Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [117]
Joseph dismissed the sarcastic remark with a wave. “I’ll admit that you have a wonderful nose for ferreting out talent,” he said. “I have read your paper today and it is really not half bad.”
There may have been enough room for two Pulitzer papers in New York, but not enough for two Pulitzers. Although Albert was willing to share the stage, Joseph wasn’t. Stung by the malevolent actions of his only living sibling, Albert took an angry swipe at Joseph’s handiwork. He told the Herald that the success of the Journal showed that for a newspaper to find readers “it is not necessary to make it slanderous, vituperative, or nasty.”
A few weeks after their encounter, Joseph made an attempt to be civil. He stopped in at Albert’s office for fifteen minutes. “He made a closer study of us and took in more during that time than another less observing man would have done in a whole day,” Albert wrote, describing the visit to a friend. “After Joe left someone asked, ‘I wonder what he dropped in for?’ My officious office-boy quickly replied, ‘I guess he dropped in to see if there was anyone else he could coax away!’”
After the visit, the two brothers would forever remain estranged. The only two remaining members of Fülöp and Elize Pulitzer’s children left in the world found they could not get along.
For those who had watched Pulitzer climb from being a lawyer’s errand boy to being a newspaper publisher, his purchase of the World held great promise. “You have entered upon the stage of a great theater and stand as if it were before the footlights in presence of the nation,” one of his oldest friends from St. Louis wrote. Another compared him to a previous newspaper giant: “The present situation is not unlike that which the elder Bennett found when he moved to attack the established dailies. You are in a magnificent field and you ought to move all of America.”
But unless Pulitzer could spark a spectacular increase in circulation he would not ascend a pinnacle of political power. Instead, he would be crushed under an avalanche of debt. Every tactic, device, scheme, plan, and method that he employed in St. Louis would have to work in New York, and he also needed to think up new ones. But before introducing his ideas, he decided to create the appearance of change.
Taking from his bag a trick he had used in St. Louis, Pulitzer sent reporters out to interview leading Democrats about the “new World,” even though it still looked like the old one. Flattered by the attention and the promise of free publicity, the party figures immediately studied the paper. Typical was the response of one party official. “I guess we are going to have a real Democratic paper at last,” he said. “The paper in its new dress is an immense improvement and the short distinct paragraphs, instead of running everything together, make the paper very readable.”
Then—also as he had done in St. Louis—Pulitzer took to reprinting all the press comments on the World’s change in ownership. He sought to project a sense of dramatic change. “He took every occasion to blow his horn and tell the public what a good newspaper he was making,” remarked the owner of a stationery and newspaper store on the West Side. “This was unusual in New York and by many people it was considered very bad taste on his part to be continually boasting and bragging about the merits of his publication.” However distasteful it might have seemed to some, it worked. Within the first few days, circulation had a modest increase. New Yorkers were curious about the World.
What they found when they picked up a copy was not all that different from before. Except for Pulitzer’s tinkering with the masthead, the layout of the paper remained unchanged. He filled in the empty spaces on each side of the top of the front page with a circle or square containing promotional copy such as “Only 8-Page Newspaper in the United States Sold for 2 Cents.” (This little innovation, which he may have stolen from Albert,