An Eminent Scapegrace Interviews an Eminent Divine: Stanley Huntley and Henry Ward Beecher, 1880

In 1878 Henry Ward Beecher finished building a house tailored to his aspirations on a thirty-six acre farm he had purchased some twenty years before, just east of Peekskill. That estate, which Beecher called "Boscobel," got a fair amount of attention both for agriculture and husbandry on the one hand and for that noteworthy structure on the other. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle often gave space to Beecher's sermons and to his other activities, so it must have come as no surprise when the Eagle provided long, front-page treatment of "BEECHER'S NEW HOME" in the issue of Sunday, June 20, 1880. The man who came the sixty miles to interview Beecher had developed a reputation for that sort of activity, as well as some others. This native New Yorker had reached thirty five years of age, and he had gained some renown or infamy for journalistic high-jinx. He did that especially in a St. Louis stay in the early and middle 1870s. On one occasion he exhausted the patience of his employer, Stilson Hutchins, so fully that Hutchins fired him. Mollified by an inspired stroke of Huntley's cheekiness, Hutchins re-hired him and, in 1877, took him to Washington, D. C., to help launch the Washington Post. There especially, Huntley garnered that reputation as an interviewer. Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes and his secretary of state, William M. Evarts, experienced-not very happily-- the attentions of this prankish Democratic newsman. The former vfs-a-vfs has interest because in 1879 Huntley encountered a young woman from Fremont, Ohio, whose family knew the Hayes family. Shortly, Florence Chance married Stanley Huntley. In interviewing that member of the Hayes cabinet, the impish journalist showed well his satiric capacity. The phlegmatic Evarts had little enthusiasm for his visitor, and that interview had more comedy than content. When Huntley informed the Secretary that he sought his "views," Evarts' "face assumed the expression of an eight-day clock with the works made of wood and the hands pointing to just about time for me to go." Simply, interviews often had a questionable, even bogus quality. Huntley ranked high where such suspicion was concerned (Saum, "Huntley Interviews"). Huntley's finest moment as an interviewer had occurred almost a year before his visit with Beecher. The sixty miles to the comforts at Peekskill bore little resemblance to his long trek from Bismarck, Dakota Territory, to the Milk River country near the Canadian border where Huntley interviewed Sitting Bull. For an inspired, rococo few months Huntley had edited the Bismarck Tribune, providing a nearly unmatched moment of frontier journalistic frolic. Ending his stay on the tripod in Bismarck in spring, 1879, Huntley accepted a commission from the Chicago Tribune to venture into the northern Montana country where Sitting Bull's fugitives came back across the line to meet the northward movement of buffalo herds. Almost exactly three years after the Little Big Horn disaster Huntley's interview with Sitting Bull covered most of the front page and part of the second page of the July 4, 1879, Chicago Tribune. Here as elsewhere, not all rushed to believe. The Eagle, for example, noting that Huntley "originated in Brooklyn," added that he combined "a strong imaginative ability" with "the faculty of usually being at a considerable distance from the persons and places described" (Eagle, July 11, 1879). Later in 1879 Huntley began his noteworthy stay at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Mostly, his contributions came in a weekly column, "Salad for Sunday." That varied fare became best known for the crotchets and splenetics of the irascible Mr. Spoopendyke whose outbursts often derived from the vacuously innocent misunderstandings of Mrs. Spoopendyke. The Spoopendyke Papers became known throughout the country, rightly so. The long interview with Beecher was signed, "S. H.," and a word about that should be offered here. On various occasions beginning in late 1879, six months before the Beecher interview, front-page specials in the Eagle appearing over those initials admit of no doubt that they came from Huntley. …