Donn Piatt: Gadfly of the Gilded Age

9 East Again, and Home to stay

168 donn piatt F 9 G East Again, and Home to stay In that same year of 1888, Piatt left Ohio and moved to New York City for the second time in his life to become at the age of sixty-nine the editor of the new Belford’s Magazine. It was a coup for the magazine’s well-known publisher, Robert Belford. The Springfield Register said that the magazine “had been wise enough to select the keenest and most slashing writer at its command, Col. Donn Piatt, to edit it and to contribute.”1 Piatt’s friend Gertrude Garrison, in a dispatch written for papers across the country, wondered why Piatt, a man of means as well as a versatile genius, had agreed to “give up his beloved leisure and once more take the public in hand. . . . Presumably it was the love of expressing himself, which writers never entirely lose.”2 At sixty-nine Piatt was an old man to be still working. The hero of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward, published that January, opines, “At forty-five . . . a man still has ten years of good manual labor in him, and twice ten years of good intellectual service.”3 At that, Bellamy was exaggerating. More than half of American men died before they reached sixty.4 Robert Belford had visited Piatt at Mac-o-cheek the previous August, to discuss the idea of starting a new liberal review that would advocate good government— including free trade—and would also publish lighter matter for family reading.5 Piatt met with Belford again in May 1888, in Washington, just as the magazine was being launched. Piatt told reporters that the new magazine would be backed by a syndicate of wealthy and prominent gentlemen who had guaranteed a circulation of 75,000 for at least the first six months.6 Whether or not this was the case, Belford did arrange to provide 70,000 copies of the magazine to the Democratic Party’s national committee. The longtime chairman of the committee, William H. Barnum, was about to be succeeded by Calvin Stewart Brice, a fellow Ohioan, who like Piatt had been a lawyer and a Union lieutenant colonel. Piatt found the two reluctant to take and distribute the copies. Barnum called the magazine a “nauseous pill” and 168 Bridges text.indb 168 7/31/12 10:29 AM east again, an home to stay 169 said that he really sympathized with those who supported high tariffs—that is, the Republicans. In fact, both Barnum and Brice were protectionists and far from President Cleveland’s, or Donn Piatt’s, views on trade. Piatt went to the attorney general, August H. Garland, sometime before the presidential election that November, to ask him to tell President Cleveland that he was being betrayed by his own party’s national committee. Cleveland, Piatt learned, reacted by saying that even if Piatt’s charge was true (and in effect it was), it was the party that had chosen Barnum and Brice and he had no right to interfere .7 Perhaps Cleveland should have interfered; in the November election he lost the White House to Benjamin Harrison. At the beginning of January 1889 editor Piatt sent a letter to that world-famous author Mark Twain. The text of the letter was typed and presumably was sent to a number of other persons, as well. It asked the recipient if he would provide information about his favorite works of prose fiction and said, “By complying with this request, you will entertain the public, so much interested in your own efforts.” Piatt signed the letter, “Donn Piatt, Ed Belford.” It is addressed, also in his own hand, to “Mr Saml Clemmens.” Did Piatt not know how to spell Clemens correctly? In any case the once promising friendship between the two writers was long finished. Mark Twain wrote, “No answer,” on the envelope, perhaps after a moment of anger.8 Certainly Twain had not forgotten Piatt, and certainly Twain could be vengeful. Years earlier he had decided to take revenge on another editor, Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune, after Reid refused to let the well-known journalist Edward House review The Gilded Age for the paper and later published pieces critical of Twain. The revenge was to come in the form of a biography of Reid that Twain never completed. In 1880, Twain attended a testimonial dinner for U. S. Grant and found that Reid, who in the past had...