CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
NEWS, LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND DRAMA, 1880–1900
From Godkin’s utterances upon journalism a small volume might easily be compiled. His ideal of a newspaper was as much English as American, with a good deal that was purely Godkinian superadded. He disliked headlines, even when not garish, and valued the headline merely as an aid to reference. He insisted upon absolute accuracy. Not only did he believe, quite properly, that comment had no place in a news story, but he thought any attempt at literary effects out of place there—that information was the one essential. Recognizing that accuracy often requires expert knowledge, he always insisted that this could be got by paying for it. Absolute integrity in every department was of course presupposed. Murat Halstead in 1889 told the Wisconsin Press Association that he saw no objection if readers “should find out that the advertiser occasionally dictates the editorials.” “No objection at all to that,” rejoined Godkin; “the objection is when they don’t find it out.”
During the eighties Dana and the Sun represented to Godkin nearly all that was evil in New York journalism, and the exchanges between the two editors were often bitter. Neither appreciated the other’s qualities. Everyone remembers Mrs. Frederick P. Bellamy’s explanation of the depravity of New York: “What can you expect of a city in which every morning the Sun makes vice attractive, and every night the Post makes virtue odious?” Dana found Godkin the one antagonist who could make him wince, and struck back hard. He persisted in calling the editor “Larry.” He never tired of exaggerating the Post’s staidness. When it changed its form in 1887, he wrote that it would now be dull in sixteen pages instead of eight. After one of the East River bridges was opened, he described the testing of the structure at length; how wagons of stone, trucks of metal, and ponderous engines were trundled across it, and finally, as the supreme burden, a cart bearing a copy of the Evening Post. When S. J. Randall died, and the Post spoke of his corrupting influence upon Congress, Dana seized the opportunity to characterize Godkin as “a scurrilous editor known to the police courts of this town as a libeler of the living, and who is known now as a defamer of the dead.”
What Godkin principally objected to in the Sun, of course, was Dana’s cynical defense of evils and his opposition to a long list of good causes. Supposedly a Democrat, Dana conceived a violent and irrational dislike of Cleveland, did his best in 1884 to defeat him, and later never missed an opportunity to attack him as the “Stuffed Prophet” or “Perpetual Candidate.” Supposedly a friend of decency in the city, for twenty years he was Tammany’s staunchest champion, a supporter in turn of Tweed’s associates, of Boss Kelly, of Grant and Gilroy, and of Croker. Standing for civil service reform in 1876, later he attacked and ridiculed reform measures unmercifully. Every attempt to improve politics elicited a burst of derision from him. The perversity of his course, its lack of principle, Godkin repeatedly exposed in columns of extracts from the Sun headed “Semper Fidelis.”
But he objected in almost equal degree to the Sun’s news columns—to the space they gave crime and scandal. Dana used to say that whatever God allowed to happen he would allow to be printed, and talked of giving a full picture of society. How far this creed carried him, and how caustically Godkin censured it, may be seen from one Evening Post paragraph (Sept. 28, 1886):
The first page of our enterprising contemporary, the Sun, to-day was an interesting picture of American society. The first column was devoted to the trial of a minister for immorality, to differences between a man named Lynch and his wife, to a rape in a vacant lot, and a suicide. The second was half given to a fire and the death of a blind newsdealer, the other half to politics. The third was given up to foreign news and politics, but half the fourth was taken up with murder in a buggy and the escape of two convicts. The fifth was wholly devoted to a very paying scandal about Lord Lonsdale and Miss Violet Cameron, and a small item about another Lord Lonsdale and twenty-four chorus girls. In the remaining two, we find the disappearance of one Sniffers, a divorce, two pugilistic items, half a column of the horse-whipping of a reporter by a girl, the discovery of her lover in jail by Miss Miller, the arrest of a small swindler, and a few other trifles. As a microcosm, the page is not often surpassed....
As Godkin said, the news of the most sensational papers gave an essentially false picture of American society. Any one who read it as a well-proportioned picture of what was happening in New York would believe that every evening about 10,000 betrayed servant girls, horse-whipped faithless lovers, and the same number of drunken husbands murdered wives in tenement houses; and that the bulk of the population was daily occupied in getting at the details of such cases, and wanted explanatory illustrations to help it, such as diagrams showing just where the servant girl stood when she struck the first blow. In a true picture, such incidents would get a few lines.
But when sensational news was obtained by inventing it, or exaggerating small episodes, or heartless intrusion into private affairs, Godkin’s indignation was much greater. His opinion of this phase of journalism was precisely that which Howells expresses of Bartley Hubbard’s unscrupulous news-gathering in “A Modern Instance.” In June, 1886, he paid his respects to “those delightful creatures who lurked behind fences and hid in the bushes two weeks ago, watching the house” where Cleveland was passing his honeymoon. More than one New York journal at that time would fabricate interviews with men its reporters could not reach. One remedy for the current abuses, Godkin thought, lay in stringent enforcement of the laws for libel. In 1893 an invented scandal about a Toronto lady and gentleman resulted in the payment of $14,537 damages by three New York papers, and Godkin declared that it was a public service for injured persons thus to bring suit. On another occasion he wrote: “Some of the most highly paid laborers of our time are lying newspaper reporters and correspondents, men who make no pretense of telling the truth, and would smile if you reproached them with not doing so.”
