Donn Piatt: Gadfly of the Gilded Age

Introduction

Introduction This is the story of a once famous man with an always rare name: Donn Piatt. As he matured, America moved toward civil war; both before and during the war he served the republic well; after the war he prospered in that booming yet corrupt time that his sometime friend Mark Twain named the Gilded Age. Those decades were later pictured by historians as a dark time, but they were also decades of progress and development.1 In that age, Donn Piatt became famous across America for his fierce criticisms of people, ranging from presidents he had befriended to swindlers he despised. Piatt was a gentleman from Ohio and a man of many accomplishments. After his death in 1891 his biographer Charles Miller called him a diplomat, historian, journalist, judge, lawyer, orator, poet, politician, soldier, statesman, and even theologian . Not least, he was a patriot. He was also a lobbyist, a novelist, a playwright, and a humorist who was once called in to replace Mark Twain when Twain’s humor failed him. Many laughed at what Piatt wrote about others; many laughed at him. Sometimes he even laughed at himself—when he was not wielding his sharp pen. Among all these occupations it was as a Washington insider, a journalist and editor, that he made his national name, after serving as both a diplomat in powerful Paris and a Union officer in tough battles. In 1869 Rutherford B. Hayes, future president, wrote his friend Donn Piatt that he thought Piatt’s true vocation was to be a “disturbing element,” and that it was a vocation in which he could do great things.2 Hayes was right, and America needed such an element. In that Gilded Age, the relief that people had felt at war’s end soon turned to widespread worry that a president who had been a wartime hero, Ulysses Grant, had gone imperial—and that both Grant’s administration and the Congress were corrupt. Washington was becoming more important in America, and at the same time Washington sycophants and lobbyists were becoming more numerous. America looked like a society of haves and have-nots. The American press seemed sometimes somnolent and indulgent in the face of lies and decay. In some ways it was a time like our own. Donn Piatt was never somnolent. Until days before he died, at seventy-two, in the fine chateau he had built in the quiet Ohio countryside, he continued to attack the wrongs and corruption he saw in America. Piatt was an early American muckraker, although that was not a term used in his lifetime.3 He told his readers that a man was gauged by his enemies. As he worked on and his health went slowly downhill, he said it was better to wear out than to rust. xi Bridges text.indb 11 7/31/12 10:29 AM Piatt knew everyone who counted in Ohio, and in his time Ohioans filled jobs from the White House down. When he moved east, he became a national gadfly and a scourge of top leaders, who sometimes reacted sharply to his criticism. Of the half dozen presidents he came to know, one cursed him—or at least so he said. Another jailed him—of this there is no question—for inciting riot and rebellion. One day Piatt was knocked down in the Capitol by a promoter he had accused of bribing congressmen. On another day a drunken senator he had ridiculed came gunning for him but went to the wrong newspaper in his search. Piatt afterward published his correct address; he kept regular hours, he said, and he wanted the senator to know his schedule: “We kill Senators on Monday . . . Wednesday we fight members of the House . . . and we protest any intrusion on Friday and Saturday . . . some little time has to be given to editing our insults.”4 Piatt died after reminding the public of a grave fault in an Ohio native and martyred president who had been a close friend, James A. Garfield, and while trying to thwart the aspirations of an Ohio politician named William McKinley.5 In the little more than seven decades that Piatt spent on earth, the rural republic on the Atlantic seaboard spread its dominion across the continent and survived four years of bloody civil war. Immigrants and pioneers filled the spaces where Lakota and bison had roamed. Railroads and the telegraph began to provide fast transport and almost instant messaging. Industry and agriculture boomed...