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that “to-day I have been as happy as a king.” Graphically too the paper was broad gauged. It filled its pages with visages of hotel clerks, artists, cooks, and cops, as well as portraits of judges, politicians, and financiers. The paper also practiced skillful tribal journalism, scorning the English on behalf of Irish readers, providing Kleindeutschland with news of Bismarck’s doings, and paying close attention to Jewish holidays for patrons on the Lower East Side. Pulitzer covered, as well, aspects of commercial culture usually relegated to specialized journals like the Spirit of the Times, Clipper, and Police Gazette; he inaugurated a sports page in the 1880s.

The World treated as front-page news such dramatic moments in the life of the city as the Festival of Connection marking the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. It promoted investigative reporting: World reporter Nellie Bly (nee Elizabeth Cochrane) feigned insanity, got herself committed to the Blackwell’s Island Asylum, and wrote up a story on the abominable conditions there that led to a grand jury investigation.1 Pulitzer certainly exploited sentiment for the sake of sales, but his paper also promoted public generosity and helped foster an ethos of civic solidarity.

Pulitzer made his paper news as well as newsmaker. In 1885 the Statue of Liberty languished unassembled in France, efforts to raise money for a pedestal having stalled. Crying, “Let us not wait for the millionaires to give this money,” Pulitzer appealed to “the people” to rescue the monument and avoid an “irrevocable disgrace to New York City.” Tens of thousands of small contributions rolled in, the pedestal was constructed, and, in the process, the World became associated indelibly with the enterprise (Pulitzer even incorporated the statue into the paper’s nameplate).

The World took great pains to attract women readers, a constituency most dailies gave scant attention. Pulitzer understood, as did manufacturers and purveyors of consumer goods, that in the 1880s women did most household purchasing, and their patronage was therefore the key to attracting advertisers. The World accordingly argued that “what the New York woman of the higher order is likely to have as her special denotement is style,” unlike her Boston sister who was “severely intellectual or burdened with scholarship.” Maintaining this stylish lead was a difficult and never-ending process, and the World was there to help.

The World also walked a fine line between the prudery demanded by genteel opinion and a sale-boosting prurience. The paper’s pages, for all their surface propriety, were suffused with erotic innuendo, sternly condemning sinfulness in general while recounting in detail the doings of particular sinners. The World served up scandals, particularly when they involved the respectable and prosperous, and waged campaigns against prostitution, abortionists, variety shows, and opium dens—campaigns simultaneously sanctimonious and titillating.

Pulitzer adopted a similar strategy in depicting violence, wrapping concupiscent accounts of bloody deeds in pious disapproval. Sensational headlines—“Who Murdered Mrs. Bush?”—dragged attention to graphic coverage of gruesome incidents, often accompanied by precisely labeled crime-scene sketches (“Bed Covered with Blood”; “Sink in Which the Knife was Found”). Executions were featured because judicial murders were simultaneously gory (“Dragged Resisting to a Prayerless Doom”) and legitimate. Reviving an ancient urban practice, the very first issues of the revamped World carried lurid accounts of executions, dwelling on the last hours of condemned killers.

If Pulitzer paid extravagant attention to most sensational aspects of the urban underworld, affording bourgeois readers the opportunity for armchair slumming, he provided equal opportunity voyeurism in the World’s society pages, peeps inside the grand châteaux that afforded the twin pleasures of virtuous condemnation and vicarious sybaritism. The paper attacked the culture of the “watered-stock aristocracy” and lit into the ostentatious