to make to screen himself from prosecution, were to say the least
singular; but they were more than that; they were of a kind no
upright citizen could resort to or sanction. He tried to tamper
with the Grand Jury, he tried to buy up the District Attorney,
he “secured,” as D. D. told me, the petit jury, and he was
negotiating, at the time the trial came on, to purchase Fox. These
are things difficult to reconcile with any supposition of the man’s
integrity or honor.
III. Admitting him, however, to be wholly innocent, his position
before the public has become such that it is a source of the most
serious mortification and embarrassment to the conductors of the
_Evening Post_. We cannot brand a defaulter, condemn peculation,
urge official economy, or get into any sort of controversy with
other journals, without having the charges against Henderson,
which nine tenths of the public believe to be true, flung in our
faces. Not once, but two dozen times, I have been shut up by a
rejoinder of this sort. Mr. Nordhoff has felt this, in his private
intercourse as well as in a public way, to such an extent that he
has told me peremptorily and positively that he would not continue
in the paper if Mr. Henderson retained an active part in connection
with it. Now, it seems to me that if there were any feeling of
delicacy in Mr. Henderson, any regard for the sensitiveness of
others, any care for the reputation and independence of the paper,
he would be willing to relieve us of this most injurious and
unpleasant predicament.
IV. I will add, that I am not satisfied with his management of
our business affairs; he gives them very little of his attention,
though he pretends to do so; he is largely and constantly engaged
in outside speculations, in grain, provisions, etc.; and in one
instance, as our books show, he has given himself a fictitious
credit of $7,000, which was irregular....
Whether commissions were actually taken none can now say; the essential
fact is that the man who was to be editor of the _Post_ had thus early
made up his mind to distrust and detest the tall, florid publisher of
the paper. Godwin actually proposed to Henderson at this date that
the latter sell out to William Dorsheimer, a well-known lawyer, later
lieutenant-governor, who was willing to buy, but Henderson naturally
refused to leave under fire. Godwin ultimately consented to stay with
the _Post_ until Bryant had refreshed himself from his Civil War labors
by a European trip; but in 1868 he sold his third share to Bryant and
Henderson for $200,000, and gladly left the office for the time being.
Nordhoff remained longer, but with unabated dislike for Henderson,
and at the crisis of the Tweed fight, as we have seen, thought it
necessary to resign. Most of the editorial employees of the _Post_
disliked the publisher. He practiced a penny-pinching economy. The
building superintendent was required to send up a daily statement of
the coal used. Ill-paid workers, coming into his office to ask for more
wages, would state their case and then note that his eyes were fixed
suggestively upon the maxim, one of many framed on the walls, “Learn to
Labor and to Wait.” But Bryant seems never to have lost his confidence
in him. Every one agrees that one of Henderson’s best traits was an
almost boyish admiration and deference for Bryant, and that he would
never do anything to offend the poet.
By the middle seventies the Civil War charges against Henderson were
largely forgotten. The danger to be apprehended from his activities
and ambition was not that the _Evening Post_ would be brought
under dishonest management, but simply that it would be brought
under a management which thought first and always of money-making,
steered its course for the greatest patronage, and shrank from such
self-sacrificing independence as the paper had displayed in the Bank
war or the early stages of the slavery struggle. Henderson never
thought of it as a sternly impartial guide of public opinion; he
thought of it as a producer of revenue. His whole later record as a
publisher, as Bryant aged, shows this.
The seventies were the hey-day of the “reading notice,” and in
printing veiled advertisements the _Post_ only followed nearly all
other newspapers. Washington Gladden left the _Independent_, the
leading religious weekly of the day, recently edited by Beecher and
Tilton, in 1871, because no fewer than three departments--an Insurance
Department, a Financial Department, and a department of “Publishers’
Notices”--were so edited and printed that, though pure advertising at
$1 a line, they appeared to a majority of readers as editorial matter.
These advertising items were frequently quoted in other journals
as utterances of the _Independent_. The _Times_ as late as 1886 was
placed in an embarrassing position by divulgence of the fact that it
had received $1,200 from the Bell Telephone Company for publishing
an advertisement which many readers would take to be an editorial.
No “reading notices” ever appeared in the editorial columns of the
_Post_, and Whiting would instantly have resigned had an effort been
made to place one in the financial columns; but they were discreditably
frequent in the news pages. Occasionally a string of them would emerge
under the heading, “Shopping Notes”; at Christmas they were prominently
displayed on the front page as “Holiday Notices”; and sometimes the
unwary reader would commence what looked like a poem and find it ending:
Ye who with languor droop and fade,
Or ye whom fiercer illness thrills;
Call the blest compound to your aid--
Trust to Brandreth’s precious pills.
But where the influence of the business office was seen in its most
pernicious form was in efforts to muzzle the treatment of the news and
to color editorial opinion. W. G. Boggs, now a tall, thin, white-haired
old man, was the advertising manager, with a wide and intimate
acquaintance among commercial men and politicians, and with an endless
succession of axes to grind. “He was the most familiar representative
of the publication in the editorial rooms,” says Mr. Towse, “and
manifested a special interest in the suppression of any paragraph, or
allusion, that might offend the dispensers of political advertising,
which in those days was an important source of revenue.” Tammany gave
much printing to the _Post’s_ job office until 1871. Henderson himself
almost never interfered--Mr. Sperry recalls only one harmless instance
during his managing editorship. But in 1872 a dramatic incident lit up
the situation as by a bolt of lightning. Arthur G. Sedgwick had just
become managing editor, giving the editorial page new strength. At this
time there was much talk of maladministration and graft in the Parks
Department. One day Sedgwick, chatting with J. Ranken Towse upon the
subject, remarked that although the rascality was clear, there appeared
no indication in it of connivance by the Commissioner, Van Nort. Towse
dissented, saying that the man was hand in glove with Tammany, and must
be fully cognizant of all that was going on. He suggested that Van Nort
had escaped suspicion because he was a social favorite, superior in
manners and culture to most politicians, and because he had used his
advertising patronage in a manner to please all New York papers. To
enforce his argument, he directed Sedgwick’s attention to a number of
highly suspicious transactions. Sedgwick, he states:
saw the points promptly, and bade me write an editorial paragraph
embodying them and demanding explanations. I told him it would be
as much as my place was worth to write such an article. He replied,
somewhat hotly, that he, not I, was responsible for the editorial
page, and peremptorily told me to write as he had directed. So I
furnished the paragraph, which, to the best of my recollection, was
largely an enumeration of undeniable facts for which Van Nort, as
the head of his department, was officially responsible, and which
he ought to be ready to explain. It was put into type and printed
as an editorial in the first edition. The paper was scarcely off
the press when the expected storm broke. Mr. Henderson, ordinarily
cold and self-restrained, passed hurriedly through my room in a
state of manifest excitement, with an early copy of the edition in
his hand. Entering the adjoining room of Mr. Sedgwick, he denounced
my unlucky article, and demanded its instant suppression. A brief
but heated altercation followed; Henderson insisting that the
article was scandalous and libelous, and must be withdrawn, and
Sedgwick asserting his sole authority in the matter and declaring
that, so long as he was managing editor, the article would remain
as it stood. Finally Henderson withdrew, but meanwhile the press
had been stopped, and the objectionable paragraph removed from
the form. Before the afternoon was over Sedgwick handed in his
resignation and returned to the service of the _Nation_.
As Mr. Towse adds, probably Bryant, now too old to be much in the
office, never knew the precise truth of this affair; and if he did,
may have thought that his interference would be bootless, and would
only intensify the irritation of the episode. But we can see why men
jocularly called Henderson “the wicked partner,” and the _Post_ a
Spenlow and Jorkins establishment.
Parke Godwin maintained his attitude of constant suspicion toward the
paper’s publisher. Two years after the sale of his third share of the
_Post_, he obtained evidence which convinced him, as he wrote Bryant,
that he had been overreached by Henderson “to the extent of one hundred
thousand dollars at least.” His efforts to institute an inquiry came
to nothing, and he ended them by sending the poet a solemn note of
warning: “I regard Mr. Henderson as a far-seeing and adroit rogue;
his design from the beginning has been and still is to get exclusive
possession of the _Evening Post_, at much less than its real value,
which I expected to prove was much more nearly a million than half a
million dollars” (July, 1870). Early in the seventies he took charge
of the _Post_ for various short periods, and what he then observed
increased his apprehensions, or, as Henderson’s defenders would say,
his prejudices. At the beginning of 1878 he prevailed upon Bryant to
have an investigation of the newspaper’s finances made by Judge Monell,
and the result was the reorganization already chronicled.
In brief, Judge Monell’s inquiries showed that very large sums were
owed to Bryant by Henderson, and that for a long period Henderson’s
private financial affairs, which had been subjected to a severe
strain by his erection of the new building, had not been properly
separated from those of the _Evening Post_. Had it not been for these
disclosures, the astute business manager would undoubtedly have been
able to step forward soon after Bryant’s death and take control. But
he could not immediately meet his debts to the Bryant family, and
was forced to consent to an arrangement which wrecked whatever plans
in that direction he may have laid. Henderson owned fifty shares,
Bryant forty-eight, Julia Bryant one, and Judge Monell one. Under the
new arrangement Henderson pledged thirty of his shares to Bryant as
security for his debts, and twenty to Parke Godwin, who reëntered the
company, while Bryant also pledged twenty shares to Godwin. The Board
of Trustees was so constituted that the position of the Bryant family
was made secure. Henderson intended to move heaven and earth to redeem
his shares; but, wrote Judge Monell in an opinion for the family, even
if he did that “he cannot change the direction nor regain control. This
can only be done by persons holding a majority of the stock.”
Godwin when made editor was regarded as one of the ablest and most
experienced journalists in New York. Far behind him were the youthful,
enthusiastic days of the forties, when he had been an ardent apostle
of Fourierism, had applauded the Brook Farm experiment, helping edit
the organ of that community, the _Harbinger_, and had advised his
friend Charles A. Dana that it was possible for a young journalist
to cultivate high thinking and high ambitions in New York on $1,000
a year. He had worked like a Trojan then on the _Post_, and had made
several unsuccessful ventures into the magazine field. Far behind him
were the pinched years of the fifties when, having temporarily left the
_Post_, he was associate editor of the struggling _Putnam’s Magazine_,
and gave it national reputation by his vigorous assaults upon the
slavery forces and President Pierce. It was with a touch of bitterness
that he had complained in 1860, when he rejoined the _Evening Post_,
that the latter had never paid him more than $50 a week. But,
purchasing Bigelow’s share of the paper at a bargain, its Civil War
profits made him rich.
The editorial writing done by Godwin had not the eloquence or finish
of Bryant’s, but it showed an equal grasp of political principles, and
a better understanding of economic problems. He was a real scholar,
the author of many books, able to appeal to cultivated audiences. His
legal, literary, and historical studies gave him a distinct advantage
over the ordinary journalist of the time, not college bred and too busy
for wide reading. Young Henry Watterson justly wrote of him in 1871,
when he had temporarily left his profession again:
It is a thousand pities that a man of Parke Godwin’s strength of
mind and strength of principle is by any chance or cause cut off
from his proper sphere of usefulness and power, the press of New
York. He has a clearer head and less gush than Greeley, and he
is hardly any lazier than Manton Marble, though older; he writes
with as much dash and point as Hurlburt, and his knowledge of the
practice of journalism is not inferior to that of Greeley and
Nordhoff. No leading writer of the day makes more impression on the
public mind than he could make, and in losing him along with Hudson
the journals of the great metropolis are real and not apparent
sufferers. Godwin is eminently a leader-writer, and whenever
he goes to work on a newspaper the addition is sure to be felt
forthwith.
Unfortunately, he was now sixty-two, and well beyond his prime, while
the defect of which Watterson speaks, his laziness, had grown upon
him. In the past he had been noted for his editorial aggressiveness,
and the most “radical” of the _Post’s_ utterances in the Civil War
are attributable to him. It was once said that, in the _Evening Post_
office in the seventies, “he was a lion in a den of Daniels.” George
Cary Eggleston, who worked with him when he was editor 1878–1881, tells
us that “he knew how to say strong things in a strong way. He could
wield the rapier of subtle sarcasm, and the bludgeon of denunciation
with an equally skilful hand. Sometimes he brought even a trip-hammer
into play with startling effect.” Eggleston cites an incident which
happened during Sarah Bernhardt’s first visit to New York in 1880. A
sensational clergyman, who always denounced the theater as the gateway
of hell, sent the _Evening Post_ a vehement protest against the space
it was giving Mme. Bernhardt, whom he characterized as a woman of
immoral character and dissolute conduct. This letter he headed, “Quite
Enough of Sara Bernhardt.” Godwin was enraged. He instantly penned an
editorial answer, which he entitled “Quite Enough of Blank”--Blank
being the clergyman’s name, used in full. Pointing out that Mme.
Bernhardt had asked for American attention solely as an artist, that
the _Post_ had treated her only in that light, and that the charge
that she was immoral was totally without supporting evidence anyway,
he demolished the luckless cleric. But Eggleston deplores “a certain
constitutional indolence” of Godwin’s as depriving the world of the
fruits of his ripest powers, and this fault was now evident. He went
much into society, he sometimes wrote his editorials in bed in the
morning and sent them down by messenger, and sometimes a promised
editorial did not appear.
Upon all the public issues which had importance during Godwin’s
editorship the position of the _Post_ had already been well fixed. It
had been an advocate of civil service reform early in the sixties, at
a time when even well-informed men, like Henry Adams in a conversation
with E. L. Godkin, spoke of it only as “something Prussian.” It had
urged an early resumption of specie payments, had bitterly opposed
the Bland Act of 1878 for the coinage of two to four million dollars’
worth of silver monthly, saying that it was “a public disgrace,” and
had resisted the greenback party. It was deeply suspicious of pensions
legislation, and had applauded Grant’s veto of the bounty bill. It
had early decided that Blaine was “one of our superfluous statesmen,”
and that the sooner he was discarded, the better. It had said in 1875
that the Granger movement promised to leave behind it a valuable
legacy of general railway legislation “which, tested by practice, will
afford us a foundation for our future legislation on questions of
transportation.” Year in and year out it asked for a lower tariff--a
tariff for revenue only--and attacked all other forms of subsidy for
private enterprises. Godwin had no momentous decisions to make.
It was by no means a foregone conclusion in 1880 that the _Post_
would support the Republican ticket, for in advance of the Republican
Convention it showed itself equally hostile to Grant (whom the _Times_
was advocating) and to Blaine (the _Tribune’s_ favorite). But as
soon as word came of Garfield’s nomination, it hailed it as “a grand
result,” and “a glorious escape from Grant and Blaine.” Of Gen.
Hancock, the Democratic nominee, the _Post_ remarked that his only
recommendation was his military record, and that his party proposed
to fill the Presidential chair with the uniform of a major-general, a
sword, and a pair of spurs.
During the final months of 1879, and throughout 1880, Godwin and
Henderson met and spoke to each other with grave, cold courtesy. They
even consulted with each other. But beneath the surface their mutual
hostility never slackened, and their associates knew they were at
daggers drawn. The crisis could not long be delayed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE VILLARD PURCHASE: CARL SCHURZ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Within three years after Bryant’s death his newspaper, still prosperous
and well-edited, was suddenly sold, and placed in the hands of the
ablest triumvirate ever enlisted by an American daily. The transfer was
announced in the issue of May 25, 1881:
The _Evening Post_ has passed under the control of Mr. Carl Schurz,
Mr. Horace White, and Mr. E. L. Godkin, who yesterday completed the
purchase of a large majority of its stock. To-morrow Mr. Schurz
will assume the editorial direction of the journal.
It was generally known that the real buyer was Henry Villard, but for
several weeks this fact was not only concealed, but for some reason was
explicitly denied both by the _Post_ and Mr. Villard. On July 1 there
appeared a supplementary announcement:
Beginning with the next number the _Nation_ will be issued as the
weekly edition of the New York _Evening Post_.
It will retain the name and have the same editorial management
as heretofore, and an increased staff of contributors, but its
contents will in the main have already appeared in the _Evening
Post_.
This consolidation will considerably enlarge the field and raise
the character of the _Evening Post’s_ literary criticism and news.
It will also add to its staff of literary contributors the very
remarkable list of writers in every department with which readers
of the _Nation_ have long been familiar.
To few interested in the _Post_ could its sale have been a surprise.
It is true that Parke Godwin had many reasons, sentimental and
practical, for continuing his editorship and maintaining the Bryant
family’s half-ownership. He appreciated the argument which John Bigelow
addressed to him when he talked of giving both up. “Bethink you,”
wrote Bigelow, “that now and for the first time in your long career
of journalism you have absolute control of a paper of traditional
respectability and authority, in which you can say just what you
please on all subjects.” His two sons seemed interested in making
journalism their career. He had an able stall, several of whom--as
the financial editor Whiting, the literary editor Eggleston, and the
dramatic editor Towse--were unexcelled in their departments, while
two valuable additions, Robert Burch and Robert Bridges (later editor
of _Scribner’s_) had been made to the news room. But Parke Godwin was
sixty-five this year. He had undertaken the writing of Bryant’s life in
two volumes, and the editing of the poet’s works in four more, while
he wished to complete his history of France, begun before the war. He
believed that it would be well for his family, after his death, to have
its money invested in a less precarious enterprise than a newspaper.
Above all, his relations with Isaac Henderson had now come to a
breaking point.
An open quarrel between them in the spring of 1881 ended in a clear
assertion by Godwin of his right to control the editorial policy. He
thought for the moment of bringing Edward H. Clement, a young Boston
journalist, later well known for his editorship and regeneration of the
_Transcript_, to be his associate. But at this juncture he accidentally
discovered that Henderson was negotiating for the sale of his half
of the _Evening Post_ to some prominent capitalist, and leaped to
the conclusion that the man was Jay Gould. In this he was doubtless
mistaken. But he was deeply alarmed by the thought that the Bryant
family might be associated with a notorious gambler and manipulator,
whose object would have been to make the _Post_ a disreputable organ of
his schemes.
Almost simultaneously he learned from Carl Schurz, then in the last
months of his service as Secretary of the Interior, that he, Horace
White, and Henry Villard were searching for a daily, into which they
were prepared to put a considerable amount of capital, and that they
were negotiating with the owners of the _Commercial Advertiser_, but
would prefer the _Evening Post_. Godwin, given a month to consider,
consulted his most judicious friends--Samuel J. Tilden, Joseph H.
Choate, President Garfield, and others--who all advised him to dispose
of the paper. Choate told him that Henderson had come to his office
for legal advice as to the possibility of somehow destroying Godwin’s
control. With great reluctance, the Bryant heirs concluded to sell. The
paper was then earning $50,000 a year, and Horace White finally agreed
to the payment of $450,000 for the family’s half, which carried control
of the board of trustees. For a time Henderson was disinclined to sell
the other half, but with the aid of Godwin, to whom Henderson was still
in debt, he was soon brought to yield.
How did Henry Villard come to purchase the _Evening Post_? He was
at this time midway in his amazing career as a railway builder.
Eight years before, when known only as a young German-American who
had proved himself one of the ablest and most daring of the Civil
War correspondents, he had become the American representative of a
Protective Committee of German bondholders at Frankfort. This body,
and a similar one which he soon joined, had large holdings in Western
railways, which Villard had been asked to supervise. Thus launched
into finance, by his ability, energy, and determination he had soon
made a large fortune. His first extensive undertakings were in the
Pacific Northwest, where another son of the Palatinate, John Jacob
Astor, had carved out a career before him; and his success with the
Oregon & California Railroad, and Oregon Railway & Navigation Company
emboldened him in 1881–83 to undertake and carry through the completion
of the Northern Pacific. His interest in his original profession, and
a wish to devote his money to some large public end, led him while
busiest with this great undertaking to conceive the plan of buying a
metropolitan paper and giving it the ablest editors procurable.
[Illustration:
PARKE GODWIN,
Editor-in-Chief 1878–1881.
HENRY VILLARD,
Owner 1881–1900.
HORACE WHITE,
Associate Editor 1881–1899,
Editor-in-Chief 1900–1903.
CARL SCHURZ,
Editor-in-Chief 1881–1883.
]