Frederick Gilmer Bonfils was an American journalist. He was a cofounder of the Denver Post.
Background
Frederick Bonfils was born on December 21, 1860, in Troy, Missouri, United States, the second son among the eight children of Eugene Napoleon Bonfils and his wife Henrietta B. Lewis, a native of Charlottesville, Virginia. His father was a rural lawyer and probate judge, who in Cleveland's first administration served as special agent in South Dakota and Wyoming for the general land office. The grandfather, Salvatori Buonfiglio (1795 - 1849), a professor of modern languages in the University of Alabama and Transylvania University, who was born in Tempio on the island of Corsica, emigrated from Rome to Boston in 1817 and two years later married Lucinda Alden, seventh-generation descendant of John Alden.
Education
Growing up in very modest circumstances, Frederick attended public school in Troy and in 1878 was appointed to the United States Military Academy. He left West Point in 1881 without graduating.
Career
For a time Frederick Bonfils worked in the Chemical National Bank, New York. He soon returned to Troy and first engaged in an insurance business conducted by his father; then he sold Texas land to residents of Missouri and Kansas. Briefly he was a clerk in the Missouri legislature. He was hottempered and quick with his fists, and if all the stories are true, many of his short-lived connections ended in physical combat. With the opening of Oklahoma Territory in 1889, he coined a small fortune overnight in the real estate boom, Guthrie being one of the towns he helped develop. Using his profits as capital and employing "L. E. Winn" and other aliases, he operated the Little Louisiana Lottery in Kansas City, Kansas, even surviving arrest. He was at last undone by the Kansas City Star under William Rockhill Nelson, which persisted in its attacks until Bonfils was driven out. He was now ready for a fresh start and it came in 1895 with a newspaper partnership into which he was invited by Harry Heye Tammen.
Tammen persuaded Bonfils to invest $12, 500 in the purchase of the Evening Post, established in Denver in 1892. Changing its name to the Denver Post, the partners took over the struggling newspaper on the date of purchase, October 28, 1895. Neither knew enough about journalism to be influenced by conventional methods, but both were aware that the Denver of the day was a wide open town which would stand almost anything. They went in for screaming headlines, later in red ink, utterly unorthodox captions, and attacks right and left upon public officials. All this was done, however, in the name of the public welfare - the Post describing itself to its readers as "Your Big Brother" and "The Paper with a Heart and Soul. " Bonfils soon began his "So the People May Know" blasts, and when he launched his first crusade it was against the operation of lotteries. For thirteen years the profits were put back into the enterprise, "Bon" holding tightly to the money drawer while the resourceful "Tam" originated many of the newspaper's bizarre stunts. There were reports of "strong-arm methods" in obtaining advertisers, "but in the entire history of the Post, no case involving its hinted blackmail was substantiated in court. "
Though the partners agreed that "a dog fight in a Denver street" was "more important than a war in Europe, " emphasis on local news did not stop them from seeking to outdo William Randolph Hearst in exploiting the episodes leading to the Spanish-American War. They met ministerial criticism of their detailed accounts of criminality with frequent repetition of a concluding moralistic line: "Crime never pays. " Crime may not have paid, but the sensationalism of the Post did. Its 1895 circulation of 4, 000 was increased to 27, 000 in three years and by 1907 it was announced as 83, 000, more than the total of its three competitors. The publishing company was moved to a prominent location and the proprietors established themselves in a private office with red-painted walls, which quickly became known to Colorado as "The Bucket of Blood. " In 1908 they began paying themselves salaries of $1, 000 a week.
This business success was not based on yellow journalism alone. The gilt motto on the Post building, "Oh, Justice, when expelled from other habitations, make this thy dwelling place, " was far-fetched almost to the point of mockery, yet the newspaper did espouse selected progressive causes, such as prison and child labor reform, and it often put its burning spotlight on official corruption. It forced down the cost of coal by leasing mines and offering the fuel to the public at much less than the dealers' price, though it was charged that this was done from resentment at the failure of merchants and coal dealers to advertise in the Post.
From October 29, 1909, to May 18, 1922, they also published the Kansas City Post, through which they sought unsuccessfully to duplicate their performance in Denver. Kansas City did not take to their extravagant practices and they sold their $250, 000 investment to Walter S. Dickey, owner of the Kansas City Journal, for $1, 250, 000.
A feud between the Post and its morning rival, the Rocky Mountain News, resulted in a street attack by Bonfils upon the News's publisher, and one-time senator, Thomas M. Patterson. Bonfils was tried, convicted, and fined fifty dollars and costs. When the Post fought a street-car strike, a crowd sympathetic with the employees sacked the newspaper's offices. Out of a dog and pony show, which Tammen ran on the side and named for his sports editor, Otto C. Floto, grew the Sells-Floto circus and a long, bitter, and noisy war with the Ringlings, which included a legal battle over use of the name Sells. The circus was primarily Tammen's affair, but Bonfils wrote scathing attacks on the "circus trust. " Finally, the Bonfils-Tammen show was sued in federal court and in 1909 it was required to stop using pictures of the four Sells brothers, but allowed to continue employment of the name as acquired from a kinsman. The journalistic operations of the pair became a national issue as a result of the Post's part in the Teapot Dome scandal. After investigating the government's lease and Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall's financial condition and printing articles about both in the summer of 1922, the Post dropped the subject.
Two years later, a Senate investigating committee which grilled Bonfils found that the Post's attacks were associated with a suit against Harry F. Sinclair, chief of the Teapot Dome oil speculators, filed by Leo Stack, and that when Sinclair paid $250, 000 and agreed to pay $750, 000 more the suit was settled and the Post's publications stopped. Notwithstanding widespread public indignation, a committee recommendation in the American Society of Newspaper Editors to expel Bonfils failed on the technical excuse that the deal took place before the society adopted its code of ethics. Tammen died while the scandal was still unfolding and Bonfils resigned his membership in the editors' organization in 1927. A similar entry in their record was the disclosure by the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1914 that the Rock Island Railroad had apparently paid $60, 000 to the Post for "editorial advertising. "
Bonfils's battle with the Rocky Mountain News grew so violent in the late twenties that the Post started a morning edition and the morning News began an afternoon issue. For two years Denver witnessed one of the bitterest and most wasteful newspaper wars in American journalism. Temporary peace came in 1928 when Bonfils and Roy W. Howard, then owner of the News, were joint guests of the Denver Chamber of Commerce, and the extra editions were discontinued. Hostilities broke out again in 1932 with publication by the News of a political convention address by Walter Walker, publisher of the Grand Junction Sentinel and senator, which called Bonfils "a public enemy" who had "left the trail of a slimy serpent across Colorado for thirty years. " Bonfils sued the News for $200, 000 for libel, whereupon the News undertook to prove the truth of the statement and drew up a "devastating" bill of forty-one counts against him. In this litigation Bonfils was fined twenty-five dollars for contempt of court for refusing to answer questions in the deposition hearings. While the case was pending, the flamboyant publisher underwent an operation for an ear abscess and died at his home less than a week later of toxic encephalitis which developed into pneumonia, in his seventy-third year.
Bonfils’s body was placed in a mausoleum in Fairmount cemetery, Denver. His estate was valued at $8, 200, 000. Five years before his death he outlined plans to endow a foundation for "the betterment of mankind, " including research for cures for cancer and tuberculosis. He was a benefactor of the high school at Troy, Missouri, and dedicated the building to the memory of his parents.
Achievements
Frederick Bonfils and Harry Heye Tammen made the Denver Post one of the most sensational newspapers in the country. The Bonfils-Tammen journalism was both hated and feared but above all it was read throughout the West, so that in their lifetime it reached a daily circulation of 150, 000 and 300, 000 on Sunday. In 1902, they also founded the Floto Dog & Pony Show, which existed untill 1921.
Connections
In 1882 Frederick Bonfils married Belle Barton of Peekskill, New York.
