Chapter XVI: “sun” Reporters and Their Work (1)

_Cummings, Ralph, W. J. Chamberlin, Brisbane, Riggs, Dieuaide,
Spears, O. K. Davis, Irwin, Adams, Denison, Wood, O’Malley, Hill,
Cronyn.--Spanish War Work._

There is an unconventional club which has no home except on the one night each year when it holds a dinner in a New York hotel. Its members are men who have been writers on the _Sun_, and who, though they have left the paper, love it. They meet for no purpose except to toast the _Sun_ of their day and this. They call themselves the Sun Alumni.

From the ranks of the novelists and magazine editors and writers come men like Will Irwin, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Robert Welles Ritchie, Albert W. Atwood, Henry James Forman, Cameron Mackenzie, Kirk Munroe, Charles Mason Fairbanks, Robert R. Whiting, James L. Ford, E. J. Edwards, Arthur F. Aldridge, George B. Mallon, Gustav Kobbé, and Frederick Kinney Noyes.

From the lists of newspaper owners and editors come Arthur Brisbane, of the Washington _Times_; Edward H. Mott, of the Goshen _Republican_; Frank H. Simonds, of the New York _Tribune_; Martin J. Hutchins, of the Chicago _Journal_; C. L. Sherman, of the Hartford _Courant_.

From the staffs of other New York newspapers come Charles Selden, Carr V. Van Anda, and Richard V. Oulahan, of the _Times_; William A. Willis, of the _Herald_; Rudolph E. Block, of the _American_; J. Arthur Seavey, of the _Tribune_; and Lindsay Denison, of the _Evening World_.

From the bench come Judges Willard Bartlett, Warren W. Foster, and Willard H. Olmsted; from government work, Stephen T. Mather, Robert Sterling Yard, and E. W. Townsend; from business, Edward G. Riggs, Willis Holly, Collin Armstrong, Oscar King Davis, Robert Grier Cooke, John H. O’Brien, and Roy Mason. If the racing season is over in Cuba, C. J. Fitzgerald is present. If business on the San Diego _Sun_ is not too brisk, its editor, Clarence McGrew, crosses the continent to be at the feast. Until his death in 1917, Franklin Matthews, associate professor of journalism at Columbia University, who was with the _Sun_ from 1890 to 1909 in many capacities, was one of the leading spirits of the Alumni. Dr. Talcott Williams, chief of the school of journalism, is another enthusiastic alumnus.

These men, the outsider observes, gather and talk in groups. The men of the eighties recall the wonders of the four-page _Sun_ and its Bogarts, Ralphs, and Cummingses. Men of the nineties chat of the feats of “Jersey” Chamberlin and “Commodore” Spears. The alumni who matriculated in the present century speak of Riggs and Irwin, Denison and O’Malley and Hill. But all talk of the _Sun_, and of Dana and Mitchell and Lord and Clarke.

It is only when they speak of reporters that there is a grouping of heroes. That is because it is a natural and pleasant practice, if an illogical one, for newspapermen of the present and previous decades to look back to this or that period of a paper and say:

“That was _the_ day! The names of the men on the staff prove it.”

An old _Sun_ man will point, for instance, to the _Sun’s_ roster of reporters in 1893, when the local staff included:

Julian Ralph
John R. Spears
Oscar K. Davis
C. J. Fitzgerald
Carr V. Van Anda
David Graham Phillips
George B. Mallon
Samuel Hopkins Adams
Daniel F. Kellogg
C. M. Fairbanks
Lawrence Reamer
W. J. Chamberlin
Edward G. Riggs
E. W. Townsend
Rudolph E. Block
Samuel A. Wood
E. D. Beach
E. O. Chamberlin
Victor Speer
Joseph Vila
W. A. Willis
Collin Armstrong

The weak place in this sort of retrospection is that after twenty-five years the observer’s focus is twisted. Julian Ralph was a great reporter in 1893, but W. J. Chamberlin, whose name is linked with Ralph’s among great _Sun_ reporters, was only just arriving. John R. Spears had made his reputation, but Riggs’s fame as a political writer was not yet established. Townsend had tickled New York with his “Chimmie Fadden” stories, but Sam Adams was a cub. Wood, Vila, and Reamer were not as important to the _Sun_ in 1893 as they are at this writing.

The men of 1893 probably agreed that there was no staff like the staff of 1868, just as the men of 1942 may gaze with proud regret at the staff list of 1917. Distance, like pay-day, lends enchantment; and newspaper history is a little more hazy than most other kinds of history, because the men who write what happens to other people have no time to set down what happens to themselves.

The anonymity of the _Sun_ reporter has been almost complete. If Julian Ralph had never gone into the field of books and magazines, he would have been as little known to the general public as the _Sun’s_ best reporter is to-day; but newspapermen would not have undervalued him. There is better quality in the things he wrote hastily and anonymously for the _Sun_ than in some of the eight or nine published volumes that bear his name, and the reason for this is that he was primarily a newspaperman.

ARTHUR BRISBANE
]

He entered the game at fifteen, as an apprentice in the office of the Red Bank (New Jersey) _Standard_. At seventeen he was a city editor and a writer of humour. At eighteen he had founded the Red Bank _Leader_--a failure. At nineteen he was one of the editors of the Webster (Massachusetts) _Times_, and at twenty he was a reporter on the New York _Graphic_. At twenty-two he was on the _Sun_, where he remained from 1875 to 1893.

Ralph was a news man who lacked none of the large reportorial qualities. He enjoyed seeing new places and new people. He liked to hunt news--an instinct missing in some good writers who fail to be great reporters. He liked to write--a taste found too seldom among men who write well, and too frequently among the graphomaniacs who fancy that everything is worth writing, and that perfection lies in an infinite number of words.

Some one said of Ralph that he “could write five thousand words about a cobblestone.” If he had done that, it would have been an interesting cobblestone. He had a passion for detail, but it was not the lifeless and wearisome detail of the realistic novelist. When he wrote half a column about a horse eating a woman’s hat, the reader became well acquainted with the horse, the woman, and the crowd that had looked on.

Ralph was untiring in mind, legs, and fingers. He liked the big one-man news story, such as an inauguration or a parade, or the general introduction of a national convention. His quiet, easy style, his ability to cover an event of many hours and much territory, were shown to good advantage in his description of the funeral of General Grant in August, 1885. He wrote it all--a full front page of small type--in about seven hours, and with a pencil. It began:

There have not often been gathered in one place so many men
whose names have been household words, and whose lives have
been inwoven with the history of a grave crisis in a great
nation’s life, as met yesterday in this city. The scene was
before General Grant’s tomb in Riverside Park; the space was
less than goes to half an ordinary city block, and the names
of the actors were William T. Sherman, Joe Johnston, Phil
Sheridan, Simon B. Buckner, John A. Logan, W. S. Hancock, Fitz
John Porter, Chester A. Arthur, Thomas A. Hendricks, John
Sherman, Fitzhugh Lee, John B. Gordon, David D. Porter, Thomas
F. Bayard, John L. Worden, and a dozen others naturally linked
in the mind with these greater men. Among them, like children
amid gray-heads, or shadows beside monuments, were other men
more newly famous, and famous only for deeds of peace in times
of quiet and plenty--a President, an ex-President, Governors,
mayors, and millionaires. And all were paying homage to the
greatest figure of their time, whose mortal remains they
pressed around with bared, bowed heads.

That was the beginning of a story of about eleven thousand words, all written by Ralph in one evening. It told everything that was worth reading about the burial--the weather, the crowded line of march, the people from out of town, the women fainting at the curbs, the uniforms and peculiarities of the Union and Confederate heroes who rode in the funeral train; told everything from eight o’clock in the morning, when the sightseers began to gather, until the bugler blew taps and the regiments fired their salute volleys. It was a story typical of Ralph, who saw everything, remembered everything, wrote everything. In detail it is unlikely that any reporter of to-day could surpass it. In dramatic quality it has been excelled by half a dozen _Sun_ reporters, including Ralph himself.

For example, there is the story of a similar event--Admiral Dewey’s funeral--written in January, 1917, by Thoreau Cronyn, of the _Sun_, with a dramatic climax such as Ralph did not reach. This is the end of Cronyn’s story--the incident of the old bugler whose art failed him in his grief:

Chattering of spectators in the background hushed abruptly. A
light breeze, which barely rumpled the river, set a few dry
leaves tossing about the tomb of Farragut, Dewey’s mentor at
Mobile. The voice of Chaplain Frazier could be heard repeating
a prayer, catching, and then going on smoothly.

A second of silence, then the brisk call of the lieutenant
commanding the firing-squad of Annapolis cadets.

“Load!”

Rifles rattling.

“Aim!”

Rifles pointed a little upward for safety’s sake, though the
cartridges had no bullets.

“Fire!”

Twenty rifles snapped as one. This twice repeated--three
volleys over the tomb into which the twelve sailors had just
carried the admiral’s body.

And now came the moment for Master-at-Arms Charles Mitchell,
bugler on the Olympia when Dewey sank the Spanish fleet, to
perform his last office for the admiral. Raising the bugle to
his lips and looking straight ahead at the still open door of
the tomb, he sounded “taps.” The first three climbing notes and
the second three were perfect. Then the break and the recovery,
and the funeral was over.

Julian Ralph saw more of the world, and made more copy out of what he saw, than any other newspaperman. While still on the _Sun_ he was making books out of the material he picked up on his assignments. In the early nineties, while still on the _Sun_ staff, he made two tours for _Harper’s Magazine_ and wrote “On Canada’s Frontier,” “Our Great West,” and “Chicago and the World’s Fair,” the last of which was the official book of the Columbian Exposition. After his experiences in the Boer War he wrote “Towards Pretoria,” “War’s Brighter Side” (with Conan Doyle), and “An American with Lord Roberts.” His other books are “Alone in China,” “Dixie; or, Southern Scenes and Sketches,” “People We Pass,” and a novel, “The Millionairess.” He was the author of the “German Barber” sketches, which appeared almost weekly in the _Sun_ for a long time, and which are remembered as among the genuine examples of real humour in dialect. During the Boer War, Ralph joined the staff of the London _Daily Mail_, and after returning from South Africa he made his home in London until his death in 1903.

A tradition about Ralph, indicating the pleasure that his articles gave to his own colleagues as well as to the public, concerns one of the great football-games of the eighties. John Spears discovered the picturesqueness of the Yale-Princeton games, usually played on Thanksgiving Day, and the _Sun_ featured them year after year. Reporters hungered for the job, for it meant not only money, but the opportunity to write a fine story.

When Ralph’s turn came he wrote such a good article that the copy-desk let it run for five columns. Lord admired it, Clarke was enthusiastic over it, and the other men in the office took turns in reading the story in the proofs, so happily was it turned. It was not until the first edition was off the press that an underling, who cared more for football than for literature, suggested that the story ought to contain the score of the game. Ralph had forgotten to state it, and all the desks, absorbed in the thrill of the article itself, had overlooked the omission.

Ralph reported for the _Sun_ the outrages of the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coal-fields. After the execution of two of the outlaws for murder, he was bold enough to follow their bodies back to their village where they had lived, in order to describe the wake. He was warned to leave the place before sunset, on pain of death, and he went, for there was nothing to be gained by staying.

On another assignment, a murder mystery, the relatives of the victim, who were ignorant and superstitious people, suspected Ralph of being the murderer. When he came into their house to see the body, they demanded that he should touch it, their belief being that the body would turn over, or the wounds reopen, if touched by the murderer. There was an implied threat of death for the reporter if he refused, but Ralph walked out without complying.

Ralph was a believer in the sixth sense of journalists, that inexplicable gift by which a man, and particularly a newspaperman, comes to a clairvoyant knowledge that something is about to happen--in other words, an exalted hunch. John B. Bogart, city editor in Ralph’s _Sun_ days, had this sense, and he called it a “current of news.” He thus described its workings to Ralph:

One day I was walking up Broadway when suddenly a current
of news came up from a cellar and enveloped me. I felt the
difference in the temperature of the air. I tingled with the
electricity or magnetism in the current. It seemed to stop me,
to turn me around, and to force me to descend some stairs which
reached up to the street by my side.

I ran down the steps, and as I did so a pistol-shot sounded in
my ears. One man had shot another, and I found myself at the
scene upon the instant.

While acting as the legislative correspondent of the _Sun_ at Albany, Ralph was in the habit of walking to one of the local parks to enjoy the view across a valley southwest of the city. One day, while gazing across the valley, he was seized with a desire to go to the mountains in the distance beyond it. The impulse remained with him for two days, and then, on the third day, he read of a news happening that had occurred in the mountains on the very day when the current of news had thrilled him.

Ralph reported the Dreyfus court-martial at Rennes, in France. One morning he could not sleep after five o’clock. As he was on his way to court he said to George W. Steevens, of the London _Daily Mail_, who was walking with him:

“Wait a moment while I go into the telegraph office and wire my paper that I expect exciting news to-day.”

At that hour there was no apparent reason to expect any news out of the ordinary, but it was only a few hours later that Maître Labori, Dreyfus’s counsel, was shot down on his way to court.

Young newspapermen who are fortunate enough to be possessed of--or by--the sixth sense must remember, however, that it cannot be relied upon to sound the alarm on every occasion. Mr. Bogart, who felt that he had a friend in the current of news, kept close track of the assignment-book. As a city editor he was unsurpassed for his diligence in following up news stories. One day he assigned Brainerd G. Smith, afterward professor of journalism at Cornell, to report the first reception given by Judge Hilton after the death of the judge’s partner, A. T. Stewart.

“And above all,” Mr. Bogart wound up, “don’t leave the house without asking Judge Hilton whether they’ve found Stewart’s body yet.”

Julian Ralph attributed his success as a journalist chiefly to three things--a liking for his work, the ability to get what he was sent for, and good humour. He omitted mention of something which distinguished him and Chamberlin and all other great reporters--hard work. Ralph himself gives a brief but complete picture of a day’s hard work in his description, in “The Making of a Journalist,” of the way in which he reported the inauguration of a President:

I had myself called at five o’clock in the morning, and, having
a cab at hand, mounted the box with the negro driver and
traveled about the city from end to end and side to side. I did
this to see the people get up and the trains roll in and the
soldiers turn out--to catch the capital robing like a bride for
her wedding.

After breakfast, eaten calmly, I made another tour of the
town, and then began to approach the subject more closely,
calling at the White House, mingling with the crowds in the
principal hotels, moving between the Senate and the House of
Representatives, to report the hurly-burly of the closing
moments of a dying administration. I saw the old and the new
President, and then witnessed the inauguration ceremonies and
the parade.

Then, having seen the new family in place in the White House, I
took a hearty luncheon, and sat down at half past one o’clock
to write steadily for twelve hours, with plenty of pencils
and pads and messenger-boys at hand, and with my notebook
supplemented by clippings from all the afternoon papers,
covering details to which I might or might not wish to refer.
Cigars, a sandwich or two at supper-time, and a stout horn of
brandy late at night were my other equipments.

As Ralph remarked, that was hard work, but it was nothing when compared with the job of reporting a national convention. “One needs only to _see_ an inauguration,” he said. “In a national convention one must _know_.”

Wilbur J. Chamberlin’s name is not in any book of American biography. In library indexes his name is found only as the author of “Ordered to China,” a series of letters he wrote to his wife while on the assignment to report the Boxer rebellion--one of the many pieces of _Sun_ work which he did faithfully and well. He never found time to write books, although he wished to do so. He was a _Sun_ man from the day he went on the staff, in 1890, until the day of his death, August 14, 1901.

Chamberlin was born in Great Bend, Pennsylvania, March 12, 1866. While he was still a boy he went to Jersey City, where he worked in newspaper offices and became the local correspondent of several newspapers, including the _Sun_. He came to be known as “Jersey” Chamberlin to the _Sun_ men who did not know how much he detested the nickname. His intimates called him Wilbur, and the office knew him generally as “W. J.”--an easy way of distinguishing him from other Chamberlins and Chamberlains. He lacked Ralph’s rather distinguished personal appearance, but his strong personality, his courage, ability, and industry overshadowed any lack of fashion.

Like Ralph, he was indefatigable. Like his brother, E. O. Chamberlin, he let nothing stop him in the pursuit of news. Like Henry R. Chamberlain, he had the gift of divining rapidly the necessary details of any intricate business with which his assignment dealt. If a bank cashier had gone wrong, “W. J.” was the man to describe how the sinner had manœuvred the theft; to wring from usually unwilling sources the story which appeared in the bank only in figures, but which must appear in the _Sun_ in terms of human life. The world of finance was more dumb then than it is now, for Wall Street had not learned the wisdom of uttering its own pitiless publicity.

Chamberlin had one idiosyncrasy and one hatred. The mental peculiarity was a wish to conceal his own age. Unlike most successful men, he wished to be thought older than he was; and he looked older. He was only thirty-five when he died in Carlsbad, on his way home from China; yet he had packed into that brief life the work of an industrious man of fifty.

His single enmity was directed against cable companies, and he had good reason to dislike them. One day, during the Spanish-American War he boarded the _Sun_ boat, the Kanapaha, and ran to Port Antonio, Jamaica, with an exclusive story. The women clerks in the telegraph office took his despatch and counted the words three times before they would start sending it. They told Chamberlin the cost, about a hundred dollars, which he promptly paid in cash.

Three or four days later he went back to Port Antonio with another important despatch. The cable clerk told him that on his previous visit their count had been one word short.

“That’s all right,” said Chamberlin, and he threw down a shilling to pay for the one word.

“Thank you,” said the lady. “_Now_ we can send the message!”

The cable hoodoo pursued Chamberlin to China. As soon as he arrived in Peking he began sending important news stories by telegraph to Tientsin, where he had left a deposit of three hundred dollars with the cable company that was to forward the messages to New York. After working in Peking for two weeks, he discovered that all his stories were lying in a pigeonhole at Tientsin; not one had been relayed.

A third time an important despatch was held up overnight because it had not been written on a regular telegraph-blank. But Chamberlin’s most bitter grudge against the cable companies was the result of his adding to a message sent to the _Sun_ on Christmas Eve, 1900, the words “Madam Christmas greeting.” This was a short way of saying, “Please call up Mrs. Chamberlin and tell her that I wish her a Merry Christmas.” Under the cable company’s rules nothing could be sent at the special newspaper rate except what was intended for publication. Chamberlin got a despatch from the manager of the cable company as follows:

Your cable _Sun_ New York December 24 words “Madam Christmas
greeting” not intended for publication. Please explain.

There was nothing for Chamberlin to do but assure the cable manager that if the _Sun_ had wished to print “Madam Christmas greeting” in its columns it was welcome to do so.

In spite of his cable misfortunes Chamberlin got more news to the _Sun_ about the Boxer troubles than any other correspondent obtained. He was the first reporter in China who told the truth about the outrageous treatment of the Chinese by some of the so-called Christians. He was particularly frank in describing the brutality of Count von Waldersee’s German soldiers. In November, 1900, he wrote to his wife:

As you have probably noticed in my despatches, I have not much
use for the German soldiers anyhow. They are a big lot of
swine, if human beings ever are swine.

Chamberlin had a reputation for possessing the ability to write any kind of a story, no matter how technical or how delicate. Edward G. Riggs was sitting beside him in the Populist convention of July, 1896, when the suspenders of the sergeant-at-arms of the convention, who was standing on a chair, cheering, surrendered to cataclasm. Riggs turned to his colleague and said triumphantly:

“At last, W. J., there’s one story you can’t write!”

But Chamberlin wrote it:

He clutched, but he clutched too late. He dived and grabbed
once, twice, thrice, but down those trousers slipped. Mary
E. Lease was only three feet away. Miss Mitchell, of Kansas,
was less than two feet away. Helen Gougar was almost on the
spot. Mrs. Julia Ward Pennington was just two seats off, and
all around and about him were gathered the most beautiful and
eloquent women of the convention, and every eye was upon the
unfortunate Deacon McDowell.

Then he grabbed, and then again, again, and again they eluded
him. Down, down he dived. At last victory perched on him. He
got the trousers, and, with a yank that threatened to rip them
from stem to stern, he pulled them up. At no time had the
applause ceased, nor had there been any sign of a let-up in the
demonstration. Now it was increased twofold. The women joined
in.

McDowell, clutching the truant trousers closely about him,
attempted to resume his part in the demonstration, but it
was useless, and after frantic efforts to show enthusiasm
he retired to hunt up tenpenny nails. When it was over, an
indignant Populist introduced this resolution:

“Resolved, that future sergeants-at-arms shall be required to
wear tights.”

The chairman did not put the resolution.

The number of Chamberlains and Chamberlins in the history of American journalism is enough to create confusion. The _Sun_ alone had four at one time. They were Wilbur J. Chamberlin and his almost equally valued brother, Ernest O. Chamberlin, who later became managing editor of the _Evening World_; Henry Richardson Chamberlain, and Henry B. Chamberlin.

E. O. Chamberlin went on the _Sun’s_ local staff while Wilbur was still engaged in small work in Jersey City. In the late eighties he was a colabourer with reporters like Daniel F. Kellogg, Edward G. Riggs, William McMurtrie Speer, Charles W. Tyler, Robert Sterling Yard, Samuel A. Wood, Paul Drane, and Willis Holly.

Henry Richardson Chamberlain, who was born in Peoria, Illinois, became a _Sun_ reporter in May, 1889. He was then thirty years old, and had had twelve years’ experience in Boston and New York. In 1888 he had served as managing editor of the New York _Press_. He was particularly valuable to the _Sun_ on the stories most easily obtained by reporters of wide acquaintance, such as business disasters. In 1891 he returned to Boston to become managing editor of the Boston _Journal_, but he was soon back on the _Sun_.

In 1892 he was sent to London as the _Sun’s_ correspondent there, and it was at this post that he won his greatest distinction. He had a news eye that looked out over political Europe and an imagination that compelled him to concern himself as much with the future of the continent as with its past and present. The Balkans and their feuds interested him strongly, and he was forever writing of what might come from the complications between the little states through their own quarrels and through their tangled relations with the powers. It was the habit of some newspapermen, both in London and New York, to stick their tongues in their cheeks over “H. R. C.’s war-cloud articles.”

“H. R. is always seeing things,” was a common remark, even when the logic of what he had written was undeniable. There couldn’t be a general war in Europe, said his critics, kindly; it was impossible.

Besides having general supervision over the _Sun’s_ European news, Chamberlain personally reported the Macedonian disturbances, the Panama Canal scandal in France, the Russian crisis of 1906, and the Messina earthquake. He was the author of many short stories and of one book, “Six Thousand Tons of Gold.” He died in London in 1911, while still in the service of the _Sun_; still believing in the impossibility of putting off forever the great war which so often rose in his visions.

Henry B. Chamberlin’s service on the _Sun_ was briefer than that of the Chamberlin brothers or H. R. Chamberlain. He came to New York from Chicago, where he had been a reporter on the _Herald_, the _Tribune_, the _Inter-Ocean_, the _Times_, and the _Record_. After 1894, when he left the _Sun_, he was again with the Chicago _Record_, and in that paper’s service he saw the Santiago sea-fight from his boat--the only newspaper boat with the American squadron.

Nor must any of these Chamberlins and Chamberlains be confused with some of their distinguished contemporaries not of the _Sun_--Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, who was the Cuban correspondent of the New York _Evening Post_ in 1898, and later an editorial writer on the New York _Evening Mail_ and the Boston _Transcript_; Eugene Tyler Chamberlain, one-time editor of the Albany _Argus_; and Samuel Selwyn Chamberlain, son of the famous Ivory Chamberlain of the New York _Herald_, founder of the _Matin_ of Paris, and at various times editor of the San Francisco _Examiner_ and the New York _American_.

Edward G. Riggs, who left the _Sun_ on February 1, 1913, to become a railroad executive, had been a _Sun_ reporter and political correspondent for twenty-eight years. He joined the staff in 1885 as a Wall Street reporter. Though he never lost interest in the world of finance and its remarkable men, he soon gravitated toward politics. He became, indeed, the best-known writer of political news in America. He wrote at every national convention from 1888--when Ambrose W. Lyman, then the Washington correspondent of the _Sun_, was at the head of a staff that included Julian Ralph and E. O. Chamberlin--until 1912. In 1892 Ralph was in charge of the _Sun’s_ national convention work, with Riggs as his first lieutenant; but Riggs was the _Sun’s_ top-sawyer at the conventions of 1896, 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912.

Riggs had a closer view of the wheels of the political machines of New York State than any other political writer. His intimate acquaintance with Senators Platt and Hill, Governors Odell and Flower, and the other powers of the State brought to him one hundred per cent of the political truths of his time--the ten per cent that can be printed and the ninety per cent that can’t.

Riggs never became a regular correspondent at either Washington or Albany. He preferred to rove, going where the news was. In Washington he knew and was welcomed by Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft; by Senators like Hanna and Quay; by Cabinet members like Hay and Knox; by House leaders like Reed and Bland. He knew J. P. Morgan and William C. Whitney as well as he knew William J. Bryan and Peffer, the Kansas Populist.

Between Presidential elections, when political affairs were quiet in New York, Riggs acted as a scout for the _Sun_ with the whole country to scan. Mr. Dana had an unflagging interest in politics, and he relied on Riggs to bring reports from every field from Maine to California.

“Riggs,” Dana once remarked to a friend, “is my Phil Sheridan.”

It was through Riggs that Thomas C. Platt, then the Republican master of New York State, sent word to Dana that he would like to have the _Sun’s_ idea of a financial plank for the Republican State platform of 1896. The plank was written by Mr. Dana and the _Sun’s_ publisher--afterward owner--William M. Laffan. It denounced the movement for the free coinage of silver and declared in favour of the gold standard. The State convention, held in March, adopted Dana’s plank, and the national convention in June accepted the same ideas in framing the platform upon which Major McKinley was elected to the Presidency.

It was Riggs who carried a message from Dana to Platt, in 1897, asking the New York Senator to withdraw his opposition to the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Platt complied, and Roosevelt got the position.

Some years ago, in response to a question as to the difference between a political reporter and a political correspondent, Riggs wrote:

There was a vast difference between the two. The political
reporter is he who begins at the foot of the ladder when he
reports the actual facts at a ward meeting. The political
correspondent is he who has run the gamut of ward meetings,
primaries, Assembly district, Senate district, and Congress
district conventions, city conventions, county conventions,
State conventions, and national conventions, and who builds his
articles to his newspaper on his information of the situation
in the State or nation, based upon circumstances and facts
arising out of all of the aforesaid conventions.

A political reporter and a political correspondent occupy in
newspaper life the same relative positions as the cellar-digger
and the architect in the building-trade world. Cellar-digger
is just as important in his sphere as architect. The most
superb architects were the most superb cellar-diggers. No man
can be a successful political correspondent unless he has
been a successful political reporter. Judges are made out of
lawyers, generals and admirals out of cadets. Only the most
ordinary of human virtues are necessary for the equipment of a
successful political reporter and correspondent--cleanliness,
sobriety, honesty, and truthfulness.

Writing of Riggs as the dean of American political correspondents, Samuel G. Blythe said in the _Saturday Evening Post_:

He has made it his business to know men in all parts of the
country, and to know them so they will tell him as much of
the truth as they will tell anybody. He is tenacious of his
opinions and loyal to his friends. He is jolly, good-natured,
companionable, and a fine chap to have around when he is in
repose. Wherever men spoke the English language he was known as
“Riggs--of the _Sun_.”

Reputation and success in newspaper work demand the highest
and most unselfish loyalty to one’s paper. It must be the
paper first and nothing else second. Loyalty is Riggs’s first
attribute, even better than his courage.

The influence of a man like Riggs cannot be estimated. There is
no way of computing this, but there is no person who will deny
that he has been a power. He has not had his head turned by
flattery. He has been “Riggs--of the _Sun_.”

One of Mr. Riggs’s last great pieces of newspaper work was a twenty-thousand-word history of national conventions which appeared in the _Sun_ in 1912--the first history of its kind ever written. Mr. Riggs was also a frequent contributor to the editorial page.

Arthur Brisbane, when he became a _Sun_ reporter in 1882, was almost the youngest reporter the _Sun_ had had; he went to work on his eighteenth birthday. He had been intensively educated in America and abroad. In his first three or four months he was a puzzle to his superiors, his colleagues, and perhaps to himself.

“He sat around,” said one of his contemporary reporters, “like a fellow who didn’t understand what it was all about--and then he came out of his trance like a shot from a gun and seemed to know everything about everything.”

Brisbane was well liked. He was a handsome, athletic youth, interested in all lines of life and literature, cheerful, and eager for adventurous assignment. After two years of reportorial work he went to France to continue certain studies, and while he was there the _Sun_ offered to him the post of London correspondent, which he accepted.

In March, 1888, when John L. Sullivan and Charley Mitchell went to Chantilly, in France, for their celebrated fight, Brisbane went with them and wrote a good two-column story about it--a story that contained never a word of pugilistic slang but a great deal of interest. He saw the human side:

Deeply interested were the handfuls of Frenchmen who gathered
and watched from such a safe and distant pavilion as we would
select to look upon a hyena fight.

And, when other reporters were deafened by the battle, Brisbane heard the plaintive appeal of Baldock, Mitchell’s tough second:

“Think of the kids, Charley, the dear little kids, a calling
for you at home and a counting on you for bread! Think what
their feelings will be if you don’t knock the ear off him, and
knock it off him again!”

Not but what the correspondent paid conscientious attention to the technique of the fray:

A detailed report of each of the thirty-nine rounds taken by
me shows that out of more than a hundred wild rushes made by
Sullivan, and of which any one would have been followed by
a knockout in Madison Square, not half a dozen resulted in
anything.

A couple of years after the establishment of the _Evening Sun_ Brisbane was made its managing editor--a big job for a man of twenty-three years. In 1890 he went to the _World_, where he became the editor of the Sunday magazine and the most illustrious exponent of that startling form of graphic art which demonstrates to the reader, without calling upon his brain for undue effort, how much taller than the Washington Monument would be New York’s daily consumption of dill pickles, if piled monumentwise.

Seven years later Mr. Hearst took Brisbane from Mr. Pulitzer and made him editor of the _Evening Journal_--a position eminently suited to his talents, for here he was able to write as he wished in that clear, simple style which had endeared him to the _Sun_.

Brisbane’s newspaper style goes directly back to the writing of William O. Bartlett. It has its terse, cutting qualities, the avoidance of all but the simplest words, and the direct drive at the object to be attained. Brisbane, too, adopted the Dana principle that nothing was more valuable in editorial writing, for the achievement of a purpose, than iteration and reiteration. This was the plan that Dana always followed in his political battles--incessant drum-fire. Brisbane uses it now as proprietor of the Washington _Times_, which he bought from Frank A. Munsey, the present owner of the _Sun_, in June, 1917.

John R. Spears was one of the big _Sun_ men for fifteen years. He, like Amos Cummings and Julian Ralph, was brought up in the atmosphere of a printing-office as a small boy; but in 1866, when he was sixteen years old, he entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis and spent a couple of years as a naval cadet. His cruise around the world in a training-ship filled him with a love of the sea that never left him. His marine knowledge helped him and the _Sun_, for which he wrote fine stories of the international yacht-races between the Mayflower and the Galatea (1886) and the Volunteer and the Thistle (1887).

Spears liked wild life on land, too, and the _Sun_ sent him into the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky to tell of the feuds of the Hatfields and the McCoys. He went into the Ozarks to write up the Bald Knobbers, and he sent picturesque stories, in the eighties, from No Man’s Land, that unappropriated strip between Kansas and Texas which knew no law from 1850, when it was taken from Mexico, until 1890, when it became a part of the new State of Oklahoma.

Spears was a hard worker. They said of him in the _Sun_ office that he never went out on an assignment without bringing in the material for a special article for the Sunday paper. He wrote several books, including “The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn,” “The Port of Missing Ships,” “The History of Our Navy,” “The Story of the American Merchant Marine,” “The Story of the New England Whalers,” and “The History of the American Slave Trade.” He now lives in retirement near Little Falls, New York. His son, Raymond S. Spears, the fiction-writer, was a _Sun_ reporter from 1896 to 1900.

Park Row knows Erasmus D. Beach chiefly through the book-reviews he wrote for the _Sun_ during many years, but he was a first-class reporter, too. The _Sun_ liked specialists, but no man could expect to stick to his specialty. When Gustav Kobbé went on the _Sun_ in March, 1880, it was for the general purpose of assisting William M. Laffan in dramatic criticism and Francis C. Bowman in musical criticism; but his first assignment was to go to Bellevue Hospital and investigate the reported mistreatment of smallpox patients--a job which he accepted like the good soldier that every good _Sun_ man is.

Mr. Beach was a clever all-round writer and reporter, with a leaning toward the purely literary side of the business, and he had no special fondness for sports; but the _Sun_ sent him, with Christopher J. Fitzgerald and David Graham Phillips, to report the Yale-Princeton football-game at Eastern Park, Brooklyn, on Thanksgiving Day, 1890--that glorious day for Yale when the score in her favour was thirty-two to nothing. It was the time of Heffelfinger and Poe, McClung and King. Beach wrote an introduction which Mr. Dana classed as Homeric. Here is a bit of it:

Great in the annals of Yale forever must be the name of
McClung. Twice within a few minutes this man has carried the
ball over the Princeton goal-line. He runs like a deer, has the
stability of footing of one of the pyramids, and is absolutely
cool in the most frightfully exciting circumstances.

A curious figure is McClung. He has just finished a run of
twenty yards, with all Princeton shoving against him. He
is steaming like a pot of porridge, and chewing gum. His
vigorously working profile is clearly outlined against the
descending sun. How dirty he is! His paddings seem to have
become loosed and to have accumulated over his knees. He has
a shield, a sort of splint, bound upon his right shin. His
long hair is held in a band, a linen fillet, the dirtiest ever
worn.

He pants as a man who has run fifty miles--who has overthrown a
house. He droops slightly for a moment’s rest, hands on knees,
eyes shining with the glare of battle, the gum catching between
his grinders. A tab on one of his ears signifies a severe
injury to that organ, an injury received in some previous match
from an opposition boot-heel, or from a slide over the rough
earth with half a dozen of the enemy seated upon him. He has a
little, sharp-featured face, squirrel-like, with a Roman nose
and eyes set near together. Brief dental gleams illuminate his
countenance in his moments of great joyfulness.

EDWARD G. RIGGS
]

Dana liked Beach’s introduction because the reader need not be a football fan to enjoy it. For the technique of the game he who wished to follow the plays could find all that he wanted in the stories of Fitzgerald and Phillips.

In connection with Beach’s literary accomplishments, there is a tradition that another famous _Sun_ reporter of the eighties, Charles M. Fairbanks, was assigned to report one of the great games at Princeton, and, although entirely unacquainted with punts and tackles, came back with a story complete in technical detail, having learned the fine points of football in a few hours. Later, in the early nineties, Fairbanks was night editor of the paper.

A _Sun_ man who has been a _Sun_ man from a time to which the memory of man goeth back only with a long pull, is Samuel A. Wood, who has been the _Sun’s_ ship-news man for more than thirty-five years. He is a good example, too, of the _Sun_ man’s anonymity, for although he was the originator of the rhymed news story and his little run-in lyrics have been the admiration of American newspapermen for more than a generation, few persons beyond Park Row have known Wood as the author of them.

Although a first-class general reporter, Wood has stuck closely to his favourite topics, the ships and the weather. He made weather news bearable with such bits as this:

The sun has crossed the line, and now the weather may be
vernal; that is, if no more cyclones come, like yesterday’s, to
spurn all the efforts of the spring to come as per the classic
rhymers. (Perhaps there was a spring in those days of the
good old-timers!) But this spring sprang a fearful leak from
clouded dome supernal, and weather that should be divine might
be declared infernal; entirely too much chilliness, nocturnal
and diurnal, which prompted many citizens to take, for woes
external, the ancient spring reviver of the old Kentucky
colonel.

The mercury fell down the tube a point below the freezing, and
Spring herself might be excused for shivering and sneezing. The
wind, a brisk northeaster, howled, the sky was dark and solemn,
and chills chased one another up and down the spinal column.

Oh hail, diphtherial mildness, hail, and rain, and snow--and
blossom! Perhaps the spring has really come, and may be playing
possum!

Wood writes rhymeless sea-stories with the grace of a Clark Russell. He turns to prose-verse only when the subject particularly suits it, as for instance in the story upon which Mr. Clarke, the night city editor, wrote the classic head--“Snygless the Seas Are--Wiig Rides the Waves No More--Back Come Banana Men--Skaal to the Vikings!” This is the text:

While off the Honduranean coast, not far from Ruatan, the
famous little fruiter Snyg on dirty weather ran. Her skipper,
Wiig, was at the helm, the boatswain hove the lead; the air was
thick; you could not see a half-ship’s length ahead. The mate
said:

“Reefs of Ruatan, I think, are off our bow.”

The skipper answered:

“You are right; they’re inside of us now.”

The water filled the engine-room and put the fires out, and
quickly o’er the weather rail the seas began to spout.

When dawn appeared there also came three blacks from off the
isle. They deftly managed their canoe, each wearing but a
smile; but, clever as they were, their boat was smashed against
the Snyg, and they were promptly hauled aboard by gallant
Captain Wiig.

“We had thirteen aboard this ship,” the fearful cook remarked.
“I think we stand a chance for life, since three coons have
embarked. Now let our good retriever, Nig, a life-line take
ashore, and all hands of the steamship Snyg may see New York
once more.”

But Nig refused to leave the ship, and so the fearless crew the
life-boat launched, but breakers stove the stout craft through
and through. Said Captain Wiig:

“Though foiled by Nig, our jig’s not up, I vow; I’ve still my
gig, and I don’t care a fig--I’ll make the beach somehow!”

And Mate Charles Christian of the Snyg (who got here yesterday)
helped launch the stanch gig of the Snyg so the crew could
get away. The gig was anchored far inshore; with raft and
trolley-line all hands on the Snyg, including Nig, were hauled
safe o’er the brine.

Although the Snyg, of schooner rig, will ply the waves no more,
let us hope that Wiig gets another Snyg for the sake of the
bards ashore.

The _Sun’s_ handling of the news of the brief war with Spain, in 1898, has an interest beyond the mere brilliance of its men’s work and the fact that this was the last war in which the newspaper correspondents had practically a free hand.

For years “Cuba Libre” had been one of the _Sun’s_ fights. From the first days of his control of the paper Mr. Dana had urged the overthrow of Spanish dominion in the island. His support of the revolutionists went back, as E. P. Mitchell has written, “to the dark remoteness of the struggles a quarter of a century before the war--the time of the Cespedes uprising, the Virginius affair, and the variegated activities of the New York Junta.” Mr. Mitchell adds:

The affection of the _Sun_ and its editor for everything Cuban
except Spanish domination lasted quite down to and after the
second advent of Maximo Gomez; it was never livelier than in
the middle seventies.

Mr. Dana was the warm friend of José Marti. He corresponded
personally (with the assistance of his Fenian stenographer,
Williams) with the leading revolutionists actually fighting
in the island. He was the constant and unwearied intellectual
resource of a swarm of patriots, adventurers, near-filibusters,
bondholding financiers, lawyer-diplomats, and grafters
operating exclusively in Manhattan. A Latin-American accent was
a sure card of admission to the woven-bottomed chair alongside
the little round table in the inner corner room of the series
of four inhabited by the _Sun’s_ entire force of editors and
reporters.

We were then the foremost if not the only American organ of
Cuban independence. The executive journalistic headquarters
of the cause was just outside Mr. Dana’s front door. The Cuba
Libre editor, as I suppose he would be styled nowadays, was a
gentleman of Latin-American origin, who bore the aggressive and
appropriate name of Rebello. The Cuba Libre “desk” was about as
depressing a seat of literary endeavor as the telegraph-blank
shelf in a country railroad station, which it resembled in its
narrowness, its dismal ink-wells, rusty pens, and other details
of disreputable equipment. From this shelf there issued, by
Mr. Dana’s direction, many encouraging editorial remarks to
Rebello’s compatriots in the jungle.

Nor was free Cuba ungrateful to the _Sun_. A few years after the war, when Mr. Mitchell was walking about the interior Cuban town of Camaguey, formerly Puerto Principe, he came upon a modest little public square, the lamp-posts of which were labelled “Plaza Charles A. Dana.” At the corner of the church of Las Mercedes was a tablet with the following inscription:

TRIBUTO DEL PUEBLO A LA MEMORIA DE
CHARLES A. DANA
ILLUSTRE PUBLICISTA AMERICANO
DEFENSOR INFATIGABLE DE LAS
LIBERTADES CUBANAS
ABRIL 10 DE 1899

Dana was dead, without having seen the blooming of the flower he had watered, but Cuba had not wholly forgotten.

* * * * *

When the Maine was blown up in February, 1898, the _Sun_ began preparations to cover a war. The managing editor, Chester S. Lord, assisted by W. J. Chamberlin, worked out the preliminary arrangements. John R. Spears, then thirty-eight years old and a reporter of wide experience, particularly in matters of the sea--he had already written “The History of Our Navy”--was sent to Key West, the headquarters of the fleet which was to blockade Havana. He was at Key West some weeks before war was declared.

The _Sun_ chartered the steam yacht Kanapaha and sent her at once to Key West, under the command of Captain Packard, to take on Spears and his staff, which included Harold M. Anderson, Nelson Lloyd, Walstein Root, Dana H. Carroll, and others. Besides the men named, who were to go with the Kanapaha on her voyage with Sampson’s fleet, the _Sun_ sent Oscar King Davis with Schley’s squadron, and Thomas M. Dieuaide on board the Texas. Dieuaide got a splendid view of the great sea-fight of July 3, when Cervera came out of the harbour of Santiago, and he wrote the _Sun’s_ first detailed account of the destruction of the Spanish fleet.

The _Sun_ men ashore in Cuba were captained by W. J. Chamberlin, who succeeded Mr. Spears some time before the battle of Santiago. His force included H. M. Anderson, Carroll and Root of the _Sun_, and Henry M. Armstrong and Acton Davies of the _Evening Sun_. Armstrong, who was with Shafter, covered much of the attack and investment of Santiago and the surrender of that city. It was Chamberlin who sent to the United States the first news of the formal surrender of Santiago, but the message was not delivered to the _Sun_. The government censorship gently commandeered it and gave it out as an official bulletin. Chamberlin wrote the story of the battle of San Juan Hill on board a tossing boat that carried him from Siboney to the cable station at Port Antonio.

The first American flag hoisted over the Morro at Santiago was the property of the _Sun_, but in this case there was no government peculation. Anderson and Acton Davies gave the flag, which was a boat ensign from the Kanapaha, to some sailors of the Texas, and the sailors fastened it to the Morro staff.

When Schley’s squadron was united with Sampson’s fleet, some time before the battle of Santiago, O. K. Davis was ordered to Manila. He had the luck to sail on the cruiser Charleston, which, on June 21, 1898, made the conquest of the island of Guam. That famous but bloodless victory was described by Davis in a two-page article which was exclusively the _Sun’s_, and of which the _Sun_ said editorially on August 9, 1898:

No such story ever has been written or ever will be written
of our conquest of the Ladrones as that of the Sun’s
correspondent, published yesterday morning. It is the picture
of a historic scene, in which not a single detail is wanting.
This far-away little isle of Guam, so much out of the world
that it had not heard of our war with Spain, and mistook the
Charleston’s shells for an honorary salute, is now a part of
the United States of America, and destined to share in the
greatness of a progressive country. The queer Spanish governor,
who declined to go upon Captain Glass’s ship because it would
be a breach of Spanish regulations, is now our prisoner at
Manila.

Dieuaide, who wrote the _Sun’s_ story of the Santiago sea-fight, is also distinguished as the author of the first published description of St. Pierre--or, rather, of the ashes that covered it--after that city and all but two persons of its thirty thousand had been buried by the eruption of Mont Pelée. The introductory paragraph of Dieuaide’s article gives an idea of his graphic power:

FORT DE FRANCE, MARTINIQUE, May 21--To-day we saw St. Pierre,
the ghastliest ghost of the modern centuries. But yesterday
the fairest of the fair of the wondrous cities of the storied
Antilles, bright, beautiful, glorious, glistening and
shimmering in her prism of tropical radiance, an opalescent
city in a setting of towering forest and mountain, now a
waste of ashen-gray without life, form, color, shape, a drear
monotone, a dim blur on the landscape--it seems even more than
the contrast between life and death.