January 2011

The annual report for the 1906 season of the New York-to-Ardsley run of the public coach Pioneer, operated by the Coaching Club of New York, was both dismal and disconcerting. It showed a net deficit of $6,845.98, and while this was a slight improvement over the previous year (when the deficit had soared to $7,309.01), the seemingly inexplicable downward trend of passenger traffic had continued unabated. The amount derived from the sale of seats had declined to an all-time low of $1,863.

It used to be said in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that all the dogs in town wailed mournfully whenever E. L. Godkin and Charles Eliot Norton got together to exchange their gloomy views on the state of the nation. In the summer of 1897 Norton wrote Godkin that he had recently been forced to put his paper aside one evening “because with each note or article the gloom deepened till it grew darker than it used to be even in my study when after an evening of talk you declared that it was enough to make Rome howl.” For more than thirty years Godkin and Norton sustained and fed each other’s pessimism, sorely disappointed as they both were with developments in post-Civil War America. They believed that American morality had declined precipitately since the early days of the republic. They lamented the lack of good men in politics and the domination of the public service by men of coarse and corrupt nature. They watched with jaundiced eyes as millions of immigrants poured into their country.

He was the most celebrated journalist of his time before he was thirty, and he moved through the dangers and graces of his era with the daring insouciance of one of his fictional heroes. His by-line was a herald’s trumpet sounding across the timescape of fin de siècle, calling the nation to view the pageantry of destiny through his eyes, to live the high adventure of it with him.

Richard Harding Davis became the embodiment of all the hungry hopes of youth for early success. His newspaper career created, in fact, a new mold of socially acceptable accomplishment for ambitious and well-bred Americans. He was a star reporter among the shining company of Dana and Brisbane’s New York Sun men when he was twenty-five. Two years later he was managing editor of Harper’s Weekly .