Newspaper Page Text
( Honrnth*r 23, 1994
05 T FF Y by John Ryan Seawright
The Looking Glass: '
Orth Stein — Poet, Editor, Artist, Killer.
In May 1898, Orth Harper Stein left
Atlanta for New Orleans. He was 35 and
dying of TB He wanted to spend his
remaining time wnting short stories, but
he appeared to have saved no money out
of his income from The Looking Glass.
He soon found work at the Camp Street
offices of the New Orleans Times -
Democrat, writing, drawing and engrav-
ing. After a year he was assigned the
daily column “By the By,” an unsigned
2,000-word miscellany that appeared
daily.
Stein filled “By the By" with detailed
sketches of life in the city he quickly
came to love. Despite his grave illness
he roamed the city day and night and
nothing missed his eye. He also wrote
about medicine, science, literature and
politics. Stein wrote six columns a week
every week, exhibiting a encyclopedic
knowledge, lethal wit and acute eye and
ear in a clear, elegant prose style with
nothing of his contemporaries’ late-
Victorian grandiloquence to it. “By the
By” was quoted and plagiarized by
columnists wherever English was spoken
and read, but Orth Stein’s name never
appeared on a single column. In addi
tion to his daily column, he contributed
several long features to the paper every
week.
Inevitably his lungs began to fail. On
April 22, 190!, his friends telegraphed
his mother and sister in Indiana to come
quickly to New Orleans. They found Stein
at his typewriter in his room at the
Grunewald Hotel, his lungs hemorrhaging
Orth Stein died in his hotel room April 26,
1901. His body was returned to Lafayette,
Ind., and buried next to his father’s in the
city cemetery overlooking Purdue Univer
sity. Some unknown person has
paid for perpetual care for Orth
Stein’s grave, it remains carefully
tended today while those of his
sister and parents grow up in weeds
Stein’s work as both wnter and
artist was overwhelmingly anony
mous or pseudonymous, both in his
own publications and elsewhere
He used as many aliases as a short
story writer as he had as a check
forger He was gifted and prolific
but seemed to care nothing for
fame His work is available today
only in bound volumes of old
newspaper and stray reels of
microfilm scattered across the
continent. He made no lasting
contribution to poetry, art or
fiction, but he was one of the most
talented of a breed of journalists
that has disappeared from the
earth Stein was a unique creature
of America in the late 19th
century, the brilliant itinerant newspaper
man who could toss off a Latin epigram,
repair a steam press, bribe a jail guard for an
interview, quote Oscar Wilde, Tesla, John
Stuart Mill or Ecclesiastes as the situation
demanded and roll into a strange town with
nothing but a change of clothes and a few
felony convictions and within months be
publishing a newspaper backed by powerful
local businessmen and politicians
Stein railed against pretense, snob
bery, the military, organized religion and
authority in almost any form, but his was
an aesthete’s rebellion. Stein mistrusted
and ridiculed the reform and revolution
ary movements of his day, the Populists,
Socialists, anarchists and Fenians.
Though he spoke out vehemently against
lynching and racial exploitation he
loathed African-Americans. He sympa
thized with the plight of prostitutes and
delighted in the boldness of the "new
women” of his day but did not support
women’s suffrage Stein was probably the
Orth H. 5t«in ^ f
with beggars and worked ceaselessly for
their forced removal from Atlanta
Stein was a bourgeois bohemian who
loved the wicked world that flourished in
the shadow of Victorian capitalism, but
needed that vast bulwark of respectability
and property kept intact to cast the twilight
where his beloved saloons and brothels and
opium dens could flourish.
The Atlanta Journal wrote of him after
his death:
His fondness for worldly things probably
prevented him from attaining eminence m a
journalistic way His writings were at all times
m the most polished English, facile,
logical ... Orth Stem was not a southern
gentleman. But something m his nature
did not permit any man to question his
courage
In concluding this senes of
articles 1 wish once again to thank
Mr. Robert C. Knebel of Lafayette,
Ind., for generously sharing his files
with me. His Poets, Painters, Paupers,
Fools: Indiana's Stem Family (Purdue
University Press, 1990) provided me
with most of my information about
Stein’s life before 1890 and after
1898 The research on Stein’s
Georgia career is my own
The following are the final two
verses of a poem of Orth Stein’s
composed near the end of his life:
What delicate wraith of passion,
What ghost of the yesteryears —
Twas something as sweet as kisses,
Something as sad as tears
only Georgia editor of his day who openly
opposed capital punishment.
He delighted in ridiculing the Georgia
militia and the military pretensions of the
state’s ruling class The Looking Glass and its
political opposite number, the People's Party
Paper, stood alone among Georgia newspa
pers opposing the Spanish-American War.
Stein sided with the victims of corrupt
jx>licemen and judges bur was disgusted
Rising only to vanish,
Baffling — yet half-reveled,
As a pang of the flesh may tell us
Where a wound has long since healed
Next Week; The One-Eyed Socialist
Preacher and The Killer Who Swapped
Souls With a Dog: Atlanta’s Osborne
Brothers
©1994, John Ryan Seawright
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