USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 2 > Part 13
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47
The Transcript has a eireulation of only 38,136, but its influence throughout the country, as well as in this community, is very great. Its treatment of
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books, art, education, musie and society is unexeelled by that of any other newspaper in the country. Nor are there any deficiencies in its news service, from the press associations and from special correspondents. Its selling price of three eents daily, except on Saturday, when it is five, has perhaps proved a factor in limiting its popular appeal.
In 18SO the Boston Advertiser was published at 27 Court street. Three years later, in February, 1883, it went into a stately new building in Washington street, running through to Devonshire. It signalized the occasion on Monday, February 19, by issuing a twenty-page paper which long remained memorable because of its size. Until the summer of 1881 it had been issued as a large folio, but on July 4 of that year it came out in quarto form. Early in 1882 Delano A. Goddard, the editor, died suddenly and was succeeded by Edward Stanwood, who had long been an editorial writer on its staff. He was one of the eminent Boston journalists of the period under review, perhaps best known as the author of Stanwood's "Presidential Elections," besides a "History of the Presidency," a life of James G. Blaine, and other works. He died in 1923, having been for the last years of his life the editor of the "Youth's Companion." It was while serving the Advertiser that he introduced to journalism Edward Page Mitehell, author of the famous Bowdoin College song, and afterwards in New York so faithful an understudy of the great Charles A. Dana that many of the sayings commonly attributed to him were really the eoinage of Mitehell.
A few months after the death of editor Goddard the Advertiser changed hands. Edward Payson Call, a young man destined to a long, active newspaper career, became the publisher, and under him the Advertiser more than ever stood out as the leading commercial and business journal of New England. Deelining revenues, however, soon led to a change and the paper was bought in 1887 by William E. Barrett, whose meteorie career in polities, as well as in journalism, is still remembered. He died in early life, and shortly after the conclusion of a congressional service. He also acquired the Evening Record, which had been started in 1884 by Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, now of the Tran- script and the author of the recently published history of that excellent journal. Mr. Barrett associated with him in the conduet of these papers Samuel W. MeCall, Henry Parkman, James W. Dunphy, Charles H. Adams and Herbert S. Underwood. The Barrett estate continued in control till December, 1914. Mr. Underwood had three years earlier crossed the street to become managing editor of the Journal, under Frank A. Munsey, to which subsequent allusion will be made. Mr. Barrett continued the Advertiser on its old lines, but did not pour new money into it or attempt the financially forbidding task of "build- ing it up." Most of his profits supposedly came from the Evening Record, a one-cent daily of great vivacity and enterprise. It had a eireulation of 30,000 when the Barrett interests sold out, as against 5,000 for the Advertiser, also owned by them.
After Mr. Barrett's death the properties were sold to Charles Sumner Bird, who, loyal to the traditions of his family, with their deep interest in public affairs, sought an outlet for his political opinions. He made his son, Francis WV. Bird, publisher and editor. At the end of the first year Mr. Bird told the assembled employees that, while the experiment had cost him much
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inore than he had expected, he hoped to see it through; but this did not prove practicable, and in 1917 he sold the Advertiser to William R. Hearst, who was able to utilize its assets in combination with his earlier established Evening and Sunday American. The Advertiser name Mr. Hearst has retained, with its Associated Press membership, for his Sunday edition. Thus the Advertiser of Nathan Hale - the father of Edward Everett Hale - and of Charles F. Dunbar, long a professor in Harvard College and an intimate associate of President Eliot, has adjusted itself to the changing standards of popular journalistic taste in the · half-century under review.
In the interest of accuracy it should be recalled that the morning tabloid, known as the Record, now owned by Mr. Hearst, and rapidly increasing in circulation, was started by M. Douglas Flattery, to whom the Bird interests had sold it, and it was not till 1921 that he transferred it to Mr. Hearst. This is perhaps a good place in the narrative to tell the story of William Randolph Hearst's connection with Boston journalism. He owns twenty-five newspapers in the United States, covering nearly all its larger cities. He came into the Boston field with the issuance of the Evening American, with a Sunday edition, on March 21, 1904. These were published in a five-story building at 85 Summer street, in a section of the city where the Hearst papers have since remained. This Evening American is said to have started with a circulation of a quarter of a million. Its political policies, like those of other Hearst journals, have repre- sented the views of the owner rather than of any political party, often changing allegiance from one to the other as issues dictated. The Boston Evening Ameri- can now has a circulation of 260,266 (government statement of October 1, 1930) and a Sunday circulation of 467,466. This Sunday edition is, of course, known as the Boston Sunday Advertiser.
The other morning newspapers of 1880 were the Herald, Globe and Post, and the extent to which they have continued in the same lines, and to a consider- able degree under the same ownership, makes their record distinguishing. While it is true that only the Globe is in the hands of the same family now as in 1880, for the greater part of the intervening period the Post has been in the control of the Grozier family, as it still remains, and the Herald has had relatively few changes of ownership, its present one dating from November 1, 1910.
The only outstanding morning newspaper published in 1SS0 which is no longer among the living is the Boston Journal, which was for many years the journalistic bulwark of New England Republicanism. It had been started in 1833, three years later than the Transcript and two years later than the Post. The period in the Journal's history at which Mr. Winsor's narration closes was one of considerable overturn in newspaperdom. In 1882 the Journal's price was reduced from $9 to $6 per year, with a corresponding change in the price of individual copies. In 1880 the paper had boasted of a circulation of 40,000. It had been published at 264 Washington street since 1860, but its circulation even then was not large enough to make the going easy. Early in the 80's Stephen O'Meara became the head of the paper and so remained, under various changes of ownership, until he sold it to Frank A. Munsey, who had long wanted to own a newspaper in Boston, an aspiration, however, which time sufficed to correct.
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Mr. Munsey undertook a striking reformation of Boston journalistic stand- ards. He took all advertising off the front page. He adopted many improve- ments, but under his ownership the paper alternated between periods of "break- ing even" and spells of substantial loss, with the result that he wearied in the enterprise and turned it over, on moderate terms, to Matthew Hale, Charles Eliot Ware and Walton A. Green, who were, like Munsey himself, warmly in sympathy with the progressive political policies of the Roosevelt era. They finally, on October 6, 1917, sold the paper to the Herald organization, which had already absorbed the Traveler, and thus the Journal passed out of the picture.
In 1880 the Boston Post was published at 17 Milk street, on the spot where Benjamin Franklin was born. It sold at three cents a copy. In the following year it was acquired, after the Edwin D. Winslow affair of unsavory memory, by Alonzo P. Moore, a prominent Boston business man, who, as the largest stockholder, became its treasurer and publisher. Robert G. Fish took up editorial leadership in the spring of 1882, a position from which he retired to become one of the fire commissioners of Boston, and on his termination of that service an editorial writer on the Transcript, retaining this post until his death in 1913. Edwin M. Bacon was the next editor of the Post. During all this period it was Democratic in politics, and generally the organ of the so-called old-fashioned Democracy. But its financial resources did not enable it to do a good job with the news, and its circulation had declined to a very low ebb, when, in 1891, it was purchased by Edwin A. Grozier, one of the most marked jour- nalistie geniuses of America. He had been a shorthand reporter on the Globe, private secretary for George D. Robinson during his campaign for Governor in 1883, and later private secretary for Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World. Mr. Grozier came back to Boston with a small capital and took over the Post, playing one of the most courageous games, with the smallest resources, in all newspaper history. He soon made his newspaper one cent, and for a generation enjoyed the advantage which this rate gave him by comparison with the two- cent price of all his rivals. This price disparity in Mr. Grozier's favor, added to his extraordinary genius for "playing" news and sensing its possibilities, built up what was at one time doubtless the largest week-day morning circulation in the country, touching 570,000 copies. Its morning circulation is now, with a price equality with its rivals, 374,863 daily and 330,281 on Sunday. Both of these figures are from the government reports of October 1, 1930. Mr. Grozier died in 1924. His son, Richard Grozier, now the dominating head of the property, possesses his father's journalistic talents to a very marked degree. It was through his enterprise that the Post had won, in 1922, the Pulitzer prize for running down the Ponzi fraud, properly estimated as the greatest piece of public- spirited service performed by any American newspaper in that year.
For the entire period covered by this review the Globe has been in the hands of Charles H. Taylor, who died in 1921, and of his sons, Charles H., Jr., and William O. Taylor, and they have proved a highly effective management. General Taylor, as he was called in his later years from his service on the staff of Governor Russell, became the head of the property in 1873. For some years he had to get along without the Associated Press, a deprivation which developed enormous resourcefulness on his part. In his early days the Globe
FRONT VIEW
MAIN STAIRWAY
ARCADE, INTERIOR COURT BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
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was militantly Democratic. It supported Butler for Governor in 1882 and 1883 and Cleveland for president in 1884. In fact its distinct Democratie tendency showed no abatement until the Bryan candidacy in 1896. Since that time the Globe has made a specialty of printing the news and avoiding in its editorial columns all traces of partisan preference. It has always been famous for the excellence of its features, and for the originality of many of its enterprises. It printed in 1881 what purported to be a copy of the Globe of 1981. This attracted great attention throughout the country, and found many imitators. The printing of a whole front page of poems on the death of President Garfield, written by local versifiers, was another of its earlier enterprises. It has retained many notable writers, of whom James Morgan, author of a half-dozen well known biographies, is perhaps the most famous. William D. Sullivan, its long time managing editor, is one of the outstanding journalists of America. The Globe is said to have been the first paper in the country to specialize in household recipes and other interests of women in the home. Its circulation daily and evening, according to the government report, stands at about 300,000. On Sunday it is materially larger.
The Boston Evening Traveler, long spelled with two "I's," was published at 31 State street by Roland Worthington and Company in 1880. It was the first two-cent evening newspaper to be established in Boston. This was in 1845. Among its well-remembered features was the review of the week written by Charles Creighton Hazewell, a man of amazing information, whose son, Edward Wentworth Hazewell, was long an editorial writer of the Boston Transcript. The Traveler passed through a number of varied ownerships in the last decade of the old century, and finally fell into the hands of Albert F. Holden of Cleveland, Ohio, who had made an astonishing success of the Plain-Dealer in that city. He eventually associated with him the late Sidney W. Winslow, the founder of the United Shoe Machinery Company, who in 1910 brought Messrs. Higgins and Smith, the owners of the Newburyport News, to Boston to run the Traveler on new and ambitious lines. But these proved expensive, and so on June 1, 1912, Mr. Winslow joined forces with the Boston IIerald organization, substituting the Traveler for the Evening Herald and giving it the more distinctive name of the two.
This brings us to the story of the Herald. Its publishers in 1880 were R. M. Pulsifer and Company. Mr. E. B. Haskell was editor-in-chief and C. H. Andrews the news manager. Its average daily circulation in July, 1881, stood at 183,000, its Sunday circulation at 117,000. In 1888 Haskell and Charles H. Andrews yielded to a new corporation, known as the Boston Herald Company, the shareholders being Pulsifer, Haskell, Andrews, John H. Holmes, E. H. Woods and Fred E. Whiting. On Pulsifer's death shortly thereafter, Mr. Holines became the largest owner. In 1904 Mr. Haskell turned over liis holdings to liis son, William E. Haskell, who finally reached an equality of ownership with Holmes. In October, 1906, Mr. Holmes sold his holdings to Haskell, who for two years before had been its publisher. Mr. Haskell removed the paper to the location on Tremont street, near Mason and Avery, which has only recently been abandoned. He established a system of individual deliveries of the paper, and otherwise proceeded energetically along original lines. But the revenues of the paper at that period would not sustain the
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standard of expenditures undertaken, with the result that in 1910 he turned the property over to receivers, John Norris, representing the International Paper Company, and Charles F. Weed, now a vice-president of the First National Bank.
In the autumn a new company was organized to take it over under the leadership of Charles F. Choate, Jr. They selected five trustees to stand before the publie as sponsors for the new enterprise. These were Riehard Olney, Henry Lee Higginson, John H. Holmes, Robert Burnett and Henry S. Howe, of whom none are now living. They made Robert Lineoln O'Brien president of the company and editor of the Herald, positions which he retained until his resignation on December 31, 1928. That period witnessed the absorption of the Traveler, already deseribed, and the subsequent absorption of the Boston Journal and to an extent its merger with the Boston Herald. The first publisher under this regime was John Wells Farley, a well-known lawyer in this eity; but his interests were in his profession rather than journalism and he withdrew shortly after the absorption of the Traveler, giving place to James H. Higgins, who had eondueted, under Mr. Winslow's finaneial leader- ship, the Lynn News and the Gloucester Times, as well as the Newburyport News, which belonged to Mr. Higgins and Mr. Smith. Of the Herald-Traveler properties Mr. Higgins remained treasurer, publisher and business manager until his breakdown in health in 1922, when, after an interregnum in which M. M. Lord, now of the Hearst serviee, represented Mr. Higgins' interests, Edwin Wesley Preston, who had been the advertising manager under Mr. Higgins, took the helm. He remains the publisher and dominating factor in the business management of the property. Its news leadership sinee Mr. O'Brien's retirement has fallen to Robert Burnett Choate, a son of the late Charles F. Choate, Jr., long the gifted Washington eorrespondent of the paper and a man of marked journalistie tastes and high attainments. The editorial page is in charge of Frank W. Buxton, well known as the author of the Pulitzer prize editorial on Calvin Coolidge. Mr. F. Lauriston Bullard, the chief editorial writer of the Herald, also won a Pulitzer prize for his editorial on the Saeco- Vanzetti ease, recommending further investigation, which, on the petition of Bishop Lawrenee and others, Governor Fuller finally provided.
The Traveler has been in recent years under the management of Harold F. Wheeler, with Joe Toye as the head of the editorial page. Its eireulation has gone forward rapidly and contributes materially to the 300,000 papers which are the current output of the new and magnificent publishing plant at the corner of Mason and Avery streets. At the time the Herald was turned over to the O'Brien régime its morning eireulation was 46,000, its evening only 7,000. Its Sunday eireulation was 38,500 but was dropping at the rate of 500 eopies each week.
The IIerald-Traveler Corporation is one of that inereasing number of newspapers in the United States which are publiely finaneed. Its stock was offered to the publie in 1929, with a considerable reservation for its own employees at a lower figure.
The Christian Science Monitor, in coming to Boston on November 25, 1908, made a distinctly new departure in journalism, not only here but in the eoun- try. The paper is international in scope, printing several editions daily,
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adapted to different geographical groups. It carries news, special articles and advertising from the four corners of the globe.
Its news policies are distinctive. It does not exploit crimes, disasters or sensations. Its aim is to spread confidence instead of fear and to record the good that men do rather than the evil. The Monitor is a part of the Christian Science Publishing Society, which was the gift of Mary Baker Eddy to the Mother Church, as the First Church of Christ Scientist in Boston is called. Accompanying this gift, which was accepted on January 15, 1908, was "a grant of trusteeship." Under the general supervision of the Christian Science Board of Directors are three trustees who administer the business of the pub- lishing society. The editorship of the Monitor rests in the hands of an editorial board of four members. Willis J. Abbot, one of the country's most substantial journalists, holds that post of responsibility.
The Monitor specializes in foreign news, by mail, by telegraph, by cable, by wireless. It has the service of the Associated Press and of the United Press, and besides has correspondents of its own all over the world. Its adver- tising is equally international. It maintains branch advertising offices in eight cities of the United States and four in Europe, besides having 500 local advertising representatives in smaller cities everywhere. Its advertising comes from thirty-four countries.
The circulation of the first edition in 1908 was 25,598. Its present circu- lation is 134,641. This is what is known as the primary circulation. It also has an even larger "secondary circulation," because nearly all the papers are by a systematic arrangement redistributed. The motto of the organization, devised by its founder, Mrs. Eddy, stands over all its departments - "To injure no man but to bless all mankind."
Mention should be made in this review of a half-century of Boston's daily journalism of the Boston News Bureau, founded by Clarence W. Barron in 1887. The recently published book, "They Told It to Barron," pictures his amazingly interesting career. He eventually established financial newspapers in six other cities, as well as the weekly financial journal with a national cir- culation, started on May 9, 1921, which bears his name. On his death in 1928 the properties fell to his son-in-law, Hugh Bancroft, who maintains them on the high plane which characterized the work of the founder.
THE LIBRARIES OF GREATER BOSTON
By CHARLES F. D. BELDEN
Boston and Massachusetts have played a significant part in the advance- ment of the public library movement in America. In 1851 a state law was enacted authorizing the establishment and maintenance of public libraries by taxation. It was in accordance with this law that the Public Library of the City of Boston was founded in 1852, thus becoming the oldest of the great free city libraries of the world supported by a municipal tax.
The experiment of Boston was watched with much interest, not only in Massachusetts but throughout the whole country, and the example was soon followed by other cities and towns. The Civil War temporarily checked the movement, but in the 70's and 80's the founding of public libraries was well under way. Massachusetts was in the lead. The figures of the United States Bureau of Education in 1891 showed that at that time the number of libraries wholly or mainly supported by taxation was 179 in Massachusetts, as against 220 in all the rest of the Union, twenty-nine states being totally without public libraries.
During the last forty years the country has, in the main, caught up with the standards of Boston and Massachusetts. This City and this Common- wealth maintain, however, in the library world, their pre-eminent positions. Massachusetts is still the only state in the country in which there is no town, no matter how small, and no city, without the benefit of a public library. In fact, the 354 cities and towns of the state harbor no less than 415 free public libraries, excluding branch libraries. The Boston Public Library stands acknowledged as the head of this great system. It is one of the three leading scholarly public libraries of the country. The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library surpass it in the wealth of their collections, but the Boston Public Library is unique in the liberality with which its great collections are made available for consultation and for free circulation. The 1,500,000 volumes belonging to the Boston Public Library are supplemented by the public libraries of the thirty-eight towns encircling the city, which bring the public library resources to a total of 3,250,000 volumes. Through the system of inter- library loans, established by the Act of 1911, the majority of these books are accessible to the entire population of Greater Boston. Among public libraries should properly be mentioned the State Library, which, although its books may not be drawn for home use, is free to all for purposes of study. To this group belong also the Massachusetts Archives of the State Department, the richest mine of material for the early history of America.
The large supply of books belonging to the public libraries of Metropolitan Boston is, none the less, only a part of the book wealth of the district. The resources of libraries belonging to private institutions greatly surpass those of the public libraries. The vast library of Harvard University alone contains
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nearly 3,000,000 volumes. It is obvious that in library affairs Massachusetts is still the "banner state" and that Greater Boston is pre-eminently the greatest book eenter in America.
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY OF THE CITY OF BOSTON
Fifty years ago the Public Library of the City of Boston was already a large and flourishing institution. Founded in 1852 and opened to the public in 1854, by 1880 it had passed the first quarter of a century of its existence. Sinee 1858 it had occupied its own building on Boylston street. In twenty years, however, it outgrew the building. In the Central Library and its ten branches, the first of which was established in 1871, there were housed 377,000 volumes, and the annual report for 1880 gave the home eireulation of books as 1,156,000. In the same report the authorities emphasized that "a new building is a erying necessity," announcing also the glad news that "there was granted to the city, for the site of a new building, a lot of land favorably situated at the southwesterly corner of Dartmouth and Boylston streets."
The ereetion of the building was entrusted to the well-known New York firm of MeKim, Mead and White. Owing to various difficulties the actual work was begun only in 1888, and it lasted for seven years. The eost, originally estimated at $450,000, exceeded $2,300,000; but the building, when completed, won the admiration of both laymen and experts. With its noble façade in Italian Renaissance style, with its spacious entrance hall, beautiful stairways, corridors and areaded courtyard, it is among the finest creations of American architecture. Its mural decorations by Sargent, Abbey, Elliott and Puvis de Chavannes, its seulpture by Saint Gaudens, French, MaeMonnies and Pratt, make the building a meeea for lovers of art.
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