The President Is a Sick Man

by Matthew Algeo

  My day’s doings will be devoid of interest to the public, and I shall be exceedingly pleased if I can be free from the attentions of newspaper correspondents.

  That the president should abandon the capital on the brink of such an important debate was regarded as unusual and troubling. Many members of Congress were disappointed by the president’s departure, especially when they learned he would not be making any appointments while he was away. Yet clearly the president was not well. The “strain” was too much.

  The rumor mill—one of the few thriving industries left in the country—resumed full-scale production.

  While Grover fished on Buzzards Bay, the House debated repeal. The debate was often tedious, but it was momentous, and the nation followed it assiduously. The papers reprinted speeches in their entirety. The arguments were already familiar by then, of course, so personality and passion tended to predominate. Both were embodied in silver’s most eloquent defender in the House, a handsome thirty-three-year-old representative from Nebraska named William Jennings Bryan.

  Born and raised in Illinois, Bryan had moved to Omaha to practice law in 1887. Three years later he was elected to Congress. He seized on the silver issue, and his silver tongue soon put him in the movement’s vanguard.

  William Jennings Bryan, photographed in 1896. As a Democratic congressman from Nebraska, Bryan became a leader of the pro-silver movement. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  When he rose to speak on the floor of the House on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 16, Bryan intended to read a speech he had labored for months to prepare. But as he looked around the chamber, with many of his colleagues drowsy in the heat, Bryan impulsively decided to forego his prepared address. He tossed the manuscript on his desk and began speaking extemporaneously. Almost immediately the languid representatives were roused by his impassioned plea for silver. He spoke with a special intensity, waving his left hand as if cracking an invisible whip. The battle was not between gold and silver, he insisted. It was between what we today would call the haves and the have-nots:

  On the one side stand the corporate interests of the United States, the moneyed interests, aggregated wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless. . . . On the other side stand an unnumbered throng, those who gave to the Democratic Party a name and for whom it has assumed to speak. Work-worn and dust-begrimed, they make their mute appeal, and too often find their cry for help beat in vain against the outer walls, while others, less deserving, gain ready access to legislative halls.

  Bryan held the chamber spellbound, and word of his oration spread instantly throughout the Capitol and even the city itself. Senators were drawn to the House chamber, and the public galleries filled. Though he’d planned to speak for only an hour, Bryan went on to speak for three, pausing only to sip a concoction of beef broth for refreshment. When he finally concluded, exhausted, an unusually loud and long ovation filled the chamber. Even a few goldbugs were moved to applaud. Pro-silver representatives mobbed Bryan as if he’d just scored the winning goal in overtime.

  Bryan’s soaring rhetoric launched a political career that would last a generation. He would become the unquestioned leader—the anti-Grover—of the pro-silver wing of the Democratic Party. But there would be no come-from-behind victory for silver in the House. Bryan’s eloquence was not enough to save the Silver Purchase Act from repeal in the lower chamber. The economy was too far gone. Something had to be done. On his way to Washington for the special session, Ohio representative Tom Johnson tried to cash a $200 check at a New York bank where he was a large depositor. But the teller said he could only give the congressman fifty dollars. There was a money famine. After a conversation with the bank’s president, Johnson got his $200, but the experience left him shaken. Johnson, a Democrat who had been undecided on repeal, ended up voting in favor of it—as did nearly every other undecided representative.

  On August 28, after seventeen days of debate, the House voted in favor of repeal by a margin of 239 to 108. The measure moved to the Senate, where pro-silver senators were already threatening to filibuster.

  Grover was still at Gray Gables when he got the news. “The action of the House was wonderfully gratifying,” he wrote, “and the majority we secured was beyond our expectations.”

  It was a spectacular political victory, but his joy would be short lived, for the very next day, August 29, the Philadelphia Press revealed what Grover had desperately fought to keep hidden: his cancer operation.

  ______________

  * Most Cleveland biographers believe Olney gave himself too much credit and that the final draft of the address was almost entirely the product of Grover’s intellect, not his attorney general’s.

  7

  THE NEWSPAPERMAN

  DR. CARLOS MACDONALD was not pleased when Dr. Ferdinand Hasbrouck was late for his appointment in Greenwich on July 2, 1893. MacDonald had engaged Hasbrouck to administer anesthesia for an important “last resort” operation. “I telegraphed to his office in New York,” MacDonald recalled, “and in reply was informed that his assistants did not know where he was.” After waiting more than an hour for Hasbrouck to show up, MacDonald was forced to cancel the procedure and send the patient home.

  “The next day Dr. Hasbrouck appeared,” MacDonald said. “He found me in a very angry frame of mind but he asked me not to criticize him until he had told his story.” And what a story he told. Hasbrouck said he had been unexpectedly and urgently summoned to assist in a secret operation on President Cleveland and that the operation had been performed on Elias Benedict’s yacht, the Oneida. No less than a matter of national security had prevented him from keeping his appointment.

  Whether MacDonald was satisfied with Hasbrouck’s explanation we do not know. What we do know is that MacDonald repeated the story to other doctors. One of the doctors to whom MacDonald told the story was Leander Jones, a prominent general practitioner in Greenwich.

  And Jones just happened to be a good friend of an enterprising newspaperman named Elisha Jay Edwards.

  He would write millions of words in his lifetime, but almost none about himself, so we know surprisingly little about Edwards. As a result, though he was one of the great reporters of his generation, he is little remembered today.

  We do know that he was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1847, ten years after Grover Cleveland, with whom he had much in common. Both men were descended from famous preachers. One of Edwards’s ancestors was Timothy Edwards, a minister whose son, Jonathan Edwards, was one of the great theologians of the eighteenth century. When he was sixteen, his family moved to New Haven. He graduated from Yale in 1870 and married Anna Scribner Jones, also descended from a prominent New England family, two years later. They would have three sons.

  Edwards planned to pursue a career in law—again like Cleveland— and graduated from Yale’s law school in 1873. He opened an office in New Haven, but shortly after he hung out his shingle, his career took a turn. He bought a stake in a small New Haven newspaper called the Elm City Press and soon became the paper’s managing editor. Within months the paper’s circulation rose from three hundred to nearly fifteen hundred copies daily. Edwards had long been interested in journalism. During law school he had worked for another New Haven paper, the Palladium. Evidently he found the newspaper business more appealing than the law. According to one account, Edwards discovered that journalism “offered a broader and more congenial scope for his endeavors.” By 1874 he had sold his stake in the Elm City Press and become the managing editor of the Norwich Bulletin, a Republican paper. “Editing is evidently his forte,” his Yale Law School yearbook noted, “uniting as he does liberality of thought with ability, being a gentleman at all times, and somewhat peculiar, perhaps, in allowing that there may be some honest men who do not agree with him politically.”

  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 hi
s 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 interest stories, articles that were provocative or amusing or intriguing but not necessarily newsworthy: a new variety of apple, the travails of a Chinese laundryman, the latest style in whiskers. One of the paper’s editors coined the dictum, “If a man bites a dog, that’s news.”

  What made these stories come alive was the writing—vivid and sparkling. Dana made sure of that. He was infatuated with the English language. As Allen Churchill puts it in Park Row, “The awesome man was fiendishly determined that every edition of the Sun stand as a monument to the ultimate in English.” Reporters were known to be disciplined for grammatical errors in their copy. One was reportedly fired for using the word “balance” when, Dana believed, he should have used “remainder” instead. Sun stories were literate, poignant, whimsical. It was groundbreaking stuff. A good example of the paper’s quirky style is the response that Francis Church, one of the Sun’s editorial writers, gave to an eight-year-old girl named Virginia O’Hanlon, who’d written a letter to the paper asking, “Is there a Santa Claus?”

  “Yes, Virginia,” Church replied on the Sun’s editorial page, “there is a Santa Claus.”

  Nominally the Sun was a Democratic paper, but Dana’s mercurial temper and frequent feuds made it hard to tell. In any event, opinions were reserved for the editorial page, which was just as likely to contain an amusing essay as a condemnation of Dana’s latest enemy. The Sun was at the forefront of the era’s evolving journalistic standards. In most papers, objectivity took a backseat—if it took a seat at all—to entertainment and advocacy. It was not unusual for newspapers to simply invent “news” to sell papers. That’s what the Sun had done before Dana took it over. In 1835 the paper published a series of articles describing life on the moon as discovered by an astronomer using a new “immense telescope.” Among the inhabitants were giant walking beavers and winged humanoids. It was utter hogwash, but no matter: circulation skyrocketed.

  Dana, however, wanted nothing to do with crude hoaxes. His Sun was a different paper, the proverbial newspaperman’s newspaper. Dana had two rules for reporters: be interesting, and never be in a hurry. At a time when reporters had a reputation for being uncouth, ill-tempered, and intoxicated, Dana preferred to hire sober gentlemen, usually college graduates. (As a native of New Hampshire, Dana also had a special fondness for New Englanders like E. J. Edwards.) He paid his reporters a decent wage but made them work long hours: twelve-hour days were typical, and twenty-hour days were not unusual. And while he didn’t hurry them, Dana did expect his reporters to be productive. In a typical week a reporter might turn out twenty-five thousand words, roughly one-third as many as are contained in this book. Dana was always on the lookout for new talent, and in 1879 he plucked E. J. Edwards from the journalistic obscurity of the Norwich Bulletin and dropped him into the most exalted newsroom in America.

  We can imagine E. J. reporting for his first day of work at the Sun. He was thirty-two years old by then—not a youngster, certainly—though he still must have been nervous, perhaps even daunted by his new position. Through the crowded streets of the Lower East Side he made his way to a neighborhood near City Hall known as Newspaper Row. All the great papers were based there: the Tribune, whose nine-story building was the tallest in the city, the Herald, the Times, the World, the Journal, and, in a shabby six-story building on the corner of Nassau and Franklin, the Sun. Horse-drawn wagons jammed the streets. Scurrying among them were hundreds of newsboys, some as young as six, each eager to buy a bundle of one hundred penny papers hot off the presses for fifty cents. If a boy sold more than fifty papers, he would make a profit that day. If he sold fewer than fifty, he would lose money.*

  Entering the Sun building, Edwards would have climbed a spiral iron staircase to the third floor, where the paper’s newsroom was located. In this respect, too, the Sun was different: while reporters at other papers still worked in private offices, the Sun’s newsroom was open. Presiding over it from an office at the top of the staircase was the imperious Dana himself, stern and imposing in his full white beard.

  The reporters worked at inclined tables illuminated by dim gaslights and, later, electric bulbs. They wrote their stories in longhand with pencils. They usually worked with their hats on, a tradition that prevented the theft of a precious beaver or derby by unscrupulous visitors—or colleagues. Edwards, like most young men of his time, wore a thick moustache. The older reporters sported full beards like Dana. Rare was the clean-shaven newspaperman.

  Female reporters were not unheard of. An estimated two hundred women worked at New York newspapers in 1888. But the newsroom was still an overwhelmingly male environment. The men dressed almost uniformly in white shirts with high, stiff collars and dark suits. Their clothing was fastened by laces or buttons; the zipper had not been invented yet. A few wore bow ties or ascots, but most wore neckties, which had only come into fashion after the war. On their feet they wore high leather shoes.

  The newsroom was filled with smoke, though none from cigarettes. Only pipes and cigars were smoked in 1879, though a machine that could roll twelve thousand cigarettes an hour would be patented the following year, ushering in the golden era of the dread disease. The older reporters chewed tobacco, which they spit with impressive accuracy into brass spittoons strategically placed throughout the room. There was no clatter of typewriters, no ringing of telephones—only the din of shouted conversations and the unrelenting rumble of the presses in the basement,
punctuated by urgent cries for a copyboy to deliver the latest dispatch to the typesetters and an occasional staccato burst of Morse code from a lone telegraph.

  It was an exciting time to work in newspapers because, unlike today, America’s appetite for them was practically insatiable. Between 1870 and 1890, the number of U.S. papers tripled from four thousand to twelve thousand. “The American newspaper press became a great turgid flood,” writes Frank Luther Mott, “carrying over the whole land its popular education, its millions of words of information about matters important and trivial, its stimulation of commerce through advertising.” That growth was fueled by huge technological advances in papermaking and printing. Allegedly inspired by observing wasps building their nests out of tree fibers, a German inventor named Friedrich Gottlob Keller devised a method for manufacturing newsprint out of cheap wood pulp instead of cotton fibers. This reduced the cost of newsprint by 75 percent between 1872 and 1892. Unfortunately it also reduced the durability of the paper. Newspapers printed on pulp deteriorate much more quickly than papers printed on fiber-based papers.

  Simultaneously, the American mechanic Richard Hoe was perfecting a printing press that used a rotating cylinder, replacing the old flatbed press that had been in favor since Gutenberg. In 1847 Hoe received a patent on a “lightning press” capable of printing eight thousand pages per hour. By 1889 his company had developed a press that could print an astounding five hundred thousand pages per hour. These advances vastly reduced the cost of newspapers, for the first time making them widely available to the masses, who were increasingly able to read them: between 1870 and 1890, the U.S. illiteracy rate fell from 20 to 13.3 percent.