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._
Managing editors did not come into favour in American newspaper offices
until the second half of the last century. As late as 1872 Frederic
Hudson, in his “History of Journalism in the United States,” grumbled
at the intrusion of a new functionary upon the field:
If a journal has an editor, and editor-in-chief, it is fair to
assume that he is also its managing editor.
That historian (he was a _Herald_ man, and Bennett would have no
managing editor) had not been reconciled to the fact that between
the editor of a newspaper--the director of its policies and opinions
and general style and tone--and the subeditors to whose various
desks comes the flood of news there must be some one who will act
as a link, lightening the labours of the editor and shouldering the
responsibilities of the desk men. He may never write an editorial
article; may never turn out a sheet of news copy or put a head on an
item; may never make up a page or arrange an assignment list--but he
must know how to do every one of these things and a great deal more.
A managing editor is really the newspaper’s manager of its employees
in the news field. He is an editor to the extent that he edits men.
He may appear to spend most of his time and judgment on the acceptance
or rejection of news matter, the giving of decisions as to the length
or character of an article, its position in the paper, and, more
broadly, the general make-up of the next day’s product; but a man
might be able to perform all these professional functions wisely and
yet be impossible as a managing editor through his inability to handle
newspapermen.
The _Tribune_ was the first New York paper to have a managing editor.
He was Dana. Serene, tactful, and a man of the world, he was able
by judicious handling to keep for the _Tribune_ the services of men
like Warren and Pike, who might have been repelled by the sometimes
irritable Greeley. The title came from the London _Times_, where it had
been used for years, perhaps borrowed from the _directeur gérant_ of
the French newspapers.
The _Sun_ had no managing editor until Dana bought it, Beach having
preferred to direct personally all matters above the ken of the city
editor. The _Sun’s_ first managing editor was Isaac W. England, whom
Dana had known and liked when both were on the _Tribune_. England
was of Welsh blood and English birth, having been born in Twerton, a
suburb of Bath, in 1832. He worked at the bookbinding trade until he
was seventeen, and then came to the United States and made his living
at bookbinding and printing. He used to tell his _Sun_ associates of
his triumphal return to England, when he was twenty, for a short visit,
which he spent in the shop of his apprenticeship, showing his old
master how much better the Yankees were at embossing and lettering.
England returned to America in the steerage and saw the brutal
treatment of immigrants. This he described in several articles and
sold them to the _Tribune_. Greeley gave him a job pulling a hand-press
at ten dollars a week, but later made him a reporter. He was city
editor of the _Tribune_ until after the Civil War, and then he went
with his friend Dana to Chicago for the short and profitless experience
with the Chicago _Republican_. In the period between Dana’s retirement
from the _Republican_ and his purchase of the _Sun_, England was
manager of the Jersey City _Times_.
England was managing editor of the _Sun_ only a year, then becoming
its publisher--a position for which he was well fitted. An example of
his business ability was given in 1877, when Frank Leslie went into
bankruptcy. England was made assignee, and he handled the affairs of
the Leslie concern so well that its debts were paid off in three years.
This was only a side job for England, who continued all the time to
manage the business matters of the _Sun_. When he died, in 1885, Dana
wrote that he had “lost the friend of almost a lifetime, a man of
unconquerable integrity, true and faithful in all things.”
The second managing editor of the _Sun_ was that great newspaperman
Amos Jay Cummings. He was born to newspaper work if any man ever was.
His father, who was a Congregational minister--a fact which could not
be surmised by listening to Amos in one of his explosive moods--was
the editor of the _Christian Palladium and Messenger_. This staid
publication was printed on the first floor of the Cummings home at
Irvington, New Jersey. Entrance to the composing-room was forbidden the
son, but with tears and tobacco he bribed the printer, one Sylvester
Bailey, who set up the Rev. Mr. Cummings’s articles, to let him in
through a window. Cummings and Bailey later set type together on the
_Tribune_. They fought in the same regiment in the Civil War. They
worked together on the _Evening Sun_, and they are buried in the same
cemetery at Irvington.
The trade once learned, young Amos left home and wandered from State
to State, making a living at the case. In 1856, when he was only
fourteen, he was attracted by the glamour that surrounded William
Walker, the famous filibuster, and joined the forces of that daring
young adventurer, who then had control of Nicaragua. The boy was one of
a strange horde of soldiers of fortune, which included British soldiers
who had been at Sebastopol, Italians who had followed Garibaldi, and
Hungarians in whom Kossuth had aroused the martial flame.
Like many of the others in Walker’s army, Cummings believed that the
Tennessean was a second Napoleon, with Central America, perhaps South
America, for his empire. But when this Napoleon came to his Elba by his
surrender to Commander Davis of the United States navy, in the spring
of 1857, Cummings decided that there was no marshal’s baton in his own
ragged knapsack and went back to be a wandering printer.
Cummings was setting type in the _Tribune_ office when the Civil War
began. He hurried out and enlisted as a private in the Twenty-Sixth New
Jersey Volunteer Infantry. He fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and
Fredericksburg. At Marye’s Hill, in the battle of Fredericksburg, his
regiment was supporting a battery against a Confederate charge. Their
lines were broken and they fell back from the guns. Cummings took the
regimental flag from the hands of the colour-sergeant and ran alone,
under the enemy’s fire, back to the guns. The Jerseymen rallied, the
guns were recovered, and Cummings got the Medal of Honor from Congress.
He left the service as sergeant-major of the regiment and presently
appeared in Greeley’s office, a seedy figure infolded in an army
overcoat.
“Mr. Greeley,” said Amos, “I’ve just got to have work.”
“Oh, indeed!” creaked Horace. “And why have you got to have work?”
Cummings said nothing, but turned his back on the great editor,
lifted his coat-tails and showed the sad, if not shocking, state of
his breeches. He got work. In 1863, when the _Tribune_ office was
threatened by the rioters, Amos helped to barricade the composing-room
and save it from the mob.
Cummings served as editor of the _Weekly Tribune_ and as a political
writer for the daily. This is the way he came to quit the _Tribune_:
John Russell Young, the third managing editor of the _Tribune_, got
the habit of issuing numbered orders. Two of these orders reached
Cummings’s desk, as follows:
Order No. 756--There is too much profanity in this office.
Order No. 757--Hereafter the political reporter must have his
copy in at 10.30 P.M.
Cummings turned to his desk and wrote:
Order No. 1234567--Everybody knows ---- well that I get most of
the political news out of the Albany _Journal_, and everybody
knows ---- ---- well that the _Journal_ doesn’t get here until
eleven o’clock at night, and anybody who knows anything knows
---- ---- well that asking me to get my stuff up at half past
ten is like asking a man to sit on a window-sill and dance on
the roof at the same time.
CUMMINGS.
The result of this multiplicity of numbered orders was that shortly
afterward Cummings presented himself to the editor of the _Sun_.
“Why are you leaving the _Tribune_?” asked Mr. Dana.
“They say,” replied Amos, “that I swear too much.”
“Just the man for me!” replied Dana, according to the version which
Cummings used to tell.
At any rate, Amos went on the _Sun_ as managing editor, and he
continued to swear. The compositors now in the _Sun_ office who
remember him at all remember him largely for that.
The union once set apart a day for contributions to the printers’-home
fund, and each compositor was to contribute the fruits of a thousand
ems of composition. Cummings, who was proud of being a union printer,
left his managing-editor’s desk and went to the composing-room.
“Ah, Mr. Cummings,” said Abe Masters, the foreman, “I’ll give you some
of your own copy to set.”
“To hell with my own copy!” said Cummings, who knew his handwriting
faults. “Give me some reprint.”
Green reporters got a taste of the Cummings profanity. One of them put
a French phrase in a story. Cummings asked him what it meant, and the
youth told him.
“Then why the hell didn’t you write it that way?” yelled Cummings.
“This paper is for people who read English!”
In those days murderers were executed in the old Tombs prison in Centre
Street. Cummings, who was full of enterprise, sought a way to get
quickly the fall of the drop. The telephone had not been perfected,
but there was a shot-tower north of the _Sun’s_ office and east of the
Tombs. Cummings sent one man to the Tombs, with instructions to wave a
flag upon the instant of the execution. Another man, stationed at the
top of the shot-tower, had another flag, with which he was to make a
sign to Cummings on the roof of the Sun Building, as soon as he saw the
flag move at the prison.
The reporter at the Tombs arranged with a keeper to notify him just
before the execution, but the keeper was sent on an errand, and
presently Cummings, standing nervously on the roof of the Sun Building,
heard the newsboys crying the extras of a rival sheet. The plan had
fallen through. No blanks could adequately represent the Cummings
temper upon that occasion.
Cummings was probably the best all-round news man of his day. He
had the executive ability and the knowledge of men that make a good
managing editor. He knew what Dana knew--that the newspapers had yet to
touch public sympathy and imagination in the news columns as well as in
editorial articles; and he knew how to do it, how to teach men to do
it, how to cram the moving picture of a living city into the four pages
of the _Sun_. He advised desk men, complimented or corrected reporters,
edited local articles, and, when a story appealed to him strongly, he
went out and got it and wrote it himself.
In such brief biographies of Cummings as have been printed you will
find that he is best remembered in the outer world as a managing
editor, or as the editor of the _Evening Sun_, or as a Representative
in Congress fighting for the rights of Civil War veterans, printers’
unions, and letter-carriers; but among the oldest generation of
newspapermen he is revered as a great reporter. He was the first real
human-interest reporter. He knew the news value of the steer loose in
the streets, the lost child in the police station, the Italian murder
that was really a case of vendetta. The _Sun_ men of his time followed
his lead, and a few of them, like Julian Ralph, outdid him, but he was
the pioneer; and a thousand _Sun_ men since then have kept, or tried
to keep, on the Cummings trail.
It was Cummings who sent men to cover the police stations at night and
made it possible for the _Sun_ to beat the news association on the
trivial items which were the delight of the reader, and which helped,
among other things, to shoot the paper’s daily circulation to one
hundred thousand in the third year of the Dana ownership.
The years when Cummings was managing editor of the _Sun_ were years
stuffed with news. Even a newspaperman without imagination would have
found plenty of happenings at hand. The Franco-Prussian War, the gold
conspiracy that ended in Black Friday (September 24, 1869), the Orange
riot (July 12, 1871), the great Chicago fire, the killing of Fisk by
Stokes, Tweedism--what more could a newspaperman wish in so brief a
period? And, of course, always there were murders. There were so many
mysterious murders in the _Sun_ that a suspicious person might have
harboured the thought that Cummings went out after his day’s work was
done and committed them for art’s sake.
When men and women stopped killing, Cummings would turn to politics.
Tweed was the great man then; under suspicion, even before 1870, but a
great man, particularly among his own. The _Sun_ printed pages about
Tweed and his satellites and the great balls of the Americus Club,
their politico-social organisation. It described the jewels worn by
the leaders of Tammany Hall, including the two-thousand-dollar club
badge--the head of a tiger with eyes of ruby and three large diamonds
shining above them.
Everybody who wanted the political news read the _Sun_. As Jim Fisk
remarked one evening as he stood proudly with Jay Gould in the lobby
of the Grand Opera House--proud of his notoriety in connection with
the Erie Railroad jobbery, proud of the infamy he enjoyed from the fact
that he owned two houses in the same block in West Twenty-third Street,
housing his wife in one and Josie Mansfield in the other; proud of his
guilty partnership in Tweedism--
“The _Sun’s_ a lively paper. I can never wait for daylight for
a copy. I have my man down there with a horse every morning,
and just as soon as he gets a _Sun_ hot from the press he jumps
on the back of that horse and puts for me as if all hell was
after him.
“Gould’s the same way; he has to see it before daylight, too.
My man has to bring him up a copy. You always get the news
ahead of everybody else. Why, the first news I got that Gould
and me were blackballed in the Blossom Club we got from the
_Sun_. I’m damned if I’d believe it at first, and Gould says,
‘What is this Blossom Club?’ Just then Sweeny came in. I asked
Sweeny if it was true, and Sweeny said yes, that Tweed was the
man that done it all. There it was in the _Sun_, straight’s a
die.”
The _Sun_ reporter who chronicled this--it may have been Cummings
himself--had gone to ask Fisk whether he and his friends had hired a
thug to black-jack the respectable Mr. Dorman B. Eaton, a foe of the
Erie outfit; but he took down and printed Fisk’s tribute to the _Sun’s_
enterprise. As there was scarcely a morning in those days when the
_Sun_ did not turn up some new trick played by the Tweed gang and the
Erie group, their anxiety to get an early copy was natural.
Tweed and his philanthropic pretences did not deceive the _Sun_. On
February 24, 1870--a year and a half before the exposure which sent
the boss to prison--the _Sun_ printed an editorial article announcing
that Tweed was willing to surrender his ownership of the city upon the
following terms:
[Illustration:
(_From a Photograph by Paul Dana_)
MR. DANA AT SEVENTY
]
To give up all interest in the court-house swindle.
To receive no more revenue from the department of survey and
inspection of buildings; and he hopes the people of New York
will remember his generosity in giving up this place, inasmuch
as his share amounts to over one hundred thousand dollars a
year.
Tweed was liked by many New Yorkers, particularly those who knew him
only by his lavish charities. One of these wrote the following letter,
which the _Sun_ printed on December 7, 1870, under the heading “A
Monument to Boss Tweed--the Money Paid In”:
Enclosed please find ten cents as a contribution to erect a
statue to William M. Tweed on Tweed Plaza. I have no doubt that
fifty thousand to seventy-five thousand of his admirers will
contribute. Yours, etc.,
SEVENTEENTH WARD VOTER.
On December 12 the _Sun_ said editorially:
Has Boss Tweed any friends? If he has, they are a mean set.
It is now more than a week since an appeal was made to them
to come forward and put up the ancillary qualities to erect a
statue of Mr. Tweed in the centre of Tweed Plaza; but as yet
only four citizens have sent in their subscriptions. These were
not large, but they were paid in cash, and there is reason for
the belief that they were the tokens of sincere admiration
for Mr. Tweed. But the hundreds, or, rather, thousands, of
small-potato politicians whom he has made rich and powerful
stand aloof and do not offer a picayune.
We propose that the statue shall be executed by Captain
Albertus de Groot, who made the celebrated Vanderbilt bronzes,
but we have not yet decided whether it shall represent the
favorite son of New York afoot or ahorseback. In fact, we
rather incline to have a nautical statue, exhibiting Boss Tweed
as a bold mariner, amid the wild fury of a hurricane, splicing
the main brace in the foretopgallant futtock shrouds of his
steam-yacht. But that is a matter for future consideration. The
first thing is to get the money; and if those who claim to be
Mr. Tweed’s friends don’t raise it, we shall begin to believe
the rumor that the Hon. P. Brains Sweeny has turned against
him, and has forbidden every one to give anything toward the
erection of the projected statue.
Ten days later the _Sun_ carried on the editorial page a long news
story headed “Our Statue of Boss Tweed--the Readers of the _Sun_
Going to Work in Dead Earnest--The _Sun’s_ Advice Followed, Ha!
Ha!--Organisation of the Tweed Testimonial Association of the City of
New York--A Bronze Statue Worth Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars to Be
Erected.”
Sure enough, the ward politicians had taken the joke seriously. Police
Justice Edward J. Shandley, Tim Campbell, Coroner Patrick Keenan,
Police Commissioner Smith, and a dozen other faithful Tammany men were
on the list of trustees. They decided upon the space then known as
Tweed Plaza, at the junction of East Broadway and New Canal and Rutgers
Streets as the site for the monument.
The _Sun_ added to the joke by printing more letters from contributors.
One, from Patrick Maloy, “champion eel-bobber,” brought ten cents and
the suggestion that the statue should be inscribed with the amount of
money that Tweed had made out of the city. This sort of thing went
on into the new year, the _Sun_ aggravating the movement with grave
editorial advice.
At last the jest became more than Tweed could bear, and from his
desk in the Senate Chamber at Albany, on March 13, 1871, he sent
the following letter to Judge Shandley, the chairman of the statue
committee:
MY DEAR SIR:
I learn that a movement to erect a statue to me in the city of
New York is being seriously pushed by a committee of citizens
of which you are chairman.
I was aware that a newspaper of our city had brought forward
the proposition, but I considered it one of the jocose
sensations for which that journal is so famous. Since I left
the city to engage in legislation the proposition appears to
have been taken up by my friends, no doubt in resentment at the
supposed unfriendly motive of the original proposition and the
manner in which it had been urged.
The only effect of the proposed statue is to present me
to the public as assenting to the parade of a public and
permanent testimonial to vanity and self-glorification which
do not exist. You will thus perceive that the movement, which
originated in a joke, but which you have made serious, is doing
me an injustice and an injury; and I beg of you to see to it
that it is at once stopped.
I hardly know which is the more absurd--the original
proposition or the grave comments of others, based upon the
idea that I have given the movement countenance. I have been
about as much abused as any man in public life; I can stand
abuse and bear even more than my share; but I have never yet
been charged with being deficient in common sense.
Yours very truly,
WM. M. TWEED.
This letter appeared in the _Sun_ the next day under the facetious
heading: “A Great Man’s Modesty--The Most Remarkable Letter Ever
Written by the Noble Benefactor of the People.” Editorial regret
was expressed at Tweed’s declination; and, still in solemn mockery,
the _Sun_ grieved over the return to the subscribers of the several
thousand dollars that had been sent to Shandley’s committee. William J.
Florence, the comedian, had put himself down for five hundred dollars.
Was it utterly absurd that the Tweed idolaters should have taken
seriously the _Sun’s_ little joke? No, for so serious a writer as
Gustavus Myers wrote in his “History of Tammany Hall” (1901) that “one
of the signers of the circular has assured the author that it was a
serious proposal. The attitude of the _Sun_ confirms this.” And another
grave literary man, Dr. Henry Van Dyke, set this down in his “Essays on
Application” (1908):
William M. Tweed, of New York, who reigned over the city for
seven years, stole six million dollars or more for himself and
six million dollars or more for his followers; was indorsed at
the heights of his corruption by six of the richest citizens of
the metropolis; had a public statue offered to him by the New
York _Sun_ as a “noble benefactor of the city,” etc.
Of course Mr. Myers and Dr. Van Dyke had never read the statue articles
from beginning to end, else they would not have stumbled over the brick
that even Tweed, with all his conceit, was able to perceive.
In July, 1871, when the New York _Times_ was fortunate enough to have
put in its hands the proof of what everybody already suspected--that
Senator Tweed, Comptroller Connolly, Park Commissioner Sweeny, and
their associates were plundering the city--the _Sun_ was busy with
its own pet news and political articles, the investigation of the
Orange riots and the extravagance and nepotism of President Grant’s
administration.
The _Sun_ did not like the _Times_, which had been directed, since
the death of Henry J. Raymond, in 1869, by Raymond’s partner, George
Jones, and Raymond’s chief editorial writer, Louis J. Jennings; but
the _Sun_ liked the Tweed gang still less. It had been pounding at it
for two years, using the head-lines “Boss Tweed’s Legislature,” or
“Mr. Sweeny’s Legislature,” every day of the sessions at the State
capital; but neither the _Sun_ nor any other newspaper had been able to
obtain the figures that proved the robbery until the county bookkeeper,
Matthew J. O’Rourke, dug them out and took them to the _Times_.
The books showed that the city had been gouged out of five million
dollars in one item alone--the price paid in two years to a Tweed
contracting firm, Ingersoll & Co., for furniture and carpets for the
county court-house. Enough carpets had been bought--or at least paid
for--to cover the eight acres of City Hall Park three layers deep. And
that five million dollars was only a fraction of the loot.
In September, 1871, after the mass-meeting of citizens in Cooper Union,
the _Sun_ began printing the revelations of Tweedism under the standing
head, “The Doom of the Ring.”
Tweed engaged as counsel, among others, William O. Bartlett, who was
not only counsel for the _Sun_ but, next to Mr. Dana, the paper’s
leading editorial writer at that time. The boss may have fancied that
in retaining Bartlett he retained the _Sun_, but it is more likely that
he sought Bartlett’s services because of that lawyer’s reputation as
an aggressive and able counsellor. If Tweed had any delusions about
influencing the _Sun_, they were quickly dispelled. On September 18, in
an editorial article probably written by Dana, the _Sun_ said:
While Mr. Bartlett, in his able argument before Judge Barnard
on Friday, vindicated Mr. Tweed from certain allegations set
forth in the complaint of Mr. Foley, he by no means relieved
him from all complicity in the enormous frauds and robberies
that have been committed in the government of this city. With
all his ability, that is something beyond Mr. Bartlett’s
power; and it is vain to hope that either of the leaders of
the Tammany Ring can ever regain the confidence of the public,
or for any length of time exercise the authority of political
office. They must all go, Sweeny, Tweed, and Hall, as well as
Connolly.
Mr. Tweed must not imagine that he can buy his way out of
the present complication with money, as he did in 1870. The
next Legislature will be made up of different material from
the Republicans he purchased, and the people will exercise a
sterner supervision over its acts.
A good picture of Tweed’s popularity, which he still retained among his
own people, was drawn in an editorial article in the _Sun_ of October
30, 1871, three days after the boss had been arrested and released in a
million dollars’ bail:
In the Fourth District William M. Tweed is sure to be
re-elected [to the State Senate]. The Republican factions,
after a great deal of quarreling, have concentrated on
O’Donovan Rossa, a well-known Fenian, but his chance is
nothing. Even if it had been possible by beginning in season to
defeat Tweed, it cannot be done with only a week’s time.
Besides, his power there is absolute. The district comprises
the most ignorant and most vicious portion of the city.
It is full of low grog-shops, houses of ill-fame, low
gambling-houses, and sailor boarding-houses, whose keepers
enjoy protection and immunity, for which they pay by the most
efficient electioneering services. Moreover, the district is
full of sinecures paid from the city treasury. If, instead
of having stolen millions, Mr. Tweed were accused of a dozen
murders, or if, instead of being in human form, he wore the
semblance of a bull or a bear, the voters of the Fourth
District would march to the polls and vote for him just as
zealously as they will do now, and the inspectors of election
would furnish for him by fraudulent counting any majority that
might be thought necessary in addition to the votes really
given.
Tweed was re-elected to the State Senate by twelve thousand plurality.
The great robber-boss was a source of news from his rise in the late
sixties to his death in 1878. As early as March, 1870, the _Sun_ gave
its readers an intimate idea of Tweed’s private extravagances under
the heading: “Bill Tweed’s Big Barn--Democratic Extravagance Versus
That of the White House--Grant’s Billiard Saloon, Caligula’s Stable,
and Leonard Jerome’s Private Theatre Eclipsed--Martin Van Buren’s Gold
Spoons Nowhere--Belmont’s Four-in-Hand Overshadowed--a Picture for
Rural Democrats.”
Beneath this head was a column story beginning:
The Hon. William M. Tweed resides at 41 West Thirty-sixth
Street. The Hon. William M. Tweed’s horses reside in East
Fortieth Street, between Madison and Park Avenues.
That was the _Sun’s_ characteristic way of starting a story.
Tweed was, in a way, responsible for the appearance of a _Sun_ more
than four pages in size. Up to December, 1875, there was no issue of
the _Sun_ on Sundays. In November of that year it was announced that
beginning on December 5 there would be a Sunday _Sun_, to be sold at
three cents, one cent more than the week-day price, but nothing was
said, or thought, of an increase In size.
On Saturday, December 4, Tweed, with the connivance of his keepers,
escaped from his house in Madison Avenue. This made a four-column story
on which Mr. Dana had not counted. Also, the advertisers had taken
advantage of the new Sunday issue, and there were more than two pages
of advertisements. There was nothing for it but to make an eight-page
paper, for which Dana, who then believed that all the news could be
told in a folio, apologised as follows:
We confess ourselves surprised at the extraordinary pressure of
advertisements upon our pages this morning; and disappointed
in being compelled to present the _Sun_ to our readers in a
different form from that to which they are accustomed. We
trust, however, that they will find it no less interesting
than usual; and, still more, that they will feel that although
the appearance may be somewhat different, it is yet the same
friendly and faithful _Sun_.
But the Sunday issue of the _Sun_ never went back to four pages, for
the eight-page paper had been made so attractive with special stories,
reprint, and short fiction that both readers and advertisers were
pleased. It was ten years, however, before the week-day _Sun_ increased
its size. Even during the Beecher trial (January, 1875) when the
_Sun’s_ reporter, Franklin Fyles, found himself unable to condense the
day’s proceedings within a page of seven columns, the _Sun_ still gave
all the rest of the day’s news.
Cummings’s right-hand man in the news department of the _Sun_ was Dr.
John B. Wood, the Great American Condenser. All the city copy passed
through his hands. He was then nearing fifty, a white-haired man who
wore two pairs of glasses with thick lenses, these crowned with a green
shade. He had been a printer on several papers and a desk man on the
_Tribune_, whence Dana brought him to the _Sun_. Wood’s sense of the
value of words was so acute that he could determine, as rapidly as his
eye passed along the pages of a story, just what might be stricken out
without loss. It might be a word, a sentence, a page; sometimes it
would be ninety-eight per cent of the article.
Even when his sight so failed that he was unable to read copy
continuously, Dr. Wood performed the remarkable feat of condensing
through a reader. Willis Holly read copy to him for months, six hours
a night. Holly might read three pages without interruption, while Wood
sat as silent as if he were asleep. Then----
“Throw out the introduction down to the middle of the second page,
begin with ‘John Elliott killed,’ and cut it off at ‘arrested him.’”
Joseph C. Hendrix, who became a member of Congress and a bank
president, was a _Sun_ cub reporter. One night he was assigned to read
copy to Dr. Wood. He picked up a sheet and began:
“‘The application of Mrs. Jane Smith for divorce from her husband, John
Smith--’”
“Cut out ‘her husband,’” said Wood.
“‘--who alleges cruelty,’” Hendrix continued, “‘in that he--’” Here the
reporter’s writing was blurred, and Hendrix, who could not decipher it,
said “Damn!”
“Cut out the ‘damn,’” said Dr. Wood.
In keeping news down to the bone Wood was of remarkable value to the
_Sun_ in those years when Dana showed that it was possible to tell
everything in four pages. New York was smaller then, and display
advertising had not come to be a science. The _Sun_ got along nicely on
its circulation, for the newsdealers paid one and one-third cents for
each copy. With the circulation receipts about fourteen hundred dollars
a day, the advertising receipts were clear profit. Amos Cummings had
such a fierce disregard for the feelings of advertisers that often,
when a good piece of news came in late, he would throw out advertising
to make room for it.
The city editors of the _Sun_ under Cummings were, in order, John
Williams, Lawrence S. Kane, Walter M. Rosebault, William Young, and
John B. Bogart. Williams, who had been a Methodist preacher, left the
_Sun_ in 1869 to become religious editor of the _Herald_. Kane, a big
blond Irishman with mutton-chop whiskers, held the city desk until the
summer of 1870 and then returned to the reportorial staff. Rosebault,
who had been one of the _Sun’s_ best young reporters, resigned from the
city editorship late in 1870 in order to study law. He afterward went
to San Francisco to be principal editorial writer of the _Chronicle_,
but soon returned to New York and for many years, while practising
law, he contributed editorial and special articles to the _Sun_. Mr.
Rosebault, who is still an active lawyer, told the present writer, in
July, 1918, that of all the reporters who served on his staff when
he was city editor of the _Sun_ only one, Sidney Rosenfeld, later a
dramatist and the first editor of _Puck_, was still alive.
The first telegraph editor of the _Sun_ was an Episcopalian clergyman,
Arthur Beckwith, afterward connected with the Brooklyn _Eagle_ and the
Brooklyn _Citizen_ as a law reporter. When he left the telegraph desk
of the _Sun_ his place was taken by Colonel Henry Grenville Shaw, a
Civil War veteran. Colonel Shaw left the _Sun_ to become night editor
of the San Francisco _Chronicle_ and was succeeded by Amos B. Stillman,
a ninety-pound man from Connecticut. He was a newspaperman in his
native state until the Civil War, and after Appomattox he went back
to Connecticut. He went on the _Sun_ in 1870 as telegraph editor, and
stayed on the same desk for forty-five years.
In the early days of Dana’s _Sun_ there were no night editors, for
it had not been found necessary to establish a central desk where
all the news of all the departments could be gathered together for
judgment as to relative value. Each desk man sent his own copy to the
composing-room, and the pages were made up by the managing editor or
the night city editor after midnight. Leisurely nights, those, with
no newspaper trains to catch and no starting of the presses until four
o’clock in the morning!
[Illustration:
AMOS JAY CUMMINGS
]
One evening in that period the other desk men in the news department of
the _Sun_ observed that Amos Stillman was extraordinarily busy and more
than usually silent. He scribbled away, revising despatches and writing
subheads, and it was after twelve o’clock when he got up, stretched,
and uttered one sentence:
“Quite a fire in Chicago!”
That was the October evening in 1871 when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started
the blaze that consumed seventeen thousand buildings. To Deacon
Stillman it was just a busy night.
Deacon Stillman was born only eighteen months after the _Sun_--Ben
Day’s _Sun_; but even as this is being written he is strolling up and
down a corridor in the _Sun_ office, waiting for another old-timer,
some mere lad of sixty, to come out and have dinner with him.
Under Cummings was developed a young man who turned out to be one of
the great city editors of New York--John B. Bogart, of whom Arthur
Brisbane wrote that he was the best teacher of journalism that America
had produced. He was in most respects the opposite of Cummings. He had
all of Cummings’s love for the business, but not his tremendous rush.
Cummings was an explosion, Bogart a steady flame. Cummings roared,
Bogart was gentle.
Like Cummings and Stillman, Bogart was a Union veteran. In 1861, when
he was only sixteen years old, he left the New Haven store where
he was a clerk and enlisted in the Seventh Connecticut Volunteers.
After serving three years in the army, he returned home to become a
bookkeeper in a dry-goods store. He went on the _Sun_ February 21,
1871, as a general reporter. On March 17, 1873--his twenty-eighth
birthday--he was made city editor, the former city editor, William
Young, having been promoted to the managing editor’s desk to take the
place of Cummings, whose health was poor.
John Bogart remained at the city desk for seventeen years of tireless
work. He was a master of journalistic detail, a patient follower-up of
the stories which, like periscopes, appear and reappear on the sea of
events.
“He was a whole school of journalism in himself,” Brisbane wrote of
Bogart years afterward. “He could tell the young men where to go for
their news, what questions to ask, what was and what was not worth
while. Above all, he could give enthusiasm to his men. He worked by
encouraging, not by harsh criticism.”
Bogart always asked a young reporter whether he had read the _Sun_ that
morning. If one confessed that he had read only part of it, Bogart
would invite him to sit down, and would say:
“Mr. Jones, it is one of the salutary customs of this paper that every
reporter shall read everything in it before appearing for duty. Don’t
even skip the advertisements, because there are stories concealed in
many of them. The _Sun_ is good breakfast-food.”
The custom of Bogart’s time is the custom still, but a reporter has to
go harder at his reading than he did in the days of the four-page _Sun_.
If a new reporter had not absorbed the _Sun_ style, Bogart gently tried
to saturate him with it.
“I notice,” he said to a man who had covered a little fire the night
before, “that you begin your story with ‘at an early hour yesterday
morning,’ and that you say also that ‘smoke was seen issuing from an
upper window.’”
“Isn’t that good English?” asked the young man.
“It is excellent English,” Bogart replied calmly, “and it has been
indorsed by generations of reporters and copy-readers. If you look in
the other papers you will find that some of them also discovered smoke
issuing from an upper window at an early hour yesterday morning. We do
not deny that it is good English; but it is not good _Sun_ English.”
Never again did smoke issue from an upper window of that reporter’s
copy.
Under Cummings and Bogart the _Sun_ turned out _Sun_ men. A young
man from Troy, Franklin Fyles, was one of their first police-station
reporters. He did not know as many policemen as did Joseph Josephs,
who wore a silk hat and a gambler’s mustache, and who covered the West
Side stations, but he wrote well. He did not know as many desperate
characters as were honoured with the acquaintance of David Davids, the
East Side police reporter, but he knew a _Sun_ story when he saw it.
In 1875, five years after Fyles came on the _Sun_, he was the star
reporter, and he reported the Beecher trial. Ten thousand words a
day in longhand was an easy day’s work for the reports of that great
scandal. Fyles became the dramatic critic of the _Sun_ in 1885, and
continued as such until 1903. In that period he wrote several plays,
including “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” in which David Belasco was his
collaborator; “Cumberland ’61,” and “The Governor of Kentucky.” Fyles
died in 1911 at the age of 64.
Another police-station reporter of the _Sun_ was Edward Payson Weston,
who had been an office-boy in various newspaper offices until about
the beginning of the Civil War and had then become a reporter. Before
Dana bought the _Sun_ Weston had walked from Portland, Maine, to
Chicago--thirteen hundred and twenty-six miles--in twenty-six days.
Forty years later he walked it in twenty-five days.
Cummings liked Weston. Whatever faults there may have been in his
literary style, his knee action was a perfect poem. He could bring a
story down from the Bellevue morgue faster than all the horse-cars. He
was the best “leg man” in the history of journalism. In 1910, more than
four decades after the _Sun_ first took him on, Weston, then a man of
seventy years, walked from Los Angeles to New York in seventy-seven
days.
Henry Mann, a Civil War veteran, was the _Sun’s_ principal court
reporter. He covered the Tweed and Stokes trials and the impeachment of
Judge Barnard. Later he was exchange editor and he is remembered also
as the author of “The History of Ancient and Medieval Republics.”
Other _Sun_ reporters were Tom Cook, who came from California, had
the shiniest silk hat on Park Row, and knew Fisk and the rest of the
Erie crowd; Big Jim Connolly, one of the best news writers of his day;
the McAlpin brothers, Robert and Tod; and Chester S. Lord, who was to
become the managing editor of the _Sun_ and serve it in that capacity
for a third of a century.
William Young, who was city editor when Lord went on the paper, gave
him his first assignment--to get a story about the effect of the
Whisky Ring’s work on the liquor trade. Lord wrote a light and airy
piece which indicated that the ring’s operations would bring highly
moral results by decreasing the supply of intoxicants; but when the
copy-reader got through with the story this is the way it read:
A _Sun_ reporter interviewed several leading wholesale
liquor-dealers yesterday concerning the despatch from
Louisville, saying that all the old whisky in the country had
been purchased by a Western firm for a rise. They said that
they had sold their accumulated stock of prime whisky months
ago. One firm, the largest in the city, had sold nearly two
thousand barrels, stored since 1858. One shrewd dealer said it
was reported that Grant was in the ring, and that he wanted to
secure a supply to fall back on in his retirement.
Mark Maguire, the celebrated “Toppy,” was the chief of the sporting
writers. He was about the oldest man in the _Sun_ office, born before
Napoleon went to Elba. He was the first king of the New York newsboys,
and Barney Williams, the boy who first sold Ben Day’s _Sun_, once
worked for him.
Maguire had as customers, when they visited New York, Jackson, Webster,
Clay, and Calhoun. When prosperity came to him he opened road-houses
that were the resorts of horse-owners like Commodore Vanderbilt and
Robert Bonner. His Cayuga House, at McComb’s Dam, was named after his
own fast trotter, Cayuga Girl. Maguire’s intimacy with Bonner was such
that the hangers-on in the racing game believed that Bonner owned the
_Sun_ and transmitted his views to Dana through “Toppy.” Maguire worked
for the _Sun_ up to his death in 1889.
When Amos Cummings had an evening to spare from his regular news work
he would go with Maguire to a prize-fight and write the story of it.
Maguire invented the chart by which a complete record of the blows
struck in a boxing match is kept--one circle for the head and one
for the body of each contestant, with a pencil-mark for every blow
landed. After an evening in which Jem Mace was one of the entertainers,
Maguire’s chart looked like a shotgun target, but Cummings, who watched
the fighters while Mark tallied the blows, would make a live story from
it.
The _Sun_ of that day had women reporters; indeed, it had the first
real woman reporter in American journalism, Mrs. Emily Verdery Battey.
She worked on fashion stories, women’s-rights stories, and general-news
stories. She was one of the Georgia Verderys, and she went on the _Sun_
shortly after Mr. Dana took hold. Her brother, George Verdery, was
also a _Sun_ reporter. Another _Sun_ woman of that time was Miss Anna
Ballard, who wrote, among other things, the news stories that bobbed up
in the surrogates’ court.
The dramatic criticisms of the _Sun_, in the first three or four years
of the seventies, were written by two young lawyers recently graduated
from the law school of New York University, Willard Bartlett and Elihu
Root. Bartlett was a year the younger, but he ranked Root as a critic
because of his acquaintance--through his father, W. O. Bartlett--with
newspaper ways. If Lester Wallack was putting on “Ours,” that would be
Mr. Bartlett’s assignment, while Mr. Root went to report the advance
of art at Woods’s Museum, where was the Lydia Thompson troupe. If it
befell that on the same evening Edwin Booth produced “Hamlet” in a new
setting and George L. Fox appeared in a more glorious than ever “Humpty
Dumpty,” Critic Bartlett would see Booth; Assistant Critic Root, Fox.
In time these young journalists passed on to be actors in that more
complex and perhaps equally interesting drama, the law, which for
fourteen years they practised together. Mr. Bartlett figured as one of
Mr. Dana’s counsel in several of the _Sun’s_ legal cases. After thirty
years on the bench, retiring from the chief judgeship of the Court of
Appeals of the State of New York through the age statute in 1916, Judge
Bartlett is still actively interested in the _Sun_, and many of its
articles on legal and literary topics are contributed by him.
As for Mr. Root, his friendship with the _Sun_ has been unbroken for
almost fifty years, and he has made more news for it than most men.
Under such circumstances even the most jealous newspaper is willing to
forgive the desertion of an assistant dramatic critic.
It was Willard Bartlett, incidentally, who was the inventor of the
_Sun’s_ celebrated office cat. One night in the eighties the copy of
a message from President Cleveland to Congress came to the desk of
the telegraph editor. It was a warm evening, and the window near the
telegraph desk was open. The message fluttered out and was lost in
Nassau Street. The _Sun_ had nothing about it the next morning, and in
the afternoon, when Mr. Bartlett called on Mr. Dana, the matter of the
lost message was under discussion. The editor remarked that it was a
matter difficult to explain to the readers.
“Oh, say that the office cat ate it up,” suggested Bartlett.
Dana chuckled and dictated a paragraph creating the cat. Instantly the
animal became famous. Newspapers pictured it as Dana’s inseparable
companion, and the _Sun_ presently had another, and longer, editorial
article about the wonderful beast:
The universal interest which this accomplished animal has
excited throughout the country is a striking refutation that
genius is not honored in its own day and generation. Perhaps no
other living critic has attained the popularity and vogue now
enjoyed by our cat. For years he worked in silence, unknown,
perhaps, beyond the limits of the office. He is a sort of
Rosicrucian cat, and his motto has been “to know all and to
keep himself unknown.” But he could not escape the glory his
efforts deserved, and a few mornings ago he woke up, like
Byron, to find himself famous.
We are glad to announce that he hasn’t been puffed up by the
enthusiastic praise which comes to him from all sources.
He is the same industrious, conscientious, sharp-eyed, and
sharp-toothed censor of copy that he has always been, nor
should we have known that he is conscious of the admiration
he excites among his esteemed contemporaries of the press had
we not observed him in the act of dilacerating a copy of the
_Graphic_ containing an alleged portrait of him.
It was impossible not to sympathize with his evident
indignation. The _Graphic’s_ portrait did foul injustice to his
majestic and intellectual features. Besides, it represented him
as having a bandage over one eye, as if he had been involved
in controversy and had had his eye mashed. Now, aside from the
fact that he needs both eyes to discharge his literary duties
properly, he is able to whip his weight in office cats, and
his fine, large eyes have never been shrouded in black, and we
don’t believe they ever will be. He is a soldier as well as a
scholar.
We have received many requests to give a detailed account
of the personal habits and peculiarities of this feline
Aristarchus. Indeed, we have been requested to prepare a full
biographical sketch to appear in the next edition of “Homes of
American Authors.” At some future day we may satisfy public
curiosity with the details of his literary methods. But genius
such as his defies analysis, and the privacy of a celebrity
ought not to be rudely invaded.
It is not out of place, however, to indicate a few traits which
illustrate his extraordinary faculty of literary decomposition,
so to speak. His favorite food is a tariff discussion. When
a big speech, full of wind and statistics, comes within his
reach, he pounces upon it immediately and digests the figures
at his leisure. During the discussion of the Morrison Bill he
used to feed steadily on tariff speeches for eight hours a day,
and yet his appetite remained unimpaired.
When a piece of stale news or a long-winded, prosy article
comes into the office, his remarkable sense of smell instantly
detects it, and it is impossible to keep it from him. He always
assists with great interest at the opening of the office mail,
and he files several hundred letters a day in his interior
department. The favorite diversion of the office-boys is to
make him jump for twelve-column articles on the restoration of
the American merchant marine.
He takes a keen delight in hunting for essays on civil-service
reform, and will play with them, if he has time, for hours.
They are so pretty that he hates to kill them, but duty
is duty. Clumsy and awkward English he springs at with
indescribable quickness and ferocity; but he won’t eat it. He
simply tears it up. He can’t stand everything.
We don’t pretend he is perfect. We admit that he has an
uncontrollable appetite for the _Congressional Record_. We have
to keep this peculiar publication out of his reach. He will sit
for hours and watch with burning eyes the iron safe in which
we are obliged to shut up the _Record_ for safe-keeping. Once
in a while we let him have a number or two. He becomes uneasy
without it. It is his catnip.
With the exception of this pardonable excess he is a blameless
beast. He mouses out all the stupid stuff and nonsense that
finds its way into the office and goes for it tooth and claw.
He is the biggest copyholder in the world. And he never gets
tired. His health is good, and we have not deemed it necessary
to take out a policy on any one of his valuable lives.
Many of our esteemed contemporaries are furnishing their
offices with cats, but they can never hope to have the equal of
the _Sun’s_ venerable polyphage. He is a cat of genius.
The cat may have contracted his hatred of the dull and prosy from the
men who worked in the _Sun_ office when Amos Cummings smiled and swore
and got out the greatest four-page paper ever seen, singing the while
the song of Walker’s filibusters:
How would you like a soldier’s life
On the plains of Nicara-goo?
Marching away and fighting all day,
Nothing to eat and as much to pay--
We do it all for glory, they say,
On the plains of Nicara-goo.
Not a bit of breakfast did I see,
And dinner was all the same to me;
Two fried cats and three fried rats
Was a supper at Nicara-goo.
Marching away and fighting all day,
Nothing to eat and as much to pay--
We do it all for glory, they say,
On the plains of Nicara-goo!
Cummings worked so hard that in 1873 he broke down and the _Sun_ sent
him to Florida. There he wandered about, exploring rivers, studying
the natives, and writing for the _Sun_, over the signature of “Ziska,”
a series of travel letters as interesting as any that ever appeared
in a newspaper. When he returned to New York in 1876, John Kelly,
then endeavouring to raise Tammany from the mire into which Tweed had
dropped it, persuaded Cummings to become managing editor of the New
York _Express_. Cummings did not stay long on the _Express_, being
disgusted with Kelly’s hostility toward Tilden’s candidacy for the
presidential nomination, and he went back to the _Sun_.
[Illustration:
DANIEL F. KELLOGG
]
[Illustration:
AMOS B. STILLMAN
]
[Illustration:
JOHN B. BOGART
]
For the next ten years his efforts were mostly in the direction of
improving the weekly issue. In 1886 he was elected to the House
of Representatives from a West Side district, but he maintained
his connection with the _Sun_, and in 1887 he became editor of the
_Evening Sun_, then just started. In 1888 Cummings resigned from the
House, saying that he was too poor to be a Congressman, but on the
death of Representative Samuel Sullivan (“Sunset”) Cox he consented
to take the vacant place and continue Cox’s battles for the welfare
of the letter-carriers. His service in the House lasted fifteen
years. Cummings was a great labour advocate, not only in behalf
of letter-carriers, but of printers, navy-yard employees, and
musicians. He had the last-named in mind when he said in a speech on an
alien-labour bill:
As the law now stands, when a German student, or one of those
fellows that swill beer along the Rhine, desires to come here
for the summer, all he has to do is to get a saxophone or some
other kind of musical instrument, call himself an artist, and
be allowed to land here.
That was Amos’s convincing, if inelegant, style. When he introduced a
bill to compensate navy-yard men for labour already performed, but not
paid for, Representative Holman, of Indiana, asked:
“How much money will it take out of the Treasury?”
“None of your business!” snapped Cummings. “The government must pay its
just debts.”
While he was in the House, Cummings wrote a series of articles on the
big men of Washington. He was a delegate to the Democratic national
conventions of 1892 and 1896. He died in Baltimore May 2, 1902, and
a Republican House of Representatives voted a public funeral to this
militant Democrat.
Greater news men than Cummings followed him, undoubtedly, but there was
no newspaperman in New York before his time who knew better what news
was or how to handle it; not even the elder Bennett, for that great man
knew only the news that looked big. Cummings was the first to know the
news that felt big.
It was Cummings and his work that Henry Watterson had in mind when he
one day remarked to Mr. Dana:
“The _Sun_ is a damned good paper, but you don’t make it.”
That statement undoubtedly pleased the editor of the _Sun_, for it was
evidence from an expert that he had carried his theory to success.
He had set men free to write what they saw, as they saw it, in their
own way. It was the _Sun_ way, and that was what he wanted. As Dana
himself handed down this heritage of literary freedom in his editorial
page to Mitchell, so he gave to the men on the news pages, through Amos
Cummings and Chester S. Lord and their successors, the right to watch
with open eyes the world pass by, and to describe that parade in a
different way three hundred and sixty-five days a year.