News gathering was rapidly changing, too. In the 1840s some newspapers used carrier pigeons to transmit news. The Sun even kept a pigeon coop on the roof of its building. A decade later came Morse’s telegraph and then, in the 1870s, Bell’s telephone. In the 1880s the clatter of typewriters began to be heard in newsrooms. The AP began using the machines in 1885. “A few years ago type writer copy was the exception,” a trade journal called the Journalist said in 1886. “Now it is the rule among the better class of journalists.”
Many of the old guard, however, could never bring themselves to adopt the newfangled machine. Like many of his generation, E. J. Edwards would continue to write his stories out in longhand. But he was no reactionary. Edwards was an early adopter of the then revolutionary “interview technique” whereby reporters actually asked the subjects of their stories questions. This was controversial because, as newspaper historian Frank Luther Mott writes, the “questions were often flippant and the replies ill considered.” The Nation said interviewing made “fools of great men.” But the technique would prove enduring.
The explosive growth of newspapers resulted in fierce competition for readers, especially in the larger cities, and in 1883, just four years after Edwards joined the Sun, the paper faced a challenge to its supremacy in New York. Joseph Pulitzer, a thirty-six-year-old Hungarian immigrant, bought the New York World and set his sights squarely on the Sun. Pulitzer had already enjoyed phenomenal success in St. Louis, where he’d bought the Dispatch at a sheriff’s sale in 1878 and soon merged it with another paper, the Post. Under Pulitzer’s management, the Post-Dispatch soon became the highest-circulated evening paper in the city. But St. Louis could not contain his ambitions, and he set his sights on New York.
The World’s circulation was twenty thousand when Pulitzer bought the paper. Sixteen months later it was one hundred thousand. Pulitzer’s recipe for success was simple: appeal to the masses. At the time, some 80 percent of New York City’s residents were either immigrants or the children of immigrants, and Pulitzer aimed the World directly at them. The stories were written so simply that even readers with limited English skills could understand and enjoy them. To paraphrase one Pulitzer biographer, other papers wrote about these people, but the World wrote for them.
But Pulitzer had other tricks up his sleeve. The World put a special emphasis on the sensational, especially crime. One critic said the World more closely resembled the Police Gazette than a daily newspaper. Pulitzer masterminded frequent publicity stunts and crusades, as when the World organized a campaign to raise money for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal after Congress failed to appropriate the necessary funds. More than 120,000 readers contributed sums as small as five cents to raise the $100,000 needed to erect the statue. Pulitzer also pioneered the use of illustrations, including pungent political cartoons. It was a style that would be widely replicated. It came to be known as yellow journalism, the name supposedly derived from a popular cartoon character called the Yellow Kid.
Dana’s Sun and Pulitzer’s World were running neck and neck in circulation when the 1884 presidential campaign rolled around. Dana still harbored a grudge against Cleveland for refusing to hire his friend, and the Sun editorialized bitterly against him. Dana said Cleveland had a “plodding mind, limited knowledge and narrow capacities.” After the Maria Halpin story broke, Dana wrote, “We do not believe that the American people will knowingly elect to the Presidency a coarse debauchee who would bring his harlots with him to Washington and hire lodgings for them convenient to the White House.”
Pulitzer, on the other hand, sensed Cleveland’s popular appeal, especially among the working class, and he promoted his candidacy unrelentingly. The World listed four reasons for endorsing Cleveland: “1. He is an honest man; 2. He is an honest man; 3. He is an honest man; 4. He is an honest man.” (Once Cleveland was elected, however, Pulitzer turned on him for refusing to appoint one of Pulitzer’s friends to a post in Berlin.)
Meanwhile, Dana’s vituperative attacks on Cleveland backfired. Rather than antipathy, they aroused sympathy for the candidate, and they certainly did the Sun no good. Alienated readers abandoned the paper in droves. During the campaign the Sun’s circulation nosedived from 137,000 to 85,000.
By Election Day the Sun had been eclipsed by the World.
In 1880, after just one year at the Sun, E. J. Edwards was named the paper’s Washington correspondent. It was a major promotion, and in his new position Edwards thrived. In 1881 his coverage of the Garfield assassination earned high praise from Charles Dana himself, who called it, with typical brevity, “the best.”
In Washington, Edwards also earned a reputation for dogged investigative reporting—at a time when such reporting was almost unheard of. In 1881 he helped uncover massive fraud in the Post Office Department. Edwards discovered that postal officials were accepting bribes in exchange for awarding contracts for mail delivery routes known as star routes. A Republican senator and an assistant postmaster general were implicated in the scheme, which cost taxpayers some $4 million (about $80 million in today’s money). Though neither was convicted, the revelations contained in Edwards’s reports ignited public fury and helped lead to the passage of the Pendleton Act, which reformed the civil service. The postmaster general at the time, Thomas James, later praised Edwards’s work. “I cheerfully bear witness to the energy and zeal with which he entered into the great Star Route fight . . . and the vigorous manner in which he denounced the corrupt and defiant gang and held up their crimes to an indignant people.”
In March 1887, Charles Dana opened a new front in his battle against Joseph Pulitzer’s World. Dana launched an evening edition of the Sun, and he summoned E. J. Edwards from Washington to be the new paper’s managing editor. (Seven months later Pulitzer would retaliate by starting an evening edition of the World.) Back in New York, Edwards worked with a Sun reporter named Jacob Riis. Like Edwards, Riis was a newspaperman with a crusading streak, and the two shared an enthusiasm for investigative reporting. In 1888 the Sun published a series of articles by Riis detailing the deplorable living conditions in New York’s tenements. The articles would later be published as a book entitled How the Other Half Lives. It is likely that Edwards helped Riis write the exposé. Edwards and Riis were pioneers in a genre that Teddy Roosevelt would label “muckraking,” because the reporters dug up dirt. (Roosevelt once called Riis “New York’s most useful citizen.”) Their goal was not merely to expose the wicked or afflicted, nor was it sensationalism for its own sake. They saw their work as a public service, to educate readers, not merely to titillate them. Over the next twenty years, a parade of muckrakers would follow—Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell— ushering in the era of modern journalism.
Under Edwards’s tutelage, the Evening Sun was an immediate success. “New York at last saw a modern, lively, well-edited, cheap evening paper,” wrote one newspaper historian. Besides Jacob Riis, Edwards also worked with Richard Harding Davis, later a noted war correspondent and novelist. (Davis’s father was L. Clarke Davis—one of Grover Cleveland’s friends.) The Evening Journal restored some of Charles Dana’s lost luster (and lucre), and the bearded curmudgeon was effusive in his praise of Edwards: “Mr. Edwards, in whatever responsibility he had been tested, excelled. As a reporter his work is beyond criticism. As an editorial writer he is pungent and thoughtful. . . and as an executive manager his career has been brilliant.”
In 1889, after ten years at the Sun, Edwards left the paper for the Philadelphia Press. The Press was founded by John Forney in 1857 as a Democratic newspaper, but Forney abandoned the Democrats for the Republicans at the outbreak of the Civil War. Throughout the war, the Press was considered the foremost Republican paper in Pennsylvania, and thousands of copies of its weekly edition were distributed to Union soldiers. It was said that Forney supported Lincoln more fully than any other newspaper editor, though his editorials were remarkable for their courtesy and lack of invective. In 1880, Charles Emory Smith bought the paper. L
ike his predecessor, Smith was a devout Republican. He served as Benjamin Harrison’s ambassador to Russia from 1890 to 1892 and would later hold positions in the McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt administrations. It was said that Smith hired only Union Army veterans to work in the paper’s pressroom.
These woodcuts of E. J. Edwards are from the 1890s, when he established himself as one of the first investigative reporters in American journalism. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
It was Smith who convinced Edwards to abandon the Sun for the Press. It probably helped that Smith, like Edwards, was a native of Connecticut. But more important to Edwards was the job: he would be the Press’s New York correspondent. It was a plum assignment. Working alone out of an office in the brand-new Schermerhorn Building on the Lower East Side, Edwards was given carte blanche to write about anything that suited his many fancies. Still composing in longhand, he filed a twenty-five-hundred-word column six days a week under the pen name Holland. The inspiration for this nom de plume is lost to history. Perhaps it was a nod to his new office: the New York Schermerhorns traced their roots back to a small Dutch village called Schermerhorn. His columns, which he called letters, touched on every imaginable issue, but Edwards especially enjoyed uncovering corruption in politics and business. Though well connected, he was never afraid to take on the rich and powerful. He also covered the arts and was not averse to including a bit of gossip as well. His columns would eventually be syndicated in several papers, including the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Chicago Inter-Ocean.
Holland’s letters in the Press were notable for their lack of sensationalism. At the time, reporters like E. J. Edwards—scrupulous and intrepid—were still rare. As a columnist he quickly earned a reputation for honesty and fairness, and in newsrooms around the country a daily question was, “What does Holland say today?”
In 1892, Edwards met a struggling young writer so desperately poor he didn’t even have a place to sleep. The writer’s name was Stephen Crane, and he had recently been fired by the New York Herald for writing a sarcastic account of a labor union parade in which he described the marchers as “uncouth.” Edwards lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, but he also kept an apartment on West Twenty-Seventh Street in Manhattan and let Crane crash there occasionally. Like Jacob Riis, Crane was fascinated by tenement life, and that fall he showed Edwards a manuscript he was working on. Called Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the grim novel told the story of the title character, a prostitute unable to escape her tenement life. The following March, Crane showed Edwards another work in progress, a Civil War novel called The Red Badge of Courage. Edwards was deeply impressed by Crane’s gritty writing, now recognized as an early example of naturalism in American literature. Crane’s characters were tragic figures trapped in circumstances they could not escape.
Edwards must have been stunned and even humbled by the twenty-one-year-old Crane’s work. Edwards convinced his editors at the Press to run a serialized version of Red Badge, which, Edwards later reported in his column, resulted in Crane receiving “a very flattering offer from one of the largest publishing houses . . . for a contract for the publication of that story in book form.”* Edwards predicted that Crane would “become one of the great men of American letters.” And indeed he would, partly due to Edwards’s patronage. The publication of Red Badge in 1895 rocketed Crane to literary fame. But his career was fleeting. Just five years later, Crane died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight.
In 1893, in conjunction with the World’s Fair in Chicago, the American Press Association, a newspaper syndicate based in New York, commissioned seventy-four experts in various fields to write columns predicting what their fields would look like one hundred years hence. E. J. Edwards was chosen to speculate on the future of journalism, and what he predicted reveals something about his belief in the powers of technology and science. In his essay, Edwards spoke with uncanny prescience:
It is quite within the bounds of possibility that, by the year 1993, the mechanical work of publishing newspapers may be done entirely by electricity. The distributing of the printed papers also may be accomplished with such celerity as to vastly extend the legitimate field of any given journal.
It is quite possible that, by the agency of forces just beginning to be understood, the reporter and editor will no longer be compelled to write. Rather, the spoken word may appear imprisoned in cold type . . .
But the newspaper of 1993 must be as is the newspaper of today—nothing but the story of human achievement, and the story of human nature, and the story of the happenings of earth.
In 1893, E. J. Edwards was at the pinnacle of his career. His column was one of the most respected and widely read in the country. In Stephen Crane, he had discovered and nurtured a magnificent young talent. Even his predictions for the future were in demand. Yet a chance meeting that summer would alter the course of his career and eventually cost him his good reputation.
______________
* After the newsboys went on strike in 1899, the newspapers finally agreed to buy back their unsold copies.
* Later accounts say the offer was perhaps less flattering than Crane had led Edwards to believe: no advance and a 10 percent royalty.
8
EXPOSED
LIKE THE REST of the country, E. J. Edwards had no inkling of Grover Cleveland’s illness when the president left Washington for his secret operation. Edwards blindly accepted Grover’s explanation that he was merely going on holiday. On July 1, 1893, the day the president had much of his upper jaw removed on the Oneida, Edwards filed a long, breezy dispatch filled with gossip from New York. “[Interior Secretary Hoke Smith] is the only member of the cabinet who has dared to assert himself in the presence of the president. . . . [A] delegation of starving miners may be sent to Washington from Colorado and Montana demanding from President Cleveland not bread but silver, which is the same thing to them.” Toward the end of the column, Edwards noted that Elias Benedict was looking forward to spending the month with the president on Buzzards Bay. “Mr. Benedict says that Mr. Cleveland is as impatient for the sea bass fishing and as hungry for a day’s sport trolling for bluefish as a schoolboy is for the first day of his vacation.”
Then, one hot afternoon in late August, Edwards was returning to his Greenwich home after a brief vacation, when an old friend named Leander Jones flagged down his carriage. Jones was a well-connected doctor who counted among his patients some of the most powerful and wealthy figures of the Gilded Age, including Elias Benedict.
“I stopped,” Edwards later wrote, “and he suggested that we go to one side for he had important news to tell me.”
Jones said to Edwards, “We have narrowly escaped, I think, having Vice President Stevenson transferred from the Senate Chamber to the White House, as president.”
Jones then proceeded to tell Edwards a most incredible story. He had learned from his friend and fellow doctor, Carlos MacDonald, that Grover Cleveland was ill. MacDonald had heard the story from a dentist named Ferdinand Hasbrouck, who said he’d taken part in an operation to remove a cancerous tumor from the president’s mouth. The operation had been performed in total secrecy on the Oneida, Elias Benedict’s yacht.
“Dr. Jones told me that the fact was sure to get out,” Edwards later recalled, “and that he thought there was no reason why he should not tell me the story.”
Edwards was stunned. He’d just been handed the scoop of the century, though in time he might wish he hadn’t been. The story Jones told wasn’t merely sensational, it was inflammatory, and Edwards understood the repercussions of reporting it. The White House still insisted the president had suffered from nothing worse than a toothache and a touch of rheumatism. By revealing that Cleveland had actually had a cancerous tumor removed from his mouth, Edwards would singlehandedly plunge the administration—and, perhaps, the country—into turmoil. He would also be risking his good name, for the president’s allies were sure to kill the messenger, at least metaphorically.
Determined to confirm the story, Edwar
ds went into the city early the next day to call on Ferdinand Hasbrouck, the dentist who’d told Jones’s friend about the surgery in the first place. Hasbrouck lived in a handsome brownstone on 126th Street in Harlem, then the most fashionable neighborhood in the city. Edwards climbed the steps and rang the bell. Hasbrouck answered in his nightshirt. Edwards apologized for waking the dentist but explained that he was a newspaperman on deadline and needed to verify a few facts for a story he was writing. His introduction sounded innocuous enough. Hasbrouck invited Edwards inside.
Edwards waited in the parlor while Hasbrouck went upstairs to change into his morning coat. When he returned, the dentist took a seat close to Edwards. Hasbrouck was fifty, wiry, and handsome, with thinning dark hair and a full beard. He’d fought in the Civil War and was slightly deaf, apparently as a result of his battlefield experience. He cupped his hand behind his ear as Edwards spoke. Almost nonchalantly, Edwards told Hasbrouck everything he’d learned about the operation from Jones: the rendezvous on the Oneida, the makeshift operating theater below deck, the surgery itself.
Hasbrouck was flabbergasted. He listened in amazement.
“Some of the physicians who were aboard the yacht must have told you that story,” he exclaimed. “You could not have obtained it in any other way!”
Edwards calmly asked Hasbrouck if the story was true.
Yes, Hasbrouck admitted, it was true. There was no point in denying it any longer. Hasbrouck told him everything. He also assured Edwards that the president had weathered the ordeal remarkably well and that the doctors were confident of his full recovery.
When the dentist finished, Edwards thanked him for his time and excused himself. He hurried to his office in the Schermerhorn Building and prepared a story about the operation for the Press, writing furiously in longhand as usual. He could not risk transmitting the story to Philadelphia by telegraph, however; a Western Union operator could not be trusted with such sensitive information. So Edwards phoned it in: he read the story to his editor at the Press over a telephone line. All the while, Edwards feared another reporter would beat him to the punch. “I was sure that the news would speedily get out,” Edwards remembered, “and I had the newspaperman’s desire to be the first to publish important news—what we call a ‘beat.’”
The President Is a Sick Man Page 14