Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  In the evening, tens of thousands of people crowded into Park Row. The newspapers affixed bulletin boards to the front of their buildings and displayed the latest election bulletins. Fights broke out between rival groups, but mostly the crowds sang songs and parodies and yelled insults. All sorts of rumors began circulating. On hearing one that Jay Gould was tampering with the votes, a crowd surged up Fifth Avenue chanting, “We’ll hang Jay Gould to a sour apple tree.” Fortunately for the financier, the police hid him in a hotel under guard.

  Finally, at week’s end, the results became clear. By a margin of 1,149 votes, out of 1,167,169 votes cast, New York fell to the Democrats, and the White House was theirs. A mere 575 voters had thrown the Republicans out of power. By a far more comfortable two-to-one margin, Pulitzer had defeated his Republican congressional opponent without lifting a finger for himself.

  Pulitzer basked in the glow of the election results. His chosen candidate was on the way to the White House. He himself had been redeemed from the ignominious election defeats he had suffered in St. Louis. But most important, Pulitzer’s gamble on the World had paid off. It was now the largest-circulating newspaper in the nation and widely credited with Cleveland’s election. “I should say, the election of Cleveland the first time was the most important achievement of the World,” Pulitzer wrote years later. “Blaine, Conkling and other politicians with whom I was personally acquainted all said the World elected Cleveland.”

  Pulitzer capped off his success with one final act before the year ended. He sat down and made out a check for $252,039 to Jay Gould. The amount represented the balance and interest remaining on the loan to purchase the World. Pulitzer paid off the loan two years before it was due. The World now belonged entirely to him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  RAISING LIBERTY

  Piled on Pulitzer’s desk each day was proof of his success beyond New York. Letters poured in from all parts of the country, filled with ideas on how to boost circulation in places such as Vermont and Nebraska and hopes that he would launch a newspaper in Washington or Chicago. Priests submitted sermons for republication, and ambitious writers begged Pulitzer to open the columns of his newspaper to articles on New Guinea, archaeology, and, in one case, a “light readable history of the Fenian movement [an Irish independence movement] for the last twenty years.” One pair of new parents told him they were christening their child “Joseph Pulitzer Conner,” and a steamboat builder asked permission to name his newest and fastest craft after Pulitzer.

  It was all too much. Pulitzer could not keep up with the deluge of mail and run the World at the same time, not to mention overseeing the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis. He flirted briefly with the idea of selling the St. Louis paper but decided its income was worth the headaches. Pulitzer knew he needed lieutenants. Finding the right ones was the problem. There was no lack of applicants. “It is approaching somewhat of a craze now in the newspaper circles of the metropolis to get on the World,” reported The Journalist. But Pulitzer had a string of bad luck. He hired one business manager away from the Herald, but the manager proceeded to discount advertising sold to big retailers, against Pulitzer’s wishes. The next hire turned out to have pocketed some of the advertising revenue at his previous job. Frustrated, Pulitzer telegraphed to James Scott, publisher of the Chicago Herald, for help. “I have always found it easier to get good writers than good reliable men for the business office,” Scott wrote back. “The business end of the World is an immense responsibility and no man of ordinary newspaper experience would be the equal to its management.”

  The news management of the paper was safely in Cockerill’s hands. But he was an exception—Pulitzer had such immense trust in Cockerill that he considered him his equal. For other positions of importance, even if Pulitzer managed to find a suitable man, he was ill suited to delegating work. He never really surrendered the responsibility, and he spent enormous amounts of time instructing, informing, and interfering with the person assigned to handle the work.

  His election to Congress and the public’s perception that Cleveland owed the presidency to Pulitzer compounded his misery by bringing an onslaught of demands for patronage jobs. Friends and strangers plied him with requests to become postmaster in Colorado, territorial governor of New Mexico, consul to Hawaii, or American minister to Berlin. The parade of supplicants thwarted the civil service commissioner’s attempts to meet with Pulitzer on legitimate government business. “I called at your office yesterday,” wrote the frustrated official, “but there was such a queue of persons at the desk that I could not wait my turn to send up my card without which formality access to you was denied me.” The new Congress would not convene until the end of the year, but already Pulitzer regretted accepting the nomination. After years of wanting to be an elected politician, he found that the appeal of office was fading.

  In early February 1885 Pulitzer traveled to Washington to see what awaited him when he assumed office. The Missouri delegation welcomed him and took him to the floor of the House of Representatives, where a debate droned on. After sitting for about an hour, Pulitzer went up to Representative James Burnes of Missouri and asked, “Have I got to stay in this place two years?”

  Politics seemed even less attractive when Pulitzer returned to New York. Cleveland was staying on the tenth floor of the Victoria Hotel. Job seekers, well-wishers, party officials, and cranks swarmed into the hotel. The police kept them in line while Cleveland’s secretary screened calling cards. Pulitzer arrived at the hotel around noon. He scampered up a private staircase to the tenth floor and gave his card to the secretary, who disappeared into the presidential chambers. When he returned, he said that Pulitzer would have to wait a minute. “I am not accustomed to waiting,” Pulitzer snapped, and then bounded down the staircase before the secretary could recover from the angry outburst. Later that evening, Pulitzer was persuaded to return to the hotel to meet Cleveland, and his bruised feelings were further assuaged when he was invited to dine with the president-elect and a small group a couple of nights later.

  Pulitzer expected a revolution from Cleveland. In the World, he argued that the president should accept no gifts, tolerate no nepotism, tax luxuries, and impose a tariff to protect labor. More important, Pulitzer wanted a political quail hunt. Cleveland needed to flush out all the Republicans in appointed offices, gain access to their supposedly secret records, and expose the skullduggery of past years. Democrats should be the ones to staff the government, Pulitzer said. “A President who is nominated and elected by a party also owes something to that party.”

  Cleveland didn’t share Pulitzer’s fervor, and was uninterested in satisfying the party’s hunger for patronage jobs after twenty-four years of exile. Even worse, the president ignored Pulitzer’s choices. In particular, Pulitzer wanted his friend Charles Gibson of St. Louis appointed to the minister’s post in Berlin and met with Cleveland to urge this selection. Gibson himself came to Washington, armed with an endorsement from the Post-Dispatch and a privately printed pamphlet. It was all for naught. In late March, Cleveland appointed someone else to the Berlin post.

  Pulitzer the reformer turned into a rejected spoils seeker. Cleveland had hardly finished taking the oath of office when it became clear that a fight was brewing between the two men.

  Frustrated with President Cleveland, Pulitzer turned his attention to a struggling effort to erect a prominent symbol of American immigration in New York. The French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s statue of Liberty Enlightening the World was collecting dust in crates in France because Americans had not yet raised the money necessary to build its pedestal on Bedloe Island in the middle of New York’s harbor.

  Seven years earlier, in 1878, Pulitzer had been among those who had seen the head of the statue at the Paris Exposition. Since moving to New York in 1883, he had provided editorial support to the undertaking. His own experience of immigration and his devotion to American liberty made the project immensely appealing to Pulitzer. In fact, within two w
eeks of taking over the World, he had replaced the printing press at the center of the two globes on the masthead with a figure of Liberty, her hand holding the torch aloft.

  All that remained to complete the project was to build an 89-foot granite pedestal to support the 151-foot, 225-ton sculpture. But the American fund-raising efforts had been anemic, especially in comparison with the French effort, which had raised more than $750,000. After years of solicitation, the American committee remained $100,000 short of the $250,000 needed for the work. Congress refused to help, other cities complained about New York’s being chosen for the statue, and most newspaper editors considered the project too costly. It seemed destined for failure.

  But Pulitzer was not going to give up on Lady Liberty. Even in the midst of the tumultuous 1884 election, he had taken time to support the work of the American committee. “Unless the statue goes to the bottom of the ocean,” wrote Pulitzer, “it is safe to predict that it will eventually stand upon an American pedestal, and then be referred to for a very long time with more sentiment than we can now dream of.”

  The scattered editorials in the World had little effect. By spring of 1885, as the French prepared to ship the statue, only the concrete base had been poured. Pulitzer was indignant. “What a burning disgrace it will be to the United States,” he wrote, “if the statue of the goddess is brought to our shores on a French government vessel and is met by the intelligence that our people, with all their wealth, have not enough public spirit, liberality and pride to provide a fitting pedestal on which it can be placed!” But his chastisement, published on a Saturday, stirred no one. The other newspapers, especially the Herald, continued to treat the project with puzzlement and disdain.

  The following Monday, however, few could any longer feign ignorance of the Statue of Liberty’s plight: Pulitzer made it the front-page story in his paper, now selling 150,000 or more copies a day. Under the banner headline WHAT SHALL BE DONE WITH THE GREAT BARTHOLDI STATUE? the World put America’s failure to raise the needed funds on display, complete with illustrations of the stalled pedestal construction.

  “There is but one thing that can be done,” Pulitzer railed from his editorial page. “We must raise the money!” He backed his call with a specific plan. “The World is the people paper, and it now appeals to the people to come forward and raise this money,” he wrote. “Let us not wait for the millionaires to give this money. It is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole population of France to the whole people of America.”

  He called on readers to send money to the paper and promised he would deliver it to the project. “Give something, however little,” Pulitzer asked. In return, he pledged that every donor’s name would be published in the World. For as little as a penny, the poorest New Yorker could have his name in print in the same newspaper whose columns were populated with the names of the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Rhinelanders, Roosevelts, and Astors.

  It was an audacious move. Pulitzer was, after all, asking people to send cash and checks to a corporation just like those which ran the railroads or operated the steel mills. It was only Pulitzer’s word that stood as a guarantee that every dime of the money would be accounted for and would be used for the statue. If no one responded, Pulitzer would look like a fool.

  By the next morning, contributions began to pour in. “I am a poor man,” wrote one reader, “but I will give something and I’ll try to get everybody else to give something.” Another wrote, “We have read what you say about the Bartholdi statue this morning and send you at once a small collection ($3.31) taken up in our office and expect to send you more very shortly.”

  Rather than start a fund-raising campaign, Pulitzer could have expediently used his own checkbook to make up the deficit. Instead, he chose to finish the project as it had been intended, by turning to the public for support. In one stroke, Pulitzer set into motion a mammoth public effort and demonstrated the growing power and civic role of the independent press. In the past, only churches and governments had been able to marshal such financial support. Now the fourth estate held an equal power to excite and direct mass public support.

  The public service also turned out to be good for business. The World’s circulation soared. By June, it would boast that its Sunday edition was the largest in size and in circulation of any newspaper published in the United States. It was consuming 834 miles of newsprint per edition. “No newspaper on the habitable globe consumed so much paper as the World yesterday.”

  The long hours of work and the sleepless nights finally prompted Pulitzer to seek rest. On May 9, he and Kate left New York on the Etruria, bound for Europe. Ralph, Lucille, and the baby—Joseph Jr., born on March 21, 1885—were sent off to New Hampshire with nannies and a doctor under the watch of William H. Davis, Kate’s younger brother, whom Joseph Sr. had recently hired as a much-needed personal assistant.

  While Kate shopped in London and Paris, Joseph talked shop with newspaper publishers who were curious about this American sensation. Not one to be outmatched, Joseph also did his fair share of consuming, with visits to wine merchants and art galleries. He engaged the help of a Parisian art dealer to search for paintings while he and Kate went off to Aix-les-Bains. “I don’t think I told you that Vanderbilt has a Pahnaroli in his fine collection and although I do not know it, it will not be a better one than yours,” the dealer wrote, deftly mentioning the other art collector.

  The Pulitzers took baths at Aix-les-Bains and at Bad Kissingen, in Germany, but they had little effect on Joseph. Instead of finding rest in his isolation and distance from New York, Pulitzer continued to meddle in every part of the World’s operation. He paid to have his editors come to Europe to meet with him, he read and criticized each issue of the paper sent to him by mail, and he kept telegraph operators busy transmitting instructions back to New York.

  Usually Pulitzer’s transatlantic chatter consisted of complaints, but he also found cause to praise the work of his staff. By July, readers had sent $75,000 to the World for the Statue of Liberty. On August 11, the paper exceeded its goal of $100,000. In less than four months, more than 120,000 readers had responded to the World’s campaign. “From every single condition in life—save only the very richest of the rich and their tainted fortunes—did contributions flow,” Pulitzer said. “From the honorable rich as well as the poorest of poor—from all parties, all sections, all ages, all sexes, all classes—from the cabinet member and the Union League member—from the poor news boys who sent their pennies, until the unprecedented number of 120,000 widely different contributors had joined in a common spirit for a common cause.”

  The European sojourn was a failure. Joseph returned home no better rested than when he had left. (Kate, however, was pregnant with their fifth child in seven years of marriage.) Insomnia still gripped him, and he was in a state of nervous exhaustion. His editors suffered. He found fault in everything they did and escalated his demands for time-consuming reports on all aspects of the operation. Men were assigned to tediously count the want-ad lineage in competing papers in order to calculate the World’s share of the market. To keep Pulitzer happy the results had to be broken down into categories and boiled down to their essence. “Put the thing in the nutshell,” he would say over and over again. “He was the damnedest best man in the world to have in a newspaper office for one hour in the morning,” said Cockerill. “For the remainder of the day he was a damned nuisance.”

  At home it was no better. His family lived in fear. Joseph exploded over even the smallest things and Kate took the brunt of his attacks. “He said that he was uncomfortable, that I did not understand the proper relations between husband and wife,” she wrote in her diary that fall. The particulars of his indictment were that she failed in what he called “the duties of a wife” and neglected to make him comfortable at home. “There was not a servant in this house who had worked harder than I had,” Kate snapped back at him, losing her temper. “I had made a slave of myself,”
she continued, telling him that “he was entirely spoilt, that with his disposition he must have something to criticize.” Her uncharacteristic outburst caused Joseph to order her from the room, telling her that he would never forgive her. “When will these scenes end or when will I be at rest?” Kate asked that night in her diary.

  One friend understood the depth of Joseph’s troubles. Writing from St. Louis, his former partner John Dillon spoke lovingly of his admiration for Pulitzer but included a warning. “Overwork in business or in routine work will break a man down but in your case the injury is greater because you have been overworking those powers and faculty which in the main is the type of higher or divine creative power,” Dillon wrote. “Not one man in ten thousand has it at all.

  “You have overstretched it,” he continued. “You have called on it to do more than it should have done, you have put it under the services of your will, you have made it work when it should have rested, you have compelled it to furnish ideas—and you have overworked it.” Dillon urged Pulitzer to leave work for six months of rest. In the end, Dillon said, his friend faced a decision. “If you wish you can do the work of a lifetime and break down; or you can do the work of a century in a lifetime, and live while you do it, which is much better.” It was the frankest Dillon had ever been with Pulitzer and he asked that the letter be burned.

  On the morning of December 3, 1885, a New York City judge was startled to see the names of the mayor and the city’s most prominent newspaper publisher in a bundle of documents handed to him. Before him was “William R. Grace, plaintiff, v. Joseph Pulitzer, defendant,” prepared by one of the best law firms in the city. The lawsuit alleged that the World’s editorial page had damaged Mayor Grace’s good name by wrongly linking him to a financial scandal surrounding the demise of the investment firm Grant & Ward and the wreck of the Marine Bank. The collapse had wiped out most of former president Grant’s fortune, sent a few men to prison, and set off a minor financial panic. The city lost $1 million in deposits it had in the firm, and the World had laid the blame on the mayor.