Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Now, with Pulitzer out of town and Cockerill in charge, Slayback began to berate the paper to anyone who would listen. One night at the end of September, Slayback went on a verbal rampage against Cockerill and the paper in the reception room of the Elks club, of which Cockerill was the president. Slayback accused Cockerill of being a blackmailer, a term then considered provocation for a duel. Cockerill gently persuaded Slayback to retire to the library, where the two held an extended conversation. When it was concluded, they headed off to drink in the bar, apparently having put their differences aside.

  But a dozen days later, Slayback resumed sniping at Cockerill and referred to the paper as a “blackmailing sheet.” The renewed attack prompted Cockerill to dig out and print the old insulting card, whose publication Pulitzer had prevented. Only an hour after the edition hit the street, the Post-Dispatch’s city editor looked up from his desk to see Slayback charging through the newsroom toward Cockerill’s office in the company of William Clopton, another lawyer.

  In his office, Cockerill was meeting with the business manager and the composing room foreman. His pistol lay on the desk, where he had placed it in anticipation of putting it into his coat when he left for home in a few minutes. Slayback threw open the door and stepped in, leaving Clopton in the hall. Then, as the men watched, Slayback took out a revolver.

  “Well, I’m here, sir,” Slayback said. Then, spotting Cockerill’s weapon on the desk, he asked, “Is that for me?”

  “No, it’s for me to use only to defend myself,” replied Cockerill.

  “You are prepared to draw, then draw,” Slayback said.

  By this time Clopton had managed to gain entrance to the room and found that the confrontation had developed into a physical struggle between the men. Cockerill pulled the trigger of his gun as Clopton rushed to disarm him. The single shot met its target, traversing both of Slayback’s lungs. He slumped to the floor with blood frothing at his mouth. In a moment, Slayback was dead.

  When word spread through town that Cockerill had killed Slayback, a mob of detractors of the Post-Dispatch gathered in front of its building. The crowd grew angry and might have stormed the building had the police not held the people back. Meanwhile, Cockerill stole away to the Lindell Hotel. Pulitzer’s old friend Charles Johnson, who had defended Pulitzer when he shot Augustine, was summoned. In Johnson’s company, Cockerill surrendered to the police that night.

  News of the shooting was reported across the country. Reporters found Pulitzer in New York. He strongly defended Cockerill, calling him “one of the quietest persons you ever knew.” Even though he admitted he did not know that his editor packed a pistol, Pulitzer said Cockerill must have done so solely for self-defense. He immediately caught a train back to St. Louis.

  Upon arriving in St. Louis, Pulitzer went directly to Cockerill’s cell and assured his editor that he would stand by him. In the paper’s office, Pulitzer scrawled a short editorial, in his large, loopy handwriting, asking readers to withhold judgment until the police and the courts had completed their work. It was doubtful that any official report would please both sides. The only witnesses to the shooting each had a motive to lie. Nor was the prosecutor likely to be considered objective, since the Post-Dispatch had supported his election.

  Slayback’s friend Clopton told the police the victim had been unarmed. The Post-Dispatch employees in the room stood by their claim that he had been armed. The gun found on Slayback seemed to corroborate Cockerill’s claim of self-defense, but some people believed the gun had been planted. In fact, years later a Post-Dispatch employee confessed that he had planted it, to help Cockerill’s plea of self-defense. But whether St. Louisans believed the killing was self-defense or murder depended less on evidence and more on their attitude toward the paper. Few sat on the fence, and those who were vindictive were vocal. “If this closes the career of that scandalous sheet it will be a life well spent,” one woman wrote to her son.

  On October 18, Pulitzer and McCullagh, the Globe-Democrat editor who had once been Cockerill’s boss, persuaded a judge to release Cockerill on $10,000 bail. A grand jury was convened to determine if Cockerill would be indicted for murder. Pulitzer knew that more than Cockerill’s fate hung in the balance. His enemies, particularly those at the Missouri Republican, struck at him and the Post-Dispatch, claiming that Slayback’s death was a direct result of his sensational journalism. For once, it seemed, Hyde had the upper hand. The Post-Dispatch’s average daily circulation fell by 2,015, and several national publications joined the chorus of critics. Harper’s Weekly, for instance, said the killing was “a direct result of personal journalism.”

  Pulitzer brushed off the Republican’s daily attacks and offered a spirited defense of Cockerill in the Post-Dispatch. He accepted responsibility for the content of the paper leading up to the shooting and wrote that Cockerill’s conduct—in print, not with the gun—had been justified by Slayback’s provocation.

  But, watching the circulation plummet, Pulitzer knew he had to disassociate the paper from Cockerill. He turned to John Dillon for help. In the three years since they had parted company, Dillon had spent some time writing for the Globe-Democrat, had gone to work in Mexico, and had recently returned to St. Louis to take a job with the weekly Spectator. Pulitzer now asked him to take over Cockerill’s job. Dillon immediately accepted the offer, and within days his restrained, refined prose calmed the editorial page. Any mention of Broadhead’s candidacy disappeared from the page.

  As part of this restoration, Pulitzer invited his actor friend John McCullough to put on a benefit performance of Julius Caesar at the Mercantile Library for the Slayback family. Boxes for the show were auctioned off. Kate bought one for $1,000, although most sold for less than $100. Notably absent were Pulitzer’s critics at the Republican, who had so ferociously attacked him. In their anger, none of Pulitzer’s enemies recognized that the victim had been a friend of his also. Years later, long after Pulitzer was no longer in St. Louis, he provided a job on the paper for Slayback’s daughter.

  In the end, the grand jury declined to indict Cokerill, convinced that Slayback had provoked the shooting by entering the office with a weapon. Pulitzer and the Post-Dispatch had survived the crisis but St. Louis had become even less hospitable to him and his family. Once again, Pulitzer left for New York.

  In the early morning hours of November 16, 1882, a few days after Joseph reached New York City, Albert and his newly assembled staff left their offices to get the first copies of The Morning Journal as it came off the New York Tribune’s presses. The men all returned to their desks to study their first effort and, as all journalists do, mark typos.

  One of the men suggested “something wet” to mark the occasion, and Albert sent the office boy out to procure some bottles. Upon his return, the editors and reporters quaffed beer and toasted the paper’s birth. Albert, however, chose Apollinaris water instead. There was no food, not even “beef an,” the famous ten-cent plate of corned beef and beans from nearby Hitchcock’s. “So,” noted one of the editors, “the Journal was baptized with Apollinaris and beer.”

  A few hours later, New Yorkers sampled The Morning Journal. Readers who couldn’t find the time to wade through the daily papers, oversize canvases of dull unbroken type, found the Journal a relief. For only a penny—a third or a fourth of the cost of other papers—readers could have their fill of short news items written in a light, breezy style. Women in particular were offered, at last, a newspaper that clearly had their interests in mind. The paper had detailed reports of weddings and balls, romantic news such as the first loves of famous men, and lots of gossipy notices. Albert, one Park Row veteran recalled, “was the first New York editor to realize the fact that shop-girls and poor clerks are interested in the daily lives of the millionaire class. He turned to their ‘doings’ and paved the way for the new journalism that followed.” The paper was soon nicknamed the “chambermaid’s delight.” From the very first appearance of the Journal, Albert found readers. It was t
he talk of the town.

  From his Manhattan hotel room Joseph enviously witnessed his brother’s success.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE GREAT THEATER

  On April 7, 1883, Jay Gould took his family and friends by private railcar to Philadelphia for the launching of his new yacht, Atalanta, named after the huntress of Greek mythology. Built at a cost of $140,000, the yacht was a floating palace with gold-edged curtains, oriental rugs, and a built-in piano. But as Gould participated in the festivities of the day, he was beset with worries. The country was in the midst of a business downturn, his nerves were frayed, and the constant public attacks on him had begun to hit home. For the first time, he was considering retirement. At the very least, it was time to lighten his load.

  He decided to rid himself of the burdensome New York World. It was a Democratic paper and he was a Republican. But perhaps an even greater sin in the eyes of a railroad and industrial baron was that it had never made a dime since he acquired it four years earlier. “I never cared anything about the World,” Gould said. The World had an anemic circulation of 15,000 and was losing money every week.

  In January, Gould had come close to disposing of the paper to John McLean, the publisher of the Cincinnati Enquirer, but McLean had been unwilling to meet the $385,000 price. There was only one man trolling for a New York paper for whom price did not seem to be a consideration. “As Joseph has more stamps than the rest of us, I might say the only one with stamps,” said McLean when his bid failed, “I suspect he will get it ultimately.”

  On the day Gould watched his new yacht slip into the water, Pulitzer was riding a train to New York. The Pulitzer family had just concluded the stay of several months in the South, undertaken out of concern for Ralph’s asthma. Joseph and Kate had given up on St. Louis and were looking for a place to buy or rent in New York City. The Post-Dispatch practically ran itself. But to be sure that it remained on track, Pulitzer received daily preprinted one-page reports that showed him at a glance all the essential information, such as circulation, advertising, expenses, and the times when the presses started and ended their runs. He was forever asking the men who managed the business side of his operations to be brief in responding to his ceaseless queries. In his words, he wanted the information in “a nutshell.”

  On the way north, Joseph dropped Kate and the children off in Washington for a stay with her family. He pushed on to New York. If the intelligence he had learned from his friend William H. Smith, director of the Associated Press, was sound and if he played his hand deftly, the World could be his. The press was reporting that Gould would leave any day for the West in the company of tycoon Russell Sage. Pulitzer would have to work fast.

  He obtained a meeting with Gould at his Western Union office, a few blocks from Park Row. As the two sat facing each other, it was clear there wasn’t much to negotiate. For Gould, who had once stacked $53 million in stock certificates on his desk and who lived in a forty-room Gothic mansion, selling the World was a Lilliputian deal. True, owning the paper had become an irritation, and Pulitzer was a willing purchaser. But Gould could have easily closed the World without making a dent in his petty cash. He wasn’t going to grant any favors to a man who made a sport of pillorying him. From a negotiating perspective, Gould’s uninterest trumped Pulitzer’s desire.

  This purchase, unlike that of the Staats-Zeitung or the Dispatch, was no fire sale. The negotiations dragged on for a couple of weeks over two issues. Gould wanted to retain a small ownership share for his son and wanted the current editor to keep his job. In the end, Gould conceded on both points and Pulitzer met his price of $346,000. The sum, according to Gould, represented the amount he had paid for the paper and the losses incurred during his four years of ownership.

  Pulitzer did not have that much cash. If he sold the Post-Dispatch, he would be trading a moneymaker for, in his own words, a “mummified corpse of the once bright and lively New York World.” His craving for the World was so intense that he would take a loan from Gould, a man whom he deemed “one of the most sinister figures that have ever flitted bat-like across the vision of the American people.”

  On April 28, Pulitzer drew up the sales contract in his own hand, with the advice and counsel of the former U.S. senator Roscoe Conkling, whom Pulitzer had befriended since Conkling had fallen out of favor with the Republican Party and opened a law practice. To take possession of the World, Pulitzer would give Gould a down payment of $34,600, and Gould would finance the remainder at a 5 percent interest rate. Under the terms of the loan, Pulitzer would pay $79,200 in 1884; $121,100 in 1885; and $121,100 in 1886, as well as the interest on the outstanding balance, which could amount to $33,730. In addition, Pulitzer promised to rent for a decade the Park Row building housing the World, for $13,560 a year. Signing the contract put Pulitzer nearly $500,000 in debt. Less than five years after spending his last few thousand dollars to buy the bankrupt Dispatch, he was betting he could repeat his success on a far grander scale.

  The stakes were high. The Post-Dispatch, which had recovered from its slump after Slayback’s murder, looked as though it would generate profits of $120,000 to $150,000 in 1883. But the World was losing thousands of dollars each month. If New York didn’t take to his so-called western journalism, Pulitzer would be ruined.

  He confessed his anxiety to Kate, who had installed herself and the children in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Five years with Joseph had convinced her that it was no use trying to restrain his ambition. He was, as he had promised in his wedding-eve letters, driven by an insatiable need to be occupied, to have meaningful work, to keep moving. On the other hand, Kate had witnessed his talent. She had, after all, accompanied him to St. Louis to spend their last dime on a bankrupt paper. She believed in him and urged him on, even if it meant risking everything they had.

  Word of the pending sale began to leak out. It was hard to keep it a secret, with Cockerill shuttling between New York and St. Louis and the Post-Dispatch business manager joining Pulitzer in New York. On May 6, the rival Globe-Democrat confirmed that Pulitzer had concluded the deal.

  On May 9, the day before Gould transferred the World to him, Pulitzer proposed to his brother that they consolidate their papers into a new one, to be called the World-Journal. Albert’s seven-month-old Journal had three times the circulation of the World and was acquiring thousands of new subscribers each month. If Albert agreed to the merger, Joseph promised him a profit of no less than $100,000 a year.

  “That is a good deal of money,” Albert said. “I shall be perfectly satisfied if I can even make a fifth of that out of the Journal.”

  “You needn’t come to the office at all, if you like you can stay at home in bed all day long,” continued Joseph, who could never brook an equal in the office.

  In hoping to combine the papers, Joseph was following the game plan he had used in St. Louis when he had merged his new paper there with Dillon’s Post. But this situation was different: Albert was making money on his own, lots of it, and his paper was not threatened by Joseph. He declined the invitation.

  “Don’t be so cock-sure of your success,” Joseph snapped. “It is the men you have got and who get the paper out every night for you that are making it what it is. When they are gone what will you do?”

  That night, Albert confronted this question. He discovered that his managing editor, E. C. Hancock, had resigned, his lead columnist had vanished, and his editorial writer had called in sick. “I did not lose a moment, jumped into a car as I was determined to get at the truth, rode to his house, obtained admission after some difficulty and soon learned that my surmise was true—my whole staff, my three most valuable men whom I had trained with such pains since the first issue of the Morning Journal, had gone over in the dead of night to a rival newspaper! This blow was intended to kill me.”

  Of course, the rival paper was the World. In a city teeming with editorial talent, Joseph had chosen to raid his brother’s shop. He was seeking more than editors. Driven by jealousy, he want
ed to put his kid brother in his place.

  At the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a reporter caught up with Pulitzer, eager to learn his plans for the World. “I intend to make it a thorough American newspaper—to un-Anglicize it, so to speak,” Pulitzer said. He promised that no immediate personnel changes were in the works. “I have no intention to bring any new men to the city for the purpose of placing them on the editorial staff of the paper,” he said. Once again Pulitzer was resorting to his old habit of lying when talking to a reporter. He preferred to keep it quiet that Cockerill, with a reputation as an editor who shot complaining readers, was on his way to New York to run the World. “In the news sense and in other ways,” Pulitzer promised, “I shall, of course, in time make considerable changes in the paper.”

  In the company of his newly purloined editor from Albert’s paper, Pulitzer went to inspect his new property on the evening of May 10. The paper was housed in a fire-damaged building at the lower end of Park Row. The fabled block housed a dozen or more daily papers. This was the newspapers’ golden age, and Park Row was the richest vein. But in New York, unlike St. Louis, Pulitzer faced competition from sophisticated, well-funded, worldly publications. Aside from Albert’s Morning Journal, there were the immensely profitable New York Herald, run by James Gordon Bennett Jr.; Charles Dana’s Sun, still attracting more than 100,000 readers each day with its compact four-page format; the late Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, now ruled by Whitelaw Reid, a conservative Republican sheet serving the prosperous. If there was a turtle among these hares, it was the sober New York Times, slowly winning a loyal following.