Riggs had a closer view of the wheels of the political machines of New York State than any other political writer. His intimate acquaintance with Senators Platt and Hill, Governors Odell and Flower, and the other powers of the State brought to him one hundred per cent of the political truths of his time—the ten per cent that can be printed and the ninety per cent that can’t.
Riggs never became a regular correspondent at either Washington or Albany. He preferred to rove, going where the news was. In Washington he knew and was welcomed by Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft; by Senators like Hanna and Quay; by Cabinet members like Hay and Knox; by House leaders like Reed and Bland. He knew J. P. Morgan and William C. Whitney as well as he knew William J. Bryan and Peffer, the Kansas Populist.
Between Presidential elections, when political affairs were quiet in New York, Riggs acted as a scout for the Sun with the whole country to scan. Mr. Dana had an unflagging interest in politics, and he relied on Riggs to bring reports from every field from Maine to California.
“Riggs,” Dana once remarked to a friend, “is my Phil Sheridan.”
It was through Riggs that Thomas C. Platt, then the Republican master of New York State, sent word to Dana that he would like to have the Sun’s idea of a financial plank for the Republican State platform of 1896. The plank was written by Mr. Dana and the Sun’s publisher—afterward owner—William M. Laffan. It denounced the movement for the free coinage of silver and declared in favour of the gold standard. The State convention, held in March, adopted Dana’s plank, and the national convention in June accepted the same ideas in framing the platform upon which Major McKinley was elected to the Presidency.
It was Riggs who carried a message from Dana to Platt, in 1897, asking the New York Senator to withdraw his opposition to the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Platt complied, and Roosevelt got the position.
Some years ago, in response to a question as to the difference between a political reporter and a political correspondent, Riggs wrote:
There was a vast difference between the two. The political reporter is he who begins at the foot of the ladder when he reports the actual facts at a ward meeting. The political correspondent is he who has run the gamut of ward meetings, primaries, Assembly district, Senate district, and Congress district conventions, city conventions, county conventions, State conventions, and national conventions, and who builds his articles to his newspaper on his information of the situation in the State or nation, based upon circumstances and facts arising out of all of the aforesaid conventions.
A political reporter and a political correspondent occupy in newspaper life the same relative positions as the cellar-digger and the architect in the building-trade world. Cellar-digger is just as important in his sphere as architect. The most superb architects were the most superb cellar-diggers. No man can be a successful political correspondent unless he has been a successful political reporter. Judges are made out of lawyers, generals and admirals out of cadets. Only the most ordinary of human virtues are necessary for the equipment of a successful political reporter and correspondent—cleanliness, sobriety, honesty, and truthfulness.
Writing of Riggs as the dean of American political correspondents, Samuel G. Blythe said in the Saturday Evening Post: