Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [162]
On October 2, 1890, Kate, Hosmer, and Ponsonby escorted the recovering Joseph onto the Teutonic in Queenstown, England, and headed home. Wearing goggle-like dark-blue glasses, Joseph walked on American soil for the first time in eighteen months.
Joseph settled into the familiar surroundings of the Fifty-Fifth Street house, which grew more luxurious with each passing month. The architect Stanford White was busily spending thousands of Pulitzer’s dollars employing painters and wall paperers. Silk was hung on the walls in Kate’s room, and a wine cellar was being planned. Joseph also acquainted himself with the unfamiliar. He had not spent any time with his daughter Constance since she was a few months old. Kate resumed her place in New York society, attending the opera and putting on dinners such as one for Varina Davis, who was in New York revising her late husband’s memoirs.
Soon Pulitzer’s days were filled with meetings, with a steady stream of executives and editors making their way uptown. The men’s appraisal of the coming congressional elections offered encouraging news. The electorate’s faith in President Harrison had been shaken by another economic panic. Support for his Republican Party was also damaged by the profligate spending of the aptly nicknamed “billion-dollar Congress,” and by the passage of the McKinley Tariff Act, which increased the cost of goods but kept workers’ wages stagnant.
In such circumstances the World would have normally opened a floodgate of editorial abuse of Republicans and praise for Democrats. But for the first time, Pulitzer sought to restrain his paper’s partisan ardor. Its ferocity was not weakened, but the frequency of its attacks was diminished. “Remember every day in the year that though politicians read the editorial page they are probably only 5 percent of our readers,” Pulitzer told his main editorial writer. “A larger portion of the remaining 95 percent not being interested in politics at all.”
After seven years of unequaled journalistic success and immense financial reward, the political fires burned less strongly in Pulitzer. Like its master, the World was also no longer a startling new phenomenon overturning the rule of establishment newspapers and shaking up the political order. Rather, it was now the undisputed monarch of Park Row, and its reign was made even clearer when the scaffolding was peeled away and New Yorkers had their first complete view of Pulitzer’s new building. Like the newspaper itself, the scale, audacity, and ornamentation of George Post’s creation were impossible to ignore. A monument to Pulitzer’s brand of journalism, the edifice transformed the landscape of Park Row.
Towering 345 feet above the sidewalk, the building had two miles of wrought-iron columns, sixteen miles of steel beams, enough iron and steel to lay twenty-nine miles of railway, and sufficient bricks to build 250 ordinary houses. It stood on a foundation thirty feet below street level, supported by twelve-foot brick footings. The cavernous basement held Hoe’s newest and fastest presses, which when running at full tilt made their rhythmic beat felt throughout the building.
The gigantic high-speed presses were not mere workhorses. They were one of the technological marvels of the age, capable of churning out enough newspapers in a few hours to supply every New Yorker with a copy, and inspiring awe among the hundreds of visitors who came to watch each day. For members of the fourth estate the smell of ink was intoxicating. Few thrills compared with hearing the sound of the bell announcing the first turns of a press and the ensuing locomotive-like thumping cadence building to a deafening roar as the procession of cut, folded, and gathered pages poured forth with increasing speed. In the minds of