the annihilation of space.

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 took 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:

Why, we have had a school of carrier-pigeons in the upper apartments of the Sun office since we have occupied the building. Did our contemporaries believe that we ever could be at fault in furnishing the earliest news to our readers? Or did they indulge the hope that in newspaper enterprise they could ever catch us napping?

Carrier-pigeons have long been remarked for their sagacity and admired for their usefulness. They are, of all birds, the most invaluable, and as auxiliary to a newspaper cannot be too highly prized. Part of the flock in our possession were employed by the London Morning Chronicle in bringing intelligence from Dublin to London, and from Paris to London, crossing both channels; therefore they are not novices in the newspaper express.

If there was delay in the arrival of the Boston steamer, and the weather clear, we despatched our choice pigeon, Sam Patch, down the Sound, and he invariably came back with a slip of delicate tissue-paper tied under his wing, containing the news. We thus are apprised of the arrival of the steamer some two hours before any one else hears of her. Our men are at their cases; the steam is up in our pressroom, and our extras are always out first.

We sometimes let one of our carriers fly to the Narrows, and in twenty minutes or so we know what is coming in, thirty miles from Sandy Hook Light. We despatch them as far as Albany, on any important mission; frequently to New Jersey, and in the summer-time they sometimes look in at Rockaway and let us know what is going on at the pavilion. We have a small sliding door in our observatory, on the top of the Sun office, through which the little aerials pass. By sending off one every little while, we ascertain the details of whatever is important or interesting at any given point.

They often fly at the rate of sixty miles an hour, easy! For example, a half-dozen will leave Washington at daylight this morning and arrive here about noon, beating the mail generally ten hours or so. They can come through from Albany in about two hours and a half, solar time. They fly exceedingly high, and keep so until they make the spires of the city, and then descend. We have not lost one by any accident, and believe ours is the only flock of value or importance in the country.

We give this brief detail of “them pigeons” because our prying friends and neighbors in the newspaper way have such a meager, guesswork account of them; and because we dislike any mystery or artifice in our business operations.

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 had 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:

ASTOUNDING INTELLIGENCE BY PRIVATE EXPRESS FROM CHARLESTON, VIA NORFOLK!—THE ATLANTIC OCEAN CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!!!—ARRIVAL AT SULLIVAN’S ISLAND OF A STEERING BALLOON INVENTED BY MR. MONCK MASON.

We stop the press at a late hour to announce that by a private express from Charleston, South Carolina, we are just put in possession of full details of the most extraordinary adventure ever accomplished by man. The Atlantic Ocean has actually been traversed in a balloon, and in the incredibly brief period of three days! Eight persons have crossed in the machine, among others Sir Everard Bringhurst and Mr. Monck Mason. We have barely time now to announce this most novel and unexpected intelligence, but we hope by ten this morning to have ready an extra with a detailed account of the voyage.

P. S.—The extra will be positively ready, and for sale at our counter, by ten o’clock this morning. It will embrace all the particulars yet known. We have also placed in the hands of an excellent artist a representation of the “Steering Balloon,” which will accompany the particulars of the voyage.

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 great problem is at length solved. The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind. The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a balloon! And this, too, without difficulty—without any great apparent danger—with thorough control of the machine—and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore!

By the energy of an agent at Charleston, South Carolina, we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage, which was performed between Saturday, the 6th instant, at 11 A.M. and 2 P.M. on Tuesday, the 9th instant, by Sir Everard Bringhurst, Mr. Osborne, a nephew of Lord Bentinck; Mr. Monck Mason, and Mr. Robert Holland, the well-known aeronauts; Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, author of “Jack Sheppard,” et cetera, and Mr. Henson, the projector of the late unsuccessful flying-machine—with two seamen from Woolwich—in all, eight persons.

The particulars furnished below may be relied on as authentic and accurate in every respect, as with a slight exception they are copied verbatim from the joint diaries of Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, to whose politeness our agent is indebted for much verbal information respecting the balloon itself, its construction, and other matters of interest. The only alteration in the MS. received has been made for the purpose of throwing the hurried account of our agent, Mr. Forsyth, into a connected and intelligible form.

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:

BALLOON—The mails from the South last Saturday night not having brought confirmation of the balloon from England, the particulars of which from our correspondent we detailed in our extra, we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous. The description of the balloon and the voyage was written with a minuteness and scientific ability calculated to obtain credit everywhere, and was read with great pleasure and satisfaction. We by no means think such a project impossible.

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:

BALLOON EXPRESS—We have been somewhat amused with the comments of the press upon the balloon express. The more intelligent editors saw its object at once. On the other hand, many of our esteemed contemporaries—those who are too ignorant to appreciate the pleasant satire—have ascribed to us the worst and basest motives. We expected as much.

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:

Left her home on Sunday morning, July 25, a young lady; had on a white dress, black shawl, blue scarf, Leghorn hat, light-colored shoes, and parasol light-colored; it is supposed some accident has befallen her. Whoever will give information respecting her at 126 Nassau shall be rewarded for their trouble.

The next day the Sun said in its news columns:

☞ The body of a young lady some eighteen or twenty years of age was found in the water at Hoboken. From the description of her dress, fears are entertained that it is the body of Miss Mary C. Rogers, who is advertised in yesterday’s paper as having disappeared from her home, 126 Nassau Street, on Sunday last.

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 riddle 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:

There can be no question that she had fallen a victim to the most imprudent and reprehensible practise, which has recently obtained to a considerable extent in this city, of placing behind the counters and at the windows of stores for the sale of articles purchased exclusively by males—especially of cigar-stores and drinking-houses—young and beautiful females for the purpose of thus attracting the attention, exciting the interest (or worse still), and thus inducing the visits and consequent custom, of the other sex—especially of the young and thoughtless.

It was by being placed in such a situation, in one of the most public spots in the city, that this unfortunate girl was led into a train of acquaintances and associations which has eventually proved not only her ruin, but an untimely and violent death in the prime of youth and beauty. From being used as an instrument of cupidity—as a sort of “man-trap” to lure by her charms the gay and giddy into the path of the spendthrift and of constant dissipation—she has become the victim of the very passions and vices which her exposure to the public gaze for mercenary gain was so well calculated to engender and encourage.

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, 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:

Boz is coming to America. We hope he will not make a fool of himself here, like a majority of his distinguished countrymen who preceded him.

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:

Among the passengers are Mr. Charles Dickens, the celebrated author, and his lady.

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:

Mr. Dickens, we have no doubt, is a very respectable gentleman, and we know that he is a very clever and agreeable author. He has written several books that have put the reading world in most excellent good humor. In this way he has done much to promote the general happiness of mankind, and honestly deserves their gratitude.

Having crossed the water for the purpose of traveling in America, where his works have been extensively read and admired, he is, of course, received and treated with marked civility, attention, and respect. We should be ashamed of our countrymen if it were otherwise. During his stay at Boston the citizens gave him a public dinner. At New Haven he received a similar token of kind regard. In this city a ball has been given him. All these attentions were right and proper, and as far as we can learn they have been uniformly conducted in a gentlemanly and respectable manner, becoming alike to the characters of those who gave and him who received them.

But a few penny-catchers of the press are determined to make money out of Boz. The shop-windows are stuffed with lithograph likenesses of him, which resemble the original just about as much as he resembles a horse. His own wife would not recognize them in any other way than by the word “Boz” written under them.

Then a corps of sneaking reporters, most of them fresh from London, are pursuing him like a pack of hounds at his heels to catch every wink of his eye, every motion of his hands, and every word that he speaks, to be dished up with all conceivable embellishments by pen and pencil, and published in extras, pamphlets, and handbills. To make all this trash sell well in the market, the greatest possible hurrah must be made by the papers interested in the speculations, and therefore the whole American people are basely caricatured by them, and represented as one vast mob following Dickens from place to place, and striving even to touch the hem of his garment.

That our readers at a distance may not be induced to suppose that the good people of New York are befooling themselves in this way, we beg leave to assure them that all these absurd reports are ridiculous caricatures, hatched from the prolific brains of a few reckless reporters for a few unprincipled papers. They do in truth make as great fools of themselves as they represent the public to be generally. But beyond their narrow and contemptible circle we are happy to know that Mr. Dickens is treated with that manly and sincere respect which is so justly his due, and which must convince him that he is amongst a warm-hearted people, who know both how to respect their guest and themselves.

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 appearance of the current number of “The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit” will not add to the happiness of retrospections. Where is that Boston committee, where the renowned getters-up of the City Hotel dinner and the ball at the Park Theater, with its tableaux vivants, its splendid decorations, and tickets at ten dollars each?

The scene is passing now before our memory—the crammed theater, full up to its third tier, the dense crowd opening a passage for Mr. Dickens and the proud and happy committee while he passes up the center of the stage amid huzzas and the waving of handkerchiefs, while the band is playing “God Save the Queen” and “See, the Conquering Hero Comes.” And our Irving, our Halleck, our Bryant passed around in the crowd, unnoticed and almost unknown. Shame! Let our cheeks crimson, as they ought.

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 carry 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 the 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:

A word to Horace Greeley—if he wishes us to write him or any of his sickly brood of newspapers into notice, he must first go to school and learn a little decency. He must further retract the dirty, malignant, and wholesale falsehood which he procured to be published in the Albany Evening Journal a year ago last winter, with the hope of injuring the Sun. He must then deal in something besides misstatements of facts.... Until he does all this we shall feel very indifferent to any thrusts that he can make at us with his dagger of lath.

Soon afterward the Sun rubbed it in by quoting the Albany Evening Journal:

Galvanize a large New England squash, and it would make as capable an editor as Horace.

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 thirty 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 the 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, and 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.

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.

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 reaching 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:

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

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—

“A little more grape, Captain Bragg!”

Moses Yale Beach himself started for Mexico as a 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.

MOSES SPERRY BEACH

A Nephew of Benjamin H. Day and a Son of Moses Yale Beach. He Held “The Sun” Until Dana’s Time. This Picture is Reproduced from the First Edition of Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad.” Mr. Beach Was One of Clemens’s Fellow Voyagers.

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—the 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:

We ask those under whose eyes the Sun does not shine from day to day—our Sun, we mean; this large and well-printed one-cent newspaper—to look it over and say whether it is not one of the wonders of the age. Does it not contain the elements of all that is valuable in a diurnal sheet? Where is more effort or enterprise expended for so small a return?

Of this effort and enterprise we feel proud; and a circulation of over fifty thousand copies of our sheet every day among at least five times that number of readers, together with the largest cash advertising patronage on this continent, convinces us that our pride is widely shared.

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 a 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.

Here is Dana’s own estimate of the second proprietor of the Sun:

Moses Y. Beach was a business man and a newspaper manager rather than what we now understand as a journalist—that is to say, one who is both a writer and a practical conductor and director of a newspaper. Mr. Beach was a man noted for enterprise in the collection of news. In the latter days when he owned and managed the Sun in New York, the telegraph was only established between Washington and Boston, though toward the end of his career it was extended, if I am not mistaken, as far towards the South as Montgomery in Alabama. The news from Europe was then brought to Halifax by steamers, just as the news from Mexico was brought to New Orleans. Mr. Beach’s energy found a successful field in establishing expresses brought by messengers on horseback from Halifax to Boston and from New Orleans to Montgomery, thus bringing the news of Europe and the news of the Mexican War to New York much earlier than they could have arrived by the ordinary public conveyance. With him were associated, sooner or later, two or three of the other New York papers; but the energy with which he carried through the undertaking made him a conspicuous and distinguished figure in the journalism of the city. The final result was the organization of the New York Associated Press, which has now become a world-embracing establishment for the collection of news of every description, which it furnishes to its members in this city and to other newspapers in every part of the country. Under the stimulus of Mr. Beach’s energetic intellect, aided by the cheapness of its price, the Sun became in his hands an important and profitable establishment. Yet he is scarcely to be classed among the prominent journalists of his day.

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.

(From Photo in the Possession of Mrs. Jennie Beach Gasper)

ALFRED ELY BEACH

A Son of Moses Y. Beach; He Left “The Sun” to Conduct the “Scientific American.”

Beach Brothers, as the new ownership of the Sun 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.

“It was very cheap,” he added.

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.

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. 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, “clapped 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:

They may certainly take their slaves with them into the new Territory, but when they get them there they will have no law for holding the slaves. Slavery is a creation of local law, and until a Legislature of Kansas or Nebraska enacts a law recognizing slavery, all slaves taken into the Territory will be entitled to their freedom.

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:

It can only excite contempt when any irate member of Congress or fanatical newspaper treats the dissolution of the Union as an event which may easily be brought about. There is moral treason in this habit of continually depreciating the value of the Union.

The Sun saw that Douglas’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise was a smashing blow delivered by a Northern 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:

We believe that the State of New York can confer citizenship on men of whatever race, and that its citizens are entitled, by the Constitution, to be treated in Missouri as citizens of New York State. To treat them otherwise is to discredit our State sovereignty.

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 a 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.

When John Brown was hanged, December 2, 1859, the Sun remarked:

The chivalry of the Old Dominion will breathe easier now.... But, while Brown cannot be regarded as a common murderer, it is only the wild extravagance of fanatical zeal that will attempt to elevate him to the rank of a martyr.

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:

An extraordinary interest is attached by the leading men of all parties to the campaign which Senator Douglas is conducting in the State of Illinois. His rival for the Senatorial nomination, Mr. Lincoln, being no match for the Little Giant in campaign oratory, Senator Trumbull has taken the stump on the Republican side.

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

Mr. Lincoln is an active State politician and a good stump orator. As to the chances of his election, that is a matter upon which we need not at present speculate.

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

It is now admitted that Mr. Lincoln’s nomination is a strong one.... He is, emphatically, a man of the people.... That he would, if elected, make a good President, we do not entertain a doubt. His chances of election are certainly good. The people are tired of being ruled by professional politicians.

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:

Of the six candidates in the field—Lincoln, Bell, Houston, Douglas, Breckinridge, and Gerrit Smith—Lincoln has unquestionably the best chance of an election by the people.

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 secessionists do not expect that Breckinridge will be elected. Should Lincoln and Hamlin be elected by the votes of the free States, then the design of the conspirators is to come out openly for a disruption of the Union and the erection of a Southern confederacy.

“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:

Mr. Lincoln appears to have been elected, and yet the country is safe.

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—

For the postmastership Charles A. Dana of the Tribune, Daniel Ullman, Thomas B. Stillman, and Armor J. Williamson are named. Either Mr. Dana or Mr. Williamson would fill the office creditably.

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:

Open the door of the Union for a free and inglorious egress, and you dry up the machine in an instant.

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:

Our proposition is that the Constitution be so amended as to permit any State, within a limited period, and upon her surrender of her share in the Federal property, to retire from the confederacy [the Union] in peace. It is a plan to emasculate Secession by depriving it of its present stimulating illegality. Does any one suppose that even South Carolina would withdraw from the Union if her withdrawal were normal?

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:

There is a manly sincerity, geniality, and strength to be felt in the whole address.

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

We state only what the proprietor of the Herald undoubtedly believes when we say that if the national ensign had not been hung out yesterday from its windows, as a concession to the gathering crowd, the issue of that paper for another day would have been more than doubtful.

Shortly afterward the Sun charged that the Herald 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 the 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 and 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 that 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:

Let there be but one war. Better it should cost millions of lives than that we should live in hourly dread of wars, contiguous to a people who could make foreign alliances and land armies upon our shores to destroy our liberties.

On the subject of the war’s cost it said:

No more talk of carrying on the war economically! The only economy is to make short and swift work of it, and the people are ready to bear the expense, if it were five hundred millions of dollars, to-day.

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:

As the greatest and most momentous act of our nation, from its foundation to the present time, we would rather have seen this step disconnected from all lesser considerations and from party influences.

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 “the 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:

It is no time to quarrel with those men who honestly wish to crush the rebellion on the ground that they have nominated a rail-splitter and a tailor. It would be more consistent with true democracy if these men were honored for rising from an humble sphere.

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 reelection of Abraham Lincoln announces to the world how firmly we have resolved to be a free and united people.

After the assassination of President Lincoln the Sun said:

In the death of Mr. Lincoln the Southern people have lost one of the best friends they had at the North. He would have treated them with more gentleness than any other statesman. From him they would have obtained concessions it is now almost impossible for our rulers and people to grant.

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 fact that over ten thousand people assembled in and about Cooper Union on Thursday evening to listen to speeches and adopt an address and resolutions prepared under that “eye single to the public welfare,” discloses the ease with which a few political tricksters may present false issues to the unthinking and, in the excitement of the moment, induce their hearers to applaud sentiments that, when calmly considered, are unworthy of a great and free people. Taking advantage of the blunders of the present administration, these self-styled Democrats raise their banners and, under the guise of proclaiming peace, in reality proclaim a war upon those very principles it is the highest boast of every true Democrat to acknowledge.

The Democratic party is essentially the peace party of the present rebellion; but it will sanction no peace that is obtained by compromising the vital principles that give force to our form of government. They will not ask for peace at the expense of the Union, and desire no Democratic victories that do not legitimately belong to them as an expression of the confidence of the people in their fidelity to the Union and the Constitution.

The late meeting, then, should not be sanctioned by any true Democrat. It was in no sense Democratic; it was in reality an opposition meeting, and only as such will it be looked upon as having any important bearing upon the great questions of the hour, and if rightly interpreted by the administration will exert no evil influence upon the future destinies of this great nation.

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:

A GREAT BATTLE—SEVENTY THOUSAND REBELS IN IT—OUR ARMY VICTORIOUS—GREAT LOSS OF LIFE—TWELVE HOURS’ FIGHTING—RETREAT OF THE REBELS—UNITED STATES FORCES PRESSING FORWARD.

But on the following morning the tune changed:

RETREAT OF OUR TROOPS—OUR ARMY SCATTERED—ONLY TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND UNION TROOPS ENGAGED—ENEMY NINETY THOUSAND STRONG—OUR CANNON LEFT BEHIND.

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:

VICTORY!—INVASION COMES TO GRIEF—LEE UTTERLY ROUTED—HIS DISASTROUS RETREAT—ALL FEDERAL PRISONERS RECAPTURED—EIGHTEEN THOUSAND PRISONERS CAPTURED—MEANS OF ESCAPE DESTROYED.

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:

OUR NATION REDEEMED—SURRENDER OF LEE AND HIS WHOLE ARMY—THE TERMS—OFFICERS AND MEN PAROLED AND TOLD TO GO HOME—THE COUNTRY WILD WITH JOY, ETC., ETC., ETC.

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,” 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 wrote 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:

Once more I write myself editor and sole proprietor of the New York Sun. My day-dream of rural enjoyment is broken, and I am again prisoner to pen and types. For months I sought to avoid the surrender, but only to find resistance without avail.... But I congratulate myself on my surroundings. Never was prisoner more royally treated.

What, then, to the readers of the Sun? Nothing save the announcement that I am henceforth its publisher and manager. They require no other prospectus, program, or platform.

Moses S. Beach.

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 expenses and speeded up the issue of the paper by adopting the stereotyping process, one of the greatest advances in newspaper history:

About a week ago we commenced printing the Sun by a new process—that of stereotyping and printing with two presses. We are much gratified to-day in being able to say that the process has proved eminently successful. From this time forth we may expect to present a clean face to our many readers every day. We have completed one stereotype within seventeen minutes and a quarter, and two within nineteen minutes and a half.

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:

We shall require the one cent for the Sun to be paid in gold, or we will receive as an equivalent two cents in currency.

Apologies or explanations are needless. An inflated currency has raised the price of white paper nearly threefold.

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 that 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 fiction 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 greatest triumph of the age.” Eleven days later the Sun contained this article:

We received last night and publish to-day what purports to be the message of Queen Victoria, congratulating the President of the United States on the successful completion of the Atlantic telegraph. We are assured that the message is genuine, and that it came through the Atlantic cable. It is not surprising, however, that the President, on receiving it, doubted its genuineness, as among the hundreds who crowded our office last evening the doubters largely preponderated.

The message, accepting it as the queen’s, is, in style and tone, utterly unworthy of the great event which it was designed to celebrate.

The message is so shabbily like royalty that we cannot believe it to be a fabrication.

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:

Victoria’s message ... in its complete form, as it appears in our columns to-day, is friendly and courteous, though rather commonplace in expression and style.

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

S. F. B. MORSE AND CYRUS W. FIELD,
WIRE-PULLERS OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY.

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

A treaty of peace has been concluded with China, by which England and France obtain all their demands, including the establishment of embassies at Peking and indemnification for the expenses of the war.

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:

THE SUN

The Oldest Cheap Paper in New York.

Notice is hereby given that the Sun newspaper, with its presses, types, and fixtures, has become the property of an association represented by the undersigned, and including among its prominent stockholders Mr. M. S. Beach, recently the exclusive owner of the whole property. It will henceforth be published in the building known for the last half-century as Tammany Hall, on the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets. Its price will remain as heretofore at two cents a copy, or six dollars per annum to mail subscribers. It will be printed in handsome style on a folio sheet, as at present; but it will contain more news and other reading matter than it has hitherto given.

In changing its proprietorship, the Sun will not in any respect change its principles or general line of conduct. It will continue to be an independent newspaper, wearing the livery of no party, and discussing public questions and the acts of public men on their merits alone. It will be guided, as it has been hitherto, by uncompromising loyalty to the Union, and will resist every attempt to weaken the bonds that unite the American people into one nation.

The Sun will support General Grant as its candidate for the Presidency. It will advocate retrenchment and economy in the public expenditures, and the reduction of the present crushing burdens of taxation. It will advocate the speedy restoration of the South, as needful to revive business and secure fair wages for labor.

The Sun will always have all the news, foreign, domestic, political, social, literary, scientific, and commercial. It will use enterprise and money freely to make the best possible newspaper, as well as the cheapest.

It will study condensation, clearness, point, and will endeavor to present its daily photograph of the whole world’s doings in the most luminous and lively manner.

It will not take as long to read the Sun as to read the London Times or Webster’s Dictionary, but when you have read it you will know about all that has happened in both hemispheres. The Sun will also publish a semiweekly edition at two dollars a year, containing the most interesting articles from the daily, and also a condensed summary of the news prepared expressly for this edition.

The Weekly Sun will continue to be issued at one dollar a year. It will be prepared with great care, and will also contain all the news in a condensed and readable form. Both the weekly and semiweekly will have accurate reports of the general, household, and cattle markets. They will also have an agricultural department, and will report the proceedings of the Farmers’ Club. This department will be edited by Andrew S. Fuller, Esq., whose name will guarantee the quality of his contributions.

We shall endeavor to make the Sun worthy the confidence of the people in every part of the country. Its circulation is now more than fifty thousand copies daily. We mean that it shall soon be doubled; and in this, the aid of all persons who want such a newspaper as we propose to make will be cordially welcomed.

Charles A. Dana,
Editor and Manager.

New York, January 25, 1868.

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

With unreserved confidence in the ability of those who are to continue this work of my life, I lay aside an armor which in these latter years has been too loosely borne.

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. Students 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.

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.”

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. 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. He 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.

“The best days of my life,” he called this period.

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.

I am in the focus of what Professor Felton calls “supersublimated transcendentalism,” and to tell the truth, I take to it rather kindly, though I stumble sadly at some notions.

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

CHARLES A. DANA AT THIRTY-EIGHT

A Photograph Taken in 1857 When He Was Managing Editor of the New York “Tribune.”

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 his 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.

I feel now an inclination to orthodoxy, and am trying to believe the real doctrine of the Trinity. Whether I shall settle down in Episcopacy, Swedenborgianism, or Goethean indifference to all religion, I know not. My only prayer is, “God help me!”

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-oil 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 there 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, editorial articles and notes, and not a little verse. His “Via Sacra” is typical of the thoughtful youth:

Slowly along the crowded street I go,

Marking with reverent look each passer’s face,

Seeking, and not in vain, in each to trace
That primal soul whereof he is the show.
For here still move, by many eyes unseen,
The blessed gods that erst Olympus kept;
Through every guise these lofty forms serene

Declare the all-holding life hath never slept;

But known each thrill that in man’s heart hath been,

And every tear that his sad eyes have wept.
Alas for us! The heavenly visitants—
We greet them still as most unwelcome guests,

Answering their smile with hateful looks askance,

Their sacred speech with foolish, bitter jests;

But oh, what is it to imperial Jove

That this poor world refuses all his love?

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 acted 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,” 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:

Keenest of Pikes:

What a desert void of news you keep at Washington! For goodness’ sake, kick up a row of some sort. Fight a duel, defraud the Treasury, set fire to the fueling-mill, get Black Dan [Webster] drunk, or commit some other excess that will make a stir.

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”:

At the outset Mr. Greeley was hopeless, and seemed disinclined to enter the contest. He told his associates that he would not restrain them; but, as for himself, he had no heart for the strife. They were more hopeful; and Richard Hildreth, the historian; Charles A. Dana, the veteran journalist; James S. Pike, and other able writers, opened and continued a powerful opposition in its columns, and did very much to rally and assure the friends of freedom and nerve them for the fight.

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

Charge Dana not to slaughter anybody, but be mild and meek-souled like me.

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

Now I write once more to entreat that I may be allowed to conduct the Tribune with reference to the mile wide that stretches either way from Pennsylvania Avenue. It is but a small space, and you have all the world besides. I cannot stay here unless this request is complied with. I would rather cease to live at all.

If you are not willing to leave me entire control with reference to this city, I ask you to call the proprietors together and have me discharged. I have to go to this and that false creature—Lew Campbell, for instance—yet in constant terror of seeing him guillotined in the next Tribune that arrives, and I can’t make him believe that I didn’t instigate it. So with everything here. If you want to throw stones at anybody’s crockery, aim at my head first, and in mercy be sure to aim well.

Again Greeley wrote to Dana:

You are getting everybody to curse me. I am too sick to be out of bed, too crazy to sleep, and am surrounded by horrors.... I can bear the responsibilities that belong to me, but you heap a load on me that will kill me.

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 places 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:

I wish to be distinctly understood as not seeking to be relieved from any responsibility for urging the advance of the Union army in Virginia, though the precise phrase, “Forward to Richmond!” was not mine, and I would have preferred not to reiterate it. Henceforth I bar all criticism in these columns on army movements. Now let the wolves howl on! I do not believe they can goad me into another personal letter.

As a matter of fact, “Forward to Richmond!” was 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:

On Thursday, March 27, I was notified that Mr. Greeley had given the stockholders notice that I must leave, or he would, and that they wanted me to leave accordingly. No cause of dissatisfaction being alleged, and H. G. having been of late more confidential and friendly than ever, not once having said anything betokening disaffection to me, I sent a friend to him to ascertain if it was true, or if some misunderstanding was at the bottom of it. My friend came and reported that it was true, and that H. G. was immovable.

On Friday, March 28, I resigned, and the trustees at once accepted it, passing highly complimentary resolutions and voting me six months’ salary after the date of my resignation. Mr. Ripley opposed the proceedings in the trustees, and, above all, insisted on delay in order that the facts might be ascertained; but all in vain.

On Saturday, March 29, Mr. Greeley came down, called another meeting of the trustees, said he had never desired me to leave, that it was a damned lie that he had presented such an alternative as that he or I must go, and finally sent me a verbal message desiring me to remain as a writer of editorials; but has never been near me since to meet the “damned lie” in person, nor written one word on the subject. I conclude, accordingly, that he is glad to have me out, and that he really set on foot the secret cabal by which it was accomplished. As soon as I get my pay for my shares—ten thousand dollars less than I could have got for them a year ago—I shall be content.

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. 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 Grant 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:

It was believed by many that if he [Dana] did not bring plenary authority to actually displace Grant, the fate of that general would certainly depend upon the character of the reports which the special commissioner might send to Washington in regard to him.

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:

We sincerely believed that Grant, whatever might be his faults and weaknesses, was a far safer man to command the army than any other general in it, or than any that might be sent to it from another field.

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 in 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:

During the eight days that I have been here, I have got new insight into slavery, which has made me no more a friend of that institution than I was before.... It was not till I saw these plantations, with their apparatus for living and working, that I really felt the aristocratic nature of it.

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

Our people entertained him with a cigar and a drink of whisky, of course, or, rather, with two drinks. This is an awful country for drinking whisky. I calculate that on an average a friendly man will drink a gallon in twenty-four hours. I wish you were here to do my drinking for me, for I suffer in public estimation for not doing as the Romans do.

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:

Grant was an uncommon fellow—the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb, and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom. Not a great man, except morally; nor an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep, and gifted with courage that never faltered. When the time came to risk all, he went in like a simple-hearted, unaffecting, unpretending hero, whom no ill omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt. A social, friendly man, too; fond of a pleasant joke and also ready with one; but liking above all a long chat of an evening, and ready to sit up with you all night talking in the cool breeze in front of his tent. Not a man of sentimentality, not demonstrative in friendship; but always holding to his friends and just even to the enemies he hated.

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

He is a lawyer by profession, a townsman of Grant, and has great influence over him, especially because he watches him day and night, and whenever he commits the folly of tasting liquor, hastens to remind him that at the beginning of the war he gave him [Rawlins] his word of honor not to touch a drop as long as it lasted. Grant thinks Rawlins a first-rate adjutant, but I think this is a mistake. He is too slow, and can’t write the English language correctly without a great deal of careful consideration.

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:

I consider this army to be very unsafe in his hands, but I know of no one except Thomas who could now be safely put in his place.

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, “but 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.

“I will hold the town till we starve!” replied Thomas.

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:

The storming of the ridge by our troops was one of the greatest miracles in military history. No man that climbs the ascent by any of the roads that wind along its front could believe that eighteen thousand men were moved up its broken and crumbling face, unless it was his fortune to witness the deed. It seems as awful as the visible interposition of God. Neither Grant nor Thomas intended it. Their orders were to carry the rifle-pits along the base of the ridge and capture their occupants; but when this was accomplished, the unaccountable spirit of the troops bore them bodily up those impracticable steeps, over bristling rifle-pits on the crest, and thirty cannon enfilading every gully. The order to storm appears to have been given simultaneously by Generals Sheridan and Wood, because the men were not to be held back, dangerous as the attempt appeared to military prudence. Besides, the generals had caught the inspiration of the men, and were ready themselves to undertake impossibilities.

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 able to notify Washington of an entire change in the morale of the contending armies:

The rebels have lost all confidence, and are already morally defeated. This army has learned to believe that it is sure of victory. Even our officers have ceased to regard Lee as an invincible military genius.... Rely upon it, the end is near as well as sure.

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:

Until you direct positively and explicitly what is to be done, everything will go on in the fatal way in which it has gone on for the past week.

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; 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:

“No, I rather think not. When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him run!”

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.

MR. DANA AT FIFTY

From a Photograph Taken in 1869, a Year After He Obtained Control of “The Sun.”

Dana then and afterward resented the suggestion that 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:

Medical officers were directed to superintend his meals and give him everything that would excite his appetite. As it was complained that his quarters in the casemate were unhealthy and disagreeable, he was, after a few weeks, transferred to Carroll Hall, a building still occupied by officers and soldiers. That Davis’s health was not ruined by his imprisonment at Fort Monroe is proved by the fact that he came out of prison in better condition than when he went in, and that he lived for twenty years afterward, and died of old age.

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 used in the remaking of the South. Of Johnson, Dana wrote to General Wilson:

The President is an obstinate, stupid man, governed by preconceived ideas, by whisky, and by women. He means one thing to-day and another to-morrow, but the glorification of Andrew Johnson all the time.

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. 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 Fifth 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:

Just as we were about commencing our own paper, the purchase of the Sun was proposed to me and accepted. It had a circulation of from fifty to sixty thousand a day, and all among the mechanics and small merchants of this city. We pay a large sum for it—$175,000—but it gives us at once a large and profitable business.

If you have a thousand dollars at leisure, you had better invest it in the stock of our company, which is increased to $350,000 in order to pay for the new acquisition. Of this sum about $220,000 is invested in the Tammany Hall real estate, which is sure to be productive, independent of the business of the paper.

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:

Peace succeeds to strife. No new Halleck can sing:

There’s a barrel of porter at Tammany Hall,

And the Bucktails are enjoying it all the night long;

In the time of my boyhood ’twas pleasant to call

For a seat and cigar ’mid the jovial throng.

So far as the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets is concerned, L’Empire est paix. The Sun shines for all; and on the site of old Tammany’s troubles and tribulations we turn back the leaves of the past, dispel the clouds of discord, and shed our beams far and near over the Regenerated Land.

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 from 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 the boss. As General Wilson wrote in his biography:

From this time forth it may be truthfully said that Dana was the Sun, and the Sun Dana. He was the sole arbiter of its policy, and it was his constant practice to supervise every editorial contribution that came in while he was on duty. The editorial page was absolutely his, whether he wrote a line in it or not, and he gave it the characteristic compactness of form and directness of statement which were ever afterward its distinguishing features.

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, 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.

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.

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 owned 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 day 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-Third 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 FIRST NUMBER OF “THE SUN” UNDER DANA

The Title Heading Has Remained Unchanged for Fifty Years.

THE HOME OF “THE SUN” FROM 1868 TO 1915

The Famous Old Building at Nassau and Spruce Streets.

The Academy of Music, at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, housed Italian opera. The Théâtre Français, 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 they 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:

There is no system of maxims or professional rules that I know of that is laid down for the guidance of the journalist. The physician has his system of ethics and that sublime oath of Hippocrates which human wisdom has never transcended. The lawyer also has his code of ethics and the rules of the courts and the rules of practice which he is instructed in; but I have never met with a system of maxims that seemed to me to be perfectly adapted to the general direction of a newspaperman. I have written down a few principles which occurred to me, which, with your permission, gentlemen, I will read for the benefit of the young newspapermen here to-night:

Get the news, get all the news, get nothing but the news.

Copy nothing from another publication without perfect credit.

Never print an interview without the knowledge and consent of the party interviewed.

Never print a paid advertisement as news-matter. Let every advertisement appear as an advertisement; no sailing under false colors.

Never attack the weak or the defenseless, either by argument, by invective, or by ridicule, unless there is some absolute public necessity for so doing.

Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth or the only truth.

Support your party, if you have one; but do not think all the good men are in it and all the bad ones outside of it.

Above all, know and believe that humanity is advancing; that there is progress in human life and human affairs; and that, as sure as God lives, the future will be greater and better than the present or the past.

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”:

Never be in a hurry.

Hold fast to the Constitution.

Stand by the Stars and Stripes. Above all, stand for liberty, whatever happens.

A word that is not spoken never does any mischief.

All the goodness of a good egg cannot make up for the badness of a bad one.

If you find you have been wrong, don’t fear to say so.

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 newspaper 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 used to lecture on journalism sometimes, when he was invited, but in the bottom of my heart I don’t believe he had any theories of journalism other than common sense and free play for individual talent when discovered and available. And I do remember distinctly that when he sent Mr. Joseph Pulitzer, then fresh from St. Louis, on to Washington to report in semieditorial correspondence the critical stage of the electoral controversy of 1876, Mr. Dana did not think it necessary to instruct that correspondent to assimilate his style to the Sun’s methods and traditions. Never was a job of momentous journalistic importance better done in the absence of plain sailing directions; but that, perhaps, was due partly to the fact that Mr. Pulitzer was somewhat of an individualist himself.

For the ancient common law of journalism, as derived from England, and perhaps before that from away back in Bœotia, Mr. Dana didn’t care one comic supplement. If anybody had asked Mr. Dana to compile a set of specific directions for running a newspaper, his reply, I am sure, would have been something like this:

“Heaven bless you, young man, there aren’t any rules! Go ahead and write when you have something to say, not when you think you ought to say something. I’ll edit out the nonsense. And, by the way, unless there happens to have been born into your noddle a little bit of the native aptitude, you ought to go and be a lawyer or a farmer or a banker or a great statesman.”

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 as 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.”

The Sun always waited for the man to bite the dog.

Here is Mr. Dana’s own definition of news:

The first thing which an editor must look for is news. If the newspaper has not the news it may have everything else, yet it will be comparatively unsuccessful; and by news I mean everything that occurs, everything which is of human interest, and which is of sufficient interest to arrest and absorb the attention of the public or of any considerable part of it.

There is a great disposition in some quarters to say that the newspapers ought to limit the amount of news that they print; that certain kinds of news ought not to be published. I do not know how that is. I am not prepared to maintain any abstract proposition in that line; but I have always felt that whatever the divine Providence permitted to occur I was not too proud to report.

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 great 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:

If I could have my way, every young man who is going to be a newspaperman, and who is not absolutely rebellious against it, should learn Greek and Latin after the good old fashion. I had rather take a young fellow who knows the “Ajax” of Sophocles, and has read Tacitus, and can scan every ode of Horace—I would rather take him to report a prize-fight or a spelling-match, for instance, than to take one who has never had those advantages.

At the same time, the cultivated man is not in every case the best reporter. One of the best I ever knew was a man who could not spell four words correctly to save his life, and his verb did not always agree with the subject in person and number; but he always got the fact so exactly, and he saw the picturesque, the interesting, the important aspect of it so vividly, that it was worth another man’s while, who possessed the knowledge of grammar and spelling, to go over the report and write it out.

Now, that was a man who had genius; he had a talent the most indubitable, and he got handsomely paid in spite of his lack of grammar, because after his work had been done over by a scholar it was really beautiful. But any man who is sincere and earnest and not always thinking about himself can be a good reporter. He can learn to ascertain the truth; he can acquire the habit of seeing.

When he looks at a fire, what is the most important thing about that fire? Here, let us say, are five houses burning; which is the greatest? Whose store is that which is burning? And who has met with the greatest loss? Has any individual perished in the conflagration? Are there any very interesting circumstances about the fire? How did it occur? Was it like Chicago, where a cow kicked over a spirit-lamp and burned up the city?

All these things the reporter has to judge about. He is the eye of the paper, and he is there to see which is the vital fact in the story, and to produce it, tell it, write it out.

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

In the first place, he must know the truth when he hears it and sees it. There are a great many men who are born without that faculty, unfortunately. But there are some men that a lie cannot deceive; and that is a very precious gift for a reporter, as well as for anybody else. The man who has it is sure to live long and prosper; especially if he is able to tell the truth which he sees, to state the fact or the discovery that he has been sent out after, in a clear and vivid and interesting manner.

The invariable law of the newspaper is to be interesting. Suppose you tell all the truths of science in a way that bores the reader; what is the good? The truths don’t stay in the mind, and nobody thinks any the better of you because you have told the truth tediously. The reporter must give his story in such a way that you know he feels its qualities and events and is interested in them.

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:

Do not take any model. Every man has his own natural style, and the thing to do is to develop it into simplicity and clearness. Do not, for instance, labor after such a style as Matthew Arnold’s—one of the most beautiful styles that has ever been seen in any literature. It is no use to try to get another man’s style or to imitate the wit or the mannerisms of another writer. The late Mr. Carlyle, for example, did, in my judgment, a considerable mischief in his day, because he led everybody to write after the style of his “French Revolution,” and it became pretty tedious.

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 one 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.”

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.

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:

From the moment of his entering the editor’s room until four or five o’clock in the morning, the strain he had to put on his faculties must have been always great, and in stirring times almost prodigious. There were hours of night when he often had to decide—to decide, of course, with great swiftness—between two or more courses of action momentously different; when, besides, he must judge the appeals brought up to the paramount arbiter from all kinds of men, from all sorts of earthly tribunals; when despatches of moment, when telegrams fraught with grave tidings, when notes hastily scribbled in the Lords or Commons, were from time to time coming in to disturb, perhaps even to annul, former reckonings; and these, besides, were the hours when, on questions newly obtruding, yet so closely, so importunately, present that they would have to be met before sunrise, he somehow must cause to spring up sudden essays, invectives, and arguments which only strong power of brain, with even much toil, could supply. For the delicate task any other than he would require to be in a state of tranquillity, would require to have ample time. But for him there are no such indulgences; he sees the hand of the clock growing more and more peremptory, and the time drawing nearer and nearer when his paper must, must be made up.

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:

Mr. Dana has always been the master, and not the slave, of the immediate task. The external features of his journalism are simplicity, directness, common sense, and the entire absence of affectation. He would no more think of living up to Mr. Kinglake’s ideal of a great, mysterious, and thought-burdened editor, than of putting on a conical hat and a black robe spangled with suns, moons, and stars, when about to receive a visitor to his editorial office in Nassau Street.

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.

(Drawn from Life by Corwin Knapp Linson)

MR. DANA IN HIS OFFICE

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 crowds 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:

In the middle of the small room a desk-table of black walnut of the Fulton Street style and the period of the first administration of Grant; a shabby little round table at the window, where Mr. Dana sits when the day is dark; one leather-covered chair, which does duty at either post, and two wooden chairs, both rickety, for visitors on errands of business or ceremony; on the desk a revolving case with a few dozen books of reference; an ink-pot and pen, not much used except in correcting manuscript and proofs, for Mr. Dana talks off to a stenographer his editorial articles and his correspondence, sometimes spending on the revision of the former twice as much time as was required for the dictation; a window-seat filled with exchanges, marked here and there in blue pencil for the editor’s eyes; a big pair of shears, and two or three extra pairs of spectacles in cache against an emergency—these few items constitute what is practically the whole objective equipment of the editor of the Sun. The shears are probably the newest article of furniture in the list. They replaced, three or four years ago, another pair of unknown antiquity, besought and obtained by Eugene Field, and now occupying, alongside of Mr. Gladstone’s ax, the place of honor in that poet’s celebrated collection of edged instruments.

For the non-essentials, the little trapezoid-shaped room contains a third table containing a file of the newspaper for a few weeks back, and a heap of new books which have passed review; an iron umbrella-rack; on the floor a cheap Turkish rug; and a lounge covered with horsehide, upon which Mr. Dana descends for a five minutes’ nap perhaps five times a year.

The adornments of the room are mostly accidental and insignificant. Ages ago somebody presented to Mr. Dana, with symbolic intent, a large stuffed owl. The bird of wisdom remains by inertia on top of the revolving bookcase, just as it would have remained there if it had been a stuffed cat or a statuette of “Folly.” Unnoticed and probably long ago forgotten by the proprietor, the owl solemnly boxes the compass as Mr. Dana swings the case, reaching in quick succession for his Bible, his Portuguese dictionary, his compendium of botanical terms, or his copy of the Democratic national platform of 1892. On the mantelpiece is an ugly, feather-haired little totem figure from Alaska, which likewise keeps its place solely by possession. It stands between a photograph of Chester A. Arthur, whom Mr. Dana liked and admired as a man of the world, and the japanned calendar-case which has shown him the time of year for the last quarter of a century. A dingy chromolithograph of Prince von Bismarck stands shoulder to shoulder with George, the Count Joannes.

The same mingling of sentiment and pure accident marks the rest of Mr. Dana’s picture-gallery. There is a large and excellent photograph of Horace Greeley, who is held in half-affectionate, half-humorous remembrance by his old associate in the management of the Tribune. Another is of the late Justice Blatchford, of the United States Supreme Court; it is the strong face of the fearless judge whose decision from the Federal bench in New York twenty years ago blocked the attempt to drag Mr. Dana before a servile little court in Washington to be tried without a jury on the charge of criminal libel, at the time when the Sun was demolishing the District Ring.

Over the mantel is Abraham Lincoln. There are pictures of the four Harper brothers and of the Appletons. Andrew Jackson is there twice, once in black and white, once in vivid colors. An inexpensive Thomas Jefferson faces the livelier Jackson. A framed diploma certifies that Mr. Dana was one of several gentlemen who presented to the State a portrait in oils of Samuel J. Tilden. On different sides of the room are William T. Coleman, the organizer of the San Francisco Vigilantes, and a crude colored print of the Haifa colony at the foot of Mount Carmel in Syria. Strangest of all in this singular collection is a photograph of a tall, lank, and superior-looking New England mill-girl, issued as an advertisement by some Connecticut concern engaged in the manufacture of spool-cotton.

For a good many years the most available wall-space in Mr. Dana’s office was occupied by a huge pasteboard chart, showing elaborately, in deadly parallel columns, the differences in the laws of the several States of the Union respecting divorce. It was put there, and it remained there, serving no earthly purpose except to illustrate the editor’s indifference as to his immediate surroundings, until it disappeared as mysteriously as it had come.

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.

“Take the partition down,” he said. “A newspaper is for the public.”

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 from 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 Dana 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.

No king, no clown, to rule this town!

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. During 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 so 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:

Men spoke softly on the street; their very voices betokened the impending event, and even their footfalls are said to have been lighter than common. But in the neighborhood of the Senator’s house there was a sense of singular and touching interest. Splendid equipages rolled to the corner, over pavements conceived in fraud and laid in corruption, to testify the regard of their occupants for eminent purity of life. Liveried servants carried hopeless messages from the door of him who was simplicity itself, and to whom the pomp and pageantry of this evil day were but the evidences of guilty degeneracy. Through all those lingering hours of anguish the sad procession came and went.

On the sidewalk stood a numerous and grateful representation of the race to whom he had given the proudest efforts and the best energies of his existence. The black man bowed his head in unaffected grief, and the black woman sat hushing her babe upon the curbstone, in mute expectation of the last decisive intelligence from the chamber above.

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.

JOSEPH PULITZER

ELIHU ROOT

JUDGE WILLARD BARTLETT

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 entered 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, 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 the 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.

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.

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:

If a journal has an editor, and editor-in-chief, it is fair to assume that he is also its managing editor.

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 the 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 described 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. 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 and presently appeared in Greeley’s office, a seedy figure infolded in an army overcoat.

“Mr. Greeley,” said Amos, “I’ve just got to have work.”

“Oh, indeed!” creaked Horace. “And why have you got to have work?”

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:

Order No. 756—There is too much profanity in this office.

Order No. 757—Hereafter the political reporter must have his copy in at 10.30 P.M.

Cummings turned to his desk and wrote:

Order No. 1234567—Everybody knows —— well that I get most of the political news out of the Albany Journal, and everybody knows —— —— well that the Journal doesn’t get here until eleven o’clock at night, and anybody who knows anything knows —— —— well that asking me to get my stuff up at half past ten is like asking a man to sit on a window-sill and dance on the roof at the same time.

Cummings.

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

“Why are you leaving the Tribune?” asked Mr. Dana.

“They say,” replied Amos, “that I swear too much.”

“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 the 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 thousand 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 Opera 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’s a lively paper. I can never wait for daylight for a copy. I have my man down there with a horse every morning, and just as soon as he gets a Sun hot from the press he jumps on the back of that horse and puts for me as if all hell was after him.

“Gould’s the same way; he has to see it before daylight, too. My man has to bring him up a copy. You always get the news ahead of everybody else. Why, the first news I got that Gould and me were blackballed in the Blossom Club we got from the Sun. I’m damned if I’d believe it at first, and Gould says, ‘What is this Blossom Club?’ Just then Sweeny came in. I asked Sweeny if it was true, and Sweeny said yes, that Tweed was the man that done it all. There it was in the Sun, straight’s a die.”

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:

(From a Photograph by Paul Dana)

MR. DANA AT SEVENTY

To give up all interest in the court-house swindle.

To receive no more revenue from the department of survey and inspection of buildings; and he hopes the people of New York will remember his generosity in giving up this place, inasmuch as his share amounts to over one hundred thousand dollars a year.

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”:

Enclosed please find ten cents as a contribution to erect a statue to William M. Tweed on Tweed Plaza. I have no doubt that fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand of his admirers will contribute. Yours, etc.,

Seventeenth Ward Voter.

On December 12 the Sun said editorially:

Has Boss Tweed any friends? If he has, they are a mean set. It is now more than a week since an appeal was made to them to come forward and put up the ancillary qualities to erect a statue of Mr. Tweed in the centre of Tweed Plaza; but as yet only four citizens have sent in their subscriptions. These were not large, but they were paid in cash, and there is reason for the belief that they were the tokens of sincere admiration for Mr. Tweed. But the hundreds, or, rather, thousands, of small-potato politicians whom he has made rich and powerful stand aloof and do not offer a picayune.

We propose that the statue shall be executed by Captain Albertus de Groot, who made the celebrated Vanderbilt bronzes, but we have not yet decided whether it shall represent the favorite son of New York afoot or ahorseback. In fact, we rather incline to have a nautical statue, exhibiting Boss Tweed as a bold mariner, amid the wild fury of a hurricane, splicing the main brace in the foretopgallant futtock shrouds of his steam-yacht. But that is a matter for future consideration. The first thing is to get the money; and if those who claim to be Mr. Tweed’s friends don’t raise it, we shall begin to believe the rumor that the Hon. P. Brains Sweeny has turned against him, and has forbidden every one to give anything toward the erection of the projected statue.

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:

My dear Sir:

I learn that a movement to erect a statue to me in the city of New York is being seriously pushed by a committee of citizens of which you are chairman.

I was aware that a newspaper of our city had brought forward the proposition, but I considered it one of the jocose sensations for which that journal is so famous. Since I left the city to engage in legislation the proposition appears to have been taken up by my friends, no doubt in resentment at the supposed unfriendly motive of the original proposition and the manner in which it had been urged.

The only effect of the proposed statue is to present me to the public as assenting to the parade of a public and permanent testimonial to vanity and self-glorification which do not exist. You will thus perceive that the movement, which originated in a joke, but which you have made serious, is doing me an injustice and an injury; and I beg of you to see to it that it is at once stopped.

I hardly know which is the more absurd—the original proposition or the grave comments of others, based upon the idea that I have given the movement countenance. I have been about as much abused as any man in public life; I can stand abuse and bear even more than my share; but I have never yet been charged with being deficient in common sense.

Yours very truly,
Wm. M. Tweed.

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):

William M. Tweed, of New York, who reigned over the city for seven years, stole six million dollars or more for himself and six million dollars or more for his followers; was indorsed at the heights of his corruption by six of the richest citizens of the metropolis; had a public statue offered to him by the New York Sun as a “noble benefactor of the city,” etc.

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 day 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:

While Mr. Bartlett, in his able argument before Judge Barnard on Friday, vindicated Mr. Tweed from certain allegations set forth in the complaint of Mr. Foley, he by no means relieved him from all complicity in the enormous frauds and robberies that have been committed in the government of this city. With all his ability, that is something beyond Mr. Bartlett’s power; and it is vain to hope that either of the leaders of the Tammany Ring can ever regain the confidence of the public, or for any length of time exercise the authority of political office. They must all go, Sweeny, Tweed, and Hall, as well as Connolly.

Mr. Tweed must not imagine that he can buy his way out of the present complication with money, as he did in 1870. The next Legislature will be made up of different material from the Republicans he purchased, and the people will exercise a sterner supervision over its acts.

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:

In the Fourth District William M. Tweed is sure to be re-elected [to the State Senate]. The Republican factions, after a great deal of quarreling, have concentrated on O’Donovan Rossa, a well-known Fenian, but his chance is nothing. Even if it had been possible by beginning in season to defeat Tweed, it cannot be done with only a week’s time.

Besides, his power there is absolute. The district comprises the most ignorant and most vicious portion of the city. It is full of low grog-shops, houses of ill-fame, low gambling-houses, and sailor boarding-houses, whose keepers enjoy protection and immunity, for which they pay by the most efficient electioneering services. Moreover, the district is full of sinecures paid from the city treasury. If, instead of having stolen millions, Mr. Tweed were accused of a dozen murders, or if, instead of being in human form, he wore the semblance of a bull or a bear, the voters of the Fourth District would march to the polls and vote for him just as zealously as they will do now, and the inspectors of election would furnish for him by fraudulent counting any majority that might be thought necessary in addition to the votes really given.

Tweed was re-elected to the State Senate by twelve thousand plurality.

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.”

Beneath this head was a column story beginning:

The Hon. William M. Tweed resides at 41 West Thirty-sixth Street. The Hon. William M. Tweed’s horses reside in East Fortieth Street, between Madison and Park Avenues.

That was the Sun’s characteristic way of starting a story.

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, who then believed that all the news could be told in a folio, apologised as follows:

We confess ourselves surprised at the extraordinary pressure of advertisements upon our pages this morning; and disappointed in being compelled to present the Sun to our readers in a different form from that to which they are accustomed. We trust, however, that they will find it no less interesting than usual; and, still more, that they will feel that although the appearance may be somewhat different, it is yet the same friendly and faithful Sun.

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 to 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—’”

“Cut out ‘her husband,’” said Wood.

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

“Cut out the ‘damn,’” said Dr. Wood.

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 Sun 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. Leisurely nights, those, with no newspaper trains to catch and no starting of the presses until four o’clock in the morning!

AMOS JAY CUMMINGS

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:

“Quite a fire in Chicago!”

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. On 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.’”

“Isn’t that good English?” asked the young man.

“It is excellent English,” Bogart replied calmly, “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.”

Never again did smoke issue from an upper window of that reporter’s copy.

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:

A Sun reporter interviewed several leading wholesale liquor-dealers yesterday concerning the despatch from Louisville, saying that all the old whisky in the country had been purchased by a Western firm for a rise. They said that they had sold their accumulated stock of prime whisky months ago. One firm, the largest in the city, had sold nearly two thousand barrels, stored since 1858. One shrewd dealer said it was reported that Grant was in the ring, and that he wanted to secure a supply to fall back on in his retirement.

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, 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 more 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.

“Oh, say that the office cat ate it up,” suggested Bartlett.

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 universal interest which this accomplished animal has excited throughout the country is a striking refutation that genius is not honored in its own day and generation. Perhaps no other living critic has attained the popularity and vogue now enjoyed by our cat. For years he worked in silence, unknown, perhaps, beyond the limits of the office. He is a sort of Rosicrucian cat, and his motto has been “to know all and to keep himself unknown.” But he could not escape the glory his efforts deserved, and a few mornings ago he woke up, like Byron, to find himself famous.

We are glad to announce that he hasn’t been puffed up by the enthusiastic praise which comes to him from all sources. He is the same industrious, conscientious, sharp-eyed, and sharp-toothed censor of copy that he has always been, nor should we have known that he is conscious of the admiration he excites among his esteemed contemporaries of the press had we not observed him in the act of dilacerating a copy of the Graphic containing an alleged portrait of him.

It was impossible not to sympathize with his evident indignation. The Graphic’s portrait did foul injustice to his majestic and intellectual features. Besides, it represented him as having a bandage over one eye, as if he had been involved in controversy and had had his eye mashed. Now, aside from the fact that he needs both eyes to discharge his literary duties properly, he is able to whip his weight in office cats, and his fine, large eyes have never been shrouded in black, and we don’t believe they ever will be. He is a soldier as well as a scholar.

We have received many requests to give a detailed account of the personal habits and peculiarities of this feline Aristarchus. Indeed, we have been requested to prepare a full biographical sketch to appear in the next edition of “Homes of American Authors.” At some future day we may satisfy public curiosity with the details of his literary methods. But genius such as his defies analysis, and the privacy of a celebrity ought not to be rudely invaded.

It is not out of place, however, to indicate a few traits which illustrate his extraordinary faculty of literary decomposition, so to speak. His favorite food is a tariff discussion. When a big speech, full of wind and statistics, comes within his reach, he pounces upon it immediately and digests the figures at his leisure. During the discussion of the Morrison Bill he used to feed steadily on tariff speeches for eight hours a day, and yet his appetite remained unimpaired.

When a piece of stale news or a long-winded, prosy article comes into the office, his remarkable sense of smell instantly detects it, and it is impossible to keep it from him. He always assists with great interest at the opening of the office mail, and he files several hundred letters a day in his interior department. The favorite diversion of the office-boys is to make him jump for twelve-column articles on the restoration of the American merchant marine.

He takes a keen delight in hunting for essays on civil-service reform, and will play with them, if he has time, for hours. They are so pretty that he hates to kill them, but duty is duty. Clumsy and awkward English he springs at with indescribable quickness and ferocity; but he won’t eat it. He simply tears it up. He can’t stand everything.

We don’t pretend he is perfect. We admit that he has an uncontrollable appetite for the Congressional Record. We have to keep this peculiar publication out of his reach. He will sit for hours and watch with burning eyes the iron safe in which we are obliged to shut up the Record for safe-keeping. Once in a while we let him have a number or two. He becomes uneasy without it. It is his catnip.

With the exception of this pardonable excess he is a blameless beast. He mouses out all the stupid stuff and nonsense that finds its way into the office and goes for it tooth and claw. He is the biggest copyholder in the world. And he never gets tired. His health is good, and we have not deemed it necessary to take out a policy on any one of his valuable lives.

Many of our esteemed contemporaries are furnishing their offices with cats, but they can never hope to have the equal of the Sun’s venerable polyphage. He is a cat of genius.

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:

How would you like a soldier’s life
On the plains of Nicara-goo?
Marching away and fighting all day,
Nothing to eat and as much to pay—
We do it all for glory, they say,
On the plains of Nicara-goo.
Not a bit of breakfast did I see,
And dinner was all the same to me;
Two fried cats and three fried rats
Was a supper at Nicara-goo.
Marching away and fighting all day,
Nothing to eat and as much to pay—
We do it all for glory, they say,
On the plains of Nicara-goo!

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.

DANIEL F. KELLOGG

AMOS B. STILLMAN

JOHN B. BOGART

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, navy-yard employees, and musicians. He had the last-named in mind when he said in a speech on an alien-labour bill:

As the law now stands, when a German student, or one of those fellows that swill beer along the Rhine, desires to come here for the summer, all he has to do is to get a saxophone or some other kind of musical instrument, call himself an artist, and be allowed to land here.

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:

“How much money will it take out of the Treasury?”

“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:

“The Sun is a damned good paper, but you don’t make it.”

That statement undoubtedly pleased the editor of the Sun, for it was evidence from an expert that he had 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.

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.

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:

Mr. Bryant being no longer actively engaged in newspaper work, Mr. Dana is left alone to tell the tale of old-time journalism in New York. He, of all his fellow editors of the great metropolis, has passed the period of middle age; though—years apart—he is as blithe and nimble as the youngest of them, and has performed, with the Sun, a feat in modern newspaper practice that entitles him to the stag-horns laid down at his death by James Gordon Bennett. Mr. Dana is no less a writer and scholar than an editor; as witness his sketch of Mr. Greeley, which for thorough character-drawing is unsurpassed. In a word, Mr. Dana at fifty-three is as vigorous, sinewy, and live as a young buck of thirty-five or forty.

His professional associates were boys when he was managing editor of the Tribune. Manton Marble was at college at Rochester, and Whitelaw Reid was going to school in Ohio. Young Bennett and Bundy were wearing short jackets.

They were rough-and-tumble days, sure enough, even for New York. There was no Central Park. Madison Square was “out of town.” Franconi’s Circus, surnamed a “hippodrome,” sprawled its ugly wooden towers, minarets, and sideshows over the ground now occupied by the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Miss Flora McFlimsy of the opposite square had not come into being; nay, Madison Square itself existed in a city ordinance merely, and, like the original of Mr. Praed’s Darnell Park, was a wretched waste of common, where the boys skated and played shinny.

The elder Harpers stood in the shoes now worn by their sons, who were off at boarding-school. George Ripley was as larky as John Hay is. Delmonico’s, down-town, was the only Delmonico’s. The warfare between the newspapers constituted the most exciting topic of the time. Bennett was “Jack Ketch,” Raymond was the “little villain,” and Greeley was by turns an “incendiary,” a “white-livered poltroon,” and a “free-lover.” Parke Godwin and Charles A. Dana were managing editors respectively; both scholars and both, as writers, superior to all the rest, except Greeley, who, as a newspaper writer, never had a superior.

The situation is changed completely. Bennett, Greeley, and Raymond are dead. Dana and Godwin, both about of an age, stand at the head of New York journalism; while Reid, Marble, and Jennings, all young men, wear the purple of a new era.

Will it be an era of reforms? There are signs that it will be. Marble is a recruit. Reid is essentially a man of the world. Jennings is an Englishman. One would think that these three, led by two ripe scholars and gentlemen like Godwin and Dana, would alter the character of the old partisan warfare in one respect at least, and that if they have need to be personal, they will be wittily so, and not brutally and dirtily personal; the which will be an advance.

There will never be an end to the personality of journalism. But there is already an end of the efficacy of filth. In this, as in other things, there are fashions. What ill thing, for example, can be said personally injurious of Reid, Marble, Jennings, Bundy, and the rest, all hard-working, painstaking men, without vices or peculiarities, who do not invite attack?

On the whole, the newspaper prospect in New York is very good. There will be, perhaps, less of what we call “character” in New York journalism, but more usefulness, honesty, and culture and as the New York dailies, like the New York milliners, set the fashion, these excellent qualities will diffuse themselves over the country. They may even reach Nashville and Memphis. It is an age of miracles. Who can tell?

“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:

A great deal of twaddle is uttered by some country newspapers just now over what they call personal journalism. They say that now that Mr. Bennett, Mr. Raymond, and Mr. Greeley are dead, the day for personal journalism is gone by, and that impersonal journalism will take its place. That appears to be a sort of journalism in which nobody will ask who is the editor of a paper or the writer of any class of article, and nobody will care.

Whenever in the newspaper profession a man rises up who is original, strong, and bold enough to make his opinions a matter of consequence to the public, there will be personal journalism; and whenever newspapers are conducted only by commonplace individuals whose views are of no interest to the world and of no consequence to anybody, there will be nothing but impersonal journalism.

And this is the essence of the whole question.

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 his editorial article in the Sun on the day after Greeley’s funeral:

In burying Mr. Greeley we bury the third founder of a newspaper which has become famous and wealthy in this city during the last thirty-five years. Mr. Raymond died three years and Mr. Bennett barely six months ago.

These three men were exceedingly unlike each other, yet each of them possessed extraordinary professional talents. Mr. Raymond surpassed both Mr. Bennett and Mr. Greeley in the versatility of his accomplishments, and in facility and smoothness as a writer. But he was less a journalist than either of the other two. Nature had rather intended him for a lawyer, and success as a legislative debater and presiding officer had directed his ambition toward that kind of life.

Mr. Bennett was exclusively a newspaperman. He was equally great as a writer, a wit, and a purveyor of news; and he never showed any desire to leave a profession in which he had made himself rich and formidable.

Horace Greeley delighted to be a maker of newspapers, not so much for the thing itself, though to that he was sincerely attached, as for the sake of promoting doctrines, ideas, and theories in which he was a believer; and his personal ambition, which was very profound and never inoperative, made him wish to be Governor, Legislator, Senator, Cabinet Minister, President, because such elevation seemed to afford the clearest possible evidence that he himself was appreciated and that the cause he espoused had gained the hearts of the people. How incomplete, indeed, would be the triumph of any set of principles if their chief advocate and promoter were to go unrecognized and unhonored!

It is a most impressive circumstance that each of these three great journalists has had to die a tragic and pitiable death. One perished by apoplexy long after midnight in the entrance of his own home; another closed his eyes with no relative near him to perform that last sad office; and the third, broken down by toils, excitements, and sufferings too strong to be borne, breathed his last in a private madhouse. What a lesson to the possessors of power, for these three men were powerful beyond others! What a commentary upon human greatness, for they were rich and great, and were looked upon with envy by thousands who thought themselves less fortunate than they! And amid such startling surprises and such a prodigious conflict of lights and shadows, the curtain falls as the tired actor, crowned with long applause, passes from that which seems to that which is.

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—

We pass the Tribune by. Our opinion of it is well known. It is Jay Gould’s paper, and a disgrace to journalism.

Dana’s attitude toward the other big newspapers was more kindly:

The Times is a very respectable paper, and more than that, a journal of which the Republican party has reason to be proud. It is not a servile organ, but a loyal partisan. We prefer for our own part to keep aloof from the party politicians. They are disagreeable fellows to have hanging about a newspaper office, and their advice we do not regard as valuable. But we do not decry party newspapers. They have their field, and must always exist. The Times is a creditable example of such a newspaper. It would be better, however, if Mr. Jennings himself wrote the whole editorial page.

The mistake of the Times was in lapsing into the dulness of respectable conservatism after its Ring fight. It should have kept on and made a crusade against frauds of all sorts.

The Herald has improved since young Mr. Bennett’s return. We are attracted toward this son of his father. He has a passion for manly sports, and that we like. If the shabby writers who make jest of his walking-matches had an income of three or four hundred thousand dollars a year, perhaps they would drive in carriages instead of walking and dawdle away their time on beds of ease or the gorgeous sofas of the Lotos Club. Mr. Bennett does otherwise. He strides up Broadway with the step of an athlete, dons his navy blue and commands his yacht, shoots pigeons, and prefers the open air of Newport to the confinement of the Herald office.

The World is a journal which pleases us on many accounts ... but occasionally there is a bit of prurient wit in its columns that might better be omitted. The World is also too often written in too fantastic language. Its young men seem to vie with each other in tormenting the language. They will do better when they learn that there is more force in simple Anglo-Saxon than in all the words they can manufacture. We advise them to read the Bible and Common Prayer Book. Those books will do their souls good, anyway, and they may also learn to write less affectedly.

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. He 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:

Until Robert Bonner sagaciously foresaw a handsome profit to be realized by excluding advertisements and crowding a small sheet with such choice literature as would surely attract a mighty throng of readers, never did the owner of any serial publication so much as dream of making both ends meet without a revenue from advertisements. The Tribune, the Times, and the Herald at length ceased to expect a profit from their circulation, and then they came to care for large editions only so far as they served to attract advertisers.

It was then that the Sun conceived the idea of a daily newspaper that should yield more satisfactory dividends from large circulation than had ever been declared by the journals that had looked to the organism of political parties and to enterprising advertisers for the bulk of their income. It saw in New York a city of sufficient population to warrant the experiment of a two-cent newspaper whose cost should equal that of the four-cent dailies in every respect, the cost of white paper alone excepted. Accordingly we produced the Sun on a sheet that leaves a small margin for profit, and by restricting the space allotted to advertisers and eliminating the verbiage in which the eight-page dailies hide the news, we made room in the Sun for not only all the real news of the day, but for interesting literature and current political discussion as well.

It was an enterprise that the public encouraged with avidity. The edition rapidly rose to one hundred and twenty thousand copies daily, and it is now rising; while the small margin of profit on that enormous circulation makes the Sun able to exist without paying any special attention to advertising—approaching very closely, in fact, to the condition of a daily newspaper able to support itself on the profits of its circulation alone.

Only a single further step remains to be taken. That step was recently foreshadowed in a leader in which the Sun intimated that the time was not far distant in which it would reject more advertising than it would accept. With a daily circulation of fifty or a hundred thousand more, there is little doubt that the Sun would find it necessary to limit the advertisers as the reporters and other writers for its columns are limited, each to a space to be determined by the public interest in his subject.

It will be a long stride in the progress of intellectual as distinguished from commercial journalism, and the Sun will probably be the first to make it, thus distancing the successors of Raymond, Bennett, and Greeley in the great sweepstakes for recognition as the Journal of the Future.

JAMES GORDON BENNETT, SR.

HORACE GREELEY

HENRY J. RAYMOND

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 in 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:

Some of our big contemporaries have been overdoing the thing. They seem to think that to secure circulation it is necessary to overload the stomachs of their readers.

The American newspaper-reader demands of an editor that he shall not give him news and discussions in heavy chunks, but so condensed and clarified that he shall be relieved of the necessity of wading through a treatise to get at a fact, or spending time on a dilated essay to get a bite at an argument.

Six or seven dreary columns are filled with leading articles, no matter whether there are subjects to discuss of public interest, or brains at hand to treat them. Our big contemporaries exhaust their young men and drive them too hard. The stock of ideas is not limitless, even in a New York newspaper office.

Another thing has been bad. Men with actual capacity of certain sorts for acceptable writing have been frightened off from doing natural and vigorous work by certain newspaper critics and doctrinaires who are in distress if the literary proprieties are seemingly violated, and if the temper and blood of the writer actually show in his work. They measure our journalistic production by an English standard, which lays it down as its first and most imperative rule that editorial writing shall be free from the characteristics of the writer. This is ruinous to good writing, and damaging to the sincerity of writers.... If we choose to glow or cry out in indignation, we do so, and we are not a bit frightened at the sound of our own voice.

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.

CHAPTER XIV
“THE SUN” AND THE GRANT SCANDALS

Dana’s Relentless Fight Against the Whisky Ring, Crédit Mobilier, “Addition, Division, and Silence,” the Safe Burglary Conspiracy and the Boss Shepherd Scandal.

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, of 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:

My dear Titian:

Allow me to introduce to you my particular friend, Mr. George O. Evans. He has a claim of some magnitude that he wishes you to help him in. Put him through as you would me. He understands addition, division, and silence.

W. H. Kemble.

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 words 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 voted “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:

The Constitution says that all trials shall be by jury, and the accused is entitled, not to be first convicted by a court and then to be convicted by a jury, but to be convicted or acquitted in the first instance by a jury.

As the Sun said of this decision, important to the freedom of the individual as well as to that of the press:

Those who sought to murder liberty, where they looked for a second Jeffreys, found a second Mansfield.

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 turned 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:

The idea that the editor of the Sun, which shines for all, could consent to become collector of the port of New York is extravagant and inadmissible. It would be stepping down and out with a vengeance.

And yet we do not mean that the collector of New York need be other than an upright man. Moses H. Grinnell was such, and Tom Murphy, though a politician, a crony of Boss Grant, and one of the donors of Boss Grant’s cottage, certainly never took a dollar of money from the Federal Treasury to which he was not entitled. General Arthur, the present collector, is a gentleman in every sense of the word.

The office of collector is respectable enough, but it is not one that the editor of the Sun could desire to take without deserving to have his conduct investigated by a proceeding de lunatico.

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?”

The Sun made this reply to Beecher’s assertion:

Everybody reads the Sun—the good, that they may be stimulated to do better; the bad, in fear and trembling lest their wickedness shall meet its deserts.

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:

The exposure of the moral nastiness in Brooklyn is a salutary thing. If, when the exposure of the scandal took place, the people had been indifferent—as indifferent as Beecher assumed to be—and had received no shock to their sense of purity and propriety, then the Jeremiahs might well have bewailed the turpitude of society and prophesied evil things for the country. Then, indeed, the poison would have been in the whole social atmosphere....

The Plymouth pastor, if a guiltless man, has brought all this trouble on himself by his cowardly course in dealing with the accusations against him....

If he is not a bold man, strong in the truth and in purity, what business has he to preach the religion of the Apostles to his fellow men—he who distributed Sharp’s rifles to the Kansas combatants with slavery, who denounced sin and bore his head high as a man of freedom of thought and action? To have kept himself consistent, he should not have dallied with Tilton and Moulton in secret, but if entrenched in innocence he should have dragged out their slanders and torn to pieces their plans from the pulpit where he had preached courage under difficulties, divine faith under sorrow, and bold encounter with sin. This would soon have expelled the poison lurking in the social atmosphere, but Beecher did not do it.

Perhaps Beecher’s thanks were not due to Dana, but Grant’s surely were. It is impossible that scandals like 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.

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.

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’s 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 forty 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 mules are all dying in Arkansas.

A printer in Texas has named his first-born Brevier Fullfaced Jones.

Real estate is looking up at New Orleans.

Translations from Hawthorne are becoming popular in France.

Venison costs six cents a pound in St. Paul.

Queen Victoria says every third woman in Cork is a beauty.

Goldwin Smith is coming to the United States.

The Pope denounces short dresses.

The same terseness is seen in the “Footlight Flashes,” begun in 1876:

Clara Morris takes her lap-dog out for a daily drive.

Miss Claxton is meeting with indifferent success in “Conscience.”

Not less than $30,000 was spent last evening in the theatres of New York.

John T. Raymond drew excellent houses as Colonel Sellers at the Brooklyn Theatre.

For the term of their appearance in “King Lear,” Lawrence Barrett will receive $1,200 a week; E. E. Sheridan, $1,000; Frederick B. Warde, $500.

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:

INTERVIEWING VANDERBILT

ANOTHER REPORTER COMES AWAY FREIGHTED WITH VALUABLE INFORMATION

Commodore Vanderbilt was eighty-one years old yesterday. He spent the day in his Fourth Avenue offices, taking his usual drive in the afternoon. A Sun reporter visited him in the evening to inquire about a favorable time for selling a few thousands of New York Central.

“This,” said the commodore, slowly and solemnly, as he entered the drawing-room, “is my birthday.”

“Indeed!” said the reporter. “Do you think the preferred stock——”

“To-day,” the commodore interrupted, “I am eighty-one years old. I am stronger——”

“Is there any prospect of an immediate rise?”

“I have never gone into the late-supper business,” the commodore answered, apparently not catching the drift of the question; “and I have always been a very temperate man. But how did you find out that this was my birthday?”

“You hinted at the fact yourself,” the reporter replied. “Will the Erie troubles——”

“The Erie troubles will not prevent me from beginning my eighty-second year with a young heart and a clear conscience.”

“And with the prospect of seeing a good many more birthday anniversaries?” the reporter asked.

“That, my dear boy,” said the commodore, “is one of those things that no fellow can tell about.”

“Do you think that this is a good time to sell?”

“No, it’s never a good time to sell after banking-hours.”

“Good evening!”

“Good evening! Drop in again.”

JULIAN RALPH

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 is from the Sun of January 6, 1873:

Stokes took his accustomed place, and his relatives sat down facing the jurors. The judge entered and took his place. Then, amid the most solemn silence, the twelve jurymen filed in and seated themselves. The awful conclusion at which they had arrived could be read in their faces. Each juror’s name was called, and with the usual response.

The judge turned toward them, and in a low, clear voice asked:

“Gentlemen, have you agreed on a verdict?”

The foreman of the jury arose and said, “We have.”

Clerk of the Court: “Gentlemen of the jury, rise. Prisoner, stand up. Gentlemen of the jury, look upon the prisoner. Prisoner, look upon the jury. What say you, gentlemen of the jury? Do you find the prisoner at the bar guilty or not guilty?”

Foreman of the Jury: “Guilty of murder in the first degree.”

A passionate wail that made men’s hearts leap rose from the group that clustered round the prisoner, and the head of the horror-stricken girl, from whose bosom the anguished cry was rent, fell upon the shoulder of her doomed brother.

The jury was polled by request of the prisoner’s counsel. No sooner had the last man answered “Yes” to the question whether all agreed on the verdict than the prisoner, erect and firm, turned his face full upon Mr. Beach (of the prosecution), who at one time had been his counsel in a civil case.

“Mr. Beach,” the prisoner said, slowly and in a full-toned voice, “you have done your work well. I hope you have been well paid for it.”

Then the prisoner sank slowly into his seat. Mr. Beach made no reply. Mr. Fellows, assistant district attorney, explained that he had refused to try the case unless Mr. Beach and Mr. Fullerton were associated with him. They had consented to join him at the request of District Attorney Garvin, and without any fee from any member of Colonel Fisk’s family.

The prisoner half-arose and, sweeping the air with his clenched fist, said:

“Mr. Fellows, say that they were hired by Jay Gould. Please say that!”

The sensation in court was such as is seldom known. You could hear it as you hear the wind stirring the trees of the forest. Then the court discharged the jury and the people began to move.

The following was printed in the Sun of June 21, 1893, under date of New Bedford, Massachusetts:

“Lizzie Andrew Borden,” said the clerk of the court, “stand up!”

She arose unsteadily, with a face as white as marble.

“Gentlemen, have you agreed upon a verdict?” said the clerk to the jury.

It was so still in court that the flutter of two fans made a great noise.

“We have,” said Foreman Richards boldly.

The prisoner was gripping the rail in front of the dock as if her standing up depended upon its keeping its place.

“Lizzie Andrew Borden,” said the clerk, “hold up your right hand. Jurors, look upon the prisoner. Prisoner, look upon the foreman.”

Every juryman stood at right-about-face, staring at the woman. There was such a gentle, kindly light beaming in every eye that no one questioned the verdict that was to be uttered. But God save every woman from the feelings that Lizzie Borden showed in the return look she cast upon that jury! It was what is pictured as the rolling gaze of a dying person. She seemed not to have the power to move her eyes directly where she was told to, and they swung all around in her head. They looked at the ceiling; they looked at everything, but they saw nothing. It was a horrible, a pitiful sight, to see her then.

“What say you, Mr. Foreman?” said the gentle old clerk.

“Not guilty!” shouted Mr. Richards.

At the words the wretched woman fell quicker than ever an ox fell in the stockyards of Chicago. Her forehead crashed against the heavy walnut rail so as to shake the reporter of the Sun who sat next to her, twelve feet away, leaning on the rail. It seemed that she must be stunned, but she was not. Quickly, with an unconscious movement, she flung up both arms, threw them over the rail, and pressed them under her face so that it rested on them. What followed was mere mockery, but it was the well-governed order of the court and had to be gone through with.

And finally, this is from the Sun of May 23, 1914:

“Charles Becker to the bar!”

Once more the door that gives entrance toward the Tombs as well as to the jury-room was opened. A deputy sheriff appeared, then Becker, then a second deputy. One glance was all you needed to see that Becker had himself under magnificent control. His iron nerve was not bending. He swung with long strides around the walls and came to a stand at the railing. Those who watched him did not see a sign of agitation. He was breathing slowly—you could see that from the rise and fall of his powerful chest—and smiling slightly as he glanced toward his counsel.

He looked for the first time toward the jurors. There was confidence and hope shining in his eyes. Coolly, without haste, he studied the face of every man in the box. Not one of them met his eye. Foreman Blagden gazed at the floor. Frederick G. Barrett, Sr., juror No. 12, studied the ceiling. The others gazed into space or turned their glance toward the justice.

There was the most perfect silence in the court-room. The movements of trolley-cars in Centre Street made a noise like rolling thunder. A pneumatic riveter at work on a building close by set up a tremendous din.

And yet such sounds and annoyances were forgotten, ceased to be of consequence, when Clerk Penny bent toward the foreman and slowly put the customary question:

“Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed upon your verdict?”

Mr. Blagden’s reply was barely audible; many in the room sensed its import, but failed to grasp the actual words. It was obvious that the foreman, having to express the will of his associates, was stirred by such feeling as seldom comes to any man.

“Guilty as charged in the indictment,” he breathed more than spoke.

Becker’s right hand was then gripped to the railing. He held his straw hat in his left hand, which, as his arm was bent backward and upward, rested against the small of his back. It is the plain truth that he took the blow without a quiver. After a second, it may be, he coughed just a little; a mere clearing of the throat. But his mouth was firm. His dark face lost no vestige of color. His black eyes turned toward the jurymen, who still avoided his glance, who looked everywhere but at the man they had condemned.

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:

The Hon. John Kelly, wearing a small bouquet in the lapel of his coat, stepped out of his coach in front of Cardinal McCloskey’s residence in Madison Avenue just before eight o’clock yesterday morning. A few minutes later three other coaches arrived, and their occupants entered the house. Many of the neighbors knew that a niece of the cardinal was to be married to Mr. Kelly, and they strained their eyes through plate-glass windows in the hope that they might see the bride and the groom. Cardinal McCloskey, having been apprized of the arrival of the wedding-party, went to the chapel in the other part of the house, and at about a quarter past eight, the time fixed for the mass pro sponsis, the marriage ceremony was begun.

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:

Two little mounds of red-colored earth around a small hole in the ground, and a few feet of downtrodden grass, were all that marked the last resting-place of Alexander T. Stewart yesterday morning. In the dead of the night robbers had dug into the earth above the vault, removed one of the stones that covered it, and stolen the body of the dead millionaire.

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:

Here Mr. Edison dropped his cigar-stump from his mouth, and, turning to Griffin, asked for some chewing-tobacco. The private secretary drew open his drawer and passed out a yellow cake as large as a dinner-plate. The professor tore away a chew, saying:

“I am partly indebted to the Sun for this tobacco. It printed an article saying that I chewed poor tobacco. That was so. The Lorillards saw the article and sent me down a box of the best plug that ever went into a man’s mouth. All the workmen have used it, and Grif says there is a marked moral improvement in the men. It seems, however, to have the opposite effect on Grif. You see that he has salted away the last cake for his own use.”

Nearly forty years later Sun reporters still went to see Mr. Edison borrow white magic from nature and 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:

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

The Sun expressed a curiosity to know—

Who are the eighty or ninety thousand people, not regular readers of the Sun, that buy the paper after a Presidential election? Where do they live? Do they read the papers only after exciting events?

On its fiftieth birthday—September 3, 1883—the Sun printed a table showing the high-tide marks of its circulation:

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

In the same article, a page review written by Mr. Mitchell, the reasons for the Sun’s success were succinctly given:

No waste of words, no nonsense, plain, outspoken expressions of honest opinion, the abolishment of the conventional measures of news importance, the substitution of the absolute standard of real interest to human beings, bright and enjoyable writing, wit, philosophical good humor, intolerance of humbug, hard hitting from the shoulder on proper occasions—do we not see all these qualities now in our esteemed contemporaries on every side of us, and in every part of the land?

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 objective 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 came 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:

Every night of his ten thousand nights of service has been a Trafalgar or a Waterloo. He has fought ten thousand battles against the world, the flesh, and the devil; the woman applicant, the refractory citizen, the liar at the other end of the wire, and the ten thousand demons which make up the great army of nervous prostration.

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.

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. Arthur 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:

“That was the day! The names of the men on the staff prove it.”

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 he 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.

ARTHUR BRISBANE

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, were 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:

There have not often been gathered in one place so many men whose names have been household words, and whose lives have been inwoven with the history of a grave crisis in a great nation’s life, as met yesterday in this city. The scene was before General Grant’s tomb in Riverside Park; the space was less than goes to half an ordinary city block, and the names of the actors were William T. Sherman, Joe Johnston, Phil Sheridan, Simon B. Buckner, John A. Logan, W. S. Hancock, Fitz John Porter, Chester A. Arthur, Thomas A. Hendricks, John Sherman, Fitzhugh Lee, John B. Gordon, David D. Porter, Thomas F. Bayard, John L. Worden, and a dozen others naturally linked in the mind with these greater men. Among them, like children amid gray-heads, or shadows beside monuments, were other men more newly famous, and famous only for deeds of peace in times of quiet and plenty—a President, an ex-President, Governors, mayors, and millionaires. And all were paying homage to the greatest figure of their time, whose mortal remains they pressed around with bared, bowed heads.

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, remembered 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:

Chattering of spectators in the background hushed abruptly. A light breeze, which barely rumpled the river, set a few dry leaves tossing about the tomb of Farragut, Dewey’s mentor at Mobile. The voice of Chaplain Frazier could be heard repeating a prayer, catching, and then going on smoothly.

A second of silence, then the brisk call of the lieutenant commanding the firing-squad of Annapolis cadets.

“Load!”

Rifles rattling.

“Aim!”

Rifles pointed a little upward for safety’s sake, though the cartridges had no bullets.

“Fire!”

Twenty rifles snapped as one. This twice repeated—three volleys over the tomb into which the twelve sailors had just carried the admiral’s body.

And now came the moment for Master-at-Arms Charles Mitchell, bugler on the Olympia when Dewey sank the Spanish fleet, to perform his last office for the admiral. Raising the bugle to his lips and looking straight ahead at the still open door of the tomb, he sounded “taps.” The first three climbing notes and the second three were perfect. Then the break and the recovery, and the funeral was over.

Julian Ralph saw more of the world, and made more copy out of what he saw, than any other newspaperman. 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 of 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:

One day I was walking up Broadway when suddenly a current of news came up from a cellar and enveloped me. I felt the difference in the temperature of the air. I tingled with the electricity or magnetism in the current. It seemed to stop me, to turn me around, and to force me to descend some stairs which reached up to the street by my side.

I ran down the steps, and as I did so a pistol-shot sounded in my ears. One man had shot another, and I found myself at the scene upon the instant.

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:

I had myself called at five o’clock in the morning, and, having a cab at hand, mounted the box with the negro driver and traveled about the city from end to end and side to side. I did this to see the people get up and the trains roll in and the soldiers turn out—to catch the capital robing like a bride for her wedding.

After breakfast, eaten calmly, I made another tour of the town, and then began to approach the subject more closely, calling at the White House, mingling with the crowds in the principal hotels, moving between the Senate and the House of Representatives, to report the hurly-burly of the closing moments of a dying administration. I saw the old and the new President, and then witnessed the inauguration ceremonies and the parade.

Then, having seen the new family in place in the White House, I took a hearty luncheon, and sat down at half past one o’clock to write steadily for twelve hours, with plenty of pencils and pads and messenger-boys at hand, and with my notebook supplemented by clippings from all the afternoon papers, covering details to which I might or might not wish to refer. Cigars, a sandwich or two at supper-time, and a stout horn of brandy late at night were my other equipments.

As Ralph remarked, that was hard work, but it was nothing when compared with the job of reporting a 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 world 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.

“Thank you,” said the lady. “Now we can send the message!”

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:

Your cable Sun New York December 24 words “Madam Christmas greeting” not intended for publication. Please explain.

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:

As you have probably noticed in my despatches, I have not much use for the German soldiers anyhow. They are a big lot of swine, if human beings ever are swine.

Chamberlin had a reputation for possessing the ability to write any kind of a story, no matter how technical 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:

“At last, W. J., there’s one story you can’t write!”

But Chamberlin wrote it:

He clutched, but he clutched too late. He dived and grabbed once, twice, thrice, but down those trousers slipped. Mary E. Lease was only three feet away. Miss Mitchell, of Kansas, was less than two feet away. Helen Gougar was almost on the spot. Mrs. Julia Ward Pennington was just two seats off, and all around and about him were gathered the most beautiful and eloquent women of the convention, and every eye was upon the unfortunate Deacon McDowell.

Then he grabbed, and then again, again, and again they eluded him. Down, down he dived. At last victory perched on him. He got the trousers, and, with a yank that threatened to rip them from stem to stern, he pulled them up. At no time had the applause ceased, nor had there been any sign of a let-up in the demonstration. Now it was increased twofold. The women joined in.

McDowell, clutching the truant trousers closely about him, attempted to resume his part in the demonstration, but it was useless, and after frantic efforts to show enthusiasm he retired to hunt up tenpenny nails. When it was over, an indignant Populist introduced this resolution:

“Resolved, that future sergeants-at-arms shall be required to wear tights.”

The chairman did not put the resolution.

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. They 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 was 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-eight 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.

“Riggs,” Dana once remarked to a friend, “is my Phil Sheridan.”

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:

There was a vast difference between the two. The political reporter is he who begins at the foot of the ladder when he reports the actual facts at a ward meeting. The political correspondent is he who has run the gamut of ward meetings, primaries, Assembly district, Senate district, and Congress district conventions, city conventions, county conventions, State conventions, and national conventions, and who builds his articles to his newspaper on his information of the situation in the State or nation, based upon circumstances and facts arising out of all of the aforesaid conventions.

A political reporter and a political correspondent occupy in newspaper life the same relative positions as the cellar-digger and the architect in the building-trade world. Cellar-digger is just as important in his sphere as architect. The most superb architects were the most superb cellar-diggers. No man can be a successful political correspondent unless he has been a successful political reporter. Judges are made out of lawyers, generals and admirals out of cadets. Only the most ordinary of human virtues are necessary for the equipment of a successful political reporter and correspondent—cleanliness, sobriety, honesty, and truthfulness.

Writing of Riggs as the dean of American political correspondents, Samuel G. Blythe said in the Saturday Evening Post:

He has made it his business to know men in all parts of the country, and to know them so they will tell him as much of the truth as they will tell anybody. He is tenacious of his opinions and loyal to his friends. He is jolly, good-natured, companionable, and a fine chap to have around when he is in repose. Wherever men spoke the English language he was known as “Riggs—of the Sun.”

Reputation and success in newspaper work demand the highest and most unselfish loyalty to one’s paper. It must be the paper first and nothing else second. Loyalty is Riggs’s first attribute, even better than his courage.

The influence of a man like Riggs cannot be estimated. There is no way of computing this, but there is no person who will deny that he has been a power. He has not had his head turned by flattery. He has been “Riggs—of the Sun.”

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 in 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:

Deeply interested were the handfuls of Frenchmen who gathered and watched from such a safe and distant pavilion as we would select to look upon a hyena fight.

And, when other reporters were deafened by the battle, Brisbane heard the plaintive appeal of Baldock, Mitchell’s tough second:

“Think of the kids, Charley, the dear little kids, a calling for you at home and a counting on you for bread! Think what their feelings will be if you don’t knock the ear off him, and knock it off him again!”

Not but what the correspondent paid conscientious attention to the technique of the fray:

A detailed report of each of the thirty-nine rounds taken by me shows that out of more than a hundred wild rushes made by Sullivan, and of which any one would have been followed by a knockout in Madison Square, not half a dozen resulted in anything.

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 many 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:

Great in the annals of Yale forever must be the name of McClung. Twice within a few minutes this man has carried the ball over the Princeton goal-line. He runs like a deer, has the stability of footing of one of the pyramids, and is absolutely cool in the most frightfully exciting circumstances.

A curious figure is McClung. He has just finished a run of twenty yards, with all Princeton shoving against him. He is steaming like a pot of porridge, and chewing gum. His vigorously working profile is clearly outlined against the descending sun. How dirty he is! His paddings seem to have become loosed and to have accumulated over his knees. He has a shield, a sort of splint, bound upon his right shin. His long hair is held in a band, a linen fillet, the dirtiest ever worn.

He pants as a man who has run fifty miles—who has overthrown a house. He droops slightly for a moment’s rest, hands on knees, eyes shining with the glare of battle, the gum catching between his grinders. A tab on one of his ears signifies a severe injury to that organ, an injury received in some previous match from an opposition boot-heel, or from a slide over the rough earth with half a dozen of the enemy seated upon him. He has a little, sharp-featured face, squirrel-like, with a Roman nose and eyes set near together. Brief dental gleams illuminate his countenance in his moments of great joyfulness.

EDWARD G. RIGGS

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:

The sun has crossed the line, and now the weather may be vernal; that is, if no more cyclones come, like yesterday’s, to spurn all the efforts of the spring to come as per the classic rhymers. (Perhaps there was a spring in those days of the good old-timers!) But this spring sprang a fearful leak from clouded dome supernal, and weather that should be divine might be declared infernal; entirely too much chilliness, nocturnal and diurnal, which prompted many citizens to take, for woes external, the ancient spring reviver of the old Kentucky colonel.

The mercury fell down the tube a point below the freezing, and Spring herself might be excused for shivering and sneezing. The wind, a brisk northeaster, howled, the sky was dark and solemn, and chills chased one another up and down the spinal column.

Oh hail, diphtherial mildness, hail, and rain, and snow—and blossom! Perhaps the spring has really come, and may be playing possum!

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:

While off the Honduranean coast, not far from Ruatan, the famous little fruiter Snyg on dirty weather ran. Her skipper, Wiig, was at the helm, the boatswain hove the lead; the air was thick; you could not see a half-ship’s length ahead. The mate said:

“Reefs of Ruatan, I think, are off our bow.”

The skipper answered:

“You are right; they’re inside of us now.”

The water filled the engine-room and put the fires out, and quickly o’er the weather rail the seas began to spout.

When dawn appeared there also came three blacks from off the isle. They deftly managed their canoe, each wearing but a smile; but, clever as they were, their boat was smashed against the Snyg, and they were promptly hauled aboard by gallant Captain Wiig.

“We had thirteen aboard this ship,” the fearful cook remarked. “I think we stand a chance for life, since three coons have embarked. Now let our good retriever, Nig, a life-line take ashore, and all hands of the steamship Snyg may see New York once more.”

But Nig refused to leave the ship, and so the fearless crew the life-boat launched, but breakers stove the stout craft through and through. Said Captain Wiig:

“Though foiled by Nig, our jig’s not up, I vow; I’ve still my gig, and I don’t care a fig—I’ll make the beach somehow!”

And Mate Charles Christian of the Snyg (who got here yesterday) helped launch the stanch gig of the Snyg so the crew could get away. The gig was anchored far inshore; with raft and trolley-line all hands on the Snyg, including Nig, were hauled safe o’er the brine.

Although the Snyg, of schooner rig, will ply the waves no more, let us hope that Wiig gets another Snyg for the sake of the bards ashore.

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 went 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:

The affection of the Sun and its editor for everything Cuban except Spanish domination lasted quite down to and after the second advent of Maximo Gomez; it was never livelier than in the middle seventies.

Mr. Dana was the warm friend of José Marti. He corresponded personally (with the assistance of his Fenian stenographer, Williams) with the leading revolutionists actually fighting in the island. He was the constant and unwearied intellectual resource of a swarm of patriots, adventurers, near-filibusters, bondholding financiers, lawyer-diplomats, and grafters operating exclusively in Manhattan. A Latin-American accent was a sure card of admission to the woven-bottomed chair alongside the little round table in the inner corner room of the series of four inhabited by the Sun’s entire force of editors and reporters.

We were then the foremost if not the only American organ of Cuban independence. The executive journalistic headquarters of the cause was just outside Mr. Dana’s front door. The Cuba Libre editor, as I suppose he would be styled nowadays, was a gentleman of Latin-American origin, who bore the aggressive and appropriate name of Rebello. The Cuba Libre “desk” was about as depressing a seat of literary endeavor as the telegraph-blank shelf in a country railroad station, which it resembled in its narrowness, its dismal ink-wells, rusty pens, and other details of disreputable equipment. From this shelf there issued, by Mr. Dana’s direction, many encouraging editorial remarks to Rebello’s compatriots in the jungle.

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, formerly 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 the 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:

No such story ever has been written or ever will be written of our conquest of the Ladrones as that of the Sun’s correspondent, published yesterday morning. It is the picture of a historic scene, in which not a single detail is wanting. This far-away little isle of Guam, so much out of the world that it had not heard of our war with Spain, and mistook the Charleston’s shells for an honorary salute, is now a part of the United States of America, and destined to share in the greatness of a progressive country. The queer Spanish governor, who declined to go upon Captain Glass’s ship because it would be a breach of Spanish regulations, is now our prisoner at Manila.

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:

Fort de France, Martinique, May 21—To-day we saw St. Pierre, the ghastliest ghost of the modern centuries. But yesterday the fairest of the fair of the wondrous cities of the storied Antilles, bright, beautiful, glorious, glistening and shimmering in her prism of tropical radiance, an opalescent city in a setting of towering forest and mountain, now a waste of ashen-gray without life, form, color, shape, a drear monotone, a dim blur on the landscape—it seems even more than the contrast between life and death.

The dead may live. St. Pierre is not alive, and never will be. Out of shape has come a void. It is the apotheosis of annihilation. To one who sits amid the ruins and gazes the long miles upward over the seamed sides of La Pelée, still thundering her terrible wrath, may come some conception of the future ruin of the worlds.

It has been a day of sharp impressions, one cutting into another until the memory-pad of the mind is crossed and crisscrossed like the fissured flanks of La Pelée herself; but most deeply graven of all, paradoxically, is the memory of a dimness, a nothingness, an emptiness, a lack of everything—the gray barrenness unrelieved of what was the rainbow St. Pierre. Mont Pelée, the most awful evidence of natural force to be seen in the world to-day—La Pelée, majestic, terrible, overpowering, has been in evidence from starlight to starlight, but it is the ashen blank that was once the city of the Saint of the Rock that stands out most clearly in the kaleidoscopic maze slipping backward and forward before our eyes.

And thus on, without losing interest, for seven solid columns.

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:

The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest-hearted, most pleasure-loving city of this continent, and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate, and have caught its flavor of the “Arabian Nights” feel that it can never be the same.

It is as though a pretty, frivolous woman had passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and different. If it rises out of the ashes it must be a modern city, much like other cities and without its old flavor.

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 people 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:

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

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:

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.

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 reporter 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:

Halifax, Nova Scotia, July 6—The steamship La Bourgogne of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, which left New York on Saturday last bound for Havre, was sunk at five o’clock on Monday morning after a collision with the British ship Cromartyshire in a dense fog about sixty miles south of Sable Island. The ship had 750 persons aboard. The number of first and second cabin passengers was 220 and of the steerage passengers 297, a total of 517. The number of officers was 11, of the crew 222. Eleven second-cabin and 51 steerage passengers and 104 of the crew, a total of 166, were saved. All the officers but four, all the first-cabin passengers, and all but one of the more than one hundred women on board, were lost. The number of lost is believed to be 584.

This was more detailed, but not more calm than the opening of Edwin C. Hill’s story on the loss of the Titanic:

The greatest marine disaster in the history of ocean traffic occurred last Sunday night, when the Titanic of the White Star Line, the greatest steamship that ever sailed the sea, shattered herself against an iceberg and sank with, it is feared, fifteen hundred of her passengers and crew in less than four hours. The monstrous modern ships may defy wind and weather, but ice and fog remain unconquered.

Out of nearly twenty-four hundred people that the Titanic carried, only eight hundred and sixty-six are known to have been saved, and most of these were women and children.

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:

The Brooklyn Theatre was built in September, 1871, opened for public entertainment October 2, 1871, and burned to the ground with the sacrifice of three hundred lives on the night of Tuesday, December 5, 1876.

Of a more literary character, yet void of excitement, was the way Julian Ralph began his narrative of the blizzard of March, 1888:

It was as if New York had been a burning candle upon which nature had clapped a snuffer, leaving nothing of the city’s activities but a struggling ember.

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, 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:

Mrs. Catherine Sheehan stood in the darkened parlor of her home at 361 West Fifteenth Street late yesterday afternoon and told her version of the murder of her son Gene, the youthful policeman whom a thug named Billy Morley shot in the forehead down under the Chatham Square elevated station early yesterday morning. Gene’s mother was thankful that her boy hadn’t killed Billy Morley before he died, “because,” she said, “I can say honestly, even now, that I’d rather have Gene’s dead body brought home to me, as it will be to-night, than to have him come to me and say, ‘Mother, I had to kill a man this morning.’

“God comfort the poor wretch that killed the boy,” the mother went on, “because he is more unhappy to-night than we are here. Maybe he was weak-minded through drink. He couldn’t have known Gene, or he wouldn’t have killed him. Did they tell you at the Oak Street Station that the other policemen called Gene ‘Happy Sheehan’? Anything they told you about him is true, because no one would lie about him. He was always happy, and he was a fine-looking young man. He always had to duck his helmet when he walked under the gas-fixture in the hall as he went out the door.

“After he went down the street yesterday I found a little book on a chair—a little list of the streets or something that Gene had forgot. I knew how particular they are about such things, and I didn’t want the boy to get in trouble, so I threw on a shawl and walked over through Chambers Street toward the river to find him. He was standing on a corner some place down there near the bridge, clapping time with his hands for a little newsy that was dancing; but he stopped clapping—struck, Gene did, when he saw me. He laughed when I handed him a little book and told him that was why I’d searched for him, patting me on the shoulder when he laughed—patting me on the shoulder.

“‘It’s a bad place for you here, Gene,’ I said. ‘Then it must be bad for you, too, mammy,’ said he; and as he walked to the end of his beat with me—it was dark then—he said, ‘There are lots of crooks here, mother, and they know and hate me, and they’re afraid of me’—proud, he said it—‘but maybe they’ll get me some night.’

“He patted me on the back and turned and walked east toward his death. Wasn’t it strange that Gene said that?

“You know how he was killed, of course, and how—now let me talk about it, children, if I want to. I promised you, didn’t I, that I wouldn’t cry any more or carry on? Well, it was five o’clock this morning when a boy rang the bell here at the house, and I looked out the window and said:

“‘Is Gene dead?’

“‘No, ma’am,’ answered the lad; ‘but they told me to tell you he was hurt in a fire and is in the hospital.’

“Jerry, my other boy, had opened the door for the lad, and was talking to him while I dressed a bit. And then I walked down-stairs and saw Jerry standing silent under the gaslight; and I said again, ‘Jerry, is Gene dead?’ And he said ‘Yes,’ and he went out.

“After a while I went down to the Oak Street Station myself, because I couldn’t wait for Jerry to come back. The policemen all stopped talking when I came in, and then one of them told me it was against the rules to show me Gene at that time; but I knew the policeman only thought I’d break down. I promised him I wouldn’t carry on, and he took me into a room to let me see Gene. It was Gene.”

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:

It was difficult for a time to get the details of the duke’s Passover garb, owing to the fact that the interior of his Nile-green limousine has recently been fitted up with book-shelves, so that the duke can be surrounded with his law library even when motoring to and from his office on the East Side. Furthermore, every space not occupied by the duke and duchess and the law library yesterday was decorated with floral set pieces in honor of Easter, a large pillow of tuberoses inscribed with the words “Our Duke” in purple immortelles, and presented by the Essex Market Bar Association to their dean, being the outstanding piece among the interior floral decorations of the duke’s Rolls-Royce. Beside Ittchee, the duke’s Jap valet and chauffeur, was a large rubber-plant, which shut off the view, the rubber-plant being the Easter gift of Solomon, Solomon, Solomon, Solomon, Solomon and Solomon, who learned all their law as students in the offices of the duke.

Little or nothing remains to be told about the duke’s Easter scenery. He was dressed in the mode, that’s all—high hat, morning coat, trousers like Martin Littleton’s, mauve spats, corn-colored gloves, patent-leather shoes, Russian-red cravat, set off with a cameo showing the face of Lord Chief Justice Russell in high relief. His only distinctive mark was the absence of a gardenia on his lapel.

He was off then, waving his snakewood cane jauntily, while the East Side scrambled after the car to try to feel the Nile-green varnish. And with a final direction to Ittchee, “Go around by Chauncey Depew’s house on the way home, my good man,” the car exploded northward, and the Passover parade on Delancey Street officially ended for the day.

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.

CHAPTER XVII
SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM

Lord, Managing Editor for Thirty-Turn Years.—Clarke, Magician of the Copy Desk.—Ethics, Fair Play and Democracy.—“The Evening Sun” and Those Who Make It.

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; and the telegraph editor, who took care of all other wire matter.

CHESTER SANDERS LORD

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 the 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, a 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:

Like Dana, he has been a great judge of men. His discernment has been little short of miraculous. Calm, dispassionate, without the slightest atom of impulse, as wise as a serpent and as gentle as a dove, Lord got about him a staff that has been regarded by newspapermen as the most brilliant in the country. Independent of thought, with a placid idea of the dignity of his place, ever ready to concede the other fellow’s point of view even though maintaining his own, Lord was never known in all the years of his managing editorship of the Sun to utter an unkind word to any man on the paper, no matter how humble his station.

One of Lord’s notable performances as managing 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 and 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:

“Chester,” said Mr. Dana one afternoon early in the nineties, leaning over Lord’s desk, “I have just torn up my Associated Press franchise. We’ve got to have the news of the world to-morrow morning, and we’ve got to get it ourselves.”

“Don’t let that fret you, Mr. Dana,” replied Lord. “You’ve got a Dante class on hand to-night. You just go home and enjoy yourself. I’ll have the news for you all right.”

Dana always said that he didn’t enjoy his Dante class a single bit that night; but he didn’t go near the Sun office, neither did he communicate with the office. He banked on Lord, and the next morning and ever afterward Lord made good on the independent service. He built up the Laffan Bureau, which more recently has become the Sun News Service, and the special correspondents of the paper in all parts of the world see to it that the Sun gets the news.

A task like that which Dana thrust on Lord might have paralyzed the average managing editor of a great metropolitan newspaper confronted by keen and powerful competitors. It was unheard of in journalism. It had never been attempted before. Lord, with calm courage and confidence, sent off thousands of telegrams and cable despatches that night. Many were shots in the air, but the majority were bull’s-eyes, as the next morning’s issue of the Sun proved.

Was Dana delighted? If you had seen him hop, skip, and jump into the office that morning, you’d have received your answer. When Lord turned up at his desk in the afternoon, Dana rushed out from his chief editor’s office, grasped him about the shoulders, and chuckled:

“Chester, you’re a brick, you’re a trump. You’re the John L. Sullivan of newspaperdom!”

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 midnight of January 1, 1905, four months after these instructions were given to Swift, the Sun got a “double urgent” message:

Port Arthur fallen—Swift.

No other paper in New York had the news. The Sun rubbed it in editorially on January 3:

Deeply conscious as we are of the deplorable lack of modern enterprise which has hitherto deprived the Sun of the distinction of repeatedly announcing the fall of Port Arthur, we have to content ourselves with the reflection that when finally the Sun did print the fall of Port Arthur, it was so.

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 matter they were preparing to send. Had the Sun any instructions for him? Yes, it had. The reply came swiftly:

Use your own judgment—Chester S. Lord.

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.

“A Sunday story?” inquired Adams.

“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.

Mr. Lord murmured something.

“Didn’t I order him discharged a few days ago?” said Mr. Dana.

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?”

Adams did not wait for the answer.

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:

“Good work!”

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 their 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.

SELAH MERRILL CLARKE

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, 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.

“Did you find the messenger?” Clarke asked the reporter on his arrival.

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? 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.”

“Son,” said Mr. Lord, “you are a great man!”

That was the Lord phrase of acquittal.

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 wilting 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.

“He’ll triple it!” cried the tempter.

Although Clarke heard the words, he kept on to his 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.

Clarke was the hero of a dozen newspaper stories, which he scorned to read.

“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?”

“Who is Blank?” said Clarke shortly.

“Why,” said his informant, “he worked here for several weeks.”

“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 story 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:

“We’re Broke,” Says Horgan.—“Sure,” Says Slattery, “But Our Wives Are Doing Fine.”

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 who 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, I shall change your copy if it comes to me. The expression would be too stale. Hyperbole is one of the gifts.”

SAMUEL A. WOOD

OSCAR KING DAVIS

THOMAS M. DIEUAIDE

SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS

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 among 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. Fitzgerald 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, 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 space 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 men 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 went 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.”

WILL IRWIN

FRANK WARD O’MALLEY

EDWIN C. HILL

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 it 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 staff 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.

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.

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:

For younger rising men we look almost in vain. Bret Harte gives no promise of lasting fecundity. Howells does charming work, and will probably long remain in position as a dainty but not suggestive or formative writer. Aldrich is very slight. John Hay easily won whatever name he has, and it will easily pass away. Henry James the younger is one of the rising men, the youth of literature.

But of all these there is not one who has yet discovered the stuff out of which the kings and princes, or even the barons, of literature are made.

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 printed 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:

GEORGINA’S REASONS!

HENRY JAMES’S LATEST STORY!

A Woman Who Commits Bigamy and Enforces Silence on Her Husband!

Two Other Lives Made Miserable by Her Heartless Action!

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.

PAUL DANA

Of the more strictly journalistic writers who, although 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 the 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”:

Sometimes people are as much interested in queer names, like Poke Stogis, for example, or in the discussion of a question such as “What Is the Best Ghost in Fiction?” or “How Should Engaged Couples Act at the Circus?” or “What Is a Dodunk?” or “Do the Angels Play Football?” as some other people are interested in the conference of the great powers.

It is well to remember always this psychological factor. Both the range of the newspaper and the attractive power of the writer for the newspaper in any department depend upon the breadth of sympathy with human affairs and the diversity of things in which he, the writer, takes a genuine personal interest.

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:

The most serious practical evil that will result from the elimination of the classics will fall upon the English language itself. The racial memory begins to decay, the racial imagination, the begetter of memory, begins to weaken, the sense of precise meanings begins to lose its edge, and the English language ceases to be a vital thing and becomes a mere code of arbitrary signals wigwagged from mouth to ear. Were I the emergency autocrat of this language, I should proclaim in drastic regulations and enforce by severe penalties the American duty of adherence to the old habits of speech, the old scrupulous respect for the finer shades of meaning, the old rigid observance of the morality of word relations; and this, I believe, can be done only by maintaining the classical culture at high potency.

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.

Benjamin H. Day was born in West Springfield, Massachusetts, April 10, 1810.

Moses Yale Beach was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, January 7, 1800.

Moses Sperry Beach was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, October 5, 1822.

Charles A. Dana was born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, August 8, 1819.

Edward P. Mitchell was born in Bath, Maine, March 24, 1852.

Frank A. Munsey was born in Mercer, Maine, August 21, 1854.

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:

IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?

We take pleasure in answering at once and thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of the Sun:

Dear Editor:

I am eight years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says “If you see it in the Sun it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon.

115 West Ninety-Fifth Street.

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas, how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance, to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God, he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

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.”

WILLIAM M. LAFFAN

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. Cullen 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.

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, Reich, and Munsey.

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:

There is much confusion in the public mind about what is known as “yellow journalism.” There have been several periods of it in New York. James Gordon Bennett was the first yellow journalist, and Charles A. Dana was the second. Mr. Pulitzer was the third. Finally, when Mr. Hearst came along, he was the fourth, and I think he quite filled the field of yellow journalism.

As Mr. Bennett became more respectable and Mr. Dana more fixed in his efforts, they were raised in the public estimation. So was Mr. Pulitzer. I think the field of yellow journalism is so filled by the Hearst newspapers that they no more compete with the World than with the Herald or the Sun.

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 control 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:

Remember the difference between white and yellow. The essential difference is not of method or quality of product, but of purpose and of moral responsibility or moral debasement. Yellow will tell you that it means force, originality, and independence in the presentation of ideas. This is consolatory to yellow, but not accurate. Yellow will print an interesting exaggeration or misstatement, knowing it to be such. If in doubt about the truth of alleged news, but in no doubt whatever as to its immediate value as a sensation, yellow will give the benefit of the doubt to the sensation every time, and print it with head-lines tall enough to reach to Saturn. White won’t; that is the only real color test. I hope you are all going to be white, and not only white, but red, white, and blue.

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 that 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 revolution which his genius and invention have wrought in the methods of practical journalism in America during the past twenty-five years can be estimated only by newspaper-makers. His mind, always original, and unblunted and unwearied at seventy-five, has been a prolific source of new ideas in the art of gathering, presenting, and discussing attractively the news of the world.

He is a radical and unterrified innovator, caring not a copper for tradition or precedent when a change of method promises a real improvement. Restlessness like his, without his genius, discrimination, and honesty of purpose, scatters and loses itself in mere whimsicalities or pettinesses; or else it deliberately degrades the newspaper upon which it is exercised.

To Mr. Dana’s personal invention are due many, if not most, of the broad changes which within a quarter of a century have transformed journalism in this country. From his individual perception of the true philosophy of human interest, more than from any other single source, have come the now general repudiation of the old conventional standards of news importance; the modern newspaper’s appreciation of the news value of the sentiment and humor of the daily life around us; the recognition of the principle that a small incident, interesting in itself and well told, may be worth a column’s space, when a large, dull fact is hardly worth a stickful’s; the surprising extension of the daily newspaper’s province so as to cover every department of general literature, and to take in the world’s fancies and imaginings as well as its actual events.

The word “news” has an entirely different significance from what it possessed twenty-five or thirty years ago under the ancient common law of journalism as derived from England; and in the production of this immense change, greatly in the interest of mankind and of the cheerfulness of daily life, it would be difficult to exaggerate the direct and indirect influence of Mr. Dana’s alert, scholarly, and widely sympathetic perceptions.

WILLIAM C. REICK

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, blackest 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!

Yellow journalism said to its readers:

“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!”

Dana said to his readers:

“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:

The newspaperman of to-day is a composite type, the product of the Sun and the New York World of fifteen or eighteen years ago. These two newspapers represented two distinct and widely different styles of journalism. The World was alert, daring, aggressive, and sensational. It was about the liveliest thing that ever swung into New York from the West.... No man has ever stamped himself more thoroughly upon his generation than has Joseph Pulitzer on the journalism of America. He was the originator and the founder of our present type of overgrown newspaper, with its illustrations and its merits and its defects.

The part the Sun played in this recreating and rejuvenating of the American press was purely literary. It was the first newspaper to make fiction out of facts—that is, to handle facts with the skill and manner of the novelist, so that they read like fiction and possessed all its charm and fascination. The Sun at that time consisted of but four pages, and I am convinced that it was the best example of newspaper-making ever produced anywhere. With the exception of one or two of these fiction-fact stories so charmingly told, it was the perfection of condensation, accuracy, brilliancy.

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 journalism 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:

It is usually not a wise thing in politics, any more than in war, to take a private from the ranks and at one bound to promote him to be commander-in-chief; yet that is what has been done in the case of Grover Cleveland.

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 his 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:

I do not believe in the establishment in this country of the German bureaucratic system, with its permanent staff of office-holders who are not responsible to the people, and whose tenure of place knows no variation and no end except the end of life. In my judgment a genuine reform of the evils complained of is reached by the vigorous simplification of the machinery of government, by the repeal of all superfluous laws, the abolition of every needless office, and the dismissal of every needless officer. The true American doctrine on this subject consists in the diminution of government, not in its increase.

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. While 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:

The Chicago platform invites us to establish a currency which will enable a man to pay his debts with half as much property as he would have to use in order to pay them now. This proposition is dishonest. I do not say that all the advocates of the free coinage of silver are dishonest. Thousands of them—millions, if there be so many—are doubtless honest in intention. But I am unable to reconcile with any ideal of integrity a change in the law which will permit a man who has borrowed a hundred dollars to pay his debt with a hundred dollars each one of which is worth only half as much as each dollar he received from the lender.

FRANK A. MUNSEY

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 to 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:

Charles Anderson Dana, editor of the Sun, died yesterday afternoon.

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 the 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:

One of Mr. Dana’s special titles to the remembrance of his fellow workers in the newspaper calling is the fact that, more than any other man on either side of the Atlantic, he raised their vocation to a level with the legal and medical professions as regards the scale of remuneration. He honored his fellow craftsmen of the pen, and he compelled the world to honor them.

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 financial 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

A The following editorial article appeared in the Sun on July 26, 1918:

“Mr. Paul Dana calls the Sun’s attention to what he claims was an error in ‘The Story of the Sun’ as it originally appeared in the Munsey Magazine: the statement that ‘he [Mr. Dana] continued in control of the property until 1900.’ Mr. Dana states that he did not dispose of his controlling interest until 1902. The statement in the Munsey Magazine publication of ‘The Story of the Sun’ was founded upon the International Encyclopædia’s biography of William M. Laffan and also upon a statement published in the Sun at the time of Mr. Laffan’s death in 1909, that Mr. Laffan obtained the control of the Sun in 1900. When the Munsey Magazine articles were reprinted in the Sunday Sun the paragraph referred to by Mr. Dana was changed to read as follows:

“‘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, obtained the business control. His proprietorship was announced on February 22, 1902, and it continued until his death in 1909.’

“We will let Mr. Dana’s version of this matter stand in ‘The Story of the Sun’ unless some further evidence appears on the disputed point.”

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 went 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 who bore a contract which would bring to the Sun four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of advertising from the magnate’s railroads.

“Tell him to see the advertising manager,” said Laffan.

“He insists on seeing you,” said the clerk.

“Tell him to go to hell,” said Laffan.

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.

EDWARD PAGE MITCHELL

Editor of “The Sun”

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:

Very great credit is due Mr. Reick for the fine development of the Evening Sun since it came under his control. I know of no man who has done a better and sounder piece of newspaper work at any time, in New York or elsewhere, than Mr. Reick has done on the Evening Sun.

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 Tract 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 his 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—

By the bright track of his fiery car

Gives token of a goodly day to-morrow.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The files of the Sun, 1833–1918.

“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.

“The Art of Newspaper Making,” by Charles A. Dana. D. Appleton & Co., 1895.

“Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press for Thirty Years,” by Augustus Maverick. A. S. Hale & Co., Hartford, Conn., 1870.

“First Blows of the Civil War,” by James S. Pike. American News Co., 1879.

“Ordered to China; Letters of Wilbur J. Chamberlin.” Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1903.

“The Making of a Journalist,” by Julian Ralph. Harper & Bros., 1903.

“Mr. Dana of the Sun,” by Edward P. Mitchell. McClure’s Magazine, October, 1894.

“The New York Sun,” by Will Irwin. American Magazine, January, 1909.

“The Men Who Make the New York Sun,” by E. J. Edwards. Munsey’s Magazine, October, 1893.

CHRONOLOGY

1833.—The Sun is founded by Benjamin H. Day, September 3.

1835.—Its home is changed from 222 William street to 156 Nassau street, August 3.

1835.—The Moon Hoax appears, August 25.

1838.—Moses Yale Beach becomes proprietor, June 28.

1842.—The Sun moves to the southwest corner of Fulton and Nassau streets, July.

1844.—Poe’s Balloon Hoax appears, April 3.

1845.—M. Y. Beach takes his sons, Moses S. and Alfred E., as partners, October 22.

1848.—Moses Yale Beach retires, December 4.

1852.—Alfred Ely Beach retires, April 6.

1860.—Moses S. Beach lets the Sun to a religious group, August 6.

1861.—The Sun returns to the management of M. S. Beach, January 1.

1864.—The price is raised to two cents, August 1.

1868.—Charles A. Dana becomes the editor and manager of the Sun, January 25.

1868.—The Sun moves to 170 Nassau street, January 25.

1875.—Edward P. Mitchell joins the editorial staff, October 1.

1897.—Death of Charles A. Dana, October 17.

1902.—William M. Laffan’s proprietorship is announced, February 22.

1903.—Edward P. Mitchell becomes the editor of the Sun, July 20.

1909.—Death of William M. Laffan, November 19.

1911.—William C. Reick becomes proprietor, December 17.

1915.—The Sun moves to 150 Nassau street, July 11.

1916.—Frank A. Munsey becomes proprietor, June 30.

1916.—With the Sun is amalgamated the New York Press, July 3.

1916.—The price is reduced to one cent, July 3.

1918.—The price again becomes two cents, January 26.

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
Beach, 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
persistence 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
in 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

Curtis, 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
death 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
starts 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

Gould, 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
“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
starts 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
defines 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

New 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
correspondent 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
Sam 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
plant, 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
first 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

Whitman, 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

THE THIRD HEAD-LINE OF THE NEW YORK SUN

THE FOURTH HEAD-LINE OF THE NEW YORK SUN

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.

The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.

Page 139: Words appear to be missing from the paragraph beginning “When Beach was twenty.”

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE SUN: NEW YORK, 1833-1918 ***

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Table of Contents

- 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