The man who invented mass media.

Gordon, John Steele

"A newspaper can send more souls to Heaven, and save more from Hell, than all the churches and chapels in New York--besides making money."

--James Gordon Bennett

On May 6,1835, a Scottish immigrant named James Gordon Bennett founded a newspaper, the New York Herald, with a capital of five hundred dollars and an office in a dank cellar. He was its only staff. New York already had more than a dozen daily newspapers and no one, except its editor, thought the Herald would differ much from its competitors.

But it did. It was to be his passion, Bennett told his first biographer, "my thought by day, and my dream by night to conduct the Herald and to show the world and posterity that a newspaper can be made the most fascinating, most powerful organ of civilization that genius ever dreamed of."

For the next thirty-seven years Bennett showed the world exactly that. By the time he died, on June 1, 1872, the Herald had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world. Its advertising revenue and editorial influence were second only to those of the Times of London. The power of its owner to shape public opinion was immense, as was the fortune he gained in his endeavor.

Far more important, however, was the fact that Bennett, in creating the Herald, invented, more than any single individual, the mass media and made it the major player in the game of public affairs that it has been ever since. This changed the rules of politics completely and made the modern political world possible. Thus, by pursuing his self-interest as a journalist and businessman, Bennett probably did more to shape the nature of modern democracy than any man of his generation.

James Gordon Bennett was born a man apart, isolated from his fellow human beings, and he always remained so. It was a fact that placed him among the greatest of journalists but severely limited his personal happiness.

He was born in Keith, Banffshire, Scotland, on September 1,1795. The majority of the people in the area made their livings as tenant farmers. But while Bennett's father was a farmer like his neighbors, he was no one's tenant. He owned the land he farmed and, affluent by local standards, came as close as anyone in this remote corner of northeastern Scotland to being upper middle-class.

Even more than his family's relative wealth, religion separated Bennett from his fellow Scots, for the Bennetts were Catholics living in a sea of Presbyterians. Brought up in a devotedly Catholic family, Bennett nevertheless went to the local school in Keith, which was by law taught by a Presbyterian and constantly watched over by the Church of Scotland. There he was largely educated with endless Bible readings. "The first book I recollect anything of was the Scriptures," Bennett remembered many years later. "In the school in which I was taught to read, the Scriptures were the principal book. The history of the patriarchs, of the prophets, of the apostles, of the martyr, of the Son of Man himself--is as familiar to me as the expression of my mother's face, and the light of my mother's eye."

He also learned Latin and Greek and, being highly intelligent and possessed of a first-rate memory, did well academically. At fifteen he was sent to Aberdeen to study at a Catholic seminary, where he received a wide-ranging education, far above what most people achieved in those days. For the rest of his life he remembered his college years with great fondness.

At this time he joined a literary club, which met in a room that Lord Byron had occupied only a very few years earlier, when the poet, just then coming to fame, had been a student in Aberdeen. There Bennett read Thomas Paine's virulently anti Catholic The Age of Reason and lost his faith. Set apart once again from most of his contemporaries, he was without any religion for nearly the rest of his life.

Little is known of Bennett's life in the five years after he left college. (Most of what we know comes from what he chose to write about himself in the Herald.) But his first freelance newspaper article, about the Battle of Waterloo, was published the following year. Napoleon, who dominated the political and military world of Bennett's youth, had naturally been a subject of much interest to Bennett. In his later career he often quoted with satisfaction Bonaparte's opinion of journalism: "A journalist! That means a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent to sovereigns, a tutor of nations! Four hostile newspapers are more to be dreaded than a hundred thousand bayonets."

His growing interest in journalism combined with a growing interest in the New World. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography was published in Scotland in 1817, and Bennett read it, as he did John Bristed's America and Its Resources. One day in 1817, when he was twenty-four, Bennett encountered a friend on the street in Aberdeen and asked him what he had been up to.

"I am going to America, Bennett," he replied.

Bennett considered this for a minute and then, to his friend's astonishment, and perhaps his own, said, "My dear fellow, I'll go with you. I want to see the place where Franklin was born."

The young man who stepped off the boat a few weeks later in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was not physically prepossessing in the least. He had black hair and blue eyes, an uncommon combination, and at six feet he was well above the average height for his generation. But he was stoop-shouldered and gangly. "Rough-hewn and bony" was how one contemporary described him, and he remained so all his life. "I eat to live," he admitted, "I do not live to eat and drink."

Worse, he was extremely cross-eyed. William Croffut, a distinguished American journalist a generation younger than Bennett, wrote that when he interviewed Bennett in his office across from City Hall Park in New York in the 1850s, "he looked at me with one eye, [while] he looked out at the City Hall with the other." Bennett made light of his ugliness, even noting in one of his often amazingly frank (if perhaps not always factually true) editorials that he had been refused accommodation in a brothel on account of his looks when he first landed in Halifax. Still, there can be no doubt that they affected him and again set him apart.

Bennett had only five pounds sterling with him when he landed in the New World, and he sought odd jobs in Halifax and then Portland, Maine, to earn the money he needed to get to Boston. Like many of his contemporaries in Britain, Bennett revered the American Revolution and its heroes. He spent the first days of his stay in Boston walking the streets and visiting the spots where the battles around Boston had been fought.

But sightseeing did not pay his bills, and Bennett was soon broke. Indeed two days without food were ended only when he found a York shilling in the Boston Common. But the next day he finally found a job, as a clerk with the Boston booksellers and publishers Wells and Lilly.

Bennett worked hard at his new job and quickly began to master many aspects of the publishing trade that would serve him well in later years. But he had no talent for waiting on customers. He was always careless about his appearance and often let his insatiable curiosity get the better of him, asking too many questions. And he could never curb his dry, sardonic sense of humor. Worse, his thick Scottish accent was hard to understand. Wells and Lilly made him a proofreader, a task that he could perform alone, and Bennett was delighted to do a job that most people in the printing business dreaded.

But Boston's smug self-satisfaction and the inbred insularity of its people--virtually all of whose ancestors had been in New England for two hundred years--began to grate on Bennett. Growing restless, he decided to move on. He quickly found New York far more to his taste. Even then New York was far more cosmopolitan than Boston, far larger, far more commercially minded. Much damaged in the Revolution, it was also far less concerned with the past; the dead hand of history lay only lightly on New York.

Bennett, still not sure where his future lay, occupied himself with odd jobs until one day he overheard a man in a coffee house ask the proprietor if he knew anyone familiar with printer's supplies. He introduced himself and found that the man was Aaron Smith Willington, the editor of the Charleston, South Carolina, Courier. Willington hired Bennett to find the printer's supplies he needed and then, impressed with his energy, offered him a permanent job at five dollars a week. Bennett accepted and found himself a journalist.

News is as old as speech, but the profession of journalism was invented only in the seventeenth century. By the end of that century there were several newspapers being regularly printed in England, carrying news items and advertising, especially after official censorship was ended in 1693. By that time the first American newspaper had also appeared. Printed in Boston by Benjamin Harris in 1690, it was suppressed by the governor after a single issue.

Boston had a regular newspaper by 1704, however, and other cities soon followed. By the end of the century every major city in the new United States had daily newspapers. These newspapers were unlike modern ones. Being devoted to one subject. such as shipping news, some resembled modern trade papers. Most were devoted to furthering a political cause or party and were essentially little more than editorial pages wrapped in some often tendentious news. The editors of these newspapers were fiercely partisan, slavishly praising those they approved of (and were often funded by) while heaping calumny on those they opposed as well as on the editors of rival newspapers.

And politics pervaded every story, no matter how nonpolitical in nature. When the Stamp Act, which taxed newspapers among other things, was enacted in 1765, every paper condemned it unceasingly, even when reporting other stories. "Saturday last was executed Henry Halbert," reported the Boston Evening Post that year, "pursuant to his sentence for the murder of the son of Jacob Woolman. He will never pay any of the taxes unjustly laid on these once happy lands."

As the politics of the new Republic heated up after the Revolution, physical assaults on newspaper editors--not infrequently by other editor--were so common as to amount to an occupational hazard.

Another thing that distinguished early American newspapers from modern ones was circulation. When Bennett first visited New York, only three of its daily newspapers had as many as two thousand subscribers while most had well under a thousand. Nor were there newsboys or even newsstands. Instead a reader who did not subscribe had either to go to the office of the paper to buy a copy or to read it at a club, library, or coffee house that subscribed.

Bennett was extremely lucky to have encountered the editor of the Charleston Courier, for it was one of the country's most influential papers, its articles widely copied by other newspapers. Further, in 1815 it had scooped the rest of the country with the first news of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812.

Willington had achieved this . scoop by stationing a boat out beyond the bar of Charleston Harbor to pick up news from incoming ships and race it in to him, a practice he maintained afterward. Although he was widely congratulated for his feat, few of the country's other editors imitated Willington's example. With the Industrial Revolution just beginning to change the pace of life in the mid-1820s, the idea that speed and timeliness were important to journalism was still largely unappreciated. Bennett, however, appreciated it at once.

Bennett spent much of his time at the Courier translating articles from French and Spanish newspapers that were brought in by ships to Charleston's busy port from Europe and Latin America, then in the throes of revolt from Spain. He acquired a lifelong interest in Latin American affairs and gave them much space in the New York Herald in later years.

While often invited to take part in the social lives of his colleagues at the Courier, Bennett seldom did so. Hemmed in by his ugliness and sharp tongue, he kept mostly to himself. But as he did everywhere he visited. Bennett closely explored Charleston, then the leading city in the South. It is clear that he was deeply affected by his sojourn there and he defended the South and its peculiar institution long after slavery had polarized the nation. Of course in Charleston, with its many well-fed, well-housed, and well-dressed house slaves, he had only a limited view of slavery. He remained largely ignorant of the brutal realities of the plantations.

At the end of ten months, Bennett left Charleston. After returning to Manhattan, he carefully studied the many New York papers and tried to strike up acquaintances with fellow journalists. But he had trouble finding a job--his physical appearance, bristly personality, and inability to kowtow didn't help, of course--and he had to support himself with freelance writing and lecturing for the next few years.

Freelance journalism, then as now, is a precarious way to make a living. And Bennett refused to write in the way then expected of journalists. Articles were usually patronizing, moralistic, and stuffed with poetical allusions and Latin quotations. Bennett, in contrast, tended to be breezy, often humorous, and always succinct. In other words, he was more interested in entertaining readers and telling them what they wanted to know than in showing off his own erudition or issuing instructions on the readers' moral duty.

In 1827 Bennett finally had a stroke of luck. The assistant editor of the New York Enquirer, who had often written on the evils of gambling and dueling, was killed in a duel that came about as a result of a card game. The editor, Mordecai Noah, was in a pinch and hired Bennett to replace him. But while Noah acknowledged Bennett's talents, he didn't like him personally.

Bennett soon suggested that he travel to Washington and report directly from there. The editor, eager to be rid of him, agreed to what was then a completely new journalistic idea, for newspapers had always depended on copying other newspapers for out-of-town news. James Gordon Bennett became the first Washington correspondent in history.

Over the next four years, he reported from Washington, Albany, Saratoga Springs--then the nation's leading summer resort--and elsewhere. His articles on politics became nationally known, being frequently copied by other pro-Jackson newspapers. Bennett meanwhile came to know personally, and to be known by, every important politician in the country.

Bennett was a firm adherent of the Jacksonian revolution then sweeping the country, and three times during this period he tried to found a newspaper to advance Jacksonian principles. Three times he failed. He came to realize that such papers could succeed only when they were subsidized by the politicians they backed because only adherents--and their enemies, of course--read these papers. That meant, in turn, that writing and editing them were, in effect, preaching to the converted. He believed there must be a way to make a newspaper far more influential. It was Bennett's genius that he found it.

Slowly during these years the conception of a new kind of newspaper began to form in Bennett's mind. To the idea of timeliness--being the first with the news--that he had learned at the Charleston Courier he added his own idea of nonpartisanship: keeping party politics out of the news pages so as to appeal to a wide segment of society instead of a narrow one that was united by a single common interest.

Then he added a third element, one pioneered by Benjamin Day on his New York Sun, founded in 1833 and aimed at a mass audience. The Sun, instead of being distributed by subscription, circulated on the London plan, devised a few years earlier by a British paper. Bundles of one hundred copies of the paper were sold to newsboys and store owners for sixty-seven cents, and the individual papers were then hawked on the street for a penny each.

One important reason for the small circulation of the early newspapers, beyond their narrow range of appeal and the difficulty of finding a copy, had been price. They generally sold for six cents, which in those days would have paid for a meal. With the average urban worker earning perhaps seventy-five cents a day, most people simply couldn't afford to buy a newspaper.

But the price was dictated by the fact that the old hand-operated flat bed presses used in the eighteenth century--not much different from the one Gutenberg had used in the fifteenth--could print only a very limited number of copies in a timely manner, about 125 an hour.

In the early nineteenth century that situation began to change when the steam engine was joined with the printing press. The first paper to use the new presses, the Times of London, in 1814, then had the largest circulation in the world, about ten thousand copies a day in a city of two million.

Benjamin Day's New York Sun was an immediate success, quickly becoming New York's most popular paper, selling more than five thousand copies a day. In 1835 Day installed a press capable of printing four thousand copies an hour, not far short of the total circulation of what had been New York's most popular paper only two years earlier, the Courier and Enquirer.

While more popular than any American newspaper had been before, the Sun appealed to only the lowest levels of literate society. It was filled with little more than local news, gossip, lurid crime reports, and dubious tales of strange occurrences. It was much more like a modern supermarket tabloid than what would today be considered a newspaper.

Bennett, sensing the rising middle class that would dominate the dawning Victorian age, wanted to move upmarket from the Sun and produce a mass newspaper that carried serious news about the real world for an upwardly mobile readership.

In conceiving his new newspaper, Bennett followed the pattern set by his contemporary George Stephenson, who used almost exclusively inventions and engineering concepts developed by others to build the world's first economically viable railroad. Bennett likewise took many already known journalistic parts and assembled from them an entirely new whole, one uniquely his own: a politically independent, mass-circulation newspaper full of up-to-the-minute news on all subjects and well-written features from around the world. And like Stephenson's Liverpool & Manchester Railroad, Bennett's New York Herald proved to be one of the seminal inventions of the nineteenth century, one that remade the world.

When the first issue of the Herald appeared Bennett was nearly forty well into middle age by the standards of the day. He had a long string of failures as an independent journalist behind him but an undiminished faith in his own abilities. "I mean to make myself the greatest newspaper man in America," he told an acquaintance, "or a cipher. It's all or nothing."

Bennett was capable of very hard work. He had contracted with a printing firm to handle the typesetting and printing (in exchange for a piece of the equity), but he was his own editor, reporter, copy editor, and advertising manager, rising at five in the morning and rarely getting to bed before midnight. At first the Herald made little impression, and Bennett's capital of only five hundred dollars dwindled. He needed something to gain attention for the Herald, and he soon found it.

Although Bennett had no gift whatever for making friends, he possessed a positive genius for making enemies, and he turned this talent to his advantage. He began attacking the editors of other newspapers in the hope of forcing them to counterattack and inevitably spread the word about the new paper in town to their own readerships. In the style of the bare-knuckle journalism of the day he attacked the city's biggest newspaper, the Sun, and "its brace of blockheads for editors."

Benjamin Day proved to have a thin skin and replied in kind, saying that Bennett's "only chance of dying an upright man will be that of hanging perpendicularly from a rope." Bennett of course was delighted. He was delighted as well with the public response, as newspaper readers began to buy the Herald to see where its next attack would land.

But while picking fights with other newspapers was all well and good, Bennett quickly introduced a dazzling array of journalistic innovations to distinguish his newspaper from all the others. He was the first to print a weather report and to cover sports regularly. And Bennett, much better educated than most of his competitors, was deeply interested and well read in economics. He decided to report on financial trends as well. On May 11, only five days after the paper's first issue, he introduced a regular feature, "Money Market," that brought the day's news from Wall Street to the readers of a general-interest newspaper for the first time. Soon he was regularly listing the closing prices of all thirty-two securities that traded on the New York Stock and Exchange Board (as the New York Stock Exchange was then called).

Wail Street--and the editors of newspapers aimed at the financial community--were not happy with the intrusion of this interloper into what they regarded as their private business. But the Herald's financial reports were an immediate hit with the public, politicians, and merchants alike. They were soon a regular feature of every major newspaper, as of course they still are.

Bennett's tactics worked, and circulation and advertising began to grow rapidly until disaster struck. On the night of August 12, 1835, just three months after the Herald's birth, fire swept through several blocks of the city. Lost in the flames was the firm that the Herald used for typesetting and printing, along with much paper and other material belonging to the Herald. Bennett was ruined before he had fairly begun.

Yet, doubtless with borrowed money, he was able to resume publication less than three weeks later. "We are again in the field," Bennett announced with characteristic panache, "larger, livelier, better, prettier, saucier, and mote independent than ever." (A few months later another, far more disastrous fire swept through thirty-five square blocks of lower Manhattan, destroying virtually all that was left of pre-revolutionary New York as well as much of the city's commercial area. Bennett, spared this time, quickly published a map of the burned-out area of the city. It was the first use of illustration in an American newspaper.)

By mid-October Bennett was doing so well that he was able to move into larger quarters. But it was the next spring that Bennett really put himself, the Herald, and the new journalism he was in the process of inventing on the map.

Early on Sunday morning April 10,1836, someone using a hatchet murdered Ellen Jewett, a beautiful young prostitute, in her room in one of New York's most luxurious brothels. The brothel keeper immediately blamed a handsome, wealthy young man named Richard P. Robinson, a frequent visitor of Ellen Jewett. He was quickly arrested.

Although "respectable" papers weren't supposed to deal with such matters, Bennett, with perhaps the greatest nose for news the world has known, realized at once that here was a story, with illicit sex, bloodshed, violence, and wealth, that would be impossible for his readers, however respectable, to resist. He played it for all it was worth. He not only carried a long account with all the gruesome details, but personally visited the scene and gave his readers a full description of the battered corpse, the room, and even the books on Jewett's bedside table.

One of his rivals accused him of being "a vampire returning to a newly found graveyard-- ike the carrion bird to the rotten carcass--like any vile thing to its congenial element." But these rivals were quickly forced to jump on the bandwagon when the Herald's circulation shot up and the city became transfixed by the case.

At first Bennett assumed Robinson was guilty, but he soon began to have his doubts. On April 15, following his instincts, Bennett again visited the scene of the crime and talked at length with the madam. He became convinced that she was lying and the next day published the complete interview. It was the first time that a direct interview--today so basic a staple of journalism that it is hard to imagine the profession without it--was published in an American newspaper. (The jury, by the way, agreed with Bennett, and Robinson was acquitted.)

At the height of the Jewett affair, the Herald was selling about fifteen thousand copies a day, more than all the papers in New York combined had sold thirteen years earlier, when Bennett first arrived in the city. Only two years later Bennett was prosperous enough to take several months off and visit the homeland he had not seen for nearly twenty years. But he never forgot he was a newspaperman. While traveling in Europe, he signed up correspondents in London, Paris, Rome, and other cities to supply the Herald with exclusive copy, the world's first foreign correspondents.

By 1840 the Herald was yielding him an annual income of about twenty-five thousand dollars, enough to make him a very rich man by the standards of the day, and James Gordon Bennett was well on his way to being the most popular, successful, and hated editor in the United States.

Having thrived on the sensationalism of the Jewett murder, Bennett became even more sensational. He had no qualms about reporting the most grisly details of murders, fires, rapes, and hangings. It was the age of Edgar Allan Poe and Gothic revival; the macabre was in fashion, and Bennett made the most of it. Most intellectuals, preachers and members of New York's social elite of course deplored the Herald's unceasing vulgarity. But they also always seemed to know what was in each day's issue, just as today People magazine, for instance, is read by far more people than admit to it.

No small reason for his success was that Bennett was a master at grabbing the reader's attention with a compelling opening paragraph, yet another innovation. "Take it altogether," he wrote in 1842, "the murder--the boxing up of the body--the alleged salting of it--the trial--firing pistols in court--cutting off the head and bringing the skull of the dead man into Court--the sentence and defiance of the judge--the Park meeting--the threat to arrest the Sheriff--the money that seemed to flow like water--the various bribes--the mock piety--the holding a sort of levee in the cell on the day of execution--the horrid marriage--the shocking suicide--and the burning of the jail, all combine to form a history that throws fable and romance for ever into the shade." Who could possibly resist reading further? Certainly not tens of thousands of New Yorkers in the 1840s.

Bennett was also among the first to exploit the fact that the private doings of the rich and famous are inherently news, whether the rich and famous like it or not. The Knickerbocker aristocracy, as New York's establishment was called, was outraged. Already under siege as the Industrial Revolution created new wealth and immigration created new voters, the Knickerbockers cherished their privacy. But society happenings were now likely to be the business of everybody, as Herald reporters infiltrated their haunts and parties.

"That filthy rag!" former Mayor Philip Hone howled into his diary after one costume ball he had at tended dressed as Cardinal Wolsey was fully reported in the Herald the next day.

Bennett in fact succeeded in infuriating nearly everybody of importance, from politicians (he once wrote that his crossed eyes came from trying "to watch the winding ways of Martin Van Buren") to clergymen (he was excommunicated by the bishop of New York for referring to transubstantiation as "religious cookery").

His fellow newspapermen, however, seemed most often enraged by him. To be sure, Bennett could dish it out with the best of them. Even so, the founder of the Herald received far more than his share in return, doubtless because of his very success. Park Benjamin, the editor of the Evening Signal, described Bennett as an "obscene foreign vagabond, a pestilential scoundrel, ass, rogue, habitual liar, loathsome and leprous slanderer and libeller." Bennett was physically assaulted by James Watson Webb, the owner of the Courier and Enquirer, only a year after he had founded the Herald. He was spit on in the street. Someone sent him a bomb through the mail. A gallows was erected for his exclusive use.

Bennett was indifferent; it all sold newspapers. But he paid a heavy price for it in his personal life. In 1840 Bennett, nearly forty-five, finally married. His bride was Henrietta Crean, whose family had emigrated from Dublin in 1838. Bennett was hardly shy about trumpeting her virtues and accomplishments in the Herald. But after he married, his enemies in the press were equally forthright in doubting them. When their eldest child, James Gordon Bennett, Jr., was born, one editor went so far as to doubt his paternity, suggesting that so monstrous a man as Bennett could not possibly have fathered a child.

This was too much even for the usually indifferent Bennett. After all, the libel reflected on his wife as much as on himself, and he sued successfully.

Mrs. Bennett produced two sons and two daughters, but only James Gordon Bennett, Jr., and his sister Jeanette survived childhood. Little is known of the family's home life beyond what Bennett himself reported in the Herald. But there can be no doubt that the unending vituperation to which her husband, and indirectly she, were subjected soon wore Mrs. Bennett down. Within a few years, when her children were old enough to attend school, she moved to Europe and largely raised her children there, returning to New York and her husband only occasionally. Bennett was once more a man alone.

While sensation sold newspapers, Bennett was far more than just a scandalmonger and purveyor of secondhand mayhem. He knew that being first with the story would sell newspapers quite as well as having the goriest details. While the Herald never lost its raffish vitality, its editor also spent whatever was required to see to it that his readers were the first to know what was happening in the burgeoning world of the Industrial Revolution. This made the Herald not only fun to read but essential. By the 1850s it had by far the largest circulation of any paper in the country and nearly the largest in the world.

By that time even the thoroughly establishment Harper's Weekly had to concede that the Herald was without peer. "No American journal at the present time can compare with it in the point of circulation, advertising, or influence," it wrote in 1858. "Its most bitter assailants concede to it unrivaled sagacity and enterprise in the collection of news. Its friends regard it as a universal guide. It has, naturally, been much abused. Abuse is the necessary price of success in any business; and it must be admitted that Mr. Bennett had not given himself much pains to conciliate his rivals. His plan has ever been rather to court than to avoid controversy; his lance is always at rest; and his powder invariably dry. But whatever rival journals may have said in their wrath, no one can seriously deny the merit of the Herald without impugning the judgment or the morals of the community which for twenty years has given it a generous and undivided support."

The newspaper revolution fomented by Bennett coincided with the communications revolution set off by Samuel F. B. Morse's telegraph in 1844. Far more than Morse, who thought the telegraph would be used only for important government dispatches, Bennett immediately realized its profound significance. As soon as the news of the successful transmission of "What hath God wrought?" was received in New York, he wrote that "the magnetic telegraph at Washington has totally annihilated what there was left of space."

Even before the telegraph, Bennett had been exploiting the new railroads and steamboats to speed the delivery of dispatches from distant points, forcing his rivals to follow suit. In 1846 Philip Hone was agog with how things had changed in just the past few years. He recorded in his diary that year that a Cunard liner had landed in Boston with news from Great Britain and that "the distance from Boston, 240 miles, was traveled by railroad and steamboat in the astonishingly short time of seven hours and five minutes."

It didn't take Bennett much longer to realize the telegraph's significance for American politics and the part that newspapers must hence-forth play in politics because of it. "This means of communication will have a prodigious, cohesive, and conservative influence on the republic," he wrote. "No better bond of union for a great confederacy of states could have been devised.... The whole nation is impressed with the same idea at the same moment. One feeling and one impulse are thus created and maintained from the center of the land to its uttermost extremities."

Even before the Mexican War broke out, Bennett organized a consortium of newspapers to pay for a pony express from New Orleans to Philadelphia, which was connected to New York by telegraph, to speed the news. It regularly beat the post office by as much as four days, and the War Department often depended on it for the latest intelligence.

With the new journalism giving the people their view of the world, politicians and businessmen quickly realized the ability of the mass-circulation newspaper to affect their self-interests by affecting the opinions of voters and customers. They sought to influence the way the newspapers presented them and therefore influenced the opinion of the people, who, in ever-increasing numbers, read the daily newspapers.

Thus Bennett's new journalism transformed the relationship between politicians and newsmen. No longer was it one of politicians dominating their paid hacks in the party press. Even as early as the end of the 1840s a new, deeply symbiotic relationship had evolved, one that has since characterized democratic government. The glue binding this relationship was, and remains, the journalists' need for news and the politicians' need for favorable coverage. The leak soon emerged as a major means of accomplishing this mutual back scratching. As usual James Gordon Bennett was present at the creation.

In 1848 the Herald obtained the text of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, and printed it in full. The Senate, which had been considering the treaty in secret session, was outraged and had the Herald's Washington correspondent arrested and grilled for his source. Bennett of course had an editorial field day regarding freedom of the press. After a month the Senate gave up, and the correspondent was released, his source still anonymous.

A few days later Bennett, to demonstrate that this sort of thing was now business as usual, published a table of "leaks," listing a dozen newspapers, their Washington correspondents, and the "Leaky Senators" who regularly supplied each with inside information. This was quite likely the first use of the word leak in this sense.

In the first two decades of the Herald's existence, American journalism was entirely transformed. Thanks to Bennett, it quickly became big business, requiring hundreds of employees to put out a first-rate paper. Bennett had been able to start the Herald with only five hundred dollars in capital. When Henry Raymond and George Jones established The New York Times only sixteen years later, they needed seventy thousand dollars.

And Bennett's new journalism had changed the very ambience of American cities, New York above all. "Many of our Boston friends," wrote the North American Review only thirty years after the Herald's founding, "have landed in New York at five o'clock in the morning, and ridden uptown in the street cars, filled at that hour with women and boys, folding newspapers and throwing off bundles of them from time to time, which are caught by other boys and women in waiting. Carriers are flitting in every direction, and the town is alive with the great business of getting two hundred thousand papers distributed before breakfast.

"The daily newspaper," it continued, "is one of those things which are rooted in the necessities of modern civilization. The steam engine is not more essential to us. The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general life of mankind."

Nowhere was this more vividly demonstrated than in the coverage of the Civil War. While Bennett had long championed the South in his editorials, when push came to shove he was strongly for the Union. He used no fewer than sixty-three correspondents, who covered every major and virtually every minor battle.

He insisted on, and paid for, speed above all. When one of his correspondents had a horse shot out from under him, Bennett refused to pay for it because the reporter had been a day later than the rival World's in reporting the battle. "A horse that couldn't beat the World isn't worth paying for," Bennett said. But when another reporter sent in a bill for one dollar for a short but vital telegraphic dispatch, Bennett paid him twenty-five dollars instead.

With these tactics and his unmatched resources, Bennett was often able to publish news from the front before the news had even reached the War Department. Bennett had stringers (correspondents paid by the word instead of regular salaries) in the Confederate states, and they provided much useful information.

As its Civil War coverage demonstrated, by the 1860s the Herald was not only the biggest newspaper in the world (its circulation reached as high as 135,000 a few times during the war years) but was the best.

The Herald is constantly ahead," the chief war editor of the rival Tribune lamented. "We are obliged to copy from it." It was also possibly the most profitable, yielding its proprietor about four hundred thousand dollars a year, enough to make him among the fifty or so richest men in the country.

And the Herald's influence was unmatched. So grateful was Abraham Lincoln for the newspaper's support of his re-election that he offered Bennett the post of minister to France, a post that Bennett--no diplomat, to put it mildly--had the good sense to turn down.

But as Bennett's newspaper became better and better, its editor's personal life and happiness only declined. A man with many enemies, he had never learned to make friends. Those he had were much his intellectual inferiors, more sycophants than companions.

When he turned seventy in 1865, he began to think of retirement and passing on his newspaper to his son. The younger Bennett, raised in Europe and surrounded by vast wealth from the day he was born, was already exhibiting the profligacy and eccentricity for which he would soon be famous. And while he inherited much of his father's unsurpassed nose for news (it was the younger Bennett who dispatched Stanley to search for Livingstone), he lacked his father's literary talent and capacity for hard work.

Nonetheless Bennett officially retired as editor in 1867, and his son's name replaced his on the masthead. But the older man kept a firm hand on the tiller while he lived, checking his son's manic excesses. In death, however, he had no choice but to leave his name, his fortune, and his incomparable newspaper to James Gordon Bennett, Jr. The latter did much in the ensuing forty years to diminish all three. (Thanks to his mismanagement, the Herald had lost much of its reputation and all of its profitability by 1924, when it was finally taken over by its old archrival, the New York Tribune.)

In his semiretirement Bennett became as lonely as he was powerful, as unloved as he was rich. His Jacksonian idealism had withered away in his isolation; his honesty about human nature now often curdled into cynicism. As an editor he remained as great as ever, but as a human being he had become almost pathetic.

Bennett maintained a summer house in Washington Heights, in then-rural northern Manhattan, over-looking the Hudson. He spent increasing time there, amusing himself by sitting on the porch, engaging in colloquies with his pet birds, all of which were named for politicians, preachers and journalists. In a very real sense he had no one else to talk to.

In 1872, at the age of seventy-six, Bennett suffered a stroke in his Washington Heights house. Shortly before, he had gone to visit Archbishop McCloskey, made his confession, been absolved, and been received back into the Catholic Church. Perhaps it was genuine contrition, perhaps cowardice in the face of approaching death. Perhaps it was a last desperate attempt to find the love that he had never known.

If so, he did not find it. He lingered for a week after his stroke, but at his death, although his bed was surrounded by doctors, servants, and hangers-on, no family member was present. In the midst of a crowd, James Gordon Bennett died as he had lived, alone.