NOTED AMERICAN JOURNALISTS AND MAGAZINE CONTRIBUTORS.
HORACE GREELEY • MURAT HALSTEAD • ALBERT SHAW
LYMAN ABBOTT • CHAS. A. DANA • HENRY W. WATTERSON
WHITELAW REID • JULIAN HAWTHORNE • RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
HORACE GREELEY.
THE FOUNDER OF MODERN JOURNALISM.
HE men of whom we love to read are those who stand for some great principle, whose lives and deeds exemplify its power. When we think of patriotism, the figure of Washington rises before us, as the man whose life, above all others, was controlled by pure love of country. Practical wisdom, shrewdness, and thrift are embodied in Benjamin Franklin. Astor and Girard represent the power of accumulation; Stewart, Carnegie, and Pullman, the power of organization; and so, when we consider the power of the press, the image which comes up before our mental view is that of Horace Greeley. In almost every personal quality there have been men who far surpassed him,—men who were greater as politicians, as organizers, as statesmen, as speakers, as writers,—but in the one respect of influencing public opinion through the press, of “making his mind the mind of other men,” no man in America has ever wielded such power as the great editor and founder of the New York “Tribune.”
Horace Greeley was one of the poor country boys who have afterward become the bone and sinew of the Republic. He was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, in 1811. His father, Zaccheus Greeley, was a struggling farmer. He moved to Vermont in 1821, and a few years later to the western part of Pennsylvania. Horace was a precocious child; and his mother, Mary Woodburn, who was of Scotch-Irish stock, used to recite to him ballads and stories, so that he really acquired a taste for literature before the age at which many children conquer the alphabet.
In his fifteenth year Horace felt that he could endure farming no longer, and at last procured from his father a reluctant consent that he should definitely seek employment as a printer. He found the longed-for opportunity at East Poultney, Vermont, in the office of the “Northern Spectator.”
In 1830, before Horace’s apprenticeship ended, the “Spectator” collapsed, and he was again set adrift. His father had removed to Western Pennsylvania, and the boy turned his face in that direction. After working for a few months on different country papers, he resolved to try his fortune in New York, and went to that city in August, 1831.