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Progressive Politics under Walter Hines Page walter hines page (1855–1918) was the last Atlantic editor to have personal memories of the Civil War. Growing up in Cary, North Carolina, the lanky boy with nut-colored curls and Huck Finn innocence wandered down to the train station with his best friend, an African American named Sam. There they saw the train halt and a large box containing the body of a Confederate soldier laid gently in the shade. A man told them that Billy Morris had come home to his parents. The boys tended the coffin while the man fetched the Morrises. In the hour or more that it took for old Mr. Morris, still covered with lint from the cotton gin, and his suddenly aged wife to come, Walt Page became aware of the world’s wrongs. At Billy Morris’s funeral the minister prayed for Southern victory. Listening to the women weep, Page felt guilty, wondering whether his doubts about the Cause had helped determine Billy’s fate. Mrs. Gregory, a neighbor, cried, “It’ll be my John next,” and sure enough, his coffin followed Billy’s. As more coffins arrived and more women donned mourning, starved and wounded soldiers straggled home. The shoemaker Mr. Sanford looked so thin that Page thought he might disintegrate before his eyes; Mr. Larkin and Joe Tatum limped into town on crutches; and one man arrived minus a cheek and ear. Young Walt and Sam still went fishing on the riverbank, but 22 We all think when we are young that we can do something with the mummies. But the mummy is a solemn fact, and it differs from all other things (except stones) in this: it lasts forever. walter hines page, letter to the State Chronicle, 1886 r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 194 ] instead of waiting silently for their catch, they spoke in hushed tones of battles and bodies.1 Page left Cary for college, and later landed a job as a cub reporter for the St. Joseph Gazette in Missouri. He rose quickly to editor before leaving to join the staff of the New York World. From there he moved first to the Raleigh State Chronicle and then to the Forum, where he raised circulation and caught Horace Scudder’s attention at the Atlantic. Page, who came to the magazine as both its assistant and acquisitions editor, succeeded Scudder in 1898. Scudder had two hesitations about Page. He worried about trusting the magazine to such a young man. (Page, at forty-three, was seventeen years younger than Scudder.) And he worried about having a Southerner at the helm, though Page, having little patience with tradition for tradition’s sake, hardly seemed “Southern.” Blaming the South’s woes on Confederate hero-worship, Page rejected all forms of what he called “mummified” thinking. To his mind, the Atlantic had strayed from its vision as a political force, and he meant to get it on track. Page’s politics were complicated. He editorialized about the Populist menace in October 1896, fearing it would bring mob rule. Despite childhood memories, he supported the Spanish-American War, reinstating the American flag from Civil War days on the Atlantic’s June 1898 cover. His support of the war troubled a core of anti-imperialists associated with the magazine, including William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Charles Eliot Norton, who begged his students not to volunteer their service. Rejecting an antiwar article from E. L. Godkin, Page drew his line between “the intelligent classes who criticize and predict disaster, and the men who must take those tasks in hand.”2 Atlantic writers supporting the war assumed the moral superiority of the United States and its responsibility toward those colonized. Page himself called it a “necessary act of surgery for the sake of civilization.”3 As a man whose family had at one time owned a few slaves and who had not wholly shed the prejudices of his caste and training, Page found it disconcerting to enter the office every day to work under the gaze of William Lloyd Garrison’s portrait. Garrison’s son, employed at the Atlantic , often invited African Americans to visit and consult with him about personal and political matters. According to Page’s biographer, Burton J. Hendrick, another Atlantic staffer recounted an incident when Page told Garrison that one of his “niggers” waited outside for an audience. “I very [18.217.228.35...

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