The part the Sun played in this recreating and rejuvenating of the American press was purely literary. It was the first newspaper to make fiction out of facts—that is, to handle facts with the skill and manner of the novelist, so that they read like fiction and possessed all its charm and fascination. The Sun at that time consisted of but four pages, and I am convinced that it was the best example of newspaper-making ever produced anywhere. With the exception of one or two of these fiction-fact stories so charmingly told, it was the perfection of condensation, accuracy, brilliancy.
Mr. Munsey did not say, because it was not germane to his subject, that for fourteen years before the advent of Pulitzer, Dana had been demonstrating the news value of the human-interest story, and that it was almost entirely upon the human-interest story, twisted and exaggerated, that yellow journalism was founded. Mr. Munsey did not say, for he could not know, that fifteen years after his address at Yale the new journalism would be extinct and the Sun would be still the Sun. The editors of to-day do not ask a reporter whether he can climb a porch or photograph an unwilling person, but whether he can see news and write it.
An adequate history of the Sun’s political activities during Dana’s time would fill volumes. Rather than the editor of an organ of the opposition, Dana was usually an opposition party in himself; not merely for the sake of opposition, but because the parties in power from 1869 to 1897 usually happened to have practices or principles with which he, as the editor of the Sun, was in disagreement. His attacks on the Grant administration for the thievery that spotted it, and on the Hayes administration because of the circumstances under which Mr. Hayes came to the Presidential chair, were bitter and without relent. His opposition to Grover Cleveland, an intellectual rather than a personal war, began before Mr. Cleveland was a national figure. In September, 1882, when the hitherto obscure Buffalonian was nominated for Governor of New York, the Sun said:
It is usually not a wise thing in politics, any more than in war, to take a private from the ranks and at one bound to promote him to be commander-in-chief; yet that is what has been done in the case of Grover Cleveland.
In the Presidential campaign of 1884 the Sun would not support Cleveland and could not support Blaine, whose conduct in Congress the Sun had frequently condemned; so it advocated the hopeless cause of General Benjamin F. Butler, who had been elected Governor of Massachusetts in 1882, the year when Cleveland was chosen Governor of New York. Dana was not an admirer of Butler’s spectacular army career, or of his general political leanings, but he admired him for his attitude in the Hayes-Tilden scandal, and he believed that Butler, if elected President, would shake things up in Washington. The Sun supported him “as a man to be immensely preferred to either of the others and as a protest against such nominations.” Dana personally announced that sooner than support Blaine he would quit work and burn his pen.
In 1885, opposing Cleveland’s free-trade policy, the Sun vigorously supported Samuel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania, a protectionist Democrat, for speaker of the House, as against John G. Carlisle, of Kentucky, a free-trader; but Randall was beaten.
The Sun ridiculed Cleveland’s theories of civil-service reform, although it believed that real reforms were needed. On this point Dana wrote, in a letter:
I do not believe in the establishment in this country of the German bureaucratic system, with its permanent staff of office-holders who are not responsible to the people, and whose tenure of place knows no variation and no end except the end of life. In my judgment a genuine reform of the evils complained of is reached by the vigorous simplification of the machinery of government, by the repeal of all superfluous laws, the abolition of every needless office, and the dismissal of every needless officer. The true American doctrine on this subject consists in the diminution of government, not in its increase.
For all of its opposition to Cleveland, whom it dubbed the “stuffed prophet,” the Sun preferred him to General Harrison in the campaign of 1888. It feared a return to power of the influences which it had combated during the administrations of Grant and Hayes. Four years afterward, however, the Sun was strongly against the third nomination of Cleveland.
In Mr. Cleveland’s second term the Sun supported his course when Dana believed it to be American. While at first it considered the President too mild and conciliatory in matters of foreign policy, it praised him and his Secretary of State, Richard Olney, for their stand against Great Britain in the Venezuela boundary dispute; praised them just as heartily as it had condemned Mr. Cleveland’s earlier action in the Hawaiian matter, when the President withdrew the treaty of annexation which his predecessor had sent to the Senate.