It was thus an editorship of “all the talents” that was installed in the Evening Post just before Garfield was shot. Schurz was specially equipped to discuss politics, the range of problems he had met while Secretary of the Interior, and German affairs; White was perhaps the best writer available on the tariff, railways, silver question, and banking; while Godkin held an unrivaled pen for general social and political topics. By birth they were German, American, and British, but Schurz and Godkin were really cosmopolites, citizens of the world. Their practical experience had covered a surprising range. We are likely to forget, for example, that Schurz had once made a living by teaching German in London, and had farmed in Wisconsin, while Godkin had been a war correspondent in the Crimea, and admitted to the New York bar. In their fundamental idealism the three men were wholly alike. Schurz’s political record and Godkin’s Nation were monuments to it. They were one in wishing to make the Post the champion of sound money, a low tariff, civil service reform, clean and independent politics, and international peace. Henry Villard with rare generosity assumed financial responsibility for the paper, but made the editors wholly independent by placing it in the hands of three trustees—Ex-Gov. Bristow, Ex-Commissioner David A. Wells, and Horace White.
II
The selection of Schurz to be editor-in-chief was more than a tribute to his station as a public man. Of the three, he had the most varied journalistic experience. As a young man in Germany he had helped Kinkel edit the Bonner Zeitung. After the Civil War he became head of the Washington Bureau of the New York Tribune, and took an instant liking both to journalism and the men engaged in it—in his reminiscences he draws a sharp contrast between their high principles and the low sense of honor among Washington officeholders. He soon accepted the editorship of the Detroit Post, a new journal, urged upon him by Senator Zechariah Chandler, and in 1867 became editor and part owner of the St. Louis Westliche Post, a place desirable because it brought him into association with Dr. Emil Preetorius and other German-Americans of congenial views. When the date of his leaving the Secretaryship of the Interior approached in 1881, he had received several offers of editorial positions. Rudolph Blankenburg, later Mayor of Philadelphia, wrote that there was crying need of a good daily in that city, and that he and other business men would found one if Schurz would take charge. The statement was published in St. Louis that a new daily was about to be established there under Schurz. But Schurz himself would have been the last to lay emphasis upon his mere practical experience—he had no taste for financial or news management, and it appears that neither the Detroit Post nor Westliche Post was financially prosperous under him. His qualifications for the chief editorship were of a different and much rarer kind.
His ability as a writer shows a mingling of high merits with a few distinct shortcomings. Since his “Reminiscences” will live as long as any work of its kind and time, no less for its style than its fascinating story, since his essay on Lincoln is an admitted classic, it is unnecessary to say that he was a master of the pen. He has interestingly related how he taught himself to write English on first coming to America. At the start he made it a practice to read his daily newspaper from beginning to end; then he proceeded to English novels—“The Vicar of Wakefield,” Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray; and he followed them with Macaulay’s essays and Blackstone’s commentaries, particularly admiring the terse, clear style of the latter. Finally he read Shakespeare’s plays, going through their enormous vocabulary with the utmost conscientiousness. At the same time he practiced turning the Letters of Junius, which he thought brilliant, into German, and back again into English. The result was that soon he not merely wrote, but thought equally well in English or German, and much preferred English for certain purposes, as public speaking and political discussion. Schurz’s speeches were among the most eloquent delivered in his generation. One of the oldest Senators said that his address of February, 1872, was the best he had ever heard in the upper chamber; his Brooklyn speech of 1884 against Blaine ranks with the greatest of American campaign orations; and his utterances upon tariff and civil service reform were read by millions.
Yet Schurz fell just short of being a great editorial writer. He used a battle-axe, at once sharp and crushing, but he could not vary it with the play of the rapier, as E. L. Godkin could. His directness, clarity, and force were marked, but his writings were lacking in humor, metaphor, and allusion. Devoting himself to large political questions, he had no time to observe interesting minor social phenomena, so that his work lacked relief. No one could excel him in argument or exposition upon subjects with which he was familiar, but he could not relieve his discussions from a reproach of dryness.
Of the mind and character behind the pen, almost nothing can be said except in praise. All his life he had been a zealot for liberalism. He had thrown himself into the revolutionary movement of ’48 with an ardor not a whit boyish, on coming to America he had instantly enlisted against slavery, and he was still an enthusiast for reform. Grover Cleveland once spoke of his career as teaching “the lesson of moral courage, of intelligent and conscientious patriotism, of independent political thought, of unselfish political affiliation, and of constant political vigilance.” He was for sound money from greenback days to the settlement of the free silver issue; he was a combatant against “imperialism” from Grant’s attempted annexation of Domingo to Roosevelt’s seizure of Panama. When Secretary of the Interior he enforced the merit system, yet unembodied in any law, in his department, requiring competitive examinations for clerkships. His one fault was that in his intentness on his own subject he sometimes lost perspective, and became indifferent to equally important aims of others.
It has been said that as Lord Halifax made the term “trimmer” honorable in England, Schurz made that of party turncoat honorable in America. His obedience to principle was so unswerving that he was heedless of allegiance to groups or individuals. He was for Seward in 1860, but fell in instantly behind Lincoln; supported President Johnson’s reconstruction policy till his trip South in 1865, and then followed Sumner; was for Grant in 1869, and one of the earliest leaders against him in 1870–71; warmly commended some of Roosevelt’s acts and condemned more; was one of Bryan’s sternest opponents in 1896, and made a speaking tour for him in 1900. The independence exhibited in this adherence to conviction was in the highest degree creditable. His sense of personal rectitude was so keen and sensitive that he could not bear to do anything for mere “expediency.” It can only be said that he was sometimes a little too positive that he was right, a little intolerant of others. His indignation when Roosevelt and Lodge in 1884 followed Blaine, whom they suspected of being dishonest, would have been less intense had he seen that there is really something to be said for party regularity under such circumstances.
Yet he was no impracticable idealist, but a man with a shrewd grasp of affairs. Mark Twain declared that he made it a rule, when in doubt in politics, to follow Schurz, saying to himself, “He’s as safe as Ben Thornburgh”—a famous Mississippi pilot. When his collected papers were published, they showed that throughout his long life he had possessed remarkable prescience. He wrote Kinkel in 1856 that Buchanan’s Administration would end the old Democratic party, that the contest with slavery would not be settled without powder, and that the North would win. In 1858 he predicted that there would be a war, and that he would fight in it. In 1864 he ventured to assert, before the election, that “In fifty years, perhaps much sooner, Lincoln’s name will be inscribed close to Washington’s on this American republic’s roll of honor. And there it will remain for all time.” No one saw farther into the reconstruction question than he. Much of what we now call conservation, especially of forests, dates from Schurz’s far-sighted pioneer work as Secretary of the Interior.
Humor is almost indispensable to an editor, and Schurz had little of it, but in compensation he was sustained by a better trait. Every one perceived the gallant quality of the man, but his intimates alone understood what a deep poetic vein fed it. Howells says that at first he was a little awed by the revolutionist, general, statesman, and editor. “But underneath them all, and in his heart of hearts, I was always divining him poet. He had lived one of the greatest and most beautiful romances, and you could not be in his presence without knowing it, unless you were particularly blind and deaf. It kindled in his eyes; it trembled in his clear, keen, yet gentle voice; it shone in his smile; it sounded in his laugh, which his youth never died out of.” No more unselfish man ever moved actively in American affairs. A sentence from a letter to Kinkel strikes the keynote to his life: “To have aims that lie outside ourselves and our immediate circle is a great thing, and well worth the sacrifice.”
Schurz, Godkin, and White made only two important changes in the form of the Post, both dictated by its union with the Nation. It was still, like the Sun of that time, like several great Paris dailies to-day, a four-page sheet; except that on Saturday Parke Godwin had instituted a two-page supplement, containing book notices, essays, fictional sketches, and other miscellaneous matter. This was now utilized for the book reviews written by the Nation’s unrivaled staff of contributors—Lowell, Bryce, Parkman, W. C. Brownell, Henry Adams, John Fiske, Charles Eliot Norton, and a long list of experts in every field. The space thus afforded was inadequate, and it became necessary to print many reviews during the week opposite the editorials, so that the Post acquired a much more literary flavor. Under Bryant and Godwin editorials had been variable in length, and nearly all headed. Now they were standardized into two forms; long headed articles, of 800 to 1,200 words each, of which two or three were printed daily, and seven to ten paragraphs of 100–250 words each, without captions. The brevier type was sometimes lifted direct into the forms of the Nation.