Among the most celebrated of modern journalists was James Gordon Bennett, the founder of the New York “Herald” newspaper. A native of Scotland and a Roman Catholic in religion, he was educated for the priesthood, but whether, like John Randolph of Roanoke, he perceived that he had “too much spice of ‘old Nick’” in his composition for the sacred calling, or on other account, he did not take orders, but emigrated to America instead. After various fortune—generally misfortune—embracing teaching, translating, and associate-editorship, he embarked upon the “Herald” enterprise in 1835. It was not until some years afterwards, however, that this journal acquired any considerable reputation outside the city of New York, and inaugurated those news enterprises which made it so celebrated and a not unfaithful chronicler of the passing events of the whole world. During the era of “special correspondence” the “Herald” maintained an extensive corps of writers in Europe and other foreign countries, who ever gave to the paper great interest and value.
Meantime, other young men, since distinguished, had been educating themselves as journalists, and, like Bennett, through various fortune. Among them was Horace Greeley, who established the first penny daily paper ever published in the world, but its foundations soon gave way. In 1841 the “Tribune” was established, and Mr. Bennett discovered in the great and varied abilities of Mr. Greeley and Henry J. Raymond, assistant editor, rivals whom no assaults could repress, and whose influence soon began to be felt and acknowledged throughout the country. The warfare long waged between these journalistic giants was always sharp, often fierce. The intense rivalry greatly augmented the enterprise of the printing offices which at length became vast establishments, employing thousands of men, from the greatest intellects of the age to the ragged urchins on the street, and receiving and disbursing vast sums of money.
The invention of the telegraph added immensely to the scope and power of the daily press. Greatly increasing its expenditures, it also greatly augmented its circulation and profits. Its demand for brain-labor became perfectly prodigious, and it almost monopolized the genius of the land. In the city of New York there were established within a very few years after Morse’s invention had begun regularly to click the news of the day no less than four morning journals of acknowledged reputation throughout the world, and which upon certain memorable occasions of current intelligence have contained in their combined columns nearly as great an amount of reading matter as the whole of Bancroft’s history of the United States.[1] The average quantity of these journals’ reading matter, of interest to the general public, is equivalent, every day, to from three to five volumes of Bancroft’s distinguished work.
[1] As I write this, I take a copy of the Chicago “Tribune” of the day, and find, by actual calculation, that it contains reading matter, exclusive of advertisements, equivalent to more than 350 pages of Bancroft. Among this matter is a profoundly thoughtful speech by Horace Greeley, delivered hundreds of miles distant the night before.
Other cities of the republic have been little if any behind the commercial and financial metropolis, excepting only the city of Washington whose most successful journalism of the old school has given way at last till quite recently to a series of wretched failures.
Editorials of a journal published in the largest city of our Lake country, which was a straggling hamlet when Dr. Livingstone first went to Africa, have been known to make the proudest speculators of Wall street tremble, and powerful corporations to abandon long-conceived schemes of injustice. In an exhaustive article on the United States census of 1860, the New York “Tribune” said of the public press:
“The very great increase in the circulation of newspapers and periodicals during the last ten years is an evidence at once of a high degree of popular intelligence and of a high standard of journalistic ability. There is no doubt that this country has the best, and the best sustained public press in the world—the best, we mean, for the people and not merely the learned few. Newspapers penetrate to every part of the country, reach even the most obscure hamlet, and find their way to almost every household. Printing offices go with the vanguard of civilization toward the west, and in the ‘new country’ are about as numerous as the mills. The dailies of the great cities cannot be carried by the government mails; they have created, during the decade, an entirely new line of business, supporting thousands of families; on issues fairly joined they have defeated many of the most maturely considered measures of Congressional Committees.”
Having given the statistics in regard to the number and circulation of the periodicals and papers of the country at the time under examination, the article goes on to say:
“The total number of daily papers thrown from the press during the year is about half that of all the other papers and periodicals combined. Supposing each one to weigh an ounce, the weight of the whole number of daily papers printed in the United States during the year of the census was 28,644,678 pounds avoirdupois—enough to load 14,322 wagons with a ton each, or to make a train of them seventy miles in length. Were all the papers and periodicals printed in 1860 placed in such a train, it would reach from New York to Richmond. Should they be pasted into one vast sheet, they would make a covering for the continent, and leave a remnant large enough to shut out the sun from the British Islands.
“But, not to dwell upon the mere material aspect of the Public Press of America, it will suffice to say that if its records shall be preserved the historian of two thousand years hence who shall narrate the events which are now taking place, will find upon their dingy pages his best authorities and his most trustworthy sources of philosophical generalization. Not all that is left of Grecian literature, not all the grand works of the fine old Romans, give so correct a picture of the great peoples of antiquity as the daily papers of America are now taking of a people far greater than that whose phalanges swept down the barbarians from the Hellespont to the Indus, or than that ‘the tramp of whose legions echoed round the world.’”