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 distribution 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 the 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 absorption 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 an 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 was 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
the 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 saying 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
preëminently 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 rôle 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 happened 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
in 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
hundred 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 _Nation_ 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 tell 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.