History of Journalism in the United States/Chapter 26
CHAPTER XXVI
AFTER- WAR PROBLEMS AND REFORM
Direct part of newspapers in government—E. L. Godkin—Editor of Nation—Real power—Fitness of Post as an influence for good—Criticism of Godkin—His pessimism—Contrast with early writings—Bryce's opinion—William Rockhill Nelson—Kansas City Star—Their extensive influence—"In His Spirit."
The war left many newspapers in a stronger position than before the struggle; the power wielded by the important journalists had established their right to be heard and had set a standard of conduct for those who were to come after. Newspapers were hereafter to play a direct part in government through their influence on those extraconstitutional forces, the political parties. There had been, it is true, a Greeley, a Weed, a Medill and a Forney; now there was not a state—perhaps but few counties—where the political policy was not inspired by some active editor or owner. The political organization without its organ was an anomaly; what became necessary was the paper that would fight the political organ.
The paper with the largest circulation was necessarily the most influential, and the larger circulation generally meant affiliation with the dominant party. These facts, together with the increased cost of manufacturing a newspaper, would tend toward a purely commercial morality, were it not for the check that lies in the newspaper of small circulation but stiff idealism.
The part in politics played by such editors as Greeley, Prentice, Rhett, Raymond, Medill or Weed, was not congenial to all men; aside from their ability or inclination to take such an active interest in politics, newspapers had become such large business undertakings that concentration on their own interests was imperative. Particularly was this the case with the men best fitted and inclined to edit conservative journals.
From the close of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century the leading conservative editor of the country was Edwin Lawrence Godkin, declared by Rhodes to be one of the greatest editors of this country, and by Bryce to be one of the greatest editors of the world.
"To my generation," declared William James, "Godkin was certainly the towering influence in all thought concerning public affairs, and indirectly his influence has certainly been more pervasive than that of any other writer of the generation, for he influenced other writers who never quoted him, and determined the whole current of discussion."
"When the work of this century is summed up," wrote Charles Elliot Norton to Godkin, "what you have done for the good old cause of civilization, the cause which is always defeated, but always after defeat taking more advanced position than before—what you have done for this cause will count for much."—"I am conscious," wrote President Eliot of Harvard to Godkin, "that the Nation has had a decided effect on my opinions and my action for nearly forty years; and I believe it has had a like effect on thousands of educated Americans."[1]
These were the opinions of men of deep feeling and fine intellect, and they encouraged Godkin in a work which, as he said himself, was difficult because he knew he was making himself odious to a large mass of people. It was a new and strange road in journalism. It was an absolutely unheard-of road in a democracy; a road that had its dangers, as was shown in the case of one of Mr. Godkin's associates on the Nation, who so confused unpopularity with success, that every time the Nation lost a subscriber he chortled with glee.
Godkin was born in Ireland and was educated at Queen's College, Belfast, during a time when the philosophy of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham was in the ascendant, a fact that explains many of his own tendencies. After serving as correspondent to the London Daily News in the Crimean War, he came to America and, during the last three years of the Civil War, was the correspondent of the same paper.
For sixteen years, it was as the editor of the Nation that he was making his mark in the country, but it is as the editor of the Evening Post, with which the Nation was merged, that he will be best remembered.
The Nation was started in 1865 and merged with the Post in 1881, Godkin becoming associate editor of that paper with Carl Schurz as editor-in-chief. Two years later Schurz retired and Godkin became editor-in-chief, a position in which he remained until 1900, when he retired because of failing health. During that time the Evening Post was one of the world's famous newspapers; it was the leader in "reform" in the United States.
Godkin rose to real power at a time when looseness of political thinking marked journalism. At the root of much of the corruption of the times was unquestionably the spoils system, its sponsors grown arrogant through the fact that, as the Democratic party was discredited, the nation was under, not a two-party, but a one-party government.
There had been, too, a slipping away from the common standards of honesty. The growth of the large corporation and the rise of public utilities had given political power a financial value hitherto unknown. The tendency was to apply material rather than moral standards; to ask, "What has he?" rather than "What is he?" A nation-wide influence for good was sadly needed.
The Evening Post was a paper fitted to be such a national influence. It had been founded as a conservative organ; the men who had edited or controlled it from its inception had been men who, if not followers of Hamilton politically, agreed with him in viewing with distaste the "excesses" of journalism. Some of these conservatives, in the old days, were robust men—Coleman for instance or Bryant, who carried constructive criticism to the point of belaboring W. L. Stone, the editor of the Commercial Advertiser, over the head with a cane. But no paper in America was better fitted for the work in hand.
It is unquestionably true, as William James says, that Godkin influenced the men who wrote editorials more than any other individual in the country. On the other hand it was also said by intellectual men that he was not always fair in his criticism of those men and measures that he did not favor, and that "he was apt to convey the idea that if any one differed from him on a vital question, like the tariff, or finance, or civil service reform, he was necessarily a bad man."[2]
It was this tendency that led many to believe that his influence on the intelligent youths of the country was not for the best, and he was blamed for painting the condition of the country and of politics as so bad that the one was not worth while entering and the other was not worth while saving. The result was that many educated young men avoided politics, considering themselves superior to those who took an interest in their country's welfare.
His influence was as potent in the West as in the East. Many were the strong and able men who owed to him their interest and activity in favor of civil service reforms, their ideas on "sound "money, their belief in free trade, and their interest in a clean city government. These were his main teachings, and he taught them with a vigor and distinction of expression that led James Bryce to say that the Nation was not only the best publication of its kind in America, but the best in the world. On the other hand it was said that he never "made a retraction or rectification of personal charges shown to be incorrect."[3] When General Francis A. Walker died in 1897, Godkin refused even to notice his funeral in the Nation, although Walker was one of the distinguished economists of the country, because the two had taken opposite sides on the gold question in 1896.
In the latter part of his life the inevitable, or rather what might be expected of a disciple of Bentham, happened. He became a thorough pessimist and regarded the democratic experiment in America as a hopeless failure. He returned to England, despairing entirely of America, and, writing to Charles Eliot Norton, said:
"But the situation to me seems this: An immense democracy, mostly ignorant, and completely secluded from foreign influences, and without any knowledge of other states of society, with great contempt for history and experience, finds itself in possession of enormous power and is eager to use it in brutal fashion against any one who comes along, without knowing how to do it, and is therefore constantly on the brink of some frightful catastrophe like that which overtook France in 1870. The spectacle of our financial condition and legislation during the last twenty years, the general silliness and credulity begotten by the newspapers, the ferocious optimism exacted of all teachers and preachers, and the general belief that we are a peculiar or chosen people to whom the experiences of other people is of no use, make a pretty dismal picture, and, I confess, rather reconcile me to the fact that my career is drawing to a close. I know how many things may be pointed out as signs of genuine progress, but they are not in the field of government. Our two leading powers, the legislature and the press, have to my knowledge been running down for thirty years. The present crisis is really a fight between the rational business men and the politicians and the newspapers, and the rational business men are not getting the best of it.
"The press is the worst feature of the situation, and yet the press would not be what it is without a public demand for it as it is. I have been having cuttings about the present situation sent in to me from all quarters, and anything more silly, ignorant, and irational you could not imagine. I am just now the object of abuse, and the abuse is just what you would hear in a barroom row. You are lucky in being a professor, and not obliged to say anything about public affairs except when you please. I have had a delightful and characteristic letter from William James urging me not 'to curse God and die,' but to keep on with 'the campaign of education.'"[4]
With the Spanish War he lost all hope of the American people ever retrieving themselves. It is unfair, however, in judging the great work that Godkin did, to be influenced by this later pessimism. It was his belief in American institutions, as he expressed it in a letter to the London Daily News in 1868, that made possible all his achievements as well as the great influence that he acquired. Later in life he met with disappointments—intellectual disappointments in his case; for he was too sincere in his nature to seek political office,—and those intellectual disappointments acted on him as disappointments of other varieties acted on other great journalists—they soured him and made him appear a man without faith and without belief.
The good that he did was not accomplished when he was bereft of the enthusiasm that moves men, but rather when he felt as he did in 1868, shortly after the Civil War; incidentally the country was then facing far more serious conditions than it faced when Godkin was so doleful.
"There is no careful and intelligent observer," he wrote, "whether he be a friend to democracy or not, who can help admiring the unbroken power with which the popular common sense—that shrewdness, or intelligence, or instinct of self-preservation, I care not what you call it, which so often makes the American farmer a better politician than nine-tenths of the best read European philosophers—works under all this tumult and confusion of tongues. The newspapers and politicians fret and fume and shout and denounce; but the great mass, the nineteen or twenty millions, work away in the fields and workshops, saying little, thinking much, hardy, earnest, self-reliant, very tolerant, very indulgent, very shrewd, but ready whenever the government needs it, with musket, or purse or vote, as the case may be, laughing and cheering occasionally at public meetings, but when you meet them individually on the highroad or in their own houses, very cool, then, sensible men, filled with no delusions, carried away by no frenzies, believing firmly in the future greatness and glory of the republic, but holding to no other article of faith as essential to political salvation."[5]
Coming when he did, Godkin was a tonic as well as an irritant. One of the causes of irritation among those who had to contend with him in editorial debate was the fact that he was a foreigner, but this, as Bryce says, gave him detachment and perspective. It is for the great ability that he had and for his great influence on the younger minds, his influence against corruption and for honesty and culture, that the country must be grateful.
"His finished criticism," says Bryce, "his exact method, his incisive handling of economic problems, his complete detachment from party, helped to form a new school of journalists, as the example he set of a serious and lofty conception of an editor's duties helped to add dignity to the position. He had not that disposition to enthrone the press which made a great English newspaper once claim for itself that it discharged in the modern world the functions of the mediaeval Church. But he brought to his work as an anonymous writer a sense of responsibillty and a zeal for the welfare of his country which no minister of State could have surpassed.
"His friends may sometimes have wished that he had more fully recognized the worth of sentiment as a motive power in politics, that he had more frequently tried to persuade as well as to convince, that he had given more credit for partial installments of honest service and for a virtue less than perfect, that he had dealt more leniently with the faults of the good and the follies of the wise. Defects in these respects were the almost inevitable defects of his admirable qualities, of his passion for truth, his hatred of wrong and injustice, his clear vision, his indomitable spirit.
"Mr. Godkin was not only inaccessible to the lures of wealth—the same may happily be said of many of his craft-brethren—he was just as little accessible to the fear of public displeasure. Nothing more incensed him than to see a statesman or an editor with ' his ear to the ground' (to use an American phrase), seeking to catch the sound of the coming crowd. To him, the less popular a view was, so much the more did it need to be well weighed, and if approved, to be strenuously and incessantly preached. Democracies will always have demagogues ready to feed their vanity and stir their passions and exaggerate the feeling of the moment. What they need is men who will swim against the stream, will tell them their faults, will urge an argument all the more forcibly because it is unwelcome. Such a one was Edwin Godkin. Since the death of Abraham Lincoln, America has been jgenerally more influenced by her writers, preachers, and thinkers than by her statesmen. In the list of those who have during the past forty years influenced her for good and helped by their pens to make history, a list illustrated by such names as those of R. W. Emerson and Phillips Brooks and James Russell Lowell, his name will find its place and receive its well-earned meed of honor."[6]
By no possible conception could his life be called a failure. The pessimism of his later years was not due to any fault of his adopted country, but to his failure to remain youthful in spirit; a failure due, in turn, to the fact that he had, as De Quincey says of Kant, "no faith, no self-distrust, no humility, no child-like docility." Men to be right, had to agree with him.
That spirit was against the very idea of government by public opinion; it was bound to breed the belief that, not alone the country, but the world, had gone wrong. We, who have traced the story of journalism, know that there was no greater cause for despair at the time that he lived and was active, than there was at any other time in the history of the nation. 'He was undoubtedly one of the great editors of the country, but he had less trying times to face than either of his notable predecessors, Bryant or Coleman, who paved the way for him and his achievements. Had he lived to see the Evening Post of to-day, with its black headlines, he would have despaired utterly of salvation in this world or the next, yet we know that these things are comparatively unimportant. His dogmatism, which was his strength, prevented him from seeing things in true relation, and from realizing that the men who see humanity laid open and at its worst,—they of the medical profession,—are the most hopeful and the men most marked by "faith, self-distrust, humility and child-like docility."
We find a healthier view of reform journalism in the West. Never was the spirit of the liberal and reform movement better exemplified than in the case of the Kansas City Star, founded by William Rockhill Nelson at about the same time that Godkin took over the Evening Post. The story of the Star was really that of hundreds of newspapers which, under the inspiring example of leaders in the profession, refused to be merely the organs of party, and became,—where the community was not large enough to make itself heard in national politics—of local and state-wide power for political and civic reform and for the betterment of the community.
Nelson was educated for the law, and became a successful business man; he was attracted to politics by the spirit of the day, partly through his acquaintance with Samuel J. Tilden. The fight against the Tweed ring stirred him, and the failure of the Democratic party to renominate Tilden in 1880 made him an independent. He was the owner of the Fort Wayne Sentinel when he decided to embark in a larger field and selected Kansas City. The Star appeared for the first time in September, 1880, when Kansas City was the muddiest town in the United States; it had no pavements and but a few plank sidewalks. It was a town apparently hopelessly corrupt. Sunday was a day for unlimited drunkenness. In the very first election that took place after the paper was started, Nelson served notice that the Star was out for better conditions:
"The Star has no ax to grind, no candidate to elect, no party to serve. Its only interest is in the growth and prosperity of Kansas City and the proper administration of the city government. It is for the best men, entirely regardless of party. It is, however, forced to admit that most of the men who are seeking nominations from both parties are utterly unfit for the positions to which they aspire. Briefless barristers, to whom no sane man would entrust a lawsuit involving five dollars, want to be city attorney. Irresponsible and incapable men, whom no one would think of selecting for cashier or bookkeeper, ask for the city treasurership. Ignorant peddlers of whiskey aspire to the city council. Such of these men who seek nominations may expect that the Star will tell the truth about them. The voters of the city have a right to know all the facts as to the character and capacity of those who ask their suffrage. These they cannot find in their party organs."[7]
The fight that followed was long and bitter, but Nelson won. A new Kansas City took the place of the one with the mud streets and the plank walks, and it was said of the Star that not a situation arose in the affairs of the city, "the location of a park, the undertaking of public works or what not," but its voice was always potent and usually decisive. In fact, the Star became the most influential paper between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Few indeed were the papers or the editors that attained to such power and influence, such distinction and wealth, as did the Star and Nelson; throughout the country, nevertheless, many men were inspired to follow in the same path, even though they did not achieve the same success. On Nelson's death his wife and his daughter, Mrs. Kirkwood, dedicated the paper to the people of Kansas City " In his spirit." The editorial signed by them summarized well the attitude of the great majority of editors, those in whom machine politics or indifference had not entirely deadened the sense of responsibility:
"The Star was dedicated by Mr. Nelson to great purposes and high ideals in the service of humanity—to honest elections, to democratic government, to the abolition of special privilege, to fair dealings on the part of public service corporations, to larger opportunities for boys and girls, to progress toward social and industrial justice, to all things that make for the richer, fuller life that he coveted passionately for every man, woman and child.
"Particularly was it dedicated to the advancement of Kansas City. Whatever helped the city the Star was for. Whatever hurt the city the Star was against. For thirty-five years this newspaper had warred against election thievery, against the boss rule, against grasping corporations that came to the town only to make money out of it, against the whole brood of enemies of Kansas City. There has been no citizen, no matter what his station, but has known that if he came forward with a practical, ef ficient plan for the city's benefit, he could count on the heartiest help and cooperation of the Star.
"Those to whom this trusteeship has fallen recognize the heavy responsibility and obligation now theirs. In meeting this responsibility and this obligation they are depending on his associates on the stafif who are in complete sympathy with his ideals, and who will have the active management of the paper. It is the one aim of the trustees and associates alike that his spirit shall direct the Star's policy, and that it shall continue to fight, as he would have it fight, for righteousness and justice and the common good, and for the greater, nobler city of his dreams."[8]