“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.
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 pe
