The editors knew how the readers liked to peruse a paper and delivered that compact four-page paper into their hands—and for just a penny. They also knew that readers loved their daily stories of crime, sex, scandal, and corruption because they found the subjects titillating and because New Yorkers feared crime in the streets and were overly anxious about the ever-growing city in general and the terrors that it posed to them. The new, urban mass entertainment world was perfect for New Yorkers, too, and so was the penny press that covered it.
The journals also thrived because the United States had undergone a financial recession in 1833 and then a depression four years later, the Panic of 1837. People had little income, so the one-cent newspapers were far more attractive than the five- and six-cent sheets they competed against.
The Herald, the Sun, the Express, and the Transcript were some of the leading pennies. The penny sheets were financially independent and not tied to Tammany Hall and other political organizations, as were most of the five- and six-cent sheets. Bennett wrote that he “found out the hollow heartedness and humbuggery of these political associations and political men.”11
The penny press, in its crackdown on crime, led by Bennett in the Jewett case, pioneered the practice of interviewing people for stories, which was never attempted by the more expensive sheets. The penny bosses theorized that the people who read their papers wanted to know what the people in the stories, heroes and villains, had to say. The success of the interview stories enabled Bennett to get the very first newspaper interview of President Martin Van Buren in 1839, a real coup for any journalist.
The penny press impressed foreigners. British writer Edward Dicey, after having spent six months in America, wrote, “I admit feely that the American press, if you judge it correctly, is a tolerably fair—probably the fairest exponent—of American opinion.”12
Another thing that the penny press did was build enormous pride in their city for New Yorkers. Bennett argued for twenty years that it should not only replace Albany as the state capital but replace Washington as the national capital. He constantly referred to it as “our noble and moral city” and treated New York as the center of the universe.13
The stories that the Herald ran about crime emphasized murders and robberies as an ever-growing menace that needed to be curbed. The media attention made crime a major topic of conversation in city streets, taverns, and parlors. Along with their coverage of crime itself, the penny sheets wrote about the inability of the police to stop it.
In its crime coverage, the penny press highlighted murder. Readers loved murders; they could not get enough stories about them. It was the most compelling and titillating kind of story the penny papers could run, and they ran every murder story they could find. Husband slays wife. Wife slays husband. Robbers kill victims. Poor carpenter kills rich banker over woman. The pages of the Sun and Herald were filled with salacious tales from the front page to the last. The stories were sexy, bawdy, tawdry, and sizzling—and they sold. The Herald ran so many of these crime stories that a YMCA in Buffalo banned the newspapers from sale there in order to protect its members. The masses loved the penny papers; the upper classes said they hated them, but many read them secretly. “They lie upon magnificent center tables and are met with in the parlors of the wealthy and proud,” wrote Walt Whitman in 1842.14
New Yorkers knew what was within the pages of the Herald. “It is equally intended for the great masses of the community—the merchant, mechanic, working people—the private family as well as the public hotel—the journeyman and his employer—the clerk and his principal,” said Bennett.15
Almost all of the penny sheets were located on congested Nassau Street, in lower Manhattan, parallel to Broadway and just south of City Hall. Others were on Anne Street, a few blocks from a police precinct and another few blocks from Tammany Hall’s massive stone headquarters. The penny press editors genuinely believed in their causes. They crusaded against the sins of the city, championing the reformers, splashing stories about the antiprostitution and temperance parades across their pages, and urging their readers to rise up in rebellion against the killers, whores, and drunks that infested the town, as well as the bungling constables who never seemed to be able to catch the crooks.16
The penny press hated crime and loathed criminals. Bennett despised lawbreakers so much that he even urged the residents of the city to ignore the lazy constables and shoot down any rioters they saw in the streets “like so many mad dogs, as pests to the community, whose deaths are a common blessing.”17
Bennett, a tall, well-built man with a rather solemn face, arrived in Canada from Scotland in 1819 at the age of twenty. He started contributing stories to papers in 1824, covered politics in Washington, D.C., for one, and gained a solid reputation as a reporter and as a hustler in the nine years prior to his arrival as the new boss of the Herald. Like archenemy Horace Greeley and others, he came to the editorship of his paper after many long years of working in journalism, years in which he gained invaluable experience. He had already worked as a reporter and columnist for seven different newspapers in America. “He had made journalism a science,” said his managing editor, Frederic Hudson.18
One of Bennett’s contemporaries, Lambert Wilmer, like many, understood that Bennett’s newspaper was one for the masses that flooded the streets of New York, and also the denizens of high society. “This journal is read by people of all classes and its power and influence are universally acknowledged. Although the Herald is denounced from one end of the country to the other as the most corrupt and profligate in existence, its opinions on almost every subject are often quoted as indisputable authority,” Wilmer wrote.19
With the Herald, Bennett had created a middle-of-the-road, nonpolitical paper. It was not a journal for those who had much, but for those who had little. The great middle class and working class had no newspaper until Bennett gave them the Herald. He quickly realized that the great masses made up 95 percent of the population of New York City and the nation and that all of the increases in population in New York were from the working class, not the rich. Those people had a new voice in the city, and Bennett knew what they wanted, such as crime stories. In the pages of the Herald he gave it to them.20
Many penny editors, like Walt Whitman, hated the sophisticated six-penny papers even more than they loathed their rivals. “They assume a position of pompous dignity and they affect a sovereign contempt for their little contemporaries,” Whitman wrote in 1842. He despised Bennett and called him “a reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes and breathing mildew at everything fresh and fragrant.”21
The rivalry between papers, especially in crime coverage, was intense. The Herald trained a flock of pigeons to carry notes tied around their legs from reporters in the field to the home office, and Greeley hired marksmen who stood on the roof of the Tribune and shot down the pigeons.22
Many in town chuckled at the word duels between the editors of the penny press. Philip Hone hated Bennett and delighted in any attack on him. He called Bennett an “ill-looking squinting man … now editor of the Herald, one of the penny papers which are hawked about the streets by a gang of troublesome ragged boys, and in which scandal is retailed to all.”23
News editors around the city acknowledged, though, that the penny sheets had been successful because of their coverage of crime and their crusade against the police. In 1845, George Wilkes and Enoch Camp, certain that there was an audience for an all-crime paper, founded the National Police Gazette, which in just a few years, with its nonstop crime coverage and wonderful illustrations by some of the city’s most skilled artists, became one of the most successful newspapers in American history.
Bennett was oblivious to all of the many lawsuits filed against him, by everyone from farmers to opera-house managers to merchants. “He is the great ogre of the Herald,” complained showman P. T. Barnum.24 Politician Albert Ramsey complained to President James Buchanan that “Bennett is the vainest man that has lived since Boswell
and his vanity makes his friendship or his enmity equally injurious.” President Buchanan said that if he could find any small reason to do so, he would have Bennett indicted. Buchanan had been mad at the Herald for years because it had opposed him during all four years of his term and while he was secretary of state. He was not happy with Tribune editor Horace Greeley, either, because Greeley opposed many of his policies.25
The feisty Herald editor did have his supporters among rivals in New York. George Wilkes, one of the founders of the National Police Gazette, said that “the Herald is the only journal I care about reading, and is, according to my notions, the best specimen of a newspaper I ever saw.” Bennett had champions around the country, too. One editor in Natchez, Mississippi, wrote that “no writer in the union is so universally quoted and relied upon by the standards of both sides of the Atlantic. This is the triumph of genius.”26
One of Bennett’s strongest supports was Senator William Seward, whose votes in Congress and policies he frequently attacked. Seward had no complaints about Bennett, or any other editor. To him, they were all just doing their job.”The press is not despotic,” said Seward. “The sweeping allegations brought against the press are not in any way just.… It reflects in all things the character of the country.”27
Crime, and the Herald’s crusade for professional police, became an important issue because the Herald was growing into the highest-circulation newspaper in New York in the 1840s and ’50s. By the outbreak of the Civil War, it would boast the largest circulation in America, and Bennett would be one of the most powerful men in the country. All of the penny sheets succeeded, not just the Herald. They became so popular that in the mid-1850s, 70,000 New York residents, out of a population of some 300,000, read a penny newspaper each day. On one day in the late 1830s, crime stories filled all the penny papers. Four penny outsold all of the other papers in town. Other publishers across the country began to scrap the six-cent sheets and publish penny papers. “The penny papers are rapidly increasing throughout the country,” said Bennett; “the large papers will sink in a few years.”28
Bennett always moaned about the city’s watchmen, who he thought were powerless to prevent the city’s going to “perdition and pestilence.” Bennett understood, however, as did the other editors, that corruption in the city’s court system was just as responsible for the crime wave as inept police officers. In the summer of 1841, the Herald published numerous stories on city and state investigations of the corrupt courts and crooked judges and lawyers.29
Reporters regularly visited police courts, a special judicial division started in the mid-1830s when crime began to overwhelm the city. They sat on benches and covered all kinds of criminal cases before the police magistrate. Press people also met at Butter Cake Dick’s, a sleazy all-night coffee shop located in a basement near City Hall. There reporters mingled with police, lawyers, and Tammany Hall workers and picked up numerous stories. Butter Cake Dick’s became famous because journalists hung out there. It was just one of several dozen such coffee shops.30
There was plenty of crime to complain about, too. Here are some stories published just in the Herald in one month in 1841:
Two sons of deceased millionaire John Stuart tried to have their mother incarcerated in the lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island so they could seize all of their father’s money and estates, leaving Mom penniless.
Boxing champion Yankee Sullivan killed a man in the ring, and the Herald made the fight a murder story and supported all of Sullivan’s critics in a short series of articles.
A member of one of New York’s blissful utopian colonies was savagely murdered.
A local politician shot a congressman dead in the middle of a street in a duel over a woman.
The son of a millionaire, seen arguing with his girlfriend at a party after both had consumed much champagne, was later fished out of the East River, dead.
A vast prostitution ring composed of bored New York housewives trying to make a little extra spending money for themselves was broken up.
A man was arrested for sexually molesting his two teenage daughters.
A ring of prostitutes who routinely robbed their clients of their jewelry and turned the loot over to a second ring of prostitutes who turned it all over to very grateful department store managers, who sold it to customers, was smashed.
Two sisters from a quiet town in Connecticut who spent the summer in a New York apartment working as prostitutes to make extra money on their “vacation” were arrested.
Two New York sisters counterfeited money and had others use it to buy goods, which they then sold to stores for cash, thus turning a huge profit, were arrested.
The beautiful, flirtatious daughter of a boardinghouse manager was stabbed to death after spurning one of the boarders who lusted after her.
The Police Gazette went a step further than Bennett. Its editors created a column they entitled “Lives of Felons” and in it drew colorful pictures of wicked criminals who were out not only to steal whatever they could or batter whomever they chose but to disrupt the social life of New York City and its inhabitants. In these long portraits, the Gazette writers brought in hundreds of crimes to paint a disparaging picture of city criminals, adding to what Bennett called the Shakespearean aspect of crime and the success of criminals because of the incompetence of the police force.31
Journalists believed that crime was not only news that sold but news that the people needed to help them reform the city. “The worst symptoms of social disease would be manifested were the crimes and offenses of the day unheeded or passed by with trivial notices by the journalists,” said Whitman.32
The Herald, the Sun, and other papers routinely ran notices that warned readers about pickpockets and burglary rings and preached against gambling and drinking on their editorial pages. The warnings were frequent. Writing in Life Illustrated, Whitman, the poet and full-time journalist who would work for eight New York papers in his life, warned visitors to the city of “sojourners robbed, swindled, and perhaps beaten.” He told them to “deposit your money in a bank; with a trusty business acquaintance; in the safe of the hotel, through a clerk, retaining only your pocket money. It is neither safe to leave it in your room, nor to carry it about your person.”33
If not for the anticrime and antipolice crusades by Bennett and the other editors, the public would never have been aroused as it was and never driven to protest to the government that a new police force was needed. The penny sheets reminded the public, every day and in every column, that New York had spun out of control and needed help—and fast.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Magnificent City and the Malignant Crime Wave
The city itself seems clear and bright in the distance—its deformations hidden and its beauty exaggerated, like the fame of far off heroes. When the sun shines on its steeples, windows and roofs of glittering tin, it is as if the fine spirits had suddenly created a city of fairy palaces. And when the still shadows creep over it, and the distant lights shine like descended constellations, twinkling to the morning music of the sea, there is something oppressive in its solemn beauty. Then comes the golden morning light, as if God suddenly unveiled his glory!
—Social reformer Lydia Maria Child, 1841
By the early 1840s, New York was the largest city in the United States, surpassing longtime rivals Boston and Philadelphia with nearly half a million residents. By 1870 the population would grow to nearly one million, more if you add the 250,000 residents of Brooklyn, then its own separate city, and another 400,000 or so people who lived somewhere else but worked in the city or visited it. There were also about 50,000 people who were transients and moved in and out of the city at an uneven pace. Seventy percent of all the hundreds of thousands of foreigners who came to America as part of the great wave of immigrants in the first decades of the nineteenth century arrived in New York. The city had over forty times the population of the 1790s, when it served as the nation’s first capital.1
Many New Yorker
s had arrived from inland America. “The crowd in Broadway … seems to have come from out of town,” wrote George William Curtis. “It has a strange wondering air. And the population of the city itself is so incessantly reinforced by those who come from the country that the city has always a little air of novelty in its own citizens.”2
That population boom was already under way when Spaniard Ramon de la Sagra visited the town in 1835. He was “astonished” at the rapid growth of the city. “Everywhere they are building houses, repairing whole sections, constructing superb hotels, opening large squares, and as if to second this activity, laying out new streets and embankments.… The whole length of the wharves, there rises up a forest of masts belonging to the vessels of many nations and steamships engaged in trade among the various states of the Union. On the North river, the bay and its eastern arm, magnificent steamboats cross and recross without ceasing,” he wrote.3
A British writer had a wonderful description for the sprawling growth of New York. He said that it was “Jack the giant killer’s beanstalk.”4
New York was gorgeous in winter, when residents sped through the streets in large, colorful horse-drawn sleighs, whose runners cut through the newly fallen white snow, and icicles hung from fifth-story rooftops. It was even prettier in summer. Social reformer Lydia Maria Child, dazzled by its vivaciousness, told her friends that it was “Babylon.”5
New York was a magical place to all who saw it. Poet Walt Whitman, who would later use it as the landscape for his book Leaves of Grass, loved it. He remembered vividly the sights and sounds of New York Harbor. “The river and bay scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day—the hurrying, splashing sea-tides–the changing panorama of steamers, all sizes, often a string of big ones, outward bound to distant ports—the myriads of white-sail’d schooners, sloops, skiffs, and the marvellously beautiful yachts … as they rounded the Battery … what refreshment of spirit such sights and experiences gave me,” he scribbled in one of his notebooks.6
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