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 f