Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [153]
Cartoon of Pulitzer purchasing the Dispatch. (Author’s collection.) Illustration of John Cockerill. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.)
When Pulitzer purchased the New York World from Jay Gould in 1883, he also agreed to lease for a decade Gould’s Park Row building that housed the paper. But within six years, Pulitzer had made such a success of the World that he built the tallest building on the globe(above), without incurring a cent of debt. The thirteen-story building, topped with a gilded dome that reflected light forty miles out to sea, became an important symbol of Pulitzer’s financial success and how he changed the landscape of journalism. The first sight of the New World for immigrants entering New York’s harbor was not a building of commerce, banking, or industry. Rather, it was a temple of America’s new mass media.
New York World building owned by Jay Gould. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.) Pulitzer building (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
Don Carlos Seitz was Pulitzer’s longest-serving business manager. He was one of the few working for Pulitzer who found a way to survive under his management style. Thirteen years after Pulitzer’s death, Seitz became his first biographer.
Arthur Brisbane, one of Joseph Pulitzer’s most brilliant news editors, was Kate Pulitzer’s lover for several years. In 1897, after Kate called off the relationship, he left the World to work for Hearst, where he remained for thirty-nine years and became the nation’s highest-paid editor and one of its best-read columnists.
Joseph Pulitzer hoped that David Graham Phillips might be trained to lead the World after his death. Unfortunately, Phillips had literary aspirations and left the paper to write novels and muckraking articles for leading magazines. Pulitzer was wounded when he discovered that the corrupt publisher portrayed in Phillips’s first novel was based, in great part, on himself.
Don Carlos Seitz. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.) Arthur Brisbane. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.) David Graham Phillips. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
Two publishers and two politicians challenged Pulitzer’s power. Charles Dana(above 1st), who twice hired Pulitzer to write for his New York Sun, grew bitter when the World stole his circulation, and he wrote a series of anti-Semitic editorials attacking Pulitzer. William Randolph Hearst(above 2nd) bought the paper that Albert Pulitzer had started and engaged in a crippling circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer’s World that almost bankrupted both newspapers. Theodore Roosevelt(above 3rd) feuded with Pulitzer for almost a quarter of century and sought to use the power of the presidency to put Pulitzer in prison. William Jennings Bryan(above) turned bitter when Pulitzer refused to support his early presidential bids and told the publisher “that the trouble with him is that he has too much money.”
Charles Dana, William Randolph Hearst, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Jennings Bryant. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
When the Pulitzer building was torn down in 1955, the cornerstone was recovered. It contained copies of the World and other newspapers, a wax-cylinder voice recording, and photographs of Pulitzer and his family, several of which are reproduced here for the first time since they were encased in the building.
One of the last photographs taken of Joseph Pulitzer before he began to lose his vision. His increasing blindness and tormenting mental and health problems would test Kate Pulitzer’s patience and love.
Opening the cornerstone. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.) Joseph and Kate Pulitzer.