Parke Godwin,
Editor-in-Chief 1878–1881.
Henry Villard,
Owner 1881–1900.
Horace White,
Associate Editor 1881–1899,
Editor-in-Chief 1900–1903.
Carl Schurz,
Editor-in-Chief 1881–1883.
Horace White, who was connected in New York with Mr. Villard’s business enterprises, and was ready to re-enter journalism, undoubtedly shared in this conception. When Godwin’s half of the Post had been purchased, and Schurz had consented to become editor-in-chief, E. L. Godkin was approached with the offer of an editorship and a share of the stock. He wisely refused to consider the proposal till Henderson’s withdrawal was assured, and then accepted it, writing Charles Eliot Norton that he did so because he was weary of the unintermittent work involved in the conduct of the Nation, because he knew that, being forty-nine, his vivacity and energy must decline, and the value of the Nation suffer proportionately, and because he wished to make more money during the few working years left to him. The Nation, in fact, was a struggling publication. It was bought by the proprietors of the Evening Post, its price was reduced to $3 a year, and Wendell Phillips Garrison, its literary editor, who was Villard’s brother-in-law, went with it to the Evening Post to take charge of its weekly issuance.
The new owner and three new editors had long regarded the Evening Post with high respect. Villard in 1857 had applied at its office for work, being out of employment and almost penniless; and upon his offering to go to India to report the Sepoy Mutiny, Bigelow had offered him $20 for every letter he wrote from that country. His political ideas had been identical with the Post’s—for example, he had been a Liberal Republican in 1872, but had refused to follow Greeley. Godkin had contributed to the Evening Post in the fifties upon such topics as the death of the old East India Company, and we have seen that he furnished correspondence from Paris in 1862. Like his friend Norton, he had long acknowledged the paper’s peculiar elevation. Horace White had contributed in the late seventies upon the silver question. Schurz had known it as a loyal ally in his efforts for a civil service law, sound money, and reform within the Republican party, while it is interesting to note that under Bryant it had said that he was the strongest man in the Senate.
Each of the three editors had his own title to distinction, and each had won his special public following. Carl Schurz had been constantly in the public eye since he lent valuable assistance to Lincoln in the campaign of 1860. The German-Americans, indeed, had known of him much earlier, for as a youth in Germany, aflame with revolutionary zeal, his military services in the uprising of 1848, and his subsequent romantic rescue of Gottfried Kinkel from the fortress at Spandau, had made him famous. In 1858, writing Kinkel from Milwaukee, he wondered a little over his steady rise in reputation, modestly explaining it as due to American curiosity in “a German who, as they declare, speaks English better than they do, and also has the advantage over their native politicians of possessing a passable knowledge of European conditions.” It was, of course, really due to appreciation of his eloquence, versatility, mental power, and enthusiasm for liberal principles. He has admitted that he was inexpressibly gratified by the salvos of applause with which he was greeted in the Chicago Convention of 1860. For his platform advocacy of Lincoln he was rewarded with the post of Minister to Spain, which he early resigned to buckle on his sword. Then came his sterling service first as a brigadier-general and later as major-general, when he fought at Chancellorsville, Chattanooga, and Gettysburg. His investigative trip through the South in 1865 for President Johnson, and refusal to suppress his report because it did not support Johnson’s views, drew national attention to his aggressive independence. Six years in the Senate, where he was unrivaled for his discussions of finance, and four years as Secretary of the Interior, had added to his fame as a man of broad views, high motives, and unshakable courage. By 1881 he was recognized as, next to Hamilton and Gallatin, our greatest foreign-born statesman.
Godkin also had a national following—a following of intellectual liberals, especially strong in university and professional circles, marshaled by the Nation since he founded it in 1865. He had, as Lowell said, made himself “a Power.” In the ability with which the weekly discussed politics and social questions, the trenchancy of its style, and the soundness of its literary criticism, it was unapproached by anything else in American—James Bryce thought also in British—journalism. The masses who knew Schurz well had hardly heard of it; but no man of cultivation who tried to keep abreast of the times neglected it, and because it was digested by newspaper editors all over the Union, Godkin’s influence was deep and wide. James Ford Rhodes gives an illustration of this influence just after the Nation became practically the weekly Evening Post. “Passing a part of the winter of 1886 in a hotel at Thomasville, Ga., it chanced that among the hundred or more guests there were eight or ten of us who regularly received the Nation by post. Ordinarily it arrived in the Friday noon train from Savannah, and when we came from our midday dinner into the hotel office, there, in our respective boxes, easily seen, and from their peculiar form recognized by every one, were our copies of the Nation. Occasionally the papers missed connections at Savannah, and our Nations did not arrive till after supper. It used to be said by certain scoffers that if a discussion of political questions came up in the afternoon of one of those days of disappointment, we readers were mum; but in the late evening, after having digested our political pabulum, we were ready to join issue with any antagonist.”
As for Horace White, he was best known in the Middle West, where he had entered journalism in 1854 as a reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal. Four years later, after much activity in behalf of the free soil movement in Kansas, during which he even removed to the Territory himself and went through the preliminary form of taking up a claim, he reported the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the Chicago Press and Tribune. His reminiscences of those weeks of intimate contact with Lincoln fill many pages of Herndon’s life of the President, and constitute one of its most interesting chapters. During the war he was Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, secretary for a time to Stanton, and organizer with A. S. Hill and Henry Villard of a news agency in competition with the Associated Press. After it, for nearly a decade, he was editor and one of the principal proprietors of the Tribune, which under him was far more liberal than it has ever been since. But he was valuable to the Evening Post chiefly because he had devoted himself for years to study of the theory of banking and finance, on which his articles and pamphlets had already made him a recognized authority.