scorching. He had a remarkable faculty for humorous imagery. It was the
most natural thing in the world for him to compare the Tammany panic
over the _Evening Post_ biographies with the introduction of a ferret
into a rat cellar. Sometimes the image was elaborate. Thus, to show
the folly of saddling the President with the appointment of thousands
of postmasters, he wrote of “The President as Sheik,” comparing him
with the Arab chief who sat under the big tree outside the city gate,
ordering the bazaar thief to jail, hearing what the widow said of
the knavish baker, and giving the good public official a robe of
honor. When Cleveland’s friends explained his Venezuela message by
the theory that he was forestalling a warlike message by Congress,
Godkin remarked: “Foreseeing that Congress would shortly get drunk, he
determined by way of cure to anticipate their bout by one of his own,
feeling that his own recovery would be speedier and less costly than
theirs. But the result was that they joined in his carouse, and they
both went to work to smash the national furniture and crockery.”
Of his unequalled gift for compressing a homily into a humorous or
ironical paragraph two examples will suffice, both written with typical
gusto:
The scenes attending the burial of the late Jesse James on
Thursday, at Kearney, Mo., were very affecting. Crowds of people
flocked together from all parts of the State to get a last sight of
the dead bandit, who had done so much to enable them to lead what
they call in Boston “full” lives. Mrs. Samuels, Jesse’s mother,
was on the ground early, and talked without reserve to everyone.
Her conversation naturally, under the circumstances, was colored
with deep religious feeling, and she said to a reporter, who in his
shy way ventured to express his sympathy with her bereavement, “I
knew it had to come; but my dear boy Jesse is better off in heaven
today than he would be here with us”--a sentiment from which no one
will be likely to dissent. The officiating clergyman with much tact
avoided dwelling on the life and character of the deceased, and
improved the occasion by enlarging upon Jesse’s chance of future
improvement in Paradise, in a manner that would probably have
struck Mr. James himself as rather mawkish. The widespread belief
in the West that he has gone straight to heaven is a touching
indication of the general softening of religious doctrines. (April,
1882.)
* * * * *
The anarchists had a picnic on Sunday at Weehawken Heights.... An
entrance fee of 25 cents was required to gain admission to the
picnic. A practical anarchist came along and attempted to enter
without paying the fee. Some accounts say that he was a policeman
in citizens’ clothes, but this is immaterial from the anarchists’
point of view, however important it may be in a Jersey court of
justice. True anarchy required that the man should enter without
paying, especially if there was any regulation requiring pay.
Taking toll at the gate is only one of the forms of law and order
which anarchy rails at and seeks to abolish.... The gatekeeper
called for help and some of his minions came forward with pickets
hastily torn from the fence, and began beating the practical man
over the head. Then the crowd outside began to throw stones at
the crowd inside, and the latter retorted in kind. A few pistols
were fired, and one boy was shot through the hand. The meeting was
a great success in the way of promoting practical anarchy, the
rioting being protracted to a late hour in the afternoon. Anarchy,
like charity, should always begin at home. (June, 1887.)
As these paragraphs suggest, Godkin was a master of that two-edged
editorial weapon, irony, which in clumsy hands may mortally wound the
user. But his most superb writing was that in which he delivered
a straightforward attack upon some evil institution or person. His
Irish sense for epithet enabled him to pierce the hide of the toughest
pachyderms in Tammany; his caustic characterization could make an
ordinary opponent wither up like a leaf touched with vitriol. One of
his younger associates once found a man of prominence sick in bed from
the pain and mortification an attack by Godkin had given him.
When Don Piatt asked the elder Bowles to define the essential qualities
of an editor, the latter replied, “Brains and ugliness,” meaning by
the last word love of combat. Godkin had a truly Celtic zest for
battle. Mr. Bishop declares that nothing interested him more than what
he called “journalistic rows.” Great was his delight, for example,
when the _Times_ and _Sun_ clashed over an exploring expedition the
former sent to Alaska, the _Sun_ remarking that it was appropriate to
name a certain river after Editor Jones of the _Times_ because it was
preternaturally shallow and muddy, and discolored the sea for miles
from its mouth, and the _Times_ attacking Dana for “the calculated
malice of splenetic age.” Godkin had an irresistible desire to mingle
in such shindies. Once in, he would read all the harsh criticism
offered of him, and fairly radiating his pleasure, would say: “What
a delightful lot they are! We must stir them up again!” His gusto in
attacking Tammany was evident to every reader. In each Presidential
election he carried the war into the enemy’s country with a rush, and
printed three editorials attacking the other candidate to every one
advocating his own. On one of his return trips from Europe he and the
other passengers of the _Normanna_ were held in quarantine because
of a cholera scare and finally carried down to Fire Island for a
prolonged stay under conditions of great discomfort. His letters to the
_Evening Post_ were delightfully scorching, he kept up the attack till
the quarantine officers were panic-stricken, and he demolished their
last defense in an article in the _North American Review_ that is a
masterpiece of destructiveness.
Godkin was at pains to state his belief that attacks upon any evil
should be as concrete and personal as possible. As he said, there was
no point in writing flowery descriptions of the Upright Judge, or
indignant denunciations of Judicial Corruption. The proper course was
to show by book and chapter the misdeeds or incompetence of Tammany
judges like Maynard, Barnard, and Cardozo, and chase them from the
bench. For one person interested in an assault on poor quarantine
regulations, ten would be interested in an assault on Dr. Jenkins,
the quarantine head. Godkin had his own Ananias Club. His attacks on
the Knights of Labor always included some hearty thrusts at their
chief, Powderly. His hatred of the pensions grabbing led him to make
a close investigation of the record of the most notorious grabber of
all, Corporal Tanner, the man who said, “God help the Surplus!” when
he became Pensions Commissioner. The editor took prodigious pleasure
in exposing Tanner as a noisy fellow who had lost his leg from a stray
shot while, a straggler from his regiment, he was lying under an apple
tree reading in what he thought a safe place.
Godkin was well aware that both his humor and his belligerency
sometimes carried him beyond the mark. More than once be assigned
a topic to a subordinate, saying, “I’d do it, but I don’t trust my
discretion.” In the heat of the Blaine campaign he wrote a paragraph
stating a charge that was quite unfounded, and went home; luckily
his associates saw it early, recognized that it would damage their
cause, and substituted another before the forms closed. Next day
Godkin was effusive in his gratitude. It is recalled that once the
editorial staff objected stubbornly to part of one of his editorials,
and after protracted argument, he consented to delete it. When the
next edition appeared with the offending passage still there, he was
excited and furious, and called the foreman of the composing room
down to explain why his orders for killing it had not been obeyed.
The foreman protested that he had received no such orders. Knowing
associates at once went to Mr. Godkin’s desk, and found that he had
written them out and absently tossed them into the waste basket.
But Godkin’s occasional excesses of temper were the defect of a rare
virtue. A capacity for righteous anger like his is all too uncommon
in journalism, the pulpit, or public life generally. Roosevelt never
forgave Godkin for the unvarying contempt and bitterness, the unwearied
bluntness of accusation, with which he wrote of Quay; but who that
knows what Quay was would say that the editor showed a jot too much
harshness?
Godkin was reared in the faith of Manchester Liberalism, and his main
principles were of that school to the end. At his college (Queens’,
Belfast), he tells us, “John Stuart Mill was our prophet, and Grote and
Bentham were our daily food. In fact, the late Neilson Hancock, who
was our professor of political economy and jurisprudence, made Bentham
his textbook.... I and my friends were filled with the teachings of
the _laissez-faire_ school and had no doubt that its recent triumph in
the abolition of the Corn Laws was sure to lead to wider ones in other
countries.”
When he came to America, he brought with him all the rooted opposition
of the Manchester school to protection and state subsidy. He shared not
only Mill’s and Cobden’s belief in free trade, but their detestation
of war, reënforced by his own Crimean experiences. Like Mill, he was a
warm advocate of colonial autonomy and the general spread of political
freedom. In his last years, he declared that he had always believed
“that the Irish people should learn self-government in the way in
which the English have learned it, and the Americans have learned
it; in which, only, any race can learn it--by practicing it.” He was
long a believer in minority or proportional representation, naming it
in 1870 as one of the three great objects of the _Nation_. Another
of these objects, civil service reform, he took up just after the
Civil War, struck by the contrast between our corrupt and incompetent
administrative system and the efficient, experienced British civil
service. The introduction of the Australian ballot, the enactment
of better election laws, the reform of municipal government, were
prominently pushed forward by Godkin. He thoroughly agreed with
the Manchester jealousy of government interference in economic and
industrial affairs, holding that unless required by some great and
general good, it was a certain evil.
These were Godkin’s principles, and by principles he always steered
his course. Greeley often did not know his own mind, Bennett and Dana
had little regard for principle, but Godkin always held fixed objects
before him. A contemporary historian, Harry Thurston Peck, in “Twenty
Years of the Republic,” writes: “It is not too much to say that
nearly all the most important questions of American political history
from 1881 to 1896 got their first public hearing largely through the
influence of Mr. Godkin.” That is an exaggeration, but an exaggeration
made possible by his tenacious championship of a dozen causes at a time
when general opinion was interested but skeptical. To be sure, the
ingrained nature of some of his principal doctrines was a limitation.
It prevented him from being a powerfully original thinker in the field
of government and politics. He taught our intellectual public lessons
which he had learned from the more advanced practice and thought of
Great Britain, and far beyond that he did not go. But this limitation
can easily be exaggerated. He was an omnivorous reader, his curiosity
in new ideas and movements was intense, and he had a really open mind.
In most ways he kept quite abreast of the times, and in some well
ahead of it. He looked much farther than the ordinary liberal into
the relationship between powerful nations and the weaker or inferior
peoples, for he perceived the affinities between economic conquest and
political conquest. His editorials upon intervention in Egypt in 1882
show that he had no patience with the view that one government might
bully another to protect the investments of its nationals. He did
believe that British intervention was justified upon other grounds,
and always maintained that Cromer’s rule there, like English rule
in India, was a boon to the native and the world. But in Africa,
Asia, and in Cuba, he was always angered by any evidence that selfish
interests--traders, coal concessionaires, investors--were using a
strong government as a catspaw to menace or subvert a weak one.
His writings upon capitalism show a steady development of ideas.
He objected to demagoguish attacks upon Capital, a word which he
disliked, saying that if people called it Savings they would have fewer
misconceptions. But he was no more inclined to defend abuses by capital
than abuses by labor. He argued for the creation of the Interstate
Commerce Commission in his first year with the _Post_. He was more
and more alarmed by the trusts, both as instruments of economic
oppression, and as dangerous influences upon the government. He wanted
evil combinations sharply attacked and broken up--not “regulated”--to
prevent monopoly, and in later years much of his zeal in attacking the
high tariff sprang from his conviction that it and the trusts were
mutual supports. No one inveighed more constantly than he against
ill-gotten wealth, or against the abuse of money power. His editorial
on the death of Peter Cooper, who used to boast that he never made a
dollar he could not take up to the Great White Throne, was one of a
long series of arguments for a public sentiment that would distinguish
between honest success and dishonest “success,” between Peter Cooper
and Jay Gould. The chief peril to the republic, he wrote in 1886, was
worship of wealth:
It is here that our greatest danger lies. The popular hero to-day,
whom our young men in cities most admire and would soonest imitate,
is neither the saint, the sage, the scholar, the soldier, nor the
statesman, but the successful stock-gambler. Stocks and bonds are
the commonest of our dinner-table topics. The man we show with most
pride to foreigners is the man who has made most millions. Our
wisest men are those who can draw the biggest checks; and--what is
worst of all--there is a growing tendency to believe that everybody
is entitled to whatever he can buy, from the Presidency down to a
street-railroad franchise.
Godkin was a keen-eyed social observer, discussing thoughtfully a
multitude of topics affecting the daily life and culture of the people.
He did not believe in prohibition, arguing throughout his editorship
against the Maine law. But he did recognize in the saloon an enormous
evil, politically and socially, he wanted it lessened by high licenses,
and utterances could be quoted which suggest that he might ultimately
have accepted even prohibition as better than the saloon’s continuance.
He disbelieved in woman suffrage for two principal reasons, because
he feared it would further debase the government of our large cities,
and because the great majority of women in his day were indifferent
to it. On social abuses of all kinds he used the lash unsparingly.
His campaign against public spitting, upon grounds of sanitation as
well as cleanliness, was potent in abolishing the spittoon. For years
he kept up a vigorous effort to shame the South out of its tolerant
attitude toward homicide. He had been shocked by this attitude when
he traveled in the South in 1856–57, and the war and Reconstruction
had made it worse. His method was characteristic. Every time one
Southerner shot another because of a quarrel over a dog, or a rail
fence, or a hasty word--which was every few days--he wrote an editorial
paragraph recounting the circumstances, with ironic comment. He dwelt
upon the bloody details, the “gloom” that pervaded the community, and
the certainty that nothing would be done to bring the murderer to
trial. For several years early in the eighties this campaign gave the
editorial page of the _Post_ a decided mortuary flavor. Part of the
Southern press was enraged, declaring that the _Post_ was maliciously
attempting to prevent emigration southward; but it got below the skin
of the section with salutary effect.
Certain of Godkin’s utterances upon labor problems show the unfortunate
effect of part of his early training. They had not only the fallacies
of the _laissez faire_ position, but were harshly put. He had a way
of speaking of workmen, when they displeased him, as “ignorant,”
“idle,” “reckless,” indicting them _en masse_. In 1887, writing
contemptuously of a strike “of coalheavers, longshoremen, and the
like,” he spoke of the men who respond to labor agitators as “a large,
passionate, ignorant, and through their ignorance, very discontented
and uncomfortable constituency.” For years in the eighties, when labor
was struggling toward effective organization, he declared that its
agitators were producing a cowardice among politicians, ministers, and
philanthropists like that the slavery leaders produced before the Civil
War. He was one of those who thought the early career of Prof. Richard
T. Ely dangerously incendiary. He repeatedly denied that strikers had
the right to post pickets around an employer’s premises. He denied them
the right to accuse an employer of paying an unjust wage, or taking
an undue share of profits, saying that a strike should be regarded
as “a simple failure of business men to agree to a bargain” (May,
1886). Labor was guilty of many crimes and abuses, from dynamiting to
boycotts, in those days. But it would be hard to find a more unfair
statement of the labor movement, 1876–1896, than Godkin wrote in the
latter year (Sept. 2):
Labor as a “question” was twenty years ago new in America.... It
gradually grew in political and social importance. Politicians
began to preach that employers were great rascals if they did not
allow laborers to stay in their service on their own terms. They
were backed up by a swarm of “ethical” economists and clergymen
all over the country, who found something hideously wrong in
the existing state of society, and proclaimed the obligation,
not simply of the employer, but of the state and society, to do
all sorts of nice things for the laborer; to carry him about
for nothing, to pay him for his labor what he should judge to
be sufficient, to provide all sorts of comforts and luxuries
for him at the public expense, on what was called “broad public
grounds.” This insanity raged for several years. It was preached
from thousands of pulpits. “Papers” were read on it at all sorts
of clubs, societies, and reunions, showing the wrongs done to the
manual laborer by everybody else. Under its influence Powderly and
his Knights of Labor grew into a great power....
This particular “craze” lasted till the Chicago riots of 1893, and
the appearance on the scene of Altgeld as the Governor of a great
State. People then saw the fruits of their teaching. Large bodies
of ignorant and thoughtless men had believed it and acted on it.
In order to settle a small dispute between a sleeping car company
and its men, they determined to suspend locomotion throughout the
business regions of a great nation. They believed they were in the
right. If the account given of labor by the clergymen and ethical
economists were true, they had the right to do what they were
doing. For some days the government of the United States seemed to
be suspended. But when one courageous man stepped to the front, and
said this nonsense should cease, it suddenly stopped. The sermons
and “papers” and ethical economy stopped too.
Godkin rejoiced when the Knights of Labor disintegrated, and said
nothing in praise of the work it did in clearing the ground for the
A. F. of L., or in hastening the eight-hour day, the abolition of
contract labor, and the establishment of labor bureaus. A similar
want of sympathy was evident in much he wrote of the farmers. In
fact, he imbibed with his British training a strong consciousness of
class, which made him speak of manual workers and small tradesmen as
inferiors. An editorial deprecating a liberal education for children of
the poor, easily accessible in files of the _Nation_ (Dec. 23, 1886) is
a curious example of his inability to understand the American denial of
any permanent class lines. As a good liberal, he believed that labor
must be strongly organized, but if he had any real feeling for it, it
seldom appeared. He was a philosophic democrat, but not a practical
democrat. His editorials, joined with certain well-known personal
traits--his great care in dress, his fastidiousness in food, his
intellectual aloofness--led many to think him a snob; a term that was
misleading, for no one was less a respecter of persons. They inspired
the well-known verses of McCready Sykes, beginning:
Godkin the righteous, known of old,
Priest of the nation’s moral health,
Within whose _Post_ we daily read
The Gospel of the Rights of Wealth.
In denying that Godkin was a pessimist, we must not deny that he was
sometimes atrabilious. Scattered through his letters are remarks that
indicate moods of deep discouragement. “I am tired of having to be
continually hopeful,” he wrote after the election of 1897, and again
in 1899: “Our present political condition is repulsive to me.” It
was his business to be censorious--to make the _Nation_, as Charles
Dudley Warner said, “the weekly judgment day.” But as Howells writes,
practically he was one of the most hopeful of men, for he was always
striving to make a bad world better. He deeply resented the charge
that the _Evening Post_ was merely a destructive critic, and used
to challenge any one to cite an instance in which it had exposed an
evil without suggesting a remedy. The commotion following the death
of Garfield brought from him a notable expression of faith in our
national stability. He recalled that the same calamity had occurred
before, when the country was in the midst of the greatest convulsion
of the century, with a million troops under arms, a colossal debt,
and terrible problems awaiting solution; that a stubborn, uneducated
man had become President, and for three years had quarreled violently
with Congress; and yet that all had ended prosperously. Mr. Bishop
was surprised on election day, in 1884, to see the calm serenity with
which Godkin awaited the result of the Blaine-Cleveland contest, but
Godkin remarked, with intense conviction: “I have been sitting here for
twenty years and more, placing faith in the American people, and they
have never gone back on me yet, and I do not believe they will now.” He
himself used to laugh at the talk of his pessimism, remarking that when
he lived in Cambridge, people said that he and Norton were accustomed
to sit at night and talk until at about 2 a. m. the gloom would get so
thick that all the dogs in town would start howling.
In the reminiscences that death prevented him from expanding, he
made a brief survey of contemporary American civilization in a tone
anything but discouraged. He believed that in government the United
States had lost ground. The people cared less about politics, were
less instructed regarding administration, and had allowed themselves to
become the tools of the bosses; while the old race of great statesmen
had died out. He also thought that the press had ceased to have much
influence on opinion, and that the pulpit had become singularly
demagogic. On the other hand, he declared that the advance of higher
education, qualitatively and quantitatively, was without a parallel
in all previous world history. “And,” he added, “the progress of
the nation generally in all the arts, except that of government, in
literature, in commerce, in invention, is something unprecedented, and
becomes daily more astonishing.”