# History of Journalism in the United States/Chapter 24

CHAPTER XXIV
AFTER THE WAR
Attempt of press to control politics—Failure of Raymond—Widespread indiflference to corruption—Samuel Bowles—Platform of new reform movement—Carl Schurz—Liberty party—Greeley's candidacy—His defeat—Blaine on Greeley—Joseph Medill—Correspondence with Greeley, Webb and Seward—Chicago Tribune.
The story of journalism now enters directly into the field of political reform. The question is no longer one of the newspaper in its proper field, representing the people, but of its controlling the machinery of politics. Greeley, Raymond and Weed came to grief, as we have seen, in their attempts to control.
Raymond, acting as spokesman for President Lincoln, had been largely instrumental in bringing about the nomination of Andrew Johnson for Vice-President. Shortly after Johnson took office, Weed breakfasted with him, and from now on Raymond and Weed were his advisors and spokesmen; on the floor of Congress Raymond championed his cause, to his own humiliation and defeat. As he aligned himself with the President in his reckless disregard of the wishes of Congress, Raymond was watched with amazement by his own party. With the assistance of Raymond, Seward and Weed, Johnson attempted to organize a National party, at the convention held in Philadelphia in August, 1866. Raymond, in his loyalty to the President, went so far as to declare that the southern states, no matter how great their disloyalty, could not be ​deprived of their rights. Within two weeks he was removed from the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, and later removed from the Committee. His career was ended, and he died three years later.
Brilliant, diplomatic, forceful, Raymond's failure as a legislator was ascribed to the fact that he had not begun his congressional career until he was too old to learn what was practically a new vocation. On the other hand, he was only fortynfive years of age, and, of the men who distinguished themselves in Congress, many had made their maiden efforts at a much later time in life. James G. Blaine suggested that if, when he was elected Lieutenant-Governor, he had instead been elected to Congress, the story might have been different.
The student of journalism will see a far different reason for Raymond's failure. A journalist can never succeed unless he is fathering popular or moral causes. Weed, who made a fortune out of politics, who was for years the political boss of his state—even aspiring, under Johnson, to be the political boss of the nation,—was also a failure, despite his great wealth. He failed to appreciate the drift of public sentiment, and so lost control of the politics of New York State to so Quixotic and temperamental a figure as Greeley.
At the time when Raymond started the New York Times, there was a broad field of usefulness for the conservative journal that he had planned, but, just as Greeley ran to an extreme in his fanaticism, his individualism, and his pursuit of everything that seemed human or idealistic, so Raymond in the field of conservatism, guided by the very materialistic Weed and influenced by the disappointed Seward, ran to a narrow conception of politics and government; he was obsessed by the idea that political power could do little wrong. His mistake was that ​of the man in office—the blindness of those in power, competing with men who had no such weakness and who still had the eagerness of unfulfilled ambition. It illustrates the truth of the statement that great journalism is journalism in attack; great journalism is never journalism in office.
The month after Raymond's removal, the New York State Republican Convention was held, and both Weed and Raymond were conspicuously absent. They had risen to the zenith of political power, but had fallen; their fall was due less to a political catastrophe than to an awakening of the moral sense of the people.
Immediately after the Civil War,—as there is likely to be after every war, after every great moral ebullition—there had sprung up, in the wake of material progress, an indifference to the finer questions of morality. For twenty-one years the struggle on slavery had so engrossed the nation that many other important problems had been neglected—practically pushed aside.
The attention of the nation had been concentrated on the larger issues, and unscrupulous men had availed themselves of the opportunities afforded by that concentration to encompass their own ends, often to the detriment of the public welfare.
"Great projects of money-making throve and multiplied," says the biographer of Samuel Bowles, "corporations enriched by the government used their wealth to corrupt legislation; the tendency to speculate was stimulated by a currency of fluctuating value; business expansion and private extravagance went on till checked by the disaster of 1873. Bestowal of public office as a reward for partisan service, an evil of long standing, had been confirmed when Lincoln virtually transferred the patronage from his overworked Administration to the Republi​can Congressmen. Its mischief was widened by the multiplication of executive officers; its wrong was only slowly appreciated by the people at large. The Democratic party at the north had been debauched and demoralized by its attitude during the war, and the Republican party had become so sacred in the eyes of most of its adherents that under its shelter abuses found easy tolerance. The progressive political work of the years from 1868 on was largely of a very disagreeable kind. It consisted very much in the rooting out of abuses both old and new. A great deal of it resembled more the work of a policeman than a prophet."
We have seen in the Republican convention of 1860, particularly on the part of those from the West, a distrust of the type of politician represented by Seward and Weed. The references at that time to the use of money indicated that, though the question had not yet become a primary one, corruption in politics was sooner or later to be a matter of absorbing public interest. The time had now come for warfare on this corruption, and in the reconstruction period, the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, under Samuel Bowles, became a journal of national influence, through its vigorous and continued denunciation of corrupt leaders and their connection with politics.
Bowles had very sharply delineated the character of James Fisk, Jr., a notorious stock gambler and corruptionist. When Bowles later visited New York, Fisk had him arrested and locked up in Ludlow Street jail. The affair attracted nation-wide attention, and many pi-ominent citizens of Boston, wishing to do Bowles honor, tendered him a dinner. The editor declined, but in so doing he wrote the platform of the new reform movement.
"The corruption in politics and the corruption in busi​ness affairs," he said, "have become offensive and startling within the past few years, and the moral sense of the community seems at times to have become blunted by the successful display and repetition of practices that violate every principle of fair dealing and integrity and put the control of government and the value of many kinds of property at the mercy of political adventurers and ruthless stock-gamblers. The press really seems to be the best, if not the only instrument, with which honest men can fight these enemies of order and integrity in government and security in property . . . American journalism is now but in its feeble infancy;—but we have more to fear at present from its good nature, from its subserviency, from its indifference, from its fear to encounter prosecution and loss of patronage by the exposure of the wrong and the exposition of the right. A courageous independence and integrity of purpose, coupled with a fearless expression of truth as to all public individuals, corporations and parties, are the features in its character to be most encouraged.
"My own observation is that the Press rarely does injustice to a thoroughly honest man or cause. It may be deceived with regard to a private individual, and misrepresent him for a time; but with reference to public men and measures, its knowledge is more intimate and competent than that of any other agency possibly can be; and I know that it withholds unjustly to the public one hundred times, where it speaks wrongly once of the individual. Certainly, nine out of ten of all libel-suits against the Press are brought by adventurers, and speculators, and scoundrels, whose contrivances to rob the public have been exposed. . . ."
Almost the same sentiments were being expressed by equally courageous men, in different sections of the coun​try, and a coalition of these forces was bound to occur. In Missouri, the leader of the protest was a very remarkable character, Carl Schurz, the editor of the St. Louis Westliche Post. Schurz had been a general in the Union army; he was one of the German patriots who had been driven out of their native land because of their battle for liberty.
Nominally, the Liberal movement had its origin in the state of Missouri in 1870. The state had not seceded, but thousands of its citizens had joined the rebel ranks. To prevent these men fighting against the Union as civilians, an amendment to the Constitution had deprived them of the rights of citizenship, and the Republicans, who held control of the legislature, were not inclined to restore these rights at once. Then and there, headed by Carl Schurz and Benjamin Gratz Brown, began the formation of the new movement. These Liberals combined with the Democrats and Missouri was turned over to Democratic control.
In many northern states, dififerent conditions were bringing about a feeling, among a vigorous minority, that the Republican party had failed to avail itself of its possibilities, despite its conduct of the war. It must be remembered that the Republican party was very young, and that to it there was not the attachment that was to be expected of the Democratic party, which had existed ever since the first president. On the Democratic party, however, was the stain of disloyalty, and many men, although they found themselves out of sympathy with the Republicans, were still unable to forget the record of the opposition during the war. They turned with enthusiasm to the third party, made up principally of bolters from the Republican ranks.
Originating with Carl Schurz, the new party was al​most "newspaper made," for the leading figures included many of the famous editors of the North. In every northern state there was opposition within the Republican party to the administration of Grant, and Schouler in the Cincinnati Commercial, Medill in the Chicago Tribune and Greeley in the New York Tribune, all helped to fan the flames.
The national convention of the Liberal Republicans, called by the Liberals of Missouri, was held at Cincinnati in May, 1872. Among the leaders of the convention were Colonel A. K. McClure, editor of the Philadelphia Times, Carl Schurz and Joseph Pulitzer of Missouri, and Horace White, one of the owners of the Chicago Tribune.
The politicians who had gone to the convention with the intention of controlling the nominations, viewed the result of the balloting with disappointment and surprise—Horace Greeley was nominated. The Free Trade Liberals in New York, at a meeting presided over by William Cullen Bryant, at once disowned the new Liberal party and its candidate.
Friends had told Greeley that it would be impossible for the Democrats to support him for the Presidency. His reply to this shows the same weakness that he had exhibited in similar circumstances in an interview with Thurlow Weed for the governorship of New York. He immediately suggested that if he were not an available candidate for President, he hoped he would be considered acceptable for the second place on the ticket.
His nomination put no heart into the men who had to make the fight for him. Even the state of New Hampshire, in which he had spent his boyhood, rebelled against his nomination and, in the October elections, the Republicans won in a landslide. He made a sturdy, ​statesmanlike fight, but it was soon apparent that the battle was hopeless. While he was still bearing up under the gloom that followed the October elections, he was called home to nurse his dying wife; he passed a month of sleepless nights, and was at her bedside when she died, a week before his defeat in November. A few weeks later, November 29, 1872, his own death came.
"I was an abolitionist for years," he said a few days before he died, "when to be one was as much as one's life was worth even here in New York,—and the negroes have all voted against me. Whatever of talents or energy I have possessed, I have freely contributed all my life to protection, to the cause of our manufacturers; and the manufacturers have expended millions to defeat me. I even made myself ridiculous in the opinion of many whose good wishes I desired, by showing fair play and giving a fair field in the Tribune to Women's Rights; and the women have all gone against me."
So passed Horace Greeley, one of the greatest of American journalists, human in his faults, human in his greatness. He represented better than any other man in history what is noble and lasting in journalism. Of all that was written of him, none wrote with more understanding than did James G. Blaine.
"The strain through which he had passed, following years of incessant care and labor, had broken his vigorous constitution," wrote Blaine after Greeley's death. "His physical strength was completely undermined, his superb intellectual powers gave way. Before the expiration of the month which witnessed his crushing defeat he had gone to his rest. The controversies which had so recently divided the country were hushed in the presence of death; and all the people, remembering only his noble impulses, his great work for humanity, his broad ​impress upon the age, united in honoring and mourning one of the most remarkable men in American history.
"His mind was original, creative, incessantly active. His industry was as unwearying as his fertility was inexhaustible. Great as was his intellectual power, his chief strength came from the depth and earnestness of his moral convictions. In the long and arduous battle against the aggression of Slavery, he had been sleepless and untiring in rousing and quickening the public conscience. He was keenly alive to the distinctions of right and wrong, and his philanthropy responded to every call of humanity. His sympathies were equally touched by the suffering of the famine-stricken Irish and by the wrongs of the plundered Indians. Next to Henry Clay, whose ardent disciple he was, he had done more than any other man to educate his countrymen in the American system of protection to home industry. He had on all occasions zealously defended the rights of labor; he had made himself an oracle with the American farmers; and .his influence was even more potent in the remote prairie homes than within the shadow of Printing-House Square. With his dogmatic earnestness, his extraordinary mental qualities, his moral power, and his quick sympathy with the instincts and impulses of the masses, he was in a peculiar sense the Tribune of the people. In any reckoning of the personal forces of the century, Horace Greeley must be counted among the foremost—intellectually and morally."
What Greeley and the New York Tribune were to the East, Joseph Medill and the Chicago Tribune were to the West. Without Greeley's temperamental difficulties and without Greeley's great ambition, Medill succeeded in developing a great newspaper. That was to him ample ​satisfaction,—although it brought with it political honors, they never gave him such disturbing moments as those with which the great eastern editor had to contend.
Such education as Medill received he obtained while working on his father's farm in Stark County, Ohio. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1864; his association with the editor of the local paper attracted him to journalism, howeyer, and he learned to set type and work a hand press. The result was that he gave up the idea of practicing law, and in 1843 he bought out the Coshocton Whig, changing the name to Coshocton Republican. Like so many young men in the middle west at that time, he burned with indignation over the aggressiveness and the arrogance of the South, and in his little paper the editorials were so bitter that on one occasion sundry Democrats waylaid him and answered his editorial attacks with cuts and bruises. Two years later he moved to Cleveland, and established the first Free Soil morning paper in that city. This paper, the name of which was changed to the Cleveland Leader, is to-day one of the important papers of the country.
Medill's great work was to unite the Free Soil and the Whig parties. The Whigs were controlled by the slave element, and it was Medill's task to draw such of the Whigs as were not under the domination of the proslavery element, into a new party, which he proposed to call the "Republican." He wrote to Horace Greeley to ask his advice about his proposed third party; we see from this how easy it was for Greeley to influence the country, when men like Joseph Medill looked to him as a leader.
"Go ahead, my friend, with your proposed Republican party, and God bless you," Greeley replied. "I hope you will have the best of luck. The time has indeed come to bury our beloved party; it is dead. But we have many ​fool friends who insist it is only in a comatose state and will recover, but I tell them it is dead—still, I dare not yet in New York announce the demise of the party and call for the organization of a new one. But do you go ahead on the Western reserve and commence the work. I like the name for it (Republican). I was opposed to J. Watson Webb when he changed the name Democrat-Republican to Whig, but at that time he had the public ear. If you can get the name Republican started in the West it will grow in the East. I fully agree to the new name and the new christening."
James Watson Webb and Thurlow Weed, to whom he also wrote, scolded him for such a suggestion, but William H. Seward suggested that the idea was worth trying out. Finally, one night in March, 1854, a meeting was called in the office of the Cleveland Leader, and there was born the National Republican party, the platform of which was "No more slave states; no more slave territory; resistance to pro-slavery aggression; slavery is sectional; liberty is national."
The following year an opportunity came and Medill went to Chicago to take an interest in the Chicago Tribune. From 1855 until the time of his death in 1888 he was, in the public mind, the editor and controller of the Tribune, though during several periods, notably the time that he served as mayor of Chicago, he was not in editorial control.
* ↑ Merriam, Life of Samuel Bowles, ii, 88.
* ↑ McClure, 301.
* ↑ Twenty Years in Congress, ii, 532-536.