The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918

by Frank Michael O'Brien

The chairman did not put the resolution.

The number of Chamberlains and Chamberlins in the history of American journalism is enough to create confusion. The Sun alone had four at one time. They were Wilbur J. Chamberlin and his almost equally valued brother, Ernest O. Chamberlin, who later became managing editor of the Evening World; Henry Richardson Chamberlain, and Henry B. Chamberlin.

E. O. Chamberlin went on the Sun’s local staff while Wilbur was still engaged in small work in Jersey City. In the late eighties he was a colabourer with reporters like Daniel F. Kellogg, Edward G. Riggs, William McMurtrie Speer, Charles W. Tyler, Robert Sterling Yard, Samuel A. Wood, Paul Drane, and Willis Holly.

Henry Richardson Chamberlain, who was born in Peoria, Illinois, became a Sun reporter in May, 1889. He was then thirty years old, and had had twelve years’ experience in Boston and New York. In 1888 he had served as managing editor of the New York Press. He was particularly valuable to the Sun on the stories most easily obtained by reporters of wide acquaintance, such as business disasters. In 1891 he returned to Boston to become managing editor of the Boston Journal, but he was soon back on the Sun.

In 1892 he was sent to London as the Sun’s correspondent there, and it was at this post that he won his greatest distinction. He had a news eye that looked out over political Europe and an imagination that compelled him to concern himself as much with the future of the continent as with its past and present. The Balkans and their feuds interested him strongly, and he was forever writing of what might come from the complications between the little states through their own quarrels and through their tangled relations with the powers. It was the habit of some newspapermen, both in London and New York, to stick their tongues in their cheeks over “H. R. C.’s war-cloud articles.”

“H. R. is always seeing things,” was a common remark, even when the logic of what he had written was undeniable. There couldn’t be a general war in Europe, said his critics, kindly; it was impossible.

Besides having general supervision over the Sun’s European news, Chamberlain personally reported the Macedonian disturbances, the Panama Canal scandal in France, the Russian crisis of 1906, and the Messina earthquake. He was the author of many short stories and of one book, “Six Thousand Tons of Gold.” He died in London in 1911, while still in the service of the Sun; still believing in the impossibility of putting off forever the great war which so often rose in his visions.

Henry B. Chamberlin’s service on the Sun was briefer than that of the Chamberlin brothers or H. R. Chamberlain. He came to New York from Chicago, where he had been a reporter on the Herald, the Tribune, the Inter-Ocean, the Times, and the Record. After 1894, when he left the Sun, he was again with the Chicago Record, and in that paper’s service he saw the Santiago sea-fight from his boat—the only newspaper boat with the American squadron.

Nor must any of these Chamberlins and Chamberlains be confused with some of their distinguished contemporaries not of the Sun—Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, who was the Cuban correspondent of the New York Evening Post in 1898, and later an editorial writer on the New York Evening Mail and the Boston Transcript; Eugene Tyler Chamberlain, one-time editor of the Albany Argus; and Samuel Selwyn Chamberlain, son of the famous Ivory Chamberlain of the New York Herald, founder of the Matin of Paris, and at various times editor of the San Francisco Examiner and the New York American.

Edward G. Riggs, who left the Sun on February 1, 1913, to become a railroad executive, had been a Sun reporter and political correspondent for twenty-eight years. He joined the staff in 1885 as a Wall Street reporter. Though he never lost interest in the world of finance and its remarkable men, he soon gravitated toward politics. He became, indeed, the best-known writer of political news in America. He wrote at every national convention from 1888—when Ambrose W. Lyman, then the Washington correspondent of the Sun, was at the head of a staff that included Julian Ralph and E. O. Chamberlin—until 1912. In 1892 Ralph was in charge of the Sun’s national convention work, with Riggs as his first lieutenant; but Riggs was the Sun’s top-sawyer at the conventions of 1896, 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912.