II
An entirely different question was posed by the election of 1876—the question whether the long friendship of Bryant and the former sub-editors for Samuel J. Tilden should carry the Evening Post over to the Democratic side. The decision finally made is of peculiar interest, for it shows how little Bryant was inclined to let personal considerations sway him upon any public question.
Early in the thirties, while Bryant and other editors were wrangling over the Bank, an ardent Democrat from New Lebanon, N. Y., named Elam Tilden, visited the Evening Post, and introduced his son Samuel, a boy in roundabouts. Bryant often spoke in later years of the impression made on him by the youth’s precocity, handsome features, and cultivated speech. A few years later young Tilden studied at New York University, and improved his acquaintance with the poet. When in the fall of 1841 Bryant made one of his country excursions, he chose New Lebanon for headquarters, and visited the Tilden family. The ties between Tilden and the Post were much strengthened after 1848, when Bigelow became junior editor. We have seen that they were acquainted as young lawyers, and Bigelow was State prison inspector at the same time that Tilden began his political career in the Assembly. Tilden frequently visited the Post and discussed political topics, it was there that he published an explanation of his stand in the campaign of 1860, and it was with the freedom of an old friend that he told Bigelow that he and Bryant shared the blood-guilt of the conflict.
After the war his visits were less frequent. But he made the Evening Post his mouthpiece when, in 1871–2, he, ex-Mayor Havemeyer, and Andrew H. Green pushed home the fight against the Tweed Ring. The Post always credited Tilden with being the chief agent in proving the actual guilt of Tweed’s lieutenants. During the spring of 1873 an acrimonious controversy was carried on between Tilden and the Times, turning in the main upon a new Charter proposed at Albany, which Tilden attacked and the Times defended. Tilden used the Post for the publication of his letters, and Bryant editorially supported him.
As Governor, Tilden invited Bryant in the early weeks of 1875 to pay him a visit at the Executive Mansion, and the editor accepted. Both branches of the Legislature tendered Bryant a public reception, the first time that the State had paid such an honor to any man of letters. At a dinner party on Tilden’s birthday, Bryant, in toasting the Governor, said that the public would not be displeased if his present position proved a stepping-stone to the Presidency. At all times the Post, like other New York papers, expressed golden opinions of Tilden’s administration, and in especial of his attacks upon the “Canal Ring,” a bi-partisan organization which had gained huge sums through fraudulent contracts for the repair of the State canals.
It was therefore natural that when in 1876 the election of a successor to Grant approached, Tilden’s friends had a strong hope that Bryant and the Evening Post would lend the Governor their support. The newspaper gave no advance hint of its attitude. When Hayes was nominated by the Republicans on June 16, it, like all other independent journals, was pleased. Its overshadowing fear had been that Blaine, whom it detested as dishonest, would be named, and it saw in Hayes as good a man as its own previous favorite, Bristow of Kentucky. While some sneered at the nomination as negative and weak, the Post predicted that it would “turn out to be positive and strong.” On the other hand, it thought the platform poor. It called the civil service plank platitudinous and empty, and the currency plank, which temporized with regard to specie resumption, worse still.
Nor did the Evening Post immediately commit itself after the Democratic Convention. Over Tilden’s nomination it rejoiced even more than over that of Hayes. It recognized his sterling integrity and zeal as a reformer and was delighted that he had beaten both Tammany and the mediocre Western aspirants, Senator Thurman and Gov. Hendricks. But it did not openly pronounce for him, and its comment upon the Democratic platform maintained a careful impartiality. “In respect to financial reform their position is worse than that of the Republicans; in respect to a reform of the civil service they offer nothing better; in respect to revenue reform they have done better.” The decision was left until after the 4th of July.
All the influence of Bigelow, who sometimes still wrote editorials for the Post, was in favor of Tilden. He was the candidate’s campaign manager, and would be Secretary of State if Tilden won. So was all the influence of Parke Godwin, Bryant’s son-in-law and formerly a part owner. Bryant’s own friendship for Tilden weighed heavily in the balance. But the decision was not, as the public supposed, Bryant’s alone. Some years earlier the Evening Post had been reorganized as a joint stock company, and Bryant held exactly half, not a majority, of the shares. The other half were owned by Isaac Henderson, the able, smooth-tongued, rubicund business manager, who had been a partner since the early fifties, and whose influence as Bryant became older gradually extended outside the business office to the editorial rooms. His one anxiety for the Evening Post was that it should pay fat dividends, and he was no more scrupulous as to the means than the business managers of other newspapers. Mr. J. Ranken Towse tells us how distinct by 1876 was the influence he exerted upon the editorial policy:
It was not often that legitimate exception could be taken to its utterances, but as much could not be said of its unaccountable reticences. For some of these there may have been a good and sufficient reason, at which I cannot even guess, but there were others which could be understood only too easily. The simple fact is that William Cullen Bryant, though editor-in-chief and half owner, was by no means in absolute control of the paper. Between the counting room and the editorial department there was a constant, silent, irrepressible conflict, not to say antagonism—for I have always been convinced that the limits of it were defined by some sort of agreement, written or tacit—whenever the question at issue was one of direct commercial profit, which often acted as a bar to the candid discussion of inconvenient topics.
When on June 29 the Post printed its warm but noncommittal praise of Tilden’s nomination, Henderson, who knew that commercial sentiment in New York was in favor of the Republicans, came upstairs and was closeted with Bryant in a long discussion of editorial policy. The next important editorial utterance, July 5, was an angry attack upon the Democratic platform. The Democratic Party was condemned for its “knavish” indifference to sound currency, and was represented as an unsafe organization to be given charge of Southern affairs while they remained so unsettled. On July 6 the Post remarked that the hard-money Tilden, running in 1876 upon a soft-money platform, presented an exact parallel to the high-tariff Greeley running in 1872 upon a low-tariff platform; that “the two canvasses are alike in their treachery, their evasiveness, their shameless surrender of principle.” On July 10 it declared fully for Hayes.
Bigelow and Parke Godwin have published a number of Bryant’s letters relating to this stand by the Evening Post. One is his refusal of Tilden’s request that he let his name head the ticket of Democratic electors. Another is his letter to J. C. Derby explaining that, while he believed Tilden a truer statesman than Hayes, he thought the Republican principles, especially with regard to sound money and the merit system, so much superior that it was impossible to detach the Evening Post from the party that had won the Civil War. He implied that his control of the paper was complete, and said that its utterances had suited him in everything except some details; while Henderson explicitly stated to the somewhat incredulous Derby that this was true. But Bigelow’s and Godwin’s own letters of the time have not been printed, and they show a strong belief that Bryant did not make the Post’s decision. It is sufficient to quote one by Bigelow, dated Albany, July 14:
The principal result of my talk with Henderson was to satisfy me that—[Bigelow simply made a long, wavy line]. The rest I will tell you when I see you.
I can hardly trust myself to talk about the Post. I hope to be spared the necessity of writing about it. But the Evening Post that you and I have known and honored, which educated us and through which we have educated others in political science, I fear no longer exists. The paper which bears its name is no more our Evening Post than the present Commercial Advertiser is the sheet once edited under that name by Col. Stone. I only wish Mr. Bryant had his name stricken out of it.
Allowance must be made for Bigelow’s chagrin. The probability is that Bryant at the end of June was wavering; that Henderson advanced his arguments respectfully but firmly; and that Bryant of his own free will placed the Evening Post behind Hayes. After all, his old associates in attacking Grant, the Liberal Republican leaders, flocked back to the G. O. P. He had the resumption of specie payments close to his heart, and was alarmed by the soft-money convictions of western Democrats; he feared the shock to hopes of civil service reform if a horde of office-hungry Democrats poured into Washington; and the recent conduct of the Democratic House gave him reason to think they would do little for tariff reduction. It was perfectly logical for the journal to stand with the party which it had helped found and had ever since supported, while it would have been hard to find a logical justification for leaving it. Throughout the campaign it stood by Hayes, though with very moderate zeal, and it rejoiced when the Electoral Commission gave him the Presidency. Bryant later wrote that he had never before felt so little interest in a contest for the Presidency. No one ever knew for whom he voted on election day, for, saying with a smile that the ballot was a secret institution, he always refused to tell; Bigelow believed that he voted for neither candidate.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
TWO REBEL LITERARY EDITORS
Amid the eulogies which followed Bryant’s death in 1878, a dissenting note was struck by that short-lived illustrated newspaper, the Daily Graphic. After a disparaging estimate of his poetry, it remarked that he, as one of our most celebrated literary men, should have made the Evening Post the country’s leading critical authority. “It utterly failed to become such an authority. Indeed, it would be hard to say what benefits the existence of the Evening Post has conferred upon literature. We say this in all kindness, and with a full knowledge that there were difficulties in the way of creating a literary journal....”
There was force in this statement of an opportunity missed, though the Graphic exaggerated the Post’s deficiencies, and failed to consider whether they might not be due to lack of public appreciation of anything better. The truth is that till 1881 there was no American newspaper whose literary criticism would now be considered of high standards. This is said with due respect to George Ripley, who after years at Harvard, at Brook farm, and in the ministry which made him personally intimate with most of the New England authors, joined the Tribune in 1849 and remained in its harness until his death. He gave himself up to literary criticism with an industry equaled in our journalistic history by that of W. P. Garrison alone. He began as a man of wide culture; he was so devoted to study and research that in time there were few subjects upon which he could not supply facts and ideas of his own; he was conscientious, unprejudiced, and accustomed to refer to first principles. Tyndall wrote that he had “the grasp of a philosopher and the good taste of a gentleman.” His reviews were easily the best in any American journal, and he had some assistance from Bayard Taylor, John Hay, and other able men. But he was too mild, while he had no thought of sending each new book to a specialist.
Through simple inattention, no regular chair was established for a literary editor by the Post till after the Civil War. In August, 1860, young William Dean Howells applied for such a place, bearing a letter from James T. Fields of the Atlantic, who said: “He chooses the Post of all papers in the Union, and if you get him for your literary work, etc., you will get a lad who will be worth his weight, etc., etc., etc.” Bigelow’s sagacity for once failed him, and Howells was turned away. Later an application from Park Benjamin was rejected. There was little room for reviews during the war, and little inclination on the part of the public to think of pure literature. But when Bryant returned from his last trip to Europe and settled down to translate Homer he finally saw the need for such an editor.
In April, 1867, there reached New York from the South a slight, gaunt man of forty-three, the emaciation of whose face was partly concealed by his heavy beard, but who was as clearly in bad health as in reduced circumstances. He was received with honor by the city’s growing colony of former Confederates. This was John R. Thompson, who had edited the Southern Literary Messenger for thirteen years previous to the war. He was employed by Albion, a weekly devoted to English interests, and then by its feeble successor, Every Afternoon. Meanwhile, E. C. Stedman had introduced him to Bryant, while Bryant’s old friend, William Gilmore Simms, wrote recommending him to notice and assistance. In May, 1868, he was appointed literary editor of the Evening Post, a position which he held five years.
Thompson’s training seemed admirable for the place. He had proved himself one of the ablest conductors of the Southern Literary Messenger, which Poe had edited before him. He gave it not only his personal services without return, but spent his small patrimony to keep it alive. Frank R. Stockton and Donald G. Mitchell among Northern authors received their first recognition from him, while the small band of Southern literary men regarded the magazine as their section’s chief exponent. When in 1859, at John P. Kennedy’s suggestion, he sought the librarianship of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, Longfellow and Edward Everett were among those who wrote recommending him. During the war, while for a time Virginia’s Assistant Secretary of State and later editor of the Richmond Record, he was a kind of laureate of the Confederacy, his spirited verses following many military events of importance. “Ashby,” “The Burial of Latane,” and “Lee to the Rear” are known by every Southern schoolboy, while “Music in Camp” is in every anthology of historical verse. In 1864 he escaped to England on a blockade runner to carry on publicity for the South, and not only worked on the Index, a Confederate organ, but contributed to Blackwood’s, Punch, the Standard, and other periodicals. He was a frequent visitor at Carlyle’s home in Cheyne Row, and is mentioned in Carlyle’s “Reminiscences”, Tennyson entertained him several times at Farringford, and he knew Bulwer, Kingsley, and Thackeray.
He soon became one of the best-liked men on the Post staff. He wrote the extensive review of the first volume of Bryant’s translation of the Iliad in February, 1870, and that of the second that summer; and Bryant came to have him much at his home. There was no more charming conversationalist in New York society. “He had read so variously, observed so minutely, and retained so tenaciously the results of his reading and observation,” Bryant wrote later in the Post, “that he was never at a loss for a topic and never failed to invest what he was speaking of with a rare and original interest. His fund of anecdote was almost inexhaustible, and his ability to illustrate any subject by apt quotation no less remarkable.” John Esten Cooke thought him an unexcelled story-teller, and R. H. Stoddard has agreed.
He was a rebel to be loved, we are told by Watson R. Sperry, later managing editor. “A lot of tall, straggling Virginia gentlemen, ex-soldiers, I fancy, all of them, began to visit the office. Mr. Thompson had a big man’s beard, a delicate body, and a sensitive, feminine nature. He was a bit punctilious, but kindness itself.” His careful attention to dress, verging on foppishness, was less out of place in Bryant’s office than it would have been in Greeley’s or Dana’s. J. Ranken Towse speaks of his personal charm, a reflection of his experience in the best Richmond and London circles. “Though not a marvel of erudition or critical genius, he was a pleasant, cultivated gentleman, refined in taste and manner, genial, humorous, and abundantly capable.”
Unfortunately, Thompson added little to the Post’s literary reputation. In large part this was because of his wretched health, for he steadily wasted away with consumption, was much out of the office, and maintained his energy only by following his doctor’s orders to take large doses of whisky. Early in 1872 his condition was so bad that when Bryant set out for Cuba, the Bahamas, and Mexico, he took Thompson along to escape the rigor of winter. Thompson, moreover, was an essayist and poet rather than a critic. He prepared a book upon his European experiences which was in the bindery of Derby & Jackson when fire destroyed it; and his letters of travel on various vacation tours, with some editorial essays, were his best work for the paper. His most famous poem, the translation of Nadaud’s “Carcassone,” was written in the Evening Post office—“the unfinished manuscript was kicking around on his desk for several days,” says Sperry—but published in Lippincott’s; its popularity rather irritated him.
Even had his health been sound and his critical faculties the best, Thompson could not have made the Post a good literary organ in the present-day sense. It did not want critical or analytic reviews. An entertaining summary or paraphrase would appeal far more to the general reader. Moreover, there was a feeling that American literature was a delicate organism, which needed petting and might have its spirit broken by harsh words. Mr. Towse justly says of Thompson: “His condemnation was apt to be expressed in terms of modified praise. He confined himself largely to what was explanatory or descriptive, though his articles were written fluently and elegantly, were interesting, and had a news, if no great descriptive value.” Bryant reviewed many of the younger poets with the same benignancy with which Howells used to review young novelists in the Easy Chair. The first important volumes of which Thompson wrote notices were the concluding volumes of Froude’s England, Kinglake’s Crimean War, and Motley’s United Netherlands, Raphael Pumpelly’s travels, Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad,” and Miss Alcott’s “Little Women.” The notices consisted of scissors work and tepid comment.
During the years just after the war, indeed, the Post’s columns were singularly devoid of permanent literary interest. The Cary sisters, Miles O’Reilly, and Helen Hunt Jackson contributed verse, and there were various occasional poems, like E. C. Stedman’s “Crete” (1867) and Holmes’s Harvard dinner poem of 1866. Samuel Osgood, for years a prominent minister at the Unitarian Church of the Messiah (Bryant’s church), and a voluminous writer on historical and religious topics, printed many essays. Charles Lanman contributed his interesting recollections of two famous Washington editors, Gales and Seaton, of the National Intelligencer, and there were others of the same small caliber.
The most noteworthy contributions were those, almost the last of his long career, from Bryant’s own pen. The aged poet, after the death of his wife and the conclusion of his translations from Homer, wrote fewer editorials, and many of these at the request of friends, in support of a worthy charity or civic movement. But he did like to write short essays for the editorial page, often printed in minion, on topics ranging from macaronic verse to history and politics. Despite what Hazlitt says of the prose style of poets, that of Bryant was always of unmistakable distinction. When he took such a subject as the beauties of winter as seen at Roslyn (January, 1873), the result was worthy of permanent preservation:
A light but continuous rain fell on Saturday and froze on everything it touched, and wetted the snow only enough to change it on the trees from white to the clearest and most brilliant crystal. So overloaded were they with their icy diamonds that tall cedars bent themselves like nodding plumes, and pines and hemlocks bowed down like tents of cloth of silver over the snowy carpet underneath. The russet leaves of the beeches shone out like frozen leaves of gold, and trunks and boughs and twigs of deciduous trees were as if they had been enameled with melted glass from their very roots to the most delicate extremities. On Sunday morning the sun shone out upon such a landscape as this, to light up, but not to melt, the silvery sheen and the diamond sparkle which winter had sprinkled over all outdoors. One who breathed the exhilaration of the air of that day, and looked upon its wonderful beauty, could hardly find it in the heart to regret the destruction that it caused. But all day long the overloaded trees yielded to the weight of ice, and one who listened could hear in every direction, like the discharge of infantry, the crashing of the falling branches. In some cases whole trees were stripped, leaving only the shattered trunk, a torn and broken shaft with all its glory strewn upon the snow.
Early in 1873 it became evident that Thompson’s condition was desperate. The Post in February, upon the advice of his physician, sent him to Colorado, a step which proved a mistake. He became rapidly worse, started back on April 17, reached the city in a dying state, and passed away at Isaac Henderson’s home on April 30. His funeral in New York was attended by Bryant, Stedman, Richard Watson Gilder, Gen. Pryor, Whitelaw Reid, R. H. Stoddard (whom he made his literary executor, but who did nothing with his manuscripts) and others of prominence; while in Richmond on the same day a meeting was held in his honor by the pulpit, bar, and press in the House of Delegates. His last incomplete review was of the poems of a Southerner, Henry Timrod. Not until 1920 were his own poems collected in a volume sponsored by his alma mater, the University of Virginia.
For some time his place was left unsupplied while Bryant searched for a successor; for the editor had come to the belated conclusion that the literary editorship should be the most important place of its kind in America. While the search was going on, in 1875, the year the Post moved into the fine Bryant Building which Henderson built for it at a cost of $750,000, George Cary Eggleston joined the staff.
Eggleston was a successful young author of thirty-five, though by no means so famous as his elder brother Edward Eggleston, whose “Hoosier Schoolmaster,” appearing in book form in 1872, had sold 20,000 copies within a year. He had crowded into these thirty-five years as much experience as many active men get in a lifetime. Born in Indiana, educated in Virginia, a soldier throughout the war in the Confederate army, later a practicing lawyer in Illinois and Mississippi, he had come to Brooklyn and in 1870 became an editorial writer on Theodore Tilton’s Brooklyn Union. Soon afterward he and Edward Eggleston took joint charge of Hearth and Home, and began putting life into that moribund publication. It was in this effort that Edward Eggleston seized upon his brother’s experiences as a schoolmaster at Riker’s Ridge, Indiana, as a basis for his famous novel. The two were on the high road to success when the magazine was purchased, and both took to free lancing. George Cary Eggleston settled down to writing boys’ books and magazine articles in an orchard-framed farmhouse in New Jersey. He had already published, first in the Atlantic and then in book form, one of the most graphic of Southern war volumes, “A Rebel’s Recollections,” which had been warmly received.
Unfortunately, while at work in his cottage he was swindled out of all his savings by a scoundrelly publisher, and hurried to New York to seek editorial work again. He felt honored to be associated with Bryant; he liked the uncompromising dignity of the Evening Post. It was, he used to say, the completest realization of the ideal of the old Pall Mall Gazette—a newspaper conducted by gentlemen, for gentlemen. His work consisted of assisting Bryant, Sidney Howard Gay, Parke Godwin, and Watson R. Sperry in writing editorials, and was congenial. Incidentally, he helped Bryant in his search for a literary editor. He wrote Thomas Bailey Aldrich, setting forth the dignity of the position, the attractive salary, and the pleasant nature of the work; all of which Aldrich acknowledged, replying: “But, my dear Eggleston, what can the paper offer to compensate one for having to live in New York?”
While affairs were in this posture, Bryant one day entered the Post library and began clambering about on a step-ladder, searching the shelves. Eggleston, from his little den opening off the larger room, saw him hunting, and suggested that he might be able to help find the information wanted. “I think not,” answered Bryant in his curt, cold way, and then added, taking down still another volume: “I’m looking for a line that I ought to know where to find, but do not.” Asking Bryant for the substance of the quotation, Eggleston was fortunately able to recognize it as a half-forgotten passage in Cowley. He seized the office copy of Cowley, turned to the page, and laid it open in Bryant’s hand. The poet seemed surprised, and lost all interest in the quotation. “How,” he demanded, “do you happen to know anything about Cowley?”
Eggleston explained that as a youth upon a Virginia plantation, seized by an overmastering thirst for literature, he had read the books in the libraries of all the old mansions in the county. Bryant settled himself interestedly in a chair of Eggleston’s room. The young man’s half-written editorial for the morrow lay unfinished on the desk, but Bryant never heeded it. For two hours he questioned Eggleston as a candidate for the Ph.D. degree in English is now questioned at his oral examination; inquiring as to his preferences, dislikes, and knowledge of books and authors, and making him defend his opinions. Then he abruptly said “Good afternoon.”
Just before noon the next day the managing editor entered Eggleston’s room with an expression of mingled irritation and amusement. Mr. Bryant had just been in, he reported. “He walked into my office and said to me, ‘Mr. Sperry, I have appointed Mr. Eggleston literary editor. Good morning, Mr. Sperry,’ and walked out again.”
Eggleston’s literary editorship, which endured until the Post changed hands in 1881, was more energetic and fruitful than that of the half-invalid Thompson, partly because he had more money to spend. He was an ambitious, vigorous young man, who knew most of the chief literary figures of the time—Howells, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Stockton, and others met when he edited Hearth and Home. In this Indian summer of the old Post, before Carl Schurz and E. L. Godkin took it over, there was another outburst of poetry in its pages. It published Bryant’s “Christmas in 1875” and his “Centennial Hymn, 1876”; Whittier’s poem to the memory of Halleck a year later; and E. C. Stedman’s “Hawthorne.” Charles Follen Adams, author of the “Leedle Yawcob Strauss” poems, contributed repeatedly. It is interesting to find verse written by A. A. Adee while he was secretary of legation in Madrid; by William Roscoe Thayer; by Edgar Fawcett, the satirical novelist; by the late F. W. Gunsaulus, Chicago’s most famous preacher; by Edward Eggleston and Agnes Repplier. There were also interesting prose contributions. E. P. Roe wrote upon—gardening! Benton J. Lossing sent some historical articles in his last years; and W. O. Stoddard, who had been Lincoln’s secretary during the Civil War, contributed both prose and verse. Bret Harte for a time had a connection with the Post, which enabled him to appear regularly for his pay, though his writing was most irregular; his work is not identifiable.
The literary correspondence of the journal was greatly strengthened. Regular letters were sent from Boston by George Parsons Lathrop, Hawthorne’s son-in-law, who during part of this period was assistant editor of the Atlantic, and well known for his books. His report (Feb. 27, 1878) of Emerson’s long-awaited delivery of his lecture on “The Fortune of the Republic”—the sunlight streaming through a window of Old South upon the speaker’s face, his manuscript placed on the flag draping the pulpit, a distinguished audience hanging on his words—was a fine bit of writing. Elie Reclus, the eminent French geographer, wrote upon French literature, as did Edward King, while there were Italian and London correspondents. From various American hands came gossip about rising literary men of the day, like the following vignette of a young lecturer named John Fiske:
His vast learning is appalling to the ordinary man.... His mind is so clear that it is said he never copies his manuscript. He writes slowly—the right thought following its predecessor with unerring precision, the fit word dropping into its place; and with this enviable faculty of composition, of understanding thoroughly, and putting on paper just as he has in mind what he sees so clearly, he works right on, far into the night, scarcely feeling the need which most writers have of mental rest. He is so deliberate and to be relied on that once seeing the man, and knowing his diligence and habits of investigation and method of writing, you cannot entertain a doubt that he will accomplish whatever he sets himself to do....
He is of a very simple and sincere nature; and of Saxon complexion and hair.... He has a rosy face, auburn beard and hair—the latter in short, crisp curls—and brown eyes as round as marbles, which, seen through the glasses he always wears, seem to have just looked up from some absorbing study and to be scarcely yet ready to take in the common scenes of life. His is not a changeful countenance, but of the same calm, self-reliant expression on all occasions, as if he took the world philosophically and was always in good humor with it. He is solid, inclined to the sluggish in build and motion, and is slow of utterance, speaking in measured phrases with his teeth half shut.
But the standard of literary criticism was very little raised by Eggleston. Some light is thrown upon his aims by his rejoinder to a fellow Virginian, E. S. Nadal, who in the Atlantic in 1877 accused newspaper critics of yielding to pressure from the advertisers, and of refusing to treat harshly writers they personally knew. Eggleston indignantly denied both allegations, remarking that he had reviewed “several thousands of good and bad books” without thought of advertising or personal friendship. He added that Nadal had mistaken the function of the newspaper literary critic. It could not be so elevated, analytic, and rigid as magazine reviewing. The newspaper writer’s chief business was not to point out faults, but “to tell newspaper readers what books are published, and what sort of book each of them is, so that the reader may decide for himself what books to buy. His work is not so much criticism as description. It is in the nature of news and comment upon news, and the newspaper reviewer rightly omits much in the way of adverse criticism.” Eggleston’s successor proved how utterly fallacious was this statement.
In accordance with it, we find the great majority of volumes—travels like Burnaby’s “Ride to Khiva,” biographies like Mrs. Charles Kingsley’s “Letters and Memorials” of her husband, histories like Symonds’s “Renaissance in Italy”—merely scissored and summarized. Eggleston plumed himself upon being the first to give a thorough account, thought quite uncritical, of the most important books. Thus Elie Reclus in 1877 sent the Post a scoop upon Hugo’s new “History of a Crime”; and a few months later it was delighted to give, in a column and a half, the first résumé of Schliemann’s story of his discoveries at Mycenæ. Eggleston was alert to obtain advance sheets of new books, and the morning newspapers complained that the publishers made him a favorite. When Tennyson’s “Harold” was issued late in 1876, there was no previous announcement, and a copy was sent all American and British literary editors precisely at noon. The Evening Post reviews for that day were already in the forms, and only an hour remained before the first edition went to press. But Eggleston resolved to anticipate the morning papers, enlisted Foreman Dithmar of the composing room, hurriedly prepared two columns of quotation and comment, and had them in type ready for the front page within his time-limit. This exploit, in which it is hard to share his pride, reminds us of the story of Hugo’s “Legend of the Ages” reaching the Tribune office just before Bayard Taylor left for the night, and of how Taylor within fifteen hours finished an “exhaustive” review, including translations of five poems.
Nevertheless, from time to time a genuinely critical bit of writing emerged in the Post. The reviews of Howells’s “A Foregone Conclusion” in 1875 and of Henry James’s “The American” in 1877, both appreciative, would do credit to any literary journal to-day. Parke Godwin wrote solid historical criticism. The paper was sufficiently discriminating to prefer the best of Constance Fenimore Woolson to the second-best of Bret Harte. Its worst misstep, shared by almost every other American journal, was its low estimate of “Tom Sawyer” in 1877. It thought the first half passable—“fairly entitled to rank with Mr. Aldrich’s ‘Story of a Bad Boy’”—but the second half poor, and it issued the grave warning: “Certainly it will be in the last degree unsafe to put the book into the hands of imitative youth.”
The subject of international copyright had been reopened in 1867 by an article in the Atlantic, and the republication of Henry C. Carey’s hostile essays; but a bill failed in Congress in 1868 and another in 1871. Bryant saw that the Evening Post kept up its campaign for a reform. Some publishers, led by Putnam’s and J. R. Osgood & Co., were for a liberal law, but others, like Harper & Brothers, stood opposed; while the type-founders, paper-makers, and binders throughout the Union were hostile. Carey’s school held that international copyright would produce a centralized monopoly of bookmaking, and included many booksellers of the Middle and Western States who complained that the bulk of English reprints were already monopolized by four or five Eastern firms. Carey also thought that the best way of giving an author his due would be simply to compel payment of a royalty to him. But the Post in 1877 took the view that the chief obstacle to international copyright lay in the conviction of many manufacturers and farmers of the West that the patent system was uneconomic and injurious, and their inclination to regard copyright as a kind of patent.
From Eggleston we learn nearly as much of Bryant in his editorial capacity as from Bigelow and Parke Godwin. Bryant regarded anonymous criticism, he told Eggleston, “as a thing quite as despicable, unmanly, and cowardly as an anonymous letter.” Eggleston’s own notices were unsigned, but Bryant had given prominence to the fact that he was literary editor, sending every publisher an announcement, and it was the rule that contributed criticism should bear at least an initial. Once when Eggleston was about to publish an anonymous review by R. H. Stoddard, Bryant’s indignant objections were with difficulty silenced. According to the literary editor, Bryant’s printed index expurgatorius by no means included all the words to which he objected; he tried to rule out “numerous” for “many,” “people” for “persons,” “monthly” for “monthly magazine,” and so on. He was accustomed to refer to Johnson’s dictionary as an authority instead of later works. Eggleston recalls the vigor of Bryant’s literary prejudices, one of them apparently evinced by his refusal to have the least share in the unveiling of the Poe monument in Baltimore.
Yet he lays emphasis upon Bryant’s unwillingness to deal severely with fellow poets. The old editor said he had always found it possible to say something good about the writings of the poorest—to praise some line, some epithet, at least. Once Eggleston in despair showed him a volume of which it was impossible to commend a single word. Bryant admitted that it was idiotic; he admitted that even the cover was an affront to taste; but, he said, looking at it with an expression of total disgust, “You can commend the publishers for putting it on well.” This was one expression of Bryant’s innate gentleness. He was seriously distressed when some scribbler of verse on one occasion caught up a single commendatory phrase in Eggleston’s unfavorable review, and asked Bryant to allow him to use that phrase as an advertisement, with Bryant’s own name attached. Eggleston answered the appeal, and did it forcibly. The poet would change his “day” at the office, or would work in the composing room, to avoid bores, but he never would be impolite to them. Once, indeed, a literary hack pestered him all morning in an effort to obtain the material for articles to publish upon Bryant when he died. Bryant came in obviously disturbed, and said to Eggleston in his mild way: “I tried to be patient, but I fear I was rude to him at the last. There seemed to be no other way of getting rid of him.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WARFARE WITHIN THE OFFICE: PARKE GODWIN’S EDITORSHIP
Six weeks before Bryant’s death preparations were made, as with a prevision of that event, for the uninterrupted control of the newspaper by his family. A reorganization was forced, under circumstances later to be recounted, upon the business manager, Isaac Henderson. The poet assigned the presidency of the Evening Post Company to Judge John J. Monell, but kept the editorship; Henderson resigned as publisher and was succeeded by his son, Isaac, Jr.; and Parke Godwin became a trustee, resuming his connection as a writer on artistic, scientific, and literary topics. In June, 1878, immediately after the funeral of Bryant, Godwin, his son-in-law, took his place, and was formally named editor in December. His editorship, which endured but three years, affords an opportunity to pause for a survey of the men who made the Evening Post of the seventies, and of the figure believed by many to be trying to unmake it.
The newspaper establishment of which Godwin became head was one which, small and antiquated though it would seem now, had made extraordinary strides since the Civil War. During the conflict it had been housed in a dingy, rickety firetrap on the northwest corner of Liberty and Nassau Streets, where it had its publication office on the first floor, its five small editorial rooms together with the composing room on the third floor, and its presses in the basement. But in 1874–5 Henderson had erected a new and imposing building of ten stories on the corner of Fulton and Broadway, which the Post occupied until 1907. Here the composing rooms, unusually spacious and well-lighted, were on the top floor, the editorial rooms next below, and the offices on the ground floor.
It was necessary then to be near the postoffice to ensure the early delivery of mails, and there being no “tickers,” evening papers had also to be near Wall Street. Stock quotations were long printed from the official sheet of the Stock Exchange. A messenger boy was kept waiting for the first copy of this publication, and it was hurried to the newspaper office, there cut into small “takes,” and put into type with all possible speed. In the seventies and early eighties the Post was printed from a huge eight-cylinder press, direct from type which was locked upon the curved cylinders, while men standing in tiers upon each side fed in the paper. The last minutes before the press hour in the composing room, as the managing editor stood over the forms and decided what news should be killed, what used, and what held over, were highly exciting.
As for the staff, though still small, it had been steadily enlarged in the sixties and seventies. The first managing editor was Charles Nordhoff, who came in 1860, when the title was still an innovation, having recently been borrowed from the London Times by the Tribune to apply to Dana. For a generation it signified not a mere manager of the news columns, as it did later, but a man who in the absence of the editor performed all his functions. When Bryant was not in the office, and Godwin did not supply his place, Nordhoff was expected to take charge of the editorial page. The first literary editor, as we have seen, John R. Thompson, was employed in 1868; for a time he was expected also to review some plays, but within a few years the Evening Post had a special musical and dramatic editor in the person of William F. Williams, and by the middle seventies Williams was practically confining himself to music while J. Ranken Towse took over, to its vast improvement, the dramatic criticism. Thus there were three valuable employees doing work which had previously been ill-done or done not at all. As for the news force, when in 1871 William Alexander Linn accepted the position of city editor, he found it to consist, besides himself, of six men. These were the managing editor, at this date Charlton Lewis; his assistant, Bronson Howard; the telegraph editor, financial editor, one salaried reporter, and one reporter “on space.”
It would have been impossible to cover the news with this force had there not been a city news association which lent valuable assistance. Even then, in emergencies Linn had sometimes to call upon the bright young men of the composing room to accept assignments, and developed some good journalists in this way. The foreman of the composing room, Dithmar, was a German of rare culture, who with little early schooling had mastered five languages, and whom Bryant sometimes delighted in pitting against pretentious men of small attainments. Indeed, Bryant often discussed poetry, German philosophy, and journalistic problems with him in the most intimate fashion. He maintained an almost tyrannical discipline in his department, sometimes quarreled violently with the managing editor when the latter wanted copy set which would necessitate the killing of matter already in type, and even claimed the right to protest to the editors against their editorial views whenever the latter displeased him. Later he was appointed American consul at Breslau, Germany, and filled the position with credit. One of the compositors whom he recommended to Linn speedily made his mark as a political reporter, and was for more than twenty years the Washington correspondent of the Times.
The managing editors who succeeded Nordhoff after his resignation in 1871 were all men of distinction. Charlton Lewis, the first, was characterized by Harper’s Weekly when he died as “a college graduate who knew Latin.” As a matter of fact, his versatility, his ability to win distinction in many different fields, was remarkable. He became well known in classical circles by his prodigious labors in producing the Latin Dictionary published under his name, a revision and expansion of Freund’s. He published translations from the German, and at the time of his death he was engaged in writing a commentary upon Dante. It is said that a professor of astronomy, chatting with him for an hour upon the science, expressed astonishment later upon being told that Lewis was not an astronomer by profession; the mistake was natural, for Lewis—who had taught both the classics and mathematics at Union College—was really proficient in mathematical astronomy. His chief practical success was in the insurance field, where he became one of the greatest authorities upon both the legal and mathematical aspects of insurance; while he is now remembered principally for his almost life-long attention to the problems of charities and corrections. When managing editor of the Post in the early seventies, be induced E. C. Wines to write a series of articles upon prison reform in the various States. Later he became interested in the movement for probation and parole, and for years was president of both the National Prison Association and Prison Association of New York. He made an able managing editor, though he was not wholly liked or trusted by some members of the staff. Mr. Towse writes:
He did not, as I remember, interfere much, if at all, with the general organization, confining himself mainly to the supervision of the editorial page, for which he wrote with his usual fluency, cogency, and eloquence. He produced copy with extraordinary rapidity and neatness, seldom making corrections of any kind. The natural alertness of his intellect was reinforced by an immense amount of varied and precise knowledge, and he impressed every one with a sense of his solid and brilliant competency.
Lewis was followed by Arthur G. Sedgwick, the brother-in-law of Charles Eliot Norton, a brilliant young writer whose promise had been early discerned by E. L. Godkin, and who had now been working for some years with Godkin in the office of the Nation. That fact alone would be a sufficient evidence of his ability and character. As W. C. Brownell wrote years later, Sedgwick’s style was “the acme of well-bred simplicity, argumentative cogency, and as clear as a bell, because he simply never experienced mental confusion.” The editorial page could not have been in better hands than his, but his connection with the Post was—at this time—brief. The fourth managing editor was Sidney Howard Gay, who wrote an excellent short life of Madison for the American Statesmen Series, and whose name is linked with Bryant’s by their nominal co-authorship of a four-volume history of the United States. As a matter of fact, Bryant supplied only the introduction and a little early advice, Gay deserving the whole credit for the work. It is badly proportioned, but in large part based upon original research, and readable in style. Gay was not merely an industrious historian, but a capable journalist, who had been trained on the Tribune in association with Greeley, Ripley, and Bayard Taylor.
The most notable of the other employees of the Evening Post in the seventies was Newton F. Whiting, the financial editor, who was followed and esteemed by the financial community as few journalists have ever been. It was far more difficult then than now to obtain a financial editor who could be trusted to abstain rigidly from dabbling in Wall Street and to hold the scales even between rival commercial interests. John Bigelow relates that in the fifties he once spoke of this difficulty at the Press Club to Dana. “Well,” said Dana, “how could you expect to get a man in that department who wouldn’t speculate?”—a rejoinder that Bigelow rightly thought a little shocking. But Whiting filled his position with an integrity that was not only absolute, but never even questioned; and with a quickness of intelligence, soundness of judgment, and scrupulous accuracy that made his death in the fall of 1882 a shock to down-town New York. Had he lived longer he would have become a figure of national prominence. The words of a memorial pamphlet issued in his honor were not a whit exaggerated:
His ability to unravel a difficult situation in Wall Street was remarkable. In the event of a sudden crisis, the facts bearing on it were immediately ascertained and lucidly exposed; and the service thus rendered in the early editorials of the Evening Post has often proved the means of turning a morning of panic into an afternoon of confidence. His service in arresting the progress of distrust on such occasions has perhaps never been fully estimated. The widespread feeling of regret in Wall Street on the news of his decease was in no small degree expressive of the loss of a helmsman in whom all had been accustomed to trust.
Becoming financial editor in 1868, it was he who condemned the Federal Government’s interference in the “Black Friday” crisis, when its sudden sale of $4,000,000 in gold in New York city destroyed the plans of Jay Gould and James Fisk, jr., for cornering the gold market. Whiting’s contention was that the importation of gold from Europe and other points would have crushed the corner anyway, and that it was not the Treasury’s business to intervene in a battle between rival gangs of speculators, particularly since it had promised not to sell gold without due notice. He believed in hard money and wrote many of the Post’s editorials against the greenback movement. Being totally opposed to the coinage of silver by the United States so long as other nations declined to coöperate in establishing the double standard upon a permanent basis, for years he daily placarded the depreciation of the standard silver dollar at the head of the Post’s money column—a device that greatly irritated silver men. His rugged strength of character was well set off by a rugged body, for he was broad-shouldered, deep-chested, and an expert horseman, boxer, and wrestler. No man in the office was better liked.
The telegraph editor under Nordhoff was Augustus Maverick, known to all students of journalism by his volume on “Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press”; a good newspaper man, but a swaggering, egotistical fellow, whose Irish hot temper and tendency to domineer over others marked him for a stormy career. He was soon dismissed from the Post for insubordination, he made an unfortunate marriage, and his life had a tragic end. The musical editor, William F. Williams, was for some time also organist of St. George’s Church. Those were the days of Mapleson and Italian opera, when a genuinely critical review would have been thought cruel, and Williams supplied the perfunctory and kindly notices wanted by the managers; the distribution of tickets in return was always generous. He was a burly, genial fellow, a veritable Count Fosco in physical appearance, and with something of the indolence which accorded with his flesh. When he found that J. Ranken Towse was keenly interested in the theater, he gladly permitted Towse to represent him upon even highly important occasions; and thus was responsible for the beginnings of dramatic criticism of a high order in the Post.
From one point of view, Parke Godwin will be seen to have succeeded to editorial control of an influential organ, ably equipped and officered, and making from $50,000 to $75,000 a year for its owners. From another point of view, he succeeded to an irrepressible conflict, and the Evening Post was only the arena in which he was to fight to the bitter end with a wary, persistent, and experienced antagonist. The struggle was between the Bryant and Henderson families for possession of the Post; between the counting room and the editorial room for the dictation of its policy. It had covertly begun while Bryant was alive, and now became open.
Isaac Henderson by 1868 was in a well entrenched position. He had one-half of the stock of the newspaper, fifty or even fifty-one shares; he owned the building outright; his son, Isaac, jr., was in training to succeed him as publisher; and his son-in-law, Watson R. Sperry, an able and honorable young graduate of Yale, had become managing editor. It was becoming plain that Henderson wished to acquire unquestioned control, to install Sperry as editor, and make the Evening Post a family possession. What was the character of the man who thus seemed on the point of obtaining “Bryant’s newspaper”?
It would be easy, from the evidence of his enemies, to take too harsh a view of Isaac Henderson. We must remember that standards of political and business morality were low after the Civil War. The fairest judgment is that Henderson was simply an average product of the days which, while they produced Peter Cooper, produced also Jim Fisk, Daniel Drew, and Jay Gould. His constant thought was of dollars and cents. On Sundays he was a prominent member of a Brooklyn Methodist church; on weekdays he was intent upon driving the hardest bargain he legitimately could. He built up the Evening Post from a weak and struggling journal into a great property, which in one year of the war divided more than $200,000 in profits; from a $7 a week clerk he became a millionaire. His tastes were mercenary, and he had the sharpness of a Yankee horse-trader, but there is no conclusive evidence that he ever did what the business man of his time would have called a clearly dishonest act. When he undertook to acquire the site of his building, owned by the Old Dutch Church, he made an investigation, found that there was a two-inch strip fronting on Broadway that the church did not own, quietly obtained title to it, and—if we may believe the Evening Telegram of July 29, 1879—in the subsequent negotiations “profited by his discovery in the pleasant sum of $125,000, the largest price ever paid for a lot two inches wide.” At the time many thought such an exploit creditable, and Henderson fitted his time.
Henderson faced his gravest charge when in January, 1864, he was dismissed from the office of Navy Agent in New York on the ground that he had accepted commissions upon contracts let for the government. Gideon Welles’s Diary for the summer of 1864 contains many references to this affair. It states that on one occasion Welles discussed the matter with Lincoln, “who thereupon brought out a correspondence that had taken place between himself and W. C. Bryant. The latter averred that H. was innocent, and denounced Savage, the principal witness against him, because arrested and under bonds. To this the President replied that the character of Savage before his arrest was as good as Henderson’s before he was arrested. He stated that he knew nothing of H.’s alleged malfeasance until brought to his notice by me, in a letter, already written, for his removal; that he inquired of me if I was satisfied he was guilty; that I said he was; and that he then directed, or said to me, ‘Go ahead, let him be removed.’” It is a fact that Bryant never wavered in his faith in his partner. The charges had their origin in the malice of Thurlow Weed, who, angered by persistent attacks made upon him by the Evening Post, sought out the information which he believed to justify them, and laid them before Welles. In May, 1865, they came to a trial in the Federal Circuit Court under Judge Nelson. The prosecution brought forward a strong array of legal talent, while Henderson was represented by Judge Pierrepont and Wm. M. Evarts; the case against him utterly broke down, the judge said as much in his charge, and without leaving their seats the jury rendered a verdict of acquittal.
Circumstances, however, inclined many to regard the verdict as one of “Not Proved” only. It is important to note that Parke Godwin, then owner of one-third of the Post, stated in a letter to Bryant, July 31, 1865, his reasons for thinking the charges true:
I infer from a remark made by Mrs. Bryant, on Saturday evening, that she still has confidence in Mr. Henderson, and as I have not, I will tell you why. I will do so in writing, because I have found writing less liable to mistake or misconstruction than what is said by word of mouth.
I. My impressions are quite decided that Mr. H. has been guilty of the malpractices charged upon him by the government, for these reasons: (1) His own clerk (Mr. Blood) admitted the receipt of $70,000 as commissions, and that these were deposited by Mr. Henderson as his own, in his own bank; (2) the prosecuting attorneys, Mr. Noyes, Judge Bosworth, D. S. Dickinson, asserted that over $100,000, as they are able to prove positively, were paid into his office as commissions; Mr. Noyes told me that there could be no doubt of this; (3) other lawyers (Mr. Marbury, for instance) assure me that clients of theirs know of the habits of the office in this respect, and would testify if legally called upon; (4) his private bank account shows very large transactions, which are said to correspond singularly with the entries in the books of the contractors implicated with him.
II. Supposing him not guilty, the efforts he made and was Willing to make to screen himself from prosecution, were to say the least singular; but they were more than that; they were of a kind no upright citizen could resort to or sanction. He tried to tamper with the Grand Jury, he tried to buy up the District Attorney, he “secured,” as D. D. told me, the petit jury, and he was negotiating, at the time the trial came on, to purchase Fox. These are things difficult to reconcile with any supposition of the man’s integrity or honor.
III. Admitting him, however, to be wholly innocent, his position before the public has become such that it is a source of the most serious mortification and embarrassment to the conductors of the Evening Post. We cannot brand a defaulter, condemn peculation, urge official economy, or get into any sort of controversy with other journals, without having the charges against Henderson, which nine tenths of the public believe to be true, flung in our faces. Not once, but two dozen times, I have been shut up by a rejoinder of this sort. Mr. Nordhoff has felt this, in his private intercourse as well as in a public way, to such an extent that he has told me peremptorily and positively that he would not continue in the paper if Mr. Henderson retained an active part in connection with it. Now, it seems to me that if there were any feeling of delicacy in Mr. Henderson, any regard for the sensitiveness of others, any care for the reputation and independence of the paper, he would be willing to relieve us of this most injurious and unpleasant predicament.
IV. I will add, that I am not satisfied with his management of our business affairs; he gives them very little of his attention, though he pretends to do so; he is largely and constantly engaged in outside speculations, in grain, provisions, etc.; and in one instance, as our books show, he has given himself a fictitious credit of $7,000, which was irregular....
Whether commissions were actually taken none can now say; the essential fact is that the man who was to be editor of the Post had thus early made up his mind to distrust and detest the tall, florid publisher of the paper. Godwin actually proposed to Henderson at this date that the latter sell out to William Dorsheimer, a well-known lawyer, later lieutenant-governor, who was willing to buy, but Henderson naturally refused to leave under fire. Godwin ultimately consented to stay with the Post until Bryant had refreshed himself from his Civil War labors by a European trip; but in 1868 he sold his third share to Bryant and Henderson for $200,000, and gladly left the office for the time being. Nordhoff remained longer, but with unabated dislike for Henderson, and at the crisis of the Tweed fight, as we have seen, thought it necessary to resign. Most of the editorial employees of the Post disliked the publisher. He practiced a penny-pinching economy. The building superintendent was required to send up a daily statement of the coal used. Ill-paid workers, coming into his office to ask for more wages, would state their case and then note that his eyes were fixed suggestively upon the maxim, one of many framed on the walls, “Learn to Labor and to Wait.” But Bryant seems never to have lost his confidence in him. Every one agrees that one of Henderson’s best traits was an almost boyish admiration and deference for Bryant, and that he would never do anything to offend the poet.
By the middle seventies the Civil War charges against Henderson were largely forgotten. The danger to be apprehended from his activities and ambition was not that the Evening Post would be brought under dishonest management, but simply that it would be brought under a management which thought first and always of money-making, steered its course for the greatest patronage, and shrank from such self-sacrificing independence as the paper had displayed in the Bank war or the early stages of the slavery struggle. Henderson never thought of it as a sternly impartial guide of public opinion; he thought of it as a producer of revenue. His whole later record as a publisher, as Bryant aged, shows this.
The seventies were the hey-day of the “reading notice,” and in printing veiled advertisements the Post only followed nearly all other newspapers. Washington Gladden left the Independent, the leading religious weekly of the day, recently edited by Beecher and Tilton, in 1871, because no fewer than three departments—an Insurance Department, a Financial Department, and a department of “Publishers’ Notices”—were so edited and printed that, though pure advertising at $1 a line, they appeared to a majority of readers as editorial matter. These advertising items were frequently quoted in other journals as utterances of the Independent. The Times as late as 1886 was placed in an embarrassing position by divulgence of the fact that it had received $1,200 from the Bell Telephone Company for publishing an advertisement which many readers would take to be an editorial. No “reading notices” ever appeared in the editorial columns of the Post, and Whiting would instantly have resigned had an effort been made to place one in the financial columns; but they were discreditably frequent in the news pages. Occasionally a string of them would emerge under the heading, “Shopping Notes”; at Christmas they were prominently displayed on the front page as “Holiday Notices”; and sometimes the unwary reader would commence what looked like a poem and find it ending:
Ye who with languor droop and fade,
Or ye whom fiercer illness thrills;
Call the blest compound to your aid—
Trust to Brandreth’s precious pills.
But where the influence of the business office was seen in its most pernicious form was in efforts to muzzle the treatment of the news and to color editorial opinion. W. G. Boggs, now a tall, thin, white-haired old man, was the advertising manager, with a wide and intimate acquaintance among commercial men and politicians, and with an endless succession of axes to grind. “He was the most familiar representative of the publication in the editorial rooms,” says Mr. Towse, “and manifested a special interest in the suppression of any paragraph, or allusion, that might offend the dispensers of political advertising, which in those days was an important source of revenue.” Tammany gave much printing to the Post’s job office until 1871. Henderson himself almost never interfered—Mr. Sperry recalls only one harmless instance during his managing editorship. But in 1872 a dramatic incident lit up the situation as by a bolt of lightning. Arthur G. Sedgwick had just become managing editor, giving the editorial page new strength. At this time there was much talk of maladministration and graft in the Parks Department. One day Sedgwick, chatting with J. Ranken Towse upon the subject, remarked that although the rascality was clear, there appeared no indication in it of connivance by the Commissioner, Van Nort. Towse dissented, saying that the man was hand in glove with Tammany, and must be fully cognizant of all that was going on. He suggested that Van Nort had escaped suspicion because he was a social favorite, superior in manners and culture to most politicians, and because he had used his advertising patronage in a manner to please all New York papers. To enforce his argument, he directed Sedgwick’s attention to a number of highly suspicious transactions. Sedgwick, he states:
saw the points promptly, and bade me write an editorial paragraph embodying them and demanding explanations. I told him it would be as much as my place was worth to write such an article. He replied, somewhat hotly, that he, not I, was responsible for the editorial page, and peremptorily told me to write as he had directed. So I furnished the paragraph, which, to the best of my recollection, was largely an enumeration of undeniable facts for which Van Nort, as the head of his department, was officially responsible, and which he ought to be ready to explain. It was put into type and printed as an editorial in the first edition. The paper was scarcely off the press when the expected storm broke. Mr. Henderson, ordinarily cold and self-restrained, passed hurriedly through my room in a state of manifest excitement, with an early copy of the edition in his hand. Entering the adjoining room of Mr. Sedgwick, he denounced my unlucky article, and demanded its instant suppression. A brief but heated altercation followed; Henderson insisting that the article was scandalous and libelous, and must be withdrawn, and Sedgwick asserting his sole authority in the matter and declaring that, so long as he was managing editor, the article would remain as it stood. Finally Henderson withdrew, but meanwhile the press had been stopped, and the objectionable paragraph removed from the form. Before the afternoon was over Sedgwick handed in his resignation and returned to the service of the Nation.
As Mr. Towse adds, probably Bryant, now too old to be much in the office, never knew the precise truth of this affair; and if he did, may have thought that his interference would be bootless, and would only intensify the irritation of the episode. But we can see why men jocularly called Henderson “the wicked partner,” and the Post a Spenlow and Jorkins establishment.
Parke Godwin maintained his attitude of constant suspicion toward the paper’s publisher. Two years after the sale of his third share of the Post, he obtained evidence which convinced him, as he wrote Bryant, that he had been overreached by Henderson “to the extent of one hundred thousand dollars at least.” His efforts to institute an inquiry came to nothing, and he ended them by sending the poet a solemn note of warning: “I regard Mr. Henderson as a far-seeing and adroit rogue; his design from the beginning has been and still is to get exclusive possession of the Evening Post, at much less than its real value, which I expected to prove was much more nearly a million than half a million dollars” (July, 1870). Early in the seventies he took charge of the Post for various short periods, and what he then observed increased his apprehensions, or, as Henderson’s defenders would say, his prejudices. At the beginning of 1878 he prevailed upon Bryant to have an investigation of the newspaper’s finances made by Judge Monell, and the result was the reorganization already chronicled.
In brief, Judge Monell’s inquiries showed that very large sums were owed to Bryant by Henderson, and that for a long period Henderson’s private financial affairs, which had been subjected to a severe strain by his erection of the new building, had not been properly separated from those of the Evening Post. Had it not been for these disclosures, the astute business manager would undoubtedly have been able to step forward soon after Bryant’s death and take control. But he could not immediately meet his debts to the Bryant family, and was forced to consent to an arrangement which wrecked whatever plans in that direction he may have laid. Henderson owned fifty shares, Bryant forty-eight, Julia Bryant one, and Judge Monell one. Under the new arrangement Henderson pledged thirty of his shares to Bryant as security for his debts, and twenty to Parke Godwin, who reëntered the company, while Bryant also pledged twenty shares to Godwin. The Board of Trustees was so constituted that the position of the Bryant family was made secure. Henderson intended to move heaven and earth to redeem his shares; but, wrote Judge Monell in an opinion for the family, even if he did that “he cannot change the direction nor regain control. This can only be done by persons holding a majority of the stock.”
Godwin when made editor was regarded as one of the ablest and most experienced journalists in New York. Far behind him were the youthful, enthusiastic days of the forties, when he had been an ardent apostle of Fourierism, had applauded the Brook Farm experiment, helping edit the organ of that community, the Harbinger, and had advised his friend Charles A. Dana that it was possible for a young journalist to cultivate high thinking and high ambitions in New York on $1,000 a year. He had worked like a Trojan then on the Post, and had made several unsuccessful ventures into the magazine field. Far behind him were the pinched years of the fifties when, having temporarily left the Post, he was associate editor of the struggling Putnam’s Magazine, and gave it national reputation by his vigorous assaults upon the slavery forces and President Pierce. It was with a touch of bitterness that he had complained in 1860, when he rejoined the Evening Post, that the latter had never paid him more than $50 a week. But, purchasing Bigelow’s share of the paper at a bargain, its Civil War profits made him rich.
The editorial writing done by Godwin had not the eloquence or finish of Bryant’s, but it showed an equal grasp of political principles, and a better understanding of economic problems. He was a real scholar, the author of many books, able to appeal to cultivated audiences. His legal, literary, and historical studies gave him a distinct advantage over the ordinary journalist of the time, not college bred and too busy for wide reading. Young Henry Watterson justly wrote of him in 1871, when he had temporarily left his profession again:
It is a thousand pities that a man of Parke Godwin’s strength of mind and strength of principle is by any chance or cause cut off from his proper sphere of usefulness and power, the press of New York. He has a clearer head and less gush than Greeley, and he is hardly any lazier than Manton Marble, though older; he writes with as much dash and point as Hurlburt, and his knowledge of the practice of journalism is not inferior to that of Greeley and Nordhoff. No leading writer of the day makes more impression on the public mind than he could make, and in losing him along with Hudson the journals of the great metropolis are real and not apparent sufferers. Godwin is eminently a leader-writer, and whenever he goes to work on a newspaper the addition is sure to be felt forthwith.
Unfortunately, he was now sixty-two, and well beyond his prime, while the defect of which Watterson speaks, his laziness, had grown upon him. In the past he had been noted for his editorial aggressiveness, and the most “radical” of the Post’s utterances in the Civil War are attributable to him. It was once said that, in the Evening Post office in the seventies, “he was a lion in a den of Daniels.” George Cary Eggleston, who worked with him when he was editor 1878–1881, tells us that “he knew how to say strong things in a strong way. He could wield the rapier of subtle sarcasm, and the bludgeon of denunciation with an equally skilful hand. Sometimes he brought even a trip-hammer into play with startling effect.” Eggleston cites an incident which happened during Sarah Bernhardt’s first visit to New York in 1880. A sensational clergyman, who always denounced the theater as the gateway of hell, sent the Evening Post a vehement protest against the space it was giving Mme. Bernhardt, whom he characterized as a woman of immoral character and dissolute conduct. This letter he headed, “Quite Enough of Sara Bernhardt.” Godwin was enraged. He instantly penned an editorial answer, which he entitled “Quite Enough of Blank”—Blank being the clergyman’s name, used in full. Pointing out that Mme. Bernhardt had asked for American attention solely as an artist, that the Post had treated her only in that light, and that the charge that she was immoral was totally without supporting evidence anyway, he demolished the luckless cleric. But Eggleston deplores “a certain constitutional indolence” of Godwin’s as depriving the world of the fruits of his ripest powers, and this fault was now evident. He went much into society, he sometimes wrote his editorials in bed in the morning and sent them down by messenger, and sometimes a promised editorial did not appear.
Upon all the public issues which had importance during Godwin’s editorship the position of the Post had already been well fixed. It had been an advocate of civil service reform early in the sixties, at a time when even well-informed men, like Henry Adams in a conversation with E. L. Godkin, spoke of it only as “something Prussian.” It had urged an early resumption of specie payments, had bitterly opposed the Bland Act of 1878 for the coinage of two to four million dollars’ worth of silver monthly, saying that it was “a public disgrace,” and had resisted the greenback party. It was deeply suspicious of pensions legislation, and had applauded Grant’s veto of the bounty bill. It had early decided that Blaine was “one of our superfluous statesmen,” and that the sooner he was discarded, the better. It had said in 1875 that the Granger movement promised to leave behind it a valuable legacy of general railway legislation “which, tested by practice, will afford us a foundation for our future legislation on questions of transportation.” Year in and year out it asked for a lower tariff—a tariff for revenue only—and attacked all other forms of subsidy for private enterprises. Godwin had no momentous decisions to make.
It was by no means a foregone conclusion in 1880 that the Post would support the Republican ticket, for in advance of the Republican Convention it showed itself equally hostile to Grant (whom the Times was advocating) and to Blaine (the Tribune’s favorite). But as soon as word came of Garfield’s nomination, it hailed it as “a grand result,” and “a glorious escape from Grant and Blaine.” Of Gen. Hancock, the Democratic nominee, the Post remarked that his only recommendation was his military record, and that his party proposed to fill the Presidential chair with the uniform of a major-general, a sword, and a pair of spurs.
During the final months of 1879, and throughout 1880, Godwin and Henderson met and spoke to each other with grave, cold courtesy. They even consulted with each other. But beneath the surface their mutual hostility never slackened, and their associates knew they were at daggers drawn. The crisis could not long be delayed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE VILLARD PURCHASE: CARL SCHURZ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Within three years after Bryant’s death his newspaper, still prosperous and well-edited, was suddenly sold, and placed in the hands of the ablest triumvirate ever enlisted by an American daily. The transfer was announced in the issue of May 25, 1881:
The Evening Post has passed under the control of Mr. Carl Schurz, Mr. Horace White, and Mr. E. L. Godkin, who yesterday completed the purchase of a large majority of its stock. To-morrow Mr. Schurz will assume the editorial direction of the journal.
It was generally known that the real buyer was Henry Villard, but for several weeks this fact was not only concealed, but for some reason was explicitly denied both by the Post and Mr. Villard. On July 1 there appeared a supplementary announcement:
Beginning with the next number the Nation will be issued as the weekly edition of the New York Evening Post.
It will retain the name and have the same editorial management as heretofore, and an increased staff of contributors, but its contents will in the main have already appeared in the Evening Post.
This consolidation will considerably enlarge the field and raise the character of the Evening Post’s literary criticism and news. It will also add to its staff of literary contributors the very remarkable list of writers in every department with which readers of the Nation have long been familiar.
To few interested in the Post could its sale have been a surprise. It is true that Parke Godwin had many reasons, sentimental and practical, for continuing his editorship and maintaining the Bryant family’s half-ownership. He appreciated the argument which John Bigelow addressed to him when he talked of giving both up. “Bethink you,” wrote Bigelow, “that now and for the first time in your long career of journalism you have absolute control of a paper of traditional respectability and authority, in which you can say just what you please on all subjects.” His two sons seemed interested in making journalism their career. He had an able stall, several of whom—as the financial editor Whiting, the literary editor Eggleston, and the dramatic editor Towse—were unexcelled in their departments, while two valuable additions, Robert Burch and Robert Bridges (later editor of Scribner’s) had been made to the news room. But Parke Godwin was sixty-five this year. He had undertaken the writing of Bryant’s life in two volumes, and the editing of the poet’s works in four more, while he wished to complete his history of France, begun before the war. He believed that it would be well for his family, after his death, to have its money invested in a less precarious enterprise than a newspaper. Above all, his relations with Isaac Henderson had now come to a breaking point.
An open quarrel between them in the spring of 1881 ended in a clear assertion by Godwin of his right to control the editorial policy. He thought for the moment of bringing Edward H. Clement, a young Boston journalist, later well known for his editorship and regeneration of the Transcript, to be his associate. But at this juncture he accidentally discovered that Henderson was negotiating for the sale of his half of the Evening Post to some prominent capitalist, and leaped to the conclusion that the man was Jay Gould. In this he was doubtless mistaken. But he was deeply alarmed by the thought that the Bryant family might be associated with a notorious gambler and manipulator, whose object would have been to make the Post a disreputable organ of his schemes.
Almost simultaneously he learned from Carl Schurz, then in the last months of his service as Secretary of the Interior, that he, Horace White, and Henry Villard were searching for a daily, into which they were prepared to put a considerable amount of capital, and that they were negotiating with the owners of the Commercial Advertiser, but would prefer the Evening Post. Godwin, given a month to consider, consulted his most judicious friends—Samuel J. Tilden, Joseph H. Choate, President Garfield, and others—who all advised him to dispose of the paper. Choate told him that Henderson had come to his office for legal advice as to the possibility of somehow destroying Godwin’s control. With great reluctance, the Bryant heirs concluded to sell. The paper was then earning $50,000 a year, and Horace White finally agreed to the payment of $450,000 for the family’s half, which carried control of the board of trustees. For a time Henderson was disinclined to sell the other half, but with the aid of Godwin, to whom Henderson was still in debt, he was soon brought to yield.
How did Henry Villard come to purchase the Evening Post? He was at this time midway in his amazing career as a railway builder. Eight years before, when known only as a young German-American who had proved himself one of the ablest and most daring of the Civil War correspondents, he had become the American representative of a Protective Committee of German bondholders at Frankfort. This body, and a similar one which he soon joined, had large holdings in Western railways, which Villard had been asked to supervise. Thus launched into finance, by his ability, energy, and determination he had soon made a large fortune. His first extensive undertakings were in the Pacific Northwest, where another son of the Palatinate, John Jacob Astor, had carved out a career before him; and his success with the Oregon & California Railroad, and Oregon Railway & Navigation Company emboldened him in 1881–83 to undertake and carry through the completion of the Northern Pacific. His interest in his original profession, and a wish to devote his money to some large public end, led him while busiest with this great undertaking to conceive the plan of buying a metropolitan paper and giving it the ablest editors procurable.
Parke Godwin,
Editor-in-Chief 1878–1881.
Henry Villard,
Owner 1881–1900.
Horace White,
Associate Editor 1881–1899,
Editor-in-Chief 1900–1903.
Carl Schurz,
Editor-in-Chief 1881–1883.
Horace White, who was connected in New York with Mr. Villard’s business enterprises, and was ready to re-enter journalism, undoubtedly shared in this conception. When Godwin’s half of the Post had been purchased, and Schurz had consented to become editor-in-chief, E. L. Godkin was approached with the offer of an editorship and a share of the stock. He wisely refused to consider the proposal till Henderson’s withdrawal was assured, and then accepted it, writing Charles Eliot Norton that he did so because he was weary of the unintermittent work involved in the conduct of the Nation, because he knew that, being forty-nine, his vivacity and energy must decline, and the value of the Nation suffer proportionately, and because he wished to make more money during the few working years left to him. The Nation, in fact, was a struggling publication. It was bought by the proprietors of the Evening Post, its price was reduced to $3 a year, and Wendell Phillips Garrison, its literary editor, who was Villard’s brother-in-law, went with it to the Evening Post to take charge of its weekly issuance.
The new owner and three new editors had long regarded the Evening Post with high respect. Villard in 1857 had applied at its office for work, being out of employment and almost penniless; and upon his offering to go to India to report the Sepoy Mutiny, Bigelow had offered him $20 for every letter he wrote from that country. His political ideas had been identical with the Post’s—for example, he had been a Liberal Republican in 1872, but had refused to follow Greeley. Godkin had contributed to the Evening Post in the fifties upon such topics as the death of the old East India Company, and we have seen that he furnished correspondence from Paris in 1862. Like his friend Norton, he had long acknowledged the paper’s peculiar elevation. Horace White had contributed in the late seventies upon the silver question. Schurz had known it as a loyal ally in his efforts for a civil service law, sound money, and reform within the Republican party, while it is interesting to note that under Bryant it had said that he was the strongest man in the Senate.
Each of the three editors had his own title to distinction, and each had won his special public following. Carl Schurz had been constantly in the public eye since he lent valuable assistance to Lincoln in the campaign of 1860. The German-Americans, indeed, had known of him much earlier, for as a youth in Germany, aflame with revolutionary zeal, his military services in the uprising of 1848, and his subsequent romantic rescue of Gottfried Kinkel from the fortress at Spandau, had made him famous. In 1858, writing Kinkel from Milwaukee, he wondered a little over his steady rise in reputation, modestly explaining it as due to American curiosity in “a German who, as they declare, speaks English better than they do, and also has the advantage over their native politicians of possessing a passable knowledge of European conditions.” It was, of course, really due to appreciation of his eloquence, versatility, mental power, and enthusiasm for liberal principles. He has admitted that he was inexpressibly gratified by the salvos of applause with which he was greeted in the Chicago Convention of 1860. For his platform advocacy of Lincoln he was rewarded with the post of Minister to Spain, which he early resigned to buckle on his sword. Then came his sterling service first as a brigadier-general and later as major-general, when he fought at Chancellorsville, Chattanooga, and Gettysburg. His investigative trip through the South in 1865 for President Johnson, and refusal to suppress his report because it did not support Johnson’s views, drew national attention to his aggressive independence. Six years in the Senate, where he was unrivaled for his discussions of finance, and four years as Secretary of the Interior, had added to his fame as a man of broad views, high motives, and unshakable courage. By 1881 he was recognized as, next to Hamilton and Gallatin, our greatest foreign-born statesman.
Godkin also had a national following—a following of intellectual liberals, especially strong in university and professional circles, marshaled by the Nation since he founded it in 1865. He had, as Lowell said, made himself “a Power.” In the ability with which the weekly discussed politics and social questions, the trenchancy of its style, and the soundness of its literary criticism, it was unapproached by anything else in American—James Bryce thought also in British—journalism. The masses who knew Schurz well had hardly heard of it; but no man of cultivation who tried to keep abreast of the times neglected it, and because it was digested by newspaper editors all over the Union, Godkin’s influence was deep and wide. James Ford Rhodes gives an illustration of this influence just after the Nation became practically the weekly Evening Post. “Passing a part of the winter of 1886 in a hotel at Thomasville, Ga., it chanced that among the hundred or more guests there were eight or ten of us who regularly received the Nation by post. Ordinarily it arrived in the Friday noon train from Savannah, and when we came from our midday dinner into the hotel office, there, in our respective boxes, easily seen, and from their peculiar form recognized by every one, were our copies of the Nation. Occasionally the papers missed connections at Savannah, and our Nations did not arrive till after supper. It used to be said by certain scoffers that if a discussion of political questions came up in the afternoon of one of those days of disappointment, we readers were mum; but in the late evening, after having digested our political pabulum, we were ready to join issue with any antagonist.”
As for Horace White, he was best known in the Middle West, where he had entered journalism in 1854 as a reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal. Four years later, after much activity in behalf of the free soil movement in Kansas, during which he even removed to the Territory himself and went through the preliminary form of taking up a claim, he reported the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the Chicago Press and Tribune. His reminiscences of those weeks of intimate contact with Lincoln fill many pages of Herndon’s life of the President, and constitute one of its most interesting chapters. During the war he was Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, secretary for a time to Stanton, and organizer with A. S. Hill and Henry Villard of a news agency in competition with the Associated Press. After it, for nearly a decade, he was editor and one of the principal proprietors of the Tribune, which under him was far more liberal than it has ever been since. But he was valuable to the Evening Post chiefly because he had devoted himself for years to study of the theory of banking and finance, on which his articles and pamphlets had already made him a recognized authority.
It was thus an editorship of “all the talents” that was installed in the Evening Post just before Garfield was shot. Schurz was specially equipped to discuss politics, the range of problems he had met while Secretary of the Interior, and German affairs; White was perhaps the best writer available on the tariff, railways, silver question, and banking; while Godkin held an unrivaled pen for general social and political topics. By birth they were German, American, and British, but Schurz and Godkin were really cosmopolites, citizens of the world. Their practical experience had covered a surprising range. We are likely to forget, for example, that Schurz had once made a living by teaching German in London, and had farmed in Wisconsin, while Godkin had been a war correspondent in the Crimea, and admitted to the New York bar. In their fundamental idealism the three men were wholly alike. Schurz’s political record and Godkin’s Nation were monuments to it. They were one in wishing to make the Post the champion of sound money, a low tariff, civil service reform, clean and independent politics, and international peace. Henry Villard with rare generosity assumed financial responsibility for the paper, but made the editors wholly independent by placing it in the hands of three trustees—Ex-Gov. Bristow, Ex-Commissioner David A. Wells, and Horace White.