SOME GENIUS IN AN OLD ROOM
_Lord, Managing Editor for Thirty-Turn Years.--Clarke, Magician of
the Copy Desk.--Ethics, Fair Play and Democracy.--“The Evening
Sun” and Those Who Make It._
For forty-seven years the city or news room of the _Sun_ was on the
third floor of the brick building at the south corner of Nassau and
Frankfort Streets, a five-story house built for Tammany Hall in 1811,
when that organization found its quarters in Martling’s Tavern--a few
doors south, on part of the site of the present Tribune Building--too
small for its robust membership.
In the days of Grand Sachems William Mooney, Matthew L. Davis, Lorenzo
B. Shepard, Elijah F. Purdy, Isaac V. Fowler, Nelson J. Waterbury, and
William D. Kennedy, and the big and little bosses, including Tweed,
this third-floor room had been used as a general meeting-hall. It
was here, in 1835, that the Locofoco--later the Equal Rights--party
was born after a conflict in which the regular Tammany men, finding
themselves in the minority, turned off the gas and left the reformers
to meet by the light of locofoco matches. It was a room from which many
a Democrat was hurled because he preferred De Witt Clinton to Tammany’s
favourite, Martin Van Buren. Two flights of long, straight stairs led
to the ground floor. They were hard to go up; they must have been
extremely painful to go down bouncing.
It was a long, wide, barnlike room, lighted by five windows that looked
upon Park Row and the City Hall. The stout old timbers were bare in
the ceiling and in them were embedded various hooks and ring-bolts to
which, once upon a time, was attached gymnasium apparatus used by a
_turn verein_, which hired the room when the Tammanyites did not need
it.
It was not a beautiful room. Mr. Dana never did anything to improve
it except in a utilitarian way, and from the time when he bought the
building from the Tammany Society, in 1867, until it was torn down
in 1915, the old place looked very much the same. Of course, new
gas-jets were added, these to be followed by electric-light wires,
until the upper air had a jungle-like appearance, and there were rude,
inexpensive desks and telephone-booths.
The floor was efficient, for it was covered with rubber matting that
deadened alike the quick footstep of Dana and the thundering stride
of pugilistic champions who came in to see the sporting editor. But
the city room’s only ornaments were men and their genius. Here wrote
Ralph and Chamberlin, Spears and Irwin, and all the rest of the fine
reporters of the old building’s years.
Near the windows of this shabby room were the desks of the men who
planned news-hunts, chose the hunters, and mounted their trophies. Six
desks handled all the news-matter in the old city room of the _Sun_.
The managing editor sat at a roll-top in the northwest corner, near a
door that led to Mr. Dana’s room. A little distance to the east was
the night editor’s desk. At the large flat-top desk near the managing
editor three men sat--the cable editor, who handled all foreign news;
the “Albany man,” who edited articles from the State and national
capitals and all of New York State; and the telegraph editor, who
took care of all other wire matter.
[Illustration:
CHESTER SANDERS LORD
]
In the southwest corner of the room was a double desk at which the city
editor sat from 10 A.M. until 5 P.M., when the night city editor came
in. Next to the city editor’s desk was the roll-top of the assistant
city editor, also used by the assistant night city editor. Beyond that
was the desk of the suburban or “Jersey” editor. Nearest the door, so
that the noise of ten-thousand-dollar challenges to twenty-round combat
would not disturb the whole room, was the desk of the sporting editor.
In the fifty years that have passed since Dana bought the _Sun_, the
changes in the heads of the news departments have been comparatively
few. True, the news office has not been as fortunate as the editorial
rooms, where only three men, Charles A. Dana, Paul Dana, and Edward P.
Mitchell, have been actual editors-in-chief; but the list of managing
editors and night city editors is not long. Before the day of Chester
S. Lord, the managing editors were, in order: Isaac W. England, Amos J.
Cummings, William Young, and Ballard Smith. Since Lord’s retirement the
managing editors have been James Luby, William Harris, and Keats Speed.
The city editors have been John Williams, Larry Kane, W. M. Rosebault,
William Young, John B. Bogart (1873–1890), Daniel F. Kellogg
(1890–1902), George B. Mallon (1902–1914), and Kenneth Lord, the
present city editor, a son of Chester S. Lord.
The night city editors before the long reign of Selah Merrill
Clarke--of whom more will be said presently--were Henry W. Odion,
Elijah M. Rewey, and Ambrose W. Lyman, all of whom had previously been
_Sun_ reporters, and all of whom remained with the _Sun_, in various
capacities, for many years. Rewey was the exchange editor from 1887 to
1903, and was variously employed at other important desk posts until
his death in 1916. Since Mr. Clarke’s retirement, in 1912, the night
city editors have been Joseph W. Bishop, J. W. Phoebus, Eugene Doane,
Marion G. Scheitlin, and M. A. Rose.
The night editors of the _Sun_, whose function it is to make up the
paper and to “sit in” when the managing editors are absent, have been
Dr. John B. Wood, the “great American condenser”; Garret P. Serviss,
now with the _Evening Journal_; Charles M. Fairbanks, Carr V. Van Anda
(1893–1904), now managing editor of the New York _Times_; George M.
Smith (1904–1912), the present managing editor of the _Evening Sun_;
and Joseph W. Bishop.
In the eighties, the nineties, and the first decade of the present
century the front corners of the city room were occupied, six nights
a week, by two men closely identified with the _Sun’s_ progress in
getting and preparing news. These, Chester S. Lord and S. M. Clarke,
were looked up to by _Sun_ men, and by Park Row generally, as essential
parts of the _Sun_.
Lord, through his city editors, reporters, and correspondents, got the
news. If it was metropolitan news--and until the latter days of July,
1914, New York was the news-centre of the world, so far as American
papers were concerned--Clarke helped to get it and then to present it
after the unapproachably artistic manner of the _Sun_. In the years
of Lord and Clarke more than a billion copies of the _Sun_ went out
containing news stories written by men whom Lord had hired and whose
work had passed beneath the hand of Clarke.
Chester Sanders Lord, who was managing editor of the _Sun_ from 1880
to 1913, was born in Romulus, New York, in 1850, the son of the Rev.
Edward Lord, a Presbyterian clergyman who was chaplain of the One
Hundred and Tenth Regiment of New York Volunteer Infantry in the Civil
War. Chester Lord studied at Hamilton College in 1869 and 1870, and
went from college to be associate editor of the Oswego _Advertiser_.
In 1872 he came to the _Sun_ as a reporter, and covered part of Horace
Greeley’s campaign for the Presidency in that year. After nine months
as a reporter he was assigned by the managing editor, Cummings, to the
suburban desk, where he remained for four years.
In the fall of 1877 he bought the Syracuse _Standard_, but in six weeks
he returned to the _Sun_ and became assistant night city editor under
Ambrose W. Lyman, the predecessor of S. M. Clarke. Ballard Smith, who
succeeded William Young as managing editor in 1878, named Lord as his
assistant, and Lord succeeded Ballard Smith as managing editor on
December 3, 1880.
For thirty-three years Lord inspected applicants for places in the news
departments of the _Sun_, and decided whether they would fit into the
human structure that Dana had built. Edward G. Riggs, who knew him as
well as any one, has written thus of him:
Like Dana, he has been a great judge of men. His discernment
has been little short of miraculous. Calm, dispassionate,
without the slightest atom of impulse, as wise as a serpent and
as gentle as a dove, Lord got about him a staff that has been
regarded by newspapermen as the most brilliant in the country.
Independent of thought, with a placid idea of the dignity of
his place, ever ready to concede the other fellow’s point of
view even though maintaining his own, Lord was never known in
all the years of his managing editorship of the _Sun_ to utter
an unkind word to any man on the paper, no matter how humble
his station.
One of Lord’s notable performances as managing editor was the
perfecting of the _Sun’s_ system of collecting election returns.
Before 1880 the correspondents had sent in the election figures in
a conscientious but rather inefficient manner--by towns, or cities.
Lord picked out a reliable correspondent in each county of New York
State and gave to the chosen man the responsibility of sending to the
_Sun_, at nine o’clock on election night, an estimate of the result in
his particular county. This was to be followed at eleven o’clock, if
necessary, with the corrected figures.
“Don’t tell us how your city, or township, or village went,” he said
to the correspondents. “Let us have your best estimate on the county.
Don’t spare the telephone or the telegraph, either to collect the
returns or to get them into the _Sun_ office.”
The telephone was just coming into general use for the transmission of
news, and Lord saw its possibilities on an election night.
As a result of the new system, improved from year to year, the
_Sun_ became what it is--the election-night authority on what has
happened. So confident was the _Sun_ of its figures on the night of
the Presidential election of 1884 that it, alone of all the New York
papers, declared the next morning that Mr. Cleveland had defeated Mr.
Blaine, although the _Sun_ had been one of the most strenuous opponents
of the Democratic candidate. Blaine, who had wired to the _Sun_ for
its estimates, got the first news of his defeat from Lord. Eight years
later, when Mr. Cleveland defeated President Harrison, the winner’s
political chief of staff, Daniel S. Lamont, received the first tidings
of the great and unexpected victory from Mr. Lord.
In the late eighties the _Sun_ was supplementing its Associated Press
news service with a valuable corps of special correspondents scattered
all over America and Europe. The news received from these _Sun_ men
led to the establishment, by William M. Laffan, then publisher of the
_Sun_, of a _Sun_ news agency which was called the Laffan Bureau. This
service, originated for the purpose of covering special events in the
live way of the _Sun_, was suddenly called upon to cover the whole news
field of the world in a more comprehensive way.
Lord’s part in this work, when Dana decided to break with the
Associated Press, has been graphically described by Mr. Riggs:
“Chester,” said Mr. Dana one afternoon early in the nineties,
leaning over Lord’s desk, “I have just torn up my Associated
Press franchise. We’ve got to have the news of the world
to-morrow morning, and we’ve got to get it ourselves.”
“Don’t let that fret you, Mr. Dana,” replied Lord. “You’ve got
a Dante class on hand to-night. You just go home and enjoy
yourself. I’ll have the news for you all right.”
Dana always said that he didn’t enjoy his Dante class a single
bit that night; but he didn’t go near the _Sun_ office, neither
did he communicate with the office. He banked on Lord, and
the next morning and ever afterward Lord made good on the
independent service. He built up the Laffan Bureau, which more
recently has become the Sun News Service, and the special
correspondents of the paper in all parts of the world see to it
that the _Sun_ gets the news.
A task like that which Dana thrust on Lord might have paralyzed
the average managing editor of a great metropolitan newspaper
confronted by keen and powerful competitors. It was unheard of
in journalism. It had never been attempted before. Lord, with
calm courage and confidence, sent off thousands of telegrams
and cable despatches that night. Many were shots in the air,
but the majority were bull’s-eyes, as the next morning’s issue
of the _Sun_ proved.
Was Dana delighted? If you had seen him hop, skip, and jump
into the office that morning, you’d have received your answer.
When Lord turned up at his desk in the afternoon, Dana rushed
out from his chief editor’s office, grasped him about the
shoulders, and chuckled:
“Chester, you’re a brick, you’re a trump. You’re the John L.
Sullivan of newspaperdom!”
The Laffan Bureau, which assimilated the old United Press, became a
news syndicate the service of which was sought by dozens of American
papers whose editors admired the _Sun’s_ manner of handling news. The
Laffan Bureau lasted until 1916, when the _Sun_, through its purchase
by Frank A. Munsey, absorbed Mr. Munsey’s New York _Press_, which had
the Associated Press service.
Among Mr. Lord’s fortunate traits as managing editor were his ability
to choose good correspondents all over the world and his entire
confidence in them after they were selected. No matter what other
correspondents wrote, the _Sun_ stood by its own men. They were on the
spot; they should know the truth as well as any one else could.
Months before Aguinaldo’s insurrection the _Sun_ man at Manila, P. G.
McDonnell, kept insisting that the Filipino chieftain would revolt. The
other New York newspapers laughed at the _Sun_ for seeing ghosts, but
McDonnell was right.
Newspaper readers will remember that in 1904 the fall of Port Arthur
was announced three or four times in about as many months, and each
time the _Sun_ appeared to be beaten on the news until the next day,
when it was discovered that the Russians were still holding out. All
the _Sun_ did about the matter was to notify its Tokyo correspondent,
John T. Swift, that when Port Arthur really fell it would expect to
hear from him by cable at “double urgent” rates. At midnight of
January 1, 1905, four months after these instructions were given to
Swift, the _Sun_ got a “double urgent” message:
Port Arthur fallen--SWIFT.
No other paper in New York had the news. The _Sun_ rubbed it in
editorially on January 3:
Deeply conscious as we are of the deplorable lack of modern
enterprise which has hitherto deprived the _Sun_ of the
distinction of repeatedly announcing the fall of Port Arthur,
we have to content ourselves with the reflection that when
finally the _Sun_ did print the fall of Port Arthur, it was so.
Soon after the election of Woodrow Wilson, in 1912, the head of the
_Sun_ bureau in Washington, the late Elting A. Fowler, made the
prediction that William Jennings Bryan would be named as Secretary of
State. Nearly every other metropolitan newspaper either ignored the
story, or ridiculed it as absurd and impossible. The _Sun_ never made
inquiry of Fowler as to the source of his information. He had been
a _Sun_ man for ten years, and that was enough. Fowler repeated and
reiterated that Bryan would be the head of the new Cabinet, and sure
enough, he was.
The _Sun_ correspondent in a city five hundred miles from New York was
covering a great murder mystery. Every other New York newspaper of
importance had sent from two to five men to handle the story; the _Sun_
sent none. The correspondent saw that the New York men were getting
sheaves of telegrams from their newspapers, directing them in detail
how to tell the story, and to what length; so he sent a message to the
_Sun_ advising it of the large numbers of New York reporters engaged on
the mystery, and of the amount of matter they were preparing to send.
Had the _Sun_ any instructions for him? Yes, it had. The reply came
swiftly:
Use your own judgment--CHESTER S. LORD.
That was the _Sun_ way, and the _Sun_ printed the correspondent’s
stories, whether they were one column long, or six. The _Sun_ could not
see how an editor in New York could know more about a distant murder
than a correspondent on the spot.
It was the _Sun’s_ way, once a man was taken on, to keep him as long
as it could. One day Mr. Lord sent for Samuel Hopkins Adams, then a
reporter, and asked him whether he would like to go away fishing.
“A Sunday story?” inquired Adams.
“No, not exactly,” said Mr. Lord. “A vacation, rather. You’ve been
fired. Go away, but come back, say, next Tuesday, and go to work, and
it’ll be all right. Don’t worry!”
Adams learned that a suit for libel had been brought against the paper
by an individual who had been made an unpleasant figure in a police
story which Adams had written.
A few days after Adams returned to his duties Mr. Dana came out of his
room and asked the city editor, Mr. Kellogg, the name of the reporter
who had written an article to which he pointed. Kellogg told Dana that
Adams was the author, and Dana strode across the room and bestowed upon
the reporter one of his brief and much prized commentaries of approval.
Then he looked at Adams more closely, and, with raised eyebrows, walked
to the managing editor’s desk.
“Who is that young man?” he asked Mr. Lord, indicating Adams with a
movement of the head.
Mr. Lord murmured something.
“Didn’t I order him discharged a few days ago?” said Mr. Dana.
Another but more prolonged murmur from Mr. Lord. Adams got up from his
desk to efface himself, but as he left the room he caught the voice of
Mr. Dana, a trifle higher and a bit plaintive:
“Why is it, Mr. Lord, that I never succeed in discharging any of your
bright young men?”
Adams did not wait for the answer.
This story, while typical of Lord, is not typical of Dana. For
every word of censure he had a hundred words of praise. He read the
paper--every line of it--for virtues to be commended rather than for
faults to be condemned.
“Who wrote the two sticks about the lame girl? A good touch; that’s the
_Sun_ idea!”
If a new man had written something he liked--even a ten-line
paragraph--the editor of the _Sun_ would cross the room to shake the
man’s hand and say:
“Good work!”
The spirit he radiated was contagious. The men, encouraged by Dana,
spread faith to one another. The “_Sun_” spirit--the envious of other
newspapers were wont to refer to those who had it as “the _Sun’s_
Mutual Admiration Society”--did and does much to make the _Sun_. The
men lived the socialism of art. If a new reporter received a difficult
assignment, ten older men were ready to tell him, in a kindly and not
at all didactic way, how to find the short cut.
Perhaps some part of the democracy of the _Sun_ office has come from
the fact that men have rarely been taken in at the top. It was Dana’s
plan to catch young men with unformed ideas of journalism and make
_Sun_ men of them. They went on the paper as cubs at fifteen dollars a
week--or even as office-boys--and worked their way to be “space men,”
if they had it in their noddles.
All space men were free and equal in the Jeffersonian sense. Their pay
was eight dollars a column. That one man made one hundred and fifty
dollars in a week when his neighbour made only fifty was usually the
result, not of the system, but of the difference between the men. Some
were harder workers than others, or better fitted by experience for
more important stories; and some were born money-makers. If a diligent
reporter, through no fault of his own, was making small “bills,”
the city editor would see to it that something profitable fell to
him--perhaps a long and easily written Sunday article.
Through changed conditions in newspaper make-up and policies, the space
system in the payment of reporters is now practically extinct. It had
good points and bad ones. Undoubtedly it developed a large number of
men to whom a salary would not have been attractive. Some, to whose
style and activities the space system lent itself, remained in the
profession longer than they would otherwise have stayed. On the other
hand, it was not always fair to reporters with whom a condensed style
was natural. The dynamics of a two-inch article, the very value of
which lies in its brevity, cannot be measured with a space-rule.
The _Sun’s_ ideas of fairness do not end with itself and its men.
It has always had a proper consideration for the feelings of the
innocent bystander. It never harms the weak, or stoops to get news in
a dishonourable or unbecoming way. It would be hard to devise a set of
rules of newspaper ethics, but a few examples of things that the _Sun_
doesn’t do may illuminate.
[Illustration:
SELAH MERRILL CLARKE
]
Soon after one of the _Sun’s_ most brilliant reporters had come on the
paper, he was sent to report the wedding of a noted sporting man and
a famous stage beauty, the marriage ceremony being performed by a
picturesque Tammany alderman. The reporter returned to the office with
a lot of amusing detail, which he recited in brief to the night city
editor.
“Just the facts of the marriage, please,” said Mr. Clarke. “The two
most important events in the life of a woman are her marriage and her
death. Neither should be treated flippantly.”
Another reporter wrote an amusing story about a fat policeman posted
at the Battery, who chased a tramp through a pool of rain-water. The
policeman fell into the water, and the tramp got away. No report of the
occurrence was made at police headquarters, but a _Sun_ man saw the
incident and wrote it.
“It’s an amusing story,” said Clarke to the reporter, “but they read
the papers at police headquarters, and this policeman may be put on
trial for not reporting the escape of the hobo. Suppose we drop this
classic on the floor?”
A telegraph messenger-boy once wrote a letter to the police
commissioner, telling him how to break up the cadets (panders) of the
East Side. A _Sun_ man found the lad and got an interesting interview
with him.
“Leave my name out, won’t you?” the messenger said to the reporter. “If
you print it, I may lose my job.”
He was told that his name was known in the _Sun_ office, but that the
reporter would present his appeal.
“Did you find the messenger?” Clarke asked the reporter on his arrival.
The _Sun_ man replied that he had found him, and that the interview was
interesting and exclusive. Before he had an opportunity to repeat the
boy’s plea for anonymity, Clarke said:
“Is it going to hurt the boy if we print his name? If it is, leave it
out, and refer to him by a fictitious number.”
Two reporters, one from the _Sun_ and one from another big daily, went
one night to interview a famous man on an important subject. The _Sun_
man returned and wrote a brief story containing none of the big news
which it had been hoped he might get. The other newspaper came out with
some startling revelations, gleaned from the same interview. Mr. Lord
showed the rival paper’s article to the _Sun_ reporter, with a mild
inquiry as to the reason for the _Sun’s_ failure to get the news.
“We both gave our word,” said the reporter, “that we would keep back
that piece of news for three days, even from our offices.”
“Son,” said Mr. Lord, “you are a great man!”
That was the Lord phrase of acquittal.
One of the big occurrences in the investigation of the life-insurance
companies in 1905 was a report which was read to the investigating
committee in executive session. Every newspaper yearned for the
contents of the document. After the committee adjourned, a member of it
whispered to a _Sun_ reporter:
“There is a bundle of those reports just inside the door of the
committee room. I should think that five dollars given to a scrub-woman
would probably get a copy for you.”
The _Sun_ man, knowing the value of the report, and not content to act
on his own estimate of _Sun_ ethics, telephoned the temptation to the
city editor, Mr. Mallon.
“A _Sun_ man who would do that would lose his job,” was the instant
decision.
A couple of days after Stephen Tyng Mather, recently First Assistant
Secretary of the Interior, went on the _Sun_ as a reporter, the city
editor, Mr. Bogart, called him to his desk.
“Mr. Mather,” said Bogart, “an admirer of the _Sun_ has sent me a
turkey. Of course, I cannot accept it. Please take it to his house in
Harlem and explain why; but don’t hurt his feelings.”
Mather had just come from college, where he had never learned that the
ethics of journalism might require a reporter to become a deliverer of
poultry, but he took the turkey. It does not detract from the moral of
the story to say that Mather and another young reporter, neither quite
understanding the _Sun’s_ stern code, took the bird to the Fellowcraft
Club and had it roasted--a fact of which Mr. Bogart may have been
unaware until now.
The best news-handler that journalism has seen, Selah Merrill Clarke,
was night city editor of the _Sun_ for thirty-one years. He came to the
paper in 1881 from the New York _World_, where he had been employed
as a reporter, and later as a desk man. In the early seventies he
wrote for the _World_ a story of a suicide, and one of the newspapers
of that day said of it that neither Dickens nor Wilkie Collins, with
all the time they could ask, could have surpassed it. His story of
the milkman’s ride down the valley of the Mill River, warning the
inhabitants that the dam had broken at the Ashfield reservoir, near
Northampton, Massachusetts (May 16, 1874), was another classic that
attracted the attention of editors, including Dana.
Clarke never thought well of himself as a reporter, and often said that
in that capacity he was a failure. As a judge of news values, or news
presentation, or as a giver of the fine literary touch which lent to
the _Sun’s_ articles that indescribable tone not found in other papers,
Clarke stood almost alone.
The city editor of a New York newspaper sows seeds; the night city
editor re-seeds barren spots, waters wilting items, and cuts and
bags the harvest. The city editor sends men out all day for news; the
night city editor judges what they bring in, and decides what space it
shall have. In the handling of a big story, on which five or fifteen
reporters may be engaged, the night city editor has to put together as
many different writings in such a way that the reader may go smoothly
from beginning to end. Chance may decree that the poorest writer has
brought in the biggest news, and the man on the desk must supply
quality as well as judgment.
At such work Clarke was a master. It has been said of him that by the
eliding stroke of his pencil and the insertion of perhaps a single word
he could change the commonplace to literature. No reporter ever worked
on the _Sun_ but wished, at one time or another, to thank Clarke for
saving him from himself. Clarke had the faculty of seeing instantly the
opportunity for improvement that the reporter might have seen an hour
or a day later.
Clarke got about New York very little, but he knew the city from Arthur
Kill to Pelham Bay; knew it just as a general at headquarters knows
the terrain on which his troops are fighting, but which he himself has
never seen. He had the map of New York in his brain. When an alarm
of fire came in from an obscure corner, he knew what lumber-yards or
oil-refineries were near the blaze, and whether that was a point where
the water pressure was likely to fail.
Clarke’s memory was uncanny; it seemed to have photographed every issue
of the _Sun_ for years. It was a saying that while Clarke stayed the
_Sun_ needed neither an index nor a “morgue”--that biographical cabinet
in which newspapers keep records of men and affairs.
Twenty-five years after the Beecher-Tilton trial a three-line
death-notice came to Clarke’s desk. He read the dead man’s name and
summoned a reporter.
“This man was a juror in the Beecher case,” said Clarke. “Look in the
file of February 6 or 7, 1875, and I think you’ll find that this man
stood up and made an interruption. Write a little piece about it.”
A _Sun_ man who reported the funeral of Russell Sage at Lawrence, Long
Island, in July, 1906, returned to the office and told Mr. Clarke that
an acquaintance of the Sage family had told him, on the train coming
back, the contents of the old man’s will--a document for which the
reading public eagerly waited. The reporter laid his informant’s card
before the night city editor. Clarke studied the name on it for a
minute, and then said:
“We won’t print the story. Dig out the file for June, 1899, and
somewhere on the front page--I think it will be in the third or fourth
column--on the 1st or 2nd of June you’ll find a story telling that this
man was sent to Sing Sing for forgery.”
Clarke’s memory was right. Although it is anti-climactic to relate
it, the ex-convict’s description of what the will contained was also
correct.
Will Irwin, while reporting a small war between two Chinese societies,
wrote an article one night about the arrest of two Hip Sing tong
men who were wearing chain armour under their blouses. Clarke, much
interested, asked Irwin all about the armour.
“It reminds me of ‘King Solomon’s Mines,’” remarked Irwin, “and the
chain armour that the heroes had made in Sheffield to wear in Africa.”
“Yes,” replied Clarke, who had not read the Haggard novel in fifteen
years; “but it wasn’t Sheffield--it was Birmingham.”
Clarke had a sense of responsibility that showed itself in nervousness.
On a night when news was breaking, that nervousness was exhibited in
his trips, every ten minutes, to the ice-water tank; in the constant
lighting and relighting of his pipe; in the quick turn of his head at
the approach of a reporter. Yet his nervousness was not contagious. So
long as Clarke was nervous, the men under him felt that they need not
be. He did all the worrying, and, unlike most worriers, got results
from it.
Let him know that something had happened in the city, and his drag-net
system was started. No matter how remote the happening, how apparently
hopeless the clue, he let neither man nor telephone rest until every
possible corner had been searched for the guilty news item. Once the
situation was in hand he would return to the adornment of a head-line
or the working out of some abstruse problem in mathematics--perhaps the
angles of a sun-dial, for Clarke’s hobby was gnomonics, and he knew
dials from Ptolemy’s time down. As a rest from mathematics he might
write a limerick in Greek, and then carefully tear it up.
Almost every newspaper in New York tried, at one time or another, to
take Clarke from the _Sun_. One night an emissary from one of the
apostles of the then new journalism entered the _Sun_ office and
sent his card to Mr. Clarke. When the night city editor appeared, he
whispered:
“Mr. ---- says that if you’ll ascertain the highest salary the _Sun_
will pay you to stay, he’ll double it.”
Clarke uttered the strange sound that was his indulgence when
disagreeably disturbed--a cross between a growl and a grunt--and turned
back toward his desk.
“He’ll triple it!” cried the tempter.
Although Clarke heard the words, he kept on to his desk, and not only
never mentioned the matter, but probably never thought of it again.
On another occasion he made a notable trip to the gate at the entrance
to the big room. A drunken visitor was making the place ring with
yells, and the office-boys could not stop him. Clarke bore the noise
for ten minutes, and then, remarking, “This is unendurable!” went and
threw the man down the stairs.
Clarke was the hero of a dozen newspaper stories, which he scorned to
read.
“Do you know, Mr. Clarke,” said a reporter who did not know how shy
“the boss” was, “that Blank has put you into a short story in _Space’s
Magazine_?”
“Who is Blank?” said Clarke shortly.
“Why,” said his informant, “he worked here for several weeks.”
“Oh, Lord!” said Clarke. “I can’t be expected, can I, to remember all
the geniuses that come and go?”
There was a mild ferocity about him that caused more than one cub to
think that the night boss was unfriendly, but this attitude had a good
effect. No young reporter ever made the same mistake twice.
“If you mean ‘child,’ write it so,” he would say. “Don’t write it
‘tot.’ And please have more variety in your motor cars. I have seen
several that were not large and red and high-powered.”
The head-lines of the _Sun_ have been well written since the first days
of Dana, and Clarke, for thirty years, was the best of the head-line
writers. He wrote rhyming heads for Sam Wood’s prose verse, satirical
heads for satires, humorous heads for the funny men’s articles. A
_Sun_ reader could gauge almost exactly the worth of an article by the
quality of the heading. A _Sun_ reporter could tell just what Clarke
thought of his story by the cleverness of the lines that the night
city editor wrote above it.
Clarke would put the obvious heading on a long, matter-of-fact yarn
in two minutes, but he might spend half an hour--if he had it to
spare--polishing a head for a short and sparkling piece of work. Two
architects who did city work pleaded poverty, but admitted having
turned over property to their wives. Clarke headed the story:
“We’re Broke,” Says Horgan.--“Sure,” Says Slattery, “But Our
Wives Are Doing Fine.”
A brief item about the arrest of some boys for stealing five copies of
“The Simple Life” he headed “Tempted Beyond Their Strength.” Over a
paragraph telling of the killing of a Park Row newsboy by a truck he
wrote: “A Sparrow Falls.”
Clarke had a besetting fear that Russell Sage would die suddenly late
at night, and that the _Sun_ would not learn of it in time. Again and
again false “hunches” caused him to send men to the Sage home on Fifth
Avenue to discover the state of the old millionaire’s health. When Mr.
Sage became seriously ill, reporters were sent in relays to watch the
house. One man who had such an assignment turned up at the _Sun_ office
at one o’clock in the morning.
“I left Mr. Sage’s house,” he explained to Clarke, “because Dr. Blank
just came out and I had a little talk with him. He asked me if S. M.
Clarke was still night city editor of the _Sun_; and when I told him
that you were, he said:
“‘Tell Selah for me that I will call him personally on the ’phone if
there is the least change in Mr. Sage’s condition. Selah and I are old
friends; we used to be room-mates in college.’”
“Blank always was a darn liar!” said Mr. Clarke. “Go back to the house
and sit on the door-step.”
On February 28, 1917, five years after Clarke retired, the Sun Alumni
Association gave a dinner in his honour, with Mr. Lord presiding. Men
came five hundred miles for the event, and the speeches were entirely
about Clarke and his work. Mr. Clarke himself, who was only five miles
away, sent a kindly letter to say that he was pleased, but that he
could not imagine anything more absurd than a man’s attending a dinner
given in his own honour.
Clarke was a factor in that nebulous institution so frequently referred
to as the “_Sun_ school of journalism,” a college in which the teaching
was by example rather than precept. Clarke occasionally told the young
reporters how not to do it, but his real lessons were given in the
columns of the _Sun_. There, in cold type, the man could see that
Clarke had thrown his beautiful introduction on the floor, had lifted a
word or a phrase from the middle of the article and put it to the fore,
or had, by one of the touches which marked the great copy-reader’s
genius, breathed life into the narrative. Clarke had no rules for
improving a story, but he had a faculty, not uncommon among the finest
copy-readers, of seeing an event more clearly than it had appeared to
the reporter who described it, even when the desk man’s information
came entirely from the reporter’s screed.
If a reporter found his story in the paper almost untouched by Clarke’s
pencil and adorned with a typical Clarkean head, it was a signal to
him that he had done well. He was sure not to get verbal approbation
from Clarke. There is a legend that Clarke once cried “Fine!” after
skimming over a sheet of well-written copy, but it is only a legend.
With a reporter who never wrote introductions and never padded his
articles Clarke would sometimes crack a joke. _Sun_ traditions have it
that once, after a reporter had turned New York inside out to dig out
a particularly difficult piece of news, the night city editor remarked
to his assistant that that reporter “was a handy man to have around the
office.” Although Clarke has been referred to by an excellent judge,
Will Irwin, as “the greatest living schoolmaster of newspapermen,” his
methods could never be adapted to the academies of journalism.
As a schoolmaster of a more positive type, _Sun_ men remember the late
Francis T. Patton, who edited suburban news for twenty years. Staff
men on assignments in New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island, and other
places just beyond the city turned in their copy to “Boss” Patton,
a cultured man who spent his spare hours reading old Latin works in
the original or working out chess problems. It was to him that the
bewildered cub turned in his hour of torment, and Patton would tell him
how long his story ought to run, how he might begin it, how end it.
“I know it isn’t right to fake, Mr. Patton,” said a new reporter; “but
is exaggeration never permissible?”
“It is,” said Patton. “You may use exaggeration whenever it is needed
to convey to the reader an adequate but not exaggerated picture of the
event you are describing. For instance, if you are reporting a storm at
Seabright, and the waves are eight and one-half feet high by the tape
which you surely carry in your hip-pocket for such emergencies, it will
hardly do to inform the reader that the waves are eight and one-half
feet high; his visualization of the scene would not be perfect. Yet, if
you write that the waves ran mountain-high, I shall change your copy
if it comes to me. The expression would be too stale. Hyperbole is one
of the gifts.”
[Illustration:
SAMUEL A. WOOD
]
[Illustration:
OSCAR KING DAVIS
]
[Illustration:
THOMAS M. DIEUAIDE
]
[Illustration:
SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
]
Patton’s droll humour was one of the delights of the _Sun_ office. One
night Charles M. Fairbanks was writing, for the _Herald_, a story about
“The Men Who Make the _Sun_ Shine.” He asked Patton for something about
himself.
“You may say,” replied the boss of the suburban desk, “that my
characteristics are brilliancy, trustworthiness, accuracy, and poetic
fervour.”
“Boss,” said a young reporter to Mr. Patton, “I often think you and I
could run this paper better than the men who are running it.”
“How strange!” said Mr. Patton, looking surprised. “I know that I
could, but it has never occurred to me that you would not do worse than
they do.”
The sports department has been one of the _Sun’s_ strongholds since
Mr. Dana’s first years. Dana would let Amos Cummings give half a page
to a race at Saratoga or Monmouth Park, and would encourage Amos to
neglect his executive duties so that the paper might have a good report
of a boxing-match. When William I lay dead in Berlin, the _Sun’s_
principal European correspondent, Arthur Brisbane, was concerned,
not with the future of the continent, but with the aftermath of the
Sullivan-Mitchell fight at Chantilly.
The stories of the international yacht-races have always been told best
in the _Sun_, whether the reporter was John R. Spears or William J.
Henderson. Mr. Henderson, who is the ablest musical critic in America,
is probably the best yachting reporter, too. While the world of music
knows him through his distinguished critiques, particularly of opera,
the _Sun_ knows him as a great reporter--one who would rank high among
the best it has ever had. Another _Sun_ man who wrote yachting well is
Duncan Curry, later of the _American_.
In turf matters the _Sun_ has long been looked upon as an authority.
In the heyday of racing the paper enjoyed the services of Christopher
J. Fitzgerald, since then familiar as a starter on many race-tracks,
and of Joseph Vila, now sporting editor of the _Evening Sun_.
Fitzgerald, although a specialist in sports, was also a first-class
general reporter. He is the hero of a story of the proverbial “_Sun_
luck,” which in this case might better be called _Sun_ persistence and
activity.
In the latter part of December, 1892, the steamship Umbria, the
fastest transatlantic boat of her day, was two weeks overdue at New
York. Every newspaper had tugs out to watch for her first appearance.
On the night of December 28 Fitzgerald was assigned to tug duty. The
first tug he took down the moonlit bay broke her propeller in the ice;
with the second tug he ran twenty miles beyond Sandy Hook. Presently
an inward-bound liner appeared in the dark, and the other newspaper
boats followed her; but this was not the Umbria, but the Britannic. An
hour later a tank steamer came along, and Fitzgerald hailed her on the
chance that she knew something about the missing ship.
“The Umbria,” came back the answer, “is about five miles astern, coming
in slowly.”
The _Sun’s_ tug raced to sea and soon came alongside the overdue
steamer. On board was Frank Marshall White, the _Sun’s_ London
correspondent, and he had, all ready written, a story telling how the
Umbria broke her machinery, and how the chief engineer lay on his back
for five days trying to mend the break. Fitzgerald took White’s story
and raced to Quarantine, where there was a telegraph-station, but, at
that hour, no operator. Fitzgerald, himself an expert telegrapher,
pounded the _Sun’s_ call, “SX,” for ten minutes, but the _Sun_ operator
had gone home.
Fitzgerald returned to the tug and went under full speed to the
Battery, landing at 3.35 A.M. Running to Park Row, he found an
assistant foreman of the _Sun_ composing-room enjoying his lemonade in
Andy Horn’s restaurant. This man rounded up four or five printers, and
they began setting up the story at 4 A.M. The _Sun_ had a complete and
exclusive story, and twenty thousand copies were sold of Fitzgerald’s
extra.
Vila, like Fitzgerald a man of large physique and a former athlete,
wrote the descriptions of a dozen Suburban Handicaps and Futurities,
of a score of great college rowing-matches, of a thousand baseball
and football games. Damon Runyon, the poet and sporting editor, once
remarked that “Vila is the only sporting writer I have ever seen who
knows exactly, at the end of a sporting event, just what he is going to
write, when he is going to write it, and how much he is going to write.”
When John W. Gates and John A. Drake came to the New York race-tracks
and made bets of sensational magnitude, Vila was the only turf reporter
able to give the exact figures of the amounts bet by the Western
plungers. The printing of these in the _Sun_ so aroused the Jockey Club
that a curb was put on big betting.
The present sports staff includes some of the writers, like Nat
Fleischer, “Daniel,” Frederick G. Lieb, and George B. Underwood, who
were on the big sports staff of the New York _Press_ when that paper
was amalgamated with the _Sun_.
Returning to the big, bare room in the old Sun Building, cast the eye
of memory through the thin forest of chandeliers entwined with lianas
of electric wiring, and across the dull desks. Boss Lord has come in
from dinner and is reading telegraphic bulletins from out-of-town
correspondents or glancing at a growing pile of proofs. At the Albany
desk Deacon Stillman is editing a batch of Congress news from Walter
Clarke or Richard V. Oulahan in Washington, or of legislative news from
Joseph L. McEntee in Albany, or is trying to think out an apt head for
a double murder in Herkimer County. At the cable desk Cyrus C. Adams,
long secretary of the American Geographical Society, is looking in
a guide-book to discover whether the name of a street in Naples has
not been distorted by the operators while in transit between the Rome
correspondent and New York. The telegraph editor is telling the night
editor, Van Anda or Smith, that he has “nothing much but yellow fever,”
and the night editor is replying that “three-quarters of a column of
yellow fever will be plenty.”
At the city desk Clarke, who has half finished the heading on a bit
about a green heron seen in Bronx Park, picks up the telephone to
tell an East Side police-station reporter to investigate the report
of an excursion boat gone aground on Hart’s Island, and then turns
away to tell Ralph, or Chamberlin, or Joseph Fox, or Irwin, or Hill,
or O’Malley, that a column and a half lead will do for the police
investigation, or the great public dinner, or whatever his task may
have been. As he finishes, a reporter lays on his desk a long story,
and Clarke, reading the substance of the first page of it in an
instant, hands it over to his assistant to edit.
At the Jersey desk Boss Patton has polished the disquisitions of a
suburban correspondent on the antics of a shark in Barnegat Bay, and is
explaining to a space man, almost with tears, why it was necessary to
cut down his article about the picnic of the Smith family at Peapack.
The sporting editor, John Mandigo, has just bade good night to some
distinguished visitor--say Mr. Fitzsimmons--and is bending over some
copy from Fitzgerald or Vila. Perhaps Henry of Navarre and Domino are
nose-and-nose in the stretch at Gravesend, or Amos Rusie has struck out
seventeen opposing batters, or Kid Lavigne has lambasted Joe Walcott
quite properly at Maspeth.
At a side desk a copy-reader on local news is struggling with a mass
of writing from various youthful reporters. “At seven ten o’clock last
evening, as Policeman McGuffin was patrolling his beat, his attention
was attracted by a cry of fire,” etc. The copy-reader knows that smoke
will presently issue from the upper windows; knows, too, that he
presently will boil the seven pages down to three lines and gently tell
the reporter why he did it.
The chess expert is turning a cabalistic cablegram from St. Petersburg
into a detailed story of the contest between a couple of the masters of
the game. The bowling man is writing a description, which may never see
the light, of a desperate struggle between the Harlem Pin Kings and the
Bensonhurst Alley Scorchers. H. L. Fitzpatrick is writing a golf story
with such magnificent technique that Mandigo will not dare to cut a
line out of it.
A dozen reporters, great and small, are at the desks in the middle
of the room, busy with pencils. In a side room three or four others,
converts to the typewriter, are pounding out copy. In another room
Riggs is dictating to a stenographer the day’s doings in political
life.
Four or five “rewrite men,” the “long wait” and his helpers, the
“short waits,” are slipping in and out of the telephone-booths, taking
and writing news articles from twenty points in the city where the
Mulberry Street reporter, the police-station reporters, the Tenderloin
man--who covers the West Thirtieth Street police-station, the Broadway
hotels, and the theatrical district--and the Harlem man are still busy
gathering news.
From a room wisely distant comes the rattle of the telegraph. Half a
dozen wires are bringing in the continent’s news. Half a dozen boys,
spurred by their chief, Dan O’Leary, carry the typed sheets to the
proper desks.
The dramatic critic comes in and sits down at his desk to write
two-thirds of a column about a first performance. The music critic has
sent down a brief notice of the night’s opera.
Most of the reporters finish their work and go out. One or two remain
to write special articles for the Sunday papers. A sporting reporter is
spinning a semi-fictional yarn of life in Chinatown. A police reporter
is composing little classics of life in Dolan’s Park Row restaurant.
At one o’clock there is a rumbling of the presses in the basement, and
soon copies of the first edition come to the desks of the news-masters.
Lord suggests to the night editor a shift of front-page articles.
Clarke, his pencil flashing, marks in additions to the story of a late
accident. A cub waits patiently for a discarded paper, to see whether
his piece has got in. An older reporter, who wrote the story in the
first column of the first page, does not look at his own work, but
turns to the sporting page to read the racing entries for the next
day--his day off.
At 1.27 A.M. Clarke rises and goes home. At two o’clock Lord closes
his desk. Most of the desk men disappear; the work is done. The night
editor--Van Anda or the imperturbable Smith--remains at his desk, with
the “long wait” reporter to bear him company. At half past three they
also go, and the watchman begins to turn out the lights. Down below,
the presses are tossing forth the product of a night’s work in the big,
bare, old room.
A story of the _Sun_ would be incomplete without a sketch of its little
sister. The _Evening Sun_ was established by Mr. Dana nearly twenty
years after he bought the _Sun_. He saw a place for a one-cent evening
newspaper, for the only journal of that description then published in
New York was the _Daily News_, which was largely a class publication.
The leading evening newspapers were the _Evening Post_, the _Commercial
Advertiser_, and the _Mail and Express_, selling for three cents and
catering to a highbrow or a partisan clientele.
The first _Evening Sun_ was issued on March 17, 1887, at an hour when
the St. Patrick’s Day parade was being reviewed by Mayor Hewitt. With
its four pages of six columns each, its brief, lively presentation
of general news, and its low price, the paper was an immediate
success--though not the success that it is to-day, with its sixteen
pages, its wealth of special articles, and the many features that make
it one of America’s best evening newspapers.
The new paper had no titular editor-in-chief. Mr. Dana was the editor
of the _Sun_ and had the general guidance of the evening paper. Dana’s
associate, the publisher of the _Sun_, William M. Laffan, took a deep
interest in the welfare of the new venture, and the _Evening Sun_ was
often referred to as his “baby.”
The first managing editor of the paper was Amos J. Cummings, with
Allan Kelly as city editor and John McCormick as sporting editor. When
Cummings went to Congress, E. J. Edwards took his place and remained
as managing editor until August, 1889, when Arthur Brisbane returned
from the post of London correspondent of the _Sun_ to manage the
evening paper.
It was Brisbane who induced Richard Harding Davis, then a young
reporter in Philadelphia, to come to New York. As Davis was walking
up from the ferry one morning in October, 1889, on his way to take
up his new duties, he was taken in hand, in City Hall Park, by a
bunco-steerer. Davis listened to the man’s wiles, turned him over to
the police of the City Hall station, and then hurried to the _Evening
Sun_ office to write a story about it for the paper. Davis’s _Van
Bibber_ stories, the first of his fiction to attract wide attention,
were originally printed in the _Evening Sun_, in 1890. As a reporter
under Brisbane, Davis picked up much of the information and experiences
that coloured his fiction.
When Brisbane went to the Pulitzer forces, he was succeeded as managing
editor by W. C. McCloy, who had been city editor, and who remained at
the head of the news department for more than twenty years.
Jacob A. Riis, who had been the police-headquarters reporter of the
_Tribune_ since 1877, went to the _Evening Sun_ in 1890, coincident
with the publication of his first popular work, “How the Other Half
Lives.” Other of his works, including “The Children of the Poor” and
“Out of Mulberry Street,” were written while he was the chief police
reporter of the _Evening Sun_. Riis’s work was valuable, not only to
the paper, but to the city itself. His writings attracted the attention
of Theodore Roosevelt when the future President was head of the police
board of New York (1895–1897), and the men became close friends.
Together they worked to improve conditions in the tenement districts,
and Roosevelt called Riis “New York’s most useful citizen.”
[Illustration:
WILL IRWIN
]
[Illustration:
FRANK WARD O’MALLEY
]
[Illustration:
EDWIN C. HILL
]
Thomas M. Dieuaide, whose work for the _Sun_ in the Spanish War has
been referred to in this volume, and who became city editor of the
_Evening Sun_, was one of Riis’s colleagues. Dieuaide was the author of
the _Evening Sun’s_ broadside against the black vice of the East Side.
Printed in 1901, shortly before the beginning of a mayoralty campaign,
it was a prime factor in the election of a reforming administration.
Richard Harding Davis was not the only fiction-writer to graduate
from the _Evening Sun’s_ school. Irvin S. Cobb got his start in the
North as an _Evening Sun_ reporter. He came to New York from Paducah,
Kentucky, rented a hall room, and sat down and wrote to the managing
editor of the _Evening Sun_ a letter of application so humorous that
he was employed immediately. His report of the peace conference at
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, following the Russo-Japanese War, attracted
wide attention. Stephen French Whitman and Algernon Blackwood, the
novelists, were also _Evening Sun_ men.
The _Evening Sun’s_ list of former dramatic critics includes Acton
Davies and Edward Fales Coward, both playwrights, and Charles
B. Dillingham, the theatrical manager. Arthur Woods, recently
police commissioner of New York, and Robert Adamson, recently fire
commissioner, were old _Evening Sun_ men. Frederick Palmer, Associated
Press correspondent with the British forces in the great war, and
Arthur Ruhl, a special correspondent at the front, are _Evening Sun_
alumni.
In the early years of the _Evening Sun_ the chief editorial writer was
James T. Watkins, whom Mr. Laffan had known in California as a man of
wide scholarship and an economic expert. He was so prolific that it
was a common saying in the office that, with Watkins at his desk, the
_Evening Sun_ needed no other writers of editorial articles. Frank H.
Simonds, who had been an editorial writer for the _Sun_ since 1908,
became chief editorial writer for the _Evening Sun_ in 1913. In 1914
his war articles attracted wide attention. He was afterward editor of
the _Tribune_.
Other writers for the editorial page were Edward H. Mullin, an Irishman
from Dublin, and Frederic J. Gregg. The chief editorial writer is now
James Luby, who is assisted by an _Evening Sun_ veteran, Winfield S.
Moody.
The managing editors since W. C. McCloy have been Charles P. Cooper,
James Luby, and the present incumbent, George M. Smith, for many years
night editor of the _Sun_, and its managing editor in the absence of
Mr. Lord.
After Allan Kelly, the city editors were W. C. McCloy, Charles P.
Cooper, Ervin Hawkins, Nelson Lloyd, and T. M. Dieuaide. Mr. Lloyd, who
left the paper to write fiction, had served as city editor from 1897 to
1904.
The _Evening Sun_ has always had a particular appeal to the woman
reader. Its first woman reporter, Miss Helen Watterson, of Cleveland,
Ohio, was induced to come East in Brisbane’s régime to write a column
called “The Woman About Town,” and ever since 1890 the staff of women
writers on the paper has been increasing. The _Evening Sun_ has a page
or two a day of feature articles written for women, by women, about
women.
The financial and sports departments of the _Evening Sun_ make it a
man’s paper, too. No home-going broker would dare to board the subway
without a copy of the Wall Street edition of the _Evening Sun_. A large
staff of sporting writers, captained by Joseph Vila, provides each day
a page or two of authoritative athletic news.
The _Sun_ and the _Evening Sun_ are run as separate publications, each
with a complete staff, but their presses and purposes are one.