The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (36 page)

Mr. Bennett takes the most indecorous liberties with the biography of so obscure an individual as myself. He says that after taking my degree at one of the English Universities, I took an unwarrantable degree of liberty with some chambermaids. This is as untrue as it is impertinent. To give plausibility to his theory of the authorship of the astronomical discoveries, he says that I sometime since informed him I was directing my attention to astronomy and optics. I am sorry to be compelled to give this statement a flat contradiction. I said not a syllable to him upon the subject. If I mentioned my immediate pursuits at all, it was that I was engaged in writing a Latin Grammar. Optics indeed!—only think of two men squinting so curiously and contradictorily as we undeniably do, putting our noses together and discussing optics! Mr. Bennett’s hypoth-esis is too ridiculous to receive any further notice from Your obedient servant,

RICHARD ADAMS LOCKE

James Gordon Bennett reprinted Locke’s letter in the next day’s
Herald
—

followed by his own response, of course, for he was not one to cede the last word. He had been delighted to receive such a clever, not to mention prompt, reply to his charges (“Good! excellent! admirable!” his response began), but clearly he was also taken aback by the vehemence with which Locke denied being the author of the moon series. Bennett had a dilemma: if any newspaperman in New York had the erudition and command of language to pull off such a magnificent hoax, it was Richard Adams Locke; but Locke, with his English background and knowledge of science, might equally well have been the one to receive a new scientific pamphlet from some “medical gentleman” just arrived from Scotland, as the
Sun
had claimed. Perhaps, Bennett mused, the truth lay somewhere in the middle. “Our friend Richard,” he now hastened to clarify, says we “attribute” to him “the astonishing discoveries made at the Cape, &c.” We did no such thing. We only said he did the writing part—he dressed up the materials, he clothed the skeletons taken from scientific works with flesh—the bat-wings and golden hair and angel’s apparel. The mathematical part was furnished by a gentleman recently
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from England, who has seen some private letters detailing the actual discoveries (modest they are in comparison to the Sun’s account) which Sir John J. H. Herschell has made.

Bennett had earlier commended Locke for his “gentlemanly” manners, and these were on full display in the
Evening Star
letter. To the accusation of past impropriety with a chambermaid Locke had responded first with humility (“so obscure an individual as myself”), then with wit (the twinned use of the word
degree
), and then stout denial; most impressively, he had done so without resorting to invective of his own. James Gordon Bennett was used to being ignored by his rivals, or replied to with the insults that were the New York newspaper editor’s stock in trade. (“Turkey buzzard,”

Mordecai Noah called him; “moral pestilence,” said James Watson Webb;

“lizard looking animal,” said Benjamin Day.) Locke had chosen a finer course; if he were not careful, Bennett must have sensed, he would find the city turning against him. The
Herald’
s editor made a tactical retreat. “As to the ‘indecorous liberties’ we took with his ‘biography,’ ‘the chambermaid, &c.’ we take that back,” he wrote. But he still insisted that Locke had claimed to be “very much engaged in optics and similar pursuits.”

That last riposte by Locke, regarding their conversation about optics, must have been especially consternating for Bennett. To deftly parry his assertion with an amusingly self-deprecating reference to their mutual strabismus (“two men squinting so curiously and contradictorily as we undeniably do”), and then to dismiss the whole of the charges as unworthy of his further attention: Richard Adams Locke was exhibiting a rhetorical sophistication rare among New York editors. Nonetheless, Bennett remained convinced that the facts of the case were against him. “The whole note of Mr. Locke,” he concluded, “furnishes ‘ample internal evidence’ for the belief we had that he has had a finger at least in this astronomical pie. He does not deny the thing plumply. He need not be ashamed of it, neither need he squint so awfully at us about the chambermaid. We can return the look with seven per cent. interest. We still persist in our belief.”

As he had promised in his letter, Richard Adams Locke did not again publicly respond to James Gordon Bennett’s accusations. Thus he left the field to his adversary, who took full advantage. Day after day, Bennett hammered away at the
Sun,
denouncing it as a lying, swindling paper unfit to receive the public’s trust; in the process he won the
Herald
legions of new
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readers, who considered it well worth a penny to find out what Bennett would say that morning. Once he tried his hand at satire, producing an item he called “A Better Story—Most Wonderful and Astounding Discoveries by Herschell the Grandson, LL.D., F.R.S., R.F.L., P.Q.R., &c. &c.

&c.” Like the
Transcript’
s earlier account by “Captain Tarbox,” this item purported to bring news of additional discoveries from the observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. The first of the sightings was “the Editor of the New York Sun, seated on a three legged stool, with a great sledge hammer in his hand, forging ‘truths,’ in the same manner that Jove forged thun-derbolts.” Bennett’s touch was not as light as Asa Greene’s; he was much better at direct attack, as with the item in which he railed against the newspaper he called “the impudent Sun—the unprincipled Sun—the mer-cenary Sun—the low bred Sun—the Sun that hoaxes the public—that tells untruths for money—that cheats the whole city and country.”

“Why still persist in cheating the public?” he asked in another item.

“How many prints and pamphlets have they yet unsold?”

Bennett knew Richard Adams Locke to be an honorable man, and in emphasizing the profits the
Sun
had reaped from the moon series he seems to have been trying to prick Locke’s conscience, like a constable badger-ing a wavering conspirator into a confession. James Gordon Bennett had made his name from insult, but he was equally adept at the calculated flat-tery that, by the 1830s, was already becoming known as the “soft soap.”

Mr. Locke has exhibited great ingenuity in the general keeping of the account. He wrote it, as we learn, to amuse a vacant hour, and out of the vigor and fulness of a vivid imagination. He has certainly exhibited talent of a very remarkable kind. Knowing as we do the amiableness of Mr. Locke’s character, we do not charge him with the intention to deceive the public. He had no money making motive in the affair. It was as far as he is concerned, a mere
jeu d’esprit,
but the motives of the Sun editors are far different.

By the “Sun editors” Bennett was referring not to Locke but to Benjamin Day and, most likely, Day’s brother-in-law Moses Yale Beach, a paper mill owner brought on to help manage the
Sun’
s financial affairs: men, Bennett believed, who cared little for truth and much for money.

There was no harm in publishing Locke’s
jeu d’esprit
and enjoying for a day or two the folly of those who believed it. “But now,” he thundered,

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“when that paper in order to get money out of a credulous public, seriously persists in averting its truth, it becomes highly improper, wicked, and in fact a species of impudent swindling.”

“Mr. Locke himself,” Bennett assured his readers, “would never sanction such a course.”

For his part, Mr. Locke was saying little. In those turbulent early September days, he was navigating a treacherous passage between truth and duty. Benjamin Day was his employer; the man had hired him at a time of great exigency, when he had been thrown out of work with a wife and daughter dependent on him, and that counted for a great deal. Moreover, Day had paid him well for the moon series, had purchased it as rightfully as any storekeeper buying a barrel of whiskey or molasses to resell at a profit. Locke felt himself bound to silence by contract, and at least as much by honor. The secret, he believed, was no longer his to tell.

There had been enough calumny in Bennett’s first charges that Locke felt he must respond, both to clear his name and protect his wife’s dignity—

that outrageous claim about the chambermaid—and also to set the record straight about those allegedly incorrect “mathematical principles.” Still, there was less to his
Evening Star
letter than it initially appeared. He had tried to uphold the
Sun’
s position without being overtly untruthful, by denying that he had made any “discoveries” (which of course he hadn’t) rather than denying having written the series itself. At the same time, he had acknowledged some doubt about the genuineness of the discoveries by inserting the careful phrase “if made at all.” (Bennett had picked right up on that: “
If
do you say?” he had crowed, before quoting Shakespeare: “‘An if is your only peacemaker, much virtue in
if.
’
If
is also an astronomer and a great one. Is it not, Richard?”)

When Locke was asked about the series, as he so often was those days, he tried as best he could to express no opinion on the subject, telling all who asked that the mails would soon arrive from Europe and the facts of the matter would then be known. What else could he say? He had not thought the series would be believed in the first place. Of course he had put a great deal of care into the writing, but he had never intended that it be taken as a genuine scientific work. If he had, he would not have filled the lunar “seas” with actual water, contrary to what all respectable modern astronomers believed about them. Nor would he have carefully graduated Herschel’s discoveries, beginning with nonorganic matter (the
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basaltic rock), proceeding through plants (the poppy flowers) to trees, and finally to animal life of ever-greater intelligence, culminating with the man-bats, who themselves appeared in three varieties of increasing sophistication. While this steady progression made for excellent suspense, keeping the
Sun’
s readers in anticipation of what marvel would be discovered next, it was highly improbable that actual astronomers would make their discoveries in such a convenient order. This was the most obvious flaw of all in the series, but no one had even noticed it.

By the beginning of September a distressing word was starting to be heard around town in connection with his name:
hoaxer.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Day was growing rich from newspapers and pamphlets and prints. The
Sun’
s circulation had risen as quickly as a hot-air balloon shed of its ballast; now the
Herald
was rising in pursuit, with James Gordon Bennett in the basket below happily throwing darts in all directions. Unlike Bennett, Richard Adams Locke had never cultivated a public identity.

Bennett had left the
Courier and Enquirer
when James Watson Webb refused to grant him a byline; Locke, on the other hand, had always preferred anonymity. He was not at all comfortable with the attention he was suddenly receiving; his good friend William Griggs remarked later that Locke had “suffered severely from the determined inquisitiveness of which he was necessarily the object.”

The talk around town was that he had begun drinking more heavily.

One evening he was having a drink in the taproom of the Washington Hotel on Broadway, when he was joined by a reporter friend of his named Finn. The two had worked together briefly at the
Sun
before Finn left to take a job at the six-penny
Journal of Commerce.
Finn mentioned that one of the
Journal’
s editors had instructed him to procure back copies of the
Sun,
so that they might reprint the moon series in the
Journal of Commerce.
The story, Finn said, was already being set into type and would likely appear the next morning.

Perhaps it was just a bit of advice to a journalist friend not to publish a false story; or perhaps, with his tongue loosened and his will weakened by drink, he could no longer hold the secret inside him.

“Don’t print it right away,” said Richard Adams Locke. “I wrote it myself.”

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c h a p t e r
13

Moonshine

The summer, at long last, was coming to an end. The heat departed as suddenly as it had arrived; now the mercury struggled to reach sixty during the days, and the nights hinted of frost. Cloaks and gloves appeared once more on the city’s streets, along with black beaver hats and the new short-napped castors that were, this season, à la mode. In the countryside that rolled out beyond Fourteenth Street, the trees were tinged with red and gold, though the pastures remained as green as ever, nourished by the summer rains that seemed so long ago. “We hope that old winter will have more consideration for poor humanity, than to think seriously of commencing his career for two months to come, or to insist upon staying where he cannot but perceive he is altogether unwelcome,”

Asa Greene remarked in the
Transcript.
He could not resist adding, “We hope the late ‘discoveries in the moon’ have had nothing to do in this early recurrence of cold weather.”

The
Transcript
could now, in September, feel a bit more comfortable in its joke. Rather than respond gratefully to a fellow journalist’s warning, Finn of the
Journal of Commerce
had taken Richard Adams Locke’s admission as a scoop, and the
Journal
ran an article that denounced the series as a hoax (though the paper continued to reprint it nonetheless), and named Locke as its author. With two of the city’s newspapers having thus identified him, Richard Adams Locke became the most famous—or notorious— newspaperman in New York. “The name of the author of the ‘Moon Hoax’ was on everybody’s lip,” the magazine
Every Saturday
would recall years later.