Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [125]
With each passing day the World’s circulation rose. One morning, an observer took an informal census of newspaper preferences on the Fourth Avenue streetcar. Three passengers were reading the Herald, four the Sun, and five the World. Only the Times and Albert’s Journal had more readers. Veterans of the business were astonished by the World’s growth. “It cannot be expected to go on forever gaining at the gait which it has been following during the past few months,” claimed the trade publication The Journalist. But it did.
By midsummer 1884, the World was selling 60,000 copies on weekdays and 100,000 on Sundays, closing in on all the leading newspapers. Advertising was booming also. “A year ago the World could hardly get advertising at any price,” reported The Journalist. “It now charges from twenty-five to thirty-five cents a line, and has as much advertising as it can conveniently handle on Sunday.”
Nothing his competitors tried seemed to slow his paper’s growth. The Herald even resorted to taking out full-page advertisements in the World. When it cut its price to that of the World, the Herald compounded its woes by also trimming the commission it paid to wholesalers. One wholesaler decided to order 3,000 copies of the World instead of the Herald for his customers. “There was no complaint, and the World gained 3,000 copies, and the Herald lost them,” recalled the president of the news dealers association. “I daresay the World kept many of them.”
In July, sitting with the press in Chicago’s Exposition Building, Pulitzer watched the Democrats pick their candidate. Pulitzer did all he could to sway the convention to Cleveland. “When a blathering ward politician objects to Cleveland because he is ‘more of a Reformer than a Democrat’ he furnishes the best argument in favor of Cleveland’s nomination and election,” Pulitzer wrote in a long stream of editorials. After a bruising fight, Cleveland won the nomination. If Pulitzer’s editorials were little noticed by the delegates, the efforts convinced Cleveland that in the coming election he had an ally upon whom he could depend.
Most of the New York City press—the Herald, Post, and Times—joined in supporting Cleveland. But not Charles Dana at the Sun. A couple of years earlier, Cleveland had offended Dana by not granting a patronage job to a friend. Despite having worked hard for Democratic unity with Pulitzer, Dana broke ranks and supported a third-party candidate in hopes of denying Cleveland a victory in the crucial New York returns. Once again, as with Schurz years earlier, Pulitzer found himself at political odds with a man whom he had greatly admired and who had once been his mentor.
On July 29, Pulitzer joined other leading Democrats in Albany to officially convey the nomination to Cleveland and to mark the formal opening of the campaign. Pulitzer was the lone newspaper publisher among the judges, elected officials, and party leaders who rode to the governor’s mansion in a parade of twenty-five carriages led by the Albany city band. The deputation made its presentation, and the governor mingled with its members until the doors were opened to the dining room, where a feast had been set out. Later, full of food and optimism, the party broke up to tend to the work ahead. In the drizzling rain and dark, the delegation paraded back into the city along a route lit by torches and fireworks, to large crowds of Democrats awaiting them in the music hall and opera house. Among the few chosen by the party to speak that night was Pulitzer.
Rather than boost Cleveland’s candidacy, Pulitzer decided to sink Blaine’s. If he could defeat Blaine in New York, the election would be won. As when he tore into Grant in 1872, Hayes in 1876, and Garfield in 1880, Pulitzer filled