Not until the end of the thirties did allegations of corruption in the city government become frequent in Bryant’s editorial columns. In August, 1843, we find the Evening Post beginning the complaints against the Charter which it was to maintain without interruption until the early seventies. It believed and continued to believe that the two boards of aldermen and assistant aldermen, soon nicknamed “the forty thieves,” had too much power. “They are at once our municipal legislature and our municipal executive; in part also, they are our municipal judiciary; they are the directors of the city finances; they are the fountain of patronage; they are all this for the greatest commercial city in the western world.” Their government it held to be always expensive and arbitrary, often inefficient, and sometimes dishonest.
The Post supported an abortive effort to amend the Charter in 1846, and in 1853, after Azariah Flagg as Controller had stripped some flagrant extravagance and grafting, it gave its voice to another movement which proved successful. Tweed was at this time an alderman. The newspaper charged the body of which he was a member with selling city property and valuable franchises for nominal prices, and then by its control of the courts quashing all efforts at prosecution. When by a smashing popular vote (June 7, 1853) the new Charter was carried, abolishing the Board of Assistant Aldermen, and excluding the aldermen from sitting in the courts of Oyer and Terminer and of the Sessions, the Post said that “a more significant and humiliating rebuke was never administered upon a body of public officers in this State before.” It little thought then that the corruption of the past was but a trifle to the corruption coming.
Bryant’s place as the foremost citizen of the lusty young metropolis was by 1850 becoming secure. He, Irving, and Cooper were universally regarded as the country’s greatest literary men. Irving was passing his final placid years at Sunnyside; Cooper on Otsego Lake, one of the most quarrelsome men in the country, was near the end of his stormy career. The city heard of them only occasionally. But Bryant was in the prime of life, seen almost daily on the streets, and heard upon every passing question. In the late forties he began to be known as a speaker upon public occasions. He delivered his eulogy upon the artist Cole in 1848 with much nervousness, but by 1851, when he presided over the press banquet to Kossuth, he had acquired self-confidence and ease. Thereafter he was in constant demand for addresses to all kinds of audiences—literary groups, the New York Historical Society, the Scotch when they celebrated the centenary of Burns’s birth, the Germans in their Schiller celebration, and so on. His increasing prestige in the city was naturally reflected upon the Evening Post.
CHAPTER NINE
LITERARY ASPECTS OF BRYANT’S NEWSPAPER, 1830–1855
For reasons fairly evident Bryant seldom used the Evening Post for the publication of his poems; he was too modest, and the magazines of the day too earnestly besought him for whatever he might write. In 1832 he brought out “The Prairies” in it, and in 1841 “The Painted Cup”—that was all in early years. He had no time for literary essays, even had he felt the Post the place for them. As for the new books, no one yet thought that dailies should give them more than brief notices; moreover, Bryant disrelished book-reviewing, a task against which he had protested while a magazine editor, and he never quite trusted his judgment upon new volumes of poetry. The Evening Post had less literary distinction in his early editorship than might be supposed; but it had much literary interest.
The most interesting book comments of the thirties were upon British travels in America. England did not like it when Hawthorne, in “Our Old Home,” called the British matron beefy. The United States did not like Dickens’s portrait of Col. Jefferson Brick, praising the ennobling institution of nigger slavery; of Prof. Mullit, who at the last election had repudiated his father for voting the wrong ticket; and Gen. Fladdock, who halted his denunciation of British pride to snub Martin Chuzzlewit when he learned that Martin had come in the steerage. At that period the United States was as sensitive as a callow youth. “We people of the Universal Yankee Nation,” remarked the Evening Post in 1833, “much as we may affect to despise the strictures of such travelers as Fearon, Capt. Roos, Basil Hall, and Mrs. Trollope, are yet mightily impatient under their censure, and manifest on the appearance of each successive book about our country a great anxiety to get hold of it and devour its contents.”
Most Americans joined in indiscriminating complaints over the animadversions of the British travelers. A few were inclined to applaud the less extreme criticism in the hope that the sound portions might be taken to heart. Bryant thought that the country had been “far too sensitive” to Basil Hall, calling that naval traveler “a good sort of prejudiced English gentleman, who saw things in a pretty fair light for a prejudiced man.” He had a high opinion of parts of Miss Martineau’s travels, though he wrote his wife that she had been given a wrong impression in some particulars by Dr. Karl Follen and the narrow-minded Boston abolitionists. Twice he asked Evening Post readers (1832–3) to remember that although Mrs. Trollope might be shrewish, she was also shrewd, and that if she had exaggerated some of the national foibles, she had sketched others accurately. In her “Domestic Manners of the Americans,” he believed, “there was really a good deal to repay curiosity. That work, notwithstanding all its misrepresentations, exaggerations, and prejudices, was a very clever and spirited production, and contained a deal of truth which, however unpalatable, has at least proved of useful tendency.” He called Capt. Marryat’s “Diary in America” a “blackguard book,” more flippant than profound, and deplored the fact that Charles Augustus Murray’s “Travels in America,” which was issued at the same time (1839), and was the work of “a well-disposed, candid, gentlemanly sort of person,” would not have one-tenth the sale. An excerpt from the dramatic criticism of the Evening Post in September, 1832, shows how effective Mrs. Trollope actually was in improving our manners. At a performance by Fanny Kemble, a gentleman, between acts, assumed a sprawling position upon a box railing:
Hissings arose, and then bleatings, and then imitations of the lowing of cattle; still the unconscious disturber pursued his chat—still the offending fragment of his coat-tail hung over the side. At last there was a laugh, and cries of “Trollope! Trollope! Trollope!” with roars of laughter, still more loud and general.
But the most important visit of a foreigner after Lafayette’s was the American tour of Dickens in the early months of 1842. It is of special interest in the history of the Evening Post as marking the active beginning of a campaign in which it took the leading part among American dailies—the campaign for international copyright, lasting a full half century.