Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [129]
Pulitzer soon proved his worth. Blaine, exhausted from a speaking tour—something candidates rarely undertook at that time—arrived in New York hoping to hold the state in the closing days of the campaign. On October 29, he committed two mistakes. In Pulitzer’s hands, they became politically fatal.
Blaine began his day with a speech before a group of Protestant clergymen at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The pastor who introduced Blaine called the Democrats the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Too tired or too distracted to notice the dangers posed by this comment, which could turn Irish voters against him, Blaine said nothing. The Democrats, who had a stenographer following Blaine, rushed a copy of the remark to newspapers. Meanwhile, Blaine moved on to a fund-raising dinner at Delmonico’s, where he was toasted by nearly 200 of the richest and most powerful men in America.
Pulitzer was the only editor who understood the significance of Blaine’s two gaffes. The other pro-Cleveland papers in New York ran their campaign stories on the inside pages. The Tribune, which favored Blaine, reported only on the dinner, calling it a triumph. That night, Pulitzer sought out Walt McDougall and Valerian Gribayedoff, the World’s other staff artist. He said he needed a large cartoon by morning.
The two retreated to the studio and sketched an unusually wide cartoon. Across it were caricatures of nineteen of the most notorious and hated financial lords who had attended the dinner, seated as in a depiction of the Last Supper. Blaine sat beatifically at the center, with Jay Gould at this right and William H. Vanderbilt at his left. On the table before the men were dishes of food with such labels as “Gould Pie,” “Monopoly Soup,” and “Lobby Pudding.” As a final touch, the artists added an impoverished, bedraggled couple, with a child, approaching the feast in hopes of a handout.
Pulitzer broke open the design of the front page, eliminating the traditional seven columns to accommodate the damning art. Nothing like this had appeared in a New York publication since Thomas Nast dethroned Boss Tweed. Pulitzer topped the dramatic cartoon with the headline THE ROYAL FEAST OF BELSHAZZAR BLAINE AND THE MONEY KINGS.
Pulitzer was not done yet. The World revealed every aspect of the dinner, even though the organizers had done their best to bar the press. From the Timbales à la Reine and Soufflés aux Marrons upon which the men feasted to the thousands of dollars pledged to buy votes, no detail was left out. Even more damning, the main story began with a one-paragraph account of men who had been thrown out of work at a mill in Blaine’s home state and were now applying for assistance or emigrating to Canada. Other stories highlighted Blaine’s silence at the slur against the Irish and his friendship with Jay Gould, and led the way to the editorial page, where Pulitzer let loose. “Read the list of Blaine’s banqueters who are to fill his pockets with money to corrupt the ballot box,” he wrote; railroad kings, greedy monopolists, lobbyists, all of them. They had grown rich on public money and special privilege. “Shall Jay Gould rule this country? Shall he own the President?”
The “Royal Feast of Belshazzar” was reprinted by the thousands. Democrats gleefully replaced their election propaganda with copies of the World. Republicans gnashed their teeth. In a reversal of politics as usual, Pulitzer’s words became more important than those of the Democratic candidate in the closing days of the campaign. It was almost as if the World were on the ballot. Only once before, in 1876, had a newspaper played such a prominent role in a presidential election, and in that case its publisher, Horace Greeley, had been a candidate. Here Pulitzer was using the power