[Illustration: THE FIRST HEAD-LINE OF THE NEW YORK SUN]
[Illustration: THE SECOND HEAD-LINE OF THE NEW YORK SUN]
[Illustration: THE STORY OF
The Sun]
[Illustration: BENJAMIN H. DAY, FOUNDER OF “THE SUN”]
THE STORY OF
The Sun.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK, 1833–1918
BY
FRANK M. O’BRIEN
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EDWARD
PAGE MITCHELL, EDITOR OF “THE
SUN”--ILLUSTRATIONS AND FACSIMILES
NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
_Copyright, 1918,
By George H. Doran Company_
_Copyright, 1917, 1918, The Frank A. Munsey Company_
_Copyright, 1918, The Sun Printing and Publishing Association_
_Printed in the United States of America_
TO
FRANK A. MUNSEY
AN INTRODUCTION
BY THE EDITOR OF THE SUN
It is truer, perhaps, of a newspaper than of most other complex things
in the world that the whole may be greater than the sum of all its
parts. In any daily paper worth a moment’s consideration the least
fancifully inclined observer will discern an individuality apart from
and in a degree independent of the dozens or hundreds or thousands of
personal values entering at a given time into the composite of its grey
pages.
This entity of the institution, as distinguished from the human beings
actually engaged in carrying it on, this fact of the newspaper’s
possession of a separate countenance, a spirit or soul differentiating
it from all others of its kind, is recognised either consciously or
unconsciously by both the more or less unimportant workers who help
to make it and by their silent partners who support it by buying and
reading it. Its loyal friends and intelligent critics outside the
establishment, the Old Subscriber and the Constant Reader, form the
habit of attributing to the newspaper, as to an individual, qualities
and powers beneficent or maleficent or merely foolish, according to
their mood or digestion. They credit it with traits of character quite
as distinct as belong to any man or woman of their acquaintance. They
personify it, moreover, without much knowledge, if any, of the people
directing and producing it; and, often and naturally, without any
particular concern about who and what these people may be.
On their own side, the makers of the paper are accustomed to
individualise it as vividly as a crew does the ship. They know better
than anybody else not only how far each personal factor, each element
of the composite, is modified and influenced in its workings by the
other personal factors associated in the production, but also the
extent to which all the personal units are influenced and modified
by something not listed in the office directory or visible upon the
payroll; something that was there before they came and will be there
after they go.
Of course, that which has given persistent idiosyncrasy to a newspaper
like the _Sun_, for example, is accumulated tradition. That which has
made the whole count for more than the sum total of its parts, in the
_Sun’s_ case as in the case of its esteemed contemporaries, is the
heritage of method and expedient, the increment of standardised skill
and localised imagination contributed through many years to the fund of
the paper by the forgotten worker as well as by the remembered.
The manner of growth of the great newspaper’s well-defined and
continuous character, distinguishing it from all the rest of the
offspring of the printing press, a development sometimes not radically
affected by changes of personnel, of ownership, of exterior conditions
and fashions set by the popular taste, is a subject over which
journalistic metaphysics might easily exert itself to the verge of
boredom. Fortunately there has been found a much better way to deal
with the attractive theme.
The _Sun_ is eighty-five years old as this book goes to press. In
telling its intimate story, from the September Tuesday which saw the
beginning of Mr. Day’s intrepid and epochal experiment, throughout the
days of the Beaches, of Dana, of Laffan, and of Reick to the time
of Mr. Munsey’s purchase of the property in the summer of 1916, Mr.
O’Brien has done what has never been undertaken before, so far as is
known to the writer of this introduction, for any newspaper with a
career of considerable span.
There have been general histories of Journalism, presenting casually
the main facts of evolution and progress in the special instance.
There have been satisfactory narratives of journalistic episodes,
reasonably accurate accounts of certain aspects or dynastic periods of
newspaper experience, excellent portrait biographies or autobiographies
of journalists of genius and high achievement, with the eminent man
usually in strong light in the foreground and his newspaper seldom
nearer than the middle distance. But here, probably for the first time
in literature of this sort, we have a real biography of a newspaper
itself, covering the whole range of its existence, exhibiting every
function of its organism, illustrating every quality that has been
conspicuous in the successive stages of its growth. The _Sun_ is the
hero of Mr. O’Brien’s “Story of the _Sun_.” The human participants
figure in their incidental relation to the main thread of its life
and activities. They do their parts, big or little, as they pass in
interesting procession. When they have done their parts they disappear,
as in real life, and the story goes on, just as the _Sun_ has gone on,
without them except as they may have left their personal impress on the
newspaper’s structure or its superficial decoration.
During no small part of its four score and five years of intelligent
interest in the world’s thoughts and doings it has been the _Sun’s_
fortune to be regarded as in a somewhat exceptional sense the newspaper
man’s newspaper. If in truth it has merited in any degree this
peculiar distinction in the eyes of its professional brethren it
must have been by reason of originality of initiative and soundness
of method; perhaps by a chronic indifference to those ancient
conventions of news importance or of editorial phraseology which, when
systematically observed, are apt to result in a pale, dull, or even
stupid uniformity of product. Mr. Dana wrote more than half a century
ago to one of his associates, “Your articles have stirred up the
animals, which you as well as I recognise as one of the great ends of
life.” Sometimes he borrowed Titania’s wand; sometimes he used a red
hot poker. Not only in that great editor’s time but also in the time
of his predecessors and successors the _Sun_ has held it to be a duty
and a joy to assist to the best of its ability in the discouragement of
anything like lethargy in the menagerie. Perhaps, again, that was one
of the things that helped to make it the newspaper man’s newspaper.
However this may be, it seems certain that to the students of the
theory and practice of journalism, now happily so numerous in the land,
the chronicler of one highly individual newspaper’s deeds and ways is
affording an object lesson of practical value, a textbook of technical
usefulness, as well as a store of authoritative history, entertaining
anecdote, and suggestive professional information. And a much wider
audience than is made up of newspaper workers present or to come will
find that the story of a newspaper which Mr. O’Brien has told with wit
and knowledge in the pages that follow becomes naturally and inevitably
a swift and charming picture of the town in which that newspaper is
published throughout the period of its service to that town--the most
interesting period in the existence of the most interesting city of the
world.
It is a fine thing for the _Sun_, by all who have worked for it in
its own spirit beloved, I believe, like a creature of flesh and blood
and living intelligence and human virtues and failings, that through
Mr. Munsey’s wish it should have found in a son of its own schooling a
biographer and interpreter so sympathetically responsive to its best
traditions.
EDWARD P. MITCHELL.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
SUNRISE AT 222 WILLIAM STREET
PAGE
_Benjamin H. Day, with No Capital Except Youth and Courage,
Establishes the First Permanent Penny Newspaper.--The
Curious First Number Entirely His Own Work_ 21
CHAPTER II
THE FIELD OF THE LITTLE “SUN”
_A Very Small Metropolis Which Day and His Partner, Wisner,
Awoke by Printing Small Human Pieces About Small Human
Beings and Having Boys Cry the Paper_ 31
CHAPTER III
RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE’S MOON HOAX
_A Magnificent Fake Which Deceived Two Continents, Brought to
“The Sun” the Largest Circulation in the World and, in
Poe’s Opinion, Established Penny Papers_ 64
CHAPTER IV
DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT
_The Success of “The Sun” Leads to the Founding of The
“Herald.”--Enterprises and Quarrels of a Furious Young
Journalism.--The Picturesque Webb.--Maria Monk_ 103
CHAPTER V
NEW YORK LIFE IN THE THIRTIES
_A Sprightly City Which Daily Bought Thirty Thousand copies of
“The Sun.”--The Rush to Start Penny Papers.--Day Sells “The
Sun” for Forty Thousand Dollars_ 121
CHAPTER VI
MOSES Y. BEACH’S ERA OF HUSTLE
_“The Sun” Uses Albany Steamboats, Horse Expresses, Trotting
Teams, Pigeons, and the Telegraph to Get News.--Poe’s
Famous Balloon Hoax and the Case of Mary Rodgers_ 139
CHAPTER VII
“THE SUN” IN THE MEXICAN WAR
_Moses Y. Beach as an Emissary of President Polk.--The
Associated Press Founded in the Office of “The Sun.”--Ben
Day’s Brother-in-Law Retires with a Small Fortune_ 164
CHAPTER VIII
“THE SUN” DURING THE CIVIL WAR
_One of the Few Entirely Loyal Newspapers of New York.--Its
Brief Ownership by a Religious Coterie.--It Returns to the
Possession of M. S. Beach, Who Sells It to Dana_ 172
CHAPTER IX
THE EARLIER CAREER OF DANA
_His Life at Brook Farm and His Tribune Experience.--His Break
with Greeley, His Civil War Services and His Chicago
Disappointment.--His Purchase of “The Sun”_ 202
CHAPTER X
DANA: HIS “SUN” AND ITS CITY
_The Period of the Great Personal Journalists.--Dana’s
Avoidance of Rules and Musty Newspaper Conventions.--His
Choice of Men and His Broad Definition of News_ 233
CHAPTER XI
DANA, AS MITCHELL SAW HIM
_A Picture of the Room Where One Man Ruled for Thirty
Years.--The Democratic Ways of a Newspaper Autocrat.--W. O.
Bartlett, Pike, and His Other Early Associates_ 247
CHAPTER XII
DANA’S FIRST BIG NEWS MEN
_Amos J. Cummings, Dr. Wood, and John B. Bogart.--The Lively
Days of Tweedism.--Elihu Root as a Dramatic Critic.--The
Birth and Popularity of “The Sun’s” Cat_ 262
CHAPTER XIII
DANA’S FAMOUS RIVALS PASS
_The Deaths of Raymond, Bennett, and Greeley Leave Him the
Dominant Figure of the American Newspaper Field.--Dana’s
Dream of a Paper Without Advertisements_ 293
CHAPTER XIV
“THE SUN” AND THE GRANT SCANDALS
_Dana’s Relentless Fight Against the Whisky Ring, the Crédit
Mobilier, “Addition, Division, and Silence,” the Safe
Burglary Conspiracy and the Boss Shepherd Scandal_ 304
CHAPTER XV
“THE SUN” AND “HUMAN INTEREST”
_Something About Everything, for Everybody.--A Wonderful
Four-Page Paper.--A Comparison of the Styles of “Sun”
Reporters in Three Periods Twenty Years Apart_ 313
CHAPTER XVI
“SUN” REPORTERS AND THEIR WORK
_Cummings, Ralph, W. J. Chamberlin, Brisbane, Riggs, Dieuaide,
Spears, O. K. Davis, Irwin, Adams, Denison, Wood, O’Malley,
Hill, Cronyn.--Spanish War Work_ 328
CHAPTER XVII
SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM
_Lord, Managing Editor for Thirty-Two Years.--Clarke, Magician
of the Copy Desk.--Ethics, Fair Play and Democracy.--“The
Evening Sun” and Those Who Make It_ 369
CHAPTER XVIII
THE FINEST SIDE OF “THE SUN”
_Literary Associations of an Editorial Department That
Has Encouraged and Attracted Men of Imagination and
Talent.--Mitchell, Hazeltine, Church, and Their Colleagues_ 402
CHAPTER XIX
“THE SUN” AND YELLOW JOURNALISM
_The Coming and Going of a Newspaper Disease.--Dana’s Attitude
Toward President Cleveland.--Dana’s Death.--Ownerships of
Paul Dana, Laffan, Reick, and Munsey_ 413
_Bibliography_ 435
_Chronology_ 437
_Index_ 439
ILLUSTRATIONS
BENJAMIN H. DAY, FOUNDER OF “THE SUN” _Frontispiece_
PAGE
BENJAMIN H. DAY, A BUST 22
THE FIRST ISSUE OF “THE SUN” 28
THE FIRST HOME OF “THE SUN” 34
THE SECOND HOME OF “THE SUN” 34
BARNEY WILLIAMS, THE FIRST NEWSBOY 50
RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE, AUTHOR OF THE MOON HOAX 68
THE FIRST INSTALMENT OF THE MOON HOAX 96
A MOON SCENE, FROM LOCKE’S GREAT DECEPTION 96
MOSES YALE BEACH, SECOND OWNER OF “THE SUN” 124
AN EXTRA OF “THE SUN” 136
THE THIRD HOME OF “THE SUN” 136
MOSES SPERRY BEACH 166
ALFRED ELY BEACH 170
CHARLES A. DANA AT THIRTY-EIGHT 204
MR. DANA AT FIFTY 224
THE FIRST NUMBER OF “THE SUN” UNDER DANA 236
THE HOME OF “THE SUN” FROM 1868 TO 1915 236
MR. DANA IN HIS OFFICE 248
JOSEPH PULITZER 258
ELIHU ROOT 258
JUDGE WILLARD BARTLETT 258
MR. DANA AT SEVENTY 270
AMOS JAY CUMMINGS 280
DANIEL F. KELLOGG 290
AMOS B. STILLMAN 290
JOHN B. BOGART 290
JAMES GORDON BENNETT, SR. 300
HORACE GREELEY 300
HENRY J. RAYMOND 300
JULIAN RALPH 316
ARTHUR BRISBANE 330
EDWARD G. RIGGS 350
CHESTER SANDERS LORD 370
SELAH MERRILL CLARKE 380
SAMUEL A. WOOD 390
OSCAR KING DAVIS 390
THOMAS M. DIEUAIDE 390
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS 390
WILL IRWIN 398
FRANK WARD O’MALLEY 398
EDWIN C. HILL 398
PAUL DANA 404
WILLIAM M. LAFFAN 410
WILLIAM C. REICK 416
FRANK A. MUNSEY 422
EDWARD PAGE MITCHELL 430
THE STORY OF “THE SUN”
CHAPTER I
SUNRISE AT 222 WILLIAM STREET
_Benjamin H. Day, with No Capital Except Youth and Courage,
Establishes the First Permanent Penny Newspaper.--The Curious
First Number Entirely His Own Work._
In the early thirties of last century the only newspapers in the city
of New York were six-cent journals whose reading-matter was adapted to
the politics of men, and whose only appeal to women was their size,
perfectly suited to deep pantry-shelves.
Dave Ramsey, a compositor on one of these sixpennies, the _Journal
of Commerce_, had an obsession. It was that a penny paper, to be
called the _Sun_, would be a success in a city full of persons whose
interest was in humanity in general, rather than in politics, and whose
pantry-shelves were of negligible width. Why his mind fastened on the
_Sun_ as the name of this child of his vision is not known; perhaps it
was because there was a daily in London bearing that title. It was a
short name, easily written, easily spoken, easily remembered.
Benjamin H. Day, another printer, worked beside Dave Ramsey in 1830.
Ramsey reiterated his idea to his neighbour so often that Day came to
believe in it, although it is doubtful whether he had the great faith
that possessed Ramsey. Now that due credit has been given to Ramsey for
the idea of the penny _Sun_, he passes out of the record, for he never
attempted to put his project into execution.
Nor was Day’s enthusiasm for a penny _Sun_ so big that he plunged into
it at once. He was a business man rather than a visionary. With the
savings from his wages as a compositor he went into the job-printing
business in a small way. He still met his old chums and still talked of
the _Sun_, but it is likely that he never would have come to start it
if it had not been for the cholera.
There was an epidemic of this plague in New York in 1832. It killed
more than thirty-five hundred people in that year, and added to the
depression of business already caused by financial disturbances and a
wretched banking system. The job-printing trade suffered with other
industries, and Day decided that he needed a newspaper--not to reform,
not to uplift, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of
Benjamin H. Day. Incidentally he might add lustre to the fame of the
President, Andrew Jackson, or uphold the hands of the mayor of New
York, Gideon Lee; but his prime purpose was to get the work of printing
handbills for John Smith, the grocer, or letter-heads for Richard
Robinson, the dealer in hay. Incidentally he might become rich and
powerful, but for the time being he needed work at his trade.
Ben Day was only twenty-three years old. He was the son of Henry Day, a
hatter of West Springfield, Massachusetts, and Mary Ely Day; and sixth
in descent from his first American ancestor, Robert Day. Shortly after
the establishment of the Springfield _Republican_ by Samuel Bowles,
in 1824, young Day went into the office of that paper, then a weekly,
to learn the printer’s trade. That was two years before the birth of
the second and greater Samuel Bowles, who was later to make the
_Republican_, as a daily, one of the greatest of American newspapers.
[Illustration:
BENJAMIN H. DAY
A Bust in the Possession of Mrs. Florence A. Snyder, Summit, N. J.
]
Day learned well his trade from Sam Bowles. When he was twenty, and a
first-class compositor, he went to New York, and worked at the case in
the offices of the _Evening Post_ and the _Commercial Advertiser_. He
married, when he was twenty-one, Miss Eveline Shepard. At the time of
the _Sun’s_ founding Mr. Day lived, with his wife and their infant son,
Henry, at 75 Duane Street, only a few blocks from the newspaper offices.
Day was a good-looking young man with a round, calm, resolute face. He
possessed health, industry, and character. Also he had courage, for
a man with a family was taking no small risk in launching, without
capital, a paper to be sold at one cent.
The idea of a penny paper was not new. In Philadelphia, the _Cent_
had had a brief, inglorious existence. In Boston, the _Bostonian_ had
failed to attract the cultured readers of the modern Athens. Eight
months before Day’s hour arrived the _Morning Post_ had braved it in
New York, selling first at two cents and later at one cent, but even
with Horace Greeley as one of the founders it lasted only three weeks.
When Ben Day sounded his friends, particularly the printers, as to
their opinion of his project, they cited the doleful fate of the
other penny journals. He drew, or had designed, a head-line for
the _Sun_ that was to be, and took it about to his cronies. A. S.
Abell, a printer on the _Mercantile Advertiser_, poked the most fun
at him. A penny paper, indeed! But this same Abell lived to stop
scoffing, to found another _Sun_--this one in Baltimore--and to buy a
half-million-dollar estate out of the profits of it. He was the second
beneficiary of the penny _Sun_ idea.
William M. Swain, another journeyman printer, also made light of
Day’s ambition. He lived to be Day’s foreman, and later to own the
Philadelphia _Public Ledger_. He told Day that the penny _Sun_ would
ruin him. As Day had not much enthusiasm at the outset, surely his
friends did not add to it, unless by kindling his stubbornness.
As for capital, he had none at all, in the money sense. He did have a
printing-press, hardly improved from the machine of Benjamin Franklin’s
day, some job-paper, and plenty of type. The press would throw off
two hundred impressions an hour at full speed, man power. He hired a
room, twelve by sixteen feet, in the building at 222 William Street.
That building was still there, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge
approach, when the _Sun_ celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1883;
but a modern six-story envelope factory is on the site to-day.
There is no question as to the general authorship of the first
paper. Day was proprietor, publisher, editor, chief pressman, and
mailing-clerk. He was not a lazy man. He stayed up all the night before
that fateful Tuesday, September 3, 1833, setting with his own hands
some advertisements that were regularly appearing in the six-cent
papers, for he wanted to make a show of prosperity.
He also wrote, or clipped from some out-of-town newspaper, a poem that
would fill nearly a column. He rewrote news items from the West and
South--some of them not more than a month old. As for the snappy local
news of the day, he bought, in the small hours of that Tuesday morning,
a copy of the _Courier and Enquirer_, the livest of the six-cent
papers, took it to the single room in William Street, clipped out or
rewrote the police-court items, and set them up himself. A boy, whose
name is unknown to fame, assisted him at devil’s work. A journeyman
printer, Parmlee, helped with the press when the last quoin had been
made tight in the fourth and last of the little pages.
The sun was well up in the sky before its namesake of New York
came slowly, hesitatingly, almost sadly, up over the horizon of
journalism--never to set! In the years to follow, the _Sun_ was to have
changes in ownership, in policy, in size, and in style, but no week-day
was to come when it could not shine. Of all the morning newspapers
printed in New York on that 3rd of September, 1833, there is only one
other--the _Journal of Commerce_--left.
But young Mr. Day, wiping the ink from his hands at noon, and waiting
in doubt to see whether the public would buy the thousand _Suns_ he had
printed, could not foresee this. Neither could he know that, by this
humble effort to exalt his printing business, he had driven a knife
into the sclerotic heart of ancient journalism. The sixpenny papers
were to laugh at this tiny intruder--to laugh and laugh, and to die.
The size of the first _Sun_ was eleven and one-quarter by eight inches,
not a great deal bigger than a sheet of commercial letter paper, and
considerably less than one-quarter the size of a page of the _Sun_ of
to-day. Compared with the first _Sun_, the present newspaper is about
sixteen times larger. The type was a good, plain face of agate, with
some verse on the last page in nonpareil.
An almost perfect reprint of the first _Sun_ was issued as a supplement
to the paper on its twentieth birthday, in 1853, and again--to the
number of about one hundred and sixty thousand copies--on its fiftieth
birthday, in 1883. Many of the persons who treasure the replicas of
1883 believe them to be original first numbers, as they were not
labelled “Presented gratuitously to the subscribers of the _Sun_,” as
was the issue of 1853. Hardly a month passes by but the _Sun_ receives
one of them from some proud owner. It is easy, however, to tell the
reprint from the original, for Mr. Day in his haste committed an error
at the masthead of the editorial or second page of the first number.
The date-line there reads “September 3, 1832,” while in the reprints
it is “September 3, 1833,” as it should have been, but wasn’t, in the
original. And there are minor typographical differences, invisible to
the layman.
Of the thousand, or fewer, copies of the first _Sun_, only five are
known to exist--one in the bound file of the _Sun’s_ first year, held
jealously in the _Sun’s_ safe; one in the private library of the editor
of the _Sun_, Edward Page Mitchell; one in the Public Library at Fifth
Avenue and Forty-second Street, New York; and two in the library of the
American Type Founders Company, Jersey City.
There were three columns on each of the four pages. At the top of the
first column on the front page was a modest announcement of the _Sun’s_
ambitions:
The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a
price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE
DAY, and at the same time afford an advantageous medium for
advertising.
It was added that the subscription in advance was three dollars a year,
and that yearly advertisers were to be accommodated with ten lines
every day for thirty dollars per annum--ten cents a day, or one cent a
line. That was the old fashion of advertising. The friendly merchant
bought thirty dollars’ worth of space, say in December, and inserted an
advertisement of his fur coats or snow-shovels. The same advertisement
might be in the paper the following July, for the newspapers made no
effort to coordinate the needs of the seller and the buyer. So long as
the merchant kept his name regularly in print, he felt that was enough.
The leading article on the first page was a semi-humorous story about
an Irish captain and his duels. It was flanked by a piece of reprint
concerning microscopic carved toys. There was a paragraph about a
Vermont boy so addicted to whistling that he fell ill of it. Mr. Day’s
apprentice may have needed this warning.
The front-page advertising, culled from other newspapers and printed
for effect, consisted of the notices of steamship sailings. In one of
these Commodore Vanderbilt offered to carry passengers from New York
to Hartford, by daylight, for one dollar, on his splendid low-pressure
steamboat Water Witch. Cornelius Vanderbilt was then thirty-nine years
old, and had made the boat line between New York and New Brunswick, New
Jersey, pay him forty thousand dollars a year. When the _Sun_ started,
the commodore was at the height of his activity, and he stuck to the
water for thirty years afterward, until he had accumulated something
like forty million dollars.
E. K. Collins had not yet established his famous Dramatic line of
clipper-ships between New York and Liverpool, but he advertised the
“very fast sailing coppered ship Nashville for New Orleans.” He was
only thirty then.
Cooks were advertised for by private families living in Broadway, near
Canal Street--pretty far up-town to live at that day--and in Temple
Street, near Liberty, pretty far down-town now.
On the second page was a bit of real news, the melancholy suicide of
a young Bostonian of “engaging manners and amiable disposition,” in
Webb’s Congress Hall, a hotel. There were also two local anecdotes; a
paragraph to the effect that “the city is nearly full of strangers
from all parts of this country and Europe”; nine police-court items,
nearly all concerning trivial assaults; news of murders committed in
Florida, at Easton, Pennsylvania, and at Columbus, Ohio; a report of an
earthquake at Charlottesville, Virginia, and a few lines of stray news
from Mexico.
The third page had the arrivals and clearances at the port of New
York, a joke about the cholera in New Orleans, a line to say that the
same disease had appeared in the City of Mexico, an item about an
insurrection in the Ohio penitentiary, a marriage announcement, a death
notice, some ship and auction advertisements, and the offer of a reward
of one thousand dollars for the recovery of thirteen thousand six
hundred dollars stolen from the mail stage between Boston and Lynn and
the arrest of the thieves.
The last page carried a poem, “A Noon Scene,” but the atmosphere was of
the Elysian Fields over in Hoboken rather than of midday in the city.
When Day scissored it, probably he did so with the idea that it would
fill a column. Another good filler was the bank-note table, copied from
a six-cent contemporary. The quotations indicated that not much of the
bank currency of the day was accepted at par.
The rest of the page was filled with borrowed advertising. The Globe
Insurance Company, of which John Jacob Astor was a director, announced
that it had a capital of a million dollars. The North River Insurance
Company, whose directorate included William B. Astor, declared its
willingness to insure against fire and against “loss or damage by
inland navigation.” At that time the boilers of river steamboats had an
unpleasant trick of blowing up; hence Commodore Vanderbilt’s mention
of the low pressure of the Water Witch. John A. Dix, then Secretary
of State of the State of New York, and later to be the hero of the
“shoot him on the spot” order, advertised an election. Castleton House
Academy, on Staten Island, offered to teach and board young gentlemen
at twenty-five dollars a quarter.
[Illustration: THE FIRST ISSUE OF “THE SUN”]
Such was the first _Sun_. Part of it was stale news, rewritten. Part
was borrowed advertising. It is doubtful whether even the police-court
items were original, although they were the most human things in
the issue, the most likely to appeal to the readers whom Day hoped
to reach--people to whom the purchase of a paper at six cents was
impossible, and to whom windy, monotonous political discussions were a
bore.
In those early thirties, daily journalism had not advanced very far.
Men were willing, but means and methods were weak. The first English
daily was the _Courrant_, issued in 1702. The _Orange Postman_, put out
the following year, was the first penny paper. The London _Times_ was
not started until 1785. It was the first English paper to use a steam
press, as the _Sun_ was the first American paper.
The first American daily was the _Pennsylvania Packet_, called later
the _General Advertiser_, begun in Philadelphia in 1784. It died in
1837. Of the existing New York papers only the _Globe_ dates back to
the eighteenth century, having been founded in 1797 as the _Commercial
Advertiser_. Next to it in age is the _Evening Post_, started in 1801.
The weakness of the early dailies was largely due to the fact that
their publishers looked almost entirely to advertising for the support
of the papers. On the other hand, the editors were politicians or
highbrows who thought more of a speech by Lord Piccadilly on empire
than of a good street tragedy; more of an essay by Lady Geraldine Glue
than of a first-class report of a kidnapping.
Another great obstacle to success--one for which neither editor
nor publisher was responsible--was the lack of facilities for the
transmission of news. Fulton launched the Clermont twenty-six years
before Day launched the _Sun_, but even in Day’s time steamships
were nothing to brag of, and the first of them was yet to cross the
Atlantic. When the _Sun_ was born, the most important railroad in
America was thirty-four miles long, from Bordentown to South Amboy,
New Jersey. There was no telegraph, and the mails were of pre-historic
slowness.
It was hard to get out a successful daily newspaper without daily
news. A weekly would have sufficed for the information that came in,
by sailing ship and stage, from Europe and Washington and Boston. Ben
Day was the first man to reconcile himself to an almost impossible
situation. He did so by the simple method of using what news was
nearest at hand--the incidental happenings of New York life. In this
way he solved his own problem and the people’s, for they found that the
local items in the _Sun_ were just what they wanted, while the price of
the paper suited them well.