The editorship of Horace White was a three years’ interlude (Jan. 1, 1900-Jan. 31, 1903) between the eighteen years of Godkin, and the equally long editorship of Rollo Ogden. Its outstanding feature was the campaign of 1900, during which the Evening Post faced the two major parties in a plague-on-both-your-houses spirit. It was impossible for it to support either McKinley or Bryan. But it did applaud Bryan’s anti-imperialist speeches, and from them and the Democratic platform plank on the Philippines it expected the greatest good. “They will put one-half the people of the United States in a high school to learn the principles of free government,” wrote Horace White, “as a class learns a lesson by repetition and observation.” In other words, believing that the Democratic Party had possessed no definite ideas regarding the Philippines previous to the Kansas City Convention, the Post hoped that the campaign would imbue it with a lasting set of principles on the subject. That hope has been justified. After Bryan defined imperialism as the paramount issue, the paper—which knew his opponent would win—more and more implied that a vote for him would be a healthy vote of protest.
The decisiveness of McKinley’s victory showed that the people were quite unconvinced of the views of Bryan and the Evening Post regarding our Philippine policy. It happened that Carl Schurz had made a tour of the West shortly before the election, speaking against imperialism, and on his return had visited the Evening Post confident that Bryan would carry a long list of States there. The day after election Joseph Bucklin Bishop argued in the editorial conference that the Post should569 treat the result frankly, and abstain from any pretense that the anti-imperialist cause had not been hard hit. The editorial which he wrote harmonized with this view. About noon Schurz came in, eager to learn what the editors thought of the election, and was shocked when he read Bishop’s editorial. Towering over the younger man, and shaking his finger in Bishop’s face, he declared in his severest tones: “You admit too much—you admit too much!” “Too much what?” demanded the irritated Bishop. “Too much truth?”
But the Evening Post of course no more surrendered its position upon the Philippine question than upon the tariff. It took the view that the islands should be freed as soon as a stable government could be erected, and it believed then, as it believes still, that the Republican idea of a stable government is altogether too exacting. That American troops should be sent to the other side of the world to impose American rule upon an unwilling people seemed to it horrible. Horace White warmly approved of President McKinley’s and John Hay’s liberal attitude toward China in the Boxer troubles, and their insistence upon the open door and Chinese integrity. The same liberal principles seemed to him to condemn the employment of a hundred thousand men and a hundred million dollars a year to subjugate the Filipinos; give them a definite promise of independence, he held, and the fighting might stop.
When Mr. White resigned, in accordance with his original intention of remaining editor but a short period, it was a foregone conclusion that his successor would be Mr. Ogden. A power in the Evening Post office since he entered it in 1891, Mr. Ogden had come to take a leading share in the guidance of policy and the writing of the important editorials. Of his long, exceedingly able, and fruitful editorship, one comparable only with Godkin’s and Bryant’s in the history of the paper, it is too soon to write in detail. But its main outlines may be roughly indicated.
In national politics the Evening Post continued independent,570 with the leaning towards the Democratic Party which its low-tariff and anti-imperialist tenets naturally gave it. The only occasions since 1884 when it has not supported the Democratic ticket are the three occasions on which Bryan ran. In 1904 it was with Parker against Roosevelt, and in 1912 and 1916 it was with Wilson. In international affairs it remained the champion of peace and of fair play for the weaker nations, with that special regard for friendship with England which has animated it since 1801. It was always to be found arrayed against the Platt and Barnes machines in State politics, and against Tammany in the city. Upon some large domestic questions its policy changed—it early became an advocate of woman’s suffrage, and in due time a supporter of national prohibition; while upon other domestic questions, as the negro question, it grew much more aggressive and insistent.
Much of the energy with which the Evening Post opposed Roosevelt in 1904 was due to its hot indignation over the steps by which, the previous fall, he had gained a right of way for the Panama Canal by hastening to confirm the separation of Panama from Colombia. Mr. Ogden’s attacks upon that high-handed act were stinging. Whether or not American agents had intrigued to bring about Panama’s secession, the Evening Post thought it shameful, in view of our protests in the Civil War against European recognition of the Confederacy, to be so precipitate in recognizing Panama. “Our policy is now the humiliating one of treating a pitifully feeble nation as we should never dream of dealing with even a second-class Power,” wrote Mr. Ogden; “of giving a friendly republic a blow in the face without waiting for either explanation or protest; of going far beyond the diplomatic requirements of the situation, and that with indecent haste—and all for what? To aid a struggling people?... No, but just for a handful of silver, just for a commercial advantage....” On one occasion he published as an editorial, without comment, the Bible passage relating to Naboth’s vineyard.
(Back): Christopher Morley C. C. Lane Donald Scott
(Middle): Henry Seidel Canby Simeon Strunsky Arthur Pound Allan Nevins Charles McD. Puckette
(Front): Franz Schneider Royal J. Davis W. O. Scroggs Edwin F. Gay
EDITORIAL COUNCIL, 1922.
571 Toward the seven years of Roosevelt’s Presidency the attitude of the Evening Post had to be a constant alternation of hostility and friendliness. It disliked his love of excitement and sensation, but liked his energy. It attacked his demands for a big army and navy, but admired his brilliant conclusion of peace between Russia and Japan. It believed him indifferent to constitutional and legal methods, censuring his tendency to ride rough-shod over Congress and curse the courts; but it valued his ability to get things done, and recognized the immense constructive achievement of his administration—his work for conservation and irrigation, his railway rate legislation, his pursuit of land thieves, postal thieves, and rebate-granting railways, his successful fight in the Northern Securities case. Above all, it recognized in him an awakener of the national conscience:
A great upheaval of moral sentiment took place during his administration. He was not the sole cause of it, but he utilized it and furthered it mightily. An account of stewardship of the rich was vigorously demanded. Business dishonesty was held up to abhorrence. Corporation rottenness was probed. All this, in spite of excesses of denunciation and legislation, was highly salutary. It was full time that people who had been mismanaging corporations and exploiting the public were called sharply to book.... The quickening of the national conscience, the rousing of a people long dead in trespasses and sins, with such concrete results as the reform of the insurance companies and the restrictions upon predatory public service corporations, is a service the value of which can scarcely be overlooked. (March, 1909.)
Having been outraged by the McKinley tariff and done its best to further the political revolt which that measure produced, having been equally denunciatory of the Dingley tariff, the Evening Post hoped in 1909 for a genuine revision downward. Throughout the campaign of 1908 it had regretted the lukewarmness of Taft’s utterances on this subject. The day after his election Mr. Ogden gave him a grave warning, which now appears as a prophecy justified:
572
To Mr. Taft we look for the fulfillment of those solemn promises—particularly for reform of the tariff—to which he and his party are committed. Notwithstanding the returns from the polls, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the recklessness and extravagance which have been encouraged by twelve years of unbroken Republican ascendency.... More menacing yet has been the open alliance between the protected manufacturers and the Republican politicians for the exploitation of the farmers and the vast mass of consumers. It is not conceivable that this sinister partnership can continue as in the past. The new and radical element which is gaining control of the Republican organization in the west will fight the stolid stand-patters like Aldrich and Cannon, and it may be set down as a certainty that if Mr. Taft does not join with them in the task of setting the Republican house in order and in casting the money-changers out of the temple, some man of foresight and power will come forward to wage the battle in behalf of the people. The great cause will produce the champion, as it produced Lincoln, and later Cleveland.
The Taft administration was but a month old when the Evening Post warned it again that the Payne-Aldrich bill contained provisions that would drive it from power unless the President intervened vigorously to remove them. When Dolliver led the attack of the West upon the tricks and robberies of the bill, charging that hoggish manufacturers had obtained permission from Aldrich to write their own tariff clauses, the editors rejoiced that never before had the public been so awake to greed and dishonesty of protection. When it found that its appeals to Taft to take action were in vain, it was totally disgusted with the President. His Winona speech it thought indefensible. Like the rest of the country, it soon discovered that he had marked deficiencies for his great office. In its view, Taft was wrong in the Ballinger affair, and in his initial advocacy of the remission of Panama tolls. He was not merely a poor politician, in the sense that he could not keep an effective party following, but he lacked foresight and energy. “He has shown himself devoid of the higher imagination in public affairs, too little prescient, without the touch of quick sympathy and popular quality which would have enabled him to take573 arms against a sea of troubles,” wrote Mr. Ogden as the administration ended.
Yet the Evening Post did not believe that Taft’s administration was the black betrayal and wretched failure which many said in 1912 it was. The country had many services to thank him for, it said, and his reputation would certainly benefit by the lapse of time. As between Taft and Roosevelt in 1912, it decidedly preferred Taft. In an editorial as the year 1911 closed, “A Square Deal for Taft,” it accused the former President of hitting below the belt. “Roosevelt is deliberately allowing himself to be used against the President, and allowing it ambiguously, equivocally, and not in the honorable and manly fashion which he has been forever advocating.... Why does he not frankly state the grounds of his opposition to Taft?” When Roosevelt did throw his hat into the ring, the editors deemed his cause in many respects weak. They felt that his denunciation of Taft was malignantly overdone. Recognizing many fine qualities in the Progressive movement, they believed that no new party could come into being without some one compelling moral or economic issue; that a program of all the virtues might be attractive, but did not afford a sound political basis, at least when coupled with the fortunes of an ambitious self-seeker. Parts of the Roosevelt program, notably his proposal for the recall of judicial decisions, and his plan for regulating the trusts by commission, struck the Post as thoroughly unsound.
Supporting Woodrow Wilson throughout the 1912 campaign, the Evening Post also supported almost all the measures of his first administration. The Federal Reserve Act and the Underwood tariff it hailed as reforms of the first magnitude. The various acts for the better use and protection of our national domain met its approval. While several influential New York newspapers attacked Wilson’s policy of “watchful waiting” in Mexican affairs, the Post held it both wise and courageous, and regretted only the temporary interruption of it by our attack upon Vera Cruz. The editors welcomed the Jones574 Act for a larger measure of Philippine autonomy, thought well of Bryan’s “cooling-off treaties,” and were grateful for the President’s veto of the literacy test bill. Indeed, the paper’s support would have been unhesitatingly given to President Wilson at the beginning of the campaign of 1916 had his opponent been a less able man than Hughes, and had it not been deeply offended that midsummer by the surrender of the President and Congress to the threat of a great railway strike, and their enactment of the eight-hour day law. As it was, shortly before November 1 the Evening Post came out for Wilson’s re?lection.
The opening of the Great War was a stunning surprise to the Evening Post, as to all America. But it was less completely taken unawares than were some papers which had failed to watch minutely the drift of affairs in Europe. On July 27, in an editorial analyzing the bellicose contents of a number of German and Austrian papers—the Hamburg Fremdenblatt, the Deutsches Volksblatt, the Neues Wiener Tageblatt, the Reichspost, and the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna—it gave a remarkably accurate view, under the title “War Madness,” of what was going on under the surface in Europe. When Germany entered Belgium its condemnation was instant. “By this action Germany has shown herself ready to lift an outlaw hand against the whole of Western Europe.” The paper did not know whether Germany directly caused and desired the war; but it believed that she indirectly caused it, and that she failed to prevent it when she might easily have done so. Before fighting had fairly commenced it ventured upon a prophecy which the fate of three thrones has fully justified:
The human mind cannot yet begin to grasp the consequences. One of them, however, seems plainly written in the book of the future. It is that, after this most awful and most wicked of all wars is over, the power of life and death over millions of men, the right to decree the ruin of industry and commerce and finance, with untold human misery stalking through the land like a plague, will be taken away from three men. No safe prediction of actual results of battle can be made. Dynasties may crumble575 before all is done, empires change their form of government. But whatever happens, Europe—humanity—will not settle back into a position enabling three Emperors to give, on their individual choice or whim, the signal for destruction and massacre.
The whole course of the war only confirmed the Evening Post’s original view that the side of right and justice was the Allied side. When the Lusitania was sunk, Mr. Ogden’s indictment of “The Outlaw German Government” was one of the most stirring editorials that ever appeared in the Evening Post or Nation; an editorial which asked the American people to show themselves “too firmly planted on right to be hysterical, and too determined on obtaining justice to bluster,” but which expressed confidence that the true and righteous judgments of the Lord would yet be visited upon the German war leaders. When President Wilson asked the American people to be neutral in thought and word, the Evening Post declared that our moral sentiment could not be neutral—that it must be with England and France. The Allied infringements upon our rights in the enforcement of the blockade it attacked, but it constantly emphasized the fact that Germany’s violations of international law were far graver, in that they affected life and liberty, not merely property.
Long hoping that American participation in the war could be honorably avoided, the Evening Post did not want peace at any price. It regarded war as a lesser calamity than the defeat of the Allies, or than supine submission to Germany’s unrestricted submarine activity. When that activity was announced it was plain that we should soon be involved in the conflict, and the editors followed Mr. Wilson’s course with general, if not perfect, approval, in the difficult days of the crisis. The President’s address to Congress asking for a declaration of war was warmly praised by the Evening Post, as placing our national motives and objects upon the most elevated plane. “All told,” it said on April 3, “Americans may take satisfaction in the fact that they enter the war only after the display of the greatest patience by the government,576 only after grievous and repeated wrongs, and upon the highest possible grounds. There can be no doubt that the country will respond instantly to the President’s leadership.” The Evening Post was not for restricted, but complete participation in the conflict. It early took issue with the administration and with dominant public sentiment in opposing the raising of the army by draft, holding that any appearance of forced military service was un-American, that a volunteer army would show a superior spirit, and that while conscription might become necessary later, it should be postponed until our traditional method of recruiting failed to bring enough men. But the Evening Post accepted the draft loyally, and gave its workings the cordial praise they deserved. From the beginning of the war it looked forward eagerly to the establishment of a world organization to preserve international peace everywhere; and in 1919 and 1920 it was among the staunchest advocates of the League of Nations.
Mr. Ogden had the assistance throughout his editorship of a staff as able as that which Mr. Godkin had gathered about him. Frank Jewett Mather, jr., served as an editorial writer from 1900 to the close of 1906, and as he says, gradually specialized in writing upon European politics and art criticism. Oswald Garrison Villard, son of Henry Villard, was called into the office from the Philadelphia Press in 1897, and remained one of the most active of the editorial writers until 1917. A brilliant young man from Wisconsin, Philip L. Allen, whose premature death was a loss to journalism, advanced rung by rung, and was an editorial writer from 1904 to 1908. Simeon Strunsky joined the staff in 1906. Three years later Dr. Fabian Franklin, long professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins, and from 1895 to 1906 editor of the Baltimore Sun, became associate editor; and Royal J. Davis entered the circle in 1910. Paul Elmer More, who was literary editor of the Evening Post after 1903, and became editor of the Nation in 1909, contributed to the editorial page; and there was a considerable list of men577 who served for short periods, especially in summers—Stuart P. Sherman, Hutchins Hapgood, Walter B. Pitkin, H. Parker Willis, and others.
As the editorial staff existed when the European War began, its members constituted a group of comprehensive tastes and abilities. Mr. Ogden decided all questions of policy, wrote almost all the leading political editorials, and in addition ranged over a wide field of social and literary comment, treating everything with an incisive, pungent style peculiarly his own. Dr. Franklin wrote upon economic subjects with unfailing sureness, treated educational and scientific topics with the authority of a scholar, and was masterly in exploding any fallacy which for the moment had assumed importance, and the detection of which required the combination of strong common sense and logical subtlety. Mr. Villard was interested in a wide range of humanitarian subjects, having made the Post, for example, an outstanding champion of the negro race, while he paid special attention to military and naval affairs. International politics was left very largely to Simeon Strunsky, whose pen was also indispensable in the humorous or satiric treatment of current subjects, and whose knowledge was encyclop?dic. Mr. Noyes continued to write regularly upon financial topics, while Mr. Davis—who was also literary editor, 1914–1920—had given special attention to certain phases of politics.
In its news department the Evening Post had suffered a heavy blow in 1897, when the city editor, H. J. Wright, became editor of the Commercial Advertiser, and took with him Norman Hapgood and Lincoln Steffens. But it quickly recovered, and under a series of managing editors—O. G. Villard, Hammond Lamont, H. J. Learoyd, E. G. Lowry, J. P. Gavit, and the present head, Charles McD. Puckette—has continued steadily to improve. The list of reporters since the beginning of the century contains many names known outside the newspaper world. Among them are Burton J. Hendrick, Norman Duncan, Freeman Tilden, and Lawrence Perry as authors; A. E. Thomas and Bayard Veiller as playwrights;578 George Henry Payne, Ralph Graves, and Arthur Warner as editors; and Rheta Childe Dorr, Walter Arndt, and Robert E. MacAlarney. The Washington correspondence has always maintained a high degree of excellence. The Washington bureau was in charge of Francis E. Leupp from 1889 to 1904, when he was appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs; he was succeeded by E. G. Lowry, J. P. Gavit, and then by David Lawrence, two of whose exploits—his “scoop” on Bryan’s resignation, and his remarkable prediction of the States which would give Wilson the Presidency in 1916—made a considerable noise in their time. The present correspondents are Mark Sullivan and Harold Phelps Stokes.
The war brought a series of rapid changes in the ownership and management of the Evening Post. The financial control of the paper had long been in the hands of Mr. Villard, who for more than fifteen years was president of the company, and had given unremitting attention to the maintenance of its high business standards, as well as to the improvement of its news and other features. At the end of July, 1917, Mr. Villard gave an option for the purchase of his share of the paper to his associates, and a few days later it was announced that Mr. Thomas W. Lamont had bought it; thus terminating the long and public-spirited proprietorship by the Villard family. Friends of the paper must ever be grateful to Mr. Lamont for carrying it through the next few years of excessive wartime costs. He placed Mr. Edwin F. Gay, widely known as the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (1908–19), in charge in January, 1920, as president of the Evening Post Company; and two years later, in the first days of 1922, the ownership of the Post passed into the hands of a syndicate organized by Mr. Gay. Meanwhile, early in 1920 Mr. Ogden had resigned the editorship, and Mr. Strunsky took charge of the editorial page.
With the marked broadening of the newspaper in the last two years, and the innovations in its form, its readers579 are as familiar as they are with the fact that its essential spirit is unaltered. The connection with the Nation having ceased in 1917, its editorial page has abandoned the narrow columns and long series of uncaptioned editorial paragraphs which had marked it since 1881. The literary pages passed in 1920 into the hands of Mr. Henry S. Canby, who has made the Evening Post Literary Review esteemed from the Atlantic to the Pacific as easily the foremost publication of its kind in America. The volume of news has been greatly increased, fresh departments have been added, illustrations given their proper place, and the appeal of the paper broadened without lowering its standards. In a period not favorable to increase of circulation, that of the Evening Post has risen, under Mr. Gay, to the highest point in its history.