Father & Son

THE JAMES GORDON BENNETTS--Don C. Seitz--Bobbs-Merrill ($5).

The Father. "Newspapers, as such, hardly deserved the name until this impertinent Scotchman came along. . . .' Before he founded the New York Herald in 1835 as a penny daily, newspapers were essentially windy political and personal organs. James Gordon Bennett gave the public hot news: the first stock table, Wall Street stories (including swindles and names), police reports, scandals. He made a sensation of the murder of a famed courtesan. He pried into the doings of the top social set, which never accepted him. The Herald's stories rollicked with color. He treated religion as news--a fact which annoyed clergymen. He published the first ship news, had a sailboat go out to Montauk Point to meet incoming ships. He had correspondents in Washington, D. C., who did not stop at handouts.

Within five years, the Herald had a circulation of 50,000, more than double that of its nearest competitor, and Bennett was getting rich.

Bennett was several times assaulted, horsewhipped or beaten up by persons who did not like his treatment of news. He always wrote an account of such matters in the Herald. An example: "As I was leisurely pursuing my business, yesterday, in Wall Street . . . James Watson Webb came up to me . . . commenced fighting with a species of brutal and demoniac desperation characteristic of a fury. My damage is a scratch, about three quarters of an inch in length, on the third finger of the left hand . . . and three buttons torn from my vest, which any tailor will reinstate for a sixpence. His loss is a rent from top to bottom of a very beautiful black coat, which cost the ruffian $40, and a blow in the face, which may have knocked down his throat some of his infernal teeth for anything I know. Balance in my favour $39.94. ... I never will abandon the cause of truth, morals and virtue."

Showman Phineas Taylor Barnum was the only man who ever completely outwitted Bennett. The Herald had made fun of Barnum's famed Jenny Lind. Barnum retaliated by selling Bennett some land at a fabulous price and by keeping theatre advertising out of the Herald for two years.

During the Mexican War, Bennett established a courier system for the Herald correspondents; he covered the Civil War with 40 reporters on the various fronts. As a source of news, the Herald dominated the U. S. field and was practically the only U. S. newspaper read in Europe. President Lincoln, knowing the importance of the Herald, once offered Bennett the portfolio of Minister to France.

Bennett died in 1872 of a stroke of apoplexy--a mocking old man, who had more enemies than friends. He gave his son complete ownership of the Herald.

The Son. Almost as soon as he was able to articulate, young Bennett knew that he would always be rich and that he would some day run the Herald. Tutors, France, champagne and the freedom of the Herald office furnished his education. New York's fastest society embraced him, because, unlike his father, he was a sporting blood. Delmonico's for luncheon, the Union Club* for late afternoon, anywhere for the evening--went young Bennett.

Yachting, polo, horse-racing and balloon-racing were boomed by Bennett. Many a Bennett Cup still stands. He was Commodore of the New York Yacht Club for three terms and sailed five races across the Atlantic, the most famed being that of 1866 when he took the null schooner Henrietta across in 13 days, 21 hours.

He was fond of plover eggs. He drank champagne from the slipper of Actress Pauline Markham, who had a "voice of velvet and the lost arms of Venus of Milo." He tried to drive a coach-and-four through the doorway of a Paris house, putting himself in the hospital for a month. Several times, in dead of night, he raced along the boulevards--stark naked in the driver's box.

He took command of the Herald at the end of the Civil War, spending more time in Europe than in the U. S., continuing his flamboyant exploits. But his word was law, whether shouted across his New York desk or cabled from Paris. He had two supreme maxims:

"I am the only reader of this paper."

"I will have no indispensable men in my employ."

Once, taking a dislike to the music critic's hair, he cabled: "Tell Meltzer to cut his hair." Further exchanges of cables found Meltzer with hair still uncut. Bennett cabled: "Send him to St. Petersburg."

Again, when the New York office was expecting an important message, Bennett cabled: "Send two mocking-birds by special messenger." They were sent and the next word from Bennett was: "Send mocking-bird food." Bennett had been boasting to a Parisian lady about the melodious American mocking-bird.

Frequently, Herald reporters would be called to Paris and then refused an audience with Bennett or sent home or told to go to the ends of the earth. The greatest news story of the century grew out of Bennett's command in 1869 to Henry Morton Stanley: "Go and find Livingstone."

Bennett would write an occasional editorial, set in double-leads on the Herald's front page. His pen was not as facile or as provoking as his father's, but his imagination was wilder. Somebody told him that the Herald was getting to be a Roman Catholic sheet; immediately a roaring editorial headed "To Hell with the Pope" was written. A wise secretary kept it off the press after Bennett had gone to bed.

Madcap though he may have seemed, Bennett made the Herald thrive. In the '70s and early '80s, it had the best staff of reporters and editors in the U. S. Mark Twain and Walt Whitman wrote for it. The decline of the Herald began when the late Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst entered the New York field as competitors, with the World and the American, respectively.

Bennett devoted his later years almost exclusively to the Paris edition of the Herald, which had long been the pet of his most lavish whims. He died in 1918 at Beaulieu, France, aged 77.* The Herald was sold to the late Frank Andrew Munsey and was later merged with the New York Tribune.

The Significance. Biographer Don Carlos Seitz has handled the eye-opening, breath-taking spectacle of the Bennetts with skill that is both accurate and vivid. On finishing the volume, one is sorry that there are today no editor-owners who pause on their yachts to demand a mockingbird or to send a Stanley to Africa.

The Author. Mr. Seitz is 66, an authority on Whistler, Pulitzer, pirates. He is a thorough investigator of uncommon Americans, a resident of Brooklyn. He was business manager of the New York World from 1898 to 1923.

Last week, a monument of the younger Bennett's heyday--the old Herald building at Herald Square, Manhattan, a replica of the Palazzo del Consiglio of Verona, designed by the late Stanford White--was being torn down to make way for a skyscraper. ^

*A managing editor of the Herald was asked if his office had any list of "sacred cows." He replied: "How in hell can I be expected to carry the names of all the members of the Union Club in my mind?"

*His father died at the same age.