enterprises, and was ready to re-enter journalism, undoubtedly
shared in this conception. When Godwin’s half of the _Post_ had been
purchased, and Schurz had consented to become editor-in-chief, E. L.
Godkin was approached with the offer of an editorship and a share of
the stock. He wisely refused to consider the proposal till Henderson’s
withdrawal was assured, and then accepted it, writing Charles Eliot
Norton that he did so because he was weary of the unintermittent work
involved in the conduct of the _Nation_, because he knew that, being
forty-nine, his vivacity and energy must decline, and the value of
the _Nation_ suffer proportionately, and because he wished to make
more money during the few working years left to him. The _Nation_, in
fact, was a struggling publication. It was bought by the proprietors
of the _Evening Post_, its price was reduced to $3 a year, and
Wendell Phillips Garrison, its literary editor, who was Villard’s
brother-in-law, went with it to the _Evening Post_ to take charge of
its weekly issuance.
The new owner and three new editors had long regarded the _Evening
Post_ with high respect. Villard in 1857 had applied at its office
for work, being out of employment and almost penniless; and upon his
offering to go to India to report the Sepoy Mutiny, Bigelow had offered
him $20 for every letter he wrote from that country. His political
ideas had been identical with the _Post’s_--for example, he had been a
Liberal Republican in 1872, but had refused to follow Greeley. Godkin
had contributed to the _Evening Post_ in the fifties upon such topics
as the death of the old East India Company, and we have seen that he
furnished correspondence from Paris in 1862. Like his friend Norton, he
had long acknowledged the paper’s peculiar elevation. Horace White had
contributed in the late seventies upon the silver question. Schurz had
known it as a loyal ally in his efforts for a civil service law, sound
money, and reform within the Republican party, while it is interesting
to note that under Bryant it had said that he was the strongest man in
the Senate.
Each of the three editors had his own title to distinction, and each
had won his special public following. Carl Schurz had been constantly
in the public eye since he lent valuable assistance to Lincoln in the
campaign of 1860. The German-Americans, indeed, had known of him much
earlier, for as a youth in Germany, aflame with revolutionary zeal, his
military services in the uprising of 1848, and his subsequent romantic
rescue of Gottfried Kinkel from the fortress at Spandau, had made him
famous. In 1858, writing Kinkel from Milwaukee, he wondered a little
over his steady rise in reputation, modestly explaining it as due to
American curiosity in “a German who, as they declare, speaks English
better than they do, and also has the advantage over their native
politicians of possessing a passable knowledge of European conditions.”
It was, of course, really due to appreciation of his eloquence,
versatility, mental power, and enthusiasm for liberal principles. He
has admitted that he was inexpressibly gratified by the salvos of
applause with which he was greeted in the Chicago Convention of 1860.
For his platform advocacy of Lincoln he was rewarded with the post of
Minister to Spain, which he early resigned to buckle on his sword.
Then came his sterling service first as a brigadier-general and later
as major-general, when he fought at Chancellorsville, Chattanooga,
and Gettysburg. His investigative trip through the South in 1865 for
President Johnson, and refusal to suppress his report because it did
not support Johnson’s views, drew national attention to his aggressive
independence. Six years in the Senate, where he was unrivaled for his
discussions of finance, and four years as Secretary of the Interior,
had added to his fame as a man of broad views, high motives, and
unshakable courage. By 1881 he was recognized as, next to Hamilton and
Gallatin, our greatest foreign-born statesman.
Godkin also had a national following--a following of intellectual
liberals, especially strong in university and professional circles,
marshaled by the _Nation_ since he founded it in 1865. He had, as
Lowell said, made himself “a Power.” In the ability with which the
weekly discussed politics and social questions, the trenchancy
of its style, and the soundness of its literary criticism, it was
unapproached by anything else in American--James Bryce thought also in
British--journalism. The masses who knew Schurz well had hardly heard
of it; but no man of cultivation who tried to keep abreast of the
times neglected it, and because it was digested by newspaper editors
all over the Union, Godkin’s influence was deep and wide. James Ford
Rhodes gives an illustration of this influence just after the _Nation_
became practically the weekly _Evening Post_. “Passing a part of the
winter of 1886 in a hotel at Thomasville, Ga., it chanced that among
the hundred or more guests there were eight or ten of us who regularly
received the _Nation_ by post. Ordinarily it arrived in the Friday noon
train from Savannah, and when we came from our midday dinner into the
hotel office, there, in our respective boxes, easily seen, and from
their peculiar form recognized by every one, were our copies of the
_Nation_. Occasionally the papers missed connections at Savannah, and
our _Nations_ did not arrive till after supper. It used to be said by
certain scoffers that if a discussion of political questions came up
in the afternoon of one of those days of disappointment, we readers
were mum; but in the late evening, after having digested our political
pabulum, we were ready to join issue with any antagonist.”
As for Horace White, he was best known in the Middle West, where he
had entered journalism in 1854 as a reporter for the Chicago _Daily
Journal_. Four years later, after much activity in behalf of the
free soil movement in Kansas, during which he even removed to the
Territory himself and went through the preliminary form of taking up a
claim, he reported the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the Chicago _Press
and Tribune_. His reminiscences of those weeks of intimate contact
with Lincoln fill many pages of Herndon’s life of the President, and
constitute one of its most interesting chapters. During the war he was
Washington correspondent of the Chicago _Tribune_, secretary for a
time to Stanton, and organizer with A. S. Hill and Henry Villard of
a news agency in competition with the Associated Press. After it, for
nearly a decade, he was editor and one of the principal proprietors of
the _Tribune_, which under him was far more liberal than it has ever
been since. But he was valuable to the _Evening Post_ chiefly because
he had devoted himself for years to study of the theory of banking and
finance, on which his articles and pamphlets had already made him a
recognized authority.
It was thus an editorship of “all the talents” that was installed in
the _Evening Post_ just before Garfield was shot. Schurz was specially
equipped to discuss politics, the range of problems he had met while
Secretary of the Interior, and German affairs; White was perhaps the
best writer available on the tariff, railways, silver question, and
banking; while Godkin held an unrivaled pen for general social and
political topics. By birth they were German, American, and British,
but Schurz and Godkin were really cosmopolites, citizens of the world.
Their practical experience had covered a surprising range. We are
likely to forget, for example, that Schurz had once made a living
by teaching German in London, and had farmed in Wisconsin, while
Godkin had been a war correspondent in the Crimea, and admitted to
the New York bar. In their fundamental idealism the three men were
wholly alike. Schurz’s political record and Godkin’s _Nation_ were
monuments to it. They were one in wishing to make the _Post_ the
champion of sound money, a low tariff, civil service reform, clean and
independent politics, and international peace. Henry Villard with rare
generosity assumed financial responsibility for the paper, but made
the editors wholly independent by placing it in the hands of three
trustees--Ex-Gov. Bristow, Ex-Commissioner David A. Wells, and Horace
White.
II
The selection of Schurz to be editor-in-chief was more than a tribute
to his station as a public man. Of the three, he had the most varied
journalistic experience. As a young man in Germany he had helped
Kinkel edit the _Bonner Zeitung_. After the Civil War he became head
of the Washington Bureau of the New York _Tribune_, and took an
instant liking both to journalism and the men engaged in it--in his
reminiscences he draws a sharp contrast between their high principles
and the low sense of honor among Washington officeholders. He soon
accepted the editorship of the Detroit _Post_, a new journal, urged
upon him by Senator Zechariah Chandler, and in 1867 became editor
and part owner of the St. Louis _Westliche Post_, a place desirable
because it brought him into association with Dr. Emil Preetorius
and other German-Americans of congenial views. When the date of his
leaving the Secretaryship of the Interior approached in 1881, he had
received several offers of editorial positions. Rudolph Blankenburg,
later Mayor of Philadelphia, wrote that there was crying need of a good
daily in that city, and that he and other business men would found one
if Schurz would take charge. The statement was published in St. Louis
that a new daily was about to be established there under Schurz. But
Schurz himself would have been the last to lay emphasis upon his mere
practical experience--he had no taste for financial or news management,
and it appears that neither the Detroit _Post_ nor _Westliche Post_
was financially prosperous under him. His qualifications for the chief
editorship were of a different and much rarer kind.
His ability as a writer shows a mingling of high merits with a few
distinct shortcomings. Since his “Reminiscences” will live as long
as any work of its kind and time, no less for its style than its
fascinating story, since his essay on Lincoln is an admitted classic,
it is unnecessary to say that he was a master of the pen. He has
interestingly related how he taught himself to write English on first
coming to America. At the start he made it a practice to read his
daily newspaper from beginning to end; then he proceeded to English
novels--“The Vicar of Wakefield,” Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray; and he
followed them with Macaulay’s essays and Blackstone’s commentaries,
particularly admiring the terse, clear style of the latter. Finally he
read Shakespeare’s plays, going through their enormous vocabulary with
the utmost conscientiousness. At the same time he practiced turning
the Letters of Junius, which he thought brilliant, into German, and
back again into English. The result was that soon he not merely wrote,
but thought equally well in English or German, and much preferred
English for certain purposes, as public speaking and political
discussion. Schurz’s speeches were among the most eloquent delivered
in his generation. One of the oldest Senators said that his address of
February, 1872, was the best he had ever heard in the upper chamber;
his Brooklyn speech of 1884 against Blaine ranks with the greatest of
American campaign orations; and his utterances upon tariff and civil
service reform were read by millions.
Yet Schurz fell just short of being a great editorial writer. He used
a battle-axe, at once sharp and crushing, but he could not vary it
with the play of the rapier, as E. L. Godkin could. His directness,
clarity, and force were marked, but his writings were lacking in humor,
metaphor, and allusion. Devoting himself to large political questions,
he had no time to observe interesting minor social phenomena, so
that his work lacked relief. No one could excel him in argument or
exposition upon subjects with which he was familiar, but he could not
relieve his discussions from a reproach of dryness.
Of the mind and character behind the pen, almost nothing can be said
except in praise. All his life he had been a zealot for liberalism.
He had thrown himself into the revolutionary movement of ’48 with
an ardor not a whit boyish, on coming to America he had instantly
enlisted against slavery, and he was still an enthusiast for reform.
Grover Cleveland once spoke of his career as teaching “the lesson
of moral courage, of intelligent and conscientious patriotism, of
independent political thought, of unselfish political affiliation, and
of constant political vigilance.” He was for sound money from greenback
days to the settlement of the free silver issue; he was a combatant
against “imperialism” from Grant’s attempted annexation of Domingo
to Roosevelt’s seizure of Panama. When Secretary of the Interior
he enforced the merit system, yet unembodied in any law, in his
department, requiring competitive examinations for clerkships. His one
fault was that in his intentness on his own subject he sometimes lost
perspective, and became indifferent to equally important aims of others.
It has been said that as Lord Halifax made the term “trimmer” honorable
in England, Schurz made that of party turncoat honorable in America.
His obedience to principle was so unswerving that he was heedless
of allegiance to groups or individuals. He was for Seward in 1860,
but fell in instantly behind Lincoln; supported President Johnson’s
reconstruction policy till his trip South in 1865, and then followed
Sumner; was for Grant in 1869, and one of the earliest leaders against
him in 1870–71; warmly commended some of Roosevelt’s acts and condemned
more; was one of Bryan’s sternest opponents in 1896, and made a
speaking tour for him in 1900. The independence exhibited in this
adherence to conviction was in the highest degree creditable. His sense
of personal rectitude was so keen and sensitive that he could not bear
to do anything for mere “expediency.” It can only be said that he was
sometimes a little too positive that he was right, a little intolerant
of others. His indignation when Roosevelt and Lodge in 1884 followed
Blaine, whom they suspected of being dishonest, would have been less
intense had he seen that there is really something to be said for party
regularity under such circumstances.
Yet he was no impracticable idealist, but a man with a shrewd grasp of
affairs. Mark Twain declared that he made it a rule, when in doubt in
politics, to follow Schurz, saying to himself, “He’s as safe as Ben
Thornburgh”--a famous Mississippi pilot. When his collected papers were
published, they showed that throughout his long life he had possessed
remarkable prescience. He wrote Kinkel in 1856 that Buchanan’s
Administration would end the old Democratic party, that the contest
with slavery would not be settled without powder, and that the North
would win. In 1858 he predicted that there would be a war, and that he
would fight in it. In 1864 he ventured to assert, before the election,
that “In fifty years, perhaps much sooner, Lincoln’s name will be
inscribed close to Washington’s on this American republic’s roll of
honor. And there it will remain for all time.” No one saw farther
into the reconstruction question than he. Much of what we now call
conservation, especially of forests, dates from Schurz’s far-sighted
pioneer work as Secretary of the Interior.
Humor is almost indispensable to an editor, and Schurz had little of
it, but in compensation he was sustained by a better trait. Every one
perceived the gallant quality of the man, but his intimates alone
understood what a deep poetic vein fed it. Howells says that at first
he was a little awed by the revolutionist, general, statesman, and
editor. “But underneath them all, and in his heart of hearts, I was
always divining him poet. He had lived one of the greatest and most
beautiful romances, and you could not be in his presence without
knowing it, unless you were particularly blind and deaf. It kindled in
his eyes; it trembled in his clear, keen, yet gentle voice; it shone
in his smile; it sounded in his laugh, which his youth never died out
of.” No more unselfish man ever moved actively in American affairs. A
sentence from a letter to Kinkel strikes the keynote to his life: “To
have aims that lie outside ourselves and our immediate circle is a
great thing, and well worth the sacrifice.”
Schurz, Godkin, and White made only two important changes in the form
of the _Post_, both dictated by its union with the _Nation_. It was
still, like the _Sun_ of that time, like several great Paris dailies
to-day, a four-page sheet; except that on Saturday Parke Godwin had
instituted a two-page supplement, containing book notices, essays,
fictional sketches, and other miscellaneous matter. This was now
utilized for the book reviews written by the _Nation’s_ unrivaled staff
of contributors--Lowell, Bryce, Parkman, W. C. Brownell, Henry Adams,
John Fiske, Charles Eliot Norton, and a long list of experts in every
field. The space thus afforded was inadequate, and it became necessary
to print many reviews during the week opposite the editorials, so that
the _Post_ acquired a much more literary flavor. Under Bryant and
Godwin editorials had been variable in length, and nearly all headed.
Now they were standardized into two forms; long headed articles, of
800 to 1,200 words each, of which two or three were printed daily, and
seven to ten paragraphs of 100–250 words each, without captions. The
brevier type was sometimes lifted direct into the forms of the _Nation_.
In the office Schurz was called “the General.” His subordinates found
him genial, kindly, and appreciative, though his manner had a touch
of military strictness. He left the news, financial, literary, and
dramatic departments almost wholly to their various heads, but bent a
watchful eye upon the musical criticism--he was an expert musician.
Against only one change in the paper’s discipline were there any
protests. W. P. Garrison, the son of the great Abolitionist, hastened
to abolish the “filthy habit” of smoking in the offices, a rule that
caused incalculable anguish among some of the veteran newspaper men; it
is said that George Cary Eggleston’s early resignation was partly due
to it. Schurz probably consented on the ground of the fire-hazard.
A few stories have come down showing “the General” as he worked, his
tall form bent short-sightedly over his pad in a little space that he
would grub out from the accumulated chaos of papers and letters on his
desk. The famous Sullivan-Ryan prize-fight occurred in February, 1882,
and when the first dispatches arrived, Linn, the news-editor, hurried
to consult Schurz, telling him that under Bryant the _Post_ had always
thrown such news into the waste-basket. This was the fact: when the
McCool-Jones fight occurred in 1867, the paper had suppressed a column
from the Associated Press, and mentioned the “revolting” affair only in
a short, tart editorial. But Schurz eagerly read the dispatches. “Mr.
Linn,” he ordered, “publish a brief result of each round, and head
it, ‘Brutal Prize-Fight’; and,” he added with a twinkle, “let me see a
copy on each round as soon as it comes in.” Linn commented on returning
to his desk, “The General is an old fighter himself.” This, however,
was an unusual display of humor on Schurz’s part. There existed from
the Civil War until 1918 a daily feature on the editorial page called
“Newspaper Waifs,” consisting of several sticksful of jokes clipped
from various sources. It was always popular; in 1894, after Godkin’s
denunciation of his Venezuela message, Cleveland was asked whether he
still read the _Evening Post_, and replied, “Yes--I read the waifs.”
Schurz insisted on seeing the copy for the feature; and, to keep it
alive, the managing editor found it necessary to include daily a half
dozen poor and obvious jokes with the good ones. With unerring eye,
glancing down the column, Schurz would o.k. the poor quips and cancel
most of the others.
The majority of Schurz’s editorials naturally dealt with party politics
and the affairs of the Federal Government. The assassination of
Garfield (July 2, 1881) and the succession of Arthur to the Presidency,
awakened much apprehension among editors of liberal views, which the
_Evening Post_ shared. For some time it found President Arthur’s
conduct reassuring, but it soon had occasion to condemn a number of his
appointments--notably his nomination of Roscoe Conkling to the Supreme
Bench, which Conkling declined, and his selection of Wm. E. Chandler
to be Secretary of the Navy--as evidence that he was introducing the
methods of the New York machine into national politics. Garfield’s
death made the question of the Presidency in 1884 important, and
during 1883 the _Post_ uttered frequent monitions that the nomination
of Blaine would disrupt the Republican party and lead to defeat. A
characteristic utterance by Schurz in July, 1883, contained some shrewd
observations on party character as it appeared just a year before
the campaign. The essential difference between the Democrats and
Republicans, he wrote, was that the former had sterling leaders but a
wrongheaded rank and file, while the latter had many pernicious leaders
but a sound general body. Men like Cleveland, Bayard, Vilas, and Hewitt
believed in civil service reform and hard money, while men like Blaine,
Conkling, Arthur, and Wm. Walter Phelps believed in spoils and a high
tariff; but the great mass of Democrats would try to drag the leaders
down to their own level, while the mass of Republicans--so Schurz
hoped--would turn their backs on Blaine and Arthur.
Early in 1883, when the question of Federal aid to the common schools
was raised, an issue still important, Schurz wrote disapproving it, as
an interference with the functions and self-reliance of the States. He
had the gratification of hailing the Pendleton Civil Service Act, the
first great step toward fulfillment of a reform on which he somehow
found time to lecture as well as write. He defended the Chinese against
unfair legislation in California, and argued constantly for a fairer
policy toward the Indians. Perhaps his most important editorials were
several in the latter half of 1882 arguing for an executive budget,
beyond doubt the first elaborate demand for this reform made by any
American editor. He wrote (August, 1882):
It is obvious how much in the way of bringing order out of chaos
would be accomplished by introducing the practice of having a
complete budget of necessary expenditures, and of the taxation
required to cover them, prepared by the executive branch of the
government, and submitted to Congress at the beginning of each
session. What we have now is merely the estimates of the different
departments of the amounts of money they want. What is needed
is, aside from the grouping together of these amounts, showing
the total sum required by the government for the year, a clear
statement of the different kinds of existing taxes, with their
yield, and the opinion of the Executive as to what taxes will best
subserve the purpose, what taxes may be cut down or abolished, and
so on. A clear summing up in a statement of this kind would be sure
to attract the attention and to reach the understanding of every
intelligent taxpayer....