Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  The newsies demanded that the World and the Journal return to their prewar wholesale price, the same as other newspapers charged. Pulitzer and Hearst refused. On July 18, 1899, a delivery driver for the World in Long Island City stuffed his bundles with free sample copies of the paper and sold them to unsuspecting newsboys. When they figured out what had happened, they demanded their money back. He refused, and the boys tipped his wagon over and ran him off. Word of their action spread and soon all the newsies were on strike. Within a day, customers looking for their afternoon paper found newsboys without newspapers and signs pinned to their jackets such as “Please don’t buy the Evening Journal and World, because the newboys has striked” or “I ain’t a scab.”

  The strike exacted an immediate toll on the evening papers. “You could walk a mile without seeing one,” one correspondent wrote home. Pulitzer got word of the strike just as he arrived in Bar Harbor after months in Europe. “Practically all the boys in New York and in many of the adjacent towns have quit selling,” Seitz told his boss. “A call is out for a mass meeting of the boys in front of the Pulitzer Building and we have just been compelled to ask the police for assistance in the matter.” The other newspapers were of no help. Except for the Journal, they were not targets of the boys’ strike and were jubilantly running editorials in support of it.

  But enemies with a common foe can find ground for cooperation. Two days after the newsboys began their action, Hearst’s business manager Solomon Carvalho and Seitz got together. “I have just been over to see Carvalho in a long conference in the matter,” Seitz told Pulitzer. “We have determined to hire as many men as possible Monday to man selling points in sufficient force to overwhelm any assault that could be made upon them and to force a representation of the paper on the streets.”

  Advertisers abandoned the papers in droves and demanded refunds as the circulation of the Evening Journal and the Evening World collapsed. “It is really a very extraordinary demonstration,” Seitz told Pulitzer. “The people seem to be against us; they are encouraging the boys and tipping them and where they are not doing this, they are refraining from buying the papers for fear of having them snatched from their hands.”

  Using homeless men whom Seitz had recruited, many under protection of the police, the evening editions of the Journal and World returned to the streets on Monday and managed to remain for several days, but with far reduced sales. “Our policy of putting men out was not helpful,” Seitz admitted to Pulitzer, “yet it was the only thing that could be done. We had to have representation and the absolute disappearance of the paper was appalling.”

  As the strike continued, Seitz kept Pulitzer informed at all times of the paper’s hard-line policy, including the use of police to break up gatherings of the children. When they could, the boys attacked scabs, although, in a chivalrous gesture, they stayed clear of a few newsstands run by women. They did their best to continue their strike. “Ain’t that ten cents worth as much as it is to Hearst and Pulitzer who are millionaires,” Kid Blink, one of their leaders, told the thousands of newsies who came to a rally. But problems soon emerged. Blink was chased by strikers who thought he had been bought off when they spotted him near Park Row wearing new clothes and carrying a roll of bills. Other leaders were similarly accused of accepting bribes, and an increasing number of boys were seen selling the boycotted papers again.

  A clever ruse brought an end to the strike. The World and the Journal told their agents and drivers to start permitting the newsboys to return unsold copies for credit. This modest improvement was enough to bring the boys back to work. However, 60 percent of the income would continue to remain with the newspapers. Absorbing the modest cost of some unsold papers was a small price for this victory. Furthermore, the credit scheme would create an incentive for the newsies to remain on the street longer, selling fresher editions of the newspaper.

  Facing the resolute partnership of the Journal and the World, and weakened by the collapse of their leadership and by desertions among their ranks, the newsboys surrendered on the afternoon of July 26. “The leaders came in to me and threw up their hands,” Seitz said. He immediately wired Pulitzer. “Strike broken. Much work required to restore circulation and rehabilitate the paper with the public.” He then announced the strike’s end to the newspapers.

  It had taken the two powerful newspapers only a week to dispense with this publicly awkward and economically powerless challenge. All through it, Pulitzer had remained silent. Twenty years earlier, during his first months of running the Post-Dispatch, he had been similarly confronted by newsboys who wanted a higher share of the paper’s sale price. He stood his ground then, without resorting to strike breakers or the police, and even expressing sympathy with the newsboys’ demands. At that time, however, as a struggling publisher trying to resurrect a bankrupt newspaper, he had limited financial options.

  This was no longer an excuse. The World was the richest and most successful newspaper enterprise in the nation. At any time Pulitzer could have put an end to the strike by giving the boys a chance to sell the World at the same rate as they sold other papers. But he chose not to. Although he himself had once been a teenager living on the streets of New York, Pulitzer showed no mercy over a dime.

  When David Graham Phillips completed his brief tour as the World’s London correspondent, Pulitzer brought him back. First, Phillips worked on the news side of the paper. Then, at the suggestion of Brisbane (before he left to join Hearst), Pulitzer moved his protégé to the editorial page. This was the rarest of benedictions. The editorial page was the most important part of the World for Pulitzer. “As Mary Stuart said about her heart being left in France as she sailed for Scotland,” he later confessed to Hosmer, my “heart was and still is in the editorial page and will be in spirit.”

  Phillips was one of four men assigned to William Merrill in charge of “the Page,” as it was reverently called. The quartet included John Dillon, Pulitzer’s original partner on the Post-Dispatch; George Eggleston, who had worked with Pulitzer on fighting Bryan in 1896; and James W. Clarke, known for his interviews. Housed in the dome, they worked in small cubbyholes. Phillips turned his into such a mess that the cleaning woman complained about the crumbled balls of paper—from false starts on editorials—strewn over the floor.

  The pressure was immense. Not only were the opinions of the World read in the seats of government and widely reproduced by other newspapers, but they never escaped the attention of the boss. Every editorial of importance was read aloud twice to Pulitzer. He pushed the men to produce their best possible work, often admonishing them to write less but better. He wanted the paper to speak with one voice. “Indeed, you might talk to Dillon and Phillips and request them ‘for the 400th time’ to write in a similar vein,” Pulitzer instructed Merrill.

  One could never please Pulitzer. One moment he would ban comments on political subjects, only to complain later that the page was devoid of politics. In the summer of 1899, in the midst of the newsboys’ strike, he unloaded his complaints. He telegraphed Merrill and instructed that his words be read aloud to Phillips and Eggleston. “It is dictated, as you see, angrily but yet deliberately for telegraphing,” Pulitzer said. “Either the editors have opinions which they are afraid to express, or they have no opinions. In either case they do not do their duty. I am tired of being both a scapegoat and scarecrow; held responsible for the very things I dislike.”

  Despite the outburst, which most of his writers knew would pass like a summer storm, Pulitzer continued to view Phillips as his potential journalistic heir. He reserved personal guidance for Phillips that he gave no one else. Inviting him to Bar Harbor at the end of the summer, Pulitzer promised that together they would review his work and development since he had joined the World. “Promise me also to insist very emphatically—for I am so cowardly about criticizing sensitive and delicate, likeable persons, that I am sure to run away from it unless you use a club,” Pulitzer continued. “Promise me further that you will use that cl
ub—with the understanding that it is for your own good, for the sake of your future. Mine is behind me, as you know.”

  Pulitzer, however, was unaware that Phillips had a different future in mind. Over drinks, Phillips told his friends that he would remain in journalism only as long as it taught him about writing and life. In the meantime, it was providing him with the material for his first novel. In his off-hours, holed up in his room at a Washington Square boarding house between Sullivan and MacDougal streets, Phillips was crafting a novel whose central character was an amalgam of Phillips’s own experiences in journalism and his observations of Pulitzer. “I had a chance to see the truth, even if the editorials didn’t permit me to tell it,” Phillips said. “I was impressed with the awful failures among men who were avowed great worldly successes. How unhappy they were, how puerile in their motives, how unattainable happiness or contentment was to them.”

  In Phillips’s novel, The Great God Success, a young man much like himself takes a job on a New York daily. The tone of the novel is set early. “Journalism is not a career,” a seasoned reporter tells the central character, who is named Howard. “It is either a school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone to something else. But if he sticks to it, he finds himself an old man, dead and done for to all intents and purposes years before he’s buried.”

  To avoid this fate, Phillips continued to work secretly on his book.

  Following the settlement of the newsies’ strike, complaints from distributors about the wholesale price of the papers brought Seitz and Carvalho back together. Carvalho told Seitz that the lesson from the past month was clear. “When I saw the advantage we had gained by co-operation during the newsboys strike,” he said, “I went to Hearst and said that it seemed to me now was a good time to undertake an arrangement with the World.”

  The two managers first began working on a détente in 1897, when Hearst proposed that the Journal and the World might find it more profitable to divide the market rather than compete endlessly. The idea was compelling enough for the publishers to meet face-to-face for the first, and only, time in their lives. At the meeting, kept secret from the press, Hearst told Pulitzer that if they could come to an agreement he was willing to diminish the scope of his paper, freeing Pulitzer to raise the price of the World. “That is to say,” said Seitz, who had been part of the negotiations, “Hearst was then willing to return to his original one-cent plan of a real one-cent paper, while the World could return to its class as a two-cent paper.”

  Proposals for a peace treaty ran into rough water as soon as the men tried to specify the details. One stumbling block was Pulitzer’s continued effort to keep Hearst from using Associated Press wire copy. Ever since his days in St. Louis, Pulitzer had placed an inordinate value on such memberships. A few months before he and Hearst held their summit, a competitor of the AP’s, United Press (unrelated to the present-day UPI), went out of business. Its subscribers in New York scrambled to apply for AP membership. The Herald, Times, and Tribune all were accepted, but Pulitzer used his position on the AP board to veto Hearst’s application. Without any wire service, Hearst would be at an enormous competitive disadvantage. But he resorted to a trick Pulitzer had used in St. Louis. Hearst bought the New York Morning Advertiser, folded it into his own paper, and gained its AP membership for his morning edition.

  Keenly aware of the early failures to broker a peace agreement and the continued hostility between their bosses, Seitz and Carvalho began talking in August 1899, to try again to work out some sort of agreement. Prior to the meeting, Seitz had been to Bar Harbor to receive his instructions for the negotiations. “We will consider any proposition on good faith, that we are and have been from the start, acting on the defensive and fully realizing about the absurdity, un-durability, and profligacy of this competition, which sooner or later must come to an end,” Pulitzer told Seitz. “The natural common sense of the situation is to bring it to an end on terms mutually beneficial by combination instead of competition, and by a combination which if possible should be a radical parting of the ways, giving each a field to itself, rather than paralleling the identical ground.”

  Combination instead of competition. In short, Pulitzer was proposing a conspiracy to restrain trade, not unlike the trusts and monopolies that his paper attacked almost daily. “All trusts are not monstrous,” Pulitzer later told Phillips. But even under the loosest interpretations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed nine years ago with his support, what Pulitzer sought was illegal. The idea was a betrayal of his avowed principles.

  Remaining in Bar Harbor, Pulitzer dictated a memo summing up his discussions with Seitz. “Please don’t mention my desire for peace any more than as a personal feeling,” he said. “It is of supreme importance to show no anxiety whatever.” Pulitzer was worried his competitors might use his infirmity to their advantage. “They would quickly seize upon either anxiety or personal weakness and physical difficulties—on which they have already banked.” He wanted Seitz to bargain from a position of power, not of necessity. “I will never negotiate under threats.”

  Pulitzer placed high hopes on the negotiations. As Seitz and Carvalho prepared to meet, he warned Seitz not to let the other side know that the Post-Dispatch was making money and that the penalty clause they devised for the treaty needed to be strong. “The point is simply to secure confidence in the scrupulous enforcement of the agreement, which is worthless unless both parties have confidence in it,” Pulitzer said. “Probably both are afraid of each other.”

  Like a nervous suitor, Pulitzer became increasingly anxious as the two sides approached each other. He received a friendly personal message from Hearst and told Seitz to acknowledge it and to let Hearst know that while it might seem impolite not to reply personally, he wanted the negotiators to focus on potential penalties for breaking any final agreement. “Please deliver this in person to Hearst himself, but verbally—not giving it in writing but in Carvalho’s presence if he desires,” Pulitzer said. Hours later, he changed his mind. “Don’t deliver Hearst message mailed yesterday till further notice,” he urgently wired Seitz.

  Upon finally sitting down with Carvalho once again, Seitz announced that Pulitzer was willing to consider any proposition, however radical, but had none in mind himself. “The burden of the negotiations, therefore,” Seitz told Carvalho, “gets back to us, and, primarily, it seems to me that the first step is to devise some method of dividing the field.”

  “How would you do it?” asked Carvalho.

  From the start, both agreed that any combination would have to include raising the price of both papers to two cents. “As I said at Bar Harbor,” Seitz reminded Pulitzer, “I believe that we would get right up against the two cent proposition in very short order. I believe now that WE ARE THERE.” But vexing details remained. They had to find a way to collude on advertising rates and develop business practices that kept the cooperation secret.

  While the men negotiated, John Norris lunched with Adolph Ochs, who three years earlier had bought the money-losing New York Times. The paper was making large gains in circulation since it had dropped its price and adopted Ochs’s style of objective reporting, expressed by the paper’s new motto “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” (The motto of Ochs’s paper in Chattanooga had been “It Does Not Soil the Breakfast Cloth.”) Ochs told Norris in confidence that Carvalho had also approached him to see if the Times would go along with a price increase to two cents. Ochs favored the idea but told Carvalho he was worried that someone would start a penny paper and undercut those who had raised their prices. Carvalho assured him it couldn’t happen, because the wholesalers and distributors would not handle any new paper in return for the lower price.

  By September, Seitz and Carvalho had completed a draft of an agreement for their bosses.

  Pulitzer pledged to sign a deal, although he remained doubtful that the negotiations could produce a suitable one. “It is difficult to direct a game by telegraph, from a distance, without seeing the
gamesters’ faces, or hearing their voices,” he complained. The proposed contract that both newspapers raise their price to two cents, and only the evening editions would remain at a penny, that the papers would limit their size; and their advertising rates would be uniform. The publishers also would promise not to raid each other’s staffs and not to engage in editorial warfare; and the Evening Journal would be permitted to have a membership in AP.

  When Norris reviewed the proposed treaty, he told Pulitzer it was a dangerous and foolish plan. Bradford Merrill had an even worse interpretation. He believed the contract would benefit only Hearst. The struggle between the papers was not about making money, Merrill said. It was a battle for supremacy. “Now the fight can never be settled finally except by one or the other tacitly, at least, yielding the primacy. It cannot be settled by any contract or trust agreement to charge the same advertising rates or to advance the price to two cents. That would not settle the war. It would prolong it. It would give the enemy fresh sinews and fresh confidence. It would simply tie the two duelists together in an embrace so close that one could not for a long time tell the victor from the vanquished.”

  Pulitzer ignored both Norris’s and Merrill’s advice, and also that of Seitz, who, when asked, said he too opposed the plan. When the proposal was read to him, Pulitzer worked on strengthening the all-important enforcement clause. The draft suggested that if either side broke the terms, it would pay the other a sum of money. Pulitzer wanted to increase the size of the penalty to a minimum of $1 million. He told Seitz he would not sign any agreement unless it was “ironclad fireproof.”