Mr. Godkin never called Cleveland brilliant, and praised him rather for an honest obstructiveness, balking the schemes of raiders, visionaries, and predatory interests, than for marked constructive abilities. Like the other “Mugwump” organs, the Evening Post was offended in 1887–88 by his apparent acquiescence in several raids upon the civil service by spoilsmen. In April, 1889, it accused the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. J. H. Maynard, of bringing heavy pressure to bear upon the New York Custom House for the dismissal of capable Republicans. Maynard denied the charge in a hot telegram; the Evening Post appealed to the Senate Committee upon the Civil Service to come to New York and investigate; and it did so, sustaining the Post’s charges in their entirety. But Mr. Godkin never forgot the consideration which Cleveland later urged in defending himself: “You know the things in which I yielded; but no one save myself can ever know the things which I resisted.” The President, said the Evening Post, had fallen short of his promises, but had done far more than any predecessor. “No man, for example, who has filled the Presidential chair since Jackson’s day would have listened for one moment to the suggestion that the New York Post Office should be taken out of politics, or would have kept the Custom House in its present comparatively neutral condition, or postponed the removal of the great bulk of officers to the end of their terms, or extended in any degree the application of the rules, or have so steadily used his veto to oppose Congressional jobbery and extravagance. No one, too, has kept the White House and its purlieus so free from the small scandals which worked so much disgrace in the days of Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur.”
In 1888 the Post showed genuine enthusiasm in advocating the election of Cleveland over Benjamin Harrison. His courageous message in favor of a low tariff in December, 1887, which did so much to ensure his defeat the next fall, met the views of the editors precisely. The Republicans declared in their platform for maintenance of the existing tariff, but for a reduction in the internal revenue taxes, and Godkin labeled them the party of “high clothes and cheap whisky.” A sharp attack was made upon Harrison’s Congressional record—“the advocate of centralization, the defender of reckless pension schemes, the friend of Hennepin Canal jobs.” Once more, but moderately, parallel columns were employed:
MURAT HALSTEAD (REP.)
“The bottom truth about Cleveland is that he may have been a Copperhead, for he is of about that grade of snake, but he has been too ignorant all his life to be an intelligent member of any political party.”
HUGH M’CULLOCH (REP.)
“I have watched Mr. Cleveland’s Administration very carefully, and I consider it to have been marked with signal ability and uprightness.”
| MURAT HALSTEAD (REP.) “The bottom truth about Cleveland is that he may have been a Copperhead, for he is of about that grade of snake, but he has been too ignorant all his life to be an intelligent member of any political party.” | HUGH M’CULLOCH (REP.) “I have watched Mr. Cleveland’s Administration very carefully, and I consider it to have been marked with signal ability and uprightness.” |
Cleveland’s defeat the Evening Post attributed in part, it is interesting to note, to the folly of the New York Democrats in nominating David B. Hill for Governor, a choice which disgusted independent voters. Naturally, Harrison’s administration confirmed by a half dozen acts the paper’s loyalty to the ex-President. The choice of Blaine to be Secretary of State, the McKinley Tariff Act, the Service Pensions Act of 1890, and the Sherman Silver-Purchase Act seemed to the editors, and to a great body of intelligent and thoughtful citizens, to be so many milestones on a road of perversity and danger. The reckless way in which our foreign relations were handled, as we shall see later, aroused grave apprehensions in Mr. Godkin. At the moment when the disgust of the Evening Post with the Republican Party was deepest, in February, 1891, Cleveland’s famous letter in opposition to the free coinage of silver, characterizing it as a “dangerous and reckless experiment,” was published. All his enemies, Dana at their head, thought that by this courageous act he had destroyed himself politically. So did many Democrats. “Again,” wrote Godkin, “the shrewd politicians sat down on the party stoop and wept, and prepared sorrowfully to nominate a first-class juggler in the person of David B. Hill, who was to show the wretched Mugwumps how much better it was to be able to keep six balls in the air than to be able to show the absurdity of a fluctuating currency.”
But Cleveland’s uncompromising stroke filled the Evening Post with joy. It had feared the Democratic Party was rushing down a steep place to destruction by accepting an alliance with these silver enthusiasts who were trying to debase the currency. Now it had faith in the willingness of the party rank and file to respond to the ex-President’s unflinching words. As it turned out, the newspaper was right. The people recognized the voice of a real statesman, and the scheming bosses who had rejoiced at his supposed political suicide, found that he had at once rescued the party from a ruinous coalition with the Populists, and made his own renomination inevitable. In the canvass which followed this renomination, the Evening Post found it unnecessary to say much about the silver question, so completely had Cleveland knocked it out of the campaign, and it centered its attention upon the McKinley Tariff. That wages had fallen in many industries, that prices of many groups of commodities had risen, and that a hundred “tariff trusts” had attained new vigor behind the McKinley bulwark, was shown in a long series of editorial articles. Lowell had already, while the McKinley Act was pending, published anonymously in the Evening Post a satirical poem upon the argument that higher rates were needed to protect our “infant industries.” When Cleveland was decisively reëlected that November, Godkin traced his victory primarily to the effect his anti-tariff message of 1887 and his anti-free-silver letter of 1891 had produced upon men:
Mr. Cleveland’s triumph to-day has been largely due to the young voters who have come on the stage since the reign of passion and prejudice came to an end and the era of discussion has opened. If the last canvass has consisted largely of appeals to reason, to facts, to the lessons of human experience ... it is to Mr. Cleveland, let us tell them, that they owe it. But they are indebted to him for something far more valuable than even this—for an example of splendid courage in the defense and assertion of honestly formed opinions; of Roman constancy under defeat, and of patient reliance on the power of deliberation and persuasion on the American people. Nothing is more important, in these days of boodle, of indifference, of cheap bellicose patriotism, than that this confidence in the might of common sense and sound doctrine and free speech should be kept alive.
No one reading this editorial would have believed that within little more than three years Mr. Godkin would turn savagely upon the man whose fine qualities he thus praised. Mr. Godkin would not have believed it. Cleveland’s second administration began well, and his policy was particularly liked by the Post in that field of foreign relations in which the break was to come. He withdrew the treaty for the annexation of Hawaii, which Godkin had opposed. He protected American rights in Cuba, but maintained strict American neutrality in the war Spain was waging there. When Great Britain put in a claim of damages against Nicaragua, and landed marines to collect the money, Cleveland acted with admirable discretion and tact. His belligerent Venezuelan message of December, 1895, indeed, was almost a flash out of a clear sky.
To understand the consternation with which Godkin received this message, which seemed to presage certain war with England, it must be appreciated how much he abhorred jingoism and war. When Crimean correspondent for the London Daily News he had described the horrors of the battlefields with indignation; and the suffering back of the lines—“the great ocean of misery which war has caused to roll over the heads of mankind ever since wars began”—he thought even more heartrending. He was no pacifist: a war in a good cause, like the war of the North to extinguish slavery and disunion, he approved. But wars merely to vindicate what some one fancied to be “national honor” he abominated as the worst relic of savagery:
Jingoism is, in fact, like Indian readiness for war, simply another name for imperfect civilization. It is a simple outburst like negro-burning, lynching, and jail-breaking, of the imperfectly subdued barbarous instincts of an earlier time. To get men to abandon fighting as the chief and most honorable business of their lives, and the only respectable way of ending disputes, has been the main work of modern civilization; and what hard work it has been, one has only to read a little Froissart or Joinville to see.