Donn Piatt: Gadfly of the Gilded Age

5 Piatt to the Capital

82 donn piatt F 5 G piatt to the capital Donn Piatt had long had what might be called a love-hate relationship with the city of Washington. As a young man he had been repelled by the vacuousness and ineptitude he saw in Congress and the White House. Washington was hot and dusty in summer and often frigid and muddy in winter. Even so, Louise Piatt had written as early as 1855 that she sensed from what Donn told her “what a magnificent place it must yet be.”1 Washington’s population was to reach 109,000 by the census of 1870. That was twice what it had been a decade earlier, just before the Civil War, but Washington was still only half the size of Cincinnati (1870 population , 216,000), the handsome city where Donn had been born and educated and to which he often returned. After the war the national capital was all in all still shabby rather than handsome , despite a few grand buildings. Even its greatest thoroughfare, Pennsylvania Avenue, was unpaved. However, the presence of the government, the diplomatic corps, and not least the growing corps of journalists and of lobbyists, made Washington a very interesting—indeed, unique—American city. Nor could anyone who visited there in late April or May ever forget the blooming fruit trees, dogwoods, and azaleas in the city, the broad tidal river stretching down toward the sea, and the green Virginia hills beyond. Beyond the dogwoods and azaleas, the war had made the federal government the country’s largest employer. Now Washington’s “fostering hand” was enlarging its role, overriding state governments to give the vote to former slaves; creating a pension system for a million veterans; modernizing and extending taxation; subsidizing the new transcontinental railroad.2 The new Department of Agriculture, created during the war, was setting up experimental stations and extension services across the country; the National Weather Service began issuing forecasts for the public; and as the country’s population grew, so did the nationwide operations of the post office.3 82 Bridges text.indb 82 7/31/12 10:29 AM piatt to the capital 83 At the same time, some people sensed an increase in corruption in America and interested themselves in the cause of reform. For some Northerners this was perhaps a question of turning the old antislavery drive into new channels.4 For others, though, the end of the war meant there was no more to fear, and there ensued “a season of contentment and of lassitude” in which at least initially there seemed little need for people to interest themselves in national affairs.5 Piatt did not believe in lassitude, and he soon found that there was a lot to do in the national capital. He went there in 1868 to become the correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial, which under Murat Halstead became perhaps the most important newspaper west of the Alleghenies. Piatt and Halstead had known each other since before the war and were fellow members of the Cincinnati Literary Club. Unlike Piatt, who had enlisted in the Union army at the age of forty-one, Halstead, ten years younger, had never served in the war.6 He joined the staff of the Commercial in 1853, became editor-in-chief in 1859, and in 1866 took over active control of the paper. The war had brought many journalists to Washington, and after the war more American newspapers were finding the need for a correspondent based there. It was a time, though, when some journalists tended to refrain from criticism of officialdom; when most newspapers were still what a standard history calls “servile party organs.”7 That did not include either Halstead or his new man in Washington. Piatt named the House of Representatives the “Cave of the Winds” and called the Senate the “Fog Bank.” Soon the foibles of statesmen were being mocked without mercy in Piatt’s dispatches. He found good company in the growing Washington press corps. Two of the top political correspondents—one historian calls them the two foremost—were Henry V. Boynton of the Cincinnati Gazette, who, like Piatt, had been a Union lieutenant colonel from Ohio, and George Alfred Townsend, who had been perhaps the youngest Civil War correspondent and now wrote for several papers.8 Both would become close collaborators with Donn Piatt, Townsend soon and Boynton years later. Piatt wrote to his friend Friedrich Hassaurek, the Cincinnati German American editor who had been Lincoln...