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This profile considers the New York Herald and
the International Herald Tribune under the control
of James Gordon Bennett, Ogden Reid and the Whitney family.
It covers -
the Bennetts
James Gordon Bennett Sr (1794-1872) - self-described as
the "Napoleon of the newspaper" - was born in
Scotland and after abortive education for the Roman Catholic
priesthood migrated to Nova Scotia in 1819. By 1822 he
had moved to New York and during that decade held a variety
of positions (including as a translator and newspaper
correspondent in Charleston, Washington, Boston and New
York).
After attracting attention as the Washington correspondent
of the New York Enquirer he founded the Globe
in New York in 1832. Its expiry soon thereafter saw his
establishment of the Pennsylvanian in Philadelphia
during 1833. In 1835 he spent US$500 to launch the New
York Herald, priced at one cent paper, with a
refreshing disclaimer of "all principle, as it is
called, all party, all politics". In a departure
from traditional practice the Herald was based
on a large circulation and advertising (and reinvestment
of profits that by 1867 reached an estimated US$400,000),
rather than subsidies by political interests or subscriptions
from a small number of subscribers. Accordingly it featured
accounts of crimes, society scandals and "natural
wonders" such as mermaids and sea monsters for "the
great masses of the community."
Bennett prided himself on innovation and investment in
news gathering, albeit with less concern for accuracy
once news was obtained. During the Civil War he maintained
a staff of 63 war correspondents. It is claimed that the
Herald featured the first Wall Street financial
article (in the year of its establishment) and was the
first US title print in full the text of a long speech
obtained by telegraph.
A rival newspaper greeted news of his death in 1872 with
the comment
James
Gordon Bennett has died a natural death, but unfortunately
his newspaper survives him. In his own way he was quite
as great a man - we are thinking of greatness in its
Jonathan Wild sense - as Fisk; but he kept on the safe
side of the law, and he was spared the expense of having
to share his plunder with the judges. His career is
a conspicuous example of prosperous infamy. An American
apologist has suggested that his character might be
described as good so far as it went, but "defective."
He was shrewd, enterprising, audacious, liberal; "visit
him, and you see before you a quiet-mannered, courteous,
and good-natured old gentleman, who is on excellent
terms with himself and with the world." But beyond
that there was a blank. "That region of the mind
where convictions, the sense of truth and honor, public
spirit, and patriotism, have their sphere, is in this
man mere vacancy." He was, in fact, an utterly
unscrupulous person, who had no desire to do evil for
its own sake, but who had made up his mind to push his
way in the world, and who was ready to follow any road
that seemed to suit his purpose. It was his combination
of rare shrewdness and profligate audacity which rendered
his example so corrupting and dangerous. When, in the
course of some quarrel, his adversary called him a pedler,
he at once adopted the name. He "peddled,"
he said, in thoughts, and feelings, and intellectual
truths, and he was going in for a wholesale business
in the same line. A pedler has a prescriptive right
to call his wares by such names as he pleases, but the
commodities out of which Bennett began to make his fortune
were, in plain language, obscenity and personal defamation:
The New-York Herald, which he invented and
continued to manage to the last hour of his life, was
at first an obscene, scurrilous print, sold at a cent,
printed by stealth on other people's types, and published
in a cellar. The office of the Herald is now
one of the grandest houses in Broadway; the paper itself
is one of the richest literary properties in the world,
and it has cast off the revolting grossness of its early
years. But it has always been conducted on the same
principle - the principle of providing any thing that
seemed likely to pay, without regard to the moral texture
of the article. The justification of the commodity was
simply that people were willing to buy it, and Bennett
never troubled himself about any thing else.
Son
James Gordon Bennett Jr (1841-1918) was educated in France
before assuming day to day responsibility for the Herald
in 1867. He continued his father's practice of circulation
building through high-profile events and series, including
finance for the 1869-71 expedition by Henry Stanley to
find David Livingston, the 1879 De Long arctic expedition
and various speed events.
After 1877 he primarily resided in Paris, directing his
newspapers by cable. He had worn out his welcome in polite
society after urinating into the fireplace (or a grand
piano) at a New Year's Day party at his then fiancée's
home in New York. During 1883 in partnership with John
Mackay he founded the Commercial Cable Company, an offshore
counterpart of Associated Press and United Press (UP).
Bennett Jr established London and Paris daily editions
of the Herald. The Paris edition has been characterised
as a sincere - and unprofitable - attempt to "promote
international goodwill" but arguably reflected the
owner's ego.
During the newspaper wars of the 1890s the Herald
was outstripped by Hearst's Journal
and Pulitzer's World.
Decline reflected managerial inattention, Bennett's absence
in Paris and demands for capital. The latter reflected
what the New York Times characterised as "a life
of erratic genius and outsize expenses", with Bennett
reportedly spending US$625,000 on his steam yacht Lysistrata,
for instance, with a crew of 100. (In contrast McKim,
Mead & White's beaux arts Herald building
at Herald Square cost a mere US$500,000.) Bennett established
the James Gordon Bennett cup as a trophy in international
yacht racing. Another Gordon Bennett Cup was awarded from
1900 to 1905 in France for auto racing. The first Gordon
Bennett balloon competition was held in Paris in 1906,
with the first air race held in 1909.
The Bennett estate offloaded the NY and Paris Herald
and NY Evening Telegram to Frank Munsey
for US$4m in 1920. The ailing Herald merged in
1922 with the New York Tribune after being sold
by "the great disposer".
the Tribune under Greeley and Reid
The New York Tribune was established in 1841
by Horace Greeley (1811-1872).
Greeley was born in Amherst, New Hampshire. After working
as a printer he moved New York City, building the Tribune
into a nationally-recognised publication.
As a Whig Greeley initially supported the rights of the
US Southern states to secede but became an ardent abolitionist
and a supporter of the North in the Civil War. He served
as a Whig Congressman from 1848 to 1849, thereafter running
unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives in 1850,
1868 and 1870. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the
United States Senate (in 1861 and 1863) and for US President
in 1872, failure partly attributable to a personal guarantee
of bail for Jefferson Davis.
Greeley gained attention for enthusiasms and catchphrases
- such as the famous "Go west, young man" -
and for anecdotes about matters such as his illegible
handwriting. In one tale he fired an inept reporter, providing
a long letter detailing that reporter's faults. It was
unreadable except for Greeley's signature; the reporter
claimed it was a letter of recommendation and was accordingly
hired by one of Greeley's competitors.
Concentration on those distractions was reflected in loss
of the Tribune to Whitelaw Reid (1837-1912).
Greeley's final moments were supposedly enlived with a
dying comment to Reid "You son of a bitch, you stole
my newspaper". Reid's account differed, claiming
that Greeley's last words were "I know my redeemer
liveth".
Reid graduated from Miami University of Ohio in 1856,
becoming a reporter during the Civil War and forming a
friendship with Greeley. By 1869 he was managing editor
of the Tribune, strengthening his position by
marrying the daughter of millionaire Darius Ogden Mills
(1825-1910). He was US minister to France from 1889 to
1892 and was ambassador to the UK from 1905 until 1912.
In 1892 he ran as the Vice Presidential candidate with
Benjamin Harrison, subsequently endorsing William McKinley
and becoming a member of the Peace Commission for the
Spanish-American War. Reid's included After the War
(1866), Ohio in the War (1868) and Problems
of Expansion (1900).
Under his son Ogden Mills Reid (1882-1947) and wife Helen
Rogers Reid (1882-1970) the paper continued a slow decline.
In 1922 it merged with the New York Herald to
form the New York Herald Tribune, which continued
to be run by Reid until his death in 1947. In 1958 the
Reids sold control to John Hay Whitney, heir to a family
fortune from Standard Oil, tobacco, street railways and
real estate.
Whitney and Whitney Communications Corp
John Hay Whitney (1904-1982) inherited over US$30 million
in 1927 and by 1964 was worth an estimated US$250 million,
partly through success at investment bank Lee, Higginson
& Co. and his venture capital firm, J H Whitney &
Co. He had served as an ambassador for President Eisenhower,
had dabbled successfully in Broadway and film finance
(notably Pioneer Pictures with Selznick), worked with
Nelson Rockefeller in the motion picture section of the
wartime Office of the Coordinator on Inter-American Affairs,
had been an early backer of Newsweek
with Vincent Astor and was brother-in-law
of CBS founder William Paley.
The paper was affected by weakening demand, managerial
indecision - arguably exacerbated by over-reliance on
advice from McKinseys and other consultants - and by poor
industrial relations (in particular two major strikes
by the typesetters' union during 1962-63 and 1966).
Whitney Communications Corporation expanded into newspapers,
magazines (eg Parade, Interior Design, 50
Plus, Boating Industry and Art In America),
broadcast television (with Corinthian Broadcasting stations
in Kingston, Mt Kisco, Mineola and New Rochelle later
sold to Dun & Bradstreet), radio
and cable tv. It reportedly pumped US$40 million into
the Herald Tribune. The New York Times
commented in 1966 that
despite
his enormous wealth, Mr Whitney finally decided he could
no longer afford the luxury of more losses in the Herald
Tribune, and economics overcame his political convictions
and strong sentimental feelings for the paper.
Its
US successor was the afternoon New York World Journal
Tribune, an ungainly three-way combination of the
Herald Tribune, Hearst's
New York Journal American and the Scripps-Howard
New York World-Telegram & Sun.
Whitney's estate later sold Picasso's 1905 painting Boy
with a Pipe (acquired in 1950 for US$30,000) for
US$104 million. The family is reported to have donated
US$300 million of Impressionist, Modern and American paintings
to the National Gallery of Art, MoMA (New York and Yale
University during the lives of Whitney and his wife; cynics
have questioned whether overall expenditure on the Whitney
racing stable equalled investment in the Tribune.
the Paris Herald-Tribune and IHT
In 1887 Bennett Jr launched the Paris edition of the Herald,
with control passing from Munsey
to the Reids as part of the 1922 merger of the New York
Herald and New York Tribune. The merger
was reflected in rebadging of the paper as the Paris Herald
Tribune.
In 1959 John Hay Whitney in turn acquired the Paris Herald
Tribune through purchase of the New York Herald
Tribune. During 1966 the Whitneys sold 50% of the
Paris Herald Tribune to the Washington Post.
The New York Times Company bought a 33% stake in the Paris
paper during the following year, with that title becoming
the International Herald Tribune (IHT).
In 1991 the Times and Post jointly acquired the Whitney
family's 33% stake in the International Herald Tribune,
which later established an alliance with the Frankfurt
Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). During
2003 the Times bought the Post's stake in the IHT
for US$65 million.
studies
Context for the Bennett era is provided by The
Creation of the Media: The Political Origins of Mass Communications
(New York: Basic 2004) by Paul Starr.
For Bennett see Oliver Carlson's The Man Who Made
News: James Gordon Bennett (New York: Duell Sloan
1942), Douglas Fermer's James Gordon Bennett &
the New York Herald: a study of editorial opinion in the
Civil War era, 1854-1867 (New York: St. Martins 1986),
When Giants Ruled: The Story of Park Row, New York's Great
Newspaper Street (New York: Fordham Uni Press
1999) by Hy Turner and James Crouthamel's Bennett's
New York Herald and the rise of the popular press
(Syracuse: Syracuse Uni Press 1989).
Eric Homberger's Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and
Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale Uni
Press 2002) may induce sympathy for Bennett Jr rather
than the piano. Don Seitz' The James Gordon Bennetts,
Father and Son (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1928)
and Bernard Weisberger' The American Newspaperman
(1961) have been superseded, as has Seitz' Horace
Greeley: Founder of the New York Tribune (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill 1926).
An account of Bennett Jr at play appears in The Bonehunters'
Revenge: Dinosaurs and Fate in the Gilded Age (New
York: Houghton Mifflin 1999) by David Wallace and Patricia
Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death
of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New
York: Vintage 1999). Issac Pray's 1853 Memoirs of
James Gordon Bennett and his Times (New York: Arno
Press 1970) remains of value.
For Greeley see his An Overland Journey: From New
York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (New
York: Knopf 1963), Glyndon Van Duesen's Horace Greeley:
Nineteenth-Century Crusader (Philadelphia: Uni of
Pennsylvania Press 1953) and J. A. Isley's Horace
Greeley and the Republican Party, 1853–1861: A Study
of the New York Tribune (1947).
For Reid see the authorised but insightful The Life
of Whitelaw Reid (New York: Scribner's 1921) by Royal
Cortissoz and Whitelaw Reid: Journalist, Politician,
Diplomat (Athens: Uni of Georgia Press 1975) by Bingham
Duncan.
For Whitney see the indulgent account by E J Kahn
in Jock: The Life and Times of John Hay Whitney
(Garden City: Doubleday 1981), Edwin Hoyt's The Whitneys:
An Informal Portrait, 1635-1975 (New York: Weybright
& Talley 1976) and W A Swanberg's Whitney Father,
Whitney Heiress (New York: Scribner 1980). The
Sisters: Babe Mortimer Paley, Betsey Roosevelt Whitney
& Minnie Astor Fosburgh - The Life & Times of
the Fabulous Cushing Sisters (New York: Random 1992)
by David Grafton provides a gossipy perspective on the
US Astors and William Paley of CBS.
For the Herald Tribune and IHT see Richard
Kluger's The Paper: The Life and Death of the New
York Herald Tribune (New York: Knopf 1986) and Charles
Robertson's The International Herald Tribune: The
First Hundred Years (New York: Columbia Uni Press
1987). There is an affectionate account in Waverley Root's
The Paris Edition: The Autobiography Of Waverley Root,
1927-1934 (San Francisco: North Point Press 1989),
Charles Robertson's An American Poet in Paris - Pauline
Avery Crawford and the Herald Tribune (Uni of Missouri
Press 2001) and Barbara Mahoney's Dispatches and Dictators:
Ralph Barnes for the Herald Tribune (Corvallis: Oregon
State Uni Press 2003).
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