Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [422]
Patricians loathed Bennett’s violations of their newly prized privacy. But they too bought the penny press, as fascinated as the plebeians with its revelations about personalities. “Everybody wonders how people can buy these receptacles of scandal, the penny papers,” Philip Hone wrote in 1837, “and yet everybody does encourage them; and the very man who blames his neighbors for setting so bad an example, occasionally puts one in his pocket to carry home to his family for their and his own edification.”
Even the Herald’s advertisements were bright, shocking, useful, and broadly appealing. Where the blanket press might run the same ad for a year, Bennett demanded fresh copy every two weeks, eventually every day. He also opened his pages promiscuously to anyone who would pay. He started a “Personals” column that included communiques from women looking for husbands, mothers searching for lost children, prostitutes soliciting clients, abortionists seeking customers.
Caveat emptor was Bennett’s guiding principle; complaints about advertisers were briskly dismissed. When one correspondent denounced Dr. Brandreth’s Pills as a quack nostrum, Bennett replied: “Send us more advertisements than Dr. Brandreth does—give us higher prices—we’ll cut Dr. Brandreth dead—or at least curtail his space. Business is business—money is money. . . . We permit no blockhead to interfere with our business.”
And business was phenomenal. Within fifteen months, the Herald claimed a circulation of twenty thousand. Bennett plowed profits back into a new steam press (from Hoe and Company), a new building at the corner of Nassau and Beekman, a bureau in Washington, and a network of European correspondents, making the Herald the first American paper to offer systematic foreign coverage. Within four years of its founding, it surpassed the Sun—and the Times of London, assuming first place in the global circulation sweepstakes.
A GLANCE AT NEW YORK
In 1836 a Philadelphia journalist exploring New York and Brooklyn found people reading penny papers in virtually every street, lane, and alley. “Almost every porter and drayman, while not engaged in his occupation, may be seen with a paper in his hands.” The penny press offered New Yorkers a broadly encompassing look at the range of groups that had clambered into visibility during the previous democratizing decades. It did not speak to or for any one of them in particular. It did not reflect, and help shape, a single constituency, as did the era’s many religious, ethnic, racial, and radical papers. It was not limited by eighteenth-century print culture’s pinched definition of urbanity and restrictive repertoire of urban types and settings. Instead, it addressed something that had never quite existed before except in republican theory: a “public” at large, a civic demos. In doing so, it offered New York’s citizenry the technical and textual means to grasp their city’s growing miscellaneity.
In 1837 this new way of seeing the city was transferred to urban guidebooks, when Asa Greene, editor of the Transcript, authored A Glance at ‘New York. Greene’s style was far livelier than his predecessors’. He included anecdotes, dialogue, and personal musings, described people and places with flair, and presented arguments illustrated with everyday events and characters.
Glance was the first critical guide to New York City. Greene felt no need to present the urban milieu in an unambivalently positive light, as his forebears had. Indeed he gently mocked New Yorkers for their insatiable need to proclaim their city biggest and best. Noting the negatives in sharp but jovial language, Greene cited corrupt municipal politics, inadequate public services (poor water and sparse parks), rampant hucksterism, superficial values, and, particularly, class stratification. Greene conveyed a sympathy for the city’s working classes that had never appeared in any previous guide. Glance had a political edge: it attacked the greed and opportunism of those in power while twitting fatuous nouveau riches.
Not content to rattle off a list of worthy