Authors: Matthew Goodman
and the excitement that it had created in the city. Greeley reminded his readers of the trial, in ancient times, of the Greek who had circulated a false report of a military victory. “Am I worthy of punishment, O Atheni-ans?” the man had proclaimed in his own defense. “Am I worthy of punishment for having given you a day of happiness?”
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c h a p t e r
16
The Best Self-Hoaxed
Man in New York
In the fall of 1836, after fifteen months as editor of the
Sun,
Richard Adams Locke left to begin work on a new penny paper called the
New
Era
. Financed by a consortium of prominent New Yorkers, the newspaper was coedited by Locke and Joseph Price, a poet and fellow journalist, formerly editor of the weekly journal the
New-York Mirror
. (Price stayed as editor for only a few months, and then left to concentrate on his literary pursuits.) The
New Era
would be New York’s fourth penny paper, but one that proposed to be something markedly different.
By this time, Locke had been in New York for nearly half a decade. He had spent years trolling in the city’s low places as a police court reporter, and after becoming an editor once again, he had earned renown not as an eloquent and impassioned editorialist against slavery but as the author of a hoax. Now, with the
New Era,
he hoped to pursue a more high-minded variety of journalism, one more consistent with his intellectual principles; the enterprise would be his last great attempt to realize his promise as a journalist and man of letters.
In the premiere issue of the
New Era,
published October 3, 1836, the editors vowed to conduct a newspaper that “gentleman can patronize, and ladies read without a blush,” free of “recklessness and brutality, indecency and exaggeration, ribaldry and scurrility.” They lamented how the “immense capability of the daily press,” which might be used to foster the public good, was instead devoted to “the most trivial and uninstructive details of unimportant incidents, or the worse than useless, the
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demoralizing disclosure of scenes of low pollution, and to unprincipled political machination.” Though the
New Era
would offer a police court column (for a New York penny paper, not to do so was tantamount to a death wish), its editors made a point of refusing, in their word, the “disgusting” items; they also abjured what they saw as the manipulation and duplicity of the political newspapers, which, they claimed, sacrificed “every principle of freedom” for the short-term gain of whichever party they happened to favor.
In a declaration certainly inspired by Locke’s own avocation, the editors vowed that their paper would not only be the equal of any in coverage of local, national, and foreign news, but that it would also give special attention to the latest developments in the world of science. For too long, they argued, science had been seen as the exclusive province of an intellectual elite; their paper would herald a new era “in which knowledge will be em-powered with ubiquity, will be equally present in the cottages of the poor as in the mansions of the rich.” Within the span of a single year, the
New
Era
“shall render every one of its constant readers as well read in the great cyclopædia of universal knowledge as the man of leisure who makes it his study.” This was a highly ambitious—some might even say quixotic—goal for a daily newspaper to set for itself, but it is a sign of the seriousness with which Richard Adams Locke undertook it that the
New Era
was the first literary production of any sort to which he signed his own name.
In the first issue the editors promised their readers “a diversified, a pi-quant, an elegant, sparkling, racy, and amusing chronicle of the times,”
and for a while the
New Era
delivered handsomely on that promise. Early on, the paper published an exposé of barbarous conditions at the Lunatic Asylum at Bloomingdale (in what is today called Morningside Heights), which resulted in the firing of at least one asylum employee. In its first month the
New Era
launched a regular series,
New York Medical Reports,
in which unnamed “competent medical gentlemen” (presumably one of them Locke’s good friend Dr. David L. Rogers) reported on recent cases of interest at various city hospitals, and analyzed the treatment provided. “The state of medical science and practice in New York is most deplorable and degrading,” declared the
New Era,
“and we mean to effect a thorough reform in it.”
In a crusade of a more lighthearted nature, Richard Adams Locke wrote a satirical proposal for the reform of modern poetry, which he called
Poetical Economy
. Poetical economy, he explained, was “an important branch
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The Best Self-Hoaxed Man in New York
of political economy,” although it had “hitherto escaped the attention of the most acute writers on the latter science.” Paper, he wrote, was a highly expensive material, and no one wasted more of it than poets, what with their reliance on wide margins and ragged lines. (Not to mention the ha-bitual overuse of capital letters: “Why should every line begin with a capital letter,” Locke wondered, “when not one out of ten has anything capital in it?”) Locke offered his readers “a practical illustration of the principles which we preach,” a long original poem presented in the form of a news item, fully punctuated and broken up into paragraphs. It began: The hills of the Sun were thronged that day with Seraph Bards in bright array; and each bore thither a diamond lyre, itself an heaven of hal-lowed fire. The valleys glowed with hastening crowds, of peerless form and lofty mien, whose halos sprung to the downy clouds and fused afar the living green.
The item’s byline identified Richard Adams Locke as “The Author of the Moon Story.” It was the first time Locke had acknowledged himself in print as the hoax’s creator; as the editor of his own paper, he clearly no longer felt himself bound to silence.
The first few months of the
New Era
also brought discussions of numerous scientific topics, among them physiology and phrenology (“an enlarged development of parts of the brain,” the item explained, “will produce the intellectual characteristics to which they correspond”); the latest meetings of the British Scientific Association, at which the ubiquitous Sir David Brewster revealed that he was close to attaining his long-held goal of constructing powerful lenses out of rock salt; a recently made drawing from Germany of the fossilized remains of a “pterodactytus,” a flying creature armed with a mouthful of monstrously sharp teeth (“The discovery of many gigantic reptiles in the ancient strata of the globe, proving, as it does, prodigious changes in its constitution and animal economy, is one of the most exciting and instructive results of modern science”); and a recent letter (this one entirely authentic) published by “our old friend, Sir John Herschel,” marveling at the extraordinary transparency of the sky over the Cape of Good Hope. “With such a sky,” remarked Locke cheerfully, “and such glasses as we know he has, who shall say that he will not eventually realize all the discoveries which we made for him last year in the moon?”
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Still, despite its lively writing and energetic reporting the
New Era
had trouble finding a wide readership. In part the problem was one of timing: in early 1837, only a few months after the paper’s founding, the country slid into a deep recession. Banks collapsed, financial firms shuttered their doors. Real estate prices, which had been soaring for years, suddenly plunged; lots that the previous September had sold for nearly five hundred dollars an acre now brought less than fifty. In New York, at least ten thousand mechanics and another two thousand clerks had been thrown out of work, and many thousands of families—even those fortunate enough to have a wage earner—were living in destitution. “At no period of its history,” the
New Era
observed about New York, “has there been as great a degree of general distress as there is at this day.”
Not surprisingly, the year was disastrous for the city’s newspaper business. The
Transcript
was crippled by the downturn in advertising revenue and would fold just two years later. Even the mighty
Sun
felt the pinch. In 1835 and 1836 the paper had turned a profit of twenty thousand dollars per year; by 1837 it was struggling to break even. If the hard times could so dramatically affect even the world’s most widely read newspaper, it is not difficult to imagine the problems faced by an upstart, one that had not yet found its footing in the country’s most competitive market against three established penny papers—and having willfully deprived itself of the racier items that had helped win readers to the penny papers in the first place.
As the months passed and the financial panic worsened, the pressure on Richard Adams Locke must have been enormous. By this time he and Esther had left their small apartment on Franklin Street and settled in the village of Tompkinsville on Staten Island, a cluster of houses peeking out amid the green hills rising steeply from the water. Beyond the village lay woods and fields and a patchwork of farms, mostly small but highly cultivated and boasting a variety of fruit orchards. Far removed from the clamor of Manhattan, it was closer in spirit to Locke’s childhood home of East Brent, a rural village surrounded by the apple orchards of Somerset. From their house it was just a few minutes’ walk down the hill—the breezes cool even in the summer and the air smelling delightfully of salt—to the Tompkinsville landing, where Locke boarded the morning ferry across the Narrows to the Whitehall slip in “mast-hemm’d Manhattan,” as Walt Whitman would later call it. He would not return home until well past dark, after the children were already asleep. Their daughter Adelaide had now been joined by two sons, Richard and Lewis. Soon even more children would arrive; with each
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passing year Locke’s expenses increased. He owned no share in the
New Era
and was entitled only to a portion of any “clear profits” that might be generated in the future—which, as 1837 turned into 1838, seemed as remote as ever. Not long into his editorship at the
New Era
he had written of “the pe-cuniary difficulties to which we are subjected, owing to non-payment by subscribers—the failure of paper-manufacturers in their contracts—the sordid altercations with a certain class of advertisers, who insist upon having their own way against every idea of right and justice—the irregularities of carriers and the consequent complaints of justly dissatisfied readers.” All of these, he admitted, were “trials of temper, and harrassing [
sic
] disturbers of equanimity and composure of mind.” He was putting in thirteen-hour days at work, in the office from eight in the morning until nine at night, and as he made his way exhaustedly home on the ferry moving back toward the dark shore of Staten Island, his mind was surely occupied with schemes to boost the paper’s circulation. Perhaps he thought he had found one in the winter of 1838, when, in his desperation, he resorted to a stratagem that had worked once before: he attempted a hoax.
“The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park” (as the
New Era
story was entitled) purported to present entries from the travel diary of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who had disappeared on an expedition along the river Niger in 1806. The
New Era
trumpeted the recent discovery of Park’s diary, three decades lost, which revealed the fate that had befallen the great explorer. It was an imaginative idea that might well have provided fertile ground for one of the adventure novels popular at the time.
As a hoax, however, it failed utterly. Unlike Locke’s moon series, the Mungo Park story fooled no one; New Yorkers were well aware of who the
New Era
editor was, and they viewed with a gimlet eye any unexpected, astonishing revelations available only in his newspaper—particularly one that brought word of discoveries made by an illustrious Briton in Africa.
As Edgar Allan Poe tartly noted, “Mr. Locke’s columns were a suspected district.” The city’s rival papers paid no attention to the
New Era
story.
Nor did the general public; no crowds swarmed the Nassau Street offices of the
New Era,
located on the very same block as the
Sun
building, where they had excitedly gathered in the late summer of 1835. The attempt to market another hoax had turned out to be a colossal miscalcula-tion. Not only did it make the
New Era
look foolish, it also confirmed Locke’s reputation as a hoaxer. Like Mungo Park himself, the series came to an abrupt end and was never seen again.
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With the
New Era,
Locke was facing a bitter irony: for all its strengths, the newspaper could not compete with the brand of sensationalist mass-market penny paper that his own work had helped popularize. Before long, the grim realities of the marketplace brought a pronounced shift in the paper’s editorial direction. In the first issue, Locke and Price had proudly identified themselves as “belonging to no political or religious party, partizans in nothing, and entirely free from any sectarian or party prejudice,” quoting with approval Alexander Pope’s dictum that “Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few.” By 1838, however, notices for meetings of the Tammany Society (the Democratic Party’s political machine) had begun to appear below the paper’s masthead, and the idio-syncratic articles on science and literature had all but disappeared, replaced by a relentless drumbeat of attacks against the national bank, monopolies, paper money, and Whig politicians and their supporters in the press. (Political parties, unlike medical reformers, provide a ready-made readership.) The following April, the
New Era’
s publisher, the Ann Street printer Jared W. Bell, renamed the newspaper the
Democratic-Republican New
Era—
its identification as a party paper was now complete—and removed Richard Adams Locke’s name from the front page, replacing it with his own. A political journalist, Theron Rudd, was now editing the paper with Locke, whose position looked to be growing increasingly tenuous. On the first day of October, Locke ran an article that criticized the collector of the New York Custom House, Jesse Hoyt, for paying his employees in small-denomination paper money issued by local banks with whom he maintained friendly relations, rather than in guaranteed government specie.