In Washington, Bennett finally made a real mark. Beginning in January 1828, he regularly transmitted richly detailed “letters” in the style of English author Horace Walpole’s celebrated Correspondence. Bennett’s encyclopedic columns colorfully described scenes ranging from Andrew Jackson’s clamorous White House receptions to spirited floor debates in Congress that the journalist observed from the press galleries. “These letters were lively, they abounded in personal allusions, and they described freely, not only Senators, but the wives and daughters of Senators,” marveled the young journalist Benjamin Perley Poore, “and they established Mr. Bennett’s reputation as a light lance among the hosts of writers” covering the capital. Poore marked Bennett as “naturally witty” and “sarcastic”—but also “sensible”—a combination of gifts he regarded as rare and marketable.
At the time, Democratic Party dogma was dispensed in Washington by the official administration organ, the United States Telegraph, edited by Duff Green, but allegedly financed by Old Hickory himself. Equally privy to official policy was the Washington Globe, the pro-Jackson paper edited by Francis Preston Blair, Sr., whom yet another Democratic editor described as “thoroughly familiar with the great chieftain” in the White House.69 Indeed, Blair, who lived in a town house situated just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the executive mansion, served simultaneously as a personal advisor to the president, a member of the coterie of confidants known as the “Kitchen Cabinet.” Though young Bennett never disguised his own Democratic bias—he was a “rampant Jackson blockhead,” he admitted—he boasted no such close ties with the president, covering the political scene with what he called “all the ease which a sense of freedom inspires.”70
A year later, Mordecai Manuel Noah’s Enquirer merged with James Watson Webb’s Courier, and the new ownership under Webb summoned Bennett home to reassume the post of associate editor. Webb’s editorial policies, however, quickly made its star writer uneasy: he wholeheartedly supported the controversial Second Bank of the United States, against which Bennett and fellow Jacksonians had consistently railed. Frustrated, Bennett “abandoned” the Courier and Enquirer “in consequence of its abandonment of General Jackson.”71 In 1832 he again tried establishing his own paper, but it survived barely two months. His application to Blair for a job at the Globe went nowhere. Growing desperate, Bennett briefly relocated to Philadelphia to edit a Democratic campaign organ called The Pennsylvanian.
Like most loyal party journalists of the time, Bennett believed his ultimate salvation should arrive in the form of appointment to a well-paying patronage post from the administration on which he had lavished so much praise. After all, similar rewards regularly came to other editors friendly to the party in power. In Washington, the last Congress had awarded the leading Democratic paper $353,000 in printing business.72 But party leaders, Vice President Martin Van Buren included, harbored doubts about Bennett’s reliability. However gifted his prose or ardent his support, he was hard to discipline. His strange demeanor, grating accent, and permanent squint continued to make people uneasy; he still seemed uncomfortably alien. The job to which Bennett aspired—the consulship at Bremen—went to someone else. Suspicion ran so deep that the party would not even advance Bennett money to launch a brand-new Democratic paper in the manner of Duff Green—another increasingly common practice political organizations employed to reward (and control) press allies. “They treated me very badly,” Bennett fumed. He sounded rather more disconsolate than embittered when he confided to his diary: “I have endeavored to secure a high position in parties, and to settle myself in life. I have always failed—why so?”73
In 1835, Bennett answered his own question. Perhaps success had eluded him in New York, Washington, and Philadelphia alike because he had remained independent and irascible, but within the strict, unforgiving party-press culture. What he needed was to establish his own rules—to work for himself. Somehow he managed to scrape together enough money to strike out on his own—after young Horace Greeley declined to become his partner in a decision that surely changed journalistic, and conceivably American, history. Instead Bennett elected to follow Ben Day’s example, but to tweak it ever so brilliantly, and to labor as hard and as publicly as it took to make it a success.
Opening shop in cramped offices, with desks made of wooden planks thrown atop crates, Bennett proved tireless. During the infancy of his newly minted Herald, he served as the sole reporter of local news—and more. He bought and read all the rival papers so he could “adapt” their state, national, and foreign reports for his own pages. He wrote literary reviews and founded a trenchant “Money Market” column to report on financial events in language ordinary New Yorkers could understand (accompanied, for the first time, by close-of-trading stock prices). He sold advertisements himself. He personally tended to the bills and accounts. Meanwhile he took to boasting in print that he was leading a life of leisure, claiming his daily routine allowed him to dine “moderately and temperately” at 4 P.M., then “read our proofs—take in cash and advertisements, which are increasing like smoke—and close the day by going to bed always by ten o’clock, seldom later. That’s the way to conduct a paper with spirit and success.”74 But energy and braggadocio alone did not make him successful.
Shrewdly, Bennett aimed his sights from the start at a slightly more sophisticated audience than that of the penny press pioneers. He targeted a more middle-class readership whose demand for news would not fluctuate with the economic climate, and who would likely patronize a daily newspaper that combined a passion for politics with the irreverent spice of the penny press. At ten-by-fourteen inches in size, the Herald was smaller than the blanket sheets, but larger than the Sun. Unafraid of either form of competition, Bennett vowed in his premiere issue that the Herald would work to become the “equal of any of the high priced papers for intelligence, good taste, sagacity, and industry, [until] there is not a person in the city, male or female, that may not be able to say—‘well, I have got a paper of my own which will tell me all about what’s doing in the world—I’m busy now—but I’ll put it in my pocket and read it at my leisure.’ ” Here was bombast with a common touch, composed in the edgy tone that became Bennett’s trademark. The declaration went on:
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 election or 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. It is equally intended for the great masses of the community—the merchant, mechanic, working people—the private family as well as the public hotel—the journeyman and his employer—the clerk and his principal.75
Of course, Bennett well knew he would never attract legions of readers by being “sound” and “good tempered.” He had no intention of being either. His target was the vast audience bored by the blanket sheets and mortified by the Sun. “There are in this city at least 150,000 persons who glance over one or more newspapers every day,” he calculated. “Only 42,000 sheets are issued daily to supply them. We have plenty of room, therefore, without jostling neighbors, rivals or friends, to pick up at least twenty or thirty thousand for the HERALD.”76 In this goal, he actually proved too modest. More in keeping with his overabundant confidence was a promise he made only privately: “That I can surpass every paper in New York, every paper will acknowledge—that I will do so, I am resolved, determined.” In print he showcased his gift for acerbic humor, and his willingness to take on the pompous and powerful.
He boasted that by eschewing “dry detail—uninteresting facts—political nonsense—personal squabbles—obsolete news,” he had “infused life, glowing eloquence, philosophy, taste, sentiment, wit and humor into the daily newspaper.” Bennett was not modest. “Shakespeare is the great genius of the drama—S
cott of the novel—Milton and Byron of the poem—and I mean to be the genius of the daily newspaper press.”77 Other examples of his uninhibited bombast included likening himself to Napoleon, Confucius, Charlemagne, and Alexander the Great.78 Not since Benjamin Franklin did an editor become such a successful promoter of himself.
Bennett managed to live up to his own publicity. And he did so, uniquely, while remaining unpredictable in, but not aloof from, politics. Partisan papers attracted readers by attacking their political foes. Bennett attracted readers by attacking all politicians, typically labeling them, regardless of party, as “tricksters,” “loafers,” “parasites,” and “vagabonds,” among other epithets.79 His paper appealed to readers who cared more for news than for party affiliation. Yet Bennett maintained political influence by never abandoning his appetite for the political arena itself. For example, he took on rival editors during the municipal campaigns of 1837, backing the Tammany Hall Democratic machine, though it went on to suffer a pummeling at the polls. One New York print publisher responded with a cartoon gleefully depicting editors, including Webb, shooting an arrow into the heart of a defeated Indian (representing Tammany), while trampling on Bennett, who can be seen cringing on the ground shouting: “Murder! . . . Save me! I’m the Ladies’ Favorite! . . . Squint Eye! Oh!!”80 Bennett and the Herald became staples in anti-Democratic caricature—another mark of the editor’s growing power and celebrity.
Though he remained aligned with Democratic principles, Bennett punished the national Democratic establishment for its previous neglect of him. He abandoned Van Buren and the Democrats during the 1840 presidential contest and threw his support behind Whig challenger William Henry Harrison. Eventually Bennett did return more reliably to the Democratic fold, too conservative on issues like race to flirt with Whig politics permanently. But his 1840 defection made it clear he was not to be taken for granted.
Certainly he was no progressive. In print, as in life, Bennett staunchly opposed abolition and ridiculed the notion of equality for African Americans. Otherwise his targets had little in common except that they had somehow aroused his enmity. He mercilessly demonized the Art-Union—a new organization formed merely to link painters with potential patrons—as a secret antislavery society. Although born Roman Catholic, he branded the pope “a decrepit, licentious, stupid, Italian blockhead” and later picked a protracted fight with the bishop of the New York diocese.81 He feuded with theatrical impresarios, ward heelers, newspaper competitors, and perceived idlers. His pen was both prolific and toxic. Bennett labeled the rival Sun as a “dirty, sneaking, driveling contemporary nigger paper” and endorsed slavery as the “natural position of the Southern colored races.” Jews he declared to be “without a single redeeming feature, except the beauty, excellence, black eyes, small feet, and fine forms of their women.”82 A lapsed advertiser who took his business elsewhere was labeled a bamboozler. Politicians who irked him, fellow journalists who questioned him, and celebrities who merely seemed ripe for humiliation inspired venom more poisonous than anything a metropolitan newspaper had ever printed. Bennett reveled in the chaos he created, and unlike his peers never seemed to take his feuds too seriously.
On one hand Bennett introduced the public-spirited tradition of reprinting important political orations promptly, and in full, and invented the tradition of investigative journalism. On the other, he recklessly targeted revered institutions and unexpectedly savaged innocent organizations. He also zestfully raked the muck when it came to reporting violent crime, prostitution, theatrical feuds, and scandals among both the high-born and the low. He seemed to relish being ornery and unpredictable, basked in his reputation for contentiousness, enjoyed being feared, and cherished his growing reputation for putting “a penny-worth of scandal on every man’s breakfast table.”83
The dynamic editor made no pretense to lofty idealism, nor did he overestimate his audience. He confidently believed New Yorkers “were more ready to seek six columns of the details of a brutal murder, or of testimony in a divorce case, or the trial of a divine for improprieties of conduct, than the same amount of words poured forth by the genius of the noblest author of the times.” His own “picture of the world,” he conceded, took him “wherever human nature and real life best display their freaks and vagaries.”84 Unashamedly, he admitted that “there was more journalistic money to be made in recording gossip that interested bar-rooms, work-shops, race courses and tenement houses, than in consulting the tastes of drawing rooms and libraries.”85 Yet even his most billious screeds had to be well crafted. Bennett was a strong and persuasive writer, and he maintained a lively, accessible, sardonic literary style that appealed to all classes, even those who were ashamed to tell their friends they read the Herald.
While Bennett taunted his competitors with the self-assurance of an Old World potentate and the bravado of a circus ringmaster (becoming something of a Barnum well before Barnum took on that role himself), he ran the business side of his enterprise with the acuity of a modern technocrat. Like Benjamin Day at the Sun, Bennett priced his lively paper at a penny, and organized its distribution according to the London Plan, selling copies at reduced rates to newsdealers. Once established, Bennett’s resiliency proved remarkable, his ability to triumph over tragedy uncanny. When fire—a constant danger in poorly ventilated buildings where employees smoked freely while setting hot type—destroyed his equipment and headquarters in August 1835, he simply secured a new office on Broadway. In the meantime, Bennett grandiosely humbled himself by advertising the Herald’s imminent revival on the pages of the yet more popular Sun.86 After a hiatus of only nineteen days, he bombastically relaunched a “larger, livelier, better, prettier, saucier, and more independent” paper than ever.87
James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, ca. 1840s.
Pledging that his resuscitated publication would become “the earliest of the early,” Bennett invested in the fastest new steam-driven printing presses, and threw himself into the task of gathering news more rapidly than his rivals.88 To acquire foreign news, most competitors were still content to dispatch employees to wait at the city’s wharves, there to meet ships carrying European newspapers whose already outdated reports could be purloined at no cost. Bennett instead hired “news boats” to intercept the papers while the ships were still at sea.
Bennett also began exploiting the rapidly expanding railroad system to speed his papers to readers in Boston, Philadelphia, and Albany, making his the first truly regional daily. He became one of the first to embrace the telegraph as a means of receiving news faster than ever. He introduced maps and line illustrations on his front pages. He pioneered in foreign correspondence and introduced the interview to journalism. And he eventually created a national weekly edition to expand the Herald’s reach well beyond New York, including an edition translated into French.89 Meanwhile, he famously demanded cash in advance for advertising. The Herald accepted notices not only from legitimate businessmen, but also from patent medicine salesman, medical charlatans, spiritualists, and even professional “escorts,” as long as they paid up front. Before long, the paper became the first to boast a classified section larger than its news space.
To create what he called “a commercial paper for the millions,” Bennett endeavored to be “serious in my aims, but full of frolic in my means.” Not everyone was amused. The Courier and Enquirer labeled him “a beggardly outcast, who daily sends forth a dirty sheet,” and the Journal of Commerce added that “if he got his desserts,” Bennett “would be horsewhipped every day.” In response, the Herald defiantly reprinted and mocked the criticism.90 Bennett’s audacious tone, irreverent voice, and most of all his growing success, irritated his envious rivals almost to distraction.
The competition eventually became too much for one of them in particular: his onetime employer, Courier and Enquirer editor James Watson Webb. Already a veteran of several public brawls, Webb confronted Bennett in the business district one day in 1836 and shoved him down the front steps
of a brokerage house in full view of astonished traders and speculators. Then for good measure Webb struck him with his walking stick. Recovering quickly, no worse for the scrape, Bennett took to print to taunt his old boss for losing both his temper and the spat he had initiated. “My damage is a scratch . . . and three buttons torn on my coat, which my tailor will reinstate for a sixpence,” the Herald editor gloated after the fracas. “His loss is a rent from top to bottom of a very beautiful black coat, which cost the ruffian $40, and a blow in the face, which may have knocked down his throat some of his infernal teeth for anything I know.” Perhaps, he gleefully added, Webb had aimed his cane at Bennett’s head in an attempt “to let out the never-failing supply of good humor and wit, which has created such a reputation for the Herald, and appropriate the contents to supply the emptiness of his own thick skull.” Bennett assured his readers that “My ideas, in a few days, will flow as freely as ever, and he will find it so, to his cost.”91
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 6