Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [118]
But if the new World looked like the old, life inside its building certainly didn’t. James B. Townsend, a reporter who had been absent at a funeral in Vermont when Pulitzer took over, was startled by what he found upon his return. “It seemed as if a cyclone had entered the building, completely disarranged everything, and had passed away leaving confusion.” Avoiding collisions with messenger boys exiting with urgent deliveries, Townsend made his way to the city room and found his colleagues running around excitedly. He asked the general manager what was the cause of all the commotion.
“You will know soon enough, young man,” the manager replied. “The new boss will see you in five minutes.” He then glanced up at Townsend and added. “After us the deluge—prepare to meet your fate.”
Indeed, Townsend was soon summoned to Pulitzer’s office. As he entered, Townsend made his first examination of his new boss, and Pulitzer of him. Dressed in a frock coat and gray trousers, Pulitzer stared back through his glasses. “So, this is Mr. T,” he said. “Well, Sir, you’ve heard that I am the new chief of this newspaper. I have already introduced new methods—new ways I proposed to galvanize this force: are you willing to aid me?”
Almost as if the breath had been sucked from him by Pulitzer’s vigor, Townsend stammered that he would like to remain on the staff. “Good, I like you,” replied Pulitzer. “Get to work.”
During the following days, editors and reporters arriving in the early morning found Pulitzer already in his office, often toiling in his shirtsleeves. When the door was open and he was dictating an editorial, recalled one man, “his speech was so interlarded with sulphurous and searing phrases that the whole staff shuddered. He was the first man I ever heard who split a word to insert an oath. He did it often. His favorite was ‘indegoddampendent.’”
As the staff settled in for the day’s work, they couldn’t escape Pulitzer. One moment he would be in the city room arguing with a reporter about some aspect of a story. No detail was too small. In one case, he was overheard discussing the estimated number of cattle that an editor had expected to arrive in New York from the West the previous day. He loved debating with his staff, usually provoking the arguments himself. “It is by argument,” he told Townsend, “that I measure a man, his shortcomings, his possession or lack of logic, and, above all, whether he has the courage of his convictions, for no man can long work for me with satisfaction to himself or myself unless he has this courage.”
Finished with the city room, Pulitzer would bark out orders in the composing room or dash into the counting room to get a report on revenues. It wasn’t long before the old-timers couldn’t take it anymore, and new faces, often younger, appeared in the editorial quarters. The men in the composing and printing rooms were content with their new manager, though Pulitzer had one dustup with them. On May 24, he and Cockerill returned from the dedication of the Brooklyn Bridge brimming with ideas about how to cover the momentous occasion, only to discover that forty-three of the fifty-one men had walked off the job in a wage dispute. It took Pulitzer only three hours to capitulate and agree to recognize the men’s union. “The whole difficulty has been amicably settled, and the men have returned happy,” Pulitzer said as he headed out with the union president and others for a glass of beer at a neighboring bar.
There was a sense that Pulitzer was pushing the World forward. “We in the office felt from the first that this remarkable personality, which has so impressed us upon its arrival inside the building, would soon make its impress felt on the great cosmopolitan public of New York,” Townsend said, “and in time the country.”
Pulitzer launched