The men of 1893 probably agreed that there was no staff like the staff of 1868, just as the men of 1942 may gaze with proud regret at the staff list of 1917. Distance, like pay-day, lends enchantment; and newspaper history is a little more hazy than most other kinds of history, because the men who write what happens to other people have no time to set down what happens to themselves.
The anonymity of the Sun reporter has been almost complete. If Julian Ralph had never gone into the field of books and magazines, he would have been as little known to the general public as the Sun’s best reporter is to-day; but newspapermen would not have undervalued him. There is better quality in the things he wrote hastily and anonymously for the Sun than in some of the eight or nine published volumes that bear his name, and the reason for this is that he was primarily a newspaperman.
ARTHUR BRISBANE
He entered the game at fifteen, as an apprentice in the office of the Red Bank (New Jersey) Standard. At seventeen he was a city editor and a writer of humour. At eighteen he had founded the Red Bank Leader—a failure. At nineteen he was one of the editors of the Webster (Massachusetts) Times, and at twenty he was a reporter on the New York Graphic. At twenty-two he was on the Sun, where he remained from 1875 to 1893.
Ralph was a news man who lacked none of the large reportorial qualities. He enjoyed seeing new places and new people. He liked to hunt news—an instinct missing in some good writers who fail to be great reporters. He liked to write—a taste found too seldom among men who write well, and too frequently among the graphomaniacs who fancy that everything is worth writing, and that perfection lies in an infinite number of words.
Some one said of Ralph that he “could write five thousand words about a cobblestone.” If he had done that, it would have been an interesting cobblestone. He had a passion for detail, but it was not the lifeless and wearisome detail of the realistic novelist. When he wrote half a column about a horse eating a woman’s hat, the reader became well acquainted with the horse, the woman, and the crowd that had looked on.
Ralph was untiring in mind, legs, and fingers. He liked the big one-man news story, such as an inauguration or a parade, or the general introduction of a national convention. His quiet, easy style, his ability to cover an event of many hours and much territory, were shown to good advantage in his description of the funeral of General Grant in August, 1885. He wrote it all—a full front page of small type—in about seven hours, and with a pencil. It began:
There have not often been gathered in one place so many men whose names have been household words, and whose lives have been inwoven with the history of a grave crisis in a great nation’s life, as met yesterday in this city. The scene was before General Grant’s tomb in Riverside Park; the space was less than goes to half an ordinary city block, and the names of the actors were William T. Sherman, Joe Johnston, Phil Sheridan, Simon B. Buckner, John A. Logan, W. S. Hancock, Fitz John Porter, Chester A. Arthur, Thomas A. Hendricks, John Sherman, Fitzhugh Lee, John B. Gordon, David D. Porter, Thomas F. Bayard, John L. Worden, and a dozen others naturally linked in the mind with these greater men. Among them, like children amid gray-heads, or shadows beside monuments, were other men more newly famous, and famous only for deeds of peace in times of quiet and plenty—a President, an ex-President, Governors, mayors, and millionaires. And all were paying homage to the greatest figure of their time, whose mortal remains they pressed around with bared, bowed heads.
That was the beginning of a story of about eleven thousand words, all written by Ralph in one evening. It told everything that was worth reading about the burial—the weather, the crowded line of march, the people from out of town, the women fainting at the curbs, the uniforms and peculiarities of the Union and Confederate heroes who rode in the funeral train; told everything from eight o’clock in the morning, when the sightseers began to gather, until the bugler blew taps and the regiments fired their salute volleys. It was a story typical of Ralph, who saw everything, remembered everything, wrote everything. In detail it is unlikely that any reporter of to-day could surpass it. In dramatic quality it has been excelled by half a dozen Sun reporters, including Ralph himself.