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Whitelaw Reid, the New York Tribune Editor Who Advised James A. Garfield

This is the first of a series of occasional blogs from the James A. Garfield National Historic Site, each a biographical sketch of someone who influenced Garfield's life, career and decisions. It begins with Whitelaw Reid, best known as editor of the New York Tribune for forty years, from 1872 to 1912.

From Ohio to the Tribune

Reid was born in Xenia, Ohio, on October 27, 1837. His mother wanted to name him James, but his baptismal certificate says only Whitelaw. He used James through childhood and took Whitelaw as a young adult, and was sometimes known simply as White. He studied Latin, classical literature and mathematics at the Xenia Academy and entered Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, at fifteen as a second-year student, joining a literary society whose members enjoyed discussing politics and public speaking. He graduated with honors in 1856. By the early 1860s he was writing for the Cincinnati Gazette, the Cincinnati Times and the Cleveland Herald under the pen name Agate.

In the Civil War he was a correspondent at several battlefields, among them Shiloh and Gettysburg, and his account of Shiloh has been described as classic war reporting. The war touched him at home too. An older brother died in 1862, though not on the battlefield, and his father died in 1865, leaving him responsible for his mother, who was in her sixties. A "get rich quick" investment in a southern plantation in 1866 was not profitable, and within two years he took the step that made him an influential voice: in 1868 he joined the staff of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, and the next year he was named managing editor. In 1872 he was part of the Liberal Republican movement that opposed a second term for President Grant and ended up supporting Greeley for president. Greeley died just days after the election, and Reid soon became the Tribune's editor.

Race and Reconstruction

Like other white northerners, Reid held a mix of opinions about Black Americans. He opposed slavery and supported Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. After the war he did not think universal suffrage for Black men was wise, although he knew many Black people he considered orderly and respectable and worthy of the vote. He favored education for the formerly enslaved but doubted their capabilities. The author, a park ranger, notes that many Americans today would find this attitude highly prejudicial but that in Reid's day it was commonly held, even among whites who wanted justice for African Americans. In the South Reid found the former rebels still rebellious, yet thought northern military domination of the white elite during Reconstruction was a mistake. He also agreed with many northerners that letting the southern elite regain political control would be a disaster for Black people locally and, nationally, lead to repudiation of the Confederate debt.

The Tribune and its workers

Greeley's disastrous candidacy and death caused the Tribune's daily circulation to fall greatly, and reviving it took years. Reid clashed with the typesetters' union and unskilled laborers on several occasions. In 1877 he proposed wage cuts, knowing the unionized workers would resist, and when a new Tribune building was going up he replaced striking workers with Italian immigrants who worked for less. The clashes lasted through the 1870s and 1880s. Insisting that "authority" must be maintained, he favored strong action against striking workers in the Railroad Strike of 1877.

Adviser to Garfield

Reid thought Hayes an excellent choice for the Republicans in 1876, but after Hayes became president, the Tribune ran articles critical of the reforms of Carl Schurz, the Secretary of the Interior. In 1880 Reid and the Tribune strongly opposed nominating Ulysses S. Grant for a third term. James G. Blaine looked to Reid like the best hope for a Republican victory, but the nomination went to Garfield, and Reid at once began counseling harmony in the party and advising the nominee. He urged Garfield to stay at his home in Mentor, Ohio, for the whole campaign. Candidates traditionally did not campaign for themselves, and Reid knew Garfield would have liked being "on the stump." Whether or not because of Reid, Garfield stayed home, and the result was the first front-porch presidential campaign, which proved a success. The two consulted regularly during the campaign and in the months before the inauguration.

Reid also gave Garfield his view of two rivals in the party. He cautioned against putting too much stock in Schurz and his ties to the German vote, and said New York's senior senator, Roscoe Conkling, should not be given too much influence over New York appointments, while recognizing that Conkling was of great value on the stump. Garfield respected Reid's political sagacity and his position as editor of an influential paper, and Garfield's view of civil service reform closely followed Reid's: he favored reform but also valued consulting Congress on appointments. In a letter, Reid passed on Mrs. Hayes's view that changing the White House practice of not serving alcohol would be a mistake that would cost about five thousand votes in Ohio.

Reid also helped as the cabinet took shape amid competing Republican factions. He agreed with Blaine, the incoming Secretary of State, that naming Thomas L. James Postmaster General would satisfy moderate Republicans and Conkling's demand for a New York appointment. James accepted, backed out after a scolding from Conkling and then accepted again, which did not please Conkling, who resented Reid's influence with Garfield. Reid's most consequential advice, supported by Blaine, was to appoint William Robertson Collector of the Port of New York. Robertson had opposed Conkling and his preferred nominee, Grant, at the 1880 convention, so the choice was a direct attack on Conkling and set off a big fight between the president and the senator that further disrupted the party. In April, when Reid was asked to persuade Robertson to withdraw, he told a friend that sticking with Robertson was the turning point of Garfield's administration, the crisis of his fate. Garfield won the fight, but Charles Guiteau, who shot him, pointed to the patronage battle with Conkling as part of his inspiration.

The linotype, and a diplomat's career

After Garfield's death Reid advised Blaine to resign from the cabinet, opposed President Arthur's administration and supported Blaine for president in 1884. Until then he refocused on the Tribune, especially on promoting an invention by Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German immigrant then living in Baltimore. On a keyboard like a typewriter's, hot lead was molded into lines of type, much faster than typographers setting lines in a composing stick one letter at a time. The editors at the Baltimore Sun rejected it, but Reid embraced the "linotype" (line-of-type) machine and helped establish the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. It meant cutting typographers' wages, and negotiations with Typographical Union No. 6 brought charges of bad faith and walkouts that were not resolved during the 1880s.

Both Hayes and Garfield offered Reid a diplomatic post in Germany, and he refused. He was without influence under Arthur and in Cleveland's first term, but after Benjamin Harrison's election in 1888 he made no secret of wanting to be Ambassador to Great Britain. He was offered France instead and accepted. Reid favored a limited role for the United States abroad, not beyond the Americas, with a small navy, and opposed annexing Hawaii, but he understood the importance of an isthmian canal in Central America. In 1892 he became Harrison's running mate and campaigned more actively than Harrison, whose wife was dying. Harrison and Reid lost, and Reid withdrew from public life for a time. In 1896 he hoped to be Secretary of State under McKinley, but New York's Republican boss, Senator Platt, opposed it, and John Sherman got the post. Reid was also passed over for Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, which left him bitter, though his disappointment eased a little when he was named to head the mission to Great Britain for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

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