Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [420]
Like the Sun, the Transcript was a working-class-friendly paper. Not only did it support workers’ right to organize unions, but one of the owners was himself a printer’s delegate to a trade union body. Greene reported on local boardinghouse price increases, theater and sporting events, and the Mechanic’s Fair, along with meetings of the Common Council and sessions of the police court, which were humorously recounted and spiced with dialogue between magistrate and accused. Soon the paper was selling nearly as well as its penny rival within Manhattan, and even better in nearby cities and towns. Dozens of penny dailies now entered the field—some lasting but a few weeks—and flourishing imitations were started in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore (several by veterans of Day’s shop).
EXHILARATING THE BREAKFAST TABLE
One of the newcomers—the New York Herald—soon surpassed all others, including the Sun. Its proprietor, a gaunt Scotsman named James Gordon Bennett, was born in a Highlands hamlet in 1795 to a Catholic family. After study in a seminary in Aberdeen, Bennett broke with the Church and adopted the laissez-faire classics as his new sacred texts. In 1819 inspired by Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, he sailed for the United States, becoming part of a resurgent Scottish migration. Bennett spent three years in Boston clerking for a bookseller and proofreading; then he worked for ten months in South Carolina on the Charleston Courier, one of the best papers in America, honing his writing skills and absorbing white supremacist views.
In 1823 Bennett settled down in New York City, where he did free-lance writing for party papers, specializing in economic analysis. His 1825-26 exposure of stock speculations drew considerable attention, and in 1826 Mordecai Noah hired him to report on Washington politics and society for the New York Enquirer. Bennett’s informed, irreverent reportage, written in a flamboyant but authoritative style, won him considerable standing in the trade. When party pressure forced the merger of Noah’s Enquirer and James Watson Webb’s Courier in 1829, Bennett became associate editor of the new Courier and Enquirer. His steady rise through the world of party newspapers was halted in 1832: when the Courier and Enquirer, encouraged by money from Biddle’s Bank, switched its allegiance to Jackson’s opponents and muzzled the pro-Jackson Bennett, he quit. Bennett started his own Democratic paper in 1833, but the party, considering him too unpredictable, gave him skimpy support, and he finally abandoned the partisan press altogether.
Bennett applied, unsuccessfully, for jobs at the Sun and Transcript, then decided to start his own penny paper. Never having set type or operated a press, Bennett needed a partner. He turned to a twenty-two-year-old printer named Horace Greeley.
Greeley, born to struggling New Hampshire farm folk, had arrived in New York in 1831, with ten dollars and a small sack of belongings, fresh from an apprenticeship in a small-town printshop. An earnest, downy-haired beanpole of a man, Greeley first found work setting type on projects ranging from an annotated Bible to William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times, a new weekly devoted particularly to racing news. Then he set up a printshop, purchased type on credit, and looked about for business. In 1832, approached by a physician with a yen to publish, Greeley agreed to collaborate on a twopenny paper, the New York Morning Post. The first issue appeared January 1, 1833, eight months before the Sun saw the light of day, but the doctor was a ponderous writer, and the paper went belly up within three weeks. When Bennett showed up, asking if he’d like to launch a penny paper, Greeley