Edwin Lawrence Godkin

• Edwin Lawrence Godkin
• Born: October 2, 1831
• Died: May 21, 1902

Journalist, social critic, moralist, and founder of The Nation, was born in Moyne, Wicklow County, Ireland, the son of the Rev. James Godkin, a Dissenting clergyman whose family had come from England in the twelfth century, and Sarah (Lawrence) Godkin, descendant of Cromwellian settlers. A writer and editor for Irish newspapers, James Godkin also served as an occasional correspondent for The Times of London. After graduation from Queen’s University, Belfast, in 1851, Edwin Godkin studied law briefly in London, then turned to journalism, writing for Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper and preparing The History of Hungary and the Magyars, a sympathetic telling of the Hungarian revolutionary movement of Lajos Kossuth. It was issued in 1853.

For two years (1853-55) he covered the Crimean War for The London Daily News and The New York Times, acquiring a firsthand grasp of military strategy and the hell of war. His candid dispatches were praised for their erudition, their depth, and the vigor of their language in describing the “ignorance” and “blunders” of the British command. Godkin emigrated to the United States in 1856, studied law in New York, was admitted to the bar, but left legal work during the Civil War to become battlefield correspondent for The London Daily News. Touring the South on horseback, he was critical of his fellow correspondents for their “wild ravings about the roaring of the guns and the whizzing of the shells . .. with fulsome puffs of some captain or colonel.”

Godkin and others started The Nation in July 1865 with $100,000 as capital and forty stockholders, making himself editor. After a financial crisis in 1866, Godkin himself took over the weekly and made it one of the country’s most influential publications. Founded in the interests of the freed slaves, it nonetheless opposed carpetbaggery and took a moderate position on Reconstruction. Possessed of a sensitive moral conscience, a trenchant and witty prose style, and the mind of a reasonable middle-class liberal, Godkin attacked the corruptions of the Grant administration, backed civil service over the traditional spoils system, and was severely critical of the speculative mania of the Gilded Age.

Few questions of the day missed Godkin’s attention. His views, expressed to an audience of mostly professors and editors, molded public opinion on such issues as the virtues of free trade, the disadvantages of silver coinage, the evils of inflation, and national territorial expansion. A follower of English liberals, Godkin favored restrictions on the powers of government in a laissez-faire society. Simultaneously, for he was not consistent, he found the urban industrial society in which he lived to be full of flaws. He believed that if business adopted a higher moral tone, many social abuses would disappear. A simplistic economic and political thinker, Godkin had as his main stock in trade a fetching appeal for decency in business and public life.

Toward the close of his life, he was seized by a pessimism about the ability of democratic masses to govern themselves. Disillusioned, according to John G. Sproat, his biographer, Godkin “died convinced that imperialism doomed the United States to a slavish repetition of the European experience.” In his heyday as a liberal Republican, however, Godkin did his best to deny Grant renomination in 1872, yet later quietly backed him over Horace Greeley, the Liberal-Republican nominee.

Godkin sold The Nation in 1881 to Henry Villard, proprietor of The New York Evening Post, but stayed on as editor of the magazine, which became the Post’s weekly edition. Two years later, when Carl Schurz retired as principal editor of the Post, Godkin also became editor in chief; he remained until 1900, when he retired.

On the Post, Godkin’s chief interest was the editorial page; he gave little attention to the news columns, assuming that the writers would maintain his own high standards of taste. He was the first New York editor to introduce a highly developed daily editorial conference to thrash out the issues and assign stories to his writers. Godkin himself was a critic of politics and the arts, endowed with a simple, pithy style that combined humor, polish, and a biting edge that turned slang to good use. Yet his objectivity contrasted with the tone of editors who used their papers as personal outlets.

Further, Godkin’s broad background in history, politics, and economics gave him the weapons for dissecting the issues of the day. Steeped in the liberalism of John Stuart Mill and the Manchester School, Godkin opposed protective tariffs and state subsidies, loyal to his own ideals of a laissez-faire liberalism. Although he championed unpopular causes, he denounced labor “agitators” and opposed picketing.

One of his major crusades was the long struggle for civil service reform and against the degradation of public life by the spoils system. Tammany Hall, the Democratic party machine in New York City, was a particular target. On other major questions of the day, Godkin assailed corruption in the Grant regime, criticized the disputed election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 (as decided by an electoral commission in 1877), and stimulated the Mugwump rebellion in 1884 against James G. Blaine. He favored currency reform, the gold standard, and a tariff for revenue only. He was a stalwart opponent of imperialism and territorial expansion, assailing as a capitulation to jingoism President Grover Cleveland’s message vehemently affirming the Monroe Doctrine in a Venezuelan boundary dispute.

Godkin’s professional and personal lives were tightly linked. He was in close touch with leaders in the professions and in public life in New York City and Boston. Personally aristocratic and polished, with a strong sense of humor, he had friends among the most prominent families of England and the United States. He corresponded with James Russell Lowell and with William and Henry James. Another correspondent, and close friend, Lord Bryce, was as pessimistic about democracy in England as Godkin had become about democracy in the United States.

Godkin’s family life was tinged with sorrow. In July 1859 he married Frances Elizabeth Foote, vivacious and intelligent, whom he had met on visits to New Haven as a guest of Yale University luminaries. They had three children, one of whom died in infancy. Their daughter, Lizzy, born in 1865, died in 1873; the death was a family tragedy from which Frances Godkin never recovered, and she died April 11, 1875. Saddened by the twin blows, Godkin left New York City and for two years lived in the more congenial atmosphere of Cambridge, Massachusetts, continuing to edit the Post by long distance. In June 1884 he married Katherine Sands.

In 1900 Godkin’s health deteriorated; after he recuperated, he and his wife sailed for England, where for a year, in improved health, he wrote occasionally for the Post. But he gradually weakened and died, at seventy, in Brixham, Devonshire. He was buried in the Hazelbeach churchyard at Northampton, England.

In retrospect, Godkin’s chief accomplishment as a reformer was in the field of civil service. Yet one should not underestimate the effect of his discourse on public matters; by discussing such issues as gold and silver coinage, free trade, and liberal economics, he stimulated others to think. He was, moreover, a believer in the free market of ideas, as exemplified in The Nation, a periodical that still survives.

Numerous books and collections of essays and letters by E. L. Godkin are available: W. M. Armstrong, ed., The Gilded Age: Letters of E. L. Godkin (1974); Henry G. Pearson: A Memorial Address (1894); A Letter on Lincoln (1913); R. Ogden, ed., Life and Letters of Edwin L. Godkin (1907); critical and biographical introduction to Edmund Burke’s Orations and Essays (1900); Problems of Modern Democracy (1907); Reflections and Comments (collection of Nation articles, 1865-95, 1895); Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy (1898). Books about Godkin include W. M. Armstrong, Godkin: A Biography (1978) and Edwin L. Godkin and American Foreign Policy—1865-1900 (1957); J. G. Murray, Edwin Lawrence Godkin in The Nation (microfilm, 1954). See also J. Bryce, Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903) and J. G. Sproat, Best Men: Liberal Reformers of the Golden Age (1971). Godkin is discussed extensively in books on journalism and the history of his period. Among them are A. Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (1922); W. G. Bleyer, Main Currents in the History of American Journalism (1927); O. G. Villard, Some Newspapers and Newspapermen (1926); V. L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (1927). P. Knightley, The First Casualty (1975) discusses Godkin’s views on war coverage and his criticisms of his colleagues in the Civil War and the Crimean War. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1931).