One Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Horace Greeley THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ,x-> race oree Centenary Typographical Union No. 6 One Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Horace Greeley First President of V . Typographical Union No. 6 New York Theatre February 5, 1911 Under the Auspices of "Big 6 HORACE GREELEY A rare photograph of Mr. Greeley, taken in 1850, while president of the New York Printers' Union. "?, 0- *-- -4 r The Formation of Typographical Union No. 6 By GEORGE A. STEVENS At the close of 1849 the New York Printers' Union (which became Typo- graphical Union No. 6 when the National Typographical Union was founded in 1852) was in a formative state. It had adopted a constitution, and under the provisions of that fundamental law the first regular session of the union convened at Stoneall's Hotel, 131 Fulton Street, on Saturday evening, Janu- ary 19, 1850. The important business of that meeting was the election of officers for the succeeding yearly term. Horace Greeley had been invited to accept the Presidency of the young organization, and he had cheerfully consented to serve in that capacity. He was therefore chosen unanimously, as were also these other officers: Vice-President, Edgar H. Rogers; Recording Secretary, "William H. Prindle; Financial Secretary, R. Cunnington; Corresponding Secretary, George Johnson; Treasurer, Thomas N. Rooker. It was quite natural for the organized printers to select Horace Greeley as their first presiding officer, because he already had been prominently > identified with workingmen's movements in a number of trades to better 00 their social and economic condition. He favored united action on their part. oc Not alone in the editorial columns of the Tribune did he urge that only 5 through associated effort could they succeed in establishing wages at a ~ standard that would permit them to preserve their homes and enjoy the comforts to which they and their families were entitled, but from the ros- " trum he eloquently espoused their cause, appealing to the public conscience w to aid in the crusade for shorter working time, improved shop conditions, and the correction of abuses that had crept insidiously into industrial life and sapped the strength of those who toiled. Especially solicitous was he . for the welfare of his own craftsmen, and he impressed upon them the neces- o sity of co-operating with him in an effort to place the printing business on ^ a broader plane, so that both the workers and the employers could derive a jg just remuneration for their work. w When the draft of the first scale of prices of the Printers' Union was H presented for consideration, President Greeley gave expression to these ideas < on the subject in the Tribune of September 3, 1850: "There ought obvi- ously to be some uniform standard or scale to be appealed to in case of dif- ference as to the proper compensation for any work done. Anarchy, uncertainty and chaos on this subject are all against the fair, regular, live- and-let-live employer, who wants good work done by good workmen, and is willing to pay for it : and benefit only the niggard who calculates to enrich himself by grinding the face of the poor and robbing labor of its honest due. 461464 All we ask is a reasonable and explicit scale of prices, agreed to by employers and journeymen, and binding until both parties consent to a change. Such a one may now be had if the honorable and fair-dealing employers will con- fer with the journeymen in establishing it." In the following November the Printers' Union held a mass meeting, at which there was a thorough discussion of the proposed scale. Mr. Greeley attended and made a vigorous speech in favor of the proposition for uniform wages. He declared that the matter ought to be brought to a decision, and if the journeymen failed to enforce their rates they should establish a model printing office to print books, pamphlets, newspapers', and all sorts of publications, and work for themselves as a co-operative society. They had met for work, he said, and not for talk, and he hoped they would do something effectual before they separated, as it was high time to bring the existing system to an end. The scale was finally adopted and went into effect in February, 1851, at which time Mr. Greeley printed a strong editorial in its favor, and it was accepted by the great majority of the employing printers. President Greeley served the union faithfully and well throughout his term, and he also represented the organization in the Congress of Trades, the central association of workingmen that was organized in this city in 1850. He retired from office on January 4, 1851. His official call for the meeting that was held on that date contained this announcement: "The First Annual Ball of the Union comes off at Tripler Hall Tuesday evening, January 7, 1851." PROGRAMME OVERTURE Prof. Max Schmidt and Orchestra TYPOGRAPHICAL UNION No. 6 President James Tole VIOLIN SELECTION a) "Meditation" (Thais) b) "Adoration" Miss Marie Deutscher Accompanist, Mr. Herbert Braham Massenet Borowski "HORACE GREELEY AND THE CAUSE OF LABOR" Senator Albert J. Beveridge, of Indiana ORCHESTRA SELECTIONS "HORACE GREELEY, THE JOURNALIST" Mr. William H. McElroy, former Editor of the New York Tribune SOPRANO SOLO, "The Lark" Mme. Alma Webster Powell Accompanist, Mr. A. Judson Powell - Bishop ORCHESTRA SELECTIONS 'HORACE GREELEY, THE MAN" Mr. Andrew McLean, Editor of the Brooklyn Citizen ii i* U rtij. That was admitted a Member of Ihe Neu*ftrh printers' 2Bttion, A Reproduction of Card No. 1, Issued by Horace Greeley cAddress of the Chairman JAMES TOLE President of Typographical Union No. 6 It is fitting that Typographical Union No. 6 should today bring to a close the three-days' series of celebrations of the birth of Horace Greeley its first president. Greeley was noted for many things, but we wish to remember him as Horace Greeley the printer ! What emotions are stirred by the mere utterance of those simple words! From 1850 to 1911, in the counting of time, is but the passing of a shadow. Yet in the fleeting of years nations and peoples have run the gamut of change ; heroes have dis- ported their laurel wreaths and passed away ; statesmen and great men in all lines of endeavor have enjoyed the sweets of their greatness, and have then stepped from the gaze of the moment. But we have been endowed with the blessed faculty of memory that memory which at bidding con- jures to the mind the glories of the past and maintains our veneration of those to whose examples we owe so much. It is, therefore, with iriore than pride and gratitude that we of the printing craft speak and think of Horace Greeley as a printer. Should we not be proud, indeed, to remember that in the hour of his greatest triumphs he, too, was proud that he was a printer? And how grateful are we that the first line written in the glorious his- tory of our organization emanated from so great a mind. For on January 1, 1850 sixty-one years ago the New York Printers' Union was organ- ized, and Greeley was its first president. The inspiring figure of Horace Greeley has surely spurred on to ambi- tious heights many of our craftsmen who followed him, and who themselves have attained to high honors in the land. Notable names might be men- tioned to those who, like the subject of the day, left the printers' case to take their places in the highest intelligence of the day. The printers' trade has been described as "the art preservative." It is more it is the avenue through which was approached the wonderful career of this immortal American, whose impress upon the social and politi- cal history of our country is written in lines of grateful remembrance. It may be that when the present fades away in the shadows of the past when the children of the future shall have become the moulders of the nation's destiny, when the press of new and strange things fills the public mind it may be that the world at large will but hazily think of the com- manding intellect of the printer in honor of whose memory we are now assembled. But the "art preservative of all arts" the art of which he was so ardent a disciple keeps forever the indelible record of his life, forever furnishing deepest inspiration, encouraging ambition to great achievements. No grander character springs from history's pages than this man, who, first perceiving the need of reforms in trade conditions then existing was the first to set about effecting those reforms. No union printer of the present day can fail to appreciate the efforts of this pioneer to establish the craft upon a basis deserving the respect of the community. Who shall say that the widespreading influence and power of the International Typo- graphical Union are not due to the energies of those who laid our founda- tions more than half a century ago? The man who begun by putting into type the thoughts of others, who later aspired even to the highest honor within the gift of his countrymen was a printer. Never forgetting his early training and associations in a printing office, it is a matter of record that among his most active work in New York City was that in the direction of elevating his chosen craft, and the success of his labors is now evidenced in the position of influence of the present union of 7.000 members, of which he was the first president a union then of 27 members. Since the stirring days of his activities in our ranks others have ap- peared and performed their alloted duties among men; men and times and conditions have changed; adversities have been met and conquered; we have been torn by strife and at times have been forced almost to the last issue in order to maintain our integrity. But throughout it all even in the darkest hour, when hope was ebbing low there was always before us the indomitable spirit of the man who set our ship afloat, the man who knew how to battle for right, whose fearlessness and determination are today the pride and glory of every American union printer. Fitting it is, then, that on this day, in various parts of the country, assemblages such as this one have gathered together to pay tribute to the memory of this great American. Men of the journalist profession are today extolling the qualities of the genius whose magic has widened the scope of their endeavors, and whose name is linked forever with the highest and purest ideals. They will speak reverently of him not only as the lead- ing editor of his time, as the greatest power in journalism of his day, but also as an astute statesman, a true and keen observer of the trend of events. Journalist, statesman, thinker, reformer, man of affairs he was, leaving behind him the ineffaceable record of his greatness! But our fondest thought of him is of the man in all his simple earnestness, the worker in the ranks of his fellow men, ever striving for the general uplift of mankind and thinking of himself merely as Horace Greeley the printer. 10 cylddress by Hon. A. J. Beveridge "Horace Greeley and the Cause of Labor" The labor problem is the fundamental problem. Believing 1 this. Horace Greeley was, in his time, the prophet of a brighter day for thcxse who toil. The great journal which he founded became, in a critical period, the trum- pet of American conscience; yet even above his fame as one of the most brilliant journalists the world has produced stands his renown as a cham- pion of the rights of labor. The welfare of men, women, and children who must eat their bread in the sweat of their faces was his deepest concern. Wise counsellor of the toiling masses, he also was a fearless fighter to better their conditions. What Horace Greeley believed in, that he fought for. Even in his early manhood Horace Greeley saw that simple and sublime truth that the laborer is not merely a commodity, but a human being, and therefore that every phase of the labor problem can be solved only from this Christian viewpoint. The old and savage theory that the workingman is merely merchandise like a sack of flour or a bucket of coal or a threshing machine; that the life energies of man, woman and child should be bought in a labor market at the lowest price which the competition of hunger made possible; that the employer need not think of the employee as a human being but only as a working animal to be used until exhausted and then cast aside that idea i,s the child of brutal barbarism. It came down to us from the hideous past. It has built more hovels and prevented the building of more homes ; placed more broken human beings in their graves and filled the abiding places of mankind with more misery and woe than all the wars that have cursed the world. This apparently is extreme ; yet it is but a carefully guarded statement of facts established by history and statistics. To Horace Greeley this idea of human labor was horrible. It would be better for the Nation and all the world if the master minds directing the material forces of our time could see this as Horace Greeley saw it. It would be better if the principle of brotherhood should enter into all our industry and commerce, making human the harsh principle of commer- cialism the principle of profit at any cost, of gain at any sacrifice, even the sacrifice of human happiness and life. And, indeed, more and more is this transpiring. More and more the principle of brotherhood is making its conquest of our industrial and commercial life. 11 More and more the idea that the laborer is a human being serving his employer in fellowship for their mutual welfare is overcoming the idea that the workingman is a mere tool, a senseless mechanism to be used only for his employer's profit until his industrial effectiveness is gone and then thrown helpless, hopeless and ruined into the great human scrapheap like a wrecked machine or ashes of burned-out fuel. For the present progress and final triumph of the idea of the laborer as a huinan being as much if not more credit is due Hiorace Greeley than to any other single American intellect. His declaration that "Man was not made merely to eat, work and sleep" went to the hearts of his countrymen when he uttered it and comes to us today like the burning words of the Hebrew prophets. His battlecry was "A place for every man and a man for every place." He declared that "Dives might perhaps give Lazarus a steady job of oakum-picking, or even gardening, in order to keep the crumbs about his table for his dogs exclusively, without at all recognizing the essential brotherhood between them or doing anything to vindicate it." For an hour I might quote such utterances of Horace Greeley. But he did not stop with these splendid generalities. A\ 7 ith the vigor of conviction he gave them point and substance by concrete plans for labor's betterment. He was among the greatest of the advocates of organized labor. He saw not only the inhumanity that the toiler suffered from want of organization ; saw not only that the disorganization of labor and the organization of cap- ital made possible "man's inhumanity to man" which "makes countless thousands mourn," but also he saw that lack of organization among labor- ers caused incredible waste and loss. It was Horace Greeley who declared that ' ' The aggregate waste of labor and faculty for want of organization in any year exceeds the cost of any war for five years, ruinous and detestable as all war is. It is palpable fatuity and criminal waste of the divine bounty to let this go on intermin- ably." And so Horace Greeley preached the righteousness and wisdom of the organization of labor. He was our great American champion of the brother- hood of toil. Not even today does any economist more thoroughly under- stand the philosophy of the organization of labor than Horace Greeley understood it three-quarters of a century ago. And no man today expounds with more guarded thoughtfulness or brilliant argument the common sense and beneficence of organized labor than did this journalistic tribune of the people from early manhood to the very sunset of his life. He thought, spoke and fought for improved labor conditions in every phase of labor's activity and life. He believed labor entitled to higher wages. Horace Greeley thought that labor, which, jointly with capital, produces this wealth, should get an increased and increasing share of it. Even in that day Greeley was shocked at the lightning-like accumula- tion of riches in the hands of a few who did little to earn them and the 12 appalling increase of the thousands who asked only an opportunity to work that they might eat. No clearer light ever has been thrown on unjustifiable industrial and financial inequalities than Horace Greeley's remorseless analysis; few stronger denunciations of this wicked condition ever were pronounced since the time when the Divine Equalizer gave to mankind his sacred message two thousand years ago. But in nearly all he said and proposed for the welfare of the working- man, Greeley was carefully practical; he did not propose to cure between morning and nightfall all the injustices we have inherited from the begin- ning of time. But there were some things upon which he did insist as immediately necessary and not to be compromised. One of these was a shortening of the laborer's working day. At that time it was both law and usage to employ labor at the lowest possible point to which the fear of starvation could drive wages, and then compel the laborer to work as many hours as the employer chose without consultation or consent of the man who did the work. So laborers were compelled to work twelve and fourteen hours, and for even longer periods, every working day. Greeley proposed to shorten this period of toil, either by agreement or by law, to a maximum of ten hours a day. The employers thought this meant their business injury even their bankruptcy. Greeley showed them, instead, that shorter hours and higher wages meant, the employers' increased prosperity. It was the same conflict between a blind and sordid selfishness on the one hand and a wise, common-sense and humanitarianism on the other hand that occurred in England a few years earlier, when Shaftesbury and Sad- dler and the other British labor reformers began to fight for the idea of the laborer as a human being. But no English reformer ever put the argument for shortening hours of labor more compellingly than did the American Greeley. Aside from the economic folly of an unlimited working day, its crass injustice shocked Greeley's honest soul. Of this stupid wrong he said : "It would be as sensible and just to prescribe that a pound of meat or sugar or coffee should consist of just as many ounces as the buyer should see fit, after the price had been settled, to exact, or that a bushel of grain should consist of an indefinite number of quarts, as that a day's work should con- sist of ten, eleven, twelve or thirteen hours' faithful labor, just as the purchaser of that labor should think proper to require." The fact that in nearly fifty trades there is at the present time an eight- hour day by agreement between employers and their organized employees; that as a result there is an increased and better product, a sturdier, happier and more enlightened laboring class ; that there are more homes and fewer hovels for these laborers, and that those homes have more books, music and comforts than ever before, is due to this humane agitation for a shorter 13 (lay of labor, of which Horace Greeley was one of the first and greatest American apostles, and to the steady, intelligent efforts of organized labor, of which Horace GreeJey was one of the first and greatest American champions. Child labor is America's peculiar industrial shame. It is a crime against manhood labor every child laborer at childhood wages takes the place of a man laborer at manhood wages. It is a crime against the humane business man his goods, made by man- hood labor at manhood wages, must meet his competitors' goods made by child labor at childhood wages. It is a crime against childhood every little one has an inalienable, a sacred, right to grow into sound-bodied, clear-brained, pure-souled maturity. It is a crime against society ; it pours into our citizenship a stream of people weakened in body and mind. It is an insult to our religion, whose founder said : ' ' Suffer little chil- dren to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of God." Horace Greeley was against it. Even in his day, when greed had scarcely begun to chain us to this body of death, he sought to restrain it. It was Horace Greeley who declared: "The State has a right to see and ought to see that the frames of the rising generation are not shattered nor their constitutions undermined by excessive toil. She should do this for her own sake as well as for Humanity's. She has a vital interest in the strength and vigor of those who are to be her future fathers and mothers, her de- fenders in war, her cultivators and artisans in peace, * * * For what- ever service it may be necessary to employ labor * * * there will always be found an abundance of adults if proper inducements are offered." Thus spoke Horace Greeley when child labor in America w^as a pleasant pastime compared with the black brutality of child labor in America today. What would he say now if he could see the reeking sweatshops, the clouded coal breakers, the thundering mills where scores of thousands of little ones are being sacrificed to Mammon in the name of a false prosperity. Here is how he summed up his unanswerable arguments for a higher estate for those who toil : "A better social condition, enlarged opportunities for good, an atmos- phere of humanity and hope, would insure a nobler and truer character, and that the dens of dissipation will clear to leave those whom a proper education has qualified and whom excessive toil has not disqualified for the improvement of liberty and leisure. "Our Eden is before us, not behind us," said Horace Greeley. And that is true. It is a long, long march before us and we can reach it as all inarching armies reach their destination, only by a step at a time. There are those who are impatient with this slow progress they want to reach the end with a single stride. Let us not blame them, for hard conditions justify their impatience. 14 There are those who resist any forward step whatever they think humanity's advance means their financial loss. Let us not blame them either, but merely pity them that the lust of gain has blinded them to the fellowship of man. Most of the labor reforms which Greeley proposed and for which lie fought already have been realized in part and ultimately and soon will be realized entirely. The ten-hour working day for which Greeley battled, against the un- limited working day of his time, now has grown into the eight-hour day from the same arguments and facts which Greeley used. It ought to be universal in all trades. From ocean to ocean organized labor is now a fact as permanent as the Government itself. The holy crusade against child labor now moving militantly forward will not cease until this stain is wiped entirely from our flag. In short, the day is dawning when the evils that Greeley denounced and the principal reforms which he proposed will be accomplished, and the mul- tiplying millions who produce the wealth of the land in peace and carry its muskets in war will more largely enjoy life, liberty and pursuit of happi- ness which is their inalienable right. And when the sun of that day is fully above the horizon its glad light will reveal Horace Greeley as the heroic figure of that notable epoch for those who toil Horace Greeley at once that epoch's prophet, philosopher, orator and soldier of the common good. 15 HORACE GREELEY c>4.ddress by William H. McElroy "Horace Greeley As a Journalist" On the 17th of August, 1831, Horace Greeley, then twenty years old, came to New York City looking for work. He carried his entire fortune- upwards of ten dollars in his pocket. He knew nobody, he bore letters of introduction to no citizen, desirable or undesirable. His nearest friend was two hundred miles away. Nevertheless the boy was hardly to be pitied. For he resolutely declined to allow poverty to blight him. On the contrary, he forced it to bless him by using it as a spur to worthy endeavor. Lacking visible friends the voice of God in his own soul must have cheered him with the assurance that he could enlist in his service if he chose and young Horace Greeley chose friends invisible but most powerful a goodly company, composed of trustworthiness, industry, perseverance, patience, courage. The sister of another prominent American told me this story of her brother. He had risen from poverty and obscurity to riches and honor, had become one of the foremost men of his country. One afternoon as she was sitting with him in his library his son came in. The son was a gay young man of fashion and something of a "sport." He had been out driving and entered the library jauntily, carrying his whip in his hand. His father gazed at him a moment and then said, with a sigh, ' ' Jack, do you know that I am inclined to pity you?" Jack, young, handsome, without a care, an heir to a fortune, naturally was amazed. "Why in the world do you pity me, father?" he asked. "Well, my son," his father explained, "I am inclined to pity you because you will never have the benefit of the disad- vantages under which I labored at your age. ' ' Horace Greeley, in the days of his youth, had the benefit of a number of first-rate disadvantages. In his essay on Representative Men, Mr. Emerson writes: "When Nature removes a great man people explore the horizon for a successor. But none comes and none will. His class is extinguished with him." But the passing away of some great men does not seem the extinguishment of their class. They go, but their class survives. That is to say, sooner or later they are succeeded by men who remind us of them, who perform the sort of work which they performed. But it was emphatically true of Horace Greeley that "his class perished with him"; that we shall not see his like again. He was not only a great man but a great man of a rare sort. He has been studied from many points of view but has not been adequately painted, for his was a personal equation of which it may be said what Daniel Webster said of Eloquence: "Words and phrases may be marshalled in every way; they cannot express it." 17 The theme which has been assigned me, Horace Greeley as a Journalist, does not call for a survey of his career from all points of view, but simply for a consideration of the character and significance of his work in his chosen profession. Many circumstances combined to make him what he was the foremost journalist of his generation. He was preeminently a manly man, a man who did his own thinking and not thinking which he inherited or was dictated to him. He was generously endowed with moral energy, intellectual resources and sympathy, of the affirmative sort, for all sorts and conditions of men, especially for the poor and oppressed. He loved work as ardently as Romeo loved Juliet. It was given him to labor in the most important, and therefore the most stimulating, newspaper field in the United States. He flourished at a time when there was special need of him a time when the supply of food for the mind and soul furnished by the newspapers of the country was sadly unequal to the demand. Just as John was called to go crying in the wilderness, "bearing witness to the Light," Horace Greeley would seem to have been called to serve as guide, philosopher, friend to thousands of his countrymen all over the land. His equipment for such a task included, among its essentials, the pen of a fluent, forcible writer. It was wickedly said of a certain rhapsodical poet that He had nothing to say but he said it splendidly. Mr. Greeley had much to say that was well worth listening to on a variety of topics of general interest, and he knew how to say it. He was a master of what has been called the art of putting things. His literary style was as frank and unaf- fected as his own nature. Sometimes, in the heat of a political canvass or in reply to a wanton attack or in the stress of one of his numberless con- troversies, his output of heated superlatives was very large. Charging his ink with vitriol he indulged in imprecatory adjectives and substantives, losing sight of the sound old caution, "Strong without rage, without overflowing full." His brother journalists of the press of the metropolis, William Cullen Bryant, Charles A. Dana and Henry J. Raymond, all college-bred men, excelled him as a writer, in certain particulars. Bryant, the poet-editor, was more profound and polished. Dana was his superior in versatility and scholarship, Raymond was more brilliant, more philosophic. But none of them surpassed him in mental robustness, none in pungent unambiguous expression. When he undertook to call a spade a spade, he did so with precision in terms which rendered it impossible for the reader to suppose that he was referring to a shovel. It is to be added, in enumerating the sources of Mr. Greeley 's strength as a journalist, that after the Tribune became well established he made a large number of lecture tours. He addressed lyceums, agricultural societies, mechanics' institutes, chambers of commerce and other bodies in various parts of the land, and in addition did his share of stump-speaking here and there. He was thus brought into personal contact with the people, and gained, at first hand, an insight into their needs and aspirations which added 18 sensibly to his practical efficiency. He was proficient in few of the arts of oratory and still was a popular speaker your mere elocutionist, how- ever accomplished, is not listened to as attentively as the man behind the gun, although the man distinctly falls "below Demosthenes or Cicero." When Mr. Greely rose to speak, his hearers said to one another, "We will now hear from the man behind the Tribune." I have said that, although not an orator (in the academic sense of the term), he was, nevertheless, a popular speaker. Andrew I). White, the distinguished ex-president of Cornell University, said of one of Mr. Greeley's speeches which he was privileged to hear (and Mr. White was a good judge of such matters) : "I never heard a more simple, strong, lucid use of the English language." That was Horace Greeley, with tongue or with pen simple, strong and lucid. I have thus glanced there is only time for a glance at funda- mental things which went to the making of Greeley the journalist and ren- dered him an influence whose extent and force it would be difficult to over- estimate. From the Atlantic to the Pacific he came to be looked up to as the chief educator of his profession, the leading moulder of public opinion, an inspiration to wholesome, progressive, broad-gauge living. More than that, the masses, as they became acquainted with his personality, grew fond of him ; for they felt, and felt truly, that "His heart was made of simple, manly stuff, As home-spun as their own." It is to be noted that these parishioners of his did not invariably say amen, to his utterances. Now and then they distinctly disagreed with him. Now and then they made light of some scheme of his for accelerating the approach of the millennium. Now and then they resented his attitude touching party principles or policies or leaders. Now and then they called him a visionary. Not a few of them repudiated his war policy and greeted his signing of Jefferson Davis' bail bond with "curses red with uncommon wrath. " But one thing they did not do they never really doubted him, never withdrew their confidence from him. Their faith in the man was founded on a rock. So it is that what Lowell said of another illustrious American is emphatically true of Horace Greeley he was a "standing testimonial to the cumulative power of character." Mr. Greeley edited three newspapers before starting the Tribune pre- liminary flights to test the machine. The Xcw Yorker was his first venture a weekly, so the prospectus ran devoted to "current literature, politics and general news." It began in March, 18M4, and was discontinued in Sep- tember, 1841. Its demise was due largely to the distressing circumstance that very many of its subscribers never paid their bills. In his "Recollec- tions of a Busy Life, ' ' Mr. Greeley states that when the paper stopped these delinquents, who became permanent in their delinquency, owed him ten thousand dollars. (It would appear from this that there were some bad people in New York even in "the good old days.") Mr. Greeley's next 10 newspaper was the Jcffcrsonian, a weekly campaign sheet in the interest of the Whig party. Price fifty cents a year. It was published in 1838-39 and was succeeded in 1840 by another and much more important campaign paper, the Log Cabin. That was the year when "William Henry Harrison was elected President of the United States, and it is scarcely too much to assert that the Log Cabin did as much to elect him as any other agency em- ployed in the canvass. It was, in fact, an ideal campaign paper, made up of short, telling editorials, trenchant and witty paragraphs; wood-cuts, crude but entertaining and effective, and "Tippecanoe" songs, words and music, so "catchy" and so expressive of the popular feeling that the country became vociferously vocal during that Harrison campaign. With the Log Cabin Mr. Greeley completed his newspaper novitiate ; for on the tenth of April, 1841, he issued the first number of the journal which was to win him imperishable fame the New York Tribune. Now. all these papers, differing from one another in some respects, had one noteworthy characteristic in common. They were clean papers, whole- some papers, papers which did not pander, papers which declined to make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness. In his "Recollections," Mr. Greeley directs, attention to the fact that the Jeffcrsonian "carefully eschewed abuse, scurrility and railing accusation." The Log Cabin, which he states, was "more lively and less sedately argumentative" than its prede- cessor, was like it in avoiding abuse, scurrility and railing accusation. That it was determined not to strike any foul blows is attested by a letter which Mr. Greeley wrote to one of his correspondents. In this letter the correspondent is informed that "Articles assailing the personal character of Mr. Van Buren [who was General Harrison's competitor for the Presi- dency] or of his supporters cannot be printed in the Cabin." As for the Tribune, it made clear in its prospectus that it was bent upon conforming its conduct to a high moral standard. This is the essential part of the pros- pectus, "The Tribune, as its name imports, will labour to advance the in- terests of the people and to promote their moral, social and political well- being. The immoral and degrading police reports, advertisements and other matter, which have been allowed to disgrace the columns of our leading penny papers, will be carefully excluded from this, and no exertion spared to render it worthy of the hearty approval of the virtuous and refined and a welcome visitor at the fireside. ' ' Words are always cheap, but Mr. Greeley conducted the Tribune in accordance with what he thus promised. He made it the conservator of whatever things are pure, lovely and of good report. He made it hospitable to science, to literature and the other arts, fine or useful. Its columns were open to the discussion of any cause including some vagaries which was decent. It was a powerful and persistent champion of the rights of labor. Such was its devotion to freedom and such its efficiency in battling against her enemies, that Harper's Weekly, in its leader on the death of Mr. Greeley, did not hesitate to declare that "Xo single force in educating the nation for 20 the terrible struggle with slavery was so powerful as the Tribune." Horace Greeley, as thus revealed, was a good and faithful servant of the people, a stalwart promoter of the civilization which really civilizes. A certain publication was once characterized as a newspaper "for which there is always a market but never an enthusiasm. " Mr. Greeley, while riot lacking a decent respect for the almighty dollar, aimed primarily to furnish his readers with a paper which would command their enthusiasm. "To do good," he said in one of his occasional addresses, "is the proper business of life ; to qualify for earnestness and efficiency in doing good, is the true end of Education ; the sum of all the knowledge in the child is the consciousness that he lives not for himself, but for his Creator and his race." Mr. Greeley 's course as a journalist was in harmony with that exalted con- ception of the purpose of human life. He did, indeed, labor strenuously to make his paper marketable an eight-hour law for others but a sixteen- hour law for Greeley, would seem to have been his way of disposing of one phase of the labor question but it was not in the man to strive for material success at the expense of principle. It followed, of course, that the assump- tion that a newspaper is a "business enterprise," never impressed him. His career justified the inference that in his view a newspaper is not a business enterprise in any sense which puts it in a different class, so far as moral obligation is concerned, from that in which the business enterprise of preaching the Gospel belongs. In other words, it was Mr. Greeley 's con- viction that the editor of a newspaper in his sanctum in the discharge of the duties of his vocation, is just as amenable to the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount as the minister in his pulpit in the discharge of the duties of his vocation. It behooves the minister to preach the truth as he sees it, whether men will hear or whether they will forbear. It no less behooves the editor so Mr. Greeley held, and ho "put his creed into his deed" to print only what he himself regards as reputable, whether men take or refuse to take his paper. Mr. Greeley had a decided opinion on the much-mooted question as to what a newspaper ought and ought not to print. One of the current New York dailies takes for its motto, "All the News that's Fit to Print"; the motto of another is "All the News that Is News." Charles A. Dana, in an address before a newspaper association, defined news to be "anything which interests the people." He went on to say that "Whatever Divine Prov- idence permits to occur I am not too proud to print." Mr. Greeley, on the other hand, in a letter written to Mr. Dana while that gentleman was a member of the Tribune staff, exclaimed, "Oh, my friend, the wisdom which teaches us what should not be said, that is the hardest to be acquired of all!" Mr. Greeley did not believe in reporting "whatever Divine Provi- dence permitted to occur." He drew the line somewhere. Divine Provi- dence permitted Sodom and Gomorra to occur. But, judging from the con- victions which Mr. Greeley expressed on the subject of newspaper publicity, he would have held that an unvarnished report of the doings at Sodom and Gomorra, when the lid was off, would have been eligible only for the waste- basket. Mr. Greeley was profoundly in earnest. There was nothing perfunctory, nothing lukewarm in his journalistic work. His utterances had their root in strong convictions. Henry J. Raymond was credited with saying to a friend that he himself never finished a sentence without a profound feeling that io was only partially true. Mr. Greeley was too thorough-going, too decided in his opinions, to have experienced such a feeling. It is related of Charles Simmer that once in the United States Senate, while he was indulging in a peculiarly fierce philippic against slavery, a fellow Senator ventured to ask him to consider the other side. "Sir," thundered Simmer, "there isn't any other side." When Greeley sat down to express his views on Slavery, Protection, Whigism, Republicanism, Henry Clay, or on any of his other favorite themes, there wasn't any other side, so far as he was concerned. He wrote with the serene confidence of one who is enunciating axioms, and, jilthough his utterances did not invariably harmonize with one another the utterances of progressive men seldom do there was an air of something very like infallibility about them. It was not unnatural, therefore, that the Tribune came to be regarded by many of its readers as of only less author- ity than the Bible itself. Mr. Depew, at the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Tribune, brought out this circumstance in his own charac- teristically racy way. We quote from his address: " 'Why do you look so gloomy?' said a traveler riding along the highway in the Western Reserve, in the old anti-slavery days, to a farmer who was sitting moodily on a fence. 'Because,' said the farmer, 'my Democratic friend next door got the best of me in an argument last night. But when I get my semi-weekly Tribune to- morrow I'll knock the foundations all out from under him.' When I was a lad in the country," Mr. Depew continued, "I have frequently observed a man drive in ten miles to the village post-office for his weekly Tribune, and the same person, when term closed, came up to the academy for his boy. I could see no difference in the affectionate tenderness and eager pleasure with which he grasped his paper or embraced his son." What a political journalist Horace Greeley was! In a popular govern- ment such as ours, a government through parties, politics is virtually a con- tinuous performance. While he was as yet but a little more than a baby he became immersed in politics and he remained immersed in them as long as he lived. He may not, indeed, have compiled election returns in his cradle, but he informs us that he was "an ardent politician when not yet half old enough to vote." In his "Recollections" he recollects more politics than anything else. He came to know the political complexion of the entire country about as thoroughly as a ward leader knows the politics of his ward. One of the stories illustrative of his genius for remembering election figures relates that a messenger came into the Tribune office the night of a Presi- dential election with telegrams, one of which read that a certain small town in Southern Ohio had given the Republican ticket a majority of two hun- dred. Mr. Greeley listened while the telegram was being read and then observed, "that town gave us two hundred and twenty majority the last time." He was an indefatigable and enthusiastic party man, striving with all his might for Whig or Republican success. Nevertheless, he refused to allow politics to interfere with the exercise of his private judgment. To employ a political phrase, politics never got the delegates away from his independence. He permanently retained the captaincy of his own soul. "I accept unreservedly," he once wrote, "the views of no man, dead or living. ' The master has said it,' was never conclusive with me. Even though T have found him right nine times I do not take his tenth proposition on trust : unless that also be proved sound I reject it." In accordance with this unreserved declaration of independence was the fair warning which he ad- dressed to whom ii might concern, in starting the Tribune, that the paper was not going to be a subservient party organ. "Earnestly believing," he frankly said, "that the political revolution which has called William Henry Harrison to the Chief Magistracy of the Nation was a triumph of Right, Reason and Public Good over Error and Sinister Ambition, the Tribune will give to the new Administration a frank and cordial but manly and independent support, judging it always by its acts and commending those only so far as they shall seem calculated to subserve the great end of all government the welfare of the People. ' ' To the same effect, but more emphatic, is the account which he gives in his "Recollections" of the place in New York journalism which he intended that the Tribune should make for itself. "My leading idea was," he explains, "the establishment of a journal removed alike from servile partisanship, on the one hand, and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other. * * * I believed there was a happy medium between these extremes a position from which a journalist might openly and heartily advocate the principles and commend the meas- ures of that party to which his convictions allied him, yet frankly dissent from its course on a particular question, and even denounce its candidates if they were shown to be deficient in capacity or (far worse) in integrity." Roscoe Conkling once affirmed that he did not know how to belong to a party a little. Mr. Greeley fought a good fight for the Whig party and for the Republican party. Neither of these organizations had in its service a stouter champion than he. But, although he did not belong to them a "little," but a great deal, he did not belong to either so much as to hesitate to criticize party measures or party representatives whenever the conclusion was forced upon him that they deserved criticism. "To thine own self be true" was an admonition to whch he ever rendered implicit obedience. I have thus touched upon the leading sources of Mr. Greeley 's conspic- uous success as a journalist. It was a logical success the natural result of a wise use of great gifts and great opportunities. W T endell Phillips, while sharply assailing the newspaper press, paid it what was really a superb com- pliment. He gave it as his opinion that America owed to the newspapers one-half, if not more, of her development. It is not too much to assert that 23 Horace Greeley contributed in a greater degree than any other journalist of his day to that development, by his incessant activity in behalf of the forces which make for progress of the best sort. I am tempted, before concluding, to tell two stories about Mr. Greeley of which I am especially fond. One of them was a favorite of George William Curtis, and this is his version of it: "When Horace Greeley was in Paris he was one morning looking with an American friend at the pictures of the Louvre and talking of this country. "The fact is," said Mr. Greeley, "that w r hat we need is a darned good licking." An Englishman who stood by and heard the conversation smiled eagerly as if he knew a nation that would like to administer the cas- tigation. "Yes, sir," said he complacently, rubbing his hands with appetite and joining in the conversation, ' ' that is just what you do want. " " But the difficulty is," continued Mr. Greeley to his friend, as if he had heard noth- ing, "the difficulty is that there is no nation in the world that can lick us." The other story was told me by the late Clinton B. Fisk for whom pos- sibly some of you failed to vote when he was the Prohibition candidate for the Presidency in 1888. I met Mr. Fisk at a Rutgers College dinner, and in the course of conversation Mr. Greeley was mentioned. "I knew Mr. Greeley very well," said Mr. Fisk, "and had many a long talk with him. After the civil war we were accustomed when we met to discuss it from many points of view. I recall an occasion when Mr. Greeley concluded all he had to say in regard to a certain point by remarking, ' Clinton, the more I think of it the more firmly convinced I become that just as soon as the war was over we ought to have freely and fully forgiven all our Southern brethren the devil take them ! ' ' The story illustrated what his war policy always revealed, his loving kindness toward the South, and emphasized in a droll way, that in spite of that loving kindness, he had become very tired of the Southern question. Members of Typographical Union Number Six, you may well be proud that this illustrious American who began the battle of life as a typesetter, a veritable printer's devil, was one of the founders and the first president of your organization. You do well to celebrate the centennial of his birth, for to ponder upon what Horace Greeley was and did is an exercise at once pleasant and profitable. It is a potent incentive to worthy living. It refreshes our faith in human nature. It is full of encouragement to the youth of our land who find themselves, as he found himself when a lad, poor and friendless, at the foot of the ladder of fortune. Mr. Greeley has taken his place in history as one of the leaders of the journalism of the nineteenth century. He had his eccentricities, his weaknesses, his limitations. No man of his day had more fun poked at him or was a more frequent target for caricature. But he could have disposed of his critics by saying to them what Cromwell said to the artist to whom he was sitting for his portrait, "Paint me as I am, warts and all." Cromwell could afford to be thus painted because he was Cromwell. Today Horace Greeley looms large, and 24 his shortcomings seem but the small dust of the balance because they were the shortcomings of such a man. One of his biographers asserts that Mr. Greeley never was a ' ' man of the world. ' ' No, he was not ; but a man does not have to be that sort of a man to be a man of the best kind. Indeed, there is the highest authority for holding that to "become as a little child" is to attain to what is best in manhood. Mr. Greeley possessed in its fulness the childlike spirit. lie had a child's enthusiasm, a child's tenderness of heart, a child's confiding disposition, a child's unsophisticated simplicity. His life was a strenuous one, full of vicissitudes. Neglect, appreciation, joy, sorrow, failure, success, obscurity, fame he experienced all of them but was overcome by none. He knew how to be abased and how to abound and in all times of his prosperity and in all times of his adversity he kept faith with the ideals which dominated his soul when, before he had attained to man 's estate, he came to New York to seek his fortune. It is as a journalist that I have been considering him, but because what the catechism calls "the chief end of man" is not achievement but character, I prefer, in closing my address, to contemplate Mr. Greeley apart from his vocation as a member of that Brotherhood of Man whose welfare he did so much to promote. When Walter Scott realized that for him the "inevitable hour" was about to strike he gave his son-in-law, Lockhart, to whom he was devotedly attached, a fare- well greeting, and although Sir Walter was one of the leading literary lights of his age, literature had no place in that valedictory. He simply said to Lockhart, so one of his biographers tells us, "Be a good man, my dear." If Horace Greeley, in response to the numberless expressions of love and ad- miration which his one hundredth birthday has inspired could send a mes- sage to you and the rest who celebrate him, we may be sure that he would say something which would make for the betterment of all classes and con- ditions of humanity. There was much in his sterling manhood which sug- gested Abraham Lincoln. They had their differences in war times, but were ever closely allied by the fervent, unselfish patriotism which they possessed in common. So there is full warrant for believing that the centennial mes- sage of Horace Greeley would harmonize with, and perchance re-echo, the solemn admonition which Abraham Lincoln addressed to his countrymen from the hallowed ground of Gettysburg, "See to it that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth." 25 461464 Few of the Letters Received JANUARY 23, 1911. GREELEY CENTENNIAL COMMITTEE: Gentlemen: A desire to add a meed of praise and admiration to that of the host of others has induced me to note a few incidents in the life of Horace Greeley, that grand old man whom I saw quite early in his profes- sional career when he was exerting all his intellectual and physical powers to achieve success in establishing The New Yorker in 1838, when the office was located in the rear building of No. 29 Ann Street. There were three hands besides myself Mr. Bowe, the foreman, Mr. Winchester, and Mr. Swain, who set up the piece of music that always graced the last page of that popular newspaper. Mr. Greeley would often "lend a hand" when the paper was behind, by setting up a few sticksful. His bent attitude while standing at the case, and bobbing motion while setting type, are vividly impressed on my memory. If he "pied" a line, his proverbial equanimity was not disturbed thereby. Apropos of pie, it was his custom every Satur- day at noon the paper having been printed and mailed to provide what was designated as a "pie gorge," to \vhich we were freely invited. About a dozen good sized pies, fresh from the famous pie bakery of Russel, in Spruce Street, would grace the imposing-stone. Ample justice was done to the delicious pastries, especially by the great editor himself who, released from the week's toil and anxiety, gave full rein to his natural flow of humor, and indulged in witticisms and anecdotes that were a feast for the soul, besides being a digestive assistant. A feature of the entertainment to me a Knickerbocker was the Yankee accent, with the nasal intonation, that marked the utterances of most of the hands, who hailed from " Varmount," including Mr. Greeley himself, who was long a resident there. Notwithstanding the financial difficulties that beset him while publishing The Xew Yorker, he never failed to pay his hands promptly every cent they had earned. He seemed to regard that obligation as a sacred one; and so, too, with regard to the same obligations to the Tribune printers. He was truly the workingman's best friend in all that the term implies, as his newspaper fully evidenced. I am proud of holding a Union Card of July 6, 1850, with his signature as its first president. CHARLES VOGT, Card No. 54 in 1850. HAMILTON, BERMUDA, Jan. 17. 1911. DEAR MR. McCABE: I should be glad and proud to come to No. 6's celebration of the Greeley centenary. But I am almost a hundred years old myself, by my personal almanac, which has been sent forward by two attacks of the grippe, and I can only join you in the cordial sense of unity which never ceases to bind printers together. Greeley was one of the best of us, and we ought to keep his memory green. Yours sincerely, W. D. HOWELLS. EDITORIAL ROOMS HARPER & BROTHERS Franklin Square NEW YORK, January 26, 1911. DEAR MR. McCABE: As I live in the country and am much enfeebled by recent illness, I am unable to accept the kind invitation of your committee to the meeting com- memorating the centenary of Horace Greeley 's birth. Along with Lincoln and old Ben Franklin, Horace Greeley ranks as a singular type, eminently original and individual, of the plain American; and it is peculiarly fitting that this centenary of his birth should be cele- brated under the auspices of Typographical Union No. 6, of which he was the first president. With hearty sympathy with your undertaking, Yours faithfully, H. M. ALDEN*. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. Form L9-50m-9,'60 (8361084)444 GREELEY COMMITTEE JOHN F. McCABE, Chairman JOHN F. LANE JOHN F. CROSSLAND WILLIAM F. WETZEL JAMES H. DAHM, Secretary L1BKAKI UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES Jlne hundredth G805 anniversary of the birth of Horace Greeley. APR 1 9 z 232 G805 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILIT A 000 788 552