New York City, New York State, United States

Finding Horace Greeley

August 3, 2018

Remembering Crazy Politics and Journalists Honored with Statues

Horace Greeley Square, New York City. Photo credit: L. Tripoli.

Visitors standing before the statue of Horace Greeley in Greeley Square Park at W. 32 Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue might not know that, in addition to being the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, a Congressional representative (however briefly), a failed presidential candidate supported by the Democrats, and a summertime resident of Chappaqua, N.Y. (now home to one former president and one failed Democratic presidential candidate), he was also a wannabe vegetarian.

Horace Greeley the Herbivore, Sort Of

“We, the American people eat a great deal too much animal food,” Greeley told the New-York Vegetarian Society at its inaugural Vegetarian Festival in 1853. He longed for a “vegetarian eating-house” but conceded that he remained a meat eater because animal flesh was what was typically offered and “tables frequently contain nothing beside that is fit for the food of man.” Apparently, vegetables, as prepared at the time, did not please his palate. See Vegetarian Festival, New York Times, Sept 5, 1853, at 1.

Greeley the National Joke

Greeley, who lived from 1811—1872, also was a founder of the Republican Party but somehow found himself running as the presidential candidate of a splinter party—the Liberal Republicans—in 1872. He also had the support of the Democratic Party. He lost the popular vote against incumbent Ulysses S Grant and died in Tarrytown, N.Y. just a few weeks after the election (and before the electoral college had met). The New York Times referred to his presidential race as a national joke. The End of a Joke, New York Times, Nov. 10, 1872, at 4.

“When the name of HORACE GREELEY was presented by the Cincinnati Convention in May last as a candidate for the Presidency it was regarded by the whole country as a huge joke,” the Times wrote.

Those were, of course, tumultuous times. The nation had survived the civil war, the freeing of slaves, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the beginning of reconstruction, and the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson after he removed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from office.

Greeley’s Wife Dies a Week Before the Election

Mary Cheney Greeley, Horace’s wife who he had married in 1836, died just a week before the election. It is hard to imagine the illness of a potential First Lady being treated so meagerly today. In a one-paragraph piece on her illness titled Mrs. Horace Greeley Dying, the New York Times reported on Oct. 25, 1872 that she was staying at 323 West 57th Street as “her death has been slowly and surely approaching.” The diagnosis: consumption (a so-called wasting disease typically associated with tuberculosis) combined with dropsy (which seems to be a sort of water retention problem). The presidential candidate and their daughters were with her. Greeley himself would not live to see the end of November. His was a sad end to an impressive career as a journalist and influencer.