<P ALIGN=CENTER> Fig. 4. Walter H. Page in 1876, when he was a Fellow
of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.</TD>
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<P ALIGN=CENTER> Fig. 5. Basil L. Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek,
Johns Hopkins University, 1876-1915</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE></CENTER>
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 Gazelle;
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.
.
<P ALIGN=CENTER>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 Stale 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-necktied 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 Encyclopaedia and learned
that " Thothmes II " was an Egyptian king of the XVII1th
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.
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