developed in any other known business. The longer a man has served the
art, the more confidently he trusts to intuition and distrusts a
decision based wholly upon experience. Several of the worst blunders
ever made in American journalism have been committed after a careful
study of the historical precedents. Throughout all his troubles,
however, all his anxieties by day and by night--because his
responsibilities never end--the managing editor's thoughts are
constantly dwelling upon the public service that may be rendered to the
reading constituency behind him.
The executive head of a newspaper, great or small, lives in a glass
house, with all the world for critics. Every act, no matter how suddenly
forced upon him, no matter how careful his judgment, is open to the
criticism of every person who reads his paper. The columns of printed
matter are the windows of his soul.
These thoughts are all in the line of duty, somewhat selfish in their
character, perhaps (because fidelity to the public is the only secret of
success); but the sense of chivalry is there,--should be there and seen
of all men, on every page of the printed sheet.
This idea of the newspaper's duty to the public is a comparatively new
phase of the journalistic art. It has arisen since the brilliant Round
Table days of Bennett, Greeley, Webb, Prentice, and Raymond. Their
standards were high. Their energy was tremendous. And when they came to
blows the combat was terrific. But Greeley, the last survivor, found his
Camlan in 1872. He was ambushed and came to his end much as King Arthur
from a race that he had trusted and defended. In Greeley's defeat for
the Presidency all theorists who had dwelt upon the so-called "Power of
the Press" received a shuddering blow. The men who had affected to
believe that the press could make and unmake destinies began to count on
their fingers the few newspapers that had opposed Horace Greeley. To
their amazement they found that, excepting one journal in the
metropolis, every daily paper in the land whose editor or chief
stockholder did not hold a public office was marshalled in his support.
The echoes of their enthusiasm can be heard even to this day. Some of
those editors ranted and roared like Sir Toby Belch; but the
professional politicians, serene and complacent as gulligut friars, saw
their editorial antagonists routed--cakes, ale, and wine-coolers.
To the believers in printer's ink, that presidential campaign was a
revelation. Mr. Greeley was the most thoroughly defeated candidate this
country has ever known.
I remember the period well, for I was a reporter on the _Tribune_, and
as a correspondent travelled from Minnesota to Louisiana. It seemed
utterly impossible in May that Mr. Greeley could fail of election; in
September, his defeat was assured. That revolt of the people against the
dictation of the newspapers was momentous in its results. The
independent voter thoroughly asserted himself, and those editors who
could be taught by the incident knew that the people resented their
leadership. The one sad and pitiful thing about the affair was the
ingratitude of the negro race. They deserted their apostle and champion.
(I speak frankly, for I was born an abolitionist.)
Throughout the Civil War, the newspapers had harangued, badgered, and
dictated; had bolstered up or destroyed men, character, and measures. It
was well, perhaps, that the men who directed these same newspapers
should be taught a severe lesson.
Without doubt, the stormy period in which Greeley, Bennett, Prentice,
Webb, and Raymond tilted, was necessary as a preparatory era to the more
brilliant age of chivalry that succeeded! We as a people were younger in
journalism than in any other intellectual or mechanical art. Great
statesmen had been grown in plenty--the very birth of the nation had
found them full-fledged. A constellation of brilliant preachers of the
Gospel and expounders of the law are remembered. We can all name them
over from Jonathan Edwards to Theodore Parker and from John Marshall to
Rufus Choate. Great mercantile families had been created, such as the
Astors, the Grinells, the Bakers, Howlands, Aspinwalls, and Claflins.
Large fortunes had been amassed in commerce; but not an editor had been
able to accumulate money enough to keep his own carriage!
Journalism languished until about 1840. The great public did not seem to
require editors. The people of New York, possibly, persisted in
remembering that the first man in this country to write an editorial
article had been hanged in the City Hall Park. He had died heroically,
immortalizing the occasion when he said: "I regret that I have only one
life to give for my country." But some people believed he had suffered
death because he wrote editorial articles.
The art of making the newspaper steadily gained in public appreciation.
To employ the simile chivalric, its young squires were changed into
full-fledged knights by the propagation of a new idea, a new aim--the
rendering of public service! True enough, the motto of the noblest
English princedom, "_Ich dien!_" acknowledges the high duty of service;
but, when proclaimed as a journalistic duty it took the form of a new
tender of fidelity from the best men at court to the people at large. It
was so accepted, and has drawn the people and the press closer together.
It was as if these true knights drew their weapons before the public eye
and offered a new pledge of fidelity in the thrilling old Norman usage
of the word "_Service!_"
A gleam of something higher and nobler than mere swashbuckling was in
every editorial eye. The idea developed, as did the nobility and purity
of Chivalry under Godfrey, the Agamemnon of Tasso. In all truly
representative editorial minds the feeling grew that any power which
their arms or training gave them should be exercised in the defense of
the weak and oppressed. They renewed the old vow: "To maintain the just
rights of such as are unable to defend themselves." It was a great
step--as far-reaching in its results as was the promulgation of that
oath in the age of Chivalry.
At this point rose the reporter. He had been recognized for years as the
coming servitor of the press. But a few of him in the early days had
been dissolute, had written without proper regard to facts, and had
brought discredit not only on himself but the chivalry which others
believed in. He began to brace up, to pull himself together, to be
better educated, to dress in excellent taste, and, above all, to write
better copy. Henry Murger had published a series of sketches under the
title "_Scenes de La Vie de Bohéme_." These few pictures described the
Paris life of that period, beyond a doubt; but here in New York a few
bright men sought to revive the spirit and the _couleur de rose_ of the
Quartier Latin. It was a clever idea, but it didn't last.
In one of the bleakest corners of the old graveyard at Nantucket stands
a monument to Henry Clapp, the presiding genius of the Bohemian Club
that sat for so many years in Phaff's cellar on Broadway. Its roll
contained many of the brightest names known in the history of the
American press. They were true Bohemians,--once defined by George
William Curtis as the "literary men who had a divine contempt for
to-morrow." How cleverly those choice spirits wrote and talked about
their lives away back in the fifties. Get a file of the New York
_Figaro_, or some of the Easy Chair papers in _Harper's_ of that period,
and enjoy their cloud-land life! I only quote one sentence and it is
from "the Chair," though I half suspect Fitz James O'Brien, rather than
George William Curtis, penned it:--
"Bohemia is a roving kingdom--a realm in the air, like Arthur's
England. It sometimes happens that, as a gipsy's child turns out
to be a prince's child, who, perforce, dwells in a palace, so
the Bohemian is found in a fine house and high society. Bohemia
is a fairyland on this hard earth. It is Arcadia in New York."
Ah! yes, this is all very beautiful, but rent had to be paid; and the
literary workers of to-day never forget that journalism is the only
branch of literature that from the outset enables a man to live and pay
his way. And yet when we remember Henry Clapp, Fitz James O'Brien, N. G.
Shepherd, and Ned Wilkins, we feel that every working newspaper man is
better to-day because they struggled and starved; because they lived in
the free air of Bohemia.
With the worker in the art, "the struggle for existence" begins with his
first day's apprentice task as a reporter. No man ever became a
journalist who did not serve that apprenticeship. There is no hope for
him outside of complete success. It requires several years for him to
learn to get news and to properly write it. One failure will blight his
entire career. Unlike any other commercial commodity, news once lost
cannot be recouped.
Dr. Samuel Johnson was the first Parliamentary reporter. He got a list
of the speakers, then went to his lodgings in a dingy court off Fleet
Street and wrote out speeches for the Lords and the Commons. He did this
for years and not one of the men so honored is on record as having
denied the accuracy of the report(?). Dr. Johnson made the reputations
of half a dozen men who are to-day mentioned among the great English
orators. They were honorable men, as the world goes, but not one of
them, except Edmund Burke, ever acknowledged his indebtedness to Samuel
Johnson. I never have known a senator or congressman to thank a
Washington correspondent for making his speech presentable to educated
eyes. He has been known to grow warm in praise of all classes of
humanity, from Tipperary to Muscovy, but never a word of commendation
escapes his lips for a newspaper man. He believes in philanthropy, but
as Napoleon said to Talleyrand, he "wants it to be a long way off!" (_Je
veux seulement que ce soit de la philanthropie lointaine._)
With the rise of journalistic chivalry came the search for news. It
became a precious prize. The special correspondent and reporter sought
it. Truth was to be rescued from oblivion! Facts began to be hunted for
like the ambergris and ivory of commerce. At first the search resembled
the quest for the Oracle of the Holy Bottle,--a test as to the public's
opinion of news. What kind of service did the public want? Adventure
followed, as a matter of course, but love of adventure was not the
impelling motive.
The American newspaper, like the American railroad, developed along new
lines. Girardin, who had created all that is worth considering in the
French press, had pinned his faith to the _feuilleton_ and the snappy
editorial article, with its "one idea only." News was of no account. In
the English journal, the supremacy of the editorial page was asserted
and maintained. News was desirable but secondary; and there was no hurry
about obtaining it. In the Spanish press blossomed--and has ever since
bloomed--the paragraph. News was a good thing, if it could be told in a
few lines, but generally, alas, dangerous. A paragraph must only be long
enough to allow a cigarette to go out while you were reading it. Wax
matches cost only a cuarta per box, but cigarettes were expensive.
Beaumarchais understood the Spanish press when he put the famous epigram
into "Figaro's" lips: "So long as you print nothing, you may print
anything."
The chivalry of the editor toward his "esteemed contemporary" is a sad
and solemn phase of this true commentary.
After you have carefully reread the "editorial" pages of two
metropolitan journals from 1841 to date, and remember that the
contemporaries of Guttenberg called printing "the black art," you will
marvel that public opinion has ever changed. If the contemporaries of
the old Nuremberg printer had lived in 1882, and taken in the _Tribune_
of February 25th, they would have gone out to gather faggots to roast an
editor. The excuse for one of the most savage attacks ever made by one
American editor upon another was that a rival had printed a private
telegram, sent by an editor to the chief magistrate of the nation, which
had found its way into wrong hands or had been "taken off the wires," as
many other messages had been before. And yet, young as I am, I remember
that in 1871, the treaty of Washington was "acquired" by means even more
questionable and printed entire, to the confusion and indignation of the
United States Senators. The very same editor laid down a dictum that was
thought to be very clever at the time: "It is the duty of our
correspondents to get the news; it is the business of other people to
keep their own secrets." This was all very well in 1871, but in 1882,
the moral "lay in the application on it."
From the very moment in which the American newspaper attained a definite
policy and impulse, its direction has been forward, and it has daily
grown in wealth and popular respect.
I have called the special correspondent the knight errant of the
newspaper. Let me prove it. The greatest, noblest of them all was J. A.
MacGahan, of Khiva and San Stefano. He was an American, born in Perry
County, Ohio. I can sketch his career in a few brief sentences: He was
at law-school in Brussels when the Franco-Prussian war burst upon
Europe, in 1870. Having had some experience as a writer for the press,
he entered the field at once. Danger and suffering were his, though he
did not achieve renown in that brief campaign. He then made his
memorable ride to Khiva, and wrote the best book on Central Asia known
to our language. Another turn of the wheel found him in Cuba describing
the Virginius complications. There I first met him. Thence he returned
to England, and sailed with Captain Young in the Pandora to the Arctic
regions, making the last search undertaken for the lost crew of Sir John
Franklin's expedition. MacGahan returned to London in the spring of 1876
in time to read in the newspapers brief despatches from Turkey
recounting the reported atrocities of the Bashi-Bazouks. He determined
at once to go to Bulgaria. In a month's time, he had put a new face on
the "Eastern Question." The great trouble between Christian and Turk was
no longer confined to "the petty quarrel of a few monks over a key and a
silver star," as defined by the late Mr. Kinglake, but assumed
proportions that could be discerned in every club and in every
drawing-room of Imperial London. MacGahan had begun his memorable ride,
the results of which will endure as long as Christianity! He visited
Batak and painted in cold type what he saw. He caused the shrieks of the
dying girls in the pillaged towns of Bulgaria to be heard throughout
Christian Europe. A Tory minister, stanch in his fidelity to the
"unspeakable Turk," sent its fleet to the Dardanelles, but dared not
land a man or fire a single gun. Popular England repudiated its old
ally. And MacGahan rode onward and wrote sheaves of letters. In every
hamlet he passed through, he said: "The Czar will avenge this! Courage,
people; he will come!"
From that time history was made as by a cyclone. The Russian hosts were
mobilized at Kischeneff, and the Czar of all the Russias reviewed them.
Then the order to cross the Pruth was given, as MacGahan had foretold;
our Knight Errant rode with the advanced guard. Through the changing
fortune of the war, grave and gay, he passed. Much of his work, now
preserved in permanent form, is the best of its kind in our language.
The assault of Skobeleff on the Gravitza redoubt was immortalized by
MacGahan's pen. When Plevna fell, our hero was in the van during the mad
rush toward the Bosphorus. The triumphant advance was never checked
until the spires and minarets of Constantinople were in sight. Bulgaria
was redeemed, the power of the Turk in Europe was broken, the
aggrandizement of Russia was complete--and all because J. A. MacGahan
had lived and striven.
At San Stefano, a suburb of the capital, on the Sea of Marmora, our hero
died of fever. Skobeleff, whose friendship dated back to the Kirgitz
Steppe and the Khivan conquest, closed his eyes and was chief mourner at
his grave. To-day on the anniversary of his death, prayers for the
repose of his soul are said in every hamlet throughout Bulgaria. His
service to the newspaper and to the civilized world extended over less
than eight years, but he accomplished for the public the work of a
lifetime.
Hail to his memory! His was the chivalry of the press!
For years the name of Latour d'Auvergne, "first grenadier of France,"
was called at nightfall in every regiment of the Imperial Grenadier
Guard. When the name was heard, the first grenadier in the rank would
answer, "_Mort--sur le champ de bataille_."
So, when the roll is called of those that have added to the chivalry and
glory of the American press, every fellow-laborer who knew "MacGahan of
Kiva and San Stefano" will salute and answer: "Dead--and glorious!"
Philogeny, the new and brilliant science that treats of the development
of the human race from the animal kingdom, teaches that the history of
the germ is an epitome of the history of the descent. It is equally true
in journalism, that the various forms of discouragement, hope, and final
success through which the individual worker in the art passes, during
his progress from the reportorial egg-cell to the fully developed
executive-editorial organism, is a compressed reproduction of the long
series of misfortunes and interferences through which the ancestors of
the American newspaper of to-day have passed. The simile is true, aye,
to the supreme part played by "the struggle for existence!" Under its
influence, through the "natural selection" of the public, a new and
nobler species of journalism has arisen and now exists. The newspaper of
to-day, evolved from rudimentary forms, is a splendid and heroic
organism; and the last upholder of the dogma of its miraculous creation
and infallible power is dead.
SOCIETY'S EXILES.
BY B. O. FLOWER.
It is difficult to over-estimate the gravity of the problem presented by
those compelled to exist in the slums of our populous cities, even when
considered from a purely economic point of view. From the midst of this
commonwealth of degradation there goes forth a moral contagion,
scourging society in all its ramifications, coupled with an atmosphere
of physical decay--an atmosphere reeking with filth, heavy with foul
odors, laden with disease. In time of any contagion the social cellar
becomes the hotbed of death, sending forth myriads of fatal germs which
permeate the air for miles around, causing thousands to die because
society is too short-sighted to understand that the interest of its
humblest member is the interest of all. The slums of our cities are the
reservoirs of physical and moral death, an enormous expense to the
State, a constant menace to society, a reality whose shadow is at once
colossal and portentous. In time of social upheavals they will prove
magazines of destruction; for while revolution will not originate in
them, once let a popular uprising take form and the cellars will
reinforce it in a manner more terrible than words can portray.
Considered ethically, the problem is even more embarrassing and
deplorable; here, as nowhere else in civilized society, thousands of our
fellowmen are exiled from the enjoyments of civilization, forced into
life's lowest strata of existence, branded with that fatal word scum. If
they aspire to rise, society shrinks from them; they seem of another
world; they are of another world; driven into the darkness of a hopeless
existence, viewed much as were lepers in olden times. Over their heads
perpetually rests the dread of eviction, of sickness, and of failure to
obtain sufficient work to keep life in the forms of their loved ones,
making existence a perpetual nightmare, from which death alone brings
release. Say not that they do not feel this; I have talked with them; I
have seen the agony born of a fear that rests heavy on their souls
stamped in their wrinkled faces and peering forth from great pathetic
eyes. For them winter has real terror, for they possess neither clothes
to keep comfortable the body, nor means with which to properly warm
their miserable tenements. Summer is scarcely less frightful in their
quarters, with the heat at once stifling, suffocating, almost
intolerable; heat which acting on the myriad germs of disease produces
fever, often ending in death, or, what is still more dreaded, chronic
invalidism. Starvation, misery, and vice, trinity of despair, haunt
their every step. The Golden Rule,--the foundation of true civilization,
the keynote of human happiness,--reaches not their wretched quarters.
Placed by society under the ban, life is one long and terrible night.
But tragic as is the fate of the present generation, still more
appalling is the picture when we contemplate the thousands of little
waves of life yearly washed into the cellar of being; fragile, helpless
innocents, responsible in no way for their presence or environment, yet
condemned to a fate more frightful than the beasts of the field; human
beings wandering in the dark, existing in the sewer, ever feeling the
crushing weight of the gay world above, which thinks little and cares
less for them. Infinitely pathetic is their lot.