The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism

by Allan Nevins

II

Yet Godkin’s defects as a general journalist only throw into clearer relief his distinction as a molder of opinion. The Evening Post was quite enough of a newspaper to be a vehicle for his editorial page, and for him that sufficed. He had no wish to appeal directly to several hundred thousand subscribers, to reach the ear of the masses, as Greeley had done. Nothing could have persuaded him to write down to the level of education and intelligence which a huge audience would have possessed. Editorial utterances could be quoted to show that he thought a daily was better when it appealed to comparatively small and select groups. In 1889 he deplored the nation-wide movement for reducing newspaper prices, and said that the Times and Tribune had been better at four cents than they were at two. Godkin spoke to the cultivated few—to university scholars, authors, clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and college graduates generally. Though at the farthest remove from pedantry or stiffness, his writing, polished, allusive, with a keen wit or irony playing across it, required a cultured understanding for its full appreciation. Addressing himself to this narrow constituency, he had an influence easily the greatest of its kind in the history of our journalism.

Foremost among the qualities which gave him this power, his friend of many years, Prof. A. V. Dicey, placed his gift of appositeness, or instinctive discernment of the question of the moment. He had this gift as clearly as Greeley, or Cobbett. His editorial page was kept constantly focussed upon the changing issues of the time. Godkin had no desire to be a voice crying in the wilderness, and knew that his influence would be lost if he wrote about international arbitration when men were thinking of the tariff. Prof. Dicey failed to add that he often helped powerfully toward putting an issue in the foreground. In 1890 he made Tammany a burning public question months before the city campaign; the Post was the first paper to show, in the early nineties, that a contest between jingoes and lovers of peace was taking shape; and he insisted that the free silver battle must be fought out when many Republican politicians were sneaking off the field. He knew how the public mind was moving before the public did. Supplementary to his gift for appositeness was his great skill in reiteration. No small part of the power of the Evening Post and Nation was simply a power of attrition. Once convinced of the justice of a position, he was always, though with unfailing originality and freshness, harping upon it. This, of course, was one of the Post’s irritating qualities for those who disagreed.

To the treatment of all subjects he brought a comprehensive and cosmopolitan knowledge of the world. He knew more than any other American editor about Europe because his personal knowledge of Europe ranged from Belfast, where he had been educated, to the Bosporus. He had lived in Paris, and written a youthful history of Hungary; when Bryce edited the Liberal Party’s “Handbook of Home Rule,” he was the only writer allotted two articles in it; he had many correspondents abroad, and in his later years spent long periods there. In this country he had seen much of ante-bellum and post-bellum society. Though a constant student, he learned only less from his intercourse with men of distinction, from Boston to Washington, than from books. His acquisitions regarding government, international affairs, politics, economics, and law gave him a clear advantage over even journalists like John Hay and Whitelaw Reid. On the other hand, he was handicapped by knowing comparatively little of the great common people, the unintellectual workers, from whose ranks Greeley, Bennett, and Raymond sprang. His Irish humor and sociability gave him some friends among them, but only a few.

Of his style it is easy to form a misapprehension. It was incisive, graphic, and pithy. But at all times it was simple, without the least straining for effect; he indulged in no rhetoric, he did not excel in epigram, as did Dana, and he had no desire to be brilliant in the sense of merely clever. It is true that one can easily find epigrams and witty flashes. On one occasion of much waving of the bloody shirt, he spoke of the rumors that there would be another war between North and South, the former led by Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, the latter by Tom, Dick, and Harry. “There are reports from Washington,” he wrote the fall of 1898, “that Hanna has told Duty to tell Destiny to tell the President to keep the Philippines. We doubt it. We believe Destiny will lie low and say nothing till after election.” He could condense an editorial into a single sentence. When Henry George, an ardent advocate of the confiscation of landed property, traveled in Ireland in the eighties, Godkin wrote: “A spark is in itself a harmless, pretty, and even useful thing, but a spark in a powder magazine is mischief in its most malignant form.” But the prevailing tone of his writings has been well said to be that “of an accomplished gentleman conversing with a set of intimates at his club.” The thoughtful, neatly-put flow of argument or exposition was constantly lighted up by humor, and often varied by irony or invective.

The humor was always spontaneous, and could be either genial or scorching. He had a remarkable faculty for humorous imagery. It was the most natural thing in the world for him to compare the Tammany panic over the Evening Post biographies with the introduction of a ferret into a rat cellar. Sometimes the image was elaborate. Thus, to show the folly of saddling the President with the appointment of thousands of postmasters, he wrote of “The President as Sheik,” comparing him with the Arab chief who sat under the big tree outside the city gate, ordering the bazaar thief to jail, hearing what the widow said of the knavish baker, and giving the good public official a robe of honor. When Cleveland’s friends explained his Venezuela message by the theory that he was forestalling a warlike message by Congress, Godkin remarked: “Foreseeing that Congress would shortly get drunk, he determined by way of cure to anticipate their bout by one of his own, feeling that his own recovery would be speedier and less costly than theirs. But the result was that they joined in his carouse, and they both went to work to smash the national furniture and crockery.”

Of his unequalled gift for compressing a homily into a humorous or ironical paragraph two examples will suffice, both written with typical gusto:

The scenes attending the burial of the late Jesse James on Thursday, at Kearney, Mo., were very affecting. Crowds of people flocked together from all parts of the State to get a last sight of the dead bandit, who had done so much to enable them to lead what they call in Boston “full” lives. Mrs. Samuels, Jesse’s mother, was on the ground early, and talked without reserve to everyone. Her conversation naturally, under the circumstances, was colored with deep religious feeling, and she said to a reporter, who in his shy way ventured to express his sympathy with her bereavement, “I knew it had to come; but my dear boy Jesse is better off in heaven today than he would be here with us”—a sentiment from which no one will be likely to dissent. The officiating clergyman with much tact avoided dwelling on the life and character of the deceased, and improved the occasion by enlarging upon Jesse’s chance of future improvement in Paradise, in a manner that would probably have struck Mr. James himself as rather mawkish. The widespread belief in the West that he has gone straight to heaven is a touching indication of the general softening of religious doctrines. (April, 1882.)

* * * * *

The anarchists had a picnic on Sunday at Weehawken Heights.... An entrance fee of 25 cents was required to gain admission to the picnic. A practical anarchist came along and attempted to enter without paying the fee. Some accounts say that he was a policeman in citizens’ clothes, but this is immaterial from the anarchists’ point of view, however important it may be in a Jersey court of justice. True anarchy required that the man should enter without paying, especially if there was any regulation requiring pay. Taking toll at the gate is only one of the forms of law and order which anarchy rails at and seeks to abolish.... The gatekeeper called for help and some of his minions came forward with pickets hastily torn from the fence, and began beating the practical man over the head. Then the crowd outside began to throw stones at the crowd inside, and the latter retorted in kind. A few pistols were fired, and one boy was shot through the hand. The meeting was a great success in the way of promoting practical anarchy, the rioting being protracted to a late hour in the afternoon. Anarchy, like charity, should always begin at home. (June, 1887.)

As these paragraphs suggest, Godkin was a master of that two-edged editorial weapon, irony, which in clumsy hands may mortally wound the user. But his most superb writing was that in which he delivered a straightforward attack upon some evil institution or person. His Irish sense for epithet enabled him to pierce the hide of the toughest pachyderms in Tammany; his caustic characterization could make an ordinary opponent wither up like a leaf touched with vitriol. One of his younger associates once found a man of prominence sick in bed from the pain and mortification an attack by Godkin had given him.

When Don Piatt asked the elder Bowles to define the essential qualities of an editor, the latter replied, “Brains and ugliness,” meaning by the last word love of combat. Godkin had a truly Celtic zest for battle. Mr. Bishop declares that nothing interested him more than what he called “journalistic rows.” Great was his delight, for example, when the Times and Sun clashed over an exploring expedition the former sent to Alaska, the Sun remarking that it was appropriate to name a certain river after Editor Jones of the Times because it was preternaturally shallow and muddy, and discolored the sea for miles from its mouth, and the Times attacking Dana for “the calculated malice of splenetic age.” Godkin had an irresistible desire to mingle in such shindies. Once in, he would read all the harsh criticism offered of him, and fairly radiating his pleasure, would say: “What a delightful lot they are! We must stir them up again!” His gusto in attacking Tammany was evident to every reader. In each Presidential election he carried the war into the enemy’s country with a rush, and printed three editorials attacking the other candidate to every one advocating his own. On one of his return trips from Europe he and the other passengers of the Normanna were held in quarantine because of a cholera scare and finally carried down to Fire Island for a prolonged stay under conditions of great discomfort. His letters to the Evening Post were delightfully scorching, he kept up the attack till the quarantine officers were panic-stricken, and he demolished their last defense in an article in the North American Review that is a masterpiece of destructiveness.

Godkin was at pains to state his belief that attacks upon any evil should be as concrete and personal as possible. As he said, there was no point in writing flowery descriptions of the Upright Judge, or indignant denunciations of Judicial Corruption. The proper course was to show by book and chapter the misdeeds or incompetence of Tammany judges like Maynard, Barnard, and Cardozo, and chase them from the bench. For one person interested in an assault on poor quarantine regulations, ten would be interested in an assault on Dr. Jenkins, the quarantine head. Godkin had his own Ananias Club. His attacks on the Knights of Labor always included some hearty thrusts at their chief, Powderly. His hatred of the pensions grabbing led him to make a close investigation of the record of the most notorious grabber of all, Corporal Tanner, the man who said, “God help the Surplus!” when he became Pensions Commissioner. The editor took prodigious pleasure in exposing Tanner as a noisy fellow who had lost his leg from a stray shot while, a straggler from his regiment, he was lying under an apple tree reading in what he thought a safe place.

Godkin was well aware that both his humor and his belligerency sometimes carried him beyond the mark. More than once be assigned a topic to a subordinate, saying, “I’d do it, but I don’t trust my discretion.” In the heat of the Blaine campaign he wrote a paragraph stating a charge that was quite unfounded, and went home; luckily his associates saw it early, recognized that it would damage their cause, and substituted another before the forms closed. Next day Godkin was effusive in his gratitude. It is recalled that once the editorial staff objected stubbornly to part of one of his editorials, and after protracted argument, he consented to delete it. When the next edition appeared with the offending passage still there, he was excited and furious, and called the foreman of the composing room down to explain why his orders for killing it had not been obeyed. The foreman protested that he had received no such orders. Knowing associates at once went to Mr. Godkin’s desk, and found that he had written them out and absently tossed them into the waste basket. But Godkin’s occasional excesses of temper were the defect of a rare virtue. A capacity for righteous anger like his is all too uncommon in journalism, the pulpit, or public life generally. Roosevelt never forgave Godkin for the unvarying contempt and bitterness, the unwearied bluntness of accusation, with which he wrote of Quay; but who that knows what Quay was would say that the editor showed a jot too much harshness?

Godkin was reared in the faith of Manchester Liberalism, and his main principles were of that school to the end. At his college (Queens’, Belfast), he tells us, “John Stuart Mill was our prophet, and Grote and Bentham were our daily food. In fact, the late Neilson Hancock, who was our professor of political economy and jurisprudence, made Bentham his textbook.... I and my friends were filled with the teachings of the laissez-faire school and had no doubt that its recent triumph in the abolition of the Corn Laws was sure to lead to wider ones in other countries.”

When he came to America, he brought with him all the rooted opposition of the Manchester school to protection and state subsidy. He shared not only Mill’s and Cobden’s belief in free trade, but their detestation of war, reënforced by his own Crimean experiences. Like Mill, he was a warm advocate of colonial autonomy and the general spread of political freedom. In his last years, he declared that he had always believed “that the Irish people should learn self-government in the way in which the English have learned it, and the Americans have learned it; in which, only, any race can learn it—by practicing it.” He was long a believer in minority or proportional representation, naming it in 1870 as one of the three great objects of the Nation. Another of these objects, civil service reform, he took up just after the Civil War, struck by the contrast between our corrupt and incompetent administrative system and the efficient, experienced British civil service. The introduction of the Australian ballot, the enactment of better election laws, the reform of municipal government, were prominently pushed forward by Godkin. He thoroughly agreed with the Manchester jealousy of government interference in economic and industrial affairs, holding that unless required by some great and general good, it was a certain evil.

These were Godkin’s principles, and by principles he always steered his course. Greeley often did not know his own mind, Bennett and Dana had little regard for principle, but Godkin always held fixed objects before him. A contemporary historian, Harry Thurston Peck, in “Twenty Years of the Republic,” writes: “It is not too much to say that nearly all the most important questions of American political history from 1881 to 1896 got their first public hearing largely through the influence of Mr. Godkin.” That is an exaggeration, but an exaggeration made possible by his tenacious championship of a dozen causes at a time when general opinion was interested but skeptical. To be sure, the ingrained nature of some of his principal doctrines was a limitation. It prevented him from being a powerfully original thinker in the field of government and politics. He taught our intellectual public lessons which he had learned from the more advanced practice and thought of Great Britain, and far beyond that he did not go. But this limitation can easily be exaggerated. He was an omnivorous reader, his curiosity in new ideas and movements was intense, and he had a really open mind.

In most ways he kept quite abreast of the times, and in some well ahead of it. He looked much farther than the ordinary liberal into the relationship between powerful nations and the weaker or inferior peoples, for he perceived the affinities between economic conquest and political conquest. His editorials upon intervention in Egypt in 1882 show that he had no patience with the view that one government might bully another to protect the investments of its nationals. He did believe that British intervention was justified upon other grounds, and always maintained that Cromer’s rule there, like English rule in India, was a boon to the native and the world. But in Africa, Asia, and in Cuba, he was always angered by any evidence that selfish interests—traders, coal concessionaires, investors—were using a strong government as a catspaw to menace or subvert a weak one.

His writings upon capitalism show a steady development of ideas. He objected to demagoguish attacks upon Capital, a word which he disliked, saying that if people called it Savings they would have fewer misconceptions. But he was no more inclined to defend abuses by capital than abuses by labor. He argued for the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in his first year with the Post. He was more and more alarmed by the trusts, both as instruments of economic oppression, and as dangerous influences upon the government. He wanted evil combinations sharply attacked and broken up—not “regulated”—to prevent monopoly, and in later years much of his zeal in attacking the high tariff sprang from his conviction that it and the trusts were mutual supports. No one inveighed more constantly than he against ill-gotten wealth, or against the abuse of money power. His editorial on the death of Peter Cooper, who used to boast that he never made a dollar he could not take up to the Great White Throne, was one of a long series of arguments for a public sentiment that would distinguish between honest success and dishonest “success,” between Peter Cooper and Jay Gould. The chief peril to the republic, he wrote in 1886, was worship of wealth:

It is here that our greatest danger lies. The popular hero to-day, whom our young men in cities most admire and would soonest imitate, is neither the saint, the sage, the scholar, the soldier, nor the statesman, but the successful stock-gambler. Stocks and bonds are the commonest of our dinner-table topics. The man we show with most pride to foreigners is the man who has made most millions. Our wisest men are those who can draw the biggest checks; and—what is worst of all—there is a growing tendency to believe that everybody is entitled to whatever he can buy, from the Presidency down to a street-railroad franchise.

Godkin was a keen-eyed social observer, discussing thoughtfully a multitude of topics affecting the daily life and culture of the people. He did not believe in prohibition, arguing throughout his editorship against the Maine law. But he did recognize in the saloon an enormous evil, politically and socially, he wanted it lessened by high licenses, and utterances could be quoted which suggest that he might ultimately have accepted even prohibition as better than the saloon’s continuance. He disbelieved in woman suffrage for two principal reasons, because he feared it would further debase the government of our large cities, and because the great majority of women in his day were indifferent to it. On social abuses of all kinds he used the lash unsparingly. His campaign against public spitting, upon grounds of sanitation as well as cleanliness, was potent in abolishing the spittoon. For years he kept up a vigorous effort to shame the South out of its tolerant attitude toward homicide. He had been shocked by this attitude when he traveled in the South in 1856–57, and the war and Reconstruction had made it worse. His method was characteristic. Every time one Southerner shot another because of a quarrel over a dog, or a rail fence, or a hasty word—which was every few days—he wrote an editorial paragraph recounting the circumstances, with ironic comment. He dwelt upon the bloody details, the “gloom” that pervaded the community, and the certainty that nothing would be done to bring the murderer to trial. For several years early in the eighties this campaign gave the editorial page of the Post a decided mortuary flavor. Part of the Southern press was enraged, declaring that the Post was maliciously attempting to prevent emigration southward; but it got below the skin of the section with salutary effect.

Certain of Godkin’s utterances upon labor problems show the unfortunate effect of part of his early training. They had not only the fallacies of the laissez faire position, but were harshly put. He had a way of speaking of workmen, when they displeased him, as “ignorant,” “idle,” “reckless,” indicting them en masse. In 1887, writing contemptuously of a strike “of coalheavers, longshoremen, and the like,” he spoke of the men who respond to labor agitators as “a large, passionate, ignorant, and through their ignorance, very discontented and uncomfortable constituency.” For years in the eighties, when labor was struggling toward effective organization, he declared that its agitators were producing a cowardice among politicians, ministers, and philanthropists like that the slavery leaders produced before the Civil War. He was one of those who thought the early career of Prof. Richard T. Ely dangerously incendiary. He repeatedly denied that strikers had the right to post pickets around an employer’s premises. He denied them the right to accuse an employer of paying an unjust wage, or taking an undue share of profits, saying that a strike should be regarded as “a simple failure of business men to agree to a bargain” (May, 1886). Labor was guilty of many crimes and abuses, from dynamiting to boycotts, in those days. But it would be hard to find a more unfair statement of the labor movement, 1876–1896, than Godkin wrote in the latter year (Sept. 2):

Labor as a “question” was twenty years ago new in America.... It gradually grew in political and social importance. Politicians began to preach that employers were great rascals if they did not allow laborers to stay in their service on their own terms. They were backed up by a swarm of “ethical” economists and clergymen all over the country, who found something hideously wrong in the existing state of society, and proclaimed the obligation, not simply of the employer, but of the state and society, to do all sorts of nice things for the laborer; to carry him about for nothing, to pay him for his labor what he should judge to be sufficient, to provide all sorts of comforts and luxuries for him at the public expense, on what was called “broad public grounds.” This insanity raged for several years. It was preached from thousands of pulpits. “Papers” were read on it at all sorts of clubs, societies, and reunions, showing the wrongs done to the manual laborer by everybody else. Under its influence Powderly and his Knights of Labor grew into a great power....

This particular “craze” lasted till the Chicago riots of 1893, and the appearance on the scene of Altgeld as the Governor of a great State. People then saw the fruits of their teaching. Large bodies of ignorant and thoughtless men had believed it and acted on it. In order to settle a small dispute between a sleeping car company and its men, they determined to suspend locomotion throughout the business regions of a great nation. They believed they were in the right. If the account given of labor by the clergymen and ethical economists were true, they had the right to do what they were doing. For some days the government of the United States seemed to be suspended. But when one courageous man stepped to the front, and said this nonsense should cease, it suddenly stopped. The sermons and “papers” and ethical economy stopped too.

Godkin rejoiced when the Knights of Labor disintegrated, and said nothing in praise of the work it did in clearing the ground for the A. F. of L., or in hastening the eight-hour day, the abolition of contract labor, and the establishment of labor bureaus. A similar want of sympathy was evident in much he wrote of the farmers. In fact, he imbibed with his British training a strong consciousness of class, which made him speak of manual workers and small tradesmen as inferiors. An editorial deprecating a liberal education for children of the poor, easily accessible in files of the Nation (Dec. 23, 1886) is a curious example of his inability to understand the American denial of any permanent class lines. As a good liberal, he believed that labor must be strongly organized, but if he had any real feeling for it, it seldom appeared. He was a philosophic democrat, but not a practical democrat. His editorials, joined with certain well-known personal traits—his great care in dress, his fastidiousness in food, his intellectual aloofness—led many to think him a snob; a term that was misleading, for no one was less a respecter of persons. They inspired the well-known verses of McCready Sykes, beginning:

Godkin the righteous, known of old,
Priest of the nation’s moral health,
Within whose Post we daily read
The Gospel of the Rights of Wealth.

In denying that Godkin was a pessimist, we must not deny that he was sometimes atrabilious. Scattered through his letters are remarks that indicate moods of deep discouragement. “I am tired of having to be continually hopeful,” he wrote after the election of 1897, and again in 1899: “Our present political condition is repulsive to me.” It was his business to be censorious—to make the Nation, as Charles Dudley Warner said, “the weekly judgment day.” But as Howells writes, practically he was one of the most hopeful of men, for he was always striving to make a bad world better. He deeply resented the charge that the Evening Post was merely a destructive critic, and used to challenge any one to cite an instance in which it had exposed an evil without suggesting a remedy. The commotion following the death of Garfield brought from him a notable expression of faith in our national stability. He recalled that the same calamity had occurred before, when the country was in the midst of the greatest convulsion of the century, with a million troops under arms, a colossal debt, and terrible problems awaiting solution; that a stubborn, uneducated man had become President, and for three years had quarreled violently with Congress; and yet that all had ended prosperously. Mr. Bishop was surprised on election day, in 1884, to see the calm serenity with which Godkin awaited the result of the Blaine-Cleveland contest, but Godkin remarked, with intense conviction: “I have been sitting here for twenty years and more, placing faith in the American people, and they have never gone back on me yet, and I do not believe they will now.” He himself used to laugh at the talk of his pessimism, remarking that when he lived in Cambridge, people said that he and Norton were accustomed to sit at night and talk until at about 2 a. m. the gloom would get so thick that all the dogs in town would start howling.

In the reminiscences that death prevented him from expanding, he made a brief survey of contemporary American civilization in a tone anything but discouraged. He believed that in government the United States had lost ground. The people cared less about politics, were less instructed regarding administration, and had allowed themselves to become the tools of the bosses; while the old race of great statesmen had died out. He also thought that the press had ceased to have much influence on opinion, and that the pulpit had become singularly demagogic. On the other hand, he declared that the advance of higher education, qualitatively and quantitatively, was without a parallel in all previous world history. “And,” he added, “the progress of the nation generally in all the arts, except that of government, in literature, in commerce, in invention, is something unprecedented, and becomes daily more astonishing.”

As to the character and extent of Godkin’s influence there is no uncertainty. Exerted directly upon the leaders of opinion, it was felt indirectly by the whole population. All over the country he convinced isolated and outstanding men, who in turn diffused his views throughout their own communities. No man who once fell under the sway of his powerful pen, even those whom he intensely irritated, could quite shake it off. One eminent New Yorker was heard to call the Post “that pessimistic, malignant, and malevolent sheet—which no good citizen ever goes to bed without reading!” The thinking young men of the colleges, and many outside them, accepted his utterances as an almost infallible guide. No public man was indifferent to them. The Evening Post and Nation long exercised a peculiar sway in newspaper offices from Maine to California. Gov. David B. Hill remarked to a secretary during the fight Godkin was waging against his machine: “I don’t care anything about the handful of Mugwumps who read it in New York City. The trouble with the damned sheet is that every editor in New York State reads it!” It was a Western editor who said that only a bold newspaper made up its mind on any new issue till it saw what the Post had to say. “For years,” a Baltimore friend wrote Godkin in 1899, “I have noticed your editorials reappearing unacknowledged, a little changed and somewhat diluted, but still with their original integrity not entirely removed from them, in the columns of other papers—a course of Post-and-water not equal to the strong meat from which the decoction was made, but still wholesome....” Henry Holt wrote the editor on his retirement that he had taught the country more than any other man in it. The same tribute was paid him by William James: “To my generation, his was certainly the towering influence in all thought concerning public affairs, and indirectly his influence has certainly been more pervasive than that of any other writer of the generation, for he influenced other writers who never quoted him, and determined the whole current of discussion.”

Such verdicts, from such men, might be multiplied to a wearisome length. The finest spirits of the time recognized in Godkin, though they often disagreed with him, though the disagreement might sometimes be violent, the most inspiring force in American journalism.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
NEWS, LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND DRAMA, 1880–1900

From Godkin’s utterances upon journalism a small volume might easily be compiled. His ideal of a newspaper was as much English as American, with a good deal that was purely Godkinian superadded. He disliked headlines, even when not garish, and valued the headline merely as an aid to reference. He insisted upon absolute accuracy. Not only did he believe, quite properly, that comment had no place in a news story, but he thought any attempt at literary effects out of place there—that information was the one essential. Recognizing that accuracy often requires expert knowledge, he always insisted that this could be got by paying for it. Absolute integrity in every department was of course presupposed. Murat Halstead in 1889 told the Wisconsin Press Association that he saw no objection if readers “should find out that the advertiser occasionally dictates the editorials.” “No objection at all to that,” rejoined Godkin; “the objection is when they don’t find it out.”

During the eighties Dana and the Sun represented to Godkin nearly all that was evil in New York journalism, and the exchanges between the two editors were often bitter. Neither appreciated the other’s qualities. Everyone remembers Mrs. Frederick P. Bellamy’s explanation of the depravity of New York: “What can you expect of a city in which every morning the Sun makes vice attractive, and every night the Post makes virtue odious?” Dana found Godkin the one antagonist who could make him wince, and struck back hard. He persisted in calling the editor “Larry.” He never tired of exaggerating the Post’s staidness. When it changed its form in 1887, he wrote that it would now be dull in sixteen pages instead of eight. After one of the East River bridges was opened, he described the testing of the structure at length; how wagons of stone, trucks of metal, and ponderous engines were trundled across it, and finally, as the supreme burden, a cart bearing a copy of the Evening Post. When S. J. Randall died, and the Post spoke of his corrupting influence upon Congress, Dana seized the opportunity to characterize Godkin as “a scurrilous editor known to the police courts of this town as a libeler of the living, and who is known now as a defamer of the dead.”

What Godkin principally objected to in the Sun, of course, was Dana’s cynical defense of evils and his opposition to a long list of good causes. Supposedly a Democrat, Dana conceived a violent and irrational dislike of Cleveland, did his best in 1884 to defeat him, and later never missed an opportunity to attack him as the “Stuffed Prophet” or “Perpetual Candidate.” Supposedly a friend of decency in the city, for twenty years he was Tammany’s staunchest champion, a supporter in turn of Tweed’s associates, of Boss Kelly, of Grant and Gilroy, and of Croker. Standing for civil service reform in 1876, later he attacked and ridiculed reform measures unmercifully. Every attempt to improve politics elicited a burst of derision from him. The perversity of his course, its lack of principle, Godkin repeatedly exposed in columns of extracts from the Sun headed “Semper Fidelis.”

But he objected in almost equal degree to the Sun’s news columns—to the space they gave crime and scandal. Dana used to say that whatever God allowed to happen he would allow to be printed, and talked of giving a full picture of society. How far this creed carried him, and how caustically Godkin censured it, may be seen from one Evening Post paragraph (Sept. 28, 1886):

The first page of our enterprising contemporary, the Sun, to-day was an interesting picture of American society. The first column was devoted to the trial of a minister for immorality, to differences between a man named Lynch and his wife, to a rape in a vacant lot, and a suicide. The second was half given to a fire and the death of a blind newsdealer, the other half to politics. The third was given up to foreign news and politics, but half the fourth was taken up with murder in a buggy and the escape of two convicts. The fifth was wholly devoted to a very paying scandal about Lord Lonsdale and Miss Violet Cameron, and a small item about another Lord Lonsdale and twenty-four chorus girls. In the remaining two, we find the disappearance of one Sniffers, a divorce, two pugilistic items, half a column of the horse-whipping of a reporter by a girl, the discovery of her lover in jail by Miss Miller, the arrest of a small swindler, and a few other trifles. As a microcosm, the page is not often surpassed....

As Godkin said, the news of the most sensational papers gave an essentially false picture of American society. Any one who read it as a well-proportioned picture of what was happening in New York would believe that every evening about 10,000 betrayed servant girls, horse-whipped faithless lovers, and the same number of drunken husbands murdered wives in tenement houses; and that the bulk of the population was daily occupied in getting at the details of such cases, and wanted explanatory illustrations to help it, such as diagrams showing just where the servant girl stood when she struck the first blow. In a true picture, such incidents would get a few lines.

But when sensational news was obtained by inventing it, or exaggerating small episodes, or heartless intrusion into private affairs, Godkin’s indignation was much greater. His opinion of this phase of journalism was precisely that which Howells expresses of Bartley Hubbard’s unscrupulous news-gathering in “A Modern Instance.” In June, 1886, he paid his respects to “those delightful creatures who lurked behind fences and hid in the bushes two weeks ago, watching the house” where Cleveland was passing his honeymoon. More than one New York journal at that time would fabricate interviews with men its reporters could not reach. One remedy for the current abuses, Godkin thought, lay in stringent enforcement of the laws for libel. In 1893 an invented scandal about a Toronto lady and gentleman resulted in the payment of $14,537 damages by three New York papers, and Godkin declared that it was a public service for injured persons thus to bring suit. On another occasion he wrote: “Some of the most highly paid laborers of our time are lying newspaper reporters and correspondents, men who make no pretense of telling the truth, and would smile if you reproached them with not doing so.”

Rollo Ogden

Editor-in-Chief 1903–1920.

In the nineties Godkin’s distaste for the Sun’s news was forgotten in his more intense reprobation of the so-called yellow press, the old World and Journal. He thought that their sensational attention to crime and immorality was shocking, that they were much more careless of truth than the Sun, and that their pictures and cartoons showed a new defect—the defect of puerility. They did go for a time to startling lengths. “The note of the press to-day which most needs changing is childishness,” wrote Godkin in May, 1896. “The pictures are childish; the intelligence is mainly for boys and girls.... The observations on public as distinguished from purely party affairs are quite juvenile.” When a number of city clubs and public libraries excluded the World and Journal from their reading rooms, Godkin applauded, holding that the new sensationalism could be stopped only by a vigorous public sentiment. He was deeply concerned, like many other sober men, over the intellectual effect of the cheap, widely read yellow sheets. They were making it impossible for the masses to read anything very long on any subject, he said, and to read anything, long or short, on any serious subject. They fed the people brief thrillers about shootings and assaults, titbits of scandal, bogus interviews, and comic aspects of every institution from Christianity down; and when the attention grew jaded, they offered pictures for tired minds. In this there was much truth, though the history of the World shows what an enormous force for good lay in the new journalism.

The sober news pages of the Evening Post were the product of a small force—never in Godkin’s day more than a half-dozen full-time reporters. But it was a remarkably efficient, well-managed force. During the nineties in particular it reached a very high level of enterprise. The managing editor from 1891 to the end of the decade was William A. Linn, who had succeeded James E. Learned. Linn had been with the Tribune from 1868 to 1871, and with the Post ever since, and had remarkable knowledge of his craft. His city editor from 1892 to 1898 was H. J. Wright, who was born in Scotland, graduated at New York University, and had worked on the Commercial Advertiser. These two found several capable men in the city room, added others, and infused an unusual esprit de corps in them. Wright’s vigor was infectious; he showed, says Norman Hapgood, “a great deal of tolerance, hard work, and enthusiasm, and a liking for intelligences of many kinds around him.”

The three most remarkable reporters of these years were Lincoln Steffens, Norman Hapgood, and W. L. Riardon, two of whom have made their mark in the higher reaches of journalism. Riardon was the political reporter. He had been trained for the Catholic priesthood, but weakness for drink and a talent for news-writing had derailed him. He was a member of Tammany Hall, and invaluable in getting material for assaults upon it. Yet his perfect accuracy and fairness shielded him from any resentment in that quarter. “He has to earn a living like the rest of us,” Croker would say whenever a particularly biting story about Tammany appeared in the Post. One of his merits was that he never failed to bring home news; if there was nothing in the assignment he went to cover, he would get a story as good or better somewhere else. Moreover, he never wrote himself out. On Friday, when a special column was often needed for Saturday’s enlarged paper, Riardon could always be counted on to have something worth while up his sleeve.

Steffens, a young Californian, who had studied in Germany and France, joined the staff on the recommendation of Mr. Bishop in 1892, and after some special reporting on rapid transit, was given a year in Wall Street at the beginning of the panic. When first sent down there, the regular Wall Street reporter being abroad, he asked for references to three or four leading bankers. “Calling on them,” he tells us, “I explained the predicament of the Post and my utter ignorance of finance and business. But I said that, if they would coach me from day to day, I would read up, study, work, and I promised in return for the trouble I might put them to, I would report even the most sensational happenings quietly and carefully. The agreement was made; I took the job, and though that had not been my purpose, the effect of the bankers’ interest in me was that we had many, many beats.” Later he was assigned to Police Headquarters at the height of the excitement over the Lexow Inquiry. His work in following the new Police Commission, of which Roosevelt was chairman, was of peculiar value to the public. This four-headed commission was always deadlocking. The obstructiveness of one member was such that the Mayor attempted his removal, but the Governor interfered to prevent it. Steffens for the Post and Jacob Riis for the Sun laid full reports of the Board’s activities before the public, and brought a great deal of public sentiment to bear behind Roosevelt. Steffens was a born newspaper man, sharply observant, vivid in description, full of humor, and with a thorough knowledge of the town.

Of his rapidity and capacity Norman Hapgood furnishes an interesting illustration. One day the 17-story Ireland building collapsed:

It fell down just about three-quarters of an hour before we went to press. There was nobody in the office except me. Mr. Wright was in despair. This was before I had developed, rather suddenly, into a reporter. As far as a story of this kind went, I was in the sub-cub stage. Nevertheless, Mr. Wright had to send me. When I reached the scene of the disaster, I saw Steffens talking to somebody concerned—I think two or three policemen. I went up to him and in quite a leisurely way asked him what information he had. He had come to know me, and be rather amused by my detached ways, so he smiled slightly, never thought of answering me, and went on with his work. I got a few points, went back to the office, and turned in about one stick of inconsequential detail. About five or ten minutes before press time, Steffens called up on the telephone. When he heard of the disaster he had not taken the trouble to phone Mr. Wright, but went direct to the spot. The paper was held fifteen or twenty minutes, and in less than half an hour’s dictation by phone Steffens had covered the catastrophe, given all its drama, told everything in an orderly, expert manner, and not missed a detail. There was not a morning paper that had an account as good.

Hapgood began on space, making about $12 a week at first; but he soon developed into the best general reporter Mr. Wright ever knew. He could write shorthand, and was particularly effective in taking interviews, addresses, and trial reports in the English style. He, and every other reporter, found that the absolute trustworthiness of the paper made men of affairs willing to give it news they denied to other dailies. The treatment of one “beat” which he procured is a happy illustration of the Post’s studious avoidance of anything that would seem noisy. He was well acquainted with some of the leaders of the Salvation Army, and at the time when the public was most interested in the question whether Ballington Booth was going to break with his father, Hapgood received absolute knowledge that he was. Turning in a story on the general situation, he inserted a short paragraph in the middle giving this statement. Mr. Wright was tempted to pick it out and put it at the head of the column. Then he laughed, said he would leave it where it was, and called attention to it only by a minor headline.

During the Spanish War the Post had a creditable quota of correspondents with the Cuban forces. A. G. Robinson sent accounts of camp life at Jacksonville and Key West; Franklin Clarkin was with Sampson’s fleet and later in the Santiago trenches; and John Bass was also at Santiago. The most remarkable of the lot, however, was E. G. Bellairs, as he called himself, who got into Cuba at Nuevitas aboard a blockade-runner from the Bahamas, and was soon sending up remarkable accounts of his adventures among the insurgents. He fell sick, his servant dug a grave for him and departed, and he was rescued by an old woman who fed him miraculous steaks and meat jellies—miraculous, that is, until he observed that his mule had disappeared. Bellairs was dismissed for cause, and it later turned out that his name was an alias, covering a criminal record; but he had high merits as a correspondent. The Associated Press promptly employed him. The Post showed its customary quietness when Sampson destroyed Cervera’s fleet. That event occurred Sunday, July 3, and the morning papers on the Fourth had very meager news; but the day being a legal holiday, the Post refused to issue any edition. Later it had full and prompt correspondence from the Philippines, a spot in which its editors were keenly interested.

Much of the Evening Post’s news value was always furnished by certain unrivaled special features—unrivaled not only in New York, but the whole country. Perhaps the chief, and certainly the most effective in maintaining the circulation, was the financial department. Alexander Dana Noyes, who came from the Commercial Advertiser to be financial editor in 1891, and held that post till 1920, gave new credit to Whiting’s pages, and ably supplemented Horace White in the editorial discussion of financial questions. As far west as Chicago, and as far south as Atlanta his columns were looked to daily as the best on industry and finance printed.

A position of equal preëminence was held by the Evening Post’s literary department, the record of which repays examination in detail. Falling heir in 1881 to the literary editor and traditions of the Nation, the Post became the first American newspaper to publish book criticism that was consistently expert, discriminating, and of high literary quality. James Bryce doubted whether there was any criticism in the world as good as the old Nation’s. By 1881 some of the greatest of Godkin’s original contributors, as Henry James and Lowell, were no longer writing for it. But in spite of such defections, the list was impressively weighty and comprehensive, and the Post had every worthy book reviewed by an authority in the field in which it lay. In fact, the dominant tone of its literary pages was authoritativeness—it was not clever, it was not newsy, but it was definitive.

In large part this meant that the reviewing was by university scholars, and the academic tone of the writing, in the best sense of the word, had much to do with the esteem for the Evening Post in academic circles. People who wanted bright belletristic literary pages were disappointed. Glancing down the roster of reviewers in the eighties, we find only two men known as novelists or writers of light essays, Joel Chandler Harris and Edward Eggleston. There was a decided deficiency in news of literary personalities, and discussions of current literary movements. But all the great institutions of learning were ably represented. It is sufficient to take Harvard as an example. Her contributors included:

Alexander Agassiz, H. P. Bowditch, Edward Channing, Francis J. Child, Ephraim Emerton, C. H. Grandgent, J. B. Greenough, Albert Bushnell Hart, William James, Charles R. Lanman, Charles Eliot Norton, George H. Palmer, Josiah Royce, N. S. Shaler, F. W. Taussig, J. D. Whitney, Justin Winsor.

Outside the universities, we find among the reviewers the names of historians like Parkman, Henry Adams, Henry C. Lea, John C. Ropes, and John Fiske; a number of men in the Federal service, like the archæologist A. F. Bandelier, the astronomer Simon Newcomb, Henry Gannett, and J. R. Soley; and writers of reputation in various fields like George E. Woodberry, T. W. Higginson, W. C. Brownell, Kenyon Cox, Brander Matthews, H. H. Furness, and Angelo Heilprin. The fare was not sufficiently varied by light and elegant features—one rule was not to accept any poetry—but it was of the best possible quality.

The literary editor from 1881 to 1903 was Wendell Phillips Garrison, who had been with the Nation since its founding in 1865, and had early taken charge of the reviews. His name is indissolubly linked with Godkin’s. “If anything goes wrong with you, I will retire into a monastery,” the editor wrote in 1883. “You are the one steady and constant man I have ever had to do with.” He is not remembered, like R. H. Hutton of the London Spectator, the only literary editor of the time superior to him, for permanently valuable literary criticism. His distinction lay in his keen judgment in selecting reviewers, his ability to inspire them, his careful scholarship, and his skill in making homogeneous the work sent to him.

Both to his associates in the office and distant contributors, Garrison was endeared by his tact and charm. When writing to reviewers, he was wont to include some personal word of friendship, often whimsical, which drew the recipients into an intimate circle. He thus built up a great family of Evening Post and Nation writers, from the Pacific Coast to St. Petersburg, more than two hundred of whom joined on the fortieth anniversary of his entrance upon journalism in presenting him a silver vase, inscribed by Goldwin Smith. Whenever Godkin caused a storm in the office, Garrison was expected to restore calm. A single example of his constant thoughtfulness may be given. H. T. Finck, the Post’s music critic, while traveling in Switzerland one summer, was attacked in Berne by typhoid fever, and sent to the University Hospital. Garrison heard of his plight, immediately ascertained that the Nation had a subscriber in Berne, a wealthy cheese exporter, and wrote this gentleman of Mr. Finck’s illness. The result was that the critic spent his convalescence in the subscriber’s home.

By his tact and high ideals, Garrison made the learned world of the United States feel that the book pages of the Evening Post and Nation were a coöperative enterprise, which all scholars should take pride in keeping at the highest possible level. Their labors were scrupulously supplemented by his own, for his scholarship was rare and his exactness almost painful. He would send a telegram to settle the question of a hyphen. An authority upon punctuation and syllabication, he prepared the materials for an exhaustive treatise upon them, parts of which were printed in a memorial volume in 1908. Until May, 1888, much of the impeccable accuracy of the literary columns was attributable to the aid furnished by Michael Heilprin, a truly noble scholar who had been driven from Hungary by the collapse of the revolution of 1848–49, and who just before the Civil War had connected himself with Appleton’s Cyclopædia. He not only wrote many articles for the Post and Nation, but placed his marvelous scholarship at their service in the revision and proof-reading of articles by others. He had a reading-knowledge of eighteen languages. Taking a dictionary of dates, he could run his eye down the page and make corrections by the half-dozen. He could give the time and place of every battle and engagement in the Civil War, and “say his popes” without stumbling, a feat which even Macaulay declined to attempt. In history, biography, geography, and literature he commanded facts literally by the ten thousand.

One of the most striking traits of Evening Post criticism was the unity of tone which Garrison gave it. All reviews and nearly all general articles were anonymous. Godkin and Garrison held that an article by a named writer was not appreciated on its merits; that if he was famous, the veriest twaddle from his pen was devoured, while if he was obscure, nothing he wrote was read. The reviewers hence felt no temptation to air personal idiosyncrasies, and were the more ready to assume the Post’s general point of view. Mr. Garrison chose his reviewer with the greatest care, and left him almost perfect freedom to say what he thought, secure in his discretion. For reasons of space he frequently had to use the blue pencil drastically, but though he called himself The Butcher he used it with tact.

When the Evening Post had a special titbit in the literary columns its rule of anonymity must have seemed a disadvantage. Thus in 1883 it published an article upon the death of Trollope, which even then would have made a greater impression upon readers had they known that its author was James Bryce. Bryce described the creator of Mrs. Proudie from personal acquaintance—“a genial, hearty, vigorous man, a typical Englishman in his face, his talk, his ideas, his tastes. His large eyes, which looked larger behind his large spectacles, were full of good-humored life and force; and though he was not witty nor brilliant in conversation, he was what is called very good company, having traveled widely, known all sorts of people, and formed positive views on nearly every subject, which he was always ready to promulgate and maintain. There was not much novelty in them ... but they were worth listening to for their solid sense, and you enjoyed the ardor with which he threw himself into a discussion.” He had, Bryce added, no successor. Howells and James, though true artists, had not yet laid hold upon the general public; Miss Broughton’s fine promise had not ripened; and “Mr. George Meredith, a strong and peculiar genius, who has a great fascination for those who will take the pains to follow him, remains unknown to the vast majority of novel readers.”

When Gladstone died, Bryce’s review of his career in the Post was signed. But it was regrettable that, after the demise of Darwin, the editors did not sign his name to his very interesting personal sketch of the great scientist:

I saw him at his home in Down last summer, and could not remember to have ever before seen him so bright, so cheerful, so full of talk. Feeble as his health had long been, he looked younger than his age, and had a freshness, an alertness of mind and eye, an interest in all passing affairs, which one seldom sees in men who are well past seventy. It was hard to believe that one was in the presence of so great and splendid a genius, for his manner was simple and natural as a child’s. He did not speak with any air of authority, much less dogmatism, even on his own topics; and on other subjects, politics for instance, he talked as one who was only anxious to hear what others had to say and resolve his own doubts. One remark struck particularly the two friends who had come to see him. He mentioned that Mr. Gladstone had, some months before, while spending a Sunday in the neighborhood, walked over to call on him; and speaking with lively admiration of the Prime Minister’s powers, he added: “It was delightful to see so great a man so simple and natural. He talked to us as one of ourselves; you would never have known what he was.” We looked at one another, and thought that there were other great men of whom this was no less true, and in whom such self-forgetful simplicity was no less beautiful.

Nearly all the Post’s obituary essays upon great American authors—Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Mrs. Stowe, and others—came from the chatty and interesting if not highly acute pen of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The Paris correspondent was Auguste Laugel, who furnished a dozen letters every half-year upon politics and literature. Much English correspondence came from the noted jurist and Oxford teacher, A. V. Dicey, who reviewed many of the important English histories, biographies, and political works before they were published in America. Occasional long reviews were furnished by other Englishmen, as Leslie Stephen and Alfred Russell Wallace.

The best appraisals of current fiction were those contributed in the eighties by W. C. Brownell, whose estimates of important books like Henry James’ “Portrait of a Lady” were almost perfect in their sanity, penetration, and literary grace. Unfortunately, he wrote rarely, and most reviews came from less distinguished hands. The Evening Post was always fervent in its admiration of Henry James’s earlier manner, and it never took a patronizing tone toward Mark Twain, but it was long a bit suspicious of Howells, admitting his power but regarding his work as ugly. Brownell enthusiastically described “The Portrait of a Lady” as superior in moral quality to George Eliot, but the reviewers of Howells disliked his realism. The verdict upon “Silas Lapham” was that, except in its fine literary form, the novel had no beauty. “There is no inspiration for any one in the character of Silas Lapham. It rouses no tender or elevating emotion, stirs no thrill of sympathy, suggests no ideal of conduct, no notion that the world at large is or can be less ugly than Lapham himself. If it is to be conceded that Mr. Howells and his school are great artists in the highest reaches of their art, then the language is in sore need of words to define Sir Walter Scott and Thackeray.” However, the writer admitted that the portrait of Lapham had a vividness and completeness unapproached in contemporary English fiction.

The essays and reviews of widest interest were probably those upon distinctly literary topics, and here the pens of George L. Kittredge, Thomas R. Lounsbury, Basil L. Gildersleeve, Charles Eliot Norton, and George E. Woodberry were especially in evidence. They wrote with charm upon a wide variety of books, and frequently with a special knowledge and interpretative insight that made their essays almost permanently significant. The most active reviewer of history and political biography was Gen. Jacob D. Cox, the works he treated ranging from the massive histories by Rhodes and Von Holst to lives of minor Civil War leaders. Cox himself wrote several books on the rebellion, and after the death of John C. Ropes—also a contributor—was easily the highest American authority upon its battles and strategy. Two other historians who assisted were Lea and Goldwin Smith. Wm. Graham Sumner wrote much on economics.

It is evident that the Evening Post’s literary strength counted as a marked addition to its new value. Some books are not news, but most are; and if in no other American journal was there so little news of sensation, in none was there so much news of ideas. An outstanding review like that which J. D. Cox wrote of Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” or Gamaliel Bradford of Woodrow Wilson’s “Congressional Government” was news in the best sense. From all the important foreign capitals, not merely London and Paris, came constant news of the new publications, new intellectual movements, and new events in letters, art, and science. Until her death that remarkable Englishwoman, Jessie White Mario, wrote from Italy. The first American news of the production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the stir it caused was furnished in a long letter from Berlin in January, 1887, by C. H. Genung. Perhaps the outstanding illustration of this alertness of the Evening Post to intellectual news is its clear reflection throughout the eighties of the discovery of Russian literature by the Western world. It and the Nation did far more than all other periodicals combined to introduce Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Dostoievsky to the American public. As it remarked in 1886, when it published articles upon “Anna Karenina,” “Childhood and Youth,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “The Insulted and Injured,” the appearance of this new literature recalled the wonder of English readers when, in the time of Scott and Coleridge, German literature was first opened to them. Isabel Hapgood was long the St. Petersburg correspondent, while Auguste Laugel was in personal communication with not only De Vogué and other students of Russian letters, but with Turgenev.

The campaign which Bryant had carried on for an international copyright law was tirelessly maintained by Godkin and Garrison. After a time it appeared that cheap piracy was about to accomplish what argument had never done; that the disreputable pirates were ruining the business of respectable piracy, as carried on by Harper’s and others. The latter paid a popular English author for the right to issue an authorized version, but within a week some printer who had paid nothing might be out with a cheaper edition which displaced the other. More and more publishers, therefore, joined in the crusade. Late in Arthur’s Administration the judiciary committee of the House reported that the justice of an international copyright law was unquestionable, and Arthur, in his last annual message, urged the subject upon the attention of Congress. But as Godkin wrote, some clergyman was always ready to start up and announce that books were a property that God had meant to be stolen, and that it was only an oversight that they had not been excepted by name from the Ten Commandments; while some Western paper was always ready to prove that a copyright bill held a hidden villainy in behalf of the pampered noblemen who wrote and published books in England.

Godkin, growing deeply interested as the eighties passed, wrote with a vehemence which George Haven Putnam describes as invaluable in impressing most thoughtful citizens and legislators, but which actually antagonized some others, and which ultimately led to a cause célébre. Prominent among the opponents of international copyright was the Rev. Dr. Isaac K. Funk, a leader of the Methodists and Prohibitionists, who gradually built up the great publishing business of Funk & Wagnalls. Dr. Funk mistakenly came to believe that a majority of Godkin’s blows were aimed at his head, and he resented the fact that among all the exponents of piracy he should be singled out as a shining mark. In due time the editor, commenting on Funk’s alleged piracy of an important English work, rather overstepped the mark and laid himself open to legal counterattack. Dr. Funk promptly brought suit for defamation and injury in the amount of $250,000. There was some consternation at the Evening Post office, where Godkin’s attack was deemed legally indefensible, and Joseph H. Choate, who was retained to defend the editor, shared it. Indeed, he told Mr. Godkin that he could hardly expect to bring him off scot-free, but would try to hold the penalty to a nominal sum.

But by characteristic adroitness and audacity, especially in cross-examining Dr. Funk, Choate made his conduct of the case a notable triumph. Mr. Godkin’s attacks had extended over a number of years. Nevertheless, Choate showed that during all this time Dr. Funk had repeatedly been asked to officiate in Methodist pulpits, that he had been honored by his denomination in other ways, that the Prohibitionists had nominated him for Congress and the Governorship, and that it was not improbable that he would some day receive their nomination for the Presidency. All these honors had come at the time when the attacks by the Post had been most intense.

“Now,” said Choate to Dr. Funk, “now, sir, will you please make clear to his honor, and to the gentlemen of the jury, just in what manner your character and your relations with your friends and your associates and the public at large have suffered injury from the so-called brutal attacks of my client?” To this challenge Dr. Funk did not know how to reply. In his final address to the jury Choate carried the war into the enemy’s territory with staggering effect. It happened that Dean Farrar’s life of Christ had been first brought out here in an authorized edition by E. P. Dutton & Co., and had immediately been pirated by Dr. Funk, although Dutton’s had paid the author a substantial sum. “I have never been a doctor of divinity,” remarked Choate; “I never expect to be one. I cannot tell, therefore, just how a doctor of divinity feels; but to me, an outsider and a layman, there is something incongruous in the idea of a doctor of divinity going into business for gain and beginning his operations by stealing the Life of his Saviour.” Partly because of the lack of evidence of any real injury to Dr. Funk, partly because of Choate’s shrewd thrust, the jury’s verdict was in favor of Godkin, and the costs were assessed upon Dr. Funk.

The ultimate partial victory for international copyright in March, 1891, just as Congress was ending its session, left the Evening Post dissatisfied. It admitted that the law was a triumph for honesty, and that it put an end to the Algerine system of fostering the national intelligence. “But if we said that it was a measure to be proud of, we should be going far beyond the truth. The obligation under which it places the foreign author of having his book ‘manufactured’ in this country, as a condition of protection for it, is a piece of tariff barbarism which is enough to make one hang one’s head.” Unfortunately, the manufacturing clause, after thirty years, is still retained in our copyright legislation.

Mr. Towse’s promotion from a reportership to the dramatic editorship was no accident, for by training and taste he was admirably fitted for the position. He had been taken regularly to the theater from his eighth birthday, had seen Charles Kean play, and recalls a performance at the old Adelphi in London in April, 1853. As a boy he was a constant and sometimes surreptitious attendant in the pit of the Old Drury, Haymarket, and other theaters. The Haymarket at the time was the recognized home of polite comedy in London, and there Mr. Towse saw admirable performances of Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Goldsmith, as well as E. A. Sothern as Lord Dundreary before the part had been made the piece of broad buffoonery which it later became in America. The Adelphi was the home of melodrama, well played. But the performances which made the chief impression upon the boy were those of the famous actor-manager Samuel Phelps, who in the fifties and early sixties raised Sadler’s Wells Theater, in the shabby and despised suburb of Islington, into a famous shrine of dramatic art, and who later appeared in other London theaters. Phelps is pronounced by Mr. Towse to have been beyond doubt the most versatile actor of the nineteenth century.

The outstanding merits of the London stage of this period lay in the fact that it rested upon the old stock companies, in which the standards of acting were far more uniformly high than those which obtained after the introduction of the star system. The actors and actresses had been reared in a school of hard work, small pay, and rigid insistence upon the difference between a mere performance and a characterization. All had served a long apprenticeship, and gained such a comprehensive knowledge of their craft that they knew how to acquit themselves creditably in comedy, tragedy, or melodrama. Mr. Towse recalls their striking diversity and authority of gesture, their distinction of speech, their easy adaptation of manner to the character, and remarkable power of emotional expression. Versatility was unescapable. At Sadler’s Wells, for instance, all Shakespeare’s plays except two were produced during Phelps’s seventeen years of management, along with the other Elizabethan dramatists, and many plays by later or contemporary authors—Colman, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Knowles, Bulwer, and so on; there being a change of bill at least twice or thrice a week.

When Mr. Towse began to review plays for the Evening Post in the early seventies, he found in New York still several very flourishing stock companies, though the theater was rapidly entering upon a transition to the star-and-circuit system. Their proficiency was like that of the British companies, although, being fewer, they did not supply so many all-round actors. A number of the best of the players had disappeared or were disappearing. James K. Hackett, Junius Brutus Booth, and J. W. Wallack were gone, Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman were meditating their farewells, and Edwin Booth was in a period of temporary eclipse. The speculative manager, almost wholly ignorant of anything about the theater but its money-making possibilities, was beginning to arise and foreshadow the day when he would make the typical New York production one in which one or two fairly able players would be supported by a parcel of supernumeraries.

But the performances at Wallack’s in the seventies and eighties were found by Mr. Towse to compare favorably with those given by the Haymarket company in London. He saw John Gilbert in a number of striking characterizations, notably Sir Harcourt Courtly, Sir Peter Teazle, and Sir Anthony Absolute, while Lester Wallack played admirably in other parts; and two other performers of note were Charles and Rose Coghlan. Augustin Daly’s company gave many brilliant, if uneven, performances in the late seventies and early eighties, and included a number of players of trained skill: Charles Fisher, Fanny Davenport, John Drew, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, Ada Rehan, and others. When “Romeo and Juliet” was presented in 1877, with Adelaide Neilson as Juliet, Mr. Towse gave her at once a place among the very great Juliets. The Union Square Company was almost wholly limited to melodrama, but within that field it was the best in the country, and probably in the world. With it Clara Morris achieved some remarkable successes. In later years Mr. Towse recalls her as playing with Tommaso Salvini, whom he thinks “not only incomparably the greatest actor and artist I have ever seen, but one who has never had an equal, probably, since the days of Garrick.”

It is by the standards thus acquired in studying the old British and American stock companies that Mr. Towse has measured the present-day stage—standards of the utmost severity, which he believes show a steady and lamentable fall in the general level of acting. He has always been ready to admit the high merit of a good many, and the genius of a few, stars; but from the time of Edwin Booth, who encouraged the star system by his failure to insist upon good supporting casts, until to-day, he has condemned the indifference shown to the subordinate rôles. The lack of taste and artistic conscience among most of the managers of our time he equally deplores. His standards of criticism are severe from not only the histrionic and literary standpoints, but from the moral standpoint. Convinced that the theater is one of the most important educational influences, good or bad, within the resources of modern civilization, he insists upon drawing a clear line between inspiring and ennobling plays, and vicious plays. No other critic in England or America has a background of experience approaching Mr. Towse’s, and none writes with more responsibility and weight.

Mr. Finck, on the other hand, has had the advantage of finding New York’s music improving from decade to decade, until the city is one of the world’s greatest music centers. When he joined the Evening Post, operatic singers and audiences were divided into two hostile camps, the Italian and German—both accepting the French as allies. Companies which gave German opera sneered at the Italian; companies which, like Mapleson’s at the Academy of Music, gave Italian opera, ignored all Germans save those who, like Gluck and Mozart, wrote more or less in the Italian manner. The revolution which erased this narrow hostility was effected, in the main, by the growth of Wagner’s popularity among operatic performers until it became irresistible.

From the beginning Mr. Finck was a champion of the German opera which Mapleson systematically slighted. During the summer of 1882 he sent the Post from Bayreuth a series of highly interesting letters upon the Wagner performances there. He described old Wagner, almost seventy, as busy half the day overseeing the productions; pleased as a child whenever the effects were especially fine, and once even shouting to Frau Cosima across the whole auditorium, “You see, my dear little wife, that we can get up something together, after all.” Mr. Finck poked fun unmercifully at the more florid Italian operas, and assisted greatly in driving pieces like Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” from the stage. In October, 1883, he was able to hail the opening of the new Metropolitan, with a company that, including Campanini and Mme. Nilsson, was willing to do full justice to the Germans; and when in the spring of 1887 he reviewed the third season of German opera, he could rejoice that of sixty-two performances Wagner had received thirty-two.

Conservative and dignified though it was, in every direction the Evening Post had a marked growth during the eighties and nineties. It found its first sporting editor in Charles Pike Sawyer, who joined the staff in the spring of 1886. It soon had a real estate editor. Its steady expansion led to the abandonment, on Oct. 31, 1887, of the folio shape in which it had always appeared since 1801. The blanket sheet was unmanageable; it could not be stereotyped, so that the printing had to be done direct from the locked type; and it gave too little space. As Godkin said, the change was a contribution to the anti-profanity movement. The sturdiness of the Post is evinced by the fact that in occasional years its profits were large, and that for the whole period the balance was decidedly upon the right side of the ledger; from 1881 to 1915, the net profits on the capital invested were about two per cent. a year. This was in spite of the fact that Henry Villard did not expect it to be a money-making business, the fact that its business managers were not aggressive, and the fact that Mr. Godkin’s editorial fearlessness and bluntness inevitably made enemies. Near the end of his editorship, Godkin’s attacks upon the smallness of the hundred-dollar tariff exemption for travelers returning from abroad involved him in a dispute with mercantile interests in New York. He made some untactful remarks concerning small tradesmen, and the result was a boycott of the paper, involving most of the department stores, which cost it large sums. Henry Villard accepted this blow in an admirable spirit, and it was determined that it would not be allowed to hamper the management in any of its activities.

Mr. Godkin once said he had never known any other man capable of the generosity Mr. Villard showed with the Evening Post. The owner never sought to influence the paper; he rarely entered the office unless invited; and he submitted without a word to attacks by the financial editor upon his railway policies. Throughout his life and for years after his death Mrs. Villard, who became the owner, upheld the editors even when Mr. Godkin assailed causes near her heart, like woman suffrage, and made large financial sacrifices to sustain the paper.

Taking its editorial page, its criticism, and its news together, the Evening Post of the period under review was quite indispensable to New Yorkers of culture. One was as certain to see it in any home of intelligence and means as he was certain to find a set of Shakespeare. It is interesting to note how our writers have singled it out as an essential piece of furniture in any household of refinement. Edith Wharton shows us old Mr. van der Luyden immersed at his Skuyterscliff mansion in the Evening Post; Joseph Hergesheimer lays it beside the study of Beethoven and the Tanagra figurine on Howat Penny’s study table. The news was not superabundant, but it was well proportioned and thoroughly reliable. The financial columns were without an equal. The criticism of books, drama, music, and art was the best in the country. The editorial views might seem congenial or repugnant, but one simply had to know what Mr. Godkin was saying.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HORACE WHITE, ROLLO OGDEN, AND THE “EVENING POST” SINCE 1900

The editorship of Horace White was a three years’ interlude (Jan. 1, 1900-Jan. 31, 1903) between the eighteen years of Godkin, and the equally long editorship of Rollo Ogden. Its outstanding feature was the campaign of 1900, during which the Evening Post faced the two major parties in a plague-on-both-your-houses spirit. It was impossible for it to support either McKinley or Bryan. But it did applaud Bryan’s anti-imperialist speeches, and from them and the Democratic platform plank on the Philippines it expected the greatest good. “They will put one-half the people of the United States in a high school to learn the principles of free government,” wrote Horace White, “as a class learns a lesson by repetition and observation.” In other words, believing that the Democratic Party had possessed no definite ideas regarding the Philippines previous to the Kansas City Convention, the Post hoped that the campaign would imbue it with a lasting set of principles on the subject. That hope has been justified. After Bryan defined imperialism as the paramount issue, the paper—which knew his opponent would win—more and more implied that a vote for him would be a healthy vote of protest.

The decisiveness of McKinley’s victory showed that the people were quite unconvinced of the views of Bryan and the Evening Post regarding our Philippine policy. It happened that Carl Schurz had made a tour of the West shortly before the election, speaking against imperialism, and on his return had visited the Evening Post confident that Bryan would carry a long list of States there. The day after election Joseph Bucklin Bishop argued in the editorial conference that the Post should treat the result frankly, and abstain from any pretense that the anti-imperialist cause had not been hard hit. The editorial which he wrote harmonized with this view. About noon Schurz came in, eager to learn what the editors thought of the election, and was shocked when he read Bishop’s editorial. Towering over the younger man, and shaking his finger in Bishop’s face, he declared in his severest tones: “You admit too much—you admit too much!” “Too much what?” demanded the irritated Bishop. “Too much truth?”

But the Evening Post of course no more surrendered its position upon the Philippine question than upon the tariff. It took the view that the islands should be freed as soon as a stable government could be erected, and it believed then, as it believes still, that the Republican idea of a stable government is altogether too exacting. That American troops should be sent to the other side of the world to impose American rule upon an unwilling people seemed to it horrible. Horace White warmly approved of President McKinley’s and John Hay’s liberal attitude toward China in the Boxer troubles, and their insistence upon the open door and Chinese integrity. The same liberal principles seemed to him to condemn the employment of a hundred thousand men and a hundred million dollars a year to subjugate the Filipinos; give them a definite promise of independence, he held, and the fighting might stop.

When Mr. White resigned, in accordance with his original intention of remaining editor but a short period, it was a foregone conclusion that his successor would be Mr. Ogden. A power in the Evening Post office since he entered it in 1891, Mr. Ogden had come to take a leading share in the guidance of policy and the writing of the important editorials. Of his long, exceedingly able, and fruitful editorship, one comparable only with Godkin’s and Bryant’s in the history of the paper, it is too soon to write in detail. But its main outlines may be roughly indicated.

In national politics the Evening Post continued independent, with the leaning towards the Democratic Party which its low-tariff and anti-imperialist tenets naturally gave it. The only occasions since 1884 when it has not supported the Democratic ticket are the three occasions on which Bryan ran. In 1904 it was with Parker against Roosevelt, and in 1912 and 1916 it was with Wilson. In international affairs it remained the champion of peace and of fair play for the weaker nations, with that special regard for friendship with England which has animated it since 1801. It was always to be found arrayed against the Platt and Barnes machines in State politics, and against Tammany in the city. Upon some large domestic questions its policy changed—it early became an advocate of woman’s suffrage, and in due time a supporter of national prohibition; while upon other domestic questions, as the negro question, it grew much more aggressive and insistent.

Much of the energy with which the Evening Post opposed Roosevelt in 1904 was due to its hot indignation over the steps by which, the previous fall, he had gained a right of way for the Panama Canal by hastening to confirm the separation of Panama from Colombia. Mr. Ogden’s attacks upon that high-handed act were stinging. Whether or not American agents had intrigued to bring about Panama’s secession, the Evening Post thought it shameful, in view of our protests in the Civil War against European recognition of the Confederacy, to be so precipitate in recognizing Panama. “Our policy is now the humiliating one of treating a pitifully feeble nation as we should never dream of dealing with even a second-class Power,” wrote Mr. Ogden; “of giving a friendly republic a blow in the face without waiting for either explanation or protest; of going far beyond the diplomatic requirements of the situation, and that with indecent haste—and all for what? To aid a struggling people?... No, but just for a handful of silver, just for a commercial advantage....” On one occasion he published as an editorial, without comment, the Bible passage relating to Naboth’s vineyard.

(Back): Christopher Morley C. C. Lane Donald Scott

(Middle): Henry Seidel Canby Simeon Strunsky Arthur Pound Allan Nevins Charles McD. Puckette

(Front): Franz Schneider Royal J. Davis W. O. Scroggs Edwin F. Gay

EDITORIAL COUNCIL, 1922.

Toward the seven years of Roosevelt’s Presidency the attitude of the Evening Post had to be a constant alternation of hostility and friendliness. It disliked his love of excitement and sensation, but liked his energy. It attacked his demands for a big army and navy, but admired his brilliant conclusion of peace between Russia and Japan. It believed him indifferent to constitutional and legal methods, censuring his tendency to ride rough-shod over Congress and curse the courts; but it valued his ability to get things done, and recognized the immense constructive achievement of his administration—his work for conservation and irrigation, his railway rate legislation, his pursuit of land thieves, postal thieves, and rebate-granting railways, his successful fight in the Northern Securities case. Above all, it recognized in him an awakener of the national conscience:

A great upheaval of moral sentiment took place during his administration. He was not the sole cause of it, but he utilized it and furthered it mightily. An account of stewardship of the rich was vigorously demanded. Business dishonesty was held up to abhorrence. Corporation rottenness was probed. All this, in spite of excesses of denunciation and legislation, was highly salutary. It was full time that people who had been mismanaging corporations and exploiting the public were called sharply to book.... The quickening of the national conscience, the rousing of a people long dead in trespasses and sins, with such concrete results as the reform of the insurance companies and the restrictions upon predatory public service corporations, is a service the value of which can scarcely be overlooked. (March, 1909.)

Having been outraged by the McKinley tariff and done its best to further the political revolt which that measure produced, having been equally denunciatory of the Dingley tariff, the Evening Post hoped in 1909 for a genuine revision downward. Throughout the campaign of 1908 it had regretted the lukewarmness of Taft’s utterances on this subject. The day after his election Mr. Ogden gave him a grave warning, which now appears as a prophecy justified:

To Mr. Taft we look for the fulfillment of those solemn promises—particularly for reform of the tariff—to which he and his party are committed. Notwithstanding the returns from the polls, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the recklessness and extravagance which have been encouraged by twelve years of unbroken Republican ascendency.... More menacing yet has been the open alliance between the protected manufacturers and the Republican politicians for the exploitation of the farmers and the vast mass of consumers. It is not conceivable that this sinister partnership can continue as in the past. The new and radical element which is gaining control of the Republican organization in the west will fight the stolid stand-patters like Aldrich and Cannon, and it may be set down as a certainty that if Mr. Taft does not join with them in the task of setting the Republican house in order and in casting the money-changers out of the temple, some man of foresight and power will come forward to wage the battle in behalf of the people. The great cause will produce the champion, as it produced Lincoln, and later Cleveland.

The Taft administration was but a month old when the Evening Post warned it again that the Payne-Aldrich bill contained provisions that would drive it from power unless the President intervened vigorously to remove them. When Dolliver led the attack of the West upon the tricks and robberies of the bill, charging that hoggish manufacturers had obtained permission from Aldrich to write their own tariff clauses, the editors rejoiced that never before had the public been so awake to greed and dishonesty of protection. When it found that its appeals to Taft to take action were in vain, it was totally disgusted with the President. His Winona speech it thought indefensible. Like the rest of the country, it soon discovered that he had marked deficiencies for his great office. In its view, Taft was wrong in the Ballinger affair, and in his initial advocacy of the remission of Panama tolls. He was not merely a poor politician, in the sense that he could not keep an effective party following, but he lacked foresight and energy. “He has shown himself devoid of the higher imagination in public affairs, too little prescient, without the touch of quick sympathy and popular quality which would have enabled him to take arms against a sea of troubles,” wrote Mr. Ogden as the administration ended.

Yet the Evening Post did not believe that Taft’s administration was the black betrayal and wretched failure which many said in 1912 it was. The country had many services to thank him for, it said, and his reputation would certainly benefit by the lapse of time. As between Taft and Roosevelt in 1912, it decidedly preferred Taft. In an editorial as the year 1911 closed, “A Square Deal for Taft,” it accused the former President of hitting below the belt. “Roosevelt is deliberately allowing himself to be used against the President, and allowing it ambiguously, equivocally, and not in the honorable and manly fashion which he has been forever advocating.... Why does he not frankly state the grounds of his opposition to Taft?” When Roosevelt did throw his hat into the ring, the editors deemed his cause in many respects weak. They felt that his denunciation of Taft was malignantly overdone. Recognizing many fine qualities in the Progressive movement, they believed that no new party could come into being without some one compelling moral or economic issue; that a program of all the virtues might be attractive, but did not afford a sound political basis, at least when coupled with the fortunes of an ambitious self-seeker. Parts of the Roosevelt program, notably his proposal for the recall of judicial decisions, and his plan for regulating the trusts by commission, struck the Post as thoroughly unsound.

Supporting Woodrow Wilson throughout the 1912 campaign, the Evening Post also supported almost all the measures of his first administration. The Federal Reserve Act and the Underwood tariff it hailed as reforms of the first magnitude. The various acts for the better use and protection of our national domain met its approval. While several influential New York newspapers attacked Wilson’s policy of “watchful waiting” in Mexican affairs, the Post held it both wise and courageous, and regretted only the temporary interruption of it by our attack upon Vera Cruz. The editors welcomed the Jones Act for a larger measure of Philippine autonomy, thought well of Bryan’s “cooling-off treaties,” and were grateful for the President’s veto of the literacy test bill. Indeed, the paper’s support would have been unhesitatingly given to President Wilson at the beginning of the campaign of 1916 had his opponent been a less able man than Hughes, and had it not been deeply offended that midsummer by the surrender of the President and Congress to the threat of a great railway strike, and their enactment of the eight-hour day law. As it was, shortly before November 1 the Evening Post came out for Wilson’s reëlection.

The opening of the Great War was a stunning surprise to the Evening Post, as to all America. But it was less completely taken unawares than were some papers which had failed to watch minutely the drift of affairs in Europe. On July 27, in an editorial analyzing the bellicose contents of a number of German and Austrian papers—the Hamburg Fremdenblatt, the Deutsches Volksblatt, the Neues Wiener Tageblatt, the Reichspost, and the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna—it gave a remarkably accurate view, under the title “War Madness,” of what was going on under the surface in Europe. When Germany entered Belgium its condemnation was instant. “By this action Germany has shown herself ready to lift an outlaw hand against the whole of Western Europe.” The paper did not know whether Germany directly caused and desired the war; but it believed that she indirectly caused it, and that she failed to prevent it when she might easily have done so. Before fighting had fairly commenced it ventured upon a prophecy which the fate of three thrones has fully justified:

The human mind cannot yet begin to grasp the consequences. One of them, however, seems plainly written in the book of the future. It is that, after this most awful and most wicked of all wars is over, the power of life and death over millions of men, the right to decree the ruin of industry and commerce and finance, with untold human misery stalking through the land like a plague, will be taken away from three men. No safe prediction of actual results of battle can be made. Dynasties may crumble before all is done, empires change their form of government. But whatever happens, Europe—humanity—will not settle back into a position enabling three Emperors to give, on their individual choice or whim, the signal for destruction and massacre.

The whole course of the war only confirmed the Evening Post’s original view that the side of right and justice was the Allied side. When the Lusitania was sunk, Mr. Ogden’s indictment of “The Outlaw German Government” was one of the most stirring editorials that ever appeared in the Evening Post or Nation; an editorial which asked the American people to show themselves “too firmly planted on right to be hysterical, and too determined on obtaining justice to bluster,” but which expressed confidence that the true and righteous judgments of the Lord would yet be visited upon the German war leaders. When President Wilson asked the American people to be neutral in thought and word, the Evening Post declared that our moral sentiment could not be neutral—that it must be with England and France. The Allied infringements upon our rights in the enforcement of the blockade it attacked, but it constantly emphasized the fact that Germany’s violations of international law were far graver, in that they affected life and liberty, not merely property.

Long hoping that American participation in the war could be honorably avoided, the Evening Post did not want peace at any price. It regarded war as a lesser calamity than the defeat of the Allies, or than supine submission to Germany’s unrestricted submarine activity. When that activity was announced it was plain that we should soon be involved in the conflict, and the editors followed Mr. Wilson’s course with general, if not perfect, approval, in the difficult days of the crisis. The President’s address to Congress asking for a declaration of war was warmly praised by the Evening Post, as placing our national motives and objects upon the most elevated plane. “All told,” it said on April 3, “Americans may take satisfaction in the fact that they enter the war only after the display of the greatest patience by the government, only after grievous and repeated wrongs, and upon the highest possible grounds. There can be no doubt that the country will respond instantly to the President’s leadership.” The Evening Post was not for restricted, but complete participation in the conflict. It early took issue with the administration and with dominant public sentiment in opposing the raising of the army by draft, holding that any appearance of forced military service was un-American, that a volunteer army would show a superior spirit, and that while conscription might become necessary later, it should be postponed until our traditional method of recruiting failed to bring enough men. But the Evening Post accepted the draft loyally, and gave its workings the cordial praise they deserved. From the beginning of the war it looked forward eagerly to the establishment of a world organization to preserve international peace everywhere; and in 1919 and 1920 it was among the staunchest advocates of the League of Nations.

Mr. Ogden had the assistance throughout his editorship of a staff as able as that which Mr. Godkin had gathered about him. Frank Jewett Mather, jr., served as an editorial writer from 1900 to the close of 1906, and as he says, gradually specialized in writing upon European politics and art criticism. Oswald Garrison Villard, son of Henry Villard, was called into the office from the Philadelphia Press in 1897, and remained one of the most active of the editorial writers until 1917. A brilliant young man from Wisconsin, Philip L. Allen, whose premature death was a loss to journalism, advanced rung by rung, and was an editorial writer from 1904 to 1908. Simeon Strunsky joined the staff in 1906. Three years later Dr. Fabian Franklin, long professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins, and from 1895 to 1906 editor of the Baltimore Sun, became associate editor; and Royal J. Davis entered the circle in 1910. Paul Elmer More, who was literary editor of the Evening Post after 1903, and became editor of the Nation in 1909, contributed to the editorial page; and there was a considerable list of men who served for short periods, especially in summers—Stuart P. Sherman, Hutchins Hapgood, Walter B. Pitkin, H. Parker Willis, and others.

As the editorial staff existed when the European War began, its members constituted a group of comprehensive tastes and abilities. Mr. Ogden decided all questions of policy, wrote almost all the leading political editorials, and in addition ranged over a wide field of social and literary comment, treating everything with an incisive, pungent style peculiarly his own. Dr. Franklin wrote upon economic subjects with unfailing sureness, treated educational and scientific topics with the authority of a scholar, and was masterly in exploding any fallacy which for the moment had assumed importance, and the detection of which required the combination of strong common sense and logical subtlety. Mr. Villard was interested in a wide range of humanitarian subjects, having made the Post, for example, an outstanding champion of the negro race, while he paid special attention to military and naval affairs. International politics was left very largely to Simeon Strunsky, whose pen was also indispensable in the humorous or satiric treatment of current subjects, and whose knowledge was encyclopædic. Mr. Noyes continued to write regularly upon financial topics, while Mr. Davis—who was also literary editor, 1914–1920—had given special attention to certain phases of politics.

In its news department the Evening Post had suffered a heavy blow in 1897, when the city editor, H. J. Wright, became editor of the Commercial Advertiser, and took with him Norman Hapgood and Lincoln Steffens. But it quickly recovered, and under a series of managing editors—O. G. Villard, Hammond Lamont, H. J. Learoyd, E. G. Lowry, J. P. Gavit, and the present head, Charles McD. Puckette—has continued steadily to improve. The list of reporters since the beginning of the century contains many names known outside the newspaper world. Among them are Burton J. Hendrick, Norman Duncan, Freeman Tilden, and Lawrence Perry as authors; A. E. Thomas and Bayard Veiller as playwrights; George Henry Payne, Ralph Graves, and Arthur Warner as editors; and Rheta Childe Dorr, Walter Arndt, and Robert E. MacAlarney. The Washington correspondence has always maintained a high degree of excellence. The Washington bureau was in charge of Francis E. Leupp from 1889 to 1904, when he was appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs; he was succeeded by E. G. Lowry, J. P. Gavit, and then by David Lawrence, two of whose exploits—his “scoop” on Bryan’s resignation, and his remarkable prediction of the States which would give Wilson the Presidency in 1916—made a considerable noise in their time. The present correspondents are Mark Sullivan and Harold Phelps Stokes.

The war brought a series of rapid changes in the ownership and management of the Evening Post. The financial control of the paper had long been in the hands of Mr. Villard, who for more than fifteen years was president of the company, and had given unremitting attention to the maintenance of its high business standards, as well as to the improvement of its news and other features. At the end of July, 1917, Mr. Villard gave an option for the purchase of his share of the paper to his associates, and a few days later it was announced that Mr. Thomas W. Lamont had bought it; thus terminating the long and public-spirited proprietorship by the Villard family. Friends of the paper must ever be grateful to Mr. Lamont for carrying it through the next few years of excessive wartime costs. He placed Mr. Edwin F. Gay, widely known as the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (1908–19), in charge in January, 1920, as president of the Evening Post Company; and two years later, in the first days of 1922, the ownership of the Post passed into the hands of a syndicate organized by Mr. Gay. Meanwhile, early in 1920 Mr. Ogden had resigned the editorship, and Mr. Strunsky took charge of the editorial page.

With the marked broadening of the newspaper in the last two years, and the innovations in its form, its readers are as familiar as they are with the fact that its essential spirit is unaltered. The connection with the Nation having ceased in 1917, its editorial page has abandoned the narrow columns and long series of uncaptioned editorial paragraphs which had marked it since 1881. The literary pages passed in 1920 into the hands of Mr. Henry S. Canby, who has made the Evening Post Literary Review esteemed from the Atlantic to the Pacific as easily the foremost publication of its kind in America. The volume of news has been greatly increased, fresh departments have been added, illustrations given their proper place, and the appeal of the paper broadened without lowering its standards. In a period not favorable to increase of circulation, that of the Evening Post has risen, under Mr. Gay, to the highest point in its history.

But it is the old Evening Post still; a newspaper which, with a history one of the longest and richest in American journalism, has from generation to generation preserved the same sterling character. The objects of its conductors may be easily stated. They wish to keep it as public-spirited as the Evening Post of Hamilton and Coleman; as ardent in defense of democracy and the oppressed as the Evening Post of Leggett; as dignified, elevated, and fearless as the Evening Post of Bryant, Bigelow, and Godwin; as keen, intellectual, and aggressive as the Evening Post of Godkin and Schurz, Ogden and Horace White; and to add what they can to this noble record.

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