From this time forth it may be truthfully said that Dana was the Sun, and the Sun Dana. He was the sole arbiter of its policy, and it was his constant practice to supervise every editorial contribution that came in while he was on duty. The editorial page was absolutely his, whether he wrote a line in it or not, and he gave it the characteristic compactness of form and directness of statement which were ever afterward its distinguishing features.

Dana was a man whose natural intellectual gifts had been augmented by his travels, his experience on the Tribune, his exploits in the war, and his association with the big men of his time. Add to all this his solid financial backing and his acquirement of a paper with a large circulation, and the combination seemed an assurance of success. Yet, had Dana lacked the peculiarly human qualities that were his, the indefinable newspaper instinct that knows when a tom-cat on the steps of the City Hall is more important than a crisis in the Balkans, the Sun would have set.

Only genius could enable a lofty-minded Republican, with a Republican aristocracy behind him, to take over the Sun and make a hundred thousand mechanics and tradesmen, nearly all Democrats, like their paper better than ever before. And that is what Dana did, except that he added to the Sun’s former readers a new army of admirers, recruited by the magic of his pen.

CHAPTER X
DANA: HIS “SUN” AND ITS CITY

The Period of the Great Personal Journalists.—Dana’s Avoidance of Rules and Musty Newspaper Conventions.—His Choice of Men and His Broad Definition of News.

When Dana came into control of the Sun, the city of New York, which then included only Manhattan and the Bronx, had less than a million population, yet it supported, or was asked to support, almost as many newspapers as it has to-day. That was the day of the great personal editor. Bennett had his Herald, with James Gordon Bennett, Jr., as his chief helper. Horace Greeley was known throughout America as the editor of the Tribune. Henry J. Raymond was at the head of the Times. Manton Marble—who died in England in 1917—was the intellectual chief of the highly intellectual World.

The greatest Republican politician of that day, Thurlow Weed, was the editor of the Commercial Advertiser. He had just changed his political throne from the Astor House to the comparatively new Fifth Avenue Hotel. Weed was seventy-one years old, but not the Nestor of New York editors, for William Cullen Bryant was three years his senior and still the active editor of the Evening Post. The Evening Express, later to be incorporated with the Mail, was ruled by the brothers Brooks, James as editor-in-chief and Erastus as manager. David M. Stone ran the Journal of Commerce. Ben Wood owned the only penny paper in town—the Evening News. Marcus M. Pomeroy, better known as Brick Pomeroy, had just started his sensational sheet, the Democrat, on the strength of the reputation he had won in the West as editor of the La Crosse Democrat. Later he changed the title of the Democrat to Pomeroy’s Advance Thought.

These were the men who assailed or defended the methods of the reconstruction of the South; who stood up for President Johnson, or cried for his impeachment; who supported the Presidential ambitions of Grant, then the looming figure in national politics, or decried the elevation of one whose fame had been exclusively military; who hammered at the wicked gates of Tammany Hall, or tried to excuse its methods.

Tweed had not yet committed his magnificent atrocities of loot, but he was practically the boss of the city, at the same time a State Senator and the street commissioner. John Kelly, then forty-six—two years the senior of the boss—was sheriff of New York. Richard Croker, who was to succeed Kelly as Kelly succeeded Tweed at the head of the wigwam, was then a stocky youth of twenty-five, engineer of a fire-department steamer and the leader of the militant youth of Fourth Avenue. He was already actively concerned in politics, allied with the Young Democracy that was rising against Tweed. In the year when Dana took the Sun, Croker was elected an alderman.