Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [147]
“To decide a bet between two parties will you kindly answer the following,” one reader wrote to the World. “Was the Editor of the New York World born in the country and is he of Jewish extraction.” Pulitzer declined to answer the letter. Despite his Episcopalian wife, his baptized children, and his family’s membership in St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, Pulitzer could not shed his Jewish identity in the eyes of others any more than he could deny his foreign birth. In the public mind there was little doubt about Pulitzer’s ethnicity.
“In all the multiplicity of Nature’s freaks, running from Albino Negroes to seven-legged calves, there is one curiosity that will always cause the observer to turn and stare. This freak is a red-headed Jew,” began a profile of Pulitzer in the trade publication The Journalist. It described “Jewseph Pulitzer” as “combing his hair with talons,” “rubbing the sores around his eyes,” and remaining in the shadows “in order to escape turning rancid in the hot sun.”
The author of this barbarous piece was Leander Richardson, an aspiring actor with a beard and a wavy chevron mustache untrimmed at the ends so as to extend wider than his face. Richardson had worked as a gossip columnist for the World under Pulitzer until he was fired for undisclosed reasons in May 1884. He and a partner launched The Journalist, and Richardson used his new post on the widely read trade magazine to seek revenge on Pulitzer.
“Any man can make money by publishing a newspaper which will defile its columns with dirty advertisements as those of Jewseph Pulitzer’s World are defiled,” wrote Richardson, referring to personal notices that some people believed were illicit coded messages for rendezvous with prostitutes. “A directory of assignation houses and worse, the recognized organ of prostitutes, pimps and janders,” claimed Anthony Comstock, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. When the fuss over the advertisements faded, Richardson didn’t relax his attacks. “There was never a greater pretender in American journalism,” he said, “than this same Jewseph Pulitzer.”
Pulitzer banned The Journalist from the office, but the anti-Semitic broadsides against him were not limited to Richardson’s personal vendetta in the trade press. In “New Jerusalem,” as the Los Angeles Times referred to New York City, others among Pulitzer’s competitors adopted Richardson’s methods. Their anger toward the upstart who was winning the circulation war found expression in attacks on Pulitzer for his Jewish origins. Even a man who had once been his mentor joined in.
The rivalry between Charles Dana and Pulitzer, harsh and vitriolic as it had been during the 1884 election, became bitterly personal in 1887. Since Pulitzer had come to New York, the Sun’s circulation had shrunk at almost the same rate that the World’s had soared. In October, Pulitzer launched the Evening World to compete with the Evening Sun, which Dana had begun publishing in the spring. In his typical fashion, Pulitzer stole one of Dana’s editors, Solomon S. Carvalho, to run the new paper. Carvalho, who had a goatee and was always impeccably dressed, had made a reputation as a reporter with a flair for covering murders and suicides when he had first joined the Sun nine years earlier. He instantly made the one-cent Evening World into an audacious purveyor of titillating and sensational news. Within a few weeks it surpassed the Evening Sun’s circulation.
The economic insult to Dana was compounded by a political dispute between him and Pulitzer. In the election for district attorney, Pulitzer was backing De Lancey Nicoll, who had prosecuted the corrupt alderman in the trial that produced the death threat against Pulitzer. Tammany Hall, however, would have nothing to do with a man seemingly hell-bent on putting corrupt politicians in jail. So Nicoll deserted the Democratic Party and won the Republican nomination. In the offing was the kind of political fight Pulitzer relished. By not abandoning Nicoll, he could prove his paper’s independence.