The New York Herald

History

The first issue of the paper was published by James Gordon Bennett Sr., on May 6, 1835.

By 1845 it was the most popular and profitable daily newspaper in the United States. In 1861 it circulated 84,000 copies and called itself "the most largely circulated journal in the world." Bennett stated that the function of a newspaper "is not to instruct but to startle and amuse." His politics tended to be anti-Catholic and he had tended to favor the "Know Nothing" faction, but he was not so anti-immigrant as the Know-Nothing Native American Party. During the American Civil War, Bennett's policy, as expressed by the newspaper, was to staunchly support the Democratic Party. Frederic Hudson served as managing editor of the paper from 1846 to 1866. During the mid-19th century, the New York Herald adopted a proslavery stance, with Bennett arguing that the Compromise of 1850 would lead to "but little anxiety entertained in relation to the question of slavery, the public mind will be so fatigued that it will be disinclined to think of the matter any further."

In April 1867 Bennett turned over control of the paper to his son James Gordon Bennett Jr. Under James Jr., the paper financed Henry Morton Stanley's expeditions into Africa to find explorer David Livingstone, where they met on November 10, 1871. The paper also supported Stanley's trans-Africa exploration. In 1879 it supported the ill-fated expedition of George W. De Long to the Arctic region.

In 1874 the Herald ran the New York Zoo hoax, in which the front page of the newspaper was devoted entirely to a fabricated story of wild animals getting loose at the Central Park Zoo and attacking numerous people. From December 1887 through August 1888, 33 of Walt Whitman's poems appeared in the New York Herald.

On October 4, 1887, Bennett Jr. sent Julius Chambers to Paris, France, to launch its European Edition. Later he moved to Paris himself, but the New York Herald suffered from his attempt to manage its operation in New York by telegram. In 1916 a Saturday issue of the paper reported that a major financier was found dead from poisoning; it added that in 1901 he was "mysteriously poisoned and narrowly escaped death."

After Bennett Jr. died in 1918, Frank Munsey acquired control of the New York Herald (including its European Edition). In 1924 Munsey sold the paper to the family of Ogden Reid, owners of the New-York Tribune, creating the New York Herald Tribune (and the International Herald Tribune with a divergent future).

When the Herald was still under the authority of its original publisher Bennett Sr., it was considered to be the most intrusive and sensationalist of the leading New York papers. Its ability to entertain the public with timely daily news made it the leading circulation paper of its period.

European edition

During the time of original publisher Bennett, The New York Herald was perhaps the best-known American paper in Europe. Its first issue came out on October 4, 1887. The official name of the paper on its front page masthead was The New York Herald European Edition—Paris; it became widely known as simply the Paris Herald.

Publisher Bennett Jr. referred to the paper as a "village publication" for the circle of people in Paris who were interested in international news. Indeed, during its first decades of publication, a feature of the paper was a list of every American known to be in Paris at the time, culled from inspections of hotel registries. Even as the paper's audience grew, most of its readers were in France or countries near France.

The European edition consistently lost money into the 1910s. As the time of Paris in World War I began, Bennett Jr. kept the paper running, even during the First Battle of the Marne when some French papers shut down. When the American Expeditionary Forces began arriving in France in 1917, demand for the Paris Herald soared, with eventually some 350,000 copies being printed each day and the edition finally becoming profitable.

The European edition subsequently became a mainstay of American expatriate culture in Europe. In Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), the first thing the novel's protagonist Jake Barnes does on returning from Spain to France is buy The New York Herald from a kiosk in Bayonne in the Basses-Pyrénées department and read it at a café.

''Evening Telegram''

The New York Evening Telegram was founded in 1867 by the junior Bennett, and was considered by many to be an evening edition of the Herald. Frank Munsey acquired the Telegram in 1920 and ended its connection to the Herald.

Commemorated

• New York's Herald Square is named after the New York Herald newspaper.{{cite book
• The New York Herald Building was designed by the prestigious firm of Stanford White, and completed in 1908. It occupied the north side of the square. At its top was the sculpture, Minerva and the Bellringers, by Antonin Carlès, which sounded every hour with bellringing. After the building was demolished in 1921 to make way for other development, the James Gordon Bennett Memorial featuring the sculpture was installed on the north side of Herald Square in 1940 to commemorate the Bennetts.
• The chorus of "Give My Regards to Broadway" includes the phrase "remember me to Herald Square." North of Herald Square is Times Square, which is named after the rival The New York Times.

References

References

1. Cohen, Daniel. (2000). "Yellow Journalism". Twenty-First Century Books.
2. Crouthamel, James. (1989). "Bennett's New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press". [[Syracuse University Press]].
3. Sandburg, Carl. (1942). "Storm Over the Land". [[Harcourt, Brace and Company]].
4. Katherine Roeder. (25 March 2014). "Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay". Univ. Press of Mississippi.
5. (1892). "New Outlook". Outlook Publishing Company, Incorporated.
6. Greene, Bryan. (6 October 2020). "When Opera Star Jenny Lind Came to America, She Witnessed a Nation Torn Apart Over Slavery".
7. Harris, Gale. (November 21, 1995). "Bennett Building". [[New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission]].
8. Carey, John. (March 18, 2007). "A good man in Africa ?". [[The Sunday Times]].
9. (October 19, 2011). "The Martians Have Landed!: A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes". McFarland.
10. Connery, T. B. (June 3, 1893). [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000020243371;view=1up;seq=526 A Famous Newspaper Hoax], ''[[Harper's Weekly]]'', p. 534
11. (December 2, 1916). "Jacques S. Halle dies". The Sun.
12. "International New York Times (newspaper)".
13. (1989). "Bennett's New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press". [[Syracuse University Press]].
14. Richard Reeves, [https://www.gale.com/binaries/content/assets/gale-us-en/primary-sources/intl-gps/intl-gps-essays/full-ghn-contextual-essays/ghn_essay_ihtha_reeves1_website.pdf "The Paris Tribune at One Hundred"], ''American Heritage Magazine'', November 1987. Volume 38, Issue 7.
15. "International Herald Tribune Historical Archive 1887–2013". Gale Cengage.
16. (Winter 1993–1994). "The Revolution in Global Communications". The Brown Journal of Foreign Affairs.
17. (12 October 2013). "End of an era as venerable 'Herald Tribune' to be reborn as 'International New York Times'". [[The Irish Times]].
18. (12 February 1927). "The Telegram Sold to Scripps-Howard". The New York Times.
19. "Herald Square – James Gordon Bennett Memorial". [[New York City Department of Parks and Recreation]].