appearance of our headlines than we could with second-rate pictures.”
“I hope,” Howard said earnestly, “that we won’t have to use that
phrase--‘our class of readers’--much longer. Our paper should interest
every man and woman able to read. It seems to me that a newspaper’s
audience should be like that of a good play--the orchestra chairs full
and the last seat in the gallery taken. I suppose you know we’re not an
‘organ’ any longer?”
“No, I didn’t.” Mr. King looked surprised. “Do you mean to say that
we’re free to print the news?”
“Free as freedom. In our news columns we’re neither Democrat nor
Republican nor Mugwump nor Reform. We have no Wall Street or social
connections. We are going to print a newspaper--all the news and nothing
but the news.”
Mr. King drummed on his desk softly with the tips of his outstretched
fingers. “Hum--hum,” he said. “This _is_ news. Well--the circulation’ll
go up. And that’s all I’m interested in.”
Howard went about his plans quietly. He avoided every appearance of
exerting authority, disturbed not a wheel in the great machine. He made
his changes so subtly that those who received the suggestions often came
to him a few days afterward, proposing as their own the very plans he
had hinted. He was thus cautious partly because of his experience of
the vanity of men, their sensitiveness to criticism, their instinctive
opposition to improvement from without; partly from his knowledge of the
hysteria which raged in the offices of the “yellow journals.” He wished
to avoid an epidemic of that hysteria--the mad rush for sensation
and novelty; the strife of opposing ambitions; the plotting and
counter-plotting of rival heads of departments; the chaos out of which
the craziest ideas often emerged triumphant, making the pages of the
paper look like a series of disordered dreams.
He was indifferent to the semblance of authority, to the shadows for
which small men are forever struggling. What he wanted, all he wanted,
was--results.
The first opposition came from the night editor, who for twenty-six
years, his weekly “night off” and his two weeks’ vacation in summer
excepted, had “made up” the paper--that is to say, had defined, with the
advice and consent of the managing editor, the position and order of
the various news items. This night editor, Mr. Vroom, was a strenuous
conservative. He believed that an editor’s duty was done when he had
intelligently arranged his paper so that the news was placed before the
reader in the order of its importance. Big headlines, attempts at effect
with varying sizes of large type and varying column-widths he held to
be crowd-catching devices, vulgar and debasing. He had no sympathy with
Howard’s theory that the first object of a newspaper published in a
democratic republic is to catch the crowd, to interest it, to compel it
to read, and so to lead it to think.
“We’re on the way to scuffling in the gutter with the ‘yellow journals’
for the pennies of the mob,” he was saying sarcastically to Mr. King,
one afternoon just as Howard joined them.
Howard laughed. “Not on the way to the gutter, Mr. Vroom. Actually in
the gutter, actually scuffling.”
“Well, I’m frank to say that I don’t like it. A newspaper ought to
appeal to the intelligent.”
“To intelligence, yes; to the intelligent, no. At least in my opinion,
that is the right theory. We want people to read us because we’re
intelligent enough to know how to please them, not because they’re
intelligent enough to overcome the difficulties we put in their way. But
let’s go out to dinner this evening and talk it over.”
They dined together at Mouquin’s every night for a week. At the end of
that time Vroom, still sarcastic and grumbling, was a convert. And a
great accession Howard found him. He had sound judgment as to the value
of news-items--what demanded first page, the “show-window,” because
it would interest everybody; what was worth a line on an inside page
because it would interest only a few thousands. He was the most skillful
of the _News-Record’s_ many good writers of headlines, a master of that,
for the newspaper, art of arts--condensed and interesting statement,
alluring the glancing reader to read on. Also he had an eye for effects
with type. “You make every page a picture,” Howard said to him. “It is
wonderful how you balance your headlines, emphasising the important
news yet saving the minor items from obscurity. I should like to see the
paper you would make if you had the right sort of illustrations to put
in.”
Vroom was amazed at himself. He who had opposed any “head” which broke
the column rule was now so far degenerated into a “yellow journalist”
that, when Howard spoke of illustrations, he actually longed to test his
skill at distributing them effectively.
* * * * *
Two months of hard work, tedious, because necessarily so indirect,
produced a newspaper which was “on the right lines,” as Howard
understood right lines. And he felt that the time had come to make the
necessary radical changes in the editorial page.
The _News-Record_ had long posed as independent because it supported now
one political party and now the other, or divided its support. But this
superficial independence was in reality subservience to the financial
interests of the two principal owners. They made their newspaper assail
Republican or Democratic corruption and misgovernment in city, state
or nation, according as their personal interests lay. They used the
editorial page and, to even better advantage, the news-columns, in
revenging themselves for too heavy levies of blackmail upon their
corrupt interests or in securing unjust legislation and privileges.
Obedient and cynical Mr. Malcolm had made the editorial page corrupt and
brilliant--never so effective as when assailing a good cause. The
great misfortune of good causes is that they attract so many fatal
friends--the superciliously conscientious; the well-meaning but
feeble-minded and blundering; the most offensive because least deceptive
kinds of hypocrites. Mr. Malcolm, as acute as he was intellectually
unscrupulous, well understood how to weaken or to ruin a just cause
through these supporters. Sometimes he stood afar off, showering the
poisoned arrows of raillery and satire. Again he was the plain-spoken
friend of the cause and warned its honest supporters against these “fool
friends” whom he pretended to regard as its leaders. Again he played the
part of a blind enthusiast and praised folly as wisdom and urged it on
to more damaging activities.
“We abhor humbug here,” he used to say; and perhaps he did in a measure
excuse himself to his conscience with the phrase. But in fact his
editorial page was usually a succession of humbugs, of brilliant
hypocrisies and cheats perpetrated under the guise of exposing humbug.
Just as Howard was ready to reverse Malcolm’s editorial programme, New
York was seized with one of its “periodic spasms of virtue.” The city
government was, as usual, in the hands of the two bosses who owned the
two political machines. One was taking the responsibility and the larger
share of the spoils; the other was maintaining him in power and getting
the smaller but a satisfactory share. The alliance between the police
and criminal vice had become so open and aggressive under this bi-boss
patronage that the people were aroused and indignant. But as they had
no capable leaders and no way of selecting leaders, there arose a
self-constituted leadership of uptown Phariseeism and sentimentality,
planning the “purification” of the city.
Every man of sense knowing human nature and the conditions of city life
knew that this plan was foredoomed to ridiculous failure, and that the
event would be a popular revulsion against “reform.”
“Why not speak the truth about these vice-hunters?” Howard was
discussing the situation with three of his editorial writers--Segur,
Huntington and Montgomery.
“It’s mighty dangerous,” Montgomery objected. “You will be sticking
knives into a sacred Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy.”
“Yes, we’ll have all the good people about our ears,” said Segur.
“We’ll be denounced as a defender of depravity, a foe of purity. They’ll
thunder away at us from every pulpit. The other newspapers will take it
up, especially those that expect to sell millions of papers containing
accounts of the ‘exposure’ of the dives and dens.”
“That’s good. I hope we shall,” said Howard cheerfully. “It will
advertise us tremendously.”
The three were better pleased than they would have admitted to
themselves by the seeming certainty of Howard’s impending undoing.
“No, gentlemen,” Howard said, as they were about to go to their rooms
for the day’s work. “There’s no danger in attacking any hypocrisy. Don’t
attack beliefs that are universal or nearly universal--at least not
openly. But don’t be afraid of a hypocrisy because it is universal.
People know that they are hypocrites in respect of it. They may not have
the courage publicly to applaud you. But they’ll be privately delighted
and will admire your courage. We’ll try to be discreet and we’ll be
careful to be truthful. And we’ll begin by making these gentlemen show
themselves up.”
The next morning the _News-Record_ published a double-leaded editorial.
It described the importance of improving political and social conditions
in New York; it went on to note the distinguished names on the committee
for the destruction of vice; it closed with the announcement that on the
following day the _News-Record_ would publish the views of these eminent
reformers upon conditions and remedies.
The next day he printed the interviews--a collection of curiosities in
utopianism, cant, ignorant fanaticism, provincialism, hypocrisy. These
appeared strictly as news; for the cardinal principle of Howard’s theory
of a newspaper was that it had no right to intrude its own views into
its news-columns. On the editorial page he riddled the interviews. By
adroit quotations, by contrasting one with another, he showed, or rather
made the so-called reformers themselves show, that where they were
sincere they were in the main silly, and where they were plausible
they were in the main insincere; that every man of them had his own pet
scheme for the salvation of wicked New York; and that they could not
possibly accomplish anything more valuable than leading the people on
the familiar, aimless, demoralizing excursion through the slums.
On the following day he frankly laughed at them as a lot of
impracticables who either did not know the patent facts of city life or
refused to admit those facts. And he turned his attention to the real
problem, a respectable administration for the city--a practical end
which could easily be accomplished by practical action. From day to day
he kept this up, publishing a splendid series of articles, humorous,
witty, satirical, eloquent, bold, with a dominant strain of sincerity
and plain common sense. As his associates had predicted, a storm
gathered and burst in fury about the _News-Record_. It was denounced
by “leading citizens,” including many of the clergy. Its “esteemed”
contemporaries published and endorsed and amplified the abuse. And its
circulation went up at the rate of five thousand a day.
When the storm was at its height, when the whole town seemed to be
agreeing with the angry reformers but was quietly laughing at their
folly and hypocrisy, Howard threw his bomb. On a Saturday morning he
gave half of his first page with big but severely impartial headlines to
an analysis of the members of the vice committee--a broadside of facts
often hinted but never before verified and published. First came those
who owned property and sub-let it for vicious purposes, the property
and purpose specified in detail; then those who were directors in
corporations which had got corrupt privileges from the local boss, the
privileges being carefully specified, and also the amounts of which they
had robbed the city. Last came those who were directors in corporations
which had bought from the State-boss injustices and licenses to rob, the
specifications given in damning detail.
His leading editorial was entitled “Why We Don’t Have Decent
Government.” It was powerful in its simplicity, its merciless raillery
and irony; and only at the very end did it contain passion. There, in a
few eloquent sentences he arraigned these professed reformers who were
growing rich through the boss-system, who were trafficking with the
bosses and were now engaged in wrecking the hopes of honesty and
decency. On that day the _News-Record’s_ circulation went up thirty
thousand. The town rang with its “exposure” and the attention of the
whole country was arrested. It was one of the historic “beats” of New
York journalism. The reputation of the _News-Record_ for fearlessness
and truth-telling and news-enterprise was established. At abound it had
become the most conspicuous and one of the most powerful journals in New
York.
XVI.
MR. STOKELY IS TACTLESS.
Howard, riding in the Park one morning late in the spring, came upon
Mrs. Carnarvon. She gave him no chance to evade her, but joined him and
accommodated her horse’s pace to his.
“And are you still on the _News-Record?_” she said. “I hope not.”
“Why?” Howard was smiling, glad to get an outside view of what he had
been doing.
“Because it’s become so sensational. It used to be such a nice paper.
And now--gracious, what headlines! What attacks on the very best people
in the town!”
“Dreadful, isn’t it?” laughed Howard. “We’ve become so depraved that we
are actually telling the truth about somebodies instead of only about
nobodies.”
“I might have known that you would sympathise with that sort of thing.”
Mrs. Carnarvon was teasing, yet reproachful. “You always were an
anarchist.”
“Is it anarchistic to be no respecter of persons and to put big
headlines over big items and little headlines over little items?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. You are encouraging the unruly classes.”
“Dear me! And we thought we were fighting the unruly class. We thought
that it was our friends--or rather, your friends--the franchise grabbers
and legislature-buyers who won’t obey the laws unless the laws happen
to suit their convenience. They’re the only unruly class I know anything
about. I’ve heard of another kind but I’ve never been able to find it.
And I never hear much about it except when a lot of big rascals are
making off weighted down with plunder. They always shout back over
their shoulders: ‘Don’t raise a disturbance or you’ll arouse the unruly
classes.’”
Mrs. Carnarvon was laughing. “You put it well,” she said, “and I’m not
clever enough to answer you. But they all tell me the _News-Record_
has become a dangerous paper, that it’s attacking everybody who has
anything.”
“Anything he has stolen, yes. But that’s all.”
“You can’t get me to sympathise with you. I like well-dressed,
well-mannered people who speak good English.”
“So do I. That’s why I’m doing all in my power to improve the conditions
for making more and more people of the sort one likes to talk to and
dine with.”
“Why, I thought you sympathised with the lower classes.”
“Not a bit of it. Who has been maligning me to you? I abhor the lower
classes--so much so that I wish to see them abolished.”
“Well, you’ll have to blame Marian for misleading me.”
“Miss Trevor? How is she?” Mrs. Carnarvon was looking closely at him,
and he was not sure that he succeeded in showing nothing more than
friendly interest.
“Haven’t you heard from her? She’s in England, visiting in Lancashire.
You know her cousin married Lord Cranmore.”
“I saw in the papers several months ago that she was going abroad. I
haven’t heard a word since.”
Mrs. Carnarvon started to say something, but changed her mind.
“When is she coming home?”
“Not until July. You must come to see us at Newport.”
“Nothing could please me better--if I can get away.”
“I’ll send you an invitation, although you have treated me very badly of
late. But I suppose you are busy.”
“Busy? Isn’t a galley slave always busy?”
“Are you still writing editorials?”
“Yes--and on the fallen _News-Record_. In fact----”
“Well--what?”
Howard laughed. “Don’t faint,” he said. “I’ll leave you at once if you
wish me to, and I’ll never give it away that you once knew me. I’m the
editor--the responsible devil for the depravity.”
“How interesting!” Mrs. Carnarvon was evidently not disturbed. Then the
American adoration of success came out. “I’m so glad you’re getting on.
I always knew you would. Really, you must come to dinner. I’ll invite
some of the people you’ve been attacking. They’ll like to look at you,
and you will be amused by them. And I don’t in the least mind your
giving it to them if they bait you, as I did this morning. Will you
come?”
“If I may leave by ten o’clock. I go down town every night.”
“Why, when do you sleep?”
“Not much, these days. Life’s too interesting to permit of much sleep.
I’ll make up when it slackens a bit.”
As he was turning his horse, she said: “Marian’s address is Claridge’s,
Brooke Street, Mayfair. If she isn’t there, they forward her mail.”
Howard was puzzled. “What made her give me that address?” he thought.
“I know she didn’t like my seeing so much of Marian. And here she is
practically inviting me to write to her.” He could not understand it.
“If I were not a ‘yellow’ editor and if Marian were not engaged to one
of the richest men in New York, I’d say that this lady was encouraging
me.” He smiled. “Not yet--not just yet.” And he cheerfully urged his
horse into a canter.
Mrs. Carnarvon’s opinion of the _News-Record_ and its recent
performances fairly represented that of the fashionable and the very
rich. They read it, as they never did before, because it interested
them. They could not deny that what it said was true; that is, they
could not deny it to their own minds, although they did vigorously deny
it publicly. Those who were attacked directly or indirectly, or expected
to be attacked, denounced the paper as an “outrage,” a “disgrace to the
city,” a “specimen of the journalism of the gutter.” Many who were not
in sympathy with the men or the methods assailed thought that its
course was “inexpedient,” “tended to increase discontent among the lower
classes,” “weakened the influence of the better classes.” Only a few
of the “triumphant classes” saw the real value and benefit of the
_News-Record’s_ frank attacks upon greed and hypocrisy, saw that these
attacks were not dangerous or demagogical because they were just and
were combined with a careful avoidance of encouragement to the lazy, the
envious, the incompetent and the ignorant.
Fortunately for Howard’s peace, that eminent New York “multi,” Samuel
Jocelyn, for whom Coulter had the highest respect, was of this last
class. When Howard began, Coulter was at Aiken where Jocelyn had a
cottage. He had never been able to make headway with Jocelyn, and Mrs.
Jocelyn deigned to give him and Mrs. Coulter only the coldest of cold
nods. Just as Coulter had become so agitated by Howard’s radical course
that he was preparing to go to New York to remonstrate with him, Jocelyn
called.
“I came to thank you for what you are doing with your paper,” he said
cordially. “It seems to me that all intelligent men who are not blind to
their own ultimate interests ought to stand by you. I can’t tell you
how much I admire your frankness and honesty. And you draw the line just
right. You attack plunder, you defend property. Will your wife and you
dine with us this evening?”
Coulter postponed his trip to New York.
On the last day of the first three months the circulation of the
_News-Record_ was 147,253--an increase of 42,150 over what it was on the
day Howard took charge; its advertising had increased twelve per cent;
its net profits for the quarter were seventy-five thousand dollars as
against fifty-seven thousand for the preceding quarter.
“Very good indeed,” was Stokely’s comment.
“Another quarter like this,” said Howard, “and I’m going to ask you to
let me increase expenses a thousand dollars a week to illustrate the
paper.”
“We’ll talk that over with Coulter. Personally I like this
‘yellow-journalism’--when it’s done intelligently. I always told Coulter
we’d have to come to it. It’s only common sense to make a paper easy
reading. Then, too, we can have a great deal more influence--in fact,
we have already. I’m getting what I want up at Albany this winter much
cheaper.”
Howard winced. “He made me feel like a blackmailer,” he said to himself
when Stokely had gone. “And I suppose these fellows do look on me as a
new Malcolm with up-to-date tricks. Well, they will see, they will see.”
He tried to go on with his work, but Stokely’s cynical words
persistently interrupted him. Why had he not squarely challenged Stokely
then and there? Why had he only winced where a year ago he would have
demanded an explanation?
He hated to confess it to himself, he made every effort to smother it,
but the thought still stared him in the face--“I am not so strong in my
ideals of personal character as I was a year ago.”
The fact that his present course was profitable gave him, he felt, more
pleasure than the fact that it was right. If the alternative of wealth
and power with self-abasement or poverty, obscurity with self-respect
were put to him now, what would he decide? Would he give up his
prospects, his hopes of Marian and of an easy career? He was afraid to
answer. He contented himself with one of his habitual evasions--“I will
settle that when the time comes. No, Stokely’s remark did not make a
crisis. If the crisis ever does come, surely I will act like a man. I’ll
be securer then, more necessary to this pair of plunderers, able to make
better terms for myself. In practical life, it is necessary to sacrifice
something in order to succeed.”
But Stokely’s words and his own silence and the real reasons for his
changing ideals and for his cowardice continued to annoy him.
Every day he came down town planning for a better newspaper the next
morning than they had ever made before. And his vigour, his enthusiasm
permeated the entire office. He went from one news department to
another, suggesting, asking for suggestions, praising, criticising
judiciously and with the greatest consideration for vanity. He talked
with the reporters, urging them on by showing keen interest in them
and their work, and intimate knowledge of what they were doing. And he
dictated every day telegrams to correspondents, thanking them for any
conspicuously good stories they had telegraphed in, adding something to
the compensation of those who were paid by space and made little.
If his work had not been his amusement the long hours, the constant
application, would have broken him down. But he had no interests outside
the office and he got his mental recreation by shifting his mind from
one department to another.
In June his salary was increased to twenty-five thousand a year and
his last lingering feeling of financial insecurity disappeared. For
the first time in his life he felt strong enough to undertake a serious
responsibility, to give hostages to fortune without fear of being unable
to keep faith. He learned from Mrs. Carnarvon that Marian was
returning on the _Oceanic_ on the ninth of July, and he accepted a
Saturday-to-Monday invitation to Newport for the twelfth of July. It was
from Segur that he got the news that Danvers was in Japan and was not
returning until the autumn.
On the ninth of July, from the window of his office, he saw the
_Oceanic_ steam up the bay and up the river to her pier. He sent down a
request that the ship-news reporter be sent up as soon as he returned.
“Is it a good story?” he asked when the reporter, Blackwell, entered.
“Was there anybody on board?”
“A lot of swell people,” the young man answered; “all the women got up
in the latest Paris gowns.”
“Did you notice whether Mrs. Provost came?”
“Came? Well, rather, with two French maids chattering and chasing after
her. And there was a tall girl with her, a stunner, a girl she called
‘Marian, my dear.’”
Howard stopped him with “Thank you. Don’t write anything about them.”
“It was the best thing I saw--the funniest.”
“Well--don’t use the names.”