We ask those under whose eyes the Sun does not shine from day to day—our Sun, we mean; this large and well-printed one-cent newspaper—to look it over and say whether it is not one of the wonders of the age. Does it not contain the elements of all that is valuable in a diurnal sheet? Where is more effort or enterprise expended for so small a return?
Of this effort and enterprise we feel proud; and a circulation of over fifty thousand copies of our sheet every day among at least five times that number of readers, together with the largest cash advertising patronage on this continent, convinces us that our pride is widely shared.
The Sun that Ben Day had turned over to Moses Y. Beach was no longer recognizable. Fifteen years had wrought many changes from the time when the young Yankee printer launched his venture on the tide of chance. The steamship, the railroad, and the telegraph had made over American journalism. The police-court items, the little local scandals, the animal stories—all the trifles upon which Day had made his way to prosperity—were now being shoved aside to make room for the quick, hot news that came in from many quarters. The Sun still strove for the patronage of the People, with a capital P, but it had educated them away from the elementary.
The elder Beach was enterprising, but never rash. He made the Sun a better business proposition than ever it was under Day. Ben Day carried a journalistic sword at his belt; Beach, a pen over his ear. Perhaps Day could not have brought the Sun up to a circulation of fifty thousand and a money value of a quarter of a million dollars; but, on the other hand, it is unlikely that Beach could ever have started the Sun.
Once it was started, and once he had seen how it was run, the task of keeping it going was fairly easy for him. He was a good publisher. Not content with getting out the Sun proper, he established the Weekly Sun, issued on Saturdays, and intended for country circulation, at one dollar a year. In 1848 he got out the American Sun, at twelve shillings a year, which was shipped abroad for the use of Europeans who cared to read of our rude American doings. Another venture of Beach’s was the Illustrated Sun and Monthly Literary Journal, a sixteen-page magazine full of woodcuts.
Mr. Beach had for sale at the Sun office all the latest novels in cheap editions. He wrote a little book himself—“The Wealth of New York: A Table of the Wealth of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City Who Are Estimated to Be Worth One Hundred Thousand Dollars or Over, with Brief Biographical Notices.” It sold for twenty-five cents.
Perhaps Beach was the father of the newspaper syndicate. In December, 1841, when the Sun received President Tyler’s message to Congress by special messenger, he had extra editions of one sheet printed for twenty other newspapers, using the same type for the body of the issue, and changing only the title-head. In this way such papers as the Vermont Chronicle, the Albany Advertiser, the Troy Whig, the Salem Gazette, and the Boston Times were able to give the whole text of the message to their readers without the delay and expense of setting it in type.
Here is Dana’s own estimate of the second proprietor of the Sun:
Moses Y. Beach was a business man and a newspaper manager rather than what we now understand as a journalist—that is to say, one who is both a writer and a practical conductor and director of a newspaper. Mr. Beach was a man noted for enterprise in the collection of news. In the latter days when he owned and managed the Sun in New York, the telegraph was only established between Washington and Boston, though toward the end of his career it was extended, if I am not mistaken, as far towards the South as Montgomery in Alabama. The news from Europe was then brought to Halifax by steamers, just as the news from Mexico was brought to New Orleans. Mr. Beach’s energy found a successful field in establishing expresses brought by messengers on horseback from Halifax to Boston and from New Orleans to Montgomery, thus bringing the news of Europe and the news of the Mexican War to New York much earlier than they could have arrived by the ordinary public conveyance. With him were associated, sooner or later, two or three of the other New York papers; but the energy with which he carried through the undertaking made him a conspicuous and distinguished figure in the journalism of the city. The final result was the organization of the New York Associated Press, which has now become a world-embracing establishment for the collection of news of every description, which it furnishes to its members in this city and to other newspapers in every part of the country. Under the stimulus of Mr. Beach’s energetic intellect, aided by the cheapness of its price, the Sun became in his hands an important and profitable establishment. Yet he is scarcely to be classed among the prominent journalists of his day.
Through conservatism, good business sense, and steady work, Moses Y. Beach amassed from the Sun what was then a handsome fortune, and when he retired he was only forty-eight. His last years were spent at the town of his birth, Wallingford, where he died on July 19, 1868, six months after the Sun had passed out of the hands of a Beach and into the hands of a Dana.