The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (48 page)

Locke’s response to Mordecai Noah was more than just a repudiation of any scriptural justification for slavery; it was, in a larger sense, a warning about the dangers of a literal-minded view of the Bible and a plea to recognize the appropriate limits of religion in society. It was a line of thinking that had informed Richard Adams Locke’s entire career. As a
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young writer in London, he joined with the Republicans, the radicals who daringly advocated the right of religious nonconformism. As the editor of a literary journal in Bristol, he wrote eloquently of God without ever invoking scripture or seeking the stamp of religious authority. As the editor of a newspaper in Somerset, he championed Catholic emancipation despite the powerful opposition of the local clergy. Across the ocean in New York, his pamphlet about the murder trial of Matthias, which in other hands might have been merely a sensationalistic account of a false prophet accused of all manner of lurid acts, became instead a reflection on the nature of faith and on the enduring conflict between science and religion. After his journalistic successes, when he was provided the opportunity to start his own newspaper, the one he established paid special attention to science, which he saw—perhaps too optimistically—as a liberating force, one that, given enough support, could usher in a new era of human enlightenment.

And of course, at the
Sun,
he created his moon story—or Moon Hoax, as it has for so long been inaccurately termed—the work for which he is still remembered, when he is remembered at all.
Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c. at the
Cape of Good Hope
was recognized in its own time as a wonderful literary production, highly imaginative, gorgeously written, its author worthy of mention in the same sentence as Swift and Defoe. It remains all that today, but it is something else as well. It is a call to us, from the decades before Darwin, not to sacrifice intellectual freedom to religious beliefs, however strongly those beliefs are held or however loudly they are proclaimed. Richard Adams Locke’s great work shone for only a very brief time, but it never died out entirely, like the light from a distant star that still comforts though it was produced long ago, and appears ever brighter the darker the sky.

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e p i l o g u e

That Tyranny Shall

Be No Longer

Benjamin Day was only twenty-seven years old when he sold the
Sun
to Moses Yale Beach in 1837. He had left school to apprentice as a printer at the age of fourteen, had worked day and night to make a success of himself, and the forty thousand dollars he received in the sale was enough for him and his family to live comfortably for the rest of his life.

It had seemed like the correct decision at the time, but Day would live for another fifty-two years, and although he later became involved in many enterprises—including the literary monthly
Brother Jonathan
and in 1843

a short-lived daily newspaper called the
True Sun—
none ever brought him the kind of personal and financial rewards he gained from the
Sun
. “I owned the whole concern till I sold it to Beach,” Day told the
Sun
in 1883, on the occasion of its semicentennial. “The silliest thing I ever did in my life was to sell that paper.”

Day had left the radical labor movement as a young man, but he always retained a connection with the working people of the city, and he believed they were entitled to a newspaper that was meant for them. He had imagined a penny newspaper that was lively and sensational and deeply engaged with the life of the city—and in no time that sort of newspaper was everywhere. In 1836, just three years after the
Sun
was founded, a visitor from Philadelphia reported seeing newspapers in the hands of nearly every man in New York and Brooklyn, and nearly every boy old enough to read. “These papers are to be found in every street, lane, and alley; in every hotel, tavern, countinghouse, shop, etc. Almost every
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porter and dray-man, while not engaged in his occupation, may be seen with a paper in his hands,” he observed. (The Philadelphian did not mention this, but much the same was surely true among women: the advertisements in the papers were directed at women as much as at men.) Each year new and ever grander buildings went up in New York, and from all around them came the cries of newsboys hawking not just the
Sun
and the
Herald,
but also the
Daily News
and the
Daily Express
, the
Evening Tattler
and the
Evening Mail
, the
Corsair
, the
Bee
, the
Serpent
, the
Union
, the
Rough Hewer,
and many others with names equally obscure today. Most of the papers had all the durability (not to mention the illuminating power) of lightning bugs, but together they demonstrated the dynamism and vitality of the penny press, and the abiding public enthusiasm for the type of newspaper Benjamin Day had first put together in his little print shop on William Street.

“The consequences of the scheme,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe about the founding of the
Sun
, “in their influence on the whole newspaper business of the country, and through this business on the interests of the country at large, are probably beyond all calculation.” Of course, a great many factors contributed to the rapid growth of the newspaper business in America, including faster printing presses that supported far greater circulations, but there can be no mistaking the truly revolutionary impact of the penny paper on America. From New York the penny press radiated swiftly outward, to cities all around the country. Just across the East River in Brooklyn was the
Daily Eagle
, a morning paper aligned with the local Democratic Party, which for its first year was edited by Richard Adams Locke, and later by an energetic young writer named Walt Whitman. (The official history of the
Eagle
, issued for the paper’s fiftieth anniversary, recalled that Whitman “occupied the editorial chair principally on stormy days; for nothing could keep him out of the sunshine, and in pleasant weather his editorial duties received scant attention.”) By the 1840s nearly every large or medium-size American city had a penny paper of its own. Philadelphia had its
Public Ledger
, Boston its
Daily Times
, New Orleans its
Picayune
, Cincinnati its
Enquirer
, Cleveland its
Plain Dealer,
and Baltimore its own
Sun
—many of which continue to publish today.

At the beginning of that vitally important decade, in 1830, the United States had a population of just under 13 million; there were 852 newspapers nationwide, with a combined circulation of 68 million copies a year.

Ten years later, the population had grown to 17 million, but the country

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now boasted 1,631 newspapers, with a combined annual circulation of 196 million copies. Though the population had increased by about one-third, the number of newspapers had nearly doubled, and total circulation nearly tripled. The United States had become, for the first time, a nation of newspaper readers.

Unlike Benjamin Day, James Gordon Bennett never sold the newspaper he founded. In 1866, having entered his seventies and finally feeling the pull of old age, he passed the ownership of the
Herald
on to his twenty-five-year-old son, who was also named, unsurprisingly, James Gordon Bennett. By this time the
Herald’
s reporting had a reach and immediacy never before seen, and, just as Bennett had predicted many years earlier, it had passed the
Sun
to become the most widely read newspaper in the world.

Shortly before his retirement, Bennett gathered his energies for one last major undertaking: building a new office for the
Herald,
one that would adequately reflect the grandeur of his creation. For years he had been looking for a choice plot of land on Broadway, the city’s main avenue; in 1865 he found it on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, just below City Hall Park—and then, having purchased it, found that he had been outwitted once again by P. T. Barnum.

Bennett and Barnum had maintained a contentious relationship for three decades, ever since they first tangled over Joice Heth. It would not have been apparent to anyone who met them socially, but in significant aspects the two were a good deal alike. Each was a man of outsize ambition, a religious nonconformist, a trafficker in racial stereotypes, and an in-comparable judge of public taste, who had built an empire on the force of his own personality. The two men, however, neither liked nor trusted each other. (“He is like the mother mountain of gold in California,” Bennett once wrote of Barnum, “with two and one-half per cent of gold dust to a mountain of primitive rock.”) Though Barnum always advertised his attractions in the
Herald,
Bennett regularly criticized them in his reviews; in 1854 Barnum sent Bennett a letter complaining that he had “been in the habit of making me a kind of target for the last 18 years.” For his part, Barnum was not above passing derogatory stories about Bennett’s private life to his friend Moses Beach at the
Sun
. The antagonism between the two would eventually yield a truly remarkable story; and though, like so many others of Barnum’s stories, it is impossible to know how much of it is true, just the fact that it may be authentic speaks volumes.

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In early 1851, the story goes, Bennett and his wife boarded the same steamship bound for New Orleans on which Barnum was touring with his celebrated attraction, the opera singer Jenny Lind. A member of Barnum’s staff, furious about the
Herald’
s attacks on his employer, declared one night that he would throw Bennett overboard in the darkness—“Nobody will know it,” he said wildly, “and I will be doing the world a favor”— and only Barnum’s intercession prevented him from carrying out his plan.

(Beyond the senselessness of the crime itself, Barnum reminded him,

“from the fact of the existing relations between the editor and myself, I should be the first to be accused of his murder.”) After persuading his employee to return to his own stateroom, Barnum ordered that the man be watched for the next several days until he calmed down. “More than one of my party said then,” reflected Barnum, clearly relishing the irony of the story, “and has often said since, what I really believe to be true, that ‘James Gordon Bennett would have been drowned that night had it not been for P. T. Barnum.’”

In 1841 Barnum bought Scudder’s American Museum, a five-story marble structure at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street (the deal that he secured with his five acres of Ivy Island), and immediately set to work. He flew the flags of the world from the roof, the American flag towering over them all. He hired a band to play on the roof during the day (a deliberately unmelodious one, so that onlookers would hurry to come inside, out of earshot), and installed the first limelight New York had ever seen, its brilliant blue-white glare visible at night a mile up Broadway. The inside of the building he stuffed as full as a child’s toy chest. Wandering through the museum’s dimly lit hallways, visitors came upon seemingly endless exhibition rooms, each one containing its own wonders: rooms with albinos, giants, dwarfs, educated dogs and industrious fleas, living statuary, and an armless man who played musical instruments and shot a bow and arrow; rooms with Indian artifacts, famous autographs, canes with carved-head handles and umbrellas that contained bayonets, trick mirrors, a working model of Niagara Falls (“With Real Water!”); rooms with collections of insects and butterflies, rocks and seashells, skeletons and stuffed animals. Somehow there were living animals inside the museum as well, lions and tigers and bears, ostriches, hippos, rhinos, and even, for a while, a giraffe—actual wild animals living in a building right on Broadway. Perhaps most amazing was the exhibition called the “Happy Fam-

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ily,” a menagerie of more than sixty creatures, many of them natural predators and prey (cats and rats, hawks and rabbits, and so forth), that had been trained to live together peacefully in a single cage. Barnum had turned the museum into the most popular attraction in the city, and the corner of Broadway and Ann into a magnet for crowds day and night— until the night of July 13, 1865, when a fire swept through the neighborhood and the American Museum burned down.

At the time Barnum held an eleven-year lease on the property, which after the fire he shrewdly had appraised at the inflated value of $275,000.

Wanting the property for the
Herald’
s new offices, James Gordon Bennett came to Barnum to ask about purchasing the lease. Barnum explained that his experts had assured him it was worth no less than $275,000, though the bank listed it for only $225,000, but he would further deduct $25,000, thus offering Bennett the doubly reduced price of $200,000.

A few days later Bennett gave Barnum a check for the money, by which time he had purchased the land itself for $500,000, the value at which his advisers had assessed it. Those advisers, however, had not known about Barnum’s lease; if they had, they would have subtracted its price from their assessment. In paying for both the land
and
the lease, Bennett had laid out $700,000 for a single plot measuring fifty-six by one hundred feet—more than had ever been paid for a comparably sized property in the history of New York.

Bennett was incensed when he discovered that he had overpaid by $200,000, and he ordered his attorney to rescind the deal. The attorney summoned Barnum to his office and informed him that Mr. Bennett had decided not to purchase the museum lot. Mr. Barnum should therefore take back the lease and return the $200,000 that had been paid for it.