Dana, Charles Anderson (1819-1897) journalist, newspaper editor, government official An idealistic youth, later to become an aggressive assistant secretary of war and at last a cynical newspaper editor, Charles A. Dana was born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, on August 8, 1819, and grew up in upstate New York. Although a descendant of Richard Dana (in 1640 a prominent resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts), Charles Dana’s father failed as a merchant and farmer and lacked the social position of distant relations. This fact apparently gave rise to Dana’s ambition, as well as his antipathy to wealth and privilege and an awareness of the “increasing poverty of the producing classes.” Before beginning work at the age of 12 in a general store in Buffalo, Dana had learned Latin on his own and used his evenings to read the classics and pick up Greek. By dint of his own efforts, Dana matriculated at Harvard at the age of 20 and did well before lack of money forced him to teach school and eye problems interfered with his studies. He completed only a year’s work, but he met George Ripley, who in 1841 established in West Rox-bury, Massachusetts, the Transcendentalist Brook Farm experiment in communal living.
On Ripley’s invitation Dana hastened to Brook Farm. There he taught German and Greek; contributed articles on social problems to the Brook Farm weekly, Harbinger; farmed; supervised the community kitchen; and with his business experience became a managing trustee. Given Dana’s hostility to individualism and competition and his desire to reform society, he favored Brook Farm’s conversion into a more radical, regimented, socialistic, “Fourierite Phalanx.” For five years, until the disastrous fire of March 6, 1846, ended the experiment, Dana was, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson remarked, the best all-around man at the farm. Coincidently, the day of the fire Dana married Eunice MacDaniel, a Brook Farmer, in New York City.
Horace Greeley, a supporter of Fourierism, immediately gave Dana a job at the New York Tribune where he soon became city editor. Although Greeley wanted him to stay in New York, Dana in 1848 and 1849 covered revolutions in France and Germany from a sympathetic, American, republican perspective, but observing working-class violence chipped away some of his faith in cooperative utopian socialism. Upon Dana’s return to New York, Greeley, despite Dana’s insubordinate streak, made him the Tribune’s managing editor. In that position for over a decade, Dana honed his skills and when Greeley was absent, edited with an iron hand everything in the Tribune, including what Greeley sent in. Even though he secured Karl Marx as a correspondent, Dana wished to ameliorate industrial conditions through cooperation between capital and labor rather than by a class struggle, and he began to crave the wealth he had found contemptible. He also enjoyed the power he wielded as an influential editor.
Beneath the surface Dana had problems with Greeley, whose wishes he sometimes ignored. Dana essentially agreed with Greeley’s politics, favored protective tariffs, and opposed the expansion of slavery, but Greeley did not like his independence, and a rift developed during the secession crisis. Greeley was willing to let the South go in peace, while Dana thought secession was unconstitutional. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Dana was responsible for the Tribune’s demand: “Forward to Richmond!” When the disaster of Bull Run occurred, many readers blamed the Tribune, and Greeley blamed Dana. By March 1862 Greeley earned Dana’s enmity by forcing him out of the Tribune.
Grateful for Dana’s editorial support, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton immediately asked him to investigate alleged corruption among contractors supplying Union armies in the Mississippi Valley. While on this temporary assignment at Memphis on July 4, 1862, Dana met and was impressed by General Ulysses S. Grant and was struck by the easy money to be made by trading with Southerners for cotton. In fall 1862 Dana returned to the Memphis area to engage in that trade. He soon agreed with Grant, however, that cotton speculators, like himself, were aiding the Confederacy and told Stanton that trade with the enemy should cease. In early 1863 Stanton appointed Dana a commissioner to investigate the payroll service and sent him west to spy on Grant, who was rumored to be drinking in excess. Dana’s reports extolled Grant’s aggressiveness and sobriety, although he had seen Grant drunk. Dana’s reports enabled Grant to emerge as the victorious Union general and satisfied Stanton, who appointed Dana assistant secretary of war in June 1863.
After the war Dana returned to journalism. He briefly edited the Chicago Republican (1865-66) on Reconstruction. While in Chicago, he angled unsuccessfully for the powerful and lucrative post of collector of the port of New York. In 1867, backed by prominent Republicans, he purchased the New York Sun, whose readers were working-class Democrats, and edited it until his death three decades later. Striking a balance between his backers and his readers, Dana promised that while presenting a clear, “lively,” daily picture of the world, the Sun would be an “advocate of the laboring masses” and would be politically independent. Abandoning his Radical Republican stance, Dana called for a quick return of the South to the Union and for the election of his friend Grant as president in 1868.
Dana was a brilliant editor, who made the Sun scintillating and amusing. If a humorous angle could be found in a news story, the Sun found it. Those whom Dana despised, and there were many, he made appear ridiculous. Since Greeley lusted after political appointments, Dana, for laughs, nominated him for everything from prison inspector to president of the United States. To Dana’s chagrin Greeley got the latter nomination. The Sun also warmed hearts with human interest stories and loved scandals, especially the BEECHER-TiLTON SCANDAL, featuring the hypocrisy of the celebrated Protestant minister Henry Ward Beecher.
Dana was playful but also vindictive, petty, and cynical in his erratic political behavior. When Grant, after his election, failed to appoint Dana to the New York collectorship, he attacked him as the “great gift-taker,” inferring that he sold offices. But Dana rejected anti-Grant Liberal Republican reformers, as self-righteous snobs, even though some of them had been his warm friends. When in 1872 they nominated Greeley for president and the Democrats followed suit, Dana supported him as the lesser of two evils but damned him with ludicrous praise.
Nominally independent, Dana pleased his readers by usually supporting Democrats, although often critical of them. Samuel J. Tilden was his ideal presidential candidate, and when he was defeated in the disputed 1876-77 election by RuTHERfORD B. Hayes, Dana was bitterly disappointed and blamed his loss on the machinations of a powerful railroad lobby. He supported GROVER CLEVELAND for New York governor in 1882 but became his bitter enemy after Cleveland gave an office to Beecher’s nephew rather than to the son of a Sun staff member. When Cleveland received the Democratic nomination in 1884, Dana supported neither him nor the Republican nominee James GiLLESPiE Blaine, backing the Greenback-Labor nominee Benjamin F. Butler, who went down to ignominious defeat.
The circulation of the Sun also took a beating. At 145,000 in 1884 it was New York’s leading daily, but its circulation dropped to 80,000 in three years. Dana’s support of Butler coincided with the rise of JOSEPH PuLiTZER’s New York World, which also catered to working-class Democrats. It did not have the Sun’s whimsy but, at eight pages, was twice as large with a more attractive layout, more sensational news, and more earnest crusades. Dana responded with vicious anti-Semitic attacks on “Judas Pulitzer,” while enlarging the Sun, improving its appearance, serializing fiction, covering sports, and appealing to a more prosperous, conservative Democratic constituency. In the late 1880s the Sun, no longer the worker’s friend, opposed strikes, the eight-hour day, and radicals. Despite his own farm background, by the 1890s Dana had sympathy for neither the plight of farmers nor their organizations. He was appalled when the Democratic Party embraced the panacea of Free Silver and nominated William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896. For the first time in 28 years, Dana supported a Republican, William McKinley. The revamping and repositioning of the Sun by Dana had increased its circulation to 120,000 by October 17, 1897, the day he died.
Further reading: Janet E. Steele, The Sun Shines for All: Journalism and Ideology in the Life of Charles Anderson Dana (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1993).
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