Chapter LXVII: A Napoleonic Conception--A Challenge to the (12)

There was at one time a good deal of speculation as to whose brain had made the phenomenal success of the all-daring _World_ experiment in journalism. I think I know all about that, and my judgment is unhesitating. Mr. Pulitzer was often and even generally fortunate in his multitudinous lieutenants, and that good fortune was chiefly due to his sagacity in the selection of the men appointed to carry out his plans. But the plans were his, just as the choice of lieutenants was, and the creative genius that revolutionized journalism and achieved results unmatched and even unapproached, was exclusively that of Joseph Pulitzer.

I do not mean that every valuable idea or suggestion which contributed to the result was originally his, though on broad lines that was true. But it was part and parcel of his genius to induce ideas and call forth suggestions at the hands of others, to make them his own, and to embody them in the policy of the _World_. So readily did he himself appreciate this necessity of getting ideas from whatever source they might come, that he often offered premiums and rewards for helpful suggestions. And when any member of his staff voluntarily offered suggestions that appealed to him, he was always ready and very generous in acknowledging and rewarding them.

But it was Joseph Pulitzer's genius that conceived the new journalism; it was his brain that gave birth to it all; it was his gift of interpreting, utilizing, and carrying out the ideas of others that made them fruitful.

I emphasize this judgment here because there has been much misapprehension regarding it, and because I knew the facts more intimately and more definitely perhaps than any other person now living does. I feel myself free to write of the subject for the reason that it has been more than a decade of years since my connection with the _World_ ceased, and the personal friendship I once enjoyed with Mr. Pulitzer became a matter of mere reminiscence to both of us.

My relations with Cockerill were not embarrassed by any question of control or authority. Cockerill had general charge of the newspaper, but the editorial page was segregated from the other sheets, and so far as that was concerned, William H. Merrill was in supreme authority. Whenever he was absent his authority devolved upon me, and for results I was answerable only to Mr. Pulitzer.

I shall never forget my introduction to my new duties. It was arranged between Merrill and me, that I should take a week off, between the severance of my connection with the _Commercial Advertiser_ and the beginning of my work on the _World_, in order that I might visit my family and rest myself at my little place on Lake George. I was to report for duty on the _World_ on a Sunday morning, when Merrill would induct me into the methods of the newspaper, preparatory to his vacation, beginning two or three days later.

[Sidenote: An Editorial Perplexity]

Unfortunately, Merrill had greater confidence in my newspaper skill and experience than I had, and so when I reported for duty on Sunday, Merrill was already gone on his vacation and I was left responsible for next day's editorial page.

I knew nothing of the _World's_ staff or organization or methods. There were no other editorial writers present in the office and upon inquiry of the office boys I learned that no others were expected to present themselves on that day.

I sent to the foreman of the composing room for the "overproofs"--that is to say, proofs of editorial matter left over from the day before. He reported that there were none, for the reason that Merrill, before leaving on the preceding day, had "killed" every editorial galley in the office.

Cockerill was not expected at the office until nine or ten o'clock that night, and there was nobody else there who could tell me anything about the matter.

Obviously, there was only one thing to do. I sat down and wrote an entire editorial page, for a newspaper whose methods and policy I knew only from the outside. When I had done that, and had got my matter into type, and had read my revised proofs, messengers arrived bearing the manuscripts of what the other editorial writers--men unknown to me--had written at their homes during the day, after the Sunday custom that then prevailed but which I abolished a little later when Merrill went to Europe upon Mr. Pulitzer's invitation and I was left in control of the editorial page.

I have related this experience thinking that it may interest readers unfamiliar with newspaper work, as an exemplification of the emergency problems with which newspaper men have often to deal. These are of frequent occurrence and of every conceivable variety. I remember that once some great utterance seemed necessary, and Mr. Pulitzer telegraphed it from Bar Harbor. It filled the entire available editorial space, so that I provided no other editorial articles whatever. I had "made up" the page and was only waiting for time before going home, when news despatches came that so completely changed the situation treated in the editorial as to compel its withdrawal.

It was after midnight, and I hadn't a line of editorial matter on the galleys with which to fill the void. The editorial page must go to the stereotypers at half-past one, and I had no soul to help me even by writing twaddle with which to fill space. The situation was imperative and the case was clear. The case was that I must write two or three columns of editorial matter and get it into type, proof-read, and corrected, before one-thirty of the clock--or one-forty-five, as the foreman of the composing room, a royal good fellow, Mr. Jackson, volunteered to stretch the time limit by some ingenious device of his own.

I wish to say here, lest no other opportunity offer, that in the thirty years of my newspaper service, I have found no better or more loyal friends than the men of the composing room, whether in high place or low; that I have never known them to hesitate, in an emergency, to help out by specially strenuous endeavor and by enduring great inconvenience on their own part. So great is my gratitude for their comradely good-fellowship that even now--ten years after a final end came to my newspaper work--one of the first parts of the establishment I visit when I have occasion to go to the _World_ office is the composing room, where old friends greet me cordially on every hand. Great--very great--are the printers. They do their work under a stress of hurry, noise, and confusion that would drive less well-made men frantic, and they do it mightily well. To one who knows, as I do, what the conditions are, every printed newspaper page is a miracle of human achievement under well-nigh inconceivable difficulties.

[Sidenote: Donn Piatt]

It was soon after my service on the _World_ began that I became acquainted with a man of brilliant gifts, often erratically employed, and of singularly interesting personality--Donn Piatt. From that time until his death I saw much of him in a quiet club-corner way, and listened with interest while he set forth his views and conclusions, always with a suggestion of humor in them and often in perverse, paradoxical ways.

One day some question arose between us as to the failure of a certain book to achieve the success we both thought it deserved. Donn Piatt's explanation was ready:

"It is because we have altogether too much education in this country," he said. "You see, our schools are turning out about a million graduates every year, under the mistaken belief that they are educated. All these boys and girls have been taught how to read, but they haven't the smallest notion of what to read, or why to read. They regard reading as you and I might regard a game of solitaire--as a convenient means of relaxing the mind, diverting the attention from more serious things--in brief, they read for amusement only, and have no notion of any other possible purpose in reading. That's why every sublimated idiot who makes a mountebank of himself as a 'humorist' wins his public instantly and easily. The great majority of readers are that way minded, and of course the publishers must cater to the taste of the multitude. They'd be worse idiots than their customers if they didn't. It's the same way with plays. The people who go to the theater want to be amused without the necessity of doing even a little thinking. Why, a few years ago when Wallack was running such things as 'She Stoops to Conquer,' 'School for Scandal,' 'London Assurance,' and the like, in his old Thirteenth Street theater, with Dion Boucicault, John Brougham, Harry Montague, John Gilbert, Harry Beckett, and a lot of other really great actors in the casts, he played to slender houses, while just around the corner there wasn't standing room when 'Pink Dominoes' was on."

My acquaintance with Donn Piatt began in a rather curious way. Some time before, there had appeared in one of the magazines a series of letters signed "Arthur Richmond." They were political philippics, inspired chiefly by a reckless, undiscriminating spirit of attack. They were as mysterious in their origin as the letters of Junius, but otherwise they bore little if any of the assumed and intended resemblance to that celebrated series. There was little of judgment, discretion, or discrimination in them, and still less of conscience. But they attracted widespread attention and the secret of their authorship was a matter of a good deal of popular curiosity. A number of very distinguished men were mentioned as conjectural possibilities in that connection.

Even after the letters themselves had ceased to be of consequence, a certain measure of curiosity as to their authorship survived, so that any newspaper revelation of the secret was exceedingly desirable. One day somebody told me that Donn Piatt had written them. Personally I did not know him, but in the freemasonry of literature and journalism every man in the profession knows every other man in it well enough at least for purposes of correspondence. So I wrote a half playful letter to Donn Piatt, saying that somebody had charged him with the authorship of that "iniquitous trash"--for so I called it--and asking him if I might affirm or deny the statement in the _World_. He replied in a characteristic letter, in which he said:

[Sidenote: "A Syndicate of Blackguards"]

"I was one of a syndicate of blackguards engaged to write the 'Arthur Richmond' letters and I did write some of them. You and I ought to know each other personally and we don't. Why won't you come up to the ---- Club to-night and help me get rid of one of the infamous table d-hote dinners they sell there for seventy-five cents? Then I'll tell you all about the 'Arthur Richmond' letters and about any other crimes of my commission that may interest you. Meanwhile, I'm sending you a letter for publication in answer to your inquiry about that particular atrocity."

As we talked that night and on succeeding occasions, Donn Piatt told me many interesting anecdotes of his career as a newspaper correspondent much given to getting into difficulty with men in high place by reason of his freedom in criticism and his vitriolic way of saying what he had to say in the most effective words he could find.

"You see the dictionary was my ruin," he said after relating one of his anecdotes. "I studied it not wisely but too well in my youth, and it taught me a lot of words that have always seemed to me peculiarly effective in the expression of thought, but to which generals and statesmen and the other small fry of what is called public life, seem to have a rooted objection. By the way, did you ever hear that I once committed arson?"

I pleaded ignorance of that incident in his career, and added:

"I shall be interested to hear of that crime if you're sure it is protected by the statute of limitations. I shouldn't like to be a witness to a confession that might send you to the penitentiary."

"Oh, I don't know that that would be so bad," he interrupted. "I'm living with my publisher now, you know, and a change might not prove undesirable. However, the crime is outlawed by time now. And besides, I didn't myself set fire to the building. I'm guilty only under the legal maxim 'Qui facit per alium facit per se.' The way of it was this: When I was a young man trying to get into a law practice out in Ohio, and eager to advertise myself by appearing in court, a fellow was indicted for arson. He came to me, explaining that he had no money with which to pay a lawyer, but that he thought I might like to appear in a case so important, and that if I would do the best I could for him, he stood ready to do anything for me that he could, by way of recompense. I took the case, of course. It was a complex one and it offered opportunities for browbeating and 'balling up' witnesses--a process that specially impresses the public with the sagacity of a lawyer who does it successfully. Then, if by any chance I should succeed in acquitting my client, my place at the bar would be assured as that of 'a sharp young feller, who had beaten the prosecuting attorney himself.'

"But in telling my client I would take his case the demon of humor betrayed me. Just across the street from my lodging was a negro church, and there was a 'revival' going on at the time. They 'revived' till two o'clock or later every night with shoutings that interfered with my sleep. With playful impulse I said to the accused man:

"'You seem to be an expert in the arts of arson. If you'll burn that negro church I'll feel that you have paid me full price for my service in defending you.'

"I defended him and, as the witnesses against him were all of shady character, I succeeded in securing his acquittal. About four o'clock the next morning a fire broke out under all four corners of that negro church, and before the local fire department got a quart of water into action, it was a heap of smouldering ashes--hymn-books and all. A week or so later I received a letter from my ex-client. He wrote from St. Louis, 'on his way west,' he said. He expressed the hope that I was 'satisfied with results,' and begged me to believe that he was 'a man of honor who never failed to repay an obligation or reward a service.'"

With Donn Piatt's permission I told that story several times. Presently I read it in brief form in a newspaper where the hero of it was set down as "Tom Platt." I suppose the reporter in that case confused the closely similar sounds of "Donn Piatt" and "Tom Platt." At any rate, it seems proper to say that the venerable ex-Senator from New York never practiced law in Ohio and never even unintentionally induced the burning of a church. The story was Donn Piatt's and the experience was his.

LXVI

[Sidenote: First Acquaintance with Mr. Pulitzer]

I first made Mr. Pulitzer's personal acquaintance in Paris, where he was living at that time. I had been at work on the _World_ for a comparatively brief while, when he asked me to visit him there--an invitation which he several times afterwards repeated, each time with increased pleasure to me.

On the occasion of my first visit to him, he said to me one evening at dinner:

"I have invited you here with the primary purpose that you shall have a good time. But secondly, I want to see you as often as I can. We have luncheon at one o'clock, and dinner at seven-thirty. I wish you'd take luncheon and dinner with me as often as you can, consistently with my primary purpose that you shall have a good time. If you've anything else on hand that interests you more, you are not to come to luncheon or dinner, and I will understand. But if you haven't anything else on hand, I sincerely wish you'd come."

In all my experience--even in Virginia during the old, limitlessly hospitable plantation days--I think I never knew a hospitality superior to this--one that left the guest so free to come on the one hand and so entirely free to stay away without question if he preferred that. I, who have celebrated hospitality of the most gracious kind in romances of Virginia, where hospitality bore its most gorgeous blossoms and its richest fruitage, bear witness that I have known no such exemplar of that virtue in its perfect manifestation as Joseph Pulitzer.

Years afterwards, at Bar Harbor, I had been working with him night and day over editorial problems of consequence, and, as I sat looking on at a game of chess in which he was engaged one evening, he suddenly ordered me to bed.

"You've been overworking," he said. "You are to go to bed now, and you are not to get up till you feel like getting up--even if it is two days hence. Go, I tell you, and pay no heed to hours or anything else. You shall not be interrupted in your sleep."

I was very weary and I went to bed. The next morning--or I supposed it to be so--I waked, and looked at my watch. It told me it was six o'clock. I tried to woo sleep again, but the effort was a failure. I knew that breakfast would not be served for some hours to come, but I simply could not remain in bed longer. I knew where a certain dear little lad of the family kept his fishing tackle and his bait. I decided that I would get up, take a cold plunge, pilfer the tackle, and spend an hour or two down on the rocks fishing.

[Sidenote: Mr. Pulitzer's Kindly Courtesy]

With this intent I slipped out of my room, making no noise lest I should wake some one from his morning slumber. The first person I met was Mr. Pulitzer. He gleefully greeted me with congratulations upon the prolonged sleep I had had, and after a brief confusion of mind, I found that it was two o'clock in the afternoon, and that my unwound watch had misled me. In his anxiety that I should have my sleep out, Mr. Pulitzer had shut off the entire half of the building in which my bedroom lay, and had stationed a servant as sentinel to prohibit intrusion upon that part of the premises and to forbid everything in the nature of noise.

Mr. Pulitzer himself never rested, in the days of my association with him. His mind knew no surcease of its activity. He slept little, and with difficulty. His waking hours, whether up or in bed, were given to a ceaseless wrestling with the problems that belong to a great newspaper's conduct. I have known him to make an earnest endeavor to dismiss these for a time. To that end he would peremptorily forbid all reference to them in the conversation of those about him. But within the space of a few minutes he would be in the midst of them again, and completely absorbed. But he recognized the necessity of rest for brains other than his own, and in all kindly ways sought to secure and even to compel it. I remember once at Bar Harbor, when for two or three days and nights in succession I had been at work on something he greatly wanted done, he said to me at breakfast:

"You're tired, and that task is finished. I want you to rest, and, of course, so long as you and I remain together you can't rest. Your brain is active and so is mine. If we stay in each other's company we shall talk, and with us talk means work. In five minutes we'll be planning some editorial crusade, and you'll get to work again. So I want you to go away from me. Let Eugene drive you to the village, and there secure an open carriage and a pair of good horses--the best you can get--and drive all over this interesting island. Get yourself rested. And when you come back, don't let me talk newspaper with you, till you've had a night's sleep."

It was in that kindly spirit that Mr. Pulitzer always treated his lieutenants when he invited them to pass a time with him. So long as he and they were together, he could not help working them almost to death. But, when he realized their weariness, he sent them off to rest, on carriage drives or yachting voyages or what not, with generous consideration of their inability to carry weight as he did night and day and every day and every night.

Sometimes his eagerness in work led him to forget his own kindly purpose. I remember once when I had been writing all day and throughout most of the night in execution of his prolific inspiration, he suddenly became aware of the fact that I must be weary. Instantly he said:

"You must rest. You must take a carriage or a boat and go off somewhere. Think out where it shall be, for yourself. But you sha'n't do another thing till you've had a good rest."

Then, as we strolled out into the porch and thence to the sea wall against which the breakers were recklessly dashing themselves to pieces, he suddenly thought of something. In a minute we were engaged in discussing that something, and half an hour later I was busy in my room, with books of reference all about me, working out that something, and it was three o'clock next morning before I finished the writing of what he wanted written on that theme. At breakfast next morning I was late, and the fact reminded him of the plans he had formed twenty-four hours before for a rest for me. He refused even to light a cigar until I should be gone.

"If we smoke together," he said, "we shall talk. If we talk we shall become interested and you'll be set to work again. Get you hence. Let me see no more of you till dinner to-night. In the meantime, do what you will to rest yourself. That's my only concern now. Drive, sail, row, loaf, play billiards--do whatever will best rest you."

I relate these things by way of showing forth one side of the character of a man who has wrought a revolution in the world. I have other things to relate that show forth another side of that interestingly complex nature.

[Sidenote: The Maynard Case]

In his anxiety to secure terseness of editorial utterance he at one time limited all editorials to fifty lines each. As I had final charge of the editorial page on four nights of the week, I found myself obliged, by the rule, to spoil many compact articles written by other men, by cutting out a line or two from things already compacted "to the limit."

I said this to Mr. Pulitzer one day, and he replied:

"Well, just to show you that I have no regard for cast-iron rules, I am going to ask you now to write four columns on a subject of public importance."

The subject was the nomination of Judge Maynard for Justice of the Court of Appeals. Judge Maynard stood accused of--let us say questionable--conduct in judicial office in relation to certain election proceedings. The details have no place here. Judge Maynard had never been impeached, and his friends indignantly repudiated every suggestion that his judicial conduct had been in any wise influenced by partisan considerations. His enemies--and they were many, including men of high repute in his own party--contended that his judicial course in that election matter unfitted him for election to the higher office.

I have every reason to believe--every reason that eleven years of editorial association can give--that in every case involving the public welfare, or public morality, or official fitness, Mr. Pulitzer sincerely desires to ascertain the facts and to govern his editorial course accordingly. I have never been able to regard him as a Democrat or a Republican in politics. He has impressed me always as an opportunist, caring far more for practical results than for doctrinaire dogmas.

In this Maynard case the contentions were conflicting, the assertions contradictory, and the facts uncertain so far at least as the _World_ knew them.

"I want you to go into the Maynard case," said Mr. Pulitzer to me, "with an absolutely unprejudiced mind. We hold no brief for or against him, as you know. I want you to get together all the documents in the case. I want you to take them home and study them as minutely as if you were preparing yourself for an examination. I want you to regard yourself as a judicial officer, oath-bound to justice, and when you shall have mastered the facts and the law in the case, I want you to set them forth in a four-column editorial that every reader of the _World_ can easily understand."

This was only one of many cases in which he set me or some other lieutenant to find out facts and determine what justice demanded, in order that justice might be done.

In 1896, when the Democratic party made its surrender to populism and wild-eyed socialism by nominating Bryan, I was at the convention in Chicago, telegraphing editorial articles. I foreshadowed the nomination as inevitable, contrary to the predictions of the _World's_ newsgatherers in the convention. Instantly, and before the nomination was made, Mr. Pulitzer telegraphed me from Bar Harbor, to come to him at once. By the time I got there the nomination was a fact accomplished.

Mr. Pulitzer said to me:

"I'm not going to tell you what my own views of the situation are, or what I think ought to be the course of the _World_, as a foremost Democratic newspaper, under the circumstances. No"--seeing that I was about to speak--"don't say a word about your own views. They are necessarily hasty and ill-considered as yet, just as my own are. I want you to take a full twenty-four hours for careful thought. At the end of that time I want you to write out your views of the policy the _World_ ought to adopt, giving your reasons for every conclusion reached."

Mr. Pulitzer did not adopt precisely the policy I recommended on that occasion. But the _World_ refused to support the Bryan candidacy with its fundamental idea of debasing the currency by the free coinage of silver dollars intrinsically worth only fifty cents apiece or less.

[Sidenote: Bryan's Message and the Reply]

While I was still his guest on that mission, there came to Bar Harbor an emissary from Mr. Bryan, who asked for an interview with Mr. Pulitzer in Mr. Bryan's behalf. As I happened to know the young man, Mr. Pulitzer asked me to see him in his stead and to receive his message. Armed with full credentials as Mr. Pulitzer's accredited representative, I visited the young ambassador, and made careful notes of the message he had to deliver. It was to this effect:

Mr. Bryan was unselfishly anxious to save the reputation of the newspaper press as a power in public affairs. His election by an overwhelming majority, he said, was certain beyond all possibility of doubt or question. But if it should be accomplished without the support of the _World_ or any other of the supposedly influential Democratic newspapers, there must be an end to the tradition of press power and newspaper influence in politics. For the sake of the press, and especially of so great a newspaper as the _World_, therefore, Mr. Bryan asked Mr. Pulitzer's attention to this danger to prestige.

When I delivered this message to Mr. Pulitzer, he laughed. Then he gave me a truly remarkable exhibition of his masterful knowledge of American political conditions, and of his sagacious prescience. He asked me to jot down some figures as he should give them to me. He named the states that would vote for Bryan with the number of electoral votes belonging to each. Then he gave me the list of states that would go against Bryan, with their electoral strength. When I had put it all down, he said:

"I don't often predict--never unless I know. But you may embody that table in an editorial, predicting that the result of the election four months hence will be very nearly, if not exactly, what those lists foreshadow. Let that be our answer to Mr. Bryan's audacious message."

The campaign had not yet opened. Mr. Bryan had just been nominated with positively wild enthusiasm. The movement which afterwards put Palmer in the field as an opposing Democratic candidate had not yet been thought of. All conditions suggested uncertainty, and yet, as we sat there in his little private porch at Bar Harbor, Mr. Pulitzer correctly named every state that would give its electoral vote to each candidate, and the returns of the election--four months later--varied from his prediction of results by only two electoral votes out of four hundred and forty-seven. And that infinitesimal variation resulted solely from the fact that by some confusion of ballots in California and Kentucky each of those states gave one vote to Bryan and the rest to his opponent.

I have known nothing in the way of exact political prescience, long in advance of the event, that equaled this or approached it. I record it as phenomenal.

LXVII

[Sidenote: A Napoleonic Conception]

Ever since the time when he bought two St. Louis newspapers, both of which were losing money, combined them, and made of them one of the most profitable newspaper properties in the country, Mr. Pulitzer's methods have been Napoleonic both in the brilliancy of their conception and in the daring of their execution. I may here record as a personal recollection the story of one of his newspaper achievements. The fact of it is well enough known; the details of its dramatic execution have never been told, I think.

In February, 1895, the government of the United States found it necessary to issue $62,300,000 in four per cent., thirty-year bonds, to make good the depletion of the gold reserve in the treasury. The bonds were sold to a syndicate at the rate of 104-3/4. Once on the market, they quickly advanced in price until they were sold by the end of that year at 118, and, if any bank or investor wanted them in considerable quantities, the price paid was 122 or more.

At the beginning of the next year it was announced that the treasury would sell $200,000,000 more of precisely the same bonds, printed from the same plates, payable at the same time, and in all respects undistinguishable from those of the year before--at that time in eager popular demand at 118 to 122. It was also announced that the treasury had arranged to sell these bonds--worth 118 or more in the open market--to the same old Morgan syndicate "at about the same price" (104-3/4), at which the preceding issue had been sold.

Mr. Pulitzer justly regarded this as a scandalous proposal to give the syndicate more than twenty-six millions of dollars of the people's money in return for no service whatever. The banks and the people of the country wanted these bonds at 118 or more, and banks and bankers in other countries were equally eager to get them at the same rate. It seemed to him, as it seemed to every other well-informed person, that this was a reckless waste of the people's money, the scandalous favoring of a syndicate of speculators, and a damaging blow to the national credit. But, unlike most other well-informed persons, Mr. Pulitzer refused to regard the situation as one beyond saving, although it was given out from Washington that the bargain with the syndicate was already irrevocably made.

Mr. Pulitzer set his editorial writers at work to make the facts of the case clear to every intelligent mind; to show forth the needlessness of the proposed squandering; to emphasize the scandal of this dealing in the dark with a gang of Wall Street bettors upon a certainty; and to demonstrate the people's readiness and even eagerness to subscribe for the bonds at a much higher rate than the discrediting one at which the Treasury had secretly agreed to sell them to the syndicate.

When all this had been done, to no purpose so far as I could see, inasmuch as the response from Washington was insistent to the effect that the sale was already agreed upon, Mr. Pulitzer one afternoon summoned me to go at once to Lakewood, where he was staying at the time. The train by which alone I could go was to arrive at Lakewood after the departure of the last train thence for New York that evening, and I mentioned that fact over the telephone. For reply I was asked to come anyhow.

When I got there night had already fallen, and as I was without even so much as a handbag, I anticipated a night of makeshift at the hotel. But as I entered Mr. Pulitzer's quarters he greeted me and said:

"Come in quickly. We must talk rapidly and to the point. You think you're to stay here all night, but you're mistaken. As this is your night to be in charge of the editorial page, you must be in the office of the _World_ at ten o'clock. I've ordered a special train to take you back. It will start at eight o'clock and run through in eighty minutes. Meanwhile, we have much to arrange, so we must get to work."

[Sidenote: A Challenge to the Government]

E. O. Chamberlin, the managing editor of the news department of the _World_, was there and had already received his instructions. To me Mr. Pulitzer said:

"We have made our case in this matter of the bond issue. We have presented the facts clearly, convincingly, conclusively, but the Administration refuses to heed them. We are now going to compel it to heed them on pain of facing a scandal that no administration could survive.

"What we demand is that these bonds shall be sold to the public at something like their actual value and not to a Wall Street syndicate for many millions less. You understand all that. You are to write a double-leaded article to occupy the whole editorial space to-morrow morning. You are not to print a line of editorial on any other subject. You are to set forth, in compact form and in the most effective way possible, the facts of the case and the considerations that demand a popular or at least a public loan instead of this deal with a syndicate, suggestive as it is of the patent falsehood that the United States Treasury's credit needs 'financing.' You are to declare, with all possible emphasis that the banks, bankers, and people of the United States stand ready and eager to lend their government all the money it wants at three per cent. interest, and to buy its four per cent. bonds at a premium that will amount to that."

He went on in this way, outlining the article he wanted me to write.

"Then, as a guarantee of the sincerity of our conviction you are to say that the _World_ offers in advance to take one million dollars of the new bonds at the highest market price, if they are offered to the public in open market.

"In the meanwhile, Chamberlin has a staff of men sending out despatches to every bank and banker in the land, setting forth our demand for a public loan instead of a syndicate dicker, and asking each for what amount of the new bonds it or he will subscribe on a three per cent. basis. To-morrow morning's paper will carry with your editorial its complete confirmation in their replies, and the proposed loan will be oversubscribed on a three per cent. basis. Even Mr. Cleveland's phenomenal self-confidence and Mr. Carlisle's purblind belief in Wall Street methods will not be able to withstand such a demonstration as that. It will _compel a public loan_. If it is true that the contract with the syndicate has already been made, _they must cancel it_. The voice of the country will be heard in the subscription list we shall print to-morrow morning, and the voice of the country has compelling power, even under this excessively self-confident administration. Now, you're faint with hunger. Hurry over to the hotel and get a bite to eat. You have thirty minutes before your special train leaves."

I hurried to the hotel, but I spent that thirty minutes, not in eating but in making a written report, for my own future use, of Mr. Pulitzer's instructions. The memorandum thus made is the basis of what I have written above.

The climax of the great national drama thus put upon the stage was worthy of the genius that inspired it. The responses of the banks and bankers--sent in during the night--showed a tremendous oversubscription of the proposed loan at a price that would yield to the government many millions more than the syndicate sale offered, and there remained unheard from the thousands and tens of thousands of private persons who were eager to buy the bonds as investment securities. In the face of the facts thus demonstrated, it would have been political suicide for the men in control at Washington to refuse a public loan and to sell the bonds to the syndicate for millions less than the people were eager to pay for them. The administration yielded to moral force, but it did so grudgingly and with manifest reluctance. It cut down the proposed loan to the minimum that the Treasury must have, and it hedged it about with every annoying device that might embarrass willing investors and prevent the subscriptions of others than banks and bankers. In spite of all such efforts to minimize the administration's defeat, the bond issue was promptly taken up at a price that saved many millions to the Treasury, and within a brief while the very bonds that Mr. Cleveland and Mr. Carlisle had so insistently desired to sell to the syndicate at 104-3/4 were very hard to get in the open market at 133 or more.

[Sidenote: The Power of the Press]

I have related this incident with some fullness because I know of no other case in which the "power of the press"--which being interpreted means the power of public opinion--to control reluctant political and governmental forces, has been so dramatically illustrated.

The only other case comparable with it was that in which not one newspaper but practically all the newspapers in the land with a united voice saved the country from chaos and civil war by compelling a wholly unwilling and very obstinate Congress to find a way out of the electoral controversy between Tilden and Hayes. No newspaper man who was in Washington at any time during that controversy doubts or can doubt that the two Houses of Congress would have adhered obstinately to their opposing views until the end, with civil war as a necessary consequence, but for the ceaseless insistence of all the newspapers of both parties that they should devise and agree upon some peaceful plan by which the controversy might be adjusted.

At the time when the prospect seemed darkest I asked Carl Schurz for his opinion of the outcome. He replied, with that intense earnestness in his voice and words which his patriotism always gave to them in times of public danger:

"If left to the two Houses of Congress to decide--and that is where the Constitution leaves it--the question will not be decided; on the contrary, the more they discuss it, the more intense and unyielding their obstinate determination not to agree will become. If it isn't settled before the fourth of March, God only knows what the result will be--civil war and chaos are the only things to be foreseen. But if left alone, as I say, the two Houses of Congress will to the end refuse to agree upon any plan of adjustment. The outlook is very gloomy, very discouraging, very black. Only a tremendous pressure of public opinion can save us from results more calamitous than any that the human mind can conceive. If the newspapers can be induced to see the danger and realize its extent--if they can persuade themselves to put aside their partisanship and unite in an insistent demand that Congress shall find a way out, a peaceful result may be compelled. Fortunately, the Southern men in both houses are eager for the accomplishment of that. They and their constituents have had enough and to spare of civil war. They may be easily won to the support of any plan that promises to bring about a peaceful solution of the controversy. But public opinion, as reflected in the newspapers, must compel Congress, or nothing will be done."

LXVIII

[Sidenote: Recollections of Carl Schurz]

This mention of Mr. Schurz reminds me of some other occasions on which I had intercourse with him. He and I many times served together on committees that had to do with matters of public interest. We were members of the same clubs, and we saw much of each other at private dinners and in other social ways, so that I came to know him well and to appreciate at its full value that absolute honesty of mind which I regard as his distinguishing characteristic. Without that quality of sincerity, and with a conscience less exigent and less resolute than his, Carl Schurz's political career might have compassed any end that ambition set before him. That is perhaps a reflection on public life and the men engaged in it. If so, I cannot help it. As it was, he never hesitated for a moment to "quarrel with his bread and butter" if his antagonism to wrong, and especially to everything that militated against human liberty, called for such quarreling. He was above all things a patriot in whose estimation considerations of the public welfare outweighed, overrode, and trampled to earth all other considerations of what kind soever. Party was to him no more than an implement, a tool for the accomplishment of patriotic ends, and he gave to party no allegiance whatever beyond the point at which it ceased to serve such ends. He was always ready to quarrel with his own party and quit it for cause, even when it offered him high preferment as the reward of continued allegiance.

In the same way, he held the scales true in all his judgments of men. Mr. Lincoln once wrote him a letter--often quoted by his enemies--which any "statesman" of the accepted type would have regarded as an unforgivable affront. Yet in due time Mr. Schurz wrote an appreciative estimate of Lincoln which has no fit fellow in the whole body of Lincoln literature. His judgments of men and measures were always the honest conclusions of an honest mind that held in reverence no other creed than that of truth and preached no other gospel than that of human liberty.

One evening I sat with him at a little dinner given by Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the historian. Paul Leicester Ford sat between him and me, while on my right sat our hostess and some other gentlewomen. Our hostess presently asked me what I thought of a certain distinguished personage whose name was at that time in everybody's mouth, and whose popularity--chiefly won by genial, humorous, after-dinner speaking--was wholly unmatched throughout the country. I do not mention his name, because he still lives and is under a cloud.

I answered that I thought him one of the worst and most dangerous of popular public men, adding:

"He has done more than any other man living to corrupt legislatures and pervert legislation to the service of iniquitous corporations."

Mr. Schurz, who was talking to some one at the other end of the table, caught some hint of what I had said. He instantly turned upon me with a demand that I should repeat it. I supposed that a controversy was coming, and by way of challenging the worst, I repeated what I had said, with added emphasis. Mr. Schurz replied:

"You are right so far as your criticism goes. The man has done all that you charge in the way of corrupting legislatures and perverting legislation. He has made a business of it. But that is the very smallest part of his offense against morality, good government, and free institutions. His far greater sin is that he has _made corruption respectable_, in the eyes of the people. And those who invite him to banquets and set him to speak there, and noisily applaud him, are all of them partners in his criminality whether they know it or not."

[Sidenote: Mr. Schurz's Patriotism]

One other conversation with Mr. Schurz strongly impressed me with his exalted character and the memory of it lingers in my mind. In the summer of the year 1900, when Mr. Bryan was nominated for the second time for President, on a platform strongly reaffirming his free silver policy and everything else for which he had stood in 1896, it was given out that Carl Schurz, who had bitterly and effectively opposed him in 1896, intended now to support him. I had finally withdrawn from the _World's_ service, and from newspaper work of every kind, and was passing the summer in literary work at my cottage on Lake George. But the _World_ telegraphed me asking me to see Mr. Schurz, who was also a Lake George cottager, and get from him some statement of his reasons for now supporting the man and the policies that he had so strenuously opposed four years before.

I had no idea that Mr. Schurz would give me any such statement for publication, but he and I had long been friends, and a call upon him would occupy a morning agreeably, with the remote chance that I might incidentally render a service to my friends of the _World_ staff. Therefore, I went.

Mr. Schurz told me frankly that he could give me nothing for publication, just as I had expected that he would do.

"I am going to make one or two speeches in this campaign," he said, "and anything I might give you now would simply take the marrow out of my speeches. But personally I shall be glad to talk the matter over with you. It seems to me to be one of positively vital importance--not to parties, for now that I have come to the end of an active life I care nothing for parties--but to our country and to the cause of human liberty."

"You think human liberty is involved?" I asked.

"Yes, certainly. Those conceptions upon which human liberty rests in every country in the world had their birth in the colonies out of which this nation was formed and they were first effectively formulated in the Declaration of Independence and enacted into fundamental law in our Constitution. The spectacle of a great, free, rich, and powerful nation securely built upon those ideas as its foundation has been an inspiration to all other peoples, and better still, a compulsion upon all rulers. If that inspiration is lost, and that compulsion withdrawn, the brutal military force that buttresses thrones will quickly undo all that our influence has accomplished in teaching men their rights and warning monarchs of their limitations."

In answer to further questions he went on to say:

"The spirit of imperialism--which is the arch-enemy of human liberty--is rampant in the land, and it seems to me the supreme duty of every man who loves liberty to oppose it with all his might, at whatever sacrifice of lesser things he may find to be necessary. I am as antagonistic to Mr. Bryan's free silver policy and to some other policies of his as I was four years ago. But the time has come when men on the other side jeer at the Declaration of Independence and mock at the Constitution itself. There is danger in this--a danger immeasurably greater than any that financial folly threatens. It seems to me time for a revolution--not a revolution of violence or one which seeks overthrow, but a revolution of public opinion designed to restore the landmarks and bring the country back to its foundations of principle. Financial folly, such as Mr. Bryan advocates, threatens us with nothing worse than a temporary disturbance of business affairs. Imperialism threatens us with the final destruction of those ideas and principles that have made our country great in itself and immeasurably greater in its influence upon thought and upon the welfare of humanity in every country on earth."

I have recorded Mr. Schurz's words here, as nearly as a trained memory allows me to do, not with the smallest concern for the political issues of nine years ago, but solely because his utterances on that occasion seem to me to have shown forth, as nothing else could have done, the high inspiration of his patriotism, and to explain what many have regarded as the inconsistencies of his political attitude at various periods of his life. That so-called inconsistency was in fact a higher consistency. His allegiance was at all times given to principles, to ideas, to high considerations of right and of human liberty, and in behalf of these he never hesitated to sacrifice his political prospects, his personal advantage, or anything else that he held to be of less human consequence.

LXIX

[Sidenote: The End of Newspaper Life]

In the spring of the year 1900 I finally ceased to be a newspaper worker. I was weary, almost beyond expression, of the endless grind of editorial endeavor. My little summer home in the woodlands on Lake George lured me to the quiet, independent, literary life that I had always desired. There was an accumulation in my mind of things I longingly desired to do, and the opportunity to do them came. Above all, I wanted to be free once more--to be nobody's "hired man," to be subject to no man's control, however generous and kindly that control might be.

Life conditions at my place, "Culross," were ideal, with no exacting social obligations, with plenty of fishing, rowing, and sailing, with my giant pines, hemlocks, oaks, and other trees for companions, and with the sweetest air to breathe that human lungs could desire.

I had just published a boys' book that passed at once into second and successive editions. The publishers of it had asked me for more books of that kind, and still more insistently for novels, while with other publishers the way was open to me for some historical and biographical writings and for works of other kinds, that I had long planned.

Under these favorable circumstances I joyously established anew the literary workshop which had twice before been broken up by that "call of the wild," the lure of journalism.

This time, the summer-time shop consisted, and still consists, of a cozy corner in one of the porches of my rambling, rock-perched cottage. There, sheltered from the rain when it came and from the fiercer of the winds, I spread a broad rug on the floor and placed my writing table and chair upon it, and there for ten years I have done my work in my own way, at my own times, and in all other ways as it has pleased me to do it. In that corner, I have only to turn my head in order to view the most beautiful of all lakes lying almost at my feet and only thirty or forty feet away. If I am seized with the impulse to go fishing, my fishing boat with its well-stocked bait wells is there inviting me. If I am minded to go upon the water for rest and thought--or to be rid of thought for a time--there are other boats in my dock, boats of several sorts and sizes, among which I am free to choose. If the weather is inclement, there are open fireplaces within the house and an ample stock of wood at hand.

[Sidenote: Life at Culross]

For ten years past I have spent all my summers in these surroundings-- staying at "Culross" four or five or even six months in each year and returning to town only for the period of winter stress.

During the ten years in which that corner of the porch has been my chief workshop, I have added twenty-odd books to the dozen or so published before, besides doing other literary work amounting to about an equal product, and if I live, the end is not yet. I make this statistical statement as an illustration of the stimulating effect of freedom upon the creative faculty. The man who must do anything else--if it be only to carry a cane, or wear cuffs, or crease his trousers, or do any other thing that involves attention and distracts the mind, is seriously handicapped for creative work of any kind.