Part 25

McKinley and Protectionism, Cleveland, Carlisle and Free Trade—how far away they seem!

With the passing of the old issues that divided parties new issues have come upon the scene. The alignment of the future will turn upon these. But underlying all issues of all time are fundamental ideas which live forever and aye, and may not be forgotten or ignored.

It used to be claimed by the followers of Jefferson that Democracy was a fixed quantity, rising out of the bedrock of the Constitution, while Federalism, Whiggism and Republicanism were but the chimeras of some prevailing fancy drawing their sustenance rather from temporizing expediency and current sentiment than from basic principles and profound conviction. To make haste slowly, to look before leaping, to take counsel of experience—were Democratic axioms. Thus the fathers of Democracy, while fully conceiving the imperfections of government and meeting as events required the need alike of movement and reform, put the visionary and experimental behind them to aim at things visible, attainable, tangible, the written Constitution the one safe precedent, the morning star and the evening star of their faith and hope.

What havoc the parties and the politicians have made of all these lofty pretenses! Where must an old-line Democrat go to find himself? Two issues, however, have come upon the scene which for the time being are paramount and which seem organic. They are set for the determination of the twentieth century: The sex question and the drink question.

I wonder if it be possible to consider them in a catholic spirit from a philosophic standpoint. I can truly say that the enactment of prohibition laws, state or national, is personally nothing to me. I long ago reached an age when the convivialism of life ceased to cut any figure in the equation of my desires and habits. It is the never-failing recourse of the intolerant, however, to ascribe an individual, and, of course, an unworthy, motive to contrariwise opinions, and I have not escaped that kind of criticism.

The challenge underlying prohibition is twofold: Does prohibition prohibit, and, if it does, may it not generate evils peculiarly its own?

The question hinges on what are called “sumptuary laws”; that is, statutes regulating the food and drink, the habits and apparel of the individual citizen. This in turn harks back to the issue of paternal government. That, once admitted and established, becomes in time all-embracing.

Bigotry is a disease. The bigot pursuing his narrow round is like the bedridden possessed by his disordered fancy. Bigotry sees nothing but itself, which it mistakes for wisdom and virtue. But Bigotry begets hypocrisy. When this spreads over a sufficient area and counts a voting majority it sends its agents abroad, and thus we acquire canting apostles and legislators at once corrupt and despotic.

They are now largely in evidence in the national capital and in the various state capitals, where the poor-dog, professional politicians most do congregate and disport themselves.

The worst of it is that there seems nowhere any popular realization—certainly any popular outcry. Do the people grow degenerate? Are they willfully dense?

Chapter the Twenty-Sixth

A Libel on Mr. Cleveland—His Fondness for Cards—Some Poker Stories—The “Senate Game”—Tom Ochiltree, Senator Allison and General Schenck

I

Not long after Mr. Cleveland’s marriage, being in Washington, I made a box party embracing Mrs. Cleveland, and the Speaker and Mrs. Carlisle, at one of the theaters where Madame Modjeska was appearing. The ladies expressing a desire to meet the famous Polish actress who had so charmed them, I took them after the play behind the scenes. Thereafter we returned to the White House where supper was awaiting us, the President amused and pleased when told of the agreeable incident.

The next day there began to buzz reports to the contrary. At first covert, they gained in volume and currency until a distinguished Republican party leader put his imprint upon them in an after-dinner speech, going the length of saying the newly-wedded Chief Magistrate had actually struck his wife and forbidden me the Executive Mansion, though I had been there every day during the week that followed.

Mr. Cleveland believed the matter too preposterous to be given any credence and took it rather stoically. But naturally Mrs. Cleveland was shocked and outraged, and I made haste to stigmatize it as a lie out of whole cloth. Yet though this was sent away by the Associated Press and published broadcast I have occasionally seen it referred to by persons over eager to assail a man incapable of an act of rudeness to a woman.

II

Mr. Cleveland was fond—not overfond—of cards. He liked to play the noble game at, say, a dollar limit—even once in a while for a little more—but not much more. And as Dr. Norvin Green was wont to observe of Commodore Vanderbilt, “he held them exceeding close to his boo-som.”

Mr. Whitney, Secretary of the Navy in his first administration, equally rich and hospitable, had often “the road gang,” as a certain group, mainly senators, was called, to dine, with the inevitable after-dinner soirée or séance. I was, when in Washington, invited to these parties. At one of them I chanced to sit between the President and Senator Don Cameron. Mr. Carlisle, at the time Speaker of the House—who handled his cards like a child and, as we all knew, couldn’t play a little—was seated on the opposite side of the table.

After a while Mr. Cameron and I began “bluffing” the game—I recall that the limit was five dollars—that is, raising and back-raising each other, and whoever else happened to be in, without much or any regard to the cards we held.

It chanced on a deal that I picked up a pat flush, Mr. Cleveland a pat full. The Pennsylvania senator and I went to the extreme, the President of course willing enough for us to play his hand for him. But the Speaker of the House persistently stayed with us and could not be driven out.

When it came to a draw Senator Cameron drew one card. Mr. Cleveland and I stood pat. But Mr. Carlisle drew four cards. At length, after much banter and betting, it reached a show-down and, _mirabile dictu_, the Speaker held four kings!

“Take the money, Carlisle; take the money,” exclaimed the President. “If ever I am President again you shall be Secretary of the Treasury. But don’t you make that four-card draw too often.”

He was President again, and Mr. Carlisle was Secretary of the Treasury.

III

There had arisen a disagreeable misunderstanding between General Schenck and myself during the period when the general was Minister at the Court of St. James. In consequence of this we did not personally meet. One evening at Chamberlin’s years after, a party of us—mainly the Ohio statesman’s old colleagues in Congress—were playing poker. He came in and joined us. Neither of us knew the other even by sight and there was no presentation when he sat in.

At length a direct play between the newcomer and me arose. There was a moment’s pause. Obviously we were strangers. Then it was that Senator Allison, of Iowa, who had in his goodness of heart purposely brought about this very situation, introduced us. The general reddened. I was taken aback. But there was no escape, and carrying it off amiably we shook hands. It is needless to say that then and there we dropped our groundless feud and remained the rest of his life very good friends.

In this connection still another poker story. Sam Bugg, the Nashville gambler, was on a Mississippi steamer bound for New Orleans. He came upon a party of Tennesseeans whom a famous card sharp had inveigled and was flagrantly robbing. Sam went away, obtained a pack of cards, and stacked them to give the gambler four kings and the brightest one of the Nashville boys four aces. After two or three failures to bring the cold deck into action Sam Bugg brushed a spider—an imaginary spider, of course—from the gambler’s coat collar, for an instant distracting his attention—and in the momentary confusion the stacked cards were duly dealt and the betting began, the gambler confident and aggressive. Finally, all the money up, the four aces beat the four kings, and for a greater amount than the Nashvillians had lost and the gambler had won. Whereupon, without change of muscle, the gambler drawled: “Mr. Bugg, the next time you see a spider biting me let him bite on!”

I was told that the Senate Game had been played during the War of Sections and directly after for large sums. With the arrival of the rebel brigadiers it was perforce reduced to a reasonable limit.

The “road gang” was not unknown at the White House. Sometimes it assembled at private houses, but its accustomed place of meeting was first Welcker’s and then Chamberlin’s. I do not know whether it continues to have abiding place or even an existence. In spite of the reputation given me by the pert paragraphers I have not been on a race course or seen a horse race or played for other than immaterial stakes for more than thirty years.

IV

As an all-round newspaper writer and reporter many sorts of people, high and low, little and big, queer and commonplace, fell in my way; statesmen and politicians, artists and athletes, circus riders and prize fighters; the riffraff and the élite; the professional and dilettante of the world polite and the underworld.

I knew Mike Walsh and Tim Campbell. I knew John Morrissey. I have seen Heenan—one of the handsomest men of his time—and likewise Adah Isaacs Menken, his inamorata—many said his wife—who went into mourning for him and thereafter hied away to Paris, where she lived under the protection of Alexandre Dumas, the elder, who buried her in Père Lachaise under a handsome monument bearing two words, “Thou knowest,” beneath a carved hand pointed to heaven.

I did draw the line, however, at Cora Pearl and Marcus Cicero Stanley.

The Parisian courtesan was at the zenith of her extraordinary celebrity when I became a rustic boulevardier. She could be seen everywhere and on all occasions. Her gowns were the showiest, her equipage the smartest; her entourage, loud though it was and vulgar, yet in its way was undeniable. She reigned for a long time the recognized queen of the demi-monde. I have beheld her in her glory on her throne—her two thrones, for she had two—one on the south side of the river, the other at the east end—not to mention the race course—surrounded by a retinue of the disreputable. She did not awaken in me the least curiosity, and I declined many opportunities to meet her.

Marcus Cicero Stanley was sprung from an aristocratic, even a distinguished, North Carolina family. He came to New York and set up for a swell. How he lived I never cared to find out, though he was believed to be what the police call a “fence.” He seemed a cross between a “con” and a “beat.” Yet for a while he flourished at Delmonico’s, which he made his headquarters, and cut a kind of dash with the unknowing. He was a handsome, mannerly brute who knew how to dress and carry himself like a gentleman.

Later there came to New York another Southerner—a Far Southerner of a very different quality—who attracted no little attention. This was Tom Ochiltree. He, too, was well born, his father an eminent jurist of Texas; he, himself, a wit, _bon homme_ and raconteur. Travers once said: “We have three professional liars in America—Tom Ochiltree is one and George Alfred Townsend is the other two.”

The stories told of Tom would fill a book. He denied none, however preposterous—was indeed the author of many of the most amusing—of how, when the old judge proposed to take him into law partnership he caused to be painted an office sign: Thomas P. Ochiltree and Father; of his reply to General Grant, who had made him United States Marshal of Texas, and later suggested that it would be well for Tom to pay less attention to the race course: “Why, Mr. President, all that turf publicity relates to a horse named after me, not to me,” it being that the horse of the day had been so called; and of General Grant’s reply: “Nevertheless, it would be well, Tom, for you to look in upon Texas once in a while”—in short, of his many sayings and exploits while a member of Congress from the Galveston district; among the rest, that having brought in a resolution tendering sympathy to the German Empire on the death of Herr Laska, the most advanced and distinguished of Radical Socialists, which became for the moment a _cause célébre_. Tom remarked, “Not that I care a damn about it, except for the prominence it gives to Bismarck.”

He lived when in Washington at Chamberlin’s. He and John Chamberlin were close friends. Once when he was breakfasting with John a mutual friend came in. He was in doubt what to order. Tom suggested beefsteak and onions.

“But,” objected the newcomer, “I am about to call on some ladies, and the smell of onions on my breath, you know!”

“Don’t let that trouble you,” said Tom; “you have the steak and onions and when you get your bill that will take your breath away!”

Under an unpromising exterior—a stocky build and fiery red head—there glowed a brave, generous and tender spirit. The man was a _preux chevalier_. He was a knight-errant. All women—especially all good and discerning women who knew him and who could intuitively read beneath that clumsy personality his fine sense of respect—even of adoration—loved Tom Ochiltree.

The equivocal celebrity he enjoyed was largely fostered by himself, his stories mostly at his own expense. His education had been but casual. But he had a great deal of it and a varied assortment. He knew everybody on both sides of the Atlantic, his friends ranging from the Prince of Wales, afterward Edward VII, Gladstone and Disraeli, Gambetta and Thiers, to the bucks of the jockey clubs. There were two of Tom—Tom the noisy on exhibition, and Tom the courtier in society.

How he lived when out of office was the subject of unflattering conjecture. Many thought him the stipendiary of Mr. Mackay, the multimillionaire, with whom he was intimate, who told me he could never induce Tom to take money except for service rendered. Among his familiars was Colonel North, the English money magnate, who said the same thing. He had a widowed sister in Texas to whom he regularly sent an income sufficient for herself and family. And when he died, to the surprise of every one, he left his sister quite an accumulation. He had never been wholly a spendthrift. Though he lived well at Chamberlin’s in Washington and the Waldorf in New York he was careful of his credit and his money. I dare say he was not unfortunate in the stock market. He never married and when he died, still a youngish man as modern ages go, all sorts of stories were told of him, and the space writers, having a congenial subject, disported themselves voluminously. Inevitably most of their stories were apocryphal.

I wonder shall we ever get any real truth out of what is called history? There are so many sides to it and such a confusing din of voices. How much does old Sam Johnson owe of the fine figure he cuts to Boswell, and, minus Boswell, how much would be left of him? For nearly a century the Empress Josephine was pictured as the effigy of the faithful and suffering wife sacrificed upon the altar of unprincipled and selfish ambition—lovelorn, deserted, heartbroken. It was Napoleon, not Josephine, except in her pride, who suffered. Who shall tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about Hamilton; about Burr; about Cæsar, Caligula and Cleopatra? Did Washington, when he was angry, swear like a trooper? What was the matter with Nero?

IV

One evening Edward King and I were dining in the Champs Elysées when he said: “There is a new coon—a literary coon—come to town. He is a Scotchman and his name is Robert Louis Stevenson.” Then he told me of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At that moment the subject of our talk was living in a kind of self-imposed penury not half a mile away. Had we known this we could have ended the poor fellow’s struggle with his pride and ambition then and there; have put him in the way of sure work and plenty of it; perhaps have lengthened, certainly have sweetened, his days, unless it be true that he was one of the impossibles, as he may easily be conceived to have been from reading his wayward biography and voluminous correspondence.

To a young Kentuckian, one of “my boys,” was given the opportunity to see the last of him and to bury him in far-away Samoa, whither he had taken himself for the final adventure and where he died, having attained some measure of the dreams he had cherished, and, let us hope, happy in the consciousness of the achievement.

I rather think Stevenson should be placed at the head of the latter-day fictionists. But fashions in literature as in dress are ever changing. Washington Irving was the first of our men of letters to obtain foreign recognition. While the fires of hate between Great Britain and America were still burning he wrote kindly and elegantly of England and the English, and was accepted on both sides of the ocean. Taking his style from Addison and Goldsmith, he emulated their charity and humor; he went to Spain and in the same deft way he pictured the then unknown byways of the land of dreams; and coming home again he peopled the region of the Hudson with the beings of legend and fancy which are dear to us.

He became our national man of letters. He stood quite at the head of our literature, giving the lie to the scornful query, “Who reads an American book?” As a pioneer he will always be considered; as a simple and vivid writer of things familiar and entertaining he will probably always be read; but as an originator literary history will hardly place him very high. There Bret Harte surely led him. The Tales of the Argonauts as works of creative fancy exceed the Sketches of Washington Irving alike in wealth of color and humor, in pathos and dramatic

## action.

Some writers make an exception of the famous Sleepy Hollow story. But they have in mind the Rip Van Winkle of Jefferson and Boucicault, not the rather attenuated story of Irving, which—as far as the twenty years of sleep went—was borrowed from an old German legend.

Mark Twain and Bret Harte, however, will always be bracketed with Washington Irving. Of the three I incline to the opinion that Mark Twain did the broadest and strongest work. His imagination had wider reach than Irving’s. There is nowhere, as there is in Harte, the suspicion either of insincerity or of artificiality. Irving’s humor was the humor of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield. It is old English. Mark Twain’s is his own—American through and through to the bone. I am not unmindful of Cooper and Hawthorne, of Longfellow, of Lowell and of Poe, but speak of Irving as the pioneer American man of letters, and of Mark Twain and Bret Harte as American literature’s most conspicuous and original modern examples.

Chapter the Twenty-Seventh

The Profession of Journalism—Newspapers and Editors in America—Bennett, Greeley and Raymond—Forney and Dana—The Education of a Journalist

I

The American newspaper has had, even in my time, three separate and distinct epochs; the thick-and-thin, more or less servile party organ; the personal, one-man-controlled, rather blatant and would-be independent; and the timorous, corporation, or family-owned billboard of such news as the ever-increasing censorship of a constantly centralizing Federal Government will allow.

This latter appears to be its present state. Neither its individuality nor its self-exploitation, scarcely its grandiose pretension, remains. There continues to be printed in large type an amount of shallow stuff that would not be missed if it were omitted altogether. But, except as a bulletin of yesterday’s doings, limited, the daily newspaper counts for little, the single advantage of the editor—in case there is an editor—that is, one clothed with supervising authority who “edits”—being that he reaches the public with his lucubrations first, the sanctity that once hedged the editorial “we” long since departed.

The editor dies, even as the actor, and leaves no copy. Editorial reputations have been as ephemeral as the publications which gave them contemporary importance. Without going as far back as the Freneaus and the Callenders, who recalls the names of Mordecai Mannasseh Noah, of Edwin Crosswell and of James Watson Webb? In their day and generation they were influential and distinguished journalists. There are dozens of other names once famous but now forgotten; George Wilkins Kendall; Gerard Hallock; Erastus Brooks; Alexander Bullitt; Barnwell Rhett; Morton McMichael; George William Childs, even Thomas Ritchie, Duff Green and Amos Kendall. “Gales and Seaton” sounds like a trade-mark; but it stood for not a little and lasted a long time in the National Capital, where newspaper vassalage and the public printing went hand-in-hand.

For a time the duello flourished. There were frequent “affairs of honor”—notably about Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in South Carolina—sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of John H. Pleasants and one of the sons of Thomas Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed, and the yet more celebrated affair between Graves, of Kentucky, and Cilley, of Maine, in which Cilley was killed; Bladensburg the scene, and the refusal of Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the occasion.

I once had an intimate account of this duel with all the cruel incidents from Henry A. Wise, a party to it, and a blood-curdling narrative it made. They fought with rifles at thirty paces, and Cilley fell on the third fire. It did much to discredit duelling in the South. The story, however, that Graves was so much affected that thereafter he could never sleep in a darkened chamber had no foundation whatever, a fact I learned from my associate in the old Louisville Journal and later in The Courier-Journal, Mr. Isham Henderson, who was a brother-in-law of Mr. Graves, his sister, Mrs. Graves, being still alive. The duello died at length. There was never sufficient reason for its being. It was both a vanity and a fad. In Hopkinson Smith’s “Col. Carter of Cartersville,” its real character is hit off to the life.

II

When very early, rather too early, I found myself in the saddle, Bennett and Greeley and Raymond in New York, and Medill and Storey in Chicago, were yet alive and conspicuous figures in the newspaper life of the time. John Bigelow, who had retired from the New York Evening Post, was Minister to France. Halstead was coming on, but, except as a correspondent, Whitelaw Reid had not “arrived.” The like was true of “Joe” McCullagh, who, in the same character, divided the newspaper reading attention of the country with George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt. Joseph Medill was withdrawing from the Chicago Tribune in favor of Horace White, presently to return and die in harness—a man of sterling intellect and character—and Wilbur F. Storey, his local rival, who was beginning to show signs of the mental malady that, developed into monomania, ultimately ended his life in gloom and despair, wrecking one of the finest newspaper properties outside of New York. William R. Nelson, who was to establish a really great newspaper in Kansas City, was still a citizen of Ft. Wayne.