Langdon Smith - Reporting

Reporting

In October 1897 Smith, along with fellow sports reporter Danny Smith, was sent by the New York Herald to Carson City, Nevada, where he covered the boxing match between James J. Corbett and English boxer Bob Fitzsimmons.

Smith continued reporting for William Randolph Hearst's Journal after the war. He was involved in at least one "scoop" for which Hearst papers became notorious, delivering the first newspaper copy of the 20th century to President McKinley. According to historian W. Joseph Campbell,

"Ten seconds into the century, the first issue of the New York Journal of 1 January 1901 fell from the newspaper's complex of fourteen high-speed presses. The first issue was rushed by automobile across pavements slippery with mud and rain to a waiting express train, reserved especially for the occasion. The newspaper was folded into an engraved silver case and carried aboard by Langdon Smith, a young reporter known for his vivid prose style. At speeds that reached eighty miles an hour, the special train raced through the darkness to Washington, D.C., and Smith's rendezvous with the president, William McKinley."

In the early years of the century he wrote for the New York Evening World as a featured writer, identified by his byline. Judging from the articles he published, he seems to have begun as a featured sports writer, with such articles as "Cock Fight Draws Out Millionaires" Beginning about 1904 his byline begins to appear frequently in the Sunday World and Sunday World Magazine on investigative articles such as "New York's Smiling Army of Factory Girls", "A Night With a Tenderloin 'Cop'", "A Day in the Hotel Astor Kitchen".

According to Brown, Smith wrote short stories, and a novel, On the Pan Handle, that were well received at the time. But Gardner was unable to verify any of this and doubts the novel and poems existed, except perhaps for a single poem, "Bessie McCall of Suicide Hall", mentioned in an article on Smith in The New York American of April 21, 1939 by one Hype Igoe. "Suicide Hall" was a saloon at 295 Bowery run by John McGurk from 1895 to 1902, when suicides by young prostitutes there forced him out of business. The building that had housed "Suicide Hall" was not demolished until 2005.

The first few stanzas of this famous poem were written and published in the New York Herald in 1895. It was worked upon for many years and later published in full in the New York Journal sometime before 1906, and posthumously published in illustrated and annotated book form as Evolution : A Fantasy (1909).