“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._
There is an unconventional club which has no home except on the one
night each year when it holds a dinner in a New York hotel. Its members
are men who have been writers on the _Sun_, and who, though they have
left the paper, love it. They meet for no purpose except to toast the
_Sun_ of their day and this. They call themselves the Sun Alumni.
From the ranks of the novelists and magazine editors and writers come
men like Will Irwin, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Robert Welles Ritchie,
Albert W. Atwood, Henry James Forman, Cameron Mackenzie, Kirk Munroe,
Charles Mason Fairbanks, Robert R. Whiting, James L. Ford, E. J.
Edwards, Arthur F. Aldridge, George B. Mallon, Gustav Kobbé, and
Frederick Kinney Noyes.
From the lists of newspaper owners and editors come Arthur Brisbane,
of the Washington _Times_; Edward H. Mott, of the Goshen _Republican_;
Frank H. Simonds, of the New York _Tribune_; Martin J. Hutchins, of the
Chicago _Journal_; C. L. Sherman, of the Hartford _Courant_.
From the staffs of other New York newspapers come Charles Selden, Carr
V. Van Anda, and Richard V. Oulahan, of the _Times_; William A. Willis,
of the _Herald_; Rudolph E. Block, of the _American_; J. Arthur
Seavey, of the _Tribune_; and Lindsay Denison, of the _Evening World_.
From the bench come Judges Willard Bartlett, Warren W. Foster, and
Willard H. Olmsted; from government work, Stephen T. Mather, Robert
Sterling Yard, and E. W. Townsend; from business, Edward G. Riggs,
Willis Holly, Collin Armstrong, Oscar King Davis, Robert Grier Cooke,
John H. O’Brien, and Roy Mason. If the racing season is over in Cuba,
C. J. Fitzgerald is present. If business on the San Diego _Sun_ is not
too brisk, its editor, Clarence McGrew, crosses the continent to be
at the feast. Until his death in 1917, Franklin Matthews, associate
professor of journalism at Columbia University, who was with the _Sun_
from 1890 to 1909 in many capacities, was one of the leading spirits of
the Alumni. Dr. Talcott Williams, chief of the school of journalism, is
another enthusiastic alumnus.
These men, the outsider observes, gather and talk in groups. The men of
the eighties recall the wonders of the four-page _Sun_ and its Bogarts,
Ralphs, and Cummingses. Men of the nineties chat of the feats of
“Jersey” Chamberlin and “Commodore” Spears. The alumni who matriculated
in the present century speak of Riggs and Irwin, Denison and O’Malley
and Hill. But all talk of the _Sun_, and of Dana and Mitchell and Lord
and Clarke.
It is only when they speak of reporters that there is a grouping of
heroes. That is because it is a natural and pleasant practice, if an
illogical one, for newspapermen of the present and previous decades to
look back to this or that period of a paper and say:
“That was _the_ day! The names of the men on the staff prove it.”
An old _Sun_ man will point, for instance, to the _Sun’s_ roster of
reporters in 1893, when the local staff included:
Julian Ralph
John R. Spears
Oscar K. Davis
C. J. Fitzgerald
Carr V. Van Anda
David Graham Phillips
George B. Mallon
Samuel Hopkins Adams
Daniel F. Kellogg
C. M. Fairbanks
Lawrence Reamer
W. J. Chamberlin
Edward G. Riggs
E. W. Townsend
Rudolph E. Block
Samuel A. Wood
E. D. Beach
E. O. Chamberlin
Victor Speer
Joseph Vila
W. A. Willis
Collin Armstrong
The weak place in this sort of retrospection is that after twenty-five
years the observer’s focus is twisted. Julian Ralph was a great
reporter in 1893, but W. J. Chamberlin, whose name is linked with
Ralph’s among great _Sun_ reporters, was only just arriving. John
R. Spears had made his reputation, but Riggs’s fame as a political
writer was not yet established. Townsend had tickled New York with his
“Chimmie Fadden” stories, but Sam Adams was a cub. Wood, Vila, and
Reamer were not as important to the _Sun_ in 1893 as they are at this
writing.
The men of 1893 probably agreed that there was no staff like the
staff of 1868, just as the men of 1942 may gaze with proud regret at
the staff list of 1917. Distance, like pay-day, lends enchantment;
and newspaper history is a little more hazy than most other kinds of
history, because the men who write what happens to other people have no
time to set down what happens to themselves.
The anonymity of the _Sun_ reporter has been almost complete. If
Julian Ralph had never gone into the field of books and magazines, he
would have been as little known to the general public as the _Sun’s_
best reporter is to-day; but newspapermen would not have undervalued
him. There is better quality in the things he wrote hastily and
anonymously for the _Sun_ than in some of the eight or nine published
volumes that bear his name, and the reason for this is that he was
primarily a newspaperman.
[Illustration:
ARTHUR BRISBANE
]
He entered the game at fifteen, as an apprentice in the office of the
Red Bank (New Jersey) _Standard_. At seventeen he was a city editor and
a writer of humour. At eighteen he had founded the Red Bank _Leader_--a
failure. At nineteen he was one of the editors of the Webster
(Massachusetts) _Times_, and at twenty he was a reporter on the New
York _Graphic_. At twenty-two he was on the _Sun_, where he remained
from 1875 to 1893.
Ralph was a news man who lacked none of the large reportorial
qualities. He enjoyed seeing new places and new people. He liked to
hunt news--an instinct missing in some good writers who fail to be
great reporters. He liked to write--a taste found too seldom among
men who write well, and too frequently among the graphomaniacs who
fancy that everything is worth writing, and that perfection lies in an
infinite number of words.
Some one said of Ralph that he “could write five thousand words about
a cobblestone.” If he had done that, it would have been an interesting
cobblestone. He had a passion for detail, but it was not the lifeless
and wearisome detail of the realistic novelist. When he wrote half
a column about a horse eating a woman’s hat, the reader became well
acquainted with the horse, the woman, and the crowd that had looked on.
Ralph was untiring in mind, legs, and fingers. He liked the big one-man
news story, such as an inauguration or a parade, or the general
introduction of a national convention. His quiet, easy style, his
ability to cover an event of many hours and much territory, were shown
to good advantage in his description of the funeral of General Grant
in August, 1885. He wrote it all--a full front page of small type--in
about seven hours, and with a pencil. It began:
There have not often been gathered in one place so many men
whose names have been household words, and whose lives have
been inwoven with the history of a grave crisis in a great
nation’s life, as met yesterday in this city. The scene was
before General Grant’s tomb in Riverside Park; the space was
less than goes to half an ordinary city block, and the names
of the actors were William T. Sherman, Joe Johnston, Phil
Sheridan, Simon B. Buckner, John A. Logan, W. S. Hancock, Fitz
John Porter, Chester A. Arthur, Thomas A. Hendricks, John
Sherman, Fitzhugh Lee, John B. Gordon, David D. Porter, Thomas
F. Bayard, John L. Worden, and a dozen others naturally linked
in the mind with these greater men. Among them, like children
amid gray-heads, or shadows beside monuments, were other men
more newly famous, and famous only for deeds of peace in times
of quiet and plenty--a President, an ex-President, Governors,
mayors, and millionaires. And all were paying homage to the
greatest figure of their time, whose mortal remains they
pressed around with bared, bowed heads.
That was the beginning of a story of about eleven thousand words, all
written by Ralph in one evening. It told everything that was worth
reading about the burial--the weather, the crowded line of march, the
people from out of town, the women fainting at the curbs, the uniforms
and peculiarities of the Union and Confederate heroes who rode in the
funeral train; told everything from eight o’clock in the morning,
when the sightseers began to gather, until the bugler blew taps and
the regiments fired their salute volleys. It was a story typical of
Ralph, who saw everything, remembered everything, wrote everything. In
detail it is unlikely that any reporter of to-day could surpass it. In
dramatic quality it has been excelled by half a dozen _Sun_ reporters,
including Ralph himself.
For example, there is the story of a similar event--Admiral Dewey’s
funeral--written in January, 1917, by Thoreau Cronyn, of the _Sun_,
with a dramatic climax such as Ralph did not reach. This is the end of
Cronyn’s story--the incident of the old bugler whose art failed him in
his grief:
Chattering of spectators in the background hushed abruptly. A
light breeze, which barely rumpled the river, set a few dry
leaves tossing about the tomb of Farragut, Dewey’s mentor at
Mobile. The voice of Chaplain Frazier could be heard repeating
a prayer, catching, and then going on smoothly.
A second of silence, then the brisk call of the lieutenant
commanding the firing-squad of Annapolis cadets.
“Load!”
Rifles rattling.
“Aim!”
Rifles pointed a little upward for safety’s sake, though the
cartridges had no bullets.
“Fire!”
Twenty rifles snapped as one. This twice repeated--three
volleys over the tomb into which the twelve sailors had just
carried the admiral’s body.
And now came the moment for Master-at-Arms Charles Mitchell,
bugler on the Olympia when Dewey sank the Spanish fleet, to
perform his last office for the admiral. Raising the bugle to
his lips and looking straight ahead at the still open door of
the tomb, he sounded “taps.” The first three climbing notes and
the second three were perfect. Then the break and the recovery,
and the funeral was over.
Julian Ralph saw more of the world, and made more copy out of what he
saw, than any other newspaperman. While still on the _Sun_ he was
making books out of the material he picked up on his assignments. In
the early nineties, while still on the _Sun_ staff, he made two tours
for _Harper’s Magazine_ and wrote “On Canada’s Frontier,” “Our Great
West,” and “Chicago and the World’s Fair,” the last of which was the
official book of the Columbian Exposition. After his experiences in the
Boer War he wrote “Towards Pretoria,” “War’s Brighter Side” (with Conan
Doyle), and “An American with Lord Roberts.” His other books are “Alone
in China,” “Dixie; or, Southern Scenes and Sketches,” “People We Pass,”
and a novel, “The Millionairess.” He was the author of the “German
Barber” sketches, which appeared almost weekly in the _Sun_ for a long
time, and which are remembered as among the genuine examples of real
humour in dialect. During the Boer War, Ralph joined the staff of the
London _Daily Mail_, and after returning from South Africa he made his
home in London until his death in 1903.
A tradition about Ralph, indicating the pleasure that his articles
gave to his own colleagues as well as to the public, concerns one
of the great football-games of the eighties. John Spears discovered
the picturesqueness of the Yale-Princeton games, usually played
on Thanksgiving Day, and the _Sun_ featured them year after year.
Reporters hungered for the job, for it meant not only money, but the
opportunity to write a fine story.
When Ralph’s turn came he wrote such a good article that the copy-desk
let it run for five columns. Lord admired it, Clarke was enthusiastic
over it, and the other men in the office took turns in reading the
story in the proofs, so happily was it turned. It was not until the
first edition was off the press that an underling, who cared more for
football than for literature, suggested that the story ought to contain
the score of the game. Ralph had forgotten to state it, and all the
desks, absorbed in the thrill of the article itself, had overlooked the
omission.
Ralph reported for the _Sun_ the outrages of the Molly Maguires in the
Pennsylvania coal-fields. After the execution of two of the outlaws for
murder, he was bold enough to follow their bodies back to their village
where they had lived, in order to describe the wake. He was warned to
leave the place before sunset, on pain of death, and he went, for there
was nothing to be gained by staying.
On another assignment, a murder mystery, the relatives of the victim,
who were ignorant and superstitious people, suspected Ralph of being
the murderer. When he came into their house to see the body, they
demanded that he should touch it, their belief being that the body
would turn over, or the wounds reopen, if touched by the murderer.
There was an implied threat of death for the reporter if he refused,
but Ralph walked out without complying.
Ralph was a believer in the sixth sense of journalists, that
inexplicable gift by which a man, and particularly a newspaperman,
comes to a clairvoyant knowledge that something is about to happen--in
other words, an exalted hunch. John B. Bogart, city editor in Ralph’s
_Sun_ days, had this sense, and he called it a “current of news.” He
thus described its workings to Ralph:
One day I was walking up Broadway when suddenly a current
of news came up from a cellar and enveloped me. I felt the
difference in the temperature of the air. I tingled with the
electricity or magnetism in the current. It seemed to stop me,
to turn me around, and to force me to descend some stairs which
reached up to the street by my side.
I ran down the steps, and as I did so a pistol-shot sounded in
my ears. One man had shot another, and I found myself at the
scene upon the instant.
While acting as the legislative correspondent of the _Sun_ at Albany,
Ralph was in the habit of walking to one of the local parks to enjoy
the view across a valley southwest of the city. One day, while gazing
across the valley, he was seized with a desire to go to the mountains
in the distance beyond it. The impulse remained with him for two days,
and then, on the third day, he read of a news happening that had
occurred in the mountains on the very day when the current of news had
thrilled him.
Ralph reported the Dreyfus court-martial at Rennes, in France. One
morning he could not sleep after five o’clock. As he was on his way to
court he said to George W. Steevens, of the London _Daily Mail_, who
was walking with him:
“Wait a moment while I go into the telegraph office and wire my paper
that I expect exciting news to-day.”
At that hour there was no apparent reason to expect any news out of
the ordinary, but it was only a few hours later that Maître Labori,
Dreyfus’s counsel, was shot down on his way to court.
Young newspapermen who are fortunate enough to be possessed of--or
by--the sixth sense must remember, however, that it cannot be relied
upon to sound the alarm on every occasion. Mr. Bogart, who felt that
he had a friend in the current of news, kept close track of the
assignment-book. As a city editor he was unsurpassed for his diligence
in following up news stories. One day he assigned Brainerd G. Smith,
afterward professor of journalism at Cornell, to report the first
reception given by Judge Hilton after the death of the judge’s partner,
A. T. Stewart.
“And above all,” Mr. Bogart wound up, “don’t leave the house without
asking Judge Hilton whether they’ve found Stewart’s body yet.”
Julian Ralph attributed his success as a journalist chiefly to three
things--a liking for his work, the ability to get what he was sent for,
and good humour. He omitted mention of something which distinguished
him and Chamberlin and all other great reporters--hard work. Ralph
himself gives a brief but complete picture of a day’s hard work in his
description, in “The Making of a Journalist,” of the way in which he
reported the inauguration of a President:
I had myself called at five o’clock in the morning, and, having
a cab at hand, mounted the box with the negro driver and
traveled about the city from end to end and side to side. I did
this to see the people get up and the trains roll in and the
soldiers turn out--to catch the capital robing like a bride for
her wedding.
After breakfast, eaten calmly, I made another tour of the
town, and then began to approach the subject more closely,
calling at the White House, mingling with the crowds in the
principal hotels, moving between the Senate and the House of
Representatives, to report the hurly-burly of the closing
moments of a dying administration. I saw the old and the new
President, and then witnessed the inauguration ceremonies and
the parade.
Then, having seen the new family in place in the White House, I
took a hearty luncheon, and sat down at half past one o’clock
to write steadily for twelve hours, with plenty of pencils
and pads and messenger-boys at hand, and with my notebook
supplemented by clippings from all the afternoon papers,
covering details to which I might or might not wish to refer.
Cigars, a sandwich or two at supper-time, and a stout horn of
brandy late at night were my other equipments.
As Ralph remarked, that was hard work, but it was nothing when compared
with the job of reporting a national convention. “One needs only to
_see_ an inauguration,” he said. “In a national convention one must
_know_.”
Wilbur J. Chamberlin’s name is not in any book of American biography.
In library indexes his name is found only as the author of “Ordered
to China,” a series of letters he wrote to his wife while on the
assignment to report the Boxer rebellion--one of the many pieces of
_Sun_ work which he did faithfully and well. He never found time to
write books, although he wished to do so. He was a _Sun_ man from the
day he went on the staff, in 1890, until the day of his death, August
14, 1901.
Chamberlin was born in Great Bend, Pennsylvania, March 12, 1866. While
he was still a boy he went to Jersey City, where he worked in newspaper
offices and became the local correspondent of several newspapers,
including the _Sun_. He came to be known as “Jersey” Chamberlin to
the _Sun_ men who did not know how much he detested the nickname.
His intimates called him Wilbur, and the office knew him generally
as “W. J.”--an easy way of distinguishing him from other Chamberlins
and Chamberlains. He lacked Ralph’s rather distinguished personal
appearance, but his strong personality, his courage, ability, and
industry overshadowed any lack of fashion.
Like Ralph, he was indefatigable. Like his brother, E. O. Chamberlin,
he let nothing stop him in the pursuit of news. Like Henry R.
Chamberlain, he had the gift of divining rapidly the necessary details
of any intricate business with which his assignment dealt. If a bank
cashier had gone wrong, “W. J.” was the man to describe how the sinner
had manœuvred the theft; to wring from usually unwilling sources the
story which appeared in the bank only in figures, but which must appear
in the _Sun_ in terms of human life. The world of finance was more
dumb then than it is now, for Wall Street had not learned the wisdom of
uttering its own pitiless publicity.
Chamberlin had one idiosyncrasy and one hatred. The mental peculiarity
was a wish to conceal his own age. Unlike most successful men, he
wished to be thought older than he was; and he looked older. He was
only thirty-five when he died in Carlsbad, on his way home from China;
yet he had packed into that brief life the work of an industrious man
of fifty.
His single enmity was directed against cable companies, and he had good
reason to dislike them. One day, during the Spanish-American War he
boarded the _Sun_ boat, the Kanapaha, and ran to Port Antonio, Jamaica,
with an exclusive story. The women clerks in the telegraph office took
his despatch and counted the words three times before they would start
sending it. They told Chamberlin the cost, about a hundred dollars,
which he promptly paid in cash.
Three or four days later he went back to Port Antonio with another
important despatch. The cable clerk told him that on his previous visit
their count had been one word short.
“That’s all right,” said Chamberlin, and he threw down a shilling to
pay for the one word.
“Thank you,” said the lady. “_Now_ we can send the message!”
The cable hoodoo pursued Chamberlin to China. As soon as he arrived
in Peking he began sending important news stories by telegraph to
Tientsin, where he had left a deposit of three hundred dollars with
the cable company that was to forward the messages to New York. After
working in Peking for two weeks, he discovered that all his stories
were lying in a pigeonhole at Tientsin; not one had been relayed.
A third time an important despatch was held up overnight because it had
not been written on a regular telegraph-blank. But Chamberlin’s most
bitter grudge against the cable companies was the result of his adding
to a message sent to the _Sun_ on Christmas Eve, 1900, the words “Madam
Christmas greeting.” This was a short way of saying, “Please call
up Mrs. Chamberlin and tell her that I wish her a Merry Christmas.”
Under the cable company’s rules nothing could be sent at the special
newspaper rate except what was intended for publication. Chamberlin got
a despatch from the manager of the cable company as follows:
Your cable _Sun_ New York December 24 words “Madam Christmas
greeting” not intended for publication. Please explain.
There was nothing for Chamberlin to do but assure the cable manager
that if the _Sun_ had wished to print “Madam Christmas greeting” in its
columns it was welcome to do so.
In spite of his cable misfortunes Chamberlin got more news to the _Sun_
about the Boxer troubles than any other correspondent obtained. He was
the first reporter in China who told the truth about the outrageous
treatment of the Chinese by some of the so-called Christians. He was
particularly frank in describing the brutality of Count von Waldersee’s
German soldiers. In November, 1900, he wrote to his wife:
As you have probably noticed in my despatches, I have not much
use for the German soldiers anyhow. They are a big lot of
swine, if human beings ever are swine.
Chamberlin had a reputation for possessing the ability to write any
kind of a story, no matter how technical or how delicate. Edward G.
Riggs was sitting beside him in the Populist convention of July, 1896,
when the suspenders of the sergeant-at-arms of the convention, who was
standing on a chair, cheering, surrendered to cataclasm. Riggs turned
to his colleague and said triumphantly:
“At last, W. J., there’s one story you can’t write!”
But Chamberlin wrote it:
He clutched, but he clutched too late. He dived and grabbed
once, twice, thrice, but down those trousers slipped. Mary
E. Lease was only three feet away. Miss Mitchell, of Kansas,
was less than two feet away. Helen Gougar was almost on the
spot. Mrs. Julia Ward Pennington was just two seats off, and
all around and about him were gathered the most beautiful and
eloquent women of the convention, and every eye was upon the
unfortunate Deacon McDowell.
Then he grabbed, and then again, again, and again they eluded
him. Down, down he dived. At last victory perched on him. He
got the trousers, and, with a yank that threatened to rip them
from stem to stern, he pulled them up. At no time had the
applause ceased, nor had there been any sign of a let-up in the
demonstration. Now it was increased twofold. The women joined
in.
McDowell, clutching the truant trousers closely about him,
attempted to resume his part in the demonstration, but it
was useless, and after frantic efforts to show enthusiasm
he retired to hunt up tenpenny nails. When it was over, an
indignant Populist introduced this resolution:
“Resolved, that future sergeants-at-arms shall be required to
wear tights.”
The chairman did not put the resolution.
The number of Chamberlains and Chamberlins in the history of American
journalism is enough to create confusion. The _Sun_ alone had four at
one time. They were Wilbur J. Chamberlin and his almost equally valued
brother, Ernest O. Chamberlin, who later became managing editor of the
_Evening World_; Henry Richardson Chamberlain, and Henry B. Chamberlin.
E. O. Chamberlin went on the _Sun’s_ local staff while Wilbur was still
engaged in small work in Jersey City. In the late eighties he was a
colabourer with reporters like Daniel F. Kellogg, Edward G. Riggs,
William McMurtrie Speer, Charles W. Tyler, Robert Sterling Yard, Samuel
A. Wood, Paul Drane, and Willis Holly.
Henry Richardson Chamberlain, who was born in Peoria, Illinois, became
a _Sun_ reporter in May, 1889. He was then thirty years old, and had
had twelve years’ experience in Boston and New York. In 1888 he had
served as managing editor of the New York _Press_. He was particularly
valuable to the _Sun_ on the stories most easily obtained by reporters
of wide acquaintance, such as business disasters. In 1891 he returned
to Boston to become managing editor of the Boston _Journal_, but he was
soon back on the _Sun_.
In 1892 he was sent to London as the _Sun’s_ correspondent there,
and it was at this post that he won his greatest distinction. He had
a news eye that looked out over political Europe and an imagination
that compelled him to concern himself as much with the future of the
continent as with its past and present. The Balkans and their feuds
interested him strongly, and he was forever writing of what might come
from the complications between the little states through their own
quarrels and through their tangled relations with the powers. It was
the habit of some newspapermen, both in London and New York, to stick
their tongues in their cheeks over “H. R. C.’s war-cloud articles.”
“H. R. is always seeing things,” was a common remark, even when the
logic of what he had written was undeniable. There couldn’t be a
general war in Europe, said his critics, kindly; it was impossible.
Besides having general supervision over the _Sun’s_ European news,
Chamberlain personally reported the Macedonian disturbances, the Panama
Canal scandal in France, the Russian crisis of 1906, and the Messina
earthquake. He was the author of many short stories and of one book,
“Six Thousand Tons of Gold.” He died in London in 1911, while still
in the service of the _Sun_; still believing in the impossibility of
putting off forever the great war which so often rose in his visions.
Henry B. Chamberlin’s service on the _Sun_ was briefer than that of
the Chamberlin brothers or H. R. Chamberlain. He came to New York from
Chicago, where he had been a reporter on the _Herald_, the _Tribune_,
the _Inter-Ocean_, the _Times_, and the _Record_. After 1894, when he
left the _Sun_, he was again with the Chicago _Record_, and in that
paper’s service he saw the Santiago sea-fight from his boat--the only
newspaper boat with the American squadron.
Nor must any of these Chamberlins and Chamberlains be confused with
some of their distinguished contemporaries not of the _Sun_--Joseph
Edgar Chamberlin, who was the Cuban correspondent of the New York
_Evening Post_ in 1898, and later an editorial writer on the New York
_Evening Mail_ and the Boston _Transcript_; Eugene Tyler Chamberlain,
one-time editor of the Albany _Argus_; and Samuel Selwyn Chamberlain,
son of the famous Ivory Chamberlain of the New York _Herald_, founder
of the _Matin_ of Paris, and at various times editor of the San
Francisco _Examiner_ and the New York _American_.
Edward G. Riggs, who left the _Sun_ on February 1, 1913, to become
a railroad executive, had been a _Sun_ reporter and political
correspondent for twenty-eight years. He joined the staff in 1885 as
a Wall Street reporter. Though he never lost interest in the world of
finance and its remarkable men, he soon gravitated toward politics. He
became, indeed, the best-known writer of political news in America. He
wrote at every national convention from 1888--when Ambrose W. Lyman,
then the Washington correspondent of the _Sun_, was at the head of a
staff that included Julian Ralph and E. O. Chamberlin--until 1912. In
1892 Ralph was in charge of the _Sun’s_ national convention work, with
Riggs as his first lieutenant; but Riggs was the _Sun’s_ top-sawyer at
the conventions of 1896, 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912.
Riggs had a closer view of the wheels of the political machines of New
York State than any other political writer. His intimate acquaintance
with Senators Platt and Hill, Governors Odell and Flower, and the
other powers of the State brought to him one hundred per cent of the
political truths of his time--the ten per cent that can be printed and
the ninety per cent that can’t.
Riggs never became a regular correspondent at either Washington or
Albany. He preferred to rove, going where the news was. In Washington
he knew and was welcomed by Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley,
Roosevelt, and Taft; by Senators like Hanna and Quay; by Cabinet
members like Hay and Knox; by House leaders like Reed and Bland. He
knew J. P. Morgan and William C. Whitney as well as he knew William J.
Bryan and Peffer, the Kansas Populist.
Between Presidential elections, when political affairs were quiet in
New York, Riggs acted as a scout for the _Sun_ with the whole country
to scan. Mr. Dana had an unflagging interest in politics, and he relied
on Riggs to bring reports from every field from Maine to California.
“Riggs,” Dana once remarked to a friend, “is my Phil Sheridan.”
It was through Riggs that Thomas C. Platt, then the Republican
master of New York State, sent word to Dana that he would like to
have the _Sun’s_ idea of a financial plank for the Republican State
platform of 1896. The plank was written by Mr. Dana and the _Sun’s_
publisher--afterward owner--William M. Laffan. It denounced the
movement for the free coinage of silver and declared in favour of the
gold standard. The State convention, held in March, adopted Dana’s
plank, and the national convention in June accepted the same ideas
in framing the platform upon which Major McKinley was elected to the
Presidency.
It was Riggs who carried a message from Dana to Platt, in 1897, asking
the New York Senator to withdraw his opposition to the nomination of
Theodore Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Platt complied,
and Roosevelt got the position.
Some years ago, in response to a question as to the difference between
a political reporter and a political correspondent, Riggs wrote:
There was a vast difference between the two. The political
reporter is he who begins at the foot of the ladder when he
reports the actual facts at a ward meeting. The political
correspondent is he who has run the gamut of ward meetings,
primaries, Assembly district, Senate district, and Congress
district conventions, city conventions, county conventions,
State conventions, and national conventions, and who builds his
articles to his newspaper on his information of the situation
in the State or nation, based upon circumstances and facts
arising out of all of the aforesaid conventions.
A political reporter and a political correspondent occupy in
newspaper life the same relative positions as the cellar-digger
and the architect in the building-trade world. Cellar-digger
is just as important in his sphere as architect. The most
superb architects were the most superb cellar-diggers. No man
can be a successful political correspondent unless he has
been a successful political reporter. Judges are made out of
lawyers, generals and admirals out of cadets. Only the most
ordinary of human virtues are necessary for the equipment of a
successful political reporter and correspondent--cleanliness,
sobriety, honesty, and truthfulness.
Writing of Riggs as the dean of American political correspondents,
Samuel G. Blythe said in the _Saturday Evening Post_:
He has made it his business to know men in all parts of the
country, and to know them so they will tell him as much of
the truth as they will tell anybody. He is tenacious of his
opinions and loyal to his friends. He is jolly, good-natured,
companionable, and a fine chap to have around when he is in
repose. Wherever men spoke the English language he was known as
“Riggs--of the _Sun_.”
Reputation and success in newspaper work demand the highest
and most unselfish loyalty to one’s paper. It must be the
paper first and nothing else second. Loyalty is Riggs’s first
attribute, even better than his courage.
The influence of a man like Riggs cannot be estimated. There is
no way of computing this, but there is no person who will deny
that he has been a power. He has not had his head turned by
flattery. He has been “Riggs--of the _Sun_.”
One of Mr. Riggs’s last great pieces of newspaper work was a
twenty-thousand-word history of national conventions which appeared
in the _Sun_ in 1912--the first history of its kind ever written. Mr.
Riggs was also a frequent contributor to the editorial page.
Arthur Brisbane, when he became a _Sun_ reporter in 1882, was
almost the youngest reporter the _Sun_ had had; he went to work on
his eighteenth birthday. He had been intensively educated in America
and abroad. In his first three or four months he was a puzzle to his
superiors, his colleagues, and perhaps to himself.
“He sat around,” said one of his contemporary reporters, “like a fellow
who didn’t understand what it was all about--and then he came out of
his trance like a shot from a gun and seemed to know everything about
everything.”
Brisbane was well liked. He was a handsome, athletic youth, interested
in all lines of life and literature, cheerful, and eager for
adventurous assignment. After two years of reportorial work he went to
France to continue certain studies, and while he was there the _Sun_
offered to him the post of London correspondent, which he accepted.
In March, 1888, when John L. Sullivan and Charley Mitchell went to
Chantilly, in France, for their celebrated fight, Brisbane went with
them and wrote a good two-column story about it--a story that contained
never a word of pugilistic slang but a great deal of interest. He saw
the human side:
Deeply interested were the handfuls of Frenchmen who gathered
and watched from such a safe and distant pavilion as we would
select to look upon a hyena fight.
And, when other reporters were deafened by the battle, Brisbane heard
the plaintive appeal of Baldock, Mitchell’s tough second:
“Think of the kids, Charley, the dear little kids, a calling
for you at home and a counting on you for bread! Think what
their feelings will be if you don’t knock the ear off him, and
knock it off him again!”
Not but what the correspondent paid conscientious attention to the
technique of the fray:
A detailed report of each of the thirty-nine rounds taken by
me shows that out of more than a hundred wild rushes made by
Sullivan, and of which any one would have been followed by
a knockout in Madison Square, not half a dozen resulted in
anything.
A couple of years after the establishment of the _Evening Sun_ Brisbane
was made its managing editor--a big job for a man of twenty-three
years. In 1890 he went to the _World_, where he became the editor of
the Sunday magazine and the most illustrious exponent of that startling
form of graphic art which demonstrates to the reader, without calling
upon his brain for undue effort, how much taller than the Washington
Monument would be New York’s daily consumption of dill pickles, if
piled monumentwise.
Seven years later Mr. Hearst took Brisbane from Mr. Pulitzer and made
him editor of the _Evening Journal_--a position eminently suited to
his talents, for here he was able to write as he wished in that clear,
simple style which had endeared him to the _Sun_.
Brisbane’s newspaper style goes directly back to the writing of William
O. Bartlett. It has its terse, cutting qualities, the avoidance of
all but the simplest words, and the direct drive at the object to be
attained. Brisbane, too, adopted the Dana principle that nothing was
more valuable in editorial writing, for the achievement of a purpose,
than iteration and reiteration. This was the plan that Dana always
followed in his political battles--incessant drum-fire. Brisbane uses
it now as proprietor of the Washington _Times_, which he bought from
Frank A. Munsey, the present owner of the _Sun_, in June, 1917.
John R. Spears was one of the big _Sun_ men for fifteen years. He, like
Amos Cummings and Julian Ralph, was brought up in the atmosphere of a
printing-office as a small boy; but in 1866, when he was sixteen years
old, he entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis and spent a couple of
years as a naval cadet. His cruise around the world in a training-ship
filled him with a love of the sea that never left him. His marine
knowledge helped him and the _Sun_, for which he wrote fine stories of
the international yacht-races between the Mayflower and the Galatea
(1886) and the Volunteer and the Thistle (1887).
Spears liked wild life on land, too, and the _Sun_ sent him into the
mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky to tell of the feuds of the
Hatfields and the McCoys. He went into the Ozarks to write up the Bald
Knobbers, and he sent picturesque stories, in the eighties, from No
Man’s Land, that unappropriated strip between Kansas and Texas which
knew no law from 1850, when it was taken from Mexico, until 1890, when
it became a part of the new State of Oklahoma.
Spears was a hard worker. They said of him in the _Sun_ office that he
never went out on an assignment without bringing in the material for a
special article for the Sunday paper. He wrote several books, including
“The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn,” “The Port of Missing Ships,” “The
History of Our Navy,” “The Story of the American Merchant Marine,” “The
Story of the New England Whalers,” and “The History of the American
Slave Trade.” He now lives in retirement near Little Falls, New York.
His son, Raymond S. Spears, the fiction-writer, was a _Sun_ reporter
from 1896 to 1900.
Park Row knows Erasmus D. Beach chiefly through the book-reviews he
wrote for the _Sun_ during many years, but he was a first-class
reporter, too. The _Sun_ liked specialists, but no man could expect to
stick to his specialty. When Gustav Kobbé went on the _Sun_ in March,
1880, it was for the general purpose of assisting William M. Laffan in
dramatic criticism and Francis C. Bowman in musical criticism; but his
first assignment was to go to Bellevue Hospital and investigate the
reported mistreatment of smallpox patients--a job which he accepted
like the good soldier that every good _Sun_ man is.
Mr. Beach was a clever all-round writer and reporter, with a leaning
toward the purely literary side of the business, and he had no special
fondness for sports; but the _Sun_ sent him, with Christopher J.
Fitzgerald and David Graham Phillips, to report the Yale-Princeton
football-game at Eastern Park, Brooklyn, on Thanksgiving Day,
1890--that glorious day for Yale when the score in her favour was
thirty-two to nothing. It was the time of Heffelfinger and Poe, McClung
and King. Beach wrote an introduction which Mr. Dana classed as
Homeric. Here is a bit of it:
Great in the annals of Yale forever must be the name of
McClung. Twice within a few minutes this man has carried the
ball over the Princeton goal-line. He runs like a deer, has the
stability of footing of one of the pyramids, and is absolutely
cool in the most frightfully exciting circumstances.
A curious figure is McClung. He has just finished a run of
twenty yards, with all Princeton shoving against him. He
is steaming like a pot of porridge, and chewing gum. His
vigorously working profile is clearly outlined against the
descending sun. How dirty he is! His paddings seem to have
become loosed and to have accumulated over his knees. He has
a shield, a sort of splint, bound upon his right shin. His
long hair is held in a band, a linen fillet, the dirtiest ever
worn.
He pants as a man who has run fifty miles--who has overthrown a
house. He droops slightly for a moment’s rest, hands on knees,
eyes shining with the glare of battle, the gum catching between
his grinders. A tab on one of his ears signifies a severe
injury to that organ, an injury received in some previous match
from an opposition boot-heel, or from a slide over the rough
earth with half a dozen of the enemy seated upon him. He has a
little, sharp-featured face, squirrel-like, with a Roman nose
and eyes set near together. Brief dental gleams illuminate his
countenance in his moments of great joyfulness.
[Illustration:
EDWARD G. RIGGS
]
Dana liked Beach’s introduction because the reader need not be a
football fan to enjoy it. For the technique of the game he who wished
to follow the plays could find all that he wanted in the stories of
Fitzgerald and Phillips.
In connection with Beach’s literary accomplishments, there is a
tradition that another famous _Sun_ reporter of the eighties, Charles
M. Fairbanks, was assigned to report one of the great games at
Princeton, and, although entirely unacquainted with punts and tackles,
came back with a story complete in technical detail, having learned the
fine points of football in a few hours. Later, in the early nineties,
Fairbanks was night editor of the paper.
A _Sun_ man who has been a _Sun_ man from a time to which the memory
of man goeth back only with a long pull, is Samuel A. Wood, who has
been the _Sun’s_ ship-news man for more than thirty-five years. He is
a good example, too, of the _Sun_ man’s anonymity, for although he was
the originator of the rhymed news story and his little run-in lyrics
have been the admiration of American newspapermen for more than a
generation, few persons beyond Park Row have known Wood as the author
of them.
Although a first-class general reporter, Wood has stuck closely to
his favourite topics, the ships and the weather. He made weather news
bearable with such bits as this:
The sun has crossed the line, and now the weather may be
vernal; that is, if no more cyclones come, like yesterday’s, to
spurn all the efforts of the spring to come as per the classic
rhymers. (Perhaps there was a spring in those days of the
good old-timers!) But this spring sprang a fearful leak from
clouded dome supernal, and weather that should be divine might
be declared infernal; entirely too much chilliness, nocturnal
and diurnal, which prompted many citizens to take, for woes
external, the ancient spring reviver of the old Kentucky
colonel.
The mercury fell down the tube a point below the freezing, and
Spring herself might be excused for shivering and sneezing. The
wind, a brisk northeaster, howled, the sky was dark and solemn,
and chills chased one another up and down the spinal column.
Oh hail, diphtherial mildness, hail, and rain, and snow--and
blossom! Perhaps the spring has really come, and may be playing
possum!
Wood writes rhymeless sea-stories with the grace of a Clark Russell. He
turns to prose-verse only when the subject particularly suits it, as
for instance in the story upon which Mr. Clarke, the night city editor,
wrote the classic head--“Snygless the Seas Are--Wiig Rides the Waves No
More--Back Come Banana Men--Skaal to the Vikings!” This is the text:
While off the Honduranean coast, not far from Ruatan, the
famous little fruiter Snyg on dirty weather ran. Her skipper,
Wiig, was at the helm, the boatswain hove the lead; the air was
thick; you could not see a half-ship’s length ahead. The mate
said:
“Reefs of Ruatan, I think, are off our bow.”
The skipper answered:
“You are right; they’re inside of us now.”
The water filled the engine-room and put the fires out, and
quickly o’er the weather rail the seas began to spout.
When dawn appeared there also came three blacks from off the
isle. They deftly managed their canoe, each wearing but a
smile; but, clever as they were, their boat was smashed against
the Snyg, and they were promptly hauled aboard by gallant
Captain Wiig.
“We had thirteen aboard this ship,” the fearful cook remarked.
“I think we stand a chance for life, since three coons have
embarked. Now let our good retriever, Nig, a life-line take
ashore, and all hands of the steamship Snyg may see New York
once more.”
But Nig refused to leave the ship, and so the fearless crew the
life-boat launched, but breakers stove the stout craft through
and through. Said Captain Wiig:
“Though foiled by Nig, our jig’s not up, I vow; I’ve still my
gig, and I don’t care a fig--I’ll make the beach somehow!”
And Mate Charles Christian of the Snyg (who got here yesterday)
helped launch the stanch gig of the Snyg so the crew could
get away. The gig was anchored far inshore; with raft and
trolley-line all hands on the Snyg, including Nig, were hauled
safe o’er the brine.
Although the Snyg, of schooner rig, will ply the waves no more,
let us hope that Wiig gets another Snyg for the sake of the
bards ashore.
The _Sun’s_ handling of the news of the brief war with Spain, in 1898,
has an interest beyond the mere brilliance of its men’s work and the
fact that this was the last war in which the newspaper correspondents
had practically a free hand.
For years “Cuba Libre” had been one of the _Sun’s_ fights. From the
first days of his control of the paper Mr. Dana had urged the overthrow
of Spanish dominion in the island. His support of the revolutionists
went back, as E. P. Mitchell has written, “to the dark remoteness of
the struggles a quarter of a century before the war--the time of the
Cespedes uprising, the Virginius affair, and the variegated activities
of the New York Junta.” Mr. Mitchell adds:
The affection of the _Sun_ and its editor for everything Cuban
except Spanish domination lasted quite down to and after the
second advent of Maximo Gomez; it was never livelier than in
the middle seventies.
Mr. Dana was the warm friend of José Marti. He corresponded
personally (with the assistance of his Fenian stenographer,
Williams) with the leading revolutionists actually fighting
in the island. He was the constant and unwearied intellectual
resource of a swarm of patriots, adventurers, near-filibusters,
bondholding financiers, lawyer-diplomats, and grafters
operating exclusively in Manhattan. A Latin-American accent was
a sure card of admission to the woven-bottomed chair alongside
the little round table in the inner corner room of the series
of four inhabited by the _Sun’s_ entire force of editors and
reporters.
We were then the foremost if not the only American organ of
Cuban independence. The executive journalistic headquarters
of the cause was just outside Mr. Dana’s front door. The Cuba
Libre editor, as I suppose he would be styled nowadays, was a
gentleman of Latin-American origin, who bore the aggressive and
appropriate name of Rebello. The Cuba Libre “desk” was about as
depressing a seat of literary endeavor as the telegraph-blank
shelf in a country railroad station, which it resembled in its
narrowness, its dismal ink-wells, rusty pens, and other details
of disreputable equipment. From this shelf there issued, by
Mr. Dana’s direction, many encouraging editorial remarks to
Rebello’s compatriots in the jungle.
Nor was free Cuba ungrateful to the _Sun_. A few years after the
war, when Mr. Mitchell was walking about the interior Cuban town of
Camaguey, formerly Puerto Principe, he came upon a modest little
public square, the lamp-posts of which were labelled “Plaza Charles A.
Dana.” At the corner of the church of Las Mercedes was a tablet with
the following inscription:
TRIBUTO DEL PUEBLO A LA MEMORIA DE
CHARLES A. DANA
ILLUSTRE PUBLICISTA AMERICANO
DEFENSOR INFATIGABLE DE LAS
LIBERTADES CUBANAS
ABRIL 10 DE 1899
Dana was dead, without having seen the blooming of the flower he had
watered, but Cuba had not wholly forgotten.
* * * * *
When the Maine was blown up in February, 1898, the _Sun_ began
preparations to cover a war. The managing editor, Chester S. Lord,
assisted by W. J. Chamberlin, worked out the preliminary arrangements.
John R. Spears, then thirty-eight years old and a reporter of wide
experience, particularly in matters of the sea--he had already written
“The History of Our Navy”--was sent to Key West, the headquarters of
the fleet which was to blockade Havana. He was at Key West some weeks
before war was declared.
The _Sun_ chartered the steam yacht Kanapaha and sent her at once to
Key West, under the command of Captain Packard, to take on Spears and
his staff, which included Harold M. Anderson, Nelson Lloyd, Walstein
Root, Dana H. Carroll, and others. Besides the men named, who were to
go with the Kanapaha on her voyage with Sampson’s fleet, the _Sun_ sent
Oscar King Davis with Schley’s squadron, and Thomas M. Dieuaide on
board the Texas. Dieuaide got a splendid view of the great sea-fight of
July 3, when Cervera came out of the harbour of Santiago, and he wrote
the _Sun’s_ first detailed account of the destruction of the Spanish
fleet.
The _Sun_ men ashore in Cuba were captained by W. J. Chamberlin, who
succeeded Mr. Spears some time before the battle of Santiago. His force
included H. M. Anderson, Carroll and Root of the _Sun_, and Henry M.
Armstrong and Acton Davies of the _Evening Sun_. Armstrong, who was
with Shafter, covered much of the attack and investment of Santiago
and the surrender of that city. It was Chamberlin who sent to the
United States the first news of the formal surrender of Santiago, but
the message was not delivered to the _Sun_. The government censorship
gently commandeered it and gave it out as an official bulletin.
Chamberlin wrote the story of the battle of San Juan Hill on board a
tossing boat that carried him from Siboney to the cable station at Port
Antonio.
The first American flag hoisted over the Morro at Santiago was the
property of the _Sun_, but in this case there was no government
peculation. Anderson and Acton Davies gave the flag, which was a boat
ensign from the Kanapaha, to some sailors of the Texas, and the sailors
fastened it to the Morro staff.
When Schley’s squadron was united with Sampson’s fleet, some time
before the battle of Santiago, O. K. Davis was ordered to Manila.
He had the luck to sail on the cruiser Charleston, which, on June
21, 1898, made the conquest of the island of Guam. That famous but
bloodless victory was described by Davis in a two-page article which
was exclusively the _Sun’s_, and of which the _Sun_ said editorially on
August 9, 1898:
No such story ever has been written or ever will be written
of our conquest of the Ladrones as that of the Sun’s
correspondent, published yesterday morning. It is the picture
of a historic scene, in which not a single detail is wanting.
This far-away little isle of Guam, so much out of the world
that it had not heard of our war with Spain, and mistook the
Charleston’s shells for an honorary salute, is now a part of
the United States of America, and destined to share in the
greatness of a progressive country. The queer Spanish governor,
who declined to go upon Captain Glass’s ship because it would
be a breach of Spanish regulations, is now our prisoner at
Manila.
Dieuaide, who wrote the _Sun’s_ story of the Santiago sea-fight, is
also distinguished as the author of the first published description
of St. Pierre--or, rather, of the ashes that covered it--after that
city and all but two persons of its thirty thousand had been buried by
the eruption of Mont Pelée. The introductory paragraph of Dieuaide’s
article gives an idea of his graphic power:
FORT DE FRANCE, MARTINIQUE, May 21--To-day we saw St. Pierre,
the ghastliest ghost of the modern centuries. But yesterday
the fairest of the fair of the wondrous cities of the storied
Antilles, bright, beautiful, glorious, glistening and
shimmering in her prism of tropical radiance, an opalescent
city in a setting of towering forest and mountain, now a
waste of ashen-gray without life, form, color, shape, a drear
monotone, a dim blur on the landscape--it seems even more than
the contrast between life and death.
The dead may live. St. Pierre is not alive, and never will
be. Out of shape has come a void. It is the apotheosis of
annihilation. To one who sits amid the ruins and gazes the
long miles upward over the seamed sides of La Pelée, still
thundering her terrible wrath, may come some conception of the
future ruin of the worlds.
It has been a day of sharp impressions, one cutting into
another until the memory-pad of the mind is crossed and
crisscrossed like the fissured flanks of La Pelée herself;
but most deeply graven of all, paradoxically, is the memory
of a dimness, a nothingness, an emptiness, a lack of
everything--the gray barrenness unrelieved of what was the
rainbow St. Pierre. Mont Pelée, the most awful evidence of
natural force to be seen in the world to-day--La Pelée,
majestic, terrible, overpowering, has been in evidence from
starlight to starlight, but it is the ashen blank that was once
the city of the Saint of the Rock that stands out most clearly
in the kaleidoscopic maze slipping backward and forward before
our eyes.
And thus on, without losing interest, for seven solid columns.
Will Irwin’s great page story, printed beside the straight news of
the San Francisco earthquake, is another _Sun_ classic. Irwin had
the fortune to be familiar with San Francisco, and he was able,
without reference to book or map, to give to New York, through the
_Sun_, a most vivid picture of “The City That Was.” It is a literary
companion-piece of Thomas M. Dieuaide’s gray drawing of St. Pierre, but
only the introduction must do here:
The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest-hearted,
most pleasure-loving city of this continent, and in many ways
the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled
refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will;
but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate,
and have caught its flavor of the “Arabian Nights” feel that it
can never be the same.
It is as though a pretty, frivolous woman had passed through a
great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and different.
If it rises out of the ashes it must be a modern city, much
like other cities and without its old flavor.
There were less than five columns of the article, but it told the
whole story of San Francisco; not in dry figures of commerce and paved
streets, but of the people and places that every Eastern man had
longed to see, but now never could see.
Writers like Ralph and Chamberlin, Dieuaide and Irwin, are spoken of as
“star” reporters, yet the saying that the _Sun_ has no star men is not
entirely fictional. Its best reporters are, and will be, remembered as
stars, but no men were, or are, treated as stars. Big reporters cover
little stories and cubs write big ones--if they can. A city editor does
not send an inexperienced man on an assignment that requires all the
skill of the trained reporter, yet it is _Sun_ history that many new
men have turned in big stories from assignments that appeared, at first
blush, to be inconsequential. There are always two or three so-called
star men in the office, but the days when there are two or three star
assignments are comparatively few.
Let us take, arbitrarily, one day twenty-five years ago--February 1,
1893--and see what some of the _Sun_ reporters did:
Jefferson Market Court S. H. Adams
Essex Market Court and Meeting of Irish
Federalists Rudolph E. Block
With R. Croker at Lakewood George B. Mallon
Custom-House News E. G. Riggs
City Hall News W. H. Olmsted
Police Headquarters Robert S. Yard
Ship News S. A. Wood
Coroners and Post-Office W. A. Willis
Subway Project and Murder at East
Eighty-Eighth Street W. J. Chamberlin
Magic Shell Swindle E. W. Townsend
Condition of Police Lodging-Houses D. G. Phillips
Carlyle Harris Case F. F. Coleman
Fire at Koster & Bial’s John Kenny
Bishop McDonnell’s Trip to Rome Evans
To gain an impression of the variety of work which comes to a _Sun_
reporter, take the assignments given to David Graham Phillips in the
last days of his service with the _Sun_ in 1893:
March 1--Joseph Jefferson’s Lecture on the Drama
” 2--Bear Hunt at Glen Cove
” 3--Special Stories for the Sunday _Sun_
” 6--Obituary of W. P. Demarest
” 7--Meeting of Russian-Americans
” 8--Mystery at New Brunswick, New Jersey
” 9--Special Stories for Sunday
” 10--Accident in Seventy-First St. Tunnel
” 11--More Triplets in Cold Spring
” 12--Services in Old Scotch Church
” 13--Furniture Sale
” 14--Opening of Hotel Waldorf
” 15--Married Four Days, Then False
” 17--Dinner, Friendly Sons of St. Patrick
” 18--Parade and Show, Barnum & Bailey
” 19--Church Quarrel, Rutherford, N. J.
Phillips was then one of the _Sun’s_ best reporters; not as large
a figure in the office as Ralph, or Chamberlin, or Spears, but one
entitled to assignments of the first class. A list of his assignments
soon after he joined the staff in the summer of 1890 would be
monotonous--Jefferson Market police-court day after day; the kind of
work with which the _Sun_ broke in a new man. Once on space, with eight
dollars a column instead of fifteen dollars a week, Phillips got what
he wanted--a peep at every corner of city life. In a little more than
two years as a space man he picked up much of the material that is seen
in his novels.
A _Sun_ man takes what comes to his lot. When W. J. Chamberlin returned
from Cuba, his first assignment was a small police case. But a really
good reporter finds his opportunity and his “big” stories for himself.
It would take a small book to give a list of the “big” stories that the
_Sun_ has printed, and a five-foot shelf of tall volumes to reprint
them all. Some of them were written leisurely, like Spears’s stories
of the Bad Lands, some in comparative ease, like Ralph’s stories of
Presidential inaugurations and the Grant funeral, or W. J. Chamberlin’s
eleven-column report of the Dewey parade in 1899. In these latter the
ease is only comparative, for the writer’s fingers had no time to rest
in the achievement of such gigantic tasks. And the comparison is with
the work done by reporters on occasions when there was no time to
arrange ideas and choose words; when the facts came in what would be to
the layman hopeless disorder.
Such an occasion, for instance, was the burning of the excursion
steamer General Slocum, the description of which--in the end a
marvellous tale of horror--was taken page by page from Lindsay Denison
as his typewriter milled it out. Such an occasion was Edwin C. Hill’s
opportunity to write his notable leads to the stories of the Republic
wreck in 1909 and the Titanic disaster in 1912. But the _Sun_ and _Sun_
men never have hysterics. Tragedy seems to tighten them up more than
other newspapers and newspapermen.
Introductions to big stories tell the pulse of the paper. Read, for
example, the _Sun_ introduction to the great ocean tragedy of 1898:
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, July 6--The steamship La Bourgogne of
the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, which left New York
on Saturday last bound for Havre, was sunk at five o’clock
on Monday morning after a collision with the British ship
Cromartyshire in a dense fog about sixty miles south of Sable
Island. The ship had 750 persons aboard. The number of first
and second cabin passengers was 220 and of the steerage
passengers 297, a total of 517. The number of officers was 11,
of the crew 222. Eleven second-cabin and 51 steerage passengers
and 104 of the crew, a total of 166, were saved. All the
officers but four, all the first-cabin passengers, and all but
one of the more than one hundred women on board, were lost. The
number of lost is believed to be 584.
This was more detailed, but not more calm than the opening of Edwin C.
Hill’s story on the loss of the Titanic:
The greatest marine disaster in the history of ocean traffic
occurred last Sunday night, when the Titanic of the White
Star Line, the greatest steamship that ever sailed the sea,
shattered herself against an iceberg and sank with, it is
feared, fifteen hundred of her passengers and crew in less
than four hours. The monstrous modern ships may defy wind and
weather, but ice and fog remain unconquered.
Out of nearly twenty-four hundred people that the Titanic
carried, only eight hundred and sixty-six are known to have
been saved, and most of these were women and children.
Probably the most restrained lead on a _Sun_ account of a great
disaster was the introduction to the article on the Brooklyn Theatre
fire of 1876:
The Brooklyn Theatre was built in September, 1871, opened for
public entertainment October 2, 1871, and burned to the ground
with the sacrifice of three hundred lives on the night of
Tuesday, December 5, 1876.
Of a more literary character, yet void of excitement, was the way
Julian Ralph began his narrative of the blizzard of March, 1888:
It was as if New York had been a burning candle upon which
nature had clapped a snuffer, leaving nothing of the city’s
activities but a struggling ember.
While on this subject, it is as well to say that the _Sun_, in ordinary
stories, does without introductions. “Begin at the beginning” has been
one of its unwritten rules; or, as a veteran copy-reader remarked to a
new reporter who told it all in the first paragraph:
“For the love of Mike, can’t you leave something for the head-writer to
say?”
Every young newspaper man hears a good deal about “human-interest
stories.” Some of the professors of journalism tell their pupils what
human-interest stories are; others advise the best way to know one, or
to get one. It is not evident, however, that any one has devised an
infallible formula for taking a trivial or commonplace event and, by
reason of the humour, pathos, or liveliness thereof, lifting it to a
higher plane.
Amos Cummings is believed to have been the first newspaperman to see
the news value of the lost child or the steer loose in the street.
Amos himself wrote a story about the steer. Ralph wrote another one,
and got his first job in New York on the strength of it. Frank W.
O’Malley wrote one recently, and made New York laugh over it. But
your newspaperman needs something besides a frightened steer and some
streets; he must have “something in his noddle,” as Mr. Dana used to
say.
Every reporter gets a chance to write a story about a lost child, but
there are perhaps only two lost-child stories of the last thirty years
that are remembered, and both were _Sun_ stories. David Graham Phillips
found his lost child in the Catskills and wrote an article over which
women wept. The next time a child was lost, Phillips’s city editor sent
him on the assignment, and he fell down. The child was there, and the
woods, and the bloodhounds, but the reporter’s brain would not turn
backward and go again through the processes that made a great story.
Hill’s story, which is remembered by its head--“A Little Child in the
Dark”--will never be repeated--by Hill.
The tear-impelling article is the most difficult thing for a good
reporter to write or a bad reporter to avoid trying to write. It might
be added that good reporters write a “sob story” only when it fastens
itself on them and demands to be written; and then they write the facts
and let the reader do the weeping. O’Malley’s story of the killing of
Policeman Gene Sheehan, which has been reprinted from the _Sun_ by
several text-books for students of journalism, is good proof of this.
Practically all of it--and it was a column long--was a straightforward
report of the story told by the policeman’s mother. This is a part:
Mrs. Catherine Sheehan stood in the darkened parlor of her
home at 361 West Fifteenth Street late yesterday afternoon and
told her version of the murder of her son Gene, the youthful
policeman whom a thug named Billy Morley shot in the forehead
down under the Chatham Square elevated station early yesterday
morning. Gene’s mother was thankful that her boy hadn’t killed
Billy Morley before he died, “because,” she said, “I can say
honestly, even now, that I’d rather have Gene’s dead body
brought home to me, as it will be to-night, than to have him
come to me and say, ‘Mother, I had to kill a man this morning.’
“God comfort the poor wretch that killed the boy,” the mother
went on, “because he is more unhappy to-night than we are here.
Maybe he was weak-minded through drink. He couldn’t have known
Gene, or he wouldn’t have killed him. Did they tell you at the
Oak Street Station that the other policemen called Gene ‘Happy
Sheehan’? Anything they told you about him is true, because
no one would lie about him. He was always happy, and he was a
fine-looking young man. He always had to duck his helmet when
he walked under the gas-fixture in the hall as he went out the
door.
“After he went down the street yesterday I found a little book
on a chair--a little list of the streets or something that Gene
had forgot. I knew how particular they are about such things,
and I didn’t want the boy to get in trouble, so I threw on a
shawl and walked over through Chambers Street toward the river
to find him. He was standing on a corner some place down there
near the bridge, clapping time with his hands for a little
newsy that was dancing; but he stopped clapping--struck, Gene
did, when he saw me. He laughed when I handed him a little book
and told him that was why I’d searched for him, patting me on
the shoulder when he laughed--patting me on the shoulder.
“‘It’s a bad place for you here, Gene,’ I said. ‘Then it must
be bad for you, too, mammy,’ said he; and as he walked to the
end of his beat with me--it was dark then--he said, ‘There are
lots of crooks here, mother, and they know and hate me, and
they’re afraid of me’--proud, he said it--‘but maybe they’ll
get me some night.’
“He patted me on the back and turned and walked east toward his
death. Wasn’t it strange that Gene said that?
“You know how he was killed, of course, and how--now let me
talk about it, children, if I want to. I promised you, didn’t
I, that I wouldn’t cry any more or carry on? Well, it was five
o’clock this morning when a boy rang the bell here at the
house, and I looked out the window and said:
“‘Is Gene dead?’
“‘No, ma’am,’ answered the lad; ‘but they told me to tell you
he was hurt in a fire and is in the hospital.’
“Jerry, my other boy, had opened the door for the lad, and
was talking to him while I dressed a bit. And then I walked
down-stairs and saw Jerry standing silent under the gaslight;
and I said again, ‘Jerry, is Gene dead?’ And he said ‘Yes,’ and
he went out.
“After a while I went down to the Oak Street Station myself,
because I couldn’t wait for Jerry to come back. The policemen
all stopped talking when I came in, and then one of them told
me it was against the rules to show me Gene at that time; but I
knew the policeman only thought I’d break down. I promised him
I wouldn’t carry on, and he took me into a room to let me see
Gene. It was Gene.”
The _Sun_ has been richly fortunate in the humour that has tinged its
news columns since its very beginning. Even Ben Day, with all the
worries of a pioneer journalist, made the types exact a smile from his
readers. With Dana, amusing the people was second only to instructing
them. Julian Ralph and Wilbur Chamberlin both had the trick of putting
together the bricks of fact with the mortar of humour. Chamberlin
had several characters, like his _Insec’ O’Connor_, whose strings he
pulled and made to dance. Hardly a sea-story of Sam Wood’s--except
where there is tragedy--does not contain something to be laughed over.
Samuel Hopkins Adams was an adept at the comic twist. Lindsay Denison
once wrote a story of a semipublic celebration of an engagement so
delightfully that the bride’s father, perhaps the only person in New
York who did not see the humour of the affair, threatened to break the
pledge of troth, although the groom was a public character who had
courted publicity all his life.
Charles Selden, as grave a reporter as ever glowered at a poor
space-bill, had a vein of structural humour perhaps unsurpassed by
any reporter. His account of a press reception at the home of Miss
Lillian Russell has been approached in delicacy only by O’Malley’s
interview with Miss Laura Jean Libbey. Selden’s story of the occasion
when creditors took away all the furniture of John L. Sullivan’s
café--except the one chair upon which the champion snoozed--was a model
of dry, unlaboured humour.
As an example of the drollness with which O’Malley has delighted _Sun_
readers for ten years, take this extract from his report of the East
Side Passover parade of 1917, referring to Counselor Levy, the Duke of
Essex Street, whose title was conferred by the _Sun_ twenty years ago:
It was difficult for a time to get the details of the duke’s
Passover garb, owing to the fact that the interior of his
Nile-green limousine has recently been fitted up with
book-shelves, so that the duke can be surrounded with his law
library even when motoring to and from his office on the East
Side. Furthermore, every space not occupied by the duke and
duchess and the law library yesterday was decorated with floral
set pieces in honor of Easter, a large pillow of tuberoses
inscribed with the words “Our Duke” in purple immortelles,
and presented by the Essex Market Bar Association to their
dean, being the outstanding piece among the interior floral
decorations of the duke’s Rolls-Royce. Beside Ittchee, the
duke’s Jap valet and chauffeur, was a large rubber-plant, which
shut off the view, the rubber-plant being the Easter gift of
Solomon, Solomon, Solomon, Solomon, Solomon and Solomon, who
learned all their law as students in the offices of the duke.
Little or nothing remains to be told about the duke’s Easter
scenery. He was dressed in the mode, that’s all--high hat,
morning coat, trousers like Martin Littleton’s, mauve spats,
corn-colored gloves, patent-leather shoes, Russian-red cravat,
set off with a cameo showing the face of Lord Chief Justice
Russell in high relief. His only distinctive mark was the
absence of a gardenia on his lapel.
He was off then, waving his snakewood cane jauntily, while the
East Side scrambled after the car to try to feel the Nile-green
varnish. And with a final direction to Ittchee, “Go around by
Chauncey Depew’s house on the way home, my good man,” the car
exploded northward, and the Passover parade on Delancey Street
officially ended for the day.
There is hardly a man who has lived five years as a _Sun_ reporter but
could write his own story of the _Sun_ just as he has written stories
of life. Here but a few of these men and their work have been touched.
It has been a long parade from Wisner of 1833 to Hill of 1918. Many of
the great reporters are dead, and of some of these it may be said that
their lives were shortened by the very fever in which they won their
glory. Some passed on to other fields of endeavour. Others are waiting
to write “the best story ever printed in the _Sun_.”
What was the best story ever printed in the _Sun_? It may be that that
story has been quoted from in these articles; and yet, if a thousand
years hence some super-scientist should invent a literary measure that
would answer the question, the crown of that high and now unbestowable
honour of authorship might fall to some man here unmentioned and
elsewhere unsung. Perhaps it was an article only two hundred words
long.