Even though work consumed most of Pulitzer’s waking hours, he found time for socializing, particularly with political New Yorkers. One evening, shortly after taking over the World, he reminisced about the campaign of 1876 with the wealthy Democrat William C. Whitney at a dinner of Democrats. Despite their shared political convictions, Pulitzer stood out as an odd duck among the well-heeled dinner guests. “Sharp-faced with bushy hair and scraggy whiskers, an ill-fitting dress suit too large for him, antagonizing people at dinner,” Whitney wrote, describing Pulitzer to his wife, who was away. Another night, Pulitzer joined Watterson at Delmonico’s for a dinner promoting the Louisville Exposition. By June, Pulitzer was a member of the Manhattan Club, an almost exclusively Democratic society.
Pulitzer even found time and, more remarkably, had enough interest, to take a lunchtime river cruise in Jay Gould’s new yacht, along with the Sun’s editor Dana and William Dorsheimer, a Democrat starting his term in Congress. That Pulitzer sought the company of these two guests was understandable. He had known both for almost a decade and shared their political beliefs. But his willingness to enjoy Gould’s yacht, food, drink, and company betrayed a dichotomy in Pulitzer that widened as he accumulated wealth. He wanted to be accepted by the elite while making a living trashing them in his paper.
Pulitzer may have taunted the wealthy, attacked their political power, and criticized their sense of entitlement, but he planned to be among them. A few weeks after his lunch with Gould, the World printed a list of New York’s millionaires. “We find the names of only three or four newspaper publishers in the magnificent array,” Pulitzer wrote. “By this time next year, as things are going, the list will be beautified with the names of at least a half-dozen journalists. We could name them now, but modesty forbids.”
In August, Pulitzer dashed out to Ohio in support of a Democrat, Judge Hoadly, who was a candidate for governor. The campaign had already deteriorated into a raucous, dirty, knockdown fight after a convention that one newspaper reporter said was more akin to a bullfight than a political meeting. Sitting in the smoking car from Urbana to Columbus, Pulitzer struck up a conversation with a reporter for McLean’s Cincinnati Enquirer, which strongly opposed Hoadly.
“This is a perfect hell you’ve been raising,” Pulitzer said.
“Just a trifle that I couldn’t well help,” replied the reporter.
Pulitzer was unconvinced and said he thought the Enquirer’s publisher was seeking revenge against Hoadly, who was involved with a competing paper.
“Well, that’s only natural,” the reporter said. “You don’t publish a newspaper as a matter of sentiment; you publish it to make money.”
“Now, I do publish a newspaper as a matter of sentiment—two of them,” replied Pulitzer. “My paper in New York City is straight-out Democratic, because in that city I am possessed of the backing of strong Democratic sentiment. My paper in St. Louis is independent, because in that city I have a strong independent sentiment.”
The two then shared a number of confidences about the campaign, including Hoadly’s belief that his election to governor would make him a leading contender for president the following year. “Bah,” said Pulitzer, “the Democratic party will not go to Ohio to find its next candidate, and if it should, nobody need fear that it would select Hoadly.”
When the train reached its destination, Pulitzer was met by one of the state’s leading Democrats. Pulitzer told him of the conversation on the train. The politician assured Pulitzer that the reporter could be trusted to keep it to himself. None of them, however, took account of the fact that the man in the seat behind them worked for the New York Times, which eagerly published a transcript, giving Pulitzer a taste of public embarrassment of the kind he usually dished out.
By the end of August 1883, with the World’s circulation twice what it had been before he bought the paper, Pulitzer felt sufficiently comfortable to leave New York for almost a month. Henry Villard, one of the nation’s most prominent railroad men, had just completed the first northern transcontinental railroad. To do so, he had overstretched his financial resources, and he was deep in debt. Desperate to drum up business for his new line, Villard contrived a huge international celebration. He invited government officials, politicians, foreign dignitaries, and editors from leading newspapers on a cross-country train ride to witness the driving of the last spike. The antirailroad, antimonopolist, and anticorporate Pulitzer accepted the invitation.
On August 28, Villard’s private trains began leaving New York. The engines pulled Wagner sleeping cars, beautifully appointed with curtains, leather seats, carpeting, and china spittoons, and configured like long drawing rooms with tables. By the time the two trains reached Chicago, the excursion party had grown to four trains with more than 300 guests including the former president Ulysses Grant. The caravan made stops for parades and banquets. In Bismarck, the delegation laid the cornerstone of the state capitol and listened to a speech by Sitting Bull, who had been released from captivity for the event. On September 8, the trains joined up with ones coming from the West in the valley of Little Blackfoot Creek, about sixty miles from Helena, Montana.
Pulitzer was surprised to find that Villard had built a pavilion, a bandstand, and promenades in this abandoned stretch. Finding a seat, Pulitzer watched as the men rapidly laid the last 1,000 feet of track. The man who had driven in the first spike on the opening of the road came forward to nail the last as the sun began to set behind the mountains. Villard spent $300,000 for the affair but he couldn’t have bought better press coverage. Newspapers across the country and in Europe played up the event—that was, all except the World, which churlishly said the event was “a comparatively unimportant incident in railroad history.”
During Pulitzer’s absence from New York, his detractors took the opportunity to spread a rumor that the World was still owned by Gould, even though Pulitzer had run a front-page two-column interview with Gould to publicize the change of ownership. The rumor had sufficient credibility, supported by Pulitzer’s willingness to float around New York waters with Gould in the latter’s yacht, that Cockerill was forced to issue a public statement. Neither Gould nor his son, said Cockerill, “nor any other human being connected with any monopoly or corporation own directly or indirectly one dollar’s worth of interest in the World or have any more to do with its management than the Emperor of China.” Despite his best efforts the rumors persisted. The Brooklyn Eagle, for instance, remarked, Pulitzer “claims that Mr. Gould has nothing to do with the paper, but the claim is simply the rankest sort of nonsense, Mr. Gould still owns the paper.”
The rumors were only a nuisance. When he returned from the West, Pulitzer was greeted by proof positive of his success. His competitors had flinched and were cutting their price. The Tribune went from four to three cents, the Times from four to two, and the Herald from three to two. Gloating, Pulitzer proclaimed, “Another victory for the World.”
As the World’s circulation rose each week, Pulitzer sought to use his newfound political leverage to help bring Democrats back to power. From the start he made no pretenses about his plans. “I want to talk to a nation, not to a select committee,” he said. Within days of buying the paper, Pulitzer had made his political aims clear and so specific that they formed a ten-point list consisting of only thirty-five words. The first five goals were to tax luxuries, inheritances, large incomes, monopolies, and corporations. The remaining goals were to eliminate protective tariffs, reform the civil service, and punish corrupt government officials and those who bought votes, as well as employers who coerced their employees during elections.
When he returned from his western junket, Pulitzer worked to unite New York’s Democrats. In 1880, the party had failed to win the White House when it lost the state by a few thousand votes. Then, Pulitzer had been a bystander. Now that he was in a position of influence in the state, he was determined that 1884 would be different. On September 24, he joined Dana at a rally of Democrats at Cooper Union. With a displ
ay of fireworks and a brass band, the Democrats pledged themselves to unity in hopes of ending their quarter-century exile from the White House. Dana, age sixty-four, who was the dean of New York editors, did not object to sharing a stage with his young rival. In May, he had been one of the few publishers in New York to comment favorably on the sale of the World, reminding readers that Pulitzer had once been his protégé.
Weeks later, as the Democrats began their usual intra-party bickering, Pulitzer met with the leaders. It seemed to him as if all Democrats in New York were intent on losing the election: he was astonished by the fractious debate on the eve of the voting. One of the veteran party members asked Pulitzer if he knew anything about New York politics.
Pulitzer conceded that his experience was limited to Missouri and other midwestern states but added sarcastically that the longer he lived in New York the less able he was to divine the objectives of the city’s politicians.
Pulitzer had shed none of his animus toward the Republican Party, which he was convinced was completely under the thumb of robber barons, monopolies, and corporate interests. “These people seem to have an idea that they are superior people—a sort of upper ruling class, and have a right through the power of their money to rule in this country as the upper classes rule in Europe,” he said. “But the millions are more powerful than the millionaires.”
In November, Pulitzer was so confident of his paper’s success that he taunted his rivals by publishing notarized statements of its circulation. The World’s average circulation was now 45,000 copies a day. In six months, he had tripled the circulation and forced his rivals to cut their prices. If he continued at this rate, the previously moribund World would be the equal of any newspaper on Park Row within the next six months. If not stopped, it would eclipse them all.
At Albert’s Morning Journal, there was also cause to celebrate. The circulation of his paper had hit 80,000. One year earlier, most New Yorkers had never heard the name Pulitzer. Now the two most talked-about newspapers belonged to the brothers. For Albert, every upward tick in circulation meant more money. For Joseph, it brought money and political power.
Chapter Seventeen
KINGMAKER
Despite his triumphant seven months at the helm of the World, Pulitzer approached the end of 1883 on a depressing note. Kate became sick. The family immediately left New York for warm weather and rest in Cuba. With his health phobias, Joseph was not going to take any chances. But his worst fears materialized, though not with Kate. She recovered. Rather, a few months later, it was his daughter, Katherine Ethel, who fell ill with pneumonia. Katherine died at six in the morning on Friday, May 9, 1884, the eve of Pulitzer’s one-year anniversary with the World.
In composing the death notice, her parents calculated her age. She was two years, eight months, and ten days old. For Joseph, who had lost all but one of his siblings, the death was what he expected of childhood. Kate, on the other hand, was unprepared. She had never experienced the grief of watching a child in the family die. On Sunday, friends gathered at the Pulitzers’ Gramercy Park residence for a quiet funeral service.
Characteristically, Pulitzer made immediate plans to travel, reserving a cabin on a ship to Europe. But he soon rejected any foreign destination. It was an election year, the most promising for Democrats in a generation. Instead, Pulitzer booked rooms at the Curtis Hotel in Lenox, Massachusetts, a small New England town a few hours north of New York that had recently been discovered by the city’s wealthy seeking relief from the summer heat. By the time he installed Ralph, now five years old, Lucille, three, and their maid in Lenox, Kate was pregnant with their fourth child.
Along with the summer’s heat came the political conventions. The Republicans selected as their nominee James Blaine, a former House Speaker, U.S. senator from Maine, and secretary of state. It was a poor choice because Blaine had an odor of corruption dating back to suspicious relationships with several major railroads in the 1870s. Many Republicans, particularly the reform-minded ones, were uncomfortable with their party’s choice.
As the convention broke up, a reporter for the World caught up with one of the disgruntled delegates. At age twenty-five, delegate Theodore Roosevelt was a rising political figure in New York. “I am going cattle-ranching in Dakota for the remainder of the summer and part of the fall,” he snapped. The reporter persisted: would he support Blaine? “That question I decline to answer. It is a subject that I do not care to talk about.” But, after some reflection at his ranch, a calmer Roosevelt announced that, yes, he would vote for Blaine.
A Republican who portrayed himself as a reformer but was supporting Blaine was too tempting a target for Pulitzer to ignore. When Roosevelt first attracted notice as a municipal reformer in the legislature, Pulitzer had been favorably impressed, even though the man was a Republican. But he concluded that Roosevelt had gone soft in his pursuit of corruption in return for advancement in his party’s ranks. “It is not surprising that young Mr. Roosevelt should prefer to offend honesty rather than to displease the machine. He is of the finical dancing-master school of reform, whose disciples are the most useful tools of the political managers,” wrote Pulitzer. “We denounced young Mr. Roosevelt as a reform fraud and a Jack-in-the-box politician who disappears whenever his boss applies a gentle pressure to his aspiring head,” he said. “In short, we have discovered that young Mr. Roosevelt is a humbug who only masquerades as a reformer while in reality is one of the most subservient of machine politicians.”
Roosevelt was a victim of Pulitzer’s stubborn, unbending insistence on principle over compromise or expediency. This was an easy stance for the nation’s newest and most prominent newspaper publisher to take. His measure of accomplishment was a blistering editorial that excited partisans and attracted readers. But for an ambitious politician like Roosevelt, success demanded results, and these required both political compromise and electoral success.
Had Pulitzer understood the necessity of compromise, he might have forged an alliance with Roosevelt that would have accelerated the political change they both sought. Instead, the editorial shot across Roosevelt’s bow became the first of many. None of Pulitzer’s attacks would be ignored by Roosevelt, who never forgave or forgot an affront. The two men were so pigheaded that they failed to see their common interest.
Although Blaine had the crucial support of young Theodore Roosevelt in New York, he lacked that of Roscoe Conkling, who still commanded a considerable following. But the former U.S. senator was working as Pulitzer’s attorney, fighting the many libel suits brought against the audacious World; also he was in no mood to forgive Blaine for their decades-long feud in Congress. “I have given up criminal law,” Conkling said when asked if he would endorse Blaine. Instead, he worked secretly with Pulitzer to undermine Blaine by writing a series of critical columns for the World, under the pen name “Stalwart.”
Pulitzer could hardly restrain his optimism about his party’s prospects. He told his readers that Blaine was “the embodiment of corruption in legislation, demagogism in politics and cupidity in affairs.” In 1884, unlike 1880, Pulitzer had no trouble backing a candidate. Two years earlier he had cast his lot with Grover Cleveland, the rotund governor of New York, who had a well-deserved reputation for integrity. Then, however, Pulitzer was speaking only to a modest midwestern audience from his editorial pulpit at the Post-Dispatch. Now he had the World and stood in the center of the most important electoral field of battle. “New York,” he said, “again becomes the battleground for the presidency.” In 1880, Republicans had staved off defeat in the presidential election by only 5,517 votes in New York. Pulitzer now commanded at least that many votes, if not more.
With each passing day the World’s circulation rose. One morning, an observer took an informal census of newspaper preferences on the Fourth Avenue streetcar. Three passengers were reading the Herald, four the Sun, and five the World. Only the Times and Albert’s Journal had more readers. Veterans of the business were astonished by the World’s
growth. “It cannot be expected to go on forever gaining at the gait which it has been following during the past few months,” claimed the trade publication The Journalist. But it did.
By midsummer 1884, the World was selling 60,000 copies on weekdays and 100,000 on Sundays, closing in on all the leading newspapers. Advertising was booming also. “A year ago the World could hardly get advertising at any price,” reported The Journalist. “It now charges from twenty-five to thirty-five cents a line, and has as much advertising as it can conveniently handle on Sunday.”
Nothing his competitors tried seemed to slow his paper’s growth. The Herald even resorted to taking out full-page advertisements in the World. When it cut its price to that of the World, the Herald compounded its woes by also trimming the commission it paid to wholesalers. One wholesaler decided to order 3,000 copies of the World instead of the Herald for his customers. “There was no complaint, and the World gained 3,000 copies, and the Herald lost them,” recalled the president of the news dealers association. “I daresay the World kept many of them.”
In July, sitting with the press in Chicago’s Exposition Building, Pulitzer watched the Democrats pick their candidate. Pulitzer did all he could to sway the convention to Cleveland. “When a blathering ward politician objects to Cleveland because he is ‘more of a Reformer than a Democrat’ he furnishes the best argument in favor of Cleveland’s nomination and election,” Pulitzer wrote in a long stream of editorials. After a bruising fight, Cleveland won the nomination. If Pulitzer’s editorials were little noticed by the delegates, the efforts convinced Cleveland that in the coming election he had an ally upon whom he could depend.
Pulitzer Page 27
