Immersed in Great Affairs: Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age of American History

Chapter 2. Journalism in Its “Higher Walks”: (1913–31)

C H A P T E R 2 Journalism in Its “Higher Walks” (1913–31) Nevins joined the editorial board of the New York Evening Post at the height of the Progressive reform movement. His career on the paper coincided with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who had taken office just a few months earlier. The Evening Post had supported Wilson during the 1912 presidential campaign, largely out of fear that the election of Theodore Roosevelt would bring an unwarranted expansion of government regulation of business.1 That fear stemmed, in part, from Roosevelt’s policy of using existing antitrust legislation to bring suit against monopolies and trusts. However, his was not so much an attack on “bigness” as such, but on those businesses that used their size to engage in unfair trade practices. In contrast, Wilson favored smaller units of business and cooperation rather than coercion as the means for regulating business practices. Many of his views were inspired by the reform activities and writing of the attorney Louis Brandeis. As for Nevins, just a few months before the presidential election of 1912 he remarked to a friend on the qualities of the two progressive candidates. He said, “Woodrow is no doubt as selfishly and coldly ambitious as his integrity will permit him to be; but it seems to me that even a calculating self-seeking, with intellect and a fearless sense of the public good behind it, is preferable to the blind Quixotic belligerency of Roosevelt, who lashes out recklessly for the mere sake of feeling that he is ‘playing the game,’ and ‘hitting the line hard’ in public life. . . .”2 As an editorial writer, Nevins sought opportunities to comment on economic and social issues, an enthusiasm that troubled Rollo Ogden, who complained that he wrote too many editorials on these subjects. “An oldstock American of British lineage,” as Nevins remembered him, 25 Ogden had “an instinct for the heart of politics,” but lacked any emotion or sensitivity for reforms that might interfere with the sanctity of private property. In contrast, Nevins shared the passion of reformminded journalists like Walter Lippmann and Walter Weyl of the New Republic magazine and the social reformer Jane Addams.3 I Like Wilson and Brandeis, Nevins favored cooperative and coordinated solutions to the country’s economic and social problems. In “The West and the New Agriculture,” an editorial he wrote for the Evening Post shortly after joining its staff in 1913, Nevins intimated that the days of the yeoman farmer were over. Farmers needed to adopt the latest scientific and technological advances and organizational efficiencies if they were to increase their productivity and lessen the drudgery of farm life, of which Nevins had firsthand experience. Some of the new association activity that Nevins admired was occurring at the instigation of farmers themselves; it included “the farmers’ institute, the State fair, the farm paper . . . , and the rural centre of every sort.” Some were being led by state universities, which organized “extension classes, demonstration farms and trains, [and] the experiment station; they also made available bulletins, seed, traveling soil analysts, dairy testers and advisers. Nevins remarked, “A rural life thus intelligent, into which professionally trained men are constantly infused, and to the improvement of which every communal assistance is given, is a guild for the prosecution of its calling that history will find it hard to match.” Then, revealing his admiration of the city over the farm, he concluded, “[T]he face of the farm states is changing in a way not unsuggestive of what is taking place in the modern city itself.” Among the many values of this cooperative spirit, Nevins noted (in a remark that reflected his recollection of the difficulties his father and other farmers had experienced) was the possibility that by acting together rather than individually, farmers could win concessions from railroads and other groups that influenced their ability to get their goods to market and to secure fair prices.4 Nevins saw cooperation as also leading to greater efficiency and productivity in business and commerce. In “The War and Special Industries ,” a 1915 editorial, he criticized the American chemical industry , with its twelve hundred different products and processes and multiplicity of interrelated, yet independent, manufacturing units. He 26 Immersed in Great Affairs observed that if the country expected to develop as a leader in dyes, it needed to “coordinate hundreds of branches of activity in such a...