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Rising and Shining: Benjamin Day and His New York Sun Before 1836
In 1829, twenty-year-old Benjamin Day packed his belongings and headed to New York City from his native West Springfield, Massachusetts, with ambitious dreams of earning enough money to start his own business. As a teenager, he had served an apprenticeship with Samuel Bowles, Sr., at the Springfield Republican office, where he had learned to set type and operate printing equipment. Now a skilled journeyman compositor and printer, he was ready to strike out on his own in the big city.[1]
It was a time when many New Englanders such as young Day were leaving their rural homes and heading for large cities, especially New York City. In addition to the many opportunities for employment available in the growing cities, the migratory movement was fueled in part by a commonly shared belief that anyone, no matter how humble his station, could achieve wealth through hard work and perseverance. In reality, upward social mobility was the great exception rather than the general rule, as almost all of the country's rich had been born into affluence. Yet the precious few who actually did rise to wealth from low beginnings, men such as John Jacob Astor, also achieved status as cultural icons, their stories became so widely known. These oft-repeated tales created the American rags-to-riches myth that so captivated the public imagination in the first half of the nineteenth century.[2] The country had even elected as president a no-nonsense, down-to-earth, common man who had ri
sen from low beginnings to realize glorious success on the battlefield and immense popularity and power in the political arena. If an Andrew Jackson could become President of the United States, and if a poor immigrant such as John Jacob Astor could amass a great fortune, then anything was possible for any man in a fast-developing nation filled with opportunities.[3]
Upon arrival in New York, young Day secured lodgings and found work as a compositor at one of the city's leading newspapers, the New-York Evening Post.[4] A respectable bastion of the old guard, the Evening Post represented one of two major types of dailies that characterized metropolitan journalism in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. As an archetype of the urban political daily, the Evening Post contained staid writing and politically-oriented editorials written by highly-educated editors for an elite readership. Mercantile sheets, intended for prominent citizens with mercantile interests, comprised the other class of newspapers. Filled with advertisements, ship schedules, wholesale product prices, and stale news both domestic and foreign, the mercantile newspapers were as uninteresting as their politically oriented brethren. The two varieties sold for either six cents a copy or ten dollars a year.
Most of the printing plants and newspaper offices of New York could be found within the same ten-block area, and the journeymen compositors and printers who worked at these facilities knew one another and formed a rather close fraternity.[5] As a compositor at one of the "respectable sixpennies," as they were called, Day soon counted among his friends other young men who had spent years laboring as lowly apprentices before rising to the coveted status of journeymen.
Shortly after Day had settled into his job, several members of his printing coterie approached him about joining them in an entrepreneurial venture. Day agreed, but his association with them turned out to be short-lived. In February of 1830 they introduced the New York Daily
Sentinel in support of Working Men's Party,[6] but for some reason Day
almost immediately backed out of the venture.[7]
Day again found employment at another six-cent daily, the newer New York Journal of Commerce. Here, he worked alongside a compositor named Dave Ramsey, a talkative man who often spoke of his intentions to establish someday a daily newspaper called the Sun. Rather than
charge the customary six cents per copy, Ramsey planned to sell each of his newspapers for one cent each. At such a price, even working class people, many thousands of them, would be able to afford a daily newspaper. Each day, as they set up type for the Journal of Commerce pages, Day listened to Ramsey prattle on about the imaginary little newspaper.
A quiet and serious young man, Day had a rather "brusque address" that concealed a "very warm heart,"[8] so he probably listened with interest to Ramsey's dreams but didn't say much for fear of bursting his friend's bubble. Sensible and practical, Day knew that hard work, ample financial resources, and luck would be needed to succeed in any business venture in New York City, especially the production of a daily newspaper. He, too, had dreams - of opening his own job printing business - but his practical side kept him from jumping into anything half-cocked, or from rambling on about it senselessly. He was saving his money, quietly, until the day when he could purchase printing press and types to start a job printing business. With his own press and types, he could even publish his own one-cent daily newspaper if he so desired.
The next two years proved eventful for Day, both professionally and personally. Throughout 1831 and 1832, he continued working as a compositor and tucked away whatever he could toward the purchase of
equipment. In September of 1831 he married his beautiful[9] cousin,
Eveline Shepard, and the couple settled on Chestnut Street in New York.
Eveline soon became pregnant and the following July she gave birth to their son, Henry. During that first summer together after their marriage, the family lived in fear of a cholera epidemic that ravaged New York City and killed some 35,000 men, women, and children. Fortunately, the newlyweds and their newborn avoided illness, but the epidemic wreaked havoc on an unstable Jacksonian economy by stopping trade and causing industry to languish for more than a year. At some time during 1832 Day acquired his type and a manual, hand-crank job press, one that could throw off two hundred impressions an hour.
As the proud owner of printing equipment, Day did something uncharacteristically impulsive. He "struck off"[10] the headline design for a newspaper, THE SUN in all caps, and took it with him to show his friend and fellow printer Arunah Abell at the Mercantile Advertiser office where Day worked as a fill-in compositor. Abell simply howled with laughter. A penny daily newspaper called the Sun to be published by Ben Day? What a dandy humbug. . . .
Another compositor friend who happened to be living with the Days at that time,[11] William Swain, realized that Day was serious about the matter. Rather than laugh, Swain tried his best to talk some sense into his friend. His arguments probably took the form of a series of questions: Who would possibly want to read a one-cent newspaper? Who in their right mind would advertise in it? Did he realize how many newspapers he would have to sell in order to turn a profit? Never mind how he intended to sell that many newspapers - how in the world did he
propose to print that many newspapers on a hand press? Even if he did
find subscribers, did he know how much trouble newspaper owners had
collecting past-due amounts from subscribers? Did he know how much work
would be involved in producing a daily newspaper almost single-handedly? He had already beaten the odds - he owned his own types and printing press - why risk everything to try out some cockamamie scheme that would probably end up ruining him?
The arguments proved too discouraging, and young Day stored away the masthead design and his dream of bringing out his one-cent newspaper. As 1832 ended and the new year began, he turned his full attention to his job printing business. He set up his press in a tiny, ground-floor office at 222 William Street, a couple of blocks from the New-York Evening Post. Eveline became pregnant again early in 1833. Throughout the year, as Day watched her belly grow larger with their second child, he worried about the future of his business and the welfare of his growing family. At some point that year, Day moved his family to Duane Street in the working-class-inhabited Fifth Ward.[12] He continued working as a fill-in compositor at the offices of the Journal of Commerce and the Mercantile Advertiser to make ends meet as he established his printing business. He had entered a crowded field anyway, but due to the economy, competition for job printing had intensified.
Each day, as he walked from Duane Street to his small, 12-by-16-foot William Street print shop, he had to cross Chatham Street, a busy thoroughfare that split away from Broadway to the northeast.[13] On Chatham, street vendors hawked penny-a-piece items to passers-by from stalls lining the sidewalks. One could find a wide assortment of items
here, from shoelaces to apples, all for one cent each. Others before
him had noticed the avidity with which purchasers parted with their
pennies on this street, and Day probably noticed it, too.[14]
His thoughts kept returning to the possibility of the Sun. The
newspaper need not be anything fancy or big; on the contrary, about all he could handle with his limited resources would be a small, handbill-sized paper that would inform, amuse, and advertise. Its price of one cent would be within the means of even the poorest laborers. A cash-in-advance policy for subscriptions, sales, and advertisements would spare him the expense and hassle of ever having to collect past-due amounts. He could clip ads and interesting news items from other papers to fill the pages. As for distribution, why not hawk the papers like the street vendors of Chatham? True, newspaper proprietors did not consider it respectable to sell their papers in such a manner, or to actively solicit subscriptions, but Day did not understand such reasoning. Why should a publisher care if it appeared to everyone that he wanted to sell more newspapers? Wasn't that the publisher's main objective? Why pretend otherwise? Why should it be perfectly acceptable to hawk a piece o
f fruit on the street, but not a newspaper? Both were simply products meant for consumption.
People liked to read - people of all classes. They enjoyed reading a variety of things, from inexpensive and sensational street literature, to cheap magazines containing factual miscellanies on a variety of subjects, to literary magazines, to their weekly and daily newspapers. Reading provided a much-needed diversion from the harsh realities and cruelties of life, as much or more for the poor man as for the rich.
Why wouldn't people opt to pay $3 per year rather than $10, or one
cent per copy rather than six cents, for their daily newspaper? True,
he would not be able to offer them a product comparable in size,[15] but what he lacked in size he could make up for in interesting, informative, and amusing content. The common sort did not buy the Courier and Enquirer to inspect the shipping lists or to ponder some stuffy political discourse.[16] They bought it to be amused by the humorous reports of drunks and assorted low life that came up before the magistrate in police court. They bought it because its columns, some of them at least, were written in an entertaining manner. Would people not appreciate a daily newspaper that gave them the freshest news and amusing content they wanted and left out all the political discourses and other boring items that most people never read anyway?
Day was a man of action once he made up his mind. He decided in August that he would bring out the first number of his one-cent daily newspaper the following month. He refused to sit by idly as his printing business failed. The little newspaper would keep him busy doing something constructive, and it would at least afford him a medium for advertising his printing business.
As August turned to September in 1833, Eveline awaited the birth of their second child,[17] and her husband busied himself making final plans for the parturition of his little newspaper. He had received his paper order from his sister's husband, Moses Yale Beach, who then operated a paper mill at Saugerties on the Hudson.[18] With paper, a printing press, type, and his small office,he was ready to proceed. He purchased several six-penny dailies and clipped advertisements from them: ads for steamboat excursions, ads for cooks needed by wealthy families, ads for insurance policies. Day felt that by including such ads it would appear that the Sun had already gained the confidence of
the foremost members of the New York commercial community as an advertising medium. He set these and other ads into type, including the ad for his job printing business, and interesting miscellanies that he had culled from other newspapers.
As the late afternoon sun streamed into the William Street office[19] that Monday, September 2, Day worked diligently setting up type for the small pages. The contents of the front page reflected Day's concept of journalism and what he felt constituted appropriate fare for a daily newspaper. He included two humorous tall tales, one about a duel-fighting Irish captain, and another about a Vermont boy who whistled so much that his muscles became stuck and he began whistling in his sleep. The latter story appeared under the heading "A Whistler" and related the following:
A boy in Vermont, accustomed to working alone, was so prone to whistling, that, as soon as he was by himself, he unconsciously commenced. When asleep, the muscles of his mouth, chest, and lungs were so completely concatenated in the association, he whistled with astonishing shrillness. A pale countenance, loss of appetite, and almost total prostration of strength, convinced his mother it would end in death, if not speedily overcome, which was accomplished by placing him in the society of another boy, who had orders to give him a blow as soon as he began to whistle.[20]
Once he finished setting the outside pages, he continued his labors at the press, printing one side of a thousand of the 11¬ x 16-inch sheets, what would become pages one and four of the Sun.[21] The next day promised to be a busy one, as it would take a full five hours to print the reverse side of the thousand sheets, and after printing they would have to be folded into the 11¬ x 8-inch finished products.
On Tuesday, September 3, Day rose early and made his way to the office of the Courier and Enquirer where he bought a copy fresh from
their press. He hurried back to William Street and got busy. He selected the most interesting items he could find from the six-cent paper, especially the lively police court report. He then went to work setting up type for the stories that would fill the remaining space on
pages two and three. Sensational local and out-of-town news filled several columns on the inside pages. He included three news items about murders, a report of an earthquake in Virginia, an account of a suicide in Boston, news of a prison uprising in Ohio, and the police court column.
From the first issue of his newspaper, Day made it clear to readers that the Sun would provide as much entertainment as it did information. Humor, fiction, poetry, and humbugs could be expected on the front page, local news items would appear on the inside pages, and all would be written in a snappy and readable style. A humbug (such as the story of the whistling boy) differed considerably from mere fiction, and also from a lie or a swindle. According to the great showman P. T. Barnum, a humbug
consists in putting on glittering appearances - outside show - novel expedients, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.[22]
Even though they involved untruths, audiences usually did not consider humbugs to be fraudulent, due to their great entertainment value. Rather than condemning the perpetrator of humbugs, people accepted everything in good fun and appreciated the entertainment in an age of precious few amusements.[23] Sharp readers would be able to distinguish the entertaining humbugs from the real news items. (Most people would
know, for instance, that a youngster could not actually whistle tunes while asleep.) Part of the fun of the Sun would be in determining which
items were absolute fact and which ones were tall tales.
By early afternoon, Day and his assistants, a journeyman printer and a boy, had finished printing and folding the little newspapers, and they took to the streets to sell them.[24] They dodged the horse-drawn
carriages and other equestrians along the bustling streets and showed the little one-cent papers to hundreds of passers-by. A steady stream of people succumbed to the curiosity, each one dipping into his pocket or into her purse to retrieve a penny.
That evening, Day counted his pennies. More than $3.00 in coins, which meant that more than 300 of the little newspapers had been sold. It was a most promising start.
As he put away the money and readied his press for the second issue, he assessed his problems. First and foremost, he needed advertisers, and in order to attract them, he had to sell more newspapers. The only way to sell more newspapers would be to hire more men to hawk them on the streets. But how could he pay additional helpers when he barely earned enough to keep his present help?
Day came up with an interesting solution - not a novel one, but one that made good sense and, he thought, would probably work. He would sell the newspapers in bulk to carriers at discount prices, and the carriers would be responsible for selling newspapers to the public. This distribution system was known as the "London plan" because London newspapers had used it for years. For every 100 copies of the Sun, vendors would pay 67 cents cash. If they were short of cash, Day would give them a 75-cent credit that would have to be paid before they could
collect their next batch of newspapers. In order to minimize their risk, he would buy back any unsold newspapers at the end of the day.[25]
The incentive system would benefit both carrier and publisher by encouraging the sale of as many newspapers as possible. For the second issue he set up the following ad:
TO THE UNEMPLOYED-a number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to
those who buy to sell again.
Day envisioned the distribution system as being a good source of work for unemployed men, so he was probably a bit surprised when the first person to respond to the ad was a ten-year-old boy. He offered the lad two dollars per week to sell as many copies as he could on the streets, hawking them like the street vendors on Chatham, and promised him extra cash if he disposed of more than a hundred newspapers. Within a short time, Day employed a handful of urchins on these terms.[26]
In addition to advertisers, Day sorely needed editorial and reportorial help. While he had basic and sound instincts about what everyday people liked to read, he did not possess extraordinary abilities as a writer. He could continue to clip items from other newspapers, but late-breaking, local items of interest would have to be written. The popular police court column presented a special problem. He wanted the column as a daily feature, but the Courier and Enquirer did not run the police court column daily. He would either need to attend the court sessions at four o'clock each morning and write them up himself, or pay someone to do it.
At some time during the first week of publication, the answer to Day's police court and editorial problems walked into the Sun office. George W. Wisner, an out-of-work journeyman printer with a "knack for
writing,"[27] had recently worked for the New York Evangelist. Wisner had dark, curly hair, a handsome and clean-shaven face, and intelligent dark
eyes that bespoke an inner strength, but his frail frame confessed of a delicate state of health that would result in his premature death at the age of 37.[28]
Wisner struck an interesting deal with Day. Since Day could not
afford to pay him very much, Wisner offered his services as police court reporter, editor, and compositor until he could earn enough money to buy into the paper. Day would retain the greater portion of Wisner's salary
as payment toward his interest in the venture, and Wisner would take home only four dollars a week, barely enough to keep him alive and not nearly enough to escape poverty.[29]
Day had to see the quality of Wisner's work before he formalized the arrangement, but he liked the sound of Wisner's offer. The two men were close in age, Wisner being younger by two years. Wisner seemed intelligent and industrious. Day liked the prospect of having someone to help shoulder expenses.
The relationship between Wisner and Day quickly became a stormy one as their political and editorial differences surfaced. Day, a Democrat, supported the presidency and policies of Andrew Jackson. Wisner opposed Jackson and his measures and would become a staunch supporter of the Whig party after its founding. More importantly, the two men disagreed on the most volatile issue of the day, the proposed abolition of slavery. Even though both men opposed slavery, Wisner supported the rising Abolitionist movement,[30] which advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves. Day felt that slavery should be gradually eradicated so that the welfare of each former slave could be protected and so that the South would have time to adjust to a different system of labor.
Their political differences caused an editorial dichotomy in the pages of the Sun from the time of Wisner's arrival until his departure in the summer of 1835, especially during the anti-Abolitionist riots of 1834.[31] Day and Wisner disagreed to a lesser extent on the acceptability of particular kinds of content.[32] While he was not averse to publishing fiction[33] and did so on a number of occasions,[34] Wisner believed a newspaper should convey factual, truthful information to readers. Wisner made sure any fiction that appeared in the Sun could be readily identified as such; Day had shown in the first issue that he did not mind blurring such distinctions. Day was willing to fabricate for the sake of entertainment as long as it amused people and did not harm
anyone. Rather than fill the paper with humbugs, Wisner selected articles of the useful-knowledge variety as fillers, or interesting items from out-of-town newspapers that credited them as sources.
Day and Wisner apparently agreed wholeheartedly on the one aspect of content that would come to define the Sun: the inclusion of interesting, local news. In addition to the daily police court column and other crime news,[35] they filled the pages with a wide assortment of local items. New Yorkers could read about a dog that rescued a store clerk from a fire,[36] and many other stories of animals exhibiting peculiar sagacity. A first-person account described an exciting
trip aboard a balloon that ascended from Castle Garden.[37] The Sun alerted its readers to the presence of a gang of pickpockets in the city,[38] and it told them of the sudden death of a man on a street near the Sun office.[39] Whether the story involved the destructive force of a
tornado in New Jersey[40] or street riots in New York,[41] people could find it in the pages of the Sun.
The varied contents - the mixed editorial voices, the sensational news items, the simple and sometimes humorous style of writing, the avoidance of serious and boring political discussions, and the entertaining mixture of local news, fiction, and poetry - appealed to New Yorkers from the start. The little newspaper became something of an
overnight success. After about a month, the Sun enjoyed sales of about 1,200 copies per day, more and more advertisers paid for insertions in the little sensation, and its conductors felt assured of its survival.
Early success forced many changes. In December, after circulation climbed to about 4,000, Day had to purchase a new press in order to meet the public demand for more newspapers. He invested in a two-cylinder machine press that produced about a thousand impressions each hour. He soon hired two of his compositor friends and former partners from the Daily Sentinel days, Willoughby Lynde and William J. Stanley, to help with typesetting and press work. Within a few months, Wisner's withheld salary and his portion of the profits had paid for a half-interest in the establishment.[42]
Success also brought competitive imitators and jealous critics. Day's compositors, Lynde and Stanley, soon had to be replaced when they left to establish their own penny daily, the Evening Transcript.[43] Inspired by Day's immediate success, Lynde and Stanley copied the successful formula of the Sun in most every respect and enjoyed much early success. Obviously jealous of the success of the penny upstarts, editors of the established sixpenny dailies complained about the "penny
trash"[44] and their police reports, due to their "inutility and dangerous
tendency,"[45] and their adherence to a politically independent course.[46]
The phenomenal success of the Sun continued throughout 1834. Like
a year-old gorilla squeezed into toddler's clothes, the Sun completely outgrew its small-time operation and inadequate equipment, and Day and Wisner again found themselves forced to make rapid changes at the close of the year. Needing a newer and faster press, they ordered a Napier from the Hoe Company and a steam engine to power it. Needing additional
page space to accommodate all the overflowing advertising patronage, they increased the size of the Sun until the pages measured 11« x 18 inches. At this juncture the two took the opportunity to change the motto of the newspaper to the famous "It Shines for All."
One of the downsides of 1834 (and indeed for the remainder of the 1830s) was the number of libel suits brought against the Sun editors, but apparently the suits did not bother either Day or Wisner. Early in 1835 they actually boasted editorially of having more than 20 libel suits brought against them in the previous year. The suits were mostly due to the inexperience of Day and Wisner and their overzealous desire to report facts and opinions without double-checking their sources or considering the consequences.
The year of 1835 proved to be an important one for the Sun in terms of personnel changes and additions, major stories, circulation surges, and the assumption of a leadership position. Richard Adams Locke would be hired in the spring and, a few months later, Wisner would sell out his interest. Moses Yale Beach would come on board as a clerk and manager of the mechanical department, and his young sons, Moses Sperry and Alfred Ely, would become regular fixtures at the Sun office doing a variety of jobs.[47] During this banner year, the Sun would publish a grand humbug that would bring it fame in the United States and abroad, and it would overtake the Times of London as the most widely
circulated newspaper in the world.
The first major story of 1835 came in April. A self-professed fakir named Robert Matthias, who became known as Matthias the Prophet, went on trial for the murder of one of his followers. At first Matthias said he possessed the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth, then he decided he was actually God the Father. He dressed the part of the latter, with an elegant, silk-lined cloak, pink-silk-lined frock coat, a silver sun gracing his left breast, silver stars twinkling on his right, and a crimson sash cinching the outfit.[48]
Wisner either could not or would not travel to White Plains to cover the sensational trial, because Day ended up making the journey himself. Despite Day's dubious writing talents, the Sun could not pass up such a tantalizing story. Everyone wanted to read all the details about this "half-cracked fellow," as Day called Matthias.
At the trial, Day began scouting around to see if he could possibly hire someone there to write the Matthias features for him. Fortunately, the Courier and Enquirer had sent their star
reporter, Richard Adams Locke, and he readily agreed to young Day's offer to earn extra money by providing some Matthias features for the Sun. A friendly, genteel Englishman with a pockmarked face (battle scars from a serious bout with smallpox), a hawkish nose, and a receding hairline that made his forehead appear quite massive, Locke also possessed luminous but crossed eyes beneath a prominent brow. Edgar Allan Poe would later tactfully describe Locke's eyes as having a "marked obliquity,"[49] but Locke would refer to his own eyes as "squinting so curiously and contradictorily."[50] An amiable soul with a number of friends from different circles, Locke also had a reputation as
a drinking man.
After the Matthias features ran in the Sun, Locke lost his job at the Courier and Enquirer and soon thereafter went to work for Day at a salary of $12 per week. The Englishman told Day that he had been fired for moonlighting for the Sun, but Day suspected that Locke had been dismissed because of his drinking habits.
Shortly after he joined the Sun, Locke approached the publishers with the idea for a series of fantastic stories he was concocting.[51] These stories described plant, animal, and humanoid life on the moon as witnessed through the telescope of a leading British astronomer. Locke had selected Sir John Herschel, an actual astronomer recognized throughout the world for his work, and he had set the story at Sir John's actual observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. An avid reader of astronomy literature, Locke possessed intimate knowledge of the subject that had allowed him to fill the stories with factual, technical details.
Locke viewed the mission of a newspaper in much the same way as Day, with tongue planted firmly in cheek and the goal of amusement. He proposed that they run the stories beneath a header that would credit the information to a recently-defunct European scientific journal, or better still, to a supplement of that journal. In mixing fact with fiction, it would give the stories maximum impact and entertainment value. Locke viewed the stories as a satire on "the monstrous fabrications of the political press of the country and the various genera and species of its party editors,"[52] but the no-nonsense Day and Wisner probably realized that the public would not be so high-minded in recognizing the literary value of the articles.
Day had a knack for knowing what sort of items would interest people - the instant success of his little paper had proven such. Upon reading the beautifully and masterfully written moon pieces, he knew that the people of New York would relish them. The success of the stories depended upon presenting the fiction as fact and Day knew it. Why not run them as though they were fact? Such a hoax would not harm anyone. The stories would certainly amuse people. And they might sell a lot of papers, possibly enough to nudge the Sun ahead of the Times of London as world circulation leader.
Wisner and Day quarreled about a number of things, and the planned Moon Hoax with the false credit line was probably one of them. Day would have argued that the Journal did not exist, that anyone with any sense would know that the articles were fake anyway, and even if some people were fooled, what harm could it possibly do? Wisner would have said that many people would not know that the Journal had ceased, that it had once published and many people had heard of it, and that the source line gave a ring of authenticity to the articles that would deliberately deceive people. Printing fiction was one thing, but for Wisner, passing off fiction as fact was quite another.
Wisner's frail health had become something of a concern anyway, so he took the opportunity to leave the Sun and pursue his dream to move out west and study law.[53] Publicly, his health would be the only reason cited for his leaving.[54] In late July, several weeks before the moon articles appeared, Day paid him five thousand dollars for his interest
in the newspaper. At this same time, Day decided to give up his job
printing business and devote all his energies to the Sun.
Immediately after Wisner departed, the Sun experienced one of the
most eventful and extraordinary months in its history. In the single month of August 1835, the newspaper office moved to a larger location, a major fire destroyed part of downtown New York, and Locke's grand moon humbug made the Sun famous throughout the world and edged the New York penny daily ahead of the Times of London as circulation leader.
At the beginning of the month, the Sun moved from the William Street office to a larger location at the corner of Nassau and Spruce
Streets, opposite City Hall. A little more than a week after they moved, a major fire raged through the downtown area. In the wee morning hours of Wednesday, August 12, the fire began on Fulton Street, and by dawn it had demolished Ann Street and many of the printing establishments of the downtown area. Fortunately, the fire did not reach Nassau Street and the Sun's new office, but the Sun's principal penny rivals were not so fortunate. Flames consumed the five-story building at 34 Ann Street that housed the Transcript and the newly established Herald. A subsequent article in the Sun would estimate that the fire put about 1000 people out of work, 200 of them printers.[55]
Sales of the Sun skyrocketed in the aftermath of the blaze. The August 12 issue of the Sun only mentioned the fire but sold more than 26,000 copies. With the Transcript and the Herald unavailable, anxious readers turned to the Sun. The editors wrote: "We may safely assert that no other one paper in the Union, nor in the world, ever sold as many papers in one day, as we did yesterday."[56] The Sun of August 13 contained details about the fire, the known dead, and names of those
affected by the blaze. Subsequent issues related stories of tragedy
associated with the fire.[57]
During the next two weeks, as the excitement caused by the
conflagration settled down, Day made plans to proceed with publication of the moon stories. Probably as a result of the fire, the Sun's increased circulation and lack of major penny competition, Locke upped the price for the moon series from $300 to between $500 and $600 dollars, which Day paid.
Day and Locke presented the moon hoax articles in a manner that allowed the story to gradually unfold. On August 21, the Sun quoted a
brief paragraph, supposedly from the Edinburgh Courant, announcing "some astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description" made by the noted astronomer Sir John Hershel at his observatory on the Cape of Good Hope. Four days later, the Sun ran a front-page article about Sir John, his work, and his ultra-powerful telescope. The article supposedly came from a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, an actual, European scientific journal that (unknown to many readers) had
recently ceased publication. Over the course of the week, five more front-page articles credited to the supplement would report the amazing sights seen through Sir John's telescope. Readers would learn that the earth-like moonscape featured shady woods, valleys, pebbled beaches, rivers, and islands. They would discover that interesting lunar creatures resembled hybrids of animals known on earth: single-horned, bluish-colored goats; miniature bison with semicircular horns; cranes with "unreasonably long legs"; and beavers that walked upright, carried their young in their arms, and built fires to warm themselves. They would thrill to the revelation that the most fantastic lunar creatures
of all appeared to be small humans with copper-colored hair that covered
their entire bodies except for yellowish faces and bat-type wings. The creatures communicated with one another and engaged in amusements that
"ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum."[58]
The Sun's penny rivals, the Transcript and the Herald (upon its August 31 revival) denounced the story as a hoax from the onset,[59] but many readers were duped, including some of the editors of the respectable sixpennies. Several of these editors took the Sun at its word and republished the articles. Reprints of the articles appeared in the Mercantile Advertiser and the ultra-respectable New-York Evening Post. The Daily Advertiser said
No article has appeared for years that will command so general a perusal and publication. Sir John has added a stock of knowledge to the present age that will immortalize his name and place it high on the page of science."[60]
Professors from Yale University made a special trip to the Sun office to take a look at the supplement to the Journal and investigate the moon business. They first approached Locke, who promptly referred them to his young boss.[61] Day, with his brusque manner, pretended to be "vastly indignant" that they would dare question the veracity of the stories. "I suppose the magazine is somewhere upstairs," he told the Yale delegates when they asked to see the Edinburgh supplement, "but I consider it almost an insult that you should ask to see it."[62] The learned men backed down. After they left, the entire office laughed for days at the prospect of having humbugged the Yale eggheads.[63]
The moon articles accomplished their goal. On August 28, 1835, the Sun boasted the largest circulation of any daily newspaper on the planet, surpassing even that celebrated bastion in London, the Times. It had a grand circulation of 19,360, which included 15,440 subscribers in New York, 700 in Brooklyn, street sales of 2,000 in New York and 1,220 out of town. At that time, the Times of London reported a circulation of about 17,000.
The Courier & Enquirer and the Journal of Commerce ignored the moon stories as long as possible. Finally, after the last in the series ran, the editor of the Journal of Commerce instructed one of the reporters named Finn (who happened to be a good friend and drinking buddy of Locke's) to get copies of the stories so the paper could reprint them. That evening over drinks the reporter told Locke his plans. If Locke remained silent on the matter and the ruse was subsequently exposed, his friend might very well lose his job. So he admitted the stories had been fabricated.[64]
When Finn passed along the knowledge to his superior, the Journal of Commerce promptly exposed and denounced the hoax. Other newspapers condemned the Sun, but readers responded with wonder and appreciation. They admired the elaborate lengths to which Locke had gone to clothe the fantastic and incredible in a mantle of truth. Even the upper classes had bought the Sun to marvel at the moon accounts. People had suspected that they were not true, but most had not been able to tell for sure. Whether true or not, the masterfully written stories had given readers so much more than a mere penny's worth of entertainment, how could they possibly complain? The wealthy Philip Hone, indicative of the public sentiment, wrote of the Hoax:
In sober truth, if this account is true, it is most enormously wonderful, and if it is a fable, the manner of its relation, with all its scientific details, names of persons
employed, and the beauty of its glowing descriptions, will give this ingenious history a place with 'Gulliver's Travels'
and 'Robinson Crusoe.'[65]
Another contemporary, the author and critic Edgar Allan Poe, credited the moon hoax with making the Sun an enduring success and establishing the penny press throughout the nation. Poe wrote,
From the epoch of the hoax "The Sun" shone with unmitigated splendor. The start thus given the paper insured it a triumph . . . Its success firmly established "the penny system" throughout the country, and (through "The Sun") consequently, we are indebted to the genius of Mr. Locke for one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress.[66]
Poe's estimation of the importance of the Moon Hoax in establishing the success of the Sun may seem a bit exaggerated, considering that the popularity of the Sun had grown phenomenally prior to the publication of the moon stories, but his observations about the success of the Sun establishing "the penny system" throughout the nation have much merit. Within two years after publication of the hoax, other penny newspapers destined for great success would be established in Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Baltimore.
The success of the Sun had been due to a number of factors. The enterprise of Benjamin Day and George Wisner helped, as did their successful management of the operation and their ability to attract talented employees such as Locke. The everyday contents of the Sun also made it popular, including its engaging, conversational writing style, its avoidance of weighty and boring political diatribes, and its emphasis on sensational crime news and other items of local interest to the masses of people. Above all, the appealing price of the Sun put it in the reach of all classes of citizens.
The success of the Sun and the new breed of newspapers it generated brought great changes to American journalism. Some of these changes, attributed to Benjamin Day, would characterize the American
newspaper business for many years to follow. Day's contributions to American journalism were summed up in 1889 in his obituary in the newspaper he founded, when it thrived under Charles A. Dana. The editorial listed three innovations attributed to Day: (1) the establishment in New York of the successful, low-priced newspaper and a more conversational style of journalism, (2) the setting of a new standard for news interest (the emphasis on local news), and (3) the invention of the American newsboy. The Sun editor wrote:
The whole modern system of delivery to the public, in all of its complex development, from the urchin who sells ten copies to the great news company that handles 50,000, is the outgrowth of Day's idea of the way to reach the public.[67]
One of Day's most important contributions to the success of his newspaper and to changes in American journalism was his ability to gauge what the public wanted, his understanding of the public's desire for entertainment, and his willingness to provide his readers with the entertaining content they wanted.
The positive qualities of Day and the Sun were offset by a few negative ones. The Sun editors sometimes abused the great power at their disposal, and their inexperience caused them more than a few troubles with the law, especially libel suits. Also, the emphasis on fiction passed off for fact severely undermined the progress toward a professional standard that would eventually embrace the ideal of objectivity in news reporting.
Yet, the reporting of sensational news and the perpetration of inventive hoaxes served to generate more popularity, which contributed to the spread of the penny press throughout the nation. As Poe pointed out in his observations on the moon hoax and the establishment of the
penny press system:
The consequences of the scheme, in their influence on the
whole newspaper business of the country, and through this
business on the interests of the country at large, are
probably beyond all calculation.[68]
[1]
Except where noted, biographical information on Benjamin Day was derived from an interview and other stories printed in the fiftieth anniversary issue of the New York Sun, 2 September 1883, and from stories in the one-hundredth anniversary issue of the Sun, 2 September, 1933. The latter issue contains a revealing portrait of Day written by his grandson. Information on Day is also included in the following sources: Frank O'Brien, The Story of The Sun (1928; reprint ed., New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 1-90; Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States (1873; reprint ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 417-424; Joseph P. McKerns, ed., Biographical Dictionary of American Journalism (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1989), 171-173; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White & Co., 1906), 13:307-308; Allen Johnson & Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930) 5:155-156. (For convenience, t
he New York Sun will be called NYS in notes.)
[2] Even Alexis de Tocqueville, the French traveler who commented on society in Jacksonian America, was taken in by the country's rags-to-riches myth. He wrote, "In America, most of the rich men were formerly poor." William E. Dodge estimated that about seventy-five percent of the wealthy men of Jacksonian America "had risen from comparatively small beginnings to their present position." See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Paris, 1835, 1840) 1: 54 and 2: 138, and William E. Dodge, Old New York: A Lecture (New York, 1880), 38-40. See also Edward Pessen, "The Egalitarian Myth and the American Social Reality: Wealth, Mobility, and Equality in the 'Era of the Common Man'," Edward Pessen, ed., The Many-Faceted Jacksonian Era: New Interpretations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 7-46; and Douglas T. Miller, Jacksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York, 1830-1860 (New York, 1967).
[3] The egalitarian myth did not apply to women or to people of color.
[4] In the 1883 interview, Day did not say exactly when he worked for the New-York Evening Post, but he indicated that he worked for the New York Journal of Commerce and the New York Mercantile Advertiser in 1830, 1831, and 1832, so he must have worked for the New-York Evening Post sometime earlier.
[5] See James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley (New York: Mason Brothers, 1855), 121. Parton wrote that almost all the printing offices in New York were located within the same square mile. The informal fraternity of printers would soon become one of the nation's first labor unions, the Typographical Association. See Sean Wilintz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 219.
[6] Day also served a brief stint as a printer for Robert Dale Owen's radical New York Free Enquirer, but this was his only other association with the labor press. The labor newspapers would decline in number and the strength of the labor movement they represented would subside in the 1830s. For more details about the New York Daily Sentinel, see Alexander Saxton, "Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press," American Quarterly 36 (1984): 211-34.
[7] Louis H. Fox, "New York City Newspapers, 1820-1850, A Bibliography," The Papers of The Bibliographical Society of America, 21 (1927):89. The Daily Sentinel struggled and finally expired only three years after it had commenced publication.
[8] The New York Times, 22 December 1889, 9.
[9] She was described as beautiful by a reminiscing grandson in 1933.
[10] These were Day's words from the 1883 interview.
[11] Isaac C. Pray, Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1855), 179.
[12] New York City directories for 1832 and 1833-34 indicate Day's home address as 17 Chestnut. The 1834-35 directory lists him at 58 Duane. No firsthand evidence could be located regarding the date of the move, but most people at that time moved on May 1 each year. See Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis, New York City, 1840-1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 18-19.
[13] A good map of New York City in 1833 is included in Edwin Williams, ed., New-York As It Is, In 1833; and Citizens' Advertising Directory (New York: J. Disturnell, 1833). A map is also reproduced in the September 2, 1933 issue of the NYS.
[14] According to Horace Greeley and James Parton, a medical student named Horatio David Sheppard got the idea for a penny newspaper by watching the penny-a-piece sales on Chatham Street. Sheppard visited print shops throughout New York trying to persuade printers to assist him in a one-cent newspaper venture. In 1832 he convinced two young printers, Francis Story and Horace Greeley, to join him. Their ill-fated Morning Post survived only a few weeks after its introduction on January 1, 1833. Sheppard turned from the newspaper business to practicing medicine. A 1935-36 city directory lists him as a "physician" at 96 Eldridge. Day and other journeymen printers in New York probably knew of the Greeley-Story-Sheppard attempt, and the failure of the venture may have made Day even more reluctant to proceed with his experiment. See Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, 91-93; also, Parton, Life of Horace Greeley, 142-144; also, Longworth's American Almanac, New-York Register, and City Directory (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1835). Day never specifically mentioned Chatham Street in the 1883 interview, but 1833 maps reveal that the street stretched across any likely path from Duane to William Streets. It seems highly probable that Day, having to cross this street each day, would have noticed the penny-a-piece sales as Sheppard had.
[15] The respectable sixpenny dailies were large at this time, but in subsequent decades they would become immense in size in an effort to compete. By the mid-1830s they had already been nicknamed "blanket sheets" due to their large proportions.
[16] Statistical evidence suggests that many people outside the upper classes were among the subscribers to six-penny daily metropolitan mercantile and political newspapers. In New York City, for example, the richest 4 percent of the population (who owned about 49 percent of the city's noncorporate wealth in 1828) represented less than 5,000 New Yorkers in 1820 and less than 8,000 New Yorkers in 1830, and both figures included men, women, and their children. See Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power before the Civil War (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1973), 35-36. See also Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 25-28. Wilentz says that the remaining population - those outside the top 4 percent - included everyone from the destitute to the laboring poor to the master craftsmen and their journeymen. With the total daily circulation of the 8 New York dailies in 1820 being 10,800, the total circulation of the 11 New York dailies in 1830 being 16,000, and increasing to 26,500 by 1833 (circulation
of the Courier and Enquirer alone accounting for more than 4,000), it becomes apparent that a great number of these newspapers were selling to people other than the very wealthy. The comparatively colorful contents of the Courier and Enquirer, along with its relatively large circulation, suggests that this paper, at least, intended to attract a wider audience than the city's elite.
[17] Their daughter Mary Ely would be born on October 27, 1833. She would die before her fifth birthday. A Genealogical Register of the Descendants in the Male Line of Robert Day of Hartford, Conn., Who Died in the Year 1648 (Northampton: J & L Metcalf, 1848), 55.
[18] Allen Johnson, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), 2: 82-84. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White & Co., 1906), 1:307.
[19] The office had many windows and was located on the eastern side of the street, therefore, according to the city map, must have faced in a due-Westerly direction. Illustrations of the various NYS offices are included in the anniversary issue of the newspaper, 3 September 1933.
[20] NYS, 3 September 1833.
[21] Day reported in the 1883 interview that he was "pretty sure that I printed a thousand copies that morning." His press could produce only 200 impressions per hour, one side only. He could have printed 1000 copies that morning only if he had already printed pages one and four.
[22] P. T. Barnum, Humbugs of the World (New York: G.W. Carleton, 1865), 8-9, 11. Barnum became the master of humbugs. He promoted a 70-plus-year-old black woman as the 160-plus-year-old former maid of young George Washington. He displayed the carefully sewn-together parts of a dead fish and a dead monkey and called it the Fiji mermaid. The public paid hard-earned money to see these attractions, but rather than denounce them as frauds and demand their money back, they were intrigued, amused, and impressed by the lengths to which Barnum would go to present falsehoods in a mantle of truth.
[23] According to Andie Tucher, "A humbug, by definition, is an in-joke that not everybody gets." Andie Tucher, Froth & Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 57.
[24] No information is available about Day's initial distribution method, but it seems likely that after gathering information, writing, editing, typesetting, and printing the first issue himself, he would have probably helped distribute the papers as well.
[25] Day eventually stopped the practice of buying back unsold copies, after he discovered that some of the carriers were renting out the sheets during the day and selling them back to him in the evening.
[26] In 1883, Day recalled his early method of distribution using newsboys hired at $2 per week. "I ran this system some time before I set up carriers with regular routes." When the routes became properties of enterprising adults, Day put the London plan into effect. The newsboys continued street sales, apparently at the $2 per week rate.
[27] NYS, 3 September 1883.
[28] C. W. Burton, Scrapbook No. 4, clipping, p. 101, Burton Historical Collections, Detroit, cited in James Stanford Bradshaw, "George W. Wisner, A Forgotten Firebrand," Chronicle (Lansing, MI: Historical Society of Michigan), 19 (1983), 2-11. Except where specifically cited, additional biographical information on Wisner was obtained from the following sources: James Stanford Bradshaw, "George W. Wisner and the New York Sun," Journalism History 6 (1979-80), 112, 117-121; Wm. David Sloan, "George W. Wisner: Michigan Editor and Politician," Journalism History 6 (1979-80), 113-116.
[29] The arrangement being Wisner's idea is indicated by the wording Day used in describing what happened: "Wisner . . . came and said if I would give him $4 a week he would get up early every morning and do these police reports. . . . He agreed to attend them regularly and write out what was interesting, besides working daytimes at setting type and doing whatever else he could. . . . Wisner did them so well that I made a new arrangement with him. He was still to have $4 a week, but I agreed that if the paper was a success we would share the profits, I retaining his share until it amounted to enough to pay for half of the establishment." In saying that he agreed to the arrangement, Day's account seems to indicate that the idea for it originated with Wisner. For information about antebellum salaries and poverty levels, see Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 59.
[30] The New York City Anti-Slavery Society, advocating the immediate emancipation of slaves, was established by Arthur and Lewis Tappan about a month after the NYS appeared, at the Chatham Street Chapel near the NYS office on William Street.
[31] The degree of Day's intolerance for Wisner's promotion of Abolitionist views is indicated by his words in the 1883 interview: "Wisner, whenever he got a chance, was always sticking in his damned little Abolitionist articles." The best scholarly examination of Day and Wisner's editorial differences on the subject of the abolishment of slavery can be found in Gary L. Whitby, The New York Penny Press and the American Romantic Movement, Ph.D. Diss., The University of Iowa, 1984; and Gary L. Whitby, "Horns of Dilemma: The Sun, Abolition, and the 1833-34 New York Riots," Journalism Quarterly, 67 (1990), 410-419.
[32] This claim is based on a close textual analysis of the Sun before and during Wisner's tenure and after his departure, and as will be shown, on the timing of Wisner's departure shortly after the hiring of Richard Adams Locke and shortly before publication of the moon hoax.
[33] According to Whitby, the inclusion of fiction in newspapers of the period seems to have been directly influenced by the many literary weeklies that became popular at that time. These quarto-size weeklies (9" x 12") were filled with news and literature, and therefore served as models for the penny papers in terms of size and content. See Whitby, The New York Penny Press and the American Romantic Movement, 162. According to Whitby, "[B]y 1833 there was often little distinction between the two: that American journalism was American literature; that American literature was American journalism; and that, given the tremendous growth and power of the American press during the romantic period, it made more sense to think of literature as 'just good journalism' than of journalism as 'literature in a hurry.' If one accepts this argument, another logically follows: that the poem, the short story, the serialized novel, etc. should be regarded as forms of news." (p. 500)
[34] See, for example, NYS, 1 November 1834, 25 December 1834, 5 February 1835.
[35] For the best scholarly examination of the penny papers' treatment of crime news, see Tucher, Froth & Scum. Tucher writes: "Chronicles of crime were not a particularly new phenomenon in America, but news of crime was. Newspapers had traditionally paid very little attention to lawbreakers and wrongdoers. Their reticence sprang in part from logistics: hard-pressed local weeklies could rarely spare precious space to report on events that most townspeople would already have heard about, clucked over, and dissected for every nuance of meaning as they went about their daily business in the town square, the shops, or the taverns." (Quote is from Tucher, p. 9) Crime news became even more prominent in the Sun when formidable penny competitors arrived on the scene - the Transcript in 1834 and the Herald in 1835.
[36] NYS, 24 October 1834
[37] NYS, 2 October, 1834.
[38] NYS, 9 November 1834.
[39] NYS, 6 May 1835.
[40] NYS, 22 June 1835.
[41] NYS, 23 June 1835.
[42] Wisner's name had already begun to appear alongside Day's on the front page of the paper, but Day recalled that Wisner did not become joint proprietor until the Spring of 1834.
[43] Founded in March of 1834, the conductors of the Evening Transcript would convert it to a morning paper and change its name to the New York Transcript about a month later. Day would also employ William Swain and Arunah Abell prior to their establishment of the very successful Philadelphia Public Ledger and the Baltimore Sun.
[44] NYS, 8 April 1834. The article quotes Col. James Watson Webb's remarks on the penny press in his Courier and Enquirer.
[45] See New-York Commercial Advertiser, 3 September 1834.
[46] See NYS, 31 March 1834.
[47] Within three years, Beach would own the newspaper.
[48] A description of Matthias the Prophet is included, along with a two-column woodcut illustration, in the 9 November 1834 issue of the NYS, when Matthias appeared before the Grand Jury of the Court of Sessions in New York City.
[49] James A. Harrison, ed., Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 17 vols. (New York: Fred De Fau & Co., 1902), 15: 48-49.
[50] Locke used these words to describe not only his own crossed eyes but also those of a former colleague at the Courier and Enquirer, James Gordon Bennett. See the New York Herald, 1 September 1835, which quotes a letter written by Locke to the Evening Star.
[51] Locke may have been assisted in writing the moon articles by Lewis Gaylord Clark, the editor of a leading literary magazine in New York, the Knickerbocker. See The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White & Co., 1898), 8:455. Day does not say that Locke showed them the stories at this time, but it seems likely that he would have offered them a sample of the stories when he approached them with the idea, as he wanted Day and Wisner to pay him $300 for the series.
[52] NYS, 16 September 1835.
[53] The Michigan territory fascinated him, and he had "always wanted to be a lawyer." See Robert B. Ross, Early Bench and Bar of Detroit (Detroit: Winn & Hammond, 1907), p. 232. See also Bradshaw, "George W. Wisner and the New York Sun," 120-121.
[54] In the 1883 interview, Day admitted that he and Wisner had quarreled before he left and thus established that his health had not been the sole reason for Wisner's departure. Within a couple of months, Wisner would be back at work in an editorial position for a Whig weekly in Michigan. See Sloan, "George W. Wisner," 113-116.
[55] NYS, 14 August 1835.
[56] NYS, 13 August 1835.
[57] NYS, 15 August 1835, 22 August 1835.
[58] NYS, 28 August 1835.
[59] New York Herald, 27 October 1835, reported that none of the penny newspaper editors had believed the moon story.
[60] Quoted in O'Brien, The Story of The Sun, 47.
[61] New York Herald, 11 September 1835. See also, William N. Griggs, ed., The Celebrated 'Moon Story,' Its Origin and Incidents (New York: Bunnell and Price, 1852), 27-28.
[62] Day used these words when he related the story in the 1883 interview.
[63] Pray, Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett, 191.
[64] In the 1883 interview, Day revealed that he believed Locke had spilled the secret after becoming "tipsy" with his friend.
[65] Allan Nevins, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936), 173.
[66] Edgar Allan Poe, "Richard Adams Locke," in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed., James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), 135.
[67] NYS, 23 December 1889
[68] Poe, "Richard Adams Locke," 126.
Price Competition
Scholar-to-Scholar Session Preference
Rising and Shining:
Benjamin Day and His New York Sun Before 1836
Susan Thompson
The University of Alabama
319 Grace Street No. 1
205-752-9197
[log in to unmask]
Abstract
From his arrival in New York until the publication of the Moon Hoax in 1835, Benjamin Day worked to establish the New York Sun as the first successful penny daily. This paper examines reasons for Day's success, editorial and ethical differences of Day and co-owner George Wisner, circumstances surrounding Wisner's departure and those surrounding the perpetration of Richard A. Locke's famous Moon Hoax, and the phenomenal growth of the Sun in the early years.
Abstract
From his arrival in New York until the publication of the Moon Hoax in 1835, Benjamin Day worked to establish the New York Sun as the first successful penny daily. The innovative Sun, with its varied editorial voices on the subject of Abolitionism, conversational style of writing, emphasis on local news and crime news, avoidance of weighty political discourses, and attractive low price, appealed to New Yorkers from the start. This paper examines reasons for Day's success the changes made in response to the phenomenal growth of the Sun in the early years, the editorial and ethical differences of Day and co-owner George Wisner, and the circumstances surrounding Wisner's departure and those surrounding the perpetration of Richard A. Locke's famous Moon Hoax. The mix of fiction with fact produced maximum entertainment value, but undermined progress toward a professional ideal of objectivity in journalism.