If comment were needed, it would be that the Sun reporter in the court-room at New Bedford had the advantage of describing a protagonist who, by her sex and by the very mystery that was left unsolved at her acquittal, was a far more dramatic figure than Stokes or the police lieutenant. The climaxes quoted are useful as an illustration of the advance of reporting from 1873, when the Sun style was still forming, to 1893 and 1914, when it was fully formed; not as a comparison between what may not have been the best work of the reporter of the Stokes trial, Henry Mann, and the stories by Julian Ralph, who saw Lizzie Borden fall, and Edwin C. Hill, who wrote the Becker article.
The Sun omitted the weary introductions that had been the fashion in newspapers—leading paragraphs which told over again what was in the head-lines and were merely a prelude to a third and detailed telling. The Sun reporter began at the beginning, thus:
The Hon. John Kelly, wearing a small bouquet in the lapel of his coat, stepped out of his coach in front of Cardinal McCloskey’s residence in Madison Avenue just before eight o’clock yesterday morning. A few minutes later three other coaches arrived, and their occupants entered the house. Many of the neighbors knew that a niece of the cardinal was to be married to Mr. Kelly, and they strained their eyes through plate-glass windows in the hope that they might see the bride and the groom. Cardinal McCloskey, having been apprized of the arrival of the wedding-party, went to the chapel in the other part of the house, and at about a quarter past eight, the time fixed for the mass pro sponsis, the marriage ceremony was begun.
In the longer and more important stories, the rule was adhered to as closely as possible. Prolixity, fine writing, and hysteria were taboo. Mark the calmness with which the Sun reporter began his story of the most sensational crime of the late seventies:
Two little mounds of red-colored earth around a small hole in the ground, and a few feet of downtrodden grass, were all that marked the last resting-place of Alexander T. Stewart yesterday morning. In the dead of the night robbers had dug into the earth above the vault, removed one of the stones that covered it, and stolen the body of the dead millionaire.
The human lights of life were caught by the Sun men and transferred to every page of every issue. In 1878 a Sun reporter was sent to Menlo Park, New Jersey, to see how a young inventor there, who had just announced the possibility of an incandescent electric light, worked:
Here Mr. Edison dropped his cigar-stump from his mouth, and, turning to Griffin, asked for some chewing-tobacco. The private secretary drew open his drawer and passed out a yellow cake as large as a dinner-plate. The professor tore away a chew, saying:
“I am partly indebted to the Sun for this tobacco. It printed an article saying that I chewed poor tobacco. That was so. The Lorillards saw the article and sent me down a box of the best plug that ever went into a man’s mouth. All the workmen have used it, and Grif says there is a marked moral improvement in the men. It seems, however, to have the opposite effect on Grif. You see that he has salted away the last cake for his own use.”
Nearly forty years later Sun reporters still went to see Mr. Edison borrow white magic from nature and chewing-tobacco from his employees, and to describe both interesting processes.
With Dana’s knowledge of what people wanted to read was mixed a curiosity, sometimes frankly expressed in the Sun, as to just why they wanted to read some things a great deal more than other things. It must be remembered that even in the seventies and eighties not everybody read a newspaper every day; some reserved their pennies and their eyes for great climaxes. The Sun, a paper which paid much attention to political matters, naturally found its circulation sharply affected by important political happenings. It sold ninety-four thousand extra copies on the morning after the Tilden-Hayes election—two hundred and twenty-two thousand copies, in all, being disposed of before eight o’clock in the morning. In 1875, when the pugilist, John Morrissey, who was supported by the Sun for the State Senate because he was anti-Tammany, defeated Fox, the Sun sold forty-nine thousand extra copies on the day after the election.