When very early, rather too early, I found myself in the saddle,
Bennett and Greeley and Raymond in New York, and Medill and Storey in
Chicago, were yet alive and conspicuous figures in the newspaper life
of the time. John Bigelow, who had retired from the New York Evening
Post, was Minister to France. Halstead was coming on, but, except as a
correspondent, Whitelaw Reid had not “arrived.” The like was true of
“Joe” McCullagh, who, in the same character, divided the newspaper
reading attention of the country with George Alfred Townsend and Donn
Piatt. Joseph Medill was withdrawing from the Chicago Tribune in favor
of Horace White, presently to return and die in harness—a man of
sterling intellect and character—and Wilbur F. Storey, his local rival,
who was beginning to show signs of the mental malady that, developed
into monomania, ultimately ended his life in gloom and despair,
wrecking one of the finest newspaper properties outside of New York.
William R. Nelson, who was to establish a really great newspaper in
Kansas City, was still a citizen of Ft. Wayne.
James Gordon Bennett, the elder, seemed then to me, and has always
seemed, the real founder of the modern newspaper as a vehicle of
popular information, and, in point of apprehension, at least, James
Gordon Bennett, the younger, did not fall behind his father. What was,
and might have been regarded and dismissed as a trivial slander drove
him out of New York and made him the greater part of his life a
resident of Paris, where I was wont to meet and know much of him.
The New York Herald, under father and son, attained enormous
prosperity, prestige and real power. It suffered chiefly from what they
call in Ireland “absentee landlordism.” Its “proprietor,” for he never
described himself as its “editor,” was a man of exquisite
sensibilities—a “despot” of course—whom nature created for a good
citizen, a good husband and the head of a happy domestic fabric. He
should have married the woman of his choice, for he was deeply in love
with her and never ceased to love her, forty years later leaving her in
his will a handsome legacy.
Crossing the ocean with the “Commodore,” as he was called by his
familiars, not long after he had taken up his residence abroad,
naturally we fell occasionally into shop talk. “What would you do,” he
once said, “if you owned the Herald?” “Why,” I answered, “I would stay
in New York and edit it;” and then I proceeded, “but you mean to ask me
what I think you ought to do with it?” “Yes,” he said, “that is about
the size of it.”
“Well, Commodore,” I answered, “if I were you, when we get in I would
send for John Cockerill and make him managing editor, and for John
Young, and put him in charge of the editorial page, and then I would go
and lose myself in the wilds of Africa.”
He adopted the first two of these suggestions. John A. Cockerill was
still under contract with Joseph Pulitzer and could not accept for a
year or more. He finally did accept and died in the Bennett service.
John Russell Young took the editorial page and was making it “hum” when
a most unaccountable thing happened. I was amazed to receive an
invitation to a dinner he had tendered and was about to give to the
quondam Virginian and just elected New York Justice Roger A. Pryor. “Is
Young gone mad,” I said to myself, “or can he have forgotten that the
one man of all the world whom the House of Bennett can never forget, or
forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?”
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.