Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/223

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tors Hay ward, Lynde, and Stanley. For a while in 1834 it looked as though the new paper was going to eclipse The Sun, as it achieved the larger circulation. Day and Wisner of The Sun were once indicted for criminal libel for an attack on Attree, the editor of The Transcript, so bitter did the fight become be- tween these two papers. The Transcript then began to pay more attention to political matters than The Sun: on December 4, 1834, it devoted its entire paper to the presidential message of Andrew Jackson and did not print a single advertisement. Get- ting into the field of its six-penny contemporaries, The Transcript soon lost its lead over The Sun, and when internal trouble arose among its printers and owners it became on July 24, 1839, only an epitaph in the newspaper graveyard.

Before The Transcript, however, another penny paper, The Man, had been born in New York on February 18, 1834. It was published in the interest of trade unions and endeavored to raise the compensation for federated labor. Nothing it printed at- tracted half so much attention as the way in which the letters in its name were drawn. This unique head when it first appeared was thus described by The Transcript, on May 27, 1834:

The Man, a penny paper published in this city, which advocates the cause of the working man, has provided itself with a new head, quite characteristic of its particular objects. This head is composed entirely of farming utensils and mechanic instruments. There is a ploughshare, a scythe, a rake, an axe, a hatchet, a saw, a hammer, an augur, a square, a drawing-knife, a plane, a goose, a pair of shears, etc., etc. all arranged and joined together so as to make THE MAN.

The Man died an early death.

One or two early penny papers in New York may be briefly mentioned. Shortly after The Sun had risen in New York, The Daily Bee came from the hive (located in Masonic Hall) of John L. Kingsley on March 5, 1834. Devoted to "literature, drama, police and court proceedings, news, etc.," it had a short life, in its first appearance in 1834, and a not much longer in its second in 1836. Kingsley later, however, rendered a more effi- cient service to American journalism by improving the method for stereotyping page forms of newspapers. Women were not neglected by the penny press. An attempt to reach them was