Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [512]
Bennett’s Herald, aimed at a more middling market niche, flourished too. Readers enjoyed his misanthropic maunderings, scathing editorials, accounts of scandals, and attacks on deceitful politicians and venal financiers. On March 2, 1840, Bennett broke new ground yet again, when he devoted his front page to the “Grand Fancy Dress Ball, at Brevoort Hall.” The story, mixing fawning society reportage with expose, recounted a tale of outrageous extravagance amid widespread suffering. Nearly six hundred costumed gentry had partied from eight in the evening until five the next morning at the Brevoort mansion on Fifth Avenue and Qth Street. (The article included a layout plan of the first two floors.)
Philip Hone—who attended as Cardinal Wolsey, garbed in scarlet merino robe and ermine cape—was delighted with the event. “Never before,” he told his diary, “has New York witnessed a fancy ball so splendidly gotten up, in better taste, or more successfully carried through.” But the racy reportage—which aroused both fascination and fury among the city’s middle and working classes—led the old mercantile elite to declare total war on James Gordon Bennett.
“This kind of surveillance is getting to be intolerable,” Hone fumed, “and nothing but the force of public opinion will correct the insolence.” He, along with leading merchants, bankers, and civic notables, worked to have “respectable people withdraw their support from the vile sheet.” Genteel readers and advertisers boycotted the Herald, rooted it out of homes, clubs, hotels, and coffeehouses, and ostracized Bennett. To no avail. The so-called moral war cost Bennett a quarter of his readership and a chunk of his ad revenue, but he soon bounced back, and voyeuristic society columns, offering mass audiences a window into elite sanctums, became a permanent feature of New York journalism.
The “moral war” was, however, a great opportunity for any publisher willing to step in as a champion of respectable values, and Horace Greeley seized the moment. On April 10, 1841, backed by the Whig magnates who had underwritten his log cabin journalism, Greeley founded the New York Tribune. His entrant in the penny press sweepstakes, Greeley declared, was intended for the “cultivated and influential families of the city,” those a notch above the Herald’s and two notches above the Sun’s. To penetrate “the parlors or sitting rooms of the uptown residents,” the Tribune would eschew the “immoral and degrading Police Reports, Advertisements and other matter which have been allowed to disgrace the columns of many of our leading Penny Papers.” Greeley’s efforts to win “the hearty approval of the virtuous and refined” soon garnered him a circulation of ten thousand a day.
Like the penny papers, city book publishers fared poorly at first. Prices and profits plummeted; so did the number of titles the houses issued. Even the largest were imperilled. Unable to transact business or secure credit in London, Harpers considered bankruptcy in 1837, before opting for retrenchment. The industry recovered, however, and even flourished, when eager newcomers, deploying penny press techniques, revolutionized the book trade.
Park Benjamin had been literary editor of Horace Greeley’s New-Yorker until, as Greeley wrote later, “the Commercial Revulsion of 1837 swept over the land, whelming it and me in the general ruin.” Benjamin then tried publishing the American Monthly Magazine, it collapsed in 1838. Finally, in 1839, he devised a publication suited to an era of cutthroat competition. Brother Jonathan, a weekly magazine, combined news with serialized novels pirated from England. It was printed cheaply,