Joseph Pulitzer, then newly come from the West, was assigned by Dana to cover the proceedings of the Electoral Commission in semieditorial style. Pulitzer was later, in 1878, a European correspondent of the Sun.
CHAPTER XV
“THE SUN” AND “HUMAN INTEREST”
Something About Everything, for Everybody.—A Wonderful Four-Page Paper.—A Comparison of the Styles of “Sun” Reporters in Three Periods Twenty Years Apart.
The political scandals made good reading, but the Sun was not content to feed its readers on investigations. It put a little bit of everything on their breakfast-plates—the Moody and Sankey revivals, Mr. Keely’s motor, which didn’t work, and young Edison’s multiple telegraph, which did; the baseball games of the days when Spalding pitched for Boston and Anson and Reach were at first and second base, respectively, for the Philadelphia Athletics; the presentation of a cup to John Cable Heenan, the prize-fighter, as the handsomest and best-dressed man at the ball of the Shandley Association; an interview with Joaquin Miller on Longfellow; the wiggles of the sea-serpent off Swampscott; a ghost-story from Long Island, with a beautiful spook lashed to the rigging of a spectral bark; the arrival of New York’s first Chinese laundryman; Father Tom Burke’s lectures on Ireland; the lectures of Tyndall on newly-discovered phenomena of light; the billiard-matches between Cyrille Dion and Maurice Daly; a tar-and-feathers party in Brooklyn—the Sun skimmed the pan of life and served the cream for two cents.
The familiar three-story head-line, which was first used by the Sun on the day of Grant’s inauguration, and which stayed the same until long after Mr. Dana’s death, attracted readers with the magic of the head-writers’ art. “The Skull in the Chimney,” “Shaved by a Lady Barber,” “A Man Hanged by Women,” “Burned Alive for $5,000,” “The Murder in the Well,” “Death Leap in a Theatre,” “An Aged Sinner Hanged,” “The Duel in the Bedroom,” “Horrors of a Madhouse,” “A Life for a Love-Letter”—none could glance at the compelling titles of the Sun stories without remaining to read. They are still fascinating in an age when lady barbers would attract no attention.
A typical Sun of 1874 might contain, in its four pages, six columns about the Beecher-Tilton case; four columns of editorial articles; a letter from Eli Perkins (Melville DeLancey Landon) at Saratoga, declaring that the spa was standing still commercially because of its lack of good drinking-water; a column, also from Saratoga, describing the defeat of Preakness by Springbok; the latest in the strange case of Charley Ross; a column headed “Life in the Metropolis—Dashes Here and There by the Sun’s Reporters”; a column of “Sunbeams,” a column about trout-fishing, two columns of general news, and five columns of advertisements.
Instead of Eli Perkins’s letter, there might be a critique by Leopold Damrosch, from Baireuth, of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” just presented; or a dissection, by “Monsieur X,” of E. A. Sothern’s Dundreary. “Monsieur X” was Napoleon Leon Thiéblin, who was for years one of the Sun’s most distinguished critics and essayists. He was that kind of newspaperman who could—and did—write on Saturday of the political news of Bismarck and on Sunday of the crowd at Coney Island.
Thiéblin, who was of French blood, was born in St. Petersburg in 1834. He was graduated at the Russian Imperial Academy of Artillery, and commanded forty pieces of cannon at the siege of Sebastopol. At the close of the Crimean War he went to London and became a member of the staff of the Pall Mall Gazette, reporting for that journal the French side of the war with Germany in 1870–71, and the atrocities of the Commune, over the pen-name of “Azamet Batuk.” He reported the Carlist War in Spain for the New York Herald, and then came to America to lecture, but Dana persuaded him to join the Sun staff. He contributed to the Sun many articles on foreign affairs, including a series on European journalism; “The Stranger’s Note-Book,” which was made up of New York sketches; letters from the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia; and the Wall Street letters signed “Rigolo.”
In the “Sunbeams” column were crowded the vagrant wit and wisdom of the world. The items concerned everything from great men in European chancelleries to organ-grinders in Nassau Street: