James Gordon Bennett, Sr. (1795-1872)

He was born in Scotland to Catholic crofters at Newmill, north of Keith in Banffshire. He left school at 15 to enter the Catholic Seminary at Aberdeen with a view towards entering the church. In 1819, he sailed to America and found work as a schoolmaster in Halifax (Nova Scotia) before continuing to work his way through Portland, Boston, and Charleston until 1823 when he came to New York. Having been a freelance writer, he became assistant editor of the New York Courier & Enquirer.

Following stints in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia he returned to New York in 1835 when he founded the cent-a-copy New York Herald from a basement on Wall Street with a capital of $500. He was a pioneer of journalism: He was the first editor to use sex and murder to sell newspapers; he was the first to intercept the incoming sailing ships for their news; to travel on the first transatlantic steamship; the first to use the telegraph and the Atlantic cable; in 1839, he was granted the first ever exclusive interview of a sitting President of the United States, Martin Van Buren; he was the first to hire a European correspondent for an American paper; and, he improved the printing machinery. By the time his son took the reins in 1867, his paper had the highest circulation in America.

In 1840, he married Henrietta Crean, maternal grand-daughter of Nathaniel Warren, M.P., Lord Mayor of Dublin and a first cousin of Sir William Johnson, 1st Bt. of New York. They had two children who were brought up in Paris, so appalled was their mother of the way her husband was treated by rival editors and those who felt the sting of his pen. Ironically, their son grew up to be the notoriously wild Gordon Bennett, bad boy of New York society.