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Edwin Lawrence Godkin Edit Profile

editor journalist author

Edwin Godkin was an Irish-born editor, journalist, and author, who mostly worked in the United States. He was a co-founder and founding editor of the Nation magazine and editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post.

Background

Edwin Lawrence Godkin was born on October 2, 1831, in County Wicklow, Ireland. He was a son of James Godkin, a Protestant minister and editor, and Sarah Lawrence Godkin.

Education

Edwin Godkin attended a series of Irish and English schools. At the age of nine, he enrolled at a prestigious grammar school at Armagh, the Belfast Royal Academical Institution. His parents transferred him to Silcoates, a school emphasizing classics for the sons of Congregational ministers, located in Leeds, outside Yorkshire, England (he may have also attended Belfast Academy, according to some sources).

In 1846, Godkin entered Queens College (now Queen's University Belfast) in Belfast, Ireland. There, he was elected the first president of the college Literary and Scientific Society. Queen's College fostered an atmosphere in favor of utilitarianism: he was introduced to the works of the Utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, whose political and economic theories did much to shape Godkin's own views. Particularly attractive to Godkin was the Utilitarians' belief in laissez-faire, private property rights, and economic law as the basis for sound government. The young Godkin was also captivated with the idea of American democracy, though this view was always tempered by a distinctly aristocratic streak in his thought. Upon his graduation in 1851, Godkin moved to London, where after a brief flirtation with law study.

Edwin Godkin earned a Master of Arts from Harvard University in 1871. He received an honorary doctorate of civil laws from Oxford University in 1897.

Career

Upon his graduation in 1851, Edwin Godkin moved to London, where after a brief flirtation with law study, he began his journalism career as a sub-editor of The Workingmen's Friend, an entertainment magazine published by John Cassell. This was a penny weekly with fiction, poetry, home instruction, and travel essays, and featuring contributors such as Jules Verne and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Godkin wrote a series of historical sketches on Hungary for the winter issues of 1851 and 1852, which he later enlarged in his first book, The History of Hungary and the Magyars, published in 1853. In this book, Godkin established his trademark passionate writing style as he railed against Austria's tyrannical reign over Hungary.

Hired as a special correspondent in Turkey for London's Daily News, Godkin covered the Crimean War from 1853 to 1855. He was one of the first English journalists to witness the war. He wrote his reports as a series of letters and returned to the United Kingdom in October of 1855. The young correspondent's dispatches from the Turkish front, sharply critical of perceived incompetence in the British and Turkish military leadership, exhibit the penchant for faultfinding and polemics that marks his later writings. When he returned to Belfast a year later, he delivered lectures on the War. He was hired as a contributing editor to the Northern Whig, a mostly liberal paper that remained conservative about property rights and social revolutions.

In October 1856, at the age of twenty-five, Godkin sailed to the United States, settling in New York. Inspired in part by Frederick Law Olmsted's writings on the American South, Godkin traveled through the region in the fall of 1856. Reporting his experience in the London Daily News, Godkin expressed his dislike of the South - which he found rude and backward - and his aversion to slavery on both moral and economic grounds. Godkin remained in New York, passing the state's bar exam in 1858, and practicing by 1859. But the confines of the courtroom and office made him restless. He continued as a freelance correspondent for the Daily News, and contributed to the New York Times, the New York Evening Post, and the Knickerbocker. Godkin spent at least four hours each day writing, a habit he maintained for the rest of his life.

Soon after his first son was born in 1860, Edwin Godkin with his wife left for Ireland. For two years, Godkin published only two unsolicited letters to the Daily News. The Godkins returned to New York in 1862. Godkin was made a special correspondent for the Daily News and resumed writing for the New York Times. He edited the Sanitary Commission Bulletin for a few months until the publication was moved to Philadelphia.

The Civil War had broken out, and President Abraham Lincoln had issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Godkin sided with the Union cause, though he criticized Lincoln for military inactivity in the early years of the conflict. For the next several years, Godkin wrote for a number of United States' newspapers, including Charles Eliot Norton's North American Review. One of Godkin's more important essays, Aristocratic Opinions on Democracy, was penned during this period. In it, Godkin argued that many of the United States' shortcomings, such as its people's coarseness of manners, could be attributed to the movement of populations to and from the countless civilized frontier.

Godkin and Olmsted had for years sought to start their own periodical, free from the biases of the daily press. In 1865, their plan was realized. With the aid of a number of liberal and abolitionist financial backers, including Norton, the weekly New York-based newspaper The Nation was launched, with Godkin as its editor in chief. The first issue was published on July 6, 1865. A journal of politics, literature, science, and the arts, The Nation was founded by its stockholders in part to promote the rights and societal assimilation of the newly freed slaves. Always fiercely independent, Godkin soon diverged from the goals of the paper's more liberal owners, opposing black suffrage and state support of the poor. On the reconstruction of the South, he took a moderate position between the mild policies of President Andrew Johnson and the more sweeping reforms proposed by the radicals. Godkin's disagreements with The Nation's more radical stockholders produced a battle for control, and he assumed principal ownership of the paper in 1866.

The Nation's staff and contributors included many of the best-known historians, writers, and thinkers of nineteenth-century United States, among them Norton and Olmsted, a journalist John R. Dennett, a philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce, and the novelist Henry James and his brother, William, a philosopher, and psychologist. Edwin Godkin encouraged the Nation contributors to write with straightforwardness and wit similar to his own style and, in the process, showed that serious writing could be lively and readable as well as informative and profound.

Godkin's own editorials set the tone of the paper, mixing astute observation and persuasive argument with humor, sarcasm, invective, and a sharp eye for governmental misconduct. Although Godkin is often remembered as liberal and progressive, his highly individual positions make him difficult to classify. He held the government's true aim to be the promotion of virtue and culture, and he was therefore mistrustful of the United States' democracy and popular rule, which he saw as leading to cultural vulgarisation and political mediocrity.

Throughout its first decade, The Nation rose steadily in circulation, reaching a peak of about thirteen thousand in the mid-1870s. Circulation declined thereafter, a consequence to some extent of several unpopular political stands the paper had taken, including support for the presidential candidacy of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

When Edwin Godkin moved back to New York several years later, The Nation was in severe financial difficulty. In 1881, Godkin sold it to the New York Evening Post, to be published as that paper's weekly edition. Godkin joined the Evening Post as associate editor under its new owner, Henry Villard, and editor in chief, Carl Schurz. Relations between Schurzand Godkin were strained, and Godkin eventually used his influence with the paper's owners to unseat Schurz and replace him as top editor in 1883. The Evening Post under Godkin in many ways resembled The Nation of years previous: outspoken, independent, and reformist.

In late 1899, in failing health and declining mental ability, Godkin was relieved of his duties with the Evening Post, staying on officially until January 1, 1900. Godkin traveled regularly to Europe in his later years and, in 1901, moved to the United Kingdom for good.

Achievements

  • Edwin Godkin influenced an entire generation of political thinkers and writers. He pressed doggedly for higher standards of governmental and municipal conduct, attacking corruption and cronyism wherever the perceived abuses. Godkin's forceful writings helped spur many regulatory reforms and served as an inspiration for twentieth-century muckraking journalism. As an opponent of American militarism overseas, Godkin had a moderating effect on many international disputes.

    Under Edwin Godkin's leadership, The Nation became one of the most influential publications of its era, distinguished by its superior writing and broad international scope; the paper won a large following among the country's scholars and decision-makers. The Nation did set a new standard for independence and incisiveness. The publication's literary quality was virtually unrivaled. Among its other accomplishments, the paper’s book reviews and literary notices were especially highly regarded.

Politics

Under the leadership of Edwin Godkin, the Post broke with the Republican Party in the presidential campaign of 1884, and his opposition to James G. Blaine (Republican candidate for president in 1884) did much to create the so-called Mugwump faction; the Post thereafter became independent. Godkin dismissed Blaine as corrupt and described his supporters as driven by a hunger for government jobs.

Godkin consistently advocated currency reform, the gold standard, a tariff for revenue only, and, especially, civil service reform. His attacks on Tammany Hall were so frequent (especially his biographical sketches of Tammany leaders) that he was sued for libel several times, but the cases were dismissed. He also voiced strong and often effective opposition to jingoism and to imperialism. He pressed for civil-service reform, seeking to free the system from political favoritism, but opposed suffrage for blacks, women, and many immigrant groups.

Views

While Edwin Godkin's reformist bent has earned for him the reputation of a progressive, he was in many ways conservative, looking back to older, more genteel traditions. The elevation of American manners and mores was perhaps his most cherished goal, an ideal that was often at odds with the values of an egalitarian society.

Quotations: "Never write without conveying information or expressing an opinion with reasons."

Membership

  • Edwin Godkin was elected the first president of the Queen's College Literary and Scientific Society.

    Literary and Scientific Society , United Kingdom

Personality

Edwin Godkin's personality and editorial style earned him as many enemies as friends. He has been described by some contemporaries as mean-spirited and icy and by others as jovial and good-natured.

Physical Characteristics: Edwin Godkin was thick-set and of medium height. Pictures from his middle years depict a man of stately bearing, with chiseled features, full beard, and mustache.

Quotes from others about the person

  • William James, the Nation contributor, said: "To my generation, his was certainly the towering influence in all thought concerning public affairs, and indirectly his influence has certainly been more pervasive than that of any other writer of the generation, for he influenced other writers who never quoted him, and determined the whole current of discussion."

Connections

While visiting Yale University president Theodore Woolsey in 1857, Godkin met Frances Elizabeth Foote. Godkin and Foote married in New Haven, Connecticut on July 27, 1859. Frances Elizabeth Foote was a member of a prominent New England family that included the writer and ecclesiastic Henry Ward Beecher and the novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Soon after his first son Lawrence was born in 1860, the Godkins left for Ireland. They wintered in Paris, spent the spring in London, and summered in Switzerland. During this time, Godkin did little writing. When the Godkins returned to the United States, they found a country in a great upheaval. On April 11, 1875, Godkin's wife, Frances, died, following a long illness. Godkin's younger daughter Elizabeth (born 1865) had died in 1873, and an infant son, Ralph, had died shortly after his birth in 1868.

In 1884, Edwin Godkin married Katherine B. Sands, of a wealthy and prominent New York and London family.

Father:
James Godkin

James Godkin was a Protestant minister, journalist, and political activist of some note, a prominent figure in the Trish independence movement. He edited a weekly paper, the Christian Patriot, and later the Dublin Daily Express. His son Edwin Godkin absorbed his admiration for the American Revolution.

late wife:
Frances Elizabeth Foote

Wife:
Katharine Sands

Son:
Lawrence Godkin

Daughter:
Elizabeth Godkin

Son:
Ralph Godkin

Friend:
Frederick Olmsted
Frederick Olmsted - Friend of Edwin Godkin

One of Edwin Godkin's first acquaintances in the United States was Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted's liberal political opinions were close to those of Godkin, and the two men began a long friendship.