IF ALL WENT WELL the Victoria would reach the Suez Canal the following night. It was about a day’s passage through the canal, after which the ship would sail via the Red Sea to Aden, on Yemen’s southern coast, and then head into open waters toward Ceylon, where Nellie Bly was scheduled to arrive on December 10, twenty-six days into her journey. That very same month another ship—this one a yacht—would set out across the Mediterranean toward Port Said, also bound for Aden and points east. The ship’s passenger was Joseph Pulitzer, owner and publisher of The World, and he was setting out on his own trip around the world, though far more slowly than his star reporter, Nellie Bly, and at the instruction not of editors but of doctors. His health, while never robust, had of late grown increasingly precarious, and his physicians believed that a long, leisurely sail, far removed from the stress of work, might help calm his nerves and restore his fading eyesight. As it turned out, Pulitzer would make it no farther than Constantinople; one afternoon, standing at the rail of the ship, he turned to his English secretary, Claude Ponsby, and remarked, “How suddenly it has gotten dark.” Ponsby looked at him in confusion and concern, for the midday sun was very bright. As it turned out, Pulitzer had suffered a detached retina in his left eye (which had been, up until then, his “good” eye), and he was immediately sent back to Europe to receive the care of ocular specialists. He would not return to the United States for another eighteen months.
Joseph Pulitzer stood six feet two inches tall and was rail thin, with long arms and the frail, narrow chest of a tubercular patient, though that was one of the few ailments with which he was not afflicted. He did have asthma, and he loved to sail his yacht not only because he craved the feeling of speed but because the ocean was the only place he felt he could get enough air. The instruction he most often gave his crew was simply, “Find a breeze.” He suffered from stomach troubles, insomnia, depression, anxiety, and an extreme sensitivity to noise, all traceable to a nervous disorder that was never adequately diagnosed despite the efforts of world-renowned specialists. Even the smallest sounds—the creak of a floorboard, the crumpling of a piece of paper—could cause him physical pain. Most debilitating of all was his poor eyesight, which would eventually deteriorate to the point that a team of secretaries had to spend hours each day reading aloud to him. Pulitzer wore pince-nez eyeglasses with small oval lenses; behind the glasses his eyes were a watery blue, though over time, as his vision dimmed, they grew clouded and gray. He had black hair swept back from his face, and a thick red-tinged beard that tapered to a point and that led his rivals to compare him to Mephistopheles. Pulitzer’s most prominent feature was his nose, a long, hawkish beak of the sort often featured in anti-Semitic caricatures, which he detested in large part because it gave his enemies ammunition against him. “His face is repulsive,” Charles Dana once wrote in a Sun editorial, “not because the physiognomy is Hebraic, but because it is Pulitzeresque.” Though he would not give his rivals the satisfaction of publicly responding in kind (in his editorial the next day Pulitzer replied, “The editor of The World accepts the hatred of Mr. Dana as a compliment”), in private these attacks drove the thin-skinned Pulitzer mad. He had been born into a Jewish family in Makó, Hungary, in the year 1847; both of his parents were Jewish, but Pulitzer did not attend synagogue and never sought to correct the reports, widely circulated, that his mother was a Roman Catholic. His Jewishness, however, did not go unnoticed. Dana taunted him as “a renegade Jew who denies his breed,” while Leander Richardson of The Journalist referred to him in print as “Jewseph Pulitzer”; in St. Louis, Pulitzer had been known among rival newspapermen, most succinctly, as “Joey the Jew.”
Pulitzer’s birthday was April 10, and throughout his life he maintained a mystical attachment to the number 10 and tried to incorporate it into all of his dealings. He bought The World on May 10, 1883, for instance, as he had earlier consolidated the Post and Dispatch of St. Louis on December 10, 1878. He bought the property for The World’s new Park Row office tower on April 10, 1888, his forty-first birthday, and the cornerstone was laid the following year on October 10. The first house Joseph Pulitzer bought in New York was at 10 East Fifty-fifth Street—the two fives of the street address only added to its appeal—and he later bought one on East Seventy-third Street. That house, designed by the leading New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, was not like any other ever seen in the city. Adjoining the main house Pulitzer had a one-story annex built to serve as his study. The walls were packed with mineral wool, the windows insulated with three panes of inch-thick glass, the fireplace chimney lined with thousands of silk threads to muffle all sound; the floor was set on ball bearings to prevent vibrations. According to The World’s business manager, “The room was so still as to be uncanny.” When Pulitzer traveled in Europe, he directed his secretaries to rent the rooms directly above, below, and on either side of his room; in later years his private yacht, the Liberty, was built with the captain’s bridge at the back of the boat rather than at the front, as was standard practice, so that no one would need to walk above Pulitzer’s head as he sat reading in his library. He had, remarked one of his secretaries, a will of iron but a nervous system of gossamer.
Joseph Pulitzer in 1888, at the age of forty-one (Illustration Credit 9.2)
Pulitzer was famously generous with his employees, paying salaries that were generally much higher than those of competing newspapers and supplementing them with unexpected, lavish gifts. He gave bonuses for work he deemed especially good, and prizes for the best news ideas, headlines, and editorials. In 1884, when The World’s circulation topped one hundred thousand for the first time, Pulitzer gave each of his editors a silk top hat; in 1890, as a reward for loyal service, he gave his private secretary, Edwin Grozier, a purse containing $1,000 in twenty-dollar gold pieces—the modern version of the bag of gold dreamed of in fairy tales. His largesse, however, came at a price. Pulitzer was haunted by the fear of being ruined by a libel lawsuit, and his editors knew that at night he read every item in the paper with that worry in mind. As the years went on he became increasingly suspicious of those around him; he often employed two men for a single job (he believed the rivalry would spur even greater creativity, but in fact it had the opposite effect, as the competitors either spent their time watching each other or else simply divided up the work between them), and he hired office spies and then paid additional spies to spy on them. The result, a World staffer once remarked, was “a condition of suspicion, jealousy and hatred, a maelstrom of office politics that drove at least two editors to drink, one into suicide, a fourth into insanity, and another into banking.”
Though the newspaper business had made him a millionaire, though he owned a yacht and a box at the opera, Pulitzer was never embraced by New York’s elite and never considered himself part of what he called the “vulgar wealthy” and the “watered-stock aristocracy.” Himself an immigrant from Central Europe—he had arrived in New York in 1864 at the age of seventeen, having been recruited in Hamburg to fight for the Union in the American Civil War—Pulitzer had no use for the coats of arms that had begun to appear on the sides of private coaches, for the French chefs and liveried servants in the Fifth Avenue mansions modeled on châteaus and palazzi, for the general fascination with Old World aristocracy that had taken hold among the city’s wealthy.
“It was a strange complex,” the New York socialite Elizabeth Lehr recalled many years later, “that made us, who belonged to a society so new, seek always inspiration from our ancients in the past! No one would have dreamt of anything so plebeian as modern fancy dress; we had all to be kings and queens and courtiers.” At her famous ball of 1883, Alva Vanderbilt dressed herself as a Venetian princess in a cream-colored gown adorned with jewels, around her neck a long strand of pearls that had once belonged to Catherine the Great. At one New York society dinner each lady guest found a bejeweled gold bracelet wrapped in her napkin, and at another the cigarettes passed around with the after-dinner coffee were wrapped in $100 bills: the
hosts had, literally, money to burn. The financier Henry Villard, owner of the New York Evening Post, built an immense mansion inspired by the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, a structure so large that it required a ton of coal per day to heat. In the Whitney mansion on Fifty-seventh Street at Fifth Avenue, the painted and gilded ceiling of the grand hall had been extracted from an Italian palace of the sixteenth century, and the stone fireplace from a French château of the same period; the walls of the salon were covered in figured Renaissance velvet; the library’s marble fireplace had been carved in Italy in the fifteenth century; and on it went throughout the house. All over Europe, Renaissance palaces were being torn down and their paintings and rugs and tapestries and statuary shipped across the Atlantic to fill the modern palaces of New York. The owners of these houses were far more plutocrat than aristocrat—most had amassed their fortunes in the new industries of railroads, steel, oil, and telegraphy, or the slightly older ones of shipping and real estate—but they arrayed themselves in the style of Europe’s peerage, with their country estates and stables and game preserves, and shooting parties and fancy dress balls, and yachts and private railroad cars and gleaming carriages attended by coachmen and footmen: “the very carmagnole of display,” huffed society writer Constance Cary Harrison, “that in earlier days was supposed to be the appanage of royalty alone.”
Jay Gould, the financier and railroad baron who owned The World from 1879 until 1883, lived, like many of his contemporaries, in a brownstone mansion on Fifth Avenue; he also owned an immense country house in Westchester built in the style of a Gothic castle, complete with tower and turrets, from which he commuted to his Manhattan office on his 230-foot-long yacht. Before a strike by the workers on one of his railroads Gould boasted that he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” which was a sentiment not far removed from that of the editor of the New York Tribune, Whitelaw Reid, who during the 1877 railroad strike had declared that “authority ought not to rest until it has swept down every resisting mob with grape-shot” and that the strike should be crushed “though it cost a thousand bloody corpses.” At the Sun, editor Charles A. Dana had been a radical in his youth, but as the years went by he became increasingly hidebound, caustically deriding all efforts for meaningful social change; he opposed female suffrage, for instance, because he believed it would introduce “a spitefulness that is peculiarly feminine” into American politics. Dana forbade the use of the term “upper classes” in the Sun because he denied the existence of class distinctions in the United States—this at a time when the top 12 percent of American families owned 86 percent of the country’s wealth. Joseph Pulitzer, who bought The World in 1883 for $346,000 (Gould was happy to unload it, as the paper was reportedly losing $40,000 a year), had a very different idea for his newspaper. On his first day as publisher of The World, Pulitzer gathered together all of the employees and made a little speech to them. “Gentlemen,” he said in his accented English, “you realize that a change has taken place in The World. Heretofore you have all been living in the parlor and taking baths every day. Now I wish you to understand that, in the future, you are all walking down the Bowery.”
The Bowery, of course, was the downtown boulevard that ran parallel to Broadway but formed, as a guidebook of the time observed, “a complete antithesis to that splendid thoroughfare.” Boisterous and proudly disreputable, it wore its dime museums and dance halls like cheap, flashy jewelry, and was the only avenue in New York on which no church would ever be built. The trains of the elevated railway roared and shrieked overhead, drowning out the conversations that went on below in Yiddish and German and Italian, and an English tinged with memories of Dublin or Donegal. The Bowery was the pulsing artery that ran through New York’s immigrant neighborhoods, home to those who brought to the city, in The World’s phrase, “strong blood and unlimited possibilities.” Four out of five people in New York were either immigrants or the children of immigrants, and they were the people to whom Joseph Pulitzer hoped to sell his paper. “Condense! Condense!” he regularly barked at his editors, urging them to cut extraneous words, to keep sentences short and descriptions vivid, to make the language as accessible as possible to an immigrant new to the country, as he himself had been only two decades earlier. “The first object of any word in any article at any time must be perfect clarity,” Pulitzer once said. “I hate all rare, unusual, non-understandable words. Avoid the vanity of foreign words or phrases or unfamiliar terms. Editorials must be written for the people, not for the few.”
In his very first editorial for The World, Pulitzer declared,
There is room in this great and glowing 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.
“Our aristocracy,” he wrote two days later, “is the aristocracy of labor.”
When the workers of Jay Gould’s Missouri Pacific Railroad went on strike, The World supported them, remarking of Gould that “one bottle of his choice wine costs more than a Missouri Pacific laborer can spend for his family for two weeks.” The World campaigned for a graduated tax on incomes above $10,000 a year and advocated new taxes on luxury items, on monopolies, and on inheritances. An investigation by The World exposed fraudulent spending of more than $2 million by the Pacific Railroad; another revealed that William H. Vanderbilt, ex officio president of the New York Central—who possessed a fortune that he himself estimated at upward of $200 million—had avoided paying any income tax at all by claiming that his debts had surpassed his earnings. The World stated bluntly, “Wealth escapes taxation.” The World exposed the police brutality rampant in immigrant neighborhoods; it agitated to reduce the working day of the city’s horsecar drivers to twelve hours; it tracked down the sources of tainted milk and sausages made from horsemeat; it shone a light on the squalid, dangerous conditions existing in New York’s tenements. Though other papers sometimes published reform-minded articles (Jacob Riis’s riveting exposés of slum life, for instance, appeared in the Sun), only The World consistently and unequivocally spoke out against the enemies of the poor—robber barons, slumlords, corrupt politicians, uncaring bureaucrats. Alone among the daily newspapers of New York, it was The World, day after day, that told the city’s newest and most vulnerable residents that the conditions in which they lived were not inevitable and were by no means unalterable: that they were not condemned to give their children poisoned food, or to breathe the noxious fumes from nearby slaughterhouses, or fear the policeman’s club, or work for pennies, or go to bed wondering if they would be set upon by rats during the night.
Joseph Pulitzer was trying to sell his paper to New Yorkers who had no tradition of reading newspapers, many of whom were barely literate in English and who had to be persuaded to stop as they walked by a corner newsstand or heard a newsboy calling out a headline. This feat would be accomplished by the front page, which functioned for a newspaper much as a display window did for a department store, luring passersby to come inside. (Pulitzer always said that he attracted his readers with the stories on page one so that they would read the editorials on page four.) Under its previous ownership, The World’s front page had featured decorous articles with headlines such as Affairs at Albany, Bench Show of Dogs, and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s Trip. No one could possibly confuse them with the articles that immediately began to appear on Pulitzer’s front page, full of violence and sex and tragedy, the headlines often running in several decks down the column, claiming one’s attention with the brazen urgency of a carnival barker:
INSANE FROM TOBACCO.
A MANIAC IN A HOTEL OVERPOWERS HALF A DOZEN MEN.
HE CHEWED TWO POUNDS OF TOBACCO A DAY.
WENT TO THE PARK TO DIE.
A YOUNG WIFE ENDS HER LIFE WHIL
E TEMPORARILY
DERANGED. CHRISTMAS WILL BRING NO MIRTH TO
THIS HOUSEHOLD. HER HUSBAND WHILE SEARCHING FOR HER
MET THE OFFICERS BEARING HER LIFELESS BODY—SHE HAD SHOT HERSELF THROUGH THE HEAD.
SHE CUT OFF HER HAND. AND ALSO SLICED OFF HER TONGUE WITH A BREAD-KNIFE. AN INSANE WOMAN CRUELLY MUTILATES
HERSELF. SHE DIES A FEW HOURS AFTERWARD—
THE SEVERED HAND FOUND ON THE PARLOR FLOOR.
Crime stories were the staple of the front page (a good crime story, after all, could provide violence and sex and tragedy all in one), but inside, the paper offered a great deal more. A World reader might find, for instance, a poignant report about flowers growing in tenement windows. “The woman who bought the flower made shirts,” the story noted about one of them. “She finished them at thirty-five cents a dozen. The flower cost fifteen cents and the pot ten. The woman made nine shirts to buy the flower.” Joseph Pulitzer understood that his readers wanted the news, but also much more: they wanted the latest fashions in robes and bonnets and trousers, an explanation of how a telephone worked, etiquette lessons, gossip about their favorite theatrical stars, adventure tales of explorers in Africa and stowaways on a tramp steamer. They wanted stories that brought them closer to their city, and stories that allowed them, at least for a while, to escape from it, and that was what they found in The World: part carnival, part crusade, and all available for only two cents a day, three on Sunday.
Eighty Days Page 22