Edwin Lawrence Godkin, 1831-1902: an Irish-American Mugwump.

In this my latest blog on the history of Irish America, I go back again to the 19th century and to the life of the Irish-born editor and political commentator, Edwin Lawrence Godkin. Now a forgotten figure, in his heyday between the 1860s and 1890s he was influential and well-connected, numbering the writer Henry James among his many prominent American friends and associates.

During the British General Election of 2017, a leading politician caused a brief media stir (and a dash to consult reference books on 19tth century American history) by dismissing an opponent as a 'mutton-headed old Mugwump'. Could he, perhaps, have been thinking of the prominent Irish Mugwump, Edwin Lawrence Godkin?

It was some years ago while I was researching an article on Irish-born journalist, William Howard Russell's newspaper reports from the Crimean War (‘Men at War: 19th century Irish war correspondents from the Crimea to China' in History Ireland Vol. 15, No. 2, March/April 2007) that I came across E. L. Godkin, who was born in Moyne, Co. Wicklow in 1831 and studied at Queens University, Belfast. He was the son of a Congregationalist Minister who was dismissed from his post on account of his support for the repeal of the Act of Union and his association with the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s. Rev. James Godkin was a significant figure in his own right, who advocated agrarian and church reform, two hotly contested political issues in 19th century Ireland. During his career as a journalist, he became editor of the Dublin Daily Express and Irish correspondent of the London Times.

Edwin Godkin evidently inherited his father's literary bent. He was still in his 20s when he published a sympathetic and well-regarded history of Hungary in which he eloquently described the influential conservative Austrian statesman, Prince Metternich, as 'one of the ablest high priests that ever ministered at the altar of absolutism."

Godkin made a name for himself reporting on the Crimean War for the London Daily News. His reports from the battlefront contain more gore than glory. Here's how vividly he described the aftermath of the fighting at Eupatoria in February 1855.

"Men lay on every side gashed and torn by those frightful wounds which round-shot invariably inflict. Here a gory trunk, looking as if the head had
been wrenched from the shoulders by the hand of a giant …another cut in
two as if by a knife and his body doubled up like a strip of brown paper."

After his return from the Crimea, Godkin worked in Belfast for the liberal newspaper, the Northern Whig and then left for the United States in 1856. In the period before the Civil War, he paid a visit to the American South which he viewed unsympathetically. On the issue of slavery, although he had little feeling for its victims, he was unequivocal. It was, he said, a "foul and monstrous" wrong. 

At the end of the Civil War, Godkin turned his hand to the newspaper business and became the co-founder and editor of The Nation (whose title recalls the Young Ireland movement's journal that Godkin would have remembered from his youth), a weekly publication based in New York which has been described as "the most influential liberal weekly" during America's gilded age. Godkin edited the Nation until 1881 when it merged with the New York Evening Post which he went on to edit from 1883 until 1899 when he retired from journalism.

During his years in journalism, Godkin was a combative, controversial figure much given to polemical forays. Although the Nation's original backers were individuals with radical views, Godkin and the paper he edited took an increasingly conservative stance. The paper's motto was: 'to govern well, govern little.' He argued that Government "must let trade, and commerce, and manufacturers, and steamboats, and railroads, and telegraphs alone". Government's job as he saw it was simply to maintain order and administer justice. As an influential editor, he campaigned for low tariffs, a hard currency, civil service reform, independence in politics and international peace while battling against his prime political phobias: imperialism, profligate spending and corruption in government.

Godkin's most influential phase was as a proponent of the Mugwump movement, whose star shone briefly during the closing decades of the 19th century, but failed to make a lasting impact on the US party system. The Mugwumps were a group of high-minded, middle class, reformist Republicans who were appalled by the machine politics and the graft that flourished in American cities in the latter part of the 19th century.

The Mugwumps made their most significant contribution to American politics when they turned their backs on the Republican candidate, James G. Blaine, and helped Grover Cleveland become the 22nd President of the United States in 1884. Cleveland was the first Democrat to be elected President since James Buchanan (1857-1861).

Godkin can be viewed as a classic Mugwump. He was pessimistic about the direction of American democracy, being especially fearful of the growing number of poor people in American cities, "that huge body of ignorant and corrupt voters" as he described them. Tammany Hall, a powerful, Irish-dominated political machine that controlled New York for long periods with the backing of immigrant voters, was a particular target of Godkin’s and of his fellow Mugwumps.

Godkin was an outright elitist who looked down on, and felt threatened by, those who did not possess his educational and social pedigree. He wanted to put a halt to immigration into the United States from southern and Eastern Europe, and was disparaging towards African Americans. A frequent critic of American foreign policy, and particularly of any expansionist tendencies, Godkin was also fiercely critical of the Fenian movement when it conducted abortive invasions of Canada in 1866 and 1870. His views mellowed with age and in the 1880s he became a supporter of Home Rule for Ireland and an admirer of Charles Stewart Parnell and W.E. Gladstone. In 1888, he contributed to a handbook on Home Rule edited by the academic and Liberal Party politician (and future Chief Secretary of Ireland), James Bryce.

When Godkin died in England in 1902, the philosopher, William James, described Godkin as "the towering influence in all thought concerning public affairs" and considered him to be more influential than any other writer of his generation. Praise indeed for an Irish Mugwump! In a more studied assessment, his biographer, William M. Armstrong, described Godkin as “the embattled spokesman for laissez-faire and a fading genteel tradition” but believed that he “lacked the expanded outlook that the new United States demanded.”

Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in Washington