Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925

25. Ellery Sedgwick: Politics and Poets

Ellery Sedgwick politics and poets ellery sedgwick did not look as one might expect the editor of the Atlantic to look, except perhaps for the glasses hanging on a cord around his neck. The historian Frederick Lewis Allen thought his loud shirts and “garishly checked suits” more appropriate for the boardwalk at Atlantic City than a Boston boardroom. A naturally grave man with exuberant tastes, he spoke with fastidious deliberation. He could reduce a new secretary to tears for having misplaced a manuscript that lay within the stack of papers on his desk. Allen thought he had the mind of a born journalist, but his skills also included those of a born businessman and great editor. He aimed for an audience who would subscribe in advance and “be loyal as long as the magazine satisfied them.”1 Before editing the Atlantic, Sedgwick had worked for Leslie’s Monthly Magazine (1900– 1905) and American Magazine (1906–1907). From his time at Leslie’s, he learned, as its founder Frank Leslie liked to say, never to shoot over the reader’s head. He stayed barely a year at American Magazine, which became the standard bearer of progressive muckrakers such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, whose exposé of John D. Rockefeller led to the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil. Sedgwick sympathized with the goals of social progressives, and under him, the Atlantic stood for “intelligent American opinion .” The magazine allowed Sedgwick, who cut 25 Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth. robert frost, “The Road Not Taken,” 1915 Ellery Sedgwick [ 225 ] Bliss Perry’s section on recent books, to give “full rein to an intense political interest born at the age of ten.” According to his own admission, he looked “about for a hero” and found one in Woodrow Wilson. After hearing Wilson speak in 1905, Sedgwick had rushed up the steps of his house, thrown open the door, and shouted to his wife, “I have been listening to a great man. I know it! I know it! Wilson will be famous.”2 Less understandable in retrospect, he would support the dictator Francisco Franco during Spain’s Civil War.3 From as far back as his undergraduate days at Harvard, Sedgwick decided that “by hook or crook” he would someday own and edit the Atlantic . He felt sure that the magazine suffered for being “a very small fifth wheel” in the “cumbersome coach” of its parent company, Houghton , Mifflin, and thought its cure lay in becoming the main occupation of a smaller, more compact organization.4 With this goal in sight, he furthered the interests of previous editors Walter Hines Page, whose progressive program he shared, and Horace Scudder, whom he admired but thought hopelessly old-fashioned. He saw his chance to buy the magazine on Bliss Perry’s retirement, and did so for fifteen thousand dollars. Houghton Mifflin retained another fifteen thousand in stock. Sedgwick felt the magazine was “long on tradition . . . [but] short on realization.”5 The magazine wanted energy, he thought, and in the spirit of Page, he relentlessly pursued stories and authors. Sedgwick tracked Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, hoping to acquire his diary, which, given the diarist’s “cantankerous nature,” promised to be full of wonderful “proofs of human perversity.” The fourth time Sedgwick approached Welles, he was permitted to see the padlocked “solid iron box” that held the manuscript. Though Sedgwick appealed to family pride and history, Welles held back. Friends with Lincoln’s son, Robert, since boyhood, and best man at his wedding, he bowed to what Sedgwick surmised was Robert’s decision against publication.6 Undeterred, Sedgwick befriended Welles’s son Edgar on the assumption that the diary would likely pass to him. It did, though Sedgwick got the diary over Edgar’s better judgment. In 1909, Edgar Welles wrote, “I authorize the publication with hesitation, and do so only under pressure; and my father’s inflexible view of right and duty, and his absolute integrity and regard for truth and honesty, must be borne in mind when some of his severe strictures are read.”7 It had taken Sedgwick more than a year to secure the diary. He r e p u b l i c o f...