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EDITED BY John C. Parish
Associate Editor of the State Historical Society of Iowa
| Volume I |
August 1920 |
No. 2 |
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Copyright 1920 by the State Historical Society of Iowa
(Transcribed by Gayle Harper)
AN OLD-TIME EDITORIAL
DIALOGUE
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Pied long ago was the type that
first carried this exchange of civilities. And many years
have passed since the two principals in the wordy duel
were laid away to rest, each with his vocabulary at his
side. But the ghost of the duel still flutters in the old
sheets of the newspaper files. Let the ghost tell its
tale.
The frontier town of Iowa City,
capital of the Territory of Iowa.
The early forties, when men wore
their politics like chips upon their shoulders and
established arsenals beneath their coat tails – with
reference to the printing office, the good old days when
the militant editor got out a weekly four page sheet, with
the assistance of an industrious but soiled and un-
washable printer's devil, a ditto towel, a dog-eared and
now vanished dictionary of classical vituperation, and a
“hell box" where the used-up type, exhausted by being made
the vehicle of ultra vigorous language, fell into an early
grave.
WILLIAM CRUM
– a young editor of twenty-two years – possessed of a
hair-trigger pen and an inkwell full of expletives, a vast
admiration for the pillars of the Whig party, and no
respect at all for the Democratic editors of the Territory
of Iowa. Under his supervision the Iowa City Standard
upholds the views of William Henry Harrison and Henry Clay
and hurls peppery paragraphs at the awful record of the
Democrats who happen to hold the whip hand in the
Territory.
VER PLANCK VAN
ANTWERP –educated at West Point and by
courtesy called General – dignified and serious, arrayed
in boiled shirt and starched collar and gold spectacles –
an old school Democrat of ''an age now verging upon the
meridian of life." He, too, is an editor and has in his
time pealed out sonorous messages through long columns of
the Democratic press.
Enter MR. CRUM followed some
time later by the GENERAL
Using the words of one of his
exchanges, Mr. Crum soliloquizes:
''There
is, somewhere in the Territory of Iowa, one 'General' V.
P. Van Antwerp, who ... is much in the habit of making
long-winded speeches, as frothy as small beer and as empty
as his head."
Soon he becomes aware that the
said General Van Antwerp has arrived at Iowa City and
become the editor of the Iowa Capitol Reporter, and the
soliloquy becomes a dialogue. In somewhat over two columns
the General makes his announcement and closes with this
glowing peroration:
"To every tenet in the
Democratic faith as promulgated by Jefferson, Jackson, Van
Buren, and Benton, the four most shining lights among the
multitudes of its distinguished advocates, I heartily
subscribe; and stand ready now, as I have ever done, to
devote my best energies to their support.
“In
those tenets I have been taught from early childhood, with
it instilled and impressed upon my mind, to consider their
effects upon the destinies of mankind as second in
importance to naught else save the Christian religion
itself; and, resting firmly under this belief, regardless
of the consequences, or of the course of others, and come
what may, adversity or prosperity, gloom or glory, weal or
woe, I shall continue, while God spares my life, to do
battle in the good and glorious cause!"
Mr. Crum
falls upon this bit of oratory with great glee and satire;
''an inaugural, and signed by My Lord Pomposity, Ver
Planck himself"; and with alternate quotations and jeers
he pokes fun at his new rival, "this West Point dandy in
gold spectacles!"
The General is aroused, and in
his second issue proclaims that "any charge in the
slightest degree implicating our character, will not be
suffered to pass by unheeded.
"But in
regard to the wretched demagogical slang, which is the
sole aliment upon which a certain class of men subsist, we
laugh to scorn both it and its authors, confident that
they can no more affect us. with those whose respect we
value, than would the Billingsgate of the fisherwomen, in
whose school they were bred, and whose style they copy."
Crum is happy. He heads his
columns with the quotation from Van Antwerp in regard to
''any charge in the slightest degree implicating our
character", and then proceeds to make charges which would
seem to come within the category indicated. He arraigns
his record as a printer of the legislative records and
says, when it stirs the General to wrath:
''That
little 'Thumdomadal' [a term Van Antwerp had applied to
Crum] might point its finger of condemnation to his false
Democracy, and hold up to public gaze his rotten and
corrupt political form, which shone through the veil of
assumed dignity like rotten dog-wood in pitch-darkness;
but let it touch his pocket, although replenished from the
People's money, and hyena-like growls will issue in rabid
fury, and in maniac-like distraction, from his troubled
spirit. The jackall, an indigenous animal of Africa, noted
for his want of sagacity and his innate predatory
disposition, it is said will yell most furiously to his
fraternal flock at a distance, whilst he is in the poultry
coop of the farmer committing his usual havocs, and
thereby rouse to his own great danger the farmer and the
neighborhood, who repair to the coop and relieve the
poultry of their fell destroyer. So it is with this West
Point jackall, in relation to the public printing." He
ends by saying that the military gentleman has not learned
any branch of the merchanic arts ''and has therefore taken
to the trade of LYING".
But Van
Antwerp is inclined to stand upon his dignity. He answers
one outburst of the Standard by saying, “of course our
sheet shall not be polluted by replying to it.” And again
the doughty General remarks:
"We
would be the last to reproach the memory of the mother who
bore him in an unlucky hour, with the frailties of her
worthless son. Here we take leave of him before the public
forever
''It would be ungenerous, after
the heavy battery has been silenced, the guns spiked and
the carriages broken, to transfix the trembling, blackened
form of the inoffensive powder-monkey. When the larger
hound bays still deeper in the forest the feeble cur will
receive very little attention.”
Meanwhile other editors have interjected a word or two
into the dialogue and been editorially cuffed by Crum or
the General. The Burlington Gazette, hurrying to the
rescue of Democracy, observes:
"The
public are generally ignorant of the fact, that, under the
title of the 'Iowa City Standard,' a sickly, little blue
sheet, of the thumbpaper size, by courtesy called
newspaper .... is weekly issued at the seat of government
; yet it is even so.”
Then after commenting on the
insignificance of the Standard, the editor falls back upon
the popular canine metaphor:
"It will
do well enough on proper occasions to notice the federal
mastiffs ; but the curs, whose vocation it is to do the
barking, should be passed by with neglect akin to that
usually extended to their canine prototype.”
The
“cur" turns aside only long enough to utter this
philosophic bark: **The mere shadow of a man who
clandestinely presides over the editorial department of
the Burlington Gazette, attempts to be very severe upon us
for our notices of that Bombastes Furioso of the Reporter.
Now, we consider the humid vaporings of this, or any
other, individual, who so far descends from the dignity of
a man as to follow, puppy like, at the heels of Ver Planck
Van Antwerp, as too contemptible to notice".
Upon the
editor of the Bloomington Herald he wastes even less
attention.
"The editor of the above print
is greatly troubled about the editorials of the Standard.
Get out of the way, man! You are not worth the ammunition
that would kill you off.”
A little
later, however, he gives voice to his contempt for the
whole array of Democrats.
''Why in
the name of all that is sensible, don't the Loco-foco
papers here and hereabouts, shut up shop – retire – back
out – or float down the Mississippi on a shingle! – ....
Such another unmitigated set of vegetables ... we imagine
could not be raked up in any other quarter of the land.
Here is the 'Iowa Capitol Reporter' – bless your soul, –
with a title that rolls over ones tongue like the tones of
a big bass drum; a bloated, empty, echoing thing, that
hasn't been guilty of propagating an original idea for the
last three months .... And then there is the 'Bloomington
Herald,' a little fiddling fice-dog affair, to which the
'Reporter' tosses parched peas and pebble stones, to be
flung back at us. That establishment never had an idea at
all . . . . Next we have the 'Territorial Gazette,' with
seven editors and two ideas – both unavailable. But the
Hawkeye must attend to that concern. – Then there is the
'Sun' – a little poverty stricken affair, 'no bigger as
mine thumb' – at Davenport. It was for a long time
published on a half sheet, and now it is a size less than
that ... Again we repeat, what do they live for? Is it
because their friends won't be at the cost of a coffin?
Die, bankrupts – die. You are 'stale, flat and
unprofitable' – worse than cold corn dodger without salt.'
The duel of words at Iowa City
becomes constantly more spirited. The proud aloofness of
the General gradually gives way before the constant and
wasp-like attacks of William Crum.
Especially does he
become wrought up by a charge that he rolled about in a
coach that should go to pay his debts. The reference to
the debts makes comparatively little impression; but the
coach, that is a different matter. With great vigor the
exponent of Democracy denies that he ever rolled in a
coach except perhaps at the invitation of some friend or
in a common stage coach. Likewise the charge that he is in
the habit of wearing silk gloves disturbs him. He never
wears silk gloves, be maintains, except at public balls or
parties; and even these are knit by a member of his
family, out of common saddlers silk.
One can
imagine him writhing uncomfortably, and nervously
adjusting his cravat and his gold spectacles as he reads
these terrible charges. Piqued by William Crum's constant
use of the term “My Lord Pomposity" and other such
nicknames, he retorts by characterizing the editor of the
Standard as ''Silly Billy" and "the last crum of
creation".
Both men in the heat of the
controversy lose sight of the rules of grammar.
“We were
not aware," says Van Antwerp, ''until the last Standard
appeared, that it looked suspicious for any one to visit
the capitol as often as they seen fit."
And Crum
bursts forth in answer to an item in the Reporter:
“The
black hearted villain who composed it knew that it was a
lie when he done so."
Finally the stings of his
twenty-two year old opponent so enrage Ver Planck Van
Antwerp that he throws dignity to the winds. The “slang-
whanging and blackguard articles of 'The Standard' " have
made a demand "of anybody who may at this time answer for
the editorship" of the Reporter. And in elephantine fury
he replies:
"Now we tell the puppy who wrote
that article that he knows, as every body else knows here,
who are the Editors of this paper; and that they are ready
at all times to answer any ‘demand' (?) that he or his
fellows may think proper to make of them .... But how is
it with regard to the vagabond concern that thus alludes
to them? Who is the author of the mass of putridity, and
villainous scurrility, that is weekly thrown before the
public through the columns of that blackguard sheet?
''That it is not its nominal proprietor, the gawkey boy
Crum, who is a pitiful tool in the hands of others, and
incapable of framing together correctly three consecutive
sentences, is of course notorious to every body here ; as
is the additional fact that it does not proceed from the
other milk-and-water creature recently imported into the
concern . . . ." And he charges wildly along, in his wrath
stumbling into language that is not here printable.
But it is the General's swan song. About a month later his
name disappears from the head of the sheet. Now and again
in the history of early Iowa we see his form stalking
through other roles, but his duel with ''Silly Billy" Crum
is over.
That young man remains,
triumphant, but perhaps, too, a little disconcerted at the
removal of his friend the enemy, for not again will he
find a foe who will make so admirable a target for his
jests, his epithets, and his satire. Pen in hand he moves
off stage to the right seeking whom he may attack.
JOHN C. PARISH
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