The President Is a Sick Man by Matthew Algeo

Author:Matthew Algeo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2011-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

E. J. Edwards, photographed around 1870, the year he graduated from Yale.

MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES, YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

His friends called him Eddie or Jay, but his byline read, “E. J. Edwards,” the name by which he would be known professionally for the rest of his life. And although he had abandoned the law for good, E. J. Edwards put his legal training to good use in the newspaper business. He pursued stories with the tenacity of a prosecutor and the fairness of a judge. He was a gifted reporter, blessed with a photographic memory and a way with words. Somehow his work caught the discerning eye of Charles Anderson Dana, the formidable publisher of the mighty New York Sun, and in 1879 Dana hired Edwards.

It was an astonishingly lucky break for Edwards. As Allen Churchill points out in Park Row, his book about fin de siècle newspapers, the daydreams of most reporters at that time were largely devoted to envisioning being summoned to work for Charles Dana, who was one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century American journalism. Before the Civil War, Dana had worked as Horace Greeley’s right-hand man at the New York Tribune, but he left that paper after the two men had a falling out. Dana then accepted a position in the Lincoln administration as a special observer on the western front of the war, where he befriended Ulysses S. Grant. Dana would champion Grant’s presidential candidacy, but, consistent with his ostensible knack for making enemies, Dana became harshly critical of Grant once he was in office.

In 1868, Dana bought the New York Sun for $175,000. The paper had been founded in 1833 as a “penny paper,” four densely typeset pages that sold for one cent. For a time it had been the daily newspaper with the highest circulation in the country, but after the war the Sun fell on hard times, a victim of increasing competition from other penny papers. By the time Dana bought it, the paper’s daily circulation had dipped to forty-three thousand, far behind its New York competitors. Under Dana’s brilliant tutelage, however, the Sun rebounded. By 1876 circulation had more than tripled to 131,000, and the newspaper was the most popular in the city. On November 8 of that year, in the heat of the disputed Hayes-Tilden presidential election, the Sun sold an astonishing 220,000 copies, a single-day sale that Dana claimed had never before been “equaled or approached.”

The secret to Dana’s success was simple and succinctly stated in one of the Sun’s promotional slogans: “Its news is the freshest, most interesting and sprightliest current, and no expense is spared to make it just what the great mass of the people want.” Like other penny papers, the Sun carried its share of “sensation stories,” what the newspaper historian Frank Luther Mott has defined as “the detailed . . . treatment of crimes, disasters, sex scandals, and monstrosities.” But the Sun was also the first major newspaper to run what we now call human

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