Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  By midsummer, Pulitzer was at Chatwold, readying himself for the fall’s political battles. The Democrats were preparing for their convention in Chicago and the Republicans for theirs in St. Louis. Pulitzer faced a daunting political problem. Choosing whom to support in a national election remained both a political and an economic decision. Readers still regarded their selection of a newspaper as a political act. The wrong presidential choice could seriously damage the World, especially with Hearst’s Journal nipping at its heels. When Pulitzer had made his bid for supremacy in New York in 1884, he had triumphed over Dana in great part because the Sun had abandoned the Democratic Party. The choice he made in the 1896 election posed similar risks for Pulitzer.

  The strength of the silver movement caught the old guard of the Democratic Party, including Pulitzer, by surprise. “There is not the remotest shadow of a chance that free silver can ever become a reality in the United States,” Pulitzer told a reporter in June. But when William Jennings Bryan spoke to the convention he lit a political prairie fire. Bellowing to the cheering delegates whose excitement rose with each phrase of inspired rhetoric, Bryan proclaimed the movement’s answer to the defenders of the gold standard. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Then, he stepped back, held his arms out and stood Christ-like before the hall. “The floor of the convention seemed to heave up,” reported the World. “Everybody seemed to go mad at once.”

  Pulitzer summoned the World’s editorial writer George Eggleston to Bar Harbor. He had correctly predicted Bryan’s nomination, unlike the other men covering the convention for the World. While Pulitzer and Eggleston conferred, an emissary from Bryan’s campaign arrived. Since only one Democrat had been elected to the White House in forty years, and then with the support of the World, such a political pilgrimage was mandatory.

  Pulitzer instructed Eggleston to meet the representative. The man informed Eggleston that Bryan would win by a large majority with or without the support of the World. “For the sake of the press, and especially of so great a newspaper as the World, therefore, Mr. Bryan asked Mr. Pulitzer’s attention to this danger to prestige.” Nothing that could have been said was more likely to have a worse effect on Pulitzer.

  When Eggleston delivered the message, Pulitzer laughed. As the two men sat on the small porch, Pulitzer asked him to jot down figures. The publisher rapidly named the states and the number of electoral votes that would go to Bryan. “I don’t often predict—never unless I know,” he said. His calculations predicted defeat. “Let that be our answer to Mr. Bryan’s audacious message.” Pulitzer’s electoral math was uncannily correct. “Mr. Pulitzer correctly named every state that would give its electoral vote to each candidate, and the returns of the election—four months later—varies from his prediction by only two electoral votes out of four hundred and forty-seven.”

  But, in a larger sense, Pulitzer had misread the political tea leaves, for the first time in his life. He failed to grasp that free silver was not a public policy debate but a cry for help from the very people for whom he had built his paper.

  Eggleston and Pulitzer crafted an unusually long editorial as the campaign season opened. The World, it said, sympathized with any candidate who stood against Wall Street’s domination and for the creation of an income tax. But before the paper could throw its support to Bryan, it raised twenty ponderous objections to the more extreme elements in the party’s platform—primarily those dealing with free silver. These policies, Pulitzer claimed, could destroy the economy. If Bryan disowned these planks, then he could win over the undecided voters.

  “You can, if you will, decide a majority of them to vote their party’s ticket,” the editorial promised, “as they would very much prefer to do if they can be satisfied that it will be right and safe to do so. Will you not try to convince them?” But it was really Pulitzer who needed convincing. He strongly opposed McKinley’s candidacy but could not bring himself to support Bryan. In hopes of resolving this quandary, he lured Creelman back to the paper to take on a special assignment. Creelman was to follow Bryan’s campaign tour. But he was to write for two audiences: the World’s readers and its publisher. Each day he sent long reports to Bar Harbor, where they were read to Pulitzer, who immediately dictated questions that were wired back. At the end of the campaign, although it had been Creelman who logged thousands of miles as Pulitzer’s political eyes and ears, it was the boss who complained of exhaustion.

  For his part, Hearst had no reservations in supporting Bryan. He published a free weekly campaign edition and covered the nominee’s every move, speech, and utterance. His support was so unquestionable that the candidate himself sent a telegram on election eve to Hearst, thanking him for it.

  Bryan went down to defeat but the Journal did not. Hearst had beaten Pulitzer at his own game. On the basis of his battle with the Sun in 1884, Pulitzer had anticipated that Bryan’s defeat would be a crippling blow to the Journal, which had been the only major Park Row newspaper to support the insurgent Democrat in the decidedly anti-silver New York. But Pulitzer was wrong. Hearst’s alliance with the Bryan campaign gave the Journal exactly what it needed. Its vigorous support for a champion of the underdog established the Journal as the city’s brash newspaper for the masses and an entertaining jester of established politics while the World equivocated. In thirteen years, Pulitzer’s World had gone from being the bad boy of Park Row to being a stodgy defender of the political establishment.

  As he had done after other setbacks, Pulitzer reacted to this one by leaving New York. Taking his old friend and editor John Dillon with him, he sailed for the Riviera, leaving his family to celebrate Christmas without him. His first stop, Monte Carlo, proved to be a nightmare. The bells of ships in the harbor rang incessantly. Two decades earlier, he had defended a church in St. Louis that rang its bells at night. Now such tolling tormented him. Scrambling, his assistants located a more suitable refuge at Hotel Cap Martin on a peninsula to the east, bathed in sea air perfumed by tangerines, lemons, and orange groves.

  The beauty of the setting did little to lighten Pulitzer’s mood. “I have never seen him so steadily and persistently gloomy or in so deep a gloom,” Alfred Butes, an English secretary who had joined Pulitzer’s retinue, wrote to Kate back in New York. “His health is worse than at any time in years,” Butes said. Pulitzer moped behind closed shutters, bored, and fretting about the children. “He needs more gaiety around him. And, unfortunately, that must always be accompanied by noise. Dear! Oh Dear! It’s a big problem. And we haven’t solved it yet.”

  Efforts to relieve Pulitzer’s ills continued, though with a touch of the comic. Dr. Ernst Schweninger, famous for helping the hefty German chancellor Bismarck lose weight, was brought to the hotel for two days of treatments. To Pulitzer, the bearded, beady-eyed doctor looked like a wild anarchist and also seemed to act like one. “He says Mr. P. can be practically cured,” Butes told Kate. “Probably could, I think, if he could survive the remedies which seem too almost drastic. I hear he laid Mr. P. down on the floor and knelt on his stomach! This is the latest, most scientific way of forcing a man to take a deep breath—and it is humorous too!”

  Pulitzer gave up claret and cigars, but these New Year’s resolutions were soon broken. “I am, in fact, kept busy from morning to night with massages and exercises,” he reported to Kate. “But I have been so miserable yet in spite of, or perhaps, on account of this, I am more miserable in some respects (physical) than I have been in years.” As soon as the Atlantic weather reports became encouraging, the party headed back to New York.

  After years of wandering the globe, Pulitzer had become expendable. In fact, his original newspaper, the Post-Dispatch, functioned smoothly and successfully in the hands of seasoned editors and managers, with only the occasional counsel from its owner. But ceding control of his beloved World to others would be an admission of surrender to his blindness and infirmities. The World was his publ
ic identity. When other newspapers or politicians cited it, they always referred to it as “Pulitzer’s World.” He could not give that up. It had been what he had worked to achieve, and the paper remained his greatest love.

  Instead, Pulitzer continued to delegate broad, but overlapping, powers to an executive council of his top three or four men. No one man had dominion over the paper or even his own portion of the operation. A single telegram sent by Pulitzer from some distant city could reduce anyone’s power in an instant. Every move his men made was second-guessed. The only certainty was that each man knew that the others were watching and reporting his every move to Pulitzer in an endless series of diaries read aloud by his secretaries. This gave the council an atmosphere of intrigue reminiscent of the Roman senate.

  Compounding the council’s woes was Pulitzer’s constant vacillating over how much power to cede to his managers. One moment he would tell them to act on their own; the next minute he would micromanage even the smallest decision. For instance, Pulitzer became annoyed when he learned that one of his lieutenants had a sign saying “Editorial Manager” on his door. He sent detailed instruction to Seitz to inform the painting department that no such sign should be made without his explicit approval and to arrange for the offending sign to be removed. “But,” he added quickly, “really do it early in the morning so that nobody will notice it.”

  As the day neared in January 1897 for Pulitzer’s ship from Europe to reach New York, the World’s staff was put to work preparing written reports that could be read to him by those secretaries whose voices he preferred. Butes bluntly instructed Seitz on the boss’s preferences. “He asks for this as conversation—especially conversations with you—has a headachy tendency and really does not furnish him with the same large number of facts which you can produce on paper.” (Pulitzer also refused to eat with Seitz, because Seitz crunched his toast, smacked his lips, and talked with food in the mouth.)

  Pulitzer stayed in New York only long enough to receive his many reports. He discovered that his lieutenants, especially Brisbane, whom he had put in charge of the Sunday flagship edition and all news coverage, had boosted the World’s circulation by descending into a sensationalist word-to-word combat with the Journal. Hearst had not only succeeded in gaining circulation but had also lured the World down into what many people in the city regarded as gutter journalism. The World had always had a sensationalistic streak, and the libel lawsuits to prove it. But in its desperate competition with Hearst the paper’s baser tendencies were unrestrained.

  What had been called “new journalism” was soon disparagingly renamed “Yellow,” after Richard F. Outcault’s comic strip. His “Hogan’s Alley,” published in the World, was one of the first Sunday color comics. It featured the immensely popular tenement adventures of the “Yellow Kid,” an odd-looking child in a long yellow nightshirt. Hearst coveted it, as he did all the World’s other successes; and he lured Outcault away from Pulitzer. Since the World retained the rights to it, “Hogan’s Alley” continued to appear, and both papers published Sunday comics featuring a yellow kid. These gave rise to the term “Yellow Journalism” to describe the antics of the World and the Journal.

  Clubs and libraries around the city began to have doubts about permitting these newspapers in their reading rooms. The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen ordered that the World and Journal be removed from its reading rooms. “There can be no doubt that these two papers exercise a most demoralizing influence upon adults, and that they tend to corrupt the minds of the coming generation,” a trustee of the society told a reporter from the New York Times, which gleefully printed his remarks. The Young Men’s Christian Association Library in Brooklyn had avoided the Journal; now it dumped the World. “The paper brought into our rooms a very undesirable class of readers,” said the librarian.

  Pulitzer knew nothing of the boycott. “It has been carefully kept from his knowledge by his family and secretaries,” recalled an employee at the World, “and upon his arrival in the golden dome he made many discoveries which should have revealed to him the weakness of his system of espionage and divided responsibilities, but it made him only more strenuous in keeping tabs on each one of his aides and stricter in requiring daily accounts of everything published in his paper.”

  Pulitzer now realized to his horror that Hearst’s Journal threatened not only his financial success but the World’s reputation and political power, which he valued above all. He directed his editors to focus their energy less on competing with the Journal and more on improving the character of the World. Recovering the respect and confidence of the public, he told them, would destroy “the notion that we are in the same class with the Journal, in recklessness and unreliability.” He also instructed Seitz to dig deeper into Hearst’s operation. “Please find somebody in Journal office with whom you can connect to discover who furnished their ideas, who is dissatisfied and obtainable or available even in the second class of executive ranks. We are getting shorter and shorter and need recruiting.”

  In a state of depression and panic, Pulitzer fled to Jekyll Island. His private Pullman train beat the one bearing J. P. Morgan to Brunswick, Georgia, by fifteen minutes. The Jekyll Club’s management, sensitive to the animosity between the two tycoons, sent separate steamships to ferry them from Brunswick to the island. On Jekyll Island, Pulitzer inspected his newest purchase, a magnificent three-story wood-shingled cottage with rounded corners and large second-story porch.

  After a month’s rest, Pulitzer went to Washington, where he rented a mansion—Kate called it a mausoleum—from the widow of a Civil War general, who had preserved and kept on display all of her late husband’s swords, uniforms, and other relics. Joseph sent for Seitz and began to hold court for Democrats, now once again as far removed from power as they had been before Cleveland’s election in 1884.

  Among those who came to see Pulitzer was the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer. Despite his defeat, Bryan remained the most important figure in the party. Pulitzer had given orders to his staff to treat him kindly. But together in the same room, the two argued vigorously. When Bryan prepared to leave, Pulitzer asked to run his hands over Bryan’s face. Bryan took Pulitzer’s hands, with their long delicate fingers, into his and passed them over his jaw. “You see, Mr. Pulitzer, I am a fighter,” said Bryan. In turn, Pulitzer took Bryan’s hands and ran them over his bearded jaw and chin. “You see I am one, too,” he said.

  When Pulitzer reached Bar Harbor in early summer, he received good news. His long fight against Jones was over. In the two years since he had given Jones dominion over the Post-Dispatch in order to get him out of New York, the paper had became an embarrassing thorn in Pulitzer’s side. Here he was waging an editorial war in the World against the Bryan tide and Jones had turned the Post-Dispatch into a proponent of free silver. As a result, Pulitzer looked like an opportunist who supported free silver where it was strong and opposed it where it was weak.

  Almost as soon as Jones had arrived in St. Louis, Pulitzer had launched an internecine corporate war to rectify his blunder of giving Jones control of the Post-Dispatch. It spilled over into the courts and went all the way to the Missouri supreme court, which ruled that Jones’s contract was ironclad. Pulitzer won a small victory, though, by paying for the lawsuit with profits Jones had generated at the Post-Dispatch.

  Jones grew tired of his struggles with the obstinate publisher and sought terms of surrender. In June, Pulitzer agreed to pay Jones $100,000 to resign and return the stock he held. The agreement stipulated that no announcement of the change would be made. The paper, Pulitzer instructed, would make Jones’s departure known only by its return to Pulitzer’s editorial positions. “Don’t want a word of national politics except against tariff, trusts, monopoly, plutocracy, corruption…not one word about Chicago platform and free silver this year.”

  With the Jones episode at an end and no elections of importance in sight, Pulitzer turned to his own personal wants. Even though he already owned a pal
ace in Maine, with its “tower of silence” a house on Fifty-Fifth Street in New York; and a hideaway on Jekyll Island, Pulitzer suddenly had a hankering to acquire William Rockefeller’s Rockwood Hall, on the Hudson River. Rockefeller’s public complaint about the taxes on this estate gave the impression he might sell it. Pulitzer sent Dillon and Seitz, who were well used to running personal errands for their boss, to investigate—under strict instructions of secrecy, especially about whom they represented. The men telegraphed Pulitzer a full report on the house, furniture, riding trails, and cost of maintaining the grounds, and even on whether trains could be heard from inside the house. In the end, though, the secret mission was a waste of time. As a phone call might have determined, Rockefeller had no interest in selling Rockwood.

  Investing in the Rockefeller mansion would have been fiscal folly that wiser heads would have counseled Pulitzer to abandon anyway. Aside from Dumont Clarke, who managed his personal fortune, Pulitzer trusted J. Angus Shaw, who watched over the finances of the World. The news from Shaw was terrifying. The nearly $1 million income that Pulitzer had drawn from the World each year had fallen to less than $350,000. Pulitzer ordered budget cuts and payroll reductions. But he knew that he could not economize his way out of the financial free fall the World had taken since Hearst’s arrival in New York. Unless he, or his editors, came up with a solution, Pulitzer’s fate would be like that of Dana and the Sun in 1884. The World would recede into history as an interesting episode in American journalism.

  No one was exempt from the reductions—not even Kate, who did not take kindly to the idea. Several years before, she and Joseph had worked out an agreement that she was to receive $6,000 a month to run the household and to cover her personal expenses and those of the children. But Kate continued to accumulate debts in Europe and New York. She told Butes the bills had to be paid. “I count, as I always do, upon you,” she wrote, “to make things as little disagreeable as possible.