Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  The war would be short and thus merciful, Pulitzer concluded. The government ought to send the fleet to Cuba and Puerto Rico, where it would easily overcome the Spanish. “With these islands captured the affair will be over—and Cuba free. It would hardly be a war, but it would be magnificent.”

  On April 19, 1898, Congress gave President McKinley authority to use force against Spain. Three weeks later, Commodore George Dewey sailed his squadron into Manila Bay in the Philippines and in six hours overwhelmed the Spanish ships in the harbor. By then, Pulitzer was already miles from New York.

  Upon completing his pro-war editorial, he left for England on the Majestic. Ledlie raised Kate’s hopes that Joseph had overcome the grief he had felt on Jekyll Island and “that you will be greeted on the other side by a reasonable gentleman who I think begins to be anxious to get over where you are.” It was a wishful prognosis. Joseph remained unsettled by Lucille’s death and distracted by the mortal combat facing his cherished World. He wandered aimlessly in England and France for several weeks. His somber mood was not even lightened when he saw Kate and his youngest daughter in Aix-les-Bains. “When are we going to see you again?” Constance wrote plaintively after her father departed without leaving a word.

  On his return to the United States, Pulitzer could not bring himself to open Chatwold for the summer so soon after Lucille’s slow death there. Compounding his anguish were an Atlantic crossing marred by asthma attacks and a discouraging consultation with his eye doctor upon reaching New York. Instead, Pulitzer engaged a mansion at Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, on a sea bluff overlooking a beach where he walked each day in the company of one of his men.

  The “Journal’s war,” as Hearst called it, or the “splendid little war,” as a friend writing to Theodore Roosevelt described it, was a romp. Hundreds of thousands had volunteered for duty. Roosevelt gave up his post as assistant secretary of the navy to become a colonel of the U.S First Volunteer Cavalry, bound for Cuba. He sent a telegram to Brooks Brothers in New York to make him a uniform of blue cravenette. On the island, he led a regiment of Rough Riders in his famous charge up San Juan Hill. One of the most media-savvy politicians of the era, Roosevelt had made sure the press was along for the ride.

  By the war’s end in August, both the Journal and the World had achieved record heights of circulation but were drowning in an ocean of red ink. Pulitzer had no mother with profitable copper mines to pay for his deficits. The World’s executives were summoned to Narragansett. The pressure was on to cut expenses. Pulitzer punishingly lectured the business manager, John Norris, for excessive spending, at one point pinning him against a railing on the boardwalk.

  Also coming to Narragansett were Winnie Davis, now thirty-three years old, and her mother, Varina, who took up quarters in its fashionable resort hotel. Since returning from her trip to Egypt with Kate, Winnie had basked in her new fame as a writer. Her new novel, set in a summer house at Bar Harbor, was earning praise, and she remained the darling of the South. Only a few days before arriving in Rhode Island, Confederate veterans attending their annual reunion in Atlanta had thrown their hats into the air when she entered the hall to a general’s proclamation of “Comrades, behold our daughter!”

  The trip through the South, however, was too taxing for Winnie, whose health was fragile. After riding in an open carriage through a heavy summertime Atlanta rain, she fell ill. Upon reaching Narragansett, she was confined to her hotel room. At first the gastritis from which the doctors concluded she suffered seemed like a surmountable problem, but as the days wore on she continued to decline. In early September, the Rockingham Hotel closed for the season but permitted her to remain in her room. A short time later, the Pulitzer home once again was in turmoil as a young woman died.

  On September 21, 1898, dressed in white muslin with white satin trim, Davis lay in a casket in the hotel lobby. The following day an escort of Union veterans escorted the coffin carrying the “daughter of the confederacy” to the train station, where Kate Pulitzer and others joined it for the journey to Richmond. Thousands waited there for the funeral. Pulitzer, who still avoided funerals whenever he could, left for Europe, taking with him David Graham Phillips, his favorite at the paper, who was now working as an editorial writer and whom he continued to groom for bigger things. Their stay in London and Paris was short, and by the end of the month they were back in New York.

  The World was desperate for Pulitzer’s attention. It clung to a tenuous lead over the Journal. Before the war, the average combined daily and Sunday circulation of the World had been 419,000, to the Journal’s 270,000. Since then, the World had lost more than 78,000 readers while the Journal had gained 46,000. “The circulation comparisons are menacing,” Norris wrote to Pulitzer in a lengthy appraisal of the competitors’ positions. On the advertising side, the situation was equally dire.

  Norris, along with Seitz, worked assiduously to deduce Hearst’s income. They estimated that Hearst had spent $4 million in his first three years and that he had access to another $5 million. The Journal’s circulation revenue was easy to compute. But it took rulers to measure the advertising space and rate cards to calculate the revenue from advertising. They determined that the Journal was earning less than half of what the World took in. But the Journal was coming on strong. A buoyant Hearst predicted that his paper would be profitable in 1899. More ominous for Pulitzer was that Hearst’s success could not entirely account for the decline of his own paper. The World’s decreases in circulation and advertising revenue exceeded the Journal’s gains. As Seitz succinctly put it to Pulitzer, “The World has lost more than the Journal has taken from it.”

  Fighting the Journal for readers on its terms had proved financially disastrous. The World was outmatched in every attempt to be more yellow than Hearst’s editors and reporters. In the end, the effort left Pulitzer’s reputation in tatters and his name inextricably linked to Hearst’s. With the war—the main excuse for the excesses—at an end, Pulitzer decided that the time had come to try to restore some sanity to the World.

  At eleven in the morning on November 28, 1898, the World’s reporters from all shifts and beats gathered in the city room under the gold dome. From the windows, they could look beyond the East River, across to Brooklyn, and out to sea. All of Manhattan was at their feet, giving reporters who watched over the city day and night a cocky sense of power. On this day, one could hardly see across the room. Though it stretched out 100 feet or more, there was not much space for this large a group. The place was already crammed with typewriter-topped desks of antique ash, standing back to back, side to side, creating a maze of aisles. Pasted on the walls and columns were large printed cards that read: “Accuracy, Accuracy!” “Who? What? When? How?” and “The Facts—the Color—the Facts.”

  The typewriters were still and the copy boys quiet as the men and women turned toward a platform at the end of the room, normally the city editor’s perch, where Seitz; Merrill; William Van Benthuysen, the Sunday editor; and other managers stood. Never before had the reporters seen a meeting like this one. Each man took a turn speaking about the excesses of the past two years, confessing his own failings as if at an addiction meeting. “The great mistakes which have been made—I speak with modesty, because I have made a number of them myself—have been caused by an excess of zeal,” said Merrill.

  “There is and has been for two years, as you know, a fierce competition,” Seitz told the group. “This has developed a tendency to rush things. It has not been to the advantage of any newspaper so doing. The World feels that it is time for the staff to learn definitely and finally that it must be a normal newspaper.”

  “Sensational? Yes, when the news is sensational,” added Van Benthuysen. “But the demand is this, that every story which is sensational in itself must also be truthful.”

  In St. Louis, Pulitzer’s old competitor Charles Knapp, who published the Missouri Republican, now renamed the Republic, decided to make a bid to dominate the city’s newspaper market. Eve
r since Pulitzer had left the city, Knapp had longed for a chance to merge with the Post-Dispatch as his competitor, the Missouri Democrat, had done with the Globe. At first, Pulitzer had been uninterested in selling his paper. But Knapp figured that the well-known headaches arising from Jones’s tenure at the Post-Dispatch and the losses incurred by the World might have changed Pulitzer’s mind. His initial contact confirmed his hunch, and Knapp left for the East.

  Pulitzer assigned the business manager, Norris, to meet with Knapp in Washington. After days of discussion, with some sessions lasting eleven hours, they had made little headway. Pulitzer was no help. He sent Norris new demands each time the two negotiators made any progress. Pulitzer was of two minds. He said he was not averse to disposing of the Post-Dispatch, but he couldn’t go through with it when he was faced with the reality of such a proposition. Pulitzer sent Norris bewildering instructions. “You should drop it and not waste your time but concentrate on the World which needs you badly enough. But if Knapp should come back with something reasonable, you will communicate it. In fact, you will communicate to me anyhow what he says.”

  With Pulitzer blowing hot and cold, Knapp made a final effort. He went to Jekyll Island to meet Pulitzer directly. His timing was poor. Pulitzer was in a testy mood from frayed nerves and sleeplessness. A morning together and a lunch brought the two men no closer to an agreement than before. Knapp gave up and left.

  Kate was also buffeted by Joseph’s stormy temper. She made the mistake of writing him about a problem in New York involving a household servant. “Mr. P. wishes not to be bothered on this matter any further,” Butes wrote back. “He read eight letters on the subject yesterday besides your own—which is an outrageous waste of time.

  “He is sorry you have not been able to come down here,” Butes continued. “And he asked you will not telegraph him as the expectation of telegrams keeps him in a very nervous condition. It is especially desirable that he should not get messages about sickness in the family unless really serious. They depress him and, of course, are unnecessary as he can be of no possible help.”

  By May 1899, when Pulitzer left for England in the company of his old partner Dillon and his son Ralph, he was in better spirits. A greater sense of calm had been restored at the World, and fiscally its house was being put in order. Although its circulation had dropped to prewar levels, so had its expenditures. It remained the best place in New York to advertise and the revenue now produced a profit rather than paying for far-flung war coverage, excessive press runs, and outlandish circulation campaigns.

  Pulitzer told his staff to send no cables for a month, unless they were “supremely important.” In Kensington he leased a different manor from the last one, and was sorely disappointed. “The barracks next door are just about as bad as they could possibly be, bugles at night, in the morning at six, there are four clocks or chimes, and peacocks in the neighborhood, all conspiring to spoil my much-needed repose.”

  In Britain, Pulitzer tested out several new secretarial candidates. The search for suitable companions remained an unsolvable problem for his aides. Pulitzer was impossible to please. Guests found being with him hard enough—they had to put up with his strictures against slurping soup or crunching on toast—but those who worked directly for him endured intolerable demands. One candidate, who quit after two weeks, told Pulitzer that one result of his having spent so many years bossing people was that he no longer knew how to relate to others. “You have therefore become so used to command that any other position with regard to those always with you became impossible to you.

  “You must forgive me a further observation. Like all very successful men you have a degree of contempt for those whose lives have been to some extent failures,” continued the very frank candidate. “You cannot help letting them feel that you regard them, through being in the necessity of taking such a position, an inferiority in life.”

  Pulitzer headed back to the United States without the hoped-for addition to his private staff. With the World past its crisis, he was eager to indulge his passion for presidential elections. Before sailing, Pulitzer told the British press that Bryan was likely to be the Democratic nominee in 1900 and hinted that the World might support his candidacy this time around. “That all depends upon his good sense or folly,” said Pulitzer. If Bryan was willing to drop his support of free silver, he would have a united party behind him, Pulitzer predicted. If he refused, he would lose.

  That summer Pulitzer reopened Chatwold, which had been unoccupied for more than a year and a half. His return to his hideaway in Maine was marred by his dissatisfaction with the remodeling of the “tower of silence.” When he inspected his study he found that it was still not soundproof, and the lighting proved inadequate. The builder wanted $108,000, 250 percent more than the initial estimate. Pulitzer refused to pay the bill.

  His house in New York also created unexpected expenses. The city’s fire marshal warned Pulitzer that unless he made some alterations, the house’s current condition might prove disastrous. He reminded Pulitzer that two fires had already occurred because of defective flues. Pulitzer, who had survived the deadly fire at the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, was not one to argue. He fixed the flues, constructed an enclosed fire escape in the rear of the building, repaired the electric lights, and installed a fire alarm in his valet’s room.

  Kate joined Joseph in Maine only briefly, preferring instead to divide her time between New York and Hot Springs, Virginia. Joseph’s intolerant behavior had not abated since his grief-filled stay on Jekyll Island, and her patience with him was at a low point. It didn’t help, either, that Joseph had instructed his cashier to cut $160 from her $6,000 monthly allowance, for customs duty he had paid on her behalf. Angus Shaw, the World’s cashier, who was used to being in the financial crossfire between the couple, warned her, “I suppose you will understand it, but I thought it best to let you know in case of any misunderstanding.”

  The relationship was getting back to normal.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  THE GREAT GOD SUCCESS

  One icy night in February 1891, firefighters responding to a call from the New York post office were told that cries could be heard coming from one of the ventilation shafts on the sidewalk. The tin vents led from an underground engine room where the fire was raging, and flames were coming up through them. When the firefighters toppled the vent, a thirteen-year-old boy scrambled out, mostly unhurt. Told that his friend was still inside, the rescuers saw what appeared to be a bundle of burning rags. They reached in and pulled out a seventeen-year-old newsboy, John Gardarino, his clothes on fire.

  Gardarino was one of thousands of children on whose work the fortunes of Pulitzer and other newspaper barons rested. In cold or heat, in rain or shine, these boys stood on street corners; in front of theaters, restaurants, and clubs; in train stations; and on the docks hawking Park Row’s newspapers. In the end, for all their high-speed color presses, telegraph lines connecting all points on the globe, and other technological marvels, the newspapers needed this army of street urchins to reach their readers.

  The injured teenager had made the fatal mistake of curling up in the ventilation shaft for the night. He could not face his family, in a Crosby Street tenement, because he had failed to sell all his newspapers that day—or perhaps had gambled away his earnings in a crap game. Because of his shame, he lay dying in a New York hospital.

  Newsies, as boys like Gardarino were called, played a particularly prominent role in the cutthroat competition between Pulitzer’s Evening World and Hearst’s Evening Journal. Despite their names, these editions began publishing in the morning and continued all day. When the news merited “extras,” they might be on the streets every hour of the day and late into the night, numbered in bewildering fashion, and even printed on paper of different colors in order to gain a competitive edge. On any street corner, a New Yorker with a penny could buy a newspaper with news as fresh as the ink.

  Since most copies of the evening papers wer
e sold on the street, rather than delivered to homes like the morning paper, their sales depended greatly on a partnership between the headline writers and the newsies—almost like that of a playwright and an actor. The editors would craft an oversize attention-grabbing headline, and the newsies would work the street by calling it out. The right kind of headline—TINY TOT WITH PENNY CLUTCHED IN CHUBBY HAND DIES UNDER TRAM BEFORE MOTHER’S EYES—could clean out an entire run of the paper.

  The Spanish-American War had been a boon for newsboys. They sold every copy of the World or Journal they could carry, even when the papers increased their press runs. Inside the Pulitzer building, however, the World’s managers desperately sought ways to comply with the publisher’s order to stem its deficit. Raising its price was out of the question, because that would be a signal of defeat in the struggle against Hearst. Cutting salaries was also out of the question. Reporters would jump to the Journal, and the unionized compositors and printers were untouchable.

  The newsies became the target of choice. The World raised the wholesale price of the paper from 50 cents per 100 to 60 cents. The Journal also raised its wholesale price, but all the other newspapers did not. Trimming a dime from a newsboy’s take might not seem like much. But when this amount was spread over the paper’s vast circulation, it could make up an entire annual deficit of nearly $1 million. Pulitzer’s managers bet that the ragtag collection of immigrant children, who often didn’t even speak the same language, could hardly put up much resistance.

  They were wrong.

  At first, the newsies tolerated the price increase. Selling sixty papers was easy during the wartime excitement. But in 1899, when newspaper sales decreased at the end of hostilities, the newsies grew anxious. Each day as they lined up on Park Row to get their bundles, the decision of how many papers to purchase weighed on their minds. Buy too few and miss out on profitable sales; buy too many and lose money.