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Updated: June 2, 2025
"Well, boss, I'se been sold 'leben times in my life and dis is de fust time I eber got de money." Godkin, in the "Nation", said that the Georgia officials were "probably as bad a lot of political tricksters and adventurers as ever got together in one place." This description will fit equally well the white officials of all the reconstructed states.
Godkin, and a few loyal readers rallied to its support, and threatened to boycott the stores. But the public as a whole and all the "Post's" esteemed contemporaries, as might have been anticipated, enjoyed the conflict from a safe distance and minded their own business.
Godkin was the editor, and next to him the chief promoters were James M. McKim of Philadelphia and Charles Eliot Norton. The first number of this "weekly journal of politics, literature, science, and art" appeared on July 6, 1865.
He could only think of Hayes as an ex-President and a man whom he highly esteemed. Lecture read at Harvard University, April 13, 1908; printed in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1908. Our two great journalists of the nineteenth century were Greeley and Godkin. Though differing in very many respects, they were alike in possessing a definite moral purpose.
But Bryce, who in this matter is the most competent of judges, intimates that Godkin's foreign education, giving him detachment and perspective, was a distinct advantage. If it will help any one to a better appreciation of the man, let Godkin be regarded as "a chiel amang us takin' notes"; as an observer not so philosophic as Tocqueville, not so genial and sympathetic as Bryce.
"I am conscious," wrote President Eliot to Godkin, "that The Nation has had a decided effect on my opinions and my action for nearly forty years; and I believe it has had like effect on thousands of educated Americans." A string of quotations, as is well known, becomes wearisome; but the importance of the point that I am trying to make will probably justify one more.
"Because," replied the farmer, "my Democratic friend next door got the best of me in an argument last night. But when I get my Weekly Tribune to-morrow I'll knock the foundations all out from under him." Premising that Godkin is as closely identified with The Nation and the Evening Post as Greeley with the Tribune, I shall refer to a personal experience.
Every one of them looked hopeless in the beginning; but the solution came in each case, through the popular determination to find some better way. But the evil goes far deeper than Mr. Godkin appears to think. To abolish corruption is to take away the present basis of organization without substituting any other.
Greeley and Godkin were alike in furnishing their readers with telling arguments. In northern New York and the Western Reserve of Ohio the Weekly Tribune was a political Bible. "Why do you look so gloomy?" said a traveler, riding along the highway in the Western Reserve during the old antislavery days, to a farmer who was sitting moodily on a fence.
Thirty-five years of journalism, in which Godkin was accustomed to give hard blows, did not, as he himself foreshadowed, call forth a unanimous chorus of praise; and the objections of intelligent and high-minded men are well worth taking into account.
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