Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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When the Sun’s advertising business had increased until its income from that source was more than two hundred dollars a day, it bought two new presses of the Napier type from Robert Hoe, at a cost of seven thousand dollars. These enabled Mr. Day to run off thirty-two hundred papers an hour on each press. On the 2nd of January, 1837, the size of the Sun was slightly increased, about an inch being added to the length and width of each of its four pages.

In February, 1837, the price of flour rose from the normal of about $5.50 a barrel to double that amount. The Sun declared that the increase was not natural, but rather the result of a combination—a suspicion which seems to have been shared by a large number of citizens. The bread riots of February 13 and later were the result of an agitation for lower prices.

The Journal of Commerce denounced the Sun as an inciter of the riots, and suggested that the grand jury should direct its attention toward Mr. Day. The Sun not only refused to recede from its stand, but suggested that the foreman of the grand jury, the famous Philip Hone, had himself incited a riot—the riot against the Abolitionists, July 11, 1834—which had a less worthy purpose than the Sun’s stand on the matter of flour prices. The Sun was virtuously indignant, even more than it had been a short time before, when the Transcript charged the Sun’s circulation man, Mr. Young, with biting two of the Transcript’s carriers!