It is here that our greatest danger lies. The popular hero to-day, whom our young men in cities most admire and would soonest imitate, is neither the saint, the sage, the scholar, the soldier, nor the statesman, but the successful stock-gambler. Stocks and bonds are the commonest of our dinner-table topics. The man we show with most pride to foreigners is the man who has made most millions. Our wisest men are those who can draw the biggest checks; and—what is worst of all—there is a growing tendency to believe that everybody is entitled to whatever he can buy, from the Presidency down to a street-railroad franchise.
Godkin was a keen-eyed social observer, discussing thoughtfully a multitude of topics affecting the daily life and culture of the people. He did not believe in prohibition, arguing throughout his editorship against the Maine law. But he did recognize in the saloon an enormous evil, politically and socially, he wanted it lessened by high licenses, and utterances could be quoted which suggest that he might ultimately have accepted even prohibition as better than the saloon’s continuance. He disbelieved in woman suffrage for two principal reasons, because he feared it would further debase the government of our large cities, and because the great majority of women in his day were indifferent to it. On social abuses of all kinds he used the lash unsparingly. His campaign against public spitting, upon grounds of sanitation as well as cleanliness, was potent in abolishing the spittoon. For years he kept up a vigorous effort to shame the South out of its tolerant attitude toward homicide. He had been shocked by this attitude when he traveled in the South in 1856–57, and the war and Reconstruction had made it worse. His method was characteristic. Every time one Southerner shot another because of a quarrel over a dog, or a rail fence, or a hasty word—which was every few days—he wrote an editorial paragraph recounting the circumstances, with ironic comment. He dwelt upon the bloody details, the “gloom” that pervaded the community, and the certainty that nothing would be done to bring the murderer to trial. For several years early in the eighties this campaign gave the editorial page of the Post a decided mortuary flavor. Part of the Southern press was enraged, declaring that the Post was maliciously attempting to prevent emigration southward; but it got below the skin of the section with salutary effect.
Certain of Godkin’s utterances upon labor problems show the unfortunate effect of part of his early training. They had not only the fallacies of the laissez faire position, but were harshly put. He had a way of speaking of workmen, when they displeased him, as “ignorant,” “idle,” “reckless,” indicting them en masse. In 1887, writing contemptuously of a strike “of coalheavers, longshoremen, and the like,” he spoke of the men who respond to labor agitators as “a large, passionate, ignorant, and through their ignorance, very discontented and uncomfortable constituency.” For years in the eighties, when labor was struggling toward effective organization, he declared that its agitators were producing a cowardice among politicians, ministers, and philanthropists like that the slavery leaders produced before the Civil War. He was one of those who thought the early career of Prof. Richard T. Ely dangerously incendiary. He repeatedly denied that strikers had the right to post pickets around an employer’s premises. He denied them the right to accuse an employer of paying an unjust wage, or taking an undue share of profits, saying that a strike should be regarded as “a simple failure of business men to agree to a bargain” (May, 1886). Labor was guilty of many crimes and abuses, from dynamiting to boycotts, in those days. But it would be hard to find a more unfair statement of the labor movement, 1876–1896, than Godkin wrote in the latter year (Sept. 2):
Labor as a “question” was twenty years ago new in America.... It gradually grew in political and social importance. Politicians began to preach that employers were great rascals if they did not allow laborers to stay in their service on their own terms. They were backed up by a swarm of “ethical” economists and clergymen all over the country, who found something hideously wrong in the existing state of society, and proclaimed the obligation, not simply of the employer, but of the state and society, to do all sorts of nice things for the laborer; to carry him about for nothing, to pay him for his labor what he should judge to be sufficient, to provide all sorts of comforts and luxuries for him at the public expense, on what was called “broad public grounds.” This insanity raged for several years. It was preached from thousands of pulpits. “Papers” were read on it at all sorts of clubs, societies, and reunions, showing the wrongs done to the manual laborer by everybody else. Under its influence Powderly and his Knights of Labor grew into a great power....
This particular “craze” lasted till the Chicago riots of 1893, and the appearance on the scene of Altgeld as the Governor of a great State. People then saw the fruits of their teaching. Large bodies of ignorant and thoughtless men had believed it and acted on it. In order to settle a small dispute between a sleeping car company and its men, they determined to suspend locomotion throughout the business regions of a great nation. They believed they were in the right. If the account given of labor by the clergymen and ethical economists were true, they had the right to do what they were doing. For some days the government of the United States seemed to be suspended. But when one courageous man stepped to the front, and said this nonsense should cease, it suddenly stopped. The sermons and “papers” and ethical economy stopped too.
Godkin rejoiced when the Knights of Labor disintegrated, and said nothing in praise of the work it did in clearing the ground for the A. F. of L., or in hastening the eight-hour day, the abolition of contract labor, and the establishment of labor bureaus. A similar want of sympathy was evident in much he wrote of the farmers. In fact, he imbibed with his British training a strong consciousness of class, which made him speak of manual workers and small tradesmen as inferiors. An editorial deprecating a liberal education for children of the poor, easily accessible in files of the Nation (Dec. 23, 1886) is a curious example of his inability to understand the American denial of any permanent class lines. As a good liberal, he believed that labor must be strongly organized, but if he had any real feeling for it, it seldom appeared. He was a philosophic democrat, but not a practical democrat. His editorials, joined with certain well-known personal traits—his great care in dress, his fastidiousness in food, his intellectual aloofness—led many to think him a snob; a term that was misleading, for no one was less a respecter of persons. They inspired the well-known verses of McCready Sykes, beginning:
Godkin the righteous, known of old,
Priest of the nation’s moral health,
Within whose Post we daily read
The Gospel of the Rights of Wealth.
In denying that Godkin was a pessimist, we must not deny that he was sometimes atrabilious. Scattered through his letters are remarks that indicate moods of deep discouragement. “I am tired of having to be continually hopeful,” he wrote after the election of 1897, and again in 1899: “Our present political condition is repulsive to me.” It was his business to be censorious—to make the Nation, as Charles Dudley Warner said, “the weekly judgment day.” But as Howells writes, practically he was one of the most hopeful of men, for he was always striving to make a bad world better. He deeply resented the charge that the Evening Post was merely a destructive critic, and used to challenge any one to cite an instance in which it had exposed an evil without suggesting a remedy. The commotion following the death of Garfield brought from him a notable expression of faith in our national stability. He recalled that the same calamity had occurred before, when the country was in the midst of the greatest convulsion of the century, with a million troops under arms, a colossal debt, and terrible problems awaiting solution; that a stubborn, uneducated man had become President, and for three years had quarreled violently with Congress; and yet that all had ended prosperously. Mr. Bishop was surprised on election day, in 1884, to see the calm serenity with which Godkin awaited the result of the Blaine-Cleveland contest, but Godkin remarked, with intense conviction: “I have been sitting here for twenty years and more, placing faith in the American people, and they have never gone back on me yet, and I do not believe they will now.” He himself used to laugh at the talk of his pessimism, remarking that when he lived in Cambridge, people said that he and Norton were accustomed to sit at night and talk until at about 2 a. m. the gloom would get so thick that all the dogs in town would start howling.
In the reminiscences that death prevented him from expanding, he made a brief survey of contemporary American civilization in a tone anything but discouraged. He believed that in government the United States had lost ground. The people cared less about politics, were less instructed regarding administration, and had allowed themselves to become the tools of the bosses; while the old race of great statesmen had died out. He also thought that the press had ceased to have much influence on opinion, and that the pulpit had become singularly demagogic. On the other hand, he declared that the advance of higher education, qualitatively and quantitatively, was without a parallel in all previous world history. “And,” he added, “the progress of the nation generally in all the arts, except that of government, in literature, in commerce, in invention, is something unprecedented, and becomes daily more astonishing.”
As to the character and extent of Godkin’s influence there is no uncertainty. Exerted directly upon the leaders of opinion, it was felt indirectly by the whole population. All over the country he convinced isolated and outstanding men, who in turn diffused his views throughout their own communities. No man who once fell under the sway of his powerful pen, even those whom he intensely irritated, could quite shake it off. One eminent New Yorker was heard to call the Post “that pessimistic, malignant, and malevolent sheet—which no good citizen ever goes to bed without reading!” The thinking young men of the colleges, and many outside them, accepted his utterances as an almost infallible guide. No public man was indifferent to them. The Evening Post and Nation long exercised a peculiar sway in newspaper offices from Maine to California. Gov. David B. Hill remarked to a secretary during the fight Godkin was waging against his machine: “I don’t care anything about the handful of Mugwumps who read it in New York City. The trouble with the damned sheet is that every editor in New York State reads it!” It was a Western editor who said that only a bold newspaper made up its mind on any new issue till it saw what the Post had to say. “For years,” a Baltimore friend wrote Godkin in 1899, “I have noticed your editorials reappearing unacknowledged, a little changed and somewhat diluted, but still with their original integrity not entirely removed from them, in the columns of other papers—a course of Post-and-water not equal to the strong meat from which the decoction was made, but still wholesome....” Henry Holt wrote the editor on his retirement that he had taught the country more than any other man in it. The same tribute was paid him by William James: “To my generation, his was certainly the towering influence in all thought concerning public affairs, and indirectly his influence has certainly been more pervasive than that of any other writer of the generation, for he influenced other writers who never quoted him, and determined the whole current of discussion.”
Such verdicts, from such men, might be multiplied to a wearisome length. The finest spirits of the time recognized in Godkin, though they often disagreed with him, though the disagreement might sometimes be violent, the most inspiring force in American journalism.