At this juncture there occurred an event which brought Schurz and Godkin into abrupt conflict over a question not merely of the manner and quality of the Post’s editorials, but of its views. Schurz had always been much more sympathetic with the laboring masses than Godkin, and in a time of many labor troubles their opinions were bound to clash. Late in July, 1883, commenced a strike of the railway telegraphers, which at first threatened a widespread interruption of communications and transportation. Schurz’s utterances were impartial, but he had no sooner left than Godkin, as he had a right to do, gave the Post a tone hostile to the strikers. His view was that in an industry so vitally connected with the public’s interests, a sudden crippling cessation of work was not allowable; that a national tribunal should be set up to decide such controversies, and that when the decision was once rendered, “general strikes in defiance or evasion of it should be punishable in some manner.” For this judgment much can be said, though it is certainly not one that the Evening Post to-day would defend.

On Aug. 8 Godkin made the Post declare that “the 30,000 or 40,000 men whom some of our modern corporations employ in telegraphic or railroad service have to be governed on the same principles as an army.” This was more than Schurz could bear, and he no sooner read the editorial, at his summer hotel in the Catskills, than he seized a pen and wrote Godkin denying that any man has to be “governed” on army principles save those who voluntarily enlist. “The relations between those who sell their labor by the day and their employers, whether the latter be great corporations or single individuals, are simple contract relations, and it seems to me monstrous to hold that the act of one or more laboring men ending that contract by stopping their work is, or should be, considered and treated in any case as desertion from the army is considered and treated.” He added that he thought Godkin’s editorial one which would do the Evening Post essential harm, and cause it to be regarded as a corporation organ. He would publicly disclaim any share in the responsibility for it did he not abhor the sensationalism of such a step. Godkin and Schurz were equally positive and tenacious of any opinion once fully assumed, and there was no issue from their disagreement except the resignation of one of them. That of Schurz was formally announced during the autumn. It is a gratifying fact that whatever temporary ill-feeling subsisted between them almost immediately disappeared, and was replaced by their former mutual high esteem. Within a few weeks after his departure Schurz contributed an editorial to the Evening Post upon Edward Lasker, the German liberal, and throughout the campaign of 1884 Godkin’s references to Schurz were warmly cordial.

The regret of the Evening Post’s friends over Schurz’s resignation was tempered by their sense that a disruption of the original arrangement was inevitable. Every newspaper has to have a single ultimate arbiter of its policy. The only exceptions to this rule are those journals which take no real interest in maintaining a thoughtful, useful policy. With neither Schurz nor Godkin willing to accept a subordinate position, with their distinct differences of temperament, the wonder is that they worked so smoothly for two full years.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
GODKIN, THE MUGWUMP MOVEMENT, AND GROVER CLEVELAND’S CAREER

Edwin Lawrence Godkin was not quite fifty-two when he became editor-in-chief in 1883, and was in the prime of life, with fifteen years of vigorous journalistic labor before him. He wrote Charles Eliot Norton that he had no intention, even if his health permitted, of staying with the Evening Post more than ten years, but his heart was enlisted far too keenly in his work and the great causes he espoused to let him go until failing health made his retirement in 1899 imperative. It is natural that his published letters should emphasize his joyous sense of a greater freedom as he entered the newspaper office; his feeling that he was giving himself to a publication which did not depend absolutely upon his pen and mind as the Nation did, and could have his vacations like other workers. But he felt also his new responsibilities. He valued the opportunity the Post gave him to impress his opinions daily upon the public; to reach a wider audience—the Post’s 20,000 buyers as well as the Nation’s 10,000; and to give more attention to certain subjects, as municipal misgovernment. “My notion is, you know,” he wrote W. P. Garrison in 1883, “that the Evening Post ought to make a specialty of being the paper to which sober-minded people would look at crises of this kind, instead of hollering and bellering and shouting platitudes like the Herald and Times.”

The independent character of the political course Godkin would steer had been fully indicated by the volumes of the Nation. This weekly, founded when the last shots of the Civil War were ringing in men’s ears, had undertaken the fearless discussion of public questions at a moment that seemed peculiarly unpropitious. The prevalent tendency of the years after the war, as Godkin said, was a fierce illiberalism, represented by such leaders as Thaddeus Stevens in the House. The Nation had at once declared war upon this narrow, rancorous political spirit, and attempted to substitute progressive and enlightened views. It had questioned the wisdom of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. It had been ten years in advance of public opinion in its attacks upon that demagogic politician, Ben Butler. It had been one of the first Republican organs to denounce the carpet-bag régime at the South, and to assail President Grant for his failures. In 1876 occurred its most serious collision with a considerable body of readers; it condemned the Southern frauds which gave Hayes the Presidency, and called his induction into office a “most deplorable and debauching enterprise,” this course costing it 3,000 subscribers. Godkin inclined in his sympathies to the Republican party, but he would not hesitate to break from it upon any question of principle.

When Godkin assumed the helm of the Evening Post, he had a shrewd suspicion that the Presidential campaign about to open would present a fundamental question of principle. As he wrote long after, James G. Blaine’s audacity, good humor, horror of rebel brigadiers, and contempt for reformers made his nomination sooner or later inevitable, and such a nomination in Godkin’s eyes presented a moral question of the first magnitude. No American newspaper has ever conducted a more effective campaign fight than that which the Evening Post waged in 1884. It was a fight not only against Blaine, but in behalf of the one contemporary American statesman whom Godkin, in his long journalistic career after 1865, highly admired.

Of reformers like Godkin, Blaine wrote in advance of his nomination: “They are noisy, but not numerous; pharisaical, but not practical; ambitious, but not wise; pretentious, but not powerful.” The Evening Post’s opinion of Blaine was equally frank. It believed that the Mulligan letters, published in 1876, convicted Blaine of prostituting his office as a member of Congress and Speaker in order to make money in various Western railways, and of lying in a vain effort to conceal the fact. It added as lesser counts against him that in his twelve years in the House he had never performed a single service for good government, and had done it much disservice, as by his covert opposition to civil service reform, and his defense of the spoliation of the public lands; that in all his public appearances he had been sensational, theatrical, and a lover of notoriety; and that while Secretary of State under Garfield “he plunged into spoils, and wallowed in them for three months, like a rhinoceros in an African pool, using every office he could lay his hands on for the reward of his henchmen and hangers-on, without shame or scruple.” But its central objection was always that he had sold his official power and influence.

The great “Mugwump” bolt from the Republican party as soon as Blaine was nominated took with it many influential Eastern journals—Harper’s Weekly, the New York Times, the Boston Herald, the Boston Advertiser, and the Springfield Republican—but it took no other pen like Godkin’s. Long in advance of the convention, he and Schurz had warned the Republican leaders that Blaine’s nomination would disrupt the party. The Evening Post pointed out in November, 1883, that the next election would probably be close, and that New York, where the voters were more independent than anywhere else, would certainly be the pivotal State. The election of 1876 had hung upon several artificial decisions in the South; that of 1884 would be likely to hang upon the judgment of a small body of thoughtful, impartial voters. On April 23, 1884, a rich New Jersey Congressman named William Walter Phelps published an article defending Blaine, to which Godkin immediately replied in a long and elaborate review of “Mr. Blaine’s Railroad Transactions.” Thereafter the paper kept up a drum-fire upon the “tattooed man.”