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Updated: June 2, 2025
An admirer of Grover Cleveland and three times a warm supporter of his candidacy for the Presidency, he saw with regret the loss of his hold on his party, which was drifting into the hands of the advocates of free silver. Then in December, 1895, Godkin lost faith in his idol. "I was thunderstruck by Cleveland's message" on the Venezuela question, he wrote to Norton.
The actual heads of papers have often been men of high standing, as Horace Greeley, Henry J. Raymond, E. L. Godkin, Henry Watterson, the late Charles A. Dana, James Gordon Bennett, and William Cullen Bryant. But in the modern newspaper the man in control is a managing editor, whose tenure of office depends upon his keeping ahead of all others.
The character of the men who take up the profession of journalism suffers from the lack of distinction and influence of their task. Raymond, Greeley, Dana, Laffan, Godkin, in America, and Delane, Hutton, Lawson, and their successors, Garvin, Strachey, Robinson, in England, are impossible products of the German journalistic soil at present.
Godkin was mistaken; the Irish had suffered no "debasement of the intellects, of the morals, not even of the physical condition," notwithstanding the plenitude of causes existing to bring such results about. Their intellect had been kept in ignorance.
Associated with Godkin from the beginning was Wendell P. Garrison, who became literary editor of the journal, and, who, Godkin wrote in 1871, "has really toiled for six years with the fidelity of a Christian martyr and upon the pay of an oysterman." I have often heard the literary criticism of The Nation called destructive like the political, but, it appears to me, with less reason.
General J. D. Cox, who had not missed a number of The Nation from 1865 to 1899, wrote to Godkin, on hearing of his prospective retirement from the Evening Post, "I really believe that earnest men, all over the land, whether they agree with you or differ, will unite in the exclamation which Lincoln made as to Grant, 'We can't spare this man he fights."
Let us be as hopeful as was Godkin in his earlier days, and rest assured that intellectual training will eventually exert its power in politics, as it has done in business and in other domains of active life. R. Ogden's Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin, I, 255. Ogden, II, 88. Ibid., I, 257. Parton's Greeley, 331, 576; my own recollections; Ogden, I, 255.
It was a period when the contest between the advocates of a single gold standard and the bimetallists raged fiercely, and the contest had not been fully settled by the election of McKinley in 1896. Godkin was emphatically for gold, Walker equally emphatic for a double standard. And they clashed.
Though the Evening Post contributed powerfully to the election of McKinley, from the fact that its catechism, teaching financial truths in a popular form, was distributed throughout the West in immense quantities by the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Godkin himself refused to vote for McKinley and put in his ballot for Palmer, the gold Democrat.
On the contrary, the dress, the face, and the personal bearing of Godkin proclaimed at once the gentleman and cultivated man of the world. You felt that he was a man whom you would like to meet at dinner, accompany on a long walk, or cross the Atlantic with, were you an acquaintance or friend.
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