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McClure's Magazine and the Muckrakers
By Harold S. Wilson PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04600-6
CHAPTER 1
The Imprint of Abolitionism
When McClure's Magazine was founded in 1893,it was staffed to a great extent by graduates of Knox College located in Galesburg, Illinois. The two dozen Knox alumni who edited, sold, and financed McClure's carried to the New York publishing world many of the reform traditions of the Great Revival. All of this was consistent with the aims of Rev. George Washington Gale, who founded Knox on the Illinois prairie in 1837.Thus evangelical Christianity — although greatly modified — with its injunctions to transform an evil world, helped to provide the purpose, technique, and content of many of the progressive reforms championed by the muckraking movement in a later era.
George Washington Gale was a mild-mannered, unobtrusive Presbyterian preacher in western New York's "burned-over district" in 1821,when his quiet, doctrinal preaching surprisingly led to the conversion of Charles G. Finney, a rather notorious young lawyer. Finney himself, turned evangelist, shortly afterwards converted the youthful Theodore Dwight Weld, a student at Hamilton College. The Great Revival commenced with these three men guiding it towards a wide area of humanitarian reform. Peripheral to the movement's central principles of "abolition and temperance" were such diverse sentiments as sabbath observance, feminism, and anti-Masonism. The need for ministers with the proper zeal and values to spread the faith became so acute that Gale resigned his pastorate and founded the Oneida Institute in New York, a manual labor school, to instruct the "called." The immediate success of the Oneida Institute led to the founding of Oberlin and Knox Colleges, the former by Finney and Weld, the latter by Gale, where the principle of manual labor was applied.
The dedicated men and women who came to the unsettled plains of Illinois at the insistence of Gale to found a college and a community were grounded in religious enthusiasm and believed in an educated elect. They also shared a common distaste for human bondage. Benjamin Lundy edited his Genius of Universal Emancipation in the neighboring county, and Owen Lovejoy, brother of the murdered Elijah P. Lovejoy, lived a few miles away at Princeton, called in Congress the "greatest Negro stealing town in the west."
Galesburg, founded around Knox College, became in time "probably the principal Underground Railroad station in Illinois," and a hotbed of abolitionist activity. The Galesburg home of Edward Beecher, one of the famous children of Lyman Beecher of Lane Seminary, was one of the locality's more notorious refuges for runaway slaves. Eventually Edward Beecher became a trustee of Knox, and his brother, Charles, became a professor of rhetoric. The college served as a meeting ground for New England and Midwestern emancipators. Such abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, John P. Hale, Cassius M. Clay, Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips received an enthusiastic welcome when they visited and lectured at Knox.
The early settlers were humble families who lived peaceably with the Illinois Indians and dreamed of Calvin's experiment at Geneva. A feminist reformer characterized them as walking under the "sun of reform." Successively the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party, and the Republican Party found militant leaders and supporters in the community. In 1843 'he first president of Knox, Hiram H. Kellogg, served as one of the nine delegates from the United States to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, and in 1845 he was succeeded in office by Jonathan Blanchard, a nationally known abolitionist who later founded Wheaton College. Galesburg was committed to militant reform long before the Baptists and Methodists split in 1845.
When Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated on the Knox campus in 1858, in the fifth of their famous addresses that year, a large sign confronting the podium read, "Knox College for Lincoln." The community's partisanship was shown more clearly two years later when the college awarded Lincoln, before his election, its first honorary doctorate. Present on these occasions were many men who were to guide the college through the next half century and leave their impression on a score of the muckrakers who graduated in the decade after Reconstruction.
Most important was the so-called Knox "Triumvirate." It consisted of George Churchill, a trustee's son who was principal of the Academy; his brother-in-law, Albert Hurd, professor of natural philosophy; and Milton L. Comstock, professor of mathematics. Churchill taught at Knox from 1855 until 1899, Hurd from 1851 until 1906, and Comstock from 1851 until 1899. Both Churchill and Hurd married daughters of George Washington Gale. Perhaps the most capable of these men was Albert Hurd. Hurd was a descendent of Barbara Heck, the New York feminist who had introduced Methodism into the United States. His own family, because of loyalist sympathies during the Revolution, had migrated to Canada, where he was born. Graduating from Middlebury College in 1850 and from Harvard shortly afterwards, Hurd commenced his long teaching career in Galesburg. Several other faculty members from the pre-Civil War era remained at Knox during the 18751900 period and long perpetuated the school's unique traditions. Teaching in the Academy at the time of the great debate was Ellen Browning Scripps, later a co-founder with her brother of the Scripps newspaper syndicate. She undoubtedly influenced many of the school's neophyte journalists.
Newton Bateman, more than any other resident, knew and loved Lincoln, saw him proudly feted on the Knox campus, and, as president and teacher from 1874 to 1896, personified the Free Soil tradition. Bateman's life was shaped by adversity. Born in New Jersey in 1822, the son of a crippled weaver, he migrated to Illinois in 1833 in a covered wagon. His mother died on the trip and was buried in an unmarked grave. The family settled in Jacksonville, Illinois, where Edward Beecher was currently serving as president of the newly founded Illinois College. Bateman, who was a classmate of Thomas Beecher, struggled through Illinois College by "almost unbelievable industry and economy, living at one period in a hollow tree, and subsisting on mush and milk, at an expense of eleven cents a week."
After graduating from Illinois College in 1843, Bateman took an M.A. at Lane Theological Seminary, Lyman Beecher's school in Cincinnati, where Henry Ward Beecher taught. In time Bateman became intimately acquainted with nearly all of the Beecher family. Working his way through seminary with a "peddler's pack on his back," Bateman eventually turned to education and was elected the first Republican State Superintendent of Schools in Illinois, a position which he held for fourteen years. For many years Bateman and Lincoln shared adjoining offices in the old state building at Springfield, and "Lincoln, with the uneducated man's exaggerated respect for learning, found relief in chats with the little schoolmaster." The friendship lapsed after Lincoln became president.
The students and teachers attracted to Knox during the Reconstruction years were on the whole devoted to the same religious and moral principles as had been the founders of the college. Such professors came as Miss Malvina M. Bennett, whose father knew Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry Wilson, and was counted "one of the founders of the abolitionist movement" in New England. Miss Bennett, young and pretty, arrived in 1880 from Boston, and immediately attracted a large following to her elocution classes, from which many of her students went forth to achieve honors in inter-collegiate oratory contests, often speaking on Civil War topics. Later she returned to Boston, where she lived with her brother and taught at Wellesley.
Another addition was Melville Best Anderson, who assumed the chair of English in 1881. Anderson not only inaugurated a popular Anglo-Saxon course, in which a number of boys did secret courting, but contributed regular articles to the Dial, a Chicago journal considered the leading literary magazine of the West. "The Dial was a journal with standards," writes Mott, "... Melville B. Anderson ... kept it so" with the aid of several New England contributors. The Dial, though rather conservative, maintained that many subjects demanded the attention of magazines, such as "those of political administration, of good government, of municipal socialism, of economics as they relate to social and individual prosperity and comfort." Anderson later moved to Stanford University, where he published a well-considered translation of the Divine Comedy. Knox replaced him with Jeremiah Whipple Jenks, a Halle Ph.D., who was to become one of the country's leading experts on trusts and municipal corruption.
On the whole the postwar years saw the faculty and students maintaining a solid phalanx in defense of the ideals of Gale and Finney, if not those of the martyred John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. In no area was life more circumspect than that of religion. "No instructor," asserted President Bateman, "could teach at Knox College if there was the slightest doubt about his orthodoxy," and in each annual report to the trustees he listed the number of Christians in the college. Bateman kept a patrician's eye on students temporarily out of school and working. "I miss your sympathetic face when I try to talk to the boys in chapel," he wrote to one student, urging him to maintain a high moral life. Nearly all of the members of the faculty occasionally addressed the students in chapel or Sunday school. Absence from chapel could be excused only by a vote of the faculty, and on Sunday there were six different church services.
Yet Bateman seems to have tolerated a good deal of theological divergency among his faculty. Albert Hurd alone was trained to address himself authoritatively to the conflict between science and religion, an old battle renewed after the war in evolutionary terms. Hurd had further prepared himself for such discussion by taking a leave of absence in 1854 to study under the Lamarkian Louis Agassiz at Harvard, where Alexander Agassiz, the son, had been his classmate. Back at Knox, with the help of his oldest daughter, Harriet, Hurd gathered up geological samples from lime quarries for a small museum he supervised, and prepared charts for his lectures. When he was scheduled to speak in morning chapel, according to his daughter, many of the townspeople would come to listen. "Father used to present all there was to be said on his chosen subject from both points of view," Harriet later wrote, "always coming to the final conclusion that the glorious poetry of the first two chapters of Genesis could not possibly be regarded as the expression of literal, scientific fact, but was to be considered as an allegorical picture...." If this recollection be correct, then Knox possessed one of the earlier advocates of the religious implications of evolution. Yet Hurd definitely believed in the revelatory nature of the Bible, since it furnished "all the factors which produce the noblest human character, it authoritatively tells us what to believe and what to do...."
On the other hand, following Aquinas' natural reason, Hurd felt that God had left another record in the rocks for man's understanding. This reconciliation of reason and faith, Harriet wrote, probably speaking for numbers of the student body, "greatly impressed me." Doubtless the collective moral injunctions of Hurd, Bateman, Willard, and Anderson left their impression upon the fallow minds of the Knox students. For example, after an emotional sermon in February, 1879, the college en masse pledged itself to temperance. Enthusiasm was far from finished. And somehow Lamarkianism and the Gospel seem to have coexisted quite pleasantly in the post-Reconstruction years.
Nonetheless, extreme religious unorthodoxy was still dangerous. In 1871 a student led some trustees to question whether he should be awarded his degree when he gave a negative answer in his senior oration to the question, "Is Orthodoxy in Theology Necessary for the Christian?" He finally got his degree and later helped found the Ethical Cultural Society. But Hurd lamented, "How sad a sight it is to see a man in the prime of life walking the streets of Galesburg with one of Ingersoll's lectures before his eyes." Hurd's fear of widely propagated heresy was unfounded. Knox still prepared a tenth of its graduates for the ministry, and his own daughter's valedictory address in 1877 was a far more common type: "What Woman Owes Christianity."
Reminiscences of the war competed with religion as a chapel topic. Newton Bateman's favorite subject was Abraham Lincoln. He gave a regular series of lectures at Knox, as well as across the country, on the abolitionist movement in Illinois. Other faculty members frequently reminisced in chapel about the Beecher family, John Brown, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, or the founding of the college.
A Methodist advocate of the Social Gospel, C. W. Blodgett, gave a typical address as late as 1896. His father-in-law had attended the Republican convention in Chicago in 1860 and supported the nomination of Lincoln. Blodgett thought Lincoln's opposition to the Compromise of 1850 as inspired as the Decalogue. Divinity further revealed itself through Lincoln's plans as president, and for this reason his administration was flawless. The service closed with the students singing "Guard That Banner While We Sleep." Blodgett was also an expert on the subject of the "Saloon and its Relation to Society," on which he frequently lectured. Intemperance, he thought, was responsible for the fact that there was not a well-governed city in America and for the increase in poverty, crime, and taxes.
Another speaker, a short time later, insisted: "we cannot doubt that the success of the Union cause was due to the moral sentiment that supported and inspired it" because "out of the calm wisdom and the pure purpose of Lincoln's mind and heart, came like a divine revelation the one sentiment and the one thought that could overmaster all others. It was the sentiment of patriotism...." With the intertwining of patriotism, orthodoxy, and social reform, it was not surprising that most of the Knox students in the postwar generation wrote themes and orations on Civil War heroes, made Uncle Tom's Cabin the most popular play ever presented in Galesburg, and went into the world with a deep commitment to the ideals of the Great Revival.
Probably a large percentage of the four hundred colleges in the country in 1880 had a similar environment. Certainly those schools in the West and Northwest had their YMCA and Prohibition clubs in large numbers. Most colleges were small and informal — Wabash, Illinois, and Allegheny as well as Harvard, California, and Kansas — and the student bodies were personally exposed to the raconteurs who explained to the new generation the meaning of the Civil War, often from experience, and the ways of God, apes, and Victorians. This was the breeding ground of the next generation's political progressives. At any rate, at Knox, if not on numerous campuses, students and faculty condemned drinking, gambling, prostitution, slums, sabbath breaking, racism, and political corruption; and upheld feminism and public charities.
On the occasion of the college's semi-centennial, the Galesburg Evening Mail evaluated the impact of Knox upon its times. Out of a thousand graduates had come six college presidents, twenty college professors, forty physicians, eighty lawyers, one hundred ministers, and twenty-five journalists. Most of the journalists were those who made McClure's Magazine.
Mary Hatton made the earliest contribution. She attended the Knox Academy between 1856 and 1861. Her son, William Allen White, helped create McClure's reform journalism. Converted from Catholicism to Congregationalism, Mary Hatton sat with the Hurd family in Edward Beecher's church, and, on occasion, heard Henry Ward Beecher, of Beecher's Bibles fame, lecture on abolitionism.
After the Civil War, she left Galesburg, possibly because a son in her employer's family fell in love with her and asked Edward Beecher to intercede. Although she had formed close relationships with many of the Knox community, including Albert Hurd, Mary Hatton went west to teach in Kansas without the benefit of her degree. In Kansas her radical abolitionist ideas about integrating her school only precipitated an imbroglio with the public school officials. A Democratic physician, whose admiration was earned by her radical politics, came to the rescue and married her. In time Mary Hatton's deep ties with Knox and the abolitionist traditions were bequeathed to her only son who became one of the most popular writers for Mc Clure's. William Allen White pioneered the fields of political and juvenile writing for the magazine when barely out of his adolescence.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from McClure's Magazine and the Muckrakers by Harold S. Wilson. Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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