CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHARACTERISTICS OF A FIGHTING EDITOR: E. L. GODKIN
One essential qualification of a great editor, a masterful personality, was so distinctively possessed by Mr. Godkin that it may be doubted whether any other American daily since the Civil War has been so much the expression of a single mind and character as the Evening Post from 1883 to 1899. The frequent statement that he was an incomparable leader-writer, but not an all-round journalist, has an element of truth, but is highly misleading. The editorial page was wholly his own, for he determined its policies, molded the ideas of his fellow-editors, and by force of example gave several of them—as a great editor always will—some characteristics of his style. The news pages he accorded only distant oversight, and one of his city editors doubts whether he regularly read more than the first page and the page opposite the editorials. Yet every cub reporter grasped Godkin’s clear-cut ideas of what a newspaper should be, and strove to contribute his mite to the realization of the editor’s ideals. There was no other journal resembling it, and its dignity, integrity, thoughtfulness, scholarly accuracy, and pride of intellect were the reflection of Godkin’s own traits. We may say that while Godkin did not pay close daily attention to any part of his journal save the editorials, the news writers, the financial writers, the critics, and the business department all paid close attention to Mr. Godkin’s views regarding their work; they would no more have thought of standing counter to them than of stepping in front of an Alpine avalanche.
The soul of the paper, its editorial page, was the product of a morning editorial conference which in its highly developed character Mr. Godkin was the first to give New York journalism. Upon the Post of Bryant’s day, and upon the Tribune under Greeley and his successive managing editors, consultation had been brief, and the assignment of editorial topics hasty. The elder Bennett had been wont to give Herald writers their subjects for the day as so many orders. But the necessity of treating ten or twelve different editorial topics in each issue of the Post after 1881, and Mr. Godkin’s solicitude that each topic be treated just right, made an elaborate conference imperative. At about nine the editorial staff gathered in a circle of chairs in Mr. Godkin’s room, having mastered the morning papers, and a businesslike discussion filled forty minutes.
Every writer was encouraged to propose his own theme for a paragraph or column editorial, and to speak freely upon themes raised by others. But Mr. Godkin had a merciless way with unsound or commonplace ideas. When some one started a subject, he would pounce upon him with “What would you say about it?” and an intensely searching glance. It was a trying moment. If the junior editor had nothing worth while to say, Godkin would cut across his flounderings with “O, there’s nothing in that,” or “We said that the other day,” or “O, everybody sees that”—emphasizing the statement with a sharp gesture or a swing in his chair. “Sometimes, after an interested attention for a few seconds,” writes Mr. Bishop, “a quick, searching question would be put that went through the subject like a knife through a toy balloon, leaving complete and utter collapse.”
However, proportionately great was the reward of the fortunate man who had an original idea, or a new way of presenting an old one. Mr. Godkin’s eye would kindle with interest, he would lean forward alertly, and catching up the theme, he would perhaps begin to enlarge it by ideas of his own, search its depths with penetrating inquiries, and reveal such possibilities in it that the original speaker had the feeling of having stumbled over a concealed diamond. If the chief, as was usually the fact, was provided with his own topic for the day, the proposer bore his discovery off in triumph. If not, he sometimes had to surrender it. “The chances were ten to the dozen,” says Mr. Bishop, “that Mr. Godkin would become so delighted with the development of the subject, so intoxicated with the intellectual pleasures of the treatment, that he would say, with a serene smile of perfect enjoyment, ‘I’ll write on that.’”
The editorial page represented work done not leisurely, but under the highest pressure. Articles of twelve hundred words, dealing informatively, thoughtfully, and in compressed style with some subject perhaps quite unexpected until that morning, had to be completed in about an hour and three-quarters. Taken, often without change, into the Nation, they withstood the test of submission to the most scholarly and exacting audience in America. The pace was not for the muddleheaded. But no one on the staff could hope to write quite like Mr. Godkin—with his wealth of ideas, ability to see a dozen relationships in a subject where the ordinary man saw one, and concise, pithy, and graphic style. Lowell told him, “You always say what I would have said—if I had only thought of it.” In the correction of proofs the whole staff was expected to join. Godkin was far from being the most approachable of editors, but to any suggestion that there was a defect in his idea or expression he turned a ready ear. Indeed, if a fellow-editor believed that a phrase or sentence was obscure, he would usually alter it whether he agreed or not, arguing that what one man in the office found faulty might seem so to a large body outside. The editorial page which thus appeared in its final form at two o’clock was an embodiment of the wisdom of the whole editorial group, Mr. Godkin dominating.
Brusque and cold though he often seemed to those who did not know him well, Godkin to the other editors was essentially a lovable man. He exacted a high standard of performance, his temper was highly mercurial, he was often abrupt in manner; but the recollection of his associates is that he gave the office an atmosphere of geniality. He delighted in jest. He would repeat with great gusto the story that staff meetings opened with a distribution of Cobden Club gold, or—it was said after the Venezuela episode—with a singing of “God Save the Queen.” His fun was of an intellectual kind, but he never failed to find subjects for it. Frequently the editorial conference would break up in a gale of merriment. Norton once wrote him, when the Nation’s troubles were giving him sleepless nights, that he would rather see the weekly perish than have its editor lose his jocularity, and Godkin wrote back: “I shall keep my laugh. Don’t be afraid.” Indeed, his letters contain any number of references to laughter, and with intimates it was often uproarious. He told Howells that his youth was “harrowed with laughter.” When Howells worked beside him for three months in the Nation office the novelist-to-be found that “we were of a like temperament in the willingness to laugh and make laugh.” If anything in the day’s news particularly apt for Howells’s special department turned up, they would talk it over, “and he did not mind turning away from his own manuscript and listening to what I had written, if the subject had offered any chance for fun. Then his laugh, his Irish laugh, hailed my luck with it, or his honest English misgiving expressed itself in a criticism which I had to own just.”
Men who read Godkin’s caustic denunciation of some wrong-doer, who admired the keen thrust with which he punctured a bit of hypocrisy, sometimes assumed that he was sour and censorious. Such readers failed to realize that he had a dual nature; that what excited his wrath and scorn often excited his risibilities also. “First would come the savage characterization, then the peal of laughter,” writes Mr. Ogden. He had a tongue for humorous phrases, an eye for humorous images, and a marked love for comic exaggeration. After his retirement in 1899, when some people were chattering about his pessimism, the weekly articles he contributed for a time over his initials to the Evening Post abounded in amusing sentences and vivacious anecdotes. Reviewing his labors for civil service reform, he recalled how when he, Congressman Jenckes, and Henry Villard held the first meeting on the subject in New York, he was appointed to draft resolutions; that the proposer was unable to read his hasty handwriting; and that “more unhappily still, when I was asked to take his place, I could not read it either!” Writing of McKinley’s amateur statesmanship, he told of the youth who, asked whether he could play the piano, replied that “he did not know, for he had never tried.” Discussing Capt. Mahan’s treatment of war as possessing benefits as well as evils, he was reminded of the French Deputy who did not want to lose the anarchist votes scattered through his district: “My friends,” he said, “there is a great deal of good in anarchy; only we must not abuse it.” Incessant bits like these reveal the fun-loving nature, the overflowing spirits, of the man.
Mr. Godkin’s marked social proclivities enlarged his influence and enriched his writing. The readiness with which, on coming to America, he made friends among the most distinguished men of Cambridge, Boston, and New York was only less remarkable than the long intimacy he enjoyed with some of the finest minds of England and this country—with Lowell and Norton, Bryce and Henry James, Gladstone and Parkman, McKim and Olmsted. He was a genial host, a witty, diverting, and brilliant guest. Mr. Ogden gives an instance of the way in which his personal charm and full mind surprised some who thought of him as a narrow, savage moralist of the editorial page. At the Century Club one night he was seated at the long dinner table with a man he knew and another who was a stranger. The latter had never seen Mr. Godkin but had taken a violent dislike to his writings. Without an introduction, the talk was free and genial, and Godkin was in his happiest vein. When the editor had left the room, the stranger inquired as to his identity. “Is that Mr. Godkin?” he exclaimed in surprise. “Then I’ll never say another word against him as long as I live.” Godkin worked with great intensity—as he himself once said, “almost dangerously hard.” His gusto and enthusiasm, especially in times of crisis like a Presidential or Tammany campaign, gave him an extraordinary absorption in his work. Yet he found time to see and talk with a surprising number of people worth seeing—authors, reformers, politicians, college professors, the best lawyers of the city, and many more.