Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
History
Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
Grady, Henry Woodfin, 1850-1889
Mr. Grady took great pride in the _Weekly Constitution_, and that paper
stands to-day a monument to his business faculty and to his wonderful
methods of management. When Mr. Grady took hold of the weekly edition,
it had about seven thousand subscribers, and his partners thought that
the field would be covered when the list reached ten thousand. To-day
the list of subscribers is not far below two hundred thousand, and is
larger than that of the weekly edition of any other American newspaper.
Just how this result has been brought about it is impossible to say. His
methods were not mysterious, perhaps, but they did not lie on the
surface. The weekly editions of newspapers that have reached large
circulations depend on some specialty—as, for instance, the Detroit
_Free Press_ with the popular sketches of M. Quad, and the Toledo
_Blade_, with the rancorous, but still popular, letters of Petroleum V.
Nasby. The _Weekly Constitution_ has never depended on such things. It
has had, and still has, the letters of Bill Arp, of Sarge Wier, and of
Betsey Hamilton, homely humorists all, but Mr. Grady took great pains
never to magnify these things into specialties. Contributions that his
assistants thought would do for the weekly, Mr. Grady would cut out
relentlessly.
It sometimes happened that subscribers would begin to fall off. Then Mr.
Grady would send for the manager of the weekly department, and proceed
to caucus with him, as the young men around the office termed the
conference. During the next few days there would be a great stir in the
weekly department, and in the course of a fortnight the list of
subscribers would begin to grow again. Once, when talking about the
weekly, Mr. Grady remarked in a jocular way that when subscriptions
began to flow in at the rate of two thousand a day, he wanted to die.
Singularly enough, when he was returning from Boston, having been seized
with the sickness that was so soon to carry him off, the business
manager telegraphed him that more than two thousand subscribers had been
received the day before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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