The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (5 page)

have, in common with their fellow laborers in every branch of industry, participated largely in the distress which pervades the producing classes of this community.” The
Daily Sentinel
took on all the working-class issues of the day but struggled to find a readership, in large part because a year’s subscription cost eight dollars—an improvement on the ten dollars charged by the merchant newspapers but still far beyond the means of most of the working people the directors hoped to reach. After just two months, a frustrated Day went back to work as a compositor for the merchant papers.

– 24 –

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 25

Benjamin Day’s Whistling Boy

In September 1831 Day married his cousin Eveline Shepard, a schoolteacher who was in her way just as strong-willed as he, though tender-hearted where he was gruff. (In later years Eveline would open up several bedrooms in their house to needy old women, a decision Day put up with silently.) The following July Eveline gave birth to a son, Henry. For the first months of Henry’s life Ben and Eveline lived in terror of the cholera epidemic that raged around them, horse-drawn carts bearing coffins arriving at houses up and down the block; they tried not to dwell on the most chill-ing sight of all, the tiny coffins built for children. The family survived the cholera, but the epidemic and its aftermath cut drastically into the business of the print shop Day had finally managed to open. In May 1833, anticipating another baby, the Days moved several blocks south from Chestnut Street to larger quarters on Duane Street at the lower edge of the working-class Fifth Ward, just a few blocks from the Five Points and all its miseries.

As the months passed and business didn’t improve, Day increasingly felt the pressure of family responsibilities bearing down on him, as hard and heavy as the platen of his little-used press, imprinting a single word:
ruin.

Some print jobs were still coming in, and he could find occasional extra work as a compositor for some of the newspapers, but he needed something regular, something steady; ideally, it would be something that would also help him publicize the quality of his print business.

As he stood for hours at the printing press in his tiny ground-floor shop, his mind kept returning to an idea proposed by a friend of his named Dave Ramsay, with whom he had worked as a compositor for the
Journal of Commerce.
Ramsay’s idea was to publish a new kind of newspaper, meant not for merchants or politicians but for working people like them. All of the papers in town cost six cents, too much for most New Yorkers; this paper, though, would cost only one cent. At the time, Ben Day had laughed down the idea with the other compositors—how can you make any money selling newspapers for a penny?—but now he began to wonder if it could actually work.

Still, as Day must have been aware, a cheap paper had been tried earlier that year in New York, and the results were hardly encouraging. It had been the notion of a young man named Horatio Sheppard, a student at the nearby Eldridge Street Medical School. Walking to class each morning, Sheppard crossed the raucous Chatham Street marketplace, where the street vendors offered everything for just one cent. He noted to himself how cheerfully people parted with a penny, how little difference there
– 25 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 26

the sun and the moon

seemed to be between having a penny and having no money at all. Buying something for a penny was, in their minds, almost like getting it for free.

Though he was studying to be a doctor, Sheppard had long been interested in the print trades, and over time he became convinced that it was possible to profitably sell a newspaper, too, for only a penny. For a year and a half, whenever he had time away from class, he made the rounds of the city’s printing offices, talking up his idea to anyone he could button-hole. But he could not convince a single person of the practicality of his idea, until he met a foreman for one of the merchant papers named Francis Story. Story had been looking for the opportunity to start his own printing business and he agreed to go in on the plan, provided that Dr.

Sheppard (he had by now received his medical degree) also bring on a printer friend of his, a moon-faced country boy named Horace Greeley.

Greeley had come to New York from Vermont less than two years earlier, dressed in ill-fitting homespun clothes and, like a character from a Grimm tale, carrying all his belongings in a bandana slung over his shoulder. But he was already an expert printer and had a reputation for remarkable intelligence (it was said that he had read the Bible through by the time he was five years old), and his unprepossessing appearance hid a restless ambition, one that eventually carried him to the editorship of the
New
York Tribune,
where he would become one of the most celebrated of all the city’s editors and in 1872 the presidential candidate of both the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties. Greeley found Sheppard’s idea appealing, but he prided himself on his New England practicality and agreed to serve as the paper’s master printer on the condition that it be sold for two cents rather than one. Sheppard was dumbfounded by Greeley’s demand. The whole appeal of the enterprise lay in its cheapness—the difference between one cent and two, he insisted, was all the difference in the world—but Greeley was not to be dissuaded. Despairing of any alternative to partnership with these men, Sheppard saw no choice but to relent.

Pooling what little capital they had, they took a small office on Liberty Street, at the corner of Nassau. Their selling plan was one that had already met with success in London: boys would hawk the papers on the street. It was decided that the new paper would commence with the new year, and on January 1, 1833, the first issue of the
Morning Post
hit New York, along with the worst snowstorm in recent memory. The snow whirled across the city, whitening dark cloaks and frock coats, making great drifts on the streets and muffling the cries of the shivering newsboys. All the New
– 26 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 27

Benjamin Day’s Whistling Boy

Yorkers who could stay at home did, and few of those who ventured outside cared to rummage around in their pockets to find two pennies for a newspaper they didn’t know. Still, despite the terrible conditions the boys managed to sell several hundred copies of the paper each day, and through the first week Sheppard met his expenses, if just barely. By the second week, however, he was deferring payment to his printers, and by the third week Greeley and Story decided to close up shop. By that time Sheppard had prevailed on his partners to lower the price to a penny, and the rise in sales during those last two days convinced him that the paper would have been a success if only he insisted on his original formula: a penny a paper.

But by that point it was too late. For Horatio Sheppard there was nothing left to do but put up his shingle: he opened a medical office on Eldridge Street and was never heard from again in the newspaper business.

As a member of New York’s small fraternity of journeymen printers, Day had undoubtedly heard about the failure of Sheppard’s
Morning
Post,
and whenever he broached the subject to his friends they laughed and reminded him of the problems a penny paper would present: how many copies would have to be printed and sold each day, how much advertising would have to be brought in? And what sort of firm, they wanted to know, would advertise in a paper intended for readers who couldn’t afford to buy a real paper? Day understood all this, but he had already proven himself to be good with money (unlike them, he had saved enough to start his own shop), and he thought he had figured out a way around some of the problems.

Though his stint at the
Daily Sentinel
had proven a failure, Day prided himself on always learning from experience, and that one had taught him some valuable lessons. The printers who founded the
Sentinel
had learned their trade on the merchant papers, and for all of their radicalism they were still in thrall to an old way of thinking about a newspaper. Like Horatio Sheppard, Day had come to understand that there was magic in the idea of a newspaper that could be had for only one cent: a “penny paper.”

For a year’s subscription he would charge not ten or even eight dollars, but only three dollars, well within the range of most potential readers—

and those subscriptions would be paid in advance, so he wouldn’t have to spend endless hours chasing down subscribers who were behind on their accounts, the way the other newspapers did. In addition to cutting the price of the paper, he would cut the size of its pages as well. The newspaper pages of the time measured about three feet long by two feet wide, or
– 27 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 28

the sun and the moon

fully four feet across when the paper was opened (because of their size, the papers were known around town as the “blanket sheets”). The format was perfectly convenient for merchant readers, who could spread out the pages on the table of a private library or on the desk of a counting house, but for Day’s readers the pages would have to be much smaller. Not only would smaller pages be less intimidating to an eye not used to reading a newspaper, but a paper of that size could be held comfortably in the hands and then, if necessary, simply rolled up and carried in a pocket, to be finished later.

For a man with so little direct experience in selling, Benjamin Day had an unusually keen sense of the marketplace. By this point he had worked as a compositor for several of the six-penny papers, the
Evening Post,
the
Journal of Commerce,
the
Courier and Enquirer,
the
Mercantile Advertiser,
and like the rest of the men in the composing room he had felt the little chill that passed through when the editor entered in his finery, issuing orders. He recognized how great the distance really was between the Fifth Ward and the newspaper district, because he walked it each day. The city’s editors knew little about most New Yorkers, and likely never even conceived of them as readers, but Day, who lived among them, knew that as a group they were strikingly literate. They had Bibles and devotional tracts for their religious needs; they had, for diversion, adventure stories and gallows confessions and broadsheet ballads. The more politically minded among them had broadsides and pamphlets. They had all kinds of printed matter. What they didn’t have, yet, was a daily newspaper.

On that September day in 1833, any potential reader could see in an instant that Benjamin Day’s new paper was dramatically different from the others being published around town. For one thing, its pages measured only eight by eleven inches, or about the size of a sheet of letter paper.

And there on the front page—just below the
Sun
nameplate emblazoned with the American eagle holding shield and arrows—was that captivating phrase: PRICE ONE PENNY.

Inside, Day had made page two the news page, following newspaper tradition, though owing to its unusually small size, the page was printed in three columns rather than the six or even seven found in the blanket sheets. Most of the second column was taken up by reports from the police office, with Day’s brief but colorful descriptions of recently heard cases, which included an assault (“John Evans, brought up for exercising
– 28 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 29

Benjamin Day’s Whistling Boy

the muscles of his right arm by pounding John Nixon on the head with his fist”); an attempt to pass counterfeit money to a boy selling oysters; a man who turned over a table of pies, peaches, and pickled lobsters near Fulton Market; and a woman arrested for attacking her husband, even though the man, having succeeded in calming “his tyrannical rib” (as Day described the wife), had decided to drop the charges. One of the lengthier reports even included a bit of dialect: Wm. Scott, from Centre Market, brought up for assaulting Charlotte Gray, a young woman with whom he lived. The magistrate, learning that they never were married, offered the prisoner a discharge, on condition that he would marry the injured girl, who was very willing to withdraw the complaint on such terms. Mr. Scott cast a sheep’s eye towards the girl, and then looking out of the window, gave the bridewell a melancholy survey: he then gave the girl another look, and was hesitating as to which he should choose—a wife or a prison. The Justice insisted on an immediate answer. At length he concluded that he “might as well marry the critter,” and they left the office apparently satisfied.

Day also included on the page short items more typical of the six-penny papers, such as news of the arrival in the city of the celebrated balloonist Charles Durant, a dinner given for the postmaster general in Nashville, and the continuing expansion of New York’s economy. He devoted more space to a Dickensian account of an orphan boy from a local almshouse who had been taken in by a family on Pearl Street. On the first day in his new home, the boy told his foster mother about the only friend he had ever had, “old dusty Bob, the rag-man, died last week”—Bob, as it turns out, had once given the boy a piece of gingerbread. Considerable attention was given to a story copied from the
Courier and Enquirer
about the suicide of a young man in Boston who had taken laudanum “in a fit of temporary derangement occasioned by an affair of the heart in which his happiness was deeply involved.” The items Day had taken from out-of-town papers were almost entirely occupied with murder: “a most outrageous and cold-blooded murder” perpetrated in Columbus, Ohio; a man in Pennsylvania on trial for the murder of his wife; an expatriate American family in South America murdered by a gang of slaves; in Hartford, a sighting on a steamboat of the notorious Ephraim K. Avery, the Methodist minister recently acquitted of the murder of a young woman.

– 29 –

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 30

the sun and the moon

Benjamin Day wasn’t a graceful writer, but he had an eye for a compelling story, and the news page he put together on September 3, 1833, was unlike anything New York had ever seen before. As city journalism, it was—in both meanings of the word—sensational. Gone were the merchant papers’ lengthy perorations on tariffs or trade policy, month-old reports from Gibraltar and Buenos Aires, and clever ripostes to jabs by rival editors, replaced by stories that were brief (the small page contained fully twenty-seven items), often amusing, and strongly seasoned with sex, romance, intrigue, violence, death—the types of stories Benjamin Day figured most New Yorkers wanted to read about.