II—BY HORACE WHITE
I HAVE read “The Humor and Tragedy of the Greeley Campaign.” What I think of it depends upon the point of view from which I look at it. The only tragic thing in it is the death of Greeley. All the rest is comedy.
Regarded as such it has high merits. I can think of nothing political that is more mirth-provoking, unless it is Dickens’s description of Mr. Veneering’s campaign for a seat in Parliament with the help of Boots and Brewer riding about London in cabs and “bringing him in.”
The first three pages are serious. On the fourth page the fun begins, and continues till the death of Greeley. At the bottom of page 33 there are two sentences beginning with the words, “We were wholly serious,” which excuse the participants, including yourself, for being at Cincinnati at all. Then the humor starts afresh and becomes side-splitting at the place where McClure enters and tosses Schurz and Halstead and yourself to the ceiling successively.
Now the question arises, What will the readers of your paper, who get from it their first and only knowledge of the campaign of 1872—and these will probably be ninety per cent. of its readers—think of that campaign? They will think it was a very droll affair and quite unaccountable. They will know nothing about disfranchisement or Santo Domingo or nepotism or whisky frauds, or civil-service rapine or the real causes of the uprising of 1871–72.
The McClure episode, by the way, is even more unaccountable. I don’t understand it myself. It reads as though Colonel McClure was surveying the scene from Olympus as a disinterested spectator, with great scorn for the participants in the convention. In fact he was chairman of the Pennsylvania delegation, supporting Greeley or Davis or somebody. He was as deep in the mud as anybody else was in the mire.
Chapter V on Greeley is prime, but it is hardly true to say or imply that his martyrdom shortened the distance across the bloody chasm or that his coffin nearly filled it. Reconstruction, Ku Klux, and carpet-baggery lasted through Grant’s second term, except in so far as it was put down (in Texas and Arkansas) despite the Republican party. The South did not get any real relief until Hayes came in, and then only as the result of a bargain made before the vote of the Electoral Commission was taken.
To sum up: I think that you have dwelt too much on the humorous side of the Cincinnati Convention, and that you have omitted the only features that gave it a raison d’être, or have given such slight attention to them that the reader will not catch their significance.