Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [106]
A few printers sought to meet with Pulitzer and threatened to stop work if their demands were not met. Pulitzer was absent, so no meeting occurred. Nor would the meeting occur upon his return, because these printers were summarily fired by his managers. The Post-Dispatch, Pulitzer declared, “declines to be told who it shall and shall not employ. It refuses to be instructed as to how to measure its type, feed its press and to be limited to the number of apprentices it shall take into office training.” He conceded that workers had the right to organize “but the right to manage the internal affairs of this office, employ and discharge and to direct when and how labor shall be performed, is one that the proprietor reserves to himself.” Simply put, Pulitzer was a democrat in politics, but a paternalistic despot in the office.
Pulitzer, however, did not treat his workers badly. In fact, the 1881 campaign by the typographical union came to an end because an overwhelming majority of Pulitzer’s compositors had signed a statement proclaiming their happiness with their working conditions and their loyalty to their boss. Pulitzer paid better than other publishers, granted vacation time, frequently rewarded good work with bonuses, and remained intensely loyal to those who served him. He even gave his employees wedding and birthday gifts. At Christmas, he made it a tradition to send turkeys to his staff, and newsboys were invited to yuletide dinners where the tables groaned under the weight of food.
Pulitzer claimed that his benevolence was self-serving. “Without good men you cannot get good work, and without good work no paper can prosper largely,” he said. Yet he was deeply charitable. Once he became wealthy, he rarely declined any financial appeal, and he was particularly receptive to appeals from people he had met on his way up. For the remainder of his life, he quietly made arrangements to send monthly checks to widows of men who had toiled for him. He remembered how his mother had faced poverty when her husband died.
That Pulitzer was absent when the printers came to see him was not surprising. As during the 1880 campaign, he used his increasing freedom from managerial responsibilities to spend time in the East. No matter how successful he was in St. Louis, New York remained the center of American journalism and politics. Pulitzer wanted in.
With its theaters, concert halls, museums, banks, corporations, and millionaires, New York was the capital of everything important in the United States. Swampy, uncivilized Washington, D.C., may have been the seat of government, but New York remained the capital of politics. In journalism, Park Row was the dream destination of every reporter and editor. In the few short blocks, more newspapers were clustered than in any other spot of the world. Their offices were so substantial, their circulation was so large, and their news gathering was so extensive that the rest of nation’s papers seemed like small-town sheets.
But in the last few years, New York’s Park Row had changed greatly. Many of the giants who created its best-known newspapers had died. Gone were the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley, the New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennett, Sr., and the New York Times’s Henry J. Raymond. The new leaders were men such as Charles Dana at the New York Sun and Edwin Lawrence Godkin at the New York Evening Post. This group, however, seemed only to be caretakers. A new order of journalism—lively, independent,