Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,042

This is the grave of James Gordon Bennett.

Born in 1795 in Newmill, Banffshire, Scotland, Bennett grew up rich and Catholic, two things. I don’t generally associate with late 18th century Scotland. He was a serious enough Catholic that he entered seminary at age 15 to become a priest. It didn’t stick and he left four years later. He was rich though and did a bunch of traveling to figure out what he did want to do. In 1819, he was invited to Canada by a friend. He accepted and had an adventure. He and his friend landed in Halifax. Needing money, Bennett got a bit of work as a school teacher (this was far less of a profession then and you could just pick it up for a short time) and earned himself enough money to travel south to the United States. He taught for awhile in Portland. Maine and then Boston.

Bennett started getting newspaper jobs while in Boston. He was working as a proofreader when a newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina hired him to translate Spanish language news for them, some of which they would reprint (which is how a lot of newspapers filled space). Since he knew Spanish, he agreed and lived down there for a short time. He moved to New York in 1823 and there he would spend most of the rest of his life. He worked on a number of the city’s largest newspapers. What he really wanted though was to start one of his own. But while it wasn’t very hard to start a newspaper in the early 19th century, it was hard to keep it solvent. He wanted a firm footing and bided his time.

Finally, in 1835, Bennett started his own paper. The New York Herald wasn’t just a fly by night operation. It became one of the most important newspapers in the country. One way it did so was going a bit tabloid. In 1836, a New York prostitute named Helen Jewett was murdered. It was a terrible crime. It was also clear who did it (though the guy unsurprisingly got off in the end). Bennett had the Herald go all-in on coverage. Supposedly, Bennett had his paper pioneer a completely new idea here–interviewing people and writing about it in the paper. Now, at first, this seems like a spurious claim and I can’t actually confirm its veracity. But I also can’t think of interviews in newspapers before this either, so it is in fact a plausible claim. Bennett’s position was that the guy who was accused was innocent and this was all a frame job. Now, the Herald was already defining itself as a paper of the upper classes. In response, the New York Sun, a paper that appealed to the city’s working classes, took Jewett’s side and said this was the typical treatment of the working class by the rich.

Bennett’s politics and thus that of his paper were inconsistent and basically personalized. He would support both Whigs and Democrats before the war and supported Franklin Pierce in 1852. Bennett basically demanded that Pierce give him the job of ambassador to France and Pierce didn’t do that. So Bennett turned on Pierce and used all his power in his popular paper to undermine the president. But if there was anything to Bennett’s politics, it’s that slavery was great. And it’s important to remember that New York City was the center of pro-slavery sentiment in the North. This had a few roots to it–NYC was always the center of slavery in the North and still had a few slaves when Bennett started his paper, the city was the nation’s commercial center and American capitalism was built on the backs of slaves, and the city’s large working class feared and hated competition from Black labor. Abolitionism really was identified with elite reformers and that was a fair accusation–while of course the Black population was poor, among whites, most of the abolitionists did come from wealthy backgrounds. So it didn’t really hurt Bennett that he supported the most disgusting politics imaginable.

Come to the Civil War and the Herald will be all in on Lincoln-hating. Bennett endorsed John C. Breckinridge in 1860, which was a sign of how far the Democrats had gone. When Stephen A. Douglas, the man who had torn the Missouri Compromise up to promote his political career, was too moderate, you know that your party is controlled by extremists. For Bennett, Abraham Lincoln was a Black Republican and his paper played up the racism of the time. Although a promoter of George McClellan generally, Bennett did not endorse anyone in 1864, but loved Andrew Johnson’s presidency. Bennett was one of those who promoted Lincoln’s 10% Plan as the way Lincoln would have done Reconstruction and thus the way we should do it now.

To review, Lincoln’s 10% Plan was an idea he threw out earlier in the war that stated that Reconstruction could happen when 10% of the South’s 1860 voters denounced slavery and agreed to rejoin the union. This had no support among Republicans and Lincoln never brought it up again. But Lincoln, who was a crafty politician who really did keep his cards close to his vest, never did articulate what his Reconstruction policies would have been. Given that Lincoln was a pretty mainstream Republicans on most issues, it’s unlikely he would have stepped outside an acceptable position in his party and there’s at least some evidence he was already coming around to supporting Black male voting. But he never said so publicly. So the Herald was one of those papers giving cover to the South after the war and ensuring the nation never would really take Reconstruction seriously.

In 1866, Bennett gave the daily running of the paper to James Jr., better known as Gordon. He slowly ran the paper into the ground while living the life of the Gilded Age elite and spending money like it was going out of style, doing the Newport mansions and the yacht races and the European trips and all of that. James Sr. died in 1876, at the age of 76, somewhat perplexed and frustrated with his profligate son. The Herald held on until 1924, but was slowly suffocated by the more populist papers that developed after his death thanks to people such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. It merged with the Tribune and became the New York Herald Tribune, which managed to last for a few more decades in a consolidating market.

James Gordon Bennett is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other newspapers moguls, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Edward Rosewater is in Omaha, Nebraska and Charles Henry Taylor is in Boston. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.