GODKIN, THE MUGWUMP MOVEMENT, AND GROVER CLEVELAND’S CAREER  
Edwin Lawrence Godkin was not quite fifty-two when he became editor-in-chief in 1883, and was in the prime of life, with fifteen years of vigorous journalistic labor before him. He wrote Charles Eliot Norton that he had no intention, even if his health permitted, of staying with the Evening Post more than ten years, but his heart was enlisted far too keenly in his work and the great causes he espoused to let him go until failing health made his retirement in 1899 imperative. It is natural that his published letters should emphasize his joyous sense of a greater freedom as he entered the newspaper office; his feeling that he was giving himself to a publication which did not depend absolutely upon his pen and mind as the Nation did, and could have his vacations like other workers. But he felt also his new responsibilities. He valued the opportunity the Post gave him to impress his opinions daily upon the public; to reach a wider audience—the Post’s 20,000 buyers as well as the Nation’s 10,000; and to give more attention to certain subjects, as municipal misgovernment. “My notion is, you know,” he wrote W. P. Garrison in 1883, “that the Evening Post ought to make a specialty of being the paper to which sober-minded people would look at crises of this kind, instead of hollering and bellering and shouting platitudes like the Herald and Times.”
The independent character of the political course Godkin would steer had been fully indicated by the volumes of the Nation. This weekly, founded when the last shots of the Civil War were ringing in men’s ears, had undertaken the fearless discussion of public questions at a moment that seemed peculiarly unpropitious. The prevalent459 tendency of the years after the war, as Godkin said, was a fierce illiberalism, represented by such leaders as Thaddeus Stevens in the House. The Nation had at once declared war upon this narrow, rancorous political spirit, and attempted to substitute progressive and enlightened views. It had questioned the wisdom of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. It had been ten years in advance of public opinion in its attacks upon that demagogic politician, Ben Butler. It had been one of the first Republican organs to denounce the carpet-bag régime at the South, and to assail President Grant for his failures. In 1876 occurred its most serious collision with a considerable body of readers; it condemned the Southern frauds which gave Hayes the Presidency, and called his induction into office a “most deplorable and debauching enterprise,” this course costing it 3,000 subscribers. Godkin inclined in his sympathies to the Republican party, but he would not hesitate to break from it upon any question of principle.
When Godkin assumed the helm of the Evening Post, he had a shrewd suspicion that the Presidential campaign about to open would present a fundamental question of principle. As he wrote long after, James G. Blaine’s audacity, good humor, horror of rebel brigadiers, and contempt for reformers made his nomination sooner or later inevitable, and such a nomination in Godkin’s eyes presented a moral question of the first magnitude. No American newspaper has ever conducted a more effective campaign fight than that which the Evening Post waged in 1884. It was a fight not only against Blaine, but in behalf of the one contemporary American statesman whom Godkin, in his long journalistic career after 1865, highly admired.
Of reformers like Godkin, Blaine wrote in advance of his nomination: “They are noisy, but not numerous; pharisaical, but not practical; ambitious, but not wise; pretentious, but not powerful.” The Evening Post’s opinion of Blaine was equally frank. It believed that the Mulligan letters, published in 1876, convicted Blaine of460 prostituting his office as a member of Congress and Speaker in order to make money in various Western railways, and of lying in a vain effort to conceal the fact. It added as lesser counts against him that in his twelve years in the House he had never performed a single service for good government, and had done it much disservice, as by his covert opposition to civil service reform, and his defense of the spoliation of the public lands; that in all his public appearances he had been sensational, theatrical, and a lover of notoriety; and that while Secretary of State under Garfield “he plunged into spoils, and wallowed in them for three months, like a rhinoceros in an African pool, using every office he could lay his hands on for the reward of his henchmen and hangers-on, without shame or scruple.” But its central objection was always that he had sold his official power and influence.
The great “Mugwump” bolt from the Republican party as soon as Blaine was nominated took with it many influential Eastern journals—Harper’s Weekly, the New York Times, the Boston Herald, the Boston Advertiser, and the Springfield Republican—but it took no other pen like Godkin’s. Long in advance of the convention, he and Schurz had warned the Republican leaders that Blaine’s nomination would disrupt the party. The Evening Post pointed out in November, 1883, that the next election would probably be close, and that New York, where the voters were more independent than anywhere else, would certainly be the pivotal State. The election of 1876 had hung upon several artificial decisions in the South; that of 1884 would be likely to hang upon the judgment of a small body of thoughtful, impartial voters. On April 23, 1884, a rich New Jersey Congressman named William Walter Phelps published an article defending Blaine, to which Godkin immediately replied in a long and elaborate review of “Mr. Blaine’s Railroad Transactions.” Thereafter the paper kept up a drum-fire upon the “tattooed man.”
How could the campaign be most effectively conducted? Godkin saw that of the arsenal of weapons available,461 the parallel column could be used with the most telling force. The attack, in the first place, must be focussed upon the Republican candidate. No one cared about the rival platforms. As for the general character of the two parties, most voters believed the Republican party to be superior, and Godkin himself would have thought so had not its jobbing, corrupt element, as he said, gradually “come to a head, in the fashion of a tumor, in Mr. James G. Blaine.” How could Blaine’s weaknesses be most clearly exposed? By his own letters, made public through Mulligan, which stripped his dealings as a Congressman with the Little Rock & Fort Smith, the union Pacific, and the Northern Pacific interests, and by his own speeches defending these transactions. Adroit though he was, Blaine in his panicky efforts at self-justification had repeatedly contradicted both himself and the admitted facts. This, with all its implications, could be concisely proved by the parallel columns.
Not all these contradictions were immediately evident. By the end of September, just after Mulligan had published a new group of Blaine letters, Godkin and his associates, Horace White, Joseph Bucklin Bishop, and A. G. Sedgwick, had detected a half dozen. By November they had raised the total to ten. Reprinted day after day, they had a value that will be evident from a couple of examples:
BLAINE LIE NO. 5
“My whole connection with the road has been open as the day. If there had been anything to conceal about it, I should never have touched it. Wherever concealment is advisable, avoidance is advisable, and I do not know any better test to apply to the honor and fairness of a business transaction.”—Mr. Blaine’s speech in Congress, April 24, 1876.
“I want you to send me a letter such as the enclosed draft.... Regard this letter as strictly confidential. Do not show it to anyone. If you can’t get the letter written in season for the nine o’clock mail to New York, please be sure to mail it during the night.... Sincerely, J. G. B. (Burn this letter)”—Blaine to Fisher, April 16, 1876.
BLAINE LIE NO. 9 [IN PART]
“Third.—I do not own and never did own an acre of coal land or any other kind of land in the Hocking Valley or in any other part of Ohio. My letter to the Hon. Hezekiah Bundy in July last on this same subject was accurately true.
Very truly yours,
J. G. Blaine.”
(Letter to the Hon. Wm. McKinley, dated Belleaire, Ohio, Oct. 4, 1884.)
“Boston, Dec. 15, 1880.
“Received of James G. Blaine, $25,180.50, being payment in full for one share in the association formed for the purchase of lands known as the Hope Furnace Tract, situated in Vinton and Athens Counties, Ohio. This receipt to be exchanged for a certificate when prepared.
J. N. Denison, Agent.”
462 One particularly notable use of the parallel columns was in contradiction of Blaine’s statement that subsequent to his purchase of the bonds of the Fort Smith railroad, only one act of Congress had been passed applying to the line, and that merely to rectify a previous mistake in legislation. The fact was, as the paper showed, that the act repealed the proviso that the railway’s grant of public lands should not be sold for more than $2.50 an acre, thus adding to the value of its securities.
The deadly parallel columns were applied to careless campaign speakers for Blaine. They were repeatedly used against the leading Blaine newspapers, the New York Tribune, Philadelphia Press, Chicago Tribune, and Cincinnati Commercial. A happy stroke, for example, exhibited their efforts to ignore the second batch of Mulligan letters:
BLAINE’S OWN VIEW OF THE LETTERS
“There is not a word in the letters which is not entirely consistent with the most scrupulous integrity and honor. I hope that every Republican paper in the United States will republish them in full.”—Mr. Blaine’s interview with the Kennebec Journal, Sept. 15, 1884.
EARLY VIEWS OF HIS ORGANS
The Tribune, Sept. 15, 1884, suppressed all the letters and had no comments.
The Boston Journal, Sept. 15, 1884, suppressed nine letters, gave misleading summaries of many of them, and commented not at all upon the suppressed ones.
The Philadelphia Press, Sept. 15, 1884, published the letters in a part of its edition only, and had no comment.
For the unprecedented scandal-mongering of this campaign, which Godkin called fit for a tenement stairway, the Evening Post and other decent newspapers felt only disgust. But when the vicious elements in Buffalo which had learned to hate Cleveland as a reform Mayor and Governor revealed the fact that, as a young man, he had once formed an illicit connection, the Post felt it necessary to treat the charge in detail and place it in its true importance. A large number of clergymen, suffrage leaders, and others hastened to declare that no man with an illegitimate child could be supported for the Presidency. Considering Blaine’s character, this seemed to the Post both ridiculous and vicious. Which was better fitted to be President, a man once unchaste, as Franklin, Webster, and Jefferson had been, or a man who sold his official463 power for money? Godkin argued that in a statesman official probity was all important, while an early lapse in personal morals was of minor significance:
“Well, but,” we shall be asked, “does not the charge against Cleveland, as you yourselves state and admit it, disqualify him, in your estimation, for the Presidency of the United States?” We answer frankly: “Yes, if his opponent be free from this stain, and as good a man in all other ways.” We should like to see candidates for the Presidency models of all the virtues, pure as the snow and steadfast as the eternal hills. But when the alternative is a man of whom the Buffalo Express, a political opponent, said immediately after his nomination, “that the people of Buffalo had known him as one of their worthiest citizens, one of their manliest men, faithful to his clients, faithful to his friends, and faithful to every public trust” ... a good son and good brother, and unmarried in order that he might be the better son and brother, against whom nothing can be said except that he has not been proof against one of the most powerful temptations by which human nature is assailed; or, on the other hand, a man convicted out of his own mouth of having publicly lied in order to hide his jobbery in office, of having offered his judicial decisions as a sign of his possible usefulness to railroad speculators in case they paid him his price, of trading in charters which had been benefited by legislation in which he took part, and of having broken his word of honor in order to destroy documentary evidence of his corruption—a man who has accumulated a fortune in a few years on the salary of a Congressman—then we say emphatically no—ten thousand times no.
A public office like the Presidency was not a reward for a blameless private life, insisted Godkin, but a heavy duty and responsibility, to be given only to a statesman of ability and official integrity. Schurz pointed out that Hamilton, the founder of the Post, was once placed in a position where he had to remain silent concerning a slur upon his honesty in office, or confess to an offense like Cleveland’s; and he hesitated not an instant to clear his public honor at this cost to private reputation. The articles of the Evening Post and Nation powerfully conduced to right thinking on this subject.
The abuse visited upon the Evening Post in this campaign464 was the greatest since the slavery struggle. The Chicago Tribune said that “it was a natural instinct of servility to the great corporations that has bound it with hoops of steel to Cleveland’s cause”; a remarkable charge in view of the fact that Jay Gould, H. H. Rogers, Cyrus W. Field, Russell Sage, H. D. Armour, and other corporation heads supported Blaine, and by their dinner with him at Delmonico’s just before election—“Belshazzar’s Feast”—did not a little to defeat him. “The Evening Post has finally gone down so low,” remarked the Poughkeepsie Eagle in September, “that it lies about itself.” The Harrisburgh Telegraph published an attack by Bryant upon Jefferson as proof that the Post had always been addicted to malevolent personalities; not mentioning the fact that Bryant had written these verses in 1803, at the age of nine, twenty-three years before he joined the Post. The New York Tribune turned Godkin’s statement, “Cleveland’s virtues are those which bind human society together,” into “Cleveland’s sins are of the sort which bind society together,” and repeatedly printed it in this form. As for Dana’s Sun, it continually called the Post “stupid”; but Dana this year was proving his own brilliance by supporting the farcical Greenback candidacy of Ben Butler, who polled 3,500 votes in New York city.
On the other hand, the paper received a steady stream of congratulatory letters. Henry Ward Beecher wrote in September that the editorials were clear, honest, and weighty. “How any one who has read them can vote for Blaine passes my comprehension. They ought to be circulated over the whole land as one of the best campaign documents. They stand in striking contrast with the inefficient speeches of Hawley, Hoard, and Dawes, and the essays and letters of Mead, Bliss & Co. Allow me to say that the Evening Post has never stood higher in its long and honorable life than now. It may almost be called the ideal family newspaper.” As a matter of fact, the editorials were circulated as campaign documents. Godkin’s articles on Blaine’s railway transactions sold 20,000 copies in pamphlet form before Sept. 20,465 when a revised edition appeared. In October the Post issued a pamphlet called “The Young Men’s Party,” by Col. T. W. Higginson, and another which embraced a reply to George Bliss and the table of ten Blaine falsehoods. In the closing days of the campaign the paper received subscriptions of $1,000 a week for the independent Campaign Fund. Godkin maintained his fierce editorial attacks to the last moment, and did not fail to make the most of the “Rum-Romanism-Rebellion” indiscretion of the Rev. Mr. Burchard, saying that Blaine had given “tacit assent” to this insult against Catholicism.
The fight was by no means won with the closing of the polls on election day, Nov. 4. Early next morning every one knew that Cleveland had carried the South, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana, that his election was assured if he had carried New York, and that New York was doubtful. The World claimed the Empire State for the Democrats, and the Sun conceded it to them, but the Tribune declared that Blaine had won. The Post’s headlines that afternoon ran: “Cleveland Probably Elected—213 Electoral Votes for Him—New York in Cleveland Column”; while the editorial declared simply that, with the returns very backward, the indications were that Cleveland had a safe majority. Crowds all day filled the streets in front of the bulletin boards, and for a time there was a threat of rioting against Jay Gould and the western union Telegraph officers, who were accused of delaying and tampering with the returns in the interest of Blaine. With an audacity born of their memory of 1876, the Republicans continued to claim the victory all day Thursday the 6th. The Tribune footed up the county returns for New York as giving Blaine a plurality of 1,166, but the addition was inaccurate—they really gave Cleveland a plurality of 128! The Associated Press, whose returns were inexcusably fragmentary and late, gave Cleveland 1,057 plurality, and the Post, with its own dispatches from every county save one, 1,378—the official figure being later given as 1,149. The excited Mail and Express made the same blunder as the Tribune,466 claiming New York for Blaine when its own inaccurately added table of counties gave Cleveland a plurality of 4,000. At two a. m. on the 7th the Associated Press announced Cleveland’s election, and Godkin was able to write:
At daylight this morning everybody conceded Cleveland’s election save the Tribune, which remains in doubt. If it persists in declaring Blaine elected there will be two inauguration ceremonies on March 4, one of Cleveland in Washington and one of Blaine on the steps of the Tribune building, the oath of office being administered by William Walter Phelps.
II
 
Our one American President whose dislike of newspapers in general could be called intense was Cleveland. He deeply resented the mud-slinging in which they had indulged against both himself and Blaine during his first campaign; and when he married in 1886, he was out............