by Pete Hamill
The management of this STOREHOUSE OF EARTH’S NOVELTIES, for the STUDY AND ENLIGHTENMENT OF ALL, has sought to make it an ATTRACTIVE MEDIUM OF POPULAR DIVERSION. There has been a sedulous desire to combine all the EXCITABLE ELEMENTS OF ENJOYMENT, with the total absence of an impure suggestion. All that is NOVEL AND CURIOUS, comprising FOREIGN ODDITIES AND NATIVE WONDERS, are here exhibited for the purpose of collecting curiosities being established in America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. In addition to the list of A Million Curiosities, is a collection of ZOOLOGICAL RARITIES, which is constantly receiving additions of singular and curious species, forming a splendid Menagerie of Living Animals. The exquisitely interesting GRAND AQUARIA, OCEAN AND RIVER GARDENS, containing the finest specimens of fish, truly pronounced the EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD. The life-like MOVING WAX FIGURES—ENORMOUS GIANTS—DIMINUTIVE DWARFS—LIVING OTTERS—THE MAMMOTH WHALE TANK, containing Splendid Specimens of LIVING WHALES—THE LIGHTNING CALCULATOR—GLASS BLOWERS—MAMMOTH FAT WOMAN—LIVING SEALS, etc. may be seen at all hours. Refined and pleasing entertainments are given THREE TIMES DAILY. . . .
Barnum was the most successful showman of his day, his theater offering three thousand seats to all comers except African Americans. But his ad in the 1866 guide was wasted, and demonstrated the hazards of lead time, the gap between submission of copy and actual publication; the theater burned down near the end of 1865. It was rebuilt, and again burned down in 1868, and Barnum shifted his talents to the circus. How I wish I’d been able to see those moving wax figures and the mammoth whale tank. They were certainly seen by the editors and reporters who worked in the area, along with all the other oddities. Barnum’s gifts for showmanship, promotion, and novelty surely affected the newspapers they made each day. Barnum, after all, spoke in banner headlines.
The content of newspapers was also affected by the hokum and hoopla that came from Barnum’s fertile mind. A unique human blend was forming in that first major New York crossroads, combining God, politics, commerce, sin, and spectacle. These were all essential components of the emerging city and became the fundamental table of contents for the more than twenty daily newspapers. The combination remained part of the city’s 1960s tabloids and exists in its own variations to this day, made even more vivid (or brainless) by the advent of cable television. Around the crossroads near Barnum’s American Museum, the nineteenth-century side streets bustled with restaurants, bookstores, bordellos, drinking establishments, “day” gambling joints, cigar stores, tailors, printers, and other, less prosperous newspapers, including my own New York Post, which was housed after 1902 at 20 Vesey Street, just off Church.
As the South Tower collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the great fierce cloud came rushing at me, my wife, Fukiko, and some cops and firemen where we stood at the corner of Vesey and Church streets, I was separated from Fukiko, unable to see through the opaque cloud that had engulfed us. The horizon vanished. The impact of all that falling glass and steel had emptied the world of sound. I was coughing and stumbling and calling my wife’s name and then was shoved to safety into the lobby of that same former New York Evening Post Building. That is, into the place where the journalistic heirs of William Cullen Bryant once directed reporters in the name of civilization. Later that terrible morning, walking away from the disaster into a world covered with the fine white talcumlike dust of mass death, I saw that all of City Hall Park was white too, and all the surrounding buildings, and I remembered for a moment sitting in the park when it was green and so was I. After a while, in the changed white world, I found my wife eight blocks away and we hugged each other with the joy of the living.
In those innocent days when I was learning my trade, I often wondered what it would have been like to work for Horace Greeley or James Gordon Bennett in a time when there were no electric lights, no typewriters, no telephones, and no telegraph. In imagination, I saw myself scribble in candlelight. I saw myself rushing to the Bowery with pencil and paper, in search of some story, and finding that Stephen Crane had arrived before me. I saw Richard Harding Davis emerging from a hansom cab on a morning thick with harbor fog, as handsome as the drawings by Charles Dana Gibson that used him as an American male archetype, and striding into the World Building. Or I was working at the World for the most sadistically brilliant of all city editors, a man named Charles Chapin. By all accounts, he had a gift for anticipating breaking news, drove his staff hard, treated them like swine, and fired them for minor infractions (in those dreadful days before the creation of the Newspaper Guild). In my lurid young man’s imagination, I was two minutes late one morning, and Chapin fired me, and I beat him senseless and went down the block to work for the Sun. Then I exulted, in a shameful way, after Chapin admitted shooting his aging wife, Nellie, in the head in a 1918 “murder-suicide pact” (that later tabloid staple). Chapin, alas, couldn’t find the nerve to kill himself. In my mind, I went to cover his trial and saw him plead guilty. Later, with some pity and more compassion than Chapin ever showed his subjects or his staff, I wrote about his death in Sing Sing in 1930 and how the warden said he had become gentler and had created a rose garden for his fellow cons. In my youthful imaginings, newspapermen always had the last word.
I was reading about all of them, trying to fill in the blanks of my education, a task I now know I will never complete. In an imaginary 1858, I went drinking in the dark smoky cellar of Pfaff’s on Broadway at Bleecker Street, the first true outpost of the city’s underground bohemia, and met all the newspapermen and bad poets and hungry painters, and their women too, and even talked one afternoon with Walt Whitman, over for the day from Brooklyn. I was summoned to Paris by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the bizarre son of the man who created modern journalism. He was, of course, drunk and abusive and insisted that I shave my beard in his presence, and I left his office and sent him a variation of the famous Hemingway cable to another press baron: UPSTICK JOB ASSWARDS.
For a while, I worked in my mind at the New York Tribune for Horace Greeley, whose statue is now to the east of City Hall, looking pensive and tired, a newspaper drooping in his hand. In that 1890 bronze by sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward, Greeley doesn’t look up at Park Row or the place where his newspaper once stood until it was demolished to widen the approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge. He appears to be thinking about his time on earth in the amazing city (he died in 1872, and the tranquil, melancholy statue was a long time coming). In life, Greeley was small and brave, a country boy with a reedy voice. His often fleeting enthusiasms charged his newspaper with a sense of surprise. Greeley never encountered an ism that he didn’t like. He embraced socialism (even hiring Karl Marx to send a column from Europe, a weekly letter that was probably written by Friedrich Engels and continued for more than a decade). He championed abolitionism. He celebrated vegetarianism. Late in life, he even dabbled in table-rapping spiritualism. But he put out a very good newspaper. He fought valiantly in print against slavery and saw clearly that the fate of the conquered Mexican territories could lead to a great, heartbreaking American civil war. His reporters returned again and again to the miseries of the New York poor, even though Greeley knew that his middle-class audience preferred a moralizing indifference. He was erratic, an imperfect husband, a self-deluded player in professional politics (even running for president against U. S. Grant in 1872, after abandoning the Republican party he’d helped create). But he was a superb newspaperman.
The man who deserved a statue and never got one was James Gordon Bennett. He was tall, gaunt, cross-eyed, sardonic, sober, intense; Dickens, that old court reporter, would have loved him. Even now, I wish I’d been around when he was inventing the kind of newspaper that I was working for in 1960 and will always cherish. Bennett published a tabloid before there were tabloids. He was born a Catholic in Scotland and started the New York Herald in 1835 in a cellar in Ann Street with, as he said, “five hundred dollars, two chairs, and a dry-goods box.” He sold his new four-page newspaper for a penny, directly competing in price with the three-yea
r-old New York Sun. He started finding an audience. The following year, he discovered a crucial part of the newspaper formula: the endless New York appetite for murder.
The occasion was the brutal killing of a twenty-three-year-old prostitute who called herself Helen Jewett. On the Saturday night of April 9, 1836, her body was found smoldering on the bed of a bordello at 41 Thomas Street. This was three blocks north of Chambers Street, between Church Street and Chapel (now West Broadway). The young woman had been hit on the head with a small ax and then set on fire. As the news spread the following morning, Bennett did something revolutionary: He went to the scene of the crime. Until then, crime news was generally buried inside the newspapers, if covered at all, and the reporters were satisfied with secondhand versions from the police. What the hell: Bad things do happen on Saturday nights. Bennett’s Sunday morning visit revealed details that made the crime a sensation. It was one of those accidents of timing that change everything.
To begin with, Bennett noticed a portrait of Lord Byron on the wall. He saw books on a shelf by Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Alexander Pope, Homer, Dryden, and others. Clearly this was no ordinary prostitute. Beyond the furnishings, he saw the young woman’s body, uncovered for him by a friendly policeman. Bennett was then forty-one. His description of the young woman’s corpse, as several feminist scholars have since pointed out, borders on the pornographic:
I could scarcely look at it for a second or two. Slowly I began to discover the lineaments of the corpse as one would the beauties of a statue of marble. It was the most remarkable sight I ever beheld—I never have, and never expect to see such another. “My God,” exclaimed I, “how like a statue! I can scarcely conceive that form to be a corpse.” Not a vein was to be seen. The body looked as white, as full, as polished as the purest Parian marble. The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici according to the casts generally given of her.
The helpful policeman told Bennett that Jewett had assumed her present appearance in less than an hour. Bennett wrote on:
It was the first process of dust returning to dust. The countenance was calm and passionless. Not the slightest appearance of emotion was there. One arm lay over her bosom—the other was inverted and hanging over her head. The left side down to the waist, where the fire had touched, was bronzed like an antique statue. For a few moments I was lost in admiration at this extraordinary sight—a beautiful female corpse, that surpassed the finest statue of antiquity. I was recalled to her horrid destiny by seeing the dreadful bloody gashes on the right temple, which must have caused instantaneous dissolution.
Bennett went on and on in that first day’s story, proving that even editors need editors, but he had found something that shook the genteel world of the business-oriented newspapers of the day. In the expanding, unruly city, violent crime was now a critical newspaper subject. Murder was the best subject of all. For days, Bennett followed up his first-day story on the Helen Jewett case, describing in detail her life before New York and her true identity, along with many details about the man who was quickly charged with her murder, a well-off young bachelor named Richard P. Robinson. The Herald’s crude presses broke down trying to service the audience. At one point, Bennett was selling thirty-five thousand copies a day while the respectable sheets were averaging eight thousand. He followed the trial of the accused (young Robinson eventually got off with the help of expensive lawyers). Bennett shifted and turned in his own judgment of the man’s guilt, first convinced Robinson was the killer, then wondering in print how such a well-brought-up young American could have committed such a heinous crime. The readers didn’t care about his inconsistencies; they kept reading. As he grew older and richer, Bennett never forgot the lesson taught by the case of Helen Jewett. Details, clearly presented, were everything. In the future, the Herald would always be the home of vivid writing. Most other newspapers learned from Bennett and by the time I was learning the craft, 125 years later, murder remained part of the daily package. Because of Bennett, crime had become a permanent part of the New York imagination.
But Bennett didn’t limit his newspaper to crime. He created the first cadre of foreign correspondents. He accelerated the velocity of news, using carrier pigeons, fast harbor boats, pony express, and eventually the telegraph to get the news while it was new. He insisted that the stock market, society, sports, and religion were worthy subjects of sustained scrutiny too. In those decades before photoreproduction, he illustrated his stories with woodcuts, if necessary, or cartoons, or charts and maps. He demanded live interviews with people in the news, written in words that made pictures in the minds of the readers. He invented the weather report and the women’s section, and sent his reporters off to the Bowery theaters and the surging district of the new Broadway to deal with what came to be known as popular culture. Bennett didn’t get moralistic about certain facts of New York life. He created what is now known as a personals column, where lovers could make appointments and ladies of the sporting life could offer their services.
His rivals tried to destroy him. They said he was a vulgarian, a crude sensationalist, a man coarsening the life of New York. Bennett fought back, modified some of his stridency, and survived. To be sure, he had immense flaws. In his own writings, he was too quick to cast aspersions. He libeled his competitors with fierce abandon (earning at least one public horsewhipping). He was often blatantly racist and supported slavery in the South, where he had many readers. He sneered at all abolitionists, starting with Greeley. But he published a newspaper that many thousands wanted to read, even when they were furious with its editorials. The Herald was alive. It was bright and audacious. It was driven by reporting. The editorials were often frantic, but the news was new. Or as new as Bennett could make it.
As a young reporter, reading about the men who made the newspapers in the nineteenth century, I had few grand illusions. I never thought that I was entering the greatest center of communications in the United States and therefore the world. I just wanted to work at a trade I loved. I also had no illusions about the moral superiority of my colleagues, neither those I worked with at the Post nor those I worked against from the other papers. Most lived with the wisdom taught by human folly. They’d all have laughed at such pretensions. I was also instructed about human frailty by the history of the trade itself, as practiced in New York.
One great case history was the story of James Gordon Bennett Jr. His father died in 1872, leaving the Herald in the hands of his spoiled lout of a son, who was then twenty-six. In spite of his great flaws as a human being, his impulsiveness, his invincibly self-indulgent ways, Junior turned out to be a surprisingly good newspaperman. He spent most of his time after 1877 in Europe because of a personal scandal in which he was the key figure. The script was unintentionally hilarious. On New Year’s Eve 1876, he was engaged to marry a young society woman. He arrived late at the young woman’s home, where friends and family were gathered for a party. Young Bennett proceeded to urinate in front of fiancée and guests. One report said he used the fireplace as his receptacle. Another insisted that it was a grand piano. Whatever the prop, the drama erupted, and the appalled men of the family threw Bennett into the night.
The aggrieved young woman broke the engagement. And a few days later, the woman’s brother horsewhipped Bennett Jr. in front of the Union Club, making blood run in the snow. This was great stuff. The upper orders of society, which had accepted Bennett when they wouldn’t accept his father, immediately blackballed him. He received no further invitations to New York events where women would be present. Off he went to Paris, where he had been raised, and stayed for almost four decades. He built the grandest yacht of the day. He created the Paris Herald (dismissed as a rich boy’s whim, it remains alive today, owned by the Herald’s old rival the New York Times). Bennett sent Stanley in search of Livingston, ordered up hundreds of other stories. He maintained control of the New Yor
k paper through a network of office spies called the White Mice. Under his long-distance command, the paper maintained high standards of reporting and continued to break story after story.
In New York, however, everything was changing in the newspaper business. Joseph Pulitzer arrived in 1883, an immigrant from Hungary who had been a Union soldier in the last year of the Civil War and gone on to make a great success of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He was thirty-six, his eyesight already failing, but he was burning with a passion for newspapers. He bought the failing World for $346,000 from the notorious stock speculator Jay Gould, a huge price for a paper that was losing $40,000 a year. Almost immediately, Pulitzer transformed it into the most profitable newspaper of its time. The key to success, as usual, was solid reporting. The reporters were the front line of Pulitzer’s crusades against desperate living conditions, poor schools, inadequate water and transportation. The politics of the editorial page were liberal, in contrast to the conservative politics of almost every other New York newspaper. As an immigrant, Pulitzer also insisted that his reporters cover the new arrivals from Italy and Eastern Europe, even if they could not read the World. “Their children will,” he said. And they did.
One person closely watching Pulitzer’s achievement was William Randolph Hearst, a rich young man from the West whose father had become a millionaire with a piece of the Comstock Lode. For a brief time, after leaving Harvard in 1886, young Hearst worked as a reporter for Pulitzer, studying the formula as Pulitzer was practicing it. Then he went west, took over his father’s San Francisco Examiner, and made it a huge success with a kick-the-door-down brand of aggressive reporting. Hearst perfected a cruder version of what Pulitzer was doing in New York. The vision was simple: Life in an American city was made of white hats and black hats, and Hearst, the roaring populist, was on the side of the white hats in crusades against vice, corruption, and crime. Within a few years the circulation of his newspaper doubled, and Hearst made a small fortune. At the same time, he was dreaming larger dreams. He began casting a covetous eye on New York.