The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman Page A
Authors: Matthew Goodman
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morning from the city streets always included high-pitched cries recounting what had happened there the day before.
During the first week of the Sun ’s publication in early September 1833, Benjamin Day received another visitor looking for a job. The young man standing before him, George Washington Wisner, had the wavy dark hair, strong jaw, and coal-black eyes of a theatrical leading man, though Day could perceive an intelligence in those eyes, along with a cockiness and a certain hardness as well, the result of half a dozen years of difficult living on his own; and perhaps Day, who prided himself on his discernment of others, also detected in the young man’s spare frame, in a certain hesitation of breath or movement, the fragile constitution that would compel him to leave the Sun only twenty months later, and to which he would eventually succumb, in a frontier town in Michigan, at the age of thirty-seven.
George Wisner was twenty-one years old, just two years younger than Benjamin Day, and although the two men had significant political differences (Wisner was more radical, particularly on the slavery question), they also had much in common. Like Day, Wisner was a printer by trade, moving to New York at the age of nineteen to seek his fortune. He came from the small town of Auburn in western New York, where he, like Day, had received a common-school education; at the age of fifteen Wisner had also left school to apprentice as a printer at a local newspaper. And like Day and so many other young men from the country, Wisner had come to New York looking for work in the burgeoning print trades. By 1833 he was working for a Nassau Street newspaper, the New-York Evangelist. The work, however, could not have been as steady as he would have liked, because the Evangelist was a weekly rather than a daily paper, and in September Wisner appeared at the Sun office on William Street looking for a job.
It was a fortuitous moment for Wisner to arrive, as Day was just seeking someone to work as his police court reporter. The Sun’ s police reports had already proven highly popular with readers, and he was eager to continue them, but he had a problem. The police court went into session at four in the morning, to process more efficiently those whom the watch-men had rounded up the previous night, and Day couldn’t attend the court sessions and do everything else that was required to bring out the Sun each day. He needed someone who was industrious, trustworthy, ready to get up before dawn to do his reporting, and, not incidentally, was – 36 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 37
The News of the City
willing to do it on the cheap. Wisner was young and single (and therefore inexpensive), and he was enthusiastic, and he came highly recommended by the foreman of the Evangelist, James G. Wilson, whom Day so respected that six years later he would ask him to be his partner on a new literary magazine called Brother Jonathan. Day offered Wisner four dollars a week to write the police column and in the afternoons help out with writing or composing, and though the sum would barely keep him housed and fed Wisner quickly agreed to the deal.
No New York newspaper had ever had a police court reporter on staff before. The Courier and Enquirer and one or two of the other papers occasionally ran police reports, but only on especially slow days, when none of the foreign or national papers had arrived and the editor was desperate to fill the news columns. And even this modest outlay of space had been met with furious criticism from rival papers, who assailed the reports as inappropriate for the pages of a respectable newspaper. “It is a fashion which does not meet with our approbation, on the score of either propriety or taste,” declared the Evening Post. “To say nothing of the absolute indecency of some of the cases which are allowed occasionally to creep into print, we deem it of little benefit to the cause of morals thus to
During the first week of the Sun ’s publication in early September 1833, Benjamin Day received another visitor looking for a job. The young man standing before him, George Washington Wisner, had the wavy dark hair, strong jaw, and coal-black eyes of a theatrical leading man, though Day could perceive an intelligence in those eyes, along with a cockiness and a certain hardness as well, the result of half a dozen years of difficult living on his own; and perhaps Day, who prided himself on his discernment of others, also detected in the young man’s spare frame, in a certain hesitation of breath or movement, the fragile constitution that would compel him to leave the Sun only twenty months later, and to which he would eventually succumb, in a frontier town in Michigan, at the age of thirty-seven.
George Wisner was twenty-one years old, just two years younger than Benjamin Day, and although the two men had significant political differences (Wisner was more radical, particularly on the slavery question), they also had much in common. Like Day, Wisner was a printer by trade, moving to New York at the age of nineteen to seek his fortune. He came from the small town of Auburn in western New York, where he, like Day, had received a common-school education; at the age of fifteen Wisner had also left school to apprentice as a printer at a local newspaper. And like Day and so many other young men from the country, Wisner had come to New York looking for work in the burgeoning print trades. By 1833 he was working for a Nassau Street newspaper, the New-York Evangelist. The work, however, could not have been as steady as he would have liked, because the Evangelist was a weekly rather than a daily paper, and in September Wisner appeared at the Sun office on William Street looking for a job.
It was a fortuitous moment for Wisner to arrive, as Day was just seeking someone to work as his police court reporter. The Sun’ s police reports had already proven highly popular with readers, and he was eager to continue them, but he had a problem. The police court went into session at four in the morning, to process more efficiently those whom the watch-men had rounded up the previous night, and Day couldn’t attend the court sessions and do everything else that was required to bring out the Sun each day. He needed someone who was industrious, trustworthy, ready to get up before dawn to do his reporting, and, not incidentally, was – 36 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 37
The News of the City
willing to do it on the cheap. Wisner was young and single (and therefore inexpensive), and he was enthusiastic, and he came highly recommended by the foreman of the Evangelist, James G. Wilson, whom Day so respected that six years later he would ask him to be his partner on a new literary magazine called Brother Jonathan. Day offered Wisner four dollars a week to write the police column and in the afternoons help out with writing or composing, and though the sum would barely keep him housed and fed Wisner quickly agreed to the deal.
No New York newspaper had ever had a police court reporter on staff before. The Courier and Enquirer and one or two of the other papers occasionally ran police reports, but only on especially slow days, when none of the foreign or national papers had arrived and the editor was desperate to fill the news columns. And even this modest outlay of space had been met with furious criticism from rival papers, who assailed the reports as inappropriate for the pages of a respectable newspaper. “It is a fashion which does not meet with our approbation, on the score of either propriety or taste,” declared the Evening Post. “To say nothing of the absolute indecency of some of the cases which are allowed occasionally to creep into print, we deem it of little benefit to the cause of morals thus to