The worst of years

 

Undoubtedly, 1897 was among the Sun’s most distressing and unsettled years. Its eccentric and irritable editor, 78-year-old Charles A. Dana, took ill in early summer and died in mid-October 1897. Dana had been a force in American journalism for fifty years and the Sun thoroughly bore his imprint. To an unusual extent, he cultivated an intellectual component at the Sun, notably by recruiting a college-educated staff. At the same time, Dana was proud of his reputation as an old-time editor and had little use for many of the innovations of late nineteenth century. He wrongly predicted in the mid-1890s that illustrations in newspapers would prove to be “a passing fashion.”26 He conceded to disliking the linotype “because it didn’t seem to me to turn out a page as handsome, in a typographical point of view, as a page set by hand.”27

 

In the old editor’s last months, the Sun gave vigorous editorial support to two noisy campaigns ostensibly aimed at curbing the excesses and presumed demoralizing effects of the leading exemplars of what was called “new journalism”—the New York Journal and New York World. In their aggressive and self-promoting ways and in their eager embrace of technological innovation, the Journal (especially) and the World represented a kind of journalism antithetical to Dana’s.

 

One campaign sought to rid public libraries, reading rooms, and social clubs across metropolitan New York of copies of the Journal and the World. The Sun took almost savage delight in endorsing the boycott, declaring it “a movement whose natural impulse is in the disgust and indignation … against the licentiousness, the vulgarity, and the criminal spirit exhibited by those shameless papers with an effrontery almost without example in the history of journalism.”28 Nonetheless, the boycott exhausted itself by mid-year.29

 

The Sun enthusiastically backed a controversial bill in the New York legislature in 1897 that proposed banning the unauthorized publication of caricatures. While almost certainly unconstitutional, the measure was inspired by hostility toward the yellow press and its flamboyant use of illustrations. The Sun, which seldom published pictures, described the legislation as “a wholesome, enlightened, and proper measure,”30 which won approval in the state senate31 before dying without a vote in the lower house.32

 

Far more embarrassing than either of the failed campaigns was the bankruptcy in March 1897 of the United Press, of which Dana was president. The collapse of United Press in a long and bitter struggle with the Associated Press news cooperative was signaled by the defections in early 1897 of several leading United Press clients, including the New York Herald and New York Tribune. 33 Dana soon was forced to file the documents that formalized the United Press demise.34

 

The humiliation of the United Press bankruptcy only deepened when, a few weeks later, the Sun printed an apology35 to Frank B. Noyes, publisher of the Washington Evening Star, to settle a case of criminal libel.36 Noyes had sued the Sun over contents of an editorial in 1895 that described him as “a thoroughly dishonest director” of the Associated Press.37 In its apology to Noyes, the Sun said it retracted “any remarks reflecting either upon his personal or business integrity.”38

 

In its editorial comments in 1897, the Sun was far more inclined to vituperation and personal attack than to evoke the eloquence and lyricism that distinguished “Is There A Santa Claus?” The trade journal Fourth Estate said the Sun was never happy unless it was on the attack,39 a quality particularly evident in assailing the Journal and the World, which the Sun excoriated collectively as “a menace … too vile for respectable people to read.”40

 

The Journal brushed aside the Sun’s criticisms, saying they were motivated solely by the Journal’s rapid and enviable growth in circulation. The Journal, moreover, was charitable in marking Dana’s death in October 1897, devoting much of the front page to the eulogizing its foe.41 The Journal’s generous gesture was not matched by Dana’s more hostile and determined rival, Joseph Pulitzer of the World, which reported Dana’s death at the top of the obituary column on its back page.42 The enmity between Dana and Pulitzer was deep-seated and extreme, even by the standards of the late nineteenth century when many rival editors harbored deep grudges and routinely exchanged insults in print. Such resentments sometimes gave rise to lawsuits, such as Noyes’ action against the Sun,43 and even to fisticuffs.44

 

Dana and Pulitzer had traded barbs since the 1880s, when the World emerged as New York’s largest newspaper, luring many readers from the Sun. Their hostility turned exceptionally ugly with Dana’s vicious, anti-Semitic attacks45 on Pulitzer who, in reply, called Dana a “mendacious blackguard” capable of “any amount of distortion of facts.”46 In 1897, the World disparaged Dana’s newspaper as among the “derelicts of journalism.”47 In reply, the Sun called the World “the shameless exponent in chief” of all that was “indecent and rascally in journalism.”48 Against such acrimony and venom, the delicate charm of “Is There A Santa Claus?” seemed decidedly out of place.

 

 

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NOTES

26.See Charles A. Dana, The Art of Newspaper Making: Three Lectures (New York: Appleton, 1895), 98.27. Dana, Art of Newspaper Making, 74.
28. “The End Is Approaching,” New York Sun (10 March 1897): 6.
29. See Campbell, Yellow Journalism, 34–39.
30. Untitled editorial comment, New York Sun (9 April 1897): 6.
31. See “Wants the Press Muzzled,” New York Herald (7 April 1897). The state senate’s vote in favor of the anti-cartoon bill was 35–14.
32. “Danger is Over,” Fourth Estate (29 April 1897): 3.
33. “The United Press Assigns: Associated Press Triumphs in the Long and Costly War of News Associations,” Fourth Estate (1 April 1897): 1
.34. “The United Press Assigns,” Fourth Estate.
35. “A Correction,” New York Sun (17 April 1897): 6
.36. “Sun Apologizes,” Fourth Estate (22 April 1897): 1.
37. “The Work of Rascals,” New York Sun (22 February 1895): 6.
38. “A Correction,” New York Sun.
39. See “The Sun Shows Spite Again,” Fourth Estate (17 June 1897): 1. The article noted that the Sun in the aftermath of the United Press bankruptcy had assailed Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune “as a defaulter and in other terms more forcible than elegant. Mr. Reid treated the attack with silent contempt, as most victims of the Sun’s malice are in the habit of doing.”
40. “Leprous New Journalism,” New York Sun (27 February 1897): 7
41. “Charles A. Dana, The Famous Editor, Is Dead,” New York Journal (18 October 1897): 1
42. “Profession or Trade?” Fourth Estate (28 October 1897): 4.
43. See also, “Ohio Editors at War,” Fourth Estate (10 June 1897): 3. The article recounted the arrest on criminal libel charges of Port Fullmer, editor of the Homes News in West Jefferson, Ohio. The charges were brought by a rival editor in London, Ohio, whom Fullmer’s newspaper had assailed in large headlines as “The Noted London Crook.”
44. See, for example, “Editors Use Their Fists,” Fourth Estate (27 October 1898): 7. The Fourth Estate’s account said “mutual expressions of editorial dislike” gave rise to the fisticuffs between two editors in Springfield, Illinois.
45. See Denis Brian, Pulitzer: A Life (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001), 127–131.
46. Cited in Brian, Pulitzer, 128.
47. “The Derelicts of Journalism,” New York World (28 March 1897): 11.
48. “A Steady Revolt,” New York Sun (10 April 1897): 6.

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