USA > Pennsylvania > A biographical album of prominent Pennsylvanians, v. 1 > Part 44
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In 1847 Mr. Barr was married to Miss Anna Dunlevy, a daughter of Jeremiah Dunlevy, an old and well-known citizen of the county, not many years deceased. The tragedy of his life, which had its influence ever afterwards, was the fearful death of Mrs. Barr, in October, 1865, by a railroad accident. In company with her husband and some friends, she started from Harrisburg on a pleasure and health-seeking tour, which was to include a trip up the lludson. Mr. and Mrs. Butler and Mr. and Mrs. Barr were occupying seats in the car facing each other. In Lancaster county, while the train was going very fast, an axle broke and the truck was thrown upward through the car, instantly killing Mrs. Barr and Mr. and Mrs. Butler, as well as a Mr. Butler, employed in the Surveyor-General's office, who was standing in the aisle Mr. Barr was injured slightly but his
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escape from death, under the circumstances, was miraculous. This fearful calamity cast a shadow over his life; but the sincerity of his religious faith and the fortitude of his character were illustrated by the Christian submission with which he withstood the shocking bereavement, and devoted his energies to the domestic duties now made more onerous by the tragic death of his wife.
For a number of years preceding his last fatal illness his health had been gradually failing and he had premonitions that the trouble was serious and the end not far off. But he kept on in the even tenor of his way, always cheerful, tender and devoted to those within the family circle, and kindly and cordial to his business associates and personal friends. His death occurred September 14, ISS6, and elicited warm tributes of respect from journalists all over the country and from a number of prominent statesmen. Hon. Samuel J. Randall, in a letter to the son, Albert J. Barr, said :
" Mr. Barr was a student, a careful and earnest thinker, of untiring energy, of noble aims and purposes, and bore through life high personal character and the esteem and respect of Pittsburgh where he lived, and of the State of Pennsylvania, where his eminent public services were justly held in great honor.
"He was gentle and modest and retiring in the ordinary business of life, but when the vital interests of the people, amongst whom he lived and for whom he had been a sturdy champion from the beginning, were at stake, or the renown and success of a friend were assailed and in jeopardy, he was 'a lion in the path,' and fought with indomitable courage and ability.
"So far as I can learn his life drew peacefully to its close surrounded with sympathizing relatives and friends.
". While he slept his spirit walked abroad And wandered past the mountains, past the clouds, Nor came again to rouse The form at peacc.'"
CHARLES EMORY SMITH.
CHARLES EMORY SMITII.
C HARLES EMORY SMITHI .- Birth east of the Hudson and a career westward of that stream have been the source and opportunity of successful life in the Northern States during three-quarters of a century. True of all professions, this has been most frequently true of journalism. The most conspicuous success in the profession is summed up by a New England ancestry and a career in the Middle States. Nor is this an accident. The surest path of personal advance- ment lies always along the national orbit, and this has made our westward march the most conspicuous fact in our historical development. To every jour- nalist who in less or large degree has shared this progress or enjoyed its oppor- tunities in the two largest States of the Union, New York and Pennsylvania, there has fallen a part in the immediate progress of affairs not often enjoyed by those whose career runs farther east or farther west; nearer our past in one case, nearer our future in the other, in both farther from our present.
The glory of a man's life grows valuable as it bears relation to the larger cur- rent of affairs, and it is his share and part in this professional development which gives special interest to the life and career of Charles Emory Smith, editor of the Philadelphia Press, a life still happily incomplete and a career to which favorable fortune has not put its last touches. Born at Mansfield, Conn., February 18, 1842, the removal of his parents in 1849 to Albany cast all his early study in the schools of that city, ending in the Albany Academy, one of the few schools of secondary instruction in New York State with traditions and a reputation of its own maintained through sixty years. Graduated from this institution at sixteen in 1858, six months were spent in his first work in journalism, the current daily leaders in the Albany Evening Transcript; and then pushing over the ground covered by the first two years of a college course, Mr. Smith passed the biennial examinations of Union College and entered at the opening of the junior year in 1859. The year following, while still a junior, he was Captain of the College Wide-awakes, the popular Republican campaign club of the day, and represented Union College on the board of editors of the University Review, a short-lived periodical of admirable aim published at New Haven which attempted to unite the literary talent of a number of colleges in a university quarterly. To it Mr. Smith contributed a paper on the history of Union College, and both his connec- tion with this periodical and his activity in organizing the College Wide-awakes give hint how early politics and periodical literature had engrossed his attention. In 1861 he was graduated and returned, his days of study and preparation for active life over at nineteen.
In the summer of 1861 Albany was the centre and headquarters of active prep- aration for the field. Like every capital of the larger Northern States, it was the point where the work of organizing the State levies and turning them over (387)
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to United States authorities was in daily and hourly progress. An important share of this work, covering a large part of the largest State in the Union, was given to Gen John F. Rathbone. In organizing his military family, he had the wit to surround himself with young men. He offered Mr. Smith, the young graduate who had attracted his attention in school and college, a position first as military Secretary, and this was later followed by promotion to the post of Judge Advocate-General, with the rank of Major and with confidential duties broader than the place and rank usually confer. For eighteen months Mr. Smith held this post, and while he remained at the work the manifold machinery of orders and requisitions passed through his hands. His duties were rather those of an Acting Adjutant-General than of the private Secretary of a Brigadier-General in the State military.
With a change in the method of raising troops, Mr. Smith entered the office of the Adjutant-General of the State and remained till Horatio Seymour suc- ceeded Edwin D. Morgan as Governor in 1863. Resigning his place, he turned then to the familiar resource of teaching, and for a year and a half held a position in the Albany Academy, from which he had been graduated four years before; but it was a time in which the vivid life of the day all turned upon the burning questions of the war, and the real work to which the young teacher gave himself was in short articles with which day by day he filled two columns of the editorial page of the Albany Express. The stamp and direction of these labors at once formed and determined what came in later years to be the familiar mold in which the larger share of Mr. Smith's editorial work was cast. Albany journalism had reached at this time a transitional period. The Argus had been established half a century earlier as a Democratic Republican organ, and the appointment of Thurlow Weed as State Printer a generation after the Argus was founded had given the Albany Journal a similar position first in the Whig and later in the Republican party. Each journal was an integral part of the partisan machinery of the day, and enjoyed an influence which made the editor of the Argus always er-officio a member of the Albany Regeney, and Weed the managing partner of the firm of Weed, Seward & Co., to which Horace Greeley addressed the first considerable declaration of political independence in American journalism. The unique position of these newspapers separated them alike from the organs which live on favors received and independent newspapers which constitute a vital polit- ical force in the community separate from party organization and machinery, sometimes greater than parties and sometimes less, enemies in war and in peace friends, but neither claiming control nor conceding partisan allegiance. Jour- nalism has a higher walk and a better worship than this; but American journal- ism has furnished fewer posts of wider influence than was presented by the con- trol of these two papers in the period soon to close when Mr. Smith dropped his teaching and the writing of editorials as an avocation to assume his vocation in an editorial position on the Albany Express in 1865. Mr. Smith's connection with the paper rapidly passed from a salaried position to a profitable share in the
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ownership, coupled with editorial control. The Express, a purely local journal until he took charge, began then to be regarded as a political force.
The re-election of Governor Fenton in 1866 confirmed his position at the head of the party, and his continued residence in Albany strengthened the relations which had sprung up during his first term between the astute poli- tician in the executive chamber and the rising young journalist. To those aware of the real condition of affairs, the conduct of the Albany Journal was somewhat discredited at this time by unfortunate management. It was also unfriendly to Governor Fenton, and these reasons both prompted and aided the Governor to draw the Express to the support of his administration. Partly by his own growing strength, largely by his aid, it emerged from the Republican Convention of 1867 with a ticket of its own making, carried against the Albany Fournal. The Express continued to make steady progress. In two years the successful management and incisive editorials had carried it to a conspicuous place as the rival Republican organ at the State capital. Its editor was thrown into increasing intimacy with the leaders of the party, among whom Governor Fenton still remained chief, when his election as Senator in 1869 transferred him from Albany to Washington. In the closing part of his term, Mr. Smith, with- out relinquishing his editorial work, acted for a time as private Secretary to the Governor, and these intimate political and personal relations continued after the removal of Mr. Fenton to a seat in the Federal Senate.
From 1867 to 1870 four successive annual clections in New York State re- turned each a Democratic majority. No Republican nominations and no party management was able to retrieve defeat or make headway against the alliance which William M. Tweed had successfully established between the corrupt wings of both parties in a State which had not in thirty years offered any party four consecutive years of success. The alliance and its influences were not absent from the Albany Journal, and in 1870 its proprietors made a radical change in its management by calling first to its associate and later to its chief editorship Mr. Charles Emory Smith. His determination to take the position with the office untrammelled by any connection with the influence then dominant on both floors and in every chamber of the State capitol, delayed this step, and it was not until over a year after the offer was first made that he resigned from the Express and accepted a place upon the Albany Journal.
The new position which he occupied carried the responsibilities, the influences and the wide relations associated with it through the long success and practice of the political journalism already described. It was a place which left to any occupant much to learn in journalism of a higher order, but to a man equal to the demands its opportunities left nothing to acquire in the close connection with affairs required in the field of practical politics. Its training in this sphere was as complete as its influence was unrivalled.
It is among the personal disadvantages of such a place that the man who fills it is liable to lose a keen apprehension of public demands and desires, while the
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public on its side misjudges the honest and honorable defence of a party policy which an editor was first in forming and in determining, with the servile acquies- cence of an organ in the work of a machine. The proof which Mr. Smith offered at a later period that his training at Albany had not unfitted him for combat in a freer field of more direct access to a greater public is the sufficient answer to the imputations which insensibly gather about a man who occupies a position where personal influence is great and public appreciation at once incomplete, inexact and inadequate. At the commencement of Mr. Smith's connection with the Albany Journal, Mr. George Dawson was joint editor and the senior in years and service, and, though gradually withdrawing after the first two years from active work, he continued nominally in this position until 18;6, when his formal retirement left Mr. Smith alone in the conduct of the paper ; but during most of the ten years over which his connection with the paper extended, from 1870 to ISSO, it was the open secret of New York politics and of Albany journalism that Mr. Smith was the controlling spirit in the politics of the Journal.
The post brought with it, as the next step in his career, a public association with politics. From 1873 on Mr. Smith was a delegate to State Conventions, and in them it soon came to be a fixed practice which acquired the force of un- written law that the editor of the Journal should head the Committee on Resolu- tions and prepare the platforms. After 1874 this was recognized throughout the State. Successive utterances of party policy and principle yearly came from Mr. Smith's pen, which drew the platform at the Convention and then expounded and enforced it in the fournal through the campaign. Election to State Conventions was succeeded in due order by the selection of Mr. Smith as delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1876. He occupied a place at Cincinnati on the Committee on Resolutions, and he discharged there, as he so often had done in State Conventions, the delicate work of embodying in words the sentiment, the opinion and the principles of the party. A large part of the platform came direct from his pen. His active connection with New York politics closed at the Utica Convention in ISSo, where he declined to occupy his old post as Chairman of the Committee on Resolutions. Once before, when Chairman of the same Committee in 1876, he had parted company with his nearest associates in the party by opposing and defeating a resolution instructing the State delegation at Cincinnati to vote as a unit. Again, in 1880, he differed from the leaders of the majority and served instead as both Temporary and Permanent Chairman-the conspicuous figure in a conspicuous Convention.
Through the early stages in which success, while it justified the movement for party purity headed by Senator Conkling, gave it, year by year, the danger- ous tendency towards arbitrary power which led to the political fall of its chief, the influence of the Journal and its editor was steadily exerted for a liberal policy. The support of W. HI. Robinson for Governor, in 1872, meant this. The efforts of Mr. Smith were directed to the same end in 1877, when he carried the first principles of Civil Service Reform in the State platform, and in 1878,
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when he framed and reported a platform to which he personally secured the approval of Mr. Wm. M. Evarts, as the head of the administration of President Hayes, and of Senator Conkling, as chief of the opposition. He followed the same liberal policy in advocating and aiding the election of Mr. George B. Sloan as Speaker of the Assembly, in opposition to the machine organization, with which he co-operated when he felt it to be right. The real strength and im- portance of the position occupied by Mr. Smith in the politics of New York State depended upon the success with which the editor of the Journal succeeded in accomplishing such results-in preventing the managers of the party from setting at naught the demands of the minority and forgetting the duty respon- sible leaders owe to all elements of a partisan organization. If these efforts proved at last unavailing, it was not for lack of their constant exercise, and no man familiar with affairs inside politics in the State was unaware that Mr. Smith represented in party councils a moderate policy and was constantly urging a frank recognition of the just claims of the minority.
All of his ability as a man of affairs had received its adequate exercise in his position upon the Albany Journal ; but there are few places as conspicuous in journalism which offer so little opportunity for the professional ability of a jour- nalist. This needed another and a larger field. Early in ISSo this opened be- fore Mr. Smith in the offer of the chief editorship of the Philadelphia Press. The Press, when Mr. Smith assumed editorial control and responsibility, March 7, ISSo, was a newspaper stranded in the shallows of a diminishing circulation, without advertising, without influence and without equipment, whose single tangible advantage over a sheet started yesterday was an Associated Press fran- chise. Founded over twenty-five years before, by John W. Forney, it had enjoyed a brilliant career through the earlier years of his management and con- trol. In later years it had steadily lost ground, and rapid changes in its man- agement had destroyed public confidence and prevented the Press from enjoying the manifest benefit of its opportunities in the second city of the Union. In all its relations in every function and in each department it needed repair, as frigates are "repaired " in our navy-yards, by taking a foot or two of the old keelson and building a new vessel about that. The perplexities and perils of such a task, its difficulties and dangers, none but journalists know, and from them most journalists shrink.
The national campaign, which ended in the clection of Garfield, had just opened when Mr. Smith assumed full control of the Press. In politics it was an unconsidered factor, its local influence had almost disappeared, in news-gather- ing it was unknown, and in the wider walks of journalism it was unfelt. All this was altered in the six months of its first national campaign under the new man- agement, and when, four years later, another national canvass opened, the Press stood foremost in the great popular movement which culminated in the nomina- tion of James G. Blaine. It led in the politics of its State and in its own city; it enjoyed an influence second to no rival newspaper; its news had no superior along
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the Atlantic coast, and in company with a few other leading newspapers it shared the best special cable service in the country, while its pages displayed that elevated and accurate reflection of national principle and sentiment which constitutes the highest work of journalism. Four years sufficed to complete this work, to raise the Press from an obscure place in the local dailies of Philadelphia to the front rank of journalism in the nation.
The talent and the methods employed in creating a successful newspaper are always essentially the same. The task requires the capacity for organizing a highly prosperous business which a successful tradesman needs; a sure instinct in catching the political drift of the day which makes the successful politician, and that special gift of the journalist who, to succeed, must know to-day what will most interest the surrounding public to-morrow. In discharging this com- plex task, whose diverse requirements are rarely or never united in the same man, the skilled assistance of an adequate staff is a fundamental requisite for success, and this, in the first cighteen months under the new management, the Press office had secured. With this task there went on the rapid extension of the Press in all the functions of the complete newspaper. By the general pub- lic, to whom a public journal daily presents itself as a casual whole, these various functions are little understood. There was in the present instance, as the earliest step and one whose influence was most widely apparent, a political policy and course of action adopted which impressed itself on the changing current of party management, left there its personal mark, and directed it into new channels. It was very largely due to the Press and its influence, as personally directed, in- spired and conducted by Mr. Smith, that the Republican party in Pennsylvania emerged from the troublous reorganization of the four years from 1880 to 1884, united and ready for new victories, and this inevitably left the Press in a com- manding position rarely occupied by any one newspaper towards a party casting half a million votes.
The initial impulse toward this important result was given in the first six months after Mr. Smith's arrival. The careful organization of the news of the Press began shortly after, and was well systematized a year and a half later, in 1883. This work involved the double task of extending over the State and the country a great net-work of local correspondents and of creating an office organi- zation competent to deal with all news as it comes. News of this character is, however, in the way of every net spread broad enough. The Press, under Mr. Smith, has added to this the development and disclosure of local abuses whose " news " lay in their original discovery. It is in this field that the most pow- erful influence of a newspaper is exerted, and the Press has not only reflected the daily local life of Philadelphia as it never was given before, but it has in addition attracted and commanded public attention by the light it has thrown on abuses first recorded in its columns. Lastly, in the sphere of opinion, where reason supplements fact and the newspaper becomes something more than a bulletin and bill-board, the Press, under Mr. Smith's immediate personal care and
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through his own utterances, came to be known as a public journal in which independence, ability and a perspicuous insight into the drift and current of popular thought united to make an editorial page which at once expressed, reflected and formed the principle and opinion, the convictions and action of the party with which it acted and the community in which its lot was cast.
The Press had been without a Sunday edition prior to the change in its man- agement in I880, and its weekly issue had sunk to a nominal circulation. In March, 1881, a local sheet, the Sunday Press, was bought to prevent any confu- sion of name, and the issue of the Sunday Press begun. From its commence- ment successful, the influence of this issue widened and its circulation increased, until in two years the latter exceeded that of any Sunday newspaper south of New York and west of Cincinnati. In spite of its steady improvement as a newspaper, and of having more than doubled its numbers, the Press lacked up to the autumn of 1883 the great popular circulation to which its merits entitled it. This, it gradually became plain, was due chiefly to its price, three cents, while its rivals sold their daily issues at two cents. Its larger size and more complete news failed to make up the difference, and in October, 1883, the step of reducing its price to two cents was taken. The result more than justified the decision. The circulation of the Press advanced by leaps and bounds and doubled by half years for a twelvemonth after. In the winter of 1883-4 the weekly issue of the paper was taken up and it repaid special care and the employment of trained talent in the same manner. The circulation of its campaign edition rose in 1884 to more than 100,000, and it went into every State in the Union and almost every Congressional district. Success like this involved, as every journalist and, most of all, every editor in charge is aware, a prompt readiness on the part of the pro- prietary management of the Press to sacrifice present profits to future business and a clear appreciation that in the long run the highest success is only secured by the highest payment in the open market of professional talent and mechanical industry. This appreciation and this readiness are rare in all walks-rarest of all, journalists are fain to believe, in newspaper proprietors. They existed in abundant and continuing measure in the chief proprietor of the Press, Mr. Calvin Wells, whose signal sagacity, courage, business foresight and broad policy have been a tower of strength to Mr. Smith. Without co-operation, and something more than co-operation, in the chief proprietor of a newspaper, the comprehen- sive insight of an editor-in-chief, which grasps by instinet the condition of the intricate problems of journalism, his ability, his experience and his professional powers are put forward to little purpose and yield stunted fruit.
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