The Bennett-Pry or quarrel had been a cause célèbre when John Young was night editor of the Philadelphia Press and I was one of its Washington correspondents. Nothing so virulent had ever passed between an editor and a Congressman. In one of his speeches Pryor had actually gone the length of rudely referring to Mrs. James Gordon Bennett.
The dinner was duly given. But it ended John’s connection with the Herald and his friendly relations with the owner of the Herald. The incident might be cited as among “The Curiosities of Journalism,” if ever a book with that title is written. John’s “break” was so bad that I never had the heart to ask him how he could have perpetrated it.
III
The making of an editor is a complex affair. Poets and painters are said to be born. Editors and orators are made. Many essential elements enter into the editorial fabrication; need to be concentrated upon and embodied by a single individual, and even, with these, environment is left to supply the opportunity and give the final touch.
Aptitude, as the first ingredient, goes without saying of every line of human endeavor. We have the authority of the adage for the belief that it is not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Yet have I known some unpromising tyros mature into very capable workmen.
The modern newspaper, as we know it, may be fairly said to have been the invention of James Gordon Bennett, the elder. Before him there were journals, not newspapers. When he died he had developed the news scheme in kind, though not in the degree that we see so elaborate and resplendent in New York and other of the leading centers of population. Mr. Bennett had led a vagrant and varied life when he started the Herald. He had been many things by turns, including a writer of verses and stories, but nothing very successful nor very long. At length he struck a central idea—a really great, original idea—the idea of printing the news of the day, comprising the History of Yesterday, fully and fairly, without fear or favor. He was followed by Greeley and Raymond—making a curious and very dissimilar triumvirate—and, at longer range, by Prentice and Forney, by Bowles and Dana, Storey, Medill and Halstead. All were marked men; Greeley a writer and propagandist; Raymond a writer, declaimer and politician; Prentice a wit and partisan; Dana a scholar and an organizer; Bowles a man both of letters and affairs. The others were men of all work, writing and fighting their way to the front, but possessing the “nose for news,” using the Bennett formula and rescript as the basis of their serious efforts, and never losing sight of it. Forney had been a printer. Medill and Storey were caught young by the lure of printer’s ink. Bowles was born and reared in the office of the Springfield Republican, founded by his father, and Halstead, a cross betwixt a pack horse and a race horse, was broken to harness before he was out of his teens.
Assuming journalism, equally with medicine and law, to be a profession, it is the only profession in which versatility is not a disadvantage. Specialism at the bar, or by the bedside, leads to perfection and attains results. The great doctor is the great surgeon or the great prescriptionist—he cannot be great in both—and the great lawyer is rarely great, if ever, as counselor and orator.
Henry Watterson—From a painting by Louis Mark in the Manhattan Club, New York