Recollections of a Varied Life Part 15

Presently the officer chiefly responsible, whom the newspaper singled out by name as the subject of its criticism, and daily denounced or ridiculed, inst.i.tuted the usual libel suit for purposes of intimidation only.

It had no such effect. The newspaper continued its crusade, and the scandal of official neglect grew daily in the public mind, until presently it threatened alarming political results.

I do not know that political corruption was more prevalent then than now, but it was more open and shameless, and as a consequence men of upright minds were readier to suspect its existence in high places.

At this time such men began rather insistently to ask why the authorities at Washington did not interfere to break up the illicit stills and why the administration retained in office the men whose neglect of that duty had become so great a scandal. It was freely suggested that somebody at Washington must be winking at the lawlessness in aid of political purposes in Brooklyn.

[Sidenote: An Interview with President Grant]

It was then that Theodore Tilton, with his const.i.tutional audacity, decided to send me to Washington to interview President Grant on the subject. I was provided with letters from Tilton, as the editor of the Republican newspaper of Brooklyn, from the Republican Postmaster Booth, and from Silas B. Dutcher and other recognized leaders of the Republican party in Brooklyn. These letters asked the President, in behalf of Republicanism in Brooklyn, to give me the desired interview, a.s.suring him of my integrity, etc.

So armed I had no difficulty in securing audience. I found General Grant to be a man of simple, upright mind, unspoiled by fame, careless of formalities and the frills of official place, in no way nervous about his dignity--just a plain, honest American citizen, accustomed to go straight to the marrow of every subject discussed, without equivocation or reserve and apparently without concern for anything except truth and justice.

He received me cordially and dismissed everybody else from the room while we talked. He offered me a cigar and we had our conference without formality.

In presenting my credentials, I was moved by his own frankness of manner to tell him that I was an ex-Confederate soldier and not a Republican in politics. I was anxious not to sail under false colors, and he expressed himself approvingly of my sentiment, a.s.suring me that my personal views in politics could make no difference in my status on this occasion.

After I had asked him a good many questions about the matter in hand, he smilingly asked:

"Why don't you put the suggestions so vaguely mentioned in these letters, into a direct question, so that I may answer it?"

It had seemed to me an impossible impudence to ask the President of the United States whether or not his administration was deliberately protecting crime for the sake of political advantage, but at his suggestion I formulated the question, hurriedly putting it in writing for the sake of accuracy in reporting it afterwards. He answered it promptly and directly, adding:

"I wish you would come to me again a week from today. I may then have a more conclusive answer to give you. Come at any rate."

When the interview was published, my good friend, Dr. St. Clair McKelway, then young in the service on the Brooklyn _Eagle_ which has since brought fame to him and extraordinary influence to the newspaper which he still conducts, said to me at a chance meeting: "I think your putting of that question to General Grant was the coolest and most colossal piece of impudence I ever heard of."

So it would have been, if I had done the thing of my own motion or otherwise without General Grant's suggestion, a thing of which, of course, no hint was given in the published interview.

When I saw the President again a week later, he needed no questioning on my part. He had fully informed himself concerning matters in Brooklyn, and knew what he wanted to say. Among other things he mentioned that he had had a meeting with the derelict official whom we had so severely criticised and who had responded with a libel suit. All that the President thought it necessary to say concerning him was:

[Sidenote: Grant's Method]

"He must go. You may say so from me. Say it in print and positively."

The publication of that sentence alone would have made the fortune of my interview, even without the other utterances of interest that I was authorized to publish as an a.s.surance that the administration intended to break up the illicit distilling in Brooklyn even if it required the whole power of the government to do it.

In relation to that matter the President said to me:

"Now for your own rea.s.surance, and not for publication, I may tell you that as soon as proper preparations can be made, the distilling district will be suddenly surrounded by a cordon of troops issuing from the Navy Yard, and revenue officers, under command of Jerome B. Wa.s.s, whom you know, I believe, will break up every distillery, carry away every still and every piece of machinery, empty every mash-tub into the gutters, and arrest everybody engaged in the business."

I gave my promise not to refer to this raid in any way in advance of its making, but asked that I might be permitted to be present with the revenue officers when it should be made. General Grant immediately sent for Mr. Wa.s.s, who was in the White House at the time, and directed him to inform me when he should be ready to make the raid, and to let me accompany him. To this he added: "Don't let any other newspaper man know of the thing."

The raid was made not long after that. In the darkness of the end of a night--a darkness increased by the practice of the distillers of extinguishing all the street lamps in that region--a strong military force silently slipped out of a remote gate in the Navy Yard inclosure, and before the movement was suspected, it had completely surrounded the district, under orders to allow no human being to pa.s.s in or out through the lines. I had with me an a.s.sistant, whom I had found the night before at a ball that he had been a.s.signed to report, and under the strict rule laid down for the military, he and I were the only newspaper men within the lines, or in any wise able to secure news of what was going on--a matter that was exciting the utmost curiosity throughout the city. On the other hand, the rigidity of the military cordon threatened to render our presence within the lines of no newspaper use to us. Ours was an afternoon newspaper and our "copy," of which we soon made many columns, must be in the office not very long after midday if it was to be of any avail. But we were not permitted to pa.s.s the lines with it, either in person or by messenger. At last we secured permission of the Navy Yard authorities to go down to the water front of the Yard and hail a pa.s.sing tug. With our pockets stuffed full of copy, we pa.s.sed in that way to the Manhattan sh.o.r.e and made our way thence by Fulton ferry to the office, where we were greeted as heroes and victors who had secured for the paper the most important "beat" that had been known in years.

There are victories, however, that are more disastrous to those who win them than defeat itself. For a time this one threatened to serve me in that way. Mr. Bowen, the owner of the paper, whom I had never before seen at the _Union_ office, presented himself there the next morning, full of enthusiasm. He was particularly impressed by the way in which I had secured advance information of the raid and with it the privilege of being present to report the affair. Unfortunately for me, he said in his enthusiasm, "that's the sort of man we make a general and not a private of, in journalism."

Newspaper employments of the better sort were not easy to get in those days, and my immediate superiors in the office interpreted Mr. Bowen's utterance to mean that he contemplated the removal of some one or other of them, to make a commanding place for me. He had even suggested, in plain words, that he would like to see me made managing editor.

In that suggestion he was utterly wrong. I knew myself to be unfit for the place for the reason that I knew little of the city and almost nothing of journalism, in which I had been engaged for no more than a few weeks. Nevertheless, Mr. Bowen's suggestion aroused the jealousy of my immediate superiors, and they at once began a series of persecutions intended to drive me off the paper, a thing that would have been calamitous to a man rather inexperienced and wholly unknown in other newspaper offices.

Theodore Tilton solved the problem by removing me from the news department and promoting me to the editorial writing staff.

x.x.xIX

[Sidenote: A Free Lance]

After somewhat more than a year's service on the Brooklyn newspaper my connection with it was severed, and for a time I was a "free lance,"

writing editorials and literary articles of various kinds for the New York _Evening Post_ in the forenoons, and devoting the afternoons to newswork on the _Tribune_--writing "on s.p.a.ce" for both.

At that time Mr. William Cullen Bryant was traveling somewhere in the South, I think, so that I did not then become acquainted with him. That came later.

The _Evening Post_ was in charge of the late Charlton T. Lewis, with whom, during many later years, I enjoyed an intimate acquaintance. Mr.

Lewis was one of the ripest scholars and most diligent students I have ever known, but he was also a man of broad human sympathies, intensely interested in public affairs and in all else that involved human progress. His knowledge of facts and his grasp of principles in the case of everything that interested him seemed to me not less than extraordinary, and they seem so still, as I remember the readiness with which he would turn from consideration of some nice question of Greek or Latin usage to write of a problem of statesmanship under discussion at Washington, or of some iniquity in munic.i.p.al misgovernment which occupied the popular mind. His eyes were often red after the scholarly vigils of the midnight, but they were wide open and clear-sighted in their survey of all human affairs, from the Old Catholic movement to police abuses. His scholarship in ancient literatures in no way interfered with his alert interest in the literature of his own language, his own country, and his own time, or with his comprehensive acquaintance with it.

He was as much at home on the rostrum as at the desk, and his readiness and force in speaking were as marked as the effectiveness of his written words. More remarkable still, perhaps, was the fact that his oral utterances, however unexpectedly and extemporaneously he might be called upon to speak, were as smoothly phrased, as polished, and as perfectly wrought in every way as if they had been carefully written out and laboriously committed to memory.

Personally he was genial, kindly, and courteous, not with the courtesy of courtliness, which has considerations of self for its impulse, but with that of good-fellowship, inspired by concern for the happiness of those with whom he came in contact.

XL

[Sidenote: Hearth and Home]

The service on the _Evening Post_ interested me particularly. My impulse was strongly toward the literary side of newspaper work, and it was on that side chiefly that the _Evening Post_ gave me opportunity. But I was working there only on s.p.a.ce and devoting the greater part of my time to less congenial tasks. In a little while I gave up both these employments to accept the position of managing editor of a weekly ill.u.s.trated publication called _Hearth and Home_. The paper had been very ambitious in its projection, very distinguished in the persons of its editors and contributors, and a financial failure from the beginning.

There were several reasons for this. The mere making of an ill.u.s.trated periodical in those days was excessively expensive. There were no photographic processes for the reproduction of pictures at that time.

Every ill.u.s.tration must be drawn on wood and engraved by hand at a cost ten or twenty times as great as that now involved in the production of a similar result.

A second difficulty was that _Hearth and Home_ was originally designed to meet a demand that did not exist. It was meant to be a country gentleman's newspaper at a time when there were scarcely any country gentlemen--in the sense intended--in America. Its appeals were largely to a leisure-cla.s.s of well-to-do people, pottering with amateur horticulture and interested in literature and art.

It had for its first editors Donald G. Mitch.e.l.l (Ik Marvel), Mrs.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge. Mrs. Dodge was the only one of the company who had the least capacity as an editor, and her work was confined to the children's pages. The others were brilliant and distinguished literary folk, but wholly without either experience or capacity as editors.

The publication had lost a fortune to its proprietors, when it was bought by Orange Judd & Company, the publishers of the _American Agriculturist_. They had changed its character somewhat, but not enough to make it successful. Its circulation--never large--had shrunk to a few thousands weekly. Its advertis.e.m.e.nts were few and unremunerative; and its total income was insufficient to cover one-half the cost of making it.

My brother, Edward, and I were employed to take control of the paper and, if possible, resuscitate it. We found a number of "t.i.te Barnacles"

there drawing extravagant salaries for which their services made no adequate return. To rid the paper of these was Edward's first concern.

We found the pigeonholes stuffed with accepted ma.n.u.scripts, not one in ten of which was worth printing. They were the work of amateurs who had nothing to say and didn't at all know how to say it. These must be paid for, as they had been accepted, but to print them would have been to invite continued failure. By my brother's order they were dumped into capacious waste baskets and better materials secured from writers of capacity--among them such persons as Dr. Edward Everett Hale, Asa Gray, George E. Waring, Jr., Charles Barnard, Mrs. Runkle, Helen Hunt, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sara Orne Jewett, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Rose Terry, and others of like ability.

[Sidenote: Mary Mapes Dodge]

Mrs. Dodge continued her well-nigh matchless work as editor of the children's pages, until a year or so later, when she left _Hearth and Home_ to create the new children's magazine, _St. Nicholas_. She was a woman of real genius--a greatly overworked word, but one fitly applied in her case. Her editorial instincts were alert and unfailing. Her gift of discovering kernels of value in ma.s.ses of chaff was astonishing, and her skill in revising and reconstructing so as to save the grain and rid it of the chaff was such as I have never known in any other editor.