Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  But in the last few years, New York’s Park Row had changed greatly. Many of the giants who created its best-known newspapers had died. Gone were the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley, the New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennett, Sr., and the New York Times’s Henry J. Raymond. The new leaders were men such as Charles Dana at the New York Sun and Edwin Lawrence Godkin at the New York Evening Post. This group, however, seemed only to be caretakers. A new order of journalism—lively, independent, and crusading—was growing in other cities. It was like theatrical plays previewing out of town, working out their kinks while awaiting their chance on Broadway.

  Pulitzer talked Daniel Houser into accompanying him to New York to look for a newspaper to buy. Houser, who co-owned the Globe-Democrat, had helped Pulitzer plan his purchase of the Dispatch four years earlier. They took rooms at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on June 19, 1881.

  After scouting around Park Row, they failed to discover any major newspaper for sale. There was one paper, a daily called Truth, which might be bought. It had started in 1879, had been an instant hit, and had quickly attained a circulation of more than 100,000 with its irreverent, light tone, bordering on the vulgar. Recently, it had run into financial difficulties, and Pulitzer made a halfhearted bid of $50,000 for it, but he was turned down. Thinking maybe he would do better to launch his own newspaper, Pulitzer asked Houser to go in with him. “I told him I was tied up with the Globe-Democrat and that the only field in New York would be for a Democratic paper, that I could not print a Republican paper in St. Louis and a Democratic paper in New York,” Houser recalled. “I advised him not to start a new paper but buy one with a location—an office, a name, a franchise.”

  Almost as if he did not want to return to St. Louis, Pulitzer found excuses to stay in the East through the summer of 1881. He dashed up to Albany to report for the Post-Dispatch on Roscoe Conkling’s fruitless bid to win back the Senate seat he had resigned over a patronage dispute with President James Garfield. The political drama culminated on July 2 when Charles Guiteau, an obscure follower of Conkling’s stalwart faction who was also a disappointed office seeker himself, pumped two bullets into the president. Doctors spent the summer battling to save Garfield’s life.

  In September, the president was moved to Elberon, part of the coastal town of Long Branch, New Jersey, where fresh sea air might speed his recovery. Pulitzer joined the pack of reporters at the West End Hotel covering the president’s convalescence. It didn’t take long for him to become skeptical about the doctors’ optimistic bulletins. Probably, most of the reporters were also doubtful about the official pronouncements. But lacking the freedom of writing for a paper they owned, most of them dutifully transmitted to their editors the morsels of upbeat news provided to them by the president’s staff. GREATLY IMPROVED reported the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post predicted, THE PRESIDENT SURELY ON THE ROAD TO RECOVERY.

  When his turn came at the telegraph office, Pulitzer handed the operator a far gloomier assessment. “There are not many in the inner circle who do not well know that the bulletins are reliable only in this, that they exaggerate and embellish to the uttermost every favorable and utterly ignore every unfavorable sign of the case,” he wired to the Post-Dispatch. The operator, one of eight brought in by Western Union to handle the volume of traffic, was impressed by what he transmitted. “Mr. Pulitzer always filed what we termed ‘good stuff,’” he recalled. “From the first line of his first story, Mr. Pulitzer predicted the death of Garfield and pilloried several of the attending physicians for their false bulletins on the President’s condition.”

  At the beginning of Garfield’s second week in Long Branch, ominous reports about his health began circulating. Most reporters, however, continued to report otherwise. They stuck to the story that the president was improving and that any news to the contrary was a product of the sensational press. A few nervous reporters covered their tracks by mentioning the rumors. Pulitzer, on the other hand, pressed on with his baleful version of Garfield’s condition. “As I said last week, the President is growing worse,” he wrote. “He is wasting away. It is only a question of time. All of his troubles, all his weakness come from the blood. It is poisoned.” The doctors, he said, were lying. Pulitzer was convinced that septicemia, which before antibiotics invariably resulted in death, had set in.

  On September 15, the president’s medical team conceded that Garfield had pyemia, or septicemia. Incredibly, reporters for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other papers downplayed this news. Pulitzer marched to the telegraph office with a blunt dispatch. “Unless his blood can be cured he cannot be saved. I said this over a week ago and I repeat it,” Pulitzer wrote. “The physicians and bulletins and reporters have lied for days and weeks and months in denying this fact.”

  The tide of bad news now overwhelmed the Pollyannas of the press. The New York Times had the most backpedaling to do. It claimed that newspapermen were astonished by the new disclosures. The Post-Dispatch bragged that the new official bulletins proved its reporting—done by its owner—had been true all along. “Even Dr. Bliss has at last been forced to confess the lamentable truth,” Pulitzer said. “He now admits everything he so positively denied every day and almost every hour of the last week.”

  On Monday morning, September 19, Pulitzer filed his final dispatch. “All hope is dead. The President is dying.” That night, with his wife and daughter at his side, Garfield ceased to breathe. In New York, a messenger boy brought the news to Vice President Chester Alan Arthur as church bells began to toll. Pulitzer returned to the city and denounced Garfield’s doctors. “If they had been blind-folded they could hardly have shown much less sense.”

  The day after the president’s death, the Post-Dispatch defended itself against the censorious complaints it had received during Pulitzer’s coverage of Garfield’s decline. “We have been charged with ‘sensationalism’ and with a desire to prematurely dispose of the sufferer,” Cockerill wrote. “We were not blinded by the bulletins of the physicians who felt it a part of their duty to keep up the spirit of the country in the face of plain facts. We went behind the bulletins…. Our predictions, we are sorry to say, have nearly all been verified.”

  The success of Pulitzer’s Post-Dispatch ceased being a novelty. By any measure, the newspaper and its publisher had become as important in St. Louis as the established morning papers—The Republican and the Globe-Democrat—and the men at their helms. During Pulitzer’s reporting from Long Branch, his paper’s circulation rose to 28,475 copies, more than three times the average circulation it had at the beginning of the year.

  To accommodate his growing staff and new presses, Pulitzer built a four-story building. He installed Richard Hoe’s latest press, which could cut and fold the paper at a high rate of speed and included the first counting devices. Since getting his first order from the upstart publisher in 1878, Hoe and his headquarters staff in New York had become very familiar with the Pulitzer name.

  Pulitzer trumpeted the link between the newspaper’s financial independence and its political independence. “From the very commencement the cardinal principle of the paper and the chief ambition of its owner and conductor has been to achieve and maintain an absolute independence, financially, politically, personally and morally,” Pulitzer wrote, celebrating the installation of the latest Hoe press. “We have absolutely no master, and no friend but the great public.”

  Indeed, the Post-Dispatch’s crusading zeal found a loyal middle-class readership. Success, however, came with costs. The paper’s campaigns of civic reform left the city’s landscape strewn with bruised and injured parties; its drive to clean up the city’s illicit pastimes of gambling and prostitution shut down popular forms of entertainment; its continual attacks on the oligarchy embittered the powerful; and the moral haughtiness of its editorials ensured that many, including its supporters, would relish a humbling misstep.

  As a consequence, Pulitzer and his family faced growing social ostracism. St. Louis may have p
rojected cosmopolitan airs to visitors, but those who lived there learned quickly that it had the pettiness of a small town. “It is encrusted,” said Pulitzer’s friend Stilson Hutchins, “with prejudices, which are steadily strengthened by such contemptible creatures as the Knapps—who prat high morality in the columns of their newspapers—traduce and slander everybody whom they can’t use or who does not belong to their set.”

  The hostility grew to the point where Pulitzer was assaulted on the street. In late March, as he was leaving Ecker’s restaurant, where he had lunched, a burly man armed with a small whip tried to strike him. Pulitzer seized his assailant by the throat and threw him against a store window, breaking it. The man, who left no clue as to the cause of his anger, ran off, escaping through a nearby saloon.

  For Kate, her husband’s notoriety was painful. Despite her pedigree, she found herself increasingly snubbed by the social elite whose company she coveted. The Pulitzers moved from their house on Washington Avenue, but there was little they could do to decrease their sense of isolation. Compounding Kate’s unhappiness was the uncertain health of the children. Both Ralph and Lucille were delicate. Ralph, in particular, was small and weak for his age and suffered from asthma and other ailments. As 1882 began, Kate was pregnant again. She remained alone a great deal of time, especially as Joseph increasingly spent time away from St. Louis.

  In March, on one of half a dozen long trips to the East that year, Pulitzer joined up with Hutchins in Washington to interview Garfield’s assassin in the jail where he awaited execution. Charles Guiteau had used as a legal defense the technically correct claim that the president had died not from the bullets but rather from the incompetence of the doctors who, as Pulitzer had reported, had misdiagnosed and mistreated their patient. Despite their shared low regard for Garfield’s doctors, Pulitzer was filled with an intense hatred of Guiteau. When he reached the cell, his enmity grew. The prisoner jumped up and greeted Pulitzer in perhaps the most wounding manner possible. “Why, how do you do, Mr. Schurz,” said Guiteau. “I know your brother very well—have spoken from the same platform with him. How much you look like him.”

  Pulitzer turned to Hutchins with a look of disgust and they both shook their heads. “I did not care, however, to lose time by explanations as to his mistake of my identity,” said Pulitzer, who decided to let the insulting misidentification go unchallenged. “My business was to study.” Perhaps, but Guiteau’s business was to make money. He earned about $50 a day selling photographs and autographs to visitors. Before the interview progressed, the required business was transacted, and Pulitzer and Hutchins soon owned their own Guiteau memorabilia.

  “He handles his greenbacks,” Pulitzer said, “like a bank teller and talks about the different points and features of his different photographs precisely as if he were standing behind the counter selling ribbons or lace.” Pulitzer found Guiteau unrepentant. Nor did Guiteau show any signs of lunacy. In fact, Pulitzer thought the man, whose actions had changed the leadership of the nation and the fortunes of thousands of ambitious men, seemed no different from a typical businessman or clerk. “He could have been taken precisely as he stood and transferred behind the counter of some dry-goods store as a perfectly fit figure.”

  By the end of the visit, Pulitzer was even more repelled by the assassin than he had been at its beginning, almost as if Guiteau’s apparent normality made the crime more heinous. As the two newspapermen rode away from the jail, Hutchins noticed that his companion “was constantly engaged in washing his hands with invisible soap in imperceptible water.”

  Perhaps inspired by his brother’s success with the Post-Dispatch, Albert Pulitzer was bitten by a similar ambition. He had been working as a $45-a-week reporter on Bennett’s New York Herald that spring when he shared his plan with a friend who worked at the New York Times. Pausing in front of the Equitable Building on Broadway, Albert told his companion that he intended to raise $20,000 to launch a paper in the already crowded New York market. His fellow reporter questioned the wisdom of embarking on such a risky enterprise with so little money. Albert laughed. “If I once get started, I shall not stop,” he said. “I can then get more capital.”

  Albert wanted to create a newspaper that would stand in contrast to the spiritless gray sheets of the time. The idea had come to him while he rode on streetcars and ferryboats. He noticed that newspaper readers gravitated to articles written in a lighter vein. “How would it do, I often asked myself when I thus watched newspaper readers, as they read their different papers, to create a new kind of paper, bright instead of dull, light instead of heavy, gay instead of wearisome?”

  During his years at the Herald, Albert had become convinced that newspapers were ignoring half of their potential readership. “It is, after all, women who enrich newspaper proprietors, it is the shops who cater to them who make the great newspaper fortunes in this country by the advertising which they pour out like a shower of gold into the columns of the papers.” He recalled how, when he sold subscriptions to a German newspaper door-to-door in St. Louis, women remained loyal to a publication that won their affection. Albert’s ideal newspaper would be full of material interesting to women.

  Albert asked his now wealthy brother for money. Even though Joseph had earlier been so eager to get a foothold into New York newspaper-dom that he had been prepared to buy a gossipy rag, he said he wouldn’t invest a cent in Albert’s scheme. “He kindly proposed that I should come out to St. Louis for a year, go to work on the Post-Dispatch and thus learn at least the rudiments of the business side of journalism.” The idea of his younger brother seeking to succeed in New York before him raised Joseph’s hackles.

  Undeterred by either the pessimism of his friends of the parsimony of his brother, Albert began a search for capital. Failing to find anyone in New York willing to invest, in the summer of 1882 Albert sailed for London, where his wit and charm had won over many people in high social circles during his previous reporting trips for the Herald. Unlike Joseph, Albert was a bon vivant. “His delightful anecdotes and reminiscences of celebrities he had met at home and abroad, his gift for seizing upon the distinctive qualities of a personality and turning them to the best account, together with his sharp and pungent wit and sparkling repartee,” recalled one smitten marquise, “rendered him an exceptionally entertaining companion.”

  In August, Albert returned triumphantly to New York with $25,000 in capital. He put together a bare-bones staff of editors and reporters and rented space on the sixth floor of the New York Tribune’s building on Spruce Street, overlooking the Sun and French’s Hotel. The Tribune agreed to print his newspaper on one of its unused presses, but only after Albert had promised that none of his staff would enter the composing room, where valuable AP dispatches might be purloined.

  New York would soon have its first Pulitzer newspaper.

  In the fall of 1882, continued concern about Ralph’s asthma led the Pulitzers to spend time away from St. Louis. Now with a third child—Katherine Ethel, who had been born on June 30—the family took up residence for the winter in Aiken, South Carolina, which was becoming a popular health resort. Even though this was an election year, Pulitzer left the management of the Post-Dispatch in Cockerill’s hands. When it came to political coverage, readers were unlikely to notice the difference. Cockerill, if such a thing was possible, became even more excited by elections than his boss—perhaps, as it would turn out, too animated.

  The most important contest in St. Louis was an election to fill the congressional seat that had become vacant when Thomas Allen, Pulitzer’s former opponent, died in office. The party bosses, specifically the Knapps and Hyde at the Republican, favored James Broadhead, an old friend and political ally of Pulitzer’s. But under Cockerill’s direction, the Post-Dispatch vigorously opposed Broadhead on the grounds that he was in the pocket of the gas monopoly and acted as Jay Gould’s man in St. Louis. Broadhead’s participation in the court cases involving the gas monopoly might have been excused as a mistake, bu
t his affiliation with Gould tainted him indelibly.

  If the railroad was the corporate evil of the era, the railroad and industrial magnate Jay Gould was its personification. Easily one of the most hated men of the era, he served as a ready target for the editorial pen of the reformist-minded Pulitzer. Two years earlier, for instance, Pulitzer heard a rumor in New York that Gould had purchased the Democratic New York World. “The Democratic party, despite its great vitality, cannot afford to have its press contaminated by such a vampire,” wrote Pulitzer on his return to St. Louis. The rumor was true. Gould had unintentionally acquired the paper when he purchased the assets of another corporation.

  Gould became Pulitzer’s particular devil. Pulitzer began a campaign to warn Missourians of the financier’s Mephistophelian intentions. From New York, in March 1882, Pulitzer filed an article claiming that Gould intended to make Missouri “his ‘pocket borough,’ controlling the Missouri legislature, running all the railroads, steamships, iron mills, and everything else he can gobble up, including one or two of the newspapers.” The Post-Dispatch took to calling Gould “Missouri’s boss.”

  Broadhead aroused the enmity of the Post-Dispatch for two reasons. Not only was he the hand-chosen candidate of Pulitzer’s archenemies in St. Louis, but he was also Gould’s representative. Still, when Broadhead won the party’s nomination, most people assumed the Post-Dispatch would support him, as it had done when Allen beat Pulitzer two years earlier. But Cockerill relished a fight. He did not back down. On the contrary, he went after Broadhead with a vengeance, laying out an array of charges of corruption. When the candidate remained silent, Cockerill wrote, “Perhaps the charges are unanswerable.”

  The attacks greatly upset Broadhead’s law partner Alonzo W. Slayback, not a man one would want to anger. Slayback had been a friend of Cockerill’s boss since they met during Pulitzer’s first political campaign as a Democrat. Slayback had tolerated the Post-Dispatch’s excited political pronouncements, and in return Pulitzer had kept Slayback out of the paper’s crosshairs. For example, about a year earlier an opponent of Slayback’s had published a card* in the Post-Dispatch accusing the lawyer of being a coward; at great expense, Pulitzer had the card removed in the middle of a press run.