Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [115]
The stakes were high. The Post-Dispatch, which had recovered from its slump after Slayback’s murder, looked as though it would generate profits of $120,000 to $150,000 in 1883. But the World was losing thousands of dollars each month. If New York didn’t take to his so-called western journalism, Pulitzer would be ruined.
He confessed his anxiety to Kate, who had installed herself and the children in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Five years with Joseph had convinced her that it was no use trying to restrain his ambition. He was, as he had promised in his wedding-eve letters, driven by an insatiable need to be occupied, to have meaningful work, to keep moving. On the other hand, Kate had witnessed his talent. She had, after all, accompanied him to St. Louis to spend their last dime on a bankrupt paper. She believed in him and urged him on, even if it meant risking everything they had.
Word of the pending sale began to leak out. It was hard to keep it a secret, with Cockerill shuttling between New York and St. Louis and the Post-Dispatch business manager joining Pulitzer in New York. On May 6, the rival Globe-Democrat confirmed that Pulitzer had concluded the deal.
On May 9, the day before Gould transferred the World to him, Pulitzer proposed to his brother that they consolidate their papers into a new one, to be called the World-Journal. Albert’s seven-month-old Journal had three times the circulation of the World and was acquiring thousands of new subscribers each month. If Albert agreed to the merger, Joseph promised him a profit of no less than $100,000 a year.
“That is a good deal of money,” Albert said. “I shall be perfectly satisfied if I can even make a fifth of that out of the Journal.”
“You needn’t come to the office at all, if you like you can stay at home in bed all day long,” continued Joseph, who could never brook an equal in the office.
In hoping to combine the papers, Joseph was following the game plan he had used in St. Louis when he had merged his new paper there with Dillon’s Post. But this situation was different: Albert was making money on his own, lots of it, and his paper was not threatened by Joseph. He declined the invitation.
“Don’t be so cock-sure of your success,” Joseph snapped. “It is the men you have got and who get the paper out every night for you that are making it what it is. When they are gone what will you do?”
That night, Albert confronted this question. He discovered that his managing editor, E. C. Hancock, had resigned, his lead columnist had vanished, and his editorial writer had called in sick. “I did not lose a moment, jumped into a car as I was determined to get at the truth, rode to his house, obtained admission after some difficulty and soon learned that my surmise was true—my whole staff, my three most valuable men whom I had trained with such pains since the first issue of the Morning Journal, had gone over in the dead of night to a rival newspaper! This blow was intended to kill me.”
Of course, the rival paper was the World. In a city teeming with editorial talent, Joseph had chosen to raid his brother’s shop. He was seeking more than editors. Driven by jealousy, he wanted to put his kid brother in his place.
At the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a reporter caught up with Pulitzer, eager to learn his plans for the World. “I intend to make it a thorough American newspaper—to un-Anglicize it, so to speak,” Pulitzer said. He promised that no immediate personnel changes were in the works. “I have no intention to bring any new men to the city for the purpose of placing them on the editorial staff of the paper,” he said. Once again Pulitzer was resorting to his old habit of lying when talking to a reporter. He preferred to keep it quiet that Cockerill, with a reputation as an editor who shot complaining readers, was on his way to New York to run the World. “In the news sense and in other ways,” Pulitzer promised, “I