Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [421]
In May 1835, therefore, Bennett went ahead on his own. He rented a basement apartment on Wall Street, stretched some pine boards between a set of flour barrels for a desk, and began singlehandedly to produce the Herald. Like his penny predecessors, Bennett set out to reach a mass audience, but not because he had a message to convey. He had no prior association with the Workingmen’s Party, no ties to New York City’s laboring class, no particular interest in its welfare. He just wanted to make a lot of money, and Day’s success had made clear that the road to riches ran through a mass market.
The Herald’s proprietor also wanted to reach the city’s elites for whom he was accustomed to writing. Besides, combining gentry with plebeian audiences would boost revenues. Bennett accordingly set out to combine the zest and local identification of the Sun and Transcript with the broader news coverage of the Courier and Enquirer and Journal of Commerce.
In the Herald’s first issue, on May 6, 1835, Bennett announced his intention to transcend existing boundaries of class. His new four-page sheet was “equally intended for the great masses of the community—the merchant, mechanic, working people—the private family as well as the public hotel—the journeyman and his employer—the clerk and his principal.” Aware that a penny paper would be automatically suspected of working-class proclivities, Bennett ingratiated himself with the mercantile elite by denouncing Day as a “Fanny Wright infidel.” The Herald offered not radicalism but relief from the “dull business air” of the large morning papers. It would “exhilarate the breakfast table.”
As promised, Bennett delivered “brevity, variety, point, piquancy, and cheapness.” His prose was fresh, pointed, and zestful. And he offered far more for a penny than did the Sun. Bennett entered the national news race. In short order, his express relays were outpacing those of the Courier and the Journal by three hours, and by 1837 his news boats rivaled those of the mercantile press. Bennett also went after New York news, even more assiduously than Day. The Herald covered City Hall and the police, court trials and executions, sports and theater, docks and coffeehouses, and sermons and church meetings to boot.
Bennett investigated Wall Street with unprecedented accuracy and acumen. Many sixpenny editors had entered into secret and lucrative collaborations with brokers, hyping or disparaging stocks to their mutual advantage. Bennett savaged them for “catering to speculators, hypocrites, stock-jobbers, bankers, brokers, and political and moral rascals of all kinds.” He, Bennett, would deal “justly, honestly and fearlessly with every institution in Wall Street—every broker—every bank—every capitalist.” Again, he delivered. His first “Money Markets” column demonstrated that a recent “uncommon rise in the stock market [was] not produced by accident,” and he repeatedly blasted stock speculations as a “secret conspiracy of our large capitalists.”
Bennett’s stance won artisanal applause. His exposes of chicaneries shrouded from the general public echoed the old labor press’s attack on privileged monopolies. Yet the bulls and bears themselves pored over his daily column, so accurate were his analyses, and so poorly did the plungers understand the market. The result was precisely the one Bennett sought: where the Sun and Transcript didn’t penetrate the downtown financial world, and the Courier and Enquirer and Journal of Commerce were “never seen in the crowd,” the Herald reached all parts of town.
The same breadth of appeal marked the pioneering coverage of society he would develop over next few years. Converting gossip into news, and private lives into public commodities, Bennett reported on the doings at Broadway mansions and the social season at Saratoga Springs, often with a whiff of mockery. Ordinary New Yorkers delighted at this peek behind the curtains. With classes segueing off to different parts of town, elite lives had become less accessible to the curious, the critical, and the covetous alike.