Associate Editor 1881–1883, Editor-in-Chief 1883–1899.
This result seemed a stunning reaction from the great victory of 1894. Van Wyck made a clean sweep of Mayor Strong’s efficient departmental heads, and when Devery became chief of police the city ran “wide open.” Yet in the moment of defeat Godkin did not lose heart, pointing out that Van Wyck’s three antagonists combined had a larger vote than he. “Four years is a long time to wait, undoubtedly, for another attack on Tammany,” the Post said, “but in those four years Tammany will be furnishing us with plenty of ammunition, and Republicans will be seeing and thinking, and the Citizens’ Union will be learning how to fight.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FREE SILVER, THE SPANISH WAR, AND IMPERIALISM
The three great final battles of Godkin’s editorship were those against the free silver craze, the Spanish War, and the retention of the Philippines. The first was decisively won, but the decisive loss of the other two cast a shadow over Mr. Godkin’s last days. “American ideals were the intellectual food of my youth, and to see America converted into a senseless, Old World conqueror, embitters my age,” he wrote a friend in May, 1899. In all three struggles the Evening Post took the same aggressive leadership as in the Mugwump campaigns against Blaine and in Godkin’s fifteen years of war upon Tammany.
The portents of the free silver uprising first became alarming to the Evening Post in 1890. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of that year it roundly attacked, and Horace White and the other editors always regarded it as the chief cause of the panic of 1893. As he pointed out, it added nearly $200,000,000 to the fiat money of the country, alarmed men at home and abroad regarding the ability of the United States to redeem its obligations in gold upon demand, caused the steady withdrawal of capital from the country, and decreased business confidence and increased money rates until failures took place on every hand. The Post’s detestation of the Sherman Act was increased by the fact that it was passed by a nefarious combination of silver men and supporters of the McKinley Tariff, a measure which the Post equally abominated. For some years in the nineties the silver danger seemed the greater because Republicans flirted with it as coyly as Democrats. In 1894 both Speaker Reed and Senator Lodge proposed to force silver upon the world by high discriminating tariffs against nations which refused to adopt bimetallism. Lodge, in fact, left the Evening Post aghast by introducing a demagogic resolution in the Senate for applying this policy against England.
Late in 1894 the reception given “Coin’s Financial School” showed how irresistibly the free silver question was thrusting itself into the political foreground. This famous pamphlet, by W. H. Harvey, related how a “smooth little financier” of Chicago named Coin, struck by the rural distress and business depression, opened a school of finance in the Art Institute in May, 1894. His lectures and colloquies continued six days. At first only young men were present, but the audience increased until it included statesmen, professors, bank presidents, and others of note, many of them—as Lyman J. Gage and J. Laurence Laughlin—designated by name. When they interrupted Coin, he quickly silenced them by his incisive logic and superior knowledge. In the end, completely converted, the company tendered him a glittering reception at the Palmer House. The pamphlet was illustrated by coarse woodcuts. One showed silver a beautiful woman decapitated by her enemies; another depicted America as a cow which the farmers were laboriously feeding while a fat capitalist milked her; a third represented the gold standard by a man hobbling on one leg. Coin had made the utmost of his ability to ask the questions as well as answer them. As Horace White said, his discussion with Prof. Laughlin was equaled by nothing save the debate in Rabelais upon the question whether a chimera ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions. The booklet was full of deceptive analogies. For example, when asked if Government coinage of depreciated silver would really make it worth a dollar in gold, Coin replied: “Certainly; if the Government bought 100,000 horses, wouldn’t the price go up?” This retort was set off with a woodcut of a horse.
No man in the country, not even Prof. W. G. Sumner, was so well equipped to answer Coin as Horace White. The “comic publication,” as the Post called it, would have been unworthy of attention had its influence not been tremendous. Silver miners, mortgage-ridden farmers, small shopkeepers and workmen, were everywhere soon studying it, making its specious arguments their own, and convincing themselves that an Eastern plutocracy had committed “the crime of ’73”—the demonetization of silver—in order to depress the prices of crops and labor. By March, 1895, it was impossible to ignore the booklet. In a series of twelve articles Mr. White exposed its many misstatements and fallacies. Coin asserted that silver was “demonetized secretly” in 1873, whereas the discussion had been full and open. He said that the silver dollar was the monetary unit of the United States 1792–1873, when it was actually so only from 1783 to 1792. He stated that the United States was the first nation to demonetize silver, whereas Germany had closed her mints to silver except for small coins in 1871. As for the horse-buying illustration, Mr. White showed that when in 1890 the Government began buying 4,500,000 ounces of silver each month, the price actually fell because the supply increased also. He discussed in detail the greenback question, Coin’s queer delusion that the country had never been prosperous since 1873, and the supposed “English octopus” that had fastened gold upon the world. With some revision, his articles appeared early in 1895 as a pamphlet entitled “Coin’s Financial Fool,” and were distributed in large numbers by the Reform Club at fifteen cents a hundred.
At the beginning of 1896 the Evening Post welcomed the signs that a great national battle over free silver was coming. The result, it predicted, would be the same that had crowned the greenback contest. “A sharp division between those who want an honest dollar and those who do not is on all accounts to be desired,” it said on April 10. “A year’s discussion of the principles that enter into this question is the best possible preparation of the public mind for the presidential campaign of 1896.” It knew that the sharp division would have to be a division between the two great parties. As the isolation of Cleveland and other gold men in the Democrat party, and the ascendancy of silverites like Bland and Tillman, became more emphatic, it frankly pinned its hopes to the Republicans.
To them it promised victory if only they refused to “straddle.” An editorial of April, 1896, called “Assurance of the Gold Standard,” told them that on a gold platform they could carry all the States north of Delaware and the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi. This would give them 210 electoral votes, and the ten more needed could certainly be obtained from Iowa, the Dakotas, and the border States. Throughout May and June the Evening Post called upon McKinley, who was almost certain to be the nominee, to declare himself for the gold standard. He had voted for the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and had made alarming utterances in favor of silver coinage as late as the fall of 1894; hence the editors’ anxiety over his uncertain position, and their resentment of his talk of making the tariff the chief issue. But McKinley refused to commit himself. He was assured of a majority of the Republican Convention if he acted tactfully, and he had no intention of antagonizing the silver wing of his party before he won the prize. In his speeches both before and just after the convention he failed to allude to the free silver issue, while in several he emphasized the “great American doctrine of protection.”