The Sun newspaper has probably done more to benefit the community by enlightening the minds of the common people than all the other papers together.
Day found New York journalism a pot of cold, stale water, and left it a boiling caldron; not so much by what he wrote as by the way in which he made his success. There were better newspapermen than Day before and during his time, plenty of them. They had knowledge and experience, they knew style, but they did not know the people. In their imagination the “gentle reader” was a male between the ages of thirty-five and ninety, with a burning interest in politics, and a fancy that the universe revolved around either Andrew Jackson or Daniel Webster. Why write for any one who did not have fixed notions on the subject of the United States Bank or Abolition?
To the mind of the sixpenny editor, the man who did not have six cents to spend was a negligible quantity. Nothing was worth printing unless it carried an appeal to the professional man or the merchant.
The Courier and Enquirer, under Colonel Webb, belched broadsides of old-fashioned Democratic doctrine, and Webb hired the best men he could find to load the guns. He had Bennett, Noah, James K. Paulding, and, later, Charles King and Henry J. Raymond. These were all good writers, most of them good newspapermen; but so far as the general public was concerned, Colonel Webb might as well have put them in a cage.
The Journal of Commerce was a great sixpenny, but it was not for the people to read. From 1828 until the Civil War its editor was Gerard Hallock, an enterprising journalist who ran expensive horse-expresses to Washington to get the proceedings of Congress, but would not admit that the public at large was more interested in a description of the murdered Helen Jewett’s gowns than in a new currency bill. The clipper-ships that lay off Sandy Hook to get the latest foreign news from the European vessels cost Hallock and Webb, who combined in this enterprise, twenty thousand dollars a year—probably more than they spent on all their local news.
In the solemn sanctum of the Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant and William Leggett wrote scholarly verse and free-trade editorials. They were live men, but their newspaper steed was slow. Leggett could urge Bryant to give a beating to Stone, the editor of the Commercial Advertiser, and he himself fought a duel with Blake, the treasurer of the Park Theatre; but these great men had little steam when it came to making a popular newspaper. The great editors were of a cult. They revolved around one another, too far aloft for the common eye.
Charles King was the most conservative of them all. He was a son of Rufus King, Senator from New York and minister to England, and he was editor of the American, an evening sixpenny, from 1827 to 1845. He lacked nothing in scholarship, but his paper was miserably dull, and rarely circulated more than a thousand copies. He remained at his editorial desk for four years after the American was absorbed by the Courier and Enquirer, and then he became president of Columbia College, a place better suited to him.
Such were the men who ruled the staid, prosy, and expensive newspapers of New York when Day and his penny Sun popped up. Most of them are better known to fame than Day is, but not one of them did anything comparable to the young printer’s achievement in making a popular, low-priced daily newspaper—and not only making it, but making it stick. For Day started something that went rolling on, increasing in size and weight until it controlled the thought of the continent. Day was the Columbus, the Sun was the egg. Anybody could do the trick—after Day showed how simple it was.
Bennett and his Herald were the first to profit by the example of the young Yankee printer. It should have been easy for Bennett, yet he had already failed at the same undertaking. He was at work in the newspaper field of New York as early as 1824, nine years before Day started the Sun. He failed as proprietor of the Sunday Courier (1825), and he failed again with the Philadelphia Pennsylvanian. He had a wealth of experience as assistant to Webb and as the Washington correspondent of the Enquirer.
It was no doubt due to the success of the Sun that Bennett, after two failures, established the Herald. He saw the human note that Ben Day had struck, and he knew, as a comparatively old newspaperman—he was forty when he started the Herald—what mistakes Day was making in the neglect of certain news fields, such as Wall Street. But the value of the penny paper Day had already proved, and Day had established, ahead of everybody else, the newsboy system, by which the man in the street could get a paper whenever he liked without making a yearly investment.