II

The selection of Schurz to be editor-in-chief was more than a tribute to his station as a public man. Of the three, he had the most varied journalistic experience. As a young man in Germany he had helped Kinkel edit the Bonner Zeitung. After the Civil War he became head of the Washington Bureau of the New York Tribune, and took an instant liking both to journalism and the men engaged in it—in his reminiscences he draws a sharp contrast between their high principles and the low sense of honor among Washington officeholders. He soon accepted the editorship of the Detroit Post, a new journal, urged upon him by Senator Zechariah Chandler, and in 1867 became editor and part owner of the St. Louis Westliche Post, a place desirable because it brought him into association with Dr. Emil Preetorius and other German-Americans of congenial views. When the date of his leaving the Secretaryship of the Interior approached in 1881, he had received several offers of editorial positions. Rudolph Blankenburg, later Mayor of Philadelphia, wrote that there was crying need of a good daily in that city, and that he and other business men would found one if Schurz would take charge. The statement was published in St. Louis that a new daily was about to be established there under Schurz. But Schurz himself would have been the last to lay emphasis upon his mere practical experience—he had no taste for financial or news management, and it appears that neither the Detroit Post nor Westliche Post was financially prosperous under him. His qualifications for the chief editorship were of a different and much rarer kind.

His ability as a writer shows a mingling of high merits with a few distinct shortcomings. Since his “Reminiscences” will live as long as any work of its kind and time, no less for its style than its fascinating story, since his essay on Lincoln is an admitted classic, it is unnecessary to say that he was a master of the pen. He has interestingly related how he taught himself to write English on first coming to America. At the start he made it a practice to read his daily newspaper from beginning to end; then he proceeded to English novels—“The Vicar of Wakefield,” Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray; and he followed them with Macaulay’s essays and Blackstone’s commentaries, particularly admiring the terse, clear style of the latter. Finally he read Shakespeare’s plays, going through their enormous vocabulary with the utmost conscientiousness. At the same time he practiced turning the Letters of Junius, which he thought brilliant, into German, and back again into English. The result was that soon he not merely wrote, but thought equally well in English or German, and much preferred English for certain purposes, as public speaking and political discussion. Schurz’s speeches were among the most eloquent delivered in his generation. One of the oldest Senators said that his address of February, 1872, was the best he had ever heard in the upper chamber; his Brooklyn speech of 1884 against Blaine ranks with the greatest of American campaign orations; and his utterances upon tariff and civil service reform were read by millions.

Yet Schurz fell just short of being a great editorial writer. He used a battle-axe, at once sharp and crushing, but he could not vary it with the play of the rapier, as E. L. Godkin could. His directness, clarity, and force were marked, but his writings were lacking in humor, metaphor, and allusion. Devoting himself to large political questions, he had no time to observe interesting minor social phenomena, so that his work lacked relief. No one could excel him in argument or exposition upon subjects with which he was familiar, but he could not relieve his discussions from a reproach of dryness.

Of the mind and character behind the pen, almost nothing can be said except in praise. All his life he had been a zealot for liberalism. He had thrown himself into the revolutionary movement of ’48 with an ardor not a whit boyish, on coming to America he had instantly enlisted against slavery, and he was still an enthusiast for reform. Grover Cleveland once spoke of his career as teaching “the lesson of moral courage, of intelligent and conscientious patriotism, of independent political thought, of unselfish political affiliation, and of constant political vigilance.” He was for sound money from greenback days to the settlement of the free silver issue; he was a combatant against “imperialism” from Grant’s attempted annexation of Domingo to Roosevelt’s seizure of Panama. When Secretary of the Interior he enforced the merit system, yet unembodied in any law, in his department, requiring competitive examinations for clerkships. His one fault was that in his intentness on his own subject he sometimes lost perspective, and became indifferent to equally important aims of others.

It has been said that as Lord Halifax made the term “trimmer” honorable in England, Schurz made that of party turncoat honorable in America. His obedience to principle was so unswerving that he was heedless of allegiance to groups or individuals. He was for Seward in 1860, but fell in instantly behind Lincoln; supported President Johnson’s reconstruction policy till his trip South in 1865, and then followed Sumner; was for Grant in 1869, and one of the earliest leaders against him in 1870–71; warmly commended some of Roosevelt’s acts and condemned more; was one of Bryan’s sternest opponents in 1896, and made a speaking tour for him in 1900. The independence exhibited in this adherence to conviction was in the highest degree creditable. His sense of personal rectitude was so keen and sensitive that he could not bear to do anything for mere “expediency.” It can only be said that he was sometimes a little too positive that he was right, a little intolerant of others. His indignation when Roosevelt and Lodge in 1884 followed Blaine, whom they suspected of being dishonest, would have been less intense had he seen that there is really something to be said for party regularity under such circumstances.

Yet he was no impracticable idealist, but a man with a shrewd grasp of affairs. Mark Twain declared that he made it a rule, when in doubt in politics, to follow Schurz, saying to himself, “He’s as safe as Ben Thornburgh”—a famous Mississippi pilot. When his collected papers were published, they showed that throughout his long life he had possessed remarkable prescience. He wrote Kinkel in 1856 that Buchanan’s Administration would end the old Democratic party, that the contest with slavery would not be settled without powder, and that the North would win. In 1858 he predicted that there would be a war, and that he would fight in it. In 1864 he ventured to assert, before the election, that “In fifty years, perhaps much sooner, Lincoln’s name will be inscribed close to Washington’s on this American republic’s roll of honor. And there it will remain for all time.” No one saw farther into the reconstruction question than he. Much of what we now call conservation, especially of forests, dates from Schurz’s far-sighted pioneer work as Secretary of the Interior.

Humor is almost indispensable to an editor, and Schurz had little of it, but in compensation he was sustained by a better trait. Every one perceived the gallant quality of the man, but his intimates alone understood what a deep poetic vein fed it. Howells says that at first he was a little awed by the revolutionist, general, statesman, and editor. “But underneath them all, and in his heart of hearts, I was always divining him poet. He had lived one of the greatest and most beautiful romances, and you could not be in his presence without knowing it, unless you were particularly blind and deaf. It kindled in his eyes; it trembled in his clear, keen, yet gentle voice; it shone in his smile; it sounded in his laugh, which his youth never died out of.” No more unselfish man ever moved actively in American affairs. A sentence from a letter to Kinkel strikes the keynote to his life: “To have aims that lie outside ourselves and our immediate circle is a great thing, and well worth the sacrifice.”

Schurz, Godkin, and White made only two important changes in the form of the Post, both dictated by its union with the Nation. It was still, like the Sun of that time, like several great Paris dailies to-day, a four-page sheet; except that on Saturday Parke Godwin had instituted a two-page supplement, containing book notices, essays, fictional sketches, and other miscellaneous matter. This was now utilized for the book reviews written by the Nation’s unrivaled staff of contributors—Lowell, Bryce, Parkman, W. C. Brownell, Henry Adams, John Fiske, Charles Eliot Norton, and a long list of experts in every field. The space thus afforded was inadequate, and it became necessary to print many reviews during the week opposite the editorials, so that the Post acquired a much more literary flavor. Under Bryant and Godwin editorials had been variable in length, and nearly all headed. Now they were standardized into two forms; long headed articles, of 800 to 1,200 words each, of which two or three were printed daily, and seven to ten paragraphs of 100–250 words each, without captions. The brevier type was sometimes lifted direct into the forms of the Nation.

In the office Schurz was called “the General.” His subordinates found him genial, kindly, and appreciative, though his manner had a touch of military strictness. He left the news, financial, literary, and dramatic departments almost wholly to their various heads, but bent a watchful eye upon the musical criticism—he was an expert musician. Against only one change in the paper’s discipline were there any protests. W. P. Garrison, the son of the great Abolitionist, hastened to abolish the “filthy habit” of smoking in the offices, a rule that caused incalculable anguish among some of the veteran newspaper men; it is said that George Cary Eggleston’s early resignation was partly due to it. Schurz probably consented on the ground of the fire-hazard.

A few stories have come down showing “the General” as he worked, his tall form bent short-sightedly over his pad in a little space that he would grub out from the accumulated chaos of papers and letters on his desk. The famous Sullivan-Ryan prize-fight occurred in February, 1882, and when the first dispatches arrived, Linn, the news-editor, hurried to consult Schurz, telling him that under Bryant the Post had always thrown such news into the waste-basket. This was the fact: when the McCool-Jones fight occurred in 1867, the paper had suppressed a column from the Associated Press, and mentioned the “revolting” affair only in a short, tart editorial. But Schurz eagerly read the dispatches. “Mr. Linn,” he ordered, “publish a brief result of each round, and head it, ‘Brutal Prize-Fight’; and,” he added with a twinkle, “let me see a copy on each round as soon as it comes in.” Linn commented on returning to his desk, “The General is an old fighter himself.” This, however, was an unusual display of humor on Schurz’s part. There existed from the Civil War until 1918 a daily feature on the editorial page called “Newspaper Waifs,” consisting of several sticksful of jokes clipped from various sources. It was always popular; in 1894, after Godkin’s denunciation of his Venezuela message, Cleveland was asked whether he still read the Evening Post, and replied, “Yes—I read the waifs.” Schurz insisted on seeing the copy for the feature; and, to keep it alive, the managing editor found it necessary to include daily a half dozen poor and obvious jokes with the good ones. With unerring eye, glancing down the column, Schurz would o.k. the poor quips and cancel most of the others.

The majority of Schurz’s editorials naturally dealt with party politics and the affairs of the Federal Government. The assassination of Garfield (July 2, 1881) and the succession of Arthur to the Presidency, awakened much apprehension among editors of liberal views, which the Evening Post shared. For some time it found President Arthur’s conduct reassuring, but it soon had occasion to condemn a number of his appointments—notably his nomination of Roscoe Conkling to the Supreme Bench, which Conkling declined, and his selection of Wm. E. Chandler to be Secretary of the Navy—as evidence that he was introducing the methods of the New York machine into national politics. Garfield’s death made the question of the Presidency in 1884 important, and during 1883 the Post uttered frequent monitions that the nomination of Blaine would disrupt the Republican party and lead to defeat. A characteristic utterance by Schurz in July, 1883, contained some shrewd observations on party character as it appeared just a year before the campaign. The essential difference between the Democrats and Republicans, he wrote, was that the former had sterling leaders but a wrongheaded rank and file, while the latter had many pernicious leaders but a sound general body. Men like Cleveland, Bayard, Vilas, and Hewitt believed in civil service reform and hard money, while men like Blaine, Conkling, Arthur, and Wm. Walter Phelps believed in spoils and a high tariff; but the great mass of Democrats would try to drag the leaders down to their own level, while the mass of Republicans—so Schurz hoped—would turn their backs on Blaine and Arthur.

Early in 1883, when the question of Federal aid to the common schools was raised, an issue still important, Schurz wrote disapproving it, as an interference with the functions and self-reliance of the States. He had the gratification of hailing the Pendleton Civil Service Act, the first great step toward fulfillment of a reform on which he somehow found time to lecture as well as write. He defended the Chinese against unfair legislation in California, and argued constantly for a fairer policy toward the Indians. Perhaps his most important editorials were several in the latter half of 1882 arguing for an executive budget, beyond doubt the first elaborate demand for this reform made by any American editor. He wrote (August, 1882):

It is obvious how much in the way of bringing order out of chaos would be accomplished by introducing the practice of having a complete budget of necessary expenditures, and of the taxation required to cover them, prepared by the executive branch of the government, and submitted to Congress at the beginning of each session. What we have now is merely the estimates of the different departments of the amounts of money they want. What is needed is, aside from the grouping together of these amounts, showing the total sum required by the government for the year, a clear statement of the different kinds of existing taxes, with their yield, and the opinion of the Executive as to what taxes will best subserve the purpose, what taxes may be cut down or abolished, and so on. A clear summing up in a statement of this kind would be sure to attract the attention and to reach the understanding of every intelligent taxpayer....

By far the most interesting of Schurz’s editorials, however, were a number upon foreign topics. He wrote repeatedly upon the affairs of Germany, where Bismarck, given a free hand by the fast aging William I, was asserting the absolute power of the throne, passing anti-Socialist legislation, and otherwise taking a reactionary course which Schurz lost no opportunity to denounce. The editor pinned his hope of a better policy to the Crown Prince, the short-lived and noble-minded Emperor Frederick. From time to time Schurz would select news from the European press and illuminate it with his special knowledge. Thus in the summer of 1883, under the title “A Strange Story,” he wrote upon the trial of the Jews of a Hungarian hamlet on the charge of sacrificial murder; the editorial was pure narrative, but its effect was a caustic denunciation of religious bigotry. When in the fall of 1882 Gottfried Kinkel died, Schurz characterized his old German comrade as the incarnation of the vague, impractical idealism of 1848, an idealism that recked nothing of hard political realities; and his editorial contained a striking bit of reminiscence:

It was this spirit which seized upon Kinkel, who was then a professor extraordinary at the University of Bonn, lecturing on the history of art and literature. He was a poet of note; of an artistic nature, also, ardent and impatient of restraint. He was an orator of wonderful fertility of imagination and power of expression.... He preached advanced democratic ideas, and his political programme fairly represented the romantic indefiniteness of the whole revolutionary movement. When the reaction came, he left his professorship, his wife and children, and, gun in hand, fought as a private soldier in the insurrectionary army of Baden. In one of the engagements he was wounded and taken, and then sentenced to imprisonment for life, put into a penitentiary, clothed in a convict’s garb, and forced to spin wool—the mere thought of which touched every heart in Germany. Then he was brought from the penitentiary to be tried at Cologne for an attempt upon an arsenal, in which he had taken part—an offense not covered by the sentence already passed upon him. The court was thronged with spectators and with soldiers. He defended himself. Before he had closed his speech, which was like a poem, the judge, the jury, the spectators, the soldiers, the very gendarmes by his side, were melting in tears. His wife stood outside the bar, forbidden to approach him; but when in the agony of grief he called out to her to come to him, the soldiers involuntarily stepped aside to let her rush into his arms. It was as if all Germany had looked on and wept with those who were in the courtroom. Then he was taken back to the penitentiary and set to wool-spinning again, until in November, 1850, some friends aided him in escaping. Again the popular heart was stirred in its poetic sympathies. His whole public career was like the most romantic episode of a romantic time—a fair representative of the spirit of these days, their heroic devotion to an ideal, and their indefiniteness of aim.

Some striking editorials by Schurz and Godkin, denouncing the vicious operations of Jay Gould in connection with the Manhattan Elevated Railroad, had a dramatic sequel. Gould and his associates, enraged by them, determined to retaliate by a personal attack upon Schurz. In pursuance of this purpose, they concocted an ingenious double-barreled slander, aimed both at Schurz and Henry Villard. In substance, it was that as Secretary of the Interior Gen. Schurz had prostituted his rulings to the advancement of Villard’s railway interests, and had been given his shares in the Evening Post as a reward. Not only was this piece of mendacity worked up in detail in the World, which Jay Gould controlled, but it found its way into an article by George W. Julian in the North American Review for March, 1883. Schurz had a short way with the authors of malicious fabrications. During the Civil War Gen. Leslie Combs had charged him with cowardice at Chancellorsville, and he had instantly called Combs a liar and challenged him to a test of courage in the next battle. Now he blew Julian to pieces in the Evening Post of the week of March 26. The facts were that the “restoration” to the Northern Pacific of a forfeited land grant, the offense charged against Schurz, had been made in accordance with a ruling by the Attorney-General and not the Secretary of the Interior; that it was based upon principles applied in the same way to many other cases; that Henry Villard did not for nearly two years afterward have any interest in the Northern Pacific; and that, on the contrary, he was interested in a rival enterprise. It is unnecessary to say that those who had believed this story in the first place were few and simple-minded.

Of the breadth of Schurz’s influence there are many evidences. A few days after he took the editorial chair ex-President Hayes declared to him: “I must see what you write.... Mrs. Hayes will not forgive me if she loses anything you write.” The files of his correspondence, kept in the Congressional Library, indicate that a majority of Congress subscribed to the daily or semi-weekly Evening Post. The Secretary of the Treasury was glad to supply seven pages of information in his own handwriting upon a question of the day; and information for news or editorial use was volunteered to Schurz by a considerable list of consuls abroad. It was at this time that a young Atlanta lawyer named Woodrow Wilson contributed a series of articles upon conditions at the South—“entirely off my own bat,” writes ex-President Wilson. The Post was read by German-Americans all over the country, and many of its editorials were reprinted by German-language journals. That Schurz felt this nation-wide interest as a constant stimulus there can be no doubt. Always a hard worker, he gave his best energies to the newspaper in spite of constant demands for public addresses and magazine articles; he wrote in 1881 that he was at his desk daily from nine to four-thirty, and in 1883, when the editor of the American Statesmen Series requested him to finish his volumes on Henry Clay as soon as possible, he replied that his duties allowed him only parts of two or three evenings a week.

From the outset many friends of the Post had predicted that an editorship of “all the talents” would work no better than had the ministry of that character in England; and the prediction was soon verified. As Isaac H. Bromley, a humorist on the Tribune said—a witticism which Godkin sometimes repeated with enjoyment—“there were too many mules in the same pasture.” Schurz and Godkin had greatly admired each other before they were associated, and were entirely congenial in their rather aristocratic intellectualism and their views on political subjects; but their methods of appealing to the public were not merely different, but disparate. Schurz employed argument and calm exposition, while Godkin varied his argument with ridicule, cutting irony, and even denunciation. There is no doubt that before long Godkin came to feel that Schurz’s editorials were too narrow in range, and too arid in the mode of presentation. On the other hand, Schurz did not always approve of Godkin’s ironic humor, and thought that he was sometimes too savagely cutting in tone. Neither was satisfied with the editorial page. Indeed, Godkin’s dissatisfaction in the late spring of 1883 became so acute that he concluded that the Evening Post experiment was a failure, that the first impetus of the change had been lost, and that heroic measures were necessary to raise the level of the newspaper. He differed greatly from Schurz, he explained, as to the quality of the editorial writing, and wished to dismiss one staff member, Robert Burch, and employ in his stead some one especially good at writing pungent paragraphs. The result was an arrangement between Godkin and Schurz by which the latter agreed to relinquish the editorship-in-chief on Aug. 1, when he went on his summer vacation; with the understanding that if, after another two years, the dissatisfaction continued, Horace White should take Godkin’s place at the helm. Schurz duly left for his vacation, Burch was dismissed, and Joseph Bucklin Bishop, a brilliant young editorial writer for the Tribune, was brought on in his stead.

At this juncture there occurred an event which brought Schurz and Godkin into abrupt conflict over a question not merely of the manner and quality of the Post’s editorials, but of its views. Schurz had always been much more sympathetic with the laboring masses than Godkin, and in a time of many labor troubles their opinions were bound to clash. Late in July, 1883, commenced a strike of the railway telegraphers, which at first threatened a widespread interruption of communications and transportation. Schurz’s utterances were impartial, but he had no sooner left than Godkin, as he had a right to do, gave the Post a tone hostile to the strikers. His view was that in an industry so vitally connected with the public’s interests, a sudden crippling cessation of work was not allowable; that a national tribunal should be set up to decide such controversies, and that when the decision was once rendered, “general strikes in defiance or evasion of it should be punishable in some manner.” For this judgment much can be said, though it is certainly not one that the Evening Post to-day would defend.

On Aug. 8 Godkin made the Post declare that “the 30,000 or 40,000 men whom some of our modern corporations employ in telegraphic or railroad service have to be governed on the same principles as an army.” This was more than Schurz could bear, and he no sooner read the editorial, at his summer hotel in the Catskills, than he seized a pen and wrote Godkin denying that any man has to be “governed” on army principles save those who voluntarily enlist. “The relations between those who sell their labor by the day and their employers, whether the latter be great corporations or single individuals, are simple contract relations, and it seems to me monstrous to hold that the act of one or more laboring men ending that contract by stopping their work is, or should be, considered and treated in any case as desertion from the army is considered and treated.” He added that he thought Godkin’s editorial one which would do the Evening Post essential harm, and cause it to be regarded as a corporation organ. He would publicly disclaim any share in the responsibility for it did he not abhor the sensationalism of such a step. Godkin and Schurz were equally positive and tenacious of any opinion once fully assumed, and there was no issue from their disagreement except the resignation of one of them. That of Schurz was formally announced during the autumn. It is a gratifying fact that whatever temporary ill-feeling subsisted between them almost immediately disappeared, and was replaced by their former mutual high esteem. Within a few weeks after his departure Schurz contributed an editorial to the Evening Post upon Edward Lasker, the German liberal, and throughout the campaign of 1884 Godkin’s references to Schurz were warmly cordial.

The regret of the Evening Post’s friends over Schurz’s resignation was tempered by their sense that a disruption of the original arrangement was inevitable. Every newspaper has to have a single ultimate arbiter of its policy. The only exceptions to this rule are those journals which take no real interest in maintaining a thoughtful, useful policy. With neither Schurz nor Godkin willing to accept a subordinate position, with their distinct differences of temperament, the wonder is that they worked so smoothly for two full years.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
GODKIN, THE MUGWUMP MOVEMENT, AND GROVER CLEVELAND’S CAREER

Edwin Lawrence Godkin was not quite fifty-two when he became editor-in-chief in 1883, and was in the prime of life, with fifteen years of vigorous journalistic labor before him. He wrote Charles Eliot Norton that he had no intention, even if his health permitted, of staying with the Evening Post more than ten years, but his heart was enlisted far too keenly in his work and the great causes he espoused to let him go until failing health made his retirement in 1899 imperative. It is natural that his published letters should emphasize his joyous sense of a greater freedom as he entered the newspaper office; his feeling that he was giving himself to a publication which did not depend absolutely upon his pen and mind as the Nation did, and could have his vacations like other workers. But he felt also his new responsibilities. He valued the opportunity the Post gave him to impress his opinions daily upon the public; to reach a wider audience—the Post’s 20,000 buyers as well as the Nation’s 10,000; and to give more attention to certain subjects, as municipal misgovernment. “My notion is, you know,” he wrote W. P. Garrison in 1883, “that the Evening Post ought to make a specialty of being the paper to which sober-minded people would look at crises of this kind, instead of hollering and bellering and shouting platitudes like the Herald and Times.”

The independent character of the political course Godkin would steer had been fully indicated by the volumes of the Nation. This weekly, founded when the last shots of the Civil War were ringing in men’s ears, had undertaken the fearless discussion of public questions at a moment that seemed peculiarly unpropitious. The prevalent tendency of the years after the war, as Godkin said, was a fierce illiberalism, represented by such leaders as Thaddeus Stevens in the House. The Nation had at once declared war upon this narrow, rancorous political spirit, and attempted to substitute progressive and enlightened views. It had questioned the wisdom of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. It had been ten years in advance of public opinion in its attacks upon that demagogic politician, Ben Butler. It had been one of the first Republican organs to denounce the carpet-bag régime at the South, and to assail President Grant for his failures. In 1876 occurred its most serious collision with a considerable body of readers; it condemned the Southern frauds which gave Hayes the Presidency, and called his induction into office a “most deplorable and debauching enterprise,” this course costing it 3,000 subscribers. Godkin inclined in his sympathies to the Republican party, but he would not hesitate to break from it upon any question of principle.

When Godkin assumed the helm of the Evening Post, he had a shrewd suspicion that the Presidential campaign about to open would present a fundamental question of principle. As he wrote long after, James G. Blaine’s audacity, good humor, horror of rebel brigadiers, and contempt for reformers made his nomination sooner or later inevitable, and such a nomination in Godkin’s eyes presented a moral question of the first magnitude. No American newspaper has ever conducted a more effective campaign fight than that which the Evening Post waged in 1884. It was a fight not only against Blaine, but in behalf of the one contemporary American statesman whom Godkin, in his long journalistic career after 1865, highly admired.

Of reformers like Godkin, Blaine wrote in advance of his nomination: “They are noisy, but not numerous; pharisaical, but not practical; ambitious, but not wise; pretentious, but not powerful.” The Evening Post’s opinion of Blaine was equally frank. It believed that the Mulligan letters, published in 1876, convicted Blaine of prostituting his office as a member of Congress and Speaker in order to make money in various Western railways, and of lying in a vain effort to conceal the fact. It added as lesser counts against him that in his twelve years in the House he had never performed a single service for good government, and had done it much disservice, as by his covert opposition to civil service reform, and his defense of the spoliation of the public lands; that in all his public appearances he had been sensational, theatrical, and a lover of notoriety; and that while Secretary of State under Garfield “he plunged into spoils, and wallowed in them for three months, like a rhinoceros in an African pool, using every office he could lay his hands on for the reward of his henchmen and hangers-on, without shame or scruple.” But its central objection was always that he had sold his official power and influence.

The great “Mugwump” bolt from the Republican party as soon as Blaine was nominated took with it many influential Eastern journals—Harper’s Weekly, the New York Times, the Boston Herald, the Boston Advertiser, and the Springfield Republican—but it took no other pen like Godkin’s. Long in advance of the convention, he and Schurz had warned the Republican leaders that Blaine’s nomination would disrupt the party. The Evening Post pointed out in November, 1883, that the next election would probably be close, and that New York, where the voters were more independent than anywhere else, would certainly be the pivotal State. The election of 1876 had hung upon several artificial decisions in the South; that of 1884 would be likely to hang upon the judgment of a small body of thoughtful, impartial voters. On April 23, 1884, a rich New Jersey Congressman named William Walter Phelps published an article defending Blaine, to which Godkin immediately replied in a long and elaborate review of “Mr. Blaine’s Railroad Transactions.” Thereafter the paper kept up a drum-fire upon the “tattooed man.”

How could the campaign be most effectively conducted? Godkin saw that of the arsenal of weapons available, the parallel column could be used with the most telling force. The attack, in the first place, must be focussed upon the Republican candidate. No one cared about the rival platforms. As for the general character of the two parties, most voters believed the Republican party to be superior, and Godkin himself would have thought so had not its jobbing, corrupt element, as he said, gradually “come to a head, in the fashion of a tumor, in Mr. James G. Blaine.” How could Blaine’s weaknesses be most clearly exposed? By his own letters, made public through Mulligan, which stripped his dealings as a Congressman with the Little Rock & Fort Smith, the Union Pacific, and the Northern Pacific interests, and by his own speeches defending these transactions. Adroit though he was, Blaine in his panicky efforts at self-justification had repeatedly contradicted both himself and the admitted facts. This, with all its implications, could be concisely proved by the parallel columns.

Not all these contradictions were immediately evident. By the end of September, just after Mulligan had published a new group of Blaine letters, Godkin and his associates, Horace White, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, and A. G. Sedgwick, had detected a half dozen. By November they had raised the total to ten. Reprinted day after day, they had a value that will be evident from a couple of examples:

BLAINE LIE NO. 5

“My whole connection with the road has been open as the day. If there had been anything to conceal about it, I should never have touched it. Wherever concealment is advisable, avoidance is advisable, and I do not know any better test to apply to the honor and fairness of a business transaction.”—Mr. Blaine’s speech in Congress, April 24, 1876.

“I want you to send me a letter such as the enclosed draft.... Regard this letter as strictly confidential. Do not show it to anyone. If you can’t get the letter written in season for the nine o’clock mail to New York, please be sure to mail it during the night.... Sincerely, J. G. B. (Burn this letter)”—Blaine to Fisher, April 16, 1876.

“My whole connection with the road has been open as the day. If there had been anything to conceal about it, I should never have touched it. Wherever concealment is advisable, avoidance is advisable, and I do not know any better test to apply to the honor and fairness of a business transaction.”—Mr. Blaine’s speech in Congress, April 24, 1876.“I want you to send me a letter such as the enclosed draft.... Regard this letter as strictly confidential. Do not show it to anyone. If you can’t get the letter written in season for the nine o’clock mail to New York, please be sure to mail it during the night.... Sincerely, J. G. B. (Burn this letter)”—Blaine to Fisher, April 16, 1876.

BLAINE LIE NO. 9 [IN PART]

“Third.—I do not own and never did own an acre of coal land or any other kind of land in the Hocking Valley or in any other part of Ohio. My letter to the Hon. Hezekiah Bundy in July last on this same subject was accurately true.

Very truly yours,
J. G. Blaine.”

(Letter to the Hon. Wm. McKinley, dated Belleaire, Ohio, Oct. 4, 1884.)

“Boston, Dec. 15, 1880.

“Received of James G. Blaine, $25,180.50, being payment in full for one share in the association formed for the purchase of lands known as the Hope Furnace Tract, situated in Vinton and Athens Counties, Ohio. This receipt to be exchanged for a certificate when prepared.

J. N. Denison, Agent.”

“Third.—I do not own and never did own an acre of coal land or any other kind of land in the Hocking Valley or in any other part of Ohio. My letter to the Hon. Hezekiah Bundy in July last on this same subject was accurately true. Very truly yours,
J. G. Blaine.” (Letter to the Hon. Wm. McKinley, dated Belleaire, Ohio, Oct. 4, 1884.)		 “Boston, Dec. 15, 1880. “Received of James G. Blaine, $25,180.50, being payment in full for one share in the association formed for the purchase of lands known as the Hope Furnace Tract, situated in Vinton and Athens Counties, Ohio. This receipt to be exchanged for a certificate when prepared. J. N. Denison, Agent.”

One particularly notable use of the parallel columns was in contradiction of Blaine’s statement that subsequent to his purchase of the bonds of the Fort Smith railroad, only one act of Congress had been passed applying to the line, and that merely to rectify a previous mistake in legislation. The fact was, as the paper showed, that the act repealed the proviso that the railway’s grant of public lands should not be sold for more than $2.50 an acre, thus adding to the value of its securities.

The deadly parallel columns were applied to careless campaign speakers for Blaine. They were repeatedly used against the leading Blaine newspapers, the New York Tribune, Philadelphia Press, Chicago Tribune, and Cincinnati Commercial. A happy stroke, for example, exhibited their efforts to ignore the second batch of Mulligan letters:

BLAINE’S OWN VIEW OF THE LETTERS

“There is not a word in the letters which is not entirely consistent with the most scrupulous integrity and honor. I hope that every Republican paper in the United States will republish them in full.”—Mr. Blaine’s interview with the Kennebec Journal, Sept. 15, 1884.

EARLY VIEWS OF HIS ORGANS

The Tribune, Sept. 15, 1884, suppressed all the letters and had no comments.

The Boston Journal, Sept. 15, 1884, suppressed nine letters, gave misleading summaries of many of them, and commented not at all upon the suppressed ones.

The Philadelphia Press, Sept. 15, 1884, published the letters in a part of its edition only, and had no comment.

BLAINE’S OWN VIEW OF THE LETTERS “There is not a word in the letters which is not entirely consistent with the most scrupulous integrity and honor. I hope that every Republican paper in the United States will republish them in full.”—Mr. Blaine’s interview with the Kennebec Journal, Sept. 15, 1884. EARLY VIEWS OF HIS ORGANS The Tribune, Sept. 15, 1884, suppressed all the letters and had no comments. The Boston Journal, Sept. 15, 1884, suppressed nine letters, gave misleading summaries of many of them, and commented not at all upon the suppressed ones. The Philadelphia Press, Sept. 15, 1884, published the letters in a part of its edition only, and had no comment.

For the unprecedented scandal-mongering of this campaign, which Godkin called fit for a tenement stairway, the Evening Post and other decent newspapers felt only disgust. But when the vicious elements in Buffalo which had learned to hate Cleveland as a reform Mayor and Governor revealed the fact that, as a young man, he had once formed an illicit connection, the Post felt it necessary to treat the charge in detail and place it in its true importance. A large number of clergymen, suffrage leaders, and others hastened to declare that no man with an illegitimate child could be supported for the Presidency. Considering Blaine’s character, this seemed to the Post both ridiculous and vicious. Which was better fitted to be President, a man once unchaste, as Franklin, Webster, and Jefferson had been, or a man who sold his official power for money? Godkin argued that in a statesman official probity was all important, while an early lapse in personal morals was of minor significance:

“Well, but,” we shall be asked, “does not the charge against Cleveland, as you yourselves state and admit it, disqualify him, in your estimation, for the Presidency of the United States?” We answer frankly: “Yes, if his opponent be free from this stain, and as good a man in all other ways.” We should like to see candidates for the Presidency models of all the virtues, pure as the snow and steadfast as the eternal hills. But when the alternative is a man of whom the Buffalo Express, a political opponent, said immediately after his nomination, “that the people of Buffalo had known him as one of their worthiest citizens, one of their manliest men, faithful to his clients, faithful to his friends, and faithful to every public trust” ... a good son and good brother, and unmarried in order that he might be the better son and brother, against whom nothing can be said except that he has not been proof against one of the most powerful temptations by which human nature is assailed; or, on the other hand, a man convicted out of his own mouth of having publicly lied in order to hide his jobbery in office, of having offered his judicial decisions as a sign of his possible usefulness to railroad speculators in case they paid him his price, of trading in charters which had been benefited by legislation in which he took part, and of having broken his word of honor in order to destroy documentary evidence of his corruption—a man who has accumulated a fortune in a few years on the salary of a Congressman—then we say emphatically no—ten thousand times no.

A public office like the Presidency was not a reward for a blameless private life, insisted Godkin, but a heavy duty and responsibility, to be given only to a statesman of ability and official integrity. Schurz pointed out that Hamilton, the founder of the Post, was once placed in a position where he had to remain silent concerning a slur upon his honesty in office, or confess to an offense like Cleveland’s; and he hesitated not an instant to clear his public honor at this cost to private reputation. The articles of the Evening Post and Nation powerfully conduced to right thinking on this subject.

The abuse visited upon the Evening Post in this campaign was the greatest since the slavery struggle. The Chicago Tribune said that “it was a natural instinct of servility to the great corporations that has bound it with hoops of steel to Cleveland’s cause”; a remarkable charge in view of the fact that Jay Gould, H. H. Rogers, Cyrus W. Field, Russell Sage, H. D. Armour, and other corporation heads supported Blaine, and by their dinner with him at Delmonico’s just before election—“Belshazzar’s Feast”—did not a little to defeat him. “The Evening Post has finally gone down so low,” remarked the Poughkeepsie Eagle in September, “that it lies about itself.” The Harrisburgh Telegraph published an attack by Bryant upon Jefferson as proof that the Post had always been addicted to malevolent personalities; not mentioning the fact that Bryant had written these verses in 1803, at the age of nine, twenty-three years before he joined the Post. The New York Tribune turned Godkin’s statement, “Cleveland’s virtues are those which bind human society together,” into “Cleveland’s sins are of the sort which bind society together,” and repeatedly printed it in this form. As for Dana’s Sun, it continually called the Post “stupid”; but Dana this year was proving his own brilliance by supporting the farcical Greenback candidacy of Ben Butler, who polled 3,500 votes in New York city.

On the other hand, the paper received a steady stream of congratulatory letters. Henry Ward Beecher wrote in September that the editorials were clear, honest, and weighty. “How any one who has read them can vote for Blaine passes my comprehension. They ought to be circulated over the whole land as one of the best campaign documents. They stand in striking contrast with the inefficient speeches of Hawley, Hoard, and Dawes, and the essays and letters of Mead, Bliss & Co. Allow me to say that the Evening Post has never stood higher in its long and honorable life than now. It may almost be called the ideal family newspaper.” As a matter of fact, the editorials were circulated as campaign documents. Godkin’s articles on Blaine’s railway transactions sold 20,000 copies in pamphlet form before Sept. 20, when a revised edition appeared. In October the Post issued a pamphlet called “The Young Men’s Party,” by Col. T. W. Higginson, and another which embraced a reply to George Bliss and the table of ten Blaine falsehoods. In the closing days of the campaign the paper received subscriptions of $1,000 a week for the independent Campaign Fund. Godkin maintained his fierce editorial attacks to the last moment, and did not fail to make the most of the “Rum-Romanism-Rebellion” indiscretion of the Rev. Mr. Burchard, saying that Blaine had given “tacit assent” to this insult against Catholicism.

The fight was by no means won with the closing of the polls on election day, Nov. 4. Early next morning every one knew that Cleveland had carried the South, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana, that his election was assured if he had carried New York, and that New York was doubtful. The World claimed the Empire State for the Democrats, and the Sun conceded it to them, but the Tribune declared that Blaine had won. The Post’s headlines that afternoon ran: “Cleveland Probably Elected—213 Electoral Votes for Him—New York in Cleveland Column”; while the editorial declared simply that, with the returns very backward, the indications were that Cleveland had a safe majority. Crowds all day filled the streets in front of the bulletin boards, and for a time there was a threat of rioting against Jay Gould and the western Union Telegraph officers, who were accused of delaying and tampering with the returns in the interest of Blaine. With an audacity born of their memory of 1876, the Republicans continued to claim the victory all day Thursday the 6th. The Tribune footed up the county returns for New York as giving Blaine a plurality of 1,166, but the addition was inaccurate—they really gave Cleveland a plurality of 128! The Associated Press, whose returns were inexcusably fragmentary and late, gave Cleveland 1,057 plurality, and the Post, with its own dispatches from every county save one, 1,378—the official figure being later given as 1,149. The excited Mail and Express made the same blunder as the Tribune, claiming New York for Blaine when its own inaccurately added table of counties gave Cleveland a plurality of 4,000. At two a. m. on the 7th the Associated Press announced Cleveland’s election, and Godkin was able to write:

At daylight this morning everybody conceded Cleveland’s election save the Tribune, which remains in doubt. If it persists in declaring Blaine elected there will be two inauguration ceremonies on March 4, one of Cleveland in Washington and one of Blaine on the steps of the Tribune building, the oath of office being administered by William Walter Phelps.