Charles Chapin's story : Written in Sing Sing Prison

By Charles E. Chapin

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Title: Charles Chapin's story
        Written in Sing Sing Prison

Author: Charles E. Chapin

Author of introduction, etc.: Basil King


        
Release date: April 25, 2026 [eBook #78544]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78544

Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHARLES CHAPIN'S STORY ***




This eBook is dedicated to the memory of Joe Cooper




[Illustration: CHARLES E. CHAPIN]




Charles Chapin’s Story

  Written in Sing Sing Prison

  “The mighty gates of circumstance
     Turn on the smallest hinge,
   And oft some seeming pettiest chance
     Gives our life its after tinge.”

  With an Introduction by
  Basil King

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons
  New York and London
  The Knickerbocker Press
  1920




  COPYRIGHT, 1920
  BY
  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

[Illustration: Colophon]




  To Her Who Ever Beckons
  To Me from Afar

  “Oh, how dark and lone and drear
     Will seem that brighter world of bliss,
   If, while wandering through each radiant zone,
     We fail to find the loved of this.”




PUBLISHERS’ NOTE


“The defendant was indicted on September 18, 1918, for murder in the
first degree, in that he had killed his wife Nellie, with a pistol, by
shooting her in the head. At the time of the killing defendant was, and
for several years prior thereto had been, the city editor of the New
York _Evening World_. He is sixty years of age. He and his wife whom he
killed had been married for thirty-nine years, and the uncontradicted
testimony is to the effect that their relations had been singularly
devoted.”

The tragic and unusual case of Charles E. Chapin, now serving a term of
life imprisonment in Sing Sing, will be well remembered by newspaper
readers. The paragraph quoted above is from the report of a Commission
which passed upon the sanity of the defendant.

At the time of the tragedy Mr. Chapin wrote a letter to a newspaper
associate in part as follows:

“For some time I have been conscious that I am on the verge of a
nervous breakdown. I have fought against it continually, but the pains
in my head grow more acute, and I realize now that the time is fast
approaching when I will collapse entirely. I dread to think of passing
the remainder of my life in a sanitarium so I am doing the only thing I
can think of to escape such a calamity. I know how wrong it is, but I
cannot go on suffering as I have for months. It takes greater courage
than I possess. I have tried to think out what is best to do, and
cannot bear the thought of leaving my wife to face the world alone, so
I have resolved to take her with me.”

The defendant then went to Prospect Park, a revolver in his pocket,
intending to end his life. In a newspaper he saw the headline, “Charles
Chapin Wanted For Murder.” Going to the nearest police station, he gave
himself up.

That, in brief, is the story of the tragedy which terminated the career
of the author of this book.




INTRODUCTION


In calling the reader’s attention to the following pages it may be
well to strike at once the personal note and explain my acquaintance
with the writer. I am not an official visitor at Sing Sing Prison.
I am not a philanthropist. In philanthropy as now practiced I have
only a limited confidence. Had I not had a personal reason for going
to the House of Sorrow I should have felt it an intrusion, almost an
impertinence, to have forced myself where men have at least the right
not to be stared at while undergoing their agony.

I met Charles Chapin at the request of another prisoner at Sing
Sing--a young man doing a life-term for a similar transgression of
the law--whom I had come to know by correspondence. A story of mine
having attracted his attention he was kind enough to write me. After an
exchange of letters I went “up the river” to see him, finding a tall,
stalwart, manly, bright-faced lad of twenty-six who had gone there at
twenty-two. This meeting was the starting point of an affection which
has become one of the precious things in my life.

The writer of this book had been at Sing Sing but a very short time
when my younger friend asked me if I would see the new arrival. Here
again my own books had prepared the way for me, and, as far as the
conditions permitted, our coming together was not different from what
it would have been had we met at a club. My recollection is that we
talked of the public interests of the day, of literature, and of the
scene around us. As to the last there was not a murmur of complaint. In
subsequent meetings we have kept to the same tone, though we could not
have become as friendly as we are without an element of what I may call
mutual solicitude stealing into our intercourse.

My object in bringing up this point is to underscore the fact that when
it comes to human dealing there is no difference between the man whom
we somewhat hideously call a convict and anybody else. We arrest him,
we try him, we sentence him, we lock him behind bars--and having in our
own thought thrust him outside the human race we fancy that it must
seem to him a matter of course to be in the limbo of outcast souls.

But not at all! Arrested, tried, sentenced, buried in a cell, he is to
himself as much a man, and the very same man, as ever he was. As truly
as men at liberty he finds the prisoner’s life abnormal. Normality,
after all, is only what we are accustomed to. Short of perfection it is
not a standard in itself. For the individual normal life is the life
to which he has trained himself, and no two lives have been trained
alike. Normality is an inner principle more than it is an outer one.
Outwardly, through a sort of moral cowardice, we conform as best we
can to accepted patterns which inwardly we reject; but it is the inner
ideal by which we truly live. There are honored men by the million all
over the world whose methods would render them abnormal to most of
their fellow-citizens were the bluff to be called. We do not call the
bluff, and we dare not, for the reason that the vast majority of us
fear that in any such unmasking we ourselves should be exposed.

At the same time hidden wrong, however concealed by our social
false-fronts, demands an expiation. We are so constituted--uprightness
is so much the native principle of the human being--that our universal
departure from the only norm there is cannot go unrecognized.
Unconsciously, subconsciously, and even to some extent consciously,
we call for sacrifice and propitiation. The more dogged our refusal
to repent and reform the more persistent our demand for something or
someone to suffer in our stead.

Modern American slang has coined a word for this, doubtless because
the need cried out for expression. Like all slang it is the voice of
the man in the street, finding the right outlet for his pent-up soul
where the scholar and lexicographer have walked round it. In this case,
however, modern and ancient instinct have been one, and in our slang
word of to-day we link up with a mighty tradition and go back to our
first recognition of the soul’s necessities.

We speak of the man on whom the hard consequences fall as--the goat. So
did the people who first read the results of wrong in terms of tragedy.
The burden of their sin was intolerable. Unwilling to see that they
could throw off that burden by giving up the sin they sought means
whereby they might go on committing the sin and escape the penalty. So
once a year they took a goat and laid their sin upon his head, sending
him off into the wilderness to get rid of him. He became the scape-goat
who bore their punishment so that they could begin with a clean slate
again. It was naïve, childish, but significant.

And in the convict, I am driven to believe, modern civilization is not
looking for the brother to be treated wisely because his weakness is
so obvious and his suffering so great. If that were all the way would
be found as soon as there was a will. The difficulties of dealing with
the prison and prisoner are, to my mind, largely inventions. When we
consider what gigantic obstacles we have overcome when it was to our
interest to overcome them anything here is child’s play. We shake our
heads and pull long faces chiefly to get dust into our own eyes, so
that we may better carry out the purpose we really have at heart.

That purpose is to find a goat. Is not that the underlying motive
of the world-wide cruelty that has made the prison of the Christian
the nearest thing to Calvary? Is not that the reason why the most
philanthropic and tender-hearted among us can mentally look on at
barbarities such as have rarely been surpassed on earth and never
turn a hair? In the prisoner we have found our goat. He is suffering
not for his own sins alone, but for ours. Naïvely, childishly, but
significantly, we outrage every human instinct within him, so that our
own secret self-reproach may be appeased. The world as it is, society
as we have formed it, must have a goat; and we seize the weakest and
most defenseless thing on which we can lay our hands.

I should say right here that I am not speaking from personal knowledge.
I know only what every other member of the public knows--what has
been written of in newspapers and books, exposed in plays and moving
pictures, and never contradicted. I am aware too that efforts at
humanizing the prison system have been made here and there, and the
Sing Sing of to-day is a proof of them. But they have been made
by individuals and have never had the public back of them. When
the public, through its elected representatives, have been able to
intervene it has been largely to nullify or put a stop to anything
meant to mitigate the poor goat’s suffering. Our women, our clergymen,
our reformers will cry out against atrocities four thousand miles away,
and not lift a finger to stop the operation of the third degree--to
cite nothing else--against their own countrymen at their own gates.
Here perhaps one should say in the words of One more tolerant than I,
“These things ought ye to have done and not leave the other undone.”

It is the more amazing then to see the human sacrifice coming through
his crucifixion with exaltation in his face and a new life in his
heart. That happens. It happens rarely enough, God knows, but the
miracle comes to pass. It has happened in the case of the boy friend
I have already mentioned. It has happened in other instances, some of
which I myself have known. I have watched it happening in the case of
him whose book I am now commending to the public.

To reconstruct a sane and helpful life when all that is left of the
self is what one has in common with the animal is an indication of a
mighty principle of growth. The writer of these pages is not the man
who went “up the river” two years ago. The book reads as though its
author had climbed through smiling hills only to fall over a frightful
precipice. Possibly; and yet one might fall over a precipice to find
oneself in a valley of fruits and flowers, even if among them there
are bitter herbs. That is the new life which out of anguish the man is
creating for himself and helping to shed about him. The reader will
not have finished this book when he has read to the last line, not
any more than we have done with a life when we scan its record on a
tombstone. The best part of it will lie in the invisible pages through
which the tale goes on.

[Illustration: Basil King’s signature]




WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN


A friend came to visit me. We were seated in the visitors’ room at Sing
Sing. It was the first time we had met since that fateful day when the
structure I had spent a lifetime in rearing, crashed down upon me and
buried me beneath the ruins. I told him something of my life in prison;
the dreary monotony of it, the loneliness, the hours of bitter regret,
the long nights of solitude, the heartache, the desolation.

In the new life in which I found myself there were duties to be
performed during the day, or I must have gone mad with the morbid
thoughts that were always surging through my brain. But there were the
long evenings and longer nights, sleepless nights in a cell that is no
bigger than a dead man’s grave.

I told my friend that I had sought distraction in books. I had plenty
of time for reading and more than twelve thousand volumes to choose
from. Books were almost my only companions. But sometimes I would read
for an hour without retaining a word and frequently I would have to
turn back and read the pages again, for I had read only with my eyes;
my mind was focused elsewhere. Thoughts of that dreadful tragedy were
ever running between the lines of the printed pages. Ofttimes something
I read would bring memories and a flood of tears. For even a felon can
weep. Oscar Wilde, in the most sorrowful story I have ever read, _De
Profundis_, into which the imprisoned poet poured the tears of his
tortured soul, wrote these lines:

“When a day comes that a man in prison does not weep, it is not when
he is happy but when his heart is hard.” And yet there are men who
argue that imprisonment is not an adequate punishment. They have
never tried it.

“Why don’t you turn to writing during some of your leisure hours,”
suggested my friend. “Why don’t you write a book?”

“About what?”

“Write an autobiography.”

“I haven’t that much egotism left.”

“Tell the story of your forty years as a newspaper man.”

That night in my cell my thoughts kept me awake. Forty years a
newspaper man! Memories began to crowd in upon me. It seemed as if even
the smallest events of my life were flashing through a kinetoscope.
Whatever else had happened to me, my memory was unimpaired. Events and
persons and names through all my forty years of newspaper activity came
back to me as vividly as if they had been crowded into the past few
months. Thoughts come quickly in the solitude of a prison cell.

Forty years! Looking forward, with the inexperienced eyes of youth,
forty years seems a long stretch of time, the span of a life of
fullness. Looking backward, when one is sixty and is at the end of his
journey, forty years is but a succession of yesterdays that multiplied
so rapidly they were come and gone almost without realization. How
much action was crowded into those forty years. How much happiness,
how much sorrow; what ambitious hopes, what bitter disappointments.
Sometimes achieving success, often humiliated by failure. Striving
always for fame and riches, acquiring a fleeting glimpse of both,
and in the end cast upon the scrap heap of humanity, abandoned and
forgotten, dead yet alive.

There is no self-pity in what I write. My heart may be torn with
anguish, my mind tormented with regret, but there has never been one
moment since I came to prison that I have pitied myself or permitted
the pity of others to depress me. I know why I am here and what brought
it about. I know that if I were not here I should not be living. I know
that if I had died and the dear one I loved had survived she would be
suffering greater privation than I ever can. Nothing else matters.

The day after my friend suggested that I write a book, I chanced to
read a bit of philosophy that was written by Samuel Smiles. “It is good
for men to be roused into action by difficulty, rather than to slumber
away their lives in useless apathy and indolence,” wrote this fine
philosopher. In the same essay he expressed this thought: “There are
natures which blossom and ripen amidst trials that would only wither
and decay in an atmosphere of ease and comfort.”

Solitude drives some men mad; it sharpens the wits of others. There are
many instances of courageous men who have turned confinement in prison
into a great personal achievement. More faint-hearted ones, crushed and
defeated by self-pity, drifted quickly into a condition of impotent
inertia. Hopeless and without ambition, they withered and died.

Some of the greatest books in all literature were written in the
solitude of confinement, written by men who suffered greater hardships
than I shall perhaps ever know, for they were in prison in the days
when men were treated with inhuman cruelty, before the searchlight of
publicity had penetrated into the loathsome dungeons where they were
chained and tortured. They are long since dead. What they wrote still
lives and will endure as long as books are read. Thoughts expressed in
words are imperishable.

When I realized what had been achieved by such illustrious men as
Cervantes and Dante and John Bunyan and Defoe and Lovelace and Cooper
and Campanella and countless others, I was lifted out of despondent
lethargy and fired with ambition to try and do something besides cry.
It is so easy to cry in prison.

I began to write. In memory I lived my life over again. My manuscript
grew into many pages and the occupation of mind it gave often lifted
me out of myself and my gloomy surroundings. I think it may have saved
me from the worst possible fate that could have befallen me. I wrote
on from day to day without fixed purpose. I had no thought of ever
publishing my story. I was content that it gave me something to do
and that in doing it the iron within was rising to crush out morbid
thoughts.

About the time my story was nearing completion, Major Lewis E. Lawes
came to Sing Sing as Warden, a man of heart and understanding, the
right man in a big job. Because I had previously had experience in
newspaper making, he asked me to become editor of the institutional
paper, the _Sing Sing Bulletin_. A request from the Warden is
equivalent to an order and it was my duty to comply as obediently as
if I had been ordered to duty on the coal dump. Major Lawes did not
make his order compulsory. He simply pointed out that it might be an
opportunity for me to do something useful, something that might be of
lasting benefit to others. It is fine to make believe that one is still
of some use in the world, even though he fails.

I published the first chapter of my autobiography in our prison paper
and some of my associates here urged me to continue it. My good
friend Basil King, who wrote that wonderful story, _The City of
Comrades_, read my manuscript. His advice prompted me to send it to
a publisher. That is how my story now comes to you.

                                                               C. E. C.
  SING SING, May, 1920.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                   PAGE

     I.--FROM THE BOTTOM                       1

    II.--BARNSTORMING                         20

   III.--CHICAGO “TRIBUNE” DAYS               40

    IV.--MY FIRST BIG “SCOOP”                 59

     V.--A MURDER MYSTERY                     82

    VI.--“STAR” REPORTING                     98

   VII.--A CITY EDITOR AT TWENTY-FIVE        126

  VIII.--BREAKING INTO PARK ROW              155

    IX.--ON THE “WORLD’S” CITY DESK          172

     X.--NEWSPAPERING TO-DAY                 193

    XI.--THE PULITZERS                       216

   XII.--NEWSPAPER ETHICS                    231

  XIII.--GATHERING CLOUDS                    265

   XIV.--TRAGEDY                             287

    XV.--A “LIFER” IN SING SING              313




Charles Chapin’s Story


CHAPTER I

FROM THE BOTTOM


I began life, and I ended life--the real living of the everyday
world--as a newspaper man.

Newspapering, of a kind, commenced for me in a thriving little Western
town when I was just fourteen years old, and had started out to climb
from the bottom the long ladder that leads up through education and
experience to fame and fortune. In this little town I was attracted by
a sign in the window of a newspaper office. A boy was wanted to deliver
papers.

I applied at the front counter for the job and was directed to the
circulation manager, who critically sized me up and declared that
I wouldn’t do. He needed strong boys, he said, boys who were husky
enough to pack a heavy bundle of newspapers over a route several miles
in length and deliver them to subscribers before they sat down to
breakfast.

I was a little chap, even for my age, but I had grit and persuaded the
man to give me a trial. It was my duty to be in the pressroom at 3.30
o’clock every morning, take papers from the press as fast as they were
printed, fold to regulation form, and start off with several hundred
strapped to my shoulder, delivering to the homes of subscribers as I
went along. It was a five-mile tramp before breakfast and in almost the
hilliest town I ever saw. Many of the streets on my route were so steep
that one took almost as many steps upward as forward and in the winter
months I would often flounder through snow that was waist deep.

My wages were four dollars a week. I realized that I could not pay
expenses and save up for my education on this slender income, so I set
to work to find ways of increasing it. Opportunity came knocking at
my door within a week. In the same building with the newspaper was a
telegraph office and one morning when I returned from delivering papers
the operator called me in and asked if I would carry an important
message to the home of a United States Senator. It was from President
Grant, he said, and could not be delayed. His regular messenger boy
hadn’t shown up.

I readily consented and I recall how chesty I felt as bearer of a
Presidential message on which the fate of the nation might hang. My
importance grew on me as I trudged along and finally I broke into a
run. When the maid came to the door and said the Senator wasn’t up I
insisted that she show me to his bedchamber.

I was led upstairs to where the Senator was sleeping his wits away,
perhaps dreaming of that big land swindle with which his name was
afterward so scandalously linked. I rapped several times without a
response. The door was ajar and I could get a glimpse of him in his
bed, the blankets pulled over his head as if to deaden the sound of his
noisy snoring.

Getting no reply to my repeated knocking I pushed the door open, went
boldly into the room, and yanked the bedclothing from the sleeper. He
awoke with a start and glared at me as if he were going to bite.

“Wake up, Senator,” I exclaimed, not a bit abashed, “I have an
important telegraph message for you from President Grant.” I know that
I must have swelled up as I thrust it into his outstretched hand.

He read it and began to laugh.

“How did you know that it is important?” he asked.

“Any message from President Grant to a United States Senator must be
important,” I replied. The Senator patted my head as he reached for his
trousers, drew out a silver dollar, and handed it to me.

“Nothing to collect on the message,” I hastened to assure him.

“The dollar is yours for being my little alarm clock and waking me up,”
he good-naturedly replied.

He asked me to pull the bellcord and when a servant responded he
ordered that breakfast be brought up for both of us. And when it came
he made me sit down and help him eat it.

During the breakfast he asked me a lot of questions about myself and
my ambitions and he gave me some wholesome advice and loaned me two
books from his library. He told me stories about famous statesmen and
how some of them had begun life as I was beginning and had fought their
way to the top. It was a wonderful hour I spent with him and there were
other hours and more silver dollars and the loan of many volumes from
his well-stocked bookcases in the weeks that followed before he was
called back to Washington by the opening of Congress.

When I reported back to the telegraph office I was offered a steady
job, the operator having discovered that his red-headed messenger had
run off with a patent medicine vendor. The messenger work wouldn’t
interfere with my delivering papers. I was to get thirteen dollars
a month and “perquisites.” The big sounding word meant that I was
permitted to charge an extra quarter for every telegram I delivered
more than a mile from the office. Visions of affluence and the means
of obtaining the much coveted education flashed through the dreams of a
tired small boy that night.

Before falling asleep I figured up how much my earnings might amount
to in a year and was elated with the total I set down. Delivering
papers at four dollars a week and telegraph messages at thirteen
dollars a month footed up three hundred and sixty-four dollars a year,
not counting “perquisites.” The “perquisites” was the only uncertain
element in my calculations. I knew that a large percentage of the
population lived more than a mile from the office and I tried to make
mental estimates of how many might be important enough to receive
telegrams. I grew as optimistic over my prospect as the visionary
Colonel Sellers did in his calculations of how many bottles of lotion
would be needed to cure all the sore eyed persons in the world.

The next day opportunity came knocking again. Across the way from “our
office” was an unpretentious restaurant, run by a jolly, red faced
man with an enormous nose, and his adorable wife. It was cheap as to
price, but everything was of good quality. It was the cleanest and
neatest eating place I can recall. At least that is the impression
that lingers in my memory after the elapse of almost half a century. I
wasn’t so fastidious as regards restaurants and food then as I grew to
be in later years. How I did love that dear motherly woman who hurried
steaming hot coffee and a “stack of wheats” to me every morning when I
returned from delivering papers.

One morning she began chatting with me in a friendly way and when she
had coaxed me to tell about myself she proposed that I help them out
by acting as cashier during the mid-day rush hour. In return I was to
get my meals. It took me less than a minute to accept. It meant that
I could save my earnings, for I also had free lodgings, the foreman
of the pressroom having granted me permission to sleep on a stack of
print paper. I acquired a bedquilt and at night I would roll up in it
and sleep more soundly and untroubled than ever I did in the luxurious
Plaza Hotel in New York, where, later in life, I made my home for many
years. There are tender memories of my nest a-top the reserve supply of
print paper, covered only with my quilt of many colors and fantastic
design. It was there I learned the lesson of self-education; a lesson
that was worth while.

Looking backward now from the last milestone of my life’s journey,
I am wondering what I might have achieved if I could have had the
opportunities so many young men neglect.

There was an editor who took a liking to me and who helped me in a
lot of ways. I have often wondered how so busy a man could have the
time or patience to give so much attention to so small a human atom
as me. He selected books for me to read and he would talk to me about
them and explain many of the perplexities that lodged in my mind. I
had a duplicate key to his bookcases and was permitted to take a book
whenever I wished. In return for this privilege I kept the bookcases
in order. It was a fine opportunity for a chap who was hungry for
knowledge and had no other way of acquiring it. And how I did read!
There was nothing in the wide range of literature that I wouldn’t
tackle and try to comprehend. I read all of the essays of Emerson
and Carlyle, the philosophies of Aristotle, Epictetus, Montaigne,
and Johnson and volume after volume of history, ancient, modern, and
medieval. In the line of fiction I read all of Balzac, Dumas, Hugo,
Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, and a score of others of the great authors.
I read the lives of the great men of all times.

And, best of all, I read the Bible. Of all authors, of all times, there
were none who expressed themselves so clearly and so beautifully as did
the men who wrote this greatest Book of all literature.

I studied the sciences, especially astronomy, chemistry, geology, and
ethnology. The works of Voltaire and Darwin interested but mystified
me. I read and studied and analyzed so far as my undeveloped brain
would reach, but in all my reading of such books my belief in God and
in the teachings of Christ was never shaken. To-day, in spite of my
present condition and what brought me to it, that belief is as firmly
rooted as ever.

I learned other things in the newspaper office and in the telegraph
office that were useful later on. The easiest accomplishment that
came to me was when I mastered the Morse code and learned to send and
receive telegraph messages. The operator who employed me as messenger
boy was my instructor and I repaid him by often taking messages from
the wires while he lingered with convivial companions in a nearby
saloon. One night the newspaper editor was worried because it was
nearly time for the night report of the Associated Press to begin and
the telegraph operator couldn’t be found. Scouts were sent scurrying in
every direction, to search for him. When they found him and brought him
to the office he could scarcely stand on his feet.

The signal for clearing the wire had already been given and the
operator lurched over to the table and responded to the call of his
office. The press report began coming. I knew the operator was in
no condition for duty and I watched him with nervous apprehension.
Automatically he grabbed a pencil and began to write but he got down
only a few illegible sentences when he collapsed and plunged from his
seat to the floor.

I let him lie there in drunken stupor while I took every word of the
report without once breaking in on the wire to ask that a sentence be
repeated. The report was several thousand words in length. The editor,
tense and anxious, sat by my side, editing the copy as fast as I wrote
it, sending it direct to the composing room. When it was done I almost
went to pieces from the nervous strain.

The editor told everyone in the office how I had saved the paper from
being sent to press without a line of telegraph news and before I went
to bed I got him to promise not to report the operator. I met the
operator many years later. He had become chief operator in one of the
most important telegraph offices in the West and gave me every facility
at his disposal when I called to arrange for filing my report of a
great political convention. He told me then that he never drank another
drop of liquor after that night I saved him from disgrace.

At the time I mastered telegraphy I also learned to set type. And I
learned something of what is called job work, such as setting display
type for letter heads, business cards, circulars, and other commercial
necessities of the printer’s art. I learned to lock a form and put it
on a press, and to run and feed the press. I got no pay for what I did
other than what I earned by delivering papers and telegraph messages. I
did it because I loved it and cared for no other form of enjoyment. I
had no boy friends and made no attempt to cultivate them. My associates
were men, chiefly men from whom I could learn something useful and
there wasn’t a man in the entire organization of the newspaper office
who didn’t cheerfully explain to me anything I asked of him. Even the
busy editors and printers would stop important work to help me with
something I couldn’t comprehend. Perhaps that is why I have always
tried to be helpful to boys who were beginning at the bottom of the
ladder as I did.

At the time I was trying to educate myself from books borrowed from
the editor’s library, I chanced to get a copy of a weekly story paper
that was exclusively for boys and girls. With that issue there had
been started a department for instruction in shorthand, conducted by
one of the ablest stenographers in New York. Shorthand was then almost
unknown in the West and even in the big cities the comparatively few
who had mastered it were employed in court and legislative work. It was
but little known even in big business, which hadn’t yet heard of the
telephone, or of electric lights, or typewriting and adding machines. I
became interested, sent on my subscription to the magazine and studied
the lessons. Soon I purchased a set of textbooks and applied myself
with such industry that I quickly mastered it. I got so that I could
take down in shorthand messages that came over the telegraph wires.
Evenings I would attend lectures and public meetings and constant
practice soon made it possible for me to make verbatim reports of even
the most rapid speakers.

One day a lawyer came to me and asked if I could report an important
trial in which he was to appear as counsel. I was timid about
undertaking it, but urged on by the telegraph operator and my friend
the editor, I consented. The day of the trial came and I walked
importantly into the courtroom with my notebooks and pencils. The
lawyer who had employed me greeted me effusively and escorted me to a
table inside the railing and immediately under the judge’s bench. There
had never been a stenographic report of a trial in that court.

Before the trial began the lawyer made a pretty speech about me,
telling how I had mastered the mysteries of a wonderful sign language
that enabled me to take down every word as fast as it was uttered, no
matter how rapidly the speaker might talk. There were few stenographers
who were my equals for speed and accuracy, the lawyer lyingly
proclaimed. The courtroom was crowded and I felt as if a spotlight had
been suddenly turned on me. The whitehaired judge beamed benignantly as
he consented to my official appointment to report the trial.

There was one in the courtroom who was hostile. I knew it the instant
I spotted him, scowling crossly at me from the opposite side of the
table. He was a weazened old chap, as bald as an egg, hooked nose and
catlike eyes. He had been official court reporter for many years and
wrote longhand with considerable speed. He evidently looked upon me as
menacing his job. Ignoring my appointment, he got out a ream of legal
cap and proceeded to take testimony in accustomed longhand.

As many of the witnesses were foreigners and spoke brokenly I
experienced some difficulty in understanding them, but I felt that I
was getting along smoothly until the judge directed me to read the
reply a witness had made to the preceding question. I read aloud from
my notes and suddenly came to a halt. I stammered and stuttered. My
notes had become undecipherable. The shorthand characters were dancing
a jib. I could make nothing of them. The lawyer who employed me glared
angrily and the old fiend with the hook nose sneered contemptuously.

The judge alone was sympathetic. He evidently understood that my
confusion was due to nervousness rather than to incompetence. The
judge tried to encourage me by telling me not to get flustered and to
take as much time as necessary for the translation. The more I tried
the more hopelessly confused I grew. At last the judge motioned to old
hooknose to read from his report. How my heart throbbed the humiliation
I felt when that hateful old court reporter gave me a withering look
of contempt as he rose and read from his notes in a loud, firm voice.
I have always hated him and his mean, supercilious sneer with which he
sank contentedly back in his chair and gloated over my defeat. What
stung the hardest was that almost the instant the judge signaled to
old hooknose, the tantalizing hieroglyphics over which I had stumbled
suddenly came to life and became as translatable as ordinary print. But
it was too late. I felt crushed and beaten.

In the telegraph office one evening, I scribbled a fanciful story
which I called _An Autobiography of a Hotel Office Chair._ I left it
on a desk when I went across the street to eat and couldn’t find it
when I returned. The operator had begun taking the press report and
I couldn’t bother him. I thought he might have chucked it into the
wastebasket, so went to bed, but when I returned from delivering papers
the next morning I found a note from the editor, complimenting me on
what he graciously described as an “exceedingly well-written little
sketch.” He added: “Stick to it and you’ll get there.” Two silver
dollars were enclosed.

I was transported to the seventh heaven with delight when I found
that he had put my _Autobiography of a Hotel Office Chair_ in a
conspicuous position on the editorial page. Within an hour I read it
not less than a dozen times. Never were telegraph messages delivered
with greater celerity than I delivered them that day. I felt as if I
had wings.

When the operator got to the office he explained the mystery of how my
story got into print. He had noticed it lying on the desk when I went
to supper and had picked it up and read it. He took it to the editor.
“I’ll print it,” the editor said. “That lad has got stuff in him. He’ll
make a newspaper man some day.”

He double leaded my story and put it on the same page with his own
brilliant editorials, for he was a brilliant writer, as I recall him,
much too big a man for the job he occupied or the narrow sphere in
which some unexplainable freak of fate had cast him. I was an editor in
Chicago when I read of his tragic death. He was dropped to make room
for a younger man and he went into the woods and blew out his wonderful
brains.

A few more words of conceit about my story of the hotel office
chair. A few days after it was printed the editor showed me the
Chicago _Tribune_ and the St. Louis _Globe Democrat_. Each
had reprinted my story, with credit to the paper in which it first
appeared. Nothing I ever did afterwards in the field of journalism
brought me so much happiness.

I began studying the papers of the big cities. Often I would read
descriptions of events, get the facts in my mind, and rewrite them
in my own way, critically comparing what I had written with what had
been printed. I think this helped as much as anything in laying the
foundation for what I ultimately came to. Whenever I could I talked
to my friend, the editor, about my ambition and he was my ever-willing
tutor and guide. One day he called me to him and said that before the
year was up he would give me a regular job as reporter. I was elated
over the promise and during the ensuing months I studied harder than
ever.

Then came a calamity in my young life. Whether it was because I worked
too much and slept too little, or because I was sleeping in the foul
atmosphere of a basement pressroom, I was stricken with a fever and
when next I was able to sit up I was a miserable little skeleton of
skin and bones.

All ambition was gone. Even that bright and happy dream of a newspaper
career vanished with the delirium I had suffered. There was but one
thing in all the world I wanted. I wanted to see my mother. And home to
her I went, as fast as a train could take me.




CHAPTER II

BARNSTORMING


As soon as I had recovered from my illness, I began hunting for a job.
I had already decided on a newspaper career and I went to Chicago with
the hope of finding employment as a reporter. Not one of the editors
appeared eager to grab me. One offered me a job as office boy.

The only one who listened to me seriously was the venerable Wilbur F.
Storey, one of the greatest editors of his day. He was proprietor of
the liveliest and most enterprising newspaper in the West, the Chicago
_Times_, then at the top notch of its popularity. The day I called
on him, there had appeared in the _Times_ the most blatantly
sensational headline that was ever printed in a respectable newspaper.
It was the talk of the town. Over an account of a hanging, in big,
black type, was: “JERKED TO JESUS.”

When I entered Mr. Storey’s sanctum he was tilted back in a big
swivel chair, his long legs stretched across the top of his desk. I
imagine that he was gloating over the sensation that shocking headline
had created. He was chuckling and smiling and his bony fingers were
clutching his snow-white whiskers.

No one was ever more gracious to me. I told him my story and of my
ambition to become a reporter. He even read the clipping I showed him
of _An Autobiography of a Hotel Office Chair_. He asked a lot of
questions but in the end said that a boy of sixteen, no matter how
bright he might be, was too young and inexperienced to undertake a
reporter’s job in a big city.

“Go back to your home town or some other small city and get a few years
of practical training,” he said, “and when you have done this come to
me again. Don’t get discouraged. I am sure you have got good stuff in
you and the grit to win success.”

And the editor who was threatened with tar and feathers at the time
of the Civil War and who was once publicly horsewhipped by an irate
burlesque actress, put his arm about me and walked with me to the
elevator. It was the last time I ever spoke to him, though a few years
later I was city editor of the great newspaper he created.

I went back to the town where my parents lived, determined to follow
the advice Mr. Storey had given me, but I discovered that it was easier
for him to tell me what to do than it was for me to do it. Neither of
the grouchy old editors of the two daily newspapers in my home town
were sufficiently impressed with my youthful enthusiasm to give me a
chance to develop the talent that was screaming for an outlet. Even the
news items I wrote for them didn’t mollify their crabbedness. I offered
to work three months on trial without pay, but they were mercilessly
unyielding to the eloquence of my appeals, gruffly telling me to go to
school and wait until I was grown up before venturing to break into
journalism.

Journalism! How I grew to detest that much abused word. Every
brainless mutt I ever met in a newspaper office described himself as a
“journalist.” The real men, the men who knew news, knew how to get it
and knew how to write it, preferred to be known as newspaper men. One
never hears a star reporter along Park Row speak of journalism.

In our town there had been one of those mushroom insurance companies
that suddenly spring into existence, collect all the money in sight and
then blow up. This particular company had gone into bankruptcy and the
sheriff was selling at auction what was left of the wreck. Among its
effects were a printing press and a fairly complete outfit. I happened
along, chirped a low bid and down came the auctioneer’s hammer. It
was mine. Nearly all of my savings went to pay for it. I got a dray
to cart it to our home and mother gave me two large rooms on an upper
floor in which to establish a printing office. I remember making myself
unpopular with the rest of the family by scrubbing inky type in the
bathtub.

I worked most of that night putting my print shop in shape and the
next day I printed business cards and circulars, announcing that I
was prepared to do all kinds of commercial printing at prices much
lower than any competitor. I got as many orders as I could fill by
soliciting among merchants and family friends and my printing business
grew so fast that I had to work day and night to keep up. To gratify
my ambition to write, I began publishing a monthly magazine for boys
and girls which I called _Our Compliments_. I wrote nearly
every line in it, set all of the type and did the presswork.

_Our Compliments_ became a flourishing publication, even if it
did make a dent in the earnings of my printing business. Many of the
budding geniuses of that period afterward entered the swelling ranks
of professional newspaper writers and authors. We amateurs exchanged
publications and got to know each other. I conceived the idea of
forming an association of amateur editors, appointed myself secretary,
issued elaborate invitations to a convention and the Western Amateur
Press Association came into existence. We elected Alex Dingwall
president, the same “Sandy” Dingwall who became famous and rich as a
theatrical manager in New York, was much loved and died not long ago,
leaving nearly a million dollars and almost as many mourners.

Now I made a false step; I became an actor. That is, my name was
printed on playbills as an actor, but if there are any alive who ever
saw me on the stage, I am sure they will back me up when I declare that
I never was an actor.

At the time I was editing _Our Compliments_ and running a
printing business on a small scale, I had a young friend who was
sadly stage-struck. In appearance he was not unlike pictures of Edwin
Booth in his younger days. Conscious of the resemblance, he wore his
hair long and wavy, soaked it with oil and brushed it back so as to
give prominence to his forehead. He affected a serious and thoughtful
expression of countenance, like the famous tragedian he idolized, and
looked the highbrow he fancied himself to be. He always wore a long
frock coat and enormously high collar. I can picture him now as he
paced solemnly through the streets of the town with corrugated brow and
downcast eyes, one hand thrust into the opening of his coat, the other
drawn behind his back, with fingers twitching convulsively.

A strange character was Rodney, though beneath his studied eccentricity
was a heart of gold. He set about organizing an amateur dramatic club
and invited me to join. I protested that I knew nothing about acting,
that in all my life the only plays I had witnessed were _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_ and _The Gypsy Queen_. He suggested a trip to Chicago
to see Lawrence Barrett in _Richelieu_. We went and I fell. It
was wonderful. Before reaching the end of our journey I had promised
to take part in the performance Rodney was getting up of _Ten Nights
in a Barroom_. I was to be Willie, who gets killed by a gambler.
Rehearsals were soon under way, directed by the public librarian, once
a professional actor. The performance was given for a popular charity
and the opera house was packed. There was a storm of applause when the
gambler killed me. I suspected that it was because I was such a bad
actor, but I was flatteringly mentioned in the newspapers and some of
my friends said I ought to go on the stage.

Rodney was so elated with the success of our performance that he
decided to get up another. This was more pretentious, two professionals
from Chicago playing the leading characters. They were the Lords--Louie
and James--who traveled extensively through the Western states with
a company of which Louie was the star and her husband the manager.
She was a versatile actress who played every range of character from
Lady Macbeth to Topsy. They were organizing for a tour of the West and
invited Rodney and me to join them. Louie painted an alluring picture
of the life of a traveling thespian, so we signed contracts for a tour
of forty weeks and were enrolled as professional “barnstormers.”

And barnstorming it was in all that the word implies. The Lords
were pioneers on what was then the Western frontier, playing in the
principal towns of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, and most of the
mining camps of Colorado and Montana. In those days few of the Western
towns boasted of a theater, so we carried our own scenery and gave
many of our performances in courthouses, public schools, and vacant
stores, borrowing lumber as we went along to build a raised platform on
which we presented our plays. The reserved seats were chairs carried
from the dining-room of hotels, but the ordinary seats were planks
strung across cracker boxes and nail kegs. We actors built the stage,
hung the scenery, arranged the seats and carried up the baggage. When
this labor was done we distributed playbills throughout the town. In
the evening we acted as ushers until time to go behind the curtain to
make ourselves up for the performance.

We usually stayed a week in a town, for railway travel was expensive
and trains uncertain. Sometimes we would get away from the railways
and travel across country by team, we actors perched on a truckload
of trunks and scenery, the ladies going ahead with the manager in
carriages. The hotels were mostly primitive and often they were so
crowded that eight actors would be compelled to sleep in four beds that
had been crowded into one small room, standing on our beds to dress
and performing our toilets in a public washroom.

Our repertoire was extensive, for we never gave a play twice in the
same town. We did _Richard III_, _Lady of Lyons_, _East Lynne_, _Damon
and Pythias_, _Lucretia Borgia_, _Macbeth_, _Rip Van Winkle_, _Hidden
Hand_, _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ and many more. There was nothing in dramatic
literature that our manager was too modest to attempt. The numerical
strength of his company never stayed his ambition. If there were not
enough actors to play the different characters, some of us had to play
two or three. I have seen the armies of Richard and Richmond assault
each other in terrific combat when both armies numbered seven men and a
girl, the latter dressed in armor and wearing a bushy beard.

Once when sickness and desertion had reduced our company to seven,
I played Uncle Tom and three white characters, blacking my face and
washing back to white as occasion required. I wasn’t eighteen. Little
Eva was nearly thirty and a mother. I met her years afterward in New
York. She had become a star at a Broadway theater, but she didn’t look
a year older than when she sat on my knee in a Colorado mining camp and
lisped wistfully: “Uncle Tom, sing to me of the angels bright.”

After two seasons with the Lords I went with them to the Black Hills,
where we played all winter in the opera house that had just been
erected in Deadwood. It was then the liveliest mining town in the
country. Fortune seekers were flocking from every direction. Vast
wealth was being dug from the gold mines and enormous smelters were
being worked day and night, converting the ore into bullion. Everybody
had plenty of money and spent it freely. The miners patronized our
theater to the limit of its seating capacity and were enthusiastic in
their appreciation.

I recall the night “Calamity Jane,” a notorious female desperado, came
to see us play _East Lynne_. She and “Arkansaw Bill,” equally
famous as a bandit and stage robber, occupied front seats. Behind them
sat Seth Bullock, afterward an intimate friend of Colonel Roosevelt.
“Calamity” was dolled up for the occasion in corduroy suit and
sombrero and appeared to be particularly vain of her green kid gloves.
She was not a fascinating lady. As soon as she was comfortably settled
in her seat she bit a chunk from a plug of tobacco and chewed as
industriously as any miner throughout the evening.

She and her escort clapped their hands in noisy appreciation until
Lady Isabel eloped with Sir Francis and then “Calamity” showed her
disapproval of the erring wife’s conduct by marching down to the
footlights and squirting a stream of tobacco juice over the front of
Lady Isabel’s pink satin evening gown. There came very near being a
rough-house when the curtain was lowered and Mr. Lord began to voice
a protest over the indignity to his wife. Trouble was avoided by the
lady desperado tossing a handful of gold coin over the footlights to
pay for the gown she had so ruthlessly desecrated. Throughout the
remainder of the performance she chewed her cud in courteous silence.
“Arkansaw Bill” was killed a week afterward when he and his band of
ruffians raided the little frontier town that is now the capital of
South Dakota. I read not long ago that “Calamity” lived to be a very
old woman. She raised enough deviltry to have deserved hanging a dozen
times.

As the season drew to a close Johnny Rodgers, manager of the opera
house, engaged me for another season. The Lords were not to remain.
In the spring the manager started for Chicago to secure new talent,
expecting to return in two weeks. At the end of that time he was still
snow-bound at the end of the stage route, nearly two hundred miles to
the eastward, waiting for the railway to be opened for traffic. The
next we heard of him he had been drowned. Impatient to get to Chicago
and complete his mission, he had ventured on a long voyage down the
Missouri River in a frail skiff, hoping to reach Sioux City and get
a train at that point for Chicago. His only companion was an Indian.
The river was choked with ice and the skiff was crushed and sunk. The
Indian alone escaped. There was a lot of speculation at the time as
to whether the Indian might not have made ’way with the venturesome
manager, who had a large amount of money in a belt around his waist.
His body was never found.

When the news of the drowning came, I sat up all night with a
hysterical widow and in the morning awoke to a realization of my own
predicament, for I was a long way from home, with no opportunity to
obtain theatrical employment and but few dollars in my pocket. The fare
to Chicago was more than a hundred dollars and the walking was bad. The
mayor met me that day and said he had been talking with some of the
citizens and they were desirous of raising a purse to send me home. I
declined the proffered charity and went to a newspaper office in search
of work, got a job setting type and in ten minutes had my coat off and
sleeves rolled up.

I didn’t have to earn my bread by setting type more than a couple of
weeks, for the editor was summoned East by a death in his family and
the publisher asked me to fill the chair until the editor returned. I
held the job for six months, earning enough to take me to Chicago in
the drawing-room of a Pullman, the only accommodation available when
I reached a railroad, after traveling two days and nights across an
alkali desert, riding the entire distance on top of a stagecoach under
a blistering August sun. Never was anyone more cruelly sunburned. The
journey was made in response to a telegram, offering me an engagement
as leading man with a company that was organizing to support a woman
star on a tour of the West. Why a manager should send to the far-away
Black Hills for an actor, had me puzzled until I found my old friend
Rodney was in the company and knew that it was through him that I had
been called. That season I essayed such trivial roles as Romeo and
Claude Melnotte and Armand Duval. Ye gods! as my mind flits back to
those days when I was a trouper, I marvel how I ever escaped the hook.

Comes now the most important event in that period of my life. On the
fourth day of November, 1879, I was married, six days after I became
twenty-one. She was the sweetest, the truest, the most lovable woman I
have ever known; full of fun and the joy of living; bright, witty, and
entertaining. All who knew her loved her. She was a woman’s woman,
a zealous champion of her sex, with none of the petty jealousies and
envies with which some women are afflicted. I never once heard her
speak unkindly of any of her associates. She was ever my best and
most dependable friend, my comforter in disappointments and worries,
patiently indulgent toward my weaknesses, proud of whatever success
came to me and with an abiding faith in my ability. In all our
thirty-nine years of married life she never wavered in her devotion,
though many times I must have strained her love almost to the breaking.

When I did right she encouraged me; when I did wrong she forgave and
kept on loving me.

We met in the parlor of a Chicago hotel. The card I sent to another was
given to her by a careless bell boy. There were mutual explanations
and she smilingly withdrew. We accidentally met again a week later. I
was in a long line of ticket buyers that led to the box office of a
theater. A lady in front of me dropped a purse and I picked it up and
restored it. There was a smile of recognition when she saw that I was
the one to whose card she had responded. Weeks went by and again we
met, this time in the breakfast-room of a hotel in Iowa. I had arrived
late the night before to join a theatrical company. When I went down to
a late breakfast there was but one person in the room. It was the same
lady. Fate!

She motioned me to a seat at her table. We were to be with the same
company. It was her first season. She had been a teacher of elocution
she told me, and had turned to the stage through advice of theatrical
friends. She was afraid she wasn’t going to like it, for already there
had been some things about stage life that grated harshly. We tarried
long at our first meal. I made up my mind that she was a young woman of
unusual refinement and intelligence and personally very attractive. She
had received an excellent education and it was only an unexpected twist
of fortune that had made it necessary for her to earn a livelihood.

That night I carried her bag to the theater and I carried it back to
the hotel after the performance. In a little town in the West, some
months later, I persuaded her to become my wife. She always claimed
that I tricked her into marriage. She didn’t come down to breakfast one
morning and I rapped on her door to ascertain the reason, thinking she
might have overslept. She had been ill nearly all night, she told me,
so I brought her some medicine and advised her to remain quiet for a
few hours. That afternoon, while playing billiards with our manager, a
strange impulse came to me and I put the cue back in the rack without
finishing the game.

“What’s up?” asked the manager, surprised at my quitting so abruptly.

“I’m going to be married.”

There was an understanding between Nellie and me that we would get
married at the close of our theatrical season, providing our affections
didn’t wane. I was sure of myself, but I wasn’t of her.

Accompanied by the manager I went to the home of an Episcopal clergyman
and arranged for a wedding in his house at five o’clock. It was then
four and I hadn’t asked the bride. I arranged with the manager to be
at the clergyman’s house with his wife to give the bride away and to
act as witnesses. Then I called on the bride. She was feeling better
and consented to go with me for a short walk. I walked her to the
rectory and coaxed her to go in with me. Even then she didn’t suspect,
but when she was in the house and found our manager and his wife there
in their Sunday clothes and the clergyman in official robe, she saw the
trap I had sprung, but she played her part of the game and came out
with a marriage certificate tightly clutched in her hand. What seemed
to bother her most was that she wore a black dress.

“Black is an evil omen for a bride,” she whispered to me on our way
back to the hotel. The manager had ordered the wedding supper and we
toasted my bride with the first champagne I ever drank.

The theatrical company had a disastrous tour and ended so ingloriously
that we were left stranded a long way from home, our salaries far in
arrears. My bride and I returned to Chicago on our trunks, the railroad
company furnishing transportation and holding our baggage until
redeemed. I borrowed the money to reclaim our trunks, settled my wife
in a hotel and started out to look for work, all in one day.

My first thought was to try for a newspaper job and when I went home
to dinner that evening I was a reporter on the Chicago _Tribune_.
At the end of my first week I drew the smallest pay of any reporter
on the staff; at the end of my last week, four years later, when I
left to become city editor of the Chicago _Times_, I was the
_Tribune’s_ highest salaried reporter.




CHAPTER III

CHICAGO _TRIBUNE_ DAYS


I enjoyed my work on the Chicago _Tribune_. It was the life I had
longed for from boyhood, and I became so fascinated with reporting
that I regretted having wasted so much time as a barnstorming player.
At first I was given only the smaller assignments to cover, but no
matter how unimportant the city editor considered them they were
always important to me and I seldom failed to make the most of my
opportunities.

It wasn’t long until some of my small assignments began to develop into
big stories, for one cannot always measure the value of a potential
news tip from the restricted horizon of a city editor’s desk. I
demonstrated this soon after I joined the staff. A citizen telephoned
that rumors were circulating of some sort of trouble at the plant of
a big steel corporation in a southern suburb. The city editor chased
me out to investigate. He evidently didn’t think much of the tip, for
several of his star reporters were sitting idle in the office at the
time.

It was a long, hard trip through a nasty storm, but when I got back to
the office I had the biggest news beat of the year. The sheriff had
closed the plant, throwing hundreds of men out of work; the concern was
bankrupt and the president of it had fled to Europe. He was a man of
great business prominence, his wife a leader in high society. I saw him
years afterward in New York, wrecked in health, his once brilliant mind
shattered. He died in an insane asylum.

That was an astonished city editor when he lifted a bunch of copy from
my desk and read what I had written about the collapse of the steel
corporation. Through lack of experience I had neglected to tell him
what I had. He was quickly alert to the importance of it and my first
big news story filled a lot of space on the front page.

But it isn’t often that the experienced editor is caught napping. It
is more apt to be the reporter. I recall that memorable night in the
_Tribune_ office when a reporter who had been sent to interview
William H. Vanderbilt strolled languidly into the office, and reported
that the great railroad magnate refused to talk. His assignment had
been an important one. The Nickel Plate road, paralleling the tracks
of the Vanderbilt lines between Chicago and Buffalo, had just been
completed and the financial pirates who conceived and carried to a
finish what the public suspected was the biggest gold brick game ever
attempted, were waiting for Vanderbilt to open his money-bags and pay
their price. Mr. Vanderbilt had arrived that night in his private car
and the reporter was sent to ask him what he was going to do about it.
It was so late when he got back the city editor had gone home and his
assistant, busy with belated copy, simply nodded as the reporter turned
in a brief item and said he had failed to get an interview.

With this off his mind, the reporter strolled to the telegraph editor’s
room, in search of a poker game. I was there, chatting with Tod
Cowles, the night editor. It was almost time for the last edition to go
to press.

We heard the reporter tell the poker players how he boarded the
Vanderbilt car and asked its owner if he had come to buy the Nickel
Plate and Vanderbilt had sneeringly called it a “streak of rust.” The
reporter had insisted on getting an interview as a matter of “great
public interest” and the irate old magnate had arrogantly exclaimed:
“The public be damned.”

“The old devil actually pushed me out of the car and slammed the door
in my face,” concluded the reporter, as he began to deal the cards.

I saw an angry glitter in the night editor’s eyes as he glanced at a
proof containing a brief item of the railroad magnate’s arrival. He
ordered the reporter to drop his cards and tell him every word said on
the car. Then he got as busy as a boy killing rattlesnakes. The most
striking story on the front page that morning was headed “The Public
be Damned!” The expression spread all over the world and is still
frequently quoted, nearly forty years afterward.

On that trip William H. Vanderbilt bought the “streak of rust,” and
Calvin S. Brice, General Samuel H. Thomas, William B. Howard, Columbus
R. Cummings, and the rest of the crowd, who put this over on him,
divided the swag. The deal netted them more than $13,000,000.

I got the full particulars first-hand from Howard, a shrewd financier
who was a genius for making fortunes in daring manipulations. He gave
me the details of many big financial stories. My first trip to New
York was as his guest, to write about the construction of the Croton
aqueduct, which was then being dug. He had a $7,000,000 contract for
the Tarrytown section. We stayed at the Union League Club for two weeks
and I frequently lunched there with his financial associates, who
amazed me with the freedom with which they discussed their affairs in
my presence. My reportorial greed for news fairly made me itch to tell
in print some of the things these mighty men discussed so brazenly. It
was my introduction to the life of a millionaire. The taste for luxury
I acquired in those two weeks I never got over.

One day, after luncheon, General Thomas confided to me that he had once
been a reporter and he told me something of how he accumulated his
millions. I suggested that he let me into the secret of how he did it.

“Better stick to reporting,” he said. “You’re a lot happier now than I
am.” From what I learned afterwards I am inclined to think he meant it.

Some millionaires I have since known were far less happy and far more
discontented than most reporters. One who is rated high among the
greatest and most successful in the industrial world and is reputed to
have accumulated more than $100,000,000, had to divorce his beautiful
wife because of her infatuation for an aged gambler. His doctor added
to his woes by cutting off his drinks and forbidding him to smoke. That
was some blow to a man who always drank champagne with his breakfast
and smoked a box of dollar cigars every day. The doctor also put him
on a diet of plain food. Death was to be the penalty of disobedience.
What a wretchedly unhappy man he must be, although he had enough money
to ballast a battleship, a marble palace on Fifth Avenue, another at
Newport, and a country estate that a king might envy.

Another mighty man of big finance was on such bad terms with his home
folk they would scarcely speak to him. All the big guns in the Wall
Street district feared him and some say he practically controlled the
affairs of the nation, bossing Presidents and Cabinet officers and
senators in much the same way that he did his chauffeur. But he got
his one day when the wind slammed a door in his face, driving an amber
and gold cigar holder so far down his throat that he almost choked to
death. It must have strained something in his mechanism, for he had
to go abroad for treatment. He died there, with only a granddaughter,
a half dozen doctors and several trained nurses at his bedside. The
newspapers got out extras announcing his death and all the millionaires
in Wall Street got up and stretched, much as the fans do at the Polo
Grounds at the end of the seventh.

But I have wandered far afield from the newsroom of a daily paper. When
I began on the Chicago _Tribune_, Joseph Medill was the chief
editor and principal owner. He was a man of big brains and wielded a
mighty influence. He belonged to the old school of journalists. There
were few like him then; I know of none now. He and Dana were much
alike, only Mr. Medill was more influential in politics and took a more
active interest in municipal government and public improvements. It was
his great brain power that made the _Tribune_ the most prosperous
of all newspapers west of New York, a position from which it has never
receded, though it is no longer dominated by its editor. Few who read
it now know or care who writes its editorials or directs the policy. It
is just a big, well-greased machine and the wheels roll round and the
paper comes out with accustomed regularity no matter who drops out from
the organization. The indispensable man in a great newspaper office no
longer exists.

In those days Mr. Medill was almost as well-known to most of the
inhabitants of Chicago as Lake Michigan, yet he was seldom seen
outside of his sanctum. Conversation with him was difficult, for he
was so deaf that he couldn’t hear a word without holding an ever
ready trumpet to his ear. He had a trick of turning his affliction to
advantage, sometimes pretending not to hear when he did and withdrawing
his trumpet from his ear and resuming his writing when he was bored or
didn’t wish to listen.

I recall when he was on the witness stand in a half-million dollar
libel suit and insisted on telling what he had to say in his own way.
In vain the counsel for the plaintiff tried to stop him, but Mr. Medill
pretended not to understand, haranguing the jury and presenting his
side of the controversy in such scholarly and logical fashion that
verdict was returned in his favor. Lawyer Trude, counsel for the
_Tribune_, declared that the case would surely have gone against
him but for the cleverness of the editor.

It was my good fortune to attract the attention of the great editor. He
intrusted to me many assignments in which he was personally interested
and I was never happier than when my efforts won his approval. He had a
way of bestowing praise that stirred in the recipient an ambition to do
even better, but he could also be snappish and make one feel cheap if
an article did not come up to his expectation. Once he was so crabbed
with me that I went back to my desk and exploded the indignation I felt
in a letter of resignation. The next day he sent for me and related an
anecdote about something that happened to him in the early part of his
career and I laughed so heartily that I forgot my injured dignity, for
what he told me made him out a bigger boob than I had been.

His brother Sam was managing editor, but I came into contact with him
very little, for he was in poor health and not long after I went on the
paper he went to California with his close personal friend William H.
Crane, the comedian, and soon after his return he died. We all mourned
him, for he was popular with the entire staff, but the paper came out
as regularly as when he was alive and there stepped into his managerial
shoes a son-in-law of Joseph Medill, Robert W. Patterson, known among
his intimates as “Handsome Bob.”

Most of the staff looked upon his coming as a huge joke. They called
him a dude and prophesied that he wouldn’t last six months. He had been
given the job simply because he had married the editor’s daughter, they
sneered, and they poked fun at his faultless attire and criticized his
whiskers, which he parted in the middle and brushed with much care. But
one cannot always tell by the way a man grows his whiskers what sort
of brain power is concealed beneath his skull. Nor does it infallibly
follow that a man is a fool because he is married to the daughter
of his boss. He had barely got his editorial chair warm before the
_Tribune_ began to do things, bigger and better than ever before.
The staid old way of presenting news gave way to a newer and better
way and the _Tribune_, by brilliant strokes of enterprise, made
such rapid progress that some of its contemporaries couldn’t keep the
pace and dropped out of the race. It was Mr. Medill’s great brains that
founded the _Tribune_ and placed it on a solid foundation but it
was Mr. Patterson’s news instinct and managerial ability that lifted
the paper out of the rut.

Some of the old hacks on the staff described the new managing editor as
an “arrogant up-start,” but I always found him courteous and kindly,
quick to appreciate efficient work, and equally quick to condemn the
slovenly methods and slothful ways of some of the old-timers who
comprised the hammer brigade.

I am told that after the death of Mr. Medill, Mr. Patterson began to
let down and throw the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of
subordinates while he was pulling wires to get elected United States
senator. He erected one of the costliest mansions in Washington and
lived there much of the time during the later years of his life, but
he never attained his political ambition. He suddenly dropped dead
while on a visit to Philadelphia and the _Tribune_ is just as
progressive and prosperous as it ever was. The paper is now controlled
by the two grandsons of Mr. Medill. One of them was in the Ojai Valley
in Southern California when I was, a few years ago. He startled the
natives by chartering a stagecoach, drawn by six white horses, to
convey him fifty miles over the mountains to Santa Barbara to get his
hair cut.

The man on the paper who most interested me was the city editor. He was
one of the oddest characters I ever came in contact with and one of
the best-informed men on almost every conceivable subject. Eccentric
though he was, he was a marvelous developer of young men. He had a
positive talent for exciting their ambition and training them to make
the most of their opportunities. A demon for hard work and a slave to
his profession, he was intolerant toward shirkers. Some called him
a “slave driver,” but he never asked one of his men to work nearly
so hard as he did himself. He was always the first to show up in the
morning and he was almost the last to leave at night. The office clock
was less regular than he and from the time he got to the office until
the paper went to press he was never idle. He did more actual work
every day than a half-dozen men now perform in most newspaper offices.
For twenty-seven years he worked sixteen hours a day and seven days a
week without a day off and without once taking a vacation. At the end
of twenty-seven years’ continual service, Mr. Medill insisted on his
having a vacation.

Once before when a holiday had been suggested, the city editor had
angrily threatened to resign. This time he yielded to persuasion. He
bought a fishing rod and what goes with it and sat for a week on a
bridge that crosses the Chicago River, baiting his hook with worms and
casting it into the turbid waters of that vast sewer. He sat there from
sunup till sundown for a week. He didn’t get so much as a nibble but at
the end of his vacation he returned to his desk sunburned and happy.

Fred Hall was his name. He served throughout the Civil War in the War
Department as secretary to Mr. Stanton and, after the rumpus between
Stanton and President Johnson, came to Chicago and got a job on the
_Tribune_. I don’t think he has been beyond the city limits
since. When I last heard of him he had been retired on a pension,
after almost a half-century in the _Tribune_ office. His wife had
been horribly killed in a motor boat explosion, his only daughter
had married and moved away and he was alone with his books and his
memories. I know but one man more lonely than he is. Both of us have
lived too long.

In fancy I can see him as he was in the old days when I was a
_Tribune_ reporter, crouched in a chair, sucking the stem of a
corncob pipe and filling the air about him with a dense cloud of smoke
while his active brain created striking features for the next day’s
issue, sometimes tossing into the wastebasket the poorly written story
of some indolent reporter and rewriting it in his own finished style.
He was the first man I ever saw use a typewriter in the editorial
room and his nimble fingers did jigsteps on the keys as he reeled off
columns of copy. In the office he invariably wore a straw hat, summer
or winter, a hat so yellowed with age that one might suspect he wore it
when he came from Washington at the close of the war. His office coat
was a seedy cardigan jacket, so frayed and worn that his shirt sleeves
showed through the elbows. I never knew him to wear a different suit
than the one he had on when first I saw him. His beard was scraggly
and of many shades. Sometimes his blue eyes would beam with merriment
through the spectacles he always wore and sometimes they stared at one
icily when a reporter stammeringly attempted to explain how he happened
to fall down on his assignment. It was useless to defend failure with
deception, for he seemed to know instinctively that a lie was coming
before it was formed. I sometimes felt as if he could simply look a man
in the eye and read what was in his mind.

He kept himself aloof from everyone except his family and the members
of his staff, yet he had an intimate knowledge of nearly every
important person in Chicago. And he knew their secrets, who and when
they married and how they got their money. He knew the city better than
all the police force and the letter carriers combined. He knew just
how long it would ordinarily take a reporter to get to any part of it,
cover a story and get back to the office. He could rattle off names
and dates from memory of nearly every event that had taken place since
the “Big Fire,” and he was a human encyclopedia of a wider range of
subjects than I ever dreamed could be stored in one human brain.

How he acquired so much useful information always puzzled me. He
read nothing but newspapers in the office, for his time was too much
occupied to permit him to read books and he was never in his home
except to eat and sleep. He had no companions and never went anywhere.
He never went to a theater, but he could repeat the plot of every new
play and tell who the actors were and the parts they played. The next
day after the first performance of _Mikado_ he was humming “The
flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la.”

Some of the men who were reporters with me at that time afterward
became famous in literature, in other professions, and some overturned
tradition by winning high places in finance. Frank Vanderlip is the
most illustrious success of all. While reporting the financial market
for the _Tribune_ he won the confidence of Lyman Gage and when
the latter retired from a bank presidency to become Secretary of the
Treasury, he appointed Vanderlip his chief assistant and Vanderlip
stepped from there into the National City Bank, where he soon rose to
President and then to Chairman of the Board of Directors, recently
retiring with more millions than a barn would hold.

John Wilkie was also taken from the _Tribune_ by Mr. Gage to fill
the important position of Chief of the Secret Service, holding the job
with distinction through several administrations and finally giving
it up to become general manager of the Chicago street railways. John
McGovern and Stanley Waterloo both achieved reputations as writers of
fiction. Ted McPhelim, described by Sir Henry Irving in his memoirs,
as the greatest of American dramatic critics, read and studied and
wrote until he broke down completely. He was one of the gentlest and
most lovable of all my many brilliant associates and didn’t deserve the
dreadful fate that befell him. He was yet a young man when he died in
an asylum. Paul Potter, the most humorous writer on the staff, became
famous as a writer of plays. He still is.

Will Van Benthuysen, who joined the staff about the time I did,
succeeded Mr. Patterson as managing editor when Mr. Medill died,
attracted the attention of Mr. Pulitzer and was lured to New York as
managing editor of the morning _World_ at double the salary he
was getting in Chicago. George Bell, who came over from Ireland in the
steerage and wrote such a clever description of his voyage that he was
promptly hired as a reporter on the _Tribune_, became one of our
shining stars. He also felt the call of the Metropolis and was many
years with the _Sun_. Like Ted McPhelim, he died insane. Vance
Thompson, one of our brightest reporters, later distinguished himself
as a Paris correspondent and fattened his bank account by writing one
of the “best sellers,” _Eat and Grow Thin_. There was “Biff”
Hall, who became a magistrate; Charlie Shuman, who got rich building
apartment houses in Los Angeles; Burke Waterloo, whom everyone loved
and who mystified all of us by blowing out his brains.




CHAPTER IV

MY FIRST BIG “SCOOP”


The escape of McGarrigle from the Chicago jail gave me an opportunity
to score my first conspicuous news scoop. It won me a lot of glory
among the craft and what was more gratifying, boosted my salary so
substantially that I landed among the highest salaried men on the
staff, promoting me almost in a twinkling from a “cub” to a “star.”

McGarrigle had been chief of police while Carter Harrison was Mayor
and with a change of administration that turned him out of office, he
was appointed warden of the big county hospital. There was no more
popular man in political life. Handsome, courteous, and genial, he had
a host of friends. The gang that put him in his new job had an ulterior
motive, for they made him collector of boodle for the most corrupt
political ring that ever infested the western metropolis. The ring was
made up of those in control of the Board of County Commissioners. The
graft was enormous. Contracts were awarded without regard to lowest
bidders and the merchants who furnished supplies to all of the county
institutions were compelled to pay a big percentage of the amount of
their bills to the boodle gang. The county was plundered right and
left, the merchants getting even for what they had to give up, by false
invoices, short weights, and outrageous overcharges. McGarrigle did the
collecting and the ringsters divided the spoils.

The county was on the verge of bankruptcy when the newspapers turned
the searchlight of publicity on the rascals and forced an investigation
by the grand jury. Eight or nine county commissioners were hustled
off to jail. Some got away and fled to foreign countries. McGarrigle
was indicted with the others and was the first to go to bat. He was
promptly convicted and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment in
Joliet penitentiary. An appeal was taken in his case and the courts
having refused to accept bail he was kept in jail until the Supreme
Court could review the evidence.

One Sunday morning Chicago was startled by the news that he had
escaped. Unlike most jail breakers, he didn’t saw his way through steel
bars to freedom nor overpower and disarm his guards. McGarrigle had
brains and he used them to open prison doors. It was the most unique
getaway I ever heard of.

Canute R. Matson was sheriff. He was a ponderous Scandanavian, big of
heart but with sluggish wits. It chanced that he and McGarrigle were
members of the same benevolent order. When McGarrigle found this out he
gave the high sign and the grip and the big sheriff fell into a trap.
One Saturday, when McGarrigle had been in jail for several months he
coaxed the sheriff to take him home for a visit with his family, at the
same time getting a hot bath and change of clothing. Not suspecting
a trick, the sheriff came to the jail that night and conveyed his
prisoner to the northern limits of the city in a closed carriage.
Arriving at McGarrigle’s home without incident, the prisoner’s
attractive wife brought refreshments and entertained the sheriff while
her husband retired to the bathroom with a suit of fresh underwear.
There was a sound of water running into the tub and then all was still.

The clock on the mantel ticked industriously and Mrs. McGarrigle was as
vivacious and entertaining as an anxious woman who is playing a game
could be. The sheriff grew uneasy. He went to the bathroom door and
knocked. There was no response. He tried the door and found it securely
fastened. Mrs. McGarrigle began to laugh. Then she dropped to her knees
and prayed that her husband might not get caught. The sheriff went out
of the house with a rush and around to the rear. The bathroom window
was open and he peeped in. The tub was filled with water, there was a
change of underwear on a stool, but it was like a cage from which the
bird has flown.

There were exciting times in Chicago the remainder of that night.
The sheriff notified the police and routed all of his deputies from
their beds to search for the fugitive. The only trace they found was
the track of the carriage wheels and the prints of horses’ hoofs at
the rear of the house, where some trusted friend had waited for the
boodler to crawl through the bathroom window. Sheriff Matson became the
laughingstock of the town. It proved his political ruin.

I was in Captain Dunham’s tugboat office the following day and
overheard Superintendent Sinclair tell of the mysterious movement
during the night of a schooner from her mooring at Rush Street bridge.
The schooner had taken on a cargo of grain during the week and had been
towed down the river late Saturday afternoon, bound for a Canadian
port on Lake Ontario. It was the schooner _Blake_. Instead of
proceeding to Lake Michigan to begin her long voyage, as a well-behaved
vessel should, she had been made fast to the dock at Rush Street,
unmindful of the fine weather and fair wind. She lay there throughout
the afternoon and evening. About midnight the bridgetender saw a
carriage roll down to the dock. The horses were jaded as if from a
hard run. A tall man got out of the carriage, shook hands with one who
remained inside, and hurriedly boarded the _Blake_. Immediately
afterward the captain came ashore, walked to a nearby saloon and
excitedly telephoned for a tug to tow him out to the lake.

“That’s how McGarrigle got away,” I whispered to Captain Dunham and I
pledged him not to mention it until I could complete an investigation
and write a story for next day’s _Tribune_.

On consulting Lloyd’s vessel register I found that the _Blake_
was owned by Fred St. John, a wealthy shipowner of St. Catherine’s,
Canada. I knew that a Doctor St. John was a prominent member of the
medical staff at the hospital where McGarrigle had been warden, and I
recalled seeing him leave the jail a few days before when I was there
interviewing one of the imprisoned boodlers. It didn’t take long to
ascertain that the Doctor was a Canadian, that he came from the town
where the owner of the schooner lived and that the owner and he were
brothers. My story was now fairly complete, except for an interview
with Doctor St. John, whom I was unable to locate, although another
reporter camped on his doorstep almost the entire night.

It was an interesting story that appeared in the _Tribune_ the
following morning. No other newspaper had it. The _Tribune_
hadn’t been on the streets long before a squad of sheriff’s men were
hurrying by train to the Straits of Mackinaw, three hundred miles away,
through which the _Blake_ must pass after sailing the length of
Lake Michigan. The officers were expected to intercept the schooner in
the narrow waters of the straits and capture the fugitive. They had
orders to take him dead or alive. They might have been successful if
they hadn’t run afoul of Captain Johnny Freer and fallen victims to an
insidious drink called “cherry bunce.”

I figured that I could take a night train, follow the sheriff’s men
to the straits, get there ahead of the schooner and be in time to
report the capture of the fleeing boodler, but it so happened that the
_Blake_ had fair winds from the hour she sailed from Chicago and
she almost broke the record for a fast voyage through Lake Michigan.

On the train that took me to Mackinaw was Melville E. Stone, now
general manager of the _Associated Press_. He was then one of
the owners of the Chicago _Daily News_ and a live wire when it
came to gathering news. Accompanied by the city editor of his paper,
he was heading for the straits to report personally the arrest of
McGarrigle. I recall how nervous I got when the sleeping car porter
confided to me that Mr. Stone had sent a telegram, ordering that the
fastest tug available be waiting for him. How could I expect to compete
with such extravagant enterprise, when I had come away with not much
more than railroad fare? I had overheard the city editor scolding one
of the reporters only a week before for charging too many carfares and
telephone calls. What would he say to one who chartered a tugboat? I
believed that he would expect his reporter to swim. When we got to
Mackinaw early the next morning, a powerful tugboat was awaiting the
enterprising proprietor of the _Daily News_. I hoped he would
invite me to accompany him, but I watched him steam out from the wharf
and there was a wicked grin on his face as he left me disconsolately
wondering what I could do to keep from being beaten.

“Are you after McGarrigle?” said a voice at my elbow. “If you be you
won’t get him here, for the schooner he is on slipped through the
straits at sundown last evening and is well on her way down Lake Huron.”

“How is it the Chicago officers didn’t capture him? Didn’t they get
here in time?”

“They got here all right and they hired a tug and cruised about all
afternoon until they sighted a vessel, almost becalmed, heading into
the straits from Lake Michigan.” My good natured informant continued,
“They thought she might be the one McGarrigle is on, so they hailed her
and went alongside. It was Captain Johnny Freer’s schooner, also bound
down the lakes from Chicago. They told him of McGarrigle’s escape and
Freer replied that he left a day ahead of the _Blake_ and there
was no good of the officers looking further before morning. He asked
them aboard and led them down to his cabin and opened some bottles
of cherry bunce. While they were getting soused Freer chanced to go
on deck and he spied the _Blake_ heading in with a fine slant of
wind. She had every stitch of canvas set and the fresh westerly wind
was driving her along with the speed of a yacht. It happens that Freer
thinks a lot of McGarrigle, because of what he did for his wife when
she was sick in the hospital and he made up his mind that the officers
shouldn’t take him if he could prevent them. And they didn’t. Returning
to the cabin, Freer opened more of his cherry bunce and they drank
until they were ‘oreied.’ They had to be helped aboard their tug and
they have been sleeping ever since. Everybody around here is laughing
about it.”

I asked if there could be any mistake about the schooner having been
the _Blake_.

“Not a chance. I have reported to the underwriters every vessel that
has sailed through the straits for the last twenty years. Besides, I
distinctly made out her name on the stern with my glasses. I rowed out
and chinned with Johnny Freer before he got under way and he told me
how he fooled the officers and got them stewed.”

“What is cherry bunce?”

“Canadian brandy, in which wild cherries have soaked for years. It’s a
favorite tipple with Canuck sailing men, and powerful stuff.”

The old vessel reporter told me that the only chance I had of
overtaking McGarrigle before he landed in Canada was to go to Port
Huron by rail and board the _Blake_ while she was being towed
through the St. Clair River to Lake Erie. I hurried to the railroad
station and found my train had already pulled out. I ran after it
faster than I ever ran in my life, grabbed the handrail of the rear
car and was almost drawn under the wheels. Trainmen dragged me to the
platform and cursed me in their excitement for taking such chances.

As I sank into a seat, gasping for breath and trembling from exertion,
I began to speculate on the wisdom of what I was doing. If the
garrulous vessel reporter had misinformed me about McGarrigle having
safely run the gauntlet I would be ruined, for Stone and his city
editor would have the story of his capture and no amount of explanation
would ever satisfy my editor that I wasn’t a fool. I’d probably get
fired by telegraph and when I returned to Chicago the boys at the press
club would tab me a boob. No other paper would give me a job, for I
hadn’t yet emerged from the adolescent stage of reporting. These and
kindred thoughts chased tormentingly through my agitated brain all that
day on the long ride to Port Huron. I began to liken myself to the
gambler who risks his all on the turn of a card or the cast of a die.

It was night when I arrived at Port Huron without a dollar. All the
money I had when I left Chicago had gone for railroad fare. I had gone
without meals all day and was without the price of a cab to take me to
a hotel. I walked from the depot and got even by engaging the best room
in the house.

After supper I telegraphed a story of the cherry bunce episode to the
_Tribune_, adding a personal note to the editor that I expected
to head off McGarrigle and send a complete story of his adventures the
following day. In an hour a reply came from the editor. It read:

“Stone wires the _Daily News_ that McGarrigle hasn’t passed
through the straits and is not expected until to-night. You are on the
wrong track and we are beaten. Come home.”

Somehow I felt confident that no matter what Mr. Stone had reported to
his paper, the fugitive had escaped from the sheriff’s men and would
be within sight of Port Huron in a few hours. Ignoring Mr. Patterson’s
curt order to return, I went down to the docks and negotiated with
Jimmy Linn for one of his fastest tugboats. We struck a bargain and
then I asked for a loan. There was no money in the tugowner’s safe that
night, but he proved a friend in need by driving me to the home of a
banker and persuading that amiable gentleman to open his vault. With a
fat roll of bills in my pocket I felt myself ready for any emergency.

I might not have indulged in such extravagant expenditure as chartering
a tugboat if Editor Stone had not taught me a lesson in newspaper
enterprise. While he was a newspaper owner and I but a cub reporter,
I had staked my all on landing that story and I argued that a big bill
for expenses couldn’t make matters any worse for me if I were beaten.

All that night I sat up in Jimmy Linn’s office, waiting for the break
of day, as nervous and apprehensive as the wretch who is expecting a
summons to the execution chamber. With the first streak of light in the
sky I was aboard the waiting tug and we steamed out into Lake Huron. An
hour later we sighted a tow of three big grain vessels, trailing astern
of a tugboat, headed for the entrance to St. Clair River. My captain
made out the middle one to be the _Blake_.

We ranged alongside and hailed the man at the wheel, but he made no
response. Something entirely unexpected happened just then. We saw two
sailors run forward along the deck of the last schooner of the tow and
cast off the hawser that stretched from her bows to the stern of the
_Blake_, and when her headway was checked we saw the crew lower
a boat. A tall man, muffled in a long coat and carrying a valise,
came from the cabin, swung over the side and dropped into the dinghy.
Two sailors began pulling for the Canadian shore, the captain of the
drifting schooner urging them on, dancing and yelling like a rum-crazed
Comanche.

“That’s Johnny Freer,” exclaimed my captain, as he headed his tug into
the wake of the dinghy.

That venturesome little vesselman had played another trick. I afterward
learned that when he got rid of the tipsy officers in the straits he
headed his boat down Lake Huron and overhauled the one McGarrigle was
on, becalmed off Point Au Sable; transferred the fugitive to his own
snug cabin, figuring that the sheriff’s men might proceed by rail
to Port Huron in time to head off McGarrigle before he could reach
Canadian soil. The tug put me ashore on the Canadian side soon after
McGarrigle got there in the dinghy, and when he found there were
no officers with me he accompanied me to a hotel, where he gave me
the details of a story that caused a big sensation when it appeared
exclusively in the _Tribune_ the following morning. As the last
line of it went over the wires this message came back to me, signed by
the managing editor:

“Congratulations and my personal thanks for your brilliant story. You
have covered yourself with glory. It is the biggest scoop in years.
All of us in the office are more than delighted with your splendid
achievement. You shall be handsomely rewarded.”

I couldn’t help laughing when I read it. Tired as I was, I still had
some sense of humor.

Mr. Patterson kept me in Canada until the Courts decided that
McGarrigle could not be extradited. I left him at the home of Dr. St.
John’s brother, where a lot of nervous politicians from Chicago visited
him, eager to aid in keeping him out of the clutches of the law. They
had to save their own slimy hides. When I got back to Chicago the
managing editor summoned me to his office, raised my salary and told
me to take a vacation of two weeks, with a generous money allowance.
As he handed me a money order on the office cashier, Mr. Patterson
magnanimously said: “I want to thank you for disobeying my orders.”

“Would you mind telling me what you would have done if, after I
disobeyed your orders, Stone had got McGarrigle in the straits?” I
responded.

It wasn’t nice of me, but I could afford to be chesty. A laugh was his
only reply.

The city editor told me how excited they all were when my story came
over the wires and how Mr. Patterson put uniformed watchmen in the
pressroom and about the building to prevent rival newspapers from
getting a copy of the _Tribune_ in time to steal the scoop. No
other paper had so much as a smell.

Late in the day Mr. Stone, still guarding the straits with the
sheriff’s men, telegraphed to his paper that McGarrigle was expected
any minute and gave instructions to hold a working force in the
office to handle a big story he expected to send after the last
regular edition. The only one in his office that dared tell him of the
_Tribune’s_ scoop was Victor Lawson, his partner, who wired him to
“come home and buy wine.”

A year later I traveled five thousand miles to get another interview
with McGarrigle; out to the Pacific coast by rail, thence by steamship
to Victoria, another across to Vancouver, then another long journey
by rail through great masses of snow and ice over the lofty Cascade
Mountains to Banff Hot Springs, where the fugitive had sought safety
from being kidnapped across the border. I spent a week with him and
the story I wrote softened the heart of Judge Grinnell, who permitted
McGarrigle to return and escape imprisonment by paying a heavy fine.

On that trip I ran across another of the boodle gang in hiding. He was
Commissioner Johnny Hannigan. I saw him hide his face when I entered a
hotel in Vancouver. He was reading a newspaper and recognized me the
instant I did him, jerking a newspaper up as if to conceal himself
from notice. I walked over to where he was sitting and snatched the
newspaper from his hands. He almost hugged me with the delight of
seeing a familiar face, even if it might mean his betrayal. He had
been pretty much over the world since he ran away from Chicago to
avoid arrest at the time of the boodle exposure. I never saw a man more
homesick. Judge Grinnell also permitted him to return on the same basis
as McGarrigle.

Lake navigation gave me another important news beat soon after that
chase to Canada at the time McGarrigle played his trick on the
fat-witted sheriff. This time it was an exclusive story from the lips
of the only survivor of the passenger steamer _Vernon_, which
foundered in the middle of Lake Michigan early one winter. She went
down in a furious snowstorm, drowning passengers and crew, only one
poor Swede seaman escaping to tell how and when and where it happened.
I had witnessed the launching of the _Vernon_ the previous
spring and had written an article for the _Tribune_ that pointed
out her faulty model and construction. She was built for speed and
with apparent disregard for safety, as sharp and slender as a yacht,
with cabins perched so high that she was an easy prey to wind and
wave. She reminded one of a wedge as she slid from the ways into the
waters of the lake, flags flying proudly, bands playing and men and
women feasting and drinking champagne to celebrate the christening.
Captain Dunham, owner of many lake vessels and an expert on marine
architecture, stood by my side. I asked what he thought of her.

“She’ll drown everyone aboard of her some day” was his sententious
reply. I feared it might be prophetic.

Booth, who supplied almost the entire West with oysters and fish in
those days, had built the steamer to make fast trips with passengers
and fish from the northern end of Lake Michigan to Chicago. He lavished
money on her construction and furnishings and was so proud of her that
he named the boat after his only son.

As lake navigation was drawing to a close in the beginning of winter,
a terrific storm swept Lake Michigan and raged with unabated fury for
days and nights. When it subsided some fishermen discovered a gilded
board on which the name _Vernon_ was carved. It was the first
intimation of disaster. The owner refused to believe his boat was lost,
insisting that she probably had found shelter from the storm among
the numerous islands at the foot of the lake. The bit of drift the
fishermen had brought in didn’t shake his confidence.

One afternoon, when all Chicago was excited over the missing steamer,
Charlie Elphicke, a prominent vessel owner, summoned me to his
office in the Board of Trade, where he showed me a telegram from one
of his captains, reporting that he had picked up a raft from the
_Vernon_, with a live sailor and a dead one frozen to it. They
were aboard of his vessel, which had just arrived at Green Bay, in
northern Wisconsin, to take on a cargo of lumber. Elphicke gave me a
letter to his captain at Green Bay and promised not to mention the
telegram until I could get there.

I was in Green Bay at daybreak the following morning and found a man to
row me out to the Elphicke schooner. The captain showed me the frozen
corpse beneath a tarpaulin, related the story of the rescue and then
brought from his cabin the most forlorn human wretch I ever beheld. His
name was Axel Stone. He was in such a pitiable plight that I quickly
offered to take him to Chicago and provide medical treatment in a
hospital. The captain agreed to this arrangement and helped me get him
to the railroad station. His limbs were so swollen he couldn’t walk or
even stand, for he had been frozen to the raft on which he escaped,
without food or sleep, for nearly a week. Others had been on the raft
with him but one by one they perished and were swept into the lake, all
save Axel Stone and the dead man, both frozen so securely the greedy
waves couldn’t pry them loose.

While we were at the station waiting for a train, an officious little
chap, accompanied by two policemen, demanded custody of the survivor.
He was the coroner and declared that he would not permit Axel to leave
until after the inquest. I pointed out the physical condition of the
sailor and warned the coroner that delay in getting him to a hospital
might mean his death, but the perky little official had high ideals of
his duty and was obdurate. I finally persuaded him to summon a jury and
hold the inquest on the spot.

When the jury was assembled, fearful that we would miss the train and
fearing more that Axel would be compelled to tell his story for local
newspaper men to telegraph to Chicago ahead of our coming, I addressed
the jury as eloquently as I could, describing the physical suffering of
the unfortunate sailor and denouncing the coroner for “his heartless
cruelty in imperiling a life for a useless display of authority.” The
jury applauded my speech and the foreman announced that they would go
on with the inquest without the witness. They even escorted us to the
train.

It was an all-day ride to Chicago, so I put the sailor to bed in the
drawing-room of the parlor car and when he was as comfortable as he
could be made, he gave me a thrilling narrative of the last trip of the
steamer _Vernon_. It caused a big sensation when it appeared in
the _Tribune_. The sailor got well in the hospital I took him to
and earned the five hundred dollars that carried him home to Sweden by
exhibiting himself in a dime museum.




CHAPTER V

A MURDER MYSTERY


One day I entered the _Tribune_ office just as a tip came in of
a tragedy in the little village of Winnetka, in the northern suburbs.
Henry Lloyd, an editorial writer, lived there, and his wife had
telephoned that old Mr. Willson and his invalid wife had been found
horribly murdered in their home. The city editor directed me to go
after the story and I was the first one from the city to reach the
scene of the crime.

I found a crowd of excited villagers gathered at the home of the
murdered couple, but not one among them could tell much more than
that Mr. Willson was president of Winnetka, and its richest citizen
and that Mrs. Willson was so eccentric that servants would not remain
with them. For years they had lived alone, Mr. Willson caring for his
crazed wife and doing the housework. He was rated a millionaire and
had the reputation among his neighbors of being stingy, and a hard
man in business dealings. The murder was a mystery. No clues had been
discovered; no one was suspected.

Neal McKeague, who kept a butcher shop nearby, had been the last to see
the old man alive. He had told how Mr. Willson came into his shop the
night before and selected a larger steak than customary because he was
expecting company from Chicago. I inquired for the butcher and was told
that he had taken an early train to the city, leaving immediately after
the tragedy was discovered. He wouldn’t be back until night. His shop
was closed.

The Willson homestead was an attractive place, occupying an entire
block, the large, old-fashioned house standing in the middle, almost
concealed from the street by the great elm trees with which it was
surrounded. The village constable let me into the house through a
window. On the floor of the living-room was the body of the murdered
millionaire, a bullet wound in his breast. He had been shot through
the heart. There were signs of a violent struggle. The old man had
evidently made a hard fight for his life. Furniture was overturned
and near the body was an empty metal box, in which money and valuable
papers had probably been kept. Some of the papers, deeds and mortgages
among them, were scattered about the room, tossed hurriedly aside by
the murderer while searching for whatever he was after. There was no
money. If there had been it had been taken.

The constable showed me a vest button he found on the floor of the
living-room. There were broken threads in the eye to which bits of
shoddy were clinging. We compared it with the buttons of Mr. Willson’s
vest and found it distinctly different. Evidently it had been wrenched
from the vest of the murderer during the struggle. I cautioned the
constable to take good care of the button, as it might prove important
in identifying the murderer. It was the only clue.

When the constable led me to the floor above I was confronted with the
most gruesome sight I ever beheld. On a bed was the brutally mutilated
body of old Mrs. Willson the face horribly crushed. Everything near it
was bespattered with blood. What struck me as peculiar was that she had
not been shot to death, like her husband. There was no sign of a bullet
wound. The implements with which she was slain were on the floor. She
had first been beaten with a pair of heavy tongs the murderer had
snatched from the fireplace, and when they had come apart he had used
the saber of her dead soldier son that had hung in a scabbard on the
wall. The scabbard was dented by the savage blows that had been dealt
on the poor woman’s head.

Assuming that both Mr. Willson and Mrs. Willson had been killed by the
same person, why wasn’t the revolver used for both murders?

What prompted the murderer to discard the easier weapon after shooting
his first victim?

Why was Mrs. Willson so cruelly butchered?

These were the confusing thoughts that raced through my brain as I
gazed on the sickening tragedy. Descending the staircase, I noticed a
blood smear on the wallpaper, the entire length of the stairs, as if
made by a bloody raincoat. It had rained all of the night before.

We went into the kitchen to look for indications of company having been
there for supper, but the dishes from the evening meal had been washed
and put away. Everything was in order. We looked in the refrigerator
and searched the garbage can for traces of the steak the village
butcher said had been bought in anticipation of visitors coming to
supper from Chicago. There was not a scrap of meat to be found. If
company had come from Chicago, they couldn’t have remained long, else
how could the dishes have been put away and no remaining signs of the
evening meal be apparent, between their departure and the coming of the
murderer. Surely, if the visitors from Chicago had committed the crime,
they wouldn’t have remained to clear away the supper table and wash and
put away the dishes and silverware. The more I thought about this the
more desirous I became for the butcher to return from the city and tell
me what he could.

The crime had been discovered by a school-teacher, the only person
in the village who was privileged to come to the Willson home. The
constable summoned her from the crowd to tell me her story. It wasn’t
much. Mr. Willson had sent her a note the previous evening, asking her
to come in the morning and look after his wife, as he had to go into
the city on business. He would go by an early train, but she would find
the key to the front door under the mat. When she got to the house she
was surprised to find that the blinds had not been opened. The key
was not under the mat. As all of the doors were locked, she lifted a
window sash and crawled into the living-room. Mr. Willson lay dead on
the floor. There was a pool of blood near the body and the overturned
furniture and scattered papers told of a tragedy. She went no farther
and hurried from the house.

The first person she met as she ran excitedly up the street was butcher
McKeague. She told him what she had discovered, but he directed her
to tell others as he was on his way to the depot to catch a train for
Chicago.

She hurried on and spread the news as she went. This was about all she
could tell me. The only relative she ever heard of was James Appleton
Willson, a nephew. He was a Chicago real estate man, not on good terms
with his uncle and never visited at his home. Nor were there ever
any visitors. The school-teacher was the only villager who had been
permitted to enter the house since Mrs. Willson lost her mind. It was a
touching story of a husband’s devotion that she told me. He never left
her if he could avoid it, shutting his home against his neighbors that
her demented condition might not attract curious attention. For years
he had cared for her as tenderly as if she had been a sick child.

The next train from Chicago brought a squad of reporters and a
half-dozen Pinkerton detectives, with Superintendent Robertson of the
Pinkerton agency personally to direct the men. They began searching for
clues in the usual way. When Neal McKeague returned from the city he
was asked to tell about Mr. Willson coming to his place for a steak the
evening before and what was said about expecting visitors. Robertson
seemed to attach considerable importance to the statement, although I
told him that I had learned from the station agent that no strangers
arrived on any of the evening trains. The detectives suggested that
they might have driven out from Chicago. It was before the days of
motor cars. Drive twenty miles in a rainstorm when there were numerous
trains! I couldn’t reconcile it with my way of reasoning.

I learned from some of the villagers that Mr. Willson had befriended
McKeague, selling him the property where his shop stood on the
easy-payment plan and loaning him the money with which to establish
himself in business. There had been some ill feeling when McKeague
discovered that the lot where his shop stood had once belonged to the
village and that Mr. Willson couldn’t give clear title to it. The day
before the tragedy they had words about the title in the village post
office and Mr. Willson had angrily demanded the money that was due him.

McKeague was a good-looking young Canadian who had been employed
in a shop where Mr. Willson formerly traded. The close-fisted old
millionaire fell out with his butcher over prices and partly out of
spite and to establish a competitive shop, he set the butcher’s helper
up in business.

What impressed me strongly was that when McKeague was told of the
murder by the school-teacher he hurried off to Chicago without stopping
to investigate. I called his attention to this and he attempted to
explain by saying that he had promised to pay an overdue bill that
morning at a wholesale market and he was afraid if he delayed doing
so his meat supply would be shut off. He gave me the name of the
wholesaler with whom he traded and the names and addresses of persons
he had called on during the day. He appeared to have perfect control
and to answer without show of irritation any questions that were asked
him.

I couldn’t help thinking that McKeague knew more about the tragedy than
he professed to. That night I wrote a story that pointed a finger of
suspicion at McKeague.

I followed up the story the next day by visiting all of the addresses
the butcher had furnished, and one that he didn’t mention. At a
wholesale market on North Clark Street, where he was being pressed for
payment of a bill, I learned that in settling his account he tendered
a bank note of large denomination that had never been creased. This
further excited my suspicion, for a village butcher was not likely to
have so large a bank note come to him in his trade and the added fact
that it had never been creased by frequent handling, inspired a thought
that it had recently been in Mr. Willson’s treasure box that I had seen
on the floor near his dead body.

Inquiry revealed that at none of the places where he visited did
McKeague once mention the shocking tragedy that had been uncovered a
few minutes before he came to the city. I reasoned that an innocent man
would have talked of little else, particularly when the victim was the
most important man in his home town and his benefactor.

The place that he visited and didn’t tell me about, I found by
accident. After making the round of the addresses furnished by McKeague
I started for Winnetka to learn what the detectives had discovered
during the day. While crossing Wells Street bridge to reach the
Northwestern railroad station, a tugboat darted from under the bridge,
belching sooty smoke over me and soiling my linen.

I stepped into a small shop for a clean collar. The clerk said my
collar wasn’t so badly soiled as one a customer wore in the previous
morning. His was stained with blood. I don’t know why I asked, news
instinct, perhaps, but I did ask what time it was the customer called
and the time the clerk gave me corresponded with the arrival of the
train that brought the butcher from Winnetka. His description of the
customer tallied with McKeague.

The clerk told me that when the customer removed the bloodstained
collar he exclaimed: “I was in a hell of a fight last night.” After
putting on a fresh collar the customer went to the back of the shop and
had a tailor replace a missing button on his vest!

The next morning the heading over my story on the front page of the
_Tribune_ was: “THOU ART THE MAN!”

Superintendent Robertson was called off the case by the Pinkertons and
in his place came blue-eyed Jim Maginn, the ablest detective I ever
came in contact with. He had brains and he knew how to use them. Once
he struck a trail he was as tenacious as a bull dog. He had read my
story that morning and he followed up the lead.

In the heap of ashes back of McKeague’s shop Maginn found some metal
buttons and decided that the butcher had burned the bloodstained
raincoat that smeared the wallpaper in the Willson home. Next he
searched the butcher’s bedroom and in a closet found a vest from which
a button had been yanked with such force that it left a hole. Another
button, different from the others, had been sewed on without much
effort to darn the hole. There were stains on the vest that looked like
blood, but this didn’t count for much as a butcher might have blood
on any of his clothing. The detective said a chemical analysis of the
stains would determine if the corpuscles were of human blood.

While Maginn was finding the vest, I got possession of another
important link in the chain of circumstantial evidence. It was a
revolver with which I shall always believe McKeague killed the old
millionaire. I had luncheon that day at the home of Mr. Lloyd, of
the _Tribune_ editorial staff, and Mrs. Lloyd, who had taken an
active interest in the tragedy handed me a small weapon she had found
beneath the mattress in her maid’s room, the significance of which was
that Belle Hagin, the maid, was McKeague’s sweetheart. On examining
the weapon I found that the cylinder would not revolve. Evidently the
cylinder pin had been lost and the round nail that had been put in its
place prevented the cylinder from turning. One could fire a single
shot, but the next time the trigger was pressed the hammer fell on the
empty cartridge. This cleared up the mystery in my mind as to why the
murderer discarded the revolver after shooting Mr. Willson and attacked
the helpless old woman with tongs and saber.

I reasoned that after the quarrel in the post office, McKeague went
to the Willson house, where the quarrel was renewed, and that when
Mr. Willson brought out his box of valuables there was a struggle and
he was shot. Mrs. Willson heard the shot and screamed and McKeague,
realizing that she knew who killed her husband, ran up the stairs
to her room. Unable to fire his weapon again, he grabbed the first
implement his eyes fell upon and beat her to death.

I hurried to Maginn with the revolver and after telling him my theory,
suggested that McKeague be taken into custody. He didn’t want to make
an arrest without consulting Mr. Pinkerton, so he instructed his men
not to lose sight of the butcher and returned to Chicago with his newly
discovered evidence.

The vest was turned over to a famous microscopist and I recall how
excited I got when the vest was put under a powerful glass and the
threads in the eyes of the detached button matched the broken threads
in the vest, for under the microscope the threads were magnified to the
size of a half-inch rope. The shreds of woolly fluff clinging to the
torn threads in the eyes of the button, were identical with the shade
and texture of the shoddy of the vest.

The heading over my story the next morning was: “THE SHADOW OF A
NOOSE.”

Before noon McKeague was brought to Chicago and placed in jail.
Although the evidence against him was purely circumstantial, the
general opinion was that he would be easily convicted, but Belle Hagin
helped to save him by testifying that she took the revolver from him
at a party one night when he had been drinking, two months before the
tragedy. She swore that it was hidden ever since under her mattress
and was there on the night the Willsons were murdered. Luther Laflin
Mills, the then prosecuting attorney, was blamed for the acquittal by
the newspapers and the criticism was not undeserved, for the prosecutor
went away on a long fishing trip in Canada and did not return to
Chicago in time properly to prepare the case for trial.

McKeague celebrated his acquittal by getting drunk and a few days later
he returned to Canada. Within a month he was in jail for felonious
assault on a woman. Some time after that Belle Hagin admitted that
she didn’t tell the truth about the revolver at the trial and the
Pinkertons were about to arrest him again and put him on trial for the
murder of Mrs. Willson, but a cowboy spared them from further trouble
by killing McKeague in a bar-room brawl out in North Dakota.




CHAPTER VI

“STAR” REPORTING


I now began to get nothing but big stories to cover. Frequently I was
permitted to select my own assignments and often to create them.

As an illustration of what I mean by creating an assignment, I once
clipped a five-line item from an evening paper about a band of
regulators in southern Indiana that were masking themselves and taking
out men and women who were loose in their moral conduct, tying them to
trees and whipping them with hickory switches.

I traveled all day and night to get to the scene of their activities
and was rewarded by witnessing, the first night I was there, the most
brutal public punishment that could be inflicted. The community was
made up of conspicuously ignorant people, and like most men and women
who are densely ignorant and uncouth, they were harshly intolerant
in dealing with the weaknesses of others. If a man wouldn’t work and
neglected his family, they took him out at night and whipped him until
he couldn’t work. The regulators were no respecters of sex and the
week before I got there they stripped and cruelly punished a woman who
didn’t care for her husband and children as they considered she should.

The night of my arrival I was awakened after midnight by a vigorous
pounding on the front door of my hotel. A battering ram drove the door
from its hinges and a crowd of men came stamping up the stairway. A
door was smashed in, a woman screamed in terror, there was a struggle
and loud curses in the hallway, and then I heard them all going down
stairs and I knew they were dragging a man and a woman with them.
Peeping out of the window, I saw in the bright moonlight that more than
fifty stalwart men were grouped in front of the hotel and that every
one wore an enormous white mask, which was simply a flour-sack, with
slits for eyes and nose, the sack pulled over the head and bunched on
the shoulders.

The man and woman, still struggling, were dragged out and quickly
surrounded. The party then marched with their victims to a clump of
trees, where they were stripped of their night clothes, tied to trees
and unmercifully whipped with long switches.

After administering the punishment, the crowd melted slowly and
silently away. I talked with the victims when they crawled back to
the hotel, their backs lacerated. I learned from them that both were
married but living apart from their lawful mates and that anonymous
notes had come to them in the last week, threatening them with a visit
from the “whip-ups” if they didn’t reform their ways. I spent two days
getting stories about this new method of reforming folk and when I got
back to Chicago I wrote a page article, giving the band the name of
“white-caps,” a name they themselves speedily adopted.

I visited another band of so-called regulators of public morals some
time afterward. They had taken a young girl who was running wild, into
a vacant lot, stripped off her clothing and covering her with a coat
of hot tar and a bagful of feathers, drove her away into the night. I
reached the place the following day, found the terrified girl hiding
in a limestone quarry, got her story and provided her with clothing
and shelter. She was only seventeen. A church deacon who boastfully
admitted that he was leader of the ruffians, gave me a list of all
who participated in the outrage and I furnished it to the prosecuting
attorney, together with sufficient evidence to indict them. Some were
sent to prison and the remainder paid heavy fines. I caused the girl to
be placed in an institution. I never knew how she turned out.

Once I witnessed the hanging of six murderers from the same scaffold
in the old Federal prison at Fort Smith, Arkansas. They were all
outlaws from the Indian Territory. At another time I was on a passenger
train in Missouri when it was held up and robbed, after the bandits
had blown up the locomotive with dynamite. They looted the passengers
and carried away a lot of plunder from the express car, shooting and
severely wounding the messenger. After the train robbers escaped, I
telegraphed five columns about it in time to catch the regular edition.

Another time I followed a daring opium smuggler over the Canadian
border, after he had escaped from treasury agents, and interviewed him
in a hotel. He talked freely to me about his adventures, but in all the
time I was with him he kept a revolver pointed at me. He apologized
for his rudeness, said he didn’t doubt that I was a newspaper man, but
that he couldn’t afford to run risks of being captured. He had taken
desperate chances the night before in attempting to visit his mother
and had narrowly escaped with his life. For years he had been the most
successful smuggler of opium operating along the Canadian border,
belonging to a ring that had its headquarters on Vancouver Island. The
duty on opium was then ten dollars a pound and smugglers found traffic
in the drug more lucrative than robbing banks. Treasury agents had been
after this elusive fellow for a long time, but although they were
often close upon him they always failed of capture. A big reward was
offered for his arrest.

Somehow the treasury men got word that he intended visiting his mother
at her home in Michigan and a posse was organized to head him off
and get him, dead or alive. The posse hid in the woods near the home
of the smuggler’s mother, felling a tree across the roadway to block
his progress. It was a bright moonlight night when they discovered
him riding alone through the woods on horseback. When he came to the
obstruction in the road, a voice commanded him to halt and surrender.
As he wheeled his horse to make a dash for liberty, six men rose out
of the bushes and blazed away with their weapons. The horse dropped
dead in his tracks, the rider under him. With six Federal officers,
all armed and ready to shoot, almost on top of him, the nervy smuggler
dragged himself from under the dead horse, darted into a thicket and
lost himself in the shadows. Making his way to the river, he found a
boat and crossed to the Canadian shore. I interviewed him the following
day.

The most singular experience I ever had and one that I have never been
able to explain satisfactorily even to myself, came to me on the day
the Anarchists were hanged. I had been among the earliest newspaper men
to reach the Haymarket after the bomb scattered death among a squad of
policemen sent there to disperse that meeting of Reds, and I was active
in the rounding up of the leaders and the long trial that followed.

I was assigned to write the story of the execution. It was a
nerve-straining task, for I had known all of them for years and had
frequently reported their meetings, long before anyone suspected they
were anything more than harmless cranks.

The night before the execution, I was among a large number of newspaper
men that kept the death watch on the condemned and one of the first to
reach the cell of Louis Ling, when he cheated the hangman by blowing
off his head with a dynamite cartridge, exploding the cartridge between
his teeth.

After a night of sleepless excitement, we newspaper men and the
spectators that held cards of admission, were summoned to the
execution chamber and I saw the unfortunate wretches I had known
so well drop into eternity with broken necks. I had witnessed many
executions but this was the most horrible. When it was over I was
nauseated and so faint I could scarcely drag myself to the street.
With others, I went to a nearby saloon and asked for brandy. I drank
the stuff and then came oblivion. In all the years since I have never
been able to recall what happened to me afterward, not even leaving the
saloon.

When I recovered my senses I was in my bed at home. The rising sun
streamed through the window and I awoke with a start. It was six
o’clock in the morning. Then came the humiliating remorse of a
drunkard. I had always proven dependable in every emergency, but now I
had fallen down and forever disgraced myself. Worst of all, the editor
who had trusted me must have had a difficult time whipping a story
together when I failed to return to the office. I felt he could never
forgive me and I buried my face in the pillow and cried.

At last I got up and dressed, so ashamed of what had happened that
I sneaked silently out of the house, hurrying down the street to
find a paper-carrier and ascertain how my paper had fared when I so
treacherously betrayed it. I bought a complete set of all the various
morning papers and eagerly began scanning the _Tribune_.

As I read the story I grew more and more puzzled. The introduction
was precisely as I had planned to write it and the story described
everything just as my eyes had seen what had taken place. There were
sentences that were undeniably mine. I was completely mystified, but my
mind was greatly relieved. It was apparent that even if I had failed
in my duty, the paper hadn’t suffered. The story was complete and was
written as well as I could have done it. Perhaps I had written it and
was now suffering from a trick of memory. I wondered if that could be
possible.

Hurrying back to my home, I encountered the maid and asked her what
time it was when I got in the night before. She said it was shortly
after ten o’clock and that I looked so pale and tired she was worried
about me. I searched her face in an effort to discover whether she
suspected that I was intoxicated, but her eyes beamed nothing but
sympathy. After breakfast I decided to go to the office and face the
music. In the elevator, I encountered Mr. Patterson.

“You wrote a fine story of the execution,” he said, putting his arm
affectionately around me and giving my body a hug.

I thanked him with as much modesty as I could assume, but I was too
uncertain about what had happened to prolong the conversation. Perhaps
the city editor had concealed from his superior that I had fallen down
on the assignment, until he could have a talk with me.

The only way to find out was to put on a bold front, so I walked into
the local room and bade the city editor a cheery “good morning.”

Mr. Hall’s response set my mind at rest. He praised my story
unstintedly and was particularly gratified that I had turned the last
of the copy over to him before nine. I next went to the proofreaders’
room and found the copy I had so unconsciously written. There was no
indication of trembling fingers, nor were there scratched-out words to
betray unsteadiness of mind. I had never written more perfect copy.

By cautious inquiry, I learned that I took but a single drink after the
execution and I then went straight to the _Tribune_ office, locked
myself in a room and wrote steadily for eight hours without a break.
The only way I can account for my interruption of memory is that I was
weary from excitement and loss of sleep, but automatically kept at the
task before me until it was accomplished and when it was and I had a
chance to think about myself, my tired brain collapsed and went dead.
An expert psychologist might explain it differently. I can’t.

Someone telephoned to the office one day that a large lake vessel,
laden with lumber, had been driven ashore near Miller’s Station, a
small village in northern Indiana. The informant said a storm was
raging and he could see the crew clinging to the rigging, frantically
waving distress signals. I called up the Chicago life-saving station
and was told they were as busy as hornets looking after vessels that
were in trouble off the harbor. The captain said the best he could do
would be to send one of his men with me. I met his man “Ed” at the
Michigan Central.

The first train out was the Limited. I knew it didn’t stop at Miller’s,
which was only a flag station, but I took a chance and we got on the
rear platform of the last sleeper. As we neared Miller’s I jerked the
cord that released the air brakes and when the train slackened, “Ed”
and I hopped off and ran away as fast as our legs could carry us,
followed by curses from the angry trainmen.

It was a walk of three miles through sand that was ankle deep to the
scene of the wreck. We found the vessel had pounded to pieces in the
breakers, drowning all but one of her crew. The shore was strewn with
wreckage and lumber and the entire population of the village, men and
women, was gathering and carting it away. They told us that the only
survivor had been taken to a clubhouse, two miles away.

“Ed” had on his life-saver uniform of blue, with gilt buttons, and I
made him pretend that he was an officer, intimidating a man with a team
to quit beach combing long enough to haul us to the club. The survivor
gave a graphic recital of the wreck and we trudged through the sand to
the railway station, only to find there were no more trains to the city
until morning. I wrote a story for the paper, but the “plug” operator
at the station was so slow that I had to turn in and send most of it
myself after I had finished writing. There was no hotel. The operator
said he would gladly invite us to his house if two of his children
weren’t sick with scarlet fever.

“Ed” and I went out into the murky night to hunt for lodgings. There
was a single light glimmering from a small shack of a house. All the
rest of the village was dark. We made for the light and a belligerent,
red-faced woman opened the door wide enough to get a glimpse of the
gilt buttons on “Ed’s” uniform. She may have thought we had come to
arrest them for carting away lumber from the wreck. Anyway, she would
have slammed the door in our faces if my companion hadn’t interfered
with his foot. We pushed our way into the house, for it was bitter
cold and raining cats and dogs. I offered to pay a dollar if she would
shelter us for the night. The silver dollar brought hospitality and
she led us to the attic, where there was a dirty mattress and dirtier
bedding, in one corner on the floor. I dropped on it as I was, wet
clothing and all, and was soon fast asleep. When I awoke in the morning
“Ed” wasn’t there. From behind a curtain that was stretched across
the attic, came sounds of suppressed giggling and on reconnoitering
I discovered that the venturesome life-saver had found playmates,
daughters of our hostess.

There was another time when a tip came by telephone of a vessel in
distress off Hyde Park. It was nearly midnight when I got there. A
few helpless men were gathered impotently on the shore, watching the
blazing signals as the crew set fire to oil-soaked bedding and cast
it into the lake. I had the idlers build a bonfire on the beach to
let the wrecked sailors know that help was coming, and hurried to a
telephone to notify the life-saving station. I kept the fire blazing
all night and the sailors kept signaling until they used up everything
combustible.

It was daylight when the life-savers came with their boat on a wagon.
They had driven nearly fifteen miles. The boat was launched and was
quickly propelled through the breakers to the stranded vessel. I went
with them. As we approached the wreck the sailors dropped into the lake
and were picked up. The last to be rescued was the captain. I asked his
name. It was the same as mine. If it had been Jones or Smith I don’t
suppose I would now recall the incident, for it was two months prior
to the assassination of Garfield and that was thirty-nine years ago. I
knew the crazy slayer of our martyred President when he was a lawyer in
Chicago. His half-brother was one of my boyhood friends.

The last important story I wrote for the _Tribune_ was a pitiful
domestic tragedy that culminated in a brain-tortured wife shooting her
faithless husband dead in my arms. As I recall the exciting events that
were woven into the story I wrote that Christmas eve, long years ago,
I am reminded of Joe McCullagh’s definition of journalism. He was the
famous editor of the St. Louis _Globe-Democrat_ for many years,
terminating a brilliant career by plunging headlong from an upper
window of his home early one morning, breaking his neck. In delivering
a lecture before a body of university students, he defined journalism
as “the art of knowing where hell is going to break loose next and
having a reporter on the spot to cover it.”

I chanced to be the reporter on the spot when the pent-up hell that was
blazing in a woman’s brain broke loose. The story I wrote is indelibly
fastened in my memory. I would have forgotten it if I could.

One day I ran into Magistrate Prindiville during the noon recess
and he told me that he had just issued warrants for the arrest of a
business man and the latter’s sister-in-law. He thought it might prove
an interesting story for the paper and suggested that I come to his
courtroom after the principals had been arrested and get the details.
All that he could tell then was that a few minutes before, an excited
little woman, accompanied by an excited brother, had obtained warrants
for the arrest of the woman’s husband and the brother’s wife. It was
a complicated case of infidelity. Officers were to make the arrests
during the afternoon. The magistrate returned to his court long enough
for me to copy names and addresses. The man to be arrested was William
McCauley; the woman was Molly Mackin.

I learned in the city directory that McCauley was office manager of
a big brewing plant on the West Side and there I went in hopes of
obtaining the story before he was locked up. At the brewery I was
told he had gone away that day for his annual vacation. They gave
me his home address, a flat building in a quiet little residential
street called Arthington Place. When I pressed a button in the lower
vestibule, a woman appeared at the head of the staircase on the floor
above and inquired what I wished.

“I have called to see Mr. McCauley,” I said.

“What is the nature of your business?”

“It is entirely personal. Kindly tell him that a _Tribune_
reporter is calling.”

“A reporter, I thought so. You may come up.”

She held the door open and motioned me into the parlor. As I entered a
man came from a side room and confronted me. He was a handsome chap,
about thirty years old, big and muscular. The woman followed into the
parlor and stood there as if eager to know what I intended asking her
husband, perhaps more eager to know how he would reply.

Her presence was so embarrassing I asked the man if I could see him
alone. He waved me toward the room he had just come from and followed
me into it. Without closing the door he brusquely demanded what I
wanted. I hardly knew myself. I had to go at it almost blindly.

“I have come to ask about Mrs. Mackin,” I venturingly began.

“What do you want to know?” was the angry response. He was visibly
agitated and was making an effort to control himself. His face grew
scarlet. “What about Mrs. Mack----”

The name died on his lips. Before he could complete it his wife
appeared in the open doorway with a revolver in her outstretched hand.
His back was to the door; I was facing it. Before I could warn him or
stop her, she pointed the revolver at the back of his head and pressed
the trigger.

There was a flash of flame and the man sank limply into my arms with a
bullet in his brain. He never knew, unless his spirit saw me struggling
with the woman when it left his body. She made as if to fire another
shot, so I let him down to the floor and grabbed her wrist, wresting
the weapon from her hand.

“Why did you do this dreadful thing?” I asked.

“Because he has wrecked all of our lives.”

I heard little children crying with fright.

“Our children,” she sobbed. “What will become of them?”

The dying man groaned and there were choking sounds in his throat. I
asked where I could find the nearest doctor.

“Don’t call one. He mustn’t live! It would be horrible after all he has
done.”

There appeared to be no likelihood of a doctor being of service, but
I went after one. A maid was shaking a rug under the window where the
shooting had taken place, but she evidently hadn’t heard the shot, for
she calmly directed me to the home of a nearby physician. The doctor
wasn’t in but his wife said she expected him any minute and she would
send him or telephone for another. I told her the case was urgent.

When I got back to the McCauley apartment the front door had been
bolted from the inside. There was no response to my knocking. Something
must have given me the strength of a stevedore, for I threw myself
against the door and burst the lock. I found Mrs. McCauley in the
kitchen with her children. She had a knife and was about to use it when
I took the knife from her hand.

McCauley was still crumpled up where I left him. I rolled him on his
back and put a pillow under his head, for there was still a flicker
of life. The queer gurgling sounds in his throat were growing less
distinct and I knew he would soon be done for.

Mrs. McCauley watched him with apathetic calmness. She made no attempt
to help, except to bring a flask of liquor when requested. I tried to
force some of it down his throat, hoping to keep him alive until the
doctors came, but his teeth were tightly clenched and I was unable to
pry them apart.

While waiting for the doctors she told her story, told it so simply and
with such pathos that it stirred my sympathy more than any story of
human suffering I ever listened to. Two doctors came in the midst of
the recital, but she went on with it to the end.

William McCauley, son of a wealthy widow, had been educated for the
priesthood but before the time came for his induction his mind changed
and he went into business. He had grown prosperous when he met Ida
Mackin, a school-teacher, and when they were married and settled
in a pretty home, there wasn’t a cloud to mar their happiness. Two
children were born and everything was serene. Along came Molly! She
entered their lives when she became the bride of sturdy Harry Mackin,
Mrs. McCauley’s brother. She was as pretty as a doll and almost as
brainless. The families saw much of each other, though they lived
apart. McCauley supplied the capital to start Harry in business. Soon
Molly had a baby. And they all were as happy as they could be. Then
something happened.

When Harry Mackin went home from the store one evening Molly was
gone. Pinned to a chair was a note in Molly’s familiar handwriting.
She had gone away with the baby and would never return. She asked to
be forgotten as one unworthy. The note stunned him. They had never
quarreled and he had toiled unceasingly that Molly might have all the
finery her heart craved.

He hurried to the home of her mother, but found no trace of Molly or
baby and next he burst into the home of his sister and sobbed his
grief into her sympathetic ears. It was as mystifying to her as it
was to him, for she and Molly had been as intimate as sisters and she
had never heard a word of discontent. William McCauley came home and
pretended great astonishment at what they told him. There was no way
of explaining what Molly had done. McCauley suggested hiring detectives
and went with Harry to an agency, directing that no expense be spared
in searching for the runaway wife.

Weeks went by without trace of Molly or baby. The detectives could find
nothing that might help to solve the mystery of her disappearance. The
husband searched frantically day and night, neglecting his business and
growing thin and pale with loss of sleep and anxiety. McCauley was ever
sympathetic. He directed the activities of the detectives and spent
hours with the grieving husband as they blindly searched every part of
the city where she might be hiding. Finally, he declared that Molly
must have lost her mind and plunged into the lake with her baby in her
arms. There seemed no other solution.

Time dragged wearily along for young Mackin, until one evening he
unexpectedly ran into his brother-in-law in the street. McCauley was
carrying bottles of wine and was walking so hurriedly he passed Harry
without recognition. The following day Harry had luncheon with his
sister and asked for a glass of wine. There was none in the house.

“Didn’t Will bring some home last night?” he asked.

“Will hasn’t been home for three days. He is out of town on business.”

The first suspicion that had ever come to him of his brother-in-law’s
perfidy burned its way into Harry Mackin’s brain. He recalled that
McCauley had been frequently away from home of late. Business had been
the excuse. That evening he was hidden in a shadow when McCauley left
the brewery and hurried away. Harry followed on the opposite side of
the street and never lost sight of him. McCauley turned into Sangamon
Street, stopped in front of a flat, fumbled in his pocket for a key and
let himself in.

Harry saw a woman, with a baby in her arms, appear at an upper window
and draw down the shade. Then he saw the shadow of a man and woman
embracing silhouette on the curtain. It was his own wife and child, for
whom he had been searching until he was almost insane.

His impulse was to burst in the door and get revenge, but another
thought came and he hurried to his sister and told her of his
discovery. It made clear to her why her husband had been from home so
much of late on what he called important business. She suggested that
they go together to the Sangamon Street flat and kill them. The brother
counseled waiting until morning, when he would have them arrested and
sent to prison, a punishment that would be worse than death, he argued.
All that night, with bruised hearts and tortured minds, they cried
aloud in their misery, while William McCauley and Molly Mackin slept
peacefully, without a thought of the tragedy that was soon to come.

In the morning brother and sister went to Magistrate Prindiville and
procured warrants, hurrying on ahead of the officers, so as to be there
when the arrests were made. It was arranged that Harry should watch
in front of the flat in Sangamon Street and Mrs. McCauley return to
her home, that she might be there if her husband came. When he went
away, McCauley had promised to be back that morning. While passing a
pawnshop she saw a revolver in the window. Impulsively she went in and
bought it. The pawnbroker loaded the weapon and showed her how to use
it.

When she got home her husband was there. She told him that his perfidy
had been uncovered and he made no denial. He no longer cared for her,
he said, for he loved only Molly and he and Molly were planning to go
far away, where they could be happy and secure in each other’s love. He
would share his savings with his wife to provide for herself and the
children.

It was then I rang the doorbell.

McCauley died before she had finished telling me her story. Officers
came soon after that, sent the body to the morgue and took her to the
police station.

Before leaving the flat I ransacked the family album for photographs
of all concerned in the tragedy. Then I hurried over to the Sangamon
Street house, ahead of the officers and interviewed Molly. Harry came
while we were talking and I had to restrain him from harming her. We
all went to the courtroom, where I explained to Magistrate Prindiville
what had happened. At my request he consented to release Molly on bail
furnished by her husband.

Harry said he would “see her in hell” before he would sign her bond,
but when I suggested that it might be prudent to do what I asked,
considering that I was the only witness to the killing of McCauley, he
yielded.

I knew that no other reporter had the story and I proceeded to bottle
it up so tightly they couldn’t get it. I sent Molly away in a cab to
a place where she couldn’t be found. Harry was similarly disposed of.
Mrs. McCauley had collapsed before they got her to the police station
and was under the care of a doctor. Magistrate Prindiville told me he
was leaving the city immediately, to be gone over the holidays. There
was no one left to feed the story to other reporters except--me.

I wrote five columns that night that appeared on the front page, with
photographs of the principals and their children. No other paper
contained more than the police could tell and that was almost nothing.

At the inquest, two days later, Mrs. McCauley was too prostrated to
tell her story but I related it just as she had told it to me, giving
at the same time a description of what had happened from the time I
first entered the McCauley flat. The jury set her free without leaving
their seats. Not long afterward she and her two children were found
dead in bed. She had turned on the gas.

Molly Mackin I saw a year later on the stage of a cheap vaudeville
theatre. A magician was performing a trick he called “The Sleeping
Beauty.” The beauty I recognized as the frail and foolish Molly. I
don’t know what became of Harry.




CHAPTER VII

A CITY EDITOR AT TWENTY-FIVE


Just a week after the McCauley homicide, I became city editor of the
Chicago _Times_. It was a great newspaper when I was a youngster,
but it was subsequently wrecked by incompetent management and was
finally absorbed by the _Herald_, as were also the _Record_,
and the _Inter-Ocean_, and all have since been merged with the
_Hearst_ publication.

For a quarter of a century the _Times_ was one of the most
enterprising newspapers in the West. A crisis came in its career when
Wilbur F. Storey suddenly developed a kink in his overworked brain and
neglected his editorial duties to devote most of his time and thought
to spiritualism. He became a fanatic on the subject, fell an easy
victim to charlatans, lost his mind completely and died in obscurity.
For awhile the paper ran along under the loose management of his
executors and in the end was sold to James J. West, a chap without much
newspaper experience, but possessed of some brains and much gall. Clint
Snowden, his brother-in-law, was a brilliant newspaper man who had been
city editor under Storey and was editing the _Evening Mail_ when
West bought the _Times_. He had agreed to go with West as editor.
They had just assumed control when my story of the McCauley tragedy
appeared. West asked Snowden who the _Tribune_ reporter was.

“I haven’t learned,” replied Snowden, “but I’ll gamble it was Chapin,
who landed that McGarrigle scoop. He’s the luckiest reporter I ever
heard of. They say he can walk into a news sensation blindfolded.”

“Let’s make him city editor of the _Times_,” said West. “Then he
can’t scoop us.”

And that is how I came to receive a note the following Saturday,
asking me to call and see West and Snowden about a matter of personal
interest. I had been to a fire and was writing a report of it when
the note came. As soon as my task was finished I went over to the
_Times_ office and accepted their offer, with the understanding
that I was to have control of the entire staff without interference
and that no one should be employed or dismissed except by me. West
insinuated that this was too much authority to confer on so young a
man, but I would come under no other condition, so he yielded.

They insisted that I take charge that night and I agreed to report
for duty in an hour. I felt considerably embarrassed when I returned
to the _Tribune_ office to quit without notice, for I had been
kindly treated during the four years I had been there and I recognized
that it was the training I had received under Mr. Hall that had made
it possible for me to land a city editor job at twenty-five. Nearly
all of the city editors at that time were twice my age. Mr. Hall flew
into a passion when I told him what I had done and parentally forbade
my leaving. When I went in to tell Mr. Patterson, he listened to me
courteously.

“I can’t make you city editor,” he said, “but the _Tribune_ will
pay you as much salary as any paper, so why not stay with us?”

“It isn’t a question of salary,” I replied, “I don’t even know what my
pay is to be, for I didn’t ask, but I do know that I would very much
like to boss that gang of reporters that have been calling me a cub for
four years.”

Mr. Patterson was big enough to understand. He said he didn’t think I
would like it as much as I imagined, but if I grew tired of the job
to remember there would always be a good one waiting for me in the
_Tribune_ office.

The entire staff was assembled in the local rooms when I got back to
the _Times_ office, for the news that I was coming had traveled
fast. They were all much older and much more experienced than I, and
most of them were hostile. Guy Magee, whom I was to replace, gracefully
surrendered his desk and turned to go, an old man without a job. I felt
a sharp twinge in my heart when I saw his white face and realized what
my coming meant to him.

It is the fate of most newspaper men. They give all that is in them to
the service of their employers and when they are old and worn-out they
are cast adrift, like battered wrecks. Some find a brief haven in an
obscure political job, to be again turned adrift with the next change
of administration. I shudder at the thought of what may come to them
after that. The luckier ones die young. Few remain actively in harness
as long as I did. There were older men than I on the great newspaper
where I worked the last twenty-seven years of my career, but they were
editorial writers, who came to the office in the middle of the day,
spent a couple of hours chatting with their associates, another hour in
composing an editorial, and then went home to rest.

As these thoughts come to me I am reminded of dear old Harry Scoville,
one of the gentlest characters I ever met in a newspaper office. He
was on the _Tribune_ when I was and was probably there before I
was born. He had filled many important positions but when his hair
and beard grew white he was relegated to the exchange desk, the last
anchorage in a newspaper office for editors who are nearing the
toboggan.

Soon after I went over to the _Times_, word came to me that after
all of his many years of service on the _Tribune_, old Harry had
gone into the discard. The man who told me about it said that an hour
before he had encountered the cast-off editor disconsolately standing
on one of the bridges, gazing longingly down into the swift, flowing
waters of the river. I asked him to look Harry up and send him to me.

That evening I told the white-haired editor how much we needed a man
of his wide experience and offered him a better berth than the one he
had lost and it was gratefully accepted. His story of what had happened
was that late on Saturday night he was summoned to the office of the
managing editor and curtly told that a younger man had been engaged
to take his place, but--“because of your long and faithful services
I have secured you an easy job in the office of the county clerk,”
benevolently concluded the managing editor. It was the meanest act I
ever heard associated with Mr. Patterson’s name. In all the later years
of my career I never forgot what happened to Harry Scoville in his old
age.

The first man I ever employed was Pete Dunne--Finley Peter Dunne, he
importantly called himself after he won fame and fortune with his
“Mr. Dooley” stories. I hired hundreds of men afterwards, but Pete
was always my special pet, both because I was fond of him and that in
hiring him I was raised from reporter to boss. It was my first official
act as city editor.

I met Pete on the street when I was hurrying over to the _Times_
office to begin my new duties. He was just out of high school and had
written some clever stories for the _Daily News_. He agreed to
join me on the _Times_ the next day. He became the star man of the
staff and in the end succeeded me as city editor.

The first man I ever fired was a chap named Scott and I hadn’t been
city editor fifteen minutes when I did it. While I was bidding my
predecessor a regretful good-bye, I inadvertently overheard what some
of the reporters in an adjoining room were saying about me. What they
said wasn’t complimentary and what Scott said was so offensive that I
would have been justified in punching him. When he coupled my name with
the most objectionable epithet he could think of, I stepped into the
room and discharged him.

“If there are others who share Scott’s opinion of me you may all ride
down in the same elevator,” I said, as I turned back to my desk. Scott
went alone.

About a fortnight after I became editor I employed a young
school-teacher who had considerable talent as a writer and directed her
to answer “help wanted” advertisements, obtain employment in sweatshops
and factories where girls worked, and write a series of articles on the
conditions she found. The stories of her experiences and observations,
under the caption of “City Slave Girls,” attracted wide-spread
attention and the circulation of the paper increased so rapidly that
the presses were overtaxed. Elated with her success, the young woman
went to New York, showed clippings of what she had done to an editor,
and was promptly employed to repeat in the Metropolis what she had done
in Chicago. Afterward she joined the regular staff and continued to do
newspaper work until she married the editor, now a wealthy publisher.
They live in a mansion in the city and have a beautiful summer home in
the country, with all that goes with it.

The success of the “City Slave Girls” made such an impression on Mr.
West, publisher of the _Times_, that he came to me with the
“yellowest” suggestion I ever listened to in a newspaper office.
The inflated circulation was beginning to slump and he wanted to do
something, he said, to revive it and send it higher than ever. He was
confident that he had hit upon the thing that would do it. When he told
me what it was I was so angry I wanted to quit and we came very close
to the breaking point while he was stubbornly arguing that what he had
in mind was within the scope of decent journalism.

What he asked me to do was to send a man and a woman reporter to
all of the reputable physicians in the city, let them pretend they
were sweethearts and that the girl was in trouble, and offer to
pay liberally for an illegal operation. I pointed out to West that
sensationalism of that sort would ruin his paper. He was so inflated
with the idea that he sent for the editor, but Snowden was as much
opposed to it as I had been. Both of us flatly declared that we
would sever all connection with the paper before we would suffer our
professional reputations to be linked with such indecency.

For awhile nothing more was said on the subject and Snowden and I
supposed that West had come to his senses and dropped it. The paper
continued to lose circulation and some of the big advertisers began
withdrawing their patronage, the chief reason being that stories
affecting West’s integrity were being noised about.

One day a note came from West, directing me to assign a bright man and
a woman reporter to report to him for instructions. He didn’t mention
what he wanted them to do and I didn’t ask. It was my duty to obey the
order. The reporter came back and wanted to tell me what the assignment
was from the publisher, but I declined to listen.

I went into the composing room shortly afterward and discovered a page
of type that was to go in the next issue. It was headed “Chicago
Abortioners.” The foreman told me it had been ordered in by the
publisher. I hurried to editor Snowden’s room and told him about it.
He was as indignant as I. We waited for West to return from a theater
and both of us pleaded with him not to print the nasty stuff, but he
obstinately refused to yield to our arguments, so we both put on our
coats and quit.

It was the end of Snowden’s newspaper career. He was an able newspaper
man, but he gave up his profession and sacrificed ambition rather than
depart from his high ideals. I always honored him for it. He became
a Government Indian agent and the last I heard of him he was old and
blind. West hired another editor, but his paper never recovered from
the black eye it got when he attempted to besmirch reputable physicians.

Several months after Snowden and I had quit the _Times_, I met
West on the street and he asked me to accept the position of Washington
correspondent at a liberal salary, offering to sign a contract for
three years and give me freedom of pen. Although I disliked the man,
his offer was alluring in that it would bring me into intimate contact
with all that was going on at the national capital. I had a yearning
for that sort of work and as there was no other opportunity within
reach I smothered my feelings and accepted.

I went to Washington shortly before the inauguration of President
Harrison and remained a year. ’Lije Halford, the President’s secretary,
had been my friend when he was an editor in Chicago, and he aided me in
getting a foothold in Washington by introducing me to many of the most
important statesmen. Senator Farwell and Senator Cullom, both of them
from Illinois, I had known in Chicago and I found them obliging and
helpful. I lived next door to Senator Farwell’s home and he directed me
to drop in on him every evening, and he would stuff my notebook with
news that would interest my readers. He gave me many important stories
that no other Chicago correspondent got. Reginald De Koven, the musical
composer who died recently, was his son-in-law.

Senator Cullom I won by writing a personal article that compared
him to Lincoln, to whom he bore a striking resemblance in physical
characteristics, if not in mental equipment. It tickled his vanity
so much that he never failed to look me up if he knew anything worth
printing. He was chairman of the Senate Committee on Interstate
Commerce at that time and a most useful source of important news. So
was Congressman Bob Hitt, one of the brightest minds among the Illinois
delegation and always my reliable friend.

“Uncle Jerry” Rusk was a perfect gold mine of information. I had known
him when he was Governor of Wisconsin and had ingratiated myself to
such an extent that he became one of my most valued friends when
Harrison appointed him Secretary of Agriculture. He would take notes
at all of the Cabinet meetings and read them to me in his rooms at the
Ebbitt House. Many wondered how I got so much accurate information of
the secret meetings of the President with his Cabinet, but this is the
first time I have ever betrayed my informant. He has been dead so many
years it no longer matters.

Blaine was ever icily unapproachable. He didn’t like newspaper men,
except when he could use them to his personal advantage, but I found
it unnecessary to court him, for I was on an intimate footing with his
son, who knew most of his father’s secrets and kept me well-posted on
affairs connected with the State Department.

Attorney General Miller was always affable. Sometimes when I exhausted
all other sources in trying to get at the bottom of some important
news that no one else would talk about, I would go to him and he
would explain every detail. I looked on him as one of the ablest and
best-informed men in Washington. He related to me once an amusing
personal story of a visit he made to his old home in Indiana during his
first summer in Washington. After calling on friends in Indianapolis,
where he and President Harrison had been law partners, he decided to
pay a visit to the town where he was born and where he had passed
his early boyhood. It was night when he arrived and he was the only
passenger to get off at the station. Miller climbed on top of the
omnibus beside the driver and they started for the hotel. The driver
had lived in the town all his life.

“Know who I am?” Miller asked.

“Yep, you and me went to the same school.”

“Indeed! Well, that was a long time ago.”

“Yep, sure was.”

“Do you know that I am now Attorney General of the United States?”

“Yep.”

“Folk here generally know about it?”

“Yep.”

“What do they say?”

“They jes laugh.”

The remainder of the ride was in silence.

One of the men in public life I esteemed most highly was James S.
Clarkson, Assistant Postmaster General. He had been a prominent
newspaper man in Iowa and had a fine appreciation of the value of news.
He not only knew news but he came into intimate contact with people
who created it, and nearly everything worth while that came to him was
passed on to me. Night after night he would slip quietly into my office
and often with the biggest news story of the day.

Clarkson was one of ’Lije Halford’s friends and we three played a trick
on the President that resulted in the appointment of Frank Palmer as
Government Printer. The job is a lucrative one and was much sought
after. The Typographical Union was boosting a Philadelphia man. Palmer
had been an editor on the Chicago _Inter-Ocean_ with Halford, and
’Lije was doing all he consistently could to get him appointed.

I called at the White House one day and found ’Lije agitated over
charges that had been filed by the powerful Typographical Union that
Palmer was editing a paper in Chicago that employed non-union printers.
If the charges were proven Palmer was beaten. I explained to Halford
that Palmer was working for a salary and had no more to do with
employing printers than I had with hiring compositors on the paper I
worked for.

Shortly before midnight a messenger came from the White House with word
that the President wished to see me immediately. I obeyed the summons
and was conducted into the President’s private office, where he sat so
sedate and dignified at his desk that one couldn’t help wondering if
he had ice water in his veins. He asked if I knew to be a positive fact
what I had told Halford about Palmer. I assured him it was and he then
asked me if I had means of finding out for him if the appointment of
Palmer would meet the approval of the Typographical Union in Chicago. I
replied that my brother was a member of the union and I could wire to
him.

“Do so to-night and send me the reply; I will wait up for it,” said Mr.
Harrison. “But do not misinterpret what I have said as meaning that I
shall appoint Mr. Palmer,” he diplomatically added.

I wasn’t sure of my brother, so I wrote a dispatch such as I wished
him to send, and rushed it to my office in Chicago, with instructions
that it be repeated back to me. In half an hour it was returned and
was speeded to the White House. It read: “I am positive that the
appointment of Mr. Palmer will be most acceptable.”

I sent another telegram that night to Frank Palmer, advising him to get
ready to come to Washington and he had his grip packed and his ticket
purchased when, a few hours later, he was officially summoned. When he
arrived in Washington the following day and received his appointment,
General Clarkson piloted him around to my office and we three had
dinner together. My brother was the first person to be given a job
under him.

Melville W. Fuller, then one of the justices of the United States
Supreme Court, was one of my most dependable sources of important news.
He was a Chicago man and not long before my coming to Washington he
had sat at my desk in the _Times_ office waiting for news to come
over our leased wire from Washington that his appointment by President
Cleveland had been confirmed by the Senate. I had the pleasure of being
first to tell him that his appointment had been approved and first to
salute him a justice. He mentioned the incident the first time I called
on him in Washington and assured me that he would be glad to help me
all he could with my work as correspondent.

I have a picture of him in my mind as he was that day of my first
visit. He was in his chamber in the dingy old building that then housed
the highest judicial authorities of the country, stretched full length
on a lounge, his coat and vest flung carelessly across a chair, a tall
mint julep on a stand by his side. He was reading a book and puffing
into its pages dense clouds of smoke from an enormous black cigar. He
closed the book as I entered the room, but my eye caught the title. It
was the _The Decameron_ of Boccaccio. I fancied he looked as sheepish
as my mother once did when I came from the office long after midnight
and found her propped up in bed with a copy of the Italian novelist’s
erotic stories of amorous adventure.

When I had been almost a year in Washington, a messenger boy came to my
home early one morning to tell me that a “crazy man in our hotel wants
you to come as quick as you can.”

I went with him and found my employer, Publisher West, pacing his room
like a caged animal. He was almost hysterical. I calmed him as best as
I could and after much urging got him to tell me what ailed him. He
had been hard pressed for money, he told me, and had issued duplicate
certificates of stock, pledging the fictitious securities for large
loans at the banks. His irregularity had been discovered and prison was
staring him in the face. He had brought a suitcase full of money to
Washington and he wanted me to go to Europe with him. I counseled him
not to act like a madman, but to return to Chicago on the next train
and try to adjust his tangled affairs before it was too late. After
much argument he accepted my advice and I saw him aboard of a westbound
train.

In a few days word came that a new man was in charge of the
_Times_ and that an editor for whom I had the utmost contempt had
been given editorial charge. It didn’t take me long to telegraph my
resignation and follow it by the first train.

The day I returned to Chicago I was introduced to a banker from Salt
Lake, one of the elders of the Mormon Church, who had been sent to
Chicago in search of someone who would go to Utah and teach his people
modern methods of running a political campaign. A wholesale merchant
whom I had known for many years and who ran into me on the street a
few hours after I arrived from Washington, recommended me. The banker
explained that there was to be an important local election in Salt
Lake City within a month and the Mormons were anticipating a bitter
fight with their implacable enemy, the Gentiles. He offered a thousand
dollars and liberal expenses if I would go to the Mormon capital and
secretly direct the campaign.

The proposition appealed to me, for I had never been in Salt Lake and
this would afford me the best opportunity I might ever have to get a
close-up view of Mormonism. Besides, I needed the money. An hour after
I promised to go, Horatio Seymour, editor of the Chicago _Herald_,
offered me the city editorship of his paper, which I promptly accepted
with the understanding that I was not to begin until my return from
Utah.

I had an interesting time during the month I spent with the Mormons.
We tore up the streets and brought colonies of voters from all over
the territory to do the work of repaving. Fortunately I was able to
get away before the finish, for one less experienced in politics than
I could have seen at a glance that the stupid Mormons hadn’t a ghost
of a chance of winning. The night before I left for Chicago they gave
me a banquet at the famous Amelia Palace, where old Brigham Young once
lived with his favorite wife. President Woodruff presided at the feast
and George Q. Cannon made an impressive speech, after which all of
the dignitaries congratulated me on having won the election for them.
I felt as if I had sold a gold brick when they handed me a thousand
dollars and a return ticket to Chicago. They were overwhelmingly
defeated.

In many respects the _Herald_, where I was soon installed as city
editor, was the pleasantest office I ever worked in. The paper was
alive with enterprise, brightly written and ably edited. The staff was
like a happy family. I never knew such teamwork, every man pulling
harmoniously with his mates and giving the best that was in him for
the glory of his paper. The only newspaper staff at that period that
equaled it in alertness, brilliancy of intellect, and ability to write,
was the splendid organization with which Mr. Dana and Chester Lord were
surrounded on the New York _Sun_. The staff of the _Sun_ was
larger and better paid than ours but in no other respect did it surpass
us.

The editor of the _Herald_ was Horatio Seymour, one of the ablest
of American journalists, keen, calm, logical, a close student of public
affairs. His brain was ever alert with ideas and with power to express
himself such as possessed by few editors I ever came in contact with.
He is now and has been for many years, an editorial writer on the New
York _World_. He was managing editor of the _Times_ when
Storey was in full vigor of greatness.

It was Seymour who put “Jerked to Jesus” over the account of a hanging.
He afterward told me that he was more ashamed of it than anything he
had ever done. Anyone who knows him would never suspect him to be
capable of so much as a blasphemous thought. He was one of the gentlest
gentlemen I ever knew. The harshest word of reproof I ever had from
him was when a story in which he was specially interested and which he
had suggested did not appear in the paper. He summoned me to his office
and asked why it had not been written. I mumbled some excuse, the real
reason for my neglect being that I had been pressed with other matters
and had forgotten his instructions.

“Please take it up to-day and pursue it until completed,” he mildly
directed, without raising his voice or betraying the irritation I
know he must have felt. The reproof as he administered it was far
more effective than if he had blustered with rage and cursed until he
was black in the face, as I have seen some editors do with much less
provocation. It is more than thirty years since that “scolding” and I
have never forgotten it.

John R. Walsh, a banker, owned the _Herald_, but beyond his
first investment, he wasn’t drawn upon for financial backing, Editor
Seymour’s brains having put the paper on a solid foundation almost from
the time he assumed control. It had been started a few years before
by some bright young men who quickly made it popular but who had the
property taken from them when they lost a libel suit for half a million
dollars that was won by a department store proprietor. As soon as I
became city editor I began employing from other newspapers the ablest
young men I knew. Mr. Seymour gave me free rein and never found fault
with my bidding for brains.

Philip D. Armour, one of the greatest of American business men, once
told me that the secret of his success was in selecting the best men
he could find for his organization. I never forgot it and in my small
way I put into practice that principle. Whatever success I attained was
almost entirely due to the fact that I first bargained with my employer
that I was never to be interfered with in selecting a staff, and always
reaching out for men of ability and energy with which to recruit
it. I lured them away from other jobs and rewarded their coming by
paying higher salaries than some of them had ever dreamed of earning,
in return for which I always exacted from them the best they had to
give. If they “made good,” they were rewarded still further. If they
shirked, it was but a short walk to the elevator.

There were no shirkers among the young men of the _Herald_ staff.
They were always greedy for work and I gave them every opportunity
to gratify their desire. There was nothing in the line of reporting
they couldn’t cover and write better than the best reporters of rival
papers. In the vocabulary of the profession, they were all “stars.”
There was Pete Dunne, the “Mr. Dooley” humorist, who had been with
me on the _Times_; Brand Whitlock, until recently Ambassador to
Belgium; Charlie Dillingham, now proprietor of the Hippodrome and the
Globe Theater in New York; John Eastman, proprietor of the Chicago
_Journal_; Charlie Seymour, brother of the editor and almost as
brilliant a writer; Ben (I forget his last name) the chap who wrote
“nothing to eat but food; nothing to wear but clothes”; and many
others, some of whom are dead. Most of those who survive are in the
front ranks of journalism or in positions high up in the business world.

They were sometimes a difficult bunch to handle, for most of them were
spirited young geniuses and not always amenable to discipline. They
had a Bohemian sort of club close by which they called the Whitechapel
and where they could always be found when not on duty. Stories came to
my ears that made me apprehensive that some of my youngsters were in
danger of becoming demoralized. I posted a notice that no member of the
club would be employed on the _Herald_ and all of my stars quit in
a bunch, leaving only the cubs to report a disastrous railroad wreck.
Their pride was stung to the quick when they read the _Herald’s_
poor account of the wreck and they came back to their desks in a hurry
the next day and asked to be forgiven, and of course they were.

The crowning folly of the Whitechapel bunch was to take the body of a
member who died to the outskirts of the city, put it on a blazing pyre,
join hands and circle about it, chanting weird songs until the body was
reduced to ashes.

Late one Saturday night a reporter brought in a story of a mother and
her daughter having been found frozen to death in their fireless home.
It was bitter cold weather and there was much poverty and suffering,
for many were out of employment. A man read the story and came to the
office the following day with a thousand dollars, which he asked me to
distribute among the needy. A blizzard was raging all of that Sunday.
I gave ten reporters a hundred dollars each and directed them to go to
different police stations, obtain from the police names of suffering
families and relieve distress as far as the money would go. What the
reporters found and did among the poor filled a page of the paper
and the man came back before noon with another thousand dollars. He
wouldn’t tell his name. I called him “the man with a heart.”

Many others sent money, for the story startled Chicago as nothing had
done for years. Thus began one of the biggest and most successful
campaigns for helping poor folk that I ever participated in. Within
two days we had a building full of willing workers for a headquarters
and the merchants sorted out their stocks and sent around dray loads
of goods of every description, while the well-to-do reduced their
wardrobes to contribute to the poor. Illinois mine owners sent an
entire train of coal. Wholesale houses and department stores sent
horses and trucks and men to aid in the distribution. Hundreds of tons
of clothing and provisions were received at headquarters and promptly
sent to different parts of the city, society women volunteering their
services to act as investigators, for we were careful to guard against
impostors. I doubt if any great public charity was ever more prudently
or systematically distributed. It was several weeks before the money
and supplies were exhausted, and by that time fine weather had set in
and there was employment for all that wanted it.

I don’t know why this incident comes back to me so vividly now unless
it is because I broke down my health under the strain of it and was
sent away unconscious to rest until I had recovered.




CHAPTER VIII

BREAKING INTO PARK ROW


I never went back to the _Herald_. After my health was restored,
or partly so, I went to New York from the seashore, drifted down to
Park Row and was attracted by the gilded dome of the World building.
The date was July 18, 1891.

I was familiar with the wonderful success of Joseph Pulitzer in New
York and I was fascinated with this stupendous monument to his brains
and energy. Acting entirely on impulse I went in, ascended to the
dome and found my way to the office of Ballard Smith, at that time
editor-in-chief. He was easily accessible. I started to introduce
myself and relate to him my newspaper experience, but he cut me short
by saying he knew of me and he almost took my breath away when he asked
if I would accept a place on the staff. Would I join the staff of the
New York _World_? I would have bartered ten years of my life for the
chance. It was a realization of my fondest dream.

I had been told that one needed a jimmy to break into the organization
of a New York newspaper, but here was an editor offering me a job
before I even had time to apply.

I began work the following day. I hadn’t been there two weeks when
Ballard Smith summoned me to his office to read a cable dispatch that
had come from Paris. It was from Mr. Pulitzer, inquiring who it was
that had written an account of a railroad wreck that appeared on the
first page a few days after I came to the paper. Mr. Smith had replied,
giving my name and the additional information that I was a new man,
and the proprietor had directed him to convey his personal compliments
to me and to present in his name a substantial cash reward. Before
completing my first month I was made assistant city editor.

I had been there a little more than a year when poor health prompted
me to take a trip to Colorado. Returning eastward, some months
afterward, I stopped in St. Louis and met Florence White, now general
manager of the New York _World_, at that time manager of the
_Post-Dispatch_, the paper that was the foundation of the enormous
fortune that Mr. Pulitzer afterward accumulated. Mr. Pulitzer left
it in charge of subordinates when he went to New York and bought the
bankrupt _World_, with the smallest circulation of any newspaper
in the metropolis, and almost overnight transformed it into one of the
most widely read and influential newspapers in America.

Mr. White offered me a job. I had always worked on a morning paper,
with the attending long hours and little chance for home life and
almost no recreation. The _Post-Dispatch_ was an afternoon paper
and I realized that I would have all of my evenings to myself. To one
recovering from a long spell of sickness it looked attractive, so I
hung my coat on a peg and went to work. It wasn’t long before I was
made city editor and I held the job until Mr. Pulitzer called me back
to New York, four years later.

I was in St. Louis when a terrific tornado cut a great gash through
the most thickly populated section of the city, destroying hundreds of
lives and millions of dollars’ worth of property. And of the newspaper
men there when the storm came tearing out of the west I was the most
inactive. That afternoon, when my work for the day was about completed,
Frankenfeld of the local weather bureau, dropped into the office and
suggested the advisability of my starting for home, if I wanted to
reach there ahead of a storm that was portended by falling barometer
and darkening skies.

“Cyclone?” I asked.

“No, not so bad as that. We never have cyclones in cities, but I think
it will be a nasty storm and I would advise you to hit the trail.”

I went to my home in the western suburbs and the storm burst with
wicked fury as I entered the house. Old Moses, my black house servant,
and I had a lively time closing the windows and when this was done
I watched the storm wrench branches from trees and carry them over
the tops of houses. I saw my chicken house topple over and the prize
rosebushes I had nursed so tenderly torn up by the roots. Almost every
growing thing in the garden was blown away. That was the penalty of
living in the suburbs, I thought, as I viewed the damage, for the storm
would pass over the built-up city and do no harm. I ate dinner and went
to bed with a grouch.

I was always up at five in the morning and at my desk before seven,
but the morning after the storm the street-car line I was accustomed
to take wasn’t running. Nor had any morning papers been delivered.
More penalty for living in the suburbs, more annoyances to start one
off to business in bad humor. I found cars moving on another line four
blocks away but I was half-way to my office before a man got on with
a newspaper. When he opened it the headlines that caught my eyes gave
me the greatest surprise I had ever known. Hundreds killed; thousands
of homes in ruins! And I was grieving over uprooted rosebushes and a
wrecked chicken house.

When I got to the office I saw a fine demonstration of the efficiency
of our organization. Not a man was missing and all were as busy as
hornets. Not one had slept a wink all night. My assistant, whose duty
it was to stand watch for an emergency after the last edition had
gone to press and I had left for the day, was at his desk with a few
belated workers when the storm hit the city. Darkness came and then a
screeching, roaring pandemonium. The tornado raged with unabated fury
for nearly an hour. All through it telephones rang and reporters in
various sections of the city described what they saw. Dead lying in the
streets, homes demolished, havoc, ruin and desolation for miles.

An extra was rushed to press and the newsboys were crying it in the
streets before the storm subsided. Additional details came over the
telephones and a second extra was sent out, followed by another shortly
before midnight. Throughout the remainder of the night the reporters
groped about in the blackness, for almost the entire lighting system
where the greatest damage was done had been put out of business, and
they bravely helped the firemen and police drag out the maimed and
dying from the heaps of ruined homes. With the beginning of dawn they
were in the office, writing like mad of the dreadful scenes they had
witnessed. I shall always be proud of those boys and of what they did
while their boss was fuming over his uprooted rosebushes.

It was the first big story within my reach that I hadn’t mixed up with
since I became a newspaper man, though I had another similar experience
some years later when President McKinley was assassinated.

At the time of that tragic occurrence I was city editor of the
_Evening World_ in New York. One afternoon I started for a ball
game at the Polo Grounds, but the weather was so hot I gave up going
to the game on the way uptown and went to my hotel at the entrance
to Central Park and was soon fast asleep. When I awoke there were
several notes that had been slipped under the door. I was wanted at the
telephone booth in the hotel. In those days rooms were not supplied
with individual telephones. I went to the office and learned that the
_World_ had been calling for me. The operator rang for twenty
minutes without getting a connection. “Busy,” “busy,” reported the
exchange.

“Anything happened?” I asked the operator.

She shifted her gum and languidly drawled: “McKinley’s shot!”

Good lord, the President assassinated and I fast asleep! The Nation
pulsating with horror and an editor sleeping his wits away because the
day was warm! When I got the connection with my office they told me a
third extra had gone to press. There was nothing left for me to do but
eat dinner, smoke a cigar, read the papers and go to bed. And that is
what I did.

While I was city editor of the _Post-Dispatch_ a judge of the
criminal court challenged me from the bench to fight a duel. It was an
amusing episode as I now recall it, although it might have terminated
in a tragedy.

Colonel Charles H. Jones, a pompous little man with bristling white
whiskers, had been sent from the _World_ office by Mr. Pulitzer
to take editorial charge of the _Post-Dispatch_. He was an
aggressive chap, with an exalted opinion of his importance, and he kept
the paper and everyone connected with it in hot water almost from the
day he assumed control. It was said of him that he used vitriol when
writing editorials. He was volcanic and turgescent. One day he caused
to be written an article attacking the integrity of the President of
the Board of Education, which he personally passed upon and ordered to
be printed the following day. He left for the East on a night train.

In his absence I was in charge of the paper and that is how I came to
be arrested for criminal libel when the angry official instituted legal
action against the newspaper. I was arraigned in the criminal court
before Judge Murphy, who was smarting over an article about himself
that had appeared in the _Post-Dispatch_ at a time I was away on
vacation. Because the Judge was known to be hostile to the paper and
everyone connected with it, the attorney who represented me asked that
the libel case be transferred to another court.

It was then that Judge Murphy turned loose his wrath. Rising from
the bench in a towering passion, he stalked out of the courtroom and
disappeared in his chambers. The spectators suspected something unusual
was about to happen and there was a hum of suppressed conversation
while awaiting the Judge’s return. Larry Harrigan, Chief of Police,
moved around to where I was sitting and whispered a warning in my ear.

“Be careful what you say and do,” he said. “Judge Murphy is crazy drunk
and ugly. He will kill you if you give him a chance.”

My vicarious arrest was growing exciting. Judge Murphy returned from
his chambers, flourishing a copy of the _Post-Dispatch_. It was
the issue that had contained the article attacking him. His face was
livid and there was a look in his eyes that evidently meant mischief.
He ordered me to the witness stand and motioned to Chester Crum, a
prominent lawyer, to interrogate me. The frame-up was now complete, for
Crum had brought his ax to the grindstone along with Murphy. Crum’s
grievance was a story in the _Post-Dispatch_ that had set the town
laughing by describing how he slid down a fire escape when a gambling
house was raided.

Judge Murphy handed the newspaper to Crum and leaned far over his bench
and glared furiously at me. His right hand was beneath the bench and
the Chief of Police afterward told me that it held a revolver. The
courtroom was packed, the spectators silent and expectant.

Crum read the article about Murphy in a loud voice and at the end of
each sentence I was asked who had written it. I declined to answer.
When Crum had finished reading, Judge Murphy thunderously ejected a
stump speech about his life being an open book, guiltless of what
the paper had printed about him. He wound up his tirade by openly
challenging me to fight him a duel. Then he went back to his chambers
for another drink.

Chief Harrigan escorted me to my office. He told me that throughout the
questioning by Crum, Judge Murphy was gripping a revolver, evidently
intent on shooting me if he could find provocation. The Chief gave me
his revolver and told me to carry it and not to hesitate to use it if
Murphy attacked me.

The next edition of the _Post-Dispatch_ contained a stenographic
report of what had taken place in the courtroom. It was headed: “A
Blatherskite on the Bench.”

An hour after the paper came out Judge Murphy, drunk and ugly, appeared
in the street opposite. A crowd gathered in anticipation of a shooting,
but the judge contented himself with shaking his clenched fist at the
editorial windows above and shouting nasty names. He didn’t come up or
fire a shot. The affair had a bloodless termination. I was exonerated
when the libel case was given a hearing before another judge and the
case itself was thrown out of court.

A week later I was walking down Olive Street one Sunday morning and I
saw Judge Murphy approaching from the opposite direction. There was no
one else in sight. I would have avoided meeting him had there been any
other way than to turn and run. I thrust my hand into the pocket of
my overcoat and gripped Harrigan’s revolver. At the same time Judge
Murphy’s hand shot into the breast of his coat. Neither of us slackened
pace and we were soon so close that we could have touched each other.
Judge Murphy averted his eyes from me and I was just as polite to him,
though I am positive that both of us were cautiously squinting out of
the corner of an eye. Nothing happened. He simply walked on as if I
wasn’t there. I don’t think he so much as looked back after passing
me. I did, for I was a bit apprehensive of rear attack, but both of us
walked so fast we were soon out of range.

I recall another occasion when our fiery little editor, Colonel Jones,
came very near being the cause of a tragedy. Some years before, while
he was editing the St. Louis _Republic_, he and David R. Francis
had been such fast friends that Jones persuaded Francis to run for
Governor, supporting his candidacy with his newspaper and personally
working for his election. Francis was elected. A quarrel between the
wives of the two men disrupted their friendship. Mrs. Jones wasn’t
invited to the inaugural festivities and of course her husband
wouldn’t go without her. There followed a bitter attack on Francis in
the editorial columns of the _Republic_ and it was kept up until
Francis put an end to the sting of his tormentor by quietly purchasing
control of the _Republic_ and ousting Colonel Jones from the
editorial chair.

Jones went to the _World_ in New York for awhile and later was
sent back to St. Louis by Mr. Pulitzer to take editorial charge of
the _Post-Dispatch_. He arrived soon after I joined the staff of
the _Post-Dispatch_ and his first official act was to appoint
me city editor of the paper. The enmity between Jones and Francis
had not cooled and Jones let no opportunity escape to give Francis a
stab with his caustic pen. One day there was something printed in the
paper in connection with the mysterious drowning of Dennis P. Slattery
that so aroused the anger of Francis, he came stalking into the
_Post-Dispatch_ office, accompanied by his brother Tom, angrily
demanding to know where the editor was. I told him that Colonel Jones
was in his office on the floor above and he and Tom Francis went up
the staircase two steps at a time.

I saw my assistant, Kinney Underwood, another fiery little Southerner,
grab a revolver from a drawer of his desk and rush up the stairway
behind them. I followed. The two Francis brothers were in the editor’s
sanctum, when I got there, demanding an immediate retraction.

Colonel Jones was at his desk, white of face but coldly dignified. I
found Kinney Underwood in an adjoining office, that was divided from
the editor’s sanctum by a glass partition through which every action of
the men inside could be watched. Underwood was crouched behind a desk,
revolver in hand, the weapon leveled at David R. Francis. The latter
had his back turned to him. Francis never knew how close to death he
was. One move to draw a weapon and Underwood would surely have killed
him.

With that imperturbable dignity that characterized our spunky little
editor, I heard him tell Francis to dictate to a stenographer what he
wished to have printed by way of retraction and I saw him at least
pretend to go ahead with his work while this was being done. When the
stenographer had written it out Colonel Jones carefully read it and
struck out more than half of it with his blue pencil. He handed the
revised item back to Francis to read.

“I’ll print that much and no more,” calmly remarked the editor.

Francis read and gave a nod of approval.

Colonel Jones turned to Tom Francis. “Take your brother out of here,”
he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of David R. and resuming
the writing from which he had been interrupted. They went away.

That is how close David R. Francis came to never receiving an
appointment as American ambassador to Russia.

Colonel Jones continued to lambast in the editorial columns everyone
with whom he formed an enmity and drove all of the advertisers away
from the newspaper by his vicious attacks. The property was in imminent
peril of being wrecked and Mr. Pulitzer began proceedings in the courts
to oust his editor, who tenaciously hung onto his job by virtue of a
long-term contract. It cost Mr. Pulitzer a lot of money to get rid of
him, but it was cheap at any price. A stroke of apoplexy terminated his
editorial career and some years later he died in a sanatarium in Italy.

Then came the startling news that the Spaniards had sunk the
_Maine_ off Havana. Alf. Ringling, the circus man, and I were
discussing the probability of an early declaration of war at luncheon,
and our conversation was interrupted by a messenger boy from my office.
He brought a telegram from Mr. Pulitzer, directing me to leave for New
York that night if possible and to come prepared to remain. A few hours
later I sat in the end of an observation car and watched the twinkling
lights of St. Louis fade into nothing. My newspaper career in that city
was at an end and I was glad of it.




CHAPTER IX

ON THE _WORLD’S_ CITY DESK


On arriving in New York and reporting at the _World_ office, I was
told why I had been summoned from St. Louis on such short notice. There
had been a tragedy in the editorial rooms of the _Evening World_.
Three nights before my arrival the managing editor had collapsed at
his desk and had been carried out with his mind completely shattered.
For weeks he had worked early and late, almost without sleep or rest.
Ever since the _Maine_ had been sunk he had seldom left his desk,
lest some more dreadful happening of imminent war find his newspaper
unprepared.

The _Evening Journal_ had recently sprung into existence and
there was great rivalry between the two papers, for Arthur Brisbane,
the _Journal_ editor, had been editor of the _Evening World_
and was now actively engaged in trying to beat the paper on which his
reputation had been made.

Ernest Chamberlain, who had succeeded Brisbane on the _Evening
World_, was equally alert in his efforts to maintain the supremacy
of Mr. Pulitzer’s wide-awake afternoon edition. Chamberlain expected
Congress to declare war any day and was alive to the importance of
every scrap of news that might point to such action. He wouldn’t trust
the judgment of subordinates, but sat at his desk day and night,
eagerly scanning press dispatches and directing the energies of special
correspondents, ready at a moment’s notice to rush extras to press.
And extras came from the presses like hot cakes from the griddle in
Childs’s window.

One night, when most of the staff had gone for the day, an extra went
out from the _Evening World_ office announcing that war had been
declared. Someone went up to the editorial room to inquire about it
and found a lunatic at the managing editor’s desk. Poor Chamberlain
had gone stark mad from overwork and worry and had manufactured the
war declaration from the raving of his crazed brain. Messengers were
rushed in every direction to recall the extras from the newsboys.
Fortunately but few of the papers got into the hands of readers or the
reputation of the _Evening World_ for accuracy and reliability
might have been seriously impaired by so palpable a fake. They dragged
Chamberlain from his desk and took him home. In a few days he was dead.
He had sacrificed his life to his calling.

The paper came out at the usual time the next morning, as bright and
enterprising as ever. None of its readers could suspect what had
occurred in the office the night before. Its brilliant young editor was
gone, but another editor of greater ability was at his desk. He was
Foster Coates. He had a fine perception of news values. He was dynamic
in the quick handling of big news, a genius for getting an extra on the
streets ahead of his rivals. I never knew an editor who was more loyal
to his job.

And I recall that day in after years when I stood with bared head and
looked with misty eyes upon his dead face in a casket; the eyelids
forever closed; all animation gone from his now placid features; that
tremendous energy of mind and body stilled like chiseled stone, and
there came to my mind the couplet he so often repeated when he and I,
all but exhausted by the nerve-straining toil of turning out war extras
in midsummer, would drop into our chairs after the final edition had
gone to press:

“Oh hell! What’s the use, what’s the use; what’s the use of chewing
tobacco just to spit out the juice. What’s the use, what’s the use!”

Like Chamberlain, Coates worked himself to death. He went from his
office after a day of hard work and dropped dead as he entered his
home. And he was a young man; Chamberlain was even younger. They die
young in journalism. During the twenty years that I was city editor of
the _Evening World_ more than fifty of our staff went to their
graves and nearly all of them were under forty.

Mr. Pulitzer came home from Europe when the war clouds gathered, and
was in New York when his promising young editor went to pieces. He
had always been fond of Chamberlain and was much distressed by what
happened, but in a great newspaper office there isn’t much time for
lamentation, for the editions must go to press according to schedule,
no matter how many worn-out editors drop by the wayside. It’s all in
the game.

The messenger who carried the news of Chamberlain’s collapse to the
home of the proprietor, brought back an order for Coates to assume
editorial charge and the new editor was at Chamberlain’s old desk,
planning the next edition, when most of the members of the staff
reported for duty. Few of them had heard of the tragedy of the night
before. They saw a new editor in charge, but newspaper workers are
accustomed to sudden editorial shifts and they went about their duties
as if he had always been there.

I arrived the following day and was installed as city editor, Fred
Duneka yielding his desk to me, in obedience to instructions from
Mr. Pulitzer, he in turn becoming assistant to Coates. The machine
was now in perfect running order, and it is the machine that counts.
An individual is but a small cog. He may think himself important
and indispensable but when he drops out the machine grinds on with
uninterrupted energy. The cashier simply balances his account and
enters a different name in the ledger.

Coates and Duneka, my two new associates, were both companionable
and capable. In all my newspaper experience I do not recall two more
delightful men. Coates was the perfection of affable gentleness though
superlatively profane. There is no word in blasphemous vocabulary that
wasn’t on the tip of his tongue. He ripped out oaths that fairly made
the windows rattle, but it was habit more than temper, for otherwise he
was almost without faults and to me was ever generous, warm-hearted,
and kindly. We were friends from the day we met.

I was equally fond of Fred Duneka, an entirely different type; less
explosive, not so energetic, but capable and effective. He had traveled
pretty much over the world as literary secretary to our blind employer,
had been London correspondent of the _World_ and had filled other
positions of responsibility before assuming the city editorship of the
evening edition.

I shall always remember his devotion through a long spell of sickness
I had that first year we were together. Worn out by the long hours of
hard work all of us had through the Cuban War, I fell an easy victim
to pneumonia. Throughout my illness and convalescence a messenger boy
was at my home at nine every morning to take to Duneka a bulletin of
my condition. This he posted on the office bulletin board and in the
evening, after the last edition had gone to press, he would sit at my
bedside and read to me and tell me what was going on at the office and
how much they all missed me. He left us to become general manager of
the publishing house of Harper Brothers. Within a year news has come to
me of the death of this dear friend and at a time when I couldn’t look
for a last time on the features I loved so well or send a message of
condolence to his afflicted family. A newspaper friend who attended the
funeral wrote me that the corpse was dressed in white broadcloth and a
conspicuous red four-in-hand tie.

War with Spain was declared a month after I was called to the
_Evening World_ and it set all of us hopping with activity, eager
to be the first on the street with news that everyone was impatient
to read. An epoch of delirious journalism began, the like of which
newspaper readers had never known. Editions of evening newspapers
made their appearance before six in the morning and almost every hour
afterward until nearly midnight.

Coates on our paper and Brisbane in the _Journal_ office developed
a craze for big type and tried to outdo each other in creating
startling headlines, the type of which was sometimes almost as deep as
the front page. Coates defended his poster type headlines by likening
the front page of a newspaper to the show window of a department store.
One must display his wares attractively, he argued, or the other
fellow would reap the largest sales. I can’t say that I was ever fully
converted to such extreme sensationalism, though I don’t think my worst
enemy would accuse me of being an old fogy in presenting news to the
public.

Flashy headlines were not the only innovation at that period. The
editors used poster type in every edition, sometimes when the news
wasn’t important enough to justify extravagant display, so when a
really big piece of news came along there was no way of attracting
attention to it except by printing the headline in red ink. Then
followed a riot of red ink, until women readers began protesting
against having their white gloves ruined. This put a crimp in the red
ink folly, for publishers are ever mindful of women readers.

Women can make or break a newspaper. Big advertisers are quick to
learn which newspapers are popular with women and the papers they read
on street cars and take to their homes are the ones that carry the
greatest amount of advertising, from which the profits of newspaper
making are chiefly derived. It is a mistaken notion that newspaper
sales make publishers rich. There isn’t a newspaper published that
wouldn’t be forced into bankruptcy if it depended on sales for revenue,
for the price of a newspaper, after deducting what the news dealers get
out of it, barely pays for the raw paper and ink.

I have often heard it said that the European War must have been a
bonanza to the newspapers because of the great demand for news, but I
doubt if there is a newspaper in New York that didn’t lose money from
the time the war began, notwithstanding that the price was doubled.
The cost of everything, the gathering of news, cable and telegraph
tolls, mechanical labor, and raw materials, was doubled and trebled.
And there were times when there was such a shortage of print paper
that publishers were at their wits’ end to get sufficient paper to run
through the next edition.

The _World_, with a circulation of almost a million a day, was in
such straits that it was obliged to buy two big paper mills outright
and it had to buy a coal mine to get enough fuel to keep the mills
running. It wasn’t in times of great news activities that Mr. Pulitzer
accumulated the vast fortune that enabled him to give two millions
of dollars to found a college of journalism and more millions for
the development of music and art and kindred beneficiaries of his
munificence.

All of us toiled early and late through the Spanish-American War, for
our staff was seriously crippled by the brave fellows who responded to
the call for soldiers. Those of us who didn’t enlist did the work on
the paper of those who did, that their salaries might go to support
their families while they were away. Every morning while the war lasted
I was out of bed at two and at my desk before four, to lay out the work
of preparing an edition that was sent to press at six. Most of the time
it was night before I could leave. The managing editor came at seven
and often remained until midnight. Both of us ate our meals at our
desks, sometimes from our hands, while superintending the making up of
an edition in the composing room.

I particularly recall that morning when the _World_ got the
greatest news beat in all journalistic history. It was news of Dewey’s
great victory at Manila, news that set all the world aflame, coming
so unexpectedly and so splendidly glorifying the American navy in the
first crushing defeat to Spain.

Edward Harden, then a newspaper man and now a broker in Wall Street,
was a guest on one of Dewey’s battleships when the entire Spanish
fleet in Manila Bay was sunk. He witnessed all of it and the smoke
of battle was barely cleared away before he set out for Hong-kong to
cable to the New York _World_ news of what had happened. His
dispatch was paid for in advance at the highest cable rate and went
ahead of the official report. It reached the _World_ office after
the last morning edition had gone to press. Van Benthuysen, managing
editor of the morning edition, was starting for home when it came.
Almost the entire working force had already gone, but enough men were
rallied to put the news in type and rush it to the presses for a late
extra. Unfortunately there were few newsboys at hand and neither men
nor wagons to give the paper with its tremendous news sensation much
distribution. My recollection is that not more than twenty thousand of
the _World’s_ half-million circulation that morning contained the
news of Dewey’s victory and most of the twenty thousand papers that had
it were sold at the entrance to Brooklyn Bridge. The sale of twenty
thousand papers brought to the office about a hundred and twenty
dollars. The news beat cost the _World_ five thousand dollars.

When I got to the office that morning Harden’s dispatch had just been
received. I got a copy of it and set all hands at work to prepare a
quick extra of our evening edition. The dispatch was set in big type
the full width of the front page and the headline over it was the
largest type in the composing room. Several inside pages were filled
with articles describing Manila Bay and the Philippine Islands; why
the Spanish fleet was there and how Dewey caught the enemy unprepared;
a contrast of the battleships of both fleets, a sketch of the
Admiral’s career, sketches of some of the officers under his command
and everything else of interest that flashed into my mind while the
complete story was being written and assembled. By the time the press
crews had reported the extra was ready for them. Every press in that
great battery was soon in motion and was kept going throughout the day
and far into the night, stopping only long enough to change some of
the pages as additional details came from cable and telegraph wires. I
don’t think as many _Evening Worlds_ were ever printed before or
since.

It may surprise many to know that the next highest record in
circulation figures, excepting the day when news came of the battle
of San Juan Hill, was when we printed the report of a prize fight
out in Nevada. These were high-water marks in circulation until the
American forces got into action in France. Not even the sinking of the
_Lusitania_ sold as many papers as did the prize fight.

Is it any wonder that even the most experienced editor finds it
difficult to measure the public’s appetite for news? I have often
printed what seemed to me to be startling news that anyone would
be eager to read only to find out the next day there had been no
appreciable increase in circulation. Other days when the paper was
below the average in news interest, there would be unexpected sales
that no one in the office could explain.

Cutting down our staff to give soldiers to the Army in Cuba, prompted
me to try a new experiment in gathering news of the city, or rather
the Metropolitan district, for the city editor and his reporters are
responsible for covering all of the news happenings within a hundred
miles of the office. It had been the customary practice up to this time
to send a reporter from the office to even remote parts of the city
and wait until he had gathered his facts and returned to the office
before his story was written. With extras being sent to press every
hour or oftener, the necessity arose for more expeditious methods. I
made a sort of checkerboard of the entire news district and stationed a
reporter in each of the squares, the principle being similar to the peg
post system that Commissioner Waldo afterward adopted for the police
force. Each reporter was held responsible for all news happening in
the square to which he was assigned and he was required always to keep
in communication with the office by telephone. If there was a fire, a
murder, a suicide or any other event worth printing, he must get to
it and obtain all the facts, and instead of wasting valuable time by
coming to the office he was to telephone the details to an experienced
writer, the latter weaving the facts into a finished story for the
paper. In newspaper offices all news articles that are not mere items
are designated as stories, whether about politics, crime, finance or
society.

When the new system of news gathering was first introduced, I was
somewhat apprehensive that accuracy might be sacrificed for speed. To
guard against this I organized a writing staff that was composed of
experienced men who not only could write but who had won their way to
the top of the profession by covering every description of news, and
who were intimately familiar with every part of the greater city and
its suburbs. They were “star” men and they became widely known as the
most accomplished and best-paid news writers in the Metropolis. There
wasn’t one among them who considered himself overworked when he had
taken over the telephone and written on a typewriter a dozen stories of
from five hundred to three thousand words each in a single day, and for
as many days as opportunity afforded.

To me they were always wonderful. I watched them day after day through
a long stretch of years and marveled at what they accomplished. The
reporters who did the leg work and fed their stories through the
telephone to the rewrite men, were quick to fall in with the new method
and it was surprising what perfect word pictures most of them gave
of what they saw and heard, and how complete were their stories in
incident and detail.

To guard against inaccuracies, a leg man was required to spell all
proper names and to read his story carefully after it was printed and
call the city editor’s attention to even the smallest mistake. In this
way a spirit of rivalry was stimulated between reporters and the men
who wrote their stories, each calling the other to strict account if an
inaccuracy was detected.

The reputations of our able rewrite battery spread so widely that
they were always sought after by other newspapers and magazines and
by big business industries. Most of them are commanding high salaries
wherever they may be. One of the ablest was Barton Currie, now editor
of _Country Gentleman_. He was with us for more than ten years and
I never parted with an associate with keener regret. The Curtis people
lured him away by doubling the large salary the _Evening World_
paid him. He was such a finished and brilliant writer of news that I
sometimes wonder why he is using his talents to tell farmers how to
coax hens to lay two eggs a day.

Irving Cobb was another of our stars. He was a small salaried reporter
on the _Evening Sun_ when my attention was first called to his
work. I asked him to come and see me and was so favorably impressed
that he got a job on the _Evening World_ at double the salary he
was then getting, and I doubled it again before the _Saturday Evening
Post_ grabbed him and sent him over to Germany when the war began.

Cobb is the homeliest man and one of the cleverest I ever knew. As an
all around newspaper writer he is worth his weight in gold, and he
weighs something under a ton. He was a crack reporter in addition to
being an accomplished writer.

My only quarrel with Cobb was that he insisted on posing as a humorist.
His idea was to turn even the most serious and tragic happening into
a laugh. One of the wittiest stories he ever wrote was about a woman
splitting her husband’s skull with an ax. I was the only one who
was permitted to enjoy its humor, for it went into the wastebasket.
One of his brightest witticisms was at my expense. It slipped out
unpremeditatedly one day when word was sent to the office that I
wouldn’t be down because of illness.

“Dear me, let us hope it is nothing trivial,” said the sympathetic
Cobb, without looking up from his typewriter.

One of Cobb’s greatest achievements as a reporter was during the trial
of Harry Thaw. I think he averaged more than twelve thousand words a
day, taking all of the testimony in longhand and writing a running
account as the trial progressed. What he wrote was telephoned direct
from the courtroom to the office, taken by a rapid typist and passed
to compositors, not more than five minutes intervening before what was
spoken in court was in type in the _Evening World_. There was no
story of that famous trial that touched him for accuracy and literary
style.

Martin Green has been a shining star on the _Evening World_
rewrite staff for eighteen years and there is no better in the
profession. I have known him to cover a National political convention
unaided and send a better account of it than the combined efforts of a
half-dozen representatives of a rival. He went to France soon after the
first Pershing expedition was sent over and the descriptive stories of
battles and trench life that he cabled to the _Evening World_ made
the other war correspondents look like a bunch of cubs.

Another of our crack men was Bob Ritchie, who also went to France as
war correspondent and was made manager of a great news syndicate with
headquarters in London, directing from there the activities of a large
force of correspondents in various parts of Europe.

Will Inglis, after many years of service with us, left to become a
literary secretary with the richest man in the world. I am told that
the permanency of his job solely depends on the doctors keeping his
employer alive and from all accounts old John D. has a lot of kick left
in him. Lindsey Denison, who could write circles around most newspaper
men, abandoned his typewriter to become a captain in the army. “Cupid”
Jordan was one of our wittiest writers and as clever in their way were
Jimmy Loughboro, Joe Brady, and a lot of other bright chaps, for whom I
have always felt a deeper affection than they perhaps credited me with.




CHAPTER X

NEWSPAPERING TO-DAY


Many newspaper readers have a mistaken impression that reporters wander
aimlessly around the city, gathering news wherever they chance to run
across it. It may surprise them to learn that during the entire twenty
years that I was city editor of the _Evening World_ I do not think
there was a half-dozen times when a reporter brought into the office a
news story that he wasn’t sent after.

It seldom happens that a reporter stumbles upon news by chance.
Gathering the news of a great city is a carefully thought-out and
systematized piece of human machinery that operates under the personal
supervision of the city editor. There are news centers like the
criminal and civil courts, the municipal offices, police headquarters
and precinct station houses, the important hotels, the theaters, and
the places where politicians congregate, where reporters are constantly
on the alert and are held responsible for the routine news that is
certain to turn up. There are reporters stationed on the water front
who board every passenger ship at quarantine and make frequent trips to
the customhouse and shipping offices.

The big news, that which commands attention and is conspicuously
displayed on the front page, is either the unexpected or news that is
obtained through the persistent investigation of reporters working
under the direction of the city editor.

The unexpected news, such as fires, murders, suicides, elopements, and
business failures, comes to a newspaper in a variety of ways, chiefly
through the police. Every one of the twelve thousand policemen in New
York is unconsciously a newspaper reporter. He must telephone to his
precinct station every happening that comes to his notice and from
there it is promptly transmitted to police headquarters. A bulletin
is then posted at headquarters for newspaper reporters to copy and
telephone to their city editors.

Within ten minutes after a murder is discovered in the most remote
section of the city, news of it should be on the desk of every city
editor. Nearly all of the criminal happenings, together with accidents
in the streets, the subways and on railroads, reach the newspaper
offices through the police. At headquarters, also, alarms are sounded
on a gong, within hearing of the reporters, and the location of all
fires is telephoned to the city editors almost simultaneously with the
sounding of the alarm and a city editor telephones to the district
reporter nearest to the point where the fire or other happening is
located, dispatching him to cover it and often calling upon reporters
in adjacent districts to assist.

Readers of the paper frequently call on the telephone to tell of
something they have witnessed. I have received in this way tips from
men in almost every station of life. A bank president has called up to
report a thrilling runaway in Fifth Avenue, a Federal Judge to tell of
a fatal automobile collision on Riverside Drive, a florist to tell of
the sudden death of a great financier, and one of the most prominent
corporation lawyers in lower Broadway once got me on the telephone to
report that he had just seen a man leap from the fifteenth story of a
skyscraper across from his office.

Most city editors have an extensive list of acquaintances who telephone
to him out of friendship whenever they see or hear anything they
think might be of interest. I recall the time Bob Davis, editor
of _Munsey’s Magazine_, got me on the telephone to tell of a
disastrous train collision in the tunnel at Grand Central railway
station, in which many were killed and many injured. He had been on the
train and as soon as he could crawl out of the wreck he hurried to the
nearest telephone to let me know what had happened. In five minutes
twenty of our best reporters were on their way to report the details of
the accident.

Although he is one of the highest salaried magazine editors in America,
I sent Bob a check for twenty-five dollars. I was told that instead
of cashing the check Bob had it framed and that it still hangs in his
office as a testimonial of the first honest money he had earned since
Frank Munsey gave him a twenty-five thousand dollar a year job editing
a magazine.

Some of the best and most reliable tips come from women, particularly
women in business and women telephone operators. It is customary to
compensate them for their trouble and once a tipster has received
a newspaper check for something that cost him but little time and
trouble, he is always on the alert for an opportunity to earn another.
I have frequently rewarded a telephone operator for a tip that took
not more than two minutes to transmit, with a check that was more than
twice her wages for a full week’s work.

Clerks in big law offices often betray secrets of their employers and
clients for what they can get from a newspaper for a tip, the newspaper
not knowing that the tipster is guilty of disloyalty. Some of these
chaps are shrewds and wary and will barter for the sale of information
until they frequently are paid far more than their tip is worth. It is
from rascally clerks of this character that most of the sensational
news about divorce suits and breach of promise cases leaks out. I have
often had a fifteen dollar a week stenographer in some law office
offer to let me read the papers in some sensational lawsuit long before
the papers were filed in court. For this privilege they asked all the
way from fifty dollars to a thousand dollars. Usually their prices were
subject to compromise.

Sometimes tips come in that are untrue, but these are easily exploded
by the investigation of experienced reporters. One of the most
persistent tips of this character I ever had to do with was connected
with the death of a multimillionaire with presidential aspirations.
I was driving past his home on Fifth Avenue the day he died and a
physician who had just come from his bedside stopped me to tell of
his patient’s death. He gave me all of the particulars of his illness
and I had no reason for doubting his veracity. Yet the following day
word came from more than a dozen sources that the millionaire had been
shot in his box at the Metropolitan Opera House by a jealous husband.
Investigation showed that it was untrue, but the rumor spread all over
the city and kept reaching me through tipsters long after the man was
in his grave.

A similar rumor was associated with the death of the president of
one of the great trust companies, who shot himself at his home a few
hours after the trust company closed its doors at the beginning of a
financial panic. I knew the man and what prompted self-destruction
but tipsters came hurrying to my office the following day to tell
that he had been slain by a popular actress. The scandalous rumor was
kept alive for a long time in all of the fashionable clubs and was
revived and magnified when the actress, whose name was linked with the
banker’s, killed herself in a southern city. I know as positively as
it is possible to know anything one is not an eyewitness to, that the
actress did not murder him.

Another tip that came to the office from a hundred different persons
and was told with more than ordinary circumstantial detail, was
connected with the alleged mysterious disappearance of a beautiful
society girl. The story ran that she was looking at laces in a Fifth
Avenue department store when a strange elderly woman spoke to her and
casually mentioned that she knew of some wonderful bargains in laces
that were to be found in a small shop that was run by Armenians in a
side street not far away. The woman offered to go with the society girl
and show her the place and they left the department store together. As
they reached the street they encountered the society girl’s fiancé.
She told him where she was going and hurried along, after making an
engagement to meet him for luncheon in an hour at a nearby restaurant.

The young man waited for her long after the appointed time and growing
uneasy, telephoned to her home and finding she wasn’t there went in
search of her in the side street where she told him the lace shop was
located. He found one that had an Armenian proprietor in a basement and
when he began questioning the Armenian he replied so evasively that the
young man ran into the street and summoned a policeman to aid him in
searching the shop. On returning with the officer the shop was locked
and the proprietor had disappeared. They broke into the shop and in a
back room found the society girl. Her clothing had been torn from her
and she had been so brutally treated that she was unconscious. They
took her to a hospital and when consciousness was restored she was
hopelessly insane.

I have told the story here almost word for word as it was told to
me many times by as many different persons. There was little or no
variation and it came from so many persons of apparent reliability
that I refused for a long time to accept the word of reporters that
investigated it that the entire story was a palpable fake. The only
fact they found in way of corroboration was a small lace shop run by an
Armenian in a basement on the side street that had been named, but the
Armenian was known in the neighborhood as a reputable merchant. He had
been there for years and so far as I know is still there.

Not satisfied with the investigations made by reporters, I personally
went to Police Commissioner Waldo, roused his interest by telling him
that a magistrate and many persons of equal prominence had come to
me with the story, all telling the details practically alike, and
the Commissioner was so much impressed that he ordered a thorough
investigation by the ablest detectives in the department. There is no
longer any doubt in my mind that it was a fake from beginning to end.
The only solution I could ever conjecture was that the story must have
been manufactured and industriously circulated by vindictive enemies of
the Armenian lace merchant to injure his business standing.

Another fake that was even more widely circulated and which came to me
day after day for weeks, was that a young girl had been found murdered
in the lavatory of a Brooklyn department store. So persistent was
this report that newspapers were accused of suppressing a horrible
crime because they were afraid of incurring the displeasure of a big
advertiser. Yet there wasn’t a word of truth in the story, or a single
fact on which to base it, other than the name of the department store.

If it had been true all of the advertisers combined could not have
prevented publication. Although some uninformed persons may think
differently, the silence of a New York newspaper is not purchasable at
any price, nor are newspapers like the _World_ ever intimidated
into withholding news by any of its advertising patrons. I have
known, however, of several instances where big advertisers withdrew
their advertisements because they were unable to bluff an editor into
suppressing some perfectly legitimate piece of news.

Another demonstration of what editor McCullagh meant when he said
“Journalism is the art of knowing where hell is going to break loose
next and having a reporter on the spot to cover it,” forcibly came to
me at the time Mayor Gaynor was shot on the deck of a steamship as he
was about to sail for Europe. Early in the morning of that day, I sent
a reporter to the Mayor’s home in Brooklyn, thinking to get a more
satisfactory interview than could be had amid the bustle and confusion
on a ship that is about to take her departure.

After the reporter telephoned the result of the interview, I directed
him to accompany the Mayor to his ship in Hoboken and to remain with
him until the ship sailed. I sent a man with a camera to meet him and
to get a photograph of the Mayor.

Reporter and photographer were aboard of the ship when one of the
most sensational news happenings of the year took place, a crazy
assassin shooting down the Mayor because of a fancied grievance he
had been brooding over. It so chanced that the shot was fired at the
very instant the photographer clicked his camera. The film showed
the wounded Mayor sinking into the arms of those closest to him. The
photographer turned his camera and clicked it again as “Big Bill”
Edwards grappled with the madman and hurled him to the deck. Within
an hour both pictures appeared on the front page of the _Evening
World_.

One very dull day, when there was a dearth of news, my telephone rang
and an excited voice reported that a big excursion steamer was ablaze
in the East River. The man said he could see men, women, and children
jumping overboard in a mad panic to escape from the flames. He hung up
before I could ask a question or obtain from him the location of the
burning steamboat. In a jiffy a half-dozen men were in telephone booths
calling up points along the river for verification of what the man had
reported and as soon as the boat was located twenty of our reporters
were hurrying to the scene of disaster. I never witnessed more splendid
team work.

The steamer was the _General Slocum_, crowded far beyond her legal
capacity with Sunday school children and their parents. Survivors were
dragged by reporters from the water and rushed down to the _World_
building to tell their stories of what happened, the reporters
scurrying back after additional news. The boat was still burning and
rescuers were combing the waters about her for survivors when our
extra appeared on the street. Another extra was issued soon afterward
and within an hour was followed by another, the story having grown
into four full pages of the newspapers, with a dozen or more graphic
illustrations.

I recall that Harry Stowe, one of the most reliable reporters on the
staff, anxiously inquired of me over the telephone what estimate we
were printing of the loss of life and when I replied that our figures
indicated that between three and four hundred were believed to have
perished, he excitedly declared that there were not less than a
thousand. I cautioned him against exaggeration and didn’t change our
estimate. The actual loss of life was even greater than the estimate
given by Stowe.

On another dull day all of us were suddenly startled by a series of
terrifying explosions that jarred the _World_ building to the
foundation. We heard the crashing of glass in buildings all around us
and from the windows saw crowds rushing wildly through the streets. The
noise was like a bombardment.

Instantly a dozen telephones were active, our men calling in every
direction to locate the explosion. Calls came in from all over the
city and suburban surroundings from excited ones who wanted to know
what had happened. All that our men could learn was that the explosion
was across the river in Jersey. We directed all our energies then to
calling up points over there, but no one appeared to know where it was
located and the only information obtainable was that the damage was
widespread. A score of reporters hurried across the river on a blind
hunt.

Nearly an hour went by and we were still groping for information,
though every second of the time we kept the telephones in operation.
Such a condition had never confronted us before and all of us grew
wildly impatient with our impotence.

Don Seitz, the publisher, who had heard the explosions and the crashing
of glass and who had been importuned by telephone inquiries, tore into
the editorial rooms and angrily demanded an explanation of why plates
for an extra hadn’t reached the pressmen. I attempted to explain but
it was of no use. He didn’t want explanations, he wanted an extra.
Publishers get that way when they know something has happened that the
public is eager to read about and the presses are not in action.

Then came the news we had been straining our nerves to get. Irving Cobb
was one of our staff who had gone out of the office soon after the
explosion almost shook us from our chairs and had located it after a
wild chase in an automobile. The account he gave over the telephone
wire of what had happened when the dynamite dock blew up was far more
complete and comprehensive than I read in any of our contemporaries.

The remainder of the story, the damage in the financial district, the
havoc in the harbor and the effect in all of the nearby towns in New
Jersey and on Staten Island, was in the office and most of it in type
before we located the spot where it happened and what had caused it.
Our extra was on the street ahead of any of the others and that night
the publisher slept the sleep of the just and the righteous.

It was “having a reporter on the spot when hell broke loose” on the
Atlantic Ocean that gave the _Evening World_ one of the largest
news beats it ever had. Some will call it luck, but here is the way it
happened: A few days before the _Titanic_ crashed into an iceberg
and dragged to the bottom so many brave men and women, a reporter for
Mr. Pulitzer’s paper in St. Louis, the _Post-Dispatch_, called to
see me. He was taking a vacation and was to sail the next morning for
Italy. I was so busy that I could spare but a few minutes to chat with
him, long enough, however, for me to learn that he was to go on the
_Carpathia_ of the Cunard Line, a bit of information that proved
valuable in a time of pressing necessity that was soon to come.

When news of the _Titanic_ disaster was flashed into our office
one morning and with it the information that the _Carpathia_ had
come to the rescue and was picking up survivors from lifeboats and
rafts, I instantly thought of the _Post-Dispatch_ reporter and
sent him a wireless to prepare a complete story and I would meet the
_Carpathia_ with a tugboat off Sandy Hook.

Before sunrise the following morning several of the _Evening
World’s_ reporters accompanied me to Sandy Hook on the fastest tug
in the harbor and we sat all day in the tower of the wireless station
waiting for the _Carpathia_ to show up. It was night when she
entered Ambrose Channel. Our tug steamed alongside and when we shouted
through a megaphone for the _Post-Dispatch_ man, he leaned far out
over the rail from an upper deck and dropped a bundle of manuscript,
tied to a life preserver, into my outstretched arms. There was a dozen
columns of a brilliantly told story with all of the thrilling details
of heroism, of wives refusing to separate from husbands who were denied
a place in the lifeboats, of brave men who perished that women and
children might be saved, of the _Titanic’s_ commander who swam to
a lifeboat with a child in his arms and deliberately swam away to a
grave beneath the sea.

The tugboat nearly burst her boilers racing at full speed to the
Battery that we might get to the office with our story and issue an
extra that all New York was feverishly waiting for. Newsboys were
crying the extras throughout the city before the _Carpathia_ was
at her dock.

Besides giving the _Evening World_ a splendid beat over all of
its rivals, the story the _Post-Dispatch_ man brought enabled the
_Morning World_ to have a complete account in the edition that
goes to other cities, while the other morning papers were many hours
in gathering a comparatively fragmentary story from survivors and crew
after the _Carpathia_ had been docked.

Ralph Pulitzer, who inherited a spirit of liberality toward his
employees from his father, presented the _Post-Dispatch_ man with
a thousand dollars in cash that night and authorized him to double the
time allotted for his vacation abroad. For the little I did towards
securing the beat, he rewarded me almost as generously.

The Pulitzers have always been magnanimous toward men who work for
them. Perhaps it is one of the reasons of their phenomenal success. The
great genius who made the _World_ seldom let a week go by without
distributing benefits among those he thought deserving of special
generosity. Every man who by luck or industry scored an important
beat or turned in an unusually well-written story, sometimes simply a
striking headline, was almost certain to receive a substantial check
from the proprietor.

Mr. Pulitzer loved his profession, loved his newspaper, and loved his
men. He was a bigger man in all that goes to make up a man who is
truly great, than any other man I ever knew. Humanity lost a scholarly
teacher and devoted friend when death stilled his activities.

Once when he was at a health resort in the south of France, a secretary
brought in a bundle of newspapers to be read to the blind publisher.
There was an accumulation of copies of all of his publications for
several weeks, for he had been traveling so fast over Europe that the
mails from New York hadn’t overtaken him. The various editions of
the _World_ were gone carefully over and he then asked for the
_Post-Dispatch_, on which he first achieved fame and laid the
foundation for his fortune. Sam Williams started to read and stumbled
so confusedly that the blind man grew irritable and angrily asked what
ailed him, for he was always impatient of anything he construed as
indifference.

“The damned paper is so rottenly printed it is almost unreadable,” Sam
explained. “The type is bad, the ink is pale and dauby, the quality of
the paper is inferior and the presswork is worse than the rest.”

“Dear me, is it really so bad as all that,” replied Mr. Pulitzer. “From
the way you describe it I think they must have substituted shoe pegs
for type and tar for ink. Send a cable to Chapin to go out and take
charge for a month and put it in shape.”

Then he summoned Dunningham, his valet, to prepare him for a nap.

Almost before he awakened from it I was on my way to St. Louis. I
remained there six weeks, making such editorial changes as I thought
were necessary and causing the business manager no end of anxiety by
getting rid of all of the old type and ordering for immediate delivery
an entirely new outfit. I did other things that I believed were for the
good of the paper and ended my stay by engaging Horatio Seymour to take
editorial control.

The last day I was in St. Louis a dispatch came from Chicago,
announcing the suspension of the _Chronicle_ of that city.
Mr. Seymour, who was editor of the Chicago _Herald_ when
I was its city editor, had become editor and publisher of the
_Chronicle_, backed by John R. Walsh, a banker, who had formerly
owned the _Herald_. Walsh had just been sent to prison for a
swindle involving many millions and his downfall had wrecked the
_Chronicle_. I located Mr. Seymour amid the ruins by long-distance
telephone and made an engagement to meet him in Chicago the next
morning.

In the disconsolate mess I found him in it didn’t require
much persuasion to induce him to accept the editorship of the
_Post-Dispatch_ at a liberal salary and with a contract that
insured permanency. He got a good job that will endure as long as he
wishes it to and Mr. Pulitzer gained one of the brainiest editorial men
that American journalism has produced.

After we had arranged the details I left for New York, caught a severe
cold in the sleeper and was sick abed when my employer returned from
Europe, a few days later. As was his custom when he got back from an
extended trip, Mr. Pulitzer had a bundle of papers brought to his home
and read to him. On opening the _Post-Dispatch_ the secretary
commented on its improved appearance. Mr. Pulitzer had the paper fully
described and was told that I had bought entirely new type.

“Who authorized him to do that?” asked the Chief.

“He did it of his own initiative. Chapin does things and gets his
authority for what he does afterward.”

“Call up Shaw and tell him to increase Chapin’s salary five hundred a
year.”

Then he got me on the telephone at my home and said so many nice things
that I got well in spite of the doctor.

When Mr. Shaw, treasurer of the _World_, informed me of the
increase, he suggested that I write a note of acknowledgment to Mr.
Pulitzer, who had gone to his summer home in Bar Harbor. I did so,
thanking him for his generosity and adding, “I can wish myself no
better luck than to be permitted to continue in your service as long as
I work for anyone.”

The return mail brought this from his confidential man of business:

“The Chief was so much pleased with your letter that he has wired to
Shaw to double the increase.”

Lucky is he who has such a man for his employer.




CHAPTER XI

THE PULITZERS


Joseph Pulitzer was the greatest man I ever knew; great as a
journalist, great as a writer, great as a business man, great as a
scholar, great as a thinker, great in his knowledge of the events
of the world, great as the directing force of a big organization
of workers. To be associated with him and to listen to the wisdom
that came from his lips in ordinary conversation, was an education
in itself. To study the working of his wonderful mind was a rare
privilege. Some of the most enjoyable hours of my life were spent in
his library and in the long drives we sometimes had together. I never
came away from him that I did not feel inflated with ambition to
accomplish something big and worth while, not just something that might
attract his attention and perhaps win commendation for myself, but
something that would be a credit to the newspaper he was so proud of.
It was the reflex of his magnetic personality.

The story of his humble beginning and his rise to greatness in the face
of obstacles that would have kept most men groveling in the mire, has
been told so often and is so familiar to all I shall not even attempt
to sketch briefly his biography. I am content to write just a few words
of the Great Master as I knew him. He was my best friend among men. I
watched them lower his body into the grave and I felt as if my spirit
were being buried with him. I loved Joseph Pulitzer.

I have heard what others who professed to know him better than I did
said of him after he was dead. Some spoke with bitterness, called him a
tyrant and described him as unfeeling and brutal. My own experience was
just the opposite.

To me he was always kind, courteous, generous, and indulgent, mild
in criticizing and almost prodigal when praising my efforts. His
mind worked like a kinetoscope. I felt a keen delight while reading
newspapers to him, he grasped everything so quickly and with such
perfect understanding. No matter what the topic might be, blind as he
was, nothing need be elaborated or explained. He instinctively knew.

Sometimes when I have been reading to him he would become explosively
profane over an article in the _World_ he disapproved of, or
perhaps an editorial writer had not fully comprehended his instructions.

And how shockingly that blind man could swear! With him profanity was
more of an art than a vice. Once when I had read something to him that
made him angry with the writer’s stupidity he swore so passionately
and so loud and grew so choleric and red in the face, that I feared
something inside of him might snap.

Suddenly he checked himself and pricked up his ears. There were angry
voices in an adjoining room. One of his young sons was having a run-in
with his tutor and was forcibly telling what he thought of him. A
peculiar expression, a mixture of annoyance and amusement, came over my
employer’s countenance.

“Dear me,” he said, “I wonder where that boy learned to swear.” He
didn’t utter another oath during the remainder of my visit.

It was at the time of this incident that I learned a useful lesson
that guided my conduct in all the years afterward that I was with his
newspaper. He had telephoned to my home before six in the morning,
asking me to call at his home before going to the office. He was
breakfasting alone when I got there and the first question he asked me
was: “What is the news at the office?”

I replied that the most important to me was that I had discharged a
dozen young reporters the day before.

“Were there no good ones among them?” he asked.

“Some were very promising and in time might have developed into
first-class men.”

“Then, why fire them?”

“I was ordered to by Norris.”

John Norris was at that time financial manager of the entire
_World_ establishment. Whenever a spasm of economy hit him he
would order the head of each department to reduce his payroll and
often this involved discharging men without regard for merit. The last
ones employed were usually the victims. It was a rotten thing to do and
all of us knew it, but Norris was supposed to have full authority from
the proprietor and we took it for granted that when he said retrench
the order must be obeyed.

“But why fire men you considered worth keeping?” demanded Mr. Pulitzer.
He was looking straight into my face and his blind eyes seemed to be
searching my inmost thoughts.

“What could I do but obey the order from Norris?”

His face twitched nervously, there was a frown on his brow and his
compressed lips indicated irritation.

“I know what I would have done had I been in your place,” was the
placid response, after it had been carefully weighed in his mind.

He didn’t explain in words what he would have done and I didn’t ask
him to, but the next time Norris ordered me to cut down the staff I
didn’t do it. Norris fumed and fussed and ripped and snorted and even
threatened, but I stood pat and never again did I discharge competent
men for no other reason than that I was ordered to. The financial
manager who came after Norris won his reputation for efficiency by less
destructive methods.

If other newspaper proprietors would speak as candidly to subordinates
as Mr. Pulitzer did to me that morning there would be fewer wholesale
dismissals of capable men at the whim of the chap who controls the
finances. It is the instability of newspaper employment that rises
like a specter to disturb the peace of mind of every young man who is
fighting for a foothold on the elusive ladder of journalistic fame.
They never know when the dreaded “iron ball” will next roll and knock
them out. I have watched their faces when a hateful blue envelope
reached them with its curt note of dismissal, and I have seen the look
of dismay as they packed their belongings and silently headed for the
elevator; and I have fairly hated myself for being in a job that made
me the instrument of such ruthless treatment of men.

Once when I had breakfasted with Mr. Pulitzer he asked me to read the
morning newspapers to him. While I was opening the bundle his butler
brought, he lit a black cigar and settled contentedly back in his chair
to listen. In a few minutes he interrupted to ask if his cigar was
burning. With the inquiry he blew a cloud of fragrant smoke into my
face and I was nearly choked.

I have thought of this incident many times and I have closed my eyes
while smoking to try and realize the sensation that comes to a blind
man when he is unable to tell if his cigar is lit. I have read of the
enjoyment of blind men for tobacco, but I don’t believe it.

Another pathetic incident connected with his blindness impressed me
deeply. We were both in London. I had completed my vacation, after an
extended automobile tour of France and England, and had packed and was
intending to sail for New York the following day. Mr. Pulitzer arrived
from the continent shortly before midnight and when he was told that I
was in London and was to sail in a few hours he had them call me up and
ask me to cancel my passage and come to him the next day for luncheon.
He was interested in all I told him about my trip and insisted that
I remain at least another week, suggesting points of interest in and
about London he particularly wished me to visit. Among others were the
House of Commons and the National Portrait Gallery.

I spent the next two days in visiting places he recommended and
the third day drove with him through the park and described what I
had seen. I recall how interested he was in the speech I had heard
Chamberlain deliver, of my being invited to tea with lords and their
ladies on the broad portico overlooking the Thames, of being shown the
wardrobe of the King and his Queen in a room off from the House of
Lords and of being permitted to sit in the throne chair and to recline
on the Cardinal’s woolsack.

What interested him most was the description I gave of the wonderful
paintings in the portrait gallery. I had spent almost an entire day
there and he had me lead his imagination through all of the rooms as I
had visited them and describe to him the portraits of English Kings
and Queens of bygone centuries and of some of the famous men who were
conspicuous figures in the history of Great Britain. When I finished
tears were flowing down his cheeks.

“What wouldn’t I give to see what you saw,” he sobbed, as he sank
back into the cushions of the carriage and remained pensively silent
throughout the remainder of our drive. I thought then that I would
gladly have given him one of my eyes were it possible.

Mr. Pulitzer was ambitious that his three sons should follow in his
footsteps and be fitted by actual experience some day to assume control
of his newspaper properties. They were fine chaps, the best types of a
rich man’s sons, but they were full of the joy of youth and the father
seemed to expect them to grow into sedate, serious men before nature
intended they should. Ralph, the eldest of the three, came from college
and passed through the various stages of news reporting, gravitating to
the editorial rooms after a few years, he having developed an inherent
ambition for editorial writing. Consequently he was well-equipped with
actual experience as well as brains to assume active control upon the
death of his father.

I recall when young Joe came from college. He was a lovable lad,
with many of his father’s characteristics and much of his mother’s
gentleness. Joe loved fun. Something at college, bills I suspect,
displeased the father and by way of discipline Joe was told that he was
to be put at work in the office. Nothing could have pleased him more.
Mr. Pulitzer got me on the telephone and these were the instructions he
gave, as nearly as I can remember:

“I am sailing for Europe in the morning and I am sending Joe down to
work under you. Treat him exactly as you would any other beginner and
don’t hesitate to discipline him should he need it. There is to be no
partiality shown because he is my son. Do you quite understand?”

“I think so.”

“Promise me you will do as I ask.”

“Your instructions will be carried out.”

“Good, I shall rely on you. Don’t forget about the discipline. I have
told him that he is to report to you every morning promptly at eight
and work until five. Please see that he does it and that he gets there
on time. I know how you handle young men and I wish you to do the same
with him that you do with them.”

Joe came the following morning and we talked matters over. He appeared
to be enthusiastic and eager. He was assigned to assist Bob Wilkes
in covering the Criminal Courts Building. Wilkes had grown up in
the office, and was a veteran reporter and I knew that he would be
particularly interested in breaking Joe in. Joe reported for duty
promptly at eight for two consecutive mornings. The third morning he
was more than an hour late. His excuse was that the “butler neglected
to call me.” I explained to him that reporters were not supposed to
rely on butlers getting them out of bed and suggested that he stop at
a department store on his way home and invest in an alarm clock. The
alarm clock did the business and Joe got down on time for almost a
week. Then came a day when he failed to put in even a tardy appearance.

When next I saw him he explained his absence by saying that he had been
at his dentist’s an entire morning and at a ball game in the afternoon.
We had a serious talk about it and I tried to impress upon his youthful
mind that every member of the staff was expected to obey the rules of
the office, one of the rules being that no one should be absent from
duty unless he were ill or had been excused. He was sorry he hadn’t
understood and promised not to do it again. The next day he asked to
get off in order that he might be at the station to welcome a girl
friend who was coming from the West. The day following it was a request
to spend the week-end with the young lady’s relatives in the country. I
explained to him what his father’s instructions were, but both of his
requests were granted.

There was another week-end party a week later and Joe would very much
like to be with it, he positively wouldn’t ask again and would work
very hard when he got back to make up for his absence. Again I was a
traitor to the promise I had given his father. Joe must have enjoyed
the party, for he overstayed his leave and was roundly scolded when he
got back. He was as penitent as an heir to millions might be expected
to be and he made a lot of promises that I think he sincerely intended
to keep.

But the sting of reprimand is soon forgotten, and promises and good
resolutions are easily broken when a pretty girl beckons from afar. And
that is what happened to Joe the following week. Despite all I had told
him about the instructions his father had given me and his own promise
not again to ask me to disobey them, he came with another pleading
request to get away for a few days and I refused. Joe went without
permission and didn’t come back for almost a week. When he did come I
fired him.

The office gasped with astonishment when it got noised about that I had
discharged “Prince Joe,” as they called him, but Joe good-naturedly
treated it as a joke and took the night train for Bar Harbor, where he
fitted out his yacht and sailed it in all of the regattas there that
summer, or until his father returned from Europe and sent him out to
St. Louis. This was just what Joe wanted, for that is where his heart
was. He married the girl and they have a beautiful home and babies, and
Joe is now president of the _Post-Dispatch_ Publishing Company and
one of the important men of the town. I imagine he has forgiven me for
firing him.

Ralph was more serious-minded. Although in such delicate health in
his early manhood as to cause his parents much anxiety, he built up
his strength by outdoor life and hunting expeditions in the western
mountains, and was in full vigor of robust manhood when called upon
to take the management of his father’s newspapers. His management has
been along safe and sane lines, but few changes having been made in
the splendid organization that his father so intelligently assembled.
The most important change has taken place within the past year when
Florence White was made general manager, a title that is new in the
_World_ office. He had been financial manager for many years
and has been with the Pulitzers ever since he came from college, more
than thirty years ago. He is the quietest and most seldom seen man in
the entire establishment, and certainly one of the most efficient.
Another quietly efficient man is Don Seitz, business manager for nearly
twenty-five years. Much of the prosperity of the _World_ is due to
his untiring energy. I always found him broadminded and liberal.

I have mentioned the instability of newspaper employment, but this
condition no longer exists in the _World_ office, where nearly
every man who occupies a responsible position in the business, the
editorial, or the mechanical departments, has been with the paper for
twenty years or longer, many of them in the same positions they now
fill. I do not think this can be truthfully said of any other American
newspaper.




CHAPTER XII

NEWSPAPER ETHICS


The editor of one of the leading magazines recently wrote to me, asking
that I write for him a series of articles on the rise and decline of
journalism during the last fifty years. The proposition struck me as
being so absurd that I promptly declined, explaining to the editor that
I was unaware of any deterioration in our daily newspapers of to-day as
compared with any period with which my memory is associated. Nor has
there been.

It is my firm belief that at no time in the history of American
journalism have newspapers been more enterprising, more reliable, or
more influential. They are now, as they always have been and I hope
always will be, the greatest of all educators of mankind, honest,
truthful, and dependable. A dozen years have gone by since the great
editor of the New York _World_ passed to his reward, but his paper
is to-day as ably edited and as alert in gathering and presenting
news as during his lifetime. I can observe no signs of degeneracy
in either the news or editorial columns. This is true of its most
aggressive rival, the New York _Times_, a greater newspaper to-day
than at any time since it was founded. Other great newspapers are the
Philadelphia _Ledger_, the Chicago _Tribune_, and scores and
hundreds of lesser important ones in various cities throughout the
country.

A devoted friend, evidently sharing the mistaken opinion of the
magazine editor who asked me to write about the decline of American
journalism, has sent me a book that was written by Upton Sinclair. It
is entitled _The Brass Check_, an abusive and wholly unmerited
tirade against American newspapers. If half that he writes against them
were true, most of the publishers and editors deserve to be put in jail
and kept there.

My friend who sent me the book writes: “You certainly ought to know the
truth about a good deal of what he relates, and now that you are in a
disinterested position in relation to it you will probably be ready to
admit many of the iniquities of the present system of journalism.”

I read the book, a mess of maliciousness, and I am surprised that
anyone so intelligent as my friend could be so prejudiced by what seems
to me unconvincing mendacity.

As to my admitting “many of the iniquities of the present system of
journalism,” I can do nothing of the kind, for none exist or ever have
existed, as far as I ever experienced. In all of my forty years of
active newspaper work, most of it in the capacity of editor, I have
personally known of but two dishonorable newspaper publishers. One of
these got his just deserts when he was sentenced to serve a long term
of imprisonment in Joliet Penitentiary.

During the entire period of twenty-seven years that I was with the
Pulitzers, I was never once asked by anyone in authority to publish an
improper news item, nor was I ever asked to withhold or suppress or
color a news article. Joseph Pulitzer was the last man who would have
suggested such a thing, and had I done so at the suggestion of another
I would have ceased to be connected with his newspaper the instant it
was called to his attention.

Mr. Pulitzer was as zealous in preserving the integrity of his
newspaper as he would have been in protecting the good name of any
member of his family. He was a stickler for accuracy. He appreciated
the difficulties his news writers encountered in getting absolutely
accurate details of anything they could not personally witness, but he
had no patience with careless reporting or exaggeration. I have known
him to handsomely reward the enterprise of one of his reporters, and
a week later order his suspension because of a gross exaggeration in
estimating the number of marchers in a St. Patrick’s Day parade.

He forgave mistakes, but punished carelessness. He knew, as all
experienced newspaper men know, that inaccuracies are bound to
appear in the news accounts that are written by the ablest and most
conscientious men of the staff, as often as in the work of the novice.
The rapidity with which details of an important news happening are
gathered and put into type in time to get into the next edition is
partly responsible for some of the inaccuracies, but the greatest
difficulty lies in getting accurate statements from those to whom a
newspaper reporter must go for facts.

Let an accident, a murder, a robbery, or any of the many happenings
of a great city take place, and the first reporters to arrive on the
scene will frequently encounter a dozen or more eyewitnesses, all of
them eager to tell what they heard and saw and no two of them ever tell
the story alike. All may mean to be truthful and perhaps are sincere
in describing what they believe took place, but they saw it through
different lenses and the reporters are confronted with the difficulty
of weeding out the facts from the mass of conflicting and confusing
statements. That is why the reports in different newspapers so seldom
agree. I have made repeated tests and have never yet found the
statements of two persons to be alike in many of the important details.

This is also true in the testimony that one hears at every important
trial. No two witnesses testify alike, although they may intend to
be absolutely truthful and impartial. Reporters, I think, seldom
deliberately lie or color the facts for the purpose of adding interest
to their stories; “faking” is what lying is called in newspaper
offices. The career of a “faker” is short lived. His offense is sure
to be soon detected and it is never condoned. I don’t think there is a
city editor who wouldn’t discharge a news “faker” without compunction.
In my long career as a city editor I fired more men for inaccurate
reporting than for all other causes.

I have mentioned how zealous Mr. Pulitzer was in preserving the
integrity of his newspaper and there comes to my mind an incident that
attracted the attention of every member of the staff at the time it
happened. A new managing editor had come to the paper from the West,
at a time when the _World_ was exposing one of the most corrupt
political bosses that ever flaunted himself in Tammany Hall, and one
night someone connected with the _World_ was astounded at seeing
the new editor occupying a box at one of the theaters with the Tammany
boss. Others in the audience were equally astounded. Mr. Pulitzer
heard of it and sent for his indiscreet editor and what he said to him
rang in his ears as long as he lived. Soon after that the editor was
shunted into a less conspicuous position and he never regained the
confidence of his employer.

Another editor, who had a personal grievance against William R. Hearst,
smuggled into the editorial columns a bitter attack on the proprietor
of the _Journal_ and it cost him his job, for although Mr.
Pulitzer was in no way friendly to Mr. Hearst, he would not suffer his
newspaper to be degraded by personal animosity on the part of one of
his staff.

One often hears it said that the news columns of a newspaper are
influenced by the business office and that news is frequently colored
or suppressed in the interest of some important advertiser. I suppose
this may be more or less true in the case of some of the small
newspapers that are struggling for their daily existence, but it is
positively untrue in the offices of the larger dailies. I was city
editor for the _Evening World_ for more than twenty years and for
a period city editor of the _Morning World_, and in all that time
no one in the business office with authority ever interfered, even by
suggestion, with the handling of the news. The only approach to it
came from a solicitor of advertising, who had no more influence or
authority in the editorial rooms than the smallest office boy. I have
many times had big advertisers come to me, frequently accompanied by
their lawyer or some man of supposedly great influence, but what they
said or sometimes threatened was wasted effort. If I had permitted them
to intimidate me into suppressing a legitimate news article and Mr.
Pulitzer found it out, I would probably have been sent away to hunt for
a new job.

The greatest pressure that was ever brought to bear on me in the way of
suppressing news was in connection with the exposure of life insurance
methods. It was I who published the first article that opened the way
to exposing the greatest scandal in financial circles that New York
has ever known. It came about in this way: I was living at the Hotel
Majestic and had a party of friends for dinner one evening. As we were
about to go down my wife answered the house telephone and reported
to me that Gage Tarbell was calling and desired to talk with me on a
matter of urgent importance. My wife consented to take our friends
to dinner without me and I went with Tarbell into the library, where
we could converse without interruption. He appeared to be greatly
perturbed. Before stating his object in calling on me he opened his
watch and showed me inside the case the photograph of a beautiful woman.

“That is my mother,” he said, “and before I go any further with what I
have to say, I want to tell you of a pledge I made to her before I left
home to make my own way in the world. I promised her that no matter
what befell me I would never in all my life do a dishonorable act and
I want you to believe me when I tell you that I have never broken that
pledge.”

I listened to him with ill-concealed astonishment wondering what
could have happened to cause him to approach me in such an intimately
confidential way. I had known him in a casual way for several
years, during the period that he had lived in the same hotel and we
had occasionally played billiards together and had chatted socially
in the foyer on a number of occasions, but that was the extent of
our relations, except that we were both admirers of fine horses and
frequently drove our teams side by side on the driveways of Central
Park. With the brief preliminary about the promise he had made to his
mother long years before, he went squarely into the subject he had come
to talk with me about.

It will be recalled that Tarbell was, at the time of which I write,
Vice-President of the Equitable, reputed to be the richest and most
prosperous of any of the large life insurance corporations, with
investments running high into the hundreds of millions. Tarbell had
control of all the agencies. I knew that he must be a man of importance
and that his income must be very large to sustain the extravagant style
in which he had lived ever since our acquaintance began.

He began by briefly sketching his career and telling me of the
magnitude of the business his company had been doing for many years.
Then he plumped something at me that opened my eyes with astonishment.
There had been a row that day in the office between Hyde, who
controlled the stock by right of inheritance from his father, and
Alexander, the President of the Equitable. In a general way Tarbell
told me what the row was about and what it was certain to lead to when
once it got into the courts.

I was amazed that such rascality could have gone on unchecked for so
many years. In all my experience I had never heard of such crookedness
among men of high financial standing and supposed integrity. Hyde I
knew only from having seen him many times driving six horses to a stage
coach through the park, and when he exhibited his prizes at the annual
Horse Show in Madison Square Garden. Alexander I had met several times
and once had been his guest at dinner at the University Club. I had
thought then that he was the handsomest and the most polished gentleman
I ever came in contact with. And could this man be the crook that
Tarbell was picturing to my mind? It seemed unbelievable.

I arranged with Tarbell that he was to be at the old Astor House at
noon the following day, prepared to present proofs of what he had
told me to a newspaper man I would assign to meet him. I sent William
Spear, one of the hardest headed and most persistent investigators on
the staff of the _World_, and Tarbell made good his promise. Part
of what he told Spear appeared in our paper the following day and it
caused the greatest sensation that had been known in financial circles
for many years.

Other papers took it up and the _World_ forced the Governor, in
the face of many obstacles, to begin a public investigation of all the
insurance companies. The history of that scandal is so recent that I
shall not go further into details, for all newspaper readers know how
the reputations of great business men were blasted, some of them dying
of the shame of it, and they know also how the investigation brought
Hughes into the limelight and carried him straight up to the Executive
Mansion at Albany and later on to the Supreme Court of the United
States.

I remember Tarbell saying to me that night at the Majestic: “I will
furnish your paper with full particulars of the greatest business
scandal this country has ever known and what I give you will tear
hitherto unblemished reputations to tatters and smear many men with
the mud of their own iniquity. But mark what I now tell you: When the
exposure that is bound to come is sifted to the bottom, Gage Tarbell is
going to come out of it with character unstained and with a clean bill
of health.”

Soon after the investigation was well under way I went abroad and
was with Mr. Pulitzer in London when the report of the investigating
commission was made public. I read it aloud, every word of it, to my
blind employer and I never knew him to be more deeply interested. I had
told him of Tarbell’s visit to me and how the exposure was begun and
of what Tarbell had predicted would be the outcome so far as he was
personally concerned. Mr. Pulitzer seemed pleased when I read to him
that the report of the commission completely exonerated Tarbell.

As I was leaving the _World_ building one afternoon, I was stopped
by one of the reporters and introduced to the man he was talking with,
Rosenthal, a gambler. I had never seen the fellow before but had read
in the _World_ a few days previous an article he had furnished
that had caused a commotion in police circles and among the gamblers of
the Tenderloin. I listened for awhile to what Rosenthal was saying to
the reporter about threats that were being made to put him out of the
way, and then hurried away to keep an appointment I had in another part
of the city.

I got to my desk early the next morning, as details of the murder of
Rosenthal in front of the Metropole Hotel were being telephoned into
the office by our reporters who were covering the story. The man I had
talked with late the previous afternoon was lying dead in the morgue
and a score of detectives and several assistant district attorneys were
chasing about the Tenderloin in search of the gunmen who had lured him
to the street and punctured him with bullets from their automatics.
Something that Rosenthal had said to me the afternoon before prompted
me to ask Max Fischel, one of our reporters who was telephoning details
of the murder, if he had seen Lieutenant Becker and what he had to say
about the crime.

“Becker is sitting on the steps of the West Forty-seventh Street police
station, across from where I am now telephoning,” reported Fischel. “I
haven’t been able to get much out of him.”

“Ask him to call me on the telephone,” I directed.

Becker called me up a few minutes later, protested that he knew nothing
about the murder or who had done it, and angrily hung up the receiver
when I started to question him. The next day I went up to Police
Headquarters and asked Commissioner Waldo why he permitted Becker to
remain on duty when everyone was connecting his name with the killing
of Rosenthal.

Waldo defended Becker to me and declared that he would not arrest him
when there was no evidence against him except the unsubstantiated
statements of gamblers and their disreputable associates in the
Tenderloin. He told me, also, that he had been down to City Hall and
had talked the matter over with Mayor Gaynor and the Mayor had given
positive orders that Becker was not to be arrested or even suspended
from duty until sufficient evidence, not yet uncovered, should be
developed to justify an arrest.

Waldo declared his belief that Becker was being “framed up” by
friends of the murdered gambler and he told me that Mayor Gaynor was
firmly convinced of his innocence. I do not believe that Waldo was
ever convinced that Becker was responsible for the killing, even
after the policeman was convicted and put to death in the electric
chair. He often told me that he believed that Becker was a victim of
circumstances and the lying testimony of those who perjured themselves
to save their own slimy hides.

The night that Gyp the Blood and his gangster pals were captured in
a Brooklyn flat, Deputy Commissioner Dougherty, who personally led
the raid that resulted in their arrests, called me in my apartments
at the Plaza Hotel to tell me of the capture he had made. He was
telephoning from the flat in which they had been hiding and he offered
to hold them there until I could run over to Brooklyn and join him. It
was a tempting invitation, but I had to decline it to keep a theater
engagement I was not privileged to break.

After Becker and the gunmen had been executed and were in their
graves, District Attorney Whitman and his wife were dining with me one
evening at the Plaza and we got to talking about the Rosenthal case.
He had been elected Governor of New York only a week before our dinner
party. I told him how Waldo felt about Becker, and he related, with
circumstantial detail, a story about the two men that made me gasp with
astonishment.

It was the story of an up-town raid, years before the Rosenthal affair,
and if true, explained in a way the hold Becker had on Waldo at the
time all New York was clamoring for Becker’s arrest.

I took pains to carefully investigate the next day the story told me by
Whitman and I learned that Becker was not concerned in the raid Whitman
told about and that at the time of the occurrence Waldo was serving
as an officer in the Philippines. A week later Whitman and I and our
wives went together to White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia to spend
Thanksgiving week and I told him the result of my investigation.

“I told you the story exactly as it was related to me,” was his only
defense.

“But you didn’t tell it to me as a bit of hearsay gossip,” I retorted.
“You told it as a statement of fact, and coming from the lips of the
District Attorney who prosecuted Becker and the gunmen and who is soon
to be Governor of the State, I had every reason to believe it was true.
I am glad I took the precaution to investigate what you told me and I
suppose that you will be gratified to learn that it is untrue in every
particular, so that you will not again repeat as a fact what is really
only a malicious, lying scandal.”

Governor Whitman changed the subject. On that trip we had a long
and earnest discussion about prohibition and, in the light of later
developments, I am impressed by the far-sightedness of my companion, or
it may have been only a lucky guess, when he predicted that the day was
not far off when Congress would declare for nation-wide prohibition.

I couldn’t conceive of such a thing coming to pass in my lifetime and
said so.

“There will come general prohibition in all of the States before my
term of office as Governor has expired,” was his prophetic reply.

At luncheon, the following day, after drinking his wine, Whitman
raised his empty glass and looking me squarely in the face, exclaimed
with considerable feeling: “I assume that you, who never indulge in
intoxicants, think that I drink more than I should. Then listen to
what I am now saying: On the first day of January next I shall be
Governor of the State of New York, and from that day on I become a
prohibitionist in fact as well as theory.”

Governor Whitman prophesied accurately in regard to what Congress
would do; but he missed fire in his prophecy about himself.

One night I was dining with Mayor Mitchel. He was smarting under the
sting of what had appeared in some of the newspapers in connection with
his transactions with Senator Reynolds in the purchase by the city
of Dreamland at Coney Island and a tract of land at Rockaway. He was
plainly upset.

“I tell you, Chapin, that the worst iniquity in this city to-day is
yellow journalism,” he exclaimed, bringing his clenched fist down on
the table with a thump that set the glassware to jigging.

I happened to know that there was some justification for what had
appeared about the Mayor and Reynolds. It was the only smudge on his
administration of city affairs, and I told him so. I told him, also,
that it had become the fashion for men who didn’t like what newspapers
printed about them to call the paper “yellow,” but that I could never
make up my mind what “yellow,” as applied to newspapers, meant. If it
meant that the newspaper printed lies and manufactured sensations that
were unfounded, I knew of no such conditions that existed in any of the
New York newspapers. I told him that I believed that all of them meant
to be fair and truthful at all times and that no paper that was run
with any different policy could hold its circulation.

Then I told him my ideas of what is meant by “yellow journalism” and
went back to forty years or more of my own experience. I told him of
the Chicago _Times_, which was run on the policy of “raise hell
and sell newspapers,” and mentioned that headline which shocked readers
of the newspaper--“Jerked to Jesus,” over the execution of a murderer
who became a religious enthusiast just before the hangman broke his
neck.

I told the Mayor something more about the Chicago _Times_ that
appeared to interest him. It was the story of the burning of Hooley’s
Theater. It thrilled Chicago one morning and then caused almost a riot
when it turned out that the story was a vicious fake.

Frank Wilkie, father of a recent Chief of the United States Secret
Service, was one of the most brilliant writers in Chicago. He was for
many years on the staff of the _Times_. One night he went to the
box-office of Hooley’s Theater and was told that the seats were all
sold. He took pains to ascertain that the statement was untrue and that
it was another way of denying him free tickets.

Wilkie went to his office and wrote five or six columns of the
most graphic description of a fire that I have ever read. Hooley’s
Theater had burned during a night performance and many had perished
in the flames because there were not enough exits. A list of those
who were dead or horribly burned contained the names of many of the
most prominent men and women in the city. All Chicago who read the
_Times_ that morning was horrified at the appalling disaster until
it came to the bottom of the final column where, in very small type,
was a line in a bracket:

“(This is what may happen).”

Then Chicago grew angry and threatened to tear the _Times_ office
apart and mob its editor. Old Wilbur F. Storey sat in his sanctum and
chuckled. He had “raised hell and sold newspapers.”

That is what I call “yellow journalism,” although the _Times_
defended the outrage by declaring that the theater was notoriously
unsafe and a menace to the lives of all who patronized it. Wretched
and inexcusable fake though it was, prompted by no other motive than
to “get even” for not receiving free tickets of admission, the article
resulted in awakening the authorities to the fact that the theater
really was unsafe and “Uncle Dick” Hooley had to close and make
extensive alterations.

What a pity that New York was so ungrateful to Mitchel. He was by far
the best Mayor the city ever had in my time. He had high ideals and
purposes and worked with untiring zeal for the betterment of New York
and her people. I know of no man, either in political or civil life,
who worked so hard as he did during his term of office.

I called on Mayor Mitchel in City Hall one day and asked him to appoint
Magistrate Herbert to a vacancy on the bench of Special Sessions
Court. There were seventeen candidates. Frank Polk, then Corporation
Counsel and later Assistant Secretary of State, came into the Mayor’s
private office just after I had stated the object of my visit.

“Come on in, Frank,” said the Mayor. “Chapin is asking me to promote
Herbert to Judge of Special Sessions. What do you think about it?”

“Herbert is a fine man,” replied Polk, “but I have another candidate
and therefore am prejudiced. However, if Chapin is boosting Herbert I
imagine that my candidate and all the others will have to wait, for I
don’t see how you can very well refuse.”

“I have no intention of refusing,” said the Mayor. “I have asked many
favors of Chapin and this is the first he has ever asked of me. Is
Herbert a Catholic?” The Mayor addressed his question to me.

“I assume that he is, but don’t know,” I replied.

“Is he a Democrat?”

“I don’t know that, either. I have never asked him what his religion
or his politics are. I only know that he is decent and I think he is
deserving of the promotion and will make a good judge.”

Herbert telephoned to me a few evenings later that he had been summoned
to the City Hall and that he had met the Mayor for the first time and
had received his appointment. He is still on the bench.

It was Herbert who introduced me to Sing Sing. Some years before any
thought came to me that I should some day call it “home,” Herbert
invited me to visit the famous old bastile on the banks of the Hudson.
A former court officer of his, John Kennedy, was then warden of Sing
Sing. Herbert sent word to him that we were coming and the warden
met us at the railway station with his official carriage. It was so
different when I came again that the event is rooted deep in my memory.

We had dinner in the warden’s residence and it was then that I first
met Father Cashin, the prison chaplain, with whom I was destined to
later in life become so intimately associated. I recall how uneasy I
felt when the warden informed us that the nice looking chap who waited
on table and passed the food to me so politely was a convict, serving
a life sentence for murder. It gave one a creepy sensation among the
nerves of his spinal column.

After dinner we looked through the prison, guided by old “P. K.”
Connaughton. I recall the horror I felt when I saw the stone holes
where the prisoners were confined when they were not at work. It seemed
incredible that human beings could live in such dank and smelly cells
and not go mad or waste away with disease. I remember saying to Judge
Herbert that if all of the judges in the Criminal Courts of New York
would come up and inspect the cells they would have little desire to
send men here, save in extreme cases. He agreed with me.

Yet, for a year and a half I have slept every night in one of these
cells and have slept as soundly as ever I did in the Plaza Hotel, which
proves the old saying that “one can get used to hanging in time.”

One day I went to the French Line pier to say bon voyage to some
friends who were sailing on _La Bourgoyne_, then one of the most
magnificent of ocean steamships. I saw her draw away from the pier,
her decks alive with happy voyagers, band playing, flags fluttering,
passengers waving farewells to loved ones left behind. Aboard the ship
I had picked up a printed passenger list. I thrust it into a pocket and
started to return to the _World_ office.

As I was leaving the pier, I encountered Judge Dillon, one of the
ablest lawyers in New York. He was for many years attorney for Jay
Gould and for Russell Sage. It was in the home of the latter that I
first met him. I walked with him to his carriage. He told me that he
had come down to see his wife and youngest daughter off for Europe.
I imagined that he appeared troubled and anxious as if he had a
premonition of impending peril. That impression would probably not
have lingered in my memory all these intervening years if _La
Bourgoyne_ had sailed safely to the end of her voyage.

Two days later a telegram was brought to me at my desk in the
_Evening World_ office. It was a brief message from our
correspondent at Halifax, telling of a terrible tragedy at sea. _La
Bourgoyne_ had been run into by a sailing vessel in a smother of
fog and had gone down, drowning many of her crew and nearly all of her
first cabin passengers.

Our correspondent had been standing on the dock at Halifax and had
sighted a vessel sailing into the harbor with colors at half mast. He
sprang aboard of a tug and went out to her. The flag at half mast was
quickly explained. The vessel had sunk _La Bourgoyne_ and was
bringing in the few survivors that had been rescued.

The correspondent didn’t wait for details, but hurried his tug back
to land and ran for a telegraph office. In ten minutes his message of
disaster and death was before me. I rushed it to the composing room to
be put into type and telephoned the mechanical forces to get ready for
an important “extra.” I wrote a headline and directed that it be set in
the largest type we had. There instantly flashed through my mind the
passenger list I had brought back from _La Bourgoyne_ and that was
rushed up to the typesetters.

In less than fifteen minutes the “extra” was in the hands of the
stereotypers and a few minutes later it was on the presses. The presses
ran all day and far into the night, stopping only that additional
details might be added to the greatest sensation of the year. I was
the first in this country except telegraph operators to learn of the
disaster. The other newspapers and the press associations got their
first intimation of it when the _Evening World_ extras appeared in
the streets.

As the extra went to press I thought of poor Judge Dillon and what the
sinking of _La Bourgoyne_ meant to him. I got him on the telephone
and broke the news as gently as I could, bidding him hope, for the list
of survivors aboard the sailing vessel had not yet come and there was a
chance that other ships would pick up additional survivors.

I got no response after breaking the news to him. The operator reported
that his receiver was off the hook and she could get no reply. I was
too busy at the time to devote further time to him, but I learned
afterward that he was so overcome that he sank feebly into a chair and
had to be helped to a lounge. This, I learned under rather peculiar
circumstances.

More than a year had passed since the sinking of _La Bourgoyne_
and my wife and I were having Thanksgiving dinner at the Hotel Savoy.
The dining-room was overcrowded and so hot that my wife swooned at the
table and would have fallen from her chair had I not caught her in my
arms. The incident attracted so much attention from the other diners
that I motioned to two waiters to aid me in carrying her in her chair
from the room. A lady at a nearby table followed and directed that my
wife be taken to her apartment. I protested and urged her to return to
the dining-room, but she insisted on having her way. She put my wife in
her bed and applied restoratives until consciousness returned and while
we waited for my wife to recover she told me that she was in mourning
for her mother and sister who were lost on _La Bourgoyne_. She was
a married daughter of Judge Dillon.

I related the incident of my telephoning news of the disaster to her
father and she told me what happened to him when I did. She was one
of the most gracious and charming of women. We chatted until long
after midnight and when I thought my wife was sufficiently recovered
to be removed to our home in a carriage, she wouldn’t listen to it,
but insisted on keeping her the remainder of the night. She brought
her home the next day and came frequently to visit us. A few years
afterward she died.

Returning to the topic with which I began this chapter--the alleged
degeneracy of American newspapers--I might add that the only noticeable
deterioration, if any really exists, is in the writing of news by
reporters. Viewed from a distance and away from a desk in the editorial
room, my impression is that the standard of writing is not so high as
it was before the European war.

One reason for this is that many of the best writers on the New
York newspapers enlisted at the first call for volunteers. Many of
them never returned. Some sleep beneath the stars that shine on the
battlefields of France and Russia. Many found more profitable fields
of activity. I don’t suppose that they have become secretaries to
wealthy hod carriers, but I know that hundreds of clever men were lured
into publicity work for great industrial concerns and that hundreds
have found lucrative employment in the publicity end of motion picture
production. In one of the largest of the cinema companies are more than
a half dozen who were with me on the _Evening World_. The general
manager was a thirty-dollar-a-week reporter and the general sales
manager was a four-dollar office boy who came to me in knee pants and
grew to manhood in our office. These two are now earning fifteen or
twenty thousand dollars a year.

Newspapers have not kept pace with other lines of business in the way
of salaries and they have let many of their best writers slip away
from them, recruiting the ranks with inexperienced graduates of the
schools of journalism that have sprung up all over the country. In
the mechanical branches, all of them unionized, publishers have been
compelled to grant such large increases that printers and pressmen
are now paid almost as much as editors and the editors and reporters
have, in many instances, found a better market for the product of their
brains and energy.

What I regret most is that publishers have found it necessary to
increase the selling price of their newspapers. I believe in the
one-cent newspaper that even the poorest can afford. I believe in the
widest possible circulation that newspapers can attain. Papers like the
_World_ and _Times_ should have a daily circulation in excess
of a million copies. They cannot get and hold it unless they sell their
papers for a cent. Past experience proves this.

Publishers justify the raise in price by the great increase in the cost
of raw material since the war began. I think it would have been wiser
to make the advertisers pay the increased cost. In times like these,
when many of the smaller newspapers have been compelled to suspend
publication because of the shortage of print paper, advertising rates
are altogether too cheap when a candy shop in New York can afford to
purchase two full pages of advertising space in all of the leading
newspapers, and where a dozen or more department stores fill a page or
more each every day in the week.

Make the advertiser pay! Let the poor read! The more newspapers that
are read the less Bolsheviki and I. W. W.




CHAPTER XIII

GATHERING CLOUDS


Newspaper men are notoriously improvident. Many of them spend their
salaries as fast as they earn them. Perhaps if they were to acquire
habits of thrift and were ambitious to save, they would cease to be
newspaper men and would go into fields where the brains and energy and
hard work that make a successful newspaper man, would make the same
man rich if as earnestly applied to almost any legitimate business
enterprise. In proof of this nearly all of the good newspaper men I
knew who left editorial jobs to go into business, soon climbed to the
top, while those of us who stuck and grew old and gray, with no taste
for business and little inclination to save, counted ourselves lucky if
we kept out of debt.

Love of luxury was my besetting sin. I was like the chap who declared
he could get along without the necessities if he could have the
luxuries. Perhaps I was too much absorbed in news gathering and
newspaper making to give much serious thought to personal matters. I
was not one of the saving kind, too fond of the good things of life to
hoard my earnings.

There was a more cogent reason why I didn’t feel called upon to stint
and save; I had expectations of inheriting great wealth. A relative,
whose sincerity I never had cause to question, had promised to make me
rich, so why deny myself and those I loved, at a time we could most
enjoy what money could buy? Why worry over what became of my newspaper
salary when there were millions in sight that would some day be mine?

An old man whose life was nearly spent would soon go to his grave and
there would be no pocket in his shroud to hold the eighty millions
of his miserly hoarding. Hadn’t he assured me time and again that he
intended leaving me a large slice of his vast fortune and wouldn’t it
be silly for me to scrimp in the present when the future would soon be
splendidly provided for? It never occurred to me that a slip might
come that would deprive me of the expected inheritance.

Already I had visions of a mansion on the Avenue, a home in the
country, a yacht, a garage full of cars, a closet all my own to hang my
clothes in and a pair of suspenders for each pair of trousers.

The relative whose millions I expected to inherit was Russell Sage, my
great uncle.

He had no children. My grandmother was his only sister and I appeared
to be the only relative in whom he was interested. He liked to go about
with me, for I had passes to everything that was worth while and it
pleased him that we could sit in a box at the opera or at any of the
theaters and not have to pay. I took him to many of the big political
gatherings at Madison Square Garden and got him a seat on the platform,
and before the meetings were over my police friends would lift him over
the heads of the crowds and escort him to the street to save him from
the crush. I took him to prize fights and watched him grow as excited
as any around us.

Sometimes he would drive with me behind my team of fast horses,
sometimes I drove with him behind his, and often we would meet out at
the speedway and he would race his team against mine. I took him for
his first automobile ride. It tickled him so much that I think he would
have been tempted to buy a car if my chauffeur hadn’t told him how
much gasoline was consumed in a drive of twenty-five miles. He always
figured the cost of everything. He didn’t buy a car, but he rode in
mine whenever I would take him and I never saw him so happy as when we
were racing at high speed over the fine roads of Westchester County and
on Long Island.

What a lot of fun that old man could have gotten out of life if he
hadn’t been so stingy!

Russell Sage was the most penurious man I ever knew. In all his life
he never spent more than twenty dollars for a suit of clothes or
four dollars for a pair of shoes. He boasted to me that he made a
twenty-dollar suit last him from five to ten years, and he wore them
until they were more threadbare and shabby than the clothes worn by the
man who cleaned his office. He was more than eighty years old before
he put on his first suit of underwear.

I have sat in his shabby little bedchamber when we were going out to an
evening entertainment and watched him sew a button on his coat or mend
a rent in some part of his clothing. I have seen him draw off his shoes
and display no embarrassment because his toes were peeping through the
holes in his socks. I have walked a mile with him through congested
streets to return an empty mineral water bottle and collect the nickel
he had deposited with the dealer.

He was a director and one of the largest stockholders of the elevated
lines and when we would ride uptown together he would crowd ahead with
his annual pass and wait until I had purchased a ticket. Once he said
he could get me by the ticket chopper on his pass, but he didn’t feel
it would be fair to the other stockholders.

Russell Sage worshipped God, but his God was Mammon. He loved nothing
but money. Nothing else in all this wonderful world counted.

“You’ll be a very rich man some day,” he often said to me. Once when he
had repeated this several times and looked as if he was expecting me
to reply, I said that I hoped I would get more enjoyment out of riches
than he did.

“I hope you will get as much pleasure out of spending my money as I
have had in accumulating it,” was his characteristic response.

I sometimes wonder what he would have thought could he have known
what became of his millions after death deprived him of the pleasure
of counting them. I have never doubted that Mr. Sage meant what he
so often said about making me rich, but Mr. Sage had no voice in
distributing his fortune. Long before he died his mind went awry and
trustees were secretly appointed to look after his business affairs,
while he remained secluded in his home. It was while the old man was in
this pitiful state of mental decay that he signed a will. It is common
history how his will subsequently was altered and erasures made with
chemicals.

Some of my relatives started to contest it, but they were persuaded
by their lawyers to compromise and their lawyers received fat fees not
only from my relatives who employed them, but from those who had charge
of settling the estate. I remained passively inert. One of the big
lawyers of New York urged me to contest and offered to supply the funds
to carry the suit to the highest court, but I couldn’t without hurting
those who were near and dear to me and who needed what they got by the
settlement to make easy declining years.

Newspaper readers will remember how that crazy Norcross came on from
Boston, walked into the office of Russell Sage, demanded a million
dollars and when he didn’t get it exploded a bomb that blew his body
into fragments, wrecked the offices, hurled a man through a window into
St. Paul’s churchyard, and cruelly maimed for life the unfortunate
Laidlaw, with whom my uncle shielded himself from harm. I was called to
Mr. Sage’s home that evening, where I listened to the graphic recital
he gave of what had happened.

Although he had passed through the most exciting experience that
ever came to him, he told the story without apparent emotion and with
astonishing calmness, not forgetting the smallest detail. The amazing
part of it to me was when he related how he had grabbed Laidlaw, a
broker’s clerk, who chanced to enter the office just as the robber made
his demand for money, and had forcibly held him in front of himself
until the bomb went off. A few trivial scratches on his face were the
only marks on Mr. Sage to show how close he had been to death.

I told him that the robber had been torn apart and that Laidlaw had
been so terribly hurt that he might not recover. If he did he would
probably be a helpless cripple all the rest of his life.

“Too bad, too bad,” was Mr. Sage’s only comment.

I suggested that someone be sent to look after Laidlaw and provide
the best medical aid obtainable, but he made no reply other than an
impatient movement of his hand. The suggestion plainly annoyed him. He
hated anything that touched his pocket.

Afterward, when he was sued for damages, he denied on the witness stand
that he had used Laidlaw to shield himself from the robber, but I know
from his own lips that he did do it and I have always believed that if
he had given Laidlaw one of his eighty millions he would have gotten
off cheap.

Russell Sage wasn’t built that way. He would pay without protest a
fifty-thousand-dollar fee to his lawyer for fighting a damage suit, but
not a dollar would he voluntarily give to the unfortunate victim of his
selfish cowardice.

It was in the parlor of his Fifth Avenue home, one Sunday afternoon,
that Mr. Sage introduced me to Jay Gould, with whom he was associated
for many years in great financial operations. Jay Gould was a wiry
little man with bristling beard and ferret-like eyes. He impressed me
as being extraordinarily restless and nervous.

He motioned me to a seat beside him on a divan and became so chatty and
affable that I ventured to relate an incident of my early reporting
days in which he figured. It was while I was with the Chicago
_Tribune_. I had been sent out of town to meet an incoming train
to which his private car was attached, my mission being to interview
him concerning a western railroad he was accused of having deliberately
wrecked. While we were seated in his car he began to grow fidgety over
the speed the train was making. Both of us were nearly pitched from our
seats every time the train took a curve. The locomotive engineer had
probably been told who was behind him and was trying to show off.

Mr. Gould stood it as long as he could but became so frightened that
he interrupted our interview by springing to his feet and jerking the
bellcord. The train was stopped and when the conductor came running
back to find out what was the matter, he got a lecture on carelessness
that made his ears tingle.

When I related this incident that Sunday afternoon in Mr. Sage’s
parlor, a peculiar expression came over Mr. Gould’s face.

“Are you a newspaper man?” he asked.

When I told him that I was with the _World_, the newspaper he once
owned and used to boost his schemes, he hastily arose, abruptly walked
to another part of the room and never deigned to notice me again. Jay
Gould didn’t like newspaper men. There was a reason. Newspapers blocked
some of his cleverest schemes by turning the searchlight of publicity
on them.

It was a treat to listen to Mr. Sage relate bits of anecdotes about the
big men of finance. He knew them all, knew most of them more intimately
than their wives did, for it was to him they came in times of stress to
borrow money. It has been said of him that he had more ready cash at
his immediate command than any man in the world. His loans were usually
made in millions and I am certain that he always exacted two millions
of collateral for every million of his cash.

He told me a lot of interesting stories about his financial “buddies”
that I don’t feel privileged to repeat. I loved to hear him tell about
Vanderbilt. Mr. Sage always called him “Bill.” Fancy being able to
speak of the greatest railway magnate in the world as “Bill!” That
alone must be full compensation for the many annoyances of being a
multimillionaire. It was a treat to hear him tell how “Bill” would come
to him and humbly plead for a loan of a few millions to tide him over
the week-end. That is where his fun came in. It was all the fun he ever
got.

The Sages lived for almost half a century in an old-fashioned brown
stone house on Fifth Avenue, a few doors above Forty-second Street,
but after the aged financier lost his mind a more pretentious house
was bought farther up the avenue and Mrs. Sage furnished it newly
throughout. When it was ready for occupancy the old gentleman was
decoyed up there and shown through the handsome rooms, but he turned
his nose up at the expensive furnishings and insisted on returning to
the familiar old home with all its well-worn shabbiness. They had a
hard time coaxing him to stay. It wasn’t until everything in the old
house had been sent to an auction shop and the house itself turned into
a busy hive for dressmakers and hairdressers that he was weaned from it.

Even his personal wardrobe went with the rest. Riley, his nurse,
bundled all of the threadbare garments and battered hats and patched
shoes and sent them to the Salvation Army to be given to anyone who
would accept them, ordering for Mr. Sage an entirely new outfit. It was
then that this poor old millionaire, poor in spite of the fact that he
had more ready cash than any other man in the world, put on the first
suit of underwear he ever wore and for the first time in all his life
was attired in clothing that distinguished him from the most lowly
beggar in the street.

My grandmother told me this story connected with the birth of Russell
Sage: Her parents were poor and lived on a small farm near Oneida,
midway between Syracuse and Utica, in the central part of New York
State. When my grandmother was seven years old she was sent out of
the house one day and cautioned not to return until late in the
afternoon. She wandered into the woods and came back with her apron
filled with black and white “kittens” which she had found squealing
in a stump. They smelled so dreadfully she intended to wash them but
when she got home she was immediately called to her mother’s room and
the bedclothing drawn down to show to her astonished eyes a new baby
brother the doctor had brought in her absence. Grandmother was so
surprised that she dumped the litter of kittens on the bed for the baby
to play with, but her horrified mother quickly pulled the covers over
the baby and screamed for someone to come and take away “those nasty
skunks.”

I related this incident to Russell Sage eighty years after it happened
and he laughed until tears ran down his cheeks.

Grandmother also told me that he didn’t attend the funeral of either
his father or his mother. On both occasions he telegraphed that he
was too busy to leave New York, directing that bills for the funeral
expenses be sent to him. In later years, when the cemetery where his
parents were buried was abandoned, he telegraphed instructions to have
the bodies taken up and interred in another cemetery at Oneida and he
also directed that a suitable headstone be erected. All this was done,
but he didn’t so much as acknowledge receipt of the bills that were
repeatedly sent to him. In the end my grandmother had to pay.

He left her fifty thousand dollars when he died. That is, a bequest for
that amount was one of the clauses in his will, but when the will was
filed she had been dead for several years. He had evidently forgotten,
for she died before the will was drawn. Riley told me that Mr. Sage
didn’t know what he was doing when he signed the will and hadn’t the
mentality to understand what was in it.

When I tumbled from the dream clouds and realized that the millions I
had expected to get had faded into a single cipher that hadn’t even
a rim, I accepted the situation philosophically and I do not recall
now that I had any feeling of disappointment or resentment. I would
have liked the money for the comforts and pleasures it would have
brought, but when Mr. Sage’s will was made public I was already in
such easy circumstances that I had been able to provide for myself
nearly everything that I could have gotten with his money. I had been
successful with speculation in Wall Street and had salted away in a
safe-deposit vault securities that apparently insured me a competence
as long as I might live. I had a yacht, a high-powered touring car,
fast horses, and was able to live in the finest hotel in New York, to
make a tour of Europe and to spend all of my vacations as luxuriously
as the richest of the idle rich.

And I had the closet all my own that I had always coveted and the pair
of suspenders for each pair of trousers. Besides all this I had a
good position and a good salary that promised to endure as long as I
should need them. I felt that I could afford to smile over the loss of
my potential inheritance and smile I did, for I had already enjoyed a
dozen years of affluence and I was so lucky in speculating that I had
an idea that I would gain riches without having them handed to me by
the administrators of a dead man’s estate.

Then things began to happen. In Wall Street one may get rich or go
broke almost over night. The ticker is a fascinating play-thing when
it is ticking thousands of dollars into one’s pockets, but it doesn’t
always tick that way. Somehow I didn’t realize that my “luck” was in
following the tips of friends who let me in on some of their financial
deals. I got an idea that I could do as well on my own hook and
sometimes I played the tips of men who thought they knew and were only
poor guessers. There came some hard knocks and my securities began
to take wings. The more I plunged the harder the knocks. Then came
sickness and a peremptory order from a physician to take my tubercular
throat to California.

I had some big deals pending when this calamity befell me, deals that I
was confident would turn out successful and recoup all of my losses. To
safeguard my account if the market took a downward turn in my absence,
I withdrew my securities and deposited them with my brokers. I also
took to them securities that were not mine, but of which I was legal
custodian. In doing this there was no thought of dishonesty in my mind.

In the hurry of getting away my only thought was to leave with my
brokers more than sufficient collateral to protect my account in any
emergency that might arise while I was away. It didn’t occur to me
that I might be wiped out. I expected to be gone not more than six
weeks, but it was eight months before I returned, eight months of
hardening outdoor life in the mountains of California and Colorado
and two months of recuperative sojourn in the lazy atmosphere of the
beautiful Hawaiian Islands.

During the winter months that I was in California I kept pretty closely
in touch with the trend of affairs in Wall Street and the reports that
came from my brokers were all favorable. In the effort to regain health
I spent money with the free hand of a Pittsburgh millionaire, but with
every confidence that my speculations would pay it back and leave a fat
margin to my credit. This was the situation when I sailed for Honolulu.

In that far-away, fascinating paradise, it was easy to forget Wall
Street. Surf riding, midnight bathing, moonlight rides, shore picnics,
native feasts with wonderful dancing and more wonderful music, climbs
up Mount Tantalus, motor trips over the Pali and around the island
through sugar and coffee plantations, and cocoanut and pineapple
groves, and an excursion to the awe-inspiring volcano, Kilauea; all
these delightful distractions tend to make one unmindful of the
frantic clashing of bulls and bears in the arena of the New York Stock
Exchange. There is no other spot on all the earth that I have seen
where one can so completely forget to worry and gain such perfect rest.
It is called the paradise of the Pacific. It is dreamland.

For three months I didn’t see a market quotation. I knew that I was
many thousands of dollars ahead of the game when my ship sailed from
San Francisco, and it never occurred to me that a convulsion might come
that would turn rich men into paupers. A convulsion did come.

On my return to California I found that all of my supposed profits had
been swept away and that many of the securities I had deposited as
margins had gone with them. I telegraphed to my brokers to find out how
I stood. A reassuring reply came back that the worst was over and the
tendency of the market was now upward. The statement that came with it
showed a satisfactory balance to my credit. I had been scorched a bit
but was far from consumed.

A San Francisco bank president took me to his club to luncheon and
introduced me to other financiers, all of whom spoke optimistically
in discussing the future of the stock market. I confided to the bank
president what had happened to me while I was blissfully oblivious
in Hawaii and he gave me a tip that he said would make up my losses
and a lot of money besides. It was to buy sugar. He got the tip in
“strict confidence” he told me, from the biggest sugar grower in the
world. That night I wired to my brokers an order to buy me enough sugar
to stock a wholesale grocer. A few days later I was inflated with
optimism, for sugar began to rise.

Before starting for New York, I decided to visit a celebrated throat
specialist and let him look me over. At the end of the week he declared
that it would be hazardous for me to return East before warm weather
set in. My throat was improved but not cured. He suggested Arizona or
Colorado. A friend who had accompanied me back from Honolulu, invited
me to go to his big cattle ranch, six thousand feet above sea level, on
the western slope of the Rockies.

So to Colorado I went, after a flying trip to the Yosemite and the Big
Trees. On the way I read the newspapers and sugar looked to be the
sweetest quotation in the market reports. I was certain from the way
the market was then going that my profits would bring back all I had
lost and more than pay for the expenses of my trip. I decided to act on
the advice of the banker and not sell until sugar reached a point that
he had jotted on the back of his visiting card.

I got to the ranch of my friend, after a hard ride on a hard-riding
horse. It was a fifty-mile climb over steep mountain roads. There was a
log cabin with a blazing fire to welcome me. It was to be exclusively
mine as long as I cared to stay. The cowboys took me on hunting and
fishing trips and I went with them on the spring round-up and aided in
driving thousands of cattle to be branded. It was the best fun I ever
experienced and all the while I knew that the tubercular germs in my
throat were being killed and that sugar was going to bring me greater
riches than I had ever known.

One day a telegram came from my brokers. Sugar had gone to smash and so
had I. All of my securities and securities that were not mine had been
lost.

I was broke. Worse than that, I was ruined and dishonored.




CHAPTER XIV

TRAGEDY


Upon returning to New York, I found that my imagination hadn’t pictured
the situation any worse than I found it. Practically everything I
possessed had been swept away.

When I went to California I had enough put away to have kept me
comfortably the remainder of my life and to insure the future of all
who were near and dear to me. I came back to find myself worse than
beggared, with only my newspaper salary left and uncertainty as to how
long that might last if my tangled financial condition became known.
There were many debts and but little to pay them with and I realized
that as soon as it became known that I was back in town there would be
a swarm of hungry creditors at my heels. I sold my yacht and automobile
and used the proceeds in settling the most pressing obligations.

Worst of all was that I didn’t have the courage to take anyone into my
confidence. I believed that if it became known to others that I was
in financial difficulties my newspaper position would be jeopardized
and my creditors would get me by the throat and prevent me from doing
anything to rehabilitate myself. My only chance of salvation, I
reasoned, was to hold creditors in check as long as possible and devote
all of my energies to building up anew.

Isn’t it the perversity of fate how lucky one sometimes is when he
least needs it and how unlucky when he is face to face with disaster?

There had been many times in recent years when speculative ventures
yielded astonishing result with almost no effort or wisdom on my part,
but now that I had reached the brink of a precipice and knew that it
would take but a little push to send me over, luck forsook me. No
matter how I speculated or how sure seemed the tips given to me by my
friends, I almost invariably was on the wrong side. If I bought stocks,
they went down; if I sold, they went up. The more I sought to lift
myself from the mire, the more hopelessly involved I became.

Time was rapidly nearing when I could no longer keep my secret. It
wasn’t debt alone that tormented me by day and night. I perhaps
could have survived that by arranging with creditors to pay them in
instalments from my newspaper earnings, but I was menaced by something
far worse, for unless I could raise a substantial sum within a period
of time that was swiftly coming to an end, there would be dishonor and
inevitable arrest and imprisonment. It was this impending ignominy
that upset my mental balance and caused me to do the crazy things that
followed.

I mentioned in the preceding chapter that at the time I was hurried
away to California I sought to safeguard the account with my brokers by
depositing with them all of the securities I possessed, together with
securities that were not mine, but of which I was legal custodian. The
latter represented an investment of eight thousand dollars I had made
in behalf of a minor relative as guardian. There was no one to question
or criticize what I did with these bonds so long as I produced them
in court when called upon to make final settlement of my trusteeship.
A bonding company must make good if I defaulted. The hideous specter
that was ever before me was whether I would be able to replace the lost
bonds.

Several times I was almost within reach of them, but each time the
market turned against me and as often I would be brought to the verge
of prostration by despair. I grew disheartened over repeated failure.
Fear took possession of me and fairly choked me into submission.

Then came days and nights of abject terror. The ring of my telephone
would often startle me so that my heart would almost stop beating and
the mere sight of a policeman in the street would cause me to tremble
and hasten my pace and perhaps dodge around a corner or into some
hallway. Often when I went to the _World_ office in the early
morning I felt certain that the policeman near the entrance was waiting
for me with a warrant, and my heart would thump wildly against my ribs
until I had passed him and was at my desk. If a card of some unknown
caller was brought to me in the office, I have caught myself asking if
it were a policeman. I got so I couldn’t sleep.

All I could think of was what would surely happen to me when the day
for settlement came and I couldn’t produce the bonds. I couldn’t take
refuge in the plea that I had intended no wrong, that I hadn’t the
least intention of converting the bonds to my own use or of speculating
with them. The law, I knew, would take into account what I had actually
done, not what my intentions were, so in reality I would be adjudged
as guilty as if I had actually stolen the bonds and squandered them or
gambled them away.

I recall going to a movie and seeing a picture of a lad who stole the
pennies from his sister’s toy savings bank and spent them for candy
and apples. After he had eaten the candy all of the people in the
street were suddenly transformed into policemen and he fled from them
in terror, but they surrounded him on all sides and beat him down with
their clubs. It turned out to be a dream, but I likened my own state
of mind to that of the conscience-stricken boy who robbed his sister’s
bank, and I realized more than I ever had before that “conscience makes
cowards of us all.”

The day I long had dreaded was finally at hand and I didn’t have the
bonds. I staved off disaster for a brief respite by sending a telegram
that I was detained by business, thus obtaining an extension. I knew
that I was at the end of my rope and rather than suffer disgrace and
imprisonment, I resolved to do the only thing that was left me. It was
cowardly, but all the courage I ever had was gone and I felt myself
crushed and beaten.

Suicide, the last resort of a moral coward, I decided was preferable
to never-ending disgrace, so I set about preparing for it. Police
Commissioner Waldo was my friend and I telephoned to him for a
revolver. Winnie Sheehan, his secretary, replied that if I would call
at the commissioner’s office there would be a weapon waiting for me.
I got it within an hour, a wicked looking thing, and found it fully
loaded. A police officer taught me how to use it.

That evening I destroyed all of my personal papers at the office
and left a note to the effect that I was unexpectedly called out of
town and might be absent for several days. At midnight I left for
Washington, accompanied by my wife, who knew nothing of my difficulties
or of what had been in my mind ever since our return from Colorado.
I told her that I was going to Washington on business and she gladly
consented to accompany me.

On the train that night I tore up my bank books and all private papers
that were in my pockets. I never would see New York again, for I was
going away to die, to die like a coward and leave her to bear all the
poverty and disgrace that was sure to follow, leave her in this way
after a lifetime of affectionate devotion. I cried all night, sickened
with the thought of it.

I caught a cold in the sleeper and the next day I was down with
the grippe. The fever lasted for two weeks and all that time I was
planning self-destruction. The first day I was able to get about I
went to the cemetery where my mother was buried and bought the plot
adjoining hers, arranging at the same time to have it resodded and
beautified with plants and shrubs.

Up to this time I thought only of putting an end to myself. My wife, I
supposed, would be cared for by my relatives. I asked them about it and
the reply was so evasive and unassuring that my plans were completely
upset. The problem now confronting me was what was to become of her.
She was so fragile and delicate it was impossible that she could ever
do for herself. She had no relatives to turn to. She had scores of
loving friends but there were none to give her more than temporary
shelter when I abandoned her.

I went away into the woods for a day and sat silently thinking. When
I returned I had made up my mind to do the most dreadful deed that my
distorted brain could conceive. It was hideous, but there was no other
way.

The following morning I went to a tombstone maker and selected a large
block of granite, giving directions to have my name and my wife’s name
carved on it and to have the stone immediately set up on my cemetery
plot. I wanted to see that everything was done as I planned, and I
arranged to go to the cemetery as soon as the tombstone maker should
notify me that his work was completed.

The interval was spent in pleasure seeking. I took my wife and my
relatives for long automobile rides in the daytime and to the theaters
in the evenings and we celebrated the anniversary of our wedding with a
sumptuous dinner at the New Willard. The day after that dinner was to
be our last day on earth. Could anything be more horrible?

The morning of that last day I was with Harry Dunlop, at that time
Washington correspondent of the _World_. I had gone to his office
to write farewell letters. When I finished my task he asked me to
accompany him to the White House, where President Wilson was to receive
all of the correspondents in a body and talk to them of the threatening
situation along the Mexican border.

I was reluctant to go but finally yielded. When we were assembled in
the President’s office, some two hundred or more, Joe Tumulty slipped
around to my side and asked me to linger after the others had been
dismissed and be presented to Mr. Wilson. I couldn’t get out of it. One
may imagine the thoughts that were flashing through my mind while for
fifteen minutes I stood with the President and chatted with him about
matters of national importance. I felt grateful that he could not read
my thoughts or know that the hand he clasped so cordially would soon
press the trigger of the revolver that was concealed in my pocket.

As I was leaving the White House, a secret service agent informed me
that Chief Flynn had telephoned that he would like me to come to his
office. I had known Flynn when he was a deputy police commissioner in
New York and we were friends. I called in response to his invitation
and he took me over to the New Willard to luncheon. He didn’t suspect
what was in my mind any more than President Wilson had, but when I left
him I went to a writing table in the hotel and wrote him a brief note
of explanation, to be delivered with the others I had written, after my
body should be found.

That night the strangest, most inexplicable phenomenon prevented me
from doing the dreadful deed I had planned.

We all went to the theater in the evening to see Ziegfeld’s Follies and
it was nearly midnight when we retired. My wife and I were occupying
the room that had been my mother’s and were sleeping in the bed in
which she died. After I had turned out the lights I hid my revolver
beneath my pillow and then lay still for a long time, trembling with
horror and dreading the monstrous thing I had to do.

At last the deep breathing of that dear little woman by my side told me
that she was fast asleep. I had waited for that time to come that she
might never know.

I drew the revolver from under the pillow and as I raised myself on my
elbow I saw something that stopped me. It was my dead mother.

She stood in the room but a few feet from the bed, not the
white-haired old woman, wasted with disease, that I had come to see a
few days before she died, but the beautiful mother I had idolized when
I was a child. She looked at me with the same sweet smile and gently
shook her head, just as she had done in childhood days when reproving
me for something I shouldn’t have done. Then she faded away.

I have thought of it often since and have wondered if it really was
my mother’s spirit I saw, or if my fevered brain imagined it. I know
it all seemed very real at the time and that what I saw or imagined I
saw caused me to thrust the revolver under the mattress and to take my
sleeping wife in my arms and kiss her, at the same time breathing a
silent prayer of gratitude that she was still alive.

In the morning I received a telegram, peremptorily demanding that I
appear in court without further delay and render a final accounting of
my trusteeship. It was accompanied by a threat to forfeit the bond. I
knew I could no longer delay the execution of what I had determined to
do, but after what had happened the night before I resolved not to do
it in our family house.

That evening my wife and I sailed down the Potomac and the next morning
we were at Old Point Comfort. We found the Chamberlain so crowded that
we were unable to secure more than one small bedroom. I declined the
poor accommodations offered me and the next train carried us on to
Richmond.

If my wife thought I acted strangely she probably attributed it to the
weakened condition the grippe had left me in. I know that she never
suspected that I was in trouble and more than half-crazed. She was
accustomed to leaving everything to me and to believing that what I
did was always the best thing to do, and I had always trained myself
to mask my thoughts and to present an untroubled exterior, no matter
how great my worries might be. It is the worst thing a husband can do
and brutally unfair to the wife, but I had always gone on the principle
that the husband should bear all the burdens and that he owed it to his
wife to share with her only his joys and pleasures.

What blind idiots some of us are.

There was a delightful suite of rooms awaiting us when we arrived
in Richmond, a fitting place for the gruesome tragedy that was so
imminent, and I resolved that it should be done that night.

We spent an enjoyable afternoon, or at least my wife did, driving about
the historic city, visiting the site where Libby Prison had stood and
in which her brother had been a prisoner of war, and on out to the
historic battlefields.

After dinner I went alone to write a brief letter of directions to
the hotel people and the coroner. When I rejoined my wife I found her
chatting vivaciously with an old friend of mine I hadn’t seen for many
years and who had noticed our names in the evening paper and had called
to renew a friendship that was broken off long ago. I was so glad to
see him that we visited until far into the night and when he went away
I had no heart to go ahead with what I had come to do.

The next day we returned to Washington. There I found another telegram
in reply to one I had sent, giving me an extension of one week to
make my appearance in court. Two days of the week were already gone.
I suggested a visit to Baltimore and to Baltimore we went, and again
I selected a suitable suite of rooms that had no connecting doors. It
was in this city that the head office of the surety company that had
furnished the bond for my trusteeship was located. I have never been
able to explain to myself why I went there. I recall seeing the gilt
lettering on the windows of the surety company as we drove by on our
way from the railway station to the hotel.

All the blood in me rushed into my heart as I realized that they must
soon make good the bonds I had lost in speculation. I wondered if they
had yet become alarmed and if they might not be trying to trace me.
In a newspaper I glanced at while we were at dinner was a notice that
George Cohan was playing _Broadway Jones_ at one of the theaters
that evening and my wife suggested that we go. I don’t remember
enjoying a play so much in all my life. The comedy of it caused me to
forget myself completely and the horror that was suspended above my
head. After the play we went to supper and continued to laugh over
what we had seen and heard. Broadway Jones had been in almost as deep
trouble as I was and had pulled out of it.

There was no tragedy in our apartment that night.

The following morning, when we started for a walk, two men with
slouched hats drawn over their eyes, went out of the hotel when we did,
crossed the street and stood on the corner for a minute as if watching
to see which direction we would take. When we started up the street
they followed on the opposite side and I was certain that they kept
glancing in our direction from the corner of their eyes. I began to
shake so I could scarcely walk. They disappeared in a building and came
out as we passed and again followed. I led my wife into a small park
and we sat on a bench. The men passed us and I imagined they looked
sharply at me, though neither spoke. They went on through the park and
I lost sight of them as they disappeared around a bend of the walk. I
believed they were hiding behind a clump of shrubbery. I was in agony.

“Those two men who just passed us are detectives and they will arrest
me,” I said to my wife.

“Arrest you! Arrest you for what?”

I told her the whole miserable story, of my losses through speculation
and what had happened to the other bonds; of my determination to put an
end to myself. I said nothing of the more monstrous part of my plan.
She listened to me in silence and without once interrupting. I don’t
think she even stirred or that the expression of her face changed
during the recital. When I had finished she took my hand in hers and
said:

“My dear husband, I know better than you can tell me that there was
nothing intentionally dishonest in what you have done. I know you are
incapable of that. I think, too, that you have worried so much over it
that you have magnified your troubles and lost control. Try to pull
yourself together. Those men you saw were not detectives, nor is it
likely that anyone is concerned about you or your movements. Let us
return to New York. You have scores of friends who will gladly aid you.
I am sure there will be some way out of it if you will only collect
your scattered wits.”

We went to New York that evening. The following day I told my troubles
to a lawyer friend. He gave me good counsel. If there were no way of
replacing the bonds, he suggested that I go direct to the bonding
company, make a clean breast of everything and propose to them that
they settle with the courts, which they would be required to do if I
defaulted, and accept from me monthly payments from my salary until
their claim was fully satisfied. What he told me gave me hope. That
night I awoke from a sound sleep and the name of a friend was fixed in
my mind. I called to my wife, who was asleep in an adjoining room, and
told her I would try and see that friend as early in the morning as I
could. I did see him. When I started to tell him of the trouble I was
in, he checked me.

“I don’t care how you got into trouble, just tell me what I have got to
do to get you out of it,” he said.

And when I did, he directed me to go to his bankers and the bonds would
be waiting for me. In less than an hour after I got them they were on
their way to court, together with my accounting, and my bondsmen and
myself were released from further liability. Only my wife, the lawyer
who counseled me, and the friend who aided me, ever knew of the peril I
was in. That legal friend is now a judge in the New York courts. I put
him there.

Unlike the burned child who dreads the fire, I didn’t keep away from
the flames that scorched and almost consumed me. One would naturally
suppose that after all I had gone through I would have learned a lesson
and would never again be drawn into the whirlpool of stock speculation.
But the microbe that had fastened in my mind wasn’t easily uprooted.

Speculation sometimes becomes a mania that should be classed with
insanity. The mischief is done when the speculator begins luckily. If
his first ventures were disastrous he could be easily cured, but when
his initial investment has been followed by an almost uninterrupted
string of profits, he begins to imagine himself a wizard and no matter
how much or how often luck turns against him he seldom stops until he
is ruined. There isn’t a broker’s office in the financial district
that isn’t haunted by white-faced, careworn men who were ruined by
speculation. Many of them were once millionaires. Worst of it is they
never give up hope of some day making a “killing.”

I stayed away for awhile, but a friend came to me with a sure thing tip
one day and I plunged on it with every dollar I could borrow. And I won.

The check that came to me was so munificent that I almost felt rich.
Part of it went to creditors, but the greater share into another
speculative investment. Again I won and I kept on winning until one
day the stock market was thrown into a wild panic by news that Germany
had declared war. The bottom dropped out of everything and the Stock
Exchange was compelled to close.

That was the last time I ever speculated. I never again had an
opportunity. The ruin that came to me was even more disastrous than
the first. Everything I had was swept away, leaving me broke and twenty
thousand dollars in debt. It was the finish.

The next four years I was in hell. Creditors harassed me day and night
and there was no way of satisfying them. They got my salary as fast as
I could earn it and sometimes much faster. I borrowed from every friend
who would lend to me, from Peter to pay Paul and from Tom to pay Peter,
but the strain was more than I could stand and I cracked under it.

There came a time when something snapped in my brain.

I knew that I was breaking down and I felt that it wouldn’t be long
before I lost my mind. Came long nights of sleeplessness, nights of
mental torment, nights when I would awake to hear “insanity and death”
shouted in my ears. I lived again the torture I went through that time
I was in Washington.

Thoughts of suicide were always hammering into my brain. All that
restrained me was what it would mean to my wife. If I were to carry out
what was ever present in my mind she would be a beggar. Worse than
that there would be nothing left for her to do but follow after me and
in the same way. It was maddening, for I loved my wife.

Once I went alone to Maine ostensibly to fish, but with a determined
purpose not to return. I had been there the summer before and had been
nearly upset in a storm on the lake. The thought came to me that I
could get caught out in another storm and that my upturned boat would
enable me to end my life without scandal, for it would at least have
the appearance of accident. No one could possibly know that it was
premeditated.

Again I cleared out my desk at the office and destroyed all of
my private papers. I fished every day for a week. Then came the
opportunity I was waiting for, a stormy day. People at the house where
I was stopping advised me not to venture on the lake, but I laughed
at their fears, and went, intending not to return. I had figured that
my life insurance would be sufficient to maintain my wife for the few
years she might survive me.

I went out on the lake and not until I was struggling with the waves
did it suddenly dawn on me that I had come away from New York without
paying the premiums on two of my accident policies. I had carried the
insurance for twenty years and had suffered the policies to lapse only
ten days before. How I could have forgotten so important a matter is
incomprehensible. I knew the companies would reinstate my policies as
soon as they received the premiums, but it was too late then for the
urgent purpose that was in my mind, for if I attempted to send checks
from Maine and in a few days was “accidentally drowned,” the companies
were certain to contest payment.

All of this flashed through my mind while I was out on the lake. I
pulled the boat back to shore. I went back to New York that night. I
paid the delinquent premiums and waited for sufficient time to elapse.

Two months went by and there was scarcely a waking hour that I wasn’t
planning self-effacement, taxing my ingenuity to find a way that would
make it appear to have been an accident. The more I thought about it
the less plausible it seemed. If I were drowned while bathing, it
might at first be reported as accidental, but my experience with such
matters convinced me that my plan was impossible, for the insurance
investigators would be certain to find out how hopelessly involved I
was and there would be sufficient grounds to contest payment of my
policies. Creditors grew more and more importunate. I had exhausted
every expedient I could think of and knew that I could no longer stave
off legal proceedings. Lawsuits and exposure meant the loss of my
position. I was against a stone wall.

The climax came in the middle of September, 1918. A bank refused
to renew my note, another bank notified me that I had overdrawn my
account, two creditors sent word that my checks had been returned
to them unpaid, and other creditors served notice that they would
immediately take action to garnishee my salary. All this in a single
day.

The following day was Sunday. It meant a respite of twenty-four hours.
After that, abysmal ruin. Nothing could save me.

If I were alive on Monday morning there would be a pack of sheriff’s
officers and process servers waiting at my office. I would be turned
out of my hotel and all of my belongings would be seized. Probably I
would be arrested for overdrawing my account. I lay awake all night
thinking about it. What a wretched end!

Early Sunday morning my wife and I started for the seashore. A block
from our hotel a little old woman in a faded black dress, her face
pinched with suffering and privation, stretched out a trembling hand
and I dropped a coin in it.

“Oh, God! I wonder if I will ever come to that,” my wife said.

I don’t suppose she meant it. She knew nothing of the predicament I was
in, though she may have intuitively suspected that I was worried about
money matters.

But what she said cut into my heart like a knife stab. I knew that
within a few hours she would be almost as friendless and helpless as
that poor creature.

On the beach at Brighton all that afternoon I could think of nothing
but the little old beggar woman. Her face would fade from the picture
and my wife’s face would come and, I would see her, sick and trembling
and wan and feeble, stretching out her hand to a chance passer-by. It
burned into my brain like fire.

There was only one way I could save her from such a fate.




CHAPTER XV

A “LIFER” IN SING SING


The amazing part of my story is that I am alive to relate it. I have
often asked myself how it happened that I did not finish what I set
out to do, and I am sure that this thought must have been even more
puzzling to my friends and probably to nearly all who read this. Some
considerate persons have tried to convince me that God had a purpose in
prolonging my life, but I wonder what the purpose could be, other than
to give me opportunity for repentance. Life seems so bleak and useless
when one is in prison.

It has been said by others that after taking the life of my wife I
lacked the fortitude to kill myself. The assumption is justifiable, but
it is untrue. With nothing left to live for, it was easy to die. It
required far greater courage voluntarily to walk into a police station
and deliver myself into custody, knowing what it would mean to me and
what I must go through when once I was made a prisoner. There were two
loaded revolvers in my pocket. I had but to press the trigger of one
and in the fraction of a second I would be beyond the reach of human
punishment.

When I gave myself up to the police I realized as vividly as I ever
realized any act of my life, that I would be put in prison, placed on
trial and convicted, and that I would have to go through the ordeal of
ignominious death by legal execution. The thought that I might escape
the electric chair and spend the remainder of my life in prison, never
came to me. I believed when I walked into the police station that but
little time would elapse before I would be put to death. Had I thought
otherwise, I would surely have chosen the easier way.

Whatever my mental condition may have been a few hours earlier, my
mind at this time was perfectly clear. I had come to myself and I knew
what I was doing. At the time of the tragedy I had scarcely slept for
more than a week. My nerves were unstrung and there was a prickling
sensation as if my brain was being tortured with red hot needles. I
felt that I was going mad and I was fearful that insanity might so
twist my brain that I would be unable to carry out what I had planned
to do. What if I became insane and killed myself and left my wife alone
in the world, without relatives or friends, to suffer and starve, after
all her loving devotion through our long married life. This thought was
a constant torment. I wonder now how I ever remained sane.

My wife never knew that the man she loved killed her. She died while
peacefully asleep. That is all the consolation I shall ever have and it
makes easier to bear what I must face as long as I live. It would have
been horrible if she had known.

Had death come to her instantly, I would now be lying by her side
in Glenwood Cemetery at Washington. She lingered for two hours,
unconscious and without pain. Had I killed myself while she were yet
alive and she had survived, all that I sacrificed to save her from
penury and want would have been in vain. I did not dare end my own
life while she breathed. So I knelt by her side, her hand in mine, and
prayed that God would understand and forgive. When her life fluttered
and went out, there came to me a strange exaltation and with it all
the worries that had been tormenting me faded into nothingness. I had
nothing more to worry about. No harm could ever befall her. Then my
brain went dead.

What happened immediately afterward I but dimly remember. I have tried
to piece together what I did throughout that day and all of the night
but it is like trying to gather the elusive threads of a fast-fading
dream. I left our hotel to go into Central Park and finish there what
was in my mind to do.

Then came delusions. It seemed to me that no matter where I went there
were hundreds of outstretched hands waiting to snatch my weapon and
prevent me from carrying out my purpose. I now realize that these
fancies were vagaries of an overwrought brain. I grew numb, insensate.
All day and all night I rode about the city on elevated trains and in
the subways. I went over to Brooklyn and sat for hours in Prospect
Park, waiting for the crowds that seemed to surround me to go away and
give me a chance to die. In the blackness of the night I found myself
trying to get into Bronx Park. It was raining and at the sound of a
footstep I fled in terror, lest a policeman seize me and take away my
weapons. No thought of arrest for what I had done came to me. I thought
only that an encounter with a policeman would result in the loss of my
two revolvers and that I should then be without the means of destroying
my life.

Throughout the night I rode up and down in the subway, from end to
end and back again, crouched in a seat at the end of a car. I fancied
myself dead and that it was the shell of what once was me that sat so
silent and still in a subway train. It was as if I were in a trance. My
hands were like lumps of ice. The blood in my body seemed frozen. For
hours I couldn’t even think. I had no sensation of thirst or hunger. I
just rode on and on like a dead man might.

In the early morning I got off at a station and went to a lavatory. A
boy was opening a bundle of papers when I came out. I bought one and
got on a train to go to my office, just as I had done every morning at
that hour for more than twenty years. I read all of the war news on the
front page. When I turned to the inside a headline glared at me. My
eyes were fascinated with the horror it told. In black type at the top
of the page was:

  “CHARLES CHAPIN WANTED FOR MURDER!”

Then it all came back. I wasn’t dead; I was alive and was wanted by the
police for murder! How many headlines like that I had written in my
forty years as a newspaper man! And now it was me who was wanted for
murder. I got off the train at the next stop and made for the nearest
police station. A voice within kept urging me to kill myself while
opportunity remained, but I deliberately walked to the station house,
placed my two revolvers before the astonished eyes of the officer in
charge and told him my name and why I was there. He looked at me as
though he thought I was crazy.

An hour later, at Police Headquarters, I made as complete a statement
as my shattered nerves would permit to an assistant district attorney
and a group of police officials. They warned me that anything I told
them might be used against me in court, but I had nothing to withhold
and no defense to offer for what I had done. I was ready to receive the
punishment the law demands and told them so. I was never more unafraid
in my life. Before night I was in a cell in the Tombs, a watchful
guard at the barred door to prevent me from cheating the executioner.
A bright light was kept shining on me throughout the night, for I was
under “observation” in “Murderers’ Row.”

Many lawyers called next day to tender their services. Some were old
friends and they generously offered me financial aid as well as legal.
I wanted nothing of them and told them so. I wanted only to be left
alone and to let the law finish me as quickly as possible. Hundreds of
letters and telegrams came. Many asked why I had not let them know of
my financial difficulties. “I would gladly have paid your debts twice
over had you come to me,” I read in some of the letters. The offers
came too late, for the one worth saving was beyond human aid and I was
a murderer.

When I was arraigned in court I asked the District Attorney if he would
obtain consent for me to attend my wife’s funeral, pledging in return
for this one favor that I would waive all formalities of trial and save
the State from further expense in expediting my execution.

It may seem strange, in view of the fact that a newspaper man is
supposed to know about such things, that I was unaware that a prisoner
charged with a capital offense is not permitted to plead guilty.
Whether he wishes to or not, a plea of “not guilty” must be arbitrarily
entered and it is then incumbent upon the prosecuting attorney to prove
him guilty. Could I have had my way, there would have been nothing to
do in disposing of my case but to sentence me. The executioner would
have attended to the rest.

When a plea to the indictment had been entered and I was remanded to
the Tombs, a newspaper friend brought Abe Levy to see me. I had known
him for twenty years as one of the ablest criminal lawyers in New York
and he and I had had many a wordy scrap when he fancied that something
our paper printed was detrimental to his client, for Levy is a zealous
champion of every man whose defense he undertakes. I explained to him
that I had no means to employ counsel and that I wished for none, as
I had no intention of making any defense when my case was called for
trial. I further told him that after the prosecution presented a prima
facie case against me, which would occupy but a few minutes, I expected
to announce to the court that I had no witnesses in my behalf and no
defense to offer.

“And then what?” asked the lawyer.

“The judge will sentence me and my troubles will soon be over.”

“And do you think there is a judge in our Criminal Courts who would
permit you to do such a thing? If there is, the Court of Appeals would
surely not tolerate it. Now, you do need a lawyer and you need one very
much, and at the request of many of your friends I am going to act in
your behalf, not for any fee, however, for I want none. I look upon it
as a sacred duty to save you from yourself.”

I was much distressed the following day to learn that my counsel had
appeared in court to ask for the appointment of a commission to inquire
into my sanity, although I was much gratified when told that Justice
Malone had appointed three men of the highest integrity to preside at
the hearing. They were George W. Wickersham, formerly United States
Attorney General; Lamar Hardy, Corporation Counsel of New York during
the administration of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel; and Dr. Jelliffe,
a famous specialist in mental diseases. I knew that these men would
not permit me to be railroaded to an asylum for the insane. I further
realized that no matter which way they reported to the court, their
finding would be above criticism. I shall always feel grateful to these
important men who gave up their valuable time and listened so patiently
to the great mass of testimony that was presented by my indefatigable
counsel.

I sat a silent spectator at the sessions of the Commission and
attentively listened to well-meaning friends and my former office
associates testify to everything they could conjure from their
resourceful memories that would help to prove me irresponsible. Every
little act of mine that could in any way be twisted into an indication
of an insane mind was dug up and elaborated, until they got me to
wondering whether I was a moral idiot, a paranoiac, or just an ordinary
unclassified lunatic.

It seemed to me that in all my life I had never heard so much
unconscious perjury. One reporter interpreted as an indication of a
deranged mind that many of his political items went into my waste
basket. Another that I would rush to a telephone booth while he was
conversing with me. I didn’t explain that I went into a telephone booth
because there was an irate creditor on the wire and that I did not
wish others in the office to hear what I said to him. A cub reporter
was sure that I was crazy because I gave him tickets to a banquet and
told him to go there and enjoy himself, but only as a guest, as another
reporter had been assigned to write about it. Four famous specialists
told of interviewing me in the Tombs on several occasions and of
their explorations into my anatomy in search of bugs. One took as an
indication of paresis that I joked with him and smoked a cigar while
he bored into my spinal column and drew from it two tubes of fluid for
laboratory analysis.

There was a doctor in the Tombs who is supposed to minister to sick
prisoners. He came to my cell and tried to win my confidence by telling
how he had hurried back from his vacation when he learned that I was
there and in need of medical attention. He bobbed up at the hearing
as a witness. I heard him proclaim himself an insanity expert and
I thought I detected a smile of derision on the countenance of Dr.
Jelliffe, one of the most celebrated of insanity experts, and if I read
his thoughts aright he was mentally exclaiming, “You poor fish!” To
the astonishment of everyone present and plainly to the disgust of the
three gentlemen who were presiding, the doctor drew from his pocket a
voluminous manuscript which purported to contain a report of every
word that had passed between himself and me during the many visits he
had made to my cell in his capacity of physician. I had always talked
freely with him. It now developed that every time he talked with me he
went straight to his office and wrote out for the District Attorney’s
use all he could recall of our conversation. He had a treacherous
memory. What he failed to remember he filled in from imagination. For
this service he earned an extra fee of fifty dollars.

When he had finished reading his manuscript he passed it over to the
District Attorney and it was put in a portfolio with other papers.
Confessedly, the doctor was less of a physician than he was “stool
pigeon” for the District Attorney. There was nothing that he could
testify to that could harm me, for I was beyond any harm he could do
and, besides, I courted the worst that could possibly befall me. But I
shudder when I think of the incalculable injury he may do to others by
prostituting his calling as he did in my case. Dr. Jelliffe took him in
hand after the manuscript had been read and interpolated with theories
and opinions, and what he didn’t do to him in the way of showing up his
ignorance and bumptious pretension, was because Dr. Jelliffe grew tired
of his own ruthlessness.

The witness who most interested me was Katie. She testified that she
had been my wife’s personal maid for eighteen years and in all that
time she could not recall having heard me utter so much as a cross
word. “He was her constant and devoted companion,” said Katie, “more
like a lover than a husband.” Katie said a lot of nice things about
me and so did the intimate women friends of my wife. Their testimony
convinced everyone present that there was no motive connected with the
tragedy other than was shown in my own frank statement.

The hearing dragged along for nearly four months. Sometimes there
would be an interruption for several weeks, because of the illness of
someone, or some other would be importantly engaged elsewhere. Nearly
a thousand pages of typewritten testimony were taken. I was on the
witness stand for seven hours, telling as connectedly as I could all
of the circumstances that led up to the tragedy. I made no attempt
to justify my act or to give my hearers the impression that I was in
any way irresponsible. On the contrary, I did everything I could to
defeat what my able and resourceful counsel was so ingeniously trying
to accomplish. And I succeeded. When I had finished telling my story
the District Attorney was so well satisfied that out of my own mouth I
had proven my sanity that he announced that he would call no witnesses.
He didn’t even review the testimony that had been given or address
the Commission. Mr. Wickersham personally wrote the report of the
Commission, which I was afterward privileged to read. It was an ably
constructed document of nearly forty pages and summed up my case with
remarkably clear understanding. It was fair, logical and not without
sympathy. I marvel that anyone could have come so close to my own
appraisal of what I did. The finding declared me legally responsible.
Dr. Jelliffe injected into it an inference that although legally sane
I was medically insane, a distinction without much difference. These
dear old doctors, bless their souls, whenever they delve profoundly
into psychiatry, get so they “kid” themselves into believing that
almost everyone except themselves is a “bug.”

I recall one question that Mr. Wickersham put to me while I was
testifying that perplexed me beyond reply. It was: “You believe in God
and in His watchful care and mercy. If you had killed yourself and not
your wife, haven’t you enough faith to believe that God would have
looked after your wife and provided for her wants?”

When the question was asked there flashed through my mind the vivid
picture of the little old woman in black who tremblingly stretched
out her hand for alms that last Sunday morning when my wife and I
were starting for Brighton Beach. No doubt she had faith in God and
often went on her knees to Him for help and strength, yet there she
was in her dire extremity of keeping body and soul together, a poor
little beggar in the streets of a cold and pitiless city. Truly, the
inscrutable working of the Divine mind is beyond human comprehension.

I falteringly attempted to reply to Mr. Wickersham, but grew confused
lest I be misunderstood and simply told him it was the only question
for which I was unable to frame an answer. I believe he understood what
was in my mind.

A day was set for my trial and Justice Bartow S. Weeks of the Supreme
Court was chosen to preside. Just a week before the trial was to begin,
Lawyer Levy came to see me in the Tombs, accompanied by one of my
friends. It was his first visit since the day, four months before, that
he applied for a commission to inquire into my sanity. All through the
hearing almost the only words exchanged between us were when I asked
about his son, sick with a fever at one of the army encampments. All
feeling of resentment had long since been merged in the admiration
I felt for the lawyer when I watched his masterly method of piecing
together testimony to support his theory. His shining bald pate
conceals a magnificent intellect.

Mr. Levy informed me that he had just come from the District Attorney.
The latter had sent for him, he said, and had told him that the
complete testimony taken during my insanity hearing had been submitted
to five Supreme Court judges and that after going over it they had
given a unanimous opinion that I could not be convicted of first degree
murder. The District Attorney had proposed that I consent to plead
guilty to a lesser degree, saving myself from a trying ordeal and the
State from the expense of a trial by jury.

“I promptly told the District Attorney that I would agree to nothing
in the way of compromise,” declared Mr. Levy, “and I further told him
that I am confident of acquitting you at the final trial of your case.
But, after a conference with some of your friends, they have asked me
to explain what you will probably have to go through if you are placed
on trial. I am reasonably certain that no jury would ever convict you,
but it is very doubtful if twelve men could agree on a verdict. This
would mean another trial, with perhaps the same result, and the trials
that would follow would perhaps run through more than a year, possibly
two or three years. If the jury should agree and found you guilty, it
would be at least a year before the Court of Appeals could act upon it,
and if a new trial was ordered many months more would probably elapse
before it could be reached. All this time you would be confined and
closely guarded in the Tombs or in the condemned cells at Sing Sing.
The case might drag along for several years and in the end, unless
there was an acquittal, we would be back to where we are to-day. Your
friends insist that you have not the physical strength to stand such an
ordeal. I will not attempt to advise you what course we shall pursue.
You must now decide that for yourself.”

It was appalling the way he described it. I already had spent four
months in the dreadful Tombs, surrounded by vicious and depraved men.
I witnessed and heard things that made my blood run cold. The horror
of it no pen can describe. Dante’s conception of hell made of it a
paradise as compared with the iniquities of that bedlam of a prison. I
realized that if I had to endure it much longer a commission wouldn’t
need to waste much time in finding me stark mad. God, what a hole to
stick men in!

To Mr. Levy, I replied: “Let me make clear to you that I have no wish
to dodge my fullest responsibility to the law for what I have done.
My desire is for the quickest possible finality. I feel now, as I
have from the day I came here, that I can go to the execution chamber
without fear. If the choice is left to me I would prefer the electric
chair to imprisonment. But I am not unmindful of all that you and
my friends are doing for me, and I am greatly distressed at what it
all means to the newspapers with which I was associated for so many
years. If what the District Attorney has said about not being able to
convict me is true, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity, I am
willing to do as he suggests, providing that it is made clear in open
court that my plea of guilty to the lesser degree is offered only to
save further trouble and expense, and because the District Attorney
is convinced that I cannot be convicted of the crime for which I am
indicted. A life sentence to State Prison at my age is to be preferred
to even one year in the Tombs.”

The following morning I went before Justice Weeks, accompanied by
Sheriff Knott, and was sentenced to serve at hard labor not less than
twenty years or more than natural life. The entire proceeding that
terminated forever my activity in the world outside of prison walls was
over in three minutes and a few days later I was brought to Sing Sing.

For many months after I put on the gray garb of a felon, I was so
ill and dazed that much of the time I could scarcely realize my
surroundings. I wanted to crawl out of sight of everyone and cry.
And there was the almost constant dread that I would soon break down
completely and be transported to that far away asylum in the mountains
of the North for the criminal insane.

Gradually the nervousness and apprehension wore away and my health
began to improve. Fear of insanity has now almost entirely left me. I
have been treated with great kindness and consideration, not only by
prison officials but by my associates in gray. My closest friends of
bygone days could not have been more kind than these unfortunate men
who are serving long sentences of imprisonment. There is so much good
in the worst of them, so much sympathy and generosity among them all.
I expect to be here as long as I may live and I am trying to serve God
and be helpful to my fellow men as best I can. The past is behind me.
What I have done I cannot undo. I give no thought to what may come. The
yesterdays are gone, the to-morrows will take care of themselves. I try
to get as much as I possibly can out of each day as I live it.

Almost two years have passed. In the solitude of my cell I have
subjected myself to a more searching examination than the most
analytical prosecutor could put me through, and the verdict that is
firmly fixed in my mind is that I did the only thing that was left me
to do. There was no other way of saving my wife.




Transcriber’s Note:

Punctuation has been standardised. Hyphenation and spelling have been
retained as in the original publication except as follows:

  Page 16
  An Autobigraphy of a Hotel Office Chair _changed to_
  An Autobiography of a Hotel Office Chair

  Page 22
  burlesque actresss, put _changed to_
  burlesque actress, put

  Page 24
  ever line in it _changed to_
  every line in it

  Page 62
  Mrs. Garrigle was as _changed to_
  Mrs. McGarrigle was as

  Page 102
  I telegraphed five colums _changed to_
  I telegraphed five columns

  Page 144
  It was the _Decameron_ of Bocaccio _changed to_
  It was _The Decameron_ of Boccaccio

  Page 147
  ticket to Chicago They _changed to_
  ticket to Chicago. They

  Page 155
  I was familar with _changed to_
  I was familiar with

  Page 156
  the additional informaation _changed to_
  the additional information

  Page 279
  Riley, told me _changed to_
  Riley told me

  Page 282
  During that winter months _changed to_
  During the winter months

  Page 288
  I I bought stocks _changed to_
  If I bought stocks






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