Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Pulitzer and Hancock entered the World newsroom just as the staff was putting the finishing touches on the next day’s edition. Although Pulitzer’s arrival had been preceded by a memo telling the employees that the new owner wished to retain them in their positions at their current salaries, the nearly 100 reporters, editors, compositors, and printers were anxious to catch a glimpse of this thirty-six-year-old outsider who held their future in his hands. The departure of the existing senior management, fleeing like ship rats, forecast great changes.

  Escorting Pulitzer around the newsroom, Hancock urged him to write some sort of pronouncement for the next day’s edition. Taking a pen, Pulitzer hurriedly began. While a newspaper must be independent, he wrote for his first editorial in the paper, “it must not be indifferent or neutral on any question involving public interest.” Then, collating phrases from his stump speeches and from five years of editorial struggles against entrenched interests in St. Louis, Pulitzer pledged that the World would fight against monopolies, organized privilege, corrupt officials, and other threats to democracy. “Its rock of faith must be true Democracy,” he wrote. “Not the Democracy of a political machine. Not the Democracy which seeks to win the spoils of office from a political rival, but the Democracy which guards with jealous care the rights of all alike, and perpetuates the free institutions it first established.

  “Performance is better than promises. Exuberant assurances are cheap,” Pulitzer continued, adding a signed announcement of the change of ownership that he had drafted to accompany his editorial. Simply watch the paper and see for yourself, he said. “There is room in this great and growing city for a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly Democratic—dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse-potentates—devoted more to the news of the New than the Old World—that will expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses—that will serve and battle for the people with earnest sincerity.” Done, Pulitzer handed the sheets to an eighteen-year-old compositor, who would later become one of his editors, and his words were rapidly set into type in time for the press run.

  Before leaving for the night, Pulitzer made one alteration to the look of the paper that hinted at his ambitions. He dropped “New York” from the name and restored the nameplate that had been used when the World began in 1860. At its center, framed by the words “The World,” was a printing press with rays of light emanating from it like the sun flanked by the two hemispheres of the globe.

  While Joseph made plans for his newspaper, Albert made repairs to his. He had managed to locate a new editor. In fact, the replacement turned out to be an improvement, and the stolen Hancock lasted only a few days under Joseph. Still fuming over the raid, Albert ran into Joseph at Madison Square Garden.

  “I congratulate you on your new recruits,” Albert said. “Perhaps you would now like to offer me a stated sum annually for the sole purpose of looking up and supplying your paper with bright writers?”

  Joseph dismissed the sarcastic remark with a wave. “I’ll admit that you have a wonderful nose for ferreting out talent,” he said. “I have read your paper today and it is really not half bad.”

  There may have been enough room for two Pulitzer papers in New York, but not enough for two Pulitzers. Although Albert was willing to share the stage, Joseph wasn’t. Stung by the malevolent actions of his only living sibling, Albert took an angry swipe at Joseph’s handiwork. He told the Herald that the success of the Journal showed that for a newspaper to find readers “it is not necessary to make it slanderous, vituperative, or nasty.”

  A few weeks after their encounter, Joseph made an attempt to be civil. He stopped in at Albert’s office for fifteen minutes. “He made a closer study of us and took in more during that time than another less observing man would have done in a whole day,” Albert wrote, describing the visit to a friend. “After Joe left someone asked, ‘I wonder what he dropped in for?’ My officious office-boy quickly replied, ‘I guess he dropped in to see if there was anyone else he could coax away!’”

  After the visit, the two brothers would forever remain estranged. The only two remaining members of Fülöp and Elize Pulitzer’s children left in the world found they could not get along.

  For those who had watched Pulitzer climb from being a lawyer’s errand boy to being a newspaper publisher, his purchase of the World held great promise. “You have entered upon the stage of a great theater and stand as if it were before the footlights in presence of the nation,” one of his oldest friends from St. Louis wrote. Another compared him to a previous newspaper giant: “The present situation is not unlike that which the elder Bennett found when he moved to attack the established dailies. You are in a magnificent field and you ought to move all of America.”

  But unless Pulitzer could spark a spectacular increase in circulation he would not ascend a pinnacle of political power. Instead, he would be crushed under an avalanche of debt. Every tactic, device, scheme, plan, and method that he employed in St. Louis would have to work in New York, and he also needed to think up new ones. But before introducing his ideas, he decided to create the appearance of change.

  Taking from his bag a trick he had used in St. Louis, Pulitzer sent reporters out to interview leading Democrats about the “new World,” even though it still looked like the old one. Flattered by the attention and the promise of free publicity, the party figures immediately studied the paper. Typical was the response of one party official. “I guess we are going to have a real Democratic paper at last,” he said. “The paper in its new dress is an immense improvement and the short distinct paragraphs, instead of running everything together, make the paper very readable.”

  Then—also as he had done in St. Louis—Pulitzer took to reprinting all the press comments on the World’s change in ownership. He sought to project a sense of dramatic change. “He took every occasion to blow his horn and tell the public what a good newspaper he was making,” remarked the owner of a stationery and newspaper store on the West Side. “This was unusual in New York and by many people it was considered very bad taste on his part to be continually boasting and bragging about the merits of his publication.” However distasteful it might have seemed to some, it worked. Within the first few days, circulation had a modest increase. New Yorkers were curious about the World.

  What they found when they picked up a copy was not all that different from before. Except for Pulitzer’s tinkering with the masthead, the layout of the paper remained unchanged. He filled in the empty spaces on each side of the top of the front page with a circle or square containing promotional copy such as “Only 8-Page Newspaper in the United States Sold for 2 Cents.” (This little innovation, which he may have stolen from Albert, became known in the business as “ears” and eventually was adopted by most papers.) The front page was divided into six or seven narrow columns, just as in other newspapers. The headlines remained small because convention bound them to the limits of the column width.

  But if the new World looked like the old, life inside its building certainly didn’t. James B. Townsend, a reporter who had been absent at a funeral in Vermont when Pulitzer took over, was startled by what he found upon his return. “It seemed as if a cyclone had entered the building, completely disarranged everything, and had passed away leaving confusion.” Avoiding collisions with messenger boys exiting with urgent deliveries, Townsend made his way to the city room and found his colleagues running around excitedly. He asked the general manager what was the cause of all the commotion.

  “You will know soon enough, young man,” the manager replied. “The new boss will see you in five minutes.” He then glanced up at Townsend and added. “After us the deluge—prepare to meet your fate.”

  Indeed, Townsend was soon summoned to Pulitzer’s office. As he entered, Townsend made his first examination of his new boss, and Pulitzer of him. Dressed in a frock coat and gray trousers, Pulitzer stared back through his glasses. “So, this is Mr. T,�
�� he said. “Well, Sir, you’ve heard that I am the new chief of this newspaper. I have already introduced new methods—new ways I proposed to galvanize this force: are you willing to aid me?”

  Almost as if the breath had been sucked from him by Pulitzer’s vigor, Townsend stammered that he would like to remain on the staff. “Good, I like you,” replied Pulitzer. “Get to work.”

  During the following days, editors and reporters arriving in the early morning found Pulitzer already in his office, often toiling in his shirtsleeves. When the door was open and he was dictating an editorial, recalled one man, “his speech was so interlarded with sulphurous and searing phrases that the whole staff shuddered. He was the first man I ever heard who split a word to insert an oath. He did it often. His favorite was ‘indegoddampendent.’”

  As the staff settled in for the day’s work, they couldn’t escape Pulitzer. One moment he would be in the city room arguing with a reporter about some aspect of a story. No detail was too small. In one case, he was overheard discussing the estimated number of cattle that an editor had expected to arrive in New York from the West the previous day. He loved debating with his staff, usually provoking the arguments himself. “It is by argument,” he told Townsend, “that I measure a man, his shortcomings, his possession or lack of logic, and, above all, whether he has the courage of his convictions, for no man can long work for me with satisfaction to himself or myself unless he has this courage.”

  Finished with the city room, Pulitzer would bark out orders in the composing room or dash into the counting room to get a report on revenues. It wasn’t long before the old-timers couldn’t take it anymore, and new faces, often younger, appeared in the editorial quarters. The men in the composing and printing rooms were content with their new manager, though Pulitzer had one dustup with them. On May 24, he and Cockerill returned from the dedication of the Brooklyn Bridge brimming with ideas about how to cover the momentous occasion, only to discover that forty-three of the fifty-one men had walked off the job in a wage dispute. It took Pulitzer only three hours to capitulate and agree to recognize the men’s union. “The whole difficulty has been amicably settled, and the men have returned happy,” Pulitzer said as he headed out with the union president and others for a glass of beer at a neighboring bar.

  There was a sense that Pulitzer was pushing the World forward. “We in the office felt from the first that this remarkable personality, which has so impressed us upon its arrival inside the building, would soon make its impress felt on the great cosmopolitan public of New York,” Townsend said, “and in time the country.”

  Pulitzer launched his journalistic revolution modestly. The dramatic changes for which he would eventually become known were still years away. At this point, he sought solely to condition his editorial staff to his principles of how a paper should be written and edited. This effort, however modest it may seem, is how the World began on its path to becoming the most widely read newspaper in American history. In an era when the printed word ruled supreme and 1,028 newspapers competed for readers, content was the means of competition. The medium was not the message; the message was. This was where Pulitzer started.

  The paper abandoned its old, dull headlines. In place of BENCH SHOW OF DOGS: PRIZES AWARDED ON THE SECOND DAY OF THE MEETING IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN on May 10 came SCREAMING FOR MERCY: HOW THE CRAVEN CORNETTI MOUNTED THE SCAFFOLD on May 12. Two weeks later the World’s readers were greeted with BAPTIZED IN BLOOD, on top of a story, complete with a diagram, on how eleven people were crushed to death in a human stampede when panic broke out in a large crowd enjoying a Sunday stroll on the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge. In a city where half a dozen newspapers offered dull, similar fare to readers each morning, Pulitzer’s dramatic headlines made the World stand out like a racehorse among draft horses.

  If the headline was the lure, the copy was the hook. Pulitzer could write all the catchy headlines he wanted, but it was up to the reporters to win over readers. He pushed his staff to give him simplicity and color. He admonished them to write in a buoyant, colloquial style comprising simple nouns, bright verbs, and short, punchy sentences. If there was a “Pulitzer formula,” it was a story written so simply that anyone could read it and so colorfully that no one would forget it. The question “Did you see that in the World?” Pulitzer instructed his staff, “should be asked every day and something should be designed to cause this.”

  Pulitzer had an uncanny ability to recognize news in what others ignored. He sent out his reporters to mine the urban dramas that other papers confined to their back pages. They returned with stories that could leave no reader unmoved. Typical, for instance, was the World’s front-page tale, which ran soon after Pulitzer took over, of the destitute and widowed Margaret Graham. She had been seen by dockworkers as she walked on the edge of a pier in the East River with an infant in her arms and a two-year-old girl clutching her skirt. “All at once the famished mother clasped the feeble little girl round her waist and, tottering to the brink of the wharf, hurled both her starving young into the river as it whirled by. She stood for a moment on the edge of the stream. The children were too weak and spent to struggle or to cry. Their little helpless heads dotted the brown tide for an instant, then they sank out of sight. The men who looked on stood spellbound.” Graham followed her children into the river but was saved by the onlookers and was taken to jail to face murder charges.

  For Pulitzer a news story was always a story. He pushed his writers to think like Dickens, who wove fiction from the sad tales of urban Victorian London, to create compelling entertainment from the drama of the modern city. To the upper classes, it was sensationalism. To the lower and working classes, it was their life. When they looked at the World, they found stories about their world.

  In the Lower East Side’s notorious bars, known as black and tans, or at dinner in their cramped tenements, men and women did not discuss society news, cultural events, or happenings in the investment houses. Rather, the talk was about the baby who fell to his death from a rooftop, the brutal beating that police officers dispensed to an unfortunate waif, or the rising cost of streetcar fares to the upper reaches of Fifth Avenue and the mansions needing servants. The clear, simple prose of the World drew in these readers, many of whom were immigrants struggling to master their first words of English. Writing about the events that mattered in their lives in a way they could understand, Pulitzer’s World gave these New Yorkers a sense of belonging and a sense of value. In one stroke, he simultaneously elevated the common man and took his spare change to fuel the World’s profits.

  The moneyed class learned to pick up the World with trepidation. Each day brought a fresh assault on privilege and another revelation of the squalor and oppression under which the new members of the laboring class toiled. Pulitzer found readers where other newspaper publishers saw a threat. Immigrants were pouring into New York at a rate never before seen. By the end of the decade, 80 percent of the city’s population was either foreign-born or of foreign parentage. Only the World seemed to consider the stories of this human tide as deserving news coverage. The other papers wrote about it; the World wrote for it.

  The World’s stories were animated not just by the facts the reporters dug up but by the voices of the city they recorded. Pulitzer drove his staff to aggressively seek out interviews, a relatively new technique in journalism pioneered by his brother, among others. Leading figures of the day were used to a considerable wall of privacy and were affronted by what Pulitzer proudly called “the insolence and impertinence of the reporters for the World.”

  Not only did he have the temerity to dispatch his men to pester politicians, manufacturers, bankers, society figures and others for answers to endless questions, but he instructed them to return with specific personal details that would illustrate the resulting articles. Pulitzer was obsessed with details. A tall man was six feet two inches tall. A beautiful woman had auburn hair, hazel eyes, and demure lips that occasionally turned upward in a coy smile. Vagueness was a
sin.

  As was inaccuracy. A disciple of the independent press movement, Pulitzer was convinced that accuracy built circulation, credibility, and editorial power. Words could paint brides as blushing, murderers as heinous, politicians as venal, but the facts had to be right. “When you go to New York, ask any of the men in the dome to show you my instructions to them, my letters written from day to day, my cables,” Pulitzer told an associate late in life. “You will see that accuracy, accuracy, accuracy, is the first and the most urgent, the most constant demand I have made on them.”

  Pulitzer practically lived at his cramped headquarters on Park Row. Kate and the children hardly ever saw him. His day began with editorial conferences—an editor who came unprepared never repeated the mistake—and ended under the harsh white gaslight as he read and reread proofs for the next morning’s edition. When not writing or editing, Pulitzer studied all the New York papers as well as more than a dozen British, German, and French ones. He demanded a great deal from his staff but even more from himself. When he had been in St. Louis, if the paper was dull he would steal home feeling sick. If it met his standard, he would be elated. As spring turned into summer in New York, Pulitzer was feeling elated.

  In his first weeks at the World, the paper’s circulation soared by 35 percent. “Increasing in circulation? You can just bet it is,” said a newsstand operator on the corner of Cortland and Greenwich streets. “I used to sell fourteen Worlds a day. I now sell thirty-four. If that ain’t an increase I don’t know what is.”

  The Pulitzers moved from their hotel rooms into a house they rented at 17 Gramercy Park, an elegant neighborhood surrounding a private park on the East Side, off Park Avenue. The aging Samuel Tilden, for whom Pulitzer had toiled in the disputed presidential election of 1876, lived at number 15. Once again there was talk of Tilden’s running for president, but Pulitzer would have nothing to do with it. “He belongs to the past and represents an idea,” Pulitzer said a few weeks after moving in next door to his famous neighbor. “Now, ideas are stronger than men, but you can’t elect an idea.”