Ambrose Bierce, Muckraker

It should surprise no one that Ambrose Bierce, a writer whose ironic short stories made a mockery of human delusions, vanities, and pretensions, was also a prolific journalist. He was a muckraking newspaper columnist with a particular interest in California politics and the agendas, interests, and backroom dealings at play in critical periods of Golden State history.

This side of his life and work is not nearly as well known as his tales. One of the more ambitious publishing projects of our time is Seattle-based Sarnath Press’s release of volumes of the collected essays and journalism of the Ohio-born iconoclast who vanished in Mexico in 1913 while covering the revolution there.

Under the editorial oversight of David E. Schultz and S.T. Joshi, best known for his voluminous work on H.P. Lovecraft, the publisher to date has put out 28 volumes of Bierce’s reportage. The most recent, covering the period from 1896-1897, is essential Bierce and serves as a useful introduction for those interested in his nonfiction.

The volume sheds light on the machinations with which industrialists assumed more power, extending their tentacles ever further through the American polity. Bierce’s columns for the San Francisco Examiner have an eerily timely ring. In those columns where he shares his thoughts on more abstract questions about education, meritocracy, and the uses and abuses of history, Bierce risks making himself a candidate for cancellation in this age of woke vengeance on the past.

The distaste for lying evident in stories such as “The Coup de Grâce,” where Union officers inflate the toll of enemy dead in their official reports for self-serving purposes, carries over into Bierce’s columns for the Examiner, which make up a bulk of this volume.

One of his favorite targets is Collis Huntington (1821-1900), the industrialist and lobbyist who did so much to expand the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railways in the later decades of the nineteenth century.

A typical Bierce headline from this period is that of a February 3, 1896, Examiner piece, “Huntington’s Methods Almost Beyond Belief.” It takes the robber baron to task for what Bierce sees as a pattern of lying, bullying, and manipulation during long-running arguments in Washington and California over funding for the expanding railroads and the degree of regulation to which the industry should be subject. What drove Bierce to pen this particular attack was Huntington’s alleged use of a fake telegram that quoted ex-senator A.P. Williams endorsing the funding bill that Huntington wanted politicians to pass, and promoting a general laissez-faire attitude toward the railroads.

“Mr. A.P. Williams, ex-United States Senator and merchant, said: ‘I am opposed to the Government taking possession of the Pacific roads and operating them. It could not operate them as economically as a company or an individual,’” states this telegram, which Bierce calls a forgery.

Long before people had to worry about AI deepfakes of presidents or military figures delivering bogus messages to the world, there was the danger of telegrams claiming to quote influential people without their knowledge or consent, or so Bierce would have his readers believe.

Many more attacks on Huntington over his outsized influence on the political process follow, and not just in the context of wrangling over funding for or regulation of the railroads. An Examiner piece dated May 13, 1896, details how Huntington has again tried to weasel his way into a dominant position in the debates and negotiations over a question of tremendous import to southern Californians: whether the port at San Pedro or the one at Santa Monica has more potential and deserves a greater investment.

In Bierce’s telling, the Southern Pacific firm was originally bullish on San Pedro, but when a rival built a road to that port, Huntington and his cohorts decided that Santa Monica was the name of the game.

“The water from there is guided by a high bluff, leaving the narrow strip between the base and the water, which the railroad promptly secured, building thereon a track leading to a great wharf the company constructed, thus effectually shutting out any competing line from ever reaching the water,” Bierce relates.

This is not the end of Huntington’s perfidy. He then turns his efforts toward belittling the value of the competing port at San Pedro, and uses his vast influence among the elected to kneecap that port’s growth. As Bierce describes them, the means by which he attempts this are utterly devious. A Rivers and Harbors bill before a House committee includes a $200,000 allocation for refurbishing the inner harbor at San Pedro, which at the time could accommodate only small ships, according to Bierce.

Huntington supports inserting provisions into the bill to set aside more than $3 million for contracts to expand the Santa Monica port. When members of Congress hear of this staggering sum, the outrage is so severe that they all but scuttle the bill and leave only $50,000 for San Pedro. Huntington then turns to friends in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Bierce relates, and, over the objections of California senators and representatives, gets the funding for Santa Monica reinserted.

In the end, Huntington does not quite get his way in the harbor battle, but the extent of his political influence is in evidence here and in many other controversies on which Bierce sets his sights. He is bitter about the reach of lobbyists and the role of money in public life, a problem as old as politics itself, and that couldn’t be more relevant today.

Other selections in this volume present the writer at his most thought-provoking. There is much here that will not go over well with the guardians of correct opinion in 2025. Sharing his thoughts on public education, Bierce takes a stance sharply at odds with the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, who believed that making working people more literate and cultivated would bring out the best of them and, as Arnold put it, help them “live more.” It is Bierce’s view that mass education serves only to distract laborers from labor and make them rue their lot in life. “It produces ‘industrial discontent’; and industrial discontent is the first visible symptom of national wreck,” Bierce writes. He also bluntly states his sympathy for men he argues have lost their foothold in the workforce as the new age of equal opportunity dawns.

Yet another provocation, for those who read this author through a presentist lens, is his argument in a column of January 19, 1896, that teaching young people about evils their nation has suffered in the past does not instill useful habits of thought or make them stronger, smarter, or even really more patriotic. If people hear such tales often enough, they just become background noise, Bierce argues.

In this connection, Bierce mentions, among other personages, Admiral Sir George Cockburn, that British scourge of America during the War of 1812 and an ancestor of the late radical journalist Alexander Cockburn.

“The American bad reputation of Generals Gage and Cornwallis and Admiral Cockburn (who, according to the school historians, used to while away the dragging hours of a seafaring life by going ashore and murdering sick Americans in their beds) has a long lease of life; but eventually, like other fragile flowers of the patriotic imagination, it will wither in the frost of indifference,” Bierce writes.

Such subject matter should mostly come out of the curriculum, Bierce argues, to make room for the imparting of more useful knowledge and skills. What he says here flies in the face of the present zeitgeist that is all about keeping historical injustices first and foremost in people’s minds, with a view to fostering and harnessing a sense of outrage and a will to try to make things right by getting back at people in the present who, in many if not all cases, had nothing to do with and in no way benefited from the crime in question.

One looks forward with much anticipation to the next volume of Bierce’s journalism.