No waste of words, no nonsense, plain, outspoken expressions of honest opinion, the abolishment of the conventional measures of news importance, the substitution of the absolute standard of real interest to human beings, bright and enjoyable writing, wit, philosophical good humor, intolerance of humbug, hard hitting from the shoulder on proper occasions—do we not see all these qualities now in our esteemed contemporaries on every side of us, and in every part of the land?
By this time Dana had framed a newspaper organisation more nearly perfect than any other in America. Grouping about him men suited to the Sun, to himself, and to one another, he had created a literary world of his own—a seeing, thinking, writing world of keen objective vision. Men of a hundred various minds, each with his own style, his own ambition, his own manner of life, the Sun staff focused their abilities into the one flood of light that came out every morning. It was a bohemia of brightness, not of beer; unconventional in its manner of seeing and writing, but not in its collars or its way of living. The Sun spirit, unquenchable then as now, burned in every corner of the shabby old rooms. It was the spirit of unselfish devotion, not so much to Dana or his likable lieutenants as to the invisible god of a machine in which each man was a pinion, meshing smoothly with his neighbour.
That these pinions did mesh without friction was due, in largest part, to Dana’s intuitive faculty of choosing men who would “fit in” rather than men who could merely write. It was by his choosing that the Sun came to have for its editorial page writers like W. O. Bartlett and E. P. Mitchell, M. W. Hazeltine and N. L. Thiéblin, Henry B. Stanton and John Swinton, James S. Pike and Fitz-Henry Warren, Paul Dana and Thomas Hitchcock, Francis P. Church and E. M. Kingsbury. It was by his choosing that the Sun had managing editors like Amos J. Cummings and Chester S. Lord, city editors like John B. Bogart and Daniel F. Kellogg, and night city editors like Henry W. Odion, Ambrose W. Lyman, and S. M. Clarke.
Managing editors and city editors hired men, hundreds of them, but always according to the Dana plan—first find the man, then find the work for him. Chester S. Lord, who took more men on the Sun than any other of its executives, was fully familiar with the Dana method when he began, in 1880, a career as managing editor that lasted for thirty-two years of brilliant achievement; and he followed it until he retired. He had been on the Sun since 1872, shortly after he came out of Hamilton College, and he had served as a reporter, as editor of suburban news, as assistant night city editor under Lyman, and as assistant managing editor in the brief period when Ballard Smith succeeded Cummings and Young as chief of the Sun’s news department.
At the beginning of his service as managing editor Lord found himself with a staff which included Bogart, Dr. Wood, Stillman, Odion, E. M. Rewey, Garrett P. Serviss, and Cyrus C. Adams, all trained desk men and most of them good reporters as well; and such first-class reporters and correspondents as Julian Ralph, S. S. Carvalho, Willis Holly, and E. J. Edwards. To these, by the time the Sun reached its half-century mark, had been added the great night city editor Clarke and reporters like John R. Spears and Arthur Brisbane. Other great newspapermen were soon to join the army of Mr. Lord in that long campaign of which the editor of the Sun said, on the occasion of Mr. Lord’s retirement:
Every night of his ten thousand nights of service has been a Trafalgar or a Waterloo. He has fought ten thousand battles against the world, the flesh, and the devil; the woman applicant, the refractory citizen, the liar at the other end of the wire, and the ten thousand demons which make up the great army of nervous prostration.
CHAPTER XVI
“SUN” REPORTERS AND THEIR WORK
Cummings, Ralph, W. J. Chamberlin, Brisbane, Riggs, Dieuaide, Spears, O. K. Davis, Irwin, Adams, Denison, Wood, O’Malley, Hill, Cronyn.—Spanish War Work.
There is an unconventional club which has no home except on the one night each year when it holds a dinner in a New York hotel. Its members are men who have been writers on the Sun, and who, though they have left the paper, love it. They meet for no purpose except to toast the Sun of their day and this. They call themselves the Sun Alumni.