Read The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York for Free Online

and concealed a very warm heart behind a brusque address.” He had no time or patience for the glad-handing and drawing-room nicety that was the publisher’s stock in trade, – 23 – 0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 24
    the sun and the moon
    but unlike many of the men who had started their own newspapers he was genuinely interested in hearing what other people thought, although he rarely asked a direct question. Instead, he would toss out a few quiet remarks, seemingly offhand but in fact carefully calculated, and then observe the effects they produced. Benjamin Day was not an especially reflective man, except as the reflection touched on business. He was eminently practical, proud of his common-school education and suspicious of the merits said to be bestowed by higher learning. He was by trade a printer, and by chance an editor, but by nature he was always a businessman.
    After arriving in New York in 1829 Day drifted among the merchant papers, working as a fill-in compositor, living frugally, saving whatever he could toward the purchase of types and a printing press of his own. Early the following year, in what turned out to be a pivotal decision, he joined the staff of the Daily Sentinel, a radical paper being started by several printers from the Courier and Enquirer. Compared to the men who ran the other newspapers in town—and to those he would later hire to write for the Sun, including Richard Adams Locke—Day was not very politically minded. He was distrustful of ideologies of any kind, but he had a strong feel for labor, having himself spent years composing by the light of a candle, working antiquated presses until his hands were blistered and his back was as stiff as iron. (Under his leadership the Sun would be a fierce advocate of higher wages and shorter working hours, and of the nascent labor movement in general. In early 1834, for instance, the paper gave extensive coverage to a strike by hundreds of Lowell mill girls, even reprinting the full text of their manifesto, Union Is Power. ) There had been other radical newspapers in New York before, all of them directed at the city’s artisan class, but the Daily Sentinel was different because it was also produced by artisans. Its six directors—Benjamin Day among them— described themselves in the first issue as “all practical printers . . . [who]
    have, in common with their fellow laborers in every branch of industry, participated largely in the distress which pervades the producing classes of this community.” The Daily Sentinel took on all the working-class issues of the day but struggled to find a readership, in large part because a year’s subscription cost eight dollars—an improvement on the ten dollars charged by the merchant newspapers but still far beyond the means of most of the working people the directors hoped to reach. After just two months, a frustrated Day went back to work as a compositor for the merchant papers.
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    Benjamin Day’s Whistling Boy
    In September 1831 Day married his cousin Eveline Shepard, a schoolteacher who was in her way just as strong-willed as he, though tender-hearted where he was gruff. (In later years Eveline would open up several bedrooms in their house to needy old women, a decision Day put up with silently.) The following July Eveline gave birth to a son, Henry. For the first months of Henry’s life Ben and Eveline lived in terror of the cholera epidemic that raged around them, horse-drawn carts bearing coffins arriving at houses up and down the block; they tried not to dwell on the most chill-ing sight of all, the tiny coffins built for children. The family survived the cholera, but the epidemic and its aftermath cut drastically into the business of the print shop Day had finally managed to open. In May 1833, anticipating another baby, the Days moved several blocks south from Chestnut Street to larger quarters on Duane Street at the lower