In such brief biographies of Cummings as have been printed you will find that he is best remembered in the outer world as a managing editor, or as the editor of the Evening Sun, or as a Representative in Congress fighting for the rights of Civil War veterans, printers’ unions, and letter-carriers; but among the oldest generation of newspapermen he is revered as a great reporter. He was the first real human-interest reporter. He knew the news value of the steer loose in the streets, the lost child in the police station, the Italian murder that was really a case of vendetta. The Sun men of his time followed his lead, and a few of them, like Julian Ralph, outdid him, but he was the pioneer; and a thousand Sun men since then have kept, or tried to keep, on the Cummings trail.
It was Cummings who sent men to cover the police stations at night and made it possible for the Sun to beat the news association on the trivial items which were the delight of the reader, and which helped, among other things, to shoot the paper’s daily circulation to one hundred thousand in the third year of the Dana ownership.
The years when Cummings was managing editor of the Sun were years stuffed with news. Even a newspaperman without imagination would have found plenty of happenings at hand. The Franco-Prussian War, the gold conspiracy that ended in Black Friday (September 24, 1869), the Orange riot (July 12, 1871), the great Chicago fire, the killing of Fisk by Stokes, Tweedism—what more could a newspaperman wish in so brief a period? And, of course, always there were murders. There were so many mysterious murders in the Sun that a suspicious person might have harboured the thought that Cummings went out after his day’s work was done and committed them for art’s sake.
When men and women stopped killing, Cummings would turn to politics. Tweed was the great man then; under suspicion, even before 1870, but a great man, particularly among his own. The Sun printed pages about Tweed and his satellites and the great balls of the Americus Club, their politico-social organisation. It described the jewels worn by the leaders of Tammany Hall, including the two-thousand-dollar club badge—the head of a tiger with eyes of ruby and three large diamonds shining above them.
Everybody who wanted the political news read the Sun. As Jim Fisk remarked one evening as he stood proudly with Jay Gould in the lobby of the Grand Opera House—proud of his notoriety in connection with the Erie Railroad jobbery, proud of the infamy he enjoyed from the fact that he owned two houses in the same block in West Twenty-third Street, housing his wife in one and Josie Mansfield in the other; proud of his guilty partnership in Tweedism—
“The Sun’s a lively paper. I can never wait for daylight for a copy. I have my man down there with a horse every morning, and just as soon as he gets a Sun hot from the press he jumps on the back of that horse and puts for me as if all hell was after him.
“Gould’s the same way; he has to see it before daylight, too. My man has to bring him up a copy. You always get the news ahead of everybody else. Why, the first news I got that Gould and me were blackballed in the Blossom Club we got from the Sun. I’m damned if I’d believe it at first, and Gould says, ‘What is this Blossom Club?’ Just then Sweeny came in. I asked Sweeny if it was true, and Sweeny said yes, that Tweed was the man that done it all. There it was in the Sun, straight’s a die.”
The Sun reporter who chronicled this—it may have been Cummings himself—had gone to ask Fisk whether he and his friends had hired a thug to black-jack the respectable Mr. Dorman B. Eaton, a foe of the Erie outfit; but he took down and printed Fisk’s tribute to the Sun’s enterprise. As there was scarcely a morning in those days when the Sun did not turn up some new trick played by the Tweed gang and the Erie group, their anxiety to get an early copy was natural.
Tweed and his philanthropic pretences did not deceive the Sun. On February 24, 1870—a year and a half before the exposure which sent the boss to prison—the Sun printed an editorial article announcing that Tweed was willing to surrender his ownership of the city upon the following terms:
