To Mr. Grady, more than to any other man, is due the development of the truck gardens and watermelon farms of southern and southwest Georgia. When he advised in the Constitution the planting of watermelons for shipment to the North, the proposition was hooted at by some of the rival editors, but he “boomed” the business, as the phrase is, and to-day the watermelon business is an established industry, and thousands of farmers are making money during what would otherwise be a dull season of the year. And so with hundreds of other things. His suggestions were always practicable, though they were sometimes so unique as to invite the criticism of the thoughtless, and they were always for the benefit of others—for the benefit of the people. How few men, even though they live to a ripe old age, leave behind them such a record of usefulness and unselfish devotion as that of this man, who died before his prime!
VII.
Mr. Grady’s editorial methods were as unique as all his other methods. They can be described, but they cannot be explained. He had an instinctive knowledge of news in its embryonic state; he seemed to know just where and when a sensation or a startling piece of information would develop itself, and he was always ready for it. Sometimes it seemed to grow and develop under his hands, and his insight and information were such that what appeared to be an ordinary news item would suddenly become, under his manipulation and interpretation, of the first importance. It was this faculty that enabled him to make the Constitution one of the leading journals of the country in its method of gathering and treating the news.
Mr. Grady was not as fond of the editorial page as might be supposed. Editorials were very well in their way—capital in an emergency—admirable when a nail was to be clinched, so to speak—but most important of all to his mind was the news and the treatment of it. The whirl of events was never too rapid for him. The most startling developments, the most unexpected happenings, always found him ready to deal with them instantly and in just the right way.
He magnified the office of reporting, and he had a great fancy for it himself. There are hundreds of instances where he voluntarily assumed the duties of a reporter after he became managing editor. A case in point is the work he did on the occasion of the Charleston earthquake. The morning after that catastrophe he was on his way to Charleston. He took a reporter with him, but he preferred to do most of the work. His graphic descriptions of the disaster in all its phases—his picturesque grouping of all the details—were the perfection of reporting, and were copied all over the country. The reporter who accompanied Mr. Grady had a wonderful tale to tell on his return. To the people of that desolate town, the young Georgian seemed to carry light and hope. Hundreds of citizens were encamped on the streets. Mr. Grady visited these camps, and his sympathetic humor brought a smile to many a sad face. He went from house to house, and from encampment to encampment, wrote two or three columns of telegraphic matter on his knee, went to his room in the hotel in the early hours of morning, fell on the bed with his clothes on, and in a moment was sound asleep. The reporter never knew the amount of work Mr. Grady had done until he saw it spread out in the columns of the Constitution. Working at high-pressure there was hardly a limit to the amount of copy Mr. Grady could produce in a given time, and it sometimes happened that he dictated an editorial to his stenographer while writing a news article.
He did a good deal of his more leisurely newspaper work at home, with his wife and children around him. He never wrote on a table or desk, but used a lapboard or a pad, leaning back in his chair with his feet as high as his head. His house was always a centre of attraction, and when visitors came in Mrs. Grady used to tell them that they needn’t mind Henry. The only thing that disturbed him on such occasions was when the people in the room conversed in a tone so low that he failed to hear what they were saying. When this happened he would look up from his writing with a quick “What’s that?” This often happened in the editorial rooms, and he would frequently write while taking part in a conversation, never losing the thread of his article or of the talk.
As I have said, he reserved his editorials for occasions or emergencies, and it was then that his luminous style showed at its best. He employed always the apt phrase; he was, in fact a phrase-builder. His gift of expression was something marvelous, and there was something melodious and fluent about his more deliberate editorials that suggested the movement of verse. I was reading awhile ago his editorial appealing to the people of Atlanta on the cold Christmas morning which has already been alluded to in this sketch. It is short—not longer than the pencil with which he wrote it, but there is that about it calculated to stir the blood, even now. Above any other man I have ever known Mr. Grady possessed the faculty of imparting his personal magnetism to cold type; and even such a statement as this is an inadequate explanation of the swift and powerful effect that his writings had on the public mind.
He had a keen eye for what, in a general way, may be called climaxes. Thus he was content to see the daily Constitution run soberly and sedately along during the week if it developed into a great paper on Sunday. He did more editorial work for the Sunday paper than for any other issue, and bent all his energies toward making an impression on that day. There was nothing about the details of the paper that he did not thoroughly understand. He knew more about the effects of type combinations than the printers did; he knew as much about the business department as the business manager; and he could secure more advertisements in three hours than his advertising clerks could solicit in a week. It used to be said of him that he lacked the business faculty. I suppose the remark was based on the fact that, in the midst of all the tremendous booms he stirred up, and the enterprises he fostered, he remained comparatively poor. I think he purposely neglected the opportunities for private gain that were offered him. There can be no more doubt of his business qualification than there can be of the fact that he neglected opportunities for private gain; but his business faculties were given to the service of the public—witness his faultless management of two of the greatest expositions ever held in the South. Had he served his own interests one-half as earnestly as he served those of the people, he would have been a millionaire. As it was, he died comparatively poor.
Mr. Grady took great pride in the Weekly Constitution, and that paper stands to-day a monument to his business faculty and to his wonderful methods of management. When Mr. Grady took hold of the weekly edition, it had about seven thousand subscribers, and his partners thought that the field would be covered when the list reached ten thousand. To-day the list of subscribers is not far below two hundred thousand, and is larger than that of the weekly edition of any other American newspaper. Just how this result has been brought about it is impossible to say. His methods were not mysterious, perhaps, but they did not lie on the surface. The weekly editions of newspapers that have reached large circulations depend on some specialty—as, for instance, the Detroit Free Press with the popular sketches of M. Quad, and the Toledo Blade, with the rancorous, but still popular, letters of Petroleum V. Nasby. The Weekly Constitution has never depended on such things. It has had, and still has, the letters of Bill Arp, of Sarge Wier, and of Betsey Hamilton, homely humorists all, but Mr. Grady took great pains never to magnify these things into specialties. Contributions that his assistants thought would do for the weekly, Mr. Grady would cut out relentlessly.
It sometimes happened that subscribers would begin to fall off. Then Mr. Grady would send for the manager of the weekly department, and proceed to caucus with him, as the young men around the office termed the conference. During the next few days there would be a great stir in the weekly department, and in the course of a fortnight the list of subscribers would begin to grow again. Once, when talking about the weekly, Mr. Grady remarked in a jocular way that when subscriptions began to flow in at the rate of two thousand a day, he wanted to die. Singularly enough, when he was returning from Boston, having been seized with the sickness that was so soon to carry him off, the business manager telegraphed him that more than two thousand subscribers had been received the day before.