A journal of twenty-two days of his life (November, 1870) shows what a multiplicity of public meetings, dinners, calls, and club evenings interspersed his toil. A half dozen times he dined or breakfasted out or entertained to dinner, thus seeing among others Bryant, Ripley, Charles Loring Brace, and H. M. Field. He was also at the public dinner of the Mercantile Library Association, where he spoke for the press, and of the Free Traders at Delmonico’s where he saw A. T. Stewart, Peter Cooper, H. C. Potter, Stewart L. Woodford, Gen. McDowell, and David A. Wells. He went to a civil service meeting at Yale, where there was a tea-party in his honor, and not only made a speech but “met all the big-bugs.” Once he lunched with Henry and Charles Francis Adams. He records going in torrents of rain to a night meeting of revenue reformers, while he attended a lecture by A. J. Mundella, and chatted there with G. W. Curtis. Repeatedly he speaks of being at the Century Club and seeing a long list of acquaintances—Lord Walter Campbell, Judge Daly, Gen. Howard, William E. Dodge, H. C. Potter, and Cyrus Field. He called upon Horace White, then in the city from Chicago, and at the Nation office received calls from Carl Schurz and Schuyler Colfax, the latter coming while he was out. This was nearly a dozen years before he became one of the editors of the Evening Post, but he always maintained a similar activity. What it meant to his editorial work is self-evident. As one of his junior editors, Mr. Bishop, says, all was grist to his mill. “A casual quip in conversation, the latest good story, a sentence from a new book, a fresh bit of political slang—all these found lodgment in his mind, and just at the proper place they would appear in his writing.”
Godkin had little patience for mere office routine, and as he grew older took advantage of the liberty which an evening paper often gives its editor for leaving early. His dislike for bores played a large part in this. As he humorously said, he saw nobody before one, and at one he went home. Of his refusal to tolerate callers who abused his time and temper, there are some amusing stories. A dull or offensive man would be ushered in, the editor would endure him for a while, and then upon the heels of a muffled explosion, the caller would emerge, red with confusion and anger, and hurriedly make for the elevator. Mr. H. J. Wright, as city editor, once introduced a gentleman, of prominence, with an extensive knowledge of municipal affairs. After a long and interesting chat, Godkin asked, “How is it I never met such a well-informed man before?” A few days later the gentleman called again, seated himself with assurance in Mr. Godkin’s room, and began to repeat himself, a thing the editor abominated. Hearing a confusion of voices, Mr. Wright hurried into the hall to find Godkin angrily shooing the interrupter out of the building.
Mr. Godkin and Horace White gathered around them an editorial staff of high ability. From the outset they had the services of Arthur G. Sedgwick, who was assistant editor from 1881 to 1885, and later not only contributed irregularly at all times, but during one summer worked in the office in Godkin’s absence. He was a writer of strong mental grasp and individuality of style, who furnished editorials and book-reviews on an amazing variety of topics, and had the knack of illuminating and making interesting everything he touched. His education as a lawyer—he had been co-editor with Oliver Wendell Holmes, later Justice of the Supreme Court, of the American Law Review—stood him in good stead in discussions of government and politics, he wrote much on belles lettres, and he was only less able than Godkin himself in treating modes and manners. When Godkin was a beginning editor he found it difficult, as he wrote Olmsted, to get an associate “to do the work of gossiping agreeably on manners, lager beer, etc., and who will bind himself to do it, whether he feels like it or not.” Sedgwick was just the man for the light, keen treatment of social topics. He had a discerning eye and a quick sense of humor. Many of his editorials were as good as the short essays of the same type which Curtis and Howells contributed to the Easy Chair of Harper’s, and had more than local and temporary fame. For example, in March, 1883, he wrote one on the dude which, reprinted all over the country, did much to familiarize this London music-hall term. It traced the lineage of the dude from the dandy, fop, and swell; it carefully distinguished him from these earlier types by his intense correctness, contrasting with their display; it described his appearance in great detail; it explained why he had arisen at just that moment; and it closed with a grave warning to all dudes to be on guard against the chief menace to their sober conservatism—they must not wear white spats.
Joseph Bucklin Bishop, later well known as secretary of the Isthmian Commission and authorized editor of Roosevelt’s letters, joined the Post the summer of 1883, and remained with it until 1900, when he became chief of the Globe’s editorial staff. He also commanded a wide range of subjects, though he dealt much more with politics than Sedgwick, and he wrote with a great deal of Godkin’s own point. To Bishop belongs the credit for originating the Voters’ Directory in 1884, still a valued campaign feature of the Post, while he had a principal hand in the campaign biographies which were so effective against Tammany. E. P. Clark was brought from the Springfield Republican into the office when Sedgwick left in the mid-eighties, and until after the end of the century his industrious hand was in constant evidence. He had the most nearly colorless style of the staff, but his full knowledge and accuracy in handling governmental and economic topics were invaluable.
The first contributions to the Post by Mr. Rollo Ogden were printed in 1881, and during the next three years he wrote frequently from Mexico City. His assistance increased after he came to New York in 1887, and in 1891 he became assistant editor and one of the pillars of the newspaper. Besides his attention to national and international politics, he gave the columns a much more literary flavor than they had had even when Sedgwick was present. There were, in addition, several writers of a briefer connection. Early in the eighties some articles exposing the defects of the Tenth Census were furnished by John C. Rose, a Baltimore attorney, and during a number of summers he joined the office staff; a Federal attorneyship, followed by elevation to the Federal bench, ended his connection. David M. Means, another attorney and a one-time professor at Middlebury College, helped during many years for short periods. The editorial columns were always open to experts in various fields who wished to contribute. Among those who occasionally furnished leaders in the eighties and nineties were future college presidents like A. T. Hadley and E. J. James, scientists like Simon Newcomb and A. F. Bandelier, and scholars like H. H. Boyesen and Worthington C. Ford.
The rank and file of the city room regarded Mr. Godkin as a remote deity, though he was on a familiar footing with the managing editors, Learned and Linn, and of frank intimacy with the city editor, H. J. Wright. “I used to see him come into the office occasionally,” writes Norman Hapgood, “with very much the same emotion that I might have now if I saw Lloyd George walk past me.” Godkin frequently rode up in the elevator with reporters, but never spoke to them, and did not know most of them by sight. Mr. Wright gives two examples of his utter indifference to a performance of special merit in the news columns. In the early days of the litigation over the interstate commerce commission, there was a hearing in New York involving intricate law points and the rather obscure rights of the carrier, attended by some of New York’s most eminent lawyers, including Godkin’s friends Choate and James C. Carter. Norman Hapgood, a new recruit, was assigned the difficult task of covering it, and wrote a column and a half a day for the whole week. When the hearing closed, Choate sent Godkin a note congratulating him upon the Post’s reports, and saying that few lawyers could have comprehended the arguments so fully, and still fewer have summarized them so well. “Upon this deserved encomium,” says Mr. Wright, “Godkin offered no comment, nor did he inquire as to the reporter’s identity.” Again, a prominent New Yorker wrote the editor praising a brief account of the descent of an awe-inspiring thunderstorm, and recording his pleasure that the news columns showed the same literary qualities as the editorial page. Godkin had not read the news story, did not read it, and did not ask for the writer’s name.
One element in this was Godkin’s assumption that, as a matter of course, the news pages would meet a high standard; but a larger element was sheer indifference to the reporters. The editorial page was preëminently the most important part of the newspaper to him. Absorbed in the ideas he spread upon it, and naturally of an aloof temperament, he was not interested in subordinates elsewhere. That he was very far from being an unappreciative man his editorial associates alone knew. They received cordial notes of congratulation from him, all the more prized because rare, for any specially meritorious work; and whenever a literary review particularly struck him, he made a point of asking for the writer’s name.
Mr. Towse, the dramatic critic, recalls receiving formal commendation from Godkin twice or thrice. One occasion was early in the eighties, when Henry Irving opened in a Shakespearean rôle in Philadelphia. All the dramatic critics were taken over by courtesy of the theater, entertained in Philadelphia, and given seats at the performance; and most of them remained at a Philadelphia hotel overnight. Mr. Towse returned to New York on a midnight train, took a cold bath, wrote a criticism of nearly two columns, and visiting the office at dawn, had it put into type. Proofs were ready when the editors arrived, and Godkin was so pleased that he for once unbent and sent an appreciative note.
Once in the nineties, Godkin even praised the reporters, though not for anything they had written. It happened that a grand jury refused an indictment in a political case, under circumstances that pointed to collusion between several jurors and the accused politician. Godkin gave utterance to these suspicions, showed that several jurymen were of evil character, and declared that one had been the proprietor of a low dive in which a shooting brawl had occurred. The juror promptly had him indicted for criminal libel, and when counsel undertook the case, they found that no legal proof existed of the alleged brawl. In desperation, Godkin appealed to the head of the Byrnes Detective Bureau, a personal friend, for help, and Byrnes made a thorough investigation of the juror’s past, without avail. He urged the editor to compromise the case, and offered his help for that purpose. Meanwhile, the Evening Post reporters had been ransacking the loft of the old Mott Street police headquarters, where station house blotters were stored. At the end of a seven days’ search, they found an entry telling of the shooting affray. The entry was photographed, Godkin appeared before another grand jury, waved the photograph in the face of the district attorney, and was vindicated. “His appreciation of the work done by the city staff was expressed that day with Irish enthusiasm,” says Mr. Wright.
On the other hand, Godkin was quick—even savagely so—to descend upon any man whose writing did not accord with his positive ideas regarding good journalism. His severity in dealing with an error of fact, proportion, or taste grew out of his rapt intensity in his own work. He pushed blunderers out of his way less because he was tactless—though he was often that—than because he was engrossed in hewing to the line. Lincoln Steffens, one of the best newspaper men New York ever had, happened to write a simple account of a music teacher’s death under distressing circumstances, which appeared on the first page. Godkin read it, leaped to the conclusion that it smacked of the sensationalism he was always denouncing, and declared that Steffens ought to be instantly dismissed. Mr. Wright protested, and the controversy brought in Mr. Garrison, who roundly asserted that the story was not only permissible, but admirable—whereupon Godkin yielded. Some remarkable work by Hapgood in reporting the meetings of the illiterate Board of Education attracted Godkin’s eye and editorial notice; but the one message he sent Hapgood was that he wanted him to confine himself to narration and description, avoiding comment. New York has never had a more expert music critic than Mr. Finck, but Godkin sometimes censured him severely for what he thought intemperate writing.