THE GREAT CIVIL WAR GOLD HOAX THE DAY THE NEWSPAPERS LIED BY CHARLES APPLE FOCUS PAGE EDITOR, Press Enterprise Despite what you might hear from some people, we in the media try hard to be fair and accurate in the stories we bring you every day. he journalism school adage is: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” But that wasn’t always the case. 150 years ago this Sunday, in fact, a New York newspaper editor had an idea he could get rich overnight. All he needed to do was spread a baldfaced lie about President Abraham Lincoln... IT WAS MAY 1864 The Civil War was dragging on, to the displeasure of voters in the North who were not necessarily sold on another four years of a Lincoln administration. On May 18, two New York City Newspapers ran some bad news: President Lincoln called for a “a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer.” More important, he was calling up 400,000 more troops for the war effort. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, however — newly in charge of the Army of the Potomac — had arrived in Virginia and was on his way to Richmond. The phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” had not yet been coined. If it had been, rest assured it would have been used. Wall Street reacted just as you’d have expected it to: Stock prices plummeted. The price of gold — then, as now, a haven for investors during tough times — shot up. There was just one little problem: Lincoln had said no such thing. THE STORY Strangely enough, the story had appeared in only two newspapers. It didn’t take long for folks to wonder why. A crowd gathered outside the offices of the Journal of Commerce, demanding answers. Lincoln, incensed, ordered that paper and the World shut down and the editors arrested — perhaps not the smartest move in an election year. A dispatch containing the news had arrived at 3:30 that morning, the night press foremen said, after the night editors had gone home. The dispatch appeared to be from The Associated Press and was delivered in the usual way: by street urchin courier. This sort of thing happened all the time. Not suspecting a bogus report, the foremen at the World and the Journal had stuffed the item into that day’s papers and rolled their respective presses. But other New York papers didn’t fall for the trick. Some had rules against late news — what we today call a “deadline.” A few others checked around, despite the late hour, and discovered that not all papers had received the AP dispatch. Smelling a possible rat, they ran the risk of getting beaten on the story and held it so editors could check it out the next day. THE SCAM It took investigators only three days to figure out who was responsible for the hoax: Joseph Howard, 35, the city editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. Whats worse: Howard had pulled this sort of stung before. In 1861, he wrote that Lincoln rode through the streets of Baltimore on the way to his inauguration wearing a Scotch cap and long military cloak. In 1862, Howard violated a military order by sneaking into the funeral of an Army general -- dressed as a clergyman. Howard and an accomplice -- Eagle reporter Francis Mallison, who wrote under the suddenly ironic pen name Francis OPake -- had borrowed money and used it to buy gold. They then composed the fake dispatch and had it sent to New York City newspapers. By the time the stock market opened on May 18, news of the dispatch was all over town, but no one yet suspected in was fake. Howard sold his gold that morning for the kind of money we newspaper folks rarely see. THE CROOKS Howard and Mallison were convicted and sent to prison at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor. Oddly enough, they served only a few months: Howards father begged Lincoln for the release of his son, which the president granted on August 22. Hearing of the release, Congressman Moses Odell *D-Brooklyn) asked for Mallisons freedom. Lincoln obliged on Sept. 23. Mallison was welcomed back to the Eagle. He was promoted to city editor, quit to serve in the New York State Assembly and then worked as a political correspondent. He died of jaundice in 1877 at age 45. Howard went on to even greater things: He worked for the New York Times, the New York Star, the New York Sun and the New York Herald. Howard wrote a column on politics and was widely distributed throughout the country and not only founded the New York Press Club but also served four times as its president. He died of kidney failure in 1908 at age 74. THE IRONY The ultimate irony in this story, however, comes thanks to Lincoln himself. The war was slowly wearing down the South, but it was costing the Union Army manpower. On July 18 — two months after the gold hoax — the president indeed issued a call for 500,000 more men ... 100,000 more than the hoax had said. The moral of this story might very well be: Never again wonder why there are so many conspiracy theorists in the world. Another lesson to take away from this: Take everything you see in the media with a grain of salt.
Posted on: Sun, 18 May 2014 14:30:01 +0000
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