Supporting Woodrow Wilson throughout the 1912 campaign, the Evening Post also supported almost all the measures of his first administration. The Federal Reserve Act and the Underwood tariff it hailed as reforms of the first magnitude. The various acts for the better use and protection of our national domain met its approval. While several influential New York newspapers attacked Wilson’s policy of “watchful waiting” in Mexican affairs, the Post held it both wise and courageous, and regretted only the temporary interruption of it by our attack upon Vera Cruz. The editors welcomed the Jones Act for a larger measure of Philippine autonomy, thought well of Bryan’s “cooling-off treaties,” and were grateful for the President’s veto of the literacy test bill. Indeed, the paper’s support would have been unhesitatingly given to President Wilson at the beginning of the campaign of 1916 had his opponent been a less able man than Hughes, and had it not been deeply offended that midsummer by the surrender of the President and Congress to the threat of a great railway strike, and their enactment of the eight-hour day law. As it was, shortly before November 1 the Evening Post came out for Wilson’s reëlection.
The opening of the Great War was a stunning surprise to the Evening Post, as to all America. But it was less completely taken unawares than were some papers which had failed to watch minutely the drift of affairs in Europe. On July 27, in an editorial analyzing the bellicose contents of a number of German and Austrian papers—the Hamburg Fremdenblatt, the Deutsches Volksblatt, the Neues Wiener Tageblatt, the Reichspost, and the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna—it gave a remarkably accurate view, under the title “War Madness,” of what was going on under the surface in Europe. When Germany entered Belgium its condemnation was instant. “By this action Germany has shown herself ready to lift an outlaw hand against the whole of Western Europe.” The paper did not know whether Germany directly caused and desired the war; but it believed that she indirectly caused it, and that she failed to prevent it when she might easily have done so. Before fighting had fairly commenced it ventured upon a prophecy which the fate of three thrones has fully justified:
The human mind cannot yet begin to grasp the consequences. One of them, however, seems plainly written in the book of the future. It is that, after this most awful and most wicked of all wars is over, the power of life and death over millions of men, the right to decree the ruin of industry and commerce and finance, with untold human misery stalking through the land like a plague, will be taken away from three men. No safe prediction of actual results of battle can be made. Dynasties may crumble before all is done, empires change their form of government. But whatever happens, Europe—humanity—will not settle back into a position enabling three Emperors to give, on their individual choice or whim, the signal for destruction and massacre.
The whole course of the war only confirmed the Evening Post’s original view that the side of right and justice was the Allied side. When the Lusitania was sunk, Mr. Ogden’s indictment of “The Outlaw German Government” was one of the most stirring editorials that ever appeared in the Evening Post or Nation; an editorial which asked the American people to show themselves “too firmly planted on right to be hysterical, and too determined on obtaining justice to bluster,” but which expressed confidence that the true and righteous judgments of the Lord would yet be visited upon the German war leaders. When President Wilson asked the American people to be neutral in thought and word, the Evening Post declared that our moral sentiment could not be neutral—that it must be with England and France. The Allied infringements upon our rights in the enforcement of the blockade it attacked, but it constantly emphasized the fact that Germany’s violations of international law were far graver, in that they affected life and liberty, not merely property.
Long hoping that American participation in the war could be honorably avoided, the Evening Post did not want peace at any price. It regarded war as a lesser calamity than the defeat of the Allies, or than supine submission to Germany’s unrestricted submarine activity. When that activity was announced it was plain that we should soon be involved in the conflict, and the editors followed Mr. Wilson’s course with general, if not perfect, approval, in the difficult days of the crisis. The President’s address to Congress asking for a declaration of war was warmly praised by the Evening Post, as placing our national motives and objects upon the most elevated plane. “All told,” it said on April 3, “Americans may take satisfaction in the fact that they enter the war only after the display of the greatest patience by the government, only after grievous and repeated wrongs, and upon the highest possible grounds. There can be no doubt that the country will respond instantly to the President’s leadership.” The Evening Post was not for restricted, but complete participation in the conflict. It early took issue with the administration and with dominant public sentiment in opposing the raising of the army by draft, holding that any appearance of forced military service was un-American, that a volunteer army would show a superior spirit, and that while conscription might become necessary later, it should be postponed until our traditional method of recruiting failed to bring enough men. But the Evening Post accepted the draft loyally, and gave its workings the cordial praise they deserved. From the beginning of the war it looked forward eagerly to the establishment of a world organization to preserve international peace everywhere; and in 1919 and 1920 it was among the staunchest advocates of the League of Nations.
Mr. Ogden had the assistance throughout his editorship of a staff as able as that which Mr. Godkin had gathered about him. Frank Jewett Mather, jr., served as an editorial writer from 1900 to the close of 1906, and as he says, gradually specialized in writing upon European politics and art criticism. Oswald Garrison Villard, son of Henry Villard, was called into the office from the Philadelphia Press in 1897, and remained one of the most active of the editorial writers until 1917. A brilliant young man from Wisconsin, Philip L. Allen, whose premature death was a loss to journalism, advanced rung by rung, and was an editorial writer from 1904 to 1908. Simeon Strunsky joined the staff in 1906. Three years later Dr. Fabian Franklin, long professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins, and from 1895 to 1906 editor of the Baltimore Sun, became associate editor; and Royal J. Davis entered the circle in 1910. Paul Elmer More, who was literary editor of the Evening Post after 1903, and became editor of the Nation in 1909, contributed to the editorial page; and there was a considerable list of men who served for short periods, especially in summers—Stuart P. Sherman, Hutchins Hapgood, Walter B. Pitkin, H. Parker Willis, and others.
As the editorial staff existed when the European War began, its members constituted a group of comprehensive tastes and abilities. Mr. Ogden decided all questions of policy, wrote almost all the leading political editorials, and in addition ranged over a wide field of social and literary comment, treating everything with an incisive, pungent style peculiarly his own. Dr. Franklin wrote upon economic subjects with unfailing sureness, treated educational and scientific topics with the authority of a scholar, and was masterly in exploding any fallacy which for the moment had assumed importance, and the detection of which required the combination of strong common sense and logical subtlety. Mr. Villard was interested in a wide range of humanitarian subjects, having made the Post, for example, an outstanding champion of the negro race, while he paid special attention to military and naval affairs. International politics was left very largely to Simeon Strunsky, whose pen was also indispensable in the humorous or satiric treatment of current subjects, and whose knowledge was encyclopædic. Mr. Noyes continued to write regularly upon financial topics, while Mr. Davis—who was also literary editor, 1914–1920—had given special attention to certain phases of politics.
In its news department the Evening Post had suffered a heavy blow in 1897, when the city editor, H. J. Wright, became editor of the Commercial Advertiser, and took with him Norman Hapgood and Lincoln Steffens. But it quickly recovered, and under a series of managing editors—O. G. Villard, Hammond Lamont, H. J. Learoyd, E. G. Lowry, J. P. Gavit, and the present head, Charles McD. Puckette—has continued steadily to improve. The list of reporters since the beginning of the century contains many names known outside the newspaper world. Among them are Burton J. Hendrick, Norman Duncan, Freeman Tilden, and Lawrence Perry as authors; A. E. Thomas and Bayard Veiller as playwrights; George Henry Payne, Ralph Graves, and Arthur Warner as editors; and Rheta Childe Dorr, Walter Arndt, and Robert E. MacAlarney. The Washington correspondence has always maintained a high degree of excellence. The Washington bureau was in charge of Francis E. Leupp from 1889 to 1904, when he was appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs; he was succeeded by E. G. Lowry, J. P. Gavit, and then by David Lawrence, two of whose exploits—his “scoop” on Bryan’s resignation, and his remarkable prediction of the States which would give Wilson the Presidency in 1916—made a considerable noise in their time. The present correspondents are Mark Sullivan and Harold Phelps Stokes.
The war brought a series of rapid changes in the ownership and management of the Evening Post. The financial control of the paper had long been in the hands of Mr. Villard, who for more than fifteen years was president of the company, and had given unremitting attention to the maintenance of its high business standards, as well as to the improvement of its news and other features. At the end of July, 1917, Mr. Villard gave an option for the purchase of his share of the paper to his associates, and a few days later it was announced that Mr. Thomas W. Lamont had bought it; thus terminating the long and public-spirited proprietorship by the Villard family. Friends of the paper must ever be grateful to Mr. Lamont for carrying it through the next few years of excessive wartime costs. He placed Mr. Edwin F. Gay, widely known as the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (1908–19), in charge in January, 1920, as president of the Evening Post Company; and two years later, in the first days of 1922, the ownership of the Post passed into the hands of a syndicate organized by Mr. Gay. Meanwhile, early in 1920 Mr. Ogden had resigned the editorship, and Mr. Strunsky took charge of the editorial page.
With the marked broadening of the newspaper in the last two years, and the innovations in its form, its readers are as familiar as they are with the fact that its essential spirit is unaltered. The connection with the Nation having ceased in 1917, its editorial page has abandoned the narrow columns and long series of uncaptioned editorial paragraphs which had marked it since 1881. The literary pages passed in 1920 into the hands of Mr. Henry S. Canby, who has made the Evening Post Literary Review esteemed from the Atlantic to the Pacific as easily the foremost publication of its kind in America. The volume of news has been greatly increased, fresh departments have been added, illustrations given their proper place, and the appeal of the paper broadened without lowering its standards. In a period not favorable to increase of circulation, that of the Evening Post has risen, under Mr. Gay, to the highest point in its history.