Edwin Lawrence Godkin was not quite fifty-two when he became editor-in-chief in 1883, and was in the prime of life, with fifteen years of vigorous journalistic labor before him. He wrote Charles Eliot Norton that he had no intention, even if his health permitted, of staying with the Evening Post more than ten years, but his heart was enlisted far too keenly in his work and the great causes he espoused to let him go until failing health made his retirement in 1899 imperative. It is natural that his published letters should emphasize his joyous sense of a greater freedom as he entered the newspaper office; his feeling that he was giving himself to a publication which did not depend absolutely upon his pen and mind as the Nation did, and could have his vacations like other workers. But he felt also his new responsibilities. He valued the opportunity the Post gave him to impress his opinions daily upon the public; to reach a wider audience—the Post’s 20,000 buyers as well as the Nation’s 10,000; and to give more attention to certain subjects, as municipal misgovernment. “My notion is, you know,” he wrote W. P. Garrison in 1883, “that the Evening Post ought to make a specialty of being the paper to which sober-minded people would look at crises of this kind, instead of hollering and bellering and shouting platitudes like the Herald and Times.”
The independent character of the political course Godkin would steer had been fully indicated by the volumes of the Nation. This weekly, founded when the last shots of the Civil War were ringing in men’s ears, had undertaken the fearless discussion of public questions at a moment that seemed peculiarly unpropitious. The prevalent459 tendency of the years after the war, as Godkin said, was a fierce illiberalism, represented by such leaders as Thaddeus Stevens in the House. The Nation had at once declared war upon this narrow, rancorous political spirit, and attempted to substitute progressive and enlightened views. It had questioned the wisdom of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. It had been ten years in advance of public opinion in its attacks upon that demagogic politician, Ben Butler. It had been one of the first Republican organs to denounce the carpet-bag régime at the South, and to assail President Grant for his failures. In 1876 occurred its most serious collision with a considerable body of readers; it condemned the Southern frauds which gave Hayes the Presidency, and called his induction into office a “most deplorable and debauching enterprise,” this course costing it 3,000 subscribers. Godkin inclined in his sympathies to the Republican party, but he would not hesitate to break from it upon any question of principle.
When Godkin assumed the helm of the Evening Post, he had a shrewd suspicion that the Presidential campaign about to open would present a fundamental question of principle. As he wrote long after, James G. Blaine’s audacity, good humor, horror of rebel brigadiers, and contempt for reformers made his nomination sooner or later inevitable, and such a nomination in Godkin’s eyes presented a moral question of the first magnitude. No American newspaper has ever conducted a more effective campaign fight than that which the Evening Post waged in 1884. It was a fight not only against Blaine, but in behalf of the one contemporary American statesman whom Godkin, in his long journalistic career after 1865, highly admired.
Of reformers like Godkin, Blaine wrote in advance of his nomination: “They are noisy, but not numerous; pharisaical, but not practical; ambitious, but not wise; pretentious, but not powerful.” The Evening Post’s opinion of Blaine was equally frank. It believed that the Mulligan letters, published in 1876, convicted Blaine of460 prostituting his office as a member of Congress and Speaker in order to make money in various Western railways, and of lying in a vain effort to conceal the fact. It added as lesser counts against him that in his twelve years in the House he had never performed a single service for good government, and had done it much disservice, as by his covert opposition to civil service reform, and his defense of the spoliation of the public lands; that in all his public appearances he had been sensational, theatrical, and a lover of notoriety; and that while Secretary of State under Garfield “he plunged into spoils, and wallowed in them for three months, like a rhinoceros in an African pool, using every office he could lay his hands on for the reward of his henchmen and hangers-on, without shame or scruple.” But its central objection was always that he had sold his official power and influence.
The great “Mugwump” bolt from the Republican party as soon as Blaine was nominated took with it many influential Eastern journals—Harper’s Weekly, the New York Times, the Boston Herald, the Boston Advertiser, and the Springfield Republican—but it took no other pen like Godkin’s. Long in advance of the convention, he and Schurz had warned the Republican leaders that Blaine’s nomination would disrupt the party. The Evening Post pointed out in November, 1883, that the next election would probably be close, and that New York, where the voters were more independent than anywhere else, would certainly be the pivotal State. The election of 1876 had hung upon several artificial decisions in the South; that of 1884 would be likely to hang upon the judgment of a small body of thoughtful, impartial voters. On April 23, 1884, a rich New Jersey Congressman named William Walter Phelps published an article defending Blaine, to which Godkin immediately replied in a long and elaborate review of “Mr. Blaine’s Railroad Transactions.” Thereafter the paper kept up a drum-fire upon the “tattooed man.”
How could the campaign be most effectively conducted? Godkin saw that of the arsenal of weapons available,461 the parallel column could be used with the most telling force. The attack, in the first place, must be focussed upon the Republican candidate. No one cared about the rival platforms. As for the general character of the two parties, most voters believed the Republican party to be superior, and Godkin himself would have thought so had not its jobbing, corrupt element, as he said, gradually “come to a head, in the fashion of a tumor, in Mr. James G. Blaine.” How could Blaine’s weaknesses be most clearly exposed? By his own letters, made public through Mulligan, which stripped his dealings as a Congressman with the Little Rock & Fort Smith, the union Pacific, and the Northern Pacific interests, and by his own speeches defending these transactions. Adroit though he was, Blaine in his panicky efforts at self-justification had repeatedly contradicted both himself and the admitted facts. This, with all its implications, could be concisely proved by the parallel columns.
Not all these contradictions were immediately evident. By the end of September, just after Mulligan had published a new group of Blaine letters, Godkin and his associates, Horace White, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, and A. G. Sedgwick, had detected a half dozen. By November they had raised the total to ten. Reprinted day after day, they had a value that will be evident from a couple of examples:
BLAINE LIE NO. 5
“My whole connection with the road has been open as the day. If there had been anything to conceal about it, I should never have touched it. Wherever concealment is advisable, avoidance is advisable, and I do not know any better test to apply to the honor and fairness of a business transaction.”—Mr. Blaine’s speech in Congress, April 24, 1876.
“I want you to send me a letter such as the enclosed draft.... Regard this letter as strictly confidential. Do not show it to anyone. If you can’t get the letter written in season for the nine o’clock mail to New York, please be sure to mail it during the night.... Sincerely, J. G. B. (Burn this letter)”—Blaine to Fisher, April 16, 1876.
BLAINE LIE NO. 9 [IN PART]
“Third.—I do not own and never did own an acre of coal land or any other kind of land in the Hocking Valley or in any other part of Ohio. My letter to the Hon. Hezekiah Bundy in July last on this same subject was accurately true.
Very truly yours,
J. G. Blaine.”
(Letter to the Hon. Wm. McKinley, dated Belleaire, Ohio, Oct. 4, 1884.)
“Boston, Dec. 15, 1880.
“Received of James G. Blaine, $25,180.50, being payment in full for one share in the association formed for the purchase of lands known as the Hope Furnace Tract, situated in Vinton and Athens Counties, Ohio. This receipt to be exchanged for a certificate when prepared.
J. N. Denison, Agent.”
462 One particularly notable use of the parallel columns was in contradiction of Blaine’s statement that subsequent to his purchase of the bonds of the Fort Smith railroad, only one act of Congress had been passed applying to the line, and that merely to rectify a previous mistake in legislation. The fact was, as the paper showed, that the act repealed the proviso that the railway’s grant of public lands should not be sold for more than $2.50 an acre, thus adding to the value of its securities.
The deadly parallel columns were applied to careless campaign speakers for Blaine. They were repeatedly used against the leading Blaine newspapers, the New York Tribune, Philadelphia Press, Chicago Tribune, and Cincinnati Commercial. A happy stroke, for example, exhibited their efforts to ignore the second batch of Mulligan letters:
BLAINE’S OWN VIEW OF THE LETTERS
“There is not a word in the letters which is not entirely consistent with the most scrupulous integrity and honor. I hope that every Republican paper in the United States will republish them in full.”—Mr. Blaine’s interview with the Kennebec Journal, Sept. 15, 1884.
EARLY VIEWS OF HIS ORGANS
The Tribune, Sept. 15, 1884, suppressed all the letters and had no comments.
The Boston Journal, Sept. 15, 1884, suppressed nine letters, gave misleading summaries of many of them, and commented not at all upon the suppressed ones.
The Philadelphia Press, Sept. 15, 1884, published the letters in a part of its edition only, and had no comment.
For the unprecedented scandal-mongering of this campaign, which Godkin called fit for a tenement stairway, the Evening Post and other decent newspapers felt only disgust. But when the vicious elements in Buffalo which had learned to hate Cleveland as a reform Mayor and Governor revealed the fact that, as a young man, he had once formed an illicit connection, the Post felt it necessary to treat the charge in detail and place it in its true importance. A large number of clergymen, suffrage leaders, and others hastened to declare that no man with an illegitimate child could be supported for the Presidency. Considering Blaine’s character, this seemed to the Post both ridiculous and vicious. Which was better fitted to be President, a man once unchaste, as Franklin, Webster, and Jefferson had been, or a man who sold his official463 power for money? Godkin argued that in a statesman official probity was all important, while an early lapse in personal morals was of minor significance:
“Well, but,” we shall be asked, “does not the charge against Cleveland, as you yourselves state and admit it, disqualify him, in your estimation, for the Presidency of the United States?” We answer frankly: “Yes, if his opponent be free from this stain, and as good a man in all other ways.” We should like to see candidates for the Presidency models of all the virtues, pure as the snow and steadfast as the eternal hills. But when the alternative is a man of whom the Buffalo Express, a political opponent, said immediately after his nomination, “that the people of Buffalo had known him as one of their worthiest citizens, one of their manliest men, faithful to his clients, faithful to his friends, and faithful to every public trust” ... a good son and good brother, and unmarried in order that he might be the better son and brother, against whom nothing can be said except that he has not been proof against one of the most powerful temptations by which human nature is assailed; or, on the other hand, a man convicted out of his own mouth of having publicly lied in order to hide his jobbery in office, of having offered his judicial decisions as a sign of his possible usefulness to railroad speculators in case they paid him his price, of trading in charters which had been benefited by legislation in which he took part, and of having broken his word of honor in order to destroy documentary evidence of his corruption—a man who has accumulated a fortune in a few years on the salary of a Congressman—then we say emphatically no—ten thousand times no.
A public office like the Presidency was not a reward for a blameless private life, insisted Godkin, but a heavy duty and responsibility, to be given only to a statesman of ability and official integrity. Schurz pointed out that Hamilton, the founder of the Post, was once placed in a position where he had to remain silent concerning a slur upon his honesty in office, or confess to an offense like Cleveland’s; and he hesitated not an instant to clear his public honor at this cost to private reputation. The articles of the Evening Post and Nation powerfully conduced to right thinking on this subject.
The abuse visited upon the Evening Post in this campaign464 was the greatest since the slavery struggle. The Chicago Tribune said that “it was a natural instinct of servility to the great corporations that has bound it with hoops of steel to Cleveland’s cause”; a remarkable charge in view of the fact that Jay Gould, H. H. Rogers, Cyrus W. Field, Russell Sage, H. D. Armour, and other corporation heads supported Blaine, and by their dinner with him at Delmonico’s just before election—“Belshazzar’s Feast”—did not a little to defeat him. “The Evening Post has finally gone down so low,” remarked the Poughkeepsie Eagle in September, “that it lies about itself.” The Harrisburgh Telegraph published an attack by Bryant upon Jefferson as proof that the Post had always been addicted to malevolent personalities; not mentioning the fact that Bryant had written these verses in 1803, at the age of nine, twenty-three years before he joined the Post. The New York Tribune turned Godkin’s statement, “Cleveland’s virtues are those which bind human society together,” into “Cleveland’s sins are of the sort which bind society together,” and repeatedly printed it in this form. As for Dana’s Sun, it continually called the Post “stupid”; but Dana this year was proving his own brilliance by supporting the farcical Greenback candidacy of Ben Butler, who polled 3,500 votes in New York city.
On the other hand, the paper received a steady stream of congratulatory letters. Henry Ward Beecher wrote in September that the editorials were clear, honest, and weighty. “How any one who has read them can vote for Blaine passes my comprehension. They ought to be circulated over the whole land as one of the best campaign documents. They stand in striking contrast with the inefficient speeches of Hawley, Hoard, and Dawes, and the essays and letters of Mead, Bliss & Co. Allow me to say that the Evening Post has never stood higher in its long and honorable life than now. It may almost be called the ideal family newspaper.” As a matter of fact, the editorials were circulated as campaign documents. Godkin’s articles on Blaine’s railway transactions sold 20,000 copies in pamphlet form before Sept. 20,465 when a revised edition appeared. In October the Post issued a pamphlet called “The Young Men’s Party,” by Col. T. W. Higginson, and another which embraced a reply to George Bliss and the table of ten Blaine falsehoods. In the closing days of the campaign the paper received subscriptions of $1,000 a week for the independent Campaign Fund. Godkin maintained his fierce editorial attacks to the last moment, and did not fail to make the most of the “Rum-Romanism-Rebellion” indiscretion of the Rev. Mr. Burchard, saying that Blaine had given “tacit assent” to this insult against Catholicism.
The fight was by no means won with the closing of the polls on election day, Nov. 4. Early next morning every one knew that Cleveland had carried the South, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana, that his election was assured if he had carried New York, and that New York was doubtful. The World claimed the Empire State for the Democrats, and the Sun conceded it to them, but the Tribune declared that Blaine had won. The Post’s headlines that afternoon ran: “Cleveland Probably Elected—213 Electoral Votes for Him—New York in Cleveland Column”; while the editorial declared simply that, with the returns very backward, the indications were that Cleveland had a safe majority. Crowds all day filled the streets in front of the bulletin boards, and for a time there was a threat of rioting against Jay Gould and the western union Telegraph officers, who were accused of delaying and tampering with the returns in the interest of Blaine. With an audacity born of their memory of 1876, the Republicans continued to claim the victory all day Thursday the 6th. The Tribune footed up the county returns for New York as giving Blaine a plurality of 1,166, but the addition was inaccurate—they really gave Cleveland a plurality of 128! The Associated Press, whose returns were inexcusably fragmentary and late, gave Cleveland 1,057 plurality, and the Post, with its own dispatches from every county save one, 1,378—the official figure being later given as 1,149. The excited Mail and Express made the same blunder as the Tribune,466 claiming New York for Blaine when its own inaccurately added table of counties gave Cleveland a plurality of 4,000. At two a. m. on the 7th the Associated Press announced Cleveland’s election, and Godkin was able to write:
At daylight this morning everybody conceded Cleveland’s election save the Tribune, which remains in doubt. If it persists in declaring Blaine elected there will be two inauguration ceremonies on March 4, one of Cleveland in Washington and one of Blaine on the steps of the Tribune building, the oath of office being administered by William Walter Phelps.
II
Our one American President whose dislike of newspapers in general could be called intense was Cleveland. He deeply resented the mud-slinging in which they had indulged against both himself and Blaine during his first campaign; and when he married in 1886, he was outraged by the manner in which a crowd of correspondents followed him into the Maryland hills on his honeymoon, occupied points of vantage, and spied upon him with field-glasses. Late that year he spoke of the “silly, mean, and cowardly lies” of the press, and of the “ghoulish glee” with which it desecrated every sacred relation of private life, an utterance which Mr. Godkin emphasized by editorial endorsement, for no editor ever hated newspaper mendacity and sensationalism more than Godkin. Cleveland’s hottest wrath was reserved for Dana’s Sun, which professed to believe that he culled his speeches from an encyclopedia, and that Miss Cleveland wrote his messages to Congress; when in 1890 the Sun made some offensive reference to his corpulence, Mr. Cleveland expressed his feelings without restraint. But he made one exception in his general dislike. He read the Evening Post faithfully, respected its views, and had a high regard for Mr. Godkin, whom he knew personally.
His friendliness had ample reason, for the Post supported almost every act of his first administration. It praised his early observance, in spirit and letter, of the467 Civil Service law, and his courageous veto of vicious little pension bills. Above all, it maintained that his administration was an invaluable demonstration that the unity of the nation was real, that it was no longer necessary for one section and party to monopolize political power. One New Yorker, the day after Cleveland’s election, had offered in a fit of rage and despair to sell Godkin his securities for fifty cents on the dollar. Some men had believed that the tariff would be wrecked overnight, and that the Confederacy would return “to the saddle” and compel the North to pay an indemnity of billions in settlement of Civil War damages. From this nightmare, which disposed men to put up with all sorts of Republican corruption, a Democratic administration had been necessary to rescue the country.
Mr. Godkin never called Cleveland brilliant, and praised him rather for an honest obstructiveness, balking the schemes of raiders, visionaries, and predatory interests, than for marked constructive abilities. Like the other “Mugwump” organs, the Evening Post was offended in 1887–88 by his apparent acquiescence in several raids upon the civil service by spoilsmen. In April, 1889, it accused the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. J. H. Maynard, of bringing heavy pressure to bear upon the New York Custom House for the dismissal of capable Republicans. Maynard denied the charge in a hot telegram; the Evening Post appealed to the Senate Committee upon the Civil Service to come to New York and investigate; and it did so, sustaining the Post’s charges in their entirety. But Mr. Godkin never forgot the consideration which Cleveland later urged in defending himself: “You know the things in which I yielded; but no one save myself can ever know the things which I resisted.” The President, said the Evening Post, had fallen short of his promises, but had done far more than any predecessor. “No man, for example, who has filled the Presidential chair since Jackson’s day would have listened for one moment to the suggestion that the New York Post Office should be taken out of politics, or would have468 kept the Custom House in its present comparatively neutral condition, or postponed the removal of the great bulk of officers to the end of their terms, or extended in any degree the application of the rules, or have so steadily used his veto to oppose Congressional jobbery and extravagance. No one, too, has kept the White House and its purlieus so free from the small scandals which worked so much disgrace in the days of Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur.”
In 1888 the Post showed genuine enthusiasm in advocating the election of Cleveland over Benjamin Harrison. His courageous message in favor of a low tariff in December, 1887, which did so much to ensure his defeat the next fall, met the views of the editors precisely. The Republicans declared in their platform for maintenance of the existing tariff, but for a reduction in the internal revenue taxes, and Godkin labeled them the party of “high clothes and cheap whisky.” A sharp attack was made upon Harrison’s Congressional record—“the advocate of centralization, the defender of reckless pension schemes, the friend of Hennepin Canal jobs.” Once more, but moderately, parallel columns were employed:
MURAT HALSTEAD (REP.)
“The bottom truth about Cleveland is that he may have been a Copperhead, for he is of about that grade of snake, but he has been too ignorant all his life to be an intelligent member of any political party.”
HUGH M’CULLOCH (REP.)
“I have watched Mr. Cleveland’s Administration very carefully, and I consider it to have been marked with signal ability and uprightness.”
Cleveland’s defeat the Evening Post attributed in part, it is interesting to note, to the folly of the New York Democrats in nominating David B. Hill for Governor, a choice which disgusted independent voters. Naturally, Harrison’s administration confirmed by a half dozen acts the paper’s loyalty to the ex-President. The choice of Blaine to be Secretary of State, the McKinley Tariff Act, the Service Pensions Act of 1890, and the Sherman Silver-Purchase Act seemed to the editors, and to a great body of intelligent and thoughtful citizens, to be so many milestones on a road of perversity and danger. The reckless way in which our foreign relations were handled,469 as we shall see later, aroused grave apprehensions in Mr. Godkin. At the moment when the disgust of the Evening Post with the Republican Party was deepest, in February, 1891, Cleveland’s famous letter in opposition to the free coinage of silver, characterizing it as a “dangerous and reckless experiment,” was published. All his enemies, Dana at their head, thought that by this courageous act he had destroyed himself politically. So did many Democrats. “Again,” wrote Godkin, “the shrewd politicians sat down on the party stoop and wept, and prepared sorrowfully to nominate a first-class juggler in the person of David B. Hill, who was to show the wretched Mugwumps how much better it was to be able to keep six balls in the air than to be able to show the absurdity of a fluctuating currency.”
But Cleveland’s uncompromising stroke filled the Evening Post with joy. It had feared the Democratic Party was rushing down a steep place to destruction by accepting an alliance with these silver enthusiasts who were trying to debase the currency. Now it had faith in the willingness of the party rank and file to respond to the ex-President’s unflinching words. As it turned out, the newspaper was right. The people recognized the voice of a real statesman, and the scheming bosses who had rejoiced at his supposed political suicide, found that he had at once rescued the party from a ruinous coalition with the Populists, and made his own renomination inevitable. In the canvass which followed this renomination, the Evening Post found it unnecessary to say much about the silver question, so completely had Cleveland knocked it out of the campaign, and it centered its attention upon the McKinley Tariff. That wages had fallen in many industries, that prices of many groups of commodities had risen, and that a hundred “tariff trusts” had attained new vigor behind the McKinley bulwark, was shown in a long series of editorial articles. Lowell had already, while the McKinley Act was pending, published anonymously in the Evening Post a satirical poem upon the argument that higher rates were needed to protect our “infant industries.”470 When Cleveland was decisively re?lected that November, Godkin traced his victory primarily to the effect his anti-tariff message of 1887 and his anti-free-silver letter of 1891 had produced upon men:
Mr. Cleveland’s triumph to-day has been largely due to the young voters who have come on the stage since the reign of passion and prejudice came to an end and the era of discussion has opened. If the last canvass has consisted largely of appeals to reason, to facts, to the lessons of human experience ... it is to Mr. Cleveland, let us tell them, that they owe it. But they are indebted to him for something far more valuable than even this—for an example of splendid courage in the defense and assertion of honestly formed opinions; of Roman constancy under defeat, and of patient reliance on the power of deliberation and persuasion on the American people. Nothing is more important, in these days of boodle, of indifference, of cheap bellicose patriotism, than that this confidence in the might of common sense and sound doctrine and free speech should be kept alive.
No one reading this editorial would have believed that within little more than three years Mr. Godkin would turn savagely upon the man whose fine qualities he thus praised. Mr. Godkin would not have believed it. Cleveland’s second administration began well, and his policy was particularly liked by the Post in that field of foreign relations in which the break was to come. He withdrew the treaty for the annexation of Hawaii, which Godkin had opposed. He protected American rights in Cuba, but maintained strict American neutrality in the war Spain was waging there. When Great Britain put in a claim of damages against Nicaragua, and landed marines to collect the money, Cleveland acted with admirable discretion and tact. His belligerent Venezuelan message of December, 1895, indeed, was almost a flash out of a clear sky.
To understand the consternation with which Godkin received this message, which seemed to presage certain war with England, it must be appreciated how much he abhorred jingoism and war. When Crimean correspondent for the London Daily News he had described the471 horrors of the battlefields with indignation; and the suffering back of the lines—“the great ocean of misery which war has caused to roll over the heads of mankind ever since wars began”—he thought even more heartrending. He was no pacifist: a war in a good cause, like the war of the North to extinguish slavery and disunion, he approved. But wars merely to vindicate what some one fancied to be “national honor” he abominated as the worst relic of savagery:
Jingoism is, in fact, like Indian readiness for war, simply another name for imperfect civilization. It is a simple outburst like negro-burning, lynching, and jail-breaking, of the imperfectly subdued barbarous instincts of an earlier time. To get men to abandon fighting as the chief and most honorable business of their lives, and the only respectable way of ending disputes, has been the main work of modern civilization; and what hard work it has been, one has only to read a little Froissart or Joinville to see.
We must also appreciate that Cleveland’s act seemed to Godkin a base surrender to jingo elements in American politics which he had hitherto been opposing. As we have said, the Evening Post had lamented what it thought the defiant tone of Harrison’s foreign policy. This it attributed to Blaine’s desire to be a “brilliant” Secretary of State. When he held that position under Garfield, he had promptly embroiled the United States with Chile, and it had fallen to President Arthur to appoint a new Secretary and extricate the nation. Seven years later he had returned, and what had he done? He had made an effort to exercise the right of search on British vessels in the Bering Sea, had filled Harrison’s administration with the resulting controversy, and had maneuvered the United States into a position in which it was defeated in arbitration proceedings. Since Cleveland’s inauguration the editors of the Evening Post had constantly deplored the bellicose talk indulged in by a considerable group of Republicans. Henry Cabot Lodge in the spring of 1895 had predicted a war in Europe, hinted that we might be drawn into it, and said that the British fortifications at472 Halifax, Bermuda, Kingston, and Esquimault “threaten us.” The same month Senator Frye, at Bridgeport, had called for a strong navy, and declared: “We [the Republicans] will show people a foreign policy that is American in every fiber, and hoist the American flag on whatever island we think best, and no hand shall ever pull it down.” Senator Cullom wanted Cuba instantly annexed. Godkin was justified in writing (Feb. 13, 1895):
The number of men and officials in this country who are now mad to fight somebody is appalling. Navy officers dream of war and talk and lecture about it incessantly. The Senate debates are filled with predictions of impending war and with talk of preparing for it at once. With the country under the necessity for the most stringent economy, appropriations of $12,000,000 for battleships are urged upon Congress, not because we need them now, but because we shall need them “in the next great war.” Most truculent and bloodthirsty of all, the Jingo editors keep up a din day after day about the way we could cripple one country’s fleet and destroy another’s commerce, and fill the heads of boys and silly men with the idea that war is the normal state of a civilized country.
To the early stages of the controversy between Venezuela and England over the western boundary of British Guiana neither the Evening Post nor any other journal paid close attention. Mr. Godkin did not think that the Monroe Doctrine could properly be stretched to cover American interference in the quarrel; and when Secretary Olney asked Great Britain to submit the dispute to arbitration, and Lord Salisbury refused, Godkin defended Salisbury’s action upon the ground that we had tended to prejudge the case in Venezuela’s favor. As yet the editor was not disturbed, trusting the President implicitly. But suddenly, on Dec. 17, 1895, Cleveland sent Congress a message asking for the appointment of a commission to determine the boundary, and stating that it would be the duty of the United States “to resist by every means in its power, as a wilful aggression upon its rights and interests,” the taking by Great Britain of any lands that the commission assigned to Venezuela.
473 “I was thunderstruck,” Godkin wrote Charles Eliot Norton. He described the week that followed as “the most anxious I have known in my career.” For the first three days the United States seemed to rise in unanimous support of Cleveland. Republican newspapers like the Tribune, which had never said a good word for him, rushed to his assistance. The editor saw so much jingoism among even intelligent people, he said, “that the prospect which seemed to open itself before me was a long fight against a half-crazed public, under a load of abuse, and the discredit of foreign birth, etc., etc.”; but he never hesitated.
The first afternoon there was time to write only a paragraph editorial expressing consternation at the doctrine that the United States should “assert such ownership of the American hemisphere as will enable us to trace all the boundary lines on it to our own satisfaction in defiance of the rest of the world.” On the second day the Evening Post devoted both its column editorials to the subject. The first, “Mr. Cleveland’s Coup d’Etat,” drew a striking contrast between war, with all it involved of suffering, loss, and moral deterioration, and the triviality of the possible cause, a wrangle about an obscure boundary line. The second reviewed the Venezuela correspondence, and attempting to refute Cleveland’s arguments, said that his message “humiliates us by its self-contradictions,” and characterized his proposal for a boundary commission as “ludicrously insulting and illogical.”
In later issues the Evening Post mingled invective with calm, sound argument. It tried to show that Salisbury’s claims in British Guiana had been, in the main, supported by incontestable evidence. It traced the history of our relations with Venezuela, and demonstrated that the little republic had missed few opportunities to treat us insolently. It declared that a commission of inquiry might be proper, but that it was indefensible to create one as a hostile proceeding, with a threat of war behind it. Months earlier, during the Nicaragua dispute, the Evening Post had issued in pamphlet form an essay by John474 Bassett Moore upon the Monroe Doctrine, showing that it gave the United States no right of interference in such affairs, and this it now sold in large quantities. Godkin unfortunately prejudiced his case by two errors—he failed to allow for the strong sentiment of most Americans in favor of a flexible interpretation of the Doctrine, and he unjustly hinted that Cleveland was eyeing a third term.
But the editor’s fears that he would stand alone were at once dissipated. The World lost no time in denouncing the belligerent message as “A Great Blunder,” and so did the Journal of Commerce. Among prominent Democratic newspapers which took their stand with the Evening Post were the Charleston News and Courier, Wilmington Every Evening, Memphis Commercial, and Louisville Post. The Cleveland Plain Dealer summed up the view of a multitude of thoughtful men in a little jest: “Teacher:—Johnny, now tell us what we learn from the Monroe Doctrine. Johnny:—That the other fellow’s wrong.” Prof. J. W. Burgess of Columbia contributed to the Evening Post a column article, in which he said: “On the whole, I have never read a more arrogant demand than that now set up by President Cleveland and Secretary Olney, in all diplomatic history.” Half a dozen times in the next fortnight the Post filled one or two columns with letters of congratulation and support. Its circulation rose materially. “In fact,” wrote Godkin when it was all over, with a touch of his eternal irony, “our course has proved the greatest success I have ever had and ever known in journalism.”
As every one knows, Lord Salisbury finally accepted arbitration, and the result was that the British obtained practically all the territory for which they had contended. The peaceful ending of the episode, and the gratification of the public over the President’s assertion of the national dignity, as most men viewed it, left Cleveland with increased prestige. The editors of the Evening Post never changed their opinion, but the incident, of course, did not materially shake their esteem of Cleveland. When475 he went out of office, the newspaper reviewed his eight years as the most satisfactory since the Civil War, praised his plain speech, courage, and honesty highly, and declared that he had made “a deeper mark upon the history of his time than any save the greatest of his predecessors.”