Bennett may have written the constitution of popular journalism, but it was Day who wrote its declaration of independence. If it had not been for the untrained Day, fifteen years younger than Bennett, it is possible that there would have been no Herald to span nearly a century under the ownership of father and son; and the two James Gordon Bennetts not only owned but absolutely were the Herald from May 10, 1835, when the father started the paper, until May 14, 1918, when the son died.
It had been said of Bennett that he discovered that “a paper universally denounced will be read.” Day learned that much a year before the Herald was started. Day was sensational, and he seemed to court the written assaults of the sixpenny editors. Bennett also sought abuse, and did not care when it brought physical pain with it. He was still more sensational than Day. If there was nothing else, his own personal affairs were made the public’s property. He was about to marry, so the Herald printed this:
TO THE READERS OF THE HERALD—Declaration of Love—Caught at Last—Going to be Married—New Movement in Civilization.
My ardent desire has been through life to reach the highest order of human excellence by the shortest possible cut. Association, night and day, in sickness and in health, in war and in peace, with a woman of the highest order of excellence must produce some curious results in my heart and feelings, and these results the future will develop in due time in the columns of the Herald. Meantime I return my heartfelt thanks for the enthusiastic patronage of the public, both of Europe and of America. The holy estate of wedlock will only increase my desire to be still more useful. God Almighty bless you all—JAMES GORDON BENNETT.
James Parton described Bennett as “a man of French intellect and Scotch habits.” Bennett was not of Scottish blood, his parents being of French descent, but his youth in Scotland, where he was born, probably impregnated him with the thrift of his environment. He established the no-credit system in the Herald business office. Probably he had observed that Colonel Webb had lost a fortune in unpaid subscriptions and advertisements.
Bennett was a good business man and an energetic editor. He used all the ideas that Day had proved profitable, and many of his own. Perhaps the most valuable thing he learned from Day was that it was unwise to be a slave to a political party. But his own experience with the luckless Pennsylvanian, a Jackson organ, may have convinced him of the futility of the strictly partisan papers, which neglected the news for the sake of the office-holders.
Day’s success with the Sun was responsible for the birth, not only of the Herald, but of a host of American penny papers, which were established at the rate of a dozen a year. Of the New York imitators the Jeffersonian, published by Childs & Devoe, and the Man, owned by George H. Evans, an Englishman who was the Henry George of his day, were not long for this world. The Transcript, started in 1834, flashed up for a time as a dangerous rival of the Sun. Three compositors, William J. Stanley, Willoughby Lynde, and Billings Hayward, owned it. Its editor was Asa Greene, erstwhile physician and bookseller and always humorist. He wrote “The Adventures of Dr. Dodimus Duckworth,” “The Perils of Pearl Street,” and “The Travels of Ex-Barber Fribbleton in America”—this last a travesty on the books of travel turned out by Englishmen who visited the States.
William H. Attree, a former compositor, wrote the Transcript’s lively police-court stories, the Sun’s rival having learned how popular was crime. The Transcript lasted five years, the earlier of them so prosperous that the proprietors thought they were going to be millionaires. But Reporter Attree went to Texas with the land-boomers, and Lynde, who wrote the paragraphs, died. When the paper failed, in 1839, Hayward went to the Herald, where he worked as a compositor all the rest of his life.
The other penny papers that sprang up in New York to give battle—while the money lasted—to the Sun, the Transcript, and the Herald, were the True Sun, started by some of Day’s discharged employees; the Morning Star, run by Major Noah, of the Evening Star; the New Era, already mentioned, which Richard Adams Locke started in 1836 in company with Jared D. Bell and Joseph Price; the Daily Whig, of which Horace Greeley was Albany correspondent in 1838; the Bee, the Serpent, the Light, the Express, the Union, the Rough Hewer, the News Times, the Examiner, the Morning Chronicle, the Evening Chronicle, the Daily Conservative, the Censor, and the Daily News. All these bobbed up, in one city alone, in the five years during which Ben Day owned the Sun.
Most of them were mushrooms in origin and morning-glories by nature. They could not stand the Sun’s rays.