An Irishman's Diary

THE FATE of Horace Greeley may be a cautionary tale for all those politicians currently traversing Ireland in search of votes.

Born 200 years ago yesterday, Greeley is now best remembered as a great American newspaper editor and as the man who advised: “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country”. Indeed, speaking of cautions, he once summed up the thrills and stresses of his profession in another pithy phrase: “Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.” And maybe that prediction was not inconsistent with the nature of his own demise. But in the event, it was politics that killed him, or at least supplied the immediate cause of death.

A life-long reform campaigner, he ran for president in 1872, aged 61. And, as with Parnell 19 years later, the strain of a hard election campaign was too much for an already weakened physique.

He survived 24 days after the popular vote. Long enough to know that he had lost heavily; although not long enough that the electoral college delegates had yet cast their ballots. He remains today the only US presidential candidate to have died before an election was over.

In a centenary tribute, the New York Timesdescribed Greeley as having been "of Scotch descent, enriched and softened with a blend of Irish", making him sound a bit like a luxury-brand whiskey. In fact his childhood was anything but luxurious. On the contrary, raised on a farm in New Hampshire, he grew up in a poverty "verging on destitution".

Despite – or because of – which, he evolved into a scrawny, tough, and energetic teenager, who first proved himself as a printer's apprentice before a natural talent for journalism propelled him to the top of that trade. He founded an influential literary weekly, the New Yorker (not that one) while only 23. And still in his 20s, he set up an even more influential newspaper, the Log Cabin.

Then, aged only 30, he merged the two into what would become his life's work: the New York Tribune. The "Great Moral Organ", as it was later known, was a liberal-minded newspaper. It was also, from the start, deeply serious. In the words of one historian: "Police reports, scandals, dubious medical advertisements, and flippant personalities were barred from its pages." Politics and the arts were its main concerns. And after the founding of the Republican Party (1854), in which debate was dominated by the looming crisis over slavery and the South, Greeley positioned the Tribuneto be the unofficial voice of the new movement.

As such, the paper used its influence first to make Lincoln the Republican candidate for the 1860 presidential election, and thereafter to ensure his victory. That was, as the NYT said in 1911, "the most momentous event in the history of the nation". And Greeley's Tribunehad been central to it.

But his touch was not so sure during the ensuing Civil War. Vacillating support for the military effort and later his magnanimity towards the Confederates – he personally signed the bail-bond for Jefferson Davis – cost him popularity.

Notwithstanding which, he continued fighting for his various causes, running for several public offices (never successfully) before his final doomed campaign.

The 1872 US presidential election was dominated – with some contemporary resonance in these parts – by the issues of corruption and public service reform. Greeley had supported the incumbent, Ulysses Grant, in 1868. But Grant was a war-hero who, disappointed that his country had not rewarded him in the manner of, for example, Britain rewarding the Duke of Wellington, was using the presidency to make up ground in that regard.

He may not have been politically corrupt. But in an era when fortunes were being made, via the new railways and other schemes, he saw no problem in accepting lavish presents from grateful admirers.

So Greeley opposed his re-election and ran for a new force, the Liberal Republicans. In a precedent that Enda Kenny might want to bear in mind, he was also endorsed by his long-time enemies, the Democrats. Greeley had spent decades abusing that party. Once, exhibiting his life-long obsession with journalistic accuracy, he clarified a previous criticism thus: “I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers; what I said was all saloonkeepers are Democrats.” That he should now attract support from them was a mixed blessing.

But in any case, for all his brilliance as an editor, Greeley proved a poor performer on the stump. Cynics soon presented the electorate’s dilemma as having to choose between a “knave” and a “fool”. In which case, 54 per cent of voters chose the knave and returned Grant to the White House for four more years.

Even if it did finish him off, it wasn’t the political campaigning alone that killed Greeley. The deprivations of his earlier life probably contributed and, as he himself had hinted, journalism is not a profession noted for longevity. But if his 1872 campaign proved a fatal misadventure, it was in keeping with a life-long philosophy that ruled out acceptance of the status quo. As one of his less-quoted aphorisms had warned: “Apathy is a sort of living oblivion.”