When Ira Stoll and I were preparing to re-launch The New York Sun in 2001, the Atlantic Monthly sent around a reporter to find out, among other things, why we had picked the name. I immediately started rattling on about how the Sun, in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, had stood for limited and honest government, equality under the law, constitutionalism, and other features of high-minded conservatism. I was just getting warmed up when the reporter, David Carr, caught me off-guard by inquiring about the New York Sun's notorious moon hoax.
Say what?
I had read the histories of the great 19th-century broadsheet that went out of publication in 1950 and whose flag we had just picked up. But so fascinated was I by its political pedigree that I had only skimmed the part about how it built its early circulation by claiming in a news story that, in South Africa, astronomers peering through a new type of telescope had seen life on the moon -- including swarms of flying man-bats.
What a way to sell newspapers.
When the Sun was born in 1833, New York had a population of more than 250,000, but its 11 daily newspapers had a combined circulation of only 26,500. These were days, Mr. Goodman notes, when a "newspaper's fortunes rose and fell on the personality of its editor."
He tells of the editor of the Herald, James Gordon Bennett, once getting caned so badly that he took to keeping a set of loaded pistols in his office, and of Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant horsewhipping William Leete Stone, of the Commercial Advertiser, who fought back with a cane that concealed a steel sword.
Making today pale by comparison.
In the early 19th century, a daily newspaper typically cost 6 cents. In 1833, the Sun, under Benjamin Day, broke into this market with a tabloid that sold for a penny. Although set in small type, it was given over to reports of murder and crime, written up in a colorful fashion. And in the bottom right corner of page one -- in a place where other papers sometimes ran fiction -- its first issue featured a dispatch about a boy who whistled in his sleep.
No nudies in those days; no equivalent to Rupert Murdoch. But wait!
The Sun was in business for two years when Day brought in as editor a Briton, Richard Adams Locke.
Those Brits.
Swirling through Mr. Goodman's telling of this story are such figures as Edgar Allan Poe, who was a Sun contributor and once penned a balloon-to-the-moon fantasy, and P.T. Barnum, a master of the newspaper-aided publicity stunt. "The Sun and the Moon" also addresses subjects such as abolition, of which the Sun was a particularly energetic advocate. Editor Locke himself refused for some years to admit to writing the moon hoax. When, in 1840, he finally confessed, he defended it as a satire on the then-current rage by which astronomy had become what he saw as a "pseudo philosophy."
Imagine how that'd go over today.
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