If any young man learning values wants to know the quickest way to
study the seamy side of life, to understand the darkest aspects of
human nature, and incidentally, to risk the loss of every illusion
he ever had, let him become a reporter on an up-to-date New York
newspaper. Within six months he will be apt to believe that every man
has his price; he will become acquainted with vice, crime, horror,
terror, and every kind of human degradation; theft, murder, arson will
seem commonplaces, forgery a very ordinary affair; men and women,
it may even seem to him, “go straight,” not because of any inherent
principle of goodness in them, but because that degree of temptation
which constitutes their particular “price” has not yet offered itself.
Passion of every type, abnormal, often incredible, will be his daily
study; if he reflects a little he will probably reach the conclusion
that either jealousy in some form, or greed for money, lie at the
root of every crime that is ever committed. The overwhelming power of
these two passions will startle him, at any rate, and his constant
association with only one aspect of life, and that the worst and
lowest, will probably produce the conviction that, given only the
opportunity, everybody is bad. His conception of women may suffer in
particular. The experience, contrariwise, may widen his tolerance and
deepen his charity; also, it may leave him as it left me, with an
ineradicable contempt for those who, born in ease, protected from the
temptations due to poverty and misery, so carelessly condemn the weak,
the criminal and the outcast.
With bigger experience may come, in time, a better view; equally, it
may never come. Proportion is not so easily recovered, for the mind,
at an impressionable age, has been deeply marked. The good, the
beautiful, the lovely, in a New York paper, is very rarely “news”; it
is considered as fake, bunkum, humbug, a pose; it is looked at askance,
regarded with suspicion, as assumed by someone for the purpose of a
“deal”; it is rarely worth its space, at any rate. A reporter finds
himself in a cynical school; he is lucky if he escape in the end with a
single rag of illusion to his back. If he has believed, up to the age
of twenty-one, as I did, that the large majority of people are decent,
kindly, honest folk, he will probably lose even that last single rag.
On the _Evening Sun_, certainly, it was not the good, the beautiful,
the clean, that constituted the most interesting news and got scare
headlines and extra editions. I give, of course, merely the impression
made upon my own mind and type, coloured as these were, some thirty
years ago, by a characteristically ignorant and innocent upbringing....
The important newspapers, in those days, were all “down town,” grouped
about Park Row, and the shabby, tumble-down building of the _Sun_
was not imposing. The World and Times towered above it; the _Morning
Advertiser_, the _Evening Telegram_, even the _Recorder_ were better
housed; the _Journal_ had not yet brought W. R. Hearst’s methods from
San Francisco. For all its humble offices, the _Sun_ was, perhaps, the
greatest power in the city. It was openly Tammany; it had a grand,
courageous editor, Charles A. Dana. “Charles A.” was an imposing
figure, a man of immense ability, a “crank” perhaps in certain ways,
but a respected chief of outstanding character and fearless policy....
My own chief, however, was W. C. McCloy, and the offices where he
reigned as managing editor were housed on the top floor of the rickety
building, with the machinery making such a din and roar and clatter
that we had to shout to make ourselves heard at all. Metal sheets
that clanged and pinged as we walked on them covered the floors. It
was amid this pandemonium I had my first interview with him. An iron
spiral staircase led from the quiet workrooms of the _Morning Sun_, on
the first floor, to the dark, low-ceilinged space, where the whirring
printing presses were not even partitioned off from the tables of
editorial departments or reporters. It was like a factory going at full
speed. Hours were 8.30 A.M. to 6.30 P.M., or later if an extra--a 6th
or 7th--edition was called for. I arrived at 8.15.
In a dark corner of this machinery shop I introduced myself with
trepidation to McCloy, mentioning Mr. Laffan’s name, and saw the blank
look come and go, as he stared at me with “Blackwood, Blackwood?...
Oh, yes, I remember! You’re fifteen dollars a week. A Britisher from
Canada.... Well, you’ll have to look lively here!” He seemed so
intensely busy and preoccupied, his mind so charged with a sort of
electric activity, that I wondered he had time to open and shut his
mouth. A small, thin man, with the slightest of frail bodies, nervous,
delicately shaped hands, gimlet eyes that pierced, a big head with
protruding forehead, a high-pitched, twanging voice that penetrated
easily above the roar of the machinery, and a general air of such
lightning speed and such popping, spitting energy that I felt he might
any moment flash into flame or burst with a cracking report into a
thousand pieces--this was the man on whom my living depended for many
months to come. The phrase “New York hustler,” darted across my mind;
it stood in the flesh before me; he lived on wires. Buried among this
mechanic perfection, however, I caught, odd to relate, an incongruous
touch--of kindness, even of tenderness. There were gentle lines in that
electric face. He had a smile I liked.
“What are you out here for? Where have you come from? What have
you been doing? What d’you know?” he asked with the rapidity of a
machine-gun. The shorthand rate must have been 400 words per minute.
I never talked so quickly in my life as in my brief reply. I watched
the smile come and go. While he listened, he was shouting instructions
to reporters then streaming in, to office boys, to printers, to
sub-editors; but his eyes never left my face, and when I had finished
my lightning sketch, the machine-gun crackled with its deadliest aim
again: “Only _one_ thing counts here; get the news and get it _quick_;
method of no consequence. Get the news and get it _first_!” He darted
off, for the first edition went to press at 10.30. As he went, however,
he turned his head a moment. “Write a story,” he backfired at me.
“Write your experiences--From Methodism to Running a Saloon,”--and he
vanished amid the whirling machinery in the back of the great room.
I have the pleasantest recollections of W. C. McCloy; he was just,
fair, sympathetic, too, when time permitted; he showed me many
little kindnesses; he was Presbyterian, his parents Scotch; he was
also--sober. I proved a poor reporter, and my salary remained at
fifteen dollars all the time I was with the paper, yet once he kept
a place open for me for many weeks; he even took me back when the
consideration was hardly deserved.
That first day, however, I spent on tenterhooks, fully expecting to be
“fired” at its end. I found a corner at the big reporters’ table, and,
having seized some “copy” paper from the general pile, I sat down to
write “From Methodism to Running a Saloon,” without the faintest idea
of how to do it. A dozen reporters sat scribbling near me, but no one
paid me the smallest attention. They came and went; at another table
Cooper, the City Editor (anglice news-editor) issued the assignments;
the editorial writers arrived and sat at their little desks apart; the
roar and pandemonium were indescribable; the first edition was going
to press, with McCloy in a dozen places at once, but chiefly watching
the make-up over the shoulders of the type-setters in the back of the
room.... I wrote on and on; I believed it was rather good; no one came
to stop me, no one looked at my “copy” or told me what length was
wanted; once or twice, McCloy, flashing by, caught my eye, but with
a glance that suggested he didn’t know who I was, why I was there at
all, or what I was writing.... The hours passed; the first edition
was already out; the reporters were reading hurriedly their own work
in print, delighted if it was on the front page; the space-men were
measuring the columns to see how much they had earned; and the make-up
for the second edition, out at noon, was being hastened on behind the
buzzing machinery in the rear.
By this time I must have written two columns at least, and I began to
wonder. Perhaps I was to appear in the principal final edition at six
o’clock! On the front page! The article, evidently, was considered
important! The notion that I was making a fool of myself, being made
a fool of, rather, also occurred to me. I wrote on and on ... it was
hunger finally that stopped me. I was famished. I turned to an albino
reporter next me, a mere boy, whose peculiarity had earned him the
nickname “Whitey.” Was I allowed to go out for lunch? “Just tell Cooper
you’re going,” he replied. “Come out with me,” he added, “if you’ve
finished your story. I’m going in a moment.” I finished my “story”
then and there, putting the circle with three dots in it which, he
explained, meant _finis_ to the printers. “Just hand it in to Cooper,
and we’ll get right out,” he said. I obeyed, Cooper taking my pile of
“copy” with a grin, and merely nodding his head when I mentioned lunch.
He was a young man with thick curly black hair, big spectacles that
magnified his good-natured eyes, only slightly less rapid and electric
than McCloy, but yet so unsure of himself that the reporters soon found
him out--and treated him accordingly. I saw my precious “copy” shoved
to one side of his desk, but I never saw it again, either in print
or elsewhere. No mention was ever made of it. It was, doubtless, two
columns of the dullest rubbish ever scribbled in that office.
“I guess Mac only wanted to see what you could do,” explained the
albino, as we swallowed “sinkers” (heavy dough scones) and gulped down
coffee at Childs’ Cheap Lunch Counter round the corner. Whitey had
invited me to lunch; he “put me wise” about a thousand things; showed
me how to make a bit on my weekly expense-account, if I wanted to;
how one could “sneak off” about five o’clock, if one knew the way;
and, most useful of all, warned me as to accuracy in my facts and
the right way to present them. A “story” whether it was the weather
story or a murder story, should give in a brief first paragraph the
essential facts--this satisfied the busy man who had no time to read
more; the second paragraph should amplify these facts--for those who
wanted to know more; afterwards--for those interested personally in the
story--should come “any stuff you can pick up.” An item that seemed
exclusive--a “scoop” or “beat” he called it--should come in the very
beginning, so as to justify the headlines.
“Whitey” was always a good friend to me. “Make friends with the
reporters on other papers,” he advised, “then you won’t get badly left
on the story you’re all ‘covering.’ Most of ’em give up all right.” He
gave me names of sundry who never “gave up,” skunks he called them.
As we hurried back to the office half an hour later, he dived into
a drug store on the ground floor. The way most of the reporters
frequented this drug store puzzled me for a time, till I learned
that whisky was to be had there in a little back room. The chemist
had no license, but by paying a monthly sum to the ward man of the
district--part of immense revenues paid to Tammany by every form of
law-breaking, from gambling-halls and disorderly houses to far graver
things--he was allowed to dispense liquor. It was a pretty system,
marvellously organized down to the lowest detail; cash to the ward
man opened most doors; a policeman paid $300 before he even got a
nomination on the force; vice paid gigantic tribute; but the people
liked a Tammany Government because “they knew where they were” with it,
though the _Sun_, my paper, was the only journal that boldly supported
it--for which Charles A. Dana was forever being attacked. I acquired
much inside experience of the secret workings of Tammany Hall before my
newspaper days came to an end.... It appalled me.
That afternoon, I had two assignments, and failed badly in both. The
first was to find a company promoter who had got into trouble, and to
ask him “all about it.” I could not find him; his house, his office,
his club knew him not. After two hours’ frantic search, I returned
crestfallen, expecting to be dismissed there and then. Cooper, however,
cut short my lengthy explanations with a shrug of the shoulders, and
sent me up to the Fort Lee woods, across the Hudson River, to find out
“all about” a suicide whose body had just been discovered under the
trees. “Get his name right, why he did it, and what the relatives have
to say,” were his parting words. The Fort Lee woods were miles away, I
saw the body--an old man with a bullet hole in his temple, I found his
son at the police station, and asked him what his tears and grief made
permissible, the answer being that “he had no troubles and we can’t
think what made him do it.” Then I telephoned these few facts to the
office. On getting back myself at half-past six when the last edition
was already on the streets, Cooper showed me the final edition of the
_Evening World_. It had a column on the front page with big head-lines.
The suicide was a defaulter, and the reporter gave a complete story
of his gambling life. Cooper offered no comment. The _Evening World_
had got “a beat”; and I had failed badly. I sat down at the reporters’
table and wondered what would happen, and then saw, lying before
me, our own last edition with exactly the same story, similar big
headlines, and all the important facts complete. An interview with the
company promoter was also in print. I was at a loss to understand what
had happened until Whitey, on the way into the drug-store a little
later, explained things: the United Press, a news agency that “covered”
everything, had sent the story. The “flimsy” men, so called because
they wrote on thin paper that made six copies at once, were very
valuable. “Make friends with them,” said Whitey, “and no one will ever
get a beat on you. They’re paid a salary and don’t care. It’s only the
space-men, as a rule, who won’t give up.”