Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [418]
One of these media rebels was Benjamin Day, the twenty-year-old journeyman printer who had helped launch the Daily Sentinel in 1830, when he was twenty. Son of a Massachusetts hatter, Day had apprenticed on a Springfield paper. Drawn to New York City, he worked for the New York Evening Post, then opened his own job shop; like many young activist printers, he became part of the workingmen’s movement. During Day’s tenure, however, the Daily Sentinel did not adopt innovations in content, style, or pricing. It relied on politics to win readers and did not long survive the death of the Workingmen’s Party.
Day soon decided to start another mass circulation daily (in part to advertise his printing plant). He was encouraged in this by the example of London’s Penny Maga-zine. Published from 1832 by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, ostensibly to educate and improve the poor, the Penny Magazine was cheap and hugely successful. By 1833 its circulation was twenty thousand, and many copies were being sold in the United States.
On September 3, 1833, Day launched the New York Sun. Unlike the sixpenny papers, which were printed on mammoth-sized paper (some were known as “blanket” sheets), the Sun was a tiny affair of four tricolumned pages on SVz-by-II-inch paper. With job printing his only source of income—“Capital! Bless you, I hadn’t any capital,” he recalled later—Day started by imprinting two hundred copies an hour on a handcranked flatbed press. He experimented boldly, however, with pricing, distribution, format, and content. The Sun cost a penny, well within artisanal reach, and Day did not require prepayment of subscriptions. Instead, using a London plan, he sold bundles of a hundred Suns for sixty-seven cents, cash in advance, to newsboys drawn from the city’s pool of orphans and unemployed. If a newsboy sold all his papers, he pocketed thirty-three cents. Some plied regular routes, collecting six cents per customer each Saturday. Others hawked Suns on the street, adding their cries to the cacophony of oyster sellers and hot-corn girls.
The Sun’s slogan—“It Shines for All”—proclaimed Day’s intention of reaching a wide spectrum of New Yorkers. So did his assertions that the paper would be “vended at a price which the poorest laborer can afford,” while being “of a character (we hope) deserving the encouragement of all classes of society.” But if the popular classes were not the exclusive target, as had been the case with the Sentinel, the paper’s demotic thrust was obvious from what it did and did not cover.
Conspicuous by their absence were ponderous articles on national and world affairs. (Even had he wanted to, Day couldn’t compete with the Journal of Commerce and its twenty-four-horse express relays from Washington.) There were no announcements about pending arrivals of cargoes of bombazine; artisans didn’t care, and merchants could find out elsewhere. There was no partisan politics as traditionally understood—no vituperative harangues, no lengthy discussions of public affairs; though the Sun tended to support Democratic candidates, it was out of conviction, not patronage.
Missing also was the radical language, the incendiary tone, of the workingmen’s press; Day well remembered the Sentinel’s failure. Instead he proclaimed his mission in language acceptable to an elite eager to educate the disorderly classes so as to improve their behavior and productivity. In an early issue, Day stressed (echoing his London predecessors) that the Sun was “effecting the march of intelligence” by “diffusing useful knowledge among the operative classes of society.” Yet Day would firmly back unions, strikes, and the ten-hour day. The Sun, said its founder, helped produce a “decided change in the condition of the laboring classes” by enabling them to “understand their own interest, and feel that they have numbers