The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (6 page)

The difference was evident on the front page. Not for Day any long-winded speeches from an editor’s favored politicians; instead, he offered a humorous tale, presented almost entirely in dialogue, about a dueling Irish captain. The more notable item, though, was a smaller one, fitted in at the bottom-right corner:

A Whistler.
—A boy in Vermont, accustomed to working alone, was so prone to whistling, that as soon as he was by himself, he unconsciously commenced. When asleep, the muscles of his mouth, chest, and lungs were so completely concatenated in the association, he whistled with astonishing shrillness. A pale countenance, loss of appetite, and almost total prostration of strength, convinced his mother it would end in death, if not speedily overcome, which was accomplished by placing him in the society of another boy, who had orders to give him a blow as soon as he began to whistle.

Was there really such a boy? Day hadn’t placed the story on page two, which was reserved for news, but in a more ambiguous spot, on the front page, where newspapers occasionally ran works of fiction. Those pieces, however, were clearly labeled as fiction. This item was formatted like a news story, although it lacked the sort of identifying details that would be expected of one.

In its description of a country boy performing a routine act in an exaggerated way, “A Whistler” resembles a form of story just then becoming popular in the American West—the tall tale. But it is perhaps more suggestive of what the great showman P. T. Barnum, himself about to arrive in New York, liked to call a “humbug,” a fanciful display of some sort, entertaining enough to “suddenly arrest public attention,” as he put it,
– 30 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 31

Benjamin Day’s Whistling Boy

and possessing just enough verisimilitude to make it seem at least possibly genuine. New Yorkers, as it turned out, loved humbugs. They happily handed over their money for the privilege of being amused by them, and seemed never to tire of debating their veracity. P. T. Barnum would grow rich and famous on the strength of his humbugs, while the
Sun,
which placed on the front page of its first issue the story of a Vermont boy who whistled even in his sleep, would win untold readers with a series of articles announcing the discovery of unicorns and man-bats on the moon.

After several hours of hawking their papers, Day and his two assistants counted up their pennies. All told, they had more than three dollars: over three hundred papers sold. Despite the encouraging start, Day could hardly have felt elated. It was Tuesday afternoon, he hadn’t slept since Sunday, and it was already time to begin work on the next day’s edition.

He trudged back toward William Street, carrying the unsold papers, as New York careened around him. He needed help: help in writing the paper, and help in getting the papers sold. The answer to the first problem would arrive within the week; the answer to the second arrived even earlier and, like the
Sun
itself, would change the landscape of the city forever.

– 31 –

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 32

This page intentionally left blank

0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 33

c h a p t e r
2

The News of the City

The notice appeared in the very next issue of the
Sun,
on September 4, 1833—an innocuous-seeming four lines buried on page three. It was overshadowed by a pair of much larger theatrical advertisements, the more notable of them publicizing the new comedy at the Park Theater,
Rip Van Winkle,
that featured the dramatist himself, Mr. James Henry Hackett (coming off a celebrated run as Falstaff), in the title role. Benjamin Day had likely copied the theatrical advertisements from the six-penny papers, along with the help-wanted notices he placed directly underneath, from employers seeking cooks, nurses, and chambermaids.

But there was one among them that clearly hadn’t been taken from elsewhere, two sentences that an exhausted Benjamin Day must have composed with a commingled sense of hope and desperation:

TO THE UNEMPLOYED.—A number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy to sell again.

Day was expecting unemployed men to respond to his appeal, but the following morning a ten-year-old boy named Bernard Flaherty walked into the
Sun
’s office and announced that he was there for the job. He was new to the city, he explained, a recent arrival from Cork, in the south of Ireland. Day was taken aback by the sight of this ragged boy standing before him, but he had always been a great exponent of hard work and personal initiative; and perhaps he also recalled how he had worked as an apprentice printer when he was only a few years older than Bernard Flaherty and living in circumstances far less dire. He couldn’t see the harm in
– 33 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 34

the sun and the moon

giving the boy a chance, so he gave him a hundred papers and told him to go out and sell all he could. He would pay two dollars a week, Day said, and there was a bonus in it for him if he managed to sell more than a hundred papers in a day.

Bernard Flaherty proved to be unusually adept at the street patter that would come to be known as “hollering,” seemed to understand instinctively how to charm a crowd into handing over their pennies (years later, under the stage name Barney Williams, he would become famous as an Irish-dialect comedian in plays such as
The Emerald Ring
and
The Con-nie Soogah
). He sold the hundred papers and more, and in the coming weeks he would be joined by several other boys, their piping voices crying out each morning the exclamatory headlines that Benjamin Day was learning sold best:
Double Distilled Villainy! Cursed Effects of Drunkenness! Awful Occurrence! Infamous Affair!

For at least a century the scrappy, sharp-talking newsboy in his baggy trousers and soft cap, the urchin with a heart of gold, would be an iconic part of the city’s life, beloved as an emblem of pluck and hustle and shrewdness, qualities on which New Yorkers prided themselves; but like all icons this was an idea made more of wish than fact, bearing little resemblance to the actual lives of the newsboys, which were as hard as the sidewalks that too often served as their bed, as unforgiving as the winter nights in which they huddled together in coal bins and sand boxes and ash heaps, warmed only by the closeness of their own bodies. Within a few years, when the newspapers that had now grown large and prosperous— at least in part on the boys’ labor—began to purchase expensive steam-powered printing presses for their underground press rooms, the boys slept on the gratings outside the newspaper offices, enveloping themselves in the steam rising up from the machines that ran through the night to print the papers they would sell on awakening. When they could they slept in the lobbies of the newspaper offices, though often they were rousted by printers who poured water on them as they slept, a technique that had proven effective in scattering rats.

Some of the boys died quickly, of exposure, and others slowly, of consumption. Like Bernard Flaherty, many of them had been born in Ireland and come to America as outcasts, and many had no parents, or had parents whose only communication was through curses and blows, and either they had been thrown out or they had left by choice, preferring to make the streets of the city their home. Some of them, by the time they began
– 34 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 35

The News of the City

selling papers, no longer even remembered their own names, although this proved less an obstacle than might be imagined, as the boys mostly dispensed with their given names, replacing them with ones they bestowed on each other: Sniffey, Pickle-nose, Fat Jack, Professor, Carrots, Dodge-me-John, Tickle-me-foot, Lozenges, Blood-sucker, The Ghost. Few had much schooling, but now during the day they learned arithmetic (eventually Benjamin Day worked out an arrangement in which he charged them sixty-seven cents cash for a hundred papers, or seventy-five cents on credit), while at night they learned English drama, shouting “Hi-hi-hi!”

from the pits of the theaters, elbowing each other to stay awake, eating peanuts and then tossing the shells at the actors they didn’t like. In time they developed their own dialect and traditions and codes of conduct, the prevailing one being the code of the wild, under which smaller newsboys were regularly plundered by larger ones, the littlest of them—some as young as five years old—being as weak and vulnerable as the baby fish that gave them their nickname: small fry.

For generations, countless boys thus kept themselves alive, and some of them—those who were especially enterprising or especially charming or especially violent—even managed to become rich. Mark Maguire, famed as “The King of the Newsboys,” started out in life peddling the
Sun,
having only enough pennies to purchase two or three copies at a time. He built up his business little by little until eventually he started making deals with publishers to buy newspapers at a bulk discount and then subcon-tracted the selling to others, making a profit on each boy’s sales. By the time he was twenty-five (still nearly as short and chubby as he had been when he was a newsboy) he had a wife and children and lived in a large house and drove a fast horse, and was said to control the fortunes of no fewer than five hundred newsboys.

Up to this time the city’s newspaper editors had considered it ungentlemanly to seek out readers—a newspaper, after all, was not a molasses cake or a piece of fruit, to be hawked on the street by ragamuffins—and took pride in the fact that their readerships had been achieved without solicitation. But the success of the
Sun,
which by the end of the year was selling in the thousands, led the other daily papers to hire their own newsboys, transforming the newspaper business in the city, and the city itself. Newspapers had been forever removed from the cloister of plush drawing rooms and ornate countinghouses, and now could be found all over, in the wharves on the west side and the warehouses on the east, and
– 35 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 36

the sun and the moon

the sounds of commerce that rose up each morning from the city streets always included high-pitched cries recounting what had happened there the day before.

During the first week of the
Sun
’s publication in early September 1833, Benjamin Day received another visitor looking for a job. The young man standing before him, George Washington Wisner, had the wavy dark hair, strong jaw, and coal-black eyes of a theatrical leading man, though Day could perceive an intelligence in those eyes, along with a cockiness and a certain hardness as well, the result of half a dozen years of difficult living on his own; and perhaps Day, who prided himself on his discernment of others, also detected in the young man’s spare frame, in a certain hesitation of breath or movement, the fragile constitution that would compel him to leave the
Sun
only twenty months later, and to which he would eventually succumb, in a frontier town in Michigan, at the age of thirty-seven.

George Wisner was twenty-one years old, just two years younger than Benjamin Day, and although the two men had significant political differences (Wisner was more radical, particularly on the slavery question), they also had much in common. Like Day, Wisner was a printer by trade, moving to New York at the age of nineteen to seek his fortune. He came from the small town of Auburn in western New York, where he, like Day, had received a common-school education; at the age of fifteen Wisner had also left school to apprentice as a printer at a local newspaper. And like Day and so many other young men from the country, Wisner had come to New York looking for work in the burgeoning print trades. By 1833 he was working for a Nassau Street newspaper, the
New-York Evangelist.
The work, however, could not have been as steady as he would have liked, because the
Evangelist
was a weekly rather than a daily paper, and in September Wisner appeared at the
Sun
office on William Street looking for a job.

It was a fortuitous moment for Wisner to arrive, as Day was just seeking someone to work as his police court reporter. The
Sun’
s police reports had already proven highly popular with readers, and he was eager to continue them, but he had a problem. The police court went into session at four in the morning, to process more efficiently those whom the watch-men had rounded up the previous night, and Day couldn’t attend the court sessions and do everything else that was required to bring out the
Sun
each day. He needed someone who was industrious, trustworthy, ready to get up before dawn to do his reporting, and, not incidentally, was
– 36 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 37

The News of the City

willing to do it on the cheap. Wisner was young and single (and therefore inexpensive), and he was enthusiastic, and he came highly recommended by the foreman of the
Evangelist,
James G. Wilson, whom Day so respected that six years later he would ask him to be his partner on a new literary magazine called
Brother Jonathan.
Day offered Wisner four dollars a week to write the police column and in the afternoons help out with writing or composing, and though the sum would barely keep him housed and fed Wisner quickly agreed to the deal.

No New York newspaper had ever had a police court reporter on staff before. The
Courier and Enquirer
and one or two of the other papers occasionally ran police reports, but only on especially slow days, when none of the foreign or national papers had arrived and the editor was desperate to fill the news columns. And even this modest outlay of space had been met with furious criticism from rival papers, who assailed the reports as inappropriate for the pages of a respectable newspaper. “It is a fashion which does not meet with our approbation, on the score of either propriety or taste,” declared the
Evening Post.
“To say nothing of the absolute indecency of some of the cases which are allowed occasionally to creep into print, we deem it of little benefit to the cause of morals thus to familiarize the community, and especially the younger parts of it, to the details of misdemeanor and crime.” (“Besides,” the
Post
added pragmat-ically, “it suggests to the novice in vice all the means of becoming expert in its devices.”) The
Sun,
on the other hand, reveled in the police court reports, which appeared without fail and eventually filled as much as a third of the entire news page. Every morning George Wisner rose at three and made his way through the dimly lit streets of Lower Manhattan to the long yellow police court building behind City Hall, settling himself into a corner of the noisy, crowded courtroom with his paper and pencil to await the call of the morning’s cases.