He had
toiled early and late all his life, and when he was ready to start for
himself he had a nominal capital of five hundred dollars, and a big idea.

He was the only newspaper man in New York who thought that a newspaper
didn't have to be dull to be good. In fact, he found that if he wished to
be an editor at all it would have to be on his own paper. So on May 6,
1835, in a cellar on Wall Street, he issued the first number of the
_Herald_.

Many things which we take for granted in the newspapers of to-day were
originated by Bennett and his lively little cellar-born sheet. In the
second month of its existence, the _Herald_ printed the first Wall Street
reports that had ever appeared in an American daily. Later, in the same
year, Bennett introduced modern reportorial methods by his graphic "story"
of the great fire that devastated down-town New York in December, 1835;
and his introduction of a picture of the Stock Exchange on fire, and a map
of the burned district, was another epoch-making innovation. It was he,
too, who ordered for the _Herald_ a telegraphic report of the first speech
ever sent in full over the wires to a newspaper--that of Calhoun on the
Mexican War.

There were no theories concerning the news in the _Herald_, no stately,
long-winded, word-spinning explanations of what the news meant; just the
news itself, given tersely and in as simple and bright language as
possible. The readers were left to draw their own inferences and make
their own comments.

Competitors Tried to Crush Him.

Bennett was right in trusting to the readers' intelligence, for his
following increased. But though the public came to him in goodly numbers,
the battle was a desperate, up-hill one. Five years after he started, all
the papers in the city banded together to crush him. The records of the
fight are curious now, chiefly for the profusion of the epithets that were
hurled at him. One paper, in one short broadside, managed to call him an
"obscene rogue," "profligate adventurer," "venomous reptile,"
"pestilential scoundrel," "polluted wretch," "habitual liar," and "veteran
blackguard."

Bennett weathered the storm, seldom bothering about hitting back, but all
the time striving to make his paper brighter and more readable. His
adversaries soon realized that they were losing ground, and they gradually
relinquished the struggle.

Twelve years after he had started the _Herald_, Bennett got into a dispute
with Horace Greele