Don Martin selected to become leading American war correspondent

  The New York Herald, for which Don Martin worked, was founded in 1835 by the inventive editor James Gordon Bennett. He influenced the entire American press by pioneering more-aggressive methods of gathering news: he developed the interview as a reporting technique, hired foreign correspondents, and gave emphasis to coverage of the arts and cultural events. Under Bennett’s direction the Herald developed a style of reporting that was sensational in emphasis, and high-spirited in tone. The Herald had a larger staff and published more news than any other New York City newspaper of its day. He managed to “outdo his rivals, increase his circulation, prestige and advertising, and make himself – and then his son – one of the richest men in the United States.” 
   James Gordon Bennett, Jr., born in 1841, grew up erratic and eccentric. He was elected Commodore of the New York Yacht Club, a name often used in referring to him. He took over control of the New York Herald from his father in 1868 and was also a gifted editor and promoter—it was he who sent Henry Morton Stanley to Africa to find the long-lost explorer and missionary David Livingstone. He contributed much to the Herald’s strengths through imaginative, even daring, management, and made the Herald supreme in New York.   
  He moved to France in 1878, after a social misstep, where he lived an extravagant cosmopolitan life up to his death in 1918. In Paris he had ‘an apartment at 120, avenue des Champs Elysées and a house on the avenue d’Iena, a villa on hunting grounds near Versailles, a shooting lodge in Scotland, a Mediterranean villa at Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the Riviera, two residences in New York and a mansion in Newport, as well the luxurious Lysistrata yacht, which rivaled any other yacht in the world, carrying a crew of 100.’ 
  From wherever he was, the Commodore ran his newspapers autocratically on a day-to-day basis. ‘Bennett had an extraordinary capacity for picking out good people who would be top-flight journalists.’ However, ‘reporters never received a byline'.‘There could be but one known man in the shop – Bennett.’ The New York Herald had a circulation of 500,000 in 1900, when it started a long decline to 60,000 when the Great War started.

 In October 1887 Bennett established the European Edition of the New York Herald in Paris, with a clientele of the cosmopolitan, world-travelling class. Up to 1918 its circulation was 12,000 in winter and 20,000 in summer. When the Paris Herald focused on war news, to which Don Martin contributed greatly, its circulation rose in 1918 to 350,000 as the members of the AEF and other Americans looked to it for their up-to-date news.[This information about Bennett and the Herald is taken from “The International Herald Tribune: The First Hundred Years”, Charles L. Robertson, Columbia University Press, 1987, and Encyclopedia Britannica online.]

  As British troops entered the war, Bennett signed up an American war correspondent, Percival Phillips. Working for the Daily Express in England, Phillips had developed a reputation from reporting on all the major stories, including revolutions in Catalonia (1909) and Portugal (1910) and the Balkan Wars (1912-13). In August 1914 he was sent to Belgium where he covered the invasion of Belgium. On the basis of this reputation, the New York Herald featured his articles on the front page, with byline as Special Correspondent of the Herald with the British Forces in France - an exception to Bennett's 'no bylines' rule.

 As America became engaged in the war in 1917 and started to send an American army to fight with the Allies, Commodore Bennett looked without success for another noted war correspondent  to the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France. Bennett made a well-paid offer to renowned war correspondent Frederick Palmer, who turned it down to became head of AEF press affairs under General Pershing, with rank of Major.(Chris Dubbs, American Journalists in the Great War, U. of Nebraska Press, 2017, p. 207)  
Bennett made a decision in October 1917 to send an American correspondent to head the Herald office in London.  He selected his leading political reporter in New York, Don Martin, who would cover the war from London as Special Correspondent covering the AEF. Don Martin arrived in London in time for New Year's Eve 1918 and spent two months heading up the Herald's London office. He moved to France in March 1918, first as  'visiting correspondent' and then as 'credentialed correspondent', covering and reporting on the war on a daily basis up to his death in early October 1918. Martin became recognized as one of the 'big four' American WWI correspondents, Ray Carroll of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Floyd Gibbons of the Chicago Tribune, Martin Green of the New York Evening World and Don Martin of the New York Herald. A photo of three of them was published in the Herald as part of the tributes shortly after Don Martin's death in Paris on October 7, 1918. 

War Correspondents Floyd Gibbons, Don Martin and Martin Green

   Don Martin's war coverage in his own words is the core of the story to be told in this blog. The material on which this blog is based is contained in Don Martin’s published war dispatches, his personal diaries for 1917 and 1918, and letters he sent in 1918 to his daughter and his family. In the next several days, we will get to know Don Martin and his life up to the time of his last assignment - to cover the Great War in Europe.