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1851-1921 By Elmer Davis Originally published 1921 |
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paper in New York," and the support of the faithful flowed to it accordingly. Its influence in the early seventies was greater than it had ever been before, and its prosperity may be judged by the fact that some of its stock sold in 1876 at fifteen times the face value.
Yet the prosperous and powerful Times of the seventies had a circulation only about a tenth of that enjoyed by The Times today. Evidence for the entire period is not available, but in the fall of 1871 - at the height of the campaign against Tweed, just before the election in which The Times led the reform forces to victory - the circulation never exceeded 36,000. The circulation of the supplement with the extracts from the Controller's books is, of course, an exception, and now and then on the morning after election the paper might have shown a higher figure; but on the whole it may be said that the leading Republican paper of the East at least, if not of the entire United States, in those years of prosperity sold anywhere from 31,000 to 35,000 copies a day.
It would be interesting to learn just what was the true circulation of The Times's contemporaries. Whatever it may have been, it was certainly not what they asserted. But statements of circulation fifty years ago belonged to the field of relativity rather than of conventional mathematics, and the. circulation managers of that day have long since gone to face the final audit of the Recording Angel.
And even on this small circulation The Times paid regularly a dividend of eighty, ninety, or a hundred per cent on its capitalization of $100,000. There
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