uncertainty. Exerted directly upon the leaders of opinion, it was felt
indirectly by the whole population. All over the country he convinced
isolated and outstanding men, who in turn diffused his views throughout
their own communities. No man who once fell under the sway of his
powerful pen, even those whom he intensely irritated, could quite shake
it off. One eminent New Yorker was heard to call the _Post_ “that
pessimistic, malignant, and malevolent sheet--which no good citizen
ever goes to bed without reading!” The thinking young men of the
colleges, and many outside them, accepted his utterances as an almost
infallible guide. No public man was indifferent to them. The _Evening
Post_ and _Nation_ long exercised a peculiar sway in newspaper offices
from Maine to California. Gov. David B. Hill remarked to a secretary
during the fight Godkin was waging against his machine: “I don’t care
anything about the handful of Mugwumps who read it in New York City.
The trouble with the damned sheet is that every editor in New York
State reads it!” It was a Western editor who said that only a bold
newspaper made up its mind on any new issue till it saw what the _Post_
had to say. “For years,” a Baltimore friend wrote Godkin in 1899, “I
have noticed your editorials reappearing unacknowledged, a little
changed and somewhat diluted, but still with their original integrity
not entirely removed from them, in the columns of other papers--a
course of _Post_-and-water not equal to the strong meat from which
the decoction was made, but still wholesome....” Henry Holt wrote the
editor on his retirement that he had taught the country more than any
other man in it. The same tribute was paid him by William James: “To
my generation, his was certainly the towering influence in all thought
concerning public affairs, and indirectly his influence has certainly
been more pervasive than that of any other writer of the generation,
for he influenced other writers who never quoted him, and determined
the whole current of discussion.”
Such verdicts, from such men, might be multiplied to a wearisome
length. The finest spirits of the time recognized in Godkin, though
they often disagreed with him, though the disagreement might sometimes
be violent, the most inspiring force in American journalism.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
NEWS, LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND DRAMA, 1880–1900
From Godkin’s utterances upon journalism a small volume might easily
be compiled. His ideal of a newspaper was as much English as American,
with a good deal that was purely Godkinian superadded. He disliked
headlines, even when not garish, and valued the headline merely as an
aid to reference. He insisted upon absolute accuracy. Not only did he
believe, quite properly, that comment had no place in a news story, but
he thought any attempt at literary effects out of place there--that
information was the one essential. Recognizing that accuracy often
requires expert knowledge, he always insisted that this could be
got by paying for it. Absolute integrity in every department was of
course presupposed. Murat Halstead in 1889 told the Wisconsin Press
Association that he saw no objection if readers “should find out that
the advertiser occasionally dictates the editorials.” “No objection at
all to that,” rejoined Godkin; “the objection is when they don’t find
it out.”
During the eighties Dana and the _Sun_ represented to Godkin nearly
all that was evil in New York journalism, and the exchanges between
the two editors were often bitter. Neither appreciated the other’s
qualities. Everyone remembers Mrs. Frederick P. Bellamy’s explanation
of the depravity of New York: “What can you expect of a city in which
every morning the _Sun_ makes vice attractive, and every night the
_Post_ makes virtue odious?” Dana found Godkin the one antagonist who
could make him wince, and struck back hard. He persisted in calling the
editor “Larry.” He never tired of exaggerating the _Post’s_ staidness.
When it changed its form in 1887, he wrote that it would now be dull
in sixteen pages instead of eight. After one of the East River bridges
was opened, he described the testing of the structure at length; how
wagons of stone, trucks of metal, and ponderous engines were trundled
across it, and finally, as the supreme burden, a cart bearing a copy of
the _Evening Post_. When S. J. Randall died, and the _Post_ spoke of
his corrupting influence upon Congress, Dana seized the opportunity to
characterize Godkin as “a scurrilous editor known to the police courts
of this town as a libeler of the living, and who is known now as a
defamer of the dead.”
What Godkin principally objected to in the _Sun_, of course, was Dana’s
cynical defense of evils and his opposition to a long list of good
causes. Supposedly a Democrat, Dana conceived a violent and irrational
dislike of Cleveland, did his best in 1884 to defeat him, and later
never missed an opportunity to attack him as the “Stuffed Prophet” or
“Perpetual Candidate.” Supposedly a friend of decency in the city,
for twenty years he was Tammany’s staunchest champion, a supporter in
turn of Tweed’s associates, of Boss Kelly, of Grant and Gilroy, and of
Croker. Standing for civil service reform in 1876, later he attacked
and ridiculed reform measures unmercifully. Every attempt to improve
politics elicited a burst of derision from him. The perversity of his
course, its lack of principle, Godkin repeatedly exposed in columns of
extracts from the _Sun_ headed “Semper Fidelis.”
But he objected in almost equal degree to the _Sun’s_ news columns--to
the space they gave crime and scandal. Dana used to say that whatever
God allowed to happen he would allow to be printed, and talked of
giving a full picture of society. How far this creed carried him, and
how caustically Godkin censured it, may be seen from one _Evening Post_
paragraph (Sept. 28, 1886):
The first page of our enterprising contemporary, the _Sun_,
to-day was an interesting picture of American society. The first
column was devoted to the trial of a minister for immorality, to
differences between a man named Lynch and his wife, to a rape in
a vacant lot, and a suicide. The second was half given to a fire
and the death of a blind newsdealer, the other half to politics.
The third was given up to foreign news and politics, but half
the fourth was taken up with murder in a buggy and the escape
of two convicts. The fifth was wholly devoted to a very paying
scandal about Lord Lonsdale and Miss Violet Cameron, and a small
item about another Lord Lonsdale and twenty-four chorus girls. In
the remaining two, we find the disappearance of one Sniffers, a
divorce, two pugilistic items, half a column of the horse-whipping
of a reporter by a girl, the discovery of her lover in jail by Miss
Miller, the arrest of a small swindler, and a few other trifles. As
a microcosm, the page is not often surpassed....
As Godkin said, the news of the most sensational papers gave an
essentially false picture of American society. Any one who read it
as a well-proportioned picture of what was happening in New York
would believe that every evening about 10,000 betrayed servant girls,
horse-whipped faithless lovers, and the same number of drunken husbands
murdered wives in tenement houses; and that the bulk of the population
was daily occupied in getting at the details of such cases, and wanted
explanatory illustrations to help it, such as diagrams showing just
where the servant girl stood when she struck the first blow. In a true
picture, such incidents would get a few lines.
But when sensational news was obtained by inventing it, or exaggerating
small episodes, or heartless intrusion into private affairs, Godkin’s
indignation was much greater. His opinion of this phase of journalism
was precisely that which Howells expresses of Bartley Hubbard’s
unscrupulous news-gathering in “A Modern Instance.” In June, 1886, he
paid his respects to “those delightful creatures who lurked behind
fences and hid in the bushes two weeks ago, watching the house” where
Cleveland was passing his honeymoon. More than one New York journal
at that time would fabricate interviews with men its reporters could
not reach. One remedy for the current abuses, Godkin thought, lay
in stringent enforcement of the laws for libel. In 1893 an invented
scandal about a Toronto lady and gentleman resulted in the payment of
$14,537 damages by three New York papers, and Godkin declared that it
was a public service for injured persons thus to bring suit. On another
occasion he wrote: “Some of the most highly paid laborers of our
time are lying newspaper reporters and correspondents, men who make no
pretense of telling the truth, and would smile if you reproached them
with not doing so.”
[Illustration: ROLLO OGDEN
Editor-in-Chief 1903–1920.]
In the nineties Godkin’s distaste for the _Sun’s_ news was forgotten
in his more intense reprobation of the so-called yellow press, the old
_World_ and _Journal_. He thought that their sensational attention to
crime and immorality was shocking, that they were much more careless of
truth than the _Sun_, and that their pictures and cartoons showed a new
defect--the defect of puerility. They did go for a time to startling
lengths. “The note of the press to-day which most needs changing is
childishness,” wrote Godkin in May, 1896. “The pictures are childish;
the intelligence is mainly for boys and girls.... The observations on
public as distinguished from purely party affairs are quite juvenile.”
When a number of city clubs and public libraries excluded the _World_
and _Journal_ from their reading rooms, Godkin applauded, holding that
the new sensationalism could be stopped only by a vigorous public
sentiment. He was deeply concerned, like many other sober men, over the
intellectual effect of the cheap, widely read yellow sheets. They were
making it impossible for the masses to read anything very long on any
subject, he said, and to read anything, long or short, on any serious
subject. They fed the people brief thrillers about shootings and
assaults, titbits of scandal, bogus interviews, and comic aspects of
every institution from Christianity down; and when the attention grew
jaded, they offered pictures for tired minds. In this there was much
truth, though the history of the _World_ shows what an enormous force
for good lay in the new journalism.
The sober news pages of the _Evening Post_ were the product of a
small force--never in Godkin’s day more than a half-dozen full-time
reporters. But it was a remarkably efficient, well-managed force.
During the nineties in particular it reached a very high level of
enterprise. The managing editor from 1891 to the end of the decade was
William A. Linn, who had succeeded James E. Learned. Linn had been
with the _Tribune_ from 1868 to 1871, and with the _Post_ ever since,
and had remarkable knowledge of his craft. His city editor from 1892 to
1898 was H. J. Wright, who was born in Scotland, graduated at New York
University, and had worked on the _Commercial Advertiser_. These two
found several capable men in the city room, added others, and infused
an unusual _esprit de corps_ in them. Wright’s vigor was infectious; he
showed, says Norman Hapgood, “a great deal of tolerance, hard work, and
enthusiasm, and a liking for intelligences of many kinds around him.”
The three most remarkable reporters of these years were Lincoln
Steffens, Norman Hapgood, and W. L. Riardon, two of whom have made
their mark in the higher reaches of journalism. Riardon was the
political reporter. He had been trained for the Catholic priesthood,
but weakness for drink and a talent for news-writing had derailed him.
He was a member of Tammany Hall, and invaluable in getting material
for assaults upon it. Yet his perfect accuracy and fairness shielded
him from any resentment in that quarter. “He has to earn a living like
the rest of us,” Croker would say whenever a particularly biting story
about Tammany appeared in the _Post_. One of his merits was that he
never failed to bring home news; if there was nothing in the assignment
he went to cover, he would get a story as good or better somewhere
else. Moreover, he never wrote himself out. On Friday, when a special
column was often needed for Saturday’s enlarged paper, Riardon could
always be counted on to have something worth while up his sleeve.
Steffens, a young Californian, who had studied in Germany and France,
joined the staff on the recommendation of Mr. Bishop in 1892, and
after some special reporting on rapid transit, was given a year in
Wall Street at the beginning of the panic. When first sent down there,
the regular Wall Street reporter being abroad, he asked for references
to three or four leading bankers. “Calling on them,” he tells us, “I
explained the predicament of the _Post_ and my utter ignorance of
finance and business. But I said that, if they would coach me from day
to day, I would read up, study, work, and I promised in return for the
trouble I might put them to, I would report even the most sensational
happenings quietly and carefully. The agreement was made; I took
the job, and though that had not been my purpose, the effect of the
bankers’ interest in me was that we had many, many beats.” Later he was
assigned to Police Headquarters at the height of the excitement over
the Lexow Inquiry. His work in following the new Police Commission,
of which Roosevelt was chairman, was of peculiar value to the public.
This four-headed commission was always deadlocking. The obstructiveness
of one member was such that the Mayor attempted his removal, but the
Governor interfered to prevent it. Steffens for the _Post_ and Jacob
Riis for the _Sun_ laid full reports of the Board’s activities before
the public, and brought a great deal of public sentiment to bear behind
Roosevelt. Steffens was a born newspaper man, sharply observant, vivid
in description, full of humor, and with a thorough knowledge of the
town.
Of his rapidity and capacity Norman Hapgood furnishes an interesting
illustration. One day the 17-story Ireland building collapsed:
It fell down just about three-quarters of an hour before we went
to press. There was nobody in the office except me. Mr. Wright
was in despair. This was before I had developed, rather suddenly,
into a reporter. As far as a story of this kind went, I was in
the sub-cub stage. Nevertheless, Mr. Wright had to send me. When
I reached the scene of the disaster, I saw Steffens talking to
somebody concerned--I think two or three policemen. I went up to
him and in quite a leisurely way asked him what information he had.
He had come to know me, and be rather amused by my detached ways,
so he smiled slightly, never thought of answering me, and went on
with his work. I got a few points, went back to the office, and
turned in about one stick of inconsequential detail. About five or
ten minutes before press time, Steffens called up on the telephone.
When he heard of the disaster he had not taken the trouble to
phone Mr. Wright, but went direct to the spot. The paper was
held fifteen or twenty minutes, and in less than half an hour’s
dictation by phone Steffens had covered the catastrophe, given all
its drama, told everything in an orderly, expert manner, and not
missed a detail. There was not a morning paper that had an account
as good.
Hapgood began on space, making about $12 a week at first; but he soon
developed into the best general reporter Mr. Wright ever knew. He could
write shorthand, and was particularly effective in taking interviews,
addresses, and trial reports in the English style. He, and every other
reporter, found that the absolute trustworthiness of the paper made men
of affairs willing to give it news they denied to other dailies. The
treatment of one “beat” which he procured is a happy illustration of
the _Post’s_ studious avoidance of anything that would seem noisy. He
was well acquainted with some of the leaders of the Salvation Army, and
at the time when the public was most interested in the question whether
Ballington Booth was going to break with his father, Hapgood received
absolute knowledge that he was. Turning in a story on the general
situation, he inserted a short paragraph in the middle giving this
statement. Mr. Wright was tempted to pick it out and put it at the head
of the column. Then he laughed, said he would leave it where it was,
and called attention to it only by a minor headline.
During the Spanish War the _Post_ had a creditable quota of
correspondents with the Cuban forces. A. G. Robinson sent accounts
of camp life at Jacksonville and Key West; Franklin Clarkin was with
Sampson’s fleet and later in the Santiago trenches; and John Bass was
also at Santiago. The most remarkable of the lot, however, was E. G.
Bellairs, as he called himself, who got into Cuba at Nuevitas aboard a
blockade-runner from the Bahamas, and was soon sending up remarkable
accounts of his adventures among the insurgents. He fell sick, his
servant dug a grave for him and departed, and he was rescued by an
old woman who fed him miraculous steaks and meat jellies--miraculous,
that is, until he observed that his mule had disappeared. Bellairs
was dismissed for cause, and it later turned out that his name was
an alias, covering a criminal record; but he had high merits as a
correspondent. The Associated Press promptly employed him. The _Post_
showed its customary quietness when Sampson destroyed Cervera’s fleet.
That event occurred Sunday, July 3, and the morning papers on the
Fourth had very meager news; but the day being a legal holiday, the
_Post_ refused to issue any edition. Later it had full and prompt
correspondence from the Philippines, a spot in which its editors were
keenly interested.
Much of the _Evening Post’s_ news value was always furnished by certain
unrivaled special features--unrivaled not only in New York, but the
whole country. Perhaps the chief, and certainly the most effective in
maintaining the circulation, was the financial department. Alexander
Dana Noyes, who came from the _Commercial Advertiser_ to be financial
editor in 1891, and held that post till 1920, gave new credit to
Whiting’s pages, and ably supplemented Horace White in the editorial
discussion of financial questions. As far west as Chicago, and as
far south as Atlanta his columns were looked to daily as the best on
industry and finance printed.
A position of equal preëminence was held by the _Evening Post’s_
literary department, the record of which repays examination in detail.
Falling heir in 1881 to the literary editor and traditions of the
_Nation_, the _Post_ became the first American newspaper to publish
book criticism that was consistently expert, discriminating, and of
high literary quality. James Bryce doubted whether there was any
criticism in the world as good as the old _Nation’s_. By 1881 some
of the greatest of Godkin’s original contributors, as Henry James
and Lowell, were no longer writing for it. But in spite of such
defections, the list was impressively weighty and comprehensive, and
the _Post_ had every worthy book reviewed by an authority in the field
in which it lay. In fact, the dominant tone of its literary pages was
authoritativeness--it was not clever, it was not newsy, but it was
definitive.
In large part this meant that the reviewing was by university
scholars, and the academic tone of the writing, in the best sense
of the word, had much to do with the esteem for the _Evening Post_
in academic circles. People who wanted bright belletristic literary
pages were disappointed. Glancing down the roster of reviewers in the
eighties, we find only two men known as novelists or writers of light
essays, Joel Chandler Harris and Edward Eggleston. There was a decided
deficiency in news of literary personalities, and discussions of
current literary movements. But all the great institutions of learning
were ably represented. It is sufficient to take Harvard as an example.
Her contributors included:
Alexander Agassiz, H. P. Bowditch, Edward Channing, Francis J.
Child, Ephraim Emerton, C. H. Grandgent, J. B. Greenough, Albert
Bushnell Hart, William James, Charles R. Lanman, Charles Eliot
Norton, George H. Palmer, Josiah Royce, N. S. Shaler, F. W.
Taussig, J. D. Whitney, Justin Winsor.
Outside the universities, we find among the reviewers the names of
historians like Parkman, Henry Adams, Henry C. Lea, John C. Ropes,
and John Fiske; a number of men in the Federal service, like the
archæologist A. F. Bandelier, the astronomer Simon Newcomb, Henry
Gannett, and J. R. Soley; and writers of reputation in various fields
like George E. Woodberry, T. W. Higginson, W. C. Brownell, Kenyon Cox,
Brander Matthews, H. H. Furness, and Angelo Heilprin. The fare was not
sufficiently varied by light and elegant features--one rule was not to
accept any poetry--but it was of the best possible quality.
The literary editor from 1881 to 1903 was Wendell Phillips Garrison,
who had been with the _Nation_ since its founding in 1865, and had
early taken charge of the reviews. His name is indissolubly linked
with Godkin’s. “If anything goes wrong with you, I will retire into
a monastery,” the editor wrote in 1883. “You are the one steady and
constant man I have ever had to do with.” He is not remembered, like
R. H. Hutton of the London _Spectator_, the only literary editor of the
time superior to him, for permanently valuable literary criticism.
His distinction lay in his keen judgment in selecting reviewers, his
ability to inspire them, his careful scholarship, and his skill in
making homogeneous the work sent to him.
Both to his associates in the office and distant contributors, Garrison
was endeared by his tact and charm. When writing to reviewers, he was
wont to include some personal word of friendship, often whimsical,
which drew the recipients into an intimate circle. He thus built up a
great family of _Evening Post_ and _Nation_ writers, from the Pacific
Coast to St. Petersburg, more than two hundred of whom joined on the
fortieth anniversary of his entrance upon journalism in presenting him
a silver vase, inscribed by Goldwin Smith. Whenever Godkin caused a
storm in the office, Garrison was expected to restore calm. A single
example of his constant thoughtfulness may be given. H. T. Finck, the
_Post’s_ music critic, while traveling in Switzerland one summer,
was attacked in Berne by typhoid fever, and sent to the University
Hospital. Garrison heard of his plight, immediately ascertained that
the _Nation_ had a subscriber in Berne, a wealthy cheese exporter, and
wrote this gentleman of Mr. Finck’s illness. The result was that the
critic spent his convalescence in the subscriber’s home.
By his tact and high ideals, Garrison made the learned world of the
United States feel that the book pages of the _Evening Post_ and
_Nation_ were a coöperative enterprise, which all scholars should take
pride in keeping at the highest possible level. Their labors were
scrupulously supplemented by his own, for his scholarship was rare and
his exactness almost painful. He would send a telegram to settle the
question of a hyphen. An authority upon punctuation and syllabication,
he prepared the materials for an exhaustive treatise upon them,
parts of which were printed in a memorial volume in 1908. Until May,
1888, much of the impeccable accuracy of the literary columns was
attributable to the aid furnished by Michael Heilprin, a truly noble
scholar who had been driven from Hungary by the collapse of the
revolution of 1848–49, and who just before the Civil War had connected
himself with Appleton’s Cyclopædia. He not only wrote many articles
for the _Post_ and _Nation_, but placed his marvelous scholarship at
their service in the revision and proof-reading of articles by others.
He had a reading-knowledge of eighteen languages. Taking a dictionary
of dates, he could run his eye down the page and make corrections by
the half-dozen. He could give the time and place of every battle and
engagement in the Civil War, and “say his popes” without stumbling, a
feat which even Macaulay declined to attempt. In history, biography,
geography, and literature he commanded facts literally by the ten
thousand.