Part 20

A string of quotations, as is well known, becomes wearisome; but the importance of the point that I am trying to make will probably justify one more. "I find myself so thoroughly agreeing with The Nation always," wrote Lowell, "that I am half persuaded that I edit it myself!" Truly Lowell had a good company: Emerson, Parkman, Curtis, Norton, James, Eliot,—all teachers in various ways. Through their lectures, books, and speeches, they influenced college students at an impressible age; they appealed to young and to middle-aged men; and they furnished comfort and entertainment for the old. It would have been difficult to find anywhere in the country an educated man whose thought was not affected by some one of these seven; and their influence on editorial writers for newspapers was remarkable. These seven were all taught by Godkin.

"Every Friday morning when The Nation comes," wrote Lowell to Godkin, "I fill my pipe, and read it from beginning to end. Do you do it all yourself? Or are there really so many clever men in the country?" Lowell's experience, with or without tobacco, was undoubtedly that of hundreds, perhaps of thousands, of educated men, and the query he raised was not an uncommon one. At one time, Godkin, I believe, wrote most of "The Week," which was made up of brief and pungent comments on events, as well as the principal editorial articles. The power of iteration, which the journalist possesses, is great, and, when that power is wielded by a man of keen intelligence and wide information, possessing a knowledge of the world, a sense of humor, and an effective literary style, it becomes tremendous. The only escape from Godkin's iteration was one frequently tried, and that was, to stop The Nation.

Although Godkin published three volumes of Essays, the honors he received during his lifetime were due to his work as editor of The Nation and the Evening Post; and this is his chief title of fame. The education, early experience, and aspiration of such a journalist are naturally matter of interest. Born in 1831, in the County of Wicklow in the southeastern part of Ireland, the son of a Presbyterian minister, he was able to say when referring to Goldwin Smith, "I am an Irishman, but I am as English in blood as he is." Receiving his higher education at Queen's College, Belfast, he took a lively interest in present politics, his college friends being Liberals. John Stuart Mill was their prophet, Grote and Bentham their daily companions, and America was their promised land. "To the scoffs of the Tories that our schemes were impracticable," he has written of these days, "our answer was that in America, barring slavery, they were actually at work. There, the chief of the state and the legislators were freely elected by the people. There, the offices were open to everybody who had the capacity to fill them. There was no army or navy, two great curses of humanity in all ages. There was to be no war except war in self-defense.... In fact, we did not doubt that in America at last the triumph of humanity over its own weaknesses and superstitions was being achieved, and the dream of Christendom was at last being realized."

As a correspondent of the London Daily News he went to the Crimea. The scenes at Malakoff gave him a disgust for war which thenceforth he never failed to express upon every opportunity. When a man of sixty-eight, reckoning its cost in blood and treasure, he deemed the Crimean War entirely unnecessary and very deplorable. Godkin arrived in America in November, 1856, and soon afterwards, with Olmsted's "Journey in the Seaboard Slave States," the "Back Country," and "Texas," as guidebooks, took a horseback journey through the South. Following closely Olmsted's trail, and speaking therefore with knowledge, he has paid him one of the highest compliments one traveler ever paid another. "Olmsted's work," he wrote, "in vividness of description and in photographic minuteness far surpasses Arthur Young's." During this journey he wrote letters to the London Daily News, and these were continued after his return to New York City. For the last three years of our Civil War, he was its regular correspondent, and, as no one denies that he was a powerful advocate when his heart was enlisted, he rendered efficient service to the cause of the North. The News was strongly pro-Northern, and Godkin furnished the facts which rendered its leaders sound and instructive as well as sympathetic. All this while he was seeing socially the best people in New York City, and making useful and desirable acquaintances in Boston and Cambridge.

The interesting story of the foundation of The Nation has been told a number of times, and it will suffice for our purpose to say that there were forty stockholders who contributed a capital of one hundred thousand dollars, one half of which was raised in Boston, and one quarter each in Philadelphia and New York. Godkin was the editor, and next to him the chief promoters were James M. McKim of Philadelphia and Charles Eliot Norton. The first number of this "weekly journal of politics, literature, science, and art" appeared on July 6, 1865. Financial embarrassment and disagreements among the stockholders marked the first year of its existence, at the end of which Godkin, McKim, and Frederick Law Olmsted took over the property, and continued the publication under the proprietorship of E. L. Godkin & Co. "The Nation owed its continued existence to Charles Eliot Norton," wrote Godkin in 1899. "It was his calm and confidence amid the shrieks of combatants ... which enabled me to do my work even with decency."

Sixteen years after The Nation was started, in 1881, Godkin sold it out to the Evening Post, becoming associate editor of that journal, with Carl Schurz as his chief. The Nation was thereafter published as the weekly edition of the Evening Post. In 1883 Schurz retired and Godkin was made editor-in-chief, having the aid and support of one of the owners, Horace White. On January 1, 1900, on account of ill health, he withdrew from the editorship of the Evening Post, thus retiring from active journalism.

For thirty-five years he had devoted himself to his work with extraordinary ability and singleness of purpose. Marked appreciation came to him: invitations to deliver courses of lectures from both Harvard and Yale, the degree of A.M. from Harvard, and the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford. What might have been a turning point in his career was the offer in 1870 of the professorship of history at Harvard. He was strongly tempted to accept it, but, before coming to a decision, he took counsel of a number of friends; and few men, I think, have ever received such wise and disinterested advice as did Godkin when he was thus hesitating in what way he should apply his teaching. The burden of the advice was not to take the professorship, if he had to give up The Nation.

Frederick Law Olmsted wrote to him: "If you can't write fully half of 'The Week' and half the leaders, and control the drift and tone of the whole while living at Cambridge, give up the professorship, for The Nation is worth many professorships. It is a question of loyalty over a question of comfort." Lowell wrote to him in the same strain: "Stay if the two things are incompatible. We may find another professor by and by ... but we can't find another editor for The Nation." From Germany, John Bigelow sent a characteristic message: "Tell the University to require each student to take a copy of The Nation. Do not profess history for them in any other way. I dare say your lectures would be good, but why limit your pupils to hundreds which are now counted by thousands?"

As is well known, Godkin relinquished the idea of the college connection and stuck to his job, although the quiet and serenity of a professor's life in Cambridge contrasted with his own turbulent days appealed to him powerfully. "Ten years hence," he wrote to Norton, "if things go on as they are now I shall be the most odious man in America. Not that I shall not have plenty of friends, but my enemies will be far more numerous and active." Six years after he had founded The Nation, and one year after he had declined the Harvard professorship, when he was yet but forty years old, he gave this humorously exaggerated account of his physical failings due to his nervous strain: "I began The Nation young, handsome, and fascinating, and am now withered and somewhat broken, rheumatism gaining on me rapidly, my complexion ruined, as also my figure, for I am growing stout."

But his choice between the Harvard professorship and The Nation was a wise one. He was a born writer of paragraphs and editorials. The files of The Nation are his monument. A crown of his laborious days is the tribute of James Bryce: "The Nation was the best weekly not only in America but in the world."

Thirty-five years of journalism, in which Godkin was accustomed to give hard blows, did not, as he himself foreshadowed, call forth a unanimous chorus of praise; and the objections of intelligent and high-minded men are well worth taking into account. The most common one is that his criticism was always destructive; that he had an eye for the weak side of causes and men that he did not favor, and these he set forth with unremitting vigor without regard for palliating circumstances; that he erected a high and impossible ideal and judged all men by it; hence, if a public man was right eight times out of ten, he would seize upon the two failures and so parade them with his withering sarcasm that the reader could get no other idea than that the man was either weak or wicked. An editor of very positive opinions, 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. He made no allowances for the weaknesses of human nature, and had no idea that he himself ever could be mistaken. Though a powerful critic, he did not realize the highest criticism, which discerns and brings out the good as well as the evil. He won his reputation by dealing out censure, which has a rare attraction for a certain class of minds, as Tacitus observed in his "History." "People," he wrote, "lend a ready ear to detraction and spite," for "malignity wears the imposing appearance of independence."

The influence of The Nation, therefore,—so these objectors to Godkin aver,—was especially unfortunate on the intelligent youth of the country. It was in 1870 that John Bigelow, whom I have just quoted, advised Harvard University to include The Nation among its requirements; and it is true that at that time, and for a good while afterwards, The Nation was favorite reading for serious Harvard students. The same practice undoubtedly prevailed at most other colleges. Now I have been told that the effect of reading The Nation was to prevent these young men from understanding their own country; that, as Godkin himself did not comprehend America, he was an unsound teacher and made his youthful readers see her through a false medium. And I am further informed that in mature life it cost an effort, a mental wrench, so to speak, to get rid of this influence and see things as they really were, which was necessary for usefulness in lives cast in America. The United States was our country; she was entitled to our love and service; and yet such a frame of mind was impossible, so this objection runs, if we read and believed the writing of The Nation. A man of character and ability, who had filled a number of public offices with credit, told me that the influence of The Nation had been potent in keeping college graduates out of public life; that things in the United States were painted so black both relatively and absolutely that the young men naturally reasoned, "Why shall we concern ourselves about a country which is surely going to destruction?" Far better, they may have said, to pattern after Plato's philosopher who kept out of politics, being "like one who retires under the shelter of a wall in the storm of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries along."

Such considerations undoubtedly lost The Nation valuable subscribers. I have been struck with three circumstances in juxtaposition. At the time of Judge Hoar's forced resignation from Grant's Cabinet in 1870, The Nation said, "In peace as in war 'that is best blood which hath most iron in't;' and much is to be excused to the man [that is, Judge Hoar] who has for the first time in many years of Washington history given a back-handed blow to many an impudent and arrogant dispenser of patronage. He may well be proud of most of the enmity that he won while in office, and may go back contented to Massachusetts to be her most honored citizen." Two months later Lowell wrote to Godkin, "The bound volumes of The Nation standing on Judge Hoar's library table, as I saw them the other day, were a sign of the estimation in which it is held by solid people and it is they who in the long run decide the fortunes of such a journal." But The Nation lost Judge Hoar's support. When I called upon him in 1893 he was no longer taking or reading it.

It is the sum of individual experiences that makes up the influence of a journal like The Nation, and one may therefore be pardoned the egotism necessarily arising from a relation of one's own contact with it. In 1866, while a student at the University of Chicago, I remember well that, in a desultory talk in the English Literature class, Professor William Matthews spoke of The Nation and advised the students to read it each week as a political education of high value. This was the first knowledge I had of it, but I was at that time, along with many other young men, devoted to the Round Table, an "Independent weekly review of Politics, Finance, Literature, Society, and Art," which flourished between the years 1864 and 1868. We asked the professor, "Do you consider The Nation superior to the Round Table?"—"Decidedly," was his reply. "The editors of the Round Table seem to write for the sake of writing, while the men who are expressing themselves in The Nation do so because their hearts and minds are full of their matter." This was a just estimate of the difference between the two journals. The Round Table, modeled after the Saturday Review, was a feeble imitation of the London weekly, then in its palmy days, while The Nation, which was patterned after the Spectator, did not suffer by the side of its model. On this hint from Professor Matthews, I began taking and reading The Nation, and with the exception of one year in Europe during my student days, I have read it ever since.

Before I touch on certain specifications I must premise that the influence of this journal on a Westerner, who read it in a receptive spirit, was probably more potent than on one living in the East. The arrogance of a higher civilization in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia than elsewhere in the United States, the term "wild and woolly West," applied to the region west of the Alleghany Mountains, is somewhat irritating to a Westerner. Yet it remains none the less true that, other things being equal, a man living in the environment of Boston or New York would have arrived more easily and more quickly at certain sound political views I shall proceed to specify than he would while living in Cleveland or Chicago. The gospel which Godkin preached was needed much more in the West than in the East; and his disciples in the western country had for him a high degree of reverence. In the biography of Godkin, allusion is made to the small pecuniary return for his work, but in thinking of him we never considered the money question. We supposed that he made a living; we knew from his articles that he was a gentleman, and saw much of good society, and there was not one of us who would not rather have been in his shoes than in those of the richest man in New York. We placed such trust in him—which his life shows to have been abundantly justified—that we should have lost all confidence in human nature had he ever been tempted by place or profit. And his influence was abiding. Presidents, statesmen, senators, congressmen rose and fell; political administrations changed; good, bad, and weak public men passed away; but Godkin preached to us every week a timely and cogent sermon.

To return now to my personal experience. I owe wholly to The Nation my conviction in favor of civil service reform; in fact, it was from these columns that I first came to understand the question. The arguments advanced were sane and strong, and especially intelligible to men in business, who, in the main, chose their employees on the ground of fitness, and who made it a rule to retain and advance competent and honest men in their employ. I think that on this subject the indirect influence of The Nation was very great, in furnishing arguments to men like myself, who never lost an opportunity to restate them, and to editorial writers for the Western newspapers, who generally read The Nation and who were apt to reproduce its line of reasoning. When I look back to 1869, the year in which I became a voter, and recall the strenuous opposition to civil service reform on the part of the politicians of both parties, and the indifference of the public, I confess that I am amazed at the progress which has been made. Such a reform is of course effected only by a number of contributing causes and some favoring circumstances, but I feel certain that it was accelerated by the constant and vigorous support of The Nation.

I owe to The Nation more than to any other agency my correct ideas on finance in two crises. The first was the "greenback craze" from 1869 to 1875. It was easy to be a hard-money man in Boston or New York, where one might imbibe the correct doctrine as one everywhere takes in the fundamental principles of civilization and morality. But it was not so in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where the severe money stringency before and during the panic of 1873, and the depression after it, caused many good and representative men to join in the cry for a larger issue of greenbacks by the government. It required no moral courage for the average citizen to resist what in 1875 seemed to be the popular move, but it did require the correct knowledge and the forcible arguments put forward weekly by The Nation. I do not forget my indebtedness to John Sherman, Carl Schurz, and Senator Thurman, but Sherman and Thurman were not always consistent on this question, and Schurz's voice was only occasionally heard; but every seven days came The Nation with its unremitting iteration, and it was an iteration varied enough to be always interesting and worthy of study. As one looks back over nearly forty years of politics one likes to recall the occasions when one has done the thing one's mature judgment fully approves; and I like to think that in 1875 I refused to vote for my party's candidate for governor, the Democratic William Allen, whose platform was "that the volume of currency be made and kept equal to the wants of trade."

A severer ordeal was the silver question of 1878, because the argument for silver was more weighty than that for irredeemable paper, and was believed to be sound by business men of both parties. I remember that many representative business men of Cleveland used to assemble around the large luncheon table of the Union Club and discuss the pending silver-coinage bill, which received the votes of both of the senators from Ohio and of all her representatives except Garfield. The gold men were in a minority also at the luncheon table, but, fortified by The Nation, we thought that we held our own in this daily discussion.

In my conversion from a belief in a protective tariff to the advocacy of one for revenue only, I recognize an obligation to Godkin, but his was only one of many influences. I owe The Nation much for its accurate knowledge of foreign affairs, especially of English politics, in which its readers were enlightened by one of the most capable of living men, Albert V. Dicey. I am indebted to it for sound ideas on municipal government, and for its advocacy of many minor measures, such for instance as the International Copyright Bill. I owe it something for its later attitude on Reconstruction, and its condemnation of the negro carpet-bag governments in the South. In a word, The Nation was on the side of civilization and good political morals.