The anarchists had a picnic on Sunday at Weehawken Heights.... An entrance fee of 25 cents was required to gain admission to the picnic. A practical anarchist came along and attempted to enter without paying the fee. Some accounts say that he was a policeman in citizens’ clothes, but this is immaterial from the anarchists’ point of view, however important it may be in a Jersey court of justice. True anarchy required that the man should enter without paying, especially if there was any regulation requiring pay. Taking toll at the gate is only one of the forms of law and order which anarchy rails at and seeks to abolish.... The gatekeeper called for help and some of his minions came forward with pickets hastily torn from the fence, and began beating the practical man over the head. Then the crowd outside began to throw stones at the crowd inside, and the latter retorted in kind. A few pistols were fired, and one boy was shot through the hand. The meeting was a great success in the way of promoting practical anarchy, the rioting being protracted to a late hour in the afternoon. Anarchy, like charity, should always begin at home. (June, 1887.)
As these paragraphs suggest, Godkin was a master of that two-edged editorial weapon, irony, which in clumsy hands may mortally wound the user. But his most superb writing was that in which he delivered a straightforward attack upon some evil institution or person. His Irish sense for epithet enabled him to pierce the hide of the toughest pachyderms in Tammany; his caustic characterization could make an ordinary opponent wither up like a leaf touched with vitriol. One of his younger associates once found a man of prominence sick in bed from the pain and mortification an attack by Godkin had given him.
When Don Piatt asked the elder Bowles to define the essential qualities of an editor, the latter replied, “Brains and ugliness,” meaning by the last word love of combat. Godkin had a truly Celtic zest for battle. Mr. Bishop declares that nothing interested him more than what he called “journalistic rows.” Great was his delight, for example, when the Times and Sun clashed over an exploring expedition the former sent to Alaska, the Sun remarking that it was appropriate to name a certain river after Editor Jones of the Times because it was preternaturally shallow and muddy, and discolored the sea for miles from its mouth, and the Times attacking Dana for “the calculated malice of splenetic age.” Godkin had an irresistible desire to mingle in such shindies. Once in, he would read all the harsh criticism offered of him, and fairly radiating his pleasure, would say: “What a delightful lot they are! We must stir them up again!” His gusto in attacking Tammany was evident to every reader. In each Presidential election he carried the war into the enemy’s country with a rush, and printed three editorials attacking the other candidate to every one advocating his own. On one of his return trips from Europe he and the other passengers of the Normanna were held in quarantine because of a cholera scare and finally carried down to Fire Island for a prolonged stay under conditions of great discomfort. His letters to the Evening Post were delightfully scorching, he kept up the attack till the quarantine officers were panic-stricken, and he demolished their last defense in an article in the North American Review that is a masterpiece of destructiveness.
Godkin was at pains to state his belief that attacks upon any evil should be as concrete and personal as possible. As he said, there was no point in writing flowery descriptions of the Upright Judge, or indignant denunciations of Judicial Corruption. The proper course was to show by book and chapter the misdeeds or incompetence of Tammany judges like Maynard, Barnard, and Cardozo, and chase them from the bench. For one person interested in an assault on poor quarantine regulations, ten would be interested in an assault on Dr. Jenkins, the quarantine head. Godkin had his own Ananias Club. His attacks on the Knights of Labor always included some hearty thrusts at their chief, Powderly. His hatred of the pensions grabbing led him to make a close investigation of the record of the most notorious grabber of all, Corporal Tanner, the man who said, “God help the Surplus!” when he became Pensions Commissioner. The editor took prodigious pleasure in exposing Tanner as a noisy fellow who had lost his leg from a stray shot while, a straggler from his regiment, he was lying under an apple tree reading in what he thought a safe place.
Godkin was well aware that both his humor and his belligerency sometimes carried him beyond the mark. More than once be assigned a topic to a subordinate, saying, “I’d do it, but I don’t trust my discretion.” In the heat of the Blaine campaign he wrote a paragraph stating a charge that was quite unfounded, and went home; luckily his associates saw it early, recognized that it would damage their cause, and substituted another before the forms closed. Next day Godkin was effusive in his gratitude. It is recalled that once the editorial staff objected stubbornly to part of one of his editorials, and after protracted argument, he consented to delete it. When the next edition appeared with the offending passage still there, he was excited and furious, and called the foreman of the composing room down to explain why his orders for killing it had not been obeyed. The foreman protested that he had received no such orders. Knowing associates at once went to Mr. Godkin’s desk, and found that he had written them out and absently tossed them into the waste basket. But Godkin’s occasional excesses of temper were the defect of a rare virtue. A capacity for righteous anger like his is all too uncommon in journalism, the pulpit, or public life generally. Roosevelt never forgave Godkin for the unvarying contempt and bitterness, the unwearied bluntness of accusation, with which he wrote of Quay; but who that knows what Quay was would say that the editor showed a jot too much harshness?
Godkin was reared in the faith of Manchester Liberalism, and his main principles were of that school to the end. At his college (Queens’, Belfast), he tells us, “John Stuart Mill was our prophet, and Grote and Bentham were our daily food. In fact, the late Neilson Hancock, who was our professor of political economy and jurisprudence, made Bentham his textbook.... I and my friends were filled with the teachings of the laissez-faire school and had no doubt that its recent triumph in the abolition of the Corn Laws was sure to lead to wider ones in other countries.”
When he came to America, he brought with him all the rooted opposition of the Manchester school to protection and state subsidy. He shared not only Mill’s and Cobden’s belief in free trade, but their detestation of war, reënforced by his own Crimean experiences. Like Mill, he was a warm advocate of colonial autonomy and the general spread of political freedom. In his last years, he declared that he had always believed “that the Irish people should learn self-government in the way in which the English have learned it, and the Americans have learned it; in which, only, any race can learn it—by practicing it.” He was long a believer in minority or proportional representation, naming it in 1870 as one of the three great objects of the Nation. Another of these objects, civil service reform, he took up just after the Civil War, struck by the contrast between our corrupt and incompetent administrative system and the efficient, experienced British civil service. The introduction of the Australian ballot, the enactment of better election laws, the reform of municipal government, were prominently pushed forward by Godkin. He thoroughly agreed with the Manchester jealousy of government interference in economic and industrial affairs, holding that unless required by some great and general good, it was a certain evil.
These were Godkin’s principles, and by principles he always steered his course. Greeley often did not know his own mind, Bennett and Dana had little regard for principle, but Godkin always held fixed objects before him. A contemporary historian, Harry Thurston Peck, in “Twenty Years of the Republic,” writes: “It is not too much to say that nearly all the most important questions of American political history from 1881 to 1896 got their first public hearing largely through the influence of Mr. Godkin.” That is an exaggeration, but an exaggeration made possible by his tenacious championship of a dozen causes at a time when general opinion was interested but skeptical. To be sure, the ingrained nature of some of his principal doctrines was a limitation. It prevented him from being a powerfully original thinker in the field of government and politics. He taught our intellectual public lessons which he had learned from the more advanced practice and thought of Great Britain, and far beyond that he did not go. But this limitation can easily be exaggerated. He was an omnivorous reader, his curiosity in new ideas and movements was intense, and he had a really open mind.
In most ways he kept quite abreast of the times, and in some well ahead of it. He looked much farther than the ordinary liberal into the relationship between powerful nations and the weaker or inferior peoples, for he perceived the affinities between economic conquest and political conquest. His editorials upon intervention in Egypt in 1882 show that he had no patience with the view that one government might bully another to protect the investments of its nationals. He did believe that British intervention was justified upon other grounds, and always maintained that Cromer’s rule there, like English rule in India, was a boon to the native and the world. But in Africa, Asia, and in Cuba, he was always angered by any evidence that selfish interests—traders, coal concessionaires, investors—were using a strong government as a catspaw to menace or subvert a weak one.
His writings upon capitalism show a steady development of ideas. He objected to demagoguish attacks upon Capital, a word which he disliked, saying that if people called it Savings they would have fewer misconceptions. But he was no more inclined to defend abuses by capital than abuses by labor. He argued for the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in his first year with the Post. He was more and more alarmed by the trusts, both as instruments of economic oppression, and as dangerous influences upon the government. He wanted evil combinations sharply attacked and broken up—not “regulated”—to prevent monopoly, and in later years much of his zeal in attacking the high tariff sprang from his conviction that it and the trusts were mutual supports. No one inveighed more constantly than he against ill-gotten wealth, or against the abuse of money power. His editorial on the death of Peter Cooper, who used to boast that he never made a dollar he could not take up to the Great White Throne, was one of a long series of arguments for a public sentiment that would distinguish between honest success and dishonest “success,” between Peter Cooper and Jay Gould. The chief peril to the republic, he wrote in 1886, was worship of wealth: