The first issue of the New York Morning Herald hit the streets of New York City on May 6. Its editor, James Gordon Bennett, was a cantankerous, cross-eyed Scotsman possessed of a supreme indifference to public opinion. He set out to break the journalistic traditions of his day. “Our only guide,” he wrote in that first issue, “shall be good, sound, practical common sense, applicable to the business and bosoms of men engaged in every-day life.” Unlike most of the other fifteen papers then published in the city, the New York Herald would not be “kept”: “We shall support no party, be the organ of no faction or coterie, and care nothing for any election or any candidate from President down to a Constable. We shall endeavor to record facts on every public and proper subject,” Bennett wrote. But when New Yorkers discovered what he deemed proper to record, he was ostracized. Businessmen and competing editors took to assaulting him on the street, and eventually several attempts were made on his life.
The Herald’s working-class readers were enthralled, however, and sent its circulation spiraling upward. At other papers, business news “was accessory to the swindling of the sharpers,” according to Bennett, who identified Wall Street miscreants in his daily financial column. Scoring one journalistic first after another, Bennett published religious news and lists of bankruptcies. He invaded high society and printed accounts of blue-blood gatherings. After financing the first two American-sponsored transatlantic cables with a partner, he gave thorough coverage to foreign stories that other editors neglected. And Bennett’s ranks of correspondents in the field during the Civil War—sometimes as many as sixteen in one battle—made the Herald’s coverage far more thorough and accurate than any other paper’s. It became one of the few President Lincoln regularly read.
But it was his colorful and in-depth reporting of crimes and court news that propelled the Herald into first place among New York City’s papers. Bennett’s stories about the murder of a supposedly beautiful young prostitute drew thousands of new readers. When rival papers accused the publisher of taking a thirteen-thousand-dollar bribe to make the initial suspect appear innocent, the Herald’s circulation leaped by ten thousand copies a day.
The worst intentions of Bennett’s enemies worked to his advantage once more during the campaign he led against prudery in May 1840. Petticoat was a taboo word in polite society at that time, a custom that outraged Bennett into writing: “Petticoats—petticoats—petticoats- there, you fastidious fools, vent your mawkishness on that.” In the commotion that followed, he was called everything from an “obscene vagabond” and a “leprous slanderer” to a “profligate wretch” and a “turkey-buzzard.” Priests and editors exhorted the people to abandon his newspaper. Bennett was unruffled. “These blockheads are determined to make me the greatest man of the age,” he wrote.
Neither success nor the wear of years made Bennett more amenable to human society. Although the publisher did marry, his wife couldn’t tolerate sharing his pariah status and, after witnessing a gang whip and beat him senseless in the street, left him to live abroad with their two children. “He had no friends at the beginning, he has made none since, and he has none now,” wrote a contemporary a few years before Bennett’s death in 1872.
Friendless he may have died, but he had invented a new kind of journalism. Even the rival New York World acknowledged the debt in its obituary: “Mr. Bennett was the Columbus, the Luther, the Napoleon, the what you will, of modern journalism.”
1860 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
The citizens of St. Joseph, Missouri, turned out on April 3 to cheer the first Pony Express rider when he galloped out of town carrying forty-nine letters, five telegrams, and several Eastern newspapers bound for Sacramento, California, the Western terminus of the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express route. Pausing at way stations only long enough to change horses, that first rider completed his seventy-five- to onehundred-mile leg of the nearly twothousand-mile relay and then passed on the mail to the next waiting horseman. Ten days later, to the delight of prospecting Californians who longed for closer contact with home, the mail arrived in Sacramento. The Pony Express had more than cut in half the time previously required to carry news east and west across the frontier.
America’s imagination was fired. Pony Express riders became heroes overnight, and their strength, daring, and perseverance were recorded in such panegyrics as this one from the St. Joseph Free Democrat: “Through the valleys, along the grassy slopes, into the snow, into sand, faster than Thor’s Thialfi, away they go, rider and horse—did you see them? … The courser has unrolled to us the great American panorama, allowed us to glance at the homes of one million people, and has put a girdle around the earth in forty minutes. Verily the riding is like the riding of Jehu, the son of Nimshi for he rideth furiously.”
From the beginning, the Pony Express was venerated, it was not, however, a lucrative investment. Launched by the freighting firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell in the hope of winning a government contract, the Pony Express cost $70,000 outright, and monthly expenses reached $4,000. The company was often unable to pay its heroic employees. And Shoshone Indians, angered by the murder of tribesmen and the loss of their land in the Utah Territory, repeatedly drove off company stock and killed station men. After losing half a million dollars on the enterprise, Russell, Majors & Waddell were unable to bid for their contract. Another company took over the Pony Express, allowing its founders to continue managing a portion of the route.
They didn’t do so for long. The Pony Express survived Indians and bankruptcy only to be done in by Samuel Morse’s invention. On October 26, 1861, telegraph lines strung from east and west were connected in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unable to compete with the singing wires, the Pony Express was halted just eighteen months after it began.
1885 One Hundred Years Ago
During the last half of the nineteenth century, America became obsessed with wheeled recreation. A rage for cycling swept the country, and, after the roller skate was modified with metal wheels and ball bearings in 1875, “skating upon rollers” became the nation’s passion. Warehouses were converted to rinks, and men, women, and children flocked to them to glide ‘round and ‘round on the smooth wooden floors. “Rinking,” it was called, and it became such a popular Sunday pursuit that church attendance dropped off. Men of the cloth naturally condemned it.
In 1885 the rinking craze peaked, and so too did the outcry against it. “Elopements, betrayals, bigamous marriages, and other social transgressions were traced to the association of the innocent with the vicious upon the skating floor,” declared The New York Times on May 18, describing the fate of skaters in the West the previous year. “The rink is too often a place in which good-looking scoundrels do a great deal of harm.” One citizen proposed to make it illegal for both sexes to occupy rinks at the same time. Not to be left out, doctors warned that “skating upon rollers is injurious to young and undeveloped persons of the weaker sex.” The Times concluded: “A disappearance of the mania for roller skating would not make the judicious grieve.”
1935 Fifty Years Ago
“I will sign a statement or affidavit to the effect that I never heard of any game or pastime called Monopoly prior to my own use of the word in this connection,” wrote the self-proclaimed inventor of Monopoly, Charles B. Darrow, to Parker Brothers in April. It must have seemed an evasive way to say that he had created the game itself, but Parker Brothers patented Monopoly in his name anyway and placed it on the market. Sales skyrocketed. Puzzles, paper masks, and games all sold well during the Depression, but Monopoly was ideally suited to the era: getting rich and forcing one’s opponents into bankruptcy is the object of the game. Monopoly granted the unemployed an opportunity to be fiendishly wealthy for hours at a time.
It seems Darrow found in Monopoly a somewhat similar opportunity. Testimony presented at a 1977 trademarkinfringement suit that Parker Brothers successfully filed against a game called Anti-Monopoly revealed why Darrow worded his 1935 letter so carefully:
In 1904 Elizabeth J. Magie patented The Landlord Game. A Quaker and follower of the nineteenth-century economist Henry George, Magie believed the power of landlords could be controlled if a single tax on land alone were instituted. She invented her game to teach “how the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers. Since Magie never manufactured her game, players made their own boards and named the properties after streets and companies in their hometowns.”In 1931 one of Darrow’s neighbors invited him over to play an Atlantic City version of the game. “He took a long time catching on,” the neighbor testified. But Darrow wasn’t so stupid. He asked for a copy of the rules and board—and took it from there, in the best spirit of the game Time reviewed in 1936 as being “generally calculated to appeal to the baldest acquisitive instincts.”
Darrow retired a millionaire at fortysix. The game he claimed to have invented has long since become the best-selling privately patented board game in history.
