Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Chapter Nineteen

  A BLIND CROESUS

  Joe Howard, one of the World’s leading reporters, was preparing to depart for Montreal on the evening of February 9, 1887, to cover the city’s famous winter carnival. The idea had been Pulitzer’s, and it was a plum assignment. Howard would spend several days visiting a monolithic illuminated ice palace and attending the carnival’s many festivities. As he talked over his plans with editors in the newsroom, Pulitzer came out from his office and walked over to him.

  “What have you been doing today, Joe?” asked Pulitzer.

  “Nothing. I’m preparing, you know, to go to Montreal,” replied Howard.

  Upon hearing this, Pulitzer remembered he had also given permission and $100 to Walt McDougall to go to Montreal. Pulitzer had no interest in having—in his words—“two high-priced men off on one job.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” Pulitzer brusquely told Howard.

  “But,” said Howard, “I’ve bought my tickets and engaged berths for the people who are going with me. One must do that early. There are crowds going to Canada right now.”

  Pulitzer’s face reddened. He raised his right hand and, waving his index finger close to Howard’s face, said, “I tell you I don’t want you to go.”

  “Don’t you point that at me,” Howard snapped back, hurling an insult, later reported as one that described Pulitzer as “a sordid, grasping, covetous Israelite.”

  Howard’s revilement kindled Pulitzer’s notorious temper. The publisher, who at six feet two inches towered over the squat reporter, struck Howard on the neck with his fist, sending him to the floor. As Howard fumbled for his eyeglasses, knocked off by the blow, Pulitzer told him he was fired. Rising from the floor, Howard tried to return the assault. But Cockerill and others restrained him and escorted him from the office.

  “Joe got so abusive that I got at him and knocked him down, and then discharged him on the spot,” Pulitzer admitted to reporters from rival newspapers who chased him down later that day. But, he added, “I wouldn’t for the world hurt Joe, so don’t say anything about it, please.” Naturally, however, the fisticuffs made the front pages of the city’s papers, except for the restrained New York Times. The New York Herald, where Howard had once worked, wrote the incident up like a prizefight, complete with diagrams and sporting-style commentary.

  Howard was not the only talent Pulitzer had plucked from Bennett’s staff at the Herald. While Bennett was in Paris, Pulitzer had persuaded the Herald’s managing editor, Ballard Smith, to move over to the World. When Bennett returned, he was so angry that he abolished the job, though others ended up doing the work under a different title.

  Bennett’s wrath was understandable. In the competitive atmosphere of Park Row, staffing remained a constant worry. Reporters were not hard to come by and most jumped at the chance to work for the World. But editors were another matter. “It is the man,” Pulitzer said, “who decides what is to go into the paper and what is to be left out, and in what shape it is to go in, who has more to do with making the newspaper than the man who simply writes for it.” The problem of finding the right editors was even more vexing for Pulitzer than for most publishers because the success of the World rested on an approach to news for which most editors were not trained. Pulitzer was betting that Ballard Smith would take to it.

  Smith was a Kentuckian who had once worked for Pulitzer’s friend Henry Watterson at the Louisville Courier-Journal. After coming to New York, Smith served briefly as an editor on the old World before going to the Herald. Debonair, with an aura of erudition from his education at Dartmouth, he married the only daughter of a wealthy merchant and gained an entrée rare for a journalist into the city’s close-knit social life—from which the Pulitzers were excluded.

  Although Smith cut an unusual figure in the crass, tumultuous world of a newspaper’s city room, Pulitzer recognized in him news instincts similar to his own. Smith was daring, a master of headlines, and, most important, willing to be trained. “I have tried faithfully to reflect exactly your views,” Smith wrote to Pulitzer not long after joining the paper. “I confess they often conflicted much with what I thought I knew well before.”

  Smith, however, did not hit it off with Cockerill, who felt threatened. Like two feral dogs, they circled each other. This was not displeasing to Pulitzer. He had no interest in building a team. Rather, he preferred having managers who competed with one another and for his approbation. Without making himself superfluous, he was taking the first steps toward assembling a structure of management that could run the paper without him.

  With Cockerill overseeing the entire operation, Smith enforcing Pulitzer’s approach to news gathering, and Merrill writing editorials, Pulitzer was freed from the day-to-day operation of the paper. The change was a necessity. He had become irascible and moody, and his health woes grew more and more apparent to those around him. “Won’t you have enough confidence to let us run the place?” asked George Turner, a Bostonian, whom Pulitzer had hired as a business manager. “I am writing this to beg you to cease worrying about the paper and, if a sea voyage is possible, to take a long one where it will be impossible to get reports or issue directions.”

  Pulitzer booked tickets to Liverpool for April 16.

  While Pulitzer waited to depart for Europe, the needs of the paper weighed heavily on him. The libel suits continued to swarm like gnats, despite Pulitzer’s interminable precautions, including reading almost every word that went into the paper. The World Almanac also required his attention. He had revived the encyclopedic work, which was originally published by the old World but had died. Pulitzer saw both promotional and moneymaking opportunities in resurrecting it. He also loved reference works. When he got into arguments—not an infrequent occurrence—he would rush to his collection of such books to find ammunition. But like all his ideas, this one created more work for which he could not find time, and he had been disappointed by the first new editions. “That it has not received the measure of my own concept,” he told an editor, “is perhaps because I had not time enough at my disposal to do all I had planned.”

  In the meantime, Pulitzer had to tend to the opening of a printing plant in Brooklyn, because the World’s main presses couldn’t keep up with demand. The paper now circulated more than a quarter of a million copies each day. To celebrate this achievement, Pulitzer sent commemorative coins set in plush-lined leather cases to advertisers and leading political figures. Slightly larger than a silver dollar, the coins were 100 percent silver, 17 percent more than the amount of silver the government used in its coins. On one side was a relief of the Statue of Liberty; the other side boasted that the World’s circulation was the largest ever attained by an American newspaper.

  The paper’s average daily circulation was now three times what it had been three years earlier, when Pulitzer had already been considered a stunning success. The new high-water mark astonished newspapermen because 1887 was not an election year, when partisan fever stoked the circulation of newspapers. The World’s numerical claims were also credible even in an era when circulation figures were often unsubstantiated bragging. Pulitzer dared anyone to prove him wrong. He offered to open his books to public inspection and promised to donate $10,000 to the press club if someone found he had misstated the figures. “It is a common query in the literary clubs and among the journalistic fraternity,” said one commentator. “What in the World will Pulitzer do next?”

  Even if Pulitzer ceased his constant self-promotion, the success of the World was now so widely known that it was spawning imitators in other cities. His formula worked, even for a young dropout from Harvard.

  In the spring of 1887, after years of entreaties, twenty-four-year-old William Randolph Hearst persuaded his father to turn over control of the family’s money-losing San Francisco Examiner to him. He had found Harvard boring in comparison with life’s possibilities for someone with money who was eager to prove himself. Commuting to work in a fifty-foot speedboat, the tall, s
lender, handsome Hearst set about transforming the Examiner into a West Coast version of the World.

  For years Hearst had read, studied, and cut out articles from the World. He told his father that he would make the family’s newspaper like the “New York World which is undoubtedly the best paper of the class to which the Examiner belongs—that class which appeals to the people and which depends for its success upon enterprise, energy and a certain startling originality.”

  “To accomplish this,” he continued, “we must have—as the World has—active, intelligent, and energetic young men.”

  Hearst needed first to break his paper’s association with its past incarnation, as Pulitzer had done when he took over the World. Almost as if he were Pulitzer in New York in 1883, Hearst resorted to every trick from Pulitzer’s playbook. He sent his reporters out to scour the poorest neighborhoods in San Francisco for tales that would make readers weep, to look in police stations and courts for crime stories that thrilled, and to search through public records to uncover corruption. The front page not only displayed the reporters’ work with headlines bold as neon lights but also trumpeted the paper’s successes as if the Examiner itself were running for office. Imitation has its rewards. The Examiner’s circulation began a steady climb.

  Hearst’s approach to management also mirrored Pulitzer’s. He left no part of the operation alone, and his indefatigable presence drove his staff to work even harder. He spent almost every waking hour working on the paper. “I don’t suppose I will live more than two or three weeks if this strain keeps up,” Hearst wrote his mother, voicing woes similar to those of Pulitzer, though he was almost twenty years Pulitzer’s junior.

  Although he greatly admired the World and imitated it, Hearst disdained its owner. He felt he had more in common with Pulitzer’s adversary Bennett, who like Hearst was heir to a family fortune and who had been given his New York Herald without spending a cent. “It is an honest and brave paper one can respect,” Hearst said. “It is the kind of paper I should like the Examiner to be, while the World is, because of the Jew that owns it, a nasty, unscrupulous damned sheet that I despise but which is too powerful to insult.” But as a copycat, his spite was like that of a man who enjoyed the company of a mistress, which Hearst did, and felt sullied by the experience the morning after.

  Despite the imitation there was a vast difference between the men. Pulitzer had started with nothing, and his newspapers were sustained and expanded by their financial success. Hearst, on the other hand, was backed by an endless reserve of family money. For any competitor, this made Hearst dangerous. He was soon boasting of the Examiner’s success in full-page advertisements calling it “The Monarch of dailies. The largest, brightest and best newspaper on the Pacific Coast.”

  But conquering the Atlantic coast would have to wait for another day.

  In late March 1887 the kind of criminal case Pulitzer loved to feature in the World opened in a New York City courtroom. Assistant District Attorney De Lancey Nicoll, whom Pulitzer admired, was prosecuting several aldermen on charges of corruption. One of the boodlers was defended by Ira Shafer, a colorful lawyer who made for good copy. The World illustrated its front-page coverage of the trial with comic drawings of Shafer, and the reporter had fun referring to Shafer’s shoes as toboggans and to his mouth as a cave of winds. All this got to be too much for the lawyer. “That dirty, filthy sheet yesterday reviled and insulted me by the publication of a lot of vile caricatures,” Shafer informed the jury, whose members were quite surprised, as they had not been permitted to read any newspapers. “A friend said to me this morning: ‘Shafer, why don’t you shoot that Hungarian Jew? Why don’t you horsewhip him?’”

  Despite the judge’s attempts to rein him in, Shafer continued. “Gentlemen, wait. The day will come when I will meet that Jew face to face, and when I do meet him let him beware,” he told the jury, which included three Jewish members. When court adjourned, Shafer went on a similar rampage before reporters in the courthouse hall. “The first time I shall meet Mr. Pulitzer after this trial is over,” he said, “I shall kill him.”

  Lawyers who knew Shafer doubted that his threat was serious, and rather attributed it to his quick-to-anger disposition. The fiery-tempered Pulitzer figured as much. He continued to ride the elevated train to work unescorted, and he dismissed any talk of danger. “If I could have been killed by threats I should have been buried long ago,” he said. “If I could be influenced by the hostility of rascals I should have conducted a very different newspaper from the World and I should have adopted a different policy when I entered journalism years ago—which was to expose fraud and crime and pursue rascals.”

  Pulitzer was soon out of Shafer’s reach anyway. Leaving Smith, Cockerill, and Merrill to run the shop, he departed with Kate on the most extensive trip they had taken since he bought the paper four years earlier. There had been scarlet fever in their house and they were eager to leave. The children were left in the care of Kate’s brother, who greatly pleased seven-year-old Lucille with the purchase of a pony. Pulitzer’s friend Childs came up from Philadelphia to see them off. “I have been very anxious about you all,” Childs told him. “What with the illness at home and the immense pressure of your great business you had too much to bear.”

  After a stopover in Scotland, the Pulitzers reached London, where Joseph was immediately confined to his hotel room by doctors worried that his cold was creating congestion in his lungs. Finally, in early May, the Pulitzers began their European trip in earnest—in Paris, a favorite of Kate’s. There they dined with J. P. Morgan’s partner Joseph Drexel, were feted by the American ambassador Robert McLane, attended balls, and purchased art and jewels.

  The Pulitzers took up quarters at the Hotel Bristol. Joseph’s brother Albert was only a few blocks away in Le Grand Hotel, but they remained estranged. The success of Albert’s Morning Journal, though now eclipsed by the World, provided him with financial freedom. His fortune made, he spent less and less time in New York and instead resided regally for long stretches in Paris and London. His marriage to Fanny was at an end. In fact, he had been romantically linked with the four-times-married Miriam Leslie, a publishing widow who was a descendant of Huguenots and sometimes went by the title Baroness de Bazus.

  An enterprising American reporter could not resist playing the two brothers against each other by seeking their opinions of French newspapers. “I think it is simply disgraceful the kind of thing which they produce here,” said Joseph. “They are newspapers in name, but newspapers with the news left out. They print neither home news nor foreign news, in fact they print nothing but stories and essays.” Au contraire, said Albert. “People in France have not got that terrible thirst for ‘news’ which consumes us at home; they are not at all in a hurry to know about accidents and crimes before it is necessary, and even then they don’t want a great mass of sickening details. In many ways their tastes are more elevated than ours.”

  Joseph and Kate went south for a rest in Aix-les-Bains and then recrossed the Channel to be among the dignitaries and royalty from around the globe who gathered in Westminster Abbey for Queen Victoria’s celebration of her silver jubilee. Afterward they watched the royal procession from the World’s London offices. While they were in London, Pulitzer flirted with the idea of buying a newspaper. Before his arrival, the World’s correspondent there had inquired which newspaper could be had and made into a British version of the New York sensation. It was a tempting proposition. Pulitzer loved London and its museums, theaters, and politics. Kate and his friends who fretted about his health were in a panic.

  Nothing came of the idea and Pulitzer resumed his statesmanlike role. The financier Junius Morgan invited the Pulitzers to his country house; “I am but a plain farmer living on my farm,” he wrote. Liberal members of Parliament feted Pulitzer in London, and he made a pilgrimage to visit their party leader, William Gladstone, at Dollis Hill Estate. Thrown out of office after his third term, as a consequence of advocating home rule for Ireland,
Gladstone was living in political exile about a forty-five-minute carriage ride from Charing Cross. Pulitzer arrived with a delegation of American politicians to present him with an ornamental silver urn, a tribute paid for by contributions from thousands of readers of the World for Gladstone’s failed efforts on behalf of Ireland.

  Gladstone, dressed in a light gray frock coat with a loosely tied blue-and-white polka-dot scarf, greeted the Americans and led them to the wooden box in which the gift had been shipped. Keys were procured and Gladstone lifted the three-foot silver urn from its container. On its top was mounted a small bust of him, and the trophy-like object was engraved with a bas-relief of Homer and Demosthenes and embossed with a rose, thistle, and shamrock.

  “Well, let us get the business formality of this out of the way so that everyone can come and look at it,” Gladstone said. Then he leaned against the box and turned to Pulitzer, who addressed the crowd. “Mr. Gladstone,” he began, “10,689 people of the first city of America ask the first citizen of England to accept this gift.” As if he were giving an American stump speech, Pulitzer droned on with praises for Gladstone, with his usual references to liberty, freedom, political equality, and democracy.

  While the ceremony continued, an American con man took advantage of the moment. He hid behind a tree and emerged to stand behind Gladstone and Pulitzer when all the dignitaries gathered for a photograph. Later he would imply to others that he was an intimate friend of the Prince of Wales, who he claimed had once taken his picture. When the mark expressed doubts, the American operator would say he thought he might even have the picture with him and would produce a photo, trimmed to show him standing with Gladstone and Pulitzer.

  Unaware of the shady operator, Pulitzer relished the moment. He sent instructions to the World to play up the ceremony. Smith gave it two columns on the front page. British newspapers were less thrilled and questioned the delegation’s claim of speaking for the American people. “In point of fact,” said the Evening Standard, “they had no more right to such a position than the three tailors of Tooley Street, who addressed the Emperor of Russia, had to represent the people of Great Britain.” The last word, however, belonged to Gladstone’s daughter Mary. That night she penned a few short lines in her diary about the ceremony. “Sat. A garden party the American presentation to [father], an object of surprising hideousness.”