No right under the Constitution to hold Subject States. To every People belongs the right to establish its own government in its own way. The United States can not with honor buy the title of a dispossessed tyrant, or crush a Republic.
I was learning something of what responsibility means for a man charged with public service, of the clash of personalities, of ambitions, judgments, ideals. And it was not long before I was saying to myself, as I had not for years, You are a part of this democratic system they are trying to make work. Is it not your business to use your profession to serve it? But how? That was clearly now my problem. I could not run away to a foreign land where I should be a mere spectator. Indeed, I was beginning to suspect that one great attraction of France was that there I had no responsibility as a citizen. I must give up Paris. Between Lincoln and the Spanish-American War I realized I was taking on a citizenship I had practically resigned.
The war had done something to McClure’s as well as to me. In all its earlier years its ambition had been to be a wholesome, enlivening, informing companion for readers, to give fiction, poetry, science of wide popular appeal—an ambition which it must be admitted opened the pages occasionally to the cheap, though it rarely excluded the fine. An eager welcome was given new writers. Indeed it was always a great day in the office when we thought a “real one” had reached us. While it fostered new writers it held on to the best of the old. It had touched public matters only as they became popular matters. Thus, when the Spanish-American War came it was quickly recognized that it yielded more interesting material than any other subject. There was a great war number and there was a continuous flow of war articles. McClure’s suddenly was a part of active, public life. Having tasted blood, it could no longer be content with being merely attractive, readable. It was a citizen and wanted to do a citizen’s part. It had a staff sympathetic with this new conception of the work. Mr. McClure had had in mind from the start the building of a permanent staff of good craftsmen, reporters on whom he could depend for a steady stream of contributions, as well as of editorial ideas. He wanted them versatile, flexible, as interested in the magazine as in themselves, capable of sinking themselves in a collective effort.
After I came in, the first to become such a permanent acquisition was Ray Stannard Baker. An article on the capture of John Wilkes Booth by Baker’s uncle, Colonel L. C. Baker, written from personal reminiscences and documents, was submitted by Baker, then on the staff of the Chicago Record. It was “the General’s” ideal of a McClure’s article. Baker was urged to write more, and each piece emphasized the first impression. The year after his first appearance in the magazine, May, 1897, he joined the staff and became a regular contributing editor.
Baker was an admirable craftsman, as well as a capital team worker. He had curiosity, appreciation, a respect for facts. You could not ruffle or antagonize him. He took the sudden calls to go here when he was going there, with equanimity; he enjoyed the unconventional intimacies of the crowd, the gaiety and excitement of belonging to what was more and more obviously a success. He was the least talkative of us all, observant rather than garrulous, the best listener in the group, save Mr. Phillips. He had a joyous laugh which was more revealing of his healthy inner self than anything else about him.
When I learned a few years later that Baker was the author of the wise, homely, whimsical “Adventures in Contentment,” “The Friendly Road” and other delightful essays under the nom de plume of David Grayson I said at once, “How stupid of me not to have known it! Haven’t I always known that Baker is a David Grayson?” Few practical philosophers, indeed, have so lived their creed as Ray Stannard Baker, and none have had a more general recognition from the multitude of people in the country who, like him, believe in the fine art of simple living. It is a comforting and beautiful thing to have had as a friend and co-worker over many years so rare a person as Ray Stannard Baker.
By good fortune McClure’s in this period happened on a reader of real genius—Viola Roseboro—the only “born reader” I have ever known. I found her in the office after one of my frequent jaunts after material. It was as a talker that I first learned to admire and love her. Her judgments were unfettered, her emotions strong and warm, her expressions free, glowing, stirring, and she loved to talk, though only when she felt sympathy and understanding. She loved to share books, of which she read many, particularly in the biographical field; she wanted none but the best—no imitation, no mere fact-finding. Her eagerness to let no good thing slip, her consciousness of the all too little time a human being has in this world to explore its riches made her rigid in her choice. An unsleeping eagerness to find talent and give it a chance, and secondarily, she said, to enrich the magazine, made every day’s work with the unsifted manuscripts an adventure. If she found exceptional merit that was also suited to McClure’s she might weep with excitement. And she stood to it till faith grew in those less sure of the untried. It was when McClure’s was making a great hunt for a good serial that I saw her one morning bringing into the editorial sanctum Booth Tarkington’s “The Gentleman from Indiana,” tears celebrating the discovery as she cried, “Here is a serial sent by God Almighty for McClure’s Magazine!”
This woman of unusual intelligence, loyalty and of truly Spartan courage was a precious addition to the crowd. Ill health, threatened blindness, have never lowered her enthusiasm, her ceaseless effort to find the best, to give the best. She is still doing it.
The most brilliant addition to the McClure’s staff in my time was Lincoln Steffens. He had made himself felt in the journalistic and political life of New York City by a fresh form of reportorial attack. Young, handsome, self-confident, with a good academic background and two years of foreign life and observation, Steffens began his professional career unencumbered by journalistic shibboleths and with an immense curiosity as to what was going on about him. He was soon puzzled and fascinated by the relations of police and politicians, politicians and the law, law and city officials, city officials and business, business and church, education, society, the press. Apparently groups from each of these categories worked together, supporting one another, an organization close, compact, loyal from fear or self-interest or both. It was because of this organization, Steffens concluded, that graft and vice and crime were established industries of the city. Attacks from outraged virtue had slowed up the system at intervals ever since the Civil War, but never permanently deranged it. A few rascals might be exterminated, but they were soon replaced. The system had bred new rascals, grown stronger and more cunning with time. He set out to trace its pattern. Incredibly outspoken, taking rascality for granted, apparently never shocked or angry or violent, never doubtful of himself, only coolly determined to demonstrate to men and women of good will and honest purpose what they were up against and warn them that the only way they could hope to grapple with a close corporation devoted to what there was in it was by an equally solid corporation devoted to decent and honest government, business, law, education, religion. First as a reporter and later as the city editor of the Globe, Steffens stirred the town.
It was entirely in harmony with the McClure method of staff building that this able, fearless innocent should be marked for absorption. He was persuaded to take the editing of the magazine, now in its tenth year and steadily growing in popularity and influence. He was to be the great executive—the editorial head that would shift some of the burden from the shoulders of Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips. But the machine was running smoothly even if with little outward excitement. Steffens made a brave effort to adjust himself to the established order, to learn the situation. Naturally he took Mr. McClure’s meteoric goings and comings, his passionate and often despairing efforts to make his staff “see” what he did, his cries that the magazine was stale, dying, more seriously than those of us who had been longer together. He seems to have been bewildered by what went on in the excited staff meetings held whenever Mr. McClure came in from a foraging expedition. I had come to look on Mr. McClure’s returns as the most genuinely creative moments of our magazine life. He was an extraordinary reporter; his sense of the meaning, the meat of a man or event, his vivid imagination, his necessity of discharging on the group at once, before they were cold, his observations, intuitions, ideas, experiences, made the gatherings on his return amazingly stimulating to me. Sifting, examining, verifying, following up, were all necessary. Mr. McClure understood that and trusted John Phillips to see that it was done, but he properly fought for his findings. In his “Autobiography” Steffens credits me with a tact in our editorial scrimmages which I do not deserve. It is true, as he says, that I was the friend of each and all, but what I was chiefly interested in was seeing the magazine grow in delight and in usefulness. I knew our excited discussions were really fertile. They also were highly entertaining.