Kinglake confirms, that the editor of the London Times could have prevented the Crimean War. Certainly he conducted it. Demosthenes did not more truly direct the resources of Athens against Philip, than did this invisible and anonymous being those of the British Empire against Russia. The first John Walter, who was to journalism what James Watt was to the steam-engine, had given this man daily access to the ear of England; and to that ear he addressed, not the effusions of his own mind, but the whole purchasable eloquence of his country. He had relays of Demosthenes. The man controlling such a press, and fit to control it, can bring the available and practised intellect of his country to bear upon the pa.s.sions of his countrymen; for it is a fact, that nearly the whole literary talent of a nation is at the command of any honorable man who has money enough, with tact enough. The editor who expends fifty guineas a day in the purchase of three short essays can have them written by the men who can do them best. What a power is this, to say three things every morning to a whole nation,--to say them with all the force which genius, knowledge, and practice united can give,--and to say them without audible contradiction! Fortunate for England is it that this power is no longer concentrated in a single man, and that the mighty influence once wielded by an individual will henceforth be exerted by a profession.
We in America have escaped all danger of ever falling under the dominion of a paper despot. There will never be a Times in America.
Twenty years ago the New York news and the New York newspaper reached distant cities at the same moment; but since the introduction of the telegraph, the news outstrips the newspaper, and is given to the public by the local press. It is this fact which forever limits the circulation and national importance of the New York press. The New York papers reach a village in Vermont late in the afternoon,--six, eight, ten hours after a carrier has distributed the Springfield Republican; and nine people in ten will be content with the brief telegrams of the local centre. At Chicago, the New York paper is forty hours behind the news; at San Francisco, thirty days; in Oregon, forty. Before California had been reached by the telegraph, the New York newspapers, on the arrival of a steamer, were sought with an avidity of which the most ludicrous accounts have been given. If the news was important and the supply of papers inadequate, nothing was more common than for a lucky newsboy to dispose of his last sheets at five times their usual price. All this has changed. A spirited local press has antic.i.p.ated the substance of the news, and most people wait tranquilly for the same local press to spread before them the particulars when the tardy mail arrives. Even the weekly and semi-weekly editions issued by the New York daily press have probably reached their maximum of importance; since the local daily press also publishes weekly and semi-weekly papers, many of which are of high excellence and are always improving, and have the additional attraction of full local intelligence. If some bold Yankee should invent a method by which a bundle of newspapers could be shot from New York to Chicago in half an hour, it would certainly enhance the importance of the New York papers, and diminish that of the rapidly expanding and able press of Chicago. Such an invention is possible; nay, we think it a probability. But even in that case, the local news, and, above all, the local advertising, would still remain as the basis of a great, lucrative, honorable, and very attractive business.
We believe, however, that if the local press were annihilated, and this whole nation lived dependent upon the press of a single city, still we should be safe from a paper despotism; because the power of the editorial lessens as the intelligence of the people in-creases.
The prestige of the editorial is gone. Just as there is a party in England who propose the omission of the sermon from the church service as something no longer needed by the people, so there are journalists who think the time is at hand for the abolition of editorials, and the concentration of the whole force of journalism upon presenting to the public the history and picture of the day. The time for this has not come, and may never come; but our journalists already know that editorials neither make nor mar a daily paper, that they do not much influence the public mind, nor change many votes, and that the power and success of a newspaper depend finally upon its success in getting and its skill in exhibiting the news. The word _newspaper_ is the exact and complete description of the thing which the true journalist aims to produce. The news is his work; editorials are his play. The news is the point of rivalry; it is that for which nineteen twentieths of the people buy newspapers; it is that which const.i.tutes the power and value of the daily press; it is that which determines the rank of every newspaper in every free country.
No editor, therefore, will ever reign over the United States, and the newspapers of no one city will attain universal currency. Hence the importance of journalism in the United States. By the time a town has ten thousand inhabitants, it usually has a daily paper, and in most large cities there is a daily paper for every twenty thousand people.
In many of the Western cities there are daily newspapers conducted with great energy, and on a scale of expenditure which enables them to approximate real excellence. Many of our readers will live to see the day when there will be in Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Cincinnati, and San Francisco daily newspapers more complete, better executed, and produced at greater expense than any newspaper now existing in the United States. This is a great deal to say, in view of the fact, that, during the late war, one of the New York papers expended in war correspondence alone two thousand dollars a week. Nevertheless, we believe it. There will never be _two_ newspapers in any one city that can sustain such an expenditure, but in fifteen years from, to-day there will be one, we think, in each of our great cities, and besides that one there will be four or five struggling to supplant it, as well as one or two having humbler aims and content with a lowlier position.
It is plain that journalism will henceforth and forever be an important and crowded profession in the United States. The daily newspaper is one of those things which are rooted in the necessities of modern civilization. The steam-engine is not more essential to us.
The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general life of mankind, and makes him part and parcel of the whole; so that we can almost say, that those who neither read newspapers nor converse with people who do read them are not members of the human _family_;--though, like the negroes of Guinea, they may become such in time. They are beyond the pale; they have no hold of the electric chain, and therefore do not receive the shock.
There are two mornings of the year on which newspapers have not hitherto been published in the city of New York,--the 5th of July, and the 2d of January. A shadow appears to rest on the world during those days, as when there is an eclipse of the sun. We are separated from our brethren, cut off, lost, alone; vague apprehensions of evil creep over the mind. We feel, in some degree, as husbands feel who, far from wife and children, say to themselves, shuddering, "What things _may_ have happened, and I not know it!" Nothing quite dispels the gloom until the Evening Post--how eagerly seized--a.s.sures us that nothing very particular has happened since our last. It is amusing to notice how universal is the habit of reading a morning paper. Hundreds of vehicles and vessels convey the business men of New York to that extremity of Manhattan Island-which may be regarded as the counting-house of the Western Continent. It is not uncommon for every individual in a cabin two hundred feet long to be sitting absorbed in his paper, like boys conning their lessons on their way to school.
Still more striking is it to observe the torrent of workingmen pouring down town, many of them reading as they go, and most of them provided with a newspaper for dinner-time, not less as a matter of course than the tin kettle which contains the material portion of the repast.
Notice, too, the long line of hackney-coaches on a stand, nearly every driver sitting on his box reading his paper. Many of our Boston friends have landed in New York at five o"clock in the morning, and ridden up town in the street cars, filled, at that hour, with women and boys, folding newspapers and throwing off bundles of them from time to time, which are caught by other boys and women in waiting.
Carriers are flitting in every direction, and the town is alive with the great business of getting two hundred thousand papers distributed before breakfast.
All this is new, but it is also permanent. Having once had daily papers, we can never again do without them; so perfectly does this great invention accord with the genius of modern life. The art of journalism is doubtless destined to continuous improvement for a long time to come; the newspapers of the future will be more convenient, and better in every way, than those of the present day; but the art remains forever an indispensable auxiliary to civilization. And this is so, not by virtue of editorial essays, but because journalism brings the events of the time to bear upon the instruction of the time. An editorial essayist is a man addressing men; but the skilled and faithful journalist, recording with exactness and power the thing that has come to pa.s.s, is Providence addressing men. The thing that has actually happened,--to know that is the beginning of wisdom. All else is theory and conjecture, which may be right and may be wrong.
While it is true that the daily press of the city of New York is limited by the telegraph, it has nevertheless a very great, an unapproached, national importance. We do not consider it certain that New York is always to remain the chief city of the United States; but it holds that rank now, and must for many years. Besides being the source of a great part of our news, it was the first city that afforded scope for papers conducted at the incredible expense which modern appliances necessitate. Consequently its daily papers reach the controlling minds of the country. They are found in all reading-rooms, exchanges, bank parlors, insurance-offices, counting-rooms, hotels, and wherever else the ruling men of the country congregate. But, above all, they are, and must be, in all newspaper offices, subject to the scissors. This is the chief source of their importance. Not merely that in this way their contents are communicated to the whole people.
The grand reason why the New York papers have national importance is, that it is chiefly through them that the art of journalism in the United States is to be perfected. They set daily copies for all editors to follow. The expenditure necessary for the carrying on of a complete daily newspaper is so immense, that the art can only be improved in the largest cities. New York is first in the field; it has the start of a quarter of a century or more; and it therefore devolves upon the journalists of that city to teach the journalists of the United States their vocation. It is this fact which invests the press of New York with such importance, and makes it so well worth considering.
It is impossible any longer to deny that the chief newspaper of that busy city is the New York Herald. No matter how much we may regret this fact, or be ashamed of it, no journalist can deny it. We do not attach much importance to the fact that Abraham Lincoln, the late lamented President of the United States, thought it worth while, during the dark days of the summer of 1864, to buy its support at the price of the offer of the French mission. He was mistaken in supposing that this paper had any considerable power to change votes; which was shown by the result of the Presidential election in the city of New York, where General McClellan had the great majority of thirty-seven thousand. Influence over opinion no paper can have which has itself no opinion, and cares for none. It is not as a vehicle of opinion that the Herald has importance, but solely as a vehicle of news. It is for its excellence, real or supposed, in this particular, that eighty thousand people buy it every morning. Mr. Lincoln committed, as we cannot help thinking, a most egregious error and fault in his purchase of the editor of this paper, though he is in some degree excused by the fact that several leading Republicans, who were in a position to know better, advised or sanctioned the bargain, and leading journalists agreed not to censure it. Mr. Lincoln could not be expected to draw the distinction, between the journalist and the writer of editorials. He perceived the strength of this carrier-pigeon"s pinions, but did not note the trivial character of the message tied to its leg. Thirty or forty war correspondents in the field, a circulation larger than any of its rivals, an advertising patronage equalled only by that of the London Times, the popularity of the paper in the army, the frequent utility of its maps and other elucidations,--these things imposed upon his mind; and his wife could tell him from personal observation, that the proprietor of this paper lived in a style of the most profuse magnificence,--maintaining costly establishments in town and country, horses, and yachts, to say nothing of that most expensive appendage to a reigning house, an heir apparent.
Our friends in the English press tell us, that the Herald was one of the princ.i.p.al obstacles in their attempts to guide English opinions aright during the late struggle. Young men in the press would point to its editorials and say:
"This is the princ.i.p.al newspaper in the Northern States; this is the Times of America; can a people be other than contemptible who prefer such a newspaper as this to journals so respectable and so excellent as the Times and Tribune, published in the same city?" "As to (American) journalism,"
says Professor Goldwin Smith, "the New York Herald is always kept before our eyes." That is to say, the editorial articles in the Herald; not that variety and fulness of intelligence which often compelled men who hated it most to get up at the dawn of day to buy it. A paper which can detach two or three men, after a battle, to collect the names of the killed and wounded, with orders to do only that, cannot lack purchasers in war time. Napoleon a.s.sures us that the whole art of war consists in having the greatest force at the point of contact. This rule applies to the art of journalism; the editor of the Herald knew it, and had the means to put it in practice.
Even here, at home, we find two opinions as to the cause of the Herald"s vast success as a business. One of these opinions is this,--the Herald takes the lead because it is such a bad paper. The other opinion is,--the Herald takes the lead because it is such a good paper. It is highly important to know which of these two opinions is correct; or, in other words, whether it is the Herald"s excellences as a newspaper, or its crimes as a public teacher, which give it such general currency. Such success as this paper has obtained is a most influential fact upon the journalism of the whole country, as any one can see who looks over a file of our most flourishing daily papers. It is evident that our daily press is rapidly becoming Heraldized; and it is well known that the tendency of imitation is to reproduce all of the copy excepting alone that which made it worth copying. It is honorable to the American press that this rule has been reversed in the present instance. Some of the more obvious good points of the Herald have become universal, while as yet no creature has been found capable of copying the worst of its errors.
If there are ten bakers in a town, the one that gives the best loaf for sixpence is sure, at last, to sell most bread. A man may puff up his loaves to a great size, by chemical agents, and so deceive the public for a time; another may catch the crowd for a time by the splendor of his gilt sheaf, the magnitude of his signs, and the bl.u.s.ter of his advertising; and the intrinsically best baker may be kept down, for a time, by want of tact, or capital, or some personal defect. But let the compet.i.tion last thirty years! The gilt sheaf fades, the cavities in the big loaf are observed; but the ugly little man round the corner comes steadily into favor, and all the town, at length, is noisy in the morning with the rattle of his carts. The particular caterer for our morning repast, now under consideration, has achieved a success of this kind, against every possible obstacle, and under every possible disadvantage. He had no friends at the start, he has made none since, and he has none now. He has had the support of no party or sect. On the contrary, he has won his object in spite of the active opposition of almost every organized body in the country, and the fixed disapproval of every public-spirited human being who has lived in the United States since he began his career. What are we to say of this? Are we to say that the people of the United States are competent to judge of bread, but not of newspapers? Are we to say that the people of the United States prefer evil to good? We cannot a.s.sent to such propositions.
Let us go back to the beginning, and see how this man made his way to his present unique position. We owe his presence in this country, it seems, to Benjamin Franklin; and he first smelt printer"s ink in Boston, near the spot where young Ben Franklin blackened his fingers with it a hundred years before. Born and reared on the northeastern coast of Scotland, in a Roman Catholic family of French origin, he has a French intellect and Scotch habits. Frenchmen residing among us can seldom understand why this man should be odious, so French is he. A French naval officer was once remonstrated with for having invited him to a ball given on board a ship of war in New York harbor. "Why, what has he done?" inquired the officer. "Has he committed murder? Has he robbed, forged, or run away with somebody"s wife?" "No." "Why then should we not invite him?" "He is the editor of the New York Herald."
"Ah!" exclaimed the Frenchman,--"the Herald! it is a delightful paper,--it reminds me of my gay Paris." This, however, was thirty years ago, when Bennett was almost as French as Voltaire. He was a Frenchman also in this: though discarding, in his youth, the doctrines of his Church, and laughing them to scorn in early manhood, he still maintained a kind of connection with the Catholic religion. The whole of his power as a writer consists in his detection of the evil in things that are good, and of the falsehood in things that are true, and of the ridiculous in things that are important. He began with the Roman Catholic Church,--"the holy Roman Catholic Church," as he once styled it,--adding in a parenthesis, "all of us Catholics are devilish holy." Another French indication is, that his early tastes were romantic literature _and_ political economy,--a conjunction very common in France from the days of the "philosophers" to the present time. During our times of financial collapse, we have noticed, among the nonsense which he daily poured forth, some gleams of a superior understanding of the fundamental laws of finance. He appears to have understood 1837 and 1857 better than most of his contemporaries.
In a Catholic seminary he acquired the rudiments of knowledge, and advanced so far as to read Virgil. He also picked up a little French and Spanish in early life. The real instructors of his mind were Napoleon, Byron, and Scott. It was their fame, however, as much as their works, that attracted and dazzled him. It is a strange thing, but true, that one of the strongest desires of one of the least reputable of living men was, and is, to be admired and held in lasting honor by his fellow-men. Nor has he now the least doubt that he deserves their admiration, and will have it. In 1817, an edition of Franklin"s Autobiography was issued in Scotland. It was his perusal of that little book that first directed his thoughts toward America, and which finally decided him to try his fortune in the New World. In May, 1819, being then about twenty years of age, he landed at Halifax, with less than five pounds in his purse, without a friend on the Western Continent, and knowing no vocation except that of book-keeper.
Between his landing at Halifax and the appearance of the first number of the Herald sixteen years elapsed; during most of which he was a very poor, laborious, under-valued, roving writer for the daily press.
At Halifax, he gave lessons in book-keeping for a few weeks, with little profit, then made his way along the coast to Portland, whence a schooner conveyed him to Boston. He was then, it appears, a soft, romantic youth, alive to the historic a.s.sociations of the place, and susceptible to the varied, enchanting loveliness of the scenes adjacent, on land and sea. He even expressed his feelings in verse, in the Childe Harold manner,--verse which does really show a poetic habit of feeling, with an occasional happiness of expression. At Boston he experienced the last extremity of want. Friendless and alone he wandered about the streets, seeking work and finding none; until, his small store of money being all expended, he pa.s.sed two whole days without food, and was then only relieved by finding a shilling on the Common. He obtained at length the place of salesman in a bookstore, from which he was soon transferred to the printing-house connected therewith, where he performed the duties of proof-reader. And here it was that he received his first lesson in the art of catering for the public mind. The firm in whose employment he was were more ambitious of glory than covetous of profit, and consequently published many works that were in advance of the general taste. Bankruptcy was their reward. The youth noted another circ.u.mstance at Boston. The newspaper most decried was Buckingham"s Galaxy; but it was also the most eagerly sought and the most extensively sold. Buckingham habitually violated the traditional and established decorums of the press; he was familiar, chatty, saucy, anecdotical, and sadly wanting in respect for the respectabilities of the most respectable town in the universe.
Every one said that he was a very bad man, _but_ every one was exceedingly curious every Sat.u.r.day to see "what the fellow had to say this week." If the youth could have obtained a sight of a file of James Franklin"s Courant, of 1722, in which the youthful Benjamin first addressed the public, he would have seen a still more striking example of a journal generally denounced and universally read.
Two years in Boston. Then he went to New York, where he soon met the publisher of a Charleston paper, who engaged him as translator from the Spanish, and general a.s.sistant. During the year spent by him at Charleston he increased his knowledge of the journalist"s art. The editor of the paper with which he was connected kept a sail-boat, in which he was accustomed to meet arriving vessels many miles from the coast, and bring in his files of newspapers a day in advance of his rivals. The young a.s.sistant remembered this, and turned it to account in after years. At Charleston he was confronted, too, with the late peculiar inst.i.tution, and saw much to approve in it, nothing to condemn. From that day to this he has been but in one thing consistent,--contempt for the negro and for all white men interested in his welfare, approving himself in this a thorough Celt. If, for one brief period, he forced himself, for personal reasons, to veil this feeling, the feeling remained rooted within him, and soon resumed its wonted expression. He liked the South, and the people of the South, and had a true Celtic sympathy with their aristocratic pretensions.
The salary of an a.s.sistant editor at that time was something between the wages of a compositor and those of an office-boy. Seven dollars a week would have been considered rather liberal pay; ten, munificent; fifteen, lavish.
Returning to New York, he endeavored to find more lucrative employment, and advertised his intention to open, near the site of the present Herald office, a "Permanent Commercial School," in which all the usual branches were to be taught "in the inductive method." His list of subjects was extensive,--"reading, elocution, penmanship, and arithmetic; algebra, astronomy, history, and geography; moral philosophy, commercial law, and political economy; English grammar, and composition; and also, if required, the French and Spanish languages, by natives of _those countries_." Application was to be made to "J.G.B., 148 Fulton Street." Applications, however, were not made in sufficient number, and the school, we believe, never came into existence. Next, he tried a course of lectures upon Political Economy, at the old Dutch Church in Ann Street, then not far from the centre of population. The public did not care to hear the young gentleman upon that abstruse subject, and the pecuniary result of the enterprise was not encouraging. He had no resource but the ill-paid, unhonored drudgery of the press.
For the next few years he was a paragraphist, reporter, scissorer, and man-of-all-work for the New York papers, daily and weekly, earning but the merest subsistence. He wrote then in very much the same style as when he afterwards amused and shocked the town in the infant Herald; only he was under restraint, being a subordinate, and was seldom allowed to violate decorum. In point of industry, sustained and indefatigable industry, he had no equal, and has never since had but one. One thing is to be specially noted as one of the chief and indispensable causes of his success. _He had no vices_. He never drank to excess, nor gormandized, nor gambled, nor even smoked, nor in any other way wasted the vitality needed for a long and tough grapple with adverse fortune. What he once wrote of himself in the early Herald was strictly true:
"I eat and drink to live,--not live to eat and drink. Social gla.s.ses of wine are my aversion; public dinners are my abomination; all species of gormandizing, my utter scorn and contempt. When I am hungry, I eat; when thirsty, drink. Wine or viands taken for society, or to stimulate conversation, tend only to dissipation, indolence, poverty, contempt, and death."
This was an immense advantage, which he had in common with several of the most mischievous men of modern times,--Calhoun, Charles XII., George III., and others. Correct bodily habits are of themselves such a source of power, that the man who has them will be extremely likely to gain the day over compet.i.tors of ten times his general worth who have them not. Dr. Franklin used to say, that if Jack Wilkes had been as exemplary in this particular as George III., he would have turned the king out of his dominions. In several of the higher kinds of labor, such as law, physic, journalism, authorship, art, when the compet.i.tion is close and keen, and many able men are near the summit, the question, who shall finally stand upon it, often resolves itself into one of physical endurance. This man Bennett would have lived and died a hireling scribe, if he had had even one of the common vices.
Everything was against his rising, except alone an enormous capacity for labor, sustained by strictly correct habits.
He lived much with politicians during these years of laborious poverty. Gravitating always towards the winning side, he did much to bring into power the worst set of politicians we ever had,--those who "availed" themselves of the popularity of Andrew Jackson, and who were afterwards used by him for the purpose of electing Martin Van Buren.
He became perfectly familiar with all that was petty and mean in the political strifes of the day, but without ever suspecting that there was anything in politics not petty and mean. He had no convictions of his own, and therefore not the least belief that any politician had.
If the people were in earnest about the affairs of their country, (_their_ country, not his,) it was because the people were not behind the scenes, were dupes of their party leaders, were a parcel of fools.
In short, he acquired his insight into political craft in the school of Tammany Hall and the Kitchen Cabinet. His value was not altogether unappreciated by the politicians. He was one of those whom they use and flatter during the heat of the contest, and forget in the distribution of the spoils of victory.
He made his first considerable hit as a journalist in the spring of 1828, when he filled the place of Washington correspondent to the New York Enquirer. In the Congressional Library, one day, he found an edition of Horace Walpole"s Letters, which amused him very much. "Why not," said he to himself, "try, a few letters on a similar plan from this city, to be published in New York?" The letters appeared. Written in a lively manner, full of personal allusions, and describing individuals respecting whom the public are always curious,--free also from offensive personalities,--the letters attracted much notice and were generally copied in the press. It is said that some of the ladies whose charms were described in those letters were indebted to them for husbands. Personalities of this kind were a novelty then, and mere novelty goes a great way in journalism. At this period he produced almost every kind of composition known to periodical literature,--paragraphs and leading articles, poetry and love-stories, reports of trials, debates, b.a.l.l.s, and police cases; his earnings ranging from five dollars a week to ten or twelve. If there had been then in New York one newspaper publisher who understood his business, the immense possible value of this man as a journalist would have been perceived, and he would have been secured, rewarded, and kept under some restraint. But there was no such man. There were three or four forcible writers for the press, but not one journalist.
During the great days of "The Courier and Inquirer," from 1829 to 1832, when it was incomparably the best newspaper on the continent, James Gordon Bennett was its most efficient hand. It lost him in 1832, when the paper abandoned General Jackson and took up Nicholas Biddle; and in losing him lost its chance of retaining the supremacy among American newspapers to this day. We can truly say, that at that time journalism, as a thing by itself and for itself, had no existence in the United States. Newspapers were mere appendages of party; and the darling object of each journal was to be recognized as the organ of the party it supported. As to the public, the great public, hungry for interesting news, no one thought of it. Forty years ago, in the city of New York, a copy of a newspaper could not be bought for money. If any one wished to see a newspaper, he had either to go to the office and subscribe, or repair to a bar-room and buy a gla.s.s of something to drink, or bribe a carrier to rob one of his customers. The circulation of the Courier and Inquirer was considered something marvellous when it printed thirty-five hundred copies a day, and its business was thought immense when its daily advertising averaged fifty-five dollars. It is not very unusual for a newspaper now to receive for advertising, in one day, six hundred times that sum. Bennett, in the course of time, had a chance been given to him, would have made the Courier and Inquirer powerful enough to cast off all party ties; and this he would have done merely by improving it as a vehicle of news.
But he was kept down upon one of those ridiculous, tantalizing, corrupting salaries, which are a little more than a single man needs, but not enough for him to marry upon. This salary was increased by the proprietors giving him a small share in the small profits of the printing-office; so that, after fourteen years of hard labor and Scotch economy, he found himself, on leaving the great paper, a capitalist to the extent of a few hundred dollars. The chief editor of the paper which he now abandoned sometimes lost as much in a single evening at the card-table. It probably never occurred to him that this poor, ill-favored Scotchman was destined to destroy his paper and all the cla.s.s of papers to which it belonged. Any one who now examines a file of the Courier and Inquirer of that time, and knows its interior circ.u.mstances, will see plainly enough that the possession of this man was the vital element in its prosperity. He alone knew the rudiments of his trade. He alone had the physical stamina, the indefatigable industry, the sleepless vigilance, the dexterity, tact, and audacity, needful for keeping up a daily newspaper in the face of keen compet.i.tion.
Unweaned yet from the politicians, he at once started a cheap party paper, "The Globe," devoted to Jackson and Van Buren. The party, however, did not rally to its support, and it had to contend with the opposition of party papers already existing, upon whose manor it was poaching. The Globe expired after an existence of thirty days. Its proprietor, still untaught by such long experience, invested the wreck of his capital in a Philadelphia Jackson paper, and struggled desperately to gain for it a footing in the party. He said to Mr. Van Buren and to other leaders, Help me to a loan of twenty-five hundred dollars for two years, and I can establish my Pennsylvanian on a self-supporting basis. The application was politely refused, and he was compelled to give up the struggle. The truth is, he was not implicitly trusted by the Jackson party. They admitted the services he had rendered; but, at the same time, they were a little afraid of the vein of mockery that broke out so frequently in his writings. He was restive in harness. He was devoted to the party, but he was under no party illusions. He was fighting in the ranks as an adventurer or soldier of fortune. He fought well; but would it do to promote a man to high rank who knew the game so well, and upon whom no man could get any _hold_? To him, in his secret soul, Martin Van Buren was nothing (as he often said) but a country lawyer, who, by a dexterous use of the party machinery, the well-timed death of De Witt Clinton, and General Jackson"s frenzy in behalf of Mrs. Eaton, had come to be the chosen successor of the fiery chieftain. The canny Scotchman saw this with horrid clearness, and saw nothing more. Political chiefs do not like subalterns of this temper. Underneath the politician in Martin Van Buren there was the citizen, the patriot, the gentleman, and the man, whose fathers were buried in American soil, whose children were to live under American inst.i.tutions, who had, necessarily, an interest in the welfare and honor of the country, and whose policy, upon the whole, was controlled by that natural interest in his country"s welfare and honor. To our mocking Celt nothing of this was apparent, nor has ever been.
His education as a journalist was completed by the failure of his Philadelphia scheme. Returning to New York, he resolved to attempt no more to rise by party aid, but henceforth have no master but the public. On the 6th of May, 1835, appeared the first number of the Morning Herald, price one cent. It was born in a cellar in Wall Street,--not a bas.e.m.e.nt, but a veritable cellar. Some persons are still doing business in that region who remember going down into its subterranean office, and buying copies of the new paper from its editor, who used to sit at a desk composed of two flour-barrels and a piece of board, and who occupied the only chair in the establishment.
For a considerable time his office contained absolutely nothing but his flour-barrel desk, one wooden chair, and a pile of Heralds. "I remember," writes Mr. William Gowans, the well-known bookseller of Na.s.sau Street,
"to have entered the subterranean office of its editor early in its career, and purchased a single copy of the paper, for which I paid the sum of one cent United States currency. On this occasion the proprietor, editor, and vendor was seated at his desk, busily engaged writing, and appeared to pay little or no attention to me as I entered. On making known my object in coming in, he requested me to put my money down on the counter, and help myself to a paper; all this time he continuing his writing operations. The office was a single oblong underground room; its furniture consisted of a counter, which also served as a desk, constructed from two flour-barrels, perhaps empty, standing apart from each other about four feet, with a single plank covering both; a chair, placed in the centre, upon which sat the editor busy at his vocation, with an inkstand by his right hand; on the end nearest the door were placed the papers for sale."
Everything appeared to be against his success. It was one poor man in a cellar against the world. Already he had failed three times; first, in 1825, when he attempted to establish a Sunday paper; next, in 1832, when he tried a party journal; recently, in Philadelphia. With great difficulty, and after many rebuffs, he had prevailed upon two young printers to print his paper and share its profits or losses, and he possessed about enough money to start the enterprise and sustain it ten days. The cheapness of his paper was no longer a novelty, for there was already a penny paper with a paying circulation. He had cut loose from all party ties, and he had no influential friends except those who had an interest in his failure. The great public, to which he made this last desperate appeal, knew him not even by name. The newsboy system scarcely existed; and all that curious machinery by which, in these days, a "new candidate for public favor" is placed, at no expense, on a thousand news-stands, had not been thought of. There he was alone in his cellar, without clerk, errand-boy, or a.s.sistant of any kind. For many weeks he did with his own hands everything,--editorials, news, reporting, receiving advertis.e.m.e.nts, and even writing advertis.e.m.e.nts for persons "unaccustomed to composition." He expressly announced that advertisers could have their advertis.e.m.e.nts written for them at the office, and this at a time when there was no one to do it but himself. The extreme cheapness of the paper rendered him absolutely dependent upon his advertisers, and yet he dared not charge more than fifty cents for sixteen lines, and he offered to insert sixteen lines for a whole year for thirty dollars.
He at once produced an eminently salable article. If just such a paper were to appear to-day, or any day, in any large city of the world, it would instantly find a mult.i.tude of readers. It was a very small sheet,--four little pages of four columns each,--much better printed than the Herald now is, and not a waste line in it. Everything _drew_, as the sailors say. There was not much scissoring in it,--the scissors have never been much esteemed in the Herald office,--but the little that there was all told upon the general effect of the sheet. There is a story current in newspaper offices that the first few numbers of the Herald were strictly decorous and "respectable," but that the editor, finding the public indifferent and his money running low, changed his tactics, and filled his paper with scurrility and indecency, which immediately made it a paying enterprise. No such thing. The first numbers were essentially of the same character as the number published this morning. They had the same excellences and the same defects: in the news department, immense industry, vigilance, and tact; in the editorial columns, the vein of Mephistophelean mockery which has puzzled and shocked so many good people at home and abroad. A leading topic then was a certain Matthias, one of those long-bearded religious impostors who used to appear from time to time. The first article in the first number of the Herald was a minute account of the origin and earlier life of the fellow,--just the thing for the paper, and the sure method of exploding _him_. The first editorial article, too, was perfectly in character:--
"In _debuts_ of this kind," said the editor,
"many talk of principle--political principle, party principle--as a sort of steel-trap to catch the public. We mean to be perfectly understood on this point, and therefore openly disclaim all steel-traps,--all principle, as it is called,--all party,--all politics. Our only guide shall be good, sound, practical common-sense, applicable to the business and bosoms of men engaged in every-day life. We shall support no party, be the organ of no faction or coterie, and care nothing for any election or any candidate, from President down to constable. We shall endeavor to record facts on every public and proper subject, stripped of verbiage and coloring, with comments, when suitable, just, independent, fearless, and good-tempered. If the Herald wants the mere expansion which many journals possess, we shall try to make it up in industry, good taste, brevity, variety, point, piquancy, and cheapness."
He proceeded immediately to give a specimen of the "comments" thus described, in the form of a review of an Annual Register just published. The Register informed him that there were 1,492 "rogues in the State Prison." His comment was: "But G.o.d only knows how many out of prison, preying upon the community, in the shape of gamblers, blacklegs, speculators, and politicians." He learned from the Register that the poor-house contained 6,547 paupers; to which he added, "and double the number going there as fast as indolence and intemperance can carry them." The first numbers were filled with nonsense and gossip about the city of New York, to which his poverty confined him.
He had no boat with which to board arriving ships, no share in the pony express from Washington, and no correspondents in other cities.
All he could do was to catch the floating gossip, scandal, and folly of the town, and present as much of them every day as one man could get upon paper by sixteen hours" labor. He laughed at everything and everybody,--not excepting himself and his squint eye,--and, though his jokes were not always good, they were generally good enough. People laughed, and were willing to expend a cent the next day to see what new folly the man would commit or relate. We all like to read about our own neighborhood: this paper gratified the propensity.
The man, we repeat, really had a vein of poetry in him, and the first numbers of the Herald show it. He had occasion to mention, one day, that Broadway was about to be paved with wooden blocks. This was not a very promising subject for a poetical comment; but he added: "When this is done, every vehicle will have to wear sleigh-bells as in sleighing times, and Broadway will be so quiet that you can pay a compliment to a lady, in pa.s.sing, and she will hear you." This was nothing in itself; but here was a man wrestling with fate in a cellar, who could turn you out two hundred such paragraphs a week, the year round. Many men can growl in a cellar; this man could laugh, and keep laughing, and make the floating population of a city laugh with him.
It must be owned, too, that he had a little real insight into the nature of things around him,--a little Scotch sense, as well as an inexhaustible fund of French vivacity. Alluding, once, to the "hard money" cry, by which the lying politicians of the day carried elections, he exploded that nonsense in two lines: "If a man gets the wearable or the eatable he wants, what cares he whether he has gold or paper-money?" He devoted two sentences to the Old School and New School Presbyterian controversy: "Great trouble among the Presbyterians just now. The question in dispute is, whether or not a man can do anything towards saving his own soul." He had, also, an article upon the Methodists, in which he said that the two religions nearest akin were the Methodist and the Roman Catholic. We should add to these trifling specimens the fact, that he uniformly maintained, from 1835 to the crash of 1837, that the prosperity of the country was unreal, and would end in disaster. Perhaps we can afford s.p.a.ce for a single specimen of his way of treating this subject; although it can be fully appreciated only by those who are old enough to remember the rage for land speculation which prevailed in 1836:--
"THE RICH POOR--THE POOR RICH.--"I have made $50,000 since last January," said one of these real-estate speculators to a friend.
""The dense you have," said the other, looking up in astonishment "Why, last January you were not worth a twenty-dollar bill."
""I know that; but I now calculate I"m worth full $50,000, if not $60,000."
"How have you made it?"
""By speculating in real estate. I bought three hundred lots at Goose Island at $150 apiece; they are now worth $400. I would not sell them for $350 apiece, I a.s.sure you."
"" Do you think so?"