John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[430] movement, which not only selected Greeley, whom Dana had first nominated, but compelled the Democratic party to select him also, and to adopt a policy on which it ultimately went into power. While the movement at first was defeated at the ballot-box, the Sun's part in it received an amount of non-partisan and even of Republican approval that has rarely ever been accorded to independent journalism.

Ignoring with his accustomed indifference the efforts of the Republican press to put him personally on the defensive after the campaign was ended, Dana said in the Sun of December 6, 1872:

A great deal of twaddle is uttered by some country newspapers just now over what they call personal journalism. They say that now that Mr. Bennett, Mr. Raymond, and Mr. Greeley are dead, the day for personal journalism is gone by, and that impersonal journalism will take its place. That appears to mean a sort of journalism in which nobody will ask who is the editor of a paper or the writer of any class of article, and nobody will care.

Whenever, in the newspaper profession, a man rises up who is original, strong, and bold enough to make his opinions a matter of consequence to the public, there will be personal journalism; and whenever newspapers are conducted only by commonplace individuals whose views are of no consequence to anybody, there will be nothing but impersonal journalism.

And this is the essence of the whole question.

Looking back upon Grant's second election, it is now evident that while the country, with an awakened conscience, was in hearty sympathy with Dana's desire to see the public service cleansed of fraud and corruption, it preferred to continue the Republicans in power with a mandate to punish their own rascals, rather than to turn