The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918O'Brien, Frank Michael
History
The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918
O'Brien, Frank Michael
Sun (New York, N.Y. : 1833)
A word to Horace Greeley--if he wishes us to write him or any
of his sickly brood of newspapers into notice, he must first go
to school and learn a little decency. He must further retract
the dirty, malignant, and wholesale falsehood which he procured
to be published in the Albany _Evening Journal_ a year ago last
winter, with the hope of injuring the _Sun_. He must then deal
in something besides misstatements of facts.... Until he does
all this we shall feel very indifferent to any thrusts that he
can make at us with his dagger of lath.
Soon afterward the _Sun_ rubbed it in by quoting the Albany _Evening
Journal_:
Galvanize a large New England squash, and it would make as
capable an editor as Horace.
But Greeley was a lively young man, in spite of his eccentric ways and
his habit of letting one leg of his trousers hang out of his unpolished
boots. Only thirty when he started the _Tribune_, he had had a lot
of experience, particularly with politicians and with fads. He still
believed in some of the fads, including temperance--which was then
considered a fad--vegetarianism, and Abolition. He had been, too, a
poet; and his verses lived to haunt his mature years. He had to give
away most of the five thousand copies that were printed of the first
number of the _Tribune_, but in a month he had a circulation of six
thousand, and in two months he doubled this.
Greeley had the instinct for getting good men, but not always the knack
of holding them. One of his early finds was Henry J. Raymond, who
attracted his attention as a boy orator for the Whig cause. Raymond
worked for Greeley’s _New Yorker_ and later for the _Tribune_. He was a
good reporter, using a system of shorthand of his own devising.
On one occasion, at least, he enabled the _Tribune_ to beat the other
papers. He was sent to Boston to report a speech, and he took with
him three printers and their cases of type. After the speech Raymond
and his compositors boarded the boat for New York, and as fast as the
reporter transcribed his notes the printers put the speech into type.
On the arrival of the boat at New York the type was ready to be put
into the forms, and the _Tribune_ was on the street hours ahead of its
rivals.
Greeley paid Raymond eight dollars a week until Raymond threatened to
leave unless he received twenty dollars a week. He got it, but Greeley
made such a fuss about the matter that Raymond realized that further
increases would be out of the question. Presently he went to the
_Courier and Enquirer_, and from 1843 to 1850 he tried to restore some
of the glory that once had crowned Colonel Webb’s paper.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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