“The Sun is a damned good paper, but you don’t make it.”
That statement undoubtedly pleased the editor of the Sun, for it was evidence from an expert that he had carried his theory to success. He had set men free to write what they saw, as they saw it, in their own way. It was the Sun way, and that was what he wanted. As Dana himself handed down this heritage of literary freedom in his editorial page to Mitchell, so he gave to the men on the news pages, through Amos Cummings and Chester S. Lord and their successors, the right to watch with open eyes the world pass by, and to describe that parade in a different way three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
CHAPTER XIII
DANA’S FAMOUS RIVALS PASS
The Deaths of Raymond, Bennett, and Greeley Leave Him the Dominant Figure of the American Newspaper Field.—Dana’s Dream of a Paper Without Advertisements.
Four years after he became the master of the Sun, and a quarter of a century before death took him from it, Dana found himself the Nestor of metropolitan journalism. Of the three other great New York editors of Dana’s time—three who had founded their own papers and lived with those papers until the wing of Azrael shut out the roar of the presses—Raymond had been the first, and the youngest, to go; for his end came when he was only forty-nine, eighteen years after the establishment of his Times.
Bennett, the inscrutable monarch of the Herald, died in 1872, three years after Raymond, but Bennett, who did not establish the Herald until he was forty, had owned it, and had given every waking hour to its welfare, for thirty-seven years. The year of Bennett’s death saw the passing of the unfortunate Greeley, broken in body and mind from his fatuous chase of public office, within three weeks of his defeat for the presidency. As the sprightly young editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Colonel Henry Watterson, wrote in his paper in January, 1873:
Mr. Bryant being no longer actively engaged in newspaper work, Mr. Dana is left alone to tell the tale of old-time journalism in New York. He, of all his fellow editors of the great metropolis, has passed the period of middle age; though—years apart—he is as blithe and nimble as the youngest of them, and has performed, with the Sun, a feat in modern newspaper practice that entitles him to the stag-horns laid down at his death by James Gordon Bennett. Mr. Dana is no less a writer and scholar than an editor; as witness his sketch of Mr. Greeley, which for thorough character-drawing is unsurpassed. In a word, Mr. Dana at fifty-three is as vigorous, sinewy, and live as a young buck of thirty-five or forty.
His professional associates were boys when he was managing editor of the Tribune. Manton Marble was at college at Rochester, and Whitelaw Reid was going to school in Ohio. Young Bennett and Bundy were wearing short jackets.
They were rough-and-tumble days, sure enough, even for New York. There was no Central Park. Madison Square was “out of town.” Franconi’s Circus, surnamed a “hippodrome,” sprawled its ugly wooden towers, minarets, and sideshows over the ground now occupied by the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Miss Flora McFlimsy of the opposite square had not come into being; nay, Madison Square itself existed in a city ordinance merely, and, like the original of Mr. Praed’s Darnell Park, was a wretched waste of common, where the boys skated and played shinny.