Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [108]
On September 15, the president’s medical team conceded that Garfield had pyemia, or septicemia. Incredibly, reporters for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other papers downplayed this news. Pulitzer marched to the telegraph office with a blunt dispatch. “Unless his blood can be cured he cannot be saved. I said this over a week ago and I repeat it,” Pulitzer wrote. “The physicians and bulletins and reporters have lied for days and weeks and months in denying this fact.”
The tide of bad news now overwhelmed the Pollyannas of the press. The New York Times had the most backpedaling to do. It claimed that newspapermen were astonished by the new disclosures. The Post-Dispatch bragged that the new official bulletins proved its reporting—done by its owner—had been true all along. “Even Dr. Bliss has at last been forced to confess the lamentable truth,” Pulitzer said. “He now admits everything he so positively denied every day and almost every hour of the last week.”
On Monday morning, September 19, Pulitzer filed his final dispatch. “All hope is dead. The President is dying.” That night, with his wife and daughter at his side, Garfield ceased to breathe. In New York, a messenger boy brought the news to Vice President Chester Alan Arthur as church bells began to toll. Pulitzer returned to the city and denounced Garfield’s doctors. “If they had been blind-folded they could hardly have shown much less sense.”
The day after the president’s death, the Post-Dispatch defended itself against the censorious complaints it had received during Pulitzer’s coverage of Garfield’s decline. “We have been charged with ‘sensationalism’ and with a desire to prematurely dispose of the sufferer,” Cockerill wrote. “We were not blinded by the bulletins of the physicians who felt it a part of their duty to keep up the spirit of the country in the face of plain facts. We went behind the bulletins…. Our predictions, we are sorry to say, have nearly all been verified.”
The success of Pulitzer’s Post-Dispatch ceased being a novelty. By any measure, the newspaper and its publisher had become as important in St. Louis as the established morning papers—The Republican and the Globe-Democrat—and the men at their helms. During Pulitzer’s reporting from Long Branch, his paper’s circulation rose to 28,475 copies, more than three times the average circulation it had at the beginning of the year.
To accommodate his growing staff and new presses, Pulitzer built a four-story building. He installed Richard Hoe’s latest press, which could cut and fold the paper at a high rate of speed and included the first counting devices. Since getting his first order from the upstart publisher in 1878, Hoe and his headquarters staff in New York had become very familiar with the Pulitzer name.
Pulitzer trumpeted the link between the newspaper’s financial independence and its political independence. “From the very commencement the cardinal principle of the paper and the chief ambition of its owner and conductor has been to achieve and maintain an absolute independence, financially, politically, personally and morally,” Pulitzer wrote, celebrating the installation of the latest Hoe press. “We have absolutely no master, and no friend but the great public.”
Indeed, the Post-Dispatch’s crusading zeal found a loyal middle-class readership. Success, however, came with costs. The paper’s campaigns of civic reform left the city’s landscape strewn with bruised and injured parties; its drive to clean up the city’s illicit pastimes of gambling and prostitution shut down popular forms of entertainment; its continual attacks on the oligarchy embittered the powerful; and the moral haughtiness of its editorials ensured that many, including its supporters, would relish a humbling misstep.
As a consequence, Pulitzer and his family faced growing social ostracism. St. Louis may have projected cosmopolitan airs to visitors, but those who lived there learned quickly that it had the pettiness of a small town.