The Life of Whitelaw Reid
by . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1921. Two vols. 8vo. x+424 and vi + 471 pp. $10.00.
THESE two volumes are packed full of history, some of which is newly revealed. So true is this, that Mr. Reid’s personality seems in this record almost submerged in the flood of events of which he formed a part, or with which he was in contact, as if biography were but a thread upon which to string the larger incidents of a nation’s life. Though this shows how closely the eminent editor was identified with the issues and important doings of his time, it raises the question whether the biographer, in spite of his loyalty and love for his former newspaper chief, may not have failed somewhat in that gift for portraiture which makes the subject stand out from his environment and lends a touch of intimacy to his acts. John Hay emerges from Thayer’s biography much more a living person than does Whitelaw Reid from the present work.
But it would be ungrateful to lay much stress on this, for there ‘is not a dull page’ in either volume. Few lives in American history have been so rich in experience. Boy and college student in the New West; schoolteacher, country editor, Lincoln campaigner, legislative reporter, war correspondent, and editorial writer; thrown into early contact with Grant, Sherman, Hayes, and Garfield in the field, and with Lincoln, Chase, and the other political leaders of the war at Washington; an eye-witness of Shiloh and Gettysburg; one of the first journalists to visit the South after the surrender; two years a cotton planter in Louisiana and Alabama during reconstruction; enjoying an intimacy with Horace Greely and John Hay which resulted in eventual editorship of the Tribune and in Hay’s association with that paper and the fruitful friendship that followed; a powerful and trusted adviser in national politics through every campaign and Republican administration for nearly thirty years; Ambassador to France, candidate for vice president in 1892, member of the Spanish Peace Commission, American representative to Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and, finally, Ambassador to Great Britain, whose range of acquaintanceship embraced rulers, statesmen, writers, and artists of five continents; a New Yorker and a cosmopolitan, with a touch of the Westerner from his California home and his trusteeship of Stanford University; a successful business man and a writer of books of no mean talent — such was Whitelaw Reid. Is it wonderful, therefore, that his biographer finds the very wealth of incident overwhelming, and must perforce portray the man through his externals?
Sound judgment, independent opinion, moral courage, and tact explain his success. He won mark as a war correspondent because he told the truth unflinchingly. As an editor he tolerated no intimidation — either by party leaders or by advertisers. During the moral slump after the Civil War, he fought courageously for sound money and party purity. Always a regular except during the Greely episode, he had warm friends among party opponents — to illustrate by one of many, Henry Watterson.
New light is thrown upon history by the quotations from private papers. They may modify somewhat the popular conception of the attitude of both Chase and Blaine toward the presidency. There are some new and taking Rooseveltiana. The book abounds in quotable sayings and anecdotes, — the German ambassador at Paris privately characterizing the Berlin expansionists as ‘all savages who can’t eat without gorging, not civilized enough to know when they have enough, unable to resist the sight of raw meat’; the British comparison of Roosevelt and the Kaiser: ‘They both talk unconventionally, but your President always makes good’; Lord Rosebery, a former Prime Minister, wearing a Taft button during the 1908 campaign.
But the interest ranges wide, beyond the field of politics either national or international. For instance, there is the account of Carlyle’s reading in manuscript and approving before publication Froude’s much maligned Life and Letters. The book is one that intelligent Americans should read — and the reading will be no burden.
VICTOR S. CLARK.