[Speech of Colonel A. K. McClure, editor of the "Philadelphia Times,"
delivered at a banquet at Philadelphia, December 9, 1896,
commemorating the fiftieth year of his connection with the press of
Pennsylvania. Governor Daniel H. Hastings, in introducing the guest of
the evening, concluded by saying: "I said in the beginning that he is
the Nestor of Pennsylvania journalism. Yes, like the King of Pylos, in
Grecian legend of the siege of Troy, he is the oldest of the living
chieftains. Forney, Morton, McMichael and most of the pioneers of our
modern journalism are gone. McClure has been to Pennsylvania what
Horace Greeley was to New York journalism. Dana, of the 'Sun,' and
McClure, of the 'Times,' are the links connecting the present with the
past of American journalism. To-night the roses of friendship and
fraternity are growing upon the walls that separate us in our
life-work, and we are here to join in our congratulations and good
wishes to him in whose honor we meet--Colonel Alexander K. McClure."]
MR. CHAIRMAN:--I cannot express the measure of my grateful
appreciation of this imposing greeting, so exceptional alike in welcome,
in numbers, and in distinction. I accept it as a tribute to the
matchless progress made by our newspapers during the present generation,
rather than a personal tribute to an humble member of the profession,
whose half century of editorial labor furnishes the occasion for leading
men of State and Nation to pay homage to American journalism, now the
great forum of our free institutions.
The duties and responsibilities of journalism are largely defined by
their environment, and there may be fitness in this occasion to refer to
the political, business, social and moral conditions under which the
Juniata "Sentinel" was founded fifty years ago, in contrast with the
greatly changed conditions which confront the journals of to-day. The
people of Juniata county were a well-to-do class, adapted to the
primitive conditions in which they lived. The enervating blight of
luxury and the despair of pinching want were strangers in their midst.
They believed in the church, in the school, in the sanctity of home, in
integrity between man and man. Christianity was accepted by them as the
common law, sincerely by many and with a respect akin to reverence by
all; and that beautiful humanity that springs from the mingled
dependence and affection of rural neighborly ties, ever taught that the
bruised reed should not be broken. They had no political convulsions
such as are common in these days. Even a sweeping political revolution
would not vary the party majority over a hundred in the few thousands of
votes they cast, and excepting in the white heat of national contests,
their personal affections often outweighed their duties to party. Public
vices and public wrongs in local administration were rarely known, and
there was little to invite the aggressive features which are so
conspicuous in modern journalism. Ministers mingled freely with the
every-day life of their flocks and were exemplars of simplicity,
frugality and integrity, and the lawyer who hoped to be successful
required first of all to command the confidence of the community in his
honesty. The ballot and the jury-box were regarded as sacred as the
sacrament itself, and the criminal courts had usually little to do
beyond the cases of vagrant offenders. Business was conducted as a rule
without the formality of contracts, and those whose lives justly
provoked scandal were shunned on every side. This community possessed
the only real wealth the world can give--content; and the local
newspaper of that day, even under the direction of a progressive
journalist, could be little more than a commonplace chronicler of
current events.
The most satisfactory newspaper work I have ever done, I mean the most
satisfactory to myself, was during the first few months after I founded
the "Sentinel." There was pardonable boyish pride in seeing my name
given with studied prominence as editor and proprietor, and the reading
of my own editorials was as soothing as the soft, sweet strains of music
on distant waters in summer evening time. They were to my mind most
exquisite in diction and logic, and it was a source of keen regret that
they were so "cabined, cribbed, and confined" within the narrowest
provincial lines, whereby the world lost so much that it greatly
needed. I knew that there were others, like Chandler, Gales, Greeley,
Ritchie, Prentice, and Kendall, who were more read and heeded, but I was
consoled by the charitable reflection that entirely by reason of
fortuitous circumstance they were known and I was not. Then to me life
was a song with my generously self-admired newspaper as the chorus.
There came rude awakenings, of course, from those blissful dreams as the
shock of editorial conflict gradually taught me that journalism was one
unending lesson in a school that has no vacations.
I have pleasant memories also of the intimate personal relations between
the village editor and his readers. Most of them were within a radius of
a few miles of the publication office, and all the influences of social
as well as political ties were employed to make them enduring patrons.
With many of them the question of sparing from their scant income three
cents a week for a county paper, was one that called for sober thought
from year to year, and it often required a personal visit and earnest
importunity to hold the hesitating subscriber. I well remember the case
of a frugal farmer of the Dunker persuasion who was sufficiently
public-spirited to subscribe for the "Sentinel" for six months, to get
the paper started, but at the end of that period he had calculated the
heavy expenses of gathering the ripening harvest and decided to stop his
paper for a while. I need not say that he was enthusiastically
confronted with many reasons why a man of his intelligence and influence
should not be without the county newspaper, but he yielded only to the
extent of further considering the matter with his wife. He returned in a
few days and spread sunshine around the editorial chair by saying that
his wife had decided to continue for another six months, as the paper
would be very handy in the fall for tying up her apple-butter crocks.
A few years after I had settled down in this quiet community to devote
my life to journalism, a shrill, weird voice was heard in the beautiful
valley of the Juniata as the iron horse made his first visit to us with
his train of cars. It was welcome music as it echoed over the foothills
of the Alleghenies, and entirely new to nearly all who heard it. With
the railway came the telegraph, the express, and the advent of the
daily newspaper among the people. In a single year the community was
transformed from its sedate and quiet ways into more energetic,
progressive, and speculative life. It was a new civilization that had
come to disturb the dreams of nearly a century, and it rapidly extended
its new influences until it reached the remotest ends of the little
county, and with this beneficent progress of civilization came also the
vices which ever accompany it, but against which the civilization itself
is ever fortified by the new factors called into requisition to
strengthen its restraining power. While advancing the better attributes
of mankind it has left unrest in the shop, the field, the forest, and
the mine, where there was content in other days, but that unrest is the
inevitable attendant of our matchless strides in the most enlightened
civilization of the age, and it will ever present new problems for our
statesmanship.
It should be remembered that while Philadelphia had then two journals of
national fame under the direction of such accomplished editorial writers
as Joseph R. Chandler and Morton McMichael, there was not a daily
newspaper in this city, or in the State, that had a circulation of
5,000, excepting only the "Ledger," then a penny journal almost unknown
outside of the city. Even the New York "Tribune" and the New York
"Herald" then relatively quite as distinguished as national journals as
they are to-day, did not have a daily circulation of over 15,000. There
are several daily journals now published in Philadelphia, each of which
circulates more newspapers every day than did all the great dailies of
New York and Pennsylvania combined, fifty years ago. There were then
successful penny papers in New York and Pittsburg as well as
Philadelphia, but the penny journal of that day was only a local
newspaper in its way, and was unfelt as a political factor.
Contrast the business, political, moral, and social conditions which
confront the journalism of this great city to-day, and none can fail to
appreciate the greatly magnified duties and responsibilities of the
journalist of this age. In this City of Brotherly Love, with the highest
standard of average intelligence in any community of like numbers of the
world, and the only great city to be found on the continent that is
distinctively American in its policy, how sharp is the contrast between
the civilization met by the Juniata "Sentinel" fifty years ago and the
civilization that is met by the Philadelphia journalist of to-day?
Public wrongs ever appear like huge cancers on the body politic, and the
swarms of the idle and vicious, with the studied crimes of those who
would acquire wealth without earning it, are a constant menace to the
social order and the safety of person and property, and demand the
utmost vigilance on the part of the faithful public journal. Continued
political power under all parties becomes corrupt and demoralized, and
it is not uncommon for apparently reputable political leaders of all
parties and organized crime to make common cause for public plunder. The
business and social conditions are also radically changed, and with
these the fearless journalists of to-day must deal with courage and
fidelity. From what was many years ago regarded, and with some reason,
as the license of the public press, has grown up the well-defined duty
of reputable journalism to maintain with dignity and firmness its
mission as public censor, and to-day in Philadelphia, as in all the
leading centres of the country, American journalism is not only the
great educator of the people, but it is the faithful handmaid of law and
order and of public and private morals. Like all great callings, from
which even the sacredness of the pulpit is not exempt, there are those
who bring persistent dishonor upon journalism, and pervert its powers to
ambition and greed; but discounted by all its imperfections, it is
to-day the greatest of our great factors in maintaining the best
attributes of our civilization and preserving social order and the
majesty of law; and the duties of the journalist to-day in our great
cities have reached a standard of dignity and magnitude of which even
the wildest enthusiast of fifty years ago could not have dreamed.
Such is the revolution wrought in journalism within a single active
lifetime. The newspaper is no longer a luxury. From being confined to
the few, as it was half a century ago, the daily newspaper is now in
almost every home in the great States of the Union, and the grave
responsibility of journalism may be appreciated when it is remembered
that the newspaper to-day is the greatest educator of the people who are
to maintain our free institutions. Widely as our schools have extended
until they are accessible to the humblest of the land, the newspaper as
an educator reaches vastly more people than all the colleges and schools
of the nation. It is read not only by the men and women of mature years,
but it begins its offices as teacher in the home circle as soon as the
child becomes a pupil in the school, and it is constantly although
imperceptibly moulding the minds of millions of our youths of all
classes and all conditions, and it has no vacations in its great work.
It not only aids the more intelligent to a sound exercise of judgment on
questions of public interest, but it is ever quickening the impulses and
shaping the aims of those who are most easily impressed, and during the
important period of life when the character of men and women is formed.
I have long held that the responsible direction of a widely read and
respected daily newspaper is the highest trust in our free government. I
do not thus speak of it to claim for it honors which may be questioned,
but I speak of it to present the oppressive responsibilities which rest
upon those who are to-day educating a nation of 70,000,000 of people,
under a government where every citizen is a sovereign, and where the
people hold in their own hands the destiny of the greatest Republic of
the world. Presidents, Cabinets, Senators, and Representatives come and
play their parts on the public stage and pass away--the few to be
remembered, the many to be forgotten--and political parties are created
and perish as new necessities and new conditions arise in the progress
of our free institutions. In my own day there have been created four new
political organizations which attained national importance, all of which
have elected Governors in Pennsylvania, and two of which have elected
Presidents of the United States, but three of them exist to-day only in
history. They are the Anti-Masonic, the Whig, the American, and the
Republican parties. Thus while rulers and the parties which call them to
power, come and go in the swift mutations of American politics, the
newspaper survives them all, and continues in its great career
regardless of the success or defeat of men or political organizations.
To seek promotion in civil trust from the editorial chair of an
influential newspaper, is to sacrifice the grander opportunity and
responsibility for the unsatisfying fame of official distinction. It is
the mission of the newspaper to create Presidents and other rulers; to
judge them when in power; to sustain them when they have been faithful
and efficient in the discharge of public duties, and to defeat them when
they are forgetful of the public welfare. In the discharge of these
important duties the newspaper must, above all, be free from the
suspicion of seeking individual advantage and it can be so only by
accepting its trust as highest of all and more enduring than all. Great
editors have been presumably honored by conferring upon them high
official positions in recognition of party services, but no editor in
the entire history of American journalism who has made his newspaper
secondary to political ambition, has written any other record than
failure as both editor and statesman.
My brethren of the press need not be reminded of the often painful
duties which come to the fearless editor. They must ever remember that
"faithful are the wounds of a friend," and no class of teachers so
well-known that:--
"Forgiveness to the injured does belong,
But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong."
Few, very few indeed, outside of the editorial sanctum ever learn how
the surges of ambition, in all its varied and fantastic phases from the
noblest to the meanest, assail and often vex journalistic duties. The
public know not of the many gifted men who must thus at times be saved
from themselves, and an editorial retrospect of half a century presents
a sad record of the newspaper work of making bricks without straw.
Justly excepting the comparatively few public men who tower over
mediocrity in public place, journalism gives the position and fashions
the fame of most of them. It is not done arbitrarily nor from choice, as
public and political necessities are often paramount with journalists,
as with others, in awarding public honors; but with all its exactions
and responsibilities, which are ever magnified by the greater
opportunities for usefulness, there is no calling that brings richer
compensation for fidelity to duty. The consciousness that each day the
editor whose readers are numbered by hundreds of thousands, may greatly
aid in making the world better than it was in the passing yesterday, is
a constant inspiration to the best efforts, and it is especially
gratifying that even in the many and at times impassioned conflicts of
journalistic dispute, the rugged and sharp-angled walls which divide us
are ever so beautiful and fragrant with the flowers of good-fellowship,
as is impressively taught by this assembly.
Thus charged with the highest of civil trusts in the most enlightened
government of the earth, the editor must be honored or dishonored here
by the measure of his fidelity to his exceptional duties, and must be so
judged in the hereafter, when the narrow pathway of life that divides
past and future eternities has been traversed. We come when bidden, we
know not whence; we go when bidden, we know not whither; but each and
all have duties to themselves, to their homes, to their country, and to
the common brotherhood of man, which when performed with the
faithfulness that human infirmities will permit, must greatly brighten
the brief and often fretful journey from the cradle to the grave.
Friends, in this evening twilight of my journalistic work, so sweetly
mellowed by the smiling faces, young and old, about me, I answer your
generous greeting with the gratitude that can perish only when the
gathering shadows shall have settled into the night that comes to purple
the better morn.