The Birmingham age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1902-1950, 1909-05-16
MOTHER OF THE
YELLOW JOURNAL
Monument to Be Raised to
Anne Royal
WAS EDITOR Of PAUL PRY
Was Terror to Men In Public Lierf.
She Adopts Heroic Method to In
terview President John 2
Quincy Adams. - :

From the washington Post.

journalism, the first of muck-ralxei s,
the founder of the sensational tnte n
view. the original Town Topics"
And now the good people of Swet 1t
Springs, Va, are going to erect a meN
mortal to the memory of her their mos L
famous citizen. Sweet Springs is a
quiet little hamlet nestled in the lctp
of the foothills of the Alleghenies, lnelr
the head of the Shenandoah vaiIle y.
where Anne Royal spent the morning Of
her life; and meantime, while the cifh.-
zens of this old village are honoring he4r,
Anne Royal herself lies in a neglec4,sl
grave down In the old COMPRESSION al
cemetery, in southwest Washington.
Yet it was IN Washington, and not 10
Sweet Springs, that this strange won an
achieved a national regulations re pm
tation as wide as that of the Preside MT
for or against whom she welded her tedf-
torial cudgel. She did it by Introducing
into the newspaper life of the Capitol,
and, indeed, of the whole country, q
new style of journalism, the 1rst seed
of the modern sensational, or yellow"
journal. Also by cutting down many
iourishing political hypocrites; and she
Hers was a romantic life; her child
hood spent as Anne Newport Fduring the
days of the Revolution on Sthe Indian
haunted frontier of western fRennsylvan-
ia; captured by the sayages' and held in
their wigwams for years, finally res
cued by the man she afterward married,
Capt. Royal, an officer of the American
army, a Virginian of wealth and family,
whose estate was near the old Sweet
Springs settlement. Here, after her ex-
citing life, she lived happily with him
for years, acquiring a strange education
from her eccentric husband, imbibing his
eccentrcities, and scattering the bounty
of his wealth broadcast among the poor
of the neighborhood-only to be left af-
ter his death with a lawsuit that, after
years of tedious litigation, left her, at
the age of 90, alone and destitute
Anne lnvades Washngton.f
In the year 1880 there game to- Wash
ington an old woman i'll of health, poor
of purse, and an utter stranger, not
only to the ways of political life. but
to every public and private citizen of
the city. By sheer force of will she
raised enough money to start a news
paper The old woman was Anne Roy
all, and the newspaper was her famous
-infamous-many called it-Paul Pry
They were parlous times in the political
world in those old days when Hickory
Jackson warred against Biddle and Clay
when daily partisan pamphlets howled
Tyranny on one side and Anarchy"
on the other, and both parties yelled
Treason The nation was fin its teeth
ing stage. and as fretful as a-well, you
know bsbiesl
Then 1t was that modern sensational
journalism was born, born on the site
where now stands the Congressional Lii
brary, and born OF woman. For it was
there that Anne Royal started her in
FAINT and impudent newspaper with tho
yellow title Paul Pry" stamped on
its swaddling clothes, and plunged into
the whirl of the political maelstrom
It's coming was a revelation-more a
revolution-in journalism. She was a very
Joan of yellow journalism. As the little
maid Of Domremy, whose sole experience
had been watching her peaceful sheep,
came forth from her quietude, and,
marching In the van of the army showed
the French generals how to gain vic
tories. so Anne Royal, unlearned in jour-
nalism, came down from her secluded
country home and taught the veterans
of the pen how to run a newspaper that
people wanted to read Neither of them,
according to the light of their times,
should>h have been in the running. Joan,
aged 16, was too young to fight Anne,
aged go, was too old to write Yet both
made good. More, they both excited the
imitation. And what greater proof of
success could be asked2
Anne Wakes EN- Up.
Therefore, the National Intelligencer
and Sentinel. the leading papers of
Washington, had devoted themselves on
ly to printing sleepy statistics of births
and deaths, the arrival and departure of
ships, the number of coffee bags import
ed from Brazil each month. and chron-
icing such other small beer as would
make patent office report read like a
Dumas romance Anne changed all this
She saw that readers wanted something
vital, and the Invest thing of that day
was politics. 1t was the one white-hot
topic, but the newspapers of the time
were chary even of wetting finger and
touching it to see if it would sizzle Such
ticklish stuff was left to special sheets
written by ''pamphleteers as they were
called, dealing only in political screeds
and gotten out much as the present cam
paign literature Of presidential cleo
ton year.
Into this seething ring of acrimonious
stripe Anne SHE'D her castor. In the very
first issue she shot forth caustlc po-
litica1 editorial, the first of its kind: the
style OF editorial, whose model was later
followed by Greeley and Dana and other
Titans of the press. Soon, through the
sonnolent offices of her contemporaries
her vigorous leaders ratified like a clap
of nearby thunder and walked up the
doing editors until they had perforce
to follow her lead and not only seek out
and print, but comment upon the current
political news.
Before then the newspapers had fur
nished but mild, bresl1fast-food sort of
journalism. Anne would none of that
While the cautious editors of Sentinel or
Intelligencer was writing first-page arti-
Gle on the subject of Wilmington and his
cat or some other such Mother Goose
stuff, Anne Royal would seize the butt
end of the English language and make 1t
crack like a bull whip over Calhoun and
South Carolina secession; flick an inch of
hide off the f1ank of the United States
bank and wind up with singing twitch
on the skin of half dozen political hyp-
oorites of congressman that made them
sit down and write letters begging the
postmaster to prohibit Paul Pry from the
malls. Anne Royal sometimes dipped her
goosequill in the vitriol, but she never
put waterein her ink.
She was the mother of the yellow jour-
nal, It's true, but she was also the mother
of modern journalism She was the first
to lay that great cornerstone of the pres
ent newspaper, the interview. Before the
advent of Anne and her Paul Pry, editors
had been content to sit back and wait
until some great man who didn't want the
public to know what he was going to say,
said 1t. Or they would go out on the
street and ask some friend of the big po-
litical whale what his opinions on GER
tain subject might be--a method about as
as tip on a horse race.
Not so Anne Royal. When she wanted
to know the whales thoughts, she grab |
bed up her ancient crino1ine, seized an ink |
bottle and goose quill, snatched a hand |