II
While Bryant was in Europe, while the Evening Post in the spring of 1835 was beginning its abrupt plunge toward financial disaster, there occurred the simultaneous birth of the New York Herald and a new journalism. Its immediate effect upon the Post was small; its effect in the long run upon all newspapers was profound. It was to not only a half-wrecked Evening Post, but to revolutionized journalistic conditions, that Bryant returned from Heidelberg.
When Bryant and Leggett had taken full charge of the Evening Post in 1829, the New York newspapers were a quarrelsome group of sixpenny dailies, some political, some commercial, and in their news features all slow, dull, and half-filled by modern standards. The best-known morning journal was the Courier and Enquirer, of which the editor and after a year the sole proprietor was James Watson Webb, a rich, hot-tempered, exceedingly handsome young man of twenty-seven, as mercurial as any Southerner, with a native taste for fighting which had been developed by his West Point education and some years in the army. Webb knew the use of the sword, pistol, and cane decidedly better than that of the pen. The Evening Post well characterized him as “a fussy, blustering, quarrelsome fellow.” He repeatedly assaulted fellow-editors in the street; he repeatedly journeyed to Washington or Albany to tweak somebody’s nose or exchange shots; and while our envoy to Brazil he wanted to kill the British Minister there. When in the early thirties Congressman Cilley of Maine charged him with taking a bribe, and refused to accept Webb’s challenge on the ground that the latter was no gentleman, the impetuous editor persuaded his second to challenge and kill Cilley. Ten years later Webb provoked Congressman Thomas F. Marshall, of Kentucky, by coarse attacks, into fighting a duel, and was sentenced to two years in the State prison. Greeley and many others of note signed a petition for a pardon, which Bryant indignantly opposed, but Gov. Seward granted it.
Chief among the Courier’s morning rivals was the Journal of Commerce, founded in 1827 as an advocate of the introduction of religion into business affairs, which went into the hands of David Hale and Gerard Hallock after the abolitionist silk merchant, Tappan, gave it up. It refused to advertise theaters and other amusement-places, and was considered a little fanatical, but it showed extraordinary enterprise for that day in news-gathering. In 1828 it stationed a swift craft off Sandy Hook to intercept incoming ships and bring the first European news up the harbor, and it subsequently arranged a relay of fast horses from Philadelphia to bring the Congressional debates a day in advance of its competitors. Webb followed the example, extending the pony relay to Washington, and spending from $15,000 to $20,000 a year on his clipper boats. Some episodes of this rivalry are amusing. After the fall of Warsaw in the Polish war, the Courier and Enquirer, to punish its competitors for news-stealing, printed a small edition denying—upon the strength of dispatches by the ship Ajax—the reported fall, and saw that copies reached the doorstep of all morning journals. There was no such arrival as the Ajax. Several newspapers reprinted the bogus news without credit, the Journal of Commerce doing so in its country but not its city edition; and great was the Courier’s sarcastic glee.
Though Webb was too explosive, too dissipated, and too slender in ability to be a great editor, he had the money to obtain able lieutenants. One was the Jewish journalist M. M. Noah, who had edited the National Advocate in Coleman’s day, and written patriotic dramas. In 1825, conceiving that the time had come for the “restoration of the Jews,” Noah had appeared at Grand Island, near Buffalo, in the insignia of one of the Hebrew monarchs, and dedicated it as the future Jerusalem and capital of the Jewish nation, calling it Ararat in honor of the original Noah. Disillusioned in this project, Noah bought a share in the Courier in 1831, and in 1832 resigned it. Another worker on the Courier was Charles King; James K. Paulding contributed; and in the forties it obtained Henry J. Raymond’s services. But the most notable of its writers when the year 1829 ended was a smart young Scotchman named James Gordon Bennett, who, after knocking about from Boston to Charleston in various employments—he had even essayed to open a commercial school in New York—had made a shining success in 1828 as Washington correspondent for Webb.
Bennett, at this time highly studious, had examined in the Congressional Library one day a copy of Horace Walpole’s letters, and at once began to imitate them in his correspondence, making it lively, full of gossip, and even vulgarly frank in descriptions of men of the day. Some Washington ladies were said to be indebted to Bennett’s glowing pen-pictures for their husbands. He was active in other capacities for the journal—he reported the White-Crowinshield murder trial in Salem, Mass., wrote editorials, squibs, and amusing articles of sorts; and Webb showed how fundamentally lacking he was in editorial discernment when he never let Bennett receive more than $12 a week. In 1832 the homely, thrifty youngster from Banffshire left the Courier.
Others among the eleven dailies were the Commercial Advertiser, the Daily Advertiser, and the Star, the last-named being the Post’s closest rival in evening circulation. Much attention was attracted to the Daily Advertiser in 1835 by the Washington letters of Erastus Brooks, a young man who wrote as brightly as Bennett but more soberly. The following year he and his brother James founded the Express, also a sixpenny paper, which succeeded against heavy obstacles. Compared with London, the New York field was overcrowded, and no journal had many subscribers; the Courier was vastly proud when it printed 3,500 copies a day. Newspapers were sold over the counter at the place of publication, and at a few hotels and coffeehouses, but not on the streets; the first employment of newsboys excited indignation, and was denounced as leading them into vice. Advertising rates continued ridiculously small. The Evening Post and its contemporaries still made the time-honored charge of $40, with a subscription thrown in, for indefinite space; the first insertion of a “square,” 8 to 16 lines, cost seventy-five cents, the second and third twenty-five, and later insertions eighteen and three-fourths cents. When the daily advertising of the Courier (apart from yearly insertions) reached $55, that sum was thought remarkable.
The harbinger of the new journalism was Benjamin H. Day, a former compositor for the Evening Post, who in September, 1833, began issuing the first penny newspaper with sufficient strength to survive, the Sun. The idea of this innovation came from London, which had possessed its Illustrated Penny Magazine since 1830, sold in huge quantities in New York and other American cities; Bryant had often praised it as an instrument for educating the poor. The Sun began with a circulation of 300, which it rapidly increased, until after the publication of the famous “moon hoax” in 1835 it boasted the largest circulation in the world; three years later it distributed 38,000 copies daily. Not until the Civil War did it raise its price above one cent, and it continued to be read by the poor almost exclusively. It was not a political force, for it voiced no energetic editorial opinions, nor was it a better purveyor of intelligence than its neighbors. It showed no more enterprise in news-collecting, its correspondence was inferior, and its appeal, apart from its cheapness and special features, lay in its great volume of help-wanted advertisements.
The new journalism therefore had its real beginning when, on May 6, 1835, in a cellar in Wall Street—not a basement, but a cellar—Bennett established the Herald. He had fifteen years’ experience, five hundred dollars, two chairs, and a dry-goods box. It also was a penny paper. But its distinction rested upon the fact that it embodied four original ideas in journalism. The first, and most important, was the necessity of a thorough search for all the news. The second was that fixed principles are dangerous, and that it is most profitable to be on the winning side. Bennett felt with Hosea Biglow that
A merciful Providence fashioned us hollow
In order thet we might our princerples swallow.
The third was the value of editorial audacity—that is, of impudence, mockery, and Mephistophelian persiflage—for Bennett had seen in Boston that the saucy, indecorous Galaxy had been universally abused, and universally read. The fourth idea embodied in the Herald was the value of audacity in the news; of unconventionality, vulgarity, and sensationalism.
Above all, Bennett gave New York city the news, with a comprehensiveness, promptness, and accuracy till then undreamed of. At first, compelled by poverty to do all the work himself, and unable to hire his first reporter for more than three months, he found the task hard. But within five weeks (June 13) he began publishing a daily financial article, something that Bryant, Col. Stone, Webb, and Hallock had not thought of, although thousands were just as keenly interested in the exchange then as now. From one to four every business afternoon, having labored in his cellar since five in the morning, Bennett was making the rounds of the business offices, collecting stock-tables and gossip. Local intelligence began to be thoroughly gathered. Incomparably the best reports of the great fire of December, 1835, are to be found in the Herald. He was the first editor to open a bureau of foreign correspondence in Europe, something that Bryant might well have done. He soon went the Courier and Journal of Commerce one better by keeping his clipper off Montauk Point, and running a special train the length of Long Island with the European newspapers. A Herald reporter, notebook in hand, began to be seen in precincts which had never known a journalist. In 1839 Bennett made bold to report the proceedings of church sects at their annual meetings, and though the denominational officers were at first indignant, they became mollified when they saw their names in print. Important trials were for the first time followed in detail, and important public speeches reproduced in their entirety. The interview was invented.
This “picture of the world” was served up with a sauce. Bennett had no reverence and no taste. He announced his own forthcoming marriage in 1840 in appalling headlines: “To the Readers of the Herald—Declaration of Love—Caught at Last—Going to be Married—New Movement in Civilization.” The Herald was not a year old before it was ridiculing republican institutions, and in shocking terms assailing the Catholic Church, the Pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. When the Erie Railroad began its infamous early career, Bryant attacked the schemes of the speculators with great effect, and helped stop the first effort of the promoters to sack the State treasury. The Herald’s comment was brief and characteristic: “The New York and Erie Railroad is to break ground in a few days. We hope they will break nothing else.” James Parton quotes one of Bennett’s impudent paragraphs as representative. “Great trouble among the Presbyterians just now. The question in dispute is, whether or not a man can do anything toward saving his own soul.” In even the few and brief book-notices this tone was maintained. Reviewing an Annual Register which told him that there were 1,492 rogues in the State Prison, Bennett added: “And God only knows how many out of prison, preying upon the community, in the shape of gamblers, blacklegs, speculators, and politicians.”
By the prominence it gave to crimes of violence, divorces, and seduction, and by its bold personal gossip, the Herald fully earned the name of a “sensation journal.” Most of the other newspapers, the magazines, and the Catholic and Protestant pulpits, denounced it roundly. The Evening Post did not mention it by name, but in 1839 condemned “the nauseous practice which some of our journals have imitated from the London press of adopting a light and profligate tone in the daily reports of instances of crime, depravity, and intemperance which fall under the eye of our municipal police, making them the subject of elaborate witticisms, and spicing them with gross allusions.” The Herald’s cynical contempt for consistent principles increased the dislike with which it was viewed. In general it was Hunker Democratic, and built up a large Southern following, but it supported Harrison in 1840 and Taylor in 1848. The English traveler, Edward Dicey, said that it had but two standing rules, one to support the existing Administration, the other to attack the land of Bennett’s birth. Dicey found that as late as Civil War times Bennett was barred from society, and that when he went to stay at a watering place near New York, the other guests at the hotel told the landlord that he must choose between the editor’s patronage and their own—and Bennett left.
But upon Bennett’s success was largely founded that of other great morning newspapers of the next decades. “It would be worth my while, sir, to give a million dollars,” said Henry J. Raymond, “if the devil would come and tell me every evening, as he does Bennett, what the people of New York would like to read about next morning.” The Sun was given new life when it passed into the hands of Moses Y. Beach in 1838. Greeley, with a capital of $1,000, founded the Tribune in April, 1841, to meet the need for a penny paper of Whig allegiance. The sixpenny journals, the Evening Post, Commercial Advertiser, Courier, Journal of Commerce, and Express, perforce learned much from the Herald about news-gathering. Years later the Evening Post described the new spirit of enterprise which had seized upon journalism by the early forties:
In those days expresses were run on election nights, and in times of great excitement the Herald and Tribune raced locomotive engines against each other in order to get the earliest news; on one occasion, we remember, the sharp reporter engaged for the Tribune “appropriating” an engine which was waiting, under steam, for the use of the opposition agent, and so beating the Herald at its own game.... Nor was the competition confined to enterprises like these. For want of the boundless facilities now afforded by the organized enterprises of the newspaper offices, there were curious experiments in unexpected directions; type was set on board of North River steamboats by corps of printers, who had a speech ready for the press in New York soon after its delivery in Albany; carrier pigeons, carefully trained, flew from Halifax or Boston with the latest news from Europe tucked under their wings, and delivered their charge to their trainer in his room near Wall Street; an adventurous person, known at the time by the mysterious title of “the man in the glazed cap,” made a voyage across the Atlantic in a common pilot boat twenty years ago, secretly and with only three or four companions, in the interest of two or three journals which determined to “beat” the others in their arrangements for obtaining early news from abroad.
Charles H. Levermore twenty years ago expressed regret in the American Historical Review that the revolution in journalism had been wrought by the unprincipled Bennett, and not by a man of such education, taste, and high-mindedness as Bryant, whose name would assure the standards of his newspaper. The best journalist and worst editor in the country, Parton called Bennett, deploring the fact that during the Civil War neither the Times, Tribune nor World could reduce the “bad, good Herald,” which Lincoln read, to a second rank. Parke Godwin, writing upon Bennett’s death in 1872 in the Evening Post, refused him the title of a great journalist even, stating that he was a great news-vender. “What he said from day to day was said merely to produce a sensation, to raise a laugh, or to confirm a vulgar prejudice; and so far as he had any influence at all as a writer, it was one that debased and corrupted the community in which his paper was read. He did more to vulgarize the tone of the press in this country than any man ever before connected with it; and the worst caricatures that the genius of Balzac, Dickens, and Thackeray has given us of the low, slang-whanging, dissolute, and unprincipled Bohemian, of the Lousteaus, Jefferson Bricks, and Capt. Shandons of the journalistic profession, fail to depict what Bennett actually was.” But his journal was read as no other had been. Men concealed it when they saw a friend approaching it, but they bought it and examined every column.
Bryant had neither the necessary inclinations nor aptitudes to accomplish such a revolution. When he started home from Germany he left his family there, meaning soon to return. Upon learning how straitened was the condition of the Evening Post, he became temporarily disheartened. Within two months he wrote Dana that he earnestly hoped that “the day will come when I may retire without danger of starving, and give myself to occupations that I like better.” Near the end of the year he informed his brother John in Illinois that he thought of removing thither with $3,000-$5,000 for a new home. The best journalist is not made from a man who is thus lukewarm in his work. Moreover, even had Bryant thrown himself heart and soul into his calling, his literary tastes, his retiring temper, his keen sense of dignity, his fame as a poet, would have prevented his breaking new ground as Bennett did. He had no equal before Greeley, and no superior later, in writing editorials, and he made the intellectual influence of the Evening Post one of the strongest in the nation. He was a great editor. But he could not have gone down into the busy ‘Change with his pencil as Bennett did; he could not have attended meetings, visited theaters, and mingled with common men in offices and on street corners, with Bennett’s constancy of purpose.
The Evening Post had as much news as some sixpenny rivals, but it sadly needed the Herald’s stimulus. Its reports of the great fire of 1835 were partly original, partly taken from the Express. When the Astor House was opened the following summer, an exciting event, it clipped its report from the Daily Advertiser—and even the latter had but one meager paragraph. Probably the most striking instance of its deficiency occurred in December, 1829, the month that Chancellor Lansing disappeared from the city streets—the greatest mystery of the kind in New York political history. The Post’s only account was left by Lansing’s friends:
Notice.—On Saturday evening, the 12th instant, Chancellor Lansing, of Albany, arrived in this city, and put up at the City Hotel; he breakfasted and dined there. Shortly after dinner he retired to his room and wrote for a short time, and about the hour that the persons intending to go to Albany usually leave the Hotel, he was observed to leave his room. He has not been seen or heard of since that time. He left his trunk, cane, etc., in his room. His friends in this city have heard this morning from Albany that he has not returned home.
It is supposed that he had written a letter to Albany and that he had intended to put it on board the steamboat that left here for that place at five o’clock that afternoon. He had made an engagement to take tea at six o’clock that evening with Mr. Robert Ray, of this city, who resides at No. 29 Marketfield Street.
He was dressed in black, and wore powder in his hair. He was a man of a large and muscular frame of body, and about five feet nine inches in height. He was upwards of seventy-six years of age. He was in good health, and has never been known to have been affected by any mental aberration. Any intelligence concerning him will be most gratefully acknowledged by his afflicted friends and family, if left for them, at the bar of the City Hotel.
No effort whatever was made to push an inquiry into this mystery, which a generation later would have made the press ring for weeks.