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