The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (46 page)

The next day Locke extended his criticism to Jonathan Coddington, the city’s postmaster: “We shall have but one more favor to ask of the heads of the Custom House and Post Office departments in this city, and that is that they will have the goodness to keep their hands off the Democracy.”

These articles, Locke believed, led to his ouster. On October 10, 1839, almost three years to the day since that buoyant first issue of the
New Era,
Richard Adams Locke sent a letter to the
Evening Post,
writing, “I solicit the medium of your independent journal to inform the public, and more especially the Democratic party, that I am not responsible for any articles that may hereafter appear in the New Era.” According to Locke, Hoyt and Coddington had made a deal to give Jared W. Bell a much-needed loan, on the condition that they be allowed to appoint editors of their
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own choosing. The two men were longtime Democratic power brokers in the city; Hoyt was widely suspected of embezzling from the Custom House, and although Locke did not state this directly, he clearly implied that they were proposing to funnel public money to the
New Era
in exchange for editorial favors. Locke alleged that he had been summarily dismissed by Bell, without even being permitted to make his good-byes in the pages of the newspaper he had helped to found. In his anger and frustration, he had delivered a swift, highly uncharacteristic act of violence, directed not against the men who had stripped him of his job but against their offending words.

Having, by a most odious and despicable act of usurpation, been prevented from announcing my disconnection with the New Era in its editions of this morning, and not choosing even to tacitly incur the responsibility of the political articles which had been introduced to it by others, I broke to pieces the type in which they were set up for publication; and I deem this an act of justice not less due to myself than the democratic party.

For his part, Jared W. Bell firmly denied all of Locke’s charges. On October 11, in a long letter addressed to the readers of the
New Era,
Bell insisted, “I have never exchanged a word, or had any intercourse, either directly or indirectly, with Mr. Hoyt or Mr. Coddington on the subject of this paper; I have neither solicited nor received any assistance from them.”

He had assured Locke of this fact, again and again; nevertheless, according to Bell, Locke took it into his head that he was about to be dismissed, and on the day of his letter to the
Post
he had announced to many of his associates that he no longer had any connection with the paper. Bell made other arrangements for the production of the next morning’s issue and went home around ten o’clock. Later that evening, he wrote, Locke came to the office to insert in the paper an item he called his “valedictory,” reiterating his conviction that Hoyt and Coddington would soon be naming their own editors. But the
New Era’
s foreman, on orders from Bell himself (word of Locke’s actions had been sent to his home), refused to allow the statement to be published. “Learning this,” Bell wrote of Locke, he came again into the office, accompanied by his accomplice, after the type had all been prepared for the paper, and with many professions of
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friendship for the establishment, threw my men off their guard and availed himself of the temporary absence of my foreman from the form, which was then nearly made up, to seize the chase, and in the instant he tumbled the whole inside form into pi. The moment he did this, he fled from the office as fast as he could run.

Bell was willing to concede one point: “It is true that I have requested several persons to assist, at many times, in writing articles for the paper, for it was not always that I could rely upon Mr. Locke’s discharging his duty.” He provided no substantiating details for this assertion (due to their absence or his kindness, it is impossible to say), but one explanation does suggest itself: that by the end of the 1830s, alcohol had begun to get the better of Richard Adams Locke.

Not long after the launch of the
New Era
in 1837, a dispute between Locke and Benjamin Day over fifty dollars that Day claimed he was owed for uncompleted work led him to pillory Locke in the
Sun
as “contemptible” and “reckless,” “the farthest extreme from veracity, and decency,” and, most damningly, as “a pitiable wanderer from the pale of sobriety and honesty.” Alcoholism was a charge not often made, even in the bare-knuckle world of New York journalism (where rivals tended to brand each other more generically, along the lines of “villain” or “black-guard” or “lizard”), and Day’s editorial attacks tended to be relatively moderate, certainly in comparison with the awe-inspiring Niagaras of invective that a James Gordon Bennett or James Watson Webb could summon forth. Day further added a distressing bit of specificity to his accusation, making reference to an incident of some months earlier when, he claimed, Locke had been revealed as “a drunkard, lying exposed in the punch room of a public theater.”

Three years later, after Locke’s contentious departure from the
New
Era,
an item appeared in the
New-Yorker
of December 19, 1840, concerning a lecture he gave at the American Institute on “the science of Terrestrial Magnetism.” The anonymous
New-Yorker
correspondent confessed to not having understood all of the evening’s presentation, in part because Locke “labored under a serious indisposition, which somewhat affected his delivery.” In the nineteenth century, the word
indisposition
was often used as a euphemism for drunkenness. Several months after that, Locke was hired to coedit the new Democratic paper the
Brooklyn
Daily Eagle,
but his tenure there lasted only a year, when he was replaced,
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in the words of a modern historian of the
Eagle,
“with the more conservative and hard working William B. Marsh.” Richard Adams Locke could well be accused of lacking conservatism, but his productivity over many years, for a succession of New York newspapers, belies the notion that he was averse to hard work and raises the suspicion that Locke had begun to “wander,” as Day had suggested, too often from sobriety.

Locke’s behavior may have been growing erratic, his work routines irregular, but to those who knew him he was, in the phrase of the day, a gentleman and a scholar, and he seems to have inspired sympathy even among those who ultimately turned against him. (“He would have been a first-rate man,” Benjamin Day later remarked of his former editor, “but for the drink.”) Immediately after the break with Jared W. Bell, a group of Locke’s friends raised money to publish another newspaper he would edit, under the original name
New Era;
that paper, though, did not survive for long, in part because of a court order obtained by Bell enjoining Locke from the use of the name. Richard Adams Locke had friends in all corners of the city; he was, in the words of his rival James Gordon Bennett, “a fluent and a ready speaker,” and in the following years he remained a presence in New York’s literary salons, among them one
soirée
that took place on January 10, 1846, in the double parlor of Miss Anne Charlotte Lynch’s house on Waverly Place, where the evening’s guests included not just Richard Adams Locke but also Edgar Allan Poe—the only time the two men were ever known to cross paths. (In a letter, the party’s hostess referred to Locke as “the man in the moon,” an indication of how, more than ten years after its publication, the moon series continued to define him in the public mind.) In May 1840, one of Locke’s literary acquaintances, Park Benjamin, editor of the popular weekly paper the
New World,
sent him a brief but highly flattering letter at his home in Staten Island. For some time, Benjamin wrote, he had hoped to republish Locke’s moon series in the
New
World,
because it had been “a topic prolific of lively anecdote, ever since its first publication; and there are many persons who have read it but cur-sorily, in the disjointed parts in which it appeared in most of the public prints, who would be gratified with a reperusal of it in a connected form.”

(Benjamin added that even those who had been thoroughly hoaxed by the story might be interested in reading it again, if only “from that comical sort of instinctive curiosity with which we look back at the peach-stone, or piece of orange-peel, that has sent us skating on the pavement.”) He

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hoped that Locke might furnish him with a full copy of “your far-famed Moon-story” for publication in the
New World,
and also write an introduction discussing “the circumstances that suggested its composition and the incidents attendant upon its unexampled career.”

Richard Adams Locke was then unemployed, after nearly a decade of continuous work as a New York journalist. At the
Sun,
he had disclaimed authorship of the moon series; at the
New Era,
he had claimed it but made no explanation. Now, without affiliation, he felt freer still. Perhaps he already sensed that his literary talents, once so abundant, were fleeing him; perhaps he knew he did not have many years left as a working writer, and that
Great Astronomical Discoveries
would be the only literary production for which he would be remembered. Park Benjamin had unexpectedly provided him an opportunity to set the record straight at last.

After five years, Locke decided that the time had come to reveal why he had written his moon story.

His letter of reply, which was published in the
New World
on May 16, 1840, might have been more than Park Benjamin had bargained for. Running across six columns of one of the
New World’
s mammoth pages, the letter comprised some nine thousand words—nearly as long as the moon series itself. If the editor was interested in “so stale a joke as my moon quiz,” Locke wrote, then he was happy to provide a full copy. “The fact is,” he admitted, “I am unaffectedly ashamed of it, not from any casuistry about it as a hoax, but because, in this very respect, it is so bungling a production. I have feared that it might be considered vain in me, if not impudent, to flutter it anew in the faces of those who are candid enough to say they were temporarily deceived by it—vain, if I were supposed to be unconscious of its glaring faults, and impudent if aware of them.” Still, he was pleased for a chance to describe how it came to be written, “since these will explain the motives of an attempt which has been gravely denounced as mischievous and immoral, and, perhaps, supply an excuse for the imperfections in its execution.”

For many years, Locke explained, he had been deeply concerned by the popularity of what he referred to as “the
imaginative school of philosophy,
” and its damaging effect on the practice of modern science. Perhaps best exemplified by—though by no means limited to—the Scottish astronomer Thomas Dick (who believed that God would not create celestial bodies without intelligent beings present to appreciate them), the school
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practiced what Locke called “
theological and devotional
encroachments upon the legitimate province of science,” taking the painstaking, dispassionate, and logical methods by which science rightfully operates and replacing them with fanciful and ultimately unprovable theories about God’s design. Its studies were pursued less with scientific experimentation than with textual interpretation, were beholden not to reason but to dogma, and were grounded not in fact but in faith. For this school, truths about the world were to be found in scripture rather than nature—or, as Locke deftly summarized it, the “
word
of God” rather than the “
works
of God.”

Scientific inquiry, he argued, “should be free as the mountain air and unchartered as the light of heaven,” yet in the nineteenth century it was still laboring under the same sectarian fetters that had once silenced Galileo and had for too long deprived the world of the revolutionary theories of Copernicus. Locke himself knew several geologists who had abandoned valuable lines of research “because they perceived it was leading them to the awful discovery that the globe on which we live was not formed in literally six days of twenty-four hours each!” He had tried as best he could to persuade them otherwise. Three of those days, he pointed out, were said to have elapsed before the heavenly bodies that measure time had even been created—and so they could not have corresponded to the days of our own age. Perhaps those three periods, which scripture refers to as “days,” were in fact incalculably long. If so, the text might comport perfectly with the discoveries that were now being made about the true age of the earth, the theological testimony thus coming into align-ment with the geological one. But Locke could not induce the geologists to continue their studies. “The imaginative and devotional philosophy prevailed; the sectarian theology of the pulpit triumphed over the theological sections of the hills.”

This domineering religiosity, as well as its harmful effect on intellectual life, was not a new phenomenon in the United States, nor was it noted only by Locke. In 1835, the same year Locke created his moon story, Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his classic work
Democracy in America
. “Christianity reigns without obstacles, by universal consent,” he observed about the country in which he had traveled so widely. “So the human spirit never sees an unlimited field before itself; however bold it is, from time to time it feels that it must halt before insurmountable barriers. Before innovating, it is forced to accept certain
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