Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 - Frank Michael O'Brien - Страница 5

EXTREME NICETY—The author of the “Book of Etiquette,” recently printed in London, says: “Silver forks are now common at every respectable table, and for my part I cannot see how it is possible to eat a dinner comfortably without them.” The booby ought to be compelled to cut his beefsteak with a piece of old barrel-hoop on a wooden trencher.

Not even abolition or etiquette, however, could sidetrack the Sun’s interest in animals. In one issue it dismissed the adjournment of Congress in three words and, just below, ran this item:

THE ANACONDA—Most of those who have seen the beautiful serpent at Peale’s Museum will recollect that in the snug quarters allotted to him there are two blankets, on one of which he lies, and the other is covered over him in cold weather. Strange to say that on Monday night, after Mr. Peale had fed the serpent with a chicken, according to custom, the serpent took it into his head to swallow one of the blankets, which is a seven-quarter one, and this blanket he has now in his stomach. The proprietor feels much anxiety.

Almost every newspaper editor in that era had a theatre feud at one day or another. The Sun’s quarrel was with Farren, the manager of the Bowery, where Forrest was playing. So the Sun said:

DAMN THE YANKEES—We are informed by a correspondent (though we have not seen the announcement ourselves) that Farren, the chap who damned the Yankees so lustily the other day, and who is now under bonds for a gross outrage on a respectable butcher near the Bowery Theater, is intending to make his appearance on the Bowery stage THIS EVENING!

Five hundred citizens gathered at the theatre that night, waited until nine o’clock, and then charged through the doors, breaking up the performance of “Metamora.” The Sun described it:

The supernumeraries scud from behind the scenes like quails—the stock actors’ teeth chattered—Oceana looked imploringly at the good-for-nothing Yankees—Nahmeeoke trembled—Guy of Godalwin turned on his heel, and Metamora coolly shouldered his tomahawk and walked off the stage.

The management announced that Farren was discharged. The mayor of New York and Edwin Forrest made conciliatory speeches, and the crowd went away.

The attacks of Colonel Stone, editor of the six-cent Commercial, aroused the Sun to retaliate in kind. A column about the colonel ended thus:

He was then again cowskinned by Mr. Bryant of the Post, and was most unpoetically flogged near the American Hotel. He has always been the slave of avarice, cowardice, and meanness.... The next time he sees fit to attack the penny press we hope he will confine himself to facts.

A month later the Sun went after Colonel Stone again:

The colonel ... for the sake of an additional glass of wine and a couple of real Spanish cigars, did actually perpetrate a most excellent and true article, the first we have seen of his for a long time past. Now we have serious thoughts that the colonel will yet become quite a decent fellow, and may ultimately ascend, after a long course of training, to a level with the penny dailies which have soared so far above him in the heavens of veracity.

It must be said of Colonel Stone that he was a man of literary and political attainments. He was editor of the Commercial Advertiser for more than twenty years.

The colonel did not reform to the Sun’s liking at once, but the feud lessened, and presently it was the Transcript—a penny paper which sprang up when the Sun’s success was assured—to which the Sun took its biggest cudgels. One of the Transcript’s editors, it said, had passed a bogus three-dollar bill on the Bank of Troy. Another walked “on both sides of the street, like a twopenny postman,” while a third “spent his money at a theatre with females,” while his family was in want. But, added the Sun, “we never let personalities creep in.”

The New York Times—not the present Times—had also started up, and it dared to boast of a circulation “greater than any in the city except the Courier.” Said the Sun:

If the daily circulation of the Sun be not larger than that of the Times and Courier both, then may we be hung up by the ears and flogged to death with a rattle-snake’s skin.

The Sun took no risk in this. By November of 1834 its circulation was above ten thousand. On December 3 it published the President’s message in full and circulated fifteen thousand copies. At the beginning of 1835 it announced a new press—a Napier, built by R. Hoe & Co.—new type, and a bigger paper, circulating twenty thousand. The print paper was to cost four-fifths of a cent a copy, but the Sun was getting lots of advertising. With the increase in size, that New Year’s Day, the Sun adopted the motto, “It Shines for All.” which it is still using to-day. This motto doubtless was suggested by the sign of the famous Rising Sun Tavern, or Howard’s Inn, which then stood at the junction of Bedford and Jamaica turnpikes, in East New York. The sign, which was in front of the tavern as early as 1776, was supported on posts near the road and bore a rude picture of a rising sun and the motto which Day adopted.

In the same month—January, 1835—the bigger and better Sun printed its first real sports story. The sporting editor, who very likely was also the police reporter and perhaps Partner Wisner as well, heard that there was to be a fight in the fields near Hoboken between Williamson, of Philadelphia, and Phelan, of New York. He crossed the ferry, hired a saddle-horse in Hoboken, and galloped to the ringside. It was bare knuckles, London rules, and only thirty seconds’ interval between rounds:

At the end of three minutes Williamson fell. (Cheers and cries of “Fair Play!”) After breathing half a minute, they went at it again, and Phelan was knocked down. (Cheers and cries of “Give it to him!”) In three minutes more Williamson fell, and the adjoining woods echoed back the shouts of the spectators.

The match lasted seventy-two minutes and ended in the defeat of Williamson. The Sun’s report contained no sporting slang, and the reporter did not seem to like pugilism:

And this is what is called “sports of the ring!” We can cheerfully encourage foot-races or any other humane and reasonable amusement, but the Lord deliver us from the “ring.”

The following day the Sun denounced prize-fighting as “a European practice, better fitted for the morally and physically oppressed classes of London than the enlightened republican citizens of New York.”

As prosperity came, the news columns improved. The sensational was not the only pabulum fed to the reader. Beside the story of a duel between two midshipmen he would find a review of the Burr autobiography, just out. Gossip about Fanny Kemble’s quarrel with her father—the Sun was vexed with the actress because she said that New York audiences were made up of butchers—would appear next to a staid report of the doings of Congress. The attacks on Rum continued, and the Sun was quick to oppose the proposed “licensing of houses of prostitution and billiard-rooms.”

The success of Mr. Day’s paper was so great that every printer and newspaperman in New York longed to run a penny journal. On June 22, 1835, the paper’s name appeared at the head of the editorial column on Page 2 as The True Sun, although on the first page the bold head-line THE SUN, remained as usual. An editorial note said:

We have changed our inside head to True Sun for reasons which will hereafter be made known.

On the following day the True Sun title was entirely missing, and its absence was explained in an editorial article as follows:

Having understood on Wednesday (June 21) that a daily paper was about being issued in this city as nearly like our own as it could be got up, under the title of The True Sun, for the avowed purpose of benefitting the proprietors at our expense, we yesterday changed our inside title, being determined to place an injunction upon any such piratical proceedings. Yesterday morning the anticipated Sun made its appearance, and at first sight we immediately abandoned our intention of defending ourselves legally, being convinced that it is a mere catchpenny second-hand concern which (had it our whole list and patronage) would in one month be among the “Things that were.” It is published by William F. Short and edited by Stephen B. Butler, who announces that his “politics are Whig.”... Mr. Short, with the ingenuity of a London pickpocket, though without the honesty, has made up his paper as nearly like ours as was possible and given it the name of The (true) Sun for the purpose of imposing on the public.... We hereby publish William F. Short and Stephen B. Butler to our editorial brethren and to the printing profession in general as Literary Scoundrels.

A day later (June 24, 1835) the Sun declared that in establishing the True Sun “Short, who is one of the printers of the Messenger, actually purloined the composition of his reading matter”; and it printed a letter from William Burnett, publisher of the Weekly Messenger, to support its charge of larceny.

On June 28, six days after the True Sun’s first appearance, the Sun announced the failure of the pretender. The True Sun’s proprietors, it said, “have concluded to abandon their piratical course.”

Another True Sun was issued by Benjamin H. Day in 1840, two years after he sold the Sun to Moses Y. Beach. A third True Sun, established by former employees of the Sun on March 20, 1843, ran for more than a year. A daily called the Citizen and True Sun, started in 1845, had a short life.

When a contemporary did not fail the Sun poked fun at it:

MAJOR NOAH’S SINGULARITY—The Evening Star of yesterday comes out in favor of the French, lottery, gambling, and phrenology for ladies. Is the man crazy?

The editor whose sanity was questioned was the famous Mordecai Manuel Noah, one of the most versatile men of his time. He was a newspaper correspondent at fifteen. When he was twenty-eight, President Madison appointed him to be consul-general at Tunis, where he distinguished himself by his rescue of several Americans who were held as slaves in the Barbary States. On his return to New York, in 1816, he again entered journalism, and was successively connected with the National Advocate, the Enquirer, the Commercial Advertiser, the Times and Messenger, and the Evening Star. In 1825 he attempted to establish a great Jewish colony on Grand Island, in the Niagara River, but he found neither sympathy nor aid among his coreligionists, and the scheme was a failure.

Noah wrote a dozen dramas, all of which have been forgotten, although he was the most popular playwright in America at that day. His Evening Star was a good paper, and the Sun’s quarrels with it were not serious.

For their attacks on Attree, the editor of the Transcript, Messrs. Day and Wisner got themselves indicted for criminal libel. They took it calmly:

Bigger men than we have passed through that ordeal. There is Major Noah, the Grand Mogul of the editorial tribe, who has not only been indicted, but, we believe, placed at the bar. Then there’s Colonel Webb; no longer ago than last autumn he was indicted by the grand jury of Delaware County. The colonel, it is said, didn’t consider this a fair business transaction, and, brushing up the mahogany pistol, he took his coach and hounds, drove up to good old Delaware, and bid defiance to the whole posse comitatus of the county. The greatest men in the country have some time in the course of their lives been indicted.

A few weeks later, when Attree, who had left the Transcript to write “horribles” for the Courier, was terribly beaten in the street, the Sun denounced the assault and tried to expose the assailants.

In February, 1835, a few days after the indictment of the partners, Mr. Wisner was challenged to a duel by a quack dentist whose medicines the Sun had exposed. The Sun announced editorially that Wisner accepted the challenge, and that, having the choice of weapons, he chose syringes charged with the dentist’s own medicine, the distance five paces. No duel!

It would seem that the Sun owners sought a challenge from the fiery James Watson Webb of the mahogany pistol, for they made many a dig at his sixpenny paper. Here is a sample:

OUTRAGEOUS—The Courier and Enquirer of Saturday morning is just twice as large as its usual size. The sheet is now large enough for a blanket and two pairs of pillow-cases, and it contains, in printers’ language, 698,300 ems—equal to eight volumes of the ordinary-sized novels of the present day. If the reading matter were printed in pica type and put in one unbroken line, it would reach from Nova Zembla to Terra del Fuego. Such a paper is an insult to a civilized community.

A little later, when Colonel Webb’s paper boasted of “the largest circulation,” the Sun offered to bet the colonel a thousand dollars—the money to go to the Washington Monument Association—that the Sun had a circulation twice as great as that of the big sixpenny daily.

It must not be thought, however, that the Sun did not attempt to treat the serious matters of the day. It handled them very well, considering the lack of facilities. The war crisis with France, happily dispelled; the amazing project of the Erie Railroad to build a line as far west as Chautauqua County, New York; the anti-abolitionist riots and the little religious rows; the ambitions of Daniel Webster and the approach of Halley’s comet—all these had their half-column or so.

When Matthias the Prophet, the Dowie of that day, was brought to trial in White Plains, Westchester County, on a charge of having poisoned a Mr. Elijah Pierson, the Sun sent a reporter to that then distant court. It is possible that this reporter was Benjamin H. Day himself. At any rate, Day attended the trial, and there made the acquaintance of a man who that very summer made the Sun the talk of the world and brought to the young paper the largest circulation of any daily.