Background
Charles H. Taylor was born on July 14, 1846, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, United States to the family of John Ingalls Taylor and Abigail Russell Hapgood.
journalist politician publisher author
Charles H. Taylor was born on July 14, 1846, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, United States to the family of John Ingalls Taylor and Abigail Russell Hapgood.
Charles Henry Taylor, known as “General Taylor,” was the savior of the Boston Globe newspaper and a giant in the world of newspaper journalism.
Taylor showed an early interest in newspapers at the age of fourteen years when he worked as a compositor in a Boston printing office. Taylor’s adolescence coincided with the Civil War, and when the war began he enlisted in a Massachusetts infantry to fight for the Union forces. In June 1863 he was wounded in an assault on Port Hudson in Louisiana. After recovering in a New Orleans hospital, Taylor was honorably discharged, and he returned to Boston to pursue newspaper work.
Taylor wrote as a reporter for several years until 1869, when he took a job as private secretary to Massachusetts Governor William Claflin. In 1872 Taylor ran for a seat in the Massachusetts legislature and won. A year later, he was re-elected and elected Clerk of the House. During this time, Taylor continued to work as a reporter, and in 1869 he founded a ten-cent magazine called American Homes. The magazine’s operations were destroyed in the devastating Boston fire of November 1872, and in 1873 Taylor took the helm of the Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe had been founded the previous year and was struggling. At the time Taylor took over, the paper was one hundred thousand dollars in debt. The Boston newspaper market was already saturated, and for five years Taylor struggled to keep the Globe alive. In 1877, Taylor executed a plan that gave him co-ownership of the Globe with Eben D. Jordan, a dry goods merchant. In full control of the paper for the first time, Taylor began to drastically change the paper.
Prior to Taylor’s ascendancy at the Globe, newspapers across the country did not appeal to the masses. Because they catered to educated, wealthy persons, the papers rarely covered social concerns, and they were written in a dry, technical style with few feature sections. Many persons in Boston preferred dime store novels to newspapers for these reasons, and Taylor began to change the paper to appeal to these persons.
Taylor renounced the Globe's Republican leanings and declared that the paper would represent Democratic ideals. The goals of the Globe changed to advance the social and financial interests of “the masses” and “to promote their moral and intellectual welfare.” The reporting began to cover social issues that had been going uncovered by the other papers that catered to Boston’s high society. Stories on wage complaints by factory workers, labor unrest, and the concerns of Boston’s Catholic and Irish population began to appear in the paper. Despite this shift in content, Taylor demanded that the reporting remain unbiased. “There are two sides to every story,” Taylor told his reporters, “get both of them.”
Taylor catered the Globe to every segment of Boston society. Women were attracted by an expanded social column and a regular column on housekeeping, and men were lured by increased coverage of sporting events. Above all, Taylor stressed the coverage of local news and events as well as reportage on local persons. The Globe began to report on parties and club affairs and weddings and any other notable occasion that might include the name of an area resident. Readership of the Globe increased, and by 1880 the paper was showing a profit.
With its democratic tenor, the Globe did not especially appeal to Republicans, but Taylor managed to win over even these readers. When Republican President James A. Garfield was assassinated in September 1881, the Globe was the only newspaper in Boston to run a special midnight edition to report the death. Two days later, the Globe published a souvenir edition of the paper that contained a full obituary and a number of poems written in tribute to the late President, including works by John Boyle O’Reilly, Walt Whitman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The compassionate coverage earned the respect of Republicans and, in Taylor’s estimation, gave the Globe an extra ten thousand new readers.
Taylor received the honorary title of “General” from Massachusetts Governor William Eustis Russell, and Taylor used the title in his professional and personal life. Joseph Pulitzer asked Taylor to manage the New York World after Pulitzer was elected to Congress in 1885, but Taylor refused. Many persons pleaded with Taylor to run for public office, but Taylor rejected these requests as well. Taylor preferred to spend his time with his true love, the Boston Globe. “There is but one office that I really care for,” Taylor once said, “and that is my present office in the Boston Globe. ” Taylor did not stop working at the Globe until he suffered a physical collapse. He died in Boston just several days later, on June 22, 1921.
Members of the Taylor family served as publishers of until 1999.
Quotes from others about the person
"Taylor was one of the first newspaper publishers to have an inkling of an attempt to translate into actuality the twentieth-century conception of the newspaper as an instrument of social service." - Florence Finch Kelly, an employee at the Globe from 1881 to 1884 and long-time reporter for the New York Times
Charles H. Taylor married Georgiana Olivia Davis on February 7, 1867. They had five children: Charles, William, Elizabeth, John, and Grace.