Alfred Holman

“ Scott was yet a self-made man. He was self-educated, self-disciplined, self-reliant. Above all of the men I have ever known he was self-centered, not in the sense that he thought overmuch of self or was devoted to the things which pertained, to self, but in the rarer and finer sense of self-dependence in the motives and usages of life.
The pioneer is necessarily an individualist, and never was there a man more imbued with the spirit of individualism than Mr. Scott. He and his kind had worked their way under and through the hardest conditions. ”

“ For days as he sat in his office or tramped the hillsides—and to this he was much given at all times—he would pour forth from the storehouse of his memory floods of elegaic poetry with sombre phrases from the literature of the ages. I know of nothing within the range of human passion more painful than the grief of a strong man; and there is impressed upon my memory in connection with the death of John Tucker Scott a most pathetic picture. ”

“ Scott represented two types of men. He was a scholar and he was a journalist. He loved to study and to preach the fundamental and the ideal. As a man of practical affairs he knew that the fundamental and the ideal are rarely attainable, that they call for conditions and for states of society nonexistent. Scholarship and philosophy gave him a vision of an airline; but as a leader in the affairs of practical life he realized that in the working world, including human progress, the forward march is not by the airline, but by a winding road. ”

“ With none of the exhilarations of the conflict with crude conditions, so powerful in their appeal to men, there had still to be suffered the same obstacles plus denial of a thousand tender impulses and a thousand deep ambitions which masculine character may never feel. To the end of his life Mr. Scott remembered—this I have from his son—that when he was fourteen years of age, and just before her death, his mother called him to a private talk and gave him admonitions for the guidance of his life which took form as the very foundation stones of his character. ”

“ In his attitude toward his assistants there was no direct oversight, no pettiness. And all who served him will bear me witness that in the crises of personal distress or domestic affliction he was the very soul of consideration. A man called from his work by any domestic emergency was never made to suffer in the thought that his absence from duty would discredit him or that it would be reflected in a diminished pay check. Nor was any man ever expected in respect of the course of the paper to write against his own convictions or in disloyalty to his own judgment. ”

“ Thus even in the old Oregon of small things, the man who sat at the fountain of community intelligence—the editorship of the one and only newspaper of the country—lived and worked for large purposes and under high aspirations. In a mind of common mold, taking its tone from the life around about it, there would have developed a sense of power leading to the exhilarations of an individual conceit. Upon the mind of Mr. Scott the effect was far different. In him and upon him there grew a noble development of moral responsibility. ”

“ The thought to seek out the tendencies of current opinion, to follow or to lead it, and so flatter and cajole the public this which has come to be almost a fundamental rule of contemporary journalism had no place in Mr. Scott's philosophy. Of what is called policy he had none at all, and he held in sovereign contempt the very word policy. "Policy! Policy!" he would say, "is the device by which small and dishonest men seek to make traffic in lies. When a newspaper gets a 'policy' it throws over its conscience and its judgment and becomes a pander. ”

“ Scott was among those who saw advantages in a scheme of protective tariff, regarded purely as an expedient. To himself there was a clear line of distinction between the abstract and the practical presentment. His position to himself was clear. But to the rough-riding "protectionist" who knew and cared nothing of fundamentals and who under motives of self-interest or under the inspirations of partisan feeling made a fetish of "protection" there appeared neither logic nor honesty in Mr. Scott's position. ”

“ Scott was truly a higher place, a place of wider responsibilities and of larger powers than any official place possibly attainable by a man geographically placed as Mr. Scott was. All who, like myself, shared in the advantages of close association with Mr. Scott are fond of recalling a thousand trivialities which, small though they are, illustrate certain aspects of his character. No man was ever more scrupulous in all the essentials of personal habit ”

“ Scott a natural gift. His propensity was to thought rather than to expression. He had nothing of the light and easy grace in the making of phrases which with many renders the operation of writing little more than pastime. Literally he forged his matter into form and if the form was always fine it was made so less by instinctive art than by unremitting labors. With many writers, especially those who combine experience with propensity, the very process of expression oftentimes inspires and shapes the thought. With Mr. Scott the thought always dominated the expression. ”

“ Scott passed almost half a century with nothing of the stimulus which comes from intellectual rivalry, with few of the legitimate helps of intellectual association, unspurred by any species of competition, working wholly under the promptings of his own impulses and his own fine sense of manly obligation, I marvel at the record.
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Generations of clean-blooded, wholesome-living, right-minded forbears gave Mr. Scott a towering frame and a constitution of mighty vitality. A youth of manual labor and untouched by vices had toughened every fibre of the physical man. ”

“ Scott that the essential values of his character were individual, it still remains to be said that they were profoundly related to the conditions and times in which his work was done. The great figures of any era are those who, sustaining the relationships of practical understanding and sympathy, are still in vision and purpose in advance of the popular mind and of the common activities. So it was with Mr. Scott. There was never a day of the many years of his long-sustained ascendancy in the life of Oregon in which he did not stand somewhat apart and somewhat in advance of his immediate world. ”

“ The machinery of social organization in a new country was in the forging; and the interest of the community was naturally and wholesomely related to serious matters. Not so much a fever to search out and present what is now called the news, as a sense of social responsibility, possessed the minds of publisher and of editor.
In its demands the situation was directly to the hand of a youth temperamentally addicted to serious things, disposed by propensity and habit to refer every incident and every question to underlying principles. ”

“ Scott was at all times with the life of Oregon he was, nevertheless, one doomed by the tendencies of his character arid duties to a life measurably solitary.
The fewest number of men are pre-eminently successful in more than a single ensemble of conditions. Any radical change is likely first to disconcert and ultimately to destroy adjustments of individual powers to working situations. The qualities which match one condition are not always or often adjustable in relation to others. ”

“ A man of trivial mind, open to the besetments of vanity, would under these recurring influences have become a colossus of self-esteem. Mr. Scott indeed knew himself a factor in affairs, but he never lost himself in a fog of self-admiration. Oftentimes, when some visitor had paid extravagant compliments upon his work in general or with respect to the character of The Oregonian, he would say, "Oh, he means well, but I suspect that if I had slammed his interest or had bumped one of his favorite prejudices his tune would have been pitched in another key. ”

“ Scott even in his youth could have adapted himself to present-day standards and methods of journalism. Journalist, preeminent journalist, though he was, for nearly half a century, his interest was never in the things which present-day journalism holds paramount. Events, unless they were related to economic or moral fundamentals, had no fascination for him, and little hold upon his attention. At the bottom of his mind there was ever a sovereign contempt for the trivialities which make up the stock in trade of the news room. ”

“ Scott's professional life, stand as the most imposing of his many public services. I refer to his advocacy of sound money as against recurrent attempts to inflate the currency of the country by issues of "fiat" paper and to debase the monetary standard by giving, or attempting to give, to silver an arbitrary parity with the world's standard of value, gold. Careful study of history had impressed upon Mr. Scott's mind the vital importance of a sound and stable currency. ”

“ The man who deals at such range with the current doings of the world has no aid through daily contact with the agents of great events and can have small knowledge of the incidental and oftentimes significant gossip which attends upon important movements. His resource must be a broad view of things. He must measure events not as they stand related to incidents, but by the gauge of fixed principles. The conditions under which Mr. Scott worked accorded perfectly with the propensities of his mind. He had a contempt for what he termed "outward flourishes"; his mind went to the core of every issue. ”

“ HARVEY W. SCOTT, EDITOR—REVIEW OF HIS HALF-CENTURY CAREER AND ESTIMATE OF HIS WORK
By Alfred Holman [1]
It was given to the generation of Mr. Scott's youth and to the succeeding generation of his maturer years to take a wilderness in the rough and mold it through steadily advancing forms to the uses of modern life At the beginning of Mr. Scott's career Oregon was a country whose very name was best known to the world as a poet's synonym for solitude and mystery; at the end it was a country which might challenge the world as an exemplar of the worthiest things in social development. ”

“ His early boyhood was passed amid the tragic excitements of Kentucky, and at the age of fifteen he followed his father, James Scott, into the wilds of Illinois. The spirit of the man is illustrated by the fact that in 1852, at the age of forty-three, he ventured upon the great trek which brought him and his family of nine sons and daughters to the then Oregon wilderness. ”

“ And if in this attitude there was something of the pride of a man of conspicuous achievement, who perhaps regarded too lightly the changed atmospheres of new times compared with old, the fact none-the-less explained and perhaps none-the-less justified a sovereign contempt for socialization projects, for sentimental declamation, for the whole range of pretenses and vanities which mark the man or the community which waits and complains as contrasted with the man or the community which girds its loins and bravely goes forward. ”

“ Scott's career, for though my reverence is more for the man than for the editor, there was that in his purely professional character which sustained very exceptional standards of journalism—standards which under the amazing prosperity which recent years have brought to the business of newspaper publishing have been well nigh overborne. ”

“ Your average journalist is a mere popularizer of appropriated materials. He applies to current events conclusions pretty much always obvious and for the most temporary. Mr. Scott, sitting apart from all but the essential facts and exercising a true philosophic instinct, sought out the subtle links through which, in history and in logic, facts stand related to facts. ”

“ Competent as his judgment was with respect to his own work as well as to the work of others, it was nevertheless Mr. Scott's practice to read over his prepared articles to his assistants. "Trying it on the dog" was his familiar phrase for this form of experimentation. He always invited criticism though I do not recall many instances in which any of us were wise enough to help him unless it were at the point of restraint. ”

“ Whoever might wish for a paper reeking with uncleanliness and pandering, vicious or flabby trivialities for the light-minded, might seek elsewhere. Mr. Scott's purposes were serious, his journalism always dominated by high purposes and limited by a taste which rejected and rebuked all tendencies to carelessness or vulgarity. ”

“ Scott and of the more thoughtful among his contemporaries. If we regard this primitive country with attention only to the numbers of its people, it appears a small and even an insignificant outpost of the world; but if, with a truer sense of values, we study it under its necessities for social and political organization, there opens to the mind's eye a field vast, practically, as the scheme of civilization itself. ”

“ No man ever wrote anything that he didn't believe, that was worth anybody's reading." And so he would set himself to labors which a man of less delicacy or of more arbitrary spirit would have imposed upon others.
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In the sense that he held in profound contempt many things which men in general delight in, Mr. Scott may be described as unsocial. He abominated ordinary frivolities in which many persons find mental refreshment. Social life in the usual interpretation of the phrase he regarded as waste of time—even worse, as tending to mental flabbiness. ”