Press: Century of Suns

One hundred years ago last week a confident, 31-year-old, side-whiskered New England printer named Arunah Shepherdson Abell breezed into Baltimore to start a daily newspaper which he called The Sun. Printer Abell’s sheet differed from its six established daily competitors in policy— printing news rather than political discussions—and in price, which was 1¢ instead of 6¢ or more. Its motto was “LIGHT FOR ALL.”

Arunah Abell and his partners, two other printers named Azariah Simmons and William M. Swain, had already founded the

1¢ Philadelphia Public Ledger. They got their idea from Benjamin Day’s New York Sun, which had been pleasing Manhattan’s masses and enriching its proprietor at a penny a copy since 1833. Sledding hard in Philadelphia, Partners Simmons and Swain left it to Partner Abell to see that the Sun shone successfully on Baltimore. The story of the Sun therefore became the story of Partner Abell, of his descendants, and of their business and journalistic heirs. Last week that story was published by four able writers, all employes of the Sun, in as comprehensive a biography as any U. S. newspaper ever received: The Sunpapers of Baltimore, by Gerald W. Johnson, Frank R. Kent, H. L. Mencken and Hamilton Owens.*

Both Publisher Abell and the city in which he set up shop were bustling and full of fight when Vol. 1 No. 1 of the Sun came out. Baltimore skippers, some of them privateersmen in the War of 1812, were trading in & out of Canton, Bombay, Lisbon, Valparaiso. Overland west to Harper’s Ferry went the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The Baltimore & Susquehanna ran north to the Pennsylvania line. Priding itself on art as well as commerce, busy Baltimore pointed to the paintings of Rembrandt Peale, to the acting of Junius Brutus Booth, to the great 180-ft. column of the Washington Monument, which gleamed in white marble over the well-scrubbed, red brick city from the heights of red clay Federal Hill.

On nautical Gay Street, where the Sun soon moved from its first quarters. Publisher Abell looked out on a teeming and sometimes boisterous communal life. Every night, watchmen plied their staves so briskly on the skulls of yowling Baltimore drunks that a rich budget of police court news was always available in the morning. Publisher Abell broke the journalistic tradition against handling such stories, served them up in his columns hot and strong. Baltimoreans liked this kind of “light for all” so well that within a year the infant Sun had 12,000 readers, by far the biggest circulation in town.

Sure he was on the right track, Publisher Abell spread himself more & more for stories. He ran special trains from Washington with Government news, used express riders and carrier pigeons to speed his copy, foreshadowed modern press associations by cooperating with other newspapers for the good of all. When the “magnetic telegraph” of Samuel Finley Breese Morse became practical in 1844. Mr. Abell soon woke up to its value, put in a newswire.

The Mexican War in 1846 gave Publisher Abel a chance to prove his mettle as a fast newsgatherer. With a relay of telegraph lines, railroads, steamboats, stagecoaches and “60 blooded horses,” the Sun brought news of the capture of Vera Cruz to President James Knox Polk before his own War Department heard about it. With speed in harvesting news, Publisher Abell also wanted speed in printing it. and to this end, he and his Philadelphia partners were first to use the Hoe cylinder press.* Next great progressive step of the Sun was its Iron Building, put up in 1851, first office structure in America made on the steel-frame principle of the modern skyscraper. Here the Sun settled down for a heyday which was ended by the Civil War.

At the war’s outset, the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry, chased through Baltimore by Southern-sympathizing rioters, was saved by heroic Mayor George William Brown, who brandished his umbrella at the mobsters, and 50 policemen who overawed the crowd with their drawn revolvers. Fifteen citizens and soldiers were killed that day. Next thing Baltimore knew, Federal guns were staring from Federal Hill, and the city was under the thumb of officious, punch-drunk General Benjamin (“Beast”) Butler. A warm Southern sympathizer and States’ rights man. Publisher Abell had his choice of keeping editorially mum or being deprived of his newspaper, thrown in jail. He kept mum. While even Union sympathizers were being jailed by the military in unhappy Baltimore, the Government watched the Sun like a cat at a mousehole. The editor-in-chief put his sheet to bed with a Federal marshal literally looking over his shoulder. But Publisher Abell managed to keep things together until the war’s end.

In the 1880s, war-weary Founder Abell began to turn the Sun over to three of his boys. Of these, rotund George William served as president until 1894. Benign Son Edwin Franklin then took over. To needy folk, Son Edwin would give bits of paper with “$10 — E.F.A.” scribbled across them. These informal checks were always good for face value with the Sun’s cashier. In the 1880’s and 90’s, the Sun tackled the Maryland Democratic political machine in a running fight.

When kind Son Edwin died in 1904, his son Walter headed the Sun’s publishing company at 32. In 1908 and 1909 the directors, who solemnly decided even the mechanical minutiae of the paper, agreed to admit display type and half-tone cuts to the advertising columns. In 1910, the Evening Sun was born.

In 1914, after the Suns had run up a frightening deficit under Charles H. Grasty (who succeeded Walter Abell as president of A. S. Abell Co. in 1910), an able financier came to the rescue in the person of Baltimore’s Van Lear Black. Hearing whispers that the Suns were going down for the last time, Mr. Black brought from New York the It Pays to Advertise company under the direction of George M. Cohan for a special morning performance before a group of Baltimore businessmen who were guests of the Sun management. Before the show they heard an ode composed for the occasion by the Sun’s Poet Folger McKinsey (“The Bentztown Bard”). Baltimore buzzed with talk at this stunt and local admen took the hint to increase space in the Sunpapers, as Baltimoreans have always called the two sheets. Mr. Black was drowned in 1930, slipping from the taffrail of his yacht Sabalo off the Jersey coast.

Probably the most eminent present members of the Sunpapers’ staff are its four biographers. Oldest of these in point of service is Political Pundit Kent, who has a roving assignment to write as he pleases for the Sun. Editorialist Mencken, who writes a weekly article for the Evening Sun, has been continuously employed on the two papers for over 30 years, is now a director of the Sun company. Present management of the Sunpapers, headed by President Paul Patterson, has sought to make the Sun and the Evening Sun separate journalistic entities, although national advertising may be inserted in both morning and evening issues at a single rate. Unwilling to support either candidate in last year’s Presidential election, both Suns are liberal, but somewhat leery of the New Deal. Respected abroad and an integral part of the civic scenery at home, with a brand-new Pulitzer Prize for their trophy room (see p. 41), the two Suns step off into their second century with a Sunday circulation of 221,389, a joint readership of 298,458 every day.

-Alfred A. Knopf ($3.75). -After these revolving presses had been in successful operation at the Sun and Public Ledger for two years, the London Times was still solemnly assuring its readers that the Hoe cylinder was a physical impossibility.