Pulitzer openly professed his faith in the evening press within days of buying the Dispatch. “Whether it be a collision in the Sea of Marmosa, a battle in the Peiwar Pass, a revolution in the Sultan’s palace, or a row in the British Cabinet, the evening paper is invariably the first to give the news,” Pulitzer told his readers. “Moreover, it reaches the subscriber when he has time to read a paper. In a city, as least, there are about three times as many people who have leisure for an evening paper as there are for a morning paper. It is merely a question whether the evening paper can occupy the field, and we propose to occupy it.”
Pulitzer’s timing was perfect. Not only were evening papers on the rise, but production and newsprint costs were decreasing. Publishers could offer readers more for their money or drop the price. Either strategy provided a stable financial footing, permitting newspapers to wean themselves from subsidies, direct or indirect, from political parties. With this prosperity, an increasing number of newspapers began to call themselves “independent.” The more independent a newspaper became, the more it drew readers seeking objective news, entertainment, and advertising to guide their growing purchases. In other words, becoming an independent newspaper was as much an economic as a political decision. “Business prosperity,” noted the Chicago Tribune, “has increased with all papers in the proportion that they have maintained their independence and their freedom.”
Pulitzer gambled he could ride these trends to journalistic and financial success. His business acumen drove him. Although he was at times an innovator in journalism, this was not his strength. Rather, he possessed remarkable foresight and had an uncanny ability to recognize value where others didn’t. He was willing to take risks based on his insights when others remained timid.
But none of Pulitzer’s ambitious plans would bear fruit on the minuscule subscription rolls of the Dispatch. So, like a bridge player, Pulitzer relied on his strong suit. He owned an AP membership, whereas Dillon’s Post made do with a weaker alternative, the National Associated Press. Dillon could survive without an authentic AP membership, but he feared doing battle with the well-equipped Pulitzer, and he still worried that the Dispatch might combine forces with the Star.
Pulitzer’s ploy worked. Within twenty-four hours, Dillon agreed to merge his paper with Pulitzer’s. A merger made good sense. Pulitzer and Dillon shared essentially the same reformist political views. For Dillon, the merger would prevent a potentially disastrous circulation fight. For Pulitzer, it would bring readers and, most important, time.
The two men decided that their respective enterprises were worth $15,000 each. They created a new corporation that issued 300 shares, valued at $100 each. Blanche Dillon, who had funded the Post, retained 149 shares; Pulitzer had 149; and two shares were assigned to William Patrick, Pulitzer’s attorney, who drew up the papers. Dillon took the posts of president and managing editor, and Pulitzer became vice president and political editor. But the agreement made it clear that Pulitzer renounced no editorial power by accepting the post of second in command. At the last minute, a clause was added to the final text, specifying that he “should write upon any subject political or otherwise without reservation.”
Dillon agreed to give Pulitzer free rein because financially he was bringing the most to the table. Although his Dispatch had fewer readers and was encumbered by a $15,000 lien from an unpaid mortgage, Pulitzer agreed to fund an expansion of the combined newspapers. Under the terms of the deal, he promised to lend up to $10,000 at 5 percent interest. No mention was made of where Pulitzer, who was down to his last reserves, would obtain such a sum.
The next day, Pulitzer abandoned the Dispatch’s headquarters and its staff. Only one employee was invited to come with Pulitzer, and he refused. Wearing a soft hat and a blue chinchilla overcoat, Pulitzer moved what little was worth keeping to the offices of the Evening Post on Pine Street, just blocks from where he had lived when he was a reporter for the Westliche Post. The following day, the new Post and Dispatch appeared.
The new paper was physically unchanged by the merger. It remained four pages long, except on Saturdays, when it promised that it might be as long as ten pages. The details of the merger were to be kept secret but were described as “decreed by immutable destiny” in an editorial that bore all the marks of Pulitzer’s hand. The editorial promised that the combination of an almost dead newspaper with another less than a year old would create a publication that would be “one of the best established among the newspapers of the country.”
Pulitzer’s dominance of the combined papers was in evidence all across the editorial page. He declared the paper’s political independence. “The Post and Dispatch will serve no party but the people; will be no organ of ‘Republicanism,’ but the organ of truth; will follow no caucuses but its own convictions; will not support the ‘Administration,’ but criticize it; will oppose all frauds and shams wherever and whatever they are; will advocate principles and ideas rather than prejudices and partisanship.”
The declaration was disingenuous. The merger agreement specified that the Post and Dispatch “would be independent with a Democratic leaning.” A careful reading of Pulitzer’s announcement made the preference clear. The Democrats remained the chosen tribe. But the declaration was the first pronouncement of what would become a tenet of Pulitzerian journalism. In his hands, independent journalism was a political tool. By building journalistic credibility with readers, a newspaper could build independent political power. For Pulitzer, journalism was another route to power.
Anyone who knew Pulitzer knew that power was something he did not readily share. McCullagh, at the Globe-Democrat, foresaw trouble for his protégé. To succeed, Dillon would have to tone down “the crude products of Pulitzer’s fiery and untamed brain,” said McCullagh. This was such a tall order that should he succeed, McCullagh added, Dillon could retire to harness zebras in the wild.
Chapter Thirteen
SUCCESS
Before the Post and Dispatch was a month old, Pulitzer announced that larger quarters and faster presses were needed to meet the surging demand for it. This was sheer chutzpah. St. Louisans weren’t exactly rushing into the streets to buy the paper. True, circulation neared 4,000. But Dillon and Pulitzer had merged their subscription lists. The actual number of new subscribers was low—hardly a groundswell straining the capacity of the Globe-Democrat’s presses, which printed the Post and Dispatch. In fact, Pulitzer’s plan seemed economically suicidal.
In the following weeks, money slipped rapidly from Dillon and Pulitzer’s hands. They leased a building at 111 North Fifth Street that had once been the home of the Evening Dispatch. Crews moved in to make needed repairs and alterations. Pulitzer and Dillon ordered one of Richard M. Hoe & Company’s newest and speediest four-cylinder presses, capable of printing the paper’s entire press run in less than an hour. To old hands in the St. Louis press corps, the expense was unjustified. So far, except for Pulitzer’s friends in politics and journalism, few people were paying any attention to the Post and Dispatch. Although it led the Star, the other afternoon paper, its circulation was one-tenth that of the leading morning newspapers. The essential problem remained. New readers were needed. And for that to happen, the paper had to be noticed.
Years before, when he worked at the Westliche Post, Pulitzer had gained attention with his crusading reporting, exposing corruption in the county government and exhorting readers to action. Now, with an entire newspaper at his disposal, he went at it again, but this time he selected a larger target. He took aim at the oligarchs who controlled the city’s economic life. “The trouble in St. Louis is not with either our masses or merchants or middle classes,” Pulitzer wrote, “but those whose wealth would seem to make it their own interest to lead in every measure of enterprise, but who do not lead, nor even sometimes follow.”
He was on to something. Like many other cities of the era, St. Louis had long been under the control of a wealthy, privileged elite. This was not really a matter of corruption and
graft, although those, too, certainly existed. Rather, a cabal, comprising many of the descendants of early settlers, ruthlessly safeguarded its own economic interests. City laws ensured that only a select group obtained lucrative business monopolies or provided such public services as streetcar lines and gaslights. By the middle of the 1870s, a growing number of merchants, professionals, and small businessmen chafed under the economic restrictions and monopolistic behavior of this elite. A newspaper that espoused their cause would find a ready audience.
In January 1879 the St. Louis Gas-Light Company quietly sought to regain its financial stranglehold on its customers. For years, this monopoly had forced St. Louisans to pay the highest rates in the nation for heat and light, making a staggering 73 percent profit. But this profitable arrangement was shattered when a court sided with a plan to cancel the gas company’s exclusive franchise. Under the pretense of offering a compromise plan, the company promised to pay all the city’s legal fees from the lengthy court fight if the city council restored the monopoly. If not for Pulitzer, the plan might have worked.
Like an editorial Paul Revere, Pulitzer sounded the alarm. “This is no compromise,” he roared from the pages of his paper. “Hands Off! No surrender to the monopoly.” The proposal, he said, reminded him of an old tale about a white man and an Indian dividing a buzzard and a turkey. “Whichever way the proposition is turned, it is the same—the city gets the buzzard, the Gas Company all the turkey.” This first volley was followed by another the next day. “The most objectionable feature of this business is that its only possibility of success depends upon bribery,” Pulitzer said. “Yes, we write it deliberately, bribery.” Lawyers who had previously sold the city’s residents into monopolistic bondage were willing to do it again, he continued. “This is an open and unblushing bid to bribe the lawyers of the city by the payment of large fees.”
Every day for the next two weeks, Pulitzer shoehorned into the paper articles that detailed the monopolistic practices of the gas company and featured poignant interviews with victimized customers. The flurry of articles, as well as the continuous stream of editorials—appearing, as they usually did, under the banner headline NO COMPROMISE! NO COMPROMISE! NO COMPROMISE!—caught the city’s attention. None of the other English-speaking newspapers joined the campaign, and certainly not The Republican, whose editor, William Hyde, was a mouthpiece for the oligarchs.
As the campaign ground on, the paper began to sound like a one-note composition. Pulitzer needed another campaign that would goad the oligarchs and attract readers. His staff obliged him by obtaining copies of the tax returns of the city’s richest residents. Kept in the assessor’s office, the returns were public documents, but they cast an embarrassing hue when published in a newspaper for all to see. Under the headline TAX DODGING: WHOLESALE PERJURY AS A FINE ART, Pulitzer published the financial declarations—especially the dishonest ones—of the city’s wealthiest men. The declarations were damning. For example, despite being reputed to be the city’s wealthiest resident, one man reported having no money in the bank or on hand and listed the value of his personal property at less than $3,000. No one escaped exposure. Judges, lawyers, politicians, and even members of the St. Louis press, such as Hyde, McCullagh, and Preetorius, found their incomplete tax returns in the paper.
When citizens file incomplete returns, Pulitzer told readers, “they commit—to use the mildest term possible—a falsehood, both ridiculous and monstrous. And a much stronger term could be used without the danger of libel suits.” To prove its point, the Post and Dispatch reprinted the text of the taxpayers’ oath each day, with the headline WHAT TAX-DODGERS SWEAR AND SWALLOW. Pulitzer, who had lied in official oaths himself, told his readers that his paper’s reporting revealed “that honor and honesty, law and oath even, are palpably violated by some of our ‘eminently respectable’ and ‘most prominent’ citizens.”
The gas campaign yielded a victory. The city rejected the plan in late February. The tax exposé, however, failed. A grand jury was convened but decided that there was nothing to probe, because the state law was so full of loopholes.
Pulitzer concluded that reporting alone wouldn’t build circulation no matter how great the story, unless one trumpeted it. To that end, he sent his reporters out to interview citizens about the tax abuses and then published reports on what they thought. This ploy paid a double dividend. It permitted the newspaper to publicize its own gallant work—THE POST AND DISPATCH MEETS WITH GENERAL APPROVAL, read one headline—and it ensured that even people who didn’t read the paper learned of its contents. Pulitzer was convinced that news reporting could be combined with promotion, and he pushed his staff to do both. A typical headline would invariably include a subhead such as “Another Exposure by the Post and Dispatch.” By March, his efforts had secured 540 new readers, an outstanding growth rate that, if maintained, promised profits by the end of the year.
Treating every aspect of city life as unexplored territory, Pulitzer commissioned articles on who lived in the alleys and byways. “Tramps, Darkeys, Goats and Garbage” were what the reporter found. Pulitzer sent his staff to learn who owned the houses that were used as brothels: well-heeled citizens, it turned out. And he had the courage to shatter the myth, steadfastly believed by its citizens, that St. Louis was on its way to becoming the nation’s next great city. Instead Pulitzer revealed that it was being outstripped in population and economic growth by its rival, Chicago.
There was hardly anything Pulitzer would not try; he even picked fights with his competitors. He never missed a chance to criticize, embarrass, or simply poke fun at other newspapers, especially Hyde’s Republican, with which he competed for Democratic readers. Once, he laid a trap for the Star. The Post and Dispatch published a fake article, said to be a cable dispatch from Lahore, Pakistan, reporting a massacre of an English garrison at the hands of rebellious Afghan war prisoners. The Star copied this and published the story prominently in its second edition, with the credit “special cable to the Star.” The next day, the Post and Dispatch revealed on its front page how it had fooled the Star.
Pulitzer’s goal was to publish every day at least one article so intriguing, so unusual, so provocative that it would cause people to talk about it at the dinner table. Sensationalism was the most common way newspapers tried to attract attention. But for readers in St. Louis that was old hat. Even the staid Republican, for example, regularly ran stories likely to ruin breakfast for anyone with a sensitive stomach. On December 9, 1878, the day Pulitzer was buying the Dispatch, the Republican put on page one a report of a child’s beheading by a train in Nevada. The head had rolled down a bank and had come to rest on the stump of its neck, facing the trainload of passengers. When it was lifted, the eyes opened and the mouth twitched. The mother soon reached the scene and collected her son’s head, severed arm, and body, placed them in her apron, and led a procession back to her home.
The Post and Dispatch ran its share of these stories. Readers learned about heinous killings by a man in Kentucky in A CRIME UNPARALLELED IN WILD AND REVENGEFUL BRUTALITY and got the details of how the rope broke in an executioner’s attempt to hang another murderer in THE HORRIBLE CRIME FOR WHICH THE BLACK RASCAL DIED.
Pulitzer had a more ambitious and less imitative scheme for building circulation. He wanted to make news from his own news coverage. A perfect opportunity presented itself in February. Two members of the police commission, on which Pulitzer had once served, were said to have ties to city gambling operations. The state senate dispatched a committee to look quietly into the matter. On Monday morning, February 17, the committee members gathered in one of the parlors of the Laclede Hotel, dismissed everyone else from the room except their secretary, and stationed two policemen at the door. Witnesses were admitted one at a time and were sworn not to reveal anything about the conduct of the hearing. Certain that they had outfoxed the press, the senators began their work.
Pulitzer was not easily put off when he wanted a story. He conferred with his city
editor, and they decided to approach a doctor whose offices in the hotel included a waiting room that had a sealed door connecting with the parlor in which the senators were to meet. By holding an ear to the door, a reporter might be able to hear the proceedings. The doctor consented to the plan. When the secret hearings began, a reporter for the Post and Dispatch who was familiar with the senators’ voices was stationed at the door, while the remainder of the press wandered through the hotel’s hallways, clueless about the proceedings. All day Pulitzer’s reporter listened, using his hands to cup his ear against the door. Unable to take notes in this awkward, cramped position, he memorized important portions and later dictated them to the city editor.
On Tuesday, the committee resumed its secret work. As its day’s work drew to an end, the early edition of the Post and Dispatch appeared on the street. “The Veil Is Rent and the Doors of the Star Chamber Fall from Their Fastening,” cried the newsboys, reading from the article headlined: A POST AND DISPATCH REPORTER DEFIES LOCKS AND BARS, BRICKS AND MORTAR. When one of the newsboys entered the lobby of the Laclede Hotel, a witness at the hearing grabbed a copy of the paper and incredulously read the first few lines. In seconds, the boy was cleaned out of his supply of papers. A note was sent up to the committee. One of the senators came from the closed chamber, got a copy of the newspaper, and retreated back into the room. Reading the account, the senator soon learned—as the paper proudly reported later—“that the cat was really out of the bag, that the dog was really dead, and that the jig was really up.”
The incensed senators summoned Pulitzer’s city editor, but he refused to divulge how the paper had obtained its scoop. A policeman was dispatched to examine the doctor’s office adjoining the hearing room. Completing his investigation, he told the committee that the door between the rooms, although blocked to traffic, was not necessarily closed to sound. Next, a man was stationed behind the door with sheets of paper to see if one could record what was being said from the other room. When he returned with notes, the senators glumly learned that indeed it was possible and actually quite easy.
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