The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 by Frank Michael O'Brien - HTML preview

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:

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:

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.