Horace Greeley pushed "Go West" and built America's biggest newspaper from a loss
Its first week, Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune took in $92 and spent $525. It sold for a penny, carried by newsboys, and in 1841 it faced a rival with more readers than all its competitors combined. Within years the Tribune was the country's highest-circulating paper, and its editor had popularised the advice to go west.
Greeley knew hardship firsthand. Born in 1811 near Amherst, New Hampshire, he did not breathe for his first twenty minutes. His father, a struggling farmer, fled to Vermont in 1820 to avoid jail for debt, and the family refused neighbours' offer to pay for the boy's schooling at Phillips Exeter. Horace read everything he could borrow. He tried to become a printer's apprentice at 11 and was told he was too young; at 15 he got the job, and locals called him the town encyclopedia.
He arrived in New York in late 1831 with little more than a trade. Early ventures flopped: a daily paper that failed, a literary weekly that reached 9,000 readers before the Panic of 1837 sank it. After the hard winter of 1836 to 1837 left many New Yorkers destitute, he urged the jobless to scatter across the country, calling the West the true destination and promising young men their energy would be rewarded there. The famous line telling young men to head west and grow up alongside the nation became forever tied to his name.
Politics gave him his break. He wrote campaign songs for the Whig candidate William Henry Harrison in 1840 and ran a campaign paper whose circulation hit 80,000, then launched the Tribune. His assistant Henry Raymond later founded The New York Times. Greeley was among the first editors to keep a full-time correspondent in Washington, and a $2-a-year weekly edition mailed nationwide spread his views through the Midwest. He championed causes from vegetarianism to temperance, and rarely ate meat after living in a boarding house run on Sylvester Graham's diet.
He helped found the Republican Party in 1854 and pressed Lincoln to commit to ending slavery sooner. In 1872 he ran for president against Ulysses Grant and lost in a landslide. His wife died five days before the election, and Greeley died a month later, before the Electoral College had met.
Source: Horace Greeley
