Josephus Daniels Says . . .: An Editor's Political Odyssey from Bryan to Wilson and F.D.R., 1894-1913

JOSEPHUS DANIELS SAYS …

Josephus Daniels at the time of his acquisition of The News and Observer

JOSEPHUS DANIELS SAYS …

An Editor’s Political Odyssey From Bryan To Wilson and F. D. R., 1894-1913

by

JOSEPH L. MORRISON

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

COPYRIGHT © 1962 BY

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Manufactured in the United States of America

PRINTED BY THE SEEMAN PRINTERY, DURHAM, N. C.

To My Mother

Preface

WHEN seeking editorial spokesmen for the post-Civil War South, one thinks immediately of Henry W. Grady and Henry Watterson. Josephus Daniels is rarely mentioned in such elevated company, although as an editor he idolized Grady and remained always on cordial terms with the crotchety, Marse Henry. Indeed Daniels, who became the dominant political editor of North Carolina with his Raleigh News and Observer, probably was a more authentic editorial spokesman for the New South than either Grady or Watterson.

Grady is generally credited with inventing the term, but New South industrialization and education had gotten started before he made the expression a byword. Grady spoke on The New South before the New England Club of New York City in 1886 and became a national celebrity overnight. His premature death, however, came only three years later, so while Grady was better known nationally, Daniels was the more effective toiler for the New South in the New South. Moreover, Daniels made the New South idea flexible enough to accommodate a progressive admixture that characterized the New South in the two decades before the First World War.

Watterson, like Grady, was far better known nationally than Daniels. Yet for all his forming a personal bridge between the Confederacy and the New South, for all his personal color, Watterson’s noisy political activity never approached in effectiveness that of Daniels. Northern editors, often mistakenly, took the opinions of the border state Marse Henry as representative of the South. They paid little attention to the unobtrusive Daniels. Yet Daniels, as his state’s Democratic national committeeman from 1896 to 1916, took an important role in every national campaign whereas Marse Henry usually sulked in his tent. Even though the last Democratic candidate Watterson approved of was Samuel J. Tilden, Marse Henry was supposed to be speaking for Southern Democrats. In point of fact, Watterson’s political activity was largely window dressing; Daniels’ was of the tougher grass roots variety. Daniels could become a colorful member of Wilson’s Cabinet; Watterson could only be colorful.

However unobtrusive on the national scene, Daniels as personal journalist played a leading role in his beloved North Carolina. He made reading of The News and Observer a habit over much of the state, not only because Tar Heels wanted the news but also because they wanted to see what Josephus Daniels says. His close identity with North Carolina, particularly with the people of its eastern half, was instinctual and full of sensitivity to the Tar Heel State’s traditions, its ethnic origins, and its culture. So closely attuned was he to the nuances of life in his area that many who disagreed with him still read his paper loyally. They followed his incessant battles with the railroads, the trusts, the money power, and the liquor interests. They followed his reform ideas such as a graduated income tax, direct election of United States Senators, women’s rights, and universal free public education. Daniels made his News and Observer virtually the Democratic Bible of his time and place, and despite his headlong and sometimes intemperate attacks on Republicans, he was widely regarded by his fellow Tar Heels as an editor who can’t be scared and can’t be bought. To be sure Daniels sometimes followed public opinion, but more often he led it. With a disarming personal geniality he shrewdly forged the link between the progressivism of Bryan and that of Wilson and young Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The principal scholarly difficulty with this segment of Daniels’ career is the small quantity of his letters for the years before 1913 compared with the mass of correspondence dealing with his later years. Apparently most of Daniels’ early papers were destroyed when a fire swept The News and Observers building soon after the editor became Secretary of the Navy. Faced with this dearth of personal correspondence, I have had to read almost every one of the editor’s editorials during this period of nearly two decades to round out the picture. It is a picture of Daniels as Tar Heel Editor, which was his own name for himself in his opening volume of memoirs. It is a picture, hopefully, which conveys the editor’s zest in his life’s calling without sacrificing an impartial view of a highly partisan era. With all my close study of Daniels’ editorials, I am still deeply aware that editorials, as public expressions of policy, cannot fully substitute for the unstudied candor of private letters. This awareness has led me not only to put superior credence in letters but also to make critical comparisons, wherever possible, between Daniels’ editorial opinions and those expressed in letters. The evidence strongly points to Daniels’ consistency.

Even though only a relatively small portion of the some 500,000 items in the Daniels Papers deal with the period before 1913, this important collection in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress is invaluable. Mr. Jonathan Daniels who, with his brothers, made his father’s papers in the Library of Congress open without restriction to all scholars, is due my special thanks for permission to inspect and publish his own personal papers. These include an illuminating father-son correspondence over a period of some four decades. Also important are the Bagley Family Papers in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, along with many other manuscripts in that distinguished repository. Valuable Daniels material is also to be found in the Flowers Collection, Duke University, and in the North Carolina Department of Archives and History. I extend my thanks to the staffs of these repositories as well as ta the staff of the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina.

An abridged version of Chapter V was published as Josephus Daniels and the Bassett Academic Freedom Case, in Journalism Quarterly, XXXIX (Spring, 1962), 187-195.

On its sometimes uncertain way to becoming first a doctoral dissertation and then a book, this manuscript has gotten innumerable helping hands. I am particularly grateful to Professor Richard L. Watson, Jr., for his initial guidance and to the helpfulness of his Duke University colleagues, particularly Professors Robert H. Woody and Robert F. Durden. I also acknowledge with thanks the later help of two specialists in the Progressive Era in North Carolina, Professors Joseph F. Steelman, of East Carolina College, and Oliver H. Orr, Jr., of North Carolina State College. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the University of North Carolina in granting me a semester’s leave of absence in order to further this work, to the Alumni Annual Giving Funds of the University of North Carolina administered by the University Research Council in providing a grant for secretarial assistance, and to Dean Norval Neil Luxon of the University’s School of Journalism for his many acts of encouragement and forebearance. I owe an especial debt of gratitude to my wife, Pearl Morrison, for her many hours of patient typing and retyping of draft, revision, and manuscript.

Contents

Preface

I. Preparing to Edit The News and Observer in 1894

II. The Reformer as a Political Out, 1894-1900

III. Education Becomes a Battleground, 1890-1900

IV. Political Battles of the Nineties

V. Daniels and the John Spencer Bassett Episode

VI. Daniels and Progressivism, 1900-1913

VII. Journalist in the New Century

VIII. Political Contests in the New Century

IX. The Climactic Battles of 1912

Notes

Bibliography

Index

JOSEPHUS DANIELS SAYS …

CHAPTER I

Preparing to Edit The News and Observer in 1894

WHEN, on August 12, 1894, Josephus Daniels brought out his first issue of the Raleigh News and Observer, he was setting out on the political path that was to lead him to a post in Woodrow Wilson’s Cabinet two decades later. These decades marked the Tar Heel Editor’s most sustained period of editorial influence, the period during which he fought the political battles that ended with the Democratic party in control of North Carolina’s destinies. It was a period during which Daniels, highly successful in state politics, endured repeated frustration on the national hustings— three defeats with his beloved William Jennings Bryan and one with the conservative Alton B. Parker—until the long siege was rewarded finally with Wilson’s triumph and the appointment as Secretary of the Navy. It was a period during which Daniels operated as Personal Journalist in the original sense, meaning one whose subscribers opened the paper each morning as much to find out what Josephus says as to read the news itself. Josephus Daniels became, during this period, not only the North Carolina Democratic spokesman in the eyes of the party’s enemies and all out-of-state observers, but a powerful influence within the party seeking to give it the direction later defined generally as the Wilsonian New Freedom.

EARLY JOURNALISM

Although only thirty-two when he assumed the helm of The News and Observer, Daniels was already a newspaper veteran. As a sixteen-year-old schoolboy at the Wilson (N.C.) Collegiate Institute, he and his younger brother Charles had published an amateur newspaper, indifferently printed, called The Cornucopia.¹ Shortly afterward appeared Editor Josephus Daniels’ maiden effort at a newspaper editorial, entitled Trouble, which appeared in a successor paper and reflected his serious religious views. While still at school he had been correspondent and subscription agent for two Raleigh papers, the Observer and Hale’s Weekly, and there promised himself that he would one day go to Raleigh and publish a newspaper of state-wide influence.² Even earlier he had admiringly looked up to the local journalists, first those of the Plain-Dealer and later of the Advance as he handed them their mail at the Wilson post office. There, where his mother supported her three young sons by serving as postmistress, young Daniels had listened eagerly to the political talk of his elders.

Daniels left school at the age of eighteen to become local editor of the Wilson Advance. It was not long before he purchased an interest in the paper, borrowing the money to do so, and in 1882 bought out the other shareholders with $2,000. Again the money was borrowed, this time secured by a mortgage on his mother’s home. It was a striking example of a mother’s faith in her young son, and Daniels later marveled at his mother’s calmly staking everything she had on his success.³ All this is indicative of Daniels’ business acumen, an amalgam of resourceful investment and unmitigated hard work that characterized him all his life. It is well to bear in mind as background for his later onslaughts against big business, monopoly, and the money power, that Daniels’ career was based foursquare on his own private initiative as businessman and employer of labor. His reform demands always sought to restore competition, never to endanger the economic system of which he was a beneficiary.

As editor and proprietor of the Wilson Advance, Daniels’ first issue spoke of it as the largest weekly newspaper in the State, and of his misgivings upon his own entering upon these responsible duties so young.⁴ Only in his twentieth year, he was still so diffident that he did not trust himself to write his own editorials, paying a dollar a week to a local lawyer-judge for the service.⁵ More experience gave Daniels a surer touch with editorials, news stories, and business matters in general. By 1885 Daniels was doing all the work on the Wilson Advance; writing editorials in the Kinston Free Press,established jointly with his brother Charles; and writing editorials for the Rocky Mount Reporter, in which he was partner with W. J. Fitzgerald.⁶ All was on a modest scale, to be sure. These weekly papers could be profitably published only at county seat towns where the editor automatically fell heir to the county’s legal advertising. The publisher ran a job printing shop as a matter of course, and in those days before widespread public education and before Rural Free Delivery, one could count on non-metropolitan newspaper circulations staying small. The 1885 circulation of the Wilson Advance reached 2,500,⁷ and this was an impressive county-wide figure in the light of the town’s 1880 population of 1,475 that was to rise to only 2,126 by 1890.⁸ By 1885 Daniels was earning the then-large income of $100 a month⁹ and was serving as president of the North Carolina Press Association.¹⁰

The reader of the anti-capitalist onslaughts that Daniels wrote from time to time is apt to forget that Daniels was himself a businessman and an able one. By the same token the reader of the militant editorials written during one of Daniels’ periodic crusades is prone to overlook the personal amiability of the man who wrote them. In his personal demeanor Daniels was at an almost astronomical remove from the kind of brawling controversialist that his editorials later made him out to be. Elected president of the State Press Association at the age of twenty-two, Daniels had won the regard of representatives of twenty newspapers of a wide range of political opinion. The combative tone of his editorials can mislead today’s reader. Actually, Daniels was widely regarded as quite likable personally, and he consistently displayed talent for reconciling intramural antagonists, a talent that was later to be displayed most notably in ironing out the differences between William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson.

Daniels’ editorial policy on the Wilson Advance was unequivocally Democratic in sentiment, generally moderate in tone but characterized by a willingness to reprint the views of more fire-eating editors. During this period he expressed himself cautiously on the racial question. While explicitly disavowing another journalist’s foreboding about the danger of Negro political ascendancy, Daniels nevertheless considered it advisable to repeat the other’s warning that Negroes made up the bulk of all Southern Republican parties and were entitled to patronage whenever that party won an election.¹¹ In general, although he did give up the paper’s largest single source of income by refusing to accept advertising of the Louisiana Lottery,¹² Daniels did his best to publish a lively paper according to the tenets of Samuel Bowles and Charles A. Dana, by which I have always felt that whatever Divine Providence permitted to occur, I was not too proud to print.¹³ Such a robust view of his editorial role could become warrant for the sensational tactics Daniels invoked against his political foes of the 1890’s, but for the time it helped him build his paper’s circulation and attract the favorable attention of, among others, the talented Raleigh editor, Walter Hines Page.

Page had turned his State Chronicle into a daily in hopeless competition with two other dailies for the meager advertising in the state capital (1880 population, 9,265).¹⁴ Editor Page was pleased by a clear news beat fashioned for him by Josephus Daniels, who sent in a detailed story about a disastrous fire in Wilson. Out of Page’s pleasure with Daniels’ enterprise in helping him beat the other Raleigh dailies came an invitation to edit, in Page’s absence, the State Chronicle for the two weeks around Christmas, 1884.¹⁵ Not long after Daniels put in this two-week stint in Raleigh, Page found himself unable to win appointment as State Printer and had to strike his colors. Daniels could not then afford to take over the State Chronicle, and stayed on in Wilson with his $100 a month. However, it was the State Chronicle to which he returned the following year and which made his statewide reputation secure by the 1890’s.

Daniels’ opportunity to acquire the State Chronicle came in 1885 while he was attending the summer session of the University of North Carolina Law School. At the end of the session he obtained a license to practice law (he never did), but he had earlier persuaded Julian S. Carr, a wealthy tobacco manufacturer of Durham, to turn over to him stock in two money-losing Raleigh papers that Daniels then combined under the State Chronicle name. The editor set off on a career of Raleigh journalism with one foot, as it were, still in Wilson, North Carolina.

He and his younger brother Charles still owned the Wilson Advance, which provided a cushion against monetary reverses and a haven in case of failure in Raleigh. But young Daniels, already at twenty-three a past president of the North Carolina Press Association, did not fail. A combination of unremitting zeal in his work and a likable personality that commended him to his political elders helped win for him the prize of State Printer that had eluded Walter Page. By 1887 the State Chronicle was prospering enough for Daniels to subscribe to a Washington news-letter by way of expanding his paper’s coverage.¹⁶ He also felt prosperous enough to offer to buy stock in Samuel A. Ashe’s News and Observer so that their papers might be consolidated under Daniels’ editorship. Without a doubt Captain Ashe, a Confederate veteran and editor of a daily paper, did not take kindly to the consolidation talk from a brash youngster who edited a weekly paper and who wanted to supplant the older man. Moreover, Ashe had written, and was again to write, bitter editorials against Daniels as competitor for the post of State Printer.

My proposition has his qualification, Daniels wrote, that I am to be editor and am to control the policy of the new paper.¹⁷ To be sure Daniels would retain Ashe, whose counsel would be invaluable, and he carefully explained that a Daniels editorship would not mean any absence of consultation or any arbitrary making of decisions. Advantages of the proposed consolidation, according to Daniels, were threefold (1) it would provide a focus for undivided support by the state’s Democratic leadership; (2) it would command greater support from Raleigh advertisers because of an increase in the merged subscription list; (3) Daniels’ offer of $8,000 in cash would enable the consolidated paper to buy new equipment and still maintain enough working capital to avoid a hand-to-mouth existence. This mainly signified that in two years after giving Carr his note for the State Chronicle property, Daniels had prospered sufficiently to offer to put $8,000 in cash into a new venture. Pointing out to Ashe that The State Chronicle is a paying institution, Daniels reminded the other that it has succeeded in Raleigh notwithstanding all adverse circumstances.¹⁸ More than a year later Daniels was still pounding away at the same objective, now offering to pay $11,000 for a like amount of stock in The News and Observer, which he understood to have but $9,000 more in outstanding shares. Daniels valued the paper at par, $20,000, and apparently now wanted to purchase majority control of the daily paper by way of effecting a consolidation.¹⁹

All merger efforts having failed, Daniels took the precarious step of launching his weekly State Chronicle as a daily. The so-called Cleveland Panic really began in North Carolina several years earlier than 1893, in fact not many months after the inaugural of the Daily State Chronicle. Bad business conditions brought the paper’s downfall eventually, but not before creating much favorable comment on its liveliness and bright appearance. The first issue of the daily on March 6, 1890, carried Daniels’ editorial, A Forward Movement, in which he happily announced the employment of Hal W. Ayer as associate editor at the largest salary given to any young man by a North Carolina newspaper.²⁰ This was the same Hal Ayer who later became Daniels’ bitter antagonist as editor of Butler’s Caucasian and who served as State Auditor in the Daniel L. Russell administration. For the time, however, even Butler, still a Democrat, hailed Daniels’ paper as fair, honest, bold and fearless. It is a people’s paper.²¹

Throughout his State Chronicle days Daniels enjoyed the moral support of, and even some political tutelage from, Judge Walter Clark, later the state’s Chief Justice. When young Daniels first arrived in Raleigh he bore a letter of introduction to Clark from Judge Henry Groves Connor of Wilson, a life-long friend of the Daniels family. The introduction was to a formidable public figure, because of all the responsible men in North Carolina Judge Clark was deemed among the most radical. Although a Confederate veteran, he looked with the impatience of a reformer at the dislocation and inequities bred by the new industrialization. His political philosophy, set forth in a sizable body of speeches and judicial opinions, held generally for making political democracy responsive to human needs and for such specific reforms as curbing the power of the trusts, abolishing child labor, and giving women the vote. Clark was a formidable figure on the bench, with his imperious eye and his tuft of beard, which bore a greater resemblance to Napoleon Ill’s imperial than to that beard of formal cut of Shakespeare’s judge. Clark’s reputation for severity could not obscure the fact of his being an almost ideal trial judge (if not an ideal supreme court justice). A total abstainer from alcohol, tobacco, and profanity, Clark once fined himself for failure to open court on time.²² This remarkable man was a bundle of contradictions; a charming gentleman and a begetter of bitter controversies, a judge who was sometimes pugnacious rather than judicious, even a translator from the French of Constant’s Recollections of the Private Life of Nafoleon. Unquestionably Daniels’ long and intimate association with Judge Clark²³ had its influence in the molding of the younger man’s political consciousness. For the time being, Judge Connor wrote his colleague Clark:

I write to call to your attention, and ask your good offices in the way of kind words, etc. for my young friend Josephus Daniels who began his career as a Metropolitan Editor. I have known, intimately, Joe from his boyhood and can say for him that in all of the qualities of character, disposition etc. which constitute and make up a first class, high toned, honorable and entirely reliable young man he Excels. I know of none superior and not many Equals. He has enjoyed that priceless blessing, better than wealth or station, the affectionate careful training of the most pious and devotedly Christian mother, and right nobly has he profited thereby. As a young man he needs kind words, expressions of confidence and esteem from men like yourself. I can assure you that they will never be abused, and you will find him worthy of all the encouragement which you can give him.²⁴

So that there would be no misunderstanding of the new editor’s viewpoint, he stated his principles in his first State Chronicle editorial. The editor was Democratic in politics, looking to Jefferson as the greatest of Americans and to Cleveland as the best President the country has yet seen. As to national matters the State Chronicle would support, in no uncertain tone, a civil service reform. Locally, Daniels declared his faith in the public schools and deplored the inefficiency of the existing state system. Not only would the State Chronicle’s columns be offered freely to the state’s educators, but Daniels saw no need for conflict between private colleges and the State University. The editorial closed with a disclaimer against publishing a sensational paper and proposing to publish rather a paper moral in tone and which no father will hesitate to place in the hands of his children.²⁵

Of key importance in solidifying Daniels’ position with the Democrats of the state was his ability to win the support of four successive legislatures, those of 1887, 1889, 1891, and 1893, appointing him State Printer. The money, some $1500 a year estimated, will help make a better paper and advance it after awhile to a daily, the young aspirant for State Printer editorialized in his first campaign.²⁶ Moreover, the post had long been regarded as giving the editor holding it a peculiarly favorable position in the Democratic party, and Daniels fully capitalized upon that fact. On securing the post he spoke of this seal of party approval²⁷ and the paper later carried a regular front-page slogan in the upper right-hand corner: The Chronicle is the regularly adopted organ of the Democratic party in North Carolina. It will lead the fight against Radicalism [meaning the Radical Republicans who had presided over Reconstruction].

His chief competitor through all four campaigns for State Printer was Captain Ashe of The News and Observer, who in the first contest already held the position of Raleigh Postmaster thanks to patronage by Cleveland’s first administration. By 1891, with Daniels publishing the State Chronicle as a daily with an annual printing cost of $18,000,²⁸ sufficient bad blood had been aroused between the two publishers for the conflict to become physical, though bloodless, on at least two) occasions.²⁹ Daniels made the most of every chance to clarify the difference between the kind of Democratic political thought that he espoused and that of Ashe, a Confederate veteran of the Bourbon persuasion. Daniels charged Ashe with opposing the reforms which selfish corporations oppose, with monopolistic, corporation and proscriptive views, with being opposed to taxing railroads on the same basis as other corporations and being opposed to a Railroad Commission.³⁰

Ashe’s retort that Daniels was conspiring with the unorthodox to attack The News and Observed³¹ [by whom he meant John R. Webster, an Independent who was House Speaker of the 1887 General Assembly and Leonidas L. Polk, leader of the Farmers’ Alliance], was not the only attack against which Daniels was to defend himself. John Nichols, Republican congressman of the Fourth District and head of the State Assembly of the Knights of Labor, forced Daniels into a public defense of his family, the only such written apologia by Daniels that the author has ever found. In answer to Nichols’ charge that Josephus Daniels, Sr. had been a Union man during the Civil War, Daniels admitted that his father was indeed for preserving the Union and had consistently supported Vance, North Carolina’s Civil War governor, reluctant secessionist, and war-time hero. Of his father Daniels wrote that during the first part of the war he served the Confederacy as a shipyard worker, during the latter part he was engaged in merchandising.³² Nichols likewise claimed that Daniels’ mother served Wilson, North Carolina, as postmistress under Republican appointment, and Daniels had shown ingratitude by opposing a local Republican politician, G. W. Stanton, who had helped her. However, Daniels insisted that his opposition to Stanton was no ingratitude at all. Stanton, he recalled, had recommended Mrs. Daniels for reappointment and became one of her bondsmen, but when Josephus Daniels, as local editor of the Wilson Advance, had opposed him for state senator, Stanton got Mrs. Daniels removed from her post.³³ She had been appointed December 6, 1866, and by the fiscal year 1881 the annual compensation had come to a then-considerable $ 1,30c).³⁴ Daniels wrote:

This is not the first time this charge has been made by Republicans who smarted under the whip in our hands. Colonel Stanton understands us. In a conversation with him some years ago, the writer told him that he appreciated his kindness to his mother, but that if he thought he was to buy his (the editor’s) convictions and principles, he was mistaken. … Colonel Stanton will admit, and has admitted, that if the writer had joined the Republican party he would have urged [President] Garfield to retain his mother in office. Poor as he was, he preferred, and his mother preferred, that he should be true to his convictions of duty and political principles, rather than retain an office which afforded a good support, by affiliating with a party in which he had no confidence.³⁵

Moving to the offensive, on the other hand, Editor Daniels knew he had an uphill fight in coming out for civil service reform. Writing to one who had commended him, Daniels outlined the odds against him—North Carolina’s adored U.S. Senator Zebulon B. Vance, the masses of the state, and even the majority of the educated element.³⁶ On the issue of educational reform, Daniels put out a special education issue carrying articles by some of the leading teachers in the state, notably the state superintendent of public instruction, Sidney M. Finger. In The History and Needs of Education of North Carolina, the latter called attention to the recent statute setting up a four-month public school term. He also related how certain municipalities were taxing themselves for graded schools, but the people groan under the burden of taxation which is, in many cases, said to be too grievous to be borne.³⁷

Such editorializing was Daniels’ way of prodding the penny-pinching old-line Democrats, even though he was careful not to press his claims too vigorously. Although throughout this period his editorials carried an undertone of impatience with Bourbon placidity and conservatism, Daniels acted like a young man who knew his time was coming. Thus he continued to co-operate with the Bourbons, who held all the apparatus of political power. Cases in point were the state’s two senators, both Confederate officers, Zebulon B. Vance and Matt W. Ransom. Because of North Carolina’s geography and the traditional designation of one senator for the East and the other for the West, Daniels’ lines of communication were much stronger with Ransom than with Vance.

It is altogether possible that Daniels was used by the wily Ransom. Daniels subscribed for some time to a Washington news-letter syndicated by Mrs. Carrie Harris, who undertook to weld an organization for Ransom’s re-election by the 1889 legislature.³⁸ In writing of her correspondence for North Carolina newspapers, Mrs. Harris confided to Senator Ransom: I will have nearly every paper in the state—incognito—and you know you can dictate to me what you please.³⁹ For his own part Daniels urged the senator to denounce the federal internal revenue system, as Vance had done, as a device by which the Republicans dispensed political favors. Such a denunciatory statement would do much, Daniels urged, to help Ransom’s chances in the coming campaign.⁴⁰ Later in the year Daniels wrote to Ransom protesting against an insinuation by "News-Observer friends" [he was, of course, still editor of the opposition State Chronicle] that I am against you. He called attention to his brothers’ services to the senator’s cause and added, I have offended some of my best friends by declining to print articles attacking you.⁴¹

Ransom won re-election by the 1889 legislature, thanks apparently to his still-potent personal magnetism. The biggest vote against Ransom was for Sydenham B. Alexander, president of the State Farmers’ Alliance, and a man who far more consistently than Ransom espoused Daniels’ avowed principles. Nevertheless, Daniels hewed to the traditional Democratic line instead of embracing the Alliance faction, apparently not so much because he hesitated to voice unpopular views but because of a deep-seated conviction that politics as the art of the possible could succeed only within disciplined organizational lines. At this time, to be sure, men of the Farmers’ Alliance had not yet broken with the Democratic party as many were later to do in the Populist revolt. At the same time it was in character for Daniels to support the regular candidate by way of cementing party solidarity.

Daniels also participated in the next Democratic success, that of 1892, but meanwhile hard times had turned the daily State Chronicle into a money-loser that Daniels had to sell early that same year. Despite the law degree that would have made possible a different career and despite the editor’s emerging from the State Chronicle experience miraculously free of debt, Daniels found himself indissolubly married to journalism, and returned to the arena later in 1892 to establish the weekly North Carolinian. The policy of this paper in the campaign of 1892 well betokened the brewing political storm in which Daniels was soon to struggle. He already saw the Negro issue as threatening to divide white men who were bent on reform. Daniels wrote: We appeal to every man who loves reform and loves his State, now that it is apparent that all divisions mean a return to Negro supremacy, to come together and elect Elias Carr and the excellent ticket nominated jointly by the Alliance men and non-Alliance men in Raleigh on May 18th.⁴² This concern lest reform be jeopardized by reformers’ differences became well justified by 1894 when the challenging reform demands of the agrarian Populists had become overwhelmingly insistent. When Daniels first came to Raleigh in 1885, the Civil War Bourbons and Brigadiers⁴³ controlled the state finances with a niggardly hand through a conservative Democratic party allied with business.⁴⁴ By the time Daniels took over The News and Observer in 1894, the discredited Bourbons and Brigadiers were beginning to make way for men with new ideas within the Democratic party.

After the Democratic victory of 1892 Daniels moved quickly to consolidate his position with Senator Ransom. Daniels wrote an editorial in the North Carolinian endorsing Ransom for a Cabinet post and also wrote the senator a letter in order to underline the editor’s personal support.⁴⁵ Daniels also urged on Ransom the naming of the editor’s boyhood friend Charles B. Aycock as District Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina.⁴⁶ The point is that Daniels was in a position to press his request, not only for Aycock but for himself. Writing on stationery bearing the heading State of North Carolina. House of Representatives, possibly the better to impress Ransom that the editor was providing newspaper coverage of the 1893 legislature, Daniels mentioned several federal jobs in which he was interested. Some were very big positions and may be entirely out of my reach, he conceded, yet I believe that Mr. [Hoke] Smith [Secretary of the Interior] would do something handsome for me if it should be requested by North Carolina’s Senators and my representative.⁴⁷

Despite all this office-seeking activity, Daniels was genuinely reluctant to forsake the editor’s sanctum for the bureaucrat’s desk. He was driven to it, apparently, by the circumstance that North Carolina journalism could not afford him a living in those hard times.⁴⁸ Consequently he gratefully accepted an appointment which led to his quick promotion to Chief Clerk of the Interior Department, for which he received $2,750 a year. He used $100 a month to support himself, his wife, baby, and a Negro nurse, and sent the balance, along with his editorials, back to his struggling North Carolinian in Raleigh.⁴⁹ He came to know a number of Democratic congressmen and party leaders during 1893 and 1894, a series of contacts that stood him in good stead during later political battles at home, but his eyes remained fixed on North Carolina and on building up his personal resources so as to fight another day. Unlike Walter H. Page, who left North Carolina when unable to make the State Chrorh ical pay, Josephus Daniels left only temporarily after he was forced to sell his daily in 1892 and continued to lose money with the weekly North Carolinian. I regard myself here as an exile from home, he wrote a North Carolina friend from Washington, banished because of the hard times, and he predicted an early return to the people God made.⁵⁰ He had earlier refused attractive offers, one to join Hoke Smith, his Interior Department head, on the Atlanta Journal, and another to associate himself with Governor and later U. S. Senator Joseph F. Johnston of Alabama, who had acquired the Birmingham Age-Herald.⁵¹ Again, unlike Walter H. Page, Daniels’ skill with politics, which was both shrewd and enthusiastic, put him in a position to hibernate in Washington, whereas Page’s impatience with politics and his superior literary craftsmanship led him to seek a career elsewhere. However, Daniels was poised in Washington and eager for instant service in the North Carolina political wars when an opportunity came to acquire The News and Observer.

In the meantime, with Daniels in Washington and his only remaining paper the money-losing weekly North Carolinian, the path seemed clear for Ashe to promote his News and Observer. Ashe leased the State Chronicle from Thomas R. Jernigan, who had bought it from Daniels, and sought to consolidate the daily paper’s position. Daniels, holding Jernigan’s mortgage of some $2,600 on the State Chronicle purchase,⁵² apparently was not consulted in the new arrangement, but he knew what was going on. His lawyers in Raleigh kept him informed and so did his mother-in-law, whom he thanked for giving me all the inside facts in regard to the newspaper matter, and whom he reassured because he knew the consolidated paper was worth the mortgage.⁵³ Captain Ashe now made his main effort. He issued a circular inviting. Democrats throughout the state to buy stock in the Raleigh News and Observer and State Chronicle, capitalized at $40,000 (Daniels’ suggestion of 1887 for the consolidated paper), a total of 400 shares at $100 each. Ashe was unduly optimistic in writing of the field being clear, and all conflicting interests being out of the way,⁵⁴ because even one daily paper in Raleigh would have trouble surviving in that severe depression. Ashe’s last-gasp effort at attaining solvency for The News and Observer fell short, and the property was soon to fall under the auctioneer’s hammer. As matters turned out, then, the same depression that spelled failure for Ashe gave Daniels the chance he had been seeking.

WATAUGA CLUB INFLUENCES

It was to the Watauga Club, organized in 1884 mainly by William J. Peele and Walter H. Page, that Josephus Daniels gravitated soon after arriving in Raleigh in early 1885.⁵⁵ Its members were young men, apparently all in their twenties, who paid only impatient respect to the Confederate veterans who filled most political posts and otherwise guided the political destinies of the Old North State with an undue emphasis, as the Wataugans saw it, upon the old. In line with a general enthusiasm for the New South type of industrial growth envisaged by Henry W. Grady, which they shared with some of their elders, these young men saw in public education the lever that would lift up North Carolina into the modern age. Page thus recalled the Wataugans’ aims: The Club, of course, had as its only purpose the training of the neglected youth of the State to useful occupations, to make work again seem worthy, as it had seemed before the blight of slavery.⁵⁶ Daniels recalled a more specific aim, that of establishing an industrial school modeled after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.⁵⁷ In any case there was little resistance by the Bourbons in the 1885 legislature, which easily passed an enabling act for a technical college. However, with customary penny-pinching, the legislature refused to appropriate enough money, and the friends of the college had to wait upon the donation of land and at least part of the money for the first builds ing.⁵⁸ This limited success was as much as the Wataugans could expect for the time being, and they then turned from that issue to sponsoring nothing less than federal aid to education.

Its official form was that of the Blair Bill, introduced in Congress by Senator Henry