It is said that some of the
ladies whose charms were described in those letters were indebted to
them for husbands. Personalities of this kind were a novelty then,
and mere novelty goes a great way in journalism. At this period
he produced almost every kind of composition known to periodical
literature,--paragraphs and leading articles, poetry and love-stories,
reports of trials, debates, balls, and police cases; his earnings
ranging from five dollars a week to ten or twelve. If there had been
then in New York one newspaper publisher who understood his business,
the immense possible value of this man as a journalist would have been
perceived, and he would have been secured, rewarded, and kept under
some restraint. But there was no such man. There were three or four
forcible writers for the press, but not one journalist.
During the great days of "The Courier and Inquirer," from 1829 to
1832, when it was incomparably the best newspaper on the continent,
James Gordon Bennett was its most efficient hand. It lost him in 1832,
when the paper abandoned General Jackson and took up Nicholas Biddle;
and in losing him lost its chance of retaining the supremacy among
American newspapers to this day.
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