Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [120]
The moneyed class learned to pick up the World with trepidation. Each day brought a fresh assault on privilege and another revelation of the squalor and oppression under which the new members of the laboring class toiled. Pulitzer found readers where other newspaper publishers saw a threat. Immigrants were pouring into New York at a rate never before seen. By the end of the decade, 80 percent of the city’s population was either foreign-born or of foreign parentage. Only the World seemed to consider the stories of this human tide as deserving news coverage. The other papers wrote about it; the World wrote for it.
The World’s stories were animated not just by the facts the reporters dug up but by the voices of the city they recorded. Pulitzer drove his staff to aggressively seek out interviews, a relatively new technique in journalism pioneered by his brother, among others. Leading figures of the day were used to a considerable wall of privacy and were affronted by what Pulitzer proudly called “the insolence and impertinence of the reporters for the World.”
Not only did he have the temerity to dispatch his men to pester politicians, manufacturers, bankers, society figures and others for answers to endless questions, but he instructed them to return with specific personal details that would illustrate the resulting articles. Pulitzer was obsessed with details. A tall man was six feet two inches tall. A beautiful woman had auburn hair, hazel eyes, and demure lips that occasionally turned upward in a coy smile. Vagueness was a sin.
As was inaccuracy. A disciple of the independent press movement, Pulitzer was convinced that accuracy built circulation, credibility, and editorial power. Words could paint brides as blushing, murderers as heinous, politicians as venal, but the facts had to be right. “When you go to New York, ask any of the men in the dome to show you my instructions to them, my letters written from day to day, my cables,” Pulitzer told an associate late in life. “You will see that accuracy, accuracy, accuracy, is the first and the most urgent, the most constant demand I have made on them.”
Pulitzer practically lived at his cramped headquarters on Park Row. Kate and the children hardly ever saw him. His day began with editorial conferences—an editor who came unprepared never repeated the mistake—and ended under the harsh white gaslight as he read and reread proofs for the next morning’s edition. When not writing or editing, Pulitzer studied all the New York papers as well as more than a dozen British, German, and French ones. He demanded a great deal from his staff but even more from himself. When he had been in St. Louis, if the paper was dull he would steal home feeling sick. If it met his standard, he would be elated. As spring turned into summer in New York, Pulitzer was feeling elated.
In his first weeks at the World, the paper’s circulation soared by 35 percent. “Increasing in circulation? You can just bet it is,” said a newsstand operator on the corner of Cortland and Greenwich streets. “I used to sell fourteen Worlds a day. I now sell thirty-four. If that ain’t an increase I don’t know what is.”
The Pulitzers moved from their hotel rooms into a house they rented at 17 Gramercy Park, an elegant neighborhood surrounding a private park on the East Side, off Park Avenue. The aging Samuel Tilden, for whom Pulitzer had toiled in the disputed presidential election of 1876, lived at number 15. Once again there was talk of Tilden’s running for president, but Pulitzer would have nothing to do with it. “He belongs to the past and represents an idea,” Pulitzer said a few weeks after moving in next door to his famous neighbor. “Now, ideas are stronger than men, but you can’t elect an idea.”
Even though work consumed most of Pulitzer’s waking hours, he found time for socializing, particularly