IX. Artemus Ward: His Town

American laughter was lucky laughter
A coonskin tune by a homespun bard;
It tasted of hams from the smokehouse rafter
And locust trees in the courthouse yard,
And Petroleum Nasby and Artemus Ward!

-From “American Laughter” by Kenneth Allan Robinson

Artemus Ward no ordinary man, lived not quite thirty-three years. Of these, only three were spent in Cleveland. They were the years, though, that showed he was no ordinary man. They set the direction of his brief life and by so doing they added something rich to the lives of all Americans. If Artemus Ward was the “father of American humor,” as he has been called, then Cleveland was its birthplace.

The most dramatic illustration of Artemus Ward’s power to use words came about at a meeting of President Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet in the dark depths of the Civil War. The date was September 22, 1862.

As the cabinet members filed into the meeting room in the White House, the President already was seated. He was grave-faced and preoccupied with a small book. When his aides had seated themselves, he looked up from the book and smiled in greeting.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “did you ever read anything from Artemus Ward?” None of the group replied as Lincoln studied their faces.

“Let me read you a chapter that is very funny!” he said as he opened the book to a chapter called, “High-handed Outrage At Utica,” and began to read.

The cabinet members listened politely, but some of them showed in their faces that they considered the reading to be inappropriate to the time, the place, and the occasion. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was open in his look of disapproval.

Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, was another who listened and disapproved. He mentioned the strange episode in his diary.

“The President,” he wrote dryly, “seemed to enjoy it very much.”

When Lincoln had finished reading, there was momentary silence as the President looked around at his cabinet. Perhaps there were some smiles, but we know there was no laughter from the President’s own despairing words.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “why don’t. you laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.”

The President’s tall shiny hat was resting on its top on the table beside him, and even as he spoke, he was removing from the hat an official document which he proceeded to read aloud to his astonished cabinet. It was the immortal Emancipation Proclamation, which would make that date in history one for all men to remember.

Artemus Ward, whose work was the companion piece of the famous proclamation, was in fact one Charles Farrar Browne, a writer and subeditor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Although he and President Lincoln never met, the Chief Executive was one of his most ardent admirers.

Browne, a native of Waterford, in Maine, was a printer in the day, when, to quote Stephen Leacock, the printer “was a sort of troubadour, carrying his composing stick as the troubadour carried his guitar, or Scott’s Last Minstrel his harp. Easily enough they changed from printers to composers, from artisans to artists.”

That metamorphosis, for Browne, occurred in Ohio, where he switched from the role of printer to that of writer on the Toledo Commercial. His career with that newspaper was brief. J. W. Gray, editor of the Plain Dealer, was struck by the originality of Browne’s writing and hired him in October, 1857, as, of all things, commercial editor of the PD.

The story announcing the hiring of Browne was headed, “An Additional Editor,” and it said:

“. .. we have felt it due Our patrons that a COMMERCIAL EDITOR should be added to our present editorial force, one who will take specially in charge the commercial department and collect and collate market reports from all parts of the world and give in condensed form the most reliable figures to our readers.

“For this purpose we have secured the services of Mr. Charles F. Brown, Esq., lately of the Toledo Commercial, and who comes to us highly recommended as a scrupulously correct and diligent business man, a talented and agreeable writer. Mr. Brown will also have charge of the Local Column in place of Mr. Cleveland, our old and well-tried associate now promoted.”

William W. Armstrong, who later would become the editor and owner of the Plain Dealer, had employed Browne briefly as a printer for the Seneca Advertiser in Sandusky, Ohio, when he was proprietor of that newspaper. Browne’s physical appearance intrigued Armstrong.

“I believe,” he said, “that he was the gawkiest, greenest-looking young fellow I had ever set eyes on.”

Another Clevelander, James F. Ryder, a prominent pioneer photographer, described Browne graphically in his volume of reminiscences, Voigtlander and I, published in 1902.

“On going into the Plain Dealer editorial rooms one morning I saw a new man and was introduced to him as Mr. Brown. He was young, cheerful in manner, tall and slender, not quite up to date in style of dress, yet by no means shabby. His hair was flaxen and very straight; his nose, the prominent feature of his face, was Romanesque-quite violently so, with a leaning to the left. His eyes were blue-gray, with a twinkle in them; his mouth seemed so given to a merry laugh, so much in motion, that it was difficult to describe, so we let it pass. It seemed as though bubbling in him was a lot of happiness which he made no effort to conceal or hold back. When we were introduced he was sitting at his table writing; he gave his leg a smart slap, arose and shook hands with me and said he was glad to meet me. I believed him for he looked glad all the time. You couldn’t look at him but that he would laugh. He laughed as he sat at his table writing, and when he had written a thing which pleased him he would slap his leg and laugh…”

Browne (he added the final “e” after he left the Plain Dealer) was twenty-three years old when he arrived in Cleveland in late 1857. His performance as commercial editor and as local reporter must have pleased the management from the outset because very shortly his name appeared on the masthead as associate editor, making him a triple-threat man. As the local reporter, he was expected to write all the local news that was fit to print, and if he couldn’t find enough of the genuine article, he was supposed to provide an acceptable substitute.

One of those dry, dull, newsless days that all reporters are familiar with must have challenged him three months later because an item appeared in the Plain Dealer saying: “Mr. Artemus Ward, proprietor of the well-known side-show, writes us from Pittsburgh as follows:

Pitsburg, Jan. 27, 18&58

The Plane Deeler:

Sir:

i write to no how about the show bisnes in Cleeveland i have a show consisting in part of a Californy Bare two snakes tame faxes &c also wax works my wax works is hard to beat, all say they is life and nateral curiosities among my wax works is our Saveyer Cen taylor and Docktor Webster in the akt of killing Parkmen. now mr. Editor scratch off a few lines and tel me how is the show bisnis in your good city i shal have hanbils printed at your oms you scratch my back and i will scratch your back, also git up a grate blow in the paper about my show don’t forgit the wax works.

yours truly

Artemus Ward

Pitsburg Penny

P.S. pitsburg is a 1 horse town. A.W.

The item delighted readers of the Plain Dealer. They chuckled so audibly and so encouragingly that in the months and years that followed, the snail-like progress of Artemus Ward’s traveling show toward Cleveland (it never did arrive) and all the many delights it promised continued to be reported in the fine, lugubrious detail of the proprietor’s “letters” to Charles Farrar Browne.

Artemus Ward was Browne’s creation, of course, but he was so much a part of Browne that the two, in time, became one. And if the world was winning a wonderful new creature of fantasy in Artemus Ward, Browne himself was losing his identity. Almost everybody came to call him Artemus Ward and that, in fact, became his most common name, as uncommon as it was. There is a story that Browne borrowed the name from a half-wit snake charmer who lived near Cleveland.

Among the attractions added to the wonderful road show of A. Ward as it plodded toward Cleveland were “an amoozing Kangaroo and other moral Beests and Snaiks . . . besides several miscellanyous statoots of celebrated Piruts and Murdrers ekalled by few and exceled by none.”

There was also the worrisome lion-the one with a vexing problem of hindsight. The lion had had an unfortunate accident, dashing headlong into a pole. The force of the collision had split the poor animal from head to tail. Its owner hastily put the animal back together again, but haste not only makes waste but also strange-looking lions. The owner had put the two halves together wrong-end-to, which may be all right to people who don’t take their lions seriously, but it certainly did make for an awkward-looking animal, if a vastly entertaining subject for Browne and his readers.

It is worth mentioning, in any discussion of Browne, that he had come to the right community to try out his wings of wit. Whether the reason is due to geography, the soil, the vagaries of the climate, or perhaps a kind of hysterical reaction to their release from the stultifying Puritan environment, nobody is able to say, but it is a proven fact that Clevelanders do like to laugh. Their record as laughers is long and unsullied. A sense of humor has been an honored attribute in the town since old Moses Cleaveland drew the first big guffaw from his followers by heading up the wrong river, and it has served them in good stead through the years, enabling them to meet all sorts of harrowing situations with the equanimity that is possible only when humor is present to balance pain.

The world knows Charles Farrar Browne only for his stories about Artemus Ward and the amusing lectures that he gave in a later period of his career, but Cleveland was privileged to have Browne inject his sparkling-and, often, devastating-wit into every phase of the community’s life in his capacity as a forerunner of the modern-day columnist.

Browne apparently came by his wit naturally because his mother also was known for her fine sense of humor. The two, mother and son, were very close. He always addressed her as “Caroline.”

“Be respectful to your mother,” she advised him one day. “Remember what the Bible says.”

“Well, I expect I ought to,” he agreed, “but it is so different from the Plain Dealer, I don’t putter with it much… a man cannot serve two masters, and I’m a Democrat.” The Plain Dealer was an outspoken Democratic Party supporter.

Browne frequently showed his serious side, as he did, for example, in his story reporting a lecture on “The Law of Success” by Ralph Waldo Emerson on January 20, 1859, in Melodeon Hall under the sponsorship of the Cleveland Library Association, admission, twenty-five cents.

“He [Emerson] is a man of massive intellect, a great and profound thinker,” conceded Reporter Browne, “but… his lecture last night was rather a sleepy affair. For our part . . . we had quite as lief see a perpendicular coffin behind a lecture desk as Emerson. The one would amuse as much as the other.

“Mr. Emerson is a great scholar-full of book learning- but, like many other great scholars, he is impractical and visionary. Let mankind adopt his ideas (providing always that mankind can understand what his ideas are) and they would live a strange, weird life-the chaotic dream of a lunatic.”

It can be deduced readily from this that Browne was no respecter of great names and in his pieces he often walked close to the edge of irreverence. He was responsible one day for presenting in the Plain Dealer three stories whose authorship he ascribed to the “three tigers of the Cleveland press”- the editors of the Plain Dealer, the Herald, and the Leader– boldly using their by-lines over the stories.

Interestingly enough, Time magazine, in an article on the success of the Plain Dealer in 1965, described the current editor-publisher of the P.D., Tom Vail, as a “tiger,” indicating that at least one journalistic tradition in Cleveland lives on.

In each of the stories, Browne had the editor in question taking a position opposite to the one that Browne mew the editor really favored. For instance, the editor of the Plain Dealer, J. W. Gray, Browne’s boss, was a man who loved to dance, but in the story that the humorist wrote under his employer’s name, he had Gray denouncing dancing as an evil which “destroys more people than War, Pestilence and Famine.”

After three years on the Plain Dealer staff, where his salary had risen to ten or twelve dollars a week, Browne had gathered enough confidence to want to try the larger national scene. By 1860, his name was known all over the country thanks to the habit of American newspapers in those days of reprinting each other’s stories and editorials. Artemus Ward had become one of the favorites of editors in almost all American cities, and they eagerly searched each issue of the Plain Dealer for his pieces to reprint.

Vanity Fair magazine took a more direct approach to this popular product in 1859 and made an arrangement with Browne for him to mail his copy directly to them. They, in turn, would pay him at an agreed rate. This arrangement bolstered Browne’s confidence and pocketbook, of course, even if it did make Editor Gray of the Plain Dealer terribly unhappy when he found out about it.

The writer and the editor quarreled over the issue. Gray wanted Browne to reserve his talents exclusively for the Plain Dealer. Browne, in reply, offered to abide by such an agreement provided the newspaper would pay him one hundred dollars a month. Editor Gray’s stricken outcry caused sailboats far out on Lake Erie to tack suddenly into the wind and startled wild animals into a dash for cover as far away as Lakewood and Hardscrabble Comers.

The end of the Cleveland chapter in the life story of Artemus Ward came shortly thereafter, when the Plain Dealer published the following:

VALE

The undersigned closes his connection with the Plain Dealer with this evening’s issue. During the three years that he has contributed to these columns he has endeavored to impart a cheerful spirit to them. He believes it is far better to stay in the Sunshine while we may, inasmuch as the Shadow must of its own accord come only too soon. He cannot here, in fit terms, express his deep gratitude to the many including every member of the Press of Cleveland, who have so often manifested the most kindly feeling toward himself. But he can very sincerely say that their courtesy and kindness will never be forgotten.

The undersigned may be permitted to Hatter himself that he has some friends among the readers of newspapers.

Charles F. Brown

Editor Gray acknowledged the defection from his staff with a polite farewell that mayor may not have been sarcastic in part, but which certainly hinted that good men to fill the “local” job weren’t terribly hard to find.

“Our associate Mr. Brown has had a ‘louder call,’ as the Reverends would say, and goes to a larger city, where he can enlarge his sphere of usefulness. To do the Locals for a daily paper in a city like this is a drudgery, cramping to such a genius as his, and we cannot blame him for aspiring to a higher position. It is the lot of our Locals to rise in the world. Bouton built himself such a reputation while with us that he went to New York and is now City Editor of the Journal of Commerce. McLaren, another Local, is now preaching the gospel; and Brown is destined to become either a minister or an author, perhaps both. Our relations are now and always have been of the most agreeable kind, and we part with him with many regrets.”

Browne accepted a job on the staff of Vanity Fair in New York, and for two years, 1860 through 1862, he- or rather, Artemus Ward- achieved some of his best writing. He was more a national celebrity now than ever before, and the news that Abraham Lincoln was one of his most faithful readers did nothing to detract from his growing reputation.

Shortly after his arrival in New York, Browne had accepted some invitations to speak. He enjoyed the experience so much, and found it so remunerative that before long he was one of the regulars on the lecture circuit, and by 1863 he was lecturing full-time, having left the Vanity Fair staff. A collection of his pieces, Artemus Ward, His Book, was published and met with “tumultuous success,” selling forty thousand copies-a large sale for the day-and enjoyed as much acclaim in England as it did in the United States.

“It was a case,” analyzed Stephen Leacock, “of the meeting of extremes. Nothing could be further from the staid classical culture of England than the mind and thought of Artemus Ward; nothing further from the humor of Dickens and his imitators than what Artemus Ward brought from over the sea-irreverent burlesque and burlesque irreverence, Gargantuan exaggeration and the orthography of a printer’s delirium. But the English seem to have delighted in the sheer ‘cussedness’ of the new American humor… and they treated him not as a comic entertainer but as a comic genius.”

England, indeed, would be witness to the last brilliant flare of that genius. In 1866, while in London on his second English tour, the frail humorist became too weak and too ill to carry on. He died at Southampton the following March, 1867, a victim of tuberculosis. He was not yet thirty-three years old.

On his deathbed in a foreign land, the mind of Artemus Ward wandered back to Cleveland and the beginning of his success. He called for a pad and pencil and wrote:

“Some twelve years ago, I occupied the position (or the position occupied me) of city editor of a journal in Cleveland, Ohio. This journal– The Plain Dealer– was issued afternoons…”

He wrote nothing further, for it was at this precise point that Charles Farrar Browne– Artemus Ward, if you please– died. He had returned home, in a sense, with his very last thoughts.