Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII
If any young man learning values wants to know the quickest way to study the seamy side of life, to understand the darkest aspects of human nature, and incidentally, to risk the loss of every illusion he ever had, let him become a reporter on an up-to-date New York newspaper. Within six months he will be apt to believe that every man has his price; he will become acquainted with vice, crime, horror, terror, and every kind of human degradation; theft, murder, arson will seem common-places, forgery a very ordinary affair; men and women, it may even seem to him, "go straight," not because of any inherent principle of goodness in them, but because that degree of temptation which constitutes their particular "price" has not yet offered itself.
Passion of every type, abnormal, often incredible, will be his daily study; if he reflects a little he will probably reach the conclusion that either jealousy in some form, or greed for money, lie at the root of every crime that is ever committed. The overwhelming power of these two passions will startle him, at any rate, and his constant association with only one aspect of life, and that the worst and lowest, will probably produce the conviction that, given only the opportunity, everybody is bad. His conception of women may suffer in particular. The experience, contrariwise, may widen his tolerance and deepen his charity; also, it may leave him as it left me, with an ineradicable contempt for those who, born in ease, protected from the temptations due to poverty and misery, so carelessly condemn the weak, the criminal and the outcast.
With bigger experience may come, in time, a better view; equally, it may never come. Proportion is not so easily recovered, for the mind, at an impressionable age, has been deeply marked. The good, the beautiful, the lovely, in a New York paper, is very rarely "news"; it is considered as fake, bunkum, humbug, a pose; it is looked at askance, regarded with suspicion, as assumed by someone for the purpose of a "deal"; it is rarely worth its space, at any rate. A reporter finds himself in a cynical school; he is lucky if he escape in the end with a single rag of illusion to his back. If he has believed, up to the age of twenty-one, as I did, that the large majority of people are decent, kindly, honest folk, he will probably lose even that last single rag. On the Evening Sun, certainly, it was not the good, the beautiful, the clean, that constituted the most interesting news and got scare headlines and extra editions. I give, of course, merely the impression made upon my own mind and type, coloured as these were, some thirty years ago, by a characteristically ignorant and innocent upbringing....
The important newspapers, in those days, were all "down town," grouped about Park Row, and the shabby, tumble-down building of the Sun was not imposing. The World and Times towered above it; the Morning Advertiser, the Evening Telegram, even the Recorder were better housed; the Journal had not yet brought W. R. Hearst's methods from San Francisco. For all its humble offices, the Sun was, perhaps, the greatest power in the city. It was openly Tammany; it had a grand, courageous editor, Charles A. Dana. "Charles A." was an imposing figure, a man of immense ability, a "crank" perhaps in certain ways, but a respected chief of outstanding character and fearless policy.... My own chief, however, was W. C. McCloy, and the offices where he reigned as managing editor were housed on the top floor of the rickety building, with the machinery making such a din and roar and clatter that we had to shout to make ourselves heard at all. Metal sheets that clanged and pinged as we walked on them covered the floors. It was amid this pandemonium I had my first interview with him. An iron spiral staircase led from the quiet work-*rooms of the Morning Sun, on the first floor, to the dark, low-ceilinged space, where the whirring printing presses were not even partitioned off from the tables of editorial departments or reporters. It was like a factory going at full speed. Hours were 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., or later if an extra--a 6th or 7th--edition was called for. I arrived at 8.15.
In a dark corner of this machinery shop I introduced myself with trepidation to McCloy, mentioning Mr. Laffan's name, and saw the blank look come and go, as he stared at me with "Blackwood, Blackwood?... Oh, yes, I remember! You're fifteen dollars a week. A Britisher from Canada.... Well, you'll have to look lively here!" He seemed so intensely busy and preoccupied, his mind so charged with a sort of electric activity, that I wondered he had time to open and shut his mouth. A small, thin man, with the slightest of frail bodies, nervous, delicately shaped hands, gimlet eyes that pierced, a big head with protruding forehead, a high-pitched, twanging voice that penetrated easily above the roar of the machinery, and a general air of such lightning speed and such popping, spitting energy that I felt he might any moment flash into flame or burst with a cracking report into a thousand pieces--this was the man on whom my living depended for many months to come. The phrase "New York hustler," darted across my mind; it stood in the flesh before me; he lived on wires. Buried among this mechanic perfection, however, I caught, odd to relate, an incongruous touch--of kindness, even of tenderness. There were gentle lines in that electric face. He had a smile I liked.
"What are you out here for? Where have you come from? What have you been doing? What d'you know?" he asked with the rapidity of a machine-gun. The shorthand rate must have been 400 words per minute.
I never talked so quickly in my life as in my brief reply. I watched the smile come and go. While he listened, he was shouting instructions to reporters then streaming in, to office boys, to printers, to sub-editors; but his eyes never left my face, and when I had finished my lightning sketch, the machine-gun crackled with its deadliest aim again: "Only one thing counts here; get the news and get it quick; method of no consequence. Get the news and get it first!" He darted off, for the first edition went to press at 10.30. As he went, however, he turned his head a moment. "Write a story," he back-fired at me. "Write your experiences--From Methodism to Running a Saloon,"--and he vanished amid the whirling machinery in the back of the great room.
I have the pleasantest recollections of W. C. McCloy; he was just, fair, sympathetic, too, when time permitted; he showed me many little kindnesses; he was Presbyterian, his parents Scotch; he was also--sober. I proved a poor reporter, and my salary remained at fifteen dollars all the time I was with the paper, yet once he kept a place open for me for many weeks; he even took me back when the consideration was hardly deserved.
That first day, however, I spent on tenterhooks, fully expecting to be "fired" at its end. I found a corner at the big reporters' table, and, having seized some "copy" paper from the general pile, I sat down to write "From Methodism to Running a Saloon," without the faintest idea of how to do it. A dozen reporters sat scribbling near me, but no one paid me the smallest attention. They came and went; at another table Cooper, the City Editor (anglice news-editor) issued the assignments; the editorial writers arrived and sat at their little desks apart; the roar and pandemonium were indescribable; the first edition was going to press, with McCloy in a dozen places at once, but chiefly watching the make-up over the shoulders of the type-setters in the back of the room.... I wrote on and on; I believed it was rather good; no one came to stop me, no one looked at my "copy" or told me what length was wanted; once or twice, McCloy, flashing by, caught my eye, but with a glance that suggested he didn't know who I was, why I was there at all, or what I was writing.... The hours passed; the first edition was already out; the reporters were reading hurriedly their own work in print, delighted if it was on the front page; the space-men were measuring the columns to see how much they had earned; and the make-up for the second edition, out at noon, was being hastened on behind the buzzing machinery in the rear.
By this time I must have written two columns at least, and I began to wonder. Perhaps I was to appear in the principal final edition at six o'clock! On the front page! The article, evidently, was considered important! The notion that I was making a fool of myself, being made a fool of, rather, also occurred to me. I wrote on and on ... it was hunger finally that stopped me. I was famished. I turned to an albino reporter next me, a mere boy, whose peculiarity had earned him the nickname "Whitey." Was I allowed to go out for lunch? "Just tell Cooper you're going," he replied. "Come out with me," he added, "if you've finished your story. I'm going in a moment." I finished my "story" then and there, putting the circle with three dots in it which, he explained, meant finis to the printers. "Just hand it in to Cooper, and we'll get right out," he said. I obeyed, Cooper taking my pile of "copy" with a grin, and merely nodding his head when I mentioned lunch. He was a young man with thick curly black hair, big spectacles that magnified his good-natured eyes, only slightly less rapid and electric than McCloy, but yet so unsure of himself that the reporters soon found him out--and treated him accordingly. I saw my precious "copy" shoved to one side of his desk, but I never saw it again, either in print or elsewhere. No mention was ever made of it. It was, doubtless, two columns of the dullest rubbish ever scribbled in that office.
"I guess Mac only wanted to see what you could do," explained the albino, as we swallowed "sinkers" (heavy dough scones) and gulped down coffee at Childs' Cheap Lunch Counter round the corner. Whitey had invited me to lunch; he "put me wise" about a thousand things; showed me how to make a bit on my weekly expense-account, if I wanted to; how one could "sneak off" about five o'clock, if one knew the way; and, most useful of all, warned me as to accuracy in my facts and the right way to present them. A "story" whether it was the weather story or a murder story, should give in a brief first paragraph the essential facts--this satisfied the busy man who had no time to read more; the second paragraph should amplify these facts--for those who wanted to know more; afterwards--for those interested personally in the story--should come "any stuff you can pick up." An item that seemed exclusive--a "scoop" or "beat" he called it--should come in the very beginning, so as to justify the headlines.
"Whitey" was always a good friend to me. "Make friends with the reporters on other papers," he advised, "then you won't get badly left on the story you're all 'covering.' Most of 'em give up all right." He gave me names of sundry who never "gave up," skunks he called them.
As we hurried back to the office half an hour later, he dived into a drug store on the ground floor. The way most of the reporters frequented this drug store puzzled me for a time, till I learned that whisky was to be had there in a little back room. The chemist had no license, but by paying a monthly sum to the ward man of the district--part of immense revenues paid to Tammany by every form of law-breaking, from gambling-hells and disorderly houses to far graver things--he was allowed to dispense liquor. It was a pretty system, marvellously organized down to the lowest detail; cash to the ward man opened most doors; a policeman paid $300 before he even got a nomination on the force; vice paid gigantic tribute; but the people liked a Tammany Government because "they knew where they were" with it, though the Sun, my paper, was the only journal that boldly supported it--for which Charles A. Dana was forever being attacked. I acquired much inside experience of the secret workings of Tammany Hall before my newspaper days came to an end.... It appalled me.
That afternoon, I had two assignments, and failed badly in both. The first was to find a company promoter who had got into trouble, and to ask him "all about it." I could not find him; his house, his office, his club knew him not. After two hours' frantic search, I returned crestfallen, expecting to be dismissed there and then. Cooper, however, cut short my lengthy explanations with a shrug of the shoulders, and sent me up to the Fort Lee woods, across the Hudson River, to find out "all about" a suicide whose body had just been discovered under the trees. "Get his name right, why he did it, and what the relatives have to say," were his parting words. The Fort Lee woods were miles away, I saw the body--an old man with a bullet hole in his temple, I found his son at the police station, and asked him what his tears and grief made permissible, the answer being that "he had no troubles and we can't think what made him do it." Then I telephoned these few facts to the office. On getting back myself at half-past six when the last edition was already on the streets, Cooper showed me the final edition of the Evening World. It had a column on the front page with big head-lines. The suicide was a defaulter, and the reporter gave a complete story of his gambling life. Cooper offered no comment. The Evening World had got "a beat"; and I had failed badly. I sat down at the reporters' table and wondered what would happen, and then saw, lying before me, our own last edition with exactly the same story, similar big headlines, and all the important facts complete. An interview with the company promoter was also in print. I was at a loss to understand what had happened until Whitey, on the way into the drug-store a little later, explained things: the United Press, a news agency that "covered" everything, had sent the story. The "flimsy" men, so called because they wrote on thin paper that made six copies at once, were very valuable. "Make friends with them," said Whitey, "and no one will ever get a beat on you. They're paid a salary and don't care. It's only the space-men, as a rule, who won't give up."