If the daily circulation of the Sun be not larger than that of the Times and Courier both, then may we be hung up by the ears and flogged to death with a rattle-snake’s skin.
The Sun took no risk in this. By November of 1834 its circulation was above ten thousand. On December 3 it published the President’s message in full and circulated fifteen thousand copies. At the beginning of 1835 it announced a new press—a Napier, built by R. Hoe & Co.—new type, and a bigger paper, circulating twenty thousand. The print paper was to cost four-fifths of a cent a copy, but the Sun was getting lots of advertising. With the increase in size, that New Year’s Day, the Sun adopted the motto, “It Shines for All.” which it is still using to-day. This motto doubtless was suggested by the sign of the famous Rising Sun Tavern, or Howard’s Inn, which then stood at the junction of Bedford and Jamaica turnpikes, in East New York. The sign, which was in front of the tavern as early as 1776, was supported on posts near the road and bore a rude picture of a rising sun and the motto which Day adopted.
In the same month—January, 1835—the bigger and better Sun printed its first real sports story. The sporting editor, who very likely was also the police reporter and perhaps Partner Wisner as well, heard that there was to be a fight in the fields near Hoboken between Williamson, of Philadelphia, and Phelan, of New York. He crossed the ferry, hired a saddle-horse in Hoboken, and galloped to the ringside. It was bare knuckles, London rules, and only thirty seconds’ interval between rounds:
At the end of three minutes Williamson fell. (Cheers and cries of “Fair Play!”) After breathing half a minute, they went at it again, and Phelan was knocked down. (Cheers and cries of “Give it to him!”) In three minutes more Williamson fell, and the adjoining woods echoed back the shouts of the spectators.
The match lasted seventy-two minutes and ended in the defeat of Williamson. The Sun’s report contained no sporting slang, and the reporter did not seem to like pugilism:
And this is what is called “sports of the ring!” We can cheerfully encourage foot-races or any other humane and reasonable amusement, but the Lord deliver us from the “ring.”
The following day the Sun denounced prize-fighting as “a European practice, better fitted for the morally and physically oppressed classes of London than the enlightened republican citizens of New York.”
As prosperity came, the news columns improved. The sensational was not the only pabulum fed to the reader. Beside the story of a duel between two midshipmen he would find a review of the Burr autobiography, just out. Gossip about Fanny Kemble’s quarrel with her father—the Sun was vexed with the actress because she said that New York audiences were made up of butchers—would appear next to a staid report of the doings of Congress. The attacks on Rum continued, and the Sun was quick to oppose the proposed “licensing of houses of prostitution and billiard-rooms.”
The success of Mr. Day’s paper was so great that every printer and newspaperman in New York longed to run a penny journal. On June 22, 1835, the paper’s name appeared at the head of the editorial column on Page 2 as The True Sun, although on the first page the bold head-line THE SUN, remained as usual. An editorial note said:
We have changed our inside head to True Sun for reasons which will hereafter be made known.