Under this management the Tribune in its first year forged steadily ahead, winning more and more of the public attention, if not always of the public approval. Greeley's
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the Tribune Greeley had hired as an editorial assistant on the New Yorker a young man who, while a college student in Vermont, had been a valued contributor to that journal.
This was Henry J. Raymond, in later years the founder of the Tribune's chief local competitor, the Times, and an antagonist in views social and political.
Greeley has said that Raymond showed more versatility and ability in journalism than any man of his age whom he ever met, and that he was the only one of his assistants with whom he had to remonstrate “for doing more work than any human brain and frame could be expected long to endure.”
1
1 Young editors who grow discouraged under criticisms of their first work may find encouragement in contrasting this praise of Raymond's practised labor with the following description by Greeley of his first attempts (given in a private letter): “Raymond is a good fellow, but utterly destitute of experience. . . . He went to work as a novice would, shears in hand, and cut out the most infernal lot of newspaper trash ever seen. He got in type a column of Lord Chatham, which you published a month ago, three or four column articles of amazing antiquity and stupidity, and then gave out an original translation of a notorious story — which I fear we have published once. Thus the New Yorker is doomed for this week.”
New York, D. Appleton and Company, March 1903.
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