No king, no clown, to rule this town!
That line, born in the Sun’s editorial page, will live as long as Shakespeare. In eight words it embodied the protest of New York against the arrogance and stupidity of machine political rule. Ten thousand times, at least, it has been credited to Dana, but as a matter of fact it was written by W. O. Bartlett.
Bartlett was one of those great newspaper writers whose fate—or choice—it is never to own a newspaper and never to attract public attention through the writing of signed articles or books. Writing was not primarily his profession, and by the older men of New York who remember him he is recalled as a brilliant lawyer rather than as a writer. He met Dana through Secretary Stanton, and he was the Sun’s attorney soon after Dana and his friends bought the paper. His law-offices were in the Sun Building, directly below Mr. Dana’s own offices. There, and also at the Hoffman House, where he lived when he was not on his estate at Brookhaven, Long Island, Mr. Bartlett wrote his articles for the Sun.
Bartlett was a writer of the school of simplicity. His style of reducing a proposition to its most elementary form, so that it was clear to even the Class B intellect, was the admiration and envy of all who knew his articles. It was an inspiration, too, to many young newspapermen of his day.
The manner of Mr. Arthur Brisbane of the Evening Journal, luring the reader into a sociological dissertation by first inquiring whether he knows “Why a Flea Jumps So Far,” is the Bartlett manner, with such modifications as are necessary to reach the attention of a group intellectually somewhat different from Bartlett’s readers. Only Bartlett did not spend too much time on the flea. Of the three men whose articles have most distinguished the first column of the Sun’s editorial page, each has had his own weapon when leading to attack. Dana struck with a sword. Mitchell used—and uses—the rapier. Bartlett swung the mace. It was jewelled with the gems of language, but still it was a mace; and if it crushed the skull of the enemy at the first blow, so much the better. It was Bartlett, for instance, who wrote the article in which the Democratic candidate for President in 1880, General Hancock, was referred to as “a good man, weighing two hundred and forty pounds.”
W. O. Bartlett wrote for the Sun from 1868 until his death in 1881. He was the foremost figure in the group of older men around Dana—the men who had been prominent in political and literary life before the Civil War. Other notable men of middle age who were chosen by Mr. Dana to write editorial articles were James S. Pike, Fitz-Henry Warren, Henry B. Stanton, and John Swinton.
James Shepherd Pike’s articles appeared more frequently in the columns of the Sun than Pike himself appeared in the office, for most of his work was done in Washington. He was about eight years older than Mr. Dana, but they were great friends from the earliest days of Dana’s Tribune experience. For five years, beginning in 1855, Pike was a Washington correspondent and one of the associate editors of the Tribune. During the Civil War he was United States minister to the Netherlands, a reward for his services in his home State, Maine, where he was useful in uniting the anti-slavery forces. He was a brother of Frederick A. Pike, a war-time Representative from Maine, whose “Tax, fight, emancipate!” was the Republican watchword from its utterance in 1861.
Pike was one of the group that supported Greeley for the Presidency in 1872. He was one of the really great publicists of his day. He wrote “The Restoration of the Currency,” “The Financial Crisis,” “Horace Greeley in 1872,” “A Prostrate State”—which was a description of the Reconstruction era in South Carolina—and “The First Blows of the Civil War,” this last a volume of reminiscent correspondence, some newspaper, some personal. The friendship and literary association of Pike and Dana lasted more than thirty years, and ended only with Pike’s death in 1882, just after he had passed threescore and ten.
Fitz-Henry Warren, who has been already referred to in this narrative as the author of the Tribune’s cry, “On to Richmond!” wrote many editorial articles for Dana, who had conceived a great admiration for Warren when both were in the service of the Tribune, Dana as managing editor and Warren as head of the Washington bureau. Warren emerged from the Civil War not only a major-general, but a powerful politician, and it was not until several years later, after he had served in the Iowa Senate and as minister to Guatemala, that Dana was able to bring the pen of this transplanted New Englander to the office of the Sun. Once there, it did splendid work.
It is not easy to identify the editorials that appeared in the Sun under the Dana régime; not so much because of the lapse of years, but because the spirit of Dana so permeated everything that was printed on his page that it is difficult to say with certainty, “This Dana wrote, this Bartlett, this Mitchell, this Warren, and this Pike.” But, for the purpose of giving some small idea of the grace and magnificence of Warren’s style, here is a paragraph from an editorial article known to have been written by him on the death of Charles Sumner in March, 1874: