Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Pulitzer’s irritation was exacerbated by an interview with George Carteret, the night editor. Running his hands over the head of the six-foot-tall, 250-pound editor, Pulitzer exclaimed, “God, you have a big head, Mr. Carteret!”

  “You are right, Mr. Pulitzer. I guess I have a big head,” replied Carteret.

  “You can’t deny it. Now tell me, Mr. Carteret, what is in that big head for tomorrow’s paper?”

  Unfortunately, the editor had come in late and hardly knew what was in that day’s edition. “My God! Only half-past eleven! And you haven’t read the morning papers! Great God! What kinds of editors are running this paper?” Angry, Pulitzer rose, and his entourage followed. He paused at the city desk before beginning his trek back across the newsroom to the elevators.

  “I want to say a word to Arthur Clarke,” said Pulitzer. The two men shook hands and, as was usual with Pulitzer, discussed their various health ailments.

  “Now tell me, my boy, what are you preparing for tomorrow’s morning paper?”

  Clarke listed the various anticipated stories and the leads that reporters were following.

  “There isn’t a good, bright Monday morning feature on the whole schedule,” said Pulitzer. Putting his hands on Clarke’s head, he added, “What have you in there, Mr. Clarke? That is where your Monday morning feature should be. You must cudgel your brain all week for it.” Clarke promised he would.

  “I know you will have a good paper tomorrow, Mr. Clarke,” finished Pulitzer, who then turned and was escorted from the room, never to return again.

  The truth was that the World functioned smoothly and successfully without Pulitzer. He had become a figurehead, an aging ruler whose only domain at the paper remained the editorial page. Even there, his hold was tenuous. He complained about its pessimistic tenor. “I am tired of this pitching into everything in this county,” he told one of his editors. “I am tired of graft and corruption stories, as if the country were going to the dogs and everything corrupt.”

  Two months before his surprise visit, the World had celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary under his ownership. Two thousand guests, including dignitaries from Washington traveling in a specially chartered train, gathered at the foot of the building for a spectacular shower of fireworks that bathed all seventeen stories in flickering light for hours. As he had been when the cornerstone was laid, and then when the building was dedicated, Pulitzer was oceans away. Ralph, who presided over the ceremonies, read a cable sent by his father from Nice, where he was testing his new yacht Liberty, which the secretarial staff was already calling The Liberty, Ha! Ha!!

  “Without public approval a newspaper cannot live; the people can destroy it any day by merely refusing it,” Ralph said, reading the telegram aloud while standing in front of a portrait of his father draped with flags. “In its last analysis, nay, in its first and every analysis, step by step, day after day, the existence of a newspaper is dependent upon the approval of the public.” That the World possessed. On an average day that month, the paper sold 707,432 copies and mailed thousands of copies to readers in every state and territory of the union.

  At midnight, everyone who could find space crowded into the cavernous underground press room to watch the largest Hoe presses on earth, the size of locomotives, stir to life, rhythmically stamping out a 200-page anniversary issue with eight sections in color.

  In August, Pulitzer sailed back across the Atlantic and summoned Seitz to his yacht to discuss coverage of the presidential election. Pulitzer’s old Democratic antagonist was back. At the beginning of the year, Pulitzer had done everything in his power to discourage Democrats from turning to William Jennings Bryan for a third time. The World even printed, and distributed widely, a pamphlet called “The Map of Bryanism: Twelve Years of Demagogy and Defeat—An Appeal to Independent Democratic Thought, by the New York World.” It hit its mark. “Mr. Bryan has formally and officially cussed the pamphlet from hell to Harlem,” Frank Cobb told Pulitzer.

  In fact, Bryan’s day had come and gone. Cobb, who had not heard the politician speak since he gave his famous “cross of gold” speech at the convention in 1896, was saddened after attending a New York rally. “He is fat and heavy and bald,” Cobb told Pulitzer. “He looks like a traveling evangelist, who had failed as an actor, and then got religion. He speaks slowly and deliberately. He has lost all the sacred fire that made him the greatest orator I ever heard.”

  Pulitzer instructed Cobb to promote alternative candidates. Cobb was impressed by the president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, and Pulitzer urged him to draft an editorial promoting Wilson as an alternative to Bryan. “What better candidate could they present who would have a better chance to carry New York and New Jersey than anybody I can think of now,” the publisher wrote.

  Pulitzer’s efforts were of no use. Bryan easily won the nomination. Although he was convinced that Bryan would lose to Roosevelt’s handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, Pulitzer ordered Cobb to support the Democratic nominee. “Bryan is as dead as a door nail,” Pulitzer told Cobb when they met on the Liberty. “A vote for Bryan is not a practical living vote, but a protest; a protest against the tendencies of the party in power; a check and rebuke to stop those tendencies; an exceedingly important rebuke and check if the vote is large enough to keep the party in power after elections on the anxious seat.”

  Without knowing Pulitzer’s motives, Bryan was grateful for the World’s support. In 1904 he had privately denounced Pulitzer as a slave to wealth, but now he sent a message of thanks. Pulitzer passed it on to Cobb. “It is a sign of forgiveness which might amuse you,” he wrote in an accompanying note.

  Pulitzer believed that the World could increase its credibility and power if it mounted a campaign to resist Roosevelt’s plans to create a legacy for himself as a great president. “The country has gone crazy under Roosevelt’s leadership in extravagance for the war idea,” Pulitzer said. “All my life I have been opposed to that so-called militarism. I may be crazy in thinking the country crazy, but the fact remains we have increased our war expenditures over one hundred millions a year.” As far as Pulitzer was concerned, Roosevelt had set the nation on a course of unbridled, unneeded, and unwise military growth. “The logic of jingoism, Rooseveltism, seems to be that the greater we are in population and strength, the more afraid we must be of foreign attack and war.”

  Roosevelt might be a lame duck, but Rooseveltism was an enemy yet to be vanquished.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  CLASH OF TITANS

  On the evening of October 2, 1908, William Speer, the editor whom Pulitzer had detailed to work for the Democratic presidential nominee in 1904, was at his desk in the editorial offices under the gold-leaf dome of the Pulitzer Building. As usual, the publisher was overseas and the editorial department was doing its best to carry on. But waging Pulitzer’s fight against Roosevelt seemed a futile exercise for those, like Speer, who wrote the World’s editorials. Neither its relentless attacks on the president—and thus on his successor, William Howard Taft—nor its support of Bryan was having much effect on the electorate. The day before, when Taft proclaimed in Bryan’s home state of Nebraska, “I am going to be elected,” few doubted his prediction.

  The one promising bit of hard news on this otherwise slow day was a tip that Speer received from an acquaintance. Reportedly, a group of Panamanians, disgruntled because they were not among those who profited from the canal now under construction in their new nation, had arrived in New York. If these men could be located, they might confirm a story that the World’s reporters had doggedly pursued for years.

  According to rumors, when President Roosevelt concluded his deal in 1902 to build the canal, $40 million earmarked by the U.S. government to purchase a French company’s holdings in Panama had gone to an American syndicate created by William Nelson Cromwell, the project’s main lobbyist. Indeed, the transaction, along with the money, had been entrusted to J.P. Morgan & Co. which seemed short on proof that it ha
d been used to pay off the French. Rather, the World’s reporters believed, the syndicate had earlier bought out the French bondholders and then pocketed the money. Cromwell’s own behavior did nothing to dampen speculation about who got the money. In 1906, when testifying before a U.S. Senate committee, he refused to discuss his part in the canal transaction, claiming it was protected by attorney-client privilege.

  The story had immense appeal in the anti-Roosevelt World’s newsroom, which was well aware of Pulitzer’s long-running battle with the one time boy wonder of New York politics. On the other hand, Roosevelt held nothing more sacrosanct than the building of the canal. He considered it one of his crowning achievements and would tolerate no questioning of his motives or actions in obtaining it—to do so meant impugning his character.

  Speer left his office, went down a flight of stairs to the newsroom and located the night editor. Under Pulitzer’s ownership, the paper had assembled a vaunted news-gathering team and was enjoying a renaissance in prestige and power after distancing itself from its association with Hearst’s American. (The Herald and the Tribune were growing progressively weaker; later, they would merge, but now the union was nearly twelve years in the future. By contrast, the once anemic New York Times was gaining strength. Among its admirers was Pulitzer himself. “You may not know that I have the Times sent to me abroad when the World is forbidden,” he had written to Adolph Ochs earlier in the year, “and that most of my news I really receive from your paper.”)

  After listening to Speer, the night editor sent out one of his best men to hunt down the rumored Panamanians. The man checked all his sources, including some among those who had participated in financing the canal. But it was to no avail. The Panamanians could not be found, if they existed at all. Meanwhile, though, his snooping was noticed.

  Around ten o’clock that night, Jonas Whitley, a former reporter for the World who now did publicity work for Cromwell, came into the newsroom. He confronted the managing editor, Caleb Van Hamm, about pursuing a story concerning Cromwell without checking with him. As Whitley talked, Van Hamm realized he knew nothing about it but saw an opportunity. “Dear, dear, Jonas, sorry to hear that,” he said. “Tell us all about it.”

  Whitley sat down and spewed a remarkable story that he thought wrongly the World already knew. Cromwell, he said, was being blackmailed by men who threatened to turn over evidence of his wrongdoing in the Panama affair to the Democratic Party unless he paid them off. When Whitley was done, Van Hamm promised to locate the article supposedly being written and told him to return in an hour, when he would be given a chance to review it before it appeared.

  As soon as Whitley left, Van Hamm hurriedly dictated an account from his notes. When Whitley came back, Van Hamm showed him proofs of the story. The public relations man made some minor corrections, picked up a telephone, and read the story to Cromwell. A few hours later it appeared in the early edition of the World. The rumors—founded or unfounded—that Cromwell and his cohorts had profited from the canal deal were in print. Among the alleged profiteers were Douglas Robinson, the president’s brother-in-law; and Charles P. Taft, the brother of the presidential candidate.

  “But for Mr. Cromwell it is probable that no Panama story of any kind would have been printed during the campaign,” said Speer’s boss, Frank Cobb, “and it is certain that the names of Charles P. Taft and Douglas Robinson would not have been published in connection with the affair.”

  After years of dormancy, the story of corruption involving the canal was back on page one.

  Over the next few weeks, as Taft successfully concluded his presidential campaign against Bryan, the World’s reporters did everything they could to keep this story alive. Pulitzer urged them on. “Examine the record, especially his [Cromwell’s] Panama record and his relations with corporations and trusts,” he wired from Wiesbaden. The paper ran a long profile of the lobbyist, reported the firing of the Canal Zone governor because he had uncovered evidence of the alleged fraud, published copyrighted reports from its Paris correspondent on his efforts to solve the mystery, and even hired a prominent British lawyer and member of Parliament to dig into the French records. Finally, the paper admitted defeat. “Every source of official information as to the identity of who got the $40,000,000 is not only closed, but wiped out, obliterated, as a result of an agreement between the United States Government and the new Panama Canal Company,” reported the World’s Paris correspondent.

  The articles, while conceding that there was no evidence tying Cromwell to an illegal scheme, resurrected the public’s doubts about the murky means by which the United States had acquired the Canal Zone when Roosevelt, in his words, “took the isthmus.” The temerity of the World in raising these issues again at the close of his reign caught Roosevelt’s attention. He had expected the worst from Pulitzer’s paper, but his anger grew when other newspapers picked up on the World’s reporting as if the malfeasance had been proved. “Who got the money?” asked the Indianapolis News on the eve of the election. “For weeks this scandal has been before the people,” it continued. “The records are in Washington, and they are public records. But the people are not to see them—till after the election, if then.”

  Pulitzer was sailing across the ocean in blissful ignorance of the tempest his newspaper was stirring up. He had been on course for Bermuda, but he changed his mind and arrived in New York a few days before the election. He went to bed in his house there by ten o’clock in the evening. “What is the use of sitting up for a foregone conclusion?” he told Seitz. Taft won handily, as the public endorsed Roosevelt’s selection of his successor.

  With the election over and his man triumphant, Roosevelt vented his anger in a private letter to a friend in Indiana, where the World’s accusations had received prominent attention in the press. The president charged that the men behind the articles on the Panama Canal were liars for hire or were seeking to boost circulation. “The most corrupt financiers, the most corrupt politicians are no greater menace to this country than the newspaper men of the type I have above discussed,” he wrote. “Whether they belong to the yellow press or to the purchased press, whatever may be the stimulating cause of their slanderous mendacity, and whatever the cloak it may wear matters but little. In any event they represent one of the potent forces for evil in the community.”

  By the time Roosevelt’s reaction became public, Pulitzer had left New York for a postelection cruise in southern waters. Seitz jumped onto a train and caught up with the Liberty as it docked in Charleston. Roosevelt’s letter, which had focused on the Indianapolis News, was on the front page of the local paper in Charleston, along with an interview with Delavan Smith, publisher of the besieged newspaper in Indiana. The two items were read to Pulitzer, who knew little of what had happened since he left New York.

  An astonished Pulitzer listened as his secretary read on. Smith was backpedaling as fast as he could. “The President’s comments on the Panama editorial are based on statements made by a prominent New York paper, not the New York Sun,” Smith told reporters who caught up with him on a train leaving Chicago. He claimed that the Indianapolis News had credited the information to “the New York newspaper making the charge and distinctly disclaimed any responsibility for its accuracy.”

  “What New York paper does Smith mean?” asked Pulitzer.

  “The World,” replied Seitz.

  “I knew damned well it must be.”

  Roosevelt had not mentioned the World. It was entirely possible that the matter might blow over, now that he had let off steam with his attack on the Indianapolis News. But Speer was in no mood to let the president’s comment pass unchallenged. He and Cobb conferred. “Up to this time the World had not discussed the Panama matter editorially,” Cobb said. “But when Mr. Roosevelt went so far as to tell the American people that the United States government ‘paid the $40,000,000 direct to the French government,’ it seemed to the World that the time had arrived when the country was entitled to the truth and the whole trut
h.”

  By the time the Liberty reached New York, Speer had published an unusually long editorial that meticulously demonstrated how Roosevelt’s statement contradicted the public record. In blunt terms, he accused the president of knowingly lying. “The fact that Theodore Roosevelt as President of the United States issues a public statement about such an important matter full of flagrant untruths, reeking with misstatements, challenging line by line the testimony of his associate Cromwell and the official records, makes it imperative that full publicity come at once through the authority and action of Congress.”

  Pulitzer did not know of Speer’s remonstrations against the president. Whether Pulitzer wanted a fight with the president or not, he now had one.

  Roosevelt still had three months left in office, and the power to pursue his quarry. On December 9, the day after the World’s editorial appeared, Roosevelt contacted Henry Stimson, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had selected the thirty-eight-year-old Republican corporate lawyer—who shared the president’s love of hunting and the outdoors—over other, more prominent candidates for the post. The appointment put Stimson on a road that would eventually take him to the highest level of national government. Already, he was being touted as a candidate for governor, and he remained deeply grateful to the president for his good fortune.

  “I do not know anything about the law of criminal libel, but I should dearly like to have it invoked about Pulitzer, of the World,” Roosevelt told Stimson. “If he can be reached by proceeding on the part of the Government for criminal libel in connection with his assertions about the Panama Canal, I should like to do it,” Roosevelt said, frankly confessing the depth of his enmity toward Pulitzer and setting Stimson on the publisher’s trail.