That was the beginning of the end of Brook Farm and of Dana’s secluded life. He went to work on the Boston Daily Chronotype for five dollars a week. It was a Congregational paper, owned and edited by Elizur Wright. When Wright was absent, Dana acted as editor, and on one of these occasions he caused the Chronotype to come out so “mighty strong against hell,” that Mr. Wright declared, years afterward, that he had to write a personal letter to every Congregational minister in Massachusetts, explaining that the apparent heresy was due to his having left the paper in the charge of “a young man without journalistic experience.”
In February, 1847, Dana went to New York, and Horace Greeley made him city editor of the Tribune at ten dollars a week. Later in that year Dana insisted on an increase of salary, and Greeley agreed to pay him fourteen dollars a week—a dollar less than his own stipend; but in consideration of this huge advance Dana was obliged to give all his talents to the Tribune.
Dana still nursed his desire to see Europe, but he had given up the idea of teaching in a German university. Newspaper work had captured him. Germany was still attractive, but now as a place of news, for the rumblings against the rule of Metternich were being heard in central Europe. And in France there was a sweep of socialism, a subject which still held the idealistic Dana, and the beginning of the revolution in Paris (February 24, 1848).
Dana told Greeley of his European ambition, but Greeley threw cold water on it, saying that Dana—not yet thirty—knew nothing about foreign politics. Dana asked how much the Tribune would pay for a letter a week if he went abroad “on his own,” and Greeley offered ten dollars, which Dana accepted. He made a similar agreement with the New York Commercial Advertiser and the Philadelphia North American, and contracted to send letters to the Harbinger and the Chronotype for five dollars a week.
“That gave me forty dollars a week for five letters,” said Dana afterward; “and when the Chronotype went up, I still had thirty-five dollars. On this I lived in Europe nearly eight months, saw plenty of revolutions, supported myself there and my family in New York, and came home only sixty-three dollars out for the whole trip.” Not a bad outcome for what was probably the first correspondence syndicate ever attempted.
The trip did wonders for Dana. He saw the foreign “improvers of mankind” in action, more violent than visionary; saw theory dashed against the rocks of reality. He came back a wiser and better newspaperman, with a knowledge of European conditions and men that served him well all his life. There is seen in some of his descriptions the fine simplicity of style that was later to make the Sun the most human newspaper.
Social experiments still interested Dana after his return to New York in the spring of 1849, but he was able to take a clearer view of their practicability than he had been in the Brook Farm days. He still favoured association and cooperation, and every sane effort toward the amelioration of human misery, but he now knew that there was no direct road to the millennium.
Once home, however, and settled, not only as managing editor, but as a holder of five shares of stock in the Tribune, Dana was kept busy with things other than socialistic theories. Slavery and the tariff were the overshadowing issues of the day.
Greeley was the great man of the Tribune office, but Dana, in the present-day language of Park Row, was the live wire almost from the day of his return from Europe. When Greeley went abroad, Dana took charge. Greeley now drew fifty dollars a week; Dana got twenty-five, Bayard Taylor twenty, George Ripley fifteen. Dana’s five shares of stock netted him about two thousand dollars a year in addition to his salary.
Here is a part of a letter which Dana wrote in 1852 to James S. Pike, the Washington correspondent of the Tribune: