One essential qualification of a great editor, a masterful personality, was so distinctively possessed by Mr. Godkin that it may be doubted whether any other American daily since the Civil War has been so much the expression of a single mind and character as the Evening Post from 1883 to 1899. The frequent statement that he was an incomparable leader-writer, but not an all-round journalist, has an element of truth, but is highly misleading. The editorial page was wholly his own, for he determined its policies, molded the ideas of his fellow-editors, and by force of example gave several of them—as a great editor always will—some characteristics of his style. The news pages he accorded only distant oversight, and one of his city editors doubts whether he regularly read more than the first page and the page opposite the editorials. Yet every cub reporter grasped Godkin’s clear-cut ideas of what a newspaper should be, and strove to contribute his mite to the realization of the editor’s ideals. There was no other journal resembling it, and its dignity, integrity, thoughtfulness, scholarly accuracy, and pride of intellect were the reflection of Godkin’s own traits. We may say that while Godkin did not pay close daily attention to any part of his journal save the editorials, the news writers, the financial writers, the critics, and the business department all paid close attention to Mr. Godkin’s views regarding their work; they would no more have thought of standing counter to them than of stepping in front of an Alpine avalanche.
The soul of the paper, its editorial page, was the product of a morning editorial conference which in its highly developed character Mr. Godkin was the first to give New York journalism. Upon the Post of Bryant’s520 day, and upon the Tribune under Greeley and his successive managing editors, consultation had been brief, and the assignment of editorial topics hasty. The elder Bennett had been wont to give Herald writers their subjects for the day as so many orders. But the necessity of treating ten or twelve different editorial topics in each issue of the Post after 1881, and Mr. Godkin’s solicitude that each topic be treated just right, made an elaborate conference imperative. At about nine the editorial staff gathered in a circle of chairs in Mr. Godkin’s room, having mastered the morning papers, and a businesslike discussion filled forty minutes.
Every writer was encouraged to propose his own theme for a paragraph or column editorial, and to speak freely upon themes raised by others. But Mr. Godkin had a merciless way with unsound or commonplace ideas. When some one started a subject, he would pounce upon him with “What would you say about it?” and an intensely searching glance. It was a trying moment. If the junior editor had nothing worth while to say, Godkin would cut across his flounderings with “O, there’s nothing in that,” or “We said that the other day,” or “O, everybody sees that”—emphasizing the statement with a sharp gesture or a swing in his chair. “Sometimes, after an interested attention for a few seconds,” writes Mr. Bishop, “a quick, searching question would be put that went through the subject like a knife through a toy balloon, leaving complete and utter collapse.”
However, proportionately great was the reward of the fortunate man who had an original idea, or a new way of presenting an old one. Mr. Godkin’s eye would kindle with interest, he would lean forward alertly, and catching up the theme, he would perhaps begin to enlarge it by ideas of his own, search its depths with penetrating inquiries, and reveal such possibilities in it that the original speaker had the feeling of having stumbled over a concealed diamond. If the chief, as was usually the fact, was provided with his own topic for the day, the proposer bore his discovery off in triumph. If not, he521 sometimes had to surrender it. “The chances were ten to the dozen,” says Mr. Bishop, “that Mr. Godkin would become so delighted with the development of the subject, so intoxicated with the intellectual pleasures of the treatment, that he would say, with a serene smile of perfect enjoyment, ‘I’ll write on that.’”
The editorial page represented work done not leisurely, but under the highest pressure. Articles of twelve hundred words, dealing informatively, thoughtfully, and in compressed style with some subject perhaps quite unexpected until that morning, had to be completed in about an hour and three-quarters. Taken, often without change, into the Nation, they withstood the test of submission to the most scholarly and exacting audience in America. The pace was not for the muddleheaded. But no one on the staff could hope to write quite like Mr. Godkin—with his wealth of ideas, ability to see a dozen relationships in a subject where the ordinary man saw one, and concise, pithy, and graphic style. Lowell told him, “You always say what I would have said—if I had only thought of it.” In the correction of proofs the whole staff was expected to join. Godkin was far from being the most approachable of editors, but to any suggestion that there was a defect in his idea or expression he turned a ready ear. Indeed, if a fellow-editor believed that a phrase or sentence was obscure, he would usually alter it whether he agreed or not, arguing that what one man in the office found faulty might seem so to a large body outside. The editorial page which thus appeared in its final form at two o’clock was an embodiment of the wisdom of the whole editorial group, Mr. Godkin dominating.
Brusque and cold though he often seemed to those who did not know him well, Godkin to the other editors was essentially a lovable man. He exacted a high standard of performance, his temper was highly mercurial, he was often abrupt in manner; but the recollection of his associates is that he gave the office an atmosphere of geniality. He delighted in jest. He would repeat with great gusto the story that staff meetings opened with a distribution522 of Cobden Club gold, or—it was said after the Venezuela episode—with a singing of “God Save the Queen.” His fun was of an intellectual kind, but he never failed to find subjects for it. Frequently the editorial conference would break up in a gale of merriment. Norton once wrote him, when the Nation’s troubles were giving him sleepless nights, that he would rather see the weekly perish than have its editor lose his jocularity, and Godkin wrote back: “I shall keep my laugh. Don’t be afraid.” Indeed, his letters contain any number of references to laughter, and with intimates it was often uproarious. He told Howells that his youth was “harrowed with laughter.” When Howells worked beside him for three months in the Nation office the novelist-to-be found that “we were of a like temperament in the willingness to laugh and make laugh.” If anything in the day’s news particularly apt for Howells’s special department turned up, they would talk it over, “and he did not mind turning away from his own manuscript and listening to what I had written, if the subject had offered any chance for fun. Then his laugh, his Irish laugh, hailed my luck with it, or his honest English misgiving expressed itself in a criticism which I had to own just.”
Men who read Godkin’s caustic denunciation of some wrong-doer, who admired the keen thrust with which he punctured a bit of hypocrisy, sometimes assumed that he was sour and censorious. Such readers failed to realize that he had a dual nature; that what excited his wrath and scorn often excited his risibilities also. “First would come the savage characterization, then the peal of laughter,” writes Mr. Ogden. He had a tongue for humorous phrases, an eye for humorous images, and a marked love for comic exaggeration. After his retirement in 1899, when some people were chattering about his pessimism, the weekly articles he contributed for a time over his initials to the Evening Post abounded in amusing sentences and vivacious anecdotes. Reviewing his labors for civil service reform, he recalled how when he, Congressman Jenckes, and Henry Villard held the first meeting on the523 subject in New York, he was appointed to draft resolutions; that the proposer was unable to read his hasty handwriting; and that “more unhappily still, when I was asked to take his place, I could not read it either!” Writing of McKinley’s amateur statesmanship, he told of the youth who, asked whether he could play the piano, replied that “he did not know, for he had never tried.” Discussing Capt. Mahan’s treatment of war as possessing benefits as well as evils, he was reminded of the French Deputy who did not want to lose the anarchist votes scattered through his district: “My friends,” he said, “there is a great deal of good in anarchy; only we must not abuse it.” Incessant bits like these reveal the fun-loving nature, the overflowing spirits, of the man.
Mr. Godkin’s marked social proclivities enlarged his influence and enriched his writing. The readiness with which, on coming to America, he made friends among the most distinguished men of Cambridge, Boston, and New York was only less remarkable than the long intimacy he enjoyed with some of the finest minds of England and this country—with Lowell and Norton, Bryce and Henry James, Gladstone and Parkman, McKim and Olmsted. He was a genial host, a witty, diverting, and brilliant guest. Mr. Ogden gives an instance of the way in which his personal charm and full mind surprised some who thought of him as a narrow, savage moralist of the editorial page. At the Century Club one night he was seated at the long dinner table with a man he knew and another who was a stranger. The latter had never seen Mr. Godkin but had taken a violent dislike to his writings. Without an introduction, the talk was free and genial, and Godkin was in his happiest vein. When the editor had left the room, the stranger inquired as to his identity. “Is that Mr. Godkin?” he exclaimed in surprise. “Then I’ll never say another word against him as long as I live.” Godkin worked with great intensity—as he himself once said, “almost dangerously hard.” His gusto and enthusiasm, especially in times of crisis like a Presidential or Tammany campaign, gave him an extraordinary absorption524 in his work. Yet he found time to see and talk with a surprising number of people worth seeing—authors, reformers, politicians, college professors, the best lawyers of the city, and many more.
A journal of twenty-two days of his life (November, 1870) shows what a multiplicity of public meetings, dinners, calls, and club evenings interspersed his toil. A half dozen times he dined or breakfasted out or entertained to dinner, thus seeing among others Bryant, Ripley, Charles Loring Brace, and H. M. Field. He was also at the public dinner of the Mercantile Library Association, where he spoke for the press, and of the Free Traders at Delmonico’s where he saw A. T. Stewart, Peter Cooper, H. C. Potter, Stewart L. Woodford, Gen. McDowell, and David A. Wells. He went to a civil service meeting at Yale, where there was a tea-party in his honor, and not only made a speech but “met all the big-bugs.” Once he lunched with Henry and Charles Francis Adams. He records going in torrents of rain to a night meeting of revenue reformers, while he attended a lecture by A. J. Mundella, and chatted there with G. W. Curtis. Repeatedly he speaks of being at the Century Club and seeing a long list of acquaintances—Lord Walter Campbell, Judge Daly, Gen. Howard, William E. Dodge, H. C. Potter, and Cyrus Field. He called upon Horace White, then in the city from Chicago, and at the Nation office received calls from Carl Schurz and Schuyler Colfax, the latter coming while he was out. This was nearly a dozen years before he became one of the editors of the Evening Post, but he always maintained a similar activity. What it meant to his editorial work is self-evident. As one of his junior editors, Mr. Bishop, says, all was grist to his mill. “A casual quip in conversation, the latest good story, a sentence from a new book, a fresh bit of political slang—all these found lodgment in his mind, and just at the proper place they would appear in his writing.”
Godkin had little patience for mere office routine, and as he grew older took advantage of the liberty which an525 evening paper often gives its editor for leaving early. His dislike for bores played a large part in this. As he humorously said, he saw nobody before one, and at one he went home. Of his refusal to tolerate callers who abused his time and temper, there are some amusing stories. A dull or offensive man would be ushered in, the editor would endure him for a while, and then upon the heels of a muffled explosion, the caller would emerge, red with confusion and anger, and hurriedly make for the elevator. Mr. H. J. Wright, as city editor, once introduced a gentleman, of prominence, with an extensive knowledge of municipal affairs. After a long and interesting chat, Godkin asked, “How is it I never met such a well-informed man before?” A few days later the gentleman called again, seated himself with assurance in Mr. Godkin’s room, and began to repeat himself, a thing the editor abominated. Hearing a confusion of voices, Mr. Wright hurried into the hall to find Godkin angrily shooing the interrupter out of the building.
Mr. Godkin and Horace White gathered around them an editorial staff of high ability. From the outset they had the services of Arthur G. Sedgwick, who was assistant editor from 1881 to 1885, and later not only contributed irregularly at all times, but during one summer worked in the office in Godkin’s absence. He was a writer of strong mental grasp and individuality of style, who furnished editorials and book-reviews on an amazing variety of topics, and had the knack of illuminating and making interesting everything he touched. His education as a lawyer—he had been co-editor with Oliver Wendell Holmes, later Justice of the Supreme Court, of the American Law Review—stood him in good stead in discussions of government and politics, he wrote much on belles lettres, and he was only less able than Godkin himself in treating modes and manners. When Godkin was a beginning editor he found it difficult, as he wrote Olmsted, to get an associate “to do the work of gossiping agreeably on manners, lager beer, etc., and who will bind himself to do it, whether he feels like it or not.” Sedgwick was526 just the man for the light, keen treatment of social topics. He had a discerning eye and a quick sense of humor. Many of his editorials were as good as the short essays of the same type which Curtis and Howells contributed to the Easy Chair of Harper’s, and had more than local and temporary fame. For example, in March, 1883, he wrote one on the dude which, reprinted all over the country, did much to familiarize this London music-hall term. It traced the lineage of the dude from the dandy, fop, and swell; it carefully distinguished him from these earlier types by his intense correctness, contrasting with their display; it described his appearance in great detail; it explained why he had arisen at just that moment; and it closed with a grave warning to all dudes to be on guard against the chief menace to their sober conservatism—they must not wear white spats.
Joseph Bucklin Bishop, later well known as secretary of the Isthmian Commission and authorized editor of Roosevelt’s letters, joined the Post the summer of 1883, and remained with it until 1900, when he became chief of the Globe’s editorial staff. He also commanded a wide range of subjects, though he dealt much more with politics than Sedgwick, and he wrote with a great deal of Godkin’s own point. To Bishop belongs the credit for originating the Voters’ Directory in 1884, still a valued campaign feature of the Post, while he had a principal hand in the campaign biographies which were so effective against Tammany. E. P. Clark was brought from the Springfield Republican into the office when Sedgwick left in the mid-eighties, and until after the end of the century his industrious hand was in constant evidence. He had the most nearly colorless style of the staff, but his full knowledge and accuracy in handling governmental and economic topics were invaluable.
The first contributions to the Post by Mr. Rollo Ogden were printed in 1881, and during the next three years he wrote frequently from Mexico City. His assistance increased after he came to New York in 1887, and in 1891 he became assistant editor and one of the pillars of the527 newspaper. Besides his attention to national and international politics, he gave the columns a much more literary flavor than they had had even when Sedgwick was present. There were, in addition, several writers of a briefer connection. Early in the eighties some articles exposing the defects of the Tenth Census were furnished by John C. Rose, a Baltimore attorney, and during a number of summers he joined the office staff; a Federal attorneyship, followed by elevation to the Federal bench, ended his connection. David M. Means, another attorney and a one-time professor at Middlebury College, helped during many years for short periods. The editorial columns were always open to experts in various fields who wished to contribute. Among those who occasionally furnished leaders in the eighties and nineties were future college presidents like A. T. Hadley and E. J. James, scientists like Simon Newcomb and A. F. Bandelier, and scholars like H. H. Boyesen and Worthington C. Ford.
The rank and file of the city room regarded Mr. Godkin as a remote deity, though he was on a familiar footing with the managing editors, Learned and Linn, and of frank intimacy with the city editor, H. J. Wright. “I used to see him come into the office occasionally,” writes Norman Hapgood, “with very much the same emotion that I might have now if I saw Lloyd George walk past me.” Godkin frequently rode up in the elevator with reporters, but never spoke to them, and did not know most of them by sight. Mr. Wright gives two examples of his utter indifference to a performance of special merit in the news columns. In the early days of the litigation over the interstate commerce commission, there was a hearing in New York involving intricate law points and the rather obscure rights of the carrier, attended by some of New York’s most eminent lawyers, including Godkin’s friends Choate and James C. Carter. Norman Hapgood, a new recruit, was assigned the difficult task of covering it, and wrote a column and a half a day for the whole week. When the hearing closed, Choate sent Godkin a note congratulating him upon the Post’s reports, and saying528 that few lawyers could have comprehended the arguments so fully, and still fewer have summarized them so well. “Upon this deserved encomium,” says Mr. Wright, “Godkin offered no comment, nor did he inquire as to the reporter’s identity.” Again, a prominent New Yorker wrote the editor praising a brief account of the descent of an awe-inspiring thunderstorm, and recording his pleasure that the news columns showed the same literary qualities as the editorial page. Godkin had not read the news story, did not read it, and did not ask for the writer’s name.
One element in this was Godkin’s assumption that, as a matter of course, the news pages would meet a high standard; but a larger element was sheer indifference to the reporters. The editorial page was pre?minently the most important part of the newspaper to him. Absorbed in the ideas he spread upon it, and naturally of an aloof temperament, he was not interested in subordinates elsewhere. That he was very far from being an unappreciative man his editorial associates alone knew. They received cordial notes of congratulation from him, all the more prized because rare, for any specially meritorious work; and whenever a literary review particularly struck him, he made a point of asking for the writer’s name.
Mr. Towse, the dramatic critic, recalls receiving formal commendation from Godkin twice or thrice. One occasion was early in the eighties, when Henry Irving opened in a Shakespearean r?le in Philadelphia. All the dramatic critics were taken over by courtesy of the theater, entertained in Philadelphia, and given seats at the performance; and most of them remained at a Philadelphia hotel overnight. Mr. Towse returned to New York on a midnight train, took a cold bath, wrote a criticism of nearly two columns, and visiting the office at dawn, had it put into type. Proofs were ready when the editors arrived, and Godkin was so pleased that he for once unbent and sent an appreciative note.
Once in the nineties, Godkin even praised the reporters, though not for anything they had written. It happened529 that a grand jury refused an indictment in a political case, under circumstances that pointed to collusion between several jurors and the accused politician. Godkin gave utterance to these suspicions, showed that several jurymen were of evil character, and declared that one had been the proprietor of a low dive in which a shooting brawl had occurred. The juror promptly had him indicted for criminal libel, and when counsel undertook the case, they found that no legal proof existed of the alleged brawl. In desperation, Godkin appealed to the head of the Byrnes Detective Bureau, a personal friend, for help, and Byrnes made a thorough investigation of the juror’s past, without avail. He urged the editor to compromise the case, and offered his help for that purpose. Meanwhile, the Evening Post reporters had been ransacking the loft of the old Mott Street police headquarters, where station house blotters were stored. At the end of a seven days’ search, they found an entry telling of the shooting affray. The entry was photographed, Godkin appeared before another grand jury, waved the photograph in the face of the district attorney, and was vindicated. “His appreciation of the work done by the city staff was expressed that day with Irish enthusiasm,” says Mr. Wright.
On the other hand, Godkin was quick—even savagely so—to descend upon any man whose writing did not accord with his positive ideas regarding good journalism. His severity in dealing with an error of fact, proportion, or taste grew out of his rapt intensity in his own work. He pushed blunderers out of his way less because he was tactless—though he was often that—than because he was engrossed in hewing to the line. Lincoln Steffens, one of the best newspaper men New York ever had, happened to write a simple account of a music teacher’s death under distressing circumstances, which appeared on the first page. Godkin read it, leaped to the conclusion that it smacked of the sensationalism he was always denouncing, and declared that Steffens ought to be instantly dismissed. Mr. Wright protested, and the controversy brought in530 Mr. Garrison, who roundly asserted that the story was not only permissible, but admirable—whereupon Godkin yielded. Some remarkable work by Hapgood in reporting the meetings of the illiterate Board of Education attracted Godkin’s eye and editorial notice; but the one message he sent Hapgood was that he wanted him to confine himself to narration and description, avoiding comment. New York has never had a more expert music critic than Mr. Finck, but Godkin sometimes censured him severely for what he thought intemperate writing.
Godkin would have been a greater journalist had he taken a broad and human interest in other departments of the newspaper than his own; and the Evening Post might have had a different history. It would have been less open to the reproach leveled against it, of being rather a magazine than a newspaper. Its circulation, instead of hovering uncertainly between 14,000 and 20,000, might have become extensive. The stone wall that was kept standing between editorial rooms and news rooms was good for neither. Mr. Godkin’s lack of broad cordiality and interest was not felt by those in daily contact with him, but it was often felt by those at the outer desks. Any newspaper must suffer if departmental members work as some did on the Post, to avoid censure and not to gain praise, for in such work there can be no initiative. There were employees who, in making decisions, would take no chance of doing anything the editor would not like, and were hence hostile to any innovation. “What I did not like and still resent somewhat,” says Lincoln Steffens, “is that he objected to individuality in reporting.” The newspaper was made too much for Godkin, too little for outside readers.
II
Yet Godkin’s defects as a general journalist only throw into clearer relief his distinction as a molder of opinion. The Evening Post was quite enough of a newspaper to be a vehicle for his editorial page, and for him that sufficed. He had no wish to appeal directly to several hundred531 thousand subscribers, to reach the ear of the masses, as Greeley had done. Nothing could have persuaded him to write down to the level of education and intelligence which a huge audience would have possessed. Editorial utterances could be quoted to show that he thought a daily was better when it appealed to comparatively small and select groups. In 1889 he deplored the nation-wide movement for reducing newspaper prices, and said that the Times and Tribune had been better at four cents than they were at two. Godkin spoke to the cultivated few—to university scholars, authors, clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and college graduates generally. Though at the farthest remove from pedantry or stiffness, his writing, polished, allusive, with a keen wit or irony playing across it, required a cultured understanding for its full appreciation. Addressing himself to this narrow constituency, he had an influence easily the greatest of its kind in the history of our journalism.
Foremost among the qualities which gave him this power, his friend of many years, Prof. A. V. Dicey, placed his gift of appositeness, or instinctive discernment of the question of the moment. He had this gift as clearly as Greeley, or Cobbett. His editorial page was kept constantly focussed upon the changing issues of the time. Godkin had no desire to be a voice crying in the wilderness, and knew that his influence would be lost if he wrote about international arbitration when men were thinking of the tariff. Prof. Dicey failed to add that he often helped powerfully toward putting an issue in the foreground. In 1890 he made Tammany a burning public question months before the city campaign; the Post was the first paper to show, in the early nineties, that a contest between jingoes and lovers of peace was taking shape; and he insisted that the free silver battle must be fought out when many Republican politicians were sneaking off the field. He knew how the public mind was moving before the public did. Supplementary to his gift for appositeness was his great skill in reiteration. No small part of the power of the Evening Post and Nation532 was simply a power of attrition. Once convinced of the justice of a position, he was always, though with unfailing originality and freshness, harping upon it. This, of course, was one of the Post’s irritating qualities for those who disagreed.
To the treatment of all subjects he brought a comprehensive and cosmopolitan knowledge of the world. He knew more than any other American editor about Europe because his personal knowledge of Europe ranged from Belfast, where he had been educated, to the Bosporus. He had lived in Paris, and written a youthful history of Hungary; when Bryce edited the Liberal Party’s “Handbook of Home Rule,” he was the only writer allotted two articles in it; he had many correspondents abroad, and in his later years spent long periods there. In this country he had seen much of ante-bellum and post-bellum society. Though a constant student, he learned only less from his intercourse with men of distinction, from Boston to Washington, than from books. His acquisitions regarding government, international affairs, politics, economics, and law gave him a clear advantage over even journalists like John Hay and Whitelaw Reid. On the other hand, he was handicapped by knowing comparatively little of the great common people, the unintellectual workers, from whose ranks Greeley, Bennett, and Raymond sprang. His Irish humor and sociability gave him some friends among them, but only a few.
Of his style it is easy to form a misapprehension. It was incisive, graphic, and pithy. But at all times it was simple, without the least straining for effect; he indulged in no rhetoric, he did not excel in epigram, as did Dana, and he had no desire to be brilliant in the sense of merely clever. It is true that one can easily find epigrams and witty flashes. On one occasion of much waving of the bloody shirt, he spoke of the rumors that there would be another war between North and South, the former led by Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, the latter by Tom, Dick, and Harry. “There are reports from Washington,” he wrote the fall of 1898, “that Hanna has told Duty to tell533 Destiny to tell the President to keep the Philippines. We doubt it. We believe Destiny will lie low and say nothing till after election.” He could condense an editorial into a single sentence. When Henry George, an ardent advocate of the confiscation of landed property, traveled in Ireland in the eighties, Godkin wrote: “A spark is in itself a harmless, pretty, and even useful thing, but a spark in a powder magazine is mischief in its most malignant form.” But the prevailing tone of his writings has been well said to be that “of an accomplished gentleman conversing with a set of intimates at his club.” The thoughtful, neatly-put flow of argument or exposition was constantly lighted up by humor, and often varied by irony or invective.
The humor was always spontaneous, and could be either genial or scorching. He had a remarkable faculty for humorous imagery. It was the most natural thing in the world for him to compare the Tammany panic over the Evening Post biographies with the introduction of a ferret into a rat cellar. Sometimes the image was elaborate. Thus, to show the folly of saddling the President with the appointment of thousands of postmasters, he wrote of “The President as Sheik,” comparing him with the Arab chief who sat under the big tree outside the city gate, ordering the bazaar thief to jail, hearing what the widow said of the knavish baker, and giving the good public official a robe of honor. When Cleveland’s friends explained his Venezuela message by the theory that he was forestalling a warlike message by Congress, Godkin remarked: “Foreseeing that Congress would shortly get drunk, he determined by way of cure to anticipate their bout by one of his own, feeling that his own recovery would be speedier and less costly than theirs. But the result was that they joined in his carouse, and they both went to work to smash the national furniture and crockery.”
Of his unequalled gift for compressing a homily into a humorous or ironical paragraph two examples will suffice, both written with typical gusto:
534
The scenes attending the burial of the late Jesse James on Thursday, at Kearney, Mo., were very affecting. Crowds of people flocked together from all parts of the State to get a last sight of the dead bandit, who had done so much to enable them to lead what they call in Boston “full” lives. Mrs. Samuels, Jesse’s mother, was on the ground early, and talked without reserve to everyone. Her conversation naturally, under the circumstances, was colored with deep religious feeling, and she said to a reporter, who in his shy way ventured to express his sympathy with her bereavement, “I knew it had to come; but my dear boy Jesse is better off in heaven today than he would be here with us”—a sentiment from which no one will be likely to dissent. The officiating clergyman with much tact avoided dwelling on the life and character of the deceased, and improved the occasion by enlarging upon Jesse’s chance of future improvement in Paradise, in a manner that would probably have struck Mr. James himself as rather mawkish. The widespread belief in the West that he has gone straight to heaven is a touching indication of the general softening of religious doctrines. (April, 1882.)
* * * * *
The anarchists had a picnic on Sunday at Weehawken Heights.... An entrance fee of 25 cents was required to gain admission to the picnic. A practical anarchist came along and attempted to enter without paying the fee. Some accounts say that he was a policeman in citizens’ clothes, but this is immaterial from the anarchists’ point of view, however important it may be in a Jersey court of justice. True anarchy required that the man should enter without paying, especially if there was any regulation requiring pay. Taking toll at the gate is only one of the forms of law and order which anarchy rails at and seeks to abolish.... The gatekeeper called for help and some of his minions came forward with pickets hastily torn from the fence, and began beating the practical man over the head. Then the crowd outside began to throw stones at the crowd inside, and the latter retorted in kind. A few pistols were fired, and one boy was shot through the hand. The meeting was a great success in the way of promoting practical anarchy, the rioting being protracted to a late hour in the afternoon. Anarchy, like charity, should always begin at home. (June, 1887.)
As these paragraphs suggest, Godkin was a master of that two-edged editorial weapon, irony, which in clumsy hands may mortally wound the user. But his most superb535 writing was that in which he delivered a straightforward attack upon some evil institution or person. His Irish sense for epithet enabled him to pierce the hide of the toughest pachyderms in Tammany; his caustic characterization could make an ordinary opponent wither up like a leaf touched with vitriol. One of his younger associates once found a man of prominence sick in bed from the pain and mortification an attack by Godkin had given him.
When Don Piatt asked the elder Bowles to define the essential qualities of an editor, the latter replied, “Brains and ugliness,” meaning by the last word love of combat. Godkin had a truly Celtic zest for battle. Mr. Bishop declares that nothing interested him more than what he called “journalistic rows.” Great was his delight, for example, when the Times and Sun clashed over an exploring expedition the former sent to Alaska, the Sun remarking that it was appropriate to name a certain river after Editor Jones of the Times because it was preternaturally shallow and muddy, and discolored the sea for miles from its mouth, and the Times attacking Dana for “the calculated malice of splenetic age.” Godkin had an irresistible desire to mingle in such shindies. Once in, he would read all the harsh criticism offered of him, and fairly radiating his pleasure, would say: “What a delightful lot they are! We must stir them up again!” His gusto in attacking Tammany was evident to every reader. In each Presidential election he carried the war into the enemy’s country with a rush, and printed three editorials attacking the other candidate to every one advocating his own. On one of his return trips from Europe he and the other passengers of the Normanna were held in quarantine because of a cholera scare and finally carried down to Fire Island for a prolonged stay under conditions of great discomfort. His letters to the Evening Post were delightfully scorching, he kept up the attack till the quarantine officers were panic-stricken, and he demolished their last defense in an article in the North American Review that is a masterpiece of destructiveness.
Godkin was at pains to state his belief that attacks536 upon any evil should be as concrete and personal as possible. As he said, there was no point in writing flowery descriptions of the Upright Judge, or indignant denunciations of Judicial Corruption. The proper course was to show by book and chapter the misdeeds or incompetence of Tammany judges like Maynard, Barnard, and Cardozo, and chase them from the bench. For one person interested in an assault on poor quarantine regulations, ten would be interested in an assault on Dr. Jenkins, the quarantine head. Godkin had his own Ananias Club. His attacks on the Knights of Labor always included some hearty thrusts at their chief, Powderly. His hatred of the pensions grabbing led him to make a close investigation of the record of the most notorious grabber of all, Corporal Tanner, the man who said, “God help the Surplus!” when he became Pensions Commissioner. The editor took prodigious pleasure in exposing Tanner as a noisy fellow who had lost his leg from a stray shot while, a straggler from his regiment, he was lying under an apple tree reading in what he thought a safe place.
Godkin was well aware that both his humor and his belligerency sometimes carried him beyond the mark. More than once be assigned a topic to a subordinate, saying, “I’d do it, but I don’t trust my discretion.” In the heat of the Blaine campaign he wrote a paragraph stating a charge that was quite unfounded, and went home; luckily his associates saw it early, recognized that it would damage their cause, and substituted another before the forms closed. Next day Godkin was effusive in his gratitude. It is recalled that once the editorial staff objected stubbornly to part of one of his editorials, and after protracted argument, he consented to delete it. When the next edition appeared with the offending passage still there, he was excited and furious, and called the foreman of the composing room down to explain why his orders for killing it had not been obeyed. The foreman protested that he had received no such orders. Knowing associates at once went to Mr. Godkin’s desk, and found that he had written them out and absently tossed537 them into the waste basket. But Godkin’s occasional excesses of temper were the defect of a rare virtue. A capacity for righteous anger like his is all too uncommon in journalism, the pulpit, or public life generally. Roosevelt never forgave Godkin for the unvarying contempt and bitterness, the unwearied bluntness of accusation, with which he wrote of Quay; but who that knows what Quay was would say that the editor showed a jot too much harshness?
Godkin was reared in the faith of Manchester Liberalism, and his main principles were of that school to the end. At his college (Queens’, Belfast), he tells us, “John Stuart Mill was our prophet, and Grote and Bentham were our daily food. In fact, the late Neilson Hancock, who was our professor of political economy and jurisprudence, made Bentham his textbook.... I and my friends were filled with the teachings of the laissez-faire school and had no doubt that its recent triumph in the abolition of the Corn Laws was sure to lead to wider ones in other countries.”
When he came to America, he brought with him all the rooted opposition of the Manchester school to protection and state subsidy. He shared not only Mill’s and Cobden’s belief in free trade, but their detestation of war, re?nforced by his own Crimean experiences. Like Mill, he was a warm advocate of colonial autonomy and the general spread of political freedom. In his last years, he declared that he had always believed “that the Irish people should learn self-government in the way in which the English have learned it, and the Americans have learned it; in which, only, any race can learn it—by practicing it.” He was long a believer in minority or proportional representation, naming it in 1870 as one of the three great objects of the Nation. Another of these objects, civil service reform, he took up just after the Civil War, struck by the contrast between our corrupt and incompetent administrative system and the efficient, experienced British civil service. The introduction of the Australian ballot, the enactment of better election laws,538 the reform of municipal government, were prominently pushed forward by Godkin. He thoroughly agreed with the Manchester jealousy of government interference in economic and industrial affairs, holding that unless required by some great and general good, it was a certain evil.
These were Godkin’s principles, and by principles he always steered his course. Greeley often did not know his own mind, Bennett and Dana had little regard for principle, but Godkin always held fixed objects before him. A contemporary historian, Harry Thurston Peck, in “Twenty Years of the Republic,” writes: “It is not too much to say that nearly all the most important questions of American political history from 1881 to 1896 got their first public hearing largely through the influence of Mr. Godkin.” That is an exaggeration, but an exaggeration made possible by his tenacious championship of a dozen causes at a time when general opinion was interested but skeptical. To be sure, the ingrained nature of some of his principal doctrines was a limitation. It prevented him from being a powerfully original thinker in the field of government and politics. He taught our intellectual public lessons which he had learned from the more advanced practice and thought of Great Britain, and far beyond that he did not go. But this limitation can easily be exaggerated. He was an omnivorous reader, his curiosity in new ideas and movements was intense, and he had a really open mind.
In most ways he kept quite abreast of the times, and in some well ahead of it. He looked much farther than the ordinary liberal into the relationship between powerful nations and the weaker or inferior peoples, for he perceived the affinities between economic conquest and political conquest. His editorials upon intervention in Egypt in 1882 show that he had no patience with the view that one government might bully another to protect the investments of its nationals. He did believe that British intervention was justified upon other grounds, and always maintained that Cromer’s rule there, like English rule539 in India, was a boon to the native and the world. But in Africa, Asia, and in Cuba, he was always angered by any evidence that selfish interests—traders, coal concessionaires, investors—were using a strong government as a catspaw to menace or subvert a weak one.
His writings upon capitalism show a steady development of ideas. He objected to demagoguish attacks upon Capital, a word which he disliked, saying that if people called it Savings they would have fewer misconceptions. But he was no more inclined to defend abuses by capital than abuses by labor. He argued for the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in his first year with the Post. He was more and more alarmed by the trusts, both as instruments of economic oppression, and as dangerous influences upon the government. He wanted evil combinations sharply attacked and broken up—not “regulated”—to prevent monopoly, and in later years much of his zeal in attacking the high tariff sprang from his conviction that it and the trusts were mutual supports. No one inveighed more constantly than he against ill-gotten wealth, or against the abuse of money power. His editorial on the death of Peter Cooper, who used to boast that he never made a dollar he could not take up to the Great White Throne, was one of a long series of arguments for a public sentiment that would distinguish between honest success and dishonest “success,” between Peter Cooper and Jay Gould. The chief peril to the republic, he wrote in 1886, was worship of wealth:
It is here that our greatest danger lies. The popular hero to-day, whom our young men in cities most admire and would soonest imitate, is neither the saint, the sage, the scholar, the soldier, nor the statesman, but the successful stock-gambler. Stocks and bonds are the commonest of our dinner-table topics. The man we show with most pride to foreigners is the man who has made most millions. Our wisest men are those who can draw the biggest checks; and—what is worst of all—there is a growing tendency to believe that everybody is entitled to whatever he can buy, from the Presidency down to a street-railroad franchise.
540 Godkin was a keen-eyed social observer, discussing thoughtfully a multitude of topics affecting the daily life and culture of the people. He did not believe in prohibition, arguing throughout his editorship against the Maine law. But he did recognize in the saloon an enormous evil, politically and socially, he wanted it lessened by high licenses, and utterances could be quoted which suggest that he might ultimately have accepted even prohibition as better than the saloon’s continuance. He disbelieved in woman suffrage for two principal reasons, because he feared it would further debase the government of our large cities, and because the great majority of women in his day were indifferent to it. On social abuses of all kinds he used the lash unsparingly. His campaign against public spitting, upon grounds of sanitation as well as cleanliness, was potent in abolishing the spittoon. For years he kept up a vigorous effort to shame the South out of its tolerant attitude toward homicide. He had been shocked by this attitude when he traveled in the South in 1856–57, and the war and Reconstruction had made it worse. His method was characteristic. Every time one Southerner shot another because of a quarrel over a dog, or a rail fence, or a hasty word—which was every few days—he wrote an editorial paragraph recounting the circumstances, with ironic comment. He dwelt upon the bloody details, the “gloom” that pervaded the community, and the certainty that nothing would be done to bring the murderer to trial. For several years early in the eighties this campaign gave the editorial page of the Post a decided mortuary flavor. Part of the Southern press was enraged, declaring that the Post was maliciously attempting to prevent emigration southward; but it got below the skin of the section with salutary effect.
Certain of Godkin’s utterances upon labor problems show the unfortunate effect of part of his early training. They had not only the fallacies of the laissez faire position, but were harshly put. He had a way of speaking of workmen, when they displeased him, as “ignorant,”541 “idle,” “reckless,” indicting them en masse. In 1887, writing contemptuously of a strike “of coalheavers, longshoremen, and the like,” he spoke of the men who respond to labor agitators as “a large, passionate, ignorant, and through their ignorance, very discontented and uncomfortable constituency.” For years in the eighties, when labor was struggling toward effective organization, he declared that its agitators were producing a cowardice among politicians, ministers, and philanthropists like that the slavery leaders produced before the Civil War. He was one of those who thought the early career of Prof. Richard T. Ely dangerously incendiary. He repeatedly denied that strikers had the right to post pickets around an employer’s premises. He denied them the right to accuse an employer of paying an unjust wage, or taking an undue share of profits, saying that a strike should be regarded as “a simple failure of business men to agree to a bargain” (May, 1886). Labor was guilty of many crimes and abuses, from dynamiting to boycotts, in those days. But it would be hard to find a more unfair statement of the labor movement, 1876–1896, than Godkin wrote in the latter year (Sept. 2):
Labor as a “question” was twenty years ago new in America.... It gradually grew in political and social importance. Politicians began to preach that employers were great rascals if they did not allow laborers to stay in their service on their own terms. They were backed up by a swarm of “ethical” economists and clergymen all over the country, who found something hideously wrong in the existing state of society, and proclaimed the obligation, not simply of the employer, but of the state and society, to do all sorts of nice things for the laborer; to carry him about for nothing, to pay him for his labor what he should judge to be sufficient, to provide all sorts of comforts and luxuries for him at the public expense, on what was called “broad public grounds.” This insanity raged for several years. It was preached from thousands of pulpits. “Papers” were read on it at all sorts of clubs, societies, and reunions, showing the wrongs done to the manual laborer by everybody else. Under its influence Powderly and his Knights of Labor grew into a great power....
This particular “craze” lasted till the Chicago riots of 1893,542 and the appearance on the scene of Altgeld as the Governor of a great State. People then saw the fruits of their teaching. Large bodies of ignorant and thoughtless men had believed it and acted on it. In order to settle a small dispute between a sleeping car company and its men, they determined to suspend locomotion throughout the business regions of a great nation. They believed they were in the right. If the account given of labor by the clergymen and ethical economists were true, they had the right to do what they were doing. For some days the government of the United States seemed to be suspended. But when one courageous man stepped to the front, and said this nonsense should cease, it suddenly stopped. The sermons and “papers” and ethical economy stopped too.
Godkin rejoiced when the Knights of Labor disintegrated, and said nothing in praise of the work it did in clearing the ground for the A. F. of L., or in hastening the eight-hour day, the abolition of contract labor, and the establishment of labor bureaus. A similar want of sympathy was evident in much he wrote of the farmers. In fact, he imbibed with his British training a strong consciousness of class, which made him speak of manual workers and small tradesmen as inferiors. An editorial deprecating a liberal education for children of the poor, easily accessible in files of the Nation (Dec. 23, 1886) is a curious example of his inability to understand the American denial of any permanent class lines. As a good liberal, he believed that labor must be strongly organized, but if he had any real feeling for it, it seldom appeared. He was a philosophic democrat, but not a practical democrat. His editorials, joined with certain well-known personal traits—his great care in dress, his fastidiousness in food, his intellectual aloofness—led many to think him a snob; a term that was misleading, for no one was less a respecter of persons. They inspired the well-known verses of McCready Sykes, beginning:
Godkin the righteous, known of old,
Priest of the nation’s moral health,
Within whose Post we daily read
The Gospel of the Rights of Wealth.
543 In denying that Godkin was a pessimist, we must not deny that he was sometimes atrabilious. Scattered through his letters are remarks that indicate moods of deep discouragement. “I am tired of having to be continually hopeful,” he wrote after the election of 1897, and again in 1899: “Our present political condition is repulsive to me.” It was his business to be censorious—to make the Nation, as Charles Dudley Warner said, “the weekly judgment day.” But as Howells writes, practically he was one of the most hopeful of men, for he was always striving to make a bad world better. He deeply resented the charge that the Evening Post was merely a destructive critic, and used to challenge any one to cite an instance in which it had exposed an evil without suggesting a remedy. The commotion following the death of Garfield brought from him a notable expression of faith in our national stability. He recalled that the same calamity had occurred before, when the country was in the midst of the greatest convulsion of the century, with a million troops under arms, a colossal debt, and terrible problems awaiting solution; that a stubborn, uneducated man had become President, and for three years had quarreled violently with Congress; and yet that all had ended prosperously. Mr. Bishop was surprised on election day, in 1884, to see the calm serenity with which Godkin awaited the result of the Blaine-Cleveland contest, but Godkin remarked, with intense conviction: “I have been sitting here for twenty years and more, placing faith in the American people, and they have never gone back on me yet, and I do not believe they will now.” He himself used to laugh at the talk of his pessimism, remarking that when he lived in Cambridge, people said that he and Norton were accustomed to sit at night and talk until at about 2 a. m. the gloom would get so thick that all the dogs in town would start howling.
In the reminiscences that death prevented him from expanding, he made a brief survey of contemporary American civilization in a tone anything but discouraged. He believed that in government the United States had lost544 ground. The people cared less about politics, were less instructed regarding administration, and had allowed themselves to become the tools of the bosses; while the old race of great statesmen had died out. He also thought that the press had ceased to have much influence on opinion, and that the pulpit had become singularly demagogic. On the other hand, he declared that the advance of higher education, qualitatively and quantitatively, was without a parallel in all previous world history. “And,” he added, “the progress of the nation generally in all the arts, except that of government, in literature, in commerce, in invention, is something unprecedented, and becomes daily more astonishing.”
As to the character and extent of Godkin’s influence there is no uncertainty. Exerted directly upon the leaders of opinion, it was felt indirectly by the whole population. All over the country he convinced isolated and outstanding men, who in turn diffused his views throughout their own communities. No man who once fell under the sway of his powerful pen, even those whom he intensely irritated, could quite shake it off. One eminent New Yorker was heard to call the Post “that pessimistic, malignant, and malevolent sheet—which no good citizen ever goes to bed without reading!” The thinking young men of the colleges, and many outside them, accepted his utterances as an almost infallible guide. No public man was indifferent to them. The Evening Post and Nation long exercised a peculiar sway in newspaper offices from Maine to California. Gov. David B. Hill remarked to a secretary during the fight Godkin was waging against his machine: “I don’t care anything about the handful of Mugwumps who read it in New York City. The trouble with the damned sheet is that every editor in New York State reads it!” It was a Western editor who said that only a bold newspaper made up its mind on any new issue till it saw what the Post had to say. “For years,” a Baltimore friend wrote Godkin in 1899, “I have noticed your editorials reappearing unacknowledged, a little changed and somewhat diluted, but still with their original integrity545 not entirely removed from them, in the columns of other papers—a course of Post-and-water not equal to the strong meat from which the decoction was made, but still wholesome....” Henry Holt wrote the editor on his retirement that he had taught the country more than any other man in it. The same tribute was paid him by William James: “To my generation, his was certainly the towering influence in all thought concerning public affairs, and indirectly his influence has certainly been more pervasive than that of any other writer of the generation, for he influenced other writers who never quoted him, and determined the whole current of discussion.”
Such verdicts, from such men, might be multiplied to a wearisome length. The finest spirits of the time recognized in Godkin, though they often disagreed with him, though the disagreement might sometimes be violent, the most inspiring force in American journalism.