“Son,” said Mr. Lord, “you are a great man!”
That was the Lord phrase of acquittal.
One of the big occurrences in the investigation of the life-insurance companies in 1905 was a report which was read to the investigating committee in executive session. Every newspaper yearned for the contents of the document. After the committee adjourned, a member of it whispered to a Sun reporter:
“There is a bundle of those reports just inside the door of the committee room. I should think that five dollars given to a scrub-woman would probably get a copy for you.”
The Sun man, knowing the value of the report, and not content to act on his own estimate of Sun ethics, telephoned the temptation to the city editor, Mr. Mallon.
“A Sun man who would do that would lose his job,” was the instant decision.
A couple of days after Stephen Tyng Mather, recently First Assistant Secretary of the Interior, went on the Sun as a reporter, the city editor, Mr. Bogart, called him to his desk.
“Mr. Mather,” said Bogart, “an admirer of the Sun has sent me a turkey. Of course, I cannot accept it. Please take it to his house in Harlem and explain why; but don’t hurt his feelings.”
Mather had just come from college, where he had never learned that the ethics of journalism might require a reporter to become a deliverer of poultry, but he took the turkey. It does not detract from the moral of the story to say that Mather and another young reporter, neither quite understanding the Sun’s stern code, took the bird to the Fellowcraft Club and had it roasted—a fact of which Mr. Bogart may have been unaware until now.
The best news-handler that journalism has seen, Selah Merrill Clarke, was night city editor of the Sun for thirty-one years. He came to the paper in 1881 from the New York World, where he had been employed as a reporter, and later as a desk man. In the early seventies he wrote for the World a story of a suicide, and one of the newspapers of that day said of it that neither Dickens nor Wilkie Collins, with all the time they could ask, could have surpassed it. His story of the milkman’s ride down the valley of the Mill River, warning the inhabitants that the dam had broken at the Ashfield reservoir, near Northampton, Massachusetts (May 16, 1874), was another classic that attracted the attention of editors, including Dana.