The Press: Sun’s Centary

Sun’s Centenary

At No. 170 Nassau St. between the years 1868 and 1915 was a long, ill-lit, barnlike room jammed with rolltop desks, littered with paper, its walls smeared with grime and dirt. When the presses pounded on the floor above, a thin downpour of dust floated over the room. Grimy wires and rusty old hooks used by gymnasts when Tammany Hall had occupied the building were suspended from the ceiling. A tortuous circular staircase led to the room, up & down which ambitious young reporters used to trudge: Arthur Brisbane, Samuel Hopkins Adams, David Graham Phillips, Edwin C. Hill, Will and Wallace Irwin, Walter Pritchard Eaton. It was the old city room of the New York Sun.

Old Sun reporters now refer to it as a rat-haunt, shudder at its squalid gloom. To Ben Day it was the amazing manifestation of a newspaper idea he had conceived, toyed with, but left to others to carry through.

Last week in Manhattan the Sun celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Ben Day’s idea. It got out a 104-page edition describing the history of the Sun from Day through Charles Anderson Dana down to the present ownership. Included was a reprint of the Sun’s first issue.

Benjamin H. Day got out that issue in his dirty little printing shop on William Street because financial panic and an epidemic of cholera had brought his business to a standstill. It was a tiny four-page sheet with the wrong date—1832 instead of 1833—printed under the mast-head. It promised to report all the news of the day. In two months it had 2,000 subscribers, within a year 10,000. But not until 1835 did the Sun become famous. And then it was the moon that made it so. A cross-eyed reporter named Richard Adams Locke wrote an ingenious account of how Sir John Herschel. with his new telescope, had found manbats, beasts and weird vegetation on the moon. Locke’s hoax shoved the Sim’s circulation up to 19,000—largest of any daily in the world —and Ben Day could boast that New Yorkers read the Sun by day, studied the moon by night. Nine years later the Sun fostered another fable—the balloon hoax. It was Edgar Allan Poe’s account of a supposed airship flight from England to South Carolina. The hoax lasted for only a day, the Sun itself explaining that the “astounding intelligence” was erroneous.

In 1838 Ben Day sold the Sun to his brother-in-law, Moses Yale Beach, for $40,000, and 30 years later said it was the silliest thing he ever did. The Beach family managed the paper for 30 years, except for the period from 1860-62 when a religious group edited it and held noon prayer meetings in the city room. Then in 1868 a group of investors headed by Charles Anderson Dana bought the Sun for $175,000, moved it lock, stock & barrel to the fusty old building on Nassau Street.

Dana had been managing editor of the potent Tribune under Horace Greeley but had resigned because of repeated differences. For Dana, the country boy who had clerked in a Buffalo store, gone to Harvard for three years until eye-strain forced him out, ownership of the Sun was a third career. (His second had been an Assistant Secretary of War.)Traveled, informed, scholarly, artistic, he gave the Sun his own peculiar tart philosophy. To people who objected to the things he printed, Dana retorted: “I have always felt that whatever the divine Providence permitted to occur, I was not too proud to report.”‘ Passionately fond of a good story, he demanded that his reporters write interestingly. Life to him was no mere procession of elections, legislatures, murders. It was “a new kind of apple, a crying child on the curb, the exact weight of a candidate for President, the latest style in whiskers, the idiosyncrasies of the City Hall clock, a new football coach at Yale, a vendetta in Mulberry Bend.”

Dana’s years as editor were the years of the nation’s lusty westward expansion and of governmental corruption from Washington down to the meanest village. From his famed corner office, piled high with books and newspapers, he fought corruption with brilliant and penetrating satire, lambasted the Tweed Ring, the Credit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring. When Pennsylvania’s corrupt State Treasurer W. H. Kemble wrote a letter to a claim agent in Washington introducing a self-seeking friend, Dana pounced upon the last line in the latter—”He understands addition, division, and silence”—as the platform of widespread fraud. Before Dana had finished, every street urchin knew the phrase, and Kemble was behind bars. Even President Cleveland feared the power of Dana’s pen, tried to buy up the Sun to muzzle his attacks. In the 30 years of Dana’s reign, the Sun trebled its circulation, added an evening edition.

Out in the rat-haunted city room a patient, portly gentleman named Chester Sanders Lord was doing for the Sun’s news coverage what Dana was doing for its editorial prestige. It was “Boss” Lord (he died last month at 83, nationally remembered) who worked out the Sun’s own system for gathering election returns in the Cleveland-Elaine campaign. He announced correctly that Cleveland had carried New York when all the other papers had conceded it to Elaine. Boss Lord’s figures were within 50 votes of the official count. When Dana broke off relations with the Associated Press, it was Boss Lord who sent out a bucketful of wires and next day had all the national and foreign news he wanted. Not until Munsey bought the Sun did it abandon its own national news service—the Laffan News Bureau.

After Dana the Sun ownership passed to Paul Dana, his son, then to William Mackay Laffan, longtime Sim dramatic critic. The days of personal journalism were over; the Sun concentrated on its news coverage. It devoted page after page to the Spanish-American War, was the first to announce that yellow fever had broken out in Cuba. The Sun reporter there had got the news past the censors by using the words Jack Ochre, and Boss Lord’s correct interpretation of Jack Ochre as “yellow fever” gave the Sun a major scoop over its bitter enemies, Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World. When Munsey bought the Sun in 1916 its reputation for complete news coverage rivaled that of the Times.

Munsey paid $2,468,000 for the Sun and Evening Sun, merged the latter with his New York Press. He moved the Sun to its present quarters in the Stewart Building on Broadway.* Then he bought the Herald, and for a time published the Sun as the Sun and New York Herald. But in 1920 he separated the two, changed the Sun over to the evening field, killed the Evening Sun. When he died in 1925 he bequeathed the Sun to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from which William T. Dewart and a group of other Sun employes bought it in 1926.

Mr. Dewart had been associated with Munsey since the day in 1898 when he applied for a job in Munsey’s printing plant and for a place in the Congregational Church choir and got both. Within 18 months he was head bookkeeper of Munsey’s Red Star News Co., by 1903 vice president, general manager and treasurer. After Munsey’s death, Dewart’s mutuali-zation plan divided the Sun stock among its employes. Under Publisher Dewart & Editor Frank M. O’Brien the Sun’s circulation has risen from 257,000 to 300,000, third in the New York evening field. It carries more department store advertising than any other U. S. daily, is reputed to be the largest money-maker among Manhattan standard-sized newspapers.

Last week another famed newspaper got out an anniversary number: the Newark, N. J. Evening News, aged. 50. Founded by the late Wallace Mcllvaine Scudder, philanthropist, attorney, onetime engineer, the first issue contained a full account of the trial of Frank James, brother of Bandit Jesse James. The issue sold 10,000 copies. Now owned by Founder Scudder’s son, the News sells 150,000 copies.

*The building had once housed the famed department store of A. T. Stewart. When Stewart died in the late 1870’s, grave-looters stole his body from the St. George’s Church in Stuyvesant Square, held it for ransom. To this day no one knows whether it was successfully ransomed. In the Garden City, L. I. Cathedral, which Stewart built, is a tomb bearing his name. But the inscription reads: ‘”He is not here, he is risen.”