Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [915]
Pulitzer also kept a critical edge on reporting about the everyday life of the working classes. Proclaiming that the World would henceforth be “dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse potentates,” he ran stories on squalid tenement housing, impure milk, infant mortality, female and child labor, and strikes. In one of the earliest instances of what would later be called muckraking, Pulitzer denounced Rockefeller’s Standard Oil as “the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country,” and his crusades for antitrust legislation helped pass the Sherman Act in 1890.
The World pointed out and excoriated the connection between big money and politicians—if they were Republican politicians. In the 1884 presidential race, when 180 financiers attended a sumptuous Delmonico’s dinner for candidate James G. Blaine, the World denounced “the Royal Feast of Belshazzar.” A huge front-page political cartoon depicted Blaine and the “Money Kings”—with precise caricatures of Gould, Vanderbilt, Astor, Depew, Carnegie, Seligman, Sage, and others shown drinking “Monopoly Soup” and downing “Lobby Pudding,” heedless of the pleas of an unemployed worker, his emaciated wife, and his ragged child for crumbs from the groaning board. The World also made much of Blaine’s meeting, earlier the same day, with a group of Protestant New York clergymen at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The spokesman, the Rev. Samuel D. Burchard of the Murray Hill Presbyterian Church, had suggested the Democrats were the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.” A tired Blaine failed to contradict the remark, a silence the World converted to vigorous assent to a proposition that affronted Catholic citizens.
Despite its sharp, even shrill attacks on great wealth, the World was not a radical paper. It railed at the Rockefellers but rejected socialism and anarchism, arguing that an enlightened capitalism could avoid class warfare if—with the help of the press—it rid itself of excesses. For all its quarrels with corruption, it was a staunch Democratic Party organ. In the 1886 mayoralty campaign it supported Abram Hewitt, not Henry George.
The World was a triumph, but Pulitzer proved unable to enjoy it. Long burdened with psychological problems (he was probably a manic depressive), his eyes and nerves deteriorated, forcing him to spend much of his time in a darkened room, and he became extremely sensitive to unexpected sounds. In his later years, the man who had mastered and marketed the city’s cacophonous commercial culture would retreat to a McKim, Meade and White mansion on 73rd Street; its utterly noise-proofed annex—double walls packed with mineral wool, and triple-glass windows—served as Pulitzer’s refuge from the slightest city sound, a burden the neurotic publisher now found intolerable.
65
Purity Crusade
The Great Fire broke out first in Murray Hill, where enraged and drunken mobs sacked and torched the mansions of millionaires. Then hungry men from the Bowery began pouring into fashionable restaurants, gorging themselves, setting the eateries ablaze, and moving on to loot and burn. Perched atop an elevated railroad platform, a reporter watched the conflagration spread out from Fifth Avenue in “billows and waves and worlds of smoke and flame.” The fires roared south, incinerating the great newspaper offices, sending rivers of now-molten lead type flowing out from Franklin Square. Finally the inferno swept into the poor and industrial districts, and soon “the oil, the gas, the rum, the thousands of filthy things which man in his drunken greed had allowed to accumulate on the face of the island appealed to heaven for purification,” and purification was at last attained when the colossal firestorm, having consumed hundreds of thousands of lives,