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(The Nation finally comes clean.)
Yet the magazine, along with the rest of the country, gradually wearied
of Reconstruction, and its abandonment of the freed slaves makes for
painful reading today. Beyond excuse, beyond extenuation, it also defies
simple explanation. What can be said is that from 1870 onward, Godkin
and The Nation became increasingly the voice not merely of the Eastern
establishment, but of the most reactionary elements within that
establishment. Bound by his “liberal” principles to oppose any attempt
to interfere with the “freedom of contract,” Godkin had always resisted
calls for an eight-hour workday and worried that a government able to
prohibit children from working in factories—a goal, he allowed, for
which “there is a great deal to be said”—might end by telling “us what
to eat, drink, avoid, hope, fear, and believe.” When the first great
railroad strikes convulsed the United States in July 1877, Godkin was
appalled: no government, he wrote, could tolerate conditions in which a
few thousand “day-laborers of the lowest class can suspend, even for a
whole day, the traffic and industry of a great nation, merely as a means
of extorting ten or twenty cents a day more in wages.” Blaming foreign
agitators, Godkin called for a show of force: “The kindest thing which
can be done for the great multitudes of untaught men who have been
received on these shores…is to show them promptly that society as here
organized, on individual freedom of thought and action, is impregnable,
and can be no more shaken than the order of nature.”
full:
http://www.thenation.com/article/202001/biography-nation-first-fifty-years
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