THE VILLARD PURCHASE: CARL SCHURZ EDITOR-IN-CHIEF  
Within three years after Bryant’s death his newspaper, still prosperous and well-edited, was suddenly sold, and placed in the hands of the ablest triumvirate ever enlisted by an American daily. The transfer was announced in the issue of May 25, 1881:
The Evening Post has passed under the control of Mr. Carl Schurz, Mr. Horace White, and Mr. E. L. Godkin, who yesterday completed the purchase of a large majority of its stock. To-morrow Mr. Schurz will assume the editorial direction of the journal.
It was generally known that the real buyer was Henry Villard, but for several weeks this fact was not only concealed, but for some reason was explicitly denied both by the Post and Mr. Villard. On July 1 there appeared a supplementary announcement:
Beginning with the next number the Nation will be issued as the weekly edition of the New York Evening Post.
It will retain the name and have the same editorial management as heretofore, and an increased staff of contributors, but its contents will in the main have already appeared in the Evening Post.
This consolidation will considerably enlarge the field and raise the character of the Evening Post’s literary criticism and news. It will also add to its staff of literary contributors the very remarkable list of writers in every department with which readers of the Nation have long been familiar.
To few interested in the Post could its sale have been a surprise. It is true that Parke Godwin had many reasons, sentimental and practical, for continuing his editorship and maintaining the Bryant family’s half-ownership. He appreciated the argument which John Bigelow addressed to him when he talked of giving both up. “Bethink you,”439 wrote Bigelow, “that now and for the first time in your long career of journalism you have absolute control of a paper of traditional respectability and authority, in which you can say just what you please on all subjects.” His two sons seemed interested in making journalism their career. He had an able stall, several of whom—as the financial editor Whiting, the literary editor Eggleston, and the dramatic editor Towse—were unexcelled in their departments, while two valuable additions, Robert Burch and Robert Bridges (later editor of Scribner’s) had been made to the news room. But Parke Godwin was sixty-five this year. He had undertaken the writing of Bryant’s life in two volumes, and the editing of the poet’s works in four more, while he wished to complete his history of France, begun before the war. He believed that it would be well for his family, after his death, to have its money invested in a less precarious enterprise than a newspaper. Above all, his relations with Isaac Henderson had now come to a breaking point.
An open quarrel between them in the spring of 1881 ended in a clear assertion by Godwin of his right to control the editorial policy. He thought for the moment of bringing Edward H. Clement, a young Boston journalist, later well known for his editorship and regeneration of the Transcript, to be his associate. But at this juncture he accidentally discovered that Henderson was negotiating for the sale of his half of the Evening Post to some prominent capitalist, and leaped to the conclusion that the man was Jay Gould. In this he was doubtless mistaken. But he was deeply alarmed by the thought that the Bryant family might be associated with a notorious gambler and manipulator, whose object would have been to make the Post a disreputable organ of his schemes.
Almost simultaneously he learned from Carl Schurz, then in the last months of his service as Secretary of the Interior, that he, Horace White, and Henry Villard were searching for a daily, into which they were prepared to put a considerable amount of capital, and that they were negotiating with the owners of the Commercial Advertiser,440 but would prefer the Evening Post. Godwin, given a month to consider, consulted his most judicious friends—Samuel J. Tilden, Joseph H. Choate, President Garfield, and others—who all advised him to dispose of the paper. Choate told him that Henderson had come to his office for legal advice as to the possibility of somehow destroying Godwin’s control. With great reluctance, the Bryant heirs concluded to sell. The paper was then earning $50,000 a year, and Horace White finally agreed to the payment of $450,000 for the family’s half, which carried control of the board of trustees. For a time Henderson was disinclined to sell the other half, but with the aid of Godwin, to whom Henderson was still in debt, he was soon brought to yield.
How did Henry Villard come to purchase the Evening Post? He was at this time midway in his amazing career as a railway builder. Eight years before, when known only as a young German-American who had proved himself one of the ablest and most daring of the Civil War correspondents, he had become the American representative of a Protective Committee of German bondholders at Frankfort. This body, and a similar one which he soon joined, had large holdings in Western railways, which Villard had been asked to supervise. Thus launched into finance, by his ability, energy, and determination he had soon made a large fortune. His first extensive undertakings were in the Pacific Northwest, where another son of the Palatinate, John Jacob Astor, had carved out a career before him; and his success with the Oregon & California Railroad, and Oregon Railway & Navigation Company emboldened him in 1881–83 to undertake and carry through the completion of the Northern Pacific. His interest in his original profession, and a wish to devote his money to some large public end, led him while busiest with this great undertaking to conceive the plan of buying a metropolitan paper and giving it the ablest editors procurable.
Parke Godwin,
Editor-in-Chief 1878–1881.
Henry Villard,
Owner 1881–1900.
 
Horace White,
Associate Editor 1881–1899,
Editor-in-Chief 1900–1903.
Carl Schurz,
Editor-in-Chief 1881–1883.
Horace White, who was connected in New York with Mr. Villard’s business enterprises, and was ready to re-enter441 journalism, undoubtedly shared in this conception. When Godwin’s half of the Post had been purchased, and Schurz had consented to become editor-in-chief, E. L. Godkin was approached with the offer of an editorship and a share of the stock. He wisely refused to consider the proposal till Henderson’s withdrawal was assured, and then accepted it, writing Charles Eliot Norton that he did so because he was weary of the unintermittent work involved in the conduct of the Nation, because he knew that, being forty-nine, his vivacity and energy must decline, and the value of the Nation suffer proportionately, and because he wished to make more money during the few working years left to him. The Nation, in fact, was a struggling publication. It was bought by the proprietors of the Evening Post, its price was reduced to $3 a year, and Wendell Phillips Garrison, its literary editor, who was Villard’s brother-in-law, went with it to the Evening Post to take charge of its weekly issuance.
The new owner and three new editors had long regarded the Evening Post with high respect. Villard in 1857 had applied at its office for work, being out of employment and almost penniless; and upon his offering to go to India to report the Sepoy Mutiny, Bigelow had offered him $20 for every letter he wrote from that country. His political ideas had been identical with the Post’s—for example, he had been a Liberal Republican in 1872, but had refused to follow Greeley. Godkin had contributed to the Evening Post in the fifties upon such topics as the death of the old East India Company, and we have seen that he furnished correspondence from Paris in 1862. Like his friend Norton, he had long acknowledged the paper’s peculiar elevation. Horace White had contributed in the late seventies upon the silver question. Schurz had known it as a loyal ally in his efforts for a civil service law, sound money, and reform within the Republican party, while it is interesting to note that under Bryant it had said that he was the strongest man in the Senate.
Each of the three editors had his own title to distinction,442 and each had won his special public following. Carl Schurz had been constantly in the public eye since he lent valuable assistance to Lincoln in the campaign of 1860. The German-Americans, indeed, had known of him much earlier, for as a youth in Germany, aflame with revolutionary zeal, his military services in the uprising of 1848, and his subsequent romantic rescue of Gottfried Kinkel from the fortress at Spandau, had made him famous. In 1858, writing Kinkel from Milwaukee, he wondered a little over his steady rise in reputation, modestly explaining it as due to American curiosity in “a German who, as they declare, speaks English better than they do, and also has the advantage over their native politicians of possessing a passable knowledge of European conditions.” It was, of course, really due to appreciation of his eloquence, versatility, mental power, and enthusiasm for liberal principles. He has admitted that he was inexpressibly gratified by the salvos of applause with which he was greeted in the Chicago Convention of 1860. For his platform advocacy of Lincoln he was rewarded with the post of Minister to Spain, which he early resigned to buckle on his sword. Then came his sterling service first as a brigadier-general and later as major-general, when he fought at Chancellorsville, Chattanooga, and Gettysburg. His investigative trip through the South in 1865 for President Johnson, and refusal to suppress his report because it did not support Johnson’s views, drew national attention to his aggressive independence. Six years in the Senate, where he was unrivaled for his discussions of finance, and four years as Secretary of the Interior, had added to his fame as a man of broad views, high motives, and unshakable courage. By 1881 he was recognized as, next to Hamilton and Gallatin, our greatest foreign-born statesman.
Godkin also had a national following—a following of intellectual liberals, especially strong in university and professional circles, marshaled by the Nation since he founded it in 1865. He had, as Lowell said, made himself “a Power.” In the ability with which the weekly443 discussed politics and social questions, the trenchancy of its style, and the soundness of its literary criticism, it was unapproached by anything else in American—James Bryce thought also in British—journalism. The masses who knew Schurz well had hardly heard of it; but no man of cultivation who tried to keep abreast of the times neglected it, and because it was digested by newspaper editors all over the union, Godkin’s influence was deep and wide. James Ford Rhodes gives an illustration of this influence just after the Nation became practically the weekly Evening Post. “Passing a part of the winter of 1886 in a hotel at Thomasville, Ga., it chanced that among the hundred or more guests there were eight or ten of us who regularly received the Nation by post. Ordinarily it arrived in the Friday noon train from Savannah, and when we came from our midday dinner into the hotel office, there, in our respective boxes, easily seen, and from their peculiar form recognized by every one, were our copies of the Nation. Occasionally the papers missed connections at Savannah, and our Nations did not arrive till after supper. It used to be said by certain scoffers that if a discussion of political questions came up in the afternoon of one of those days of disappointment, we readers were mum; but in the late evening, after having digested our political pabulum, we were ready to join issue with any antagonist.”
As for Horace White, he was best known in the Middle West, where he had entered journalism in 1854 as a reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal. Four years later, after much activity in behalf of the free soil movement in Kansas, during which he even removed to the Territory himself and went through the preliminary form of taking up a claim, he reported the Lincoln-Douglas debates for the Chicago Press and Tribune. His reminiscences of those weeks of intimate contact with Lincoln fill many pages of Herndon’s life of the President, and constitute one of its most interesting chapters. During the war he was Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, secretary for a time to Stanton, and organizer with A. S.444 Hill and Henry Villard of a news agency in competition with the Associated Press. After it, for nearly a decade, he was editor and one of the principal proprietors of the Tribune, which under him was far more liberal than it has ever been since. But he was valuable to the Evening Post chiefly because he had devoted himself for years to study of the theory of banking and finance, on which his articles and pamphlets had already made him a recognized authority.
It was thus an editorship of “all the talents” that was installed in the Evening Post just before Garfield was shot. Schurz was specially equipped to discuss politics, the range of problems he had met while Secretary of the Interior, and German affairs; White was perhaps the best writer available on the tariff, railways, silver question, and banking; while Godkin held an unrivaled pen for general social and political topics. By birth they were German, American, and British, but Schurz and Godkin were really cosmopolites, citizens of the world. Their practical experience had covered a surprising range. We are likely to forget, for example, that Schurz had once made a living by teaching German in London, and had farmed in Wisconsin, while Godkin had been a war correspondent in the Crimea, and admitted to the New York bar. In their fundamental idealism the three men were wholly alike. Schurz’s political record and Godkin’s Nation were monuments to it. They were one in wishing to make the Post the champion of sound money, a low tariff, civil service reform, clean and independent politics, and international peace. Henry Villard with rare generosity assumed financial responsibility for the paper, but made the editors wholly independent by placing it in the hands of three trustees—Ex-Gov. Bristow, Ex-Commissioner David A. Wells, and Horace White.
II
 
The selection of Schurz to be editor-in-chief was more than a tribute to his station as a public man. Of the three, he had the most varied journalistic experience. As445 a young man in Germany he had helped Kinkel edit the Bonner Zeitung. After the Civil War he became head of the Washington Bureau of the New York Tribune, and took an instant liking both to journalism and the men engaged in it—in his reminiscences he draws a sharp contrast between their high principles and the low sense of honor among Washington officeholders. He soon accepted the editorship of the Detroit Post, a new journal, urged upon him by Senator Zechariah Chandler, and in 1867 became editor and part owner of the St. Louis Westliche Post, a place desirable because it brought him into association with Dr. Emil Preetorius and other German-Americans of congenial views. When the date of his leaving the Secretaryship of the Interior approached in 1881, he had received several offers of editorial positions. Rudolph Blankenburg, later Mayor of Philadelphia, wrote that there was crying need of a good daily in that city, and that he and other business men would found one if Schurz would take charge. The statement was published in St. Louis that a new daily was about to be established there under Schurz. But Schurz himself would have been the last to lay emphasis upon his mere practical experience—he had no taste for financial or news management, and it appears that neither the Detroit Post nor Westliche Post was financially prosperous under him. His qualifications for the chief editorship were of a different and much rarer kind.
His ability as a writer shows a mingling of high merits with a few distinct shortcomings. Since his “Reminiscences” will live as long as any work of its kind and time, no less for its style than its fascinating story, since his essay on Lincoln is an admitted classic, it is unnecessary to say that he was a master of the pen. He has interestingly related how he taught himself to write English on first coming to America. At the start he made it a practice to read his daily newspaper from beginning to end; then he proceeded to English novels—“The Vicar of Wakefield,” Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray; and he followed them with Macaulay’s essays and Blackstone’s446 commentaries, particularly admiring the terse, clear style of the latter. Finally he read Shakespeare’s plays, going through their enormous vocabulary with the utmost conscientiousness. At the same time he practiced turning the Letters of Junius, which he thought brilliant, into German, and back again into English. The result was that soon he not merely wrote, but thought equally well in English or German, and much preferred English for certain purposes, as public speaking and political discussion. Schurz’s speeches were among the most eloquent delivered in his generation. One of the oldest Senators said that his address of February, 1872, was the best he had ever heard in the upper chamber; his Brooklyn speech of 1884 against Blaine ranks with the greatest of American campaign orations; and his utterances upon tariff and civil service reform were read by millions.
Yet Schurz fell just short of being a great editorial writer. He used a battle-axe, at once sharp and crushing, but he could not vary it with the play of the rapier, as E. L. Godkin could. His directness, clarity, and force were marked, but his writings were lacking in humor, metaphor, and allusion. Devoting himself to large political questions, he had no time to observe interesting minor social phenomena, so that his work lacked relief. No one could excel him in argument or exposition upon subjects with which he was familiar, but he could not relieve his discussions from a reproach of dryness.
Of the mind and character behind the pen, almost nothing can be said except in praise. All his life he had been a zealot for liberalism. He had thrown himself into the revolutionary movement of ’48 with an ardor not a whit boyish, on coming to America he had instantly enlisted against slavery, and he was still an enthusiast for reform. Grover Cleveland once spoke of his career as teaching “the lesson of moral courage, of intelligent and conscientious patriotism, of independent political thought, of unselfish political affiliation, and of constant political vigilance.” He was for sound money from greenback days to the settlement of the free silver issue;447 he was a combatant against “imperialism” from Grant’s attempted annexation of Domingo to Roosevelt’s seizure of Panama. When Secretary of the Interior he enforced the merit system, yet unembodied in any law, in his department, requiring competitive examinations for clerkships. His one fault was that in his intentness on his own subject he sometimes lost perspective, and became indifferent to equally important aims of others.
It has been said that as Lord Halifax made the term “trimmer” honorable in England, Schurz made that of party turncoat honorable in America. His obedience to principle was so unswerving that he was heedless of allegiance to groups or individuals. He was for Seward in 1860, but fell in instantly behind Lincoln; supported President Johnson’s reconstruction policy till his trip South in 1865, and then followed Sumner; was for Grant in 1869, and one of the earliest leaders against him in 1870–71; warmly commended some of Roosevelt’s acts and condemned more; was one of Bryan’s sternest opponents in 1896, and made a speaking tour for him in 1900. The independence exhibited in this adherence to conviction was in the highest degree creditable. His sense of personal rectitude was so keen and sensitive that he could not bear to do anything for mere “expediency.” It can only be said that he was sometimes a little too positive that he was right, a little intolerant of others. His indignation when Roosevelt and Lodge in 1884 followed Blaine, whom they suspected of being dishonest, would have been less intense had he seen that there is really something to be said for party regularity under such circumstances.
Yet he was no impracticable idealist, but a man with a shrewd grasp of affairs. Mark Twain declared that he made it a rule, when in doubt in politics, to follow Schurz, saying to himself, “He............