FREE SILVER, THE SPANISH WAR, AND IMPERIALISM  
The three great final battles of Godkin’s editorship were those against the free silver craze, the Spanish War, and the retention of the Philippines. The first was decisively won, but the decisive loss of the other two cast a shadow over Mr. Godkin’s last days. “American ideals were the intellectual food of my youth, and to see America converted into a senseless, Old World conqueror, embitters my age,” he wrote a friend in May, 1899. In all three struggles the Evening Post took the same aggressive leadership as in the Mugwump campaigns against Blaine and in Godkin’s fifteen years of war upon Tammany.
The portents of the free silver uprising first became alarming to the Evening Post in 1890. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of that year it roundly attacked, and Horace White and the other editors always regarded it as the chief cause of the panic of 1893. As he pointed out, it added nearly $200,000,000 to the fiat money of the country, alarmed men at home and abroad regarding the ability of the United States to redeem its obligations in gold upon demand, caused the steady withdrawal of capital from the country, and decreased business confidence and increased money rates until failures took place on every hand. The Post’s detestation of the Sherman Act was increased by the fact that it was passed by a nefarious combination of silver men and supporters of the McKinley Tariff, a measure which the Post equally abominated. For some years in the nineties the silver danger seemed the greater because Republicans flirted with it as coyly as Democrats. In 1894 both Speaker Reed and Senator Lodge proposed to force silver upon the world by high discriminating tariffs against nations497 which refused to adopt bimetallism. Lodge, in fact, left the Evening Post aghast by introducing a demagogic resolution in the Senate for applying this policy against England.
Late in 1894 the reception given “Coin’s Financial School” showed how irresistibly the free silver question was thrusting itself into the political foreground. This famous pamphlet, by W. H. Harvey, related how a “smooth little financier” of Chicago named Coin, struck by the rural distress and business depression, opened a school of finance in the Art Institute in May, 1894. His lectures and colloquies continued six days. At first only young men were present, but the audience increased until it included statesmen, professors, bank presidents, and others of note, many of them—as Lyman J. Gage and J. Laurence Laughlin—designated by name. When they interrupted Coin, he quickly silenced them by his incisive logic and superior knowledge. In the end, completely converted, the company tendered him a glittering reception at the Palmer House. The pamphlet was illustrated by coarse woodcuts. One showed silver a beautiful woman decapitated by her enemies; another depicted America as a cow which the farmers were laboriously feeding while a fat capitalist milked her; a third represented the gold standard by a man hobbling on one leg. Coin had made the utmost of his ability to ask the questions as well as answer them. As Horace White said, his discussion with Prof. Laughlin was equaled by nothing save the debate in Rabelais upon the question whether a chimera ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions. The booklet was full of deceptive analogies. For example, when asked if Government coinage of depreciated silver would really make it worth a dollar in gold, Coin replied: “Certainly; if the Government bought 100,000 horses, wouldn’t the price go up?” This retort was set off with a woodcut of a horse.
No man in the country, not even Prof. W. G. Sumner, was so well equipped to answer Coin as Horace White. The “comic publication,” as the Post called it, would498 have been unworthy of attention had its influence not been tremendous. Silver miners, mortgage-ridden farmers, small shopkeepers and workmen, were everywhere soon studying it, making its specious arguments their own, and convincing themselves that an Eastern plutocracy had committed “the crime of ’73”—the demonetization of silver—in order to depress the prices of crops and labor. By March, 1895, it was impossible to ignore the booklet. In a series of twelve articles Mr. White exposed its many misstatements and fallacies. Coin asserted that silver was “demonetized secretly” in 1873, whereas the discussion had been full and open. He said that the silver dollar was the monetary unit of the United States 1792–1873, when it was actually so only from 1783 to 1792. He stated that the United States was the first nation to demonetize silver, whereas Germany had closed her mints to silver except for small coins in 1871. As for the horse-buying illustration, Mr. White showed that when in 1890 the Government began buying 4,500,000 ounces of silver each month, the price actually fell because the supply increased also. He discussed in detail the greenback question, Coin’s queer delusion that the country had never been prosperous since 1873, and the supposed “English octopus” that had fastened gold upon the world. With some revision, his articles appeared early in 1895 as a pamphlet entitled “Coin’s Financial Fool,” and were distributed in large numbers by the Reform Club at fifteen cents a hundred.
At the beginning of 1896 the Evening Post welcomed the signs that a great national battle over free silver was coming. The result, it predicted, would be the same that had crowned the greenback contest. “A sharp division between those who want an honest dollar and those who do not is on all accounts to be desired,” it said on April 10. “A year’s discussion of the principles that enter into this question is the best possible preparation of the public mind for the presidential campaign of 1896.” It knew that the sharp division would have to be a division between the two great parties. As the isolation of Cleveland499 and other gold men in the Democrat party, and the ascendancy of silverites like Bland and Tillman, became more emphatic, it frankly pinned its hopes to the Republicans.
To them it promised victory if only they refused to “straddle.” An editorial of April, 1896, called “Assurance of the Gold Standard,” told them that on a gold platform they could carry all the States north of Delaware and the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi. This would give them 210 electoral votes, and the ten more needed could certainly be obtained from Iowa, the Dakotas, and the border States. Throughout May and June the Evening Post called upon McKinley, who was almost certain to be the nominee, to declare himself for the gold standard. He had voted for the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and had made alarming utterances in favor of silver coinage as late as the fall of 1894; hence the editors’ anxiety over his uncertain position, and their resentment of his talk of making the tariff the chief issue. But McKinley refused to commit himself. He was assured of a majority of the Republican Convention if he acted tactfully, and he had no intention of antagonizing the silver wing of his party before he won the prize. In his speeches both before and just after the convention he failed to allude to the free silver issue, while in several he emphasized the “great American doctrine of protection.”
McKinley’s nomination was therefore received by Godkin and his associates with hostility. Not since 1860, they wrote, had the nation so needed a man of strong character and clear views; yet the Republicans had chosen a trimmer of uncertain mental operations. The gold plank in the platform was admirable, but it simply emphasized the fact that McKinley was, at the time he was named, a total misfit. Nevertheless, Godkin tried to be optimistic:
Nothing marks more clearly than McKinley’s nomination the mistake of turning nominating conventions into vast exciting crowds, doing their work under the eyes of a larger crowd, more excited still. There can be little doubt that the gold in the platform500 was forced on the convention by the business men, and that, had the convention been a deliberative body, McKinley’s unfitness to stand on any such platform would have been recognized. But the pledges given by the delegates before they ever met or compared notes, made it impossible to choose any other. About the platform they were free, but about the candidate they were tied up, so that they were compelled to put him astride a body of doctrine with which he had never been in thorough sympathy. But the formal recognition of the doctrine by the party at least insures discussion, and encourages us to hope that there will be no more difficulty in killing the silver heresy through the country by free debate than there has been in getting such a collection of politicians as met at St. Louis to declare for the gold standard.
If the Evening Post was frigid toward McKinley, it was filled with angry contempt by the nomination of Bryan. He was totally unknown to the country at large; he had not even been a regular delegate to the convention; he made a windy speech to the roaring mob of repudiators which called itself the Democratic party, and was nominated because he was of the stamp of Tillman and Altgeld, with a more attractive personality—so ran its verdict. The decadence of the great party of Jackson, Benton, Tilden, and Cleveland seemed to it confirmed by the platform, which Horace White pronounced “baser than anything ever avowed heretofore by a political party in this country outside of the slavery question.” The free coinage plank, he said, with the silver dollar really worth 52 cents, meant the repudiation of the half part of all the debts incurred since 1872, when the gold dollar had been made the unit of value.
One of the campaign achievements of the Evening Post was truly spectacular. Immediately after Bryan’s nomination its financial editor, Mr. A. D. Noyes, began publishing a series of editorials called “A Free Coinage Catechism.” This question-and-answer presentation of controversial subjects was a familiar one in the Evening Post ever since Godkin assumed control, but it was never more effectively used than in July and August, 1896. Mr.501 Noyes slashed directly into the errors of the Democrats, as a single brief excerpt will show:
Q. What is the fundamental contention of the free coinage advocates? A. That the amount of money in circulation has been decreasing since the demonetization of silver, and that this decrease has caused a general fall in prices.
Q. Is it true that the money supply has been decreasing? A. It is not.
Q. What are the facts? A. So far as the United States is concerned, there has been an enormous increase. In 1860 the money in circulation in this country was $442,102,477; in 1872 it was $738,309,549; by the Treasury bulletin, at the beginning of the present month of July, it was $1,509,725,200.
Q. What does this show? A. It shows that our money supply has increased 240 per cent. as compared with 1860, and 104 per cent. as compared with 1872.
These editorials were immediately issued by the Evening Post in a sixteen-page pamphlet, and by Sept. 4 a first edition of 1,350,000 copies had been sold. A new edition with two new chapters and other additional matter was then brought out, and by Nov. 2 the total sale had reached 1,956,000 copies. Horace White’s pamphlet, “Coin’s Financial Fool,” continued to sell, and was supplemented by the publication in leaflet form of a public address which he had made in Chicago in 1893 upon “The Gold Standard: How It Came Into the World, and Why It Will Stay.” It can safely be said that the most important campaign documents issued in behalf of sound money were these by Mr. Noyes and Mr. White.
Less spectacular, but no less effective, were Horace White’s editorials throughout the summer. As reprinted by the Nation, they reached editors and other leaders of opinion the land over, and filtered down to the public by a thousand channels. Godkin wrote upon the more general political aspects of the campaign, leaving the hard day-to-day arguing mainly to Mr. White. During the whole campaign the paper managed to attack Bryan and Democracy without open advocacy of McKinley and the Republican Party. When McKinley published his letter502 of acceptance, the Post wholeheartedly praised its financial passages, and declared that they defined the one real issue of the campaign. But its distaste for McKinley’s personality, its aversion for his high-tariff views, and the repugnant character of the dominant Republican leaders—Hanna, Platt, Quay, Lodge, Frye, and others—prevented it from giving more than implied and tacit approval to his candidacy. Godkin himself voted the Gold Democratic ticket.
The New York press approached nearer to unanimity that summer than in any Presidential campaign since the era of good feeling. The Journal was Bryan’s one important supporter. When he was nominated, the World turned its back upon him, saying: “Lunacy having dictated the platform, it was perhaps natural that hysteria should evolve the candidate.” Though Dana called himself a Democrat, the Sun was more fervently anti-Bryan than the Tribune. Bryan called New York “the heart of what seems to be the enemy’s country.” His attempt to invade it in mid-August, when he journeyed 1,500 miles to Madison Square Garden to be notified of his nomination, was a dismal failure. The night was one of intense heat, the notification speech of Gov. W. J. Stone of Missouri was intolerably long, and the very character of Bryan’s address was a disappointment. He had been expected to display the eloquence which had so dazzled the Chicago Convention. Instead, he read from manuscript a long speech on the model of Lincoln’s Cooper union Address, dealing in the dry tone of a student with what he imagined to be economic facts and governmental principles. Many hearers left early. But the Post explained his failure, not by his refusal to attempt eloquence, but by the fact that his dreary discourse abounded in “the most grating self-contradictions, the grossest blunders in matters of fact, the emptiest platitudes and vaguest assertions”; and by the fact that while Lincoln had appealed to national honor, the young man from the Platte argued “the cause of private dishonesty and public disgrace.”
Some newspapers indulged in downright ferocity. The503 Journal spoke of the plutocrats, the monopolists, the great corporations, and their protector Hanna, in characteristic Journal fashion. The Tribune called Bryan a “wretched, addle-pated boy posing in vapid vanity and mouthing resounding rottenness”; a man “apt ... at lies and forgeries and blasphemies”; a “puppet in the blood-imbued hands of Altgeld, the anarchist” and of others who made up a “league of hell.” The Sun applauded the Yale students who tried to break up a New Haven speech by Bryan. Even the Post spoke in the harshest tones of those Western farmers the genuineness of whose hardships no one now denies, and characterizes the struggle as one between “the great civilizing forces of the republic” and “the still surviving barbarism bred by slavery in the South and the reckless spirit of adventure in the mining camps of the West.” Such overstatements show how intense was Eastern feeling over the election. Though the Post’s attitude toward McKinley tempered its rejoicings in the result, it nevertheless hailed it as “the most impressive vindication of democracy governing according to law and order that the country has ever seen.”
II
 
The one great doctrine that the Evening Post has maintained as insistently as its low-tariff stand is its opposition to any artificial extension of American sovereignty. From Coleman’s protests against Jackson’s high-handed invasion of the Floridas to Mr. Ogden’s protest against the purchase of the Danish West Indies, this position has been unfalteringly sustained. Bryant was among the first to oppose the annexation of Texas, denounced Walker’s filibusterers as “desperadoes” and “pirates,” and could not condemn too fiercely the Southern projects for acquiring Cuba in the fifties. When Seward purchased Alaska, he opposed that act; for, as he said, many Congressmen advocated it not because they felt they were getting anything of value, but because it was a blow at the prestige of Great Britain and a precaution against the growth of her Pacific power. The basis of the Evening Post’s scathing504 attacks on President Grant’s effort to annex Santo Domingo was its belief that the Anglo-Saxon rule of a Latin and negro people would be contrary to all traditions of the republic, and a complete evil for both countries.
The attitude of the paper toward conquest and military adventure was the same no matter what country was involved. Bryant could never see anything in the Crimean War but a useless and inexcusable sea of blood and misery. When the threat of the Franco-Prussian War first appeared, the Evening Post held that if the ambition of the French to dictate boundaries and sovereigns to Europe was to go on retarding civilization till it met an effectual check, now was the time to check it. Like every other American newspaper, the Post had been embittered against Napoleon III by his interference in Mexico and other acts of hostility toward the United States. The receipt of the news of Sedan was the signal for an impromptu celebration in the editorial rooms. Nevertheless, Bryant and his sub-editors warned Germany against annexation as a “barbarous custom,” saying that she should let Napoleon III be the last European ruler who aspired to govern by force an unwilling and subjugated people. They also warned her against militarism, which had been the curse of France. “It is for united Germany to say that this wrong shall no longer continue; and the way to say it is to disband, as soon as peace is won, those huge armies which have done such mighty deeds, and thus declare to the world that Germany, like America, means peace; and has no fear, because it intends no wrong.”
But if Bryant was always vigorous in denouncing armed aggression, Godkin was always savage. His hatred of national truculence colored his earliest public utterances. It inspired his indignant letters to the London Daily News upon the Trent Affair in 1861, when the tone of the British press and Foreign Office seemed to him needlessly offensive. The attitude he took in the Nation toward Dominican annexation and the designs of many Americans upon Cuba in the seventies was one of trenchant hostility. When he became editor of the Evening Post, not a year505 passed without fresh criticism of this spirit. His attacks upon British military adventures were as freely expressed. When Gordon was killed at Khartum, he wrote with the utmost bitterness of the whole Sudan tragedy—the British Jingo demand for destruction of the Mahdi, its collision with the really admirable spirit of Arab nationalism, the waste of hundreds of millions, the death of hundreds of brave Britons and thousands of brave Arabs. “There is a powerful passage in De Maistre, apropos of war,” he concluded, “describing the loathing and disgust which would be excited in the human breast by the spectacle of tens of thousands of cats meeting in a great plain, and scratching and biting each other till half their number were dead and mangled. To beings superior to man, conflicts like this in the Sudan must have much the same look of grotesque horror.”
By 1894 Mr. Godkin was convinced that the spirit of jingoism was growing more and more rampant the world over. The Continent was divided between the Dual and Triple Alliances. The desire to grab territory had infected even Italy. That country had emerged from the struggle for unification one of the poorest in Europe, with taxation at the last limit of endurance. She badly needed reforms in education, administration, and communication. Yet she hastened to establish an army of 600,000, and a navy of a dozen battleships, and to hunt up some African natives to subjugate like other nations. The result of her efforts to assume a protectorate over Abyssinia was a series of defeats, heavy loss in men, the overthrow of the Crispi Ministry, and reduction to the verge of bankruptcy. “It is no longer sufficient for a people to be happy, peaceful, industrious, well-educated, lightly taxed,” tauntingly wrote Godkin. “It must have somebody afraid of it. What does a nation amount to if nobody is afraid of it? Not a fico secco, as King Humbert would say.” England was clearly headed for war in South Africa. But what grieved Mr. Godkin most was the evident desire of many Americans, the Hearsts and Lodges leading them, to fight somebody. In February, 1896, he wrote upon this phenomenon506 under the title “National Insanity,” comparing it to the recurrent disposition of some men to get drunk in spite of reason.
After the Venezuela Affair, the eagerness of these jingoes for a war turned toward Spain as an object. The Cubans had renewed their revolt in February, 1895, and fought so well that by the end of the next year they controlled three-fourths of the inland country. The cruelty of the struggle shocked Americans, while our heavy Cuban investments and trade gave us a pecuniary interest in the island. When it was proposed in Congress that the Cubans be recognized as belligerents (March, 1896), Godkin regarded this as evidence that Cleveland’s Venezuela message had turned the thoughts of Congressmen toward baiting other nations. “He suggested to a body of idle, ignorant, lazy, and not very scrupulous men an exciting game, which involved no labor and promised lots of fun, and would be likely to furnish them with the means of annoying and embarrassing him.” Recognition was out of the question, for the Cubans had no capital, no government, and no army but guerrilla bands. These facts A. G. Sedgwick demonstrated in “A Cuban Catechism.” However, a number of incidents showed that American feeling was really growing. Princeton students that spring hanged the boy heir to the Spanish throne in effigy, miners in Leadville burnt a Spanish flag in the street, and Senator Morgan of Alabama tried in June to lash Congress into excitement over the American citizens who had been roughly treated by the Spanish authorities in Cuba.
At no time did the Evening Post conceal the fact that American interference might become necessary. Civil war in Cuba could not continue indefinitely; if the island were not pacified within a reasonable period, the United States would be justified in demanding a new policy on the part of Spain. Nor did it at any time conceal its indignation at Weyler’s inhumane policy of herding the Cuban peasantry into the Spanish lines, and at other Spanish mistakes. Late in 1897 Spain offered Cuba a form of autonomy, but on careful examination, the Post pronounced507 it a hollow cheat. The great essentials of government were kept in Spanish hands, and only a pretty plaything was extended. When Weyler was replaced by Blanco, who was sent out to pursue conciliation, the paper predicted that he would fail as generations before Alexander of Parma had failed when sent by Philip II to replace the bloody Alva in the low countries. No man, it said, could rule Cuba with a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other. On Sept. 18, 1897, our Minister at Madrid tendered the friendly offices of the United States, and hinted that if the rebellion continued, President McKinley would take serious action. The Post spoke approvingly:
This, it is important to recall, is the historic American position, and is the only rational and justifiable way of dealing with an affair which, in any aspect, is deplorable and thick with embarrassments. No longer ago than President Cleveland’s message of Dec. 7, 1896, interference on the lines indicated was distinctly foreshadowed, and he was but taking his stand where President Grant had taken his in 1874 and 1875. With our foreign affairs then in the careful hands of Hamilton Fish, interference with Spain on the ground of the prolonged rebellion in Cuba was yet distinctly intimated. In his annual message of Dec. 7, 1874, Gen. Grant referred to the continuance of t............