CHARACTERISTICS OF A FIGHTING EDITOR: E. L. GODKIN  
One essential qualification of a great editor, a masterful personality, was so distinctively possessed by Mr. Godkin that it may be doubted whether any other American daily since the Civil War has been so much the expression of a single mind and character as the Evening Post from 1883 to 1899. The frequent statement that he was an incomparable leader-writer, but not an all-round journalist, has an element of truth, but is highly misleading. The editorial page was wholly his own, for he determined its policies, molded the ideas of his fellow-editors, and by force of example gave several of them—as a great editor always will—some characteristics of his style. The news pages he accorded only distant oversight, and one of his city editors doubts whether he regularly read more than the first page and the page opposite the editorials. Yet every cub reporter grasped Godkin’s clear-cut ideas of what a newspaper should be, and strove to contribute his mite to the realization of the editor’s ideals. There was no other journal resembling it, and its dignity, integrity, thoughtfulness, scholarly accuracy, and pride of intellect were the reflection of Godkin’s own traits. We may say that while Godkin did not pay close daily attention to any part of his journal save the editorials, the news writers, the financial writers, the critics, and the business department all paid close attention to Mr. Godkin’s views regarding their work; they would no more have thought of standing counter to them than of stepping in front of an Alpine avalanche.
The soul of the paper, its editorial page, was the product of a morning editorial conference which in its highly developed character Mr. Godkin was the first to give New York journalism. Upon the Post of Bryant’s520 day, and upon the Tribune under Greeley and his successive managing editors, consultation had been brief, and the assignment of editorial topics hasty. The elder Bennett had been wont to give Herald writers their subjects for the day as so many orders. But the necessity of treating ten or twelve different editorial topics in each issue of the Post after 1881, and Mr. Godkin’s solicitude that each topic be treated just right, made an elaborate conference imperative. At about nine the editorial staff gathered in a circle of chairs in Mr. Godkin’s room, having mastered the morning papers, and a businesslike discussion filled forty minutes.
Every writer was encouraged to propose his own theme for a paragraph or column editorial, and to speak freely upon themes raised by others. But Mr. Godkin had a merciless way with unsound or commonplace ideas. When some one started a subject, he would pounce upon him with “What would you say about it?” and an intensely searching glance. It was a trying moment. If the junior editor had nothing worth while to say, Godkin would cut across his flounderings with “O, there’s nothing in that,” or “We said that the other day,” or “O, everybody sees that”—emphasizing the statement with a sharp gesture or a swing in his chair. “Sometimes, after an interested attention for a few seconds,” writes Mr. Bishop, “a quick, searching question would be put that went through the subject like a knife through a toy balloon, leaving complete and utter collapse.”
However, proportionately great was the reward of the fortunate man who had an original idea, or a new way of presenting an old one. Mr. Godkin’s eye would kindle with interest, he would lean forward alertly, and catching up the theme, he would perhaps begin to enlarge it by ideas of his own, search its depths with penetrating inquiries, and reveal such possibilities in it that the original speaker had the feeling of having stumbled over a concealed diamond. If the chief, as was usually the fact, was provided with his own topic for the day, the proposer bore his discovery off in triumph. If not, he521 sometimes had to surrender it. “The chances were ten to the dozen,” says Mr. Bishop, “that Mr. Godkin would become so delighted with the development of the subject, so intoxicated with the intellectual pleasures of the treatment, that he would say, with a serene smile of perfect enjoyment, ‘I’ll write on that.’”
The editorial page represented work done not leisurely, but under the highest pressure. Articles of twelve hundred words, dealing informatively, thoughtfully, and in compressed style with some subject perhaps quite unexpected until that morning, had to be completed in about an hour and three-quarters. Taken, often without change, into the Nation, they withstood the test of submission to the most scholarly and exacting audience in America. The pace was not for the muddleheaded. But no one on the staff could hope to write quite like Mr. Godkin—with his wealth of ideas, ability to see a dozen relationships in a subject where the ordinary man saw one, and concise, pithy, and graphic style. Lowell told him, “You always say what I would have said—if I had only thought of it.” In the correction of proofs the whole staff was expected to join. Godkin was far from being the most approachable of editors, but to any suggestion that there was a defect in his idea or expression he turned a ready ear. Indeed, if a fellow-editor believed that a phrase or sentence was obscure, he would usually alter it whether he agreed or not, arguing that what one man in the office found faulty might seem so to a large body outside. The editorial page which thus appeared in its final form at two o’clock was an embodiment of the wisdom of the whole editorial group, Mr. Godkin dominating.
Brusque and cold though he often seemed to those who did not know him well, Godkin to the other editors was essentially a lovable man. He exacted a high standard of performance, his temper was highly mercurial, he was often abrupt in manner; but the recollection of his associates is that he gave the office an atmosphere of geniality. He delighted in jest. He would repeat with great gusto the story that staff meetings opened with a distribution522 of Cobden Club gold, or—it was said after the Venezuela episode—with a singing of “God Save the Queen.” His fun was of an intellectual kind, but he never failed to find subjects for it. Frequently the editorial conference would break up in a gale of merriment. Norton once wrote him, when the Nation’s troubles were giving him sleepless nights, that he would rather see the weekly perish than have its editor lose his jocularity, and Godkin wrote back: “I shall keep my laugh. Don’t be afraid.” Indeed, his letters contain any number of references to laughter, and with intimates it was often uproarious. He told Howells that his youth was “harrowed with laughter.” When Howells worked beside him for three months in the Nation office the novelist-to-be found that “we were of a like temperament in the willingness to laugh and make laugh.” If anything in the day’s news particularly apt for Howells’s special department turned up, they would talk it over, “and he did not mind turning away from his own manuscript and listening to what I had written, if the subject had offered any chance for fun. Then his laugh, his Irish laugh, hailed my luck with it, or his honest English misgiving expressed itself in a criticism which I had to own just.”
Men who read Godkin’s caustic denunciation of some wrong-doer, who admired the keen thrust with which he punctured a bit of hypocrisy, sometimes assumed that he was sour and censorious. Such readers failed to realize that he had a dual nature; that what excited his wrath and scorn often excited his risibilities also. “First would come the savage characterization, then the peal of laughter,” writes Mr. Ogden. He had a tongue for humorous phrases, an eye for humorous images, and a marked love for comic exaggeration. After his retirement in 1899, when some people were chattering about his pessimism, the weekly articles he contributed for a time over his initials to the Evening Post abounded in amusing sentences and vivacious anecdotes. Reviewing his labors for civil service reform, he recalled how when he, Congressman Jenckes, and Henry Villard held the first meeting on the523 subject in New York, he was appointed to draft resolutions; that the proposer was unable to read his hasty handwriting; and that “more unhappily still, when I was asked to take his place, I could not read it either!” Writing of McKinley’s amateur statesmanship, he told of the youth who, asked whether he could play the piano, replied that “he did not know, for he had never tried.” Discussing Capt. Mahan’s treatment of war as possessing benefits as well as evils, he was reminded of the French Deputy who did not want to lose the anarchist votes scattered through his district: “My friends,” he said, “there is a great deal of good in anarchy; only we must not abuse it.” Incessant bits like these reveal the fun-loving nature, the overflowing spirits, of the man.
Mr. Godkin’s marked social proclivities enlarged his influence and enriched his writing. The readiness with which, on coming to America, he made friends among the most distinguished men of Cambridge, Boston, and New York was only less remarkable than the long intimacy he enjoyed with some of the finest minds of England and this country—with Lowell and Norton, Bryce and Henry James, Gladstone and Parkman, McKim and Olmsted. He was a genial host, a witty, diverting, and brilliant guest. Mr. Ogden gives an instance of the way in which his personal charm and full mind surprised some who thought of him as a narrow, savage moralist of the editorial page. At the Century Club one night he was seated at the long dinner table with a man he knew and another who was a stranger. The latter had never seen Mr. Godkin but had taken a violent dislike to his writings. Without an introduction, the talk was free and genial, and Godkin was in his happiest vein. When the editor had left the room, the stranger inquired as to his identity. “Is that Mr. Godkin?” he exclaimed in surprise. “Then I’ll never say another word against him as long as I live.” Godkin worked with great intensity—as he himself once said, “almost dangerously hard.” His gusto and enthusiasm, especially in times of crisis like a Presidential or Tammany campaign, gave him an extraordinary absorption524 in his work. Yet he found time to see and talk with a surprising number of people worth seeing—authors, reformers, politicians, college professors, the best lawyers of the city, and many more.
A journal of twenty-two days of his life (November, 1870) shows what a multiplicity of public meetings, dinners, calls, and club evenings interspersed his toil. A half dozen times he dined or breakfasted out or entertained to dinner, thus seeing among others Bryant, Ripley, Charles Loring Brace, and H. M. Field. He was also at the public dinner of the Mercantile Library Association, where he spoke for the press, and of the Free Traders at Delmonico’s where he saw A. T. Stewart, Peter Cooper, H. C. Potter, Stewart L. Woodford, Gen. McDowell, and David A. Wells. He went to a civil service meeting at Yale, where there was a tea-party in his honor, and not only made a speech but “met all the big-bugs.” Once he lunched with Henry and Charles Francis Adams. He records going in torrents of rain to a night meeting of revenue reformers, while he attended a lecture by A. J. Mundella, and chatted there with G. W. Curtis. Repeatedly he speaks of being at the Century Club and seeing a long list of acquaintances—Lord Walter Campbell, Judge Daly, Gen. Howard, William E. Dodge, H. C. Potter, and Cyrus Field. He called upon Horace White, then in the city from Chicago, and at the Nation office received calls from Carl Schurz and Schuyler Colfax, the latter coming while he was out. This was nearly a dozen years before he became one of the editors of the Evening Post, but he always maintained a similar activity. What it meant to his editorial work is self-evident. As one of his junior editors, Mr. Bishop, says, all was grist to his mill. “A casual quip in conversation, the latest good story, a sentence from a new book, a fresh bit of political slang—all these found lodgment in his mind, and just at the proper place they would appear in his writing.”
Godkin had little patience for mere office routine, and as he grew older took advantage of the liberty which an525 evening paper often gives its editor for leaving early. His dislike for bores played a large part in this. As he humorously said, he saw nobody before one, and at one he went home. Of his refusal to tolerate callers who abused his time and temper, there are some amusing stories. A dull or offensive man would be ushered in, the editor would endure him for a while, and then upon the heels of a muffled explosion, the caller would emerge, red with confusion and anger, and hurriedly make for the elevator. Mr. H. J. Wright, as city editor, once introduced a gentleman, of prominence, with an extensive knowledge of municipal affairs. After a long and interesting chat, Godkin asked, “How is it I never met such a well-informed man before?” A few days later the gentleman called again, seated himself with assurance in Mr. Godkin’s room, and began to repeat himself, a thing the editor abominated. Hearing a confusion of voices, Mr. Wright hurried into the hall to find Godkin angrily shooing the interrupter out of the building.
Mr. Godkin and Horace White gathered around them an editorial staff of high ability. From the outset they had the services of Arthur G. Sedgwick, who was assistant editor from 1881 to 1885, and later not only contributed irregularly at all times, but during one summer worked in the office in Godkin’s absence. He was a writer of strong mental grasp and individuality of style, who furnished editorials and book-reviews on an amazing variety of topics, and had the knack of illuminating and making interesting everything he touched. His education as a lawyer—he had been co-editor with Oliver Wendell Holmes, later Justice of the Supreme Court, of the American Law Review—stood him in good stead in discussions of government and politics, he wrote much on belles lettres, and he was only less able than Godkin himself in treating modes and manners. When Godkin was a beginning editor he found it difficult, as he wrote Olmsted, to get an associate “to do the work of gossiping agreeably on manners, lager beer, etc., and who will bind himself to do it, whether he feels like it or not.” Sedgwick was526 just the man for the light, keen treatment of social topics. He had a discerning eye and a quick sense of humor. Many of his editorials were as good as the short essays of the same type which Curtis and Howells contributed to the Easy Chair of Harper’s, and had more than local and temporary fame. For example, in March, 1883, he wrote one on the dude which, reprinted all over the country, did much to familiarize this London music-hall term. It traced the lineage of the dude from the dandy, fop, and swell; it carefully distinguished him from these earlier types by his intense correctness, contrasting with their display; it described his appearance in great detail; it explained why he had arisen at just that moment; and it closed with a grave warning to all dudes to be on guard against the chief menace to their sober conservatism—they must not wear white spats.
Joseph Bucklin Bishop, later well known as secretary of the Isthmian Commission and authorized editor of Roosevelt’s letters, joined the Post the summer of 1883, and remained with it until 1900, when he became chief of the Globe’s editorial staff. He also commanded a wide range of subjects, though he dealt much more with politics than Sedgwick, and he wrote with a great deal of Godkin’s own point. To Bishop belongs the credit for originating the Voters’ Directory in 1884, still a valued campaign feature of the Post, while he had a principal hand in the campaign biographies which were so effective against Tammany. E. P. Clark was brought from the Springfield Republican into the office when Sedgwick left in the mid-eighties, and until after the end of the century his industrious hand was in constant evidence. He had the most nearly colorless style of the staff, but his full knowledge and accuracy in handling governmental and economic topics were invaluable.
The first contributions to the Post by Mr. Rollo Ogden were printed in 1881, and during the next three years he wrote frequently from Mexico City. His assistance increased after he came to New York in 1887, and in 1891 he became assistant editor and one of the pillars of the527 newspaper. Besides his attention to national and international politics, he gave the columns a much more literary flavor than they had had even when Sedgwick was present. There were, in addition, several writers of a briefer connection. Early in the eighties some articles exposing the defects of the Tenth Census were furnished by John C. Rose, a Baltimore attorney, and during a number of summers he joined the office staff; a Federal attorneyship, followed by elevation to the Federal bench, ended his connection. David M. Means, another attorney and a one-time professor at Middlebury College, helped during many years for short periods. The editorial columns were always open to experts in various fields who wished to contribute. Among those who occasionally furnished leaders in the eighties and nineties were future college presidents like A. T. Hadley and E. J. James, scientists like Simon Newcomb and A. F. Bandelier, and scholars like H. H. Boyesen and Worthington C. Ford.
The rank and file of the city room regarded Mr. Godkin as a remote deity, though he was on a familiar footing with the managing editors, Learned and Linn, and of frank intimacy with the city editor, H. J. Wright. “I used to see him come into the office occasionally,” writes Norman Hapgood, “with very much the same emotion that I might have now if I saw Lloyd George walk past me.” Godkin frequently rode up in the elevator with reporters, but never spoke to them, and did not know most of them by sight. Mr. Wright gives two examples of his utter indifference to a performance of special merit in the news columns. In the early days of the litigation over the interstate commerce commission, there was a hearing in New York involving intricate law points and the rather obscure rights of the carrier, attended by some of New York’s most eminent lawyers, including Godkin’s friends Choate and James C. Carter. Norman Hapgood, a new recruit, was assigned the difficult task of covering it, and wrote a column and a half a day for the whole week. When the hearing closed, Choate sent Godkin a note congratulating him upon the Post’s reports, and saying528 that few lawyers could have comprehended the arguments so fully, and still fewer have summarized them so well. “Upon this deserved encomium,” says Mr. Wright, “Godkin offered no comment, nor did he inquire as to the reporter’s identity.” Again, a prominent New Yorker wrote the editor praising a brief account of the descent of an awe-inspiring thunderstorm, and recording his pleasure that the news columns showed the same literary qualities as the editorial page. Godkin had not read the news story, did not read it, and did not ask for the writer’s name.
One element in this was Godkin’s assumption that, as a matter of course, the news pages would meet a high standard; but a larger element was sheer indifference to the reporters. The editorial page was pre?minently the most important part of the newspaper to him. Absorbed in the ideas he spread upon it, and naturally of an aloof temperament, he was not interested in subordinates elsewhere. That he was very far from being an unappreciative man his editorial associates alone knew. They received cordial notes of congratulation from him, all the more prized because rare, for any specially meritorious work; and whenever a literary review particularly struck him, he made a point of asking for the writer’s name.
Mr. Towse, the dramatic critic, recalls receiving formal commendation from Godkin twice or thrice. One occasion was early in the eighties, when Henry Irving opened in a Shakespearean r?le in Philadelphia. All the dramatic critics were taken over by courtesy of the theater, entertained in Philadelphia, and given seats at the performance; and most of them remained at a Philadelphia hotel overnight. Mr. Towse returned to New York on a midnight train, took a cold bath, wrote a criticism of nearly two columns, and visiting the office at dawn, had it put into type. Proofs were ready when the editors arrived, and Godkin was so pleased that he for once unbent and sent an appreciative note.
Once in the nineties, Godkin even praised the reporters, though not for anything they had written. It happened529 that a grand jury refused an indictment in a political case, under circumstances that pointed to collusion between several jurors and the accused politician. Godkin gave utterance to these suspicions, showed that several jurymen were of evil character, and declared that one had been the proprietor of a low dive in which a shooting brawl had occurred. The juror promptly had him indicted for criminal libel, and when counsel undertook the case, they found that no legal proof existed of the alleged brawl. In desperation, Godkin appealed to the head of the Byrnes Detective Bureau, a personal friend, for help, and Byrnes made a thorough investigation of the juror’s past, without avail. He urged the editor to compromise the case, and offered his help for that purpose. Meanwhile, the Evening Post reporters had been ransacking the loft of the old Mott Street police headquarters, where station house blotters were stored. At the end of a seven days’ search, they found an entry telling of the shooting affray. The entry was photographed, Godkin appeared before another grand jury, waved the photograph in the face of the district attorney, and was vindicated. “His appreciation of the work done by the city staff was expressed that day with Irish enthusiasm,” says Mr. Wright.
On the other hand, Godkin was quick—even savagely so—to descend upon any man whose writing did not accord with his positive ideas regarding good journalism. His severity in dealing with an error of fact, proportion, or taste grew out of his rapt intensity in his own work. He pushed blunderers out of his way less because he was tactless—though he was often that—than because he was engrossed in hewing to the line. Lincoln Steffens, one of the best newspaper men New York ever had, happened to write a simple account of a music teacher’s death under distressing circumstances, which appeared on the first page. Godkin read it, leaped to the conclusion that it smacked of the sensationalism he was always denouncing, and declared that Steffens ought to be instantly dismissed. Mr. Wright protested, and the controversy brought in530 Mr. Garrison, who roundly asserted that the story was not only permissible, but admirable—whereupon Godkin yielded. Some remarkable work by Hapgood in reporting the meetings of the illiterate Board of Education attracted Godkin’s eye and editorial notice; but the one message he sent Hapgood was that he wanted him to confine himself to narration and description, avoiding comment. New York has never had a more expert music critic than Mr. Finck, but Godkin sometimes censured him severely for what he thought intemperate writing.
Godkin would have been a greater journalist had he taken a broad and human interest in other departments of the newspaper than his own; and the Evening Post might have had a different history. It would have been less open to the reproach leveled against it, of being rather a magazine than a newspaper. Its circulation, instead of hovering uncertainly between 14,000 and 20,000, might have become extensive. The stone wall that was kept standing between editorial rooms and news rooms was good for neither. Mr. Godkin’s lack of broad cordiality and interest was not felt by those in daily contact with him, but it was often felt by those at the outer desks. Any newspaper must suffer if departmental members work as some did on the Post, to avoid censure and not to gain praise, for in such work there can be no initiative. There were employees who, in making decisions, would take no chance of doing anything the editor would not like, and were hence hostile to any innovation. “What I did not like and still resent somewhat,” says Lincoln Steffens, “is that he objected to individuality in reporting.” The newspaper was made too much for Godkin, too little for outside readers.
II
 
Yet Godkin’s defects as a general journalist only throw into clearer relief his distinction as a molder of opinion. The Evening Post was quite enough of a newspaper to be a vehicle for his editorial page, and for him that sufficed. He had no wish to appeal directly to several hundred531 thousand subscribers, to reach the ear of the masses, as Greeley had done. Nothing could have persuaded him to write down to the level of education and intelligence which a huge audience would have possessed. Editorial utterances could be quoted to show that he thought a daily was better when it appealed to comparatively small and select groups. In 1889 he deplored the nation-wide movement for reducing newspaper prices, and said that the Times and Tribune had been better at four cents than they were at two. Godkin spoke to the cultivated few—to university scholars, authors, clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and college graduates generally. Though at the farthest remove from pedantry or stiffness, his writing, polished, allusive, with a keen wit or irony playing across it, required a cultured understanding for its full appreciation. Addressing himself to this narrow constituency, he had an influence easily the greatest of its kind in the history of our journalism.
Foremost among the qualities which gave him this power, his friend of many years, Prof. A. V. Dicey, placed his gift of appositeness, or instinctive discernment of the question of the moment. He had this gift as clearly as Greeley, or Cobbett. His editorial page was kept constantly focussed upon the changing issues of the time. Godkin had no desire to be a voice crying in the wilderness, and knew that his influence would be lost if he wrote about international arbitration when men were thinking of the tariff. Prof. Dicey failed to add that he often helped powerfully toward putting an issue in the foreground. In 1890 he made Tammany a burning public question months before the city campaign; the Post was the first paper to show, in the early nineties, that a contest between jingoes and lovers of peace was taking shape; and he insisted that the free silver battle must be fought out when many Republican politicians were sneaking off the field. He knew how the public mind was moving before the public did. Supplementary to his gift for appositeness was his great skill in reiteration. No small part of the power of the Evening Post and Nation532 was simply a power of attrition. Once convinced of the justice of a position, he was always, though with unfailing originality and freshness, harping upon it. This, of course, was one of the Post’s irritating qualities for those who disagreed.
To the treatment of all subjects he brought a comprehensive and cosmopolitan knowledge of the world. He knew more than any other American editor about Europe because his personal knowledge of Europe ranged from Belfast, where he had been educated, to the Bosporus. He had lived in Paris, and written a youthful history of Hungary; when Bryce edited the Liberal Party’s “Handbook of Home Rule,” he was the only writer allotted two articles in it; he had many correspondents abroad, and in his later years spent long periods there. In this country he had seen much of ante-bellum and post-bellum society. Though a constant student, he learned only less from his intercourse with men ............