When very early, rather too early, I found myself in the saddle, Bennett
and Greeley and Raymond in New York, and Medill and Storey in Chicago, were
yet alive and conspicuous figures in the newspaper life of the time. John
Bigelow, who had retired from the New York Evening Post, was Minister to
France. Halstead was coming on, but, except as a correspondent, Whitelaw
Reid had not "arrived." The like was true of "Joe" McCullagh, who, in the
same character, divided the newspaper reading attention of the country with
George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt. Joseph Medill was withdrawing from
the Chicago Tribune in favor of Horace White, presently to return and die
in harness--a man of sterling intellect and character--and Wilbur F.
Storey, his local rival, who was beginning to show signs of the mental
malady that, developed into monomania, ultimately ended his life in gloom
and despair, wrecking one of the finest newspaper properties outside of New
York. William R. Nelson, who was to establish a really great newspaper in
Kansas City, was still a citizen of Ft. Wayne.
James Gordon Bennett, the elder, seemed then to me, and has always
seemed, the real founder of the modern newspaper as a vehicle of popular
information, and, in point of apprehension, at least, James Gordon Bennett,
the younger, did not fall behind his father. What was, and might have been
regarded and dismissed as a trivial slander drove him out of New York and
made him the greater part of his life a resident of Paris, where I was wont
to meet and know much of him.
The New York Herald, under father and son, attained enormous prosperity,
prestige and real power. It suffered chiefly from what they call in Ireland
"absentee landlordism." Its "proprietor," for he never described himself
as its "editor," was a man of exquisite sensibilities--a "despot" of
course--whom nature created for a good citizen, a good husband and the head
of a happy domestic fabric. He should have married the woman of his choice,
for he was deeply in love with her and never ceased to love her, forty
years later leaving her in his will a handsome legacy.
Crossing the ocean with the "Commodore," as he was called by his familiars,
not long after he had taken up his residence abroad, naturally we fell
occasionally into shop talk. "What would you do," he once said, "if you
owned the Herald?" "Why," I answered, "I would stay in New York and edit
it;" and then I proceeded, "but you mean to ask me what I think you ought
to do with it?" "Yes," he said, "that is about the size of it."
"Well, Commodore," I answered, "if I were you, when we get in I would send
for John Cockerill and make him managing editor, and for John Young, and
put him in charge of the editorial page, and then I would go and lose
myself in the wilds of Africa."
He adopted the first two of these suggestions. John A. Cockerill was still
under contract with Joseph Pulitzer and could not accept for a year or
more. He finally did accept and died in the Bennett service. John Russell
Young took the editorial page and was making it "hum" when a most
unaccountable thing happened. I was amazed to receive an invitation to a
dinner he had tendered and was about to give to the quondam Virginian and
just elected New York Justice Roger A. Pryor. "Is Young gone mad," I said
to myself, "or can he have forgotten that the one man of all the world whom
the House of Bennett can never forget, or forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?"
The Bennett-Pry or quarrel had been a _cause célèbre_ when John Young
was night editor of the Philadelphia Press and I was one of its Washington
correspondents. Nothing so virulent had ever passed between an editor and a
Congressman. In one of his speeches Pryor had actually gone the length of
rudely referring to Mrs. James Gordon Bennett.
The dinner was duly given. But it ended John's connection with the Herald
and his friendly relations with the owner of the Herald. The incident might
be cited as among "The Curiosities of Journalism," if ever a book with that
title is written. John's "break" was so bad that I never had the heart to
ask him how he could have perpetrated it.