Petermann could not understand why the same European societies that freely endorsed ambitious exploratory tromps through the malarial jungles of Africa could not countenance the periodic deaths of their adventurous sons in the High Arctic. If anything, he insisted, the polar regions were far safer than the Dark Continent. “For decades,” he said, “our explorers, one after the other, have let themselves be slaughtered in the interiors of the most dangerous continents, especially Africa, perhaps by fanatical inhabitants, perhaps by the deadly climate, while such dangers and sacrifice occur with Arctic expeditions, at the most, only as rare exceptions.”
But everything Petermann had seen in America—and especially in Philadelphia—had convinced him that the United States had the national nerve for this endeavor. After attending the Centennial Exposition, Petermann visited Washington, Baltimore, and the Naval Academy at Annapolis. He toured Boston, various towns in New England, and then Niagara Falls. Everywhere he went, he was celebrated. The country’s leading scientists feted him. In Washington, he met with the presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, and officials threw a formal reception. Reporters followed him and quoted his pronouncements at length. His American tour was like a victory lap at the end of a prestigious career. It was all a pleasant surprise: Petermann had not realized he had such an adoring public in the United States.
ON JULY 10, Petermann was invited to speak before the American Geographical Society in New York. The event was held at Chickering Hall, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street. The auditorium was oppressively hot and humid—a historic heat wave was suffocating the Northeast—and yet crowds came in droves to see the famous German. “I was almost killed by the heat,” Petermann later said. A classical organist played a short concert, and then Petermann took the stage.
He could not say enough about this extraordinary nation and its raw energy, and he thanked his hosts for their many kindnesses. “I am altogether most happy that I have lived to see this great country and people,” he began. He was impressed by Washington, D.C. The capital, he said, had been “built on a magnificent plan, and the extent of its squares and parks surpass those of any other city in the world.” He especially loved New York, where he had been staying in the plush Brevoort Hotel. “This city,” he said, “and especially its Broadway, appears to me a kind of prime meridian, where two worlds meet, the eastern and the western.”
When he visited Annapolis, Dr. Petermann happened to be at the Naval Academy during graduation, and he was thrilled by the sight of the happy midshipmen collecting their diplomas and tossing their caps in the air. He was convinced that America would one day have a powerful navy—a navy that would play a role not only in war but also in peacetime exploration. “When I learned at Annapolis that only one man-of-war is in service now,” he said, “it struck me how essentially a country of peace this mighty nation is.”
August Petermann would be returning to Germany soon, but he would arrive a changed man. “All my expectations have been surpassed,” he said. “All I have seen has filled me with admiration.” The United States was now, he thought, the new engine driving the world. It was “at the head of any human progress and culture that may be found on the globe. This is a highly favored and rich country, a land of wonderful natural capabilities.”
Then, alluding to the wondrous Centennial Exposition, he concluded: “I wish you and this country the same progress and prosperity as has marked your first one hundred years.”
7 · SATISFACTION
James Gordon Bennett Jr. liked to give the impression that he had sprung fully formed into the world—an original creature, with no past, no allegiances, indebted to no one. But to understand his extraordinary place in the social milieu of New York, as well as in the rough-and-tumble world of American newspapers, one has to reach back and recognize the equally extraordinary career of his father, James Gordon Bennett Sr.
Bennett the Elder was a dour, bookish man who had immigrated to the United States from Scotland in 1819 and, through a combination of shrewd business instincts and a nearly masochistic work ethic, managed to found the Herald sixteen years later. From the start, he wanted his penny paper to be “impudent and intrusive,” and at that he more than succeeded. His attacks on politicians and businessmen were so scathing that he frequently incurred death threats, and he was beaten in the streets on several occasions. He received a bomb in the mail. One enemy tried to drown him. But adversity only egged Bennett on. He was fearless, and he loved playing the role of a bothersome Jeremiah. His paper named names, and his reporters freely ventured into the city’s vice-ridden netherworlds. In 1836, he drew outrage for his front-page coverage of the brutal hatchet murder of a prostitute; for this salacious story, he had conducted what is generally regarded as the first full-length interview ever published in a newspaper. (Genteel sensibilities were especially offended by the fact that he had interviewed the victim’s madam.)
While the financial pages of rival papers often turned a blind eye to shenanigans on Wall Street, Bennett Sr.’s Herald regularly published investigations into the latest stock market frauds and scams. A speculator named A. A. Clason, incensed by a particularly hard-hitting piece that had run in the Herald, ambushed Bennett in the street and lashed him with a horsewhip. Bennett’s biographer reported that “the whip broke at the first blow, however, and fell to the sidewalk; Bennett politely picked up the pieces and handed them to his assailant.”
Bennett the Elder was the city’s most notorious grump, and he certainly looked the part: Prematurely gray, he was a slouching, badly cross-eyed man with a beak of a nose and a craggy face that danced with nervous tics. His distressing appearance once got him kicked out of a bordello—the girls, chasing him from their establishment, told him (or so he later claimed): “You are too ugly a rascal to come amongst us.”
Bennett’s paper was as sought after as he was shunned. The Herald soon grew to be the largest-circulation daily in America. As its sole owner, he became a multimillionaire, though his money did nothing to gain him entry into New York social circles. Bennett remained a pariah, blackballed from the best clubs and salons. But what did he care? “American Society,” he boasted, “consists of the people who don’t invite me to their parties.”
Bennett Sr.’s views were never tepid on any subject. He was, for example, a vigorous opponent of women’s rights—“motherhood is the best cure for the mania,” he said, “and we would recommend it to all who are afflicted.” His outlook on life was unencumbered by even a trace of altruism. “Lofty editorials and public-spirited crusades, in his view, were a lot of nonsense,” observed one biographer. “All men were selfish, greedy, and intrinsically worthless; the human condition could never be bettered, certainly not through the medium of journalism.” Instead, Bennett busied himself solely with “getting out the liveliest sheet in town and watching his acumen reflected in the balance sheets, the circulation tallies, and the advertising revenues.”
One day in 1840, however, Bennett suddenly felt the tug of an unfamiliar emotion: love. He became smitten with an Irishwoman, half his age, named Henrietta Crean. A fashionable social climber who was fluent in at least six languages, Miss Crean taught piano and elocution and was widely described as one of the most elegant young women in New York. Bennett certainly thought she was; he fairly gushed about her in the pages of his own paper, noting that her “figure is most magnificent—her head, neck, and bust, of the purest classic contour.”
No one thought it possible, but Bennett had fallen head over heels. They were soon married, and in May 1841, a boy, James Gordon Bennett Jr., was born. (The Herald’s nemesis, the New York Sun, duly noted the arrival but insisted that the handsome child could not be Bennett’s.) Although three more children were born in quick succession, only one, a lovely daughter named Jeannette, survived past early childhood.
Henrietta Bennett hated her role as the trophy wife of the most controversial misanthrope in American publishing. One day in November 1850, while she and her hu
sband were out for a stroll down Broadway, Bennett was assailed by a gang of vigilantes led by a man named John Graham, whose run for district attorney Bennett had opposed. Henrietta watched in horror as her husband was beaten nearly to death in the street, while a pair of policemen standing nearby failed to intervene. After Bennett’s recovery, Henrietta informed him that she was finished with New York. She had no taste for her husband’s tempestuous, ink-stained life and thought it was no world for their children to grow up in. She collected young James and Jeannette and decamped to Paris; except for a few brief visits, she never came back. Bennett effectively returned to his ways as a crotchety bachelor, running his paper alone.
James and Jeannette thus grew up as expatriates—raised by an indulgent Irish mother, taught by the best French tutors, and sheltered by an ocean from the grim, hard man who made their lavish existence possible.
AS JAMES BECAME a teenager, he made more frequent trips back to the New York to be with his father. Bennett Sr. wanted his son to take over the paper eventually, so he gave him a desk and at least the appearance of a few responsibilities. But the princeling had no interest in journalism—or work of any kind. He had discovered that the world of New York high society, which had shunned his father, warmly embraced him, and he began to run with a fast crowd. He became admired, said an editor of the Sun, as “the beau ideal of the man of the world and all around daredevil.” An early biographer remarked that “it would take an Arabian Night’s volume to chronicle all the mad doings of the young man and his ‘set.’ ” When he wasn’t frequenting taverns and fleshpots, he spent most of his time on yachts, and he proved to be a formidable, if reckless, sailor. His father built him his own yacht, the Henrietta, in 1860, and James began to sail it competitively, winning races in both America and England.
When the Civil War broke out, James wanted to serve in the Union Navy, even though he had no naval training. When that proved impossible, he effectively bought himself an officership in the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service, in which he was commissioned as a “third lieutenant” and served on his own donated yacht, the Henrietta. He patrolled Long Island and then participated in the naval blockade off the coast of Florida. Bennett’s service to his country proved short-lived, but it helped forge a close relationship between the Herald and the U.S. Navy that would last for decades.
In 1866, Bennett won the first transoceanic yacht race, sailing the Henrietta from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to the Isle of Wight in thirteen days, twenty-one hours, and fifty-five minutes. When he wasn’t on the high seas, Bennett began to show much more interest in the Herald, and later that same year, the ailing elder Bennett turned the paper’s reins over to his son. (Bennett Sr. died in 1872 at the age of seventy-six.)
From the start, Bennett Jr. was a tyrannical and thoroughly unpredictable boss. “I am the only reader of this paper,” he often told his editors. “I am the only one to be pleased.” But his instincts for a good story were nearly pitch-perfect, and the circulation of the Herald increased dramatically. Unlike his miserly father, Bennett Jr. was willing to spend huge sums of money to gather the news, and he sent his reporters farther and farther afield to do it. In 1869, he came up with the idea of sending a reporter to search for David Livingstone in Africa, and he is said to have dispatched young Henry Morton Stanley with an almost laughably laconic command: “Find Livingstone.” Stanley did, of course, and the exclusives he sent back expanded the Herald’s circulation even further.
Bennett was unlike any other publisher in the world. A playboy, a breakneck sportsman, and an absolute autocrat, he had a high-wire management style that drove reporters crazy but often spurred them to find extraordinary stories under impossible deadline pressures. Somehow the whole delicate construction worked, and under Bennett’s incomparable personality, the New York Herald became the most interesting and influential newspaper in America, if not the world. One reporter and editor who labored under Bennett for many years compared working at the Herald to serving in the French Foreign Legion: “There was something compelling about the tigerish proprietor with his fickleness and brutality. Women are said to be fascinated by such characters. Certainly, newspaper men were.”
IN THE MIDST of a snowfall on New Year’s Day 1877, James Gordon Bennett Jr. pulled his sleigh up to 44 West Nineteenth Street, told his coachman to wait for him, and then staggered up the stairs to join the holiday party that was well under way at his fiancée’s house. The rumors that had been buzzing around New York were true: James Bennett, after a history of dalliances with stage girls and women of questionable repute, had finally fallen in love and was engaged to be married to a proper debutante. The nuptials were scheduled to take place in just a few weeks.
The lucky lady was Caroline May, the daughter of a prominent doctor who lived in Baltimore, summered in Newport, and kept this fine town house in Manhattan. Caroline was described as “a slender, fair-haired girl with a proud tilt to her chin” and, according to another account, was a woman of “unusual beauty … noted for charm and daring.” She must have been extraordinary, for she had managed to accomplish something many New Yorkers thought impossible. Wrote one biographer: “Jimmy Bennett, veteran of fleshpots, terror of polite society, naked coachman, reckless polo player, high-living and free-spending clubman, was about to be tamed by domesticity.”
For as long as anyone could remember, fashionable Knickerbockers had observed a tradition of “calling” on New Year’s Day. Families would hitch up their horses and sleighs and, amid a happy din of song and jangling harness bells, move about the city, attending open-house parties where the brandy and bourbon eggnog flowed freely. These gatherings were “the excuse for much drunkenness,” one Bennett contemporary later wrote. Bennett had been “calling” all day, and by four in the afternoon, as he rapped on the Mays’ front door, he was well into his cups.
Bennett was welcomed into the warm parlor and, with his accustomed alacrity, made his way to the bar. He was always delighted to be at the May home, and the Mays seemed happy to have him for a future son-in-law. Caroline had become a close friend of Bennett’s younger sister, Jeannette, which further solidified the bond. By all accounts Bennett loved Caroline, and his intentions to marry her appeared genuine. The previous summer, the social pages of the newspapers had noted that in Newport she’d “had the seat of honor” on the box of his carriage and that he often took her out on his yacht. In New York, the couple was frequently seen at the opera, at dinner parties, and at the theater.
“The match was regarded a brilliant one by the young lady’s friends,” noted one newspaper, “[and] the friends of Mr. Bennett and his father were equally pleased.” At Caroline’s request, Bennett had ordered an elaborate trousseau of clothes, jewelry, and linens from the finest shops in Paris, and when the shipment arrived in New York, customs officials reportedly charged him $9,000 in duties. The wedding was to be a small, private affair, after which Bennett and his new bride would board the steamer Russia and sail for Europe, where an extensive newlywed tour had been arranged.
On this festive first day of the New Year, the wedding plans remained intact. Yet there seemed a part of Bennett that was not ready to settle down. He had doubts about matrimony, even if he had no doubts about Caroline. Several times during their engagement, she had been forced to break things off when Bennett drank too much and scampered away with his sporting friends, pulling off some idiotic and thoroughly embarrassing stunt. One gossip columnist asserted that Bennett was liable “at any moment to go on a spree” and observed that liquor had a way of “intensifying his impulsiveness … and deadening the many noble qualities of head and heart which characterize him when he is ‘himself.’ ”
Still, hope sprang eternal within certain social circles. One New York society columnist noted optimistically that it “had been some time” since Bennett went on a bender and that he seemed “so assiduous in his attentions to his fiancée that all his friends began to hope this time there would be a marriage.”
Now Bennett b
arged into the drawing room of the May home and greeted Caroline, her parents, and her several sisters. The room was also packed with many of Bennett’s friends from the Union Club, and there was much teasing and backslapping as he circulated among them. A fire crackled in one corner, and a grand piano sat in another, with carolers gathered around. Bennett made some ribald comments, and when a servant proffered a tray of fortified punch, helped himself to another drink.
About this time Bennett took full leave of his senses. Standing beside the grand piano, he unbuttoned his trousers and, in plain view of the guests, began to relieve himself, arcing a stream into the innards of the instrument. (Other accounts say he pissed into the fireplace.) Whatever the case, Bennett clearly felt it was time to “pump out the bilge,” as one chronicler put it, and he had no compunction about doing so inside a high society salon. “Bennett forgot where he was,” a Herald editor wrote years later, “and became guilty of conduct unbecoming a gentleman—or any one else.”
The drawing room was suddenly plunged in chaos. Genteel guests recoiled in horror and bolted from the scene. Women screamed and swooned—or feigned swooning. As Bennett shook off, a clutch of his friends encircled him and demanded to know what in God’s name he was doing. He seemed oblivious to the enormity of his offense, even when two strong men briskly escorted him out of the May residence and tossed him into the street, beside his waiting sleigh.
IT WAS NOT until the next morning, when he had sobered up, that Bennett began to fathom what he had done. The May family sent a message informing him that, once again, the engagement was off—and this time, for good. When he wandered over to the Union Club, he detected a new coolness of tone among his chums. On the streets, passersby cut him awkward glances. People throughout the city expected Bennett to misbehave in colorful, outlandish ways, but this time he had gone too far.
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