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The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I

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Title: The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I

Author: Burton Jesse Hendrick


        
Release date: November 6, 2005 [eBook #17017]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

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[Illustration: Walter H. Page]




THE
LIFE AND LETTERS OF
WALTER H. PAGE


BY
BURTON J. HENDRICK


VOLUME
I


GARDEN CITY      NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1922




PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.

_First Edition
after the printing of 377 de luxe copies_




_PREFATORY NOTE_


_Among the many who have assisted in the preparation of this Biography
especial acknowledgment is made to Mr. Irwin Laughlin, First Secretary
and Counsellor of the London Embassy under Mr. Page. Mr. Page's papers
show the high regard which he entertained for Mr. Laughlin's abilities
and character, and the author similarly has found Mr. Laughlin's
assistance indispensable. Mr. Laughlin has had the goodness to read the
manuscript and make numerous suggestions, all for the purpose of
reënforcing the accuracy of the narrative. The author gratefully
remembers many long conversations with Viscount Grey of Fallodon, in
which Anglo-American relations from 1913 to 1916 were exhaustively
canvassed and many side-lights thrown upon Mr. Page's conduct of his
difficult and delicate duties. The British Foreign Office most
courteously gave the writer permission to examine a large number of
documents in its archives bearing upon Mr. Page's ambassadorship and
consented to the publication of several of the most important._

B.J.H.




CONTENTS

VOLUME I

CHAPTER                                          PAGE
   I. A RECONSTRUCTION BOYHOOD                      1
  II. JOURNALISM                                   32
 III. "THE FORGOTTEN MAN"                          64
  IV. THE WILSONIAN ERA BEGINS                    102
   V. ENGLAND BEFORE THE WAR                      132
  VI. "POLICY" AND "PRINCIPLE" IN MEXICO          175
 VII. PERSONALITIES OF THE MEXICAN PROBLEM        215
VIII. HONOUR AND DISHONOUR IN PANAMA              232
  IX. AMERICA TRIES TO PREVENT THE EUROPEAN WAR   270
   X. THE GRAND SMASH                             301
  XI. ENGLAND UNDER THE STRESS OF WAR             327
 XII. "WAGING NEUTRALITY"                         357
XIII. GERMANY'S FIRST PEACE DRIVES                398




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


     Walter H. Page                                       _Frontispiece_

     Allison Francis Page (1824-1899), father of Walter H. Page        20

     Catherine Raboteau Page (1831-1897), mother of Walter H. Page     21

     Walter H. Page in 1876, when he was a Fellow of Johns Hopkins
         University, Baltimore, Md.                                    36

     Basil L. Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, Johns Hopkins
         University, 1876-1915                                         37

     Walter H. Page (1899) from a photograph taken when he was
         editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_                             100

     Dr. Wallace Buttrick, President of the General Education Board   101

     Charles D. McIver, of Greensboro, North Carolina, a leader in
         the cause of Southern Education                              116

     Woodrow Wilson in 1912                                           117

     Walter H. Page, from a photograph taken a few years before he
         became American Ambassador to Great Britain                  292

     The British Foreign Office, Downing Street                       293

     No. 6 Grosvenor Square, the American Embassy under Mr. Page      308

     Irwin Laughlin, Secretary of the American Embassy at London,
         1912-1917, Counsellor 1916-1919                              309




THE

LIFE AND LETTERS

OF

WALTER H. PAGE




THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE




CHAPTER I

A RECONSTRUCTION BOYHOOD

I


The earliest recollections of any man have great biographical interest,
and this is especially the case with Walter Page, for not the least
dramatic aspect of his life was that it spanned the two greatest wars in
history. Page spent his last weeks in England, at Sandwich, on the coast
of Kent; every day and every night he could hear the pounding of the
great guns in France, as the Germans were making their last desperate
attempt to reach Paris or the Channel ports. His memories of his
childhood days in America were similarly the sights and sounds of war.
Page was a North Carolina boy; he has himself recorded the impression
that the Civil War left upon his mind.

"One day," he writes, "when the cotton fields were white and the elm
leaves were falling, in the soft autumn of the Southern climate wherein
the sky is fathomlessly clear, the locomotive's whistle blew a much
longer time than usual as the train approached Millworth. It did not
stop at so small a station except when there was somebody to get off or
to get on, and so long a blast meant that someone was coming. Sam and I
ran down the avenue of elms to see who it was. Sam was my Negro
companion, philosopher, and friend. I was ten years old and Sam said
that he was fourteen. There was constant talk about the war. Many men of
the neighbourhood had gone away somewhere--that was certain; but Sam and
I had a theory that the war was only a story. We had been fooled about
old granny Thomas's bringing the baby and long ago we had been fooled
also about Santa Claus. The war might be another such invention, and we
sometimes suspected that it was. But we found out the truth that day,
and for this reason it is among my clearest early recollections.

"For, when the train stopped, they put off a big box and gently laid it
in the shade of the fence. The only man at the station was the man who
had come to change the mail-bags; and he said that this was Billy
Morris's coffin and that he had been killed in a battle. He asked us to
stay with it till he could send word to Mr. Morris, who lived two miles
away. The man came back presently and leaned against the fence till old
Mr. Morris arrived, an hour or more later. The lint of cotton was on his
wagon, for he was hauling his crop to the gin when the sad news reached
him; and he came in his shirt sleeves, his wife on the wagon seat with
him.

"All the neighbourhood gathered at the church, a funeral was preached
and there was a long prayer for our success against the invaders, and
Billy Morris was buried. I remember that I wept the more because it now
seemed to me that my doubt about the war had somehow done Billy Morris
an injustice. Old Mrs. Gregory wept more loudly than anybody else; and
she kept saying, while the service was going on, 'It'll be my John
next.' In a little while, sure enough, John Gregory's coffin was put off
the train, as Billy Morris's had been, and I regarded her as a woman
gifted with prophecy. Other coffins, too, were put off from time to
time. About the war there could no longer be a doubt. And, a little
later, its realities and horrors came nearer home to us, with swift,
deep experiences.

"One day my father took me to the camp and parade ground ten miles away,
near the capital. The General and the Governor sat on horses and the
soldiers marched by them and the band played. They were going to the
front. There surely must be a war at the front, I told Sam that night.
Still more coffins were brought home, too, as the months and the years
passed; and the women of the neighbourhood used to come and spend whole
days with my mother, sewing for the soldiers. So precious became woollen
cloth that every rag was saved and the threads were unravelled to be
spun and woven into new fabrics. And they baked bread and roasted
chickens and sheep and pigs and made cakes, all to go to the soldiers at
the front[1]."

The quality that is uppermost in the Page stock, both in the past and in
the present generation, is that of the builder and the pioneer. The
ancestor of the North Carolina Pages was a Lewis Page, who, in the
latter part of the eighteenth century, left the original American home
in Virginia, and started life anew in what was then regarded as the less
civilized country to the south. Several explanations have survived as to
the cause of his departure, one being that his interest in the rising
tide of Methodism had made him uncongenial to his Church of England
relatives; in the absence of definite knowledge, however, it may safely
be assumed that the impelling motive was that love of seeking out new
things, of constructing a new home in the wilderness, which has never
forsaken his descendants. His son, Anderson Page, manifesting this same
love of change, went farther south into Wake County, and acquired a
plantation of a thousand acres about twelve miles north of Raleigh. He
cultivated this estate with slaves, sending his abundant crops of cotton
and tobacco to Petersburg, Virginia, a traffic that made him
sufficiently prosperous to give several of his sons a college education.
The son who is chiefly interesting at the present time, Allison Francis
Page, the father of the future Ambassador, did not enjoy this
opportunity. This fact in itself gives an insight into his character.
While his brothers were grappling with Latin and Greek and theology--one
of them became a Methodist preacher of the hortatory type for which the
South is famous--we catch glimpses of the older man battling with the
logs in the Cape Fear River, or penetrating the virgin pine forest,
felling trees and converting its raw material to the uses of a growing
civilization. Like many of the Page breed, this Page was a giant in size
and in strength, as sound morally and physically as the mighty forests
in which a considerable part of his life was spent, brave, determined,
aggressive, domineering almost to the point of intolerance, deeply
religious and abstemious--a mixture of the frontiersman and the Old
Testament prophet. Walter Page dedicated one of his books[2] to his
father, in words that accurately sum up his character and career. "To
the honoured memory of my father, whose work was work that built up the
commonwealth." Indeed, Frank Page--for this is the name by which he was
generally known--spent his whole life in these constructive labours. He
founded two towns in North Carolina, Cary and Aberdeen; in the City of
Raleigh he constructed hotels and other buildings; his enterprising and
restless spirit opened up Moore County--which includes the Pinehurst
region; he scattered his logging camps and his sawmills all over the
face of the earth; and he constructed a railroad through the pine woods
that made him a rich man.

Though he was not especially versed in the learning of the schools,
Walter Page's father had a mind that was keen and far-reaching. He was a
pioneer in politics as he was in the practical concerns of life. Though
he was the son of slave-holding progenitors and even owned slaves
himself, he was not a believer in slavery. The country that he primarily
loved was not Moore County or North Carolina, but the United States of
America. In politics he was a Whig, which meant that, in the years
preceding the Civil War, he was opposed to the extension of slavery and
did not regard the election of Abraham Lincoln as a sufficient
provocation for the secession of the Southern States. It is therefore
not surprising that Walter Page, in the midst of the London turmoil of
1916, should have found his thoughts reverting to his father as he
remembered him in Civil War days. That gaunt figure of America's time of
agony proved an inspiration and hope in the anxieties that assailed the
Ambassador. "When our Civil War began," wrote Page to Col. Edward M.
House--the date was November 24, 1916, one of the darkest days for the
Allied cause--"every man who had a large and firm grip on economic facts
foresaw how it would end--not when but how. Young as I was, I recall a
conversation between my father and the most distinguished judge of his
day in North Carolina. They put down on one side the number of men in
the Confederate States, the number of ships, the number of manufactures,
as nearly as they knew, the number of skilled workmen, the number of
guns, the aggregate of wealth and of possible production. On the other
side they put down the best estimate they could make of all these
things in the Northern States. The Northern States made two (or I
shouldn't wonder if it were three) times as good a showing in men and
resources as the Confederacy had. 'Judge,' said my father, 'this is the
most foolhardy enterprise that man ever undertook.' But Yancey of
Alabama was about that time making five-hour speeches to thousands of
people all over the South, declaring that one Southerner could whip five
Yankees, and the awful slaughter began and darkened our childhood and
put all our best men where they would see the sun no more. Our people
had at last to accept worse terms than they could have got at the
beginning. This World War, even more than our Civil War, is an economic
struggle. Put down on either side the same items that my father and the
judge put down and add the items up. You will see the inevitable
result."

If we are seeking an ancestral explanation for that moral ruggedness,
that quick perception of the difference between right and wrong, that
unobscured vision into men and events, and that deep devotion to America
and to democracy which formed the fibre of Walter Page's being, we
evidently need look no further than his father. But the son had
qualities which the older man did not possess--an enthusiasm for
literature and learning, a love of the beautiful in Nature and in art,
above all a gentleness of temperament and of manner. These qualities he
held in common with his mother. On his father's side Page was undiluted
English; on his mother's he was French and English. Her father was John
Samuel Raboteau, the descendant of Huguenot refugees who had fled from
France on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; her mother was Esther
Barclay, a member of a family which gave the name of Barclaysville to a
small town half way between Raleigh and Fayetteville, North Carolina.
It is a member of this tribe to whom Page once referred as the "vigorous
Barclay who held her receptions to notable men in her bedroom during the
years of her bedridden condition." She was the proprietor of the "Half
Way House," a tavern located between Fayetteville and Raleigh; and in
her old age she kept royal state, in the fashion which Page describes,
for such as were socially entitled to this consideration. The most vivid
impression which her present-day descendants retain is that of her
fervent devotion to the Southern cause. She carried the spirit of
secession to such an extreme that she had the gate to her yard painted
to give a complete presentment of the Confederate Flag. Walter Page's
mother, the granddaughter of this determined and rebellious lady, had
also her positive quality, but in a somewhat more subdued form. She did
not die until 1897, and so the recollection of her is fresh and vivid.
As a mature woman she was undemonstrative and soft spoken; a Methodist
of old-fashioned Wesleyan type, she dressed with a Quaker-like
simplicity, her brown hair brushed flatly down upon a finely shaped head
and her garments destitute of ruffles or ornamentation. The home which
she directed was a home without playing cards or dancing or smoking or
wine-bibbing or other worldly frivolities, yet the memories of her
presence which Catherine Page has left are not at all austere. Duty was
with her the prime consideration of life, and fundamental morals the
first conceptions which she instilled in her children's growing minds,
yet she had a quiet sense of humour and a real love of fun.

She had also strong likes and dislikes, and was not especially
hospitable to men and women who fell under her disapproval. A small
North Carolina town, in the years preceding and following the Civil
War, was not a fruitful soil for cultivating an interest in things
intellectual, yet those who remember Walter Page's mother remember her
always with a book in her hand. She would read at her knitting and at
her miscellaneous household duties, which were rather arduous in the
straitened days that followed the war, and the books she read were
always substantial ones. Perhaps because her son Walter was in delicate
health, perhaps because his early tastes and temperament were not unlike
her own, perhaps because he was her oldest surviving child, the fact
remains that, of a family of eight, he was generally regarded as the
child with whom she was especially sympathetic. The picture of mother
and son in those early days is an altogether charming one. Page's mother
was only twenty-four when he was born; she retained her youth for many
years after that event, and during his early childhood, in appearance
and manner, she was little more than a girl. When Walter was a small
boy, he and his mother used to take long walks in the woods, sometimes
spending the entire day, fishing along the brooks, hunting wild flowers,
now and then pausing while the mother read pages of Dickens or of Scott.
These experiences Page never forgot. Nearly all his letters to his
mother--to whom, even in his busiest days in New York, he wrote
constantly--have been accidentally destroyed, but a few scraps indicate
the close spiritual bond that existed between the two. Always he seemed
to think of his mother as young. Through his entire life, in whatever
part of the world he might be, and however important was the work in
which he might be engaged, Page never failed to write her a long and
affectionate letter at Christmas.

"Well, I've gossiped a night or two"--such is the conclusion of his
Christmas letter of 1893, when Page was thirty-eight, with a growing
family of his own--"till I've filled the paper--all such little news and
less nonsense as most gossip and most letters are made of. But it is for
you to read between the lines. That's where the love lies, dear mother.
I wish you were here Christmas; we should welcome you as nobody else in
the world can be welcomed. But wherever you are and though all the rest
have the joy of seeing you, which is denied to me, never a Christmas
comes but I feel as near you as I did years and years ago when we were
young. (In those years _big_ fish bit in old Wiley Bancom's pond by the
railroad: they must have been two inches long!)--I would give a year's
growth to have the pleasure of having you here. You may be sure that
every one of my children along with me will look with an added reverence
toward the picture on the wall that greets me every morning, when we
have our little Christmas frolics--the picture that little Katharine
points to and says 'That's my grandmudder.'--The years, as they come,
every one, deepen my gratitude to you, as I better and better understand
the significance of life and every one adds to an affection that was
never small. God bless you.

     "WALTER."

       *       *       *       *       *

Such were the father and mother of Walter Hines Page; they were married
at Fayetteville, North Carolina, July 5, 1849; two children who preceded
Walter died in infancy. The latter was born at Cary, August 15, 1855.
Cary was a small village which Frank Page had created; in honour of the
founder it was for several years known as Page's Station; the father
himself changed the name to Cary, as a tribute to a temperance orator
who caused something of a commotion in the neighbourhood in the early
seventies. Cary was not then much of a town and has not since become
one; but it was placed amid the scene of important historical events.
Page's home was almost the last stopping place of Sherman's army on its
march through Georgia and the Carolinas, and the Confederacy came to an
end, with Johnston's surrender of the last Confederate Army, at Durham,
only fifteen miles from Page's home. Walter, a boy of ten, his brother
Robert, aged six, and the negro "companion" Tance--who figures as Sam in
the extract quoted above--stood at the second-story window and watched
Sherman's soldiers pass their house, in hot pursuit of General "Joe"
Wheeler's cavalry. The thing that most astonished the children was the
vast size of the army, which took all day to file by their home. They
had never realized that either of the fighting forces could embrace such
great numbers of men. Nor did the behaviour of the invading troops
especially endear them to their unwilling hosts. Part of the cavalry
encamped in the Page yard; their horses ate the bark off the mimosa
trees; an army corps built its campfires under the great oaks, and cut
their emblems on the trunks; the officers took possession of the house,
a colonel making his headquarters in the parlour. Several looting
cavalrymen ran their swords through the beds, probably looking for
hidden silver; the hearth was torn up in the same feverish quest; angry
at their failure, they emptied sacks of flour and scattered their
contents in the bedrooms and on the stairs; for days the flour,
intermingled with feathers from the bayonetted beds, formed a carpet all
over the house. It is therefore perhaps not strange that the feelings
which Walter entertained for Sherman's "bummers," despite his father's
Whig principles, were those of most Southern communities. One day a
kindly Northern soldier, sympathizing with the boy because of the small
rations left for the local population, invited him to join the
officers' mess at dinner. Walter drew proudly back.

"I'll starve before I'll eat with the Yankees," he said.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I slept that night on a trundle bed by my mother's," Page wrote years
afterward, describing these early scenes, "for her room was the only
room left for the family, and we had all lived there since the day
before. The dining room and the kitchen were now superfluous, because
there was nothing more to cook or to eat. . . . A week or more after the
army corps had gone, I drove with my father to the capital one day, and
almost every mile of the journey we saw a blue coat or a gray coat lying
by the road, with bones or hair protruding--the unburied and the
forgotten of either army. Thus I had come to know what war was, and
death by violence was among the first deep impressions made on my mind.
My emotions must have been violently dealt with and my sensibilities
blunted--or sharpened? Who shall say? The wounded and the starved
straggled home from hospitals and from prisons. There was old Mr.
Sanford, the shoemaker, come back again, with a body so thin and a step
so uncertain that I expected to see him fall to pieces. Mr. Larkin and
Joe Tatum went on crutches; and I saw a man at the post-office one day
whose cheek and ear had been torn away by a shell. Even when Sam and I
sat on the river-bank fishing, and ought to have been silent lest the
fish swim away, we told over in low tones the stories that we had heard
of wounds and of deaths and of battles.

"But there was the cheerful gentleness of my mother to draw my thoughts
to different things. I can even now recall many special little plans
that she made to keep my mind from battles. She hid the military cap
that I had worn. She bought from me my military buttons and put them
away. She would call me in and tell me pleasant stories of her own
childhood. She would put down her work to make puzzles with me, and she
read gentle books to me and kept away from me all the stories of the war
and of death that she could. Whatever hardships befell her (and they
must have been many) she kept a tender manner of resignation and of
cheerful patience.

"After a while the neighbourhood came to life again. There were more
widows, more sonless mothers, more empty sleeves and wooden legs than
anybody there had ever seen before. But the mimosa bloomed, the cotton
was planted again, and the peach trees blossomed; and the barnyard and
the stable again became full of life. For, when the army marched away,
they, too, were as silent as an old battlefield. The last hen had been
caught under the corn-crib by a 'Yankee' soldier, who had torn his coat
in this brave raid. Aunt Maria told Sam that all Yankees were chicken
thieves whether they 'brung freedom or no.'

"Every year the cotton bloomed and ripened and opened white to the sun;
for the ripening of the cotton and the running of the river and the
turning of the mills make the thread not of my story only but of the
story of our Southern land--of its institutions, of its misfortunes and
of its place in the economy of the world; and they will make the main
threads of its story, I am sure, so long as the sun shines on our white
fields and the rivers run--a story that is now rushing swiftly into a
happier narrative of a broader day. The same women who had guided the
spindles in war-time were again at their tasks--they at least were left;
but the machinery was now old and worked ill. Negro men, who had
wandered a while looking for an invisible 'freedom,' came back and went
to work on the farm from force of habit. They now received wages and
bought their own food. That was the only apparent difference that
freedom had brought them.

"My Aunt Katharine came from the city for a visit, my Cousin Margaret
with her. Through the orchard, out into the newly ploughed ground
beyond, back over the lawn which was itself bravely repairing the hurt
done by horses' hoofs and tent-poles, and under the oaks, which bore the
scars of camp-fires, we two romped and played gentler games than camp
and battle. One afternoon, as our mothers sat on the piazza and saw us
come loaded with apple-blossoms, they said something (so I afterward
learned) about the eternal blooming of childhood and of Nature--how
sweet the early summer was in spite of the harrying of the land by war;
for our gorgeous pageant of the seasons came on as if the earth had been
the home of unbroken peace[3]."


II

And so it was a tragic world into which this boy Page had been born. He
was ten years old when the Civil War came to an end, and his early life
was therefore cast in a desolate country. Like all of his neighbours,
Frank Page had been ruined by the war. Both the Southern and Northern
armies had passed over the Page territory; compared with the military
depredations with which Page became familiar in the last years of his
life, the Federal troops did not particularly misbehave, the attacks on
hen roosts and the destruction of feather beds representing the extreme
of their "atrocities"; but no country can entertain two great fighting
forces without feeling the effects for a prolonged period. Life in this
part of North Carolina again became reduced to its fundamentals. The
old homesteads and the Negro huts were still left standing, and their
interiors were for the most part unharmed, but nearly everything else
had disappeared. Horses, cattle, hogs, livestock of all kinds had
vanished before the advancing hosts of hungry soldiers; and there was
one thing which was even more a rarity than these. That was money.
Confederate veterans went around in their faded gray uniforms, not only
because they loved them, but because they did not have the wherewithal
to buy new wardrobes. Judges, planters, and other dignified members of
the community became hack drivers from the necessity of picking up a few
small coins. Page's father was more fortunate than the rest, for he had
one asset with which to accumulate a little liquid capital; he possessed
a fine peach orchard, which was particularly productive in the summer of
1865, and the Northern soldiers, who drew their pay in money that had
real value, developed a weakness for the fruit. Walter Page, a boy of
ten, used to take his peaches to Raleigh, and sell them to the
"invader"; although he still disdained having companionable relations
with the enemy, he was not above meeting them on a business footing; and
the greenbacks and silver coin obtained in this way laid a new basis for
the family fortunes.

Despite this happy windfall, life for the next few years proved an
arduous affair. The horrors of reconstruction which followed the war
were more agonizing than the war itself. Page's keenest enthusiasm in
after life was democracy, in its several manifestations; but the form in
which democracy first unrolled before his astonished eyes was a phase
that could hardly inspire much enthusiasm. Misguided sentimentalists and
more malicious politicians in the North had suddenly endowed the Negro
with the ballot. In practically all Southern States that meant
government by Negroes--or what was even worse, government by a
combination of Negroes and the most vicious white elements, including
that which was native to the soil and that which had imported itself
from the North for this particular purpose. Thus the political
vocabulary of Page's formative years consisted chiefly of such words as
"scalawag," "carpet bagger," "regulator," "Union League," "Ku Klux
Klan," and the like. The resulting confusion, political, social, and
economic, did not completely amount to the destruction of a
civilization, for underneath it all the old sleepy ante-bellum South
still maintained its existence almost unchanged. The two most
conspicuous and contrasting figures were the Confederate veteran walking
around in a sleeveless coat and the sharp-featured New England school
mar'm, armed with that spelling book which was overnight to change the
African from a genial barbarian into an intelligent and conscientious
social unit; but more persistent than these forces was that old dreamy,
"unprogressive" Southland--the same country that Page himself described
in an article on "An Old Southern Borough" which, as a young man, he
contributed to the _Atlantic Monthly_. It was still the country where
the "old-fashioned gentleman" was the controlling social influence,
where a knowledge of Latin and Greek still made its possessor a person
of consideration, where Emerson was a "Yankee philosopher" and therefore
not important, where Shakespeare and Milton were looked upon almost as
contemporary authors, where the Church and politics and the matrimonial
history of friends and relatives formed the staple of conversation, and
where a strong prejudice still existed against anything that resembled
popular education. In the absence of more substantial employment, stump
speaking, especially eloquent in praise of the South and its
achievements in war, had become the leading industry.

"Wat" Page--he is still known by this name in his old home--was a tall,
rangy, curly-headed boy, with brown hair and brown eyes, fond of fishing
and hunting, not especially robust, but conspicuously alert and vital.
Such of his old playmates as survive recall chiefly his keenness of
observation, his contagious laughter, his devotion to reading and to
talk. He was also given to taking long walks in the woods, frequently
with the solitary companionship of a book. Indeed, his extremely
efficient family regarded him as a dreamer and were not entirely clear
as to what purpose he was destined to serve in a community which, above
all, demanded practical men. Such elementary schools as North Carolina
possessed had vanished in the war; the prevailing custom was for the
better-conditioned families to join forces and engage a teacher for
their assembled children. It was in such a primary school in Cary that
Page learned the elementary branches, though his mother herself taught
him to read and write. The boy showed such aptitude in his studies that
his mother began to hope, though in no aggressive fashion, that he might
some day become a Methodist clergyman; she had given him his middle
name, "Hines," in honour of her favourite preacher--a kinsman. At the
age of twelve Page was transferred to the Bingham School, then located
at Mcbane. This was the Eton of North Carolina, from both a social and
an educational standpoint. It was a military school; the boys all
dressed in gray uniforms built on the plan of the Confederate army; the
hero constantly paraded before their imaginations was Robert E. Lee;
discipline was rigidly military; more important, a high standard of
honour was insisted upon. There was one thing a boy could not do at
Bingham and remain in the school; that was to cheat in class-rooms or at
examinations. For this offence no second chance was given. "I cannot
argue the subject," Page quotes Colonel Bingham saying to the distracted
parent whose son had been dismissed on this charge, and who was begging
for his reinstatement. "In fact, I have no power to reinstate your boy.
I could not keep the honour of the school--I could not even keep the
boys, if he were to return. They would appeal to their parents and most
of them would be called home. They are the flower of the South, Sir!"
And the social standards that controlled the thinking of the South for
so many years after the war were strongly entrenched. "The son of a
Confederate general," Page writes, "if he were at all a decent fellow,
had, of course, a higher social rank at the Bingham School than the son
of a colonel. There was some difficulty in deciding the exact rank of a
judge or a governor, as a father; but the son of a preacher had a fair
chance of a good social rating, especially of an Episcopalian clergyman.
A Presbyterian preacher came next in rank. I at first was at a social
disadvantage. My father had been a Methodist--that was bad enough; but
he had had no military title at all. If it had become known among the
boys that he had been a 'Union man'--I used to shudder at the suspicion
in which I should be held. And the fact that my father had held no
military title did at last become known!"

A single episode discloses that Page maintained his respect for the
Bingham School to the end. In March, 1918, as American Ambassador, he
went up to Harrow and gave an informal talk to the boys on the United
States. His hosts were so pleased that two prizes were established to
commemorate his visit. One was for an essay by Harrow boys on the
subject: "The Drawing Together of America and Great Britain by Common
Devotion to a Great Cause." A similar prize on the same subject was
offered to the boys of some American school, and Page was asked to
select the recipient. He promptly named his old Bingham School in North
Carolina.

It was at Bingham that Page gained his first knowledge of Greek, Latin,
and mathematics, and he was an outstanding student in all three
subjects. He had no particular liking for mathematics, but he could
never understand why any one should find this branch of learning
difficult; he mastered it with the utmost ease and always stood high. In
two or three years he had absorbed everything that Bingham could offer
and was ready for the next step. But political conditions in North
Carolina now had their influence upon Page's educational plans. Under
ordinary conditions he would have entered the State University at Chapel
Hill; it had been a great headquarters in ante-bellum days for the
prosperous families of the South. But by the time that Page was ready to
go to college the University had fallen upon evil days. The forces which
then ruled the state, acting in accordance with the new principles of
racial equality, had opened the doors of this, one of the most
aristocratic of Southern institutions, to Negroes. The consequences may
be easily imagined. The newly enfranchised blacks showed no inclination
for the groves of Academe, and not a single representative of the race
applied for matriculation. The outraged white population turned its back
upon this new type of coeducation; in the autumn of 1872 not a solitary
white boy made his appearance. The old university therefore closed its
doors for lack of students and for the next few years it became a
pitiable victim to the worst vices of the reconstruction era.
Politicians were awarded the presidency and the professorships as
political pap, and the resources of the place, in money and books, were
scattered to the wind. Page had therefore to find his education
elsewhere. The deep religious feelings of his family quickly settled
this point. The young man promptly betook himself to the backwoods of
North Carolina and knocked at the doors of Trinity College, a Methodist
Institution then located in Randolph County. Trinity has since changed
its abiding place to Durham and has been transformed into one of the
largest and most successful colleges of the new South; but in those days
a famous Methodist divine and journalist described it as "a college with
a few buildings that look like tobacco barns and a few teachers that
look as though they ought to be worming tobacco." Page spent something
more than a year at Trinity, entering in the autumn of 1871, and leaving
in December, 1872. A few letters, written from this place, are scarcely
more complimentary than the judgment passed above. They show that the
young man was very unhappy. One long letter to his mother is nothing but
a boyish diatribe against the place. "I do not care a horse apple for
Trinity's distinction," he writes, and then he gives the reasons for
this juvenile contempt. His first report, he says, will soon reach home;
he warns his mother that it will be unfavourable, and he explains that
this bad showing is the result of a deliberate plot. The boys who obtain
high marks, Page declares, secure them usually by cheating or through
the partisanship of the professors; a high grade therefore really means
that the recipient is either a humbug or a bootlicker. Page had
therefore attempted to keep his reputation unsullied by aiming at a low
academic record! The report on that three months' work, which still
survives, discloses that Page's conspiracy against himself did not
succeed, for his marks are all high. "Be sure to send him back" is the
annotation on this document, indicating that Page had made a better
impression on Trinity than Trinity had made on Page.

But the rebellious young man did not return. After Christmas, 1872, his
schoolboy letters reveal him at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va.
Here again the atmosphere is Methodistical, but of a somewhat more
genial type. "It was at Ashland that I first began to unfold," said Page
afterward. "Dear old Ashland!" Dr. Duncan, the President, was a
clergyman whose pulpit oratory is still a tradition in the South, but,
in addition to his religious exaltation, he was an exceedingly lovable,
companionable, and stimulating human being. Certainly there was no lack
of the religious impulse. "We have a preacher president," Page writes
his mother, "a preacher secretary, a preacher chaplain, and a dozen
preacher students and three or more preachers are living here and
twenty-five or thirty yet-to-be preachers in college!" In this latter
class Page evidently places himself; at least he gravely writes his
mother--he was now eighteen--that he had definitely made up his mind to
enter the Methodist ministry. He had a close friend--Wilbur Fisk
Tillett--who cherished similar ambitions, and Page one day surprised
Tillett by suggesting that, at the approaching Methodist Conference,
they apply for licensing as "local preachers" for the next summer. His
friend dissuaded him, however, and henceforth Page concentrated on more
worldly studies. In many ways he was the life of the undergraduate body.
His desire for an immediate theological campaign was merely that passion
for doing things and for self-expression which were always conspicuous
traits. His intense ambition as a boy is still remembered in this sleepy
little village. He read every book in the sparse college library; he
talked to his college mates and his professors on every imaginable
subject; he led his associates in the miniature parliament--the Franklin
Debating Society--to which he belonged; he wrote prose and verse at an
astonishing rate; he explored the country for miles around, making
frequent pilgrimages to the birthplace of Henry Clay, which is the chief
historical glory of Ashland, and to that Hanover Court House which was
the scene of the oratorical triumph of Patrick Henry; he flirted with
the pretty girls in the village, and even had two half-serious love
affairs in rapid succession; he slept upon a hard mattress at night and
imbibed more than the usual allotment of Greek, Latin, and mathematics
in the daytime. One year he captured the Greek prize and the next the
Sutherlin medal for oratory. With a fellow classicist he entered into a
solemn compact to hold all their conversation, even on the most trivial
topics, in Latin, with heavy penalties for careless lapses into English.
Probably the linguistic result would have astonished Quintilian, but the
experiment at least had a certain influence in improving the young man's
Latinity. Another favourite dissipation was that of translating English
masterpieces into the ancient tongue; there still survives among Page's
early papers a copy of Bryant's "Waterfowl" done into Latin iambics. As
to Page's personal appearance, a designation coined by a fellow student
who afterward became a famous editor gives the suggestion of a portrait.
He called him one of the "seven slabs" of the college. And, as always,
the adjectives which his contemporaries chiefly use in describing Page
are "alert" and "positive."

[Illustration: Allison Francis Page (1824-1899), father of Walter H.
Page]

[Illustration: Catherine Raboteau Page (1831-1897), mother of Walter H.
Page]

But Randolph-Macon did one great thing for Page. Like many small
struggling Southern, colleges it managed to assemble several instructors
of real mental distinction. And at the time of Page's undergraduate life
it possessed at least one great teacher. This was Thomas R. Price,
afterward Professor of Greek at the University of Virginia and Professor
of English at Columbia University in New York. Professor Price took one
forward step that has given him a permanent fame in the history of
Southern education. He found that the greatest stumbling block to
teaching Greek was not the conditional mood, but the fact that his
hopeful charges were not sufficiently familiar with their mother tongue.
The prayer that was always on Price's lips, and the one with which he
made his boys most familiar, was that of a wise old Greek: "O Great
Apollo, send down the reviving rain upon our fields; preserve our
flocks; ward off our enemies; and--build up our speech!" "It is
irrational," he said, "absurd, almost criminal, to expect a young man,
whose knowledge of English words and construction is scant and inexact,
to put into English a difficult thought of Plato or an involved period
of Cicero." Above all, it will be observed, Price's intellectual
enthusiasm was the ancient tongue. A present-day argument for learning
Greek and Latin is that thereby we improve our English; but Thomas H.
Price advocated the teaching of English so that we might better
understand the dead languages. To-day every great American educational
institution has vast resources for teaching English literature; even in
1876, most American universities had their professors of English; but
Price insisted on placing English on exactly the same footing as Greek
and Latin. He himself became head of the new English school at
Randolph-Macon; and Page himself at once became the favourite pupil.
This distinguished scholar--a fine figure with an imperial beard that
suggested the Confederate officer--used to have Page to tea at least
twice a week and at these meetings the young man was first introduced in
an understanding way to Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and
the other writers who became the literary passions of his maturer life.
And Price did even more for Page; he passed him on to another place and
to another teacher who extended his horizon. Up to the autumn of 1876
Page had never gone farther North than Ashland; he was still a Southern
boy, speaking with the Southern drawl, living exclusively the thoughts
and even the prejudices of the South. His family's broad-minded attitude
had prevented him from acquiring a too restricted view of certain
problems that were then vexing both sections of the country; however,
his outlook was still a limited one, as his youthful correspondence
shows. But in October of the centennial year a great prospect opened
before him.


III

Two or three years previously an eccentric merchant named Johns Hopkins
had died, leaving the larger part of his fortune to found a college or
university in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins was not an educated man himself
and his conception of a new college did not extend beyond creating
something in the nature of a Yale or Harvard in Maryland. By a lucky
chance, however, a Yale graduate who was then the President of the
University of California, Daniel Coit Gilman, was invited to come to
Baltimore and discuss with the trustees his availability for the
headship of the new institution. Dr. Gilman promptly informed his
prospective employers that he would have no interest in associating
himself with a new American college built upon the lines of those which
then existed. Such a foundation would merely be a duplication of work
already well done elsewhere and therefore a waste of money and effort.
He proposed that this large endowment should be used, not for the
erection of expensive architecture, but primarily for seeking out, in
all parts of the world, the best professorial brains in certain approved
branches of learning. In the same spirit he suggested that a similarly
selective process be adopted in the choice of students: that only those
American boys who had displayed exceptional promise should be admitted
and that part of the university funds should be used to pay the expenses
of twenty young men who, in undergraduate work at other colleges, stood
head and shoulders above their contemporaries. The bringing together of
these two sets of brains for graduate study would constitute the new
university. A few rooms in the nearest dwelling house would suffice for
headquarters. Dr. Gilman's scheme was approved; he became President on
these terms; he gathered his faculty not only in the United States but
in England, and he collected his first body of students, especially his
first twenty fellows, with the same minute care.

It seems almost a miracle that an inexperienced youth in a little
Methodist college in Virginia should have been chosen as one of these
first twenty fellows, and it is a sufficient tribute to the impression
that Page must have made upon all who met him that he should have won
this great academic distinction. He was only twenty-one at the time--the
youngest of a group nearly every member of which became distinguished in
after life. He won a Fellowship in Greek. This in itself was a great
good fortune; even greater was the fact that his new life brought him
into immediate contact with a scholar of great genius and lovableness.
Someone has said that America has produced four scholars of the very
first rank--Agassiz in natural science, Whitney in philology, Willard
Gibbs in physics, and Gildersleeve in Greek. It was the last of these
who now took Walter Page in charge. The atmosphere of Johns Hopkins was
quite different from anything which the young man had previously known.
The university gave a great shock to that part of the American community
with which Page had spent his life by beginning its first session in
October, 1876, without an opening prayer. Instead Thomas H. Huxley was
invited from England to deliver a scientific address--an address which
now has an honoured place in his collected works. The absence of prayer
and the presence of so audacious a Darwinian as Huxley caused a
tremendous excitement in the public prints, the religious press, and the
evangelical pulpit. In the minds of Gilman and his abettors, however,
all this was intended to emphasize the fact that Johns Hopkins was a
real university, in which the unbiased truth was to be the only aim. And
certainly this was the spirit of the institution. "Gentlemen, you must
light your own torch," was the admonition of President Gilman, in his
welcoming address to his twenty fellows; intellectual independence,
freedom from the trammels of tradition, were thus to be the directing
ideas. One of Page's associates was Josiah Royce, who afterward had a
distinguished career in philosophy at Harvard. "The beginnings of Johns
Hopkins," he afterward wrote, "was a dawn wherein it was bliss to be
alive. The air was full of noteworthy work done by the older men of the
place and of hopes that one might find a way to get a little working
power one's self. One longed to be a doer of the word, not a hearer
only, a creator of his own infinitesimal fraction of the product, bound
in God's name to produce when the time came."

A choice group of five aspiring Grecians, of whom Page was one,
periodically gathered around a long pine table in a second-story room of
an old dwelling house on Howard Street, with Professor Gildersleeve at
the head. The process of teaching was thus the intimate contact of mind
with mind. Here in the course of nearly two years' residence, Page was
led by Professor Gildersleeve into the closest communion with the great
minds of the ancient world and gained that intimate knowledge of their
written word which was the basis of his mental equipment. "Professor
Gildersleeve, splendid scholar that he is!" he wrote to a friend in
North Carolina. "He makes me grow wonderfully. When I have a chance to
enjoy Æschylus as I have now, I go to work on those immortal pieces with
a pleasure that swallows up everything." To the extent that Gildersleeve
opened up the literary treasures of the past--and no man had a greater
appreciation of his favourite authors than this fine humanist--Page's
life was one of unalloyed delight. But there was another side to the
picture. This little company of scholars was composed of men who aspired
to no ordinary knowledge of Greek; they expected to devote their entire
lives to the subject, to edit Greek texts, and to hold Greek chairs at
the leading American universities. Such, indeed, has been the career of
nearly all members of the group. The Greek tragedies were therefore read
for other things than their stylistic and dramatic values. The sons of
Germania then exercised a profound influence on American education;
Professor Gildersleeve himself was a graduate of Göttingen, and the
necessity of "settling hoti's business" was strong in his seminar.
Gildersleeve was a writer of English who developed real style; as a
Greek scholar, his fame rests chiefly upon his work in the field of
historical syntax. He assumed that his students could read Greek as
easily as they could read French, and the really important tasks he set
them had to do with the most abstruse fields of philology. For work of
this kind Page had little interest and less inclination. When Professor
Gildersleeve would assign him the adverb [Greek: prin], and direct him
to study the peculiarities of its use from Homer down to the Byzantine
writers, he really found himself in pretty deep waters. Was it
conceivable that a man could spend a lifetime in an occupation of this
kind? By pursuing such studies Gildersleeve and his most advanced pupils
uncovered many new facts about the language and even found hitherto
unsuspected beauties; but Page's letters show that this sort of effort
was extremely uncongenial. He fulminates against the "grammarians" and
begins to think that perhaps, after all, a career of erudite scholarship
is not the ideal existence. "Learn to look on me as a Greek drudge," he
writes, "somewhere pounding into men and boys a faint hint of the beauty
of old Greekdom. That's most probably what I shall come to before many
years. I am sure that I have mistaken my lifework, if I consider Greek
my lifework. In truth at times I am tempted to throw the whole thing
away. . . . But without a home feeling in Greek literature no man can lay
claim to high culture." So he would keep at it for three or four years
and "then leave it as a man's work." Despite these despairing words Page
acquired a living knowledge of Greek that was one of his choicest
possessions through life. That he made a greater success than his
self-depreciation would imply is evident from the fact that his
Fellowship was renewed for the next year.

But the truth is that the world was tugging at Page more insistently
than the cloister. "Speaking grammatically," writes Prof. E.G. Sihler,
one of Page's fellow students of that time, in his "Confessions and
Convictions of a Classicist," "Page was interested in that one of the
main tenses which we call the Present." In his after life, amid all the
excitements of journalism, Page could take a brief vacation and spend
it with Ulysses by the sea; but actuality and human activity charmed him
even more than did the heroes of the ancient world. He went somewhat
into Baltimore society, but not extensively; he joined a club whose
membership comprised the leading intellectual men of the town; probably
his most congenial associations, however, came of the Saturday night
meetings of the fellows in Hopkins Hall, where, over pipes and steins of
beer, they passed in review all the questions of the day. Page was still
the Southern boy, with the strange notions about the North and Northern
people which were the inheritance of many years' misunderstandings. He
writes of one fellow student to whom he had taken a liking. "He is that
rare thing," he says, "a Yankee Christian gentleman." He particularly
dislikes one of his instructors, but, as he explains, he is "a native of
Connecticut, and Connecticut, I suppose, is capable of producing any
unholy human phenomenon." Speaking of a beautiful and well mannered
Greek girl whom he had met, he says: "The little creature might be taken
for a Southern girl, but never for a Yankee. She has an easy manner and
even an air of gentility about her that doesn't appear north of Mason
and Dixon's Line. Indeed, however much the Southern race (I say race
intentionally: Yankeedom is the home of another race from us) however
much the Southern race owes its strength to Anglo-Saxon blood, it owes
its beauty and gracefulness to the Southern climate and culture. Who
says that we are not an improvement on the English? An improvement in a
happy combination of mental graces and Saxon force?" This sort of thing
is especially entertaining in the youthful Page, for it is precisely
against this kind of complacency that, as a mature man, he directed his
choicest ridicule. As an editor and writer his energies were devoted to
reconciling North and South, and Johns Hopkins itself had much to do
with opening his eyes. Its young men and its professors were gathered
from all parts of the country; a student, if his mind was awake, learned
more than Greek and mathematics; he learned much about that far-flung
nation known as the United States.

And Page did not confine his work exclusively to the curriculum. He
writes that he is regularly attending a German Sunday School, not,
however, from religious motives, but from a desire to improve his
colloquial German. "Is this courting the Devil for knowledge?" he asks.
And all this time he was engaging in a delightful correspondence--from
which these quotations are taken--with a young woman in North Carolina,
his cousin. About this time this cousin began spending her summers in
the Page home at Cary; her great interest in books made the two young
people good friends and companions. It was she who first introduced Page
to certain Southern writers, especially Timrod and Sidney Lanier, and,
when Page left for Johns Hopkins, the two entered into a compact for a
systematic reading and study of the English poets. According to this
plan, certain parts of Tennyson or Chaucer would be set aside for a
particular week's reading; then both would write the impressions gained
and the criticisms which they assumed to make, and send the product to
the other. The plan was carried out more faithfully than is usually the
case in such arrangements; a large number of Page's letters survive and
give a complete history of his mental progress. There are lengthy
disquisitions on Wordsworth, Browning, Byron, Shelley, Matthew Arnold,
and the like. These letters also show that Page, as a relaxation from
Greek roots and syntax, was indulging in poetic flights of his own; his
efforts, which he encloses in his letters, are mainly imitations of the
particular poet in whom he was at the moment interested. This
correspondence also takes Page to Germany, in which country he spent the
larger part of the summer of 1877. This choice of the Fatherland as a
place of pilgrimage was probably merely a reflection of the enthusiasm
for German educational methods which then prevailed in the United
States, especially at Johns Hopkins. Page's letters are the usual
traveller's descriptions of unfamiliar customs, museums, libraries, and
the like; so far as enlarging his outlook was concerned the experience
does not seem to have been especially profitable.

He returned to Baltimore in the autumn of 1877, but only for a few
months. He had pretty definitely abandoned his plan of devoting his life
to Greek scholarship. As a mental stimulus, as a recreation from the
cares of life, his Greek authors would always be a first love, as they
proved to be; but he had abandoned his early ambition of making them his
everyday occupation and means of livelihood. Of course there was only
one career for a man of his leanings, and, more and more, his mind was
turning to journalism. For only one brief period did he again listen to
the temptations of a scholar's existence. The university of his native
state invited him to lecture in the summer school of 1878; he took
Shakespeare for his subject, and made so great a success that there was
some discussion of his settling down permanently at Chapel Hill in the
chair of Greek. Had the offer definitely been made Page would probably
have accepted, but difficulties arose. Page was no longer orthodox in
his religious views; he had long outgrown dogma and could only smile at
the recollection that he had once thought of becoming a clergyman. But a
rationalist at the University of North Carolina in 1878 could hardly be
endured. The offer, therefore, fortunately was not made. Afterward Page
was much criticized for having left his native state at a time when it
especially needed young men of his type. It may therefore be recorded
that, if there were any blame at all, it rested upon North Carolina. He
refers to his disappointment in a letter in February, 1879--a letter
that proved to be a prophecy. "I shall some day buy a home," he says,
"where I was not allowed to work for one, and be laid away in the soil
that I love. I wanted to work for the old state; it had no need for it,
it seems."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: From "The Southerner," Chapter I. The first chapter in this
novel is practically autobiographical, though fictitious names have been
used.]

[Footnote 2: "The Rebuilding of Old Commonwealths." (1902.)]

[Footnote 3: "The Southerner," Chapter I.]




CHAPTER II

JOURNALISM

I


The five years from 1878 to 1883 Page spent in various places, engaged,
for the larger part of the time, in several kinds of journalistic work.
It was his period of struggle and of preparation. Like many American
public men he served a brief apprenticeship--in his case, a very brief
one--as a pedagogue. In the autumn of 1878 he went to Louisville,
Kentucky, and taught English for a year at the Boys' High School. But he
presently found an occupation in this progressive city which proved far
more absorbing. A few months before his arrival certain energetic
spirits had founded a weekly paper, the _Age_, a journal which, they
hoped, would fill the place in the Southern States which the very
successful New York _Nation_, under the editorship of Godkin, was then
occupying in the North. Page at once began contributing leading articles
on literary and political topics to this publication; the work proved so
congenial that he purchased--on notes--a controlling interest in the new
venture and became its directing spirit. The _Age_ was in every way a
worthy enterprise; in the dignity of its make-up and the high literary
standards at which it aimed it imitated the London _Spectator_. Perhaps
Page obtained a thousand dollars' worth of fun out of his investment; if
so, that represented his entire profit. He now learned a lesson which
was emphasized in his after career as editor and publisher, and that was
that the Southern States provided a poor market for books or
periodicals. The net result of the proceeding was that, at the age of
twenty-three, he found himself out of a job and considerably in debt.

He has himself rapidly sketched his varied activities of the next five
years:

"After trying in vain," he writes, "to get work to do on any newspaper
in North Carolina, I advertised for a job in journalism--any sort of a
job. By a queer accident--a fortunate one for me--the owner of the St.
Joseph, Missouri, _Gazette_, answered the advertisement. Why he did it,
I never found out. He was in the same sort of desperate need of a
newspaper man as I was in desperate need of a job. I knew nothing about
him: he knew nothing about me. I knew nothing about newspaper work. I
had done nothing since I left the University but teach English in the
Louisville, Kentucky, High School for boys one winter and lecture at the
summer school at Chapel Hill one summer. I made up my mind to go into
journalism. But journalism didn't seem in any hurry to make up its mind
to admit me. Not only did all the papers in North Carolina decline my
requests for work, but such of them in Baltimore and Louisville as I
tried said 'No.' So I borrowed $50 and set out to St. Joe, Missouri,
where I didn't know a human being. I became a reporter. At first I
reported the price of cattle--went to the stockyards, etc. My salary
came near to paying my board and lodging, but it didn't quite do it. But
I had a good time in St. Joe for somewhat more than a year. There were
interesting people there. I came to know something about Western life.
Kansas was across the river. I often went there. I came to know Kansas
City, St. Louis--a good deal of the West. After a while I was made
editor of the paper. What a rousing political campaign or two we had!
Then--I had done that kind of a job as long as I cared to. Every
swashbuckling campaign is like every other one. Why do two? Besides, I
knew my trade. I had done everything on a daily paper from stockyard
reports to political editorials and heavy literary articles. In the
meantime I had written several magazine articles and done other such
jobs. I got leave of absence for a month or two. I wrote to several of
the principal papers in Chicago, New York, and Boston and told them that
I was going down South to make political and social studies and that I
was going to send them my letters. I hoped they'd publish them.

"That's all I could say. I could make no engagement; they didn't know
me. I didn't even ask for an engagement. I told them simply this: that
I'd write letters and send them; and I prayed heaven that they'd print
them and pay for them. Then off I went with my little money in my
pocket--about enough to get to New Orleans. I travelled and I wrote. I
went all over the South. I sent letters and letters and letters. All the
papers published all that I sent them and I was rolling in wealth! I had
money in my pocket for the first time in my life. Then I went back to
St. Joe and resigned; for the (old) New York _World_ had asked me to go
to the Atlanta Exposition as a correspondent. I went. I wrote and kept
writing. How kind Henry Grady was to me! But at last the Exposition
ended. I was out of a job. I applied to the _Constitution_. No, they
wouldn't have me. I never got a job in my life that I asked for! But all
my life better jobs have been given me than I dared ask for. Well--I was
at the end of my rope in Atlanta and I was trying to make a living in
any honest way I could when one day a telegram came from the New York
_World_ (it was the old _World_, which was one of the best of the
dailies in its literary quality) asking me to come to New York. I had
never seen a man on the paper--had never been in New York except for a
day when I landed there on a return voyage from a European trip that I
took during one vacation when I was in the University. Then I went to
New York straight and quickly. I had an interesting experience on the
old _World_, writing literary matter chiefly, an editorial now and then,
and I was frequently sent as a correspondent on interesting errands. I
travelled all over the country with the Tariff Commission. I spent one
winter in Washington as a sort of editorial correspondent while the
tariff bill was going through Congress. Then, one day, the _World_ was
sold to Mr. Pulitzer and all the staff resigned. The character of the
paper changed."

What better training could a journalist ask for than this? Page was only
twenty-eight when these five years came to an end; but his life had been
a comprehensive education in human contact, in the course of which he
had picked up many things that were not included in the routine of Johns
Hopkins University. From Athens to St. Joe, from the comedies of
Aristophanes to the stockyards and political conventions of Kansas
City--the transition may possibly have been an abrupt one, but it is not
likely that Page so regarded it. For books and the personal relation
both appealed to him, in almost equal proportions, as essentials to the
fully rounded man. Merely from the standpoint of geography, Page's
achievement had been an important one; how many Americans, at the age of
twenty-eight, have such an extensive mileage to their credit? Page had
spent his childhood--and his childhood only--in North Carolina; he had
passed his youth in Virginia and Maryland; before he was twenty-three he
had lived several months in Germany, and, on his return voyage, he had
sailed by the white cliffs of England, and, from the deck of his
steamer, had caught glimpses of that Isle of Wight which then held his
youthful favourite Tennyson. He had added to these experiences a winter
in Kentucky and a sojourn of nearly two years in Missouri. His Southern
trip, to which Page refers in the above, had taken him through
Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana; he had visited
the West again in 1882, spending a considerable time in all the large
cities, Chicago, Omaha, Denver, Leadville, Salt Lake, and from the
latter point he had travelled extensively through Mormondom. The several
months spent in Atlanta had given the young correspondent a glimpse into
the new South, for this energetic city embodied a Southern spirit that
was several decades removed from the Civil War. After this came nearly
two years in New York and Washington, where Page gained his first
insight into Federal politics; in particular, as a correspondent
attached to the Tariff Commission--an assignment that again started him
on his travels to industrial centres--he came into contact, for the
first time, with the mechanism of framing the great American tariff. And
during this period Page was not only forming a first-hand acquaintance
with the passing scene, but also with important actors in it. The mere
fact that, on the St. Joseph _Gazette_, he succeeded Eugene Field--"a
good fellow named Page is going to take my desk," said the careless
poet, "I hope he will succeed to my debts too"--always remained a
pleasant memory. He entered zealously into the life of this active
community; his love of talk and disputation, his interest in politics,
his hearty laugh, his vigorous handclasp, his animation of body and of
spirit, and his sunny outlook on men and events--these are the traits
that his old friends in this town, some of whom still survive,
associate with the juvenile editor. In his Southern trip Page
called--self-invited--upon Jefferson Davis and was cordially
received. At Atlanta, as he records above, he made friends with that
chivalric champion of a resurrected South, Henry Grady; here also he
obtained fugitive glimpses of a struggling and briefless lawyer, who,
like Page, was interested more in books and writing than in the humdrum
of professional life, and who was then engaged in putting together a
brochure on _Congressional Government_ which immediately gave him a
national standing. The name of this sympathetic acquaintance was Woodrow
Wilson.

[Illustration: Walter H. Page in 1876, when he was a Fellow of Johns
Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.]

[Illustration: Basil L. Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, Johns Hopkins
University, 1876-1915]

Another important event had taken place, for, at St. Louis, on November
15, 1880, Page had married Miss Willia Alice Wilson. Miss Wilson was the
daughter of a Scotch physician, Dr. William Wilson, who had settled in
Michigan, near Detroit, in 1832. When she was a small child she went
with her sister's family--her father had died seven years before--to
North Carolina, near Cary; and she and Page had been childhood friends
and schoolmates. At the time of the wedding, Page was editor of the St.
Joseph _Gazette_; the fact that he had attained this position, five
months after starting at the bottom, sufficiently discloses his aptitude
for journalistic work.

Page had now outgrown any Southern particularism with which he may have
started life. He no longer found his country exclusively in the area
south of the Potomac; he had made his own the West, the North--New York,
Chicago, Denver, as well as Atlanta and Raleigh. It is worth while
insisting on this fact, for the cultivation of a wide-sweeping
Americanism and a profound faith in democracy became the qualities that
will loom most largely in his career from this time forward. It is
necessary only to read the newspaper letters which he wrote on his
Southern trip in 1881 to understand how early his mind seized this new
point of view. Many things which now fell under his observant eye in the
Southern States greatly irritated him and with his characteristic
impulsiveness he pictured these traits in pungent phrase. The atmosphere
of shiftlessness that too generally prevailed in some localities; the
gangs of tobacco-chewing loafers assembled around railway stations; the
listless Negroes that seemed to overhang the whole country like a black
cloud; the plantation mansions in a sad state of disrepair; the old
unoccupied slave huts overgrown with weeds; the unpainted and
broken-down fences; the rich soil that was crudely and wastefully
cultivated with a single crop--the youthful social philosopher found
himself comparing these vestigia of a half-moribund civilization with
the vibrant cities of the North, the beautiful white and green villages
of New England, and the fertile prairie farms of the West. "Even the
dogs," he said, "look old-fashioned." Oh, for a change in his beloved
South--a change of almost any kind! "Even a heresy, if it be bright and
fresh, would be a relief. You feel as if you wished to see some kind of
an effort put forth, a discussion, a fight, a runaway, anything to make
the blood go faster." Wherever Page saw signs of a new spirit--and he
saw many--he recorded them with an eagerness which showed his loyalty to
the section of his birth. The splitting up of great plantations into
small farms he put down as one of the indications of a new day. A
growing tendency to educate, not only the white child, but the Negro,
inspired a similar tribute. But he rejoiced most over the decreasing
bitterness of the masses over the memories of the Civil War, and
discovered, with satisfaction, that any remaining ill-feeling was a
heritage left not by the Union soldier, but by the carpetbagger.

And one scene is worth preserving, for it illustrates not only the zeal
of Page himself for the common country, but the changing attitude of the
Southern people. It was enacted at Martin, Tennessee, on the evening of
July 2, 1881. Page was spending a few hours in the village grocery,
discussing things in general with the local yeomanry, when the telegraph
operator came from the post office with rather more than his usual
expedition and excitement. He was frantically waving a yellow slip which
bore the news that President Garfield had been shot. Garfield had been
an energetic and a successful general in the war and his subsequent
course in Congress, where he had joined the radical Republicans, had not
caused the South to look upon him as a friend. But these farmers
responded to this shock, not like sectionalists, but like Americans.
"Every man of them," Page records, "expressed almost a personal sorrow.
Little was said of politics or of parties. Mr. Garfield was President of
the United States--that was enough. A dozen voices spoke the great
gratification that the assassin was not a Southern man. It was an
affecting scene to see weather-beaten old countrymen so profoundly
agitated--men who yesterday I should have supposed hardly knew and
certainly did not seem to care who was President. The great centres of
population, of politicians, and of thought may be profoundly agitated
to-night, but no more patriotic sorrow and humiliation is felt anywhere
by any men than by these old backwoods ex-Confederates."

Page himself was so stirred by the news that he ascended a cracker
barrel, and made a speech to the assembled countrymen, preaching to
responsive ears the theme of North and South, now reunited in a common
sorrow. Thus, by the time he was twenty-six, Page, at any rate in
respect to his Americanism, was a full-grown man.


II

A few years afterward Page had an opportunity of discussing this, his
favourite topic, with the American whom he most admired. Perhaps the
finest thing in the career of Grover Cleveland was the influence which
he exerted upon young men. After the sordid political transactions of
the reconstruction period and after the orgy of partisanship which had
followed the Civil War, this new figure, acceding to the Presidency in
1885, came as an inspiration to millions of zealous and intelligent
young college-bred Americans. One of the first to feel the new spell was
Walter Page; Mr. Cleveland was perhaps the most important influence in
forming his public ideals. Of everything that Cleveland
represented--civil service reform; the cleansing of politics, state and
national; the reduction in the tariff; a foreign policy which, without
degenerating into truculence, manfully upheld the rights of American
citizens; a determination to curb the growing pension evil; the doctrine
that the Government was something to be served and not something to be
plundered--Page became an active and brilliant journalistic advocate. It
was therefore a great day in his life when, on a trip to Washington in
the autumn of 1885, he had an hour's private conversation with President
Cleveland, and it was entirely characteristic of Page that he should
make the conversation take the turn of a discussion of the so-called
Southern question.

"In the White House at Washington," Page wrote about this visit, "is an
honest, plain, strong man, a man of wonderfully broad information and of
most uncommon industry. He has always been a Democrat. He is a
distinguished lawyer and a scholar on all public questions. He is as
frank and patriotic and sincere as any man that ever won the high place
he holds. Within less than a year he has done so well and so wisely that
he has disappointed his enemies and won their admiration. He is as
unselfish as he is great. He is one of the most industrious men in the
world. He rises early and works late and does not waste his time--all
because his time is now not his own but the Republic's, whose most
honoured servant he is. I count it among the most inspiring experiences
in my life that I had the privilege, at the suggestion of one of his
personal friends, of talking with him one morning about the complete
reuniting of the two great sections of our Republic by his election. I
told him, and I know I told him the truth, when I said that every young
man in the Southern States who, without an opportunity to share either
the glory or the defeat of the late Confederacy, had in spite of himself
suffered the disadvantages of the poverty and oppression that followed
war, took new hope for the full and speedy realization of a complete
union, of unparalleled prosperity and of broad thinking and noble living
from his elevation to the Presidency. I told him that the men of North
Carolina were not only patriotic but ambitious as well; and that they
were Democrats and proud citizens of the State and the Republic not
because they wanted offices or favours, but because they loved freedom
and wished the land that had been impoverished by war to regain more
than it had lost. 'I have not called, Mr. President, to ask for an
office for myself or for anybody else,' I remarked; 'but to have the
pleasure of expressing my gratification, as a citizen of North Carolina,
at the complete change in political methods and morals that I believe
will date from your Administration.' He answered that he was glad to
see all men who came in such a spirit and did not come to
beg--especially young men of the South of to-day; and he talked and
encouraged me to talk freely as if he had been as small a man as I am,
or I as great a man as he is.

"From that day to this it has been my business to watch every public act
that he does, to read every public word he speaks, and it has been a
pleasure and a benefit to me (like the benefit that a man gets from
reading a great history--for he is making a great history) to study the
progress of his Administration; and at every step he seems to me to
warrant the trust that the great Democratic party put in him."

The period to which Page refers in this letter represented the time when
he was making a serious and harassing attempt to establish himself in
his chosen profession in his native state. He went south for a short
visit after resigning his place on the New York _World_, and several
admirers in Raleigh persuaded him to found a new paper, which should
devote itself to preaching the Cleveland ideals, and, above all, to
exerting an influence on the development of a new Southern spirit. No
task could have been more grateful to Page and there was no place in
which he would have better liked to undertake it than in the old state
which he loved so well. The result was the _State Chronicle_ of Raleigh,
practically a new paper, which for a year and a half proved to be the
most unconventional and refreshing influence that North Carolina had
known in many a year. Necessarily Page found himself in conflict with
his environment. He had little interest in the things that then chiefly
interested the state, and North Carolina apparently had little interest
in the things that chiefly occupied the mind of the youthful journalist.
Page was interested in Cleveland, in the reform of the civil service;
the Democrats of North Carolina little appreciated their great national
leader and were especially hostile to his belief that service to a party
did not in itself establish a qualification for public office. Page was
interested in uplifting the common people, in helping every farmer to
own his own acres, and in teaching the most modern and scientific way of
cultivating them; he was interested in giving every boy and girl at
least an elementary education, and in giving a university training to
such as had the aptitude and the ambition to obtain it; he believed in
industrial training--and in these things the North Carolina of those
days had little concern. Page even went so far as to take an open stand
for the pitiably neglected black man: he insisted that he should be
taught to read and write, and instructed in agriculture and the manual
trades. A man who advocated such revolutionary things in those days was
accused--and Page was so accused--of attempting to promote the "social
equality" of the two races. Page also declaimed in favour of developing
the state industrially; he called attention to the absurdity of sending
Southern cotton to New England spinning mills, and he pointed out the
boundless but unworked natural resources of the state, in minerals,
forests, waterpower, and lands.

North Carolina, he informed his astonished compatriots, had once been a
great manufacturing colony; why could the state not become one again?
But the matter in which the buoyant editor and his constituents found
themselves most at variance was the spirit that controlled North
Carolina life. It was a spirit that found comfort for its present
poverty and lack of progress in a backward look at the greatness of the
state in the past and the achievements of its sons in the Civil War.
Though Page believed that the Confederacy had been a ghastly error, and
though he abhorred the institution of slavery and attributed to it all
the woes, economic and social, from which his section suffered, he
rendered that homage to the soldiers of the South which is the due of
brave, self-sacrificing and conscientious men; yet he taught that
progress lay in regarding the four dreadful years of the Civil War as
the closed chapter of an unhappy and mistaken history and in hastening
the day when the South should resume its place as a living part of the
great American democracy. All manifestations of a contrary spirit he
ridiculed in language which was extremely readable but which at times
outraged the good conservative people whom he was attempting to convert.
He did not even spare the one figure which was almost a part of the
Southerner's religion, the Confederate general, especially that
particular type who used his war record as a stepping stone to public
office, and whose oratory, colourful and turgid in its celebrations of
the past, Page regarded as somewhat unrelated, in style and matter, to
the realities of the present. The image-breaking editor even asserted
that the Daughters of the Confederacy were not entirely a helpful
influence in Southern regeneration; for they, too, were harping always
upon the old times and keeping alive sectional antagonisms and hatreds.
This he regarded as an unworthy occupation for high-minded Southern
women, and he said so, sometimes in language that made him very
unpopular in certain circles.

Altogether it was a piquant period in Page's life. He found that he had
suddenly become a "traitor" to his country and that his experiences in
the North had completely "Yankeeized" him. Even in more mature days,
Page's pen had its javelin-like quality; and in 1884, possessed as he
was of all the fury of youth, he never hesitated to return every blow
that was rained upon his head. As a matter of fact he had a highly
enjoyable time. The _State Chronicle_ during his editorship is one of
the most cherished recollections of older North Carolinians to-day. Even
those who hurled the liveliest epithets in his direction have long since
accepted the ideas for which Page was then contending; "the only trouble
with him," they now ruefully admit, "was that he was forty years ahead
of his time." They recall with satisfaction the satiric accounts which
Page used to publish of Democratic Conventions--solemn, long-winded,
frock-coated, white-neck-tied affairs that displayed little concern for
the reform of the tariff or of the civil service, but an energetic
interest in pensioning Confederate veterans and erecting monuments to
the Southern heroes of the Civil War. One editorial is joyfully
recalled, in which Page referred to a public officer who was
distinguished for his dignity and his family tree, but not noted for any
animated administration of his duties, as "Thothmes II." When this
bewildered functionary searched the Encyclopædia and learned that
"Thothmes II" was an Egyptian king of the XVIIIth dynasty, whose
dessicated mummy had recently been disinterred from the hot sands of the
desert, he naturally stopped his subscription to the paper. The metaphor
apparently tickled Page, for he used it in a series of articles which
have become immortal in the political annals of North Carolina. These
have always been known as the "Mummy letters." They furnished a vivid
but rather aggravating explanation for the existing backwardness and
chauvinism of the commonwealth. All the trouble, it seems, was caused by
the "mummies." "It is an awfully discouraging business," Page wrote, "to
undertake to prove to a mummy that it is a mummy. You go up to it and
say, 'Old fellow, the Egyptian dynasties crumbled several thousand years
ago: you are a fish out of water. You have by accident or the
Providence of God got a long way out of your time. This is America.' The
old thing grins that grin which death set on its solemn features when
the world was young; and your task is so pitiful that even the humour of
it is gone. Give it up."

Everything great in North Carolina, Page declared, belonged to a
vanished generation. "Our great lawyers, great judges, great editors,
are all of the past. . . . In the general intelligence of the people, in
intellectual force and in cultivation, we are doing nothing. We are not
doing or getting more liberal ideas, a broader view of this world. . . .
The presumptuous powers of ignorance, heredity, decayed respectability
and stagnation that control public action and public expression are
absolutely leading us back intellectually."

But Page did more than berate the mummified aristocracy which, he
declared, was driving the best talent and initiative from the state; he
was not the only man in Raleigh who expressed these unpopular views; at
that time, indeed, he was the centre and inspiration of a group of young
progressive spirits who held frequent meetings to devise ways of
starting the state on the road to a new existence. Page then, as always,
exercised a great fascination over young men. The apparently merciless
character of his ridicule might at first convey the idea of intolerance;
the fact remains, however, that he was the most tolerant of men; he was
almost deferential to the opinions of others, even the shallow and the
inexperienced; and nothing delighted him more than an animated
discussion. His liveliness of spirits, his mental and physical vitality,
the constant sparkle of his talk, the sharp edge of his humour,
naturally drew the younger men to his side. The result was the
organization of the Wautauga Club, a gathering which held monthly
meetings for the discussion of ways and means of improving social and
educational conditions in North Carolina. The very name gives the key to
its mental outlook. The Wautauga colony was one of the last founded in
North Carolina--in the extreme west, on a plateau of the Great Smoky
Mountains; it was always famous for the energy and independence of its
people. The word "Wautauga" therefore suggested the breaker of
tradition; and it provided a stimulating name for Page's group of young
spiritual and economic pathfinders. The Wautauga Club had a brief
existence of a little more than two years, the period practically
covering Page's residence in the state; but its influence is an
important fact at the present time. It gave the state ideas that
afterward caused something like a revolution in its economic and
educational status. The noblest monument to its labours is the State
College in Raleigh, an institution which now has more than a thousand
students, for the most part studying the mechanic arts and scientific
agriculture. To this one college most North Carolinians to-day attribute
the fact that their state in appreciable measure is realizing its great
economic and industrial opportunities. From it in the last thirty years
thousands of young men have gone: in all sections of the commonwealth
they have caused the almost barren acres to yield fertile and
diversified crops; they have planted everywhere new industries; they
have unfolded unsuspected resources and everywhere created wealth and
spread enlightenment. This institution is a direct outcome of Page's
brief sojourn in his native state nearly forty years ago. The idea
originated in his brain; the files of the _State Chronicle_ tell the
story of his struggle in its behalf; the activities of the Wautauga Club
were largely concentrated upon securing its establishment.

The State College was a great victory for Page, but final success did
not come until three years after he had left the state. For a year and a
half of hard newspaper work convinced Page that North Carolina really
had no permanent place for him. The _Chronicle_ was editorially a
success: Page's articles were widely quoted, not only in his own state
but in New England and other parts of the Union. He succeeded in
stirring up North Carolina and the South generally, but popular support
for the _Chronicle_ was not forthcoming in sufficient amount to make the
paper a commercial possibility. Reluctantly and sadly Page had to forego
his hope of playing an active part in rescuing his state from the
disasters of the Civil War. Late in the summer of 1885, he again left
for the North, which now became his permanent home.


III

And with this second sojourn in New York Page's opportunity came. The
first two years he spent in newspaper work, for the most part with the
_Evening Post_, but, one day in November, 1887, a man whom he had never
seen came into his office and unfolded a new opportunity. Two years
before a rather miscellaneous group had launched an ambitious literary
undertaking. This was a monthly periodical, which, it was hoped, would
do for the United States what such publications as the _Fortnightly_ and
the _Contemporary_ were doing for England. The magazine was to have the
highest literary quality and to be sufficiently dignified to attract the
finest minds in America as contributors; its purpose was to exercise a
profound influence in politics, literature, science, and art. The
projectors had selected for this publication a title that was almost
perfection--the _Forum_--but which, after nearly two years'
experimentation, represented about the limit of their achievement. The
_Forum_ had hardly made an impression on public thought and had
attracted very few readers, although it had lost large sums of money for
its progenitors. These public-spirited gentlemen now turned to Page as
the man who might rescue them from their dilemma and achieve their
purpose. He accepted the engagement, first as manager and presently as
editor, and remained the guiding spirit of the _Forum_ for eight years,
until the summer of 1895.

That the success of a publication is the success of its editors, and not
of its business managers and its "backers," is a truth that ought to be
generally apparent; never has this fact been so eloquently illustrated
as in the case of the _Forum_ under Page. Before his accession it had
had not the slightest importance; for the period of his editorship it is
doubtful if any review published in English exercised so great an
influence, and certainly none ever obtained so large a circulation. From
almost nothing the _Forum_, in two or three years, attracted 30,000
subscribers--something without precedent for a publication of this
character. It had accomplished this great result simply because of the
vitality and interest of its contents. The period covered was an
important one, in the United States and Europe; it was the time of
Cleveland's second administration in this country, and of Gladstone's
fourth administration in England; it was a time of great controversy and
of a growing interest in science, education, social reform and a better
political order. All these great matters were reflected in the pages of
the _Forum_, whose list of contributors contained the most distinguished
names in all countries. Its purpose, as Page explained it, was "to
provoke discussion about subjects of contemporary interest, in which the
magazine is not a partisan, but merely the instrument." In the highest
sense, that is, its purpose was journalistic; practically everything
that it printed was related to the thought and the action of the time.
So insistent was Page on this programme that his pages were not "closed"
until a week before the day of issue. Though the _Forum_ dealt
constantly in controversial subjects it never did so in a narrow-minded
spirit; it was always ready to hear both sides of a question and the
magazine "debate," in which opposing writers handled vigorously the same
theme, was a constant feature.

Page, indeed, represented a new type of editor. Up to that time this
functionary had been a rather solemn, inaccessible high priest; he sat
secluded in his sanctuary, and weeded out from the mass of manuscripts
dumped upon his desk the particular selections which seemed to be most
suited to his purpose. To solicit contributions would have seemed an
entirely undignified proceeding; in all cases contributors must come to
him. According to Page, however, "an editor must know men and be out
among men." His system of "making up" the magazine at first somewhat
astounded his associates. A month or two in advance of publication day
he would draw up his table of contents. This, in its preliminary stage,
amounted to nothing except a list of the main subjects which he aspired
to handle in that number. It was a hope, not a performance. The subjects
were commonly suggested by the happenings of the time--an especially
outrageous lynching, the trial of a clergyman for heresy, a new attack
upon the Monroe Doctrine, the discovery of a new substance such as
radium, the publication of an epoch-making book. Page would then fix
upon the inevitable men who could write most readably and most
authoritatively upon these topics, and "go after" them. Sometimes he
would write one of his matchless editorial letters; at other times he
would make a personal visit; if necessary, he would use any available
friends in a wire-pulling campaign. At all odds he must "get" his man;
once he had fixed upon a certain contributor nothing could divert him
from the chase. Nor did the negotiations cease after he had "landed" his
quarry. He had his way of discussing the subject with his proposed
writer, and he discussed it from every possible point of view. He would
take him to lunch or to dinner; in his quiet way he would draw him out,
find whether he really knew much about the subject, learn the attitude
that he was likely to take, and delicately slip in suggestions of his
own. Not infrequently this preliminary interview would disclose that the
much sought writer, despite appearances, was not the one who was
destined for that particular job; in this case Page would find some way
of shunting him in favour of a more promising candidate. But Page was no
mere chaser of names; there was nothing of the literary tuft-hunter
about his editorial methods. He liked to see such men as Theodore
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Graham Sumner, Charles W. Eliot,
Frederic Harrison, Paul Bourget, and the like upon his title page--and
here these and many other similarly distinguished authors appeared--but
the greatest name could not attain a place there if the letter press
that followed were unworthy. Indeed Page's habit of throwing out the
contributions of the great, after paying a stiff price for them, caused
much perturbation in his counting room. One day he called in one of his
associates.

"Do you see that waste basket?" he asked, pointing to a large receptacle
filled to overflowing with manuscripts. "All our Cleveland articles are
there!"

He had gone to great trouble and expense to obtain a series of six
articles from the most prominent publicists and political leaders of
the country on the first year of Mr. Cleveland's second administration.
It was to be the "feature" of the number then in preparation.

"There isn't one of them," he declared, "who has got the point. I have
thrown them all away and I am going to try to write something myself."

And he spent a couple of days turning out an article which aroused great
public interest. When Page commissioned an article, he meant simply that
he would pay full price for it; whether he would publish it depended
entirely upon the quality of the material itself. But Page was just as
severe upon his own writings as upon those of other men. He wrote
occasionally--always under a nom-de-plume; but he had great difficulty
in satisfying his own editorial standards. After finishing an article he
would commonly send for one of his friends and read the result.

"That is superb!" this admiring associate would sometimes say.

In response Page would take the manuscript and, holding it aloft in two
hands, tear it into several bits, and throw the scraps into the waste
basket.

"Oh, I can do better than that," he would laugh and in another minute he
was busy rewriting the article, from beginning to end.

Page retired from the editorship of the _Forum_ in 1895. The severance
of relations was half a comedy, half a tragedy. The proprietors had only
the remotest relation to literature; they had lost much money in the
enterprise before Page became editor and only the fortunate accident of
securing his services had changed their losing venture into a financial
success. In a moment of despair, before the happier period had arrived,
they offered to sell the property to Page and his friends. Page quickly
assembled a new group to purchase control, when, much to the amazement
of the old owners, the _Forum_ began to make money. Instead of having a
burden on their hands, the proprietors suddenly discovered that they had
a gold mine. They therefore refused to deliver their holdings and an
inevitable struggle ensued for control. Page could edit a magazine and
turn a shipwrecked enterprise into a profitable one; but, in a tussle of
this kind, he was no match for the shrewd business men who owned the
property. When the time came for counting noses Page and his friends
found themselves in a minority. Of course his resignation as editor
necessarily followed this little unpleasantness. And just as inevitably
the _Forum_ again began to lose money, and soon sank into an obscurity
from which it has never emerged.

The _Forum_ had established Page's reputation as an editor, and the
competition for his services was lively. The distinguished Boston
publishing house of Houghton, Mifflin & Company immediately invited him
to become a part of their organization. When Horace E. Scudder, in 1898,
resigned the editorship of the _Atlantic Monthly_, Page succeeded him.
Thus Page became the successor of James Russell Lowell, James T. Fields,
William D. Howells, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich as the head of this famous
periodical. This meant that he had reached the top of his profession. He
was now forty-three years old.

No American publication had ever had so brilliant a history. Founded in
1857, in the most flourishing period of the New England writers, its
pages had first published many of the best essays of Emerson, the second
series of the Biglow papers as well as many other of Lowell's writings,
poems of Longfellow and Whittier, such great successes as Holmes's
"Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," Mrs. Howe's "Battle Hymn of the
Republic," and the early novels of Henry James. If America had a
literature, the _Atlantic_ was certainly its most successful periodical
exponent. Yet, in a sense, the _Atlantic_, by the time Page succeeded to
the editorship, had become the victim of its dazzling past. Its recent
editors had lived too exclusively in their back numbers. They had
conducted the magazine too much for the restricted audience of Boston
and New England. There was a time, indeed, when the business office
arranged the subscribers in two classes--"Boston" and "foreign";
"Boston" representing their local adherents, and "foreign" the loyal
readers who lived in the more benighted parts of the United States. One
of its editors had been heard to boast that he never solicited a
contribution; it was not his business to be a literary drummer! Let the
truth be fairly spoken: when Page made his first appearance in the
_Atlantic_ office, the magazine was unquestionably on the decline. Its
literary quality was still high; the momentum that its great
contributors had given it was still keeping the publication alive;
entrance into its columns still represented the ultimate ambition of the
aspiring American writer; but it needed a new spirit to insure its
future. What it required was the kind of editing that had suddenly made
the _Forum_ one of the greatest of English-written reviews. This is the
reason why the canny Yankee proprietors had reached over to New York and
grasped Page as quickly as the capitalists of the _Forum_ let him slip
between their fingers.

Page's sense of humour discovered a certain ironic aspect in his
position as the dictator of this famous New England magazine. The fact
that his manner was impatiently energetic and somewhat startling to the
placid atmosphere of Park Street was not the thing that really signified
its break with its past. But here was a Southerner firmly entrenched in
a headquarters that had long been sacred to the New England
abolitionists. One of the first sights that greeted Page, as he came
into the office, was the angular and spectacled countenance of William
Lloyd Garrison, gazing down from a steel engraving on the wall. One of
Garrison's sons was a colleague, and the anterooms were frequently
cluttered with dusky gentlemen patiently waiting for interviews with
this benefactor of their race. Page once was careless enough to inform
Mr. Garrison that "one of your niggers" was waiting outside for an
audience. "I very much regret, Mr. Page," came the answer, "that you
should insist on spelling 'Negro' with two 'g's'." Despite the mock
solemnity of this rebuke, perennial good-nature and raillery prevailed
between the son of Garrison and his disrespectful but ever sympathetic
Southern friend. Indeed, one of Page's earliest performances was to
introduce a spirit of laughter and genial coöperation into a rather
solemn and self-satisfied environment. Mr. Mifflin, the head of the
house, even formally thanked Page "for the hearty human way in which you
take hold of life." Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, the present editor of the
_Atlantic_, has described the somewhat disconcerting descent of Page
upon the editorial sanctuary of James Russell Lowell:

     "Were a visitant from another sphere to ask me for the incarnation
     of those qualities we love to call American, I should turn to a
     familiar gallery of my memory and point to the living portrait that
     hangs there of Walter Page. A sort of foursquareness, bluntness, it
     seemed to some; an uneasy, often explosive energy; a disposition to
     underrate fine drawn nicenesses of all sorts; ingrained Yankee
     common sense, checking his vaulting enthusiasm; enormous
     self-confidence, impatience of failure--all of these were in him;
     and he was besides affectionate to a fault, devoted to his country,
     his family, his craft--a strong, bluff, tender man.

     "Those were the decorous days of the old tradition, and Page's
     entrance into the 'atmosphere' of Park Street has taken on the
     dignity of legend. There were all kinds of signs and portents, as
     the older denizens will tell you. Strange breezes floated through
     the office, electric emanations, and a pervasive scent of tobacco,
     which--so the local historian says--had been unknown in the
     vicinity since the days of Walter Raleigh, except for the literary
     aroma of Aldrich's quarantined sanctum upstairs. Page's coming
     marked the end of small ways. His first requirement was, in lieu of
     a desk, a table that might have served a family of twelve for
     Thanksgiving dinner. No one could imagine what that vast, polished
     tableland could serve for until they watched the editor at work.
     Then they saw. Order vanished and chaos reigned. Huge piles of
     papers, letters, articles, reports, books, pamphlets, magazines,
     congregated themselves as if by magic. To work in such confusion
     seemed hopeless, but Page eluded the congestion by the simple
     expedient of moving on. He would light a fresh cigar, give the
     editorial chair a hitch, and begin his work in front of a fresh
     expanse of table, with no clutter of the past to disturb the new
     day's litter.

     "The motive power of his work was enthusiasm. Never was more
     generous welcome given to a newcomer than Page held out to the
     successful manuscript of an unknown. I remember, though I heard the
     news second hand at the time, what a day it was in the office when
     the first manuscript from the future author of 'To Have and To
     Hold,' came in from an untried Southern girl. He walked up and
     down, reading paragraphs aloud and slapping the crisp manuscript
     to enforce his commendation. To take a humbler instance, I recall
     the words of over generous praise with which he greeted the first
     paper I ever sent to an editor quite as clearly as I remember the
     monstrous effort which had brought it into being. Sometimes he
     would do a favoured manuscript the honour of taking it out to lunch
     in his coat-pocket, and an associate vividly recalls eggs, coffee,
     and pie in a near-by restaurant, while, in a voice that could be
     heard by the remotest lunchers, Page read passages which many of
     them were too startled to appreciate. He was not given to
     overrating, but it was not in his nature to understate. 'I tell
     you,' said he, grumbling over some unfortunate proof-sheets from
     Manhattan, 'there isn't one man in New York who can write
     English--not from the Battery to Harlem Heights.' And if the faults
     were moral rather than literary, his disapproval grew in emphasis.
     There is more than tradition in the tale of the Negro who,
     presuming on Page's deep interest in his race, brought to his desk
     a manuscript copied word for word from a published source. Page
     recognized the deception, and seizing the rascal's collar with a
     firm editorial grip, rejected the poem, and ejected the poet, with
     an energy very invigorating to the ancient serenities of the
     office.

     "Page was always effervescent with ideas. Like an editor who would
     have made a good fisherman, he used to say that you had to cast a
     dozen times before you could get a strike. He was forever in those
     days sending out ideas and suggestions and invitations to write.
     The result was electric, and the magazine became with a suddenness
     (of which only an editor can appreciate the wonder) a storehouse of
     animating thoughts. He avoided the mistake common to our craft of
     editing a magazine for the immediate satisfaction of his
     colleagues. 'Don't write for the office,' he would say. 'Write for
     outside,' and so his magazine became a living thing. His phrase
     suggests one special gift that Page had, for which his profession
     should do him especial honour. He was able, quite beyond the powers
     of any man of my acquaintance, to put compendiously into words the
     secrets of successful editing. It was capital training just to hear
     him talk. 'Never save a feature,' he used to say. 'Always work for
     the next number. Forget the others. Spend everything just on that.'
     And to those who know, there is divination in the principle. Again
     he understood instinctively that to write well a man must not only
     have something to say, but must long to say it. A highly
     intelligent representative of the coloured race came to him with a
     philosophic essay. Page would have none of it. 'I know what you are
     thinking of,' said Page. 'You are thinking of the barriers we set
     up against you, and the handicap of your lot. If you will write
     what it feels like to be a Negro, I will print that.' The result
     was a paper which has seemed to me the most moving expression of
     the hopeless hope of the race I know of.

     "Page was generous in his coöperation. He never drew a rigid line
     about his share in any enterprise, but gave and took help with each
     and all. A lover of good English, with an honest passion for things
     tersely said, Page esteemed good journalism far above any
     second-rate manifestation of more pretentious forms; but many of us
     will regret that he was not privileged to find some outlet for his
     energies in which aspiration for real literature might have played
     an ampler part. For the literature of the past Page had great
     respect, but his interest was ever in the present and the future.
     He was forever fulminating against bad writing, and hated the
     ignorant and slipshod work of the hack almost as much as he
     despised the sham of the man who affected letters, the dabbler and
     the poetaster. His taste was for the roast beef of literature, not
     for the side dishes and the trimmings, and his appreciation of the
     substantial work of others was no surer than his instinct for his
     own performance. He was an admirable writer of exposition,
     argument, and narrative--solid and thoughtful, but never dull. . . .
     I came into close relations with him and from him I learned more of
     my profession than from any one I have ever known. Scores of other
     men would say the same."

But the fact that a new hand had seized the _Atlantic_ was apparent in
other places than in the _Atlantic_ office itself. One of Page's
contributors of the _Forum_ days, Mr. Courtney DeKalb, happened to be in
St. Louis when the first number of the magazine under its new editor
made its appearance. Mr. DeKalb had been out of the country for some
time and knew nothing of the change. Happening accidentally to pick up
the _Atlantic_, the table of contents caught his eye. It bore the traces
of an unmistakable hand. Only one man, he said to himself, could
assemble such a group as that, and above all, only Page could give such
an enticing turn of the titles. He therefore sat down and wrote his old
friend congratulating him on his accession to the _Atlantic Monthly_.
The change that now took place was indeed a conspicuous, almost a
startling one. The _Atlantic_ retained all its old literary flavour, for
to its traditions Page was as much devoted as the highest caste
Bostonian; it still gave up much of its space to a high type of fiction,
poetry, and reviews of contemporary literature, but every number
contained also an assortment of articles which celebrated the prevailing
activities of men and women in all worth-while fields of effort. There
were discussions of present-day politics, and these even became
personal dissections of presidential candidates; there were articles on
the racial characters of the American population: Theodore Roosevelt was
permitted to discuss the New York police; Woodrow Wilson to pass in
review the several elements that made the Nation; Booker T. Washington
to picture the awakening of the Negro; John Muir to enlighten Americans
upon a national beauty and wealth of which they had been woefully
ignorant, their forests; William Allen White to describe certain aspects
of his favourite Kansas; E.L. Godkin to review the dangers and the hopes
of American democracy; Jacob Rüs to tell about the Battle with the Slum;
and W.G. Frost to reveal for the first time the archaic civilization of
the Kentucky mountaineers. The latter article illustrated Page's genius
at rewriting titles. Mr. Frost's theme was that these Kentucky
mountaineers were really Elizabethan survivals; that their dialect,
their ballads, their habits were really a case of arrested development;
that by studying them present-day Americans could get a picture of their
distant forbears. Page gave vitality to the presentation by changing a
commonplace title to this one: "Our Contemporary Ancestors."

There were those who were offended by Page's willingness to seek
inspiration on the highways and byways and even in newspapers, for not
infrequently he would find hidden away in a corner an idea that would
result in valuable magazine matter. On one occasion at least this
practice had important literary consequences. One day he happened to
read that a Mrs. Robert Hanning had died in Toronto, the account
casually mentioning the fact that Mrs. Hanning was the youngest sister
of Thomas Carlyle. Page handed this clipping to a young assistant, and
told him to take the first train to Canada. The editor could easily
divine that a sister of Carlyle, expatriated for forty-six years on
this side of the Atlantic, must have received a large number of letters
from her brother, and it was safe to assume that they had been carefully
preserved. Such proved to be the fact; and a new volume of Carlyle
letters, of somewhat more genial character than the other collections,
was the outcome of this visit[4]. And another fruit of this journalistic
habit was "The Memoirs of a Revolutionist," by Prince Peter Kropotkin.
In 1897 the great Russian nihilist was lecturing in Boston. Page met
him, learned from his own lips his story, and persuaded him to put it in
permanent form. This willingness of Page to admit such a revolutionary
person into the pages of the _Atlantic_ caused some excitement in
conventional circles. In fact, it did take some courage, but Page never
hesitated; the man was of heroic mould, he had a great story to tell, he
wielded an engaging pen, and his purposes were high-minded. A great book
of memoirs was the result.

Mr. Sedgwick refers above to Page's editorial fervour when Miss Mary
Johnston's "Prisoners of Hope" first fell out of the blue sky into his
Boston office. Page's joy was not less keen because the young author was
a Virginia girl, and because she had discovered that the early period of
Virginia history was a field for romance. When, a few months afterward,
Page was casting about for an _Atlantic_ serial, Miss Johnston and this
Virginia field seemed to be an especially favourable prospect.
"Prisoners of Hope" had been published as a book and had made a good
success, but Miss Johnston's future still lay ahead of her. With Page to
think meant to act, and so, instead of writing a formal letter, he at
once jumped on a train for Birmingham, Alabama, where Miss Johnston was
then living. "I remember quite distinctly that first meeting," writes
Miss Johnston. "The day was rainy. Standing at my window I watched Mr.
Page--a characteristic figure, air and walk--approach the house. When a
few minutes later I met him he was simplicity and kindliness itself.
This was my first personal contact with publishers (my publishers) or
with editors of anything so great as the _Atlantic_. My heart beat! But
he was friendly and Southern. I told him what I had done upon a new
story. He was going on that night. Might he take the manuscript with him
and read it upon the train? It might--he couldn't say positively, of
course--but it might have serial possibilities. I was only too glad for
him to have the manuscript. I forget just how many chapters I had
completed. But it was not quite in order. Could I get it so in a few
hours? In that case he would send a messenger for it from the hotel.
Yes, I could. Very good! A little further talk and he left with a strong
handshake. Three or four hours later he had the manuscript and took it
with him from Birmingham that night."

Page's enterprising visit had put into his hands the half-finished
manuscript of a story, "To Have and to Hold," which, when printed in the
_Atlantic_, more than doubled its circulation, and which, when made into
a book, proved one of the biggest successes since "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Page's most independent stroke in his _Atlantic_ days came with the
outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Boston was then the headquarters
of a national mood which has almost passed out of popular remembrance.
Its spokesmen called themselves anti-imperialists. The theory back of
their protest was that the American declaration of war on Spain was not
only the wanton attack of a great bully upon a feeble little country: it
was something that was bound to have deplorable consequences. The
United States was breaking with its past and engaging in European
quarrels; as a consequence of the war it would acquire territories and
embark on a career of "imperialism." Page was impatient at this kind of
twaddle. He declared that the Spanish War was a "necessary act of
surgery for the health of civilization." He did not believe that a
nation, simply because it was small, should be permitted to maintain
indefinitely a human slaughter house at the door of the United States.
The _Atlantic_ for June, 1898, gave the so-called anti-imperialists a
thrill of horror. On the cover appeared the defiantly flying American
flag; the first article was a vigorous and approving presentation of the
American case against Spain; though this was unsigned, its incisive
style at once betrayed the author. The _Atlantic_ had printed the
American flag on its cover during the Civil War; but certain New
Englanders thought that this latest struggle, in its motives and its
proportions, was hardly entitled to the distinction. Page declared,
however, that the Spanish War marked a new period in history; and he
endorsed the McKinley Administration, not only in the war itself, but in
its consequences, particularly the annexation of the Philippine Islands.

Page greatly enjoyed life in Boston and Cambridge. The _Atlantic_ was
rapidly growing in circulation and in influence, and the new friends
that its editor was making were especially to his taste. He now had a
family of four children, three boys and one girl--and their bringing up
and education, as he said at this time, constituted his real occupation.
So far as he could see, in the summer of 1899, he was permanently
established in life. But larger events in the publishing world now again
pulled him back to New York.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 4: "Letters of Thomas Carlyle to his Youngest Sister." Edited
by Charles Townsend Copeland. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1899.]




CHAPTER III

"THE FORGOTTEN MAN"

I


In July, 1899, the publishing community learned that financial
difficulties were seriously embarrassing the great house of Harper. For
nearly a century this establishment had maintained a position almost of
preëminence among American publishers. Three generations of Harpers had
successively presided over its destinies; its magazines and books had
become almost a household necessity in all parts of the United States,
and its authors included many of the names most celebrated in American
letters. The average American could no more associate the idea of
bankruptcy with this great business than with the federal Treasury
itself. Yet this incredible disaster had virtually taken place. At this
time the public knew nothing of the impending ruin; the fact was,
however, that, in July, 1899, the banking house of J.P. Morgan & Company
practically controlled this property. This was the situation which again
called Page to New York.

In the preceding year Mr. S.S. McClure, whose recent success as editor
and publisher had been little less than a sensation, had joined forces
with Mr. Frank N. Doubleday, and organized the new firm of Doubleday &
McClure. This business was making rapid progress; and that it would soon
become one of the leading American publishing houses was already
apparent. It was perhaps not unnatural, therefore, that Mr. J. Pierpont
Morgan, scanning the horizon for the men who might rescue the Harper
concern from approaching disaster, should have had his attention drawn
to Mr. McClure and Mr. Doubleday. "The failure of Harper & Brothers,"
Mr. Morgan said in a published statement, "would be a national
calamity." One morning, therefore, a member of the Harper firm called
upon Mr. McClure. Without the slightest hesitation he unfolded the
Harper situation to his astonished contemporary. The solution proposed
was more astonishing still. This was that Mr. Doubleday and Mr. McClure
should amalgamate their young and vigorous business with the Harper
enterprise and become the active managers of the new corporation. Both
Mr. McClure and Mr. Doubleday were comparatively young men, and the
magnitude of the proposed undertaking at first rather staggered them. It
was as though a small independent steel maker should suddenly be invited
to take over the United States Steel Corporation. Mr. McClure,
characteristically impetuous and daring, wished to accept the invitation
outright; Mr. Doubleday, however, suggested a period of probation. The
outcome was that the two men offered to take charge of Harper & Brothers
for a few months, and then decide whether they wished to make the
association a permanent one. One thing was immediately apparent; Messrs.
Doubleday and McClure, able as they were, would need the help of the
best talent available in the work that lay ahead. The first man to whom
they turned was Page, who presently left Boston and took up his business
abode at Franklin Square. The rumble of the elevated road was somewhat
distracting after the four quiet years in Park Street, but the new daily
routine was not lacking in interest. The Harper experiment, however, did
not end as Mr. Morgan had hoped. After a few months Messrs. Doubleday,
Page and McClure withdrew, and left the work of rescue to be performed
by Mr. George Harvey, who, curiously enough, succeeded Page, twenty-one
years afterward, in an even more important post--that of ambassador to
the Court of St. James's. The one important outcome of the Harper
episode, so far as Page was concerned, was the forming of a close
business and personal association with Mr. Frank N. Doubleday. As soon
as the two men definitely decided not to assume the Harper
responsibility, therefore, they joined forces and founded the firm of
Doubleday, Page & Company. Page now had the opportunity which he had
long wished for; the mere editing of magazines, even magazines of such
an eminent character as the _Forum_ and the _Atlantic Monthly_, could
hardly satisfy his ambition; he yearned to possess something which he
could call his own, at least in part.

The life of an editor has its unsatisfactory aspect, unless the editor
himself has an influential ownership in his periodical. Page now found
his opportunity to establish a monthly magazine which he could regard as
his own in both senses. He was its untrammelled editor, and also, in
part, its proprietor. All editors and writers will sympathize with the
ideas expressed in a letter written about this time to Page's friend,
Mr. William Roscoe Thayer, already distinguished as the historian of
Italian unity and afterward to win fame as the biographer of Cavour and
John Hay. When the first number of the _World's Work_ appeared Mr.
Thayer wrote, expressing a slight disappointment that its leading
tendency was journalistic rather than literary and intellectual. "When
you edited the _Forum_," wrote Mr. Thayer, "I perceived that no such
talent for editing had been seen in America before, and when, a little
later, you rejuvenated the _Atlantic_, making it for a couple of years
the best periodical printed in English, I felt that you had a great
mission before you as evoker and editor of the best literary work and
weightiest thought on important topics of our foremost men." He had
hoped to see a magnified _Atlantic_, and the new publication, splendid
as it was, seemed to be of rather more popular character than the
publications with which Page had previously been associated. Page met
this challenge in his usual hearty fashion.

     _To William Roscoe Thayer_
       34 Union Square East, New York,
         December 5, 1900.

     My Dear Thayer:

     The _World's Work_ has brought me nothing so good as your letter of
     yesterday. When Mrs. Page read it, she shouted "Now that's it!" For
     "it" read "truth," and you will have her meaning and mine. My
     thanks you may be sure you have, in great and earnest abundance.

     You surprise me in two ways--(1) that you think as well of the
     magazine as you do. If it have half the force and earnestness that
     you say it has, how happy I shall be, for then it will surely bring
     something to pass. The other way in which you surprise me is by the
     flattering things that you say about my conduct of the _Atlantic_.
     Alas! it was not what you in your kind way say--no, no.

     Of course the _World's Work_ is not yet by any means what I hope to
     make it. But it has this incalculable advantage (to me) over every
     other magazine in existence: it is mine (mine and my partners',
     i.e., partly mine), and I shall not work to build up a good piece
     of machinery and then be turned out to graze as an old horse is.
     This of course, is selfish and personal--not wholly selfish either,
     I think. I threw down the _Atlantic_ for this reason: (Consider the
     history of its editors) Lowell[5] complained bitterly that he was
     never rewarded properly for the time and work he did; Fields was
     (in a way) one of its owners; it was sold out from under Howells,
     etc., etc. I might (probably should) have been at the mercy
     completely of owners some day who would have dismissed me for a
     younger man. Nearly all hired editors suffer this fate. My good
     friends in Boston were sincere in thinking that my day of doom
     would never come; but they didn't offer me any guarantee--part
     ownership, for instance; and the years go swiftly. I could afford,
     of my own volition, to leave the _Atlantic_. I couldn't afford to
     take permanently the risks that a hired editor must take. Nor
     should I ever again have turned my hand to such a task except on a
     magazine of my own. I should have sought other employment. There
     are many easier and better and more influential things to do--yet;
     ten years hence I might have been too old. Harry Houghton[6] has an
     old horse thirty years old. I used to see him grazing sometimes and
     hear his master's self-congratulatory explanation of his own
     kindness to that faithful beast. In the office of Houghton, Mifflin
     & Company there is an old man whom I used to see every
     day--pensioned, grazing. Then I would go home and see four bright
     children. Three of them are now away from home at school; and the
     four cost a pretty penny to educate. My income had been the same
     for ten years-or very nearly the same. If I was a "magic" editor, I
     confess I didn't see the magic; and there is no power under Heaven
     or in it that can prove to me that I ought to keep on making
     magazines as a hired man--without the common security of permanent
     service for lack of which nearly all my predecessors lost their
     chance.

     But this is not all, nor half. A man ought to express himself,
     ought to live his own life, say his own little say, before silence
     comes. The "say" may be bad--a mere yawp, and silence might be more
     becoming. But the same argument would make a man dissatisfied with
     his own nose if it happened to be ugly. It's _his_ nose, and he
     must content himself. So it's _his_ yawp and he must let it go.

     I'm not going to make the new magazine my own megaphone--you may be
     sure of that. It will nevertheless contain my general
     interpretation of things, in which I swear I do believe! The first
     thing, of course, is to establish it. Then it can be shaped more
     nearly into what I wish it to become. If it seem unmannerly,
     aggressive, I know no other way to make it heard. If it died, then
     the game would be up. Well, we seem to have established it at once.
     It promises not to cost us a penny of investment.

     Now, the magazines need new topics. They have all threshed over old
     straw for many years. There is _one_ new subject, to my thinking
     worth all the old ones: the new impulse in American life, the new
     feeling of nationality, our coming to realize ourselves. To my mind
     there is greater promise in democracy than men of any preceding
     period ever dared dream of--aggressive democracy--growth by action.
     Our writers (the few we have) are yet in the pre-democratic era.
     When men's imaginations lay hold on the things that already begin
     to appear above the horizon, we shall have something worth reading.
     At present I can do no more than bawl out, "See! here are new
     subjects." One of these days somebody will come along who can write
     about them. I have started out without a writer. Fiske is under
     contract, James would give nothing more to the _Atlantic_, you were
     ill (I thank Heaven you are no longer so) the second-and third-rate
     essayists have been bought by mere Wall Street publishers. Beyond
     these are the company of story tellers and beyond them only a
     dreary waste of dead-level unimaginative men and women. I can
     (soon) get all that I could ever have got in the _Atlantic_ and new
     ones (I know they'll come) whom I could never have got there.

     You'll see--within a year or two--by far a better magazine than I
     have ever made; and you and I will differ in nothing unless you
     feel despair about the breakdown of certain democratic theories,
     which I think were always mere theories. Let 'em go! The real
     thing, which is life and action, is better.

     Heartily and always your grateful friend,
                                 Walter H. Page

Thus the fact that Page's new magazine was intended for a popular
audience was not the result of accident, but of design. It represented a
periodical plan which had long been taking shape in Page's mind. The
things that he had been doing for the _Forum_ and the _Atlantic_ he
aspired to do for a larger audience than that to which publications of
this character could appeal. Scholar though Page was, and lover of the
finest things in literature that he had always been, yet this sympathy
and interest had always lain with the masses. Perhaps it is impossible
to make literature democratic, but Page believed that he would be
genuinely serving the great cause that was nearest his heart if he could
spread wide the facts of the modern world, especially the facts of
America, and if he could clothe the expression in language which, while
always dignified and even "literary," would still be sufficiently
touched with the vital, the picturesque, and the "human," to make his
new publication appeal to a wide audience of intelligent, everyday
Americans. It was thus part of his general programme of improving the
status of the average man, and it formed a logical part of his
philosophy of human advancement. For the only acceptable measure of any
civilization, Page believed, was the extent to which it improved the
condition of the common citizen. A few cultured and university-trained
men at the top; a few ancient families living in luxury; a few painters
and poets and statesmen and generals; these things, in Page's view, did
not constitute a satisfactory state of society; the real test was the
extent to which the masses participated in education, in the necessities
and comforts of existence, in the right of self-evolution and
self-expression, in that "equality of opportunity," which, Page never
wearied of repeating, "was the basis of social progress." The mere right
to vote and to hold office was not democracy; parliamentary majorities
and political caucuses were not democracy--at the best these things were
only details and not the most important ones; democracy was the right of
every man to enjoy, in accordance with his aptitudes of character and
mentality, the material and spiritual opportunities that nature and
science had placed at the disposition of mankind. This democratic creed
had now become the dominating interest of Page's life. From this time on
it consumed all his activities. His new magazine set itself first of all
to interpret the American panorama from this point of view; to describe
the progress that the several parts of the country were making in the
several manifestations of democracy--education, agriculture, industry,
social life, politics--and the importance that Page attached to them was
practically in the order named. Above all it concerned itself with the
men and women who were accomplishing most in the definite realization of
this great end.

And now also Page began to carry his activities far beyond mere print.
In his early residence in New York, from 1885 to 1895, he had always
taken his part in public movements; he had been a vital spirit in the
New York Reform Club, which was engaged mainly in advocating the
Cleveland tariff; he had always shown a willingness to experiment with
new ideas; at one time he had mingled with Socialists and he had been
quite captivated by the personal and literary charm of Henry George.
After 1900, however, Page became essentially a public man, though not in
the political sense. His work as editor and writer was merely one
expression of the enthusiasms that occupied his mind. From 1900 until
1913, when he left for England, life meant for him mainly an effort to
spread the democratic ideal, as he conceived it; concretely it
represented a constant campaign for improving the fundamental
opportunities and the everyday social advantages of the masses.


II

Inevitably the condition of the people in his own homeland enlisted
Page's sympathy, for he had learned of their necessities at first hand.
The need of education had powerfully impressed him even as a boy. At
twenty-three he began writing articles for the Raleigh _Observer_, and
practically all of them were pleas for the education of the Southern
child. His subsequent activities of this kind, as editor of the _State
Chronicle_, have already been described. The American from other parts
of the country is rather shocked when he first learns of the
backwardness of education in the South a generation ago. In any real
sense there was no publicly supported system for training the child. A
few wretched hovels, scattered through a sparsely settled country,
served as school houses; a few uninspiring and neglected women, earning
perhaps $50 or $75 a year, did weary duty as teachers; a few groups of
anemic and listless children, attending school for only forty days a
year--such was the preparation for life which most Southern states gave
the less fortunate of their citizens. The glaring fact that emphasized
the outcome of this official carelessness was an illiteracy, among white
men and women, of 26 per cent. Among the Negroes it was vastly larger.

The first exhortation to reform came from the Wautauga Club, which Page
had organized in Raleigh in 1884. After Page had left his native state,
other men began preaching the same crusade. Perhaps the greatest of
those advocates whom the South loves to refer to as "educational
statesmen" was Dr. Charles D. McIver, of Greensboro, N.C. McIver's
personality and career had an heroic quality all their own. Back in the
'eighties McIver and Edwin A. Alderman, now President of the University
of Virginia, endured all kinds of hardships and buffetings in the cause
of popular education; they stumped the state, much like political
campaigners, preaching the strange new gospel in mountain cabin, in
village church, at the cart's tail--all in an attempt to arouse their
lethargic countrymen to the duty of laying a small tax to save their
children from illiteracy. Some day the story of McIver and Alderman will
find its historian; when it does, he will learn that, in those dark
ages, one of their greatest sources of inspiration was Walter Page.
McIver, a great burly boy, physically and intellectually, so full of
energy that existence for him was little less than an unending tornado,
so full of zeal that any other occupation than that of training the
neglected seemed a trifling with life, so sleepless in his efforts that,
at the age of forty-five, he one day dropped dead while travelling on a
railroad train; Alderman, a man of finer culture, quieter in his
methods, an orator of polish and restraint, but an advocate vigorous in
the prosecution of the great end; and Page, living faraway in the North,
but pumping his associates full of courage and enthusiasm--these were
the three guardsmen of this new battle for the elevation of the white
and black men of the South. McIver's great work was the State Normal
College for Women, which, amid unparalleled difficulties, he founded
for teaching the teachers of the new Southern generation. It was at this
institution that Page, in 1897, delivered the address which gave the
cause of Southern education that one thing which is worth armies to any
struggling reform--a phrase; and it was a phrase that lived in the
popular mind and heart and summed up, in a way that a thousand speeches
could never have done, the great purpose for which the best people in
the state were striving.

His editorial gift for title-making now served Page in good stead. "The
Forgotten Man," which was the heading of his address, immediately passed
into the common speech of the South and even at this day inevitably
appears in all discussions of social progress. It was again Page's
familiar message of democracy, of improving the condition of the
everyday man, woman, and child; and the message, as is usually the case
in all incitements to change, involved many unpleasant facts. Page had
first of all to inform his fellow Southerners that it was only in the
South that "The Forgotten Man" was really an outstanding feature. He did
not exist in New England, in the Middle States, in the Mississippi
Valley, or in the West, or existed in these regions to so slight an
extent that he was not a grave menace to society. But in the South the
situation was quite different. And for this fact the explanation was
found in history. The South certainly could not fix the blame upon
Nature. In natural wealth--in forests, mines, quarries, rich soil, in
the unlimited power supplied by water courses--the Southern States
formed perhaps the richest region in the country. These things North
Carolina and her sister communities had not developed; more startling
still, they had not developed a source of wealth that was infinitely
greater than all these combined; they had not developed their men and
their women. The Southern States represented the purest "Anglo-Saxon"
strain in the United States; to-day in North Carolina only one person in
four hundred is of "foreign stock," and a voting list of almost any town
contains practically nothing except the English and Scotch names that
were borne by the original settlers. Yet here democracy, in any real
sense, had scarcely obtained a footing. The region which had given
Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to the world was still, in the
year 1897, organized upon an essentially aristocratic basis. The
conception of education which prevailed in the most hide-bound
aristocracies of Europe still ruled south of the Potomac. There was no
acceptance of that fundamental American doctrine that education was the
function of the state. It was generally regarded as the luxury of the
rich and the socially high placed; it was certainly not for the poor;
and it was a generally accepted view that those who enjoyed this
privilege must pay for it out of their own pockets. Again Page returned
to the "mummy" theme--the fact that North Carolina, and the South
generally, were too much ruled by "dead men's" hands. The state was
ruled by a "little aristocracy, which, in its social and economic
character, made a failure and left a stubborn crop of wrong social
notions behind it--especially about education." The chief backward
influences were the stump and the pulpit. "From the days of King George
to this day, the politicians of North Carolina have declaimed against
taxes, thus laying the foundation of our poverty. It was a misfortune
for us that the quarrel with King George happened to turn upon the
question of taxation--so great was the dread of taxation that was
instilled into us." What had the upper classes done for the education of
the average man? The statistics of illiteracy, the deplorable economic
and social conditions of the rural population--and most of the
population of North Carolina was rural--furnished the answer.

Thus the North Carolina aristocracy had failed in education and the
failure of the Church had been as complete and deplorable. The preachers
had established preparatory schools for boys and girls, but these were
under the control of sects; and so education was either a class or an
ecclesiastical concern. "The forgotten man remained forgotten. The
aristocratic scheme of education had passed him by. To a less extent,
but still to the extent of hundreds of thousands, the ecclesiastical
scheme had passed him by." But even the education which these
institutions gave was inferior. Page told his North Carolina audience
that the University of which they were so proud did not rank with
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other universities of the North. The state
had not produced great scholars nor established great libraries. In the
estimation of publishers North Carolina was unimportant as a book
market. "By any test that may be made, both these systems have failed
even with the classes that they appealed to." The net result was that
"One in every four was wholly forgotten"--that is, was unable to read
and write. And the worst of it all was that the victim of this neglect
was not disturbed over his situation. "The forgotten man was content to
be forgotten. He became not only a dead weight, but a definite opponent
of social progress. He faithfully heard the politician on the stump
praise him for virtues that he did not have. The politicians told him
that he lived in the best state in the Union; told him that the other
politicians had some hare-brained plan to increase his taxes, told him
as a consolation for his ignorance how many of his kinsmen had been
killed in the war, told him to distrust any one who wished to change
anything. What was good enough for his fathers was good enough for him.
Thus the 'forgotten man' became a dupe, became thankful for being
neglected. And the preacher told him that the ills and misfortunes of
this life were blessings in disguise, that God meant his poverty as a
means of grace, and that if he accepted the right creed all would be
well with him. These influences encouraged inertia. There could not have
been a better means to prevent the development of the people."

Even more tragic than these "forgotten men" were the "forgotten women."
"Thin and wrinkled in youth from ill-prepared food, clad without warmth
or grace, living in untidy houses, working from daylight till bedtime at
the dull round of weary duties, the slaves of men of equal slovenliness,
the mothers of joyless children--all uneducated if not illiterate."
"This sight," Page told his hearers, "every one of you has seen, not in
the countries whither we send missionaries, but in the borders of the
State of North Carolina, in this year of grace."

"Our civilization," he declared, "has been a failure." Both the
politicians and the preacher had failed to lift the masses. "It is a
time for a wiser statesmanship and a more certain means of grace." He
admitted that there had been recent progress in North Carolina, owing
largely to the work of McIver and Alderman, but taxes for educational
purposes were still low. What was the solution? "A public school system
generously supported by public sentiment and generously maintained by
both state and local taxation, is the only effective means to develop
the forgotten man and even more surely the only means to develop the
forgotten woman. . . ." "If any beggar for a church school oppose a local
tax for schools or a higher school tax, take him to the huts of the
forgotten women and children, and in their hopeless presence remind him
that the church system of education has not touched tens of thousands of
these lives and ask him whether he thinks it wrong that the commonwealth
should educate them. If he think it wrong ask him and ask the people
plainly, whether he be a worthy preacher of the gospel that declares one
man equal to another in the sight of God? . . . The most sacred thing in
the commonwealth and to the commonwealth is the child, whether it be
your child or the child of the dull-faced mother of the hovel. The child
of the dull-faced mother may, as you know, be the most capable child in
the state. . . . Several of the strongest personalities that were ever born
in North Carolina were men whose very fathers were unknown. We have all
known two such, who held high places in Church and State. President
Eliot said a little while ago that the ablest man that he had known in
his many years' connection with Harvard University was the son of a
brick mason."

In place of the ecclesiastical creed that had guided North Carolina for
so many generations Page proposed his creed of democracy. He advised
that North Carolina commit this to memory and teach it to its children.
It was as follows:

     "I believe in the free public training of both the hands and the
     mind of every child born of woman.

     "I believe that by the right training of men we add to the wealth
     of the world. All wealth is the creation of man, and he creates it
     only in proportion to the trained uses of the community; and the
     more men we train the more wealth everyone may create.

     "I believe in the perpetual regeneration of society, and in the
     immortality of democracy and in growth everlasting."

Thus Page nailed his theses upon the door of his native state, and
mighty was the reverberation. In a few weeks Page's Greensboro address
had made its way all over the Southern States, and his melancholy
figure, "the forgotten man" had become part of the indelible imagery of
the Southern people. The portrait etched itself deeply into the popular
consciousness for the very good reason that its truth was pretty
generally recognized. The higher type of newspaper, though it winced
somewhat at Page's strictures, manfully recognized that the best way of
meeting his charge was by setting to work and improving conditions. The
fact is that the better conscience of North Carolina welcomed this
eloquent description of unquestioned evils; but the gentlemen whom Page
used to stigmatize as "professional Southerners"--the men who
commercialized class and sectional prejudice to their own political and
financial or ecclesiastical profit--fell foul of this "renegade," this
"Southern Yankee" this sacrilegious "intruder" who had dared to visit
his old home and desecrate its traditions and its religion. This
clerical wrath was kindled into fresh flame when Page, in an editorial
in his magazine, declared that these same preachers, ignoring their real
duties, were content "to herd their women and children around the
stagnant pools of theology." For real religion Page had the deepest
reverence, and he had great respect also for the robust evangelical
preachers whose efforts had contributed so much to the opening up of the
frontier. In his Greensboro address Page had given these men high
praise. But for the assiduous idolaters of stratified dogma he
entertained a contempt which he was seldom at pains to conceal. North
Carolina had many clergymen of the more progressive type; these men
chuckled at Page's vigorous characterization of the brethren, but those
against whom it had been aimed raged with a fervour that was almost
unchristian. This clerical excitement, however, did not greatly disturb
the philosophic Page. The hubbub lasted for several years--for Page's
Greensboro speech was only the first of many pronouncements of the same
kind--but he never publicly referred to the attacks upon him.
Occasionally in letters to his friends he would good-naturedly discuss
them. "I have had several letters," he wrote to Professor Edwin Mims, of
Trinity College, North Carolina, "about an 'excoriation' (Great Heavens!
What a word!) that somebody in North Carolina has been giving me. I
never read these things and I don't know what it's all about--nor do I
care. But perhaps you'll be interested in a letter that I wrote an old
friend (a lady) who is concerned about it. I enclose a copy of it. I
shall never notice any 'excoriator.' But if you wish to add to the
gaiety of nations, give this copy to some newspaper and let it loose in
the state--if you care to do so. We must have patience with these puny
and peevish brethren. They've been trained to a false view of life.
Heaven knows I bear them no ill-will."

The letter to which Page referred follows:

     MY DEAR FRIEND:

     I have your letter saying that some of the papers in North Carolina
     are again "jumping on" me. I do not know which they are, and I am
     glad that you did not tell me. I had heard of it before. A preacher
     wrote me the other day that he approved of every word of an
     "excoriation" that some religious editor had given me. A kindly
     Christian act--wasn't it, to send a stranger word that you were
     glad that he had been abused by a religious editor? I wrote him a
     gentle letter, telling him that I hoped he'd have a long and happy
     life preaching a gospel of friendliness and neighbourliness and
     good-will, and that I cared nothing about "excoriations." Why
     should he, then, forsake his calling and take delight in
     disseminating personal abuse?

     And why do you not write me about things that I really care for in
     the good old country--the budding trees, the pleasant weather, news
     of old friends, gossip of good people--cheerful things? I pray you,
     don't be concerned about what any poor whining soul may write about
     me. I don't care for myself: I care only for him; for the writer of
     personal abuse always suffers from it--never the man abused.

     I haven't read what my kindly clerical correspondent calls an
     "excoriation" for ten years, and I never shall read one if I know
     what it is beforehand. Why should I or anybody read such stuff? I
     can't find time to do half the positive things that I should like
     to do for the broadening of my own character and for the
     encouragement of others. Why should I waste a single minute in such
     a negative and cheerless way as reading anybody's personal abuse of
     anybody else--least of all myself?

     These silly outbursts never reach me and they never can; and they,
     therefore, utterly fail, and always will fail, of their aim; yet,
     my dear friend, there is nevertheless a serious side to such folly.
     For it shows the need of education, education, education. The
     religious editor and the preacher who took joy in his abuse of me
     have such a starved view of life that they cannot themselves,
     perhaps, ever be educated into kindliness and dignity of thought.
     But their children may be--must be. Think of beautiful children
     growing up in a home where "excoriating" people who differ with you
     is regarded as a manly Christian exercise! It is pitiful beyond
     words. There is no way to lift up life that is on so low a level
     except by the free education of all the people. Let us work for
     that and, when the growlers are done growling and forgotten, better
     men will remember us with gratitude.

     I felt greatly complimented and pleased to receive an invitation
     the other day to attend the North Carolina Teachers' Assembly in
     June. I have many things to do in June, but I am going--going with
     great pleasure. I hope to see you there. I know of no other company
     of people that I should be so glad to meet. They are doing noble
     work--the most devoted and useful work in this whole wide world.
     They are the true leaders of the people. I often wish that I were
     one of them. They inspire me as nobody else does. They are the army
     of our salvation.

     Write me what they are doing. Write me about the wonderful
     educational progress. And write me about the peach trees and the
     budding imminence of spring; and about the children who now live
     all day outdoors and grow brown and plump. And never mind that
     queer sect, "The Excoriators." They and their stage thunder will be
     forgotten to-morrow. Meantime let us live and work for things
     nobler than any controversies, for things that are larger than the
     poor mission of any sect; and let us have charity and a patient
     pity for those that think they serve God by abusing their
     fellow-men. I wish I saw some way to help them to a broader and a
     higher life.

     Faithfully yours,

     WALTER H. PAGE.


III

That Page should have little interest in "excoriators" at the time this
letter was written--in April, 1902--was not surprising, for his
educational campaign and that of his friends was now bearing fruit.
"Write me about the wonderful educational progress," he says to this
correspondent; and, indeed, the change that was coming over North
Carolina and the South generally seemed to be tinged with the
miraculous. The "Forgotten Man" and the "Forgotten Woman" were rapidly
coming into their own. Two years after the delivery of Page's Greensboro
address, a small group of educational enthusiasts met at Capon Springs,
West Virginia, to discuss the general situation in the South. The leader
of this little gathering was Robert C. Ogden, a great New York merchant
who for many years had been President of the Board of Hampton Institute.
Out of this meeting grew the Southern Educational Conference, which was
little more than an annual meeting for advertising broadcast the
educational needs of the South. Each year Mr. Ogden chartered a railroad
train; a hundred or so of the leading editors, lawyers, bankers, and the
like became his guests; the train moved through the Southern States,
pausing now and then to investigate some particular institution or
locality; and at some Southern city, such as Birmingham or Atlanta or
Winston-Salem, a stop of several days would be made, a public building
engaged, and long meetings held. In all these proceedings Page was an
active figure, as he became in the Southern Education Board, which
directly resulted from Mr. Ogden's public spirited excursions. Like the
Conference, the Southern Education Board was a purely missionary
organization, and its most active worker was Page himself. He was
constantly speaking and writing on his favourite subject; he printed
article after article, not only in his own magazine, but in the
_Atlantic_, in the _Outlook_, and in a multitude of newspapers, such as
the Boston _Transcript_, the New York _Times_, and the Kansas City
_Star_. And always through his writings, and, indeed, through his life,
there ran, like the motif of an opera, that same perpetual plea for "the
forgotten man"--the need of uplifting the backward masses through
training, both of the mind and of the hand.

The day came when this loyal group had other things to work with than
their voices and their pens; their efforts had attracted the attention
of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, who brought assistance of an extremely
substantial character. In 1902 Mr. Rockefeller organized the General
Education Board. Of the ten members six were taken from the Southern
Education Board; other members represented general educational interests
and especially the Baptist interests to which Mr. Rockefeller had been
contributing for years. In a large sense, therefore, especially in its
membership, the General Education Board was a development of the Ogden
organization; but it was much broader in its sweep, taking under its
view the entire nation and all forms of educational effort. It
immediately began to interest itself in the needs of the South. In 1902
Mr. Rockefeller gave this new corporation $1,000,000; in 1905 he gave it
$10,000,000; in 1907 he astonished the Nation by giving $32,000,000,
and, in 1909, another $10,000,000; the whole making a total of
$53,000,000, the largest sum ever given by a single man, up to that
time, for social or philanthropic purposes. The General Education Board
now became the chief outside interest of Page's life. He was made a
member of the Executive Committee, faithfully attended all its sessions,
and participated intimately in every important plan. All such bodies
have their decorative members and their working members; Page belonged
emphatically in the latter class. Not only was he fertile in
suggestions, but his ready mind could give almost any proposal its
proper emphasis and clearly set forth its essential details. Between
Page and Dr. Buttrick, Secretary and now President of the Board, a close
personal intimacy grew up. Dr. Buttrick moved to Teaneck Road,
Englewood, where Page had his home, and many a long evening did the two
men spend together, many a long walk did they take in the surrounding
country, always discussing education, especially Southern education. A
letter to the present writer from Dr. Abraham Flexner, the present
Secretary of the Board, perhaps sums up the matter. "Page was one of the
real educational statesmen of this country," says Dr. Flexner, "probably
the greatest that we have had since the Civil War."

And this Rockefeller support came at a time when that movement known as
the "educational awakening" had started in the South. In 1900 North
Carolina elected its greatest governor since the Civil War--Charles B.
Aycock. A much repeated anecdote attributes Lincoln's detestation of
slavery to a slave auction that he witnessed as a small boy; Aycock's
first zeal as an educational reformer had an origin that was even more
pathetic, for he always carried in his mind his recollection of his own
mother signing an important legal document with a cross. As a young man
fresh from the university Aycock also came under the influence of Page.
An old letter, preserved among Page's papers, dated February 26, 1886,
discloses that he was a sympathizing reader of the "mummy" controversy;
when the brickbats began flying in Page's direction Aycock wrote,
telling Page that "fully three fourths of the people are with you and
wish you Godspeed in your effort to awaken better work, greater
activity, and freer opinion in the state." And now under Aycock's
governorship North Carolina began to tackle the educational problem with
a purpose. School houses started up all over the state at the rate of
one a day--many of them beautiful, commodious, modern structures, in
every way the equals of any in the North or West; high schools, normal
schools, trade schools made their appearance wherever the need was
greatest; and in other parts of the South the response was similarly
energetic. The reform is not yet complete, but the description that Page
gave of Southern education in 1897, accurate in all its details as it
was then, has now become ancient history.


IV

And in occupations of this kind Page passed his years of maturity. His
was not a spectacular life; his family for the most part still remained
his most immediate interest; the daily round of an editor has its
imaginative quality, but in the main it was for Page a quiet, even a
cloistered existence; the work that an editor does, the achievements
that he can put to his credit, are usually anonymous; and the American
public little understood the extent to which Page was influencing many
of the most vital forces of his time. The business association that he
had formed with Mr. Doubleday turned out most happily. Their publishing
house, in a short time, attained a position of great influence and
prosperity. The two men, on both the personal and the business side,
were congenial and complementary; and the love that both felt for
country life led to the establishment of a publishing and printing plant
of unusual beauty. In Garden City, Long Island, a great brick structure
was built, somewhat suggestive in its architecture of Hampton Court,
surrounded by pools and fountains, Italian gardens, green walks and
pergolas, gardens blooming in appropriate seasons with roses, peonies,
rhododendrons, chrysanthemums, and the like, and parks of evergreen,
fir, cedar, and more exotic trees and shrubs. Certainly fate could have
designed no more fitting setting for Page's favourite activities than
this. In assembling authors, in instigating the writing of books, in
watching the achievements and the tendencies of American life, in the
routine of editing his magazine--all this in association with partners
whose daily companionship was a delight and a stimulation--Page spent
his last years in America.

Page's independence as an editor, sufficiently indicated in the days of
his vivacious youth, became even more emphatic in his maturer years. In
his eyes, merely inking over so many pages of good white paper was not
journalism; conviction, zeal, honesty--these were the important points.
Almost on the very day that his appointment as Ambassador to Great
Britain was announced his magazine published an editorial from his pen,
which contained not especially complimentary references to his new
chief, Mr. Bryan, the Secretary of State; naturally the newspapers found
much amusement in these few sentences; but the thing was typical of
Page's whole career as an editor. He held to the creed that an editor
should divorce himself entirely from prejudices, animosities, and
predilections; this seems an obvious, even a trite thing to say, yet
there are so few men who can leave personal considerations aside in
writing of men and events that it is worth while pointing out that Page
was such a man. When his firm was planning to establish its magazine,
his partner, Mr. Doubleday, was approached by a New York politician of
large influence but shady reputation who wished to be assured that it
would reflect correct political principles. "You should see Mr. Page
about that," was the response. "No, this is a business matter," the
insinuating gentleman went on, and then he proceeded to show that about
twenty-five thousand subscribers could be obtained if the publication
preached orthodox standpat doctrine. "I don't think you had better see
Mr. Page," said Mr. Doubleday, dismissing his caller.

Many incidents which illustrate this independence could be given; one
will suffice. In 1907 and 1908, Page's magazine published the "Random
Reminiscences of John D. Rockefeller." While the articles were
appearing, the Hearst newspapers obtained a large number of letters
that, some years before, had passed between Mr. John D. Archbold,
President of the Standard Oil Company and one of Mr. Rockefeller's
business associates from the earliest days, and Senator Joseph B.
Foraker, of Ohio. These letters uncovered one of the gravest scandals
that had ever involved an American public man; they instantaneously
destroyed Senator Foraker's political career and hastened his death.
They showed that this brilliant man had been obtaining large sums of
money from the Standard Oil Company while he was filling the post of
United States Senator and that at the same time he was receiving
suggestions from Mr. Archbold about pending legislation. Mr. Rockefeller
was not personally involved, for he had retired from active business
many years before these things had been done; but the Standard Oil
Company, with which his name was intimately associated, was involved and
in a way that seemed to substantiate the worst charges that had been
made against it. At this time Page, as a member of the General Education
Board, was doing his part in helping to disperse the Rockefeller
millions for public purposes; his magazine was publishing Mr.
Rockefeller's reminiscences; there are editors who would have felt a
certain embarrassment in commenting on the Archbold transaction. Page,
however, did not hesitate. Mr. Archbold, hearing that he intended to
treat the subject fully, asked him to come and see him. Page replied
that he would be glad to have Mr. Archbold call upon him. The two men
were brought together by friendly intermediaries in a neutral place; but
the great oil magnate's explanation of his iniquities did not satisfy
Page. The November, 1908, issue of the magazine contained, in one
section, an interesting chapter by Mr. Rockefeller, describing the early
days of the Standard Oil Company, and, in another, ten columns by Page,
discussing the Archbold disclosures in language that was discriminating
and well tempered, but not at all complimentary to Mr. Archbold or to
the Standard Oil Company.

Occasionally Page was summoned for services of a public character. Thus
President Roosevelt, whose friendship he had enjoyed for many years,
asked him to serve upon his Country Life Commission--a group of men
called by the President to study ways of improving the surroundings and
extending the opportunities of American farmers. Page's interest in
Negro education led to his appointment to the Jeanes Board. He early
became an admirer of Booker Washington, and especially approved his plan
for uplifting the Negro by industrial training. One of the great
services that Page rendered literature was his persuasion of Washington
to write that really great autobiography, "Up from Slavery," and another
biography in a different field, for which he was responsible, was Miss
Helen Keller's "Story of My Life." And only once, amid these fine but
not showy activities, did Page's life assume anything in the nature of
the sensational. This was in 1909, when he published his one effort at
novel writing, "The Southerner." To write novels had been an early
ambition with Page; indeed his papers disclose that he had meditated
several plans of this kind; but he never seriously settled himself to
the task until the year 1906. In July of that year the _Atlantic
Monthly_ began publishing a serial entitled "The Autobiography of a
Southerner Since the Civil War," by Nicholas Worth. The literary matter
that appeared under this title most readers accepted as veracious though
anonymous autobiography. It related the life adventures of a young man,
born in the South, of parents who had had little sympathy with the
Confederate cause, attempting to carve out his career in the section of
his birth and meeting opposition and defeat from the prejudices with
which he constantly found himself in conflict. The story found its main
theme and background in the fact that the Southern States were so
exclusively living in the memories of the Civil War that it was
impossible for modern ideas to obtain a foothold. "I have sometimes
thought," said the author, and this passage may be taken as embodying
the leading point of the narrative, "that many of the men who survived
that unnatural war unwittingly did us a greater hurt than the war
itself. It gave everyone of them the intensest experience of his life
and ever afterward he referred every other experience to this. Thus it
stopped the thought of most of them as an earthquake stops a clock. The
fierce blow of battle paralyzed the mind. Their speech was a vocabulary
of war, their loyalties were loyalties, not to living ideas or duties,
but to old commanders and to distorted traditions. They were dead men,
most of them, moving among the living as ghosts; and yet, as ghosts in a
play, they held the stage." In another passage the writer names the
"ghosts" which are chiefly responsible for preventing Southern progress.
They are three: "The Ghost of the Confederate dead, the Ghost of
religious orthodoxy, the Ghost of Negro domination." Everywhere the hero
finds his progress blocked by these obstructive wraiths of the past. He
seeks a livelihood in educational work--becomes a local superintendent
of Public Instruction, and loses his place because his religious views
are unorthodox, because he refuses to accept the popular estimate of
Confederate statesmen, and because he hopes to educate the black child
as well as the white one. He enters politics and runs for public office
on the platform of the new day, is elected, and then finds himself
counted out by political ringsters. Still he does not lose faith, and
finally settles down in the management of a cotton mill, convinced that
the real path of salvation lies in economic effort. This mere skeleton
of a story furnishes an excuse for rehearsing again the ideas that Page
had already made familiar in his writings and in his public addresses.
This time the lesson is enlivened by the portrayal of certain typical
characters of the post-bellum South. They are all there--the several
types of Negro, ranging all the way from the faithful and philosophic
plantation retainer to the lazy "Publican" office-seeker; the political
colonel, to whom the Confederate veterans and the "fair daughters of the
South (God bless 'em)" are the mainstays of "civerlerzation" and
indispensable instrumentalities in the game of partisan politics; the
evangelical clergymen who cared more for old-fashioned creeds than for
the education of the masses; the disreputable editor who specialized in
Negro crime and constantly preached the doctrine of the "white man's
country"; the Southern woman who, innocently and sincerely and even
charmingly, upheld the ancient tradition and the ancient feud. On the
other hand, Page's book portrays the buoyant enthusiast of the new day,
the reformer who was seeking to establish a public school system and to
strengthen the position of woman; and, above all, the quiet,
hard-working industrialist who cared nothing for stump speaking but much
for cotton mills, improved methods of farming, the introduction of
diversified crops, the tidying up of cities and the country.

These chapters, extensively rewritten, were published as a book in 1909.
Probably Page was under no illusion that he had created a real romance
when he described his completed work as a "novel." The _Atlantic_
autobiography had attracted wide attention, and the identification of
the author had been immediate and accurate. Page's friends began calling
his house on the telephone and asking for "Nicholas" and certain genial
spirits addressed him in letters as "Marse Little Nick"--the name under
which the hero was known to the old Negro family servant, Uncle
Ephraim--perhaps the best drawn character in the book. Page's real
purpose in calling the book a "novel" therefore, was to inform the
public that the story, so far as its incidents and most of its
characters were concerned, was pure fiction. Certain episodes, such as
those describing the hero's early days, were, in the main, veracious
transcripts from Page's own life, but the rest of the book bears
practically no relation to his career. The fact that he spent his
mature years in the North, editing magazines and publishing, whereas
Nicholas Worth spends his in the South, engaged in educational work and
in politics and industry, settles this point. The characters, too, are
rather types than specific individuals, though one or two of them,
particularly Professor Billy Bain, who is clearly Charles D. McIver, may
be accepted as fairly accurate portraits. But as a work of fiction "The
Southerner" can hardly be considered a success; the love story is too
slight, the women not well done, most of the characters rather
personified qualities than flesh and blood people. Its strength consists
in the picture that it gives of the so-called "Southern problem," and
especially of the devastating influence of slavery. From this standpoint
the book is an autobiography, for the ideas and convictions it presents
had formed the mental life of Page from his earliest days.

And these were the things that hurt. Yet the stories of the anger caused
by "The Southerner" have been much exaggerated. It is said that a
certain distinguished Southern senator declared that, had he known that
Page was the author of "The Southerner," he would have blocked his
nomination as Ambassador to Great Britain; certain Southern newspapers
also severely denounced the volume; even some of Page's friends thought
that it was a little unkind in spots; yet as a whole the Southern people
accepted it as a fair, and certainly as an honest, treatment of a very
difficult subject. Possibly Page was a little hard upon the Confederate
veteran, and did not sufficiently portray the really pathetic aspects of
his character; any shortcomings of this sort are due, not to any failing
in sympathy, but to the fact that Page's zeal was absorbingly
concentrated upon certain glaring abuses. And as to the accuracy of his
vision in these respects there could be no question. The volume was a
welcome antidote to the sentimental Southern novels that had contented
themselves with glorifying a vanished society which, when the veil is
stripped, was not heroic in all its phases, for it was based upon an
institution so squalid as human slavery, and to those even more
pernicious books which, by luridly portraying the unquestioned vices of
reconstruction and the frightful consequences which resulted from giving
the Negro the ballot, simply aroused useless passions and made the way
out of the existing wilderness still more difficult. So the best public
opinion, North and South, regarded "The Southerner," and decided that
Page had performed a service to the section of his birth in writing it.
Indeed the fair-minded and intelligent spirit with which the best
elements in the South received "The Southerner" in itself demonstrated
that this great region had entered upon a new day.


V

Nor was Page's work for the South yet ended. In the important five years
from 1905 to 1910 he performed two services of an extremely practical
kind. In 1906 the problem of Southern education assumed a new phase. Dr.
Wallace Buttrick, the Secretary of the General Education Board, had now
decided that the fundamental difficulty was economic. By that time the
Southern people had revised their original conception that education was
a private and not a public concern; there was now a general acceptance
of the doctrine that the mental and physical training of every child,
white and black, was the responsibility of the state; Aycock's campaign
had worked such a popular revolution on this subject that no politician
who aspired to public office would dare to take a contrary view. Yet the
economic difficulty still remained. The South was poor; whatever might
be the general desire, the taxable resources were not sufficient to
support such a comprehensive system of popular instruction as existed in
the North and West. Any permanent improvement must therefore be based
upon the strengthening of the South's economic position. Essentially the
task was to build up Southern agriculture, which for generations had
been wasteful, unintelligent and consequently unproductive. Such a
far-reaching programme might well appall the most energetic reformer,
but Dr. Buttrick set to work. He saw little light until his attention
was drawn to a quaint and philosophic gentleman--a kind of bucolic Ben
Franklin--who was then obscurely working in the cotton lands of
Louisiana, making warfare on the boll weevil in a way of his own. At
that time Dr. Seaman A. Knapp had made no national reputation; yet he
had evolved a plan for redeeming country life and making American farms
more fruitful that has since worked marvellous results. There was
nothing especially sensational about its details. Dr. Knapp had made the
discovery in relation to farms that the utilitarians had long since made
with reference to other human activities: that the only way to improve
agriculture was not to talk about it, but to go and do it. During the
preceding fifty years agricultural colleges had sprung up all over the
United States--Dr. Knapp had been president of one himself; practically
every Southern state had one or more; agricultural lecturers covered
thousands of miles annually telling their yawning audiences how to farm;
these efforts had scattered broadcast much valuable information about
the subject, but the difficulty lay in inducing the farmers to apply it.
Dr. Knapp had a new method. He selected a particular farmer and
persuaded him to work his fields for a period according to methods
which he prescribed. He told his pupil how to plough, what seed to
plant, how to space his rows, what fertilizers to use, and the like. If
a selected acreage yielded a profitable crop which the farmer could sell
at an increased price Dr. Knapp had sufficient faith in human nature to
believe that that particular farmer would continue to operate his farm
on the new method and that his neighbours, having this practical example
of growing prosperity, would imitate him.

Such was the famous "Demonstration Work" of Dr. Seaman A. Knapp; this
activity is now a regular branch of the Department of Agriculture,
employing thousands of agents and spending not far from $18,000,000 a
year. Its application to the South has made practically a new and rich
country, and it has long since been extended to other regions. When Dr.
Buttrick first met Knapp, however, there were few indications of this
splendid future. He brought Dr. Knapp North and exhibited him to Page.
This was precisely the kind of man who appealed to Page's sympathies.
His mind was always keenly on the scent for the new man--the original
thinker who had some practical plan for uplifting humankind and making
life more worth while. And Dr. Knapp's mission was one that had filled
most of his thoughts for many years; its real purpose was the enrichment
of country life. Page therefore took to Dr. Knapp with a mighty zest. He
supported him on all occasions; he pled his cause with great eloquence
before the General Education Board, whose purse strings were liberally
unloosed in behalf of the Knapp work; in his writings, in speeches, in
letters, in all forms of public advocacy, he insisted that Dr. Knapp had
found the solution of the agricultural problem. The fact is that Page
regarded Knapp as one of the greatest men of the time. His feeling came
out with characteristic intensity on the occasion of the homely
reformer's funeral. "The exercises," Page once told a friend, "were held
in a rather dismal little church on the outskirts of Washington. The day
was bleak and chill, the attendants were few--chiefly officials of the
Department of Agriculture. The clergyman read the service in the most
perfunctory way. Then James Wilson, the Secretary of Agriculture, spoke
formally of Dr. Knapp as a faithful servant of the Department who always
did well what he was told to do, commending his life in an altogether
commonplace fashion. By that time my heart was pretty hot. No one seemed
to divine that in the coffin before them was the body of a really great
man, one who had hit upon a fruitful idea in American agriculture--an
idea that was destined to cover the nation and enrich rural life
immeasurably." Page was so moved by this lack of appreciation, so full
of sorrow at the loss of one of his dearest friends, that, when he rose
to speak, his appraisment took on a certain indignation. Their dead
associate, Page declared, would outrank the generals and the politicians
who received the world's plaudits, for he had devoted his life to a
really great purpose; his inspiration had been the love of the common
people, his faith, his sympathy had all been expended in an effort to
brighten the life of the too frequently neglected masses. Page's address
on this occasion was entirely extemporaneous; no record of it was ever
made, but those who heard it still carry the memory of an eloquent and
fiery outburst that placed Knapp's work in its proper relation to
American history and gave an unforgettable picture of a patient,
idealistic, achieving man whose name will loom large in the future.

During this same period Page, always on the outlook for the exceptional
man, made another discovery which has had world-wide consequences. As a
member of President Roosevelt's Country Life Commission Page became one
of the committee assigned to investigate conditions in the Southern
States. The sanitarian of this commission was Dr. Charles W. Stiles, a
man who held high rank as a zoölogist, and who, as such, had for many
years done important work with the Department of Agriculture. Page had
hardly formed Dr. Stiles's acquaintance before he discovered that, at
that time, he was a man of one idea. And this one idea had for years
brought upon his head much good-natured ridicule. For Dr. Stiles had his
own explanation for much of the mental and physical sluggishness that
prevailed in the rural sections of the Southern States. Yet he could not
mention this without exciting uproarious laughter--even in the presence
of scientific men. Several years previously Dr. Stiles had discovered
that a hitherto unclassified species of a parasite popularly known as
the hookworm prevailed to an astonishing extent in all the Southern
States. The pathological effects of this creature had long been known;
it localized in the intestines, there secreted a poison that destroyed
the red blood corpuscles, and reduced its victims to a deplorable state
of anæmia, making them constantly ill, listless, mentally dull--in every
sense of the word useless units of society. The encouraging part of this
discovery was that the patients could quickly be cured and the hookworm
eradicated by a few simple improvements in sanitation. Dr. Stiles had
long been advocating such a campaign as an indispensable preliminary to
improving Southern life. But the humorous aspect of the hookworm always
interfered with his cause; the microbe of laziness had at last been
found!

It was not until Dr. Stiles, in the course of this Southern trip,
cornered Page in a Pullman car, that he finally found an attentive
listener. Page, of course, had his preliminary laugh, but then the
hookworm began to work on his imagination. He quickly discovered that
Dr. Stiles was no fool; and before the expedition was finished, he had
become a convert and, like most converts, an extremely zealous one. The
hookworm now filled his thoughts as completely as it did those of his
friend; he studied it, he talked about it; and characteristically he set
to work to see what could be done. How much Southern history did the
thing explain? Was it not forces like this, and not statesmen and
generals, that really controlled the destinies of mankind? Page's North
Carolina country people had for generations been denounced as
"crackers," and as "hill-billies," but here was the discovery that the
great mass of them were ill--as ill as the tuberculosis patients in the
Adirondacks. Free these masses from the enervating parasite that
consumed all their energies--for Dr. Stiles had discovered that the
disease afflicted the great majority of the rural classes--and a new
generation would result. Naturally the cause strongly touched Page's
sympathies. He laid the case before the ever sympathetic Dr. Buttrick,
but here again progress was slow. By hard hammering, however, he half
converted Dr. Buttrick, who, in turn, took the case of the hookworm to
his old associate, Dr. Frederick T. Gates. What Page was determined to
obtain was a million dollars or so from Mr. John D. Rockefeller, for the
purpose of engaging in deadly warfare upon this pest. This was the
proper way to produce results: first persuade Dr. Buttrick, then induce
him to persuade Dr. Gates, who, if convinced, had ready access to the
great treasure house. But Dr. Gates also began to smile; even the
combined eloquence of Page and Dr. Buttrick could not move him. So the
reform marked time until one day Dr. Buttrick, Dr. Gates, and Dr. Simon
Flexner, the Director of the Rockefeller institute, happened to be
fellow travellers--again on a Pullman car.

"Dr. Flexner," said Dr. Buttrick--this for the benefit of his
incredulous friend--"what is the scientific standing of Dr. Charles W.
Stiles?"

"Very, very high," came the immediate response, and at this Dr. Gates
pricked up his ears. Yet the subsequent conversation disclosed that Dr.
Flexner was unfamiliar with the Stiles hookworm work. He, too, smiled at
the idea, but, like Page his smile was not one of ridicule.

"If Dr. Stiles believes this," was his dictum, "it is something to be
taken most seriously."

As Dr. Flexner is probably the leading medical scientist in the United
States, his judgment at once lifted the hookworm issue to a new plane.
Dr. Gates ceased laughing and events now moved rapidly. Mr. Rockefeller
gave a million dollars to a sanitary commission for the eradication of
the hookworm in the Southern States, and of this Page became a charter
member. In this way an enterprise that is the greatest sanitary and
health reform of modern times had its beginnings. So great was the
success of the Hookworm Commission in the South, so many thousands were
almost daily restored to health and usefulness, that Mr. Rockefeller
extended its work all over the world--to India, Egypt, China, Australia,
to all sections that fall within the now accurately located "hookworm
belt." Out of it grew the great International Health Commission, also
endowed with unlimited millions of Rockefeller money, which is engaged
in stamping out disease and promoting medical education in all quarters
of the globe. Dr. Stiles and Page's associates on the General Education
Board attribute the origin of this work to the simple fact that Page,
great humourist that he was, could temper his humour with
intelligence, and could therefore perceive the point at which a joke
ceased to be a joke and actually concealed a truth of the most
far-reaching importance to mankind.

[Illustration: Walter H. Page (1899), from a photograph taken when he
was editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_]

[Illustration: Dr. Wallace Buttrick, President of the General Education
Board]

Page enjoyed the full results of this labour one night in the autumn of
1913, when Dr. Wickliffe Rose, the head of the International Health
Board, came to London to discuss the possibility of beginning hookworm
work in the British Empire, especially in Egypt and India. Page, as
Ambassador, arranged a dinner at the Marlborough Club, attended by the
leading medical scientists of the kingdom and several members of the
Cabinet. Dr. Rose's description of his work made a deep impression. He
was informed that the British Government was only too ready to coöperate
with the Health Board. When the discussion was ended the Right
Honourable Lewis Harcourt, the Secretary of State for the Colonies,
concluded an eloquent address with these words:

"The time will come when we shall look back on this evening as the
beginning of a new era in British colonial administration."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: A memorandum of an old _Atlantic_ balance sheet discloses
that James Russell Lowell's salary as editor was $1,500 a year.]

[Footnote 6: A member of the firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Company.]




CHAPTER IV

THE WILSONIAN ERA BEGINS

I


It was Page's interest in the material and spiritual elevation of the
masses that first directed his attention to the Presidential aspirations
of Woodrow Wilson. So much history has been made since 1912 that the
public questions which then stirred the popular mind have largely passed
out of recollection. Yet the great rallying cry of that era was
democracy, spelled with a small "d." In the fifty years since the Civil
War only one Democratic President had occupied the White House. The
Republicans' long lease of power had produced certain symptoms which
their political foes now proceeded to describe as great public abuses.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that neither political virtue nor
political depravity was the exclusive possession of either of the great
national organizations. The Republican party, especially under the
enlightened autocracy of Roosevelt, had started such reforms as
conservation, the improvement of country life, the regulation of the
railroads, and the warfare on the trusts, and had shown successful
interest in such evidences of the new day as child labour laws,
employer's liability laws, corrupt practice acts, direct primaries and
the popular election of United States Senators--not all perhaps wise as
methods, but all certainly inspired with a new conception of democratic
government. Roosevelt also had led in the onslaught on that corporation
influence which, after all, constituted the great problem of American
politics. But Mr. Taft's administration had impressed many men, and
especially Page, as a discouraging slump back into the ancient system.
Page was never blind to the inadequacies of his own party; the three
campaigns of Bryan and his extensive influence with the Democratic
masses at times caused him deep despair; that even the corporations had
extended their tentacles into the ranks of Jefferson was all too obvious
a fact; yet the Democratic party at that time Page regarded as the most
available instrument for embodying in legislation and practice the new
things in which he most believed. Above all, the Democratic party in
1912 possessed one asset to which the Republicans could lay no claim--a
new man, a new leader, the first statesman who had crossed its threshold
since Grover Cleveland.

Like many scholarly Americans, Page had been charmed by the intellectual
brilliancy of Woodrow Wilson. The utter commonplaceness of much of what
passes for political thinking in this country had for years discouraged
him. American political life may have possessed energy, character, even
greatness; but it was certainly lacking in distinction. It was this new
quality that Wilson brought, and it was this that attracted thousands of
cultivated Americans to his standard, irrespective of party. The man was
an original thinker; he exercised the priceless possession of literary
style. He entertained; he did not weary; even his temperamental
deficiencies, which were apparent to many observers in 1912, had at
least the advantage that attaches to the interesting and the unusual.

What Page and thousands of other public-spirited men saw in Wilson was a
leader of fine intellectual gifts who was prepared to devote his
splendid energies to making life more attractive and profitable to the
"Forgotten Man." Here was the opportunity then, to embody in one
imaginative statesman all the interest which for a generation had been
accumulating in favour of the democratic revival. At any rate, after
thirty years of Republican half-success and half-failure, here was the
chance for a new deal. Amid a mob of shopworn public men, here was one
who had at least the charm of novelty.

Page had known Mr. Wilson for thirty years, and all this time the
Princeton scholar had seemed to him to be one of the most helpful
influences at work in the United States. As already noted Page had met
the future President when he was serving a journalistic apprenticeship
in Atlanta, Georgia. Wilson was then spending his days in a dingy law
office and was putting to good use the time consumed in waiting for the
clients who never came by writing that famous book on "Congressional
Government" which first lifted his name out of obscurity. This work, the
product of a man of twenty-nine, was perhaps the first searching
examination to which the American Congressional system had ever been
subjected. It brought Wilson a professorship at the newly established
Bryn Mawr College and drew to him other growing minds like Page's.
"Watch that man!" was Page's admonition to his friends. Wilson then went
into academic work and Page plunged into the exactions of daily and
periodical journalism, but Page's papers show that the two men had kept
in touch with each other during the succeeding thirty years. These
papers include a collection of letters from Woodrow Wilson, the earliest
of which is dated October 30, 1885, when the future President was
beginning his career at Bryn Mawr. He was eager to come to New York,
Wilson said, and discuss with Page "half a hundred topics" suggested by
"Congressional Government." The atmosphere at Bryn Mawr was evidently
not stimulating. "Such a talk would give me a chance to let off some of
the enthusiasm I am just now painfully stirring up in enforced silence."
The _Forum_ and the _Atlantic Monthly_, when Page was editor, showed
many traces of his interest in Wilson, who was one of his most frequent
contributors. When Wilson became President of Princeton, he occasionally
called upon his old _Atlantic_ friend for advice. He writes to Page on
various matters--to ask for suggestions about filling a professorship or
a lectureship; and there are also references to the difficulties Wilson
is having with the Princeton trustees.

Page's letters also portray the new hopes with which Wilson inspired
him. One of his best loved correspondents was Henry Wallace, editor of
_Wallace's Farmer_, a homely and genial Rooseveltian. Page was one of
those who immensely admired Roosevelt's career; but he regarded him as a
man who had finished his work, at least in domestic affairs, and whose
great claim upon posterity would be as the stimulator of the American
conscience. "I see you are coming around to Wilson," Page writes, "and
in pretty rapid fashion. I assure you that that is the solution of the
problem. I have known him since we were boys, and I have been studying
him lately with a great deal of care. I haven't any doubt but that is
the way out. The old labels 'Democrat' and 'Republican' have ceased to
have any meaning, not only in my mind and in yours, but I think in the
minds of nearly all the people. Don't you feel that way?"

The campaign of 1912 was approaching its end when this letter was
written; and no proceeding in American politics had so aroused Page's
energies. He had himself played a part in Wilson's nomination. He was
one of the first to urge the Princeton President to seize the great
opportunity that was rising before him. These suggestions were coming
from many sources in the summer of 1910; Mr. Wilson was about to retire
from the Presidency of Princeton; the movement had started to make him
Governor of New Jersey, and it was well understood that this was merely
intended as the first step to the White House. But Mr. Wilson was
himself undecided; to escape the excitement of the moment he had retired
to a country house at Lyme, Connecticut. In this place, in response to a
letter, Page now sought him out. His visit was a plea that Mr. Wilson
should accept his proffered fate; the Governorship of New Jersey, then
the Presidency, and the opportunity to promote the causes in which both
men believed.

"But do you think I can do it, Page?" asked the hesitating Wilson.

"I am sure you can": and then Page again, with his customary gusto,
launched into his persuasive argument. His host at one moment would
assent; at another present the difficulties; it was apparent that he was
having trouble in reaching a decision. To what extent Page's
conversation converted him the record does not disclose; it is apparent,
however, that when, in the next two years, difficulties came, his mind
seemed naturally to turn in Page's direction. Especially noticeable is
it that he appeals to Page for help against his fool friends. An
indiscreet person in New Jersey is booming Mr. Wilson for the
Presidency; the activity of such a man inevitably brings ridicule upon
the object of his attention; cannot Page find some kindly way of calling
him off? Mr. Wilson asks Page's advice about a campaign manager, and
incidentally expresses his own aversion to a man of "large calibre" for
this engagement. There were occasional conferences with Mr. Wilson on
his Presidential prospects, one of which took place at Page's New York
apartment. Page was also the man who brought Mr. Wilson and Colonel
House together; this had the immediate result of placing the important
state of Texas on the Wilson side, and, as its ultimate consequence,
brought about one of the most important associations in the history of
American politics. Page had known Colonel House for many years and was
the advocate who convinced the sagacious Texan that Woodrow Wilson was
the man. Wilson also acquired the habit of referring to Page men who
offered themselves to him as volunteer workers in his cause. "Go and see
Walter Page" was his usual answer to this kind of an approach. But Page
was not a collector of delegates to nominating conventions; not his the
art of manipulating these assemblages in the interest of a favoured man;
yet his services to the Wilson cause, while less demonstrative, were
almost as practical. His talent lay in exposition; and he now took upon
himself the task of spreading Wilson's fame. In his own magazine and in
books published by his firm, in letters to friends, in personal
conferences, he set forth Wilson's achievements. Page also persuaded
Wilson to make his famous speechmaking trip through the Western States
in 1911 and this was perhaps his largest definite contribution to the
Wilson campaign. It was in the course of this historic pilgrimage that
the American masses obtained their first view of a previously too-much
hidden figure.

On election day Page wrote the President-elect a letter of
congratulation which contains one item of the greatest interest. When
the time came for the new President to deliver his first message to
Congress, he surprised the country by abandoning the usual practice of
sending a long written communication to be droned out by a reading
clerk to a yawning company of legislators. He appeared in person and
read the document himself. As President Harding has followed his example
it seems likely that this innovation, which certainly represents a great
improvement over the old routine, has become the established custom. The
origin of the idea therefore has historic value.

     _To Woodrow Wilson_
           Garden City, N.Y.
        Election Day, 1912. [Nov. 5]

     MY DEAR MR. PRESIDENT-ELECT:

     Before going into town to hear the returns, I write you my
     congratulations. Even if you were defeated, I should still
     congratulate you on putting a Presidential campaign on a higher
     level than it has ever before reached since Washington's time. Your
     grip became firmer and your sweep wider every week. It was
     inspiring to watch the unfolding of the deep meaning of it and to
     see the people's grasp of the main idea. It was fairly, highly,
     freely, won, and now we enter the Era of Great Opportunity. It is
     hard to measure the extent or the thrill of the new interest in
     public affairs and the new hope that you have aroused in thousands
     of men who were becoming hopeless under the long-drawn-out reign of
     privilege.

     To the big burden of suggestions that you are receiving, may I add
     these small ones?

     1. Call Congress in extra session mainly to revise the tariff and
     incidentally to prepare the way for rural credit societies.

     Mr

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