The Profession of Journalism—Newspapers and Editors in America—Bennett, Greeley and Raymond—Forney and Dana—The Education of a Journalist

I

The American newspaper has had, even in my time, three separate and distinct epochs; the thick-and-thin, more or less servile party organ; the personal, one-man-controlled, rather blatant and would-be independent; and the timorous, corporation, or family-owned billboard of such news as the ever-increasing censorship of a constantly centralizing Federal Government will allow.

This latter appears to be its present state. Neither its individuality nor its self-exploitation, scarcely its grandiose pretension, remains. There continues to be printed in large type an amount of shallow stuff that would not be missed if it were omitted altogether. But, except as a bulletin of yesterday’s doings, limited, the daily newspaper counts for little, the single advantage of the editor—in case there is an editor—that is, one clothed with supervising authority who “edits”—being that he reaches the public with his lucubrations first, the sanctity that once hedged the editorial “we” long since departed.

The editor dies, even as the actor, and leaves no copy. Editorial reputations have been as ephemeral as the publications which gave them contemporary importance. Without going as far back as the Freneaus and the Callenders, who recalls the names of Mordecai Mannasseh Noah, of Edwin Crosswell and of James Watson Webb? In their day and generation they were influential and distinguished journalists. There are dozens of other names once famous but now forgotten; George Wilkins Kendall; Gerard Hallock; Erastus Brooks; Alexander Bullitt; Barnwell Rhett; Morton McMichael; George William Childs, even Thomas Ritchie, Duff Green and Amos Kendall. “Gales and Seaton” sounds like a trade-mark; but it stood for not a little and lasted a long time in the National Capital, where newspaper vassalage and the public printing went hand-in-hand.

For a time the duello flourished. There were frequent “affairs of honor”—notably about Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in South Carolina—sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of John H. Pleasants and one of the sons of Thomas Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed, and the yet more celebrated affair between Graves, of Kentucky, and Cilley, of Maine, in which Cilley was killed; Bladensburg the scene, and the refusal of Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the occasion.

I once had an intimate account of this duel with all the cruel incidents from Henry A. Wise, a party to it, and a blood-curdling narrative it made. They fought with rifles at thirty paces, and Cilley fell on the third fire. It did much to discredit duelling in the South. The story, however, that Graves was so much affected that thereafter he could never sleep in a darkened chamber had no foundation whatever, a fact I learned from my associate in the old Louisville Journal and later in The Courier-Journal, Mr. Isham Henderson, who was a brother-in-law of Mr. Graves, his sister, Mrs. Graves, being still alive. The duello died at length. There was never sufficient reason for its being. It was both a vanity and a fad. In Hopkinson Smith’s “Col. Carter of Cartersville,” its real character is hit off to the life.

II

When very early, rather too early, I found myself in the saddle, Bennett and Greeley and Raymond in New York, and Medill and Storey in Chicago, were yet alive and conspicuous figures in the newspaper life of the time. John Bigelow, who had retired from the New York Evening Post, was Minister to France. Halstead was coming on, but, except as a correspondent, Whitelaw Reid had not “arrived.” The like was true of “Joe” McCullagh, who, in the same character, divided the newspaper reading attention of the country with George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt. Joseph Medill was withdrawing from the Chicago Tribune in favor of Horace White, presently to return and die in harness—a man of sterling intellect and character—and Wilbur F. Storey, his local rival, who was beginning to show signs of the mental malady that, developed into monomania, ultimately ended his life in gloom and despair, wrecking one of the finest newspaper properties outside of New York. William R. Nelson, who was to establish a really great newspaper in Kansas City, was still a citizen of Ft. Wayne.

James Gordon Bennett, the elder, seemed then to me, and has always seemed, the real founder of the modern newspaper as a vehicle of popular information, and, in point of apprehension, at least, James Gordon Bennett, the younger, did not fall behind his father. What was, and might have been regarded and dismissed as a trivial slander drove him out of New York and made him the greater part of his life a resident of Paris, where I was wont to meet and know much of him.

The New York Herald, under father and son, attained enormous prosperity, prestige and real power. It suffered chiefly from what they call in Ireland “absentee landlordism.” Its “proprietor,” for he never described himself as its “editor,” was a man of exquisite sensibilities—a “despot” of course—whom nature created for a good citizen, a good husband and the head of a happy domestic fabric. He should have married the woman of his choice, for he was deeply in love with her and never ceased to love her, forty years later leaving her in his will a handsome legacy.

Crossing the ocean with the “Commodore,” as he was called by his familiars, not long after he had taken up his residence abroad, naturally we fell occasionally into shop talk. “What would you do,” he once said, “if you owned the Herald?” “Why,” I answered, “I would stay in New York and edit it;” and then I proceeded, “but you mean to ask me what I think you ought to do with it?” “Yes,” he said, “that is about the size of it.”

“Well, Commodore,” I answered, “if I were you, when we get in I would send for John Cockerill and make him managing editor, and for John Young, and put him in charge of the editorial page, and then I would go and lose myself in the wilds of Africa.”

He adopted the first two of these suggestions. John A. Cockerill was still under contract with Joseph Pulitzer and could not accept for a year or more. He finally did accept and died in the Bennett service. John Russell Young took the editorial page and was making it “hum” when a most unaccountable thing happened. I was amazed to receive an invitation to a dinner he had tendered and was about to give to the quondam Virginian and just elected New York Justice Roger A. Pryor. “Is Young gone mad,” I said to myself, “or can he have forgotten that the one man of all the world whom the House of Bennett can never forget, or forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?”

The Bennett-Pry or quarrel had been a cause cÉlÈbre when John Young was night editor of the Philadelphia Press and I was one of its Washington correspondents. Nothing so virulent had ever passed between an editor and a Congressman. In one of his speeches Pryor had actually gone the length of rudely referring to Mrs. James Gordon Bennett.

The dinner was duly given. But it ended John’s connection with the Herald and his friendly relations with the owner of the Herald. The incident might be cited as among “The Curiosities of Journalism,” if ever a book with that title is written. John’s “break” was so bad that I never had the heart to ask him how he could have perpetrated it.

III

The making of an editor is a complex affair. Poets and painters are said to be born. Editors and orators are made. Many essential elements enter into the editorial fabrication; need to be concentrated upon and embodied by a single individual, and even, with these, environment is left to supply the opportunity and give the final touch.

Aptitude, as the first ingredient, goes without saying of every line of human endeavor. We have the authority of the adage for the belief that it is not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Yet have I known some unpromising tyros mature into very capable workmen.

The modern newspaper, as we know it, may be fairly said to have been the invention of James Gordon Bennett, the elder. Before him there were journals, not newspapers. When he died he had developed the news scheme in kind, though not in the degree that we see so elaborate and resplendent in New York and other of the leading centers of population. Mr. Bennett had led a vagrant and varied life when he started the Herald. He had been many things by turns, including a writer of verses and stories, but nothing very successful nor very long. At length he struck a central idea—a really great, original idea—the idea of printing the news of the day, comprising the History of Yesterday, fully and fairly, without fear or favor. He was followed by Greeley and Raymond—making a curious and very dissimilar triumvirate—and, at longer range, by Prentice and Forney, by Bowles and Dana, Storey, Medill and Halstead. All were marked men; Greeley a writer and propagandist; Raymond a writer, declaimer and politician; Prentice a wit and partisan; Dana a scholar and an organizer; Bowles a man both of letters and affairs. The others were men of all work, writing and fighting their way to the front, but possessing the “nose for news,” using the Bennett formula and rescript as the basis of their serious efforts, and never losing sight of it. Forney had been a printer. Medill and Storey were caught young by the lure of printer’s ink. Bowles was born and reared in the office of the Springfield Republican, founded by his father, and Halstead, a cross betwixt a pack horse and a race horse, was broken to harness before he was out of his teens.

Assuming journalism, equally with medicine and law, to be a profession, it is the only profession in which versatility is not a disadvantage. Specialism at the bar, or by the bedside, leads to perfection and attains results. The great doctor is the great surgeon or the great prescriptionist—he cannot be great in both—and the great lawyer is rarely great, if ever, as counselor and orator.

Henry Watterson—From a painting by Louis Mark in the Manhattan Club, New York

The great editor is by no means the great writer. But he ought to be able to write and must be a judge of writing. The newspaper office is a little kingdom. The great editor needs to know and does know every range of it between the editorial room, the composing room and the pressroom. He must hold well in hand everybody and every function, having risen, as it were, step-by-step from the ground floor to the roof. He should be level-headed, yet impressionable; sympathetic, yet self-possessed; able quickly to sift, detect and discriminate; of various knowledge, experience and interest; the cackle of the adjacent barnyard the noise of the world to his eager mind and pliant ear. Nothing too small for him to tackle, nothing too great, he should keep to the middle of the road and well in rear of the moving columns; loving his art—for such it is—for art’s sake; getting his sufficiency, along with its independence, in the public approval and patronage, seeking never anything further for himself. Disinterestedness being the soul of successful journalism, unselfish devotion to every noble purpose in public and private life, he should say to preferment, as to bribers, “get behind me, Satan.” Whitelaw Reid, to take a ready and conspicuous example, was a great journalist, but rather early in life he abandoned journalism for office and became a figure in politics and diplomacy so that, as in the case of Franklin, whose example and footsteps in the main he followed, he will be remembered rather as the Ambassador than as the Editor.

More and more must these requirements be fulfilled by the aspiring journalist. As the world passes from the Rule of Force—force of prowess, force of habit, force of convention—to the Rule of Numbers, the daily journal is destined, if it survives as a power, to become the teacher—the very Bible—of the people. The people are already beginning to distinguish between the wholesome and the meretricious in their newspapers. Newspaper owners, likewise, are beginning to realize the value of character. Instances might be cited where the public, discerning some sinister but unseen power behind its press, has slowly yet surely withdrawn its confidence and support. However impersonal it pretends to be, with whatever of mystery it affects to envelop itself, the public insists upon some visible presence. In some States the law requires it. Thus “personal journalism” cannot be escaped, and whether the “one-man power” emanates from the Counting Room or the Editorial Room, as they are called, it must be clear and answerable, responsive to the common weal, and, above all, trustworthy.

IV

John Weiss Forney was among the most conspicuous men of his time. He was likewise one of the handsomest. By nature and training a journalist, he played an active, not to say an equivocal, part in public life-at the outset a Democratic and then a Republican leader.

Born in the little town of Lancaster, it was his mischance to have attached himself early in life to the fortunes of Mr. Buchanan, whom he long served with fidelity and effect. But when Mr. Buchanan came to the Presidency, Forney, who aspired first to a place in the Cabinet, which was denied him, and then to a seat in the Senate, for which he was beaten—through flagrant bribery, as the story ran—was left out in the cold. Thereafter he became something of a political adventurer.

The days of the newspaper “organ” approached their end. Forney’s occupation, like Othello’s, was gone, for he was nothing if not an organ grinder. Facile with pen and tongue, he seemed a born courtier—a veritable Dalgetty, whose loyal devotion to his knight-at-arms deserved better recognition than the cold and wary Pennsylvania chieftain was willing to give. It is only fair to say that Forney’s character furnished reasonable excuse for this neglect and apparent ingratitude. The row between them, however, was party splitting. As the friend and backer of Douglas, and later along a brilliant journalistic soldier of fortune, Forney did as much as any other man to lay the Democratic party low.

I can speak of him with a certain familiarity and authority, for I was one of his “boys.” I admired him greatly and loved him dearly. Most of the young newspaper men about Philadelphia and Washington did so. He was an all-around modern journalist of the first class. Both as a newspaper writer and creator and manager, he stood upon the front line, rating with Bennett and Greeley and Raymond. He first entertained and then cultivated the thirst for office, which proved the undoing of Greeley and Raymond, and it proved his undoing. He had a passion for politics. He would shine in public life. If he could not play first fiddle he would take any other instrument. Thus failing of a Senatorship, he was glad to get the Secretaryship of the Senate, having been Clerk of the House.

He was bound to be in the orchestra. In those days newspaper independence was little known. Mr. Greeley was willing to play bottle-holder to Mr. Seward, Mr. Prentice to Mr. Clay. James Gordon Bennett, the elder, and later his son, James Gordon Bennett, the younger, challenged this kind of servility. The Herald stood at the outset of its career manfully in the face of unspeakable obloquy against it. The public understood it and rose to it. The time came when the elder Bennett was to attain official as well as popular recognition. Mr. Lincoln offered him the French mission and Mr. Bennett declined it. He was rich and famous, and to another it might have seemed a kind of crowning glory. To him it seemed only a coming down—a badge of servitude—a lowering of the flag of independent journalism under which, and under which alone, he had fought all his life.

Charles A. Dana was not far behind the Bennetts in his independence. He well knew what parties and politicians are. The most scholarly and accomplished of American journalists, he made the Sun “shine for all,” and, during the years of his active management, a most prosperous property. It happened that whilst I was penny-a-lining in New York I took a piece of space work—not very common in those days—to the Tribune and received a few dollars for it. Ten years later, meeting Mr. Dana at dinner, I recalled the circumstance, and thenceforward we became the best of friends. Twice indeed we had runabouts together in foreign lands. His house in town, and the island home called Dorsoris, which he had made for himself, might not inaptly be described as very shrines of hospitality and art, the master of the house a virtuoso in music and painting no less than in letters. One might meet under his roof the most diverse people, but always interesting and agreeable people. Perhaps at times he carried his aversions a little too far. But he had reasons for them, and a man of robust temperament and habit, it was not in him to sit down under an injury, or fancied injury. I never knew a more efficient journalist. What he did not know about a newspaper, was scarcely worth knowing.

In my day Journalism has made great strides. It has become a recognized profession. Schools of special training are springing up here and there. Several of the universities have each its College of Journalism. The tendency to discredit these, which was general and pronounced at the start, lowers its tone and grows less confident.

Assuredly there is room for special training toward the making of an editor. Too often the newspaper subaltern obtaining promotion through aptitudes peculiarly his own, has failed to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge of his art. He has been too busy seeking “scoops” and doing “stunts” to concern himself about perspectives, principles, causes and effects, probable impressions and consequences, or even to master the technical details which make such a difference in the preparation of matter intended for publication and popular perusal. The School of Journalism may not be always able to give him the needful instruction. But it can set him in the right direction and better prepare him to think and act for himself.