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._
The English historian, Kinglake, wrote a description of John T.
Delane, the most famous editor of the London _Times_, which Mr. Dana’s
associate, Mr. Mitchell, liked to quote as a picture of what Mr.
Dana was _not_. It is a fine limning of the great editor, as great
editors were supposed to be before Dana showed his disregard for the
journalistic dust of the ages:
From the moment of his entering the editor’s room until four or
five o’clock in the morning, the strain he had to put on his
faculties must have been always great, and in stirring times
almost prodigious. There were hours of night when he often had
to decide--to decide, of course, with great swiftness--between
two or more courses of action momentously different; when,
besides, he must judge the appeals brought up to the paramount
arbiter from all kinds of men, from all sorts of earthly
tribunals; when despatches of moment, when telegrams fraught
with grave tidings, when notes hastily scribbled in the Lords
or Commons, were from time to time coming in to disturb,
perhaps even to annul, former reckonings; and these, besides,
were the hours when, on questions newly obtruding, yet so
closely, so importunately, present that they would have to be
met before sunrise, he somehow must cause to spring up sudden
essays, invectives, and arguments which only strong power of
brain, with even much toil, could supply. For the delicate
task any other than he would require to be in a state of
tranquillity, would require to have ample time. But for him
there are no such indulgences; he sees the hand of the clock
growing more and more peremptory, and the time drawing nearer
and nearer when his paper must, _must_ be made up.
That, mark you, was Delane, not Dana. When Mr. Dana counselled the
young men at Cornell never to be in a hurry, he meant it. Fury was
never a part of his system of life and work. Probably he viewed with
something like contempt the high-pressure editor of his own and former
days. There was no agony in the daily birth of the _Sun_. Mr. Mitchell
said of his chief:
Mr. Dana has always been the master, and not the slave, of the
immediate task. The external features of his journalism are
simplicity, directness, common sense, and the entire absence
of affectation. He would no more think of living up to Mr.
Kinglake’s ideal of a great, mysterious, and thought-burdened
editor, than of putting on a conical hat and a black robe
spangled with suns, moons, and stars, when about to receive a
visitor to his editorial office in Nassau Street.
That office in Nassau Street, of which every reader of the _Sun_, and
surely every newspaperman in America, formed his own mental picture!
To some imaginations it probably was a bare room, with a desk for the
editor and, close by, the famous cat. To other imaginations, whose
owners were familiar with Mr. Dana’s love for the beautiful, the office
may have been a studio unmarred by the presence of a single unbeautiful
object. Both visions were incorrect.
[Illustration:
(_Drawn from Life by Corwin Knapp Linson_)
MR. DANA IN HIS OFFICE
]
Surroundings were nothing to Dana. To him an office was a place to
work, to convert ideas into readable form. What would works of art be
in such a place to a man who took more interest in the crowds that
went to and fro on Park Row beneath his window? Let the room itself be
described by Mr. Mitchell, who set down this picture of it after he had
spent hours in it with Mr. Dana almost daily for twenty years:
In the middle of the small room a desk-table of black walnut
of the Fulton Street style and the period of the first
administration of Grant; a shabby little round table at
the window, where Mr. Dana sits when the day is dark; one
leather-covered chair, which does duty at either post, and
two wooden chairs, both rickety, for visitors on errands of
business or ceremony; on the desk a revolving case with a
few dozen books of reference; an ink-pot and pen, not much
used except in correcting manuscript and proofs, for Mr. Dana
talks off to a stenographer his editorial articles and his
correspondence, sometimes spending on the revision of the
former twice as much time as was required for the dictation;
a window-seat filled with exchanges, marked here and there
in blue pencil for the editor’s eyes; a big pair of shears,
and two or three extra pairs of spectacles in cache against
an emergency--these few items constitute what is practically
the whole objective equipment of the editor of the _Sun_. The
shears are probably the newest article of furniture in the
list. They replaced, three or four years ago, another pair of
unknown antiquity, besought and obtained by Eugene Field, and
now occupying, alongside of Mr. Gladstone’s ax, the place of
honor in that poet’s celebrated collection of edged instruments.
For the non-essentials, the little trapezoid-shaped room
contains a third table containing a file of the newspaper for
a few weeks back, and a heap of new books which have passed
review; an iron umbrella-rack; on the floor a cheap Turkish
rug; and a lounge covered with horsehide, upon which Mr. Dana
descends for a five minutes’ nap perhaps five times a year.
The adornments of the room are mostly accidental and
insignificant. Ages ago somebody presented to Mr. Dana, with
symbolic intent, a large stuffed owl. The bird of wisdom
remains by inertia on top of the revolving bookcase, just as
it would have remained there if it had been a stuffed cat or a
statuette of “Folly.” Unnoticed and probably long ago forgotten
by the proprietor, the owl solemnly boxes the compass as Mr.
Dana swings the case, reaching in quick succession for his
Bible, his Portuguese dictionary, his compendium of botanical
terms, or his copy of the Democratic national platform of 1892.
On the mantelpiece is an ugly, feather-haired little totem
figure from Alaska, which likewise keeps its place solely
by possession. It stands between a photograph of Chester
A. Arthur, whom Mr. Dana liked and admired as a man of the
world, and the japanned calendar-case which has shown him
the time of year for the last quarter of a century. A dingy
chromolithograph of Prince von Bismarck stands shoulder to
shoulder with George, the Count Joannes.
The same mingling of sentiment and pure accident marks the rest
of Mr. Dana’s picture-gallery. There is a large and excellent
photograph of Horace Greeley, who is held in half-affectionate,
half-humorous remembrance by his old associate in the
management of the _Tribune_. Another is of the late Justice
Blatchford, of the United States Supreme Court; it is the
strong face of the fearless judge whose decision from the
Federal bench in New York twenty years ago blocked the attempt
to drag Mr. Dana before a servile little court in Washington to
be tried without a jury on the charge of criminal libel, at the
time when the _Sun_ was demolishing the District Ring.
Over the mantel is Abraham Lincoln. There are pictures of the
four Harper brothers and of the Appletons. Andrew Jackson is
there twice, once in black and white, once in vivid colors.
An inexpensive Thomas Jefferson faces the livelier Jackson.
A framed diploma certifies that Mr. Dana was one of several
gentlemen who presented to the State a portrait in oils of
Samuel J. Tilden. On different sides of the room are William
T. Coleman, the organizer of the San Francisco Vigilantes, and
a crude colored print of the Haifa colony at the foot of Mount
Carmel in Syria. Strangest of all in this singular collection
is a photograph of a tall, lank, and superior-looking New
England mill-girl, issued as an advertisement by some
Connecticut concern engaged in the manufacture of spool-cotton.
For a good many years the most available wall-space in Mr.
Dana’s office was occupied by a huge pasteboard chart, showing
elaborately, in deadly parallel columns, the differences
in the laws of the several States of the Union respecting
divorce. It was put there, and it remained there, serving no
earthly purpose except to illustrate the editor’s indifference
as to his immediate surroundings, until it disappeared as
mysteriously as it had come.
Such were Mr. Dana’s surroundings, with nothing to indicate, as Mr.
Mitchell remarked, that the occupant “knew Manet from Monet, or old
Persian lustre from Gubbio.”
It is twenty years since Dana went out of that room for the last time,
and the room and the old building are no more, but the stuffed owl
is still at his post in the office of the editor of the _Sun_. He
is an older if not wiser bird, and he is no longer subjected to the
revolutions of the bookcase, for Mr. Mitchell has given him a firmer
perch beside his door. From a nearby wall Mr. Dana’s pictures of the
four Harpers keep vigil, too.
Dana was interested in everything, read everything, saw almost
everybody. His own office was almost as free as the great main office
of the _Sun_, where sat everybody from the managing editor down to the
office-boy. One day Dana, coming into the big room, saw carpenters
building a partition between the room and the head of the stairs that
led to the street. It was explained to him that the public was inclined
to be unnecessarily intrusive at times.
“Take the partition down,” he said. “A newspaper is for the public.”
That this was not always a desirable plan is illustrated in a story
about Dana, probably apocryphal, but characteristic. One night the city
editor rushed into his chief’s room.
“Mr. Dana,” he said, “there’s a man out there with a cocked revolver.
He is very much excited, and he insists on seeing the editor-in-chief.”
“Is he very much excited?” inquired Mr. Dana, returning to the proof
that he was reading. “If you think it is worth while, ask Amos Cummings
if he will see the gentleman and write him up.”
Persons in search of alms would enter Mr. Dana’s room without ceremony.
If they were Sisters of Charity, as often was the case, Mr. Dana would
walk up and down, telling them of his visit with the Pope, and would
finish by giving them one of the silver dollars of which his pocket
seemed to have an endless supply. Almost every day, when he despatched
a boy to a nearby restaurant for his sandwich and bottle of milk, he
would give him a five-dollar bill and instruct him to bring back the
change all in silver. He liked to jingle the coins in his pocket and to
have them ready for alms-giving.
Dana was never fussy, never overbearing with his men. He bore patiently
with the occasional sinner, and tried to put the best face on a mistake.
The Dana patience extended also to outsiders. On one occasion William
M. Laffan, then the dramatic critic and later the owner of the _Sun_,
wrote a severe criticism of a performance by Miss Ada Rehan. Augustin
Daly hurried to Mr. Dana’s office the next afternoon.
“Mr. Dana,” he said, “I have called to try to convince you that you
should discharge your dramatic editor. He has--”
“I see,” said Dana, smiling. “Well, Mr. Daly, I will speak to Mr.
Laffan about the matter, and if he thinks that he really deserves to be
discharged, I will most certainly do it!”
Thirty or forty years ago the belief was not uncommon, among those
ignorant of editorial methods and the limitations of human powers,
that Mr. Dana wrote every word that appeared on the editorial page of
the _Sun_. It is likely that this flattering myth came to his ears and
caused him more than one chuckle. Dana wrote pieces for the _Sun_, many
of them, but he never essayed the superhuman task of filling the whole
page with his own self. Nobody knew better than he what a bore a man
becomes who flows opinion constantly, whether by voice or by pen.
For Dana, not the eternal verities in allopathic doses, but the
entertaining varieties, carefully administered. He might be immensely
interested in the destruction of the Whisky Ring, and in writing about
that infamy articles which would scorch the ears of Washington; but
he knew that not every man, woman, and child who read the _Sun_ was
furious about the Whisky Ring or cared to read columns of opinion about
it every day. They must have pabulum in the form of an article about
the princely earnings of Charles Dickens, or the identification of
Mount Sinai, or the mysterious murder of a French count.
So he hired men who could compare Dickens’s lectures with Thackeray’s,
or were familiar with the controversy over Mount Barghir, or who knew a
murder mystery when they saw it. They wrote, and he read and sometimes
edited, but usually approved, for he knew that newspaper success lay
not so much in a choice of topics as in a choice of men. He knew that
the success of an editorial page came less from inside opinions than
from outside interest. Dana’s remarkable success in the exaltation
of journalism to literary heights was won not so much through what he
wrote, but through what he left other men free to write.
His own work as a writer for the _Sun_ took but a fraction of his busy
day. He dictated his articles to Tom Williams, his stenographer, a
Fenian and a bold man.
“Can you write as fast as I talk?” asked Dana when Williams applied for
the job.
“I doubt it, Mr. Dana,” said Williams; “but I can write as fast as any
man ought to talk.”
For twenty years Tom Williams transcribed articles that absorbed the
readers of the _Sun_, but his own heart was down the bay, near his
Staten Island home, where he spent most of his spare time in fishing
and sailing. It was always a grief to Williams to enter the office on
an election or similarly important night, and to find that no one paid
any attention to his stories about how the fish were biting.
Dana had no doubt--nor had any one, least of all those who came under
his editorial condemnation--of his own ability as a trenchant writer.
The expression of thought was an art which he had studied from boyhood.
Whatever of the academic appeared in his early work had been driven out
during his service on the _Tribune_ and in the war, particularly the
latter, for as a reporter for the government he learned to avoid all
but the salients of expression. But as the editor of the _Sun_ he found
less delight in his own product than in the work of some other man
whose literary ability answered his own standards of terseness, vigour,
and illumination. The new man would help the _Sun_, and that was all
that Dana asked.
That another man’s work should be mistaken for his own, or his own for
another man’s, was to Dana nothing at all, except perhaps a source of
amusement. The anonymity of the writers on the _Sun_ was so complete
that the public knew their work only as a whole; but whenever anything
particularly biting or humorous appeared, the same public instantly
decided that Dana must have written it.
No king, no clown, to rule this town!
That line, born in the _Sun’s_ editorial page, will live as long as
Shakespeare. In eight words it embodied the protest of New York against
the arrogance and stupidity of machine political rule. Ten thousand
times, at least, it has been credited to Dana, but as a matter of fact
it was written by W. O. Bartlett.
Bartlett was one of those great newspaper writers whose fate--or
choice--it is never to own a newspaper and never to attract public
attention through the writing of signed articles or books. Writing
was not primarily his profession, and by the older men of New York
who remember him he is recalled as a brilliant lawyer rather than
as a writer. He met Dana through Secretary Stanton, and he was the
_Sun’s_ attorney soon after Dana and his friends bought the paper. His
law-offices were in the Sun Building, directly below Mr. Dana’s own
offices. There, and also at the Hoffman House, where he lived when he
was not on his estate at Brookhaven, Long Island, Mr. Bartlett wrote
his articles for the _Sun_.
Bartlett was a writer of the school of simplicity. His style of
reducing a proposition to its most elementary form, so that it was
clear to even the Class B intellect, was the admiration and envy of
all who knew his articles. It was an inspiration, too, to many young
newspapermen of his day.
The manner of Mr. Arthur Brisbane of the _Evening Journal_, luring
the reader into a sociological dissertation by first inquiring
whether he knows “Why a Flea Jumps So Far,” is the Bartlett manner,
with such modifications as are necessary to reach the attention of a
group intellectually somewhat different from Bartlett’s readers. Only
Bartlett did not spend too much time on the flea. Of the three men
whose articles have most distinguished the first column of the _Sun’s_
editorial page, each has had his own weapon when leading to attack.
Dana struck with a sword. Mitchell used--and uses--the rapier. Bartlett
swung the mace. It was jewelled with the gems of language, but still
it was a mace; and if it crushed the skull of the enemy at the first
blow, so much the better. It was Bartlett, for instance, who wrote
the article in which the Democratic candidate for President in 1880,
General Hancock, was referred to as “a good man, weighing two hundred
and forty pounds.”
W. O. Bartlett wrote for the _Sun_ from 1868 until his death in 1881.
He was the foremost figure in the group of older men around Dana--the
men who had been prominent in political and literary life before the
Civil War. Other notable men of middle age who were chosen by Mr. Dana
to write editorial articles were James S. Pike, Fitz-Henry Warren,
Henry B. Stanton, and John Swinton.
James Shepherd Pike’s articles appeared more frequently in the columns
of the _Sun_ than Pike himself appeared in the office, for most of his
work was done in Washington. He was about eight years older than Mr.
Dana, but they were great friends from the earliest days of Dana’s
_Tribune_ experience. For five years, beginning in 1855, Pike was
a Washington correspondent and one of the associate editors of the
_Tribune_. During the Civil War he was United States minister to the
Netherlands, a reward for his services in his home State, Maine, where
he was useful in uniting the anti-slavery forces. He was a brother of
Frederick A. Pike, a war-time Representative from Maine, whose “Tax,
fight, emancipate!” was the Republican watchword from its utterance in
1861.
Pike was one of the group that supported Greeley for the Presidency in
1872. He was one of the really great publicists of his day. He wrote
“The Restoration of the Currency,” “The Financial Crisis,” “Horace
Greeley in 1872,” “A Prostrate State”--which was a description of the
Reconstruction era in South Carolina--and “The First Blows of the Civil
War,” this last a volume of reminiscent correspondence, some newspaper,
some personal. The friendship and literary association of Pike and Dana
lasted more than thirty years, and ended only with Pike’s death in
1882, just after he had passed threescore and ten.
Fitz-Henry Warren, who has been already referred to in this narrative
as the author of the _Tribune’s_ cry, “On to Richmond!” wrote many
editorial articles for Dana, who had conceived a great admiration for
Warren when both were in the service of the _Tribune_, Dana as managing
editor and Warren as head of the Washington bureau. Warren emerged from
the Civil War not only a major-general, but a powerful politician, and
it was not until several years later, after he had served in the Iowa
Senate and as minister to Guatemala, that Dana was able to bring the
pen of this transplanted New Englander to the office of the _Sun_. Once
there, it did splendid work.
It is not easy to identify the editorials that appeared in the _Sun_
under the Dana régime; not so much because of the lapse of years, but
because the spirit of Dana so permeated everything that was printed on
his page that it is difficult to say with certainty, “This Dana wrote,
this Bartlett, this Mitchell, this Warren, and this Pike.” But, for
the purpose of giving some small idea of the grace and magnificence of
Warren’s style, here is a paragraph from an editorial article known to
have been written by him on the death of Charles Sumner in March, 1874:
Men spoke softly on the street; their very voices betokened the
impending event, and even their footfalls are said to have been
lighter than common. But in the neighborhood of the Senator’s
house there was a sense of singular and touching interest.
Splendid equipages rolled to the corner, over pavements
conceived in fraud and laid in corruption, to testify the
regard of their occupants for eminent purity of life. Liveried
servants carried hopeless messages from the door of him who was
simplicity itself, and to whom the pomp and pageantry of this
evil day were but the evidences of guilty degeneracy. Through
all those lingering hours of anguish the sad procession came
and went.
On the sidewalk stood a numerous and grateful representation
of the race to whom he had given the proudest efforts and the
best energies of his existence. The black man bowed his head
in unaffected grief, and the black woman sat hushing her babe
upon the curbstone, in mute expectation of the last decisive
intelligence from the chamber above.
General Warren continued to write for the _Sun_ until 1876, and he
died two years afterward, when he was only sixty-two years old, in
Brimfield, Massachusetts, the town of his birth.
[Illustration: JOSEPH PULITZER]
[Illustration: ELIHU ROOT]
[Illustration: JUDGE WILLARD BARTLETT]
Although Henry Brewster Stanton was a comparatively old man when
he began writing for the _Sun_, his activities in that line lasted
for nearly twenty years. In 1826, when he was twenty-one years old,
he entered newspaper work on Thurlow Weed’s _Monroe Telegraph_,
published in Rochester. Soon afterward he became an advocate of the
anti-slavery cause. In 1840 he married Elizabeth Cady, and with her
went abroad, where in Great Britain and France they worked for the
relief of the slaves in the United States. It was during that journey
that Elizabeth Cady Stanton signed the first call for a woman’s rights
convention.
On his return to America Stanton studied law with his father-in-law,
Daniel Cady. After his admission to the bar he practised in Boston, but
he returned to New York and politics in 1847. He left the Democratic
party to become one of the founders of the Republican party.
Dana met Stanton when the latter was a writer for the _Tribune_, and
when Dana came into the control of the _Sun_ he secured the veteran
as a contributor. Stanton knew politics from A to Z, and his brief
articles, filled with political wisdom and often salted with his
dry humour, were just the class of matter that Dana wanted for the
editorial page. Stanton was also a capable reviewer of books. He wrote
for the _Sun_ from 1868 until his death in 1887. Henry Ward Beecher
said of him:
“I think Stanton has all the elements of old John Adams--able, staunch,
patriotic, full of principle, and always unpopular. He lacks that sense
of other people’s opinions which keeps a man from running against them.”
John Swinton was one of the few of Dana’s men who might be described
as a “character.” He lived a double intellectual life, writing
conservative articles in his newspaper hours and making socialistic
speeches when he was off duty. Yet it was a double life without
duplicity, for there was no concealment in it, no hypocrisy, and
no harm. When he had finished his day in the office of the _Sun_,
perhaps at writing some instructive paragraphs about the possibilities
of American trade in Nicaragua, he would take off his skull-cap,
place a black soft hat on his gray head, and go forth to dilate on
the advantages of super-Fourierism to some sympathetic audience of
socialists.
There was a story in the office that one evening Mr. Swinton, making a
speech at a socialistic gathering, referred hotly to the editor of the
_Sun_ as one of the props of a false form of government, and added that
“some day two old men will come rolling down the steps of the _Sun_
office,” and that at the bottom of the steps he, Swinton, would be on
top.
This may be of a piece with the story about Mr. Dana and the man with
the revolver; but the young men in the reporters’ room liked to tell
it to younger men. It probably had its basis in the fact that on the
morning after a particularly ferocious assault on capital, John Swinton
would poke his head into Mr. Dana’s room to tell him how he had given
him the dickens the night before--information which tickled Mr. Dana
immensely. And Dana never went to the bottom of the _Sun_ stairs except
on his own sturdy legs.
Swinton was a Scotsman, born in Haddingtonshire in 1830. He emigrated
to Canada as a boy, learned the printer’s trade, and worked at the case
in New York. After travels all over the country, he lived for a time
in Charleston, South Carolina, and there acquired an abhorrence for
slavery. He went to Kansas and took part in the Free Soil contest, but
returned to New York in 1857 and began the study of medicine.
While so engaged he contributed articles to the New York _Times_, and
Henry J. Raymond, who liked his work, took him as an editorial writer.
He was the managing editor of the _Times_ during the Civil War, and
had sole charge during Raymond’s absences. At the end of the war
Swinton’s health caused him to resign from the managing editorship, but
he continued to write for the editorial page. He went to work on the
_Sun_ about 1877.
His specialty was paragraphs. Dana liked men who could do anything, but
he also preferred that every man should have some specialty. Swinton
had the imagination and the light touch of the skilful weaver of
small items. Also, he was much interested in Central America, and his
knowledge of that region was of frequent use to the _Sun_.
Swinton left the _Sun_ in 1883 to give his whole time to _John
Swinton’s Paper_, a weekly journal in which he expounded his
labour-reform and other political views. He was the author of many
pamphlets and several books, including a “Eulogy of Henry J. Raymond”
and an “Oration on John Brown.”
Such were the editorial writers of what may be called the iron age of
the _Sun_; the men who helped Dana to build the first story of a great
house. As they passed on, younger men, some greater men, trained in the
Dana school, took their places and spanned the _Sun’s_ golden age--such
men as E. P. Mitchell, Francis P. Church, and Mayo W. Hazeltine.
Meanwhile, on the other side of a partition on the third floor of the
old brick building at the corner of Frankfort Street, another group of
men were doing their best to advance Dana’s _Sun_ by making it the best
newspaper as well as the best editorial paper in America. These, too,
were giants.