an advantageous medium for advertising,” he proclaimed in his inaugural issue of September 3, 1833. To achieve this end, the Sun sold for one cent—one sixth the price of the mercantile or political papers sold by subscription. Moreover, Day followed the British practice of selling copies at a discount to boys who in turn sold them on the street. This greatly enhanced the paper’s circulation, which reached 2,000 by November 1834, 5,000 by early 1835, and 15,000 by the middle of that year.8
The Sun sold in such quantities because it defined “the news of the day” in terms that made sense to an ever growing laboring class of immigrants and rural migrants, for whom international trade and even partisan politics were largely irrelevant. Certainly, the paper catered to advertisers, much to the chagrin of readers who learned the hard way about the dangers of buying fraudulent products from the array of merchants who saw opportunities in a market that was just beginning to emerge. Still, a paper could not sell advertising unless it attracted readers, and Day did so with a mix of human interest stories, police reporting, and exposés of churches, courts, banks, and government.
Contemporary accounts make it clear that the Sun—as well as the Philadelphia Public Ledger (1836), the Boston Daily Times (1836), the Baltimore Sun (1837), and a wave of other papers that sprang up along the Eastern seaboard—created a vast new readership. As with so much else in popular culture in this period, the center of the newspaper world was New York. Surveying the scene, the Ledger described an environment that clearly excited the writer in its novelty:
In the cities of New York and Brooklyn, containing a population of 300,000, the daily circulation of the penny papers is not less than 70,000. This is nearly sufficient to place a newspaper in the hand of every man in the two cities, and even every boy old enough to read. These papers are to be found in every street, lane, and alley; in every hotel, tavern, counting-house, shop, etc. Almost every porter and dray-man, while not engaged in his occupation, may be seen with a paper in his hands.9
The Sun’s success was soon matched, and then eclipsed, by the New York Herald, founded by James Gordon Bennett in 1835. The Herald borrowed many of the Suns techniques, but took them a step further, as when Bennett made the trial of a young clerk for the murder of a prostitute—two people of no social standing—into a gripping national saga. The paper was also particularly aggressive in attacking church leaders, as well as its own rivals. Bennett’s decision to raise the price of the Herald to two cents in its second year turned out to be a savvy investment, for it allowed him to expand and to experiment with new techniques, ranging from buying a fleet of boats to meet news-bearing vessels from Europe to developing his business reporting to the point where it was competitive with the mercantile papers.10
Indeed, the Herald’s success was so great that it inspired attacks from the elite press, which in 1840 declared a “moral war” that was joined by papers in Boston, Philadelphia, and even England. Sinking to the level they supposedly deplored, these papers excoriated the Herald and its editors for “reckless depravity.” and “moral leprosy” Barely concealed beneath their fear of an encroaching rival was a growing concern over the direction of American journalism.11
Meanwhile, the expansion of penny newspapers along the Eastern seaboard—and their steady penetration westward—was greatly facilitated by technological developments. The first penny papers were printed on hand-operated presses, but mechanically powered steam and cylinder machines soon allowed for a tremendous growth in productive potential. Moreover, the relationship between newspaper culture and technology was a reciprocal one: new technologies created new markets, and new markets spurred the development of more efficient presses, paper manufacturing, and distribution methods.12
Probably the most important technological development in this period was the telegraph. Building on the work of other scientists and inventors, Samuel Morse, a New York professor of art and design, gave the first public demonstrations of his new device in 1838. Although many early observers were impressed, it took a while before the telegraph’s tremendous potential—the opportunity to communicate instantly across space—overcame early skepticism and logistical problems. Journalistic adoption of the telegraph was pioneered by the Baltimore Sun, which used an experimental line between that city and Washington to report on the presidential nomination of James Polk at the Democratic National Convention in 1844. Baltimore was also strategically located on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad line, which made it a key communications center in the years that followed. The outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846 also stimulated the rapid expansion of telegraphy as a means of communication. In the first week of 1848, Bennett claimed to have spent over $12,000 for 79,000 words of telegraphic content in the Herald.13
As has so often happened in the annals of technological revolution, the telegraph opened possibilities that soon became severely constricted by commercial interests. Samuel Morse was desperate to sell his new invention to the government, which he hoped would build and operate its own lines for the public good. The government refused, failing to recognize the telegraph’s potential and fearing waste and fraud. A series of companies that wanted to exploit—and control—the telegraph for profit then rushed into the vacuum. In a pattern that would be repeated throughout the next 150 years, the result was a bruising financial battle over how to organize the new communications technology and whom it should benefit. In the case of telegraphy, this at first meant the proliferation of duplicate lines, many of poor quality, and rampant speculation. By the late 1840s, however, three organized interests had emerged: those who owned the lines, those who operated them, and those who prepared the information to be sent along them. In 1849, a consortium of six New York daily papers formed the Harbor News Association, later to be called the Associated Press. AP brought telegraph operators into the organization, but it passed up the opportunity to buy telegraph lines, leaving that part of the field to others. Beginning in the 1850s, the Western Union Telegraph Company began to buy and build lines, until it eventually became a monopoly. After the Civil War, AP and WU formed a communications axis (a matter to be discussed in Chapter 3).
Unlike the political press, the penny papers generally disavowed party affiliation. Nevertheless, they did become involved in the political issues of day, and they reflected the powerful, if incomplete, egalitarian currents that suffused the Jacksonian era. Indeed, many newspaper editors participated in an artisanal radicalism (a kind of proletarian politics with a Jeffersonian spin) that marked a class order still in flux. Three years before founding the Sun, for example, Benjamin Day was briefly listed as one of six directors of the Daily Sentinel, a political arm of the Workingmen’s Party. The party, which had shown surprising strength in the New York municipal elections in 1829 and which published a weekly paper for fifteen years, suggested the rich possibilities for radical politics that would resurface periodically in the decades before the Civil War.14
By the mid-1830s, much of this vitality had been absorbed by the new Democratic Party, which had become a broad-based coalition of Northern urban workers and wealthy Southern agrarians deeply distrustful of the nascent capitalists who would soon be known as Whigs. Men like Day, who had trimmed their radical sails in the process of starting their own businesses, nonetheless retained a deep distrust of financial elites. To some extent this reflected their personal frustrations in securing capital while upper-class newspapers could serenely count on the help of banks, especially the hated Federalist-founded Bank of the United States (which Jackson eventually destroyed by refusing to renew its charter). To some extent too, the penny press’s political stance was tailored to the perceived needs of its audience. There can be little doubt, in any case, that there was an important democratic component at its core.
Unfortunately, the coalition between Northern urban workers and Southern agrarians was an unstable compound. Rhetoric notwithstanding, politicians like Jackson’s successor Martin Van Buren probably had more in common with his Whig rivals than the working people he presumably represented (his power base was tellingly known as
