Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [169]
Their assumption made sense. Since coming to New York, Pulitzer had expanded his advocacy of labor from the modest support he had offered in St. Louis, where he catered to a more middle-class professional readership. Under Pulitzer, the World had exposed sweatshops and supported efforts to limit working hours, protect women and children from abuse in the workplace, and increase the number of schools for laborers’ children. In one pro-labor campaign, Pulitzer had come to verbal blows with his antagonist Theodore Roosevelt, who was then a state legislator. Roosevelt had described a bill reducing the working hours for car drivers as communistic. “If it be Communism, nice, dainty, cultured Mr. Roosevelt to say to these favored corporations, ‘Twelve hours shall be a legal day’s work,’” Pulitzer wrote, “pray what is when the corporations say to their employees, ‘You shall slave for sixteen hours a day or starve.’”
In St. Louis, his own workers remained mostly nonunion, but Pulitzer recognized the unions in his New York shop and supported workers in several major strikes, even raising money from his readers for a strike fund. He had also rallied to the side of striking workers at the Missouri Pacific Railroad. “This is the case in a nutshell,” he wrote. “Dividends paid on watered stock which was done to add to the hoards of millionaires who are sailing in their floating palaces among the soft breezes of the Antilles. Wages cut down to a miserable pittance of $1 to $1.18 a day, out of which the workman on the Western roads, if a married man, must feed and clothe a family.”
It was no wonder that Merrill felt comfortable bringing the World to the side of the striking Homestead workers as the conflict continued to escalate. The Pinkerton guards arrived by boat, and they and the strikers engaged in a pitched battle that resulted in deaths on both sides. But the strikers prevailed, and they paraded the captured guards through town like prisoners of war. Frick called on the governor, who sent in 8,000 state militiamen, placed the town under martial law, and reclaimed the mill for the company. The message to labor was clear. When and if workers gained the upper hand, American industry could call upon the power of the state. Merrill was outraged, calling the use of the troops “obnoxious” and “inexcusable.”
Pulitzer—who now traveled in floating palaces himself, vacationed with the barons of capitalism at Jekyll Island, and lived like royalty in Paris—learned about the battle of Homestead from French newspapers. He immediately told Ponsonby to cable to New York and obtain a full report on the conduct of the World. When he learned that the paper had sided with the workers, he was furious. He cabled Merrill, rebuking him and accusing him of sensationalism and of having disregarded law and order. “There is but one thing for the locked-out men to do. They must submit to the law,” Pulitzer said. “They must not resist the authority of the State. They must not make war upon the community.”
The Pulitzer who had built up the Post-Dispatch and the World as voices for the disinherited was gone. The bitter darkness into which he had fallen and the cocoon of wealth that surrounded him had destroyed Pulitzer’s empathy. When it came to supporting reform and political and social change, property was now the trump card in Pulitzer’s deck.
Angry about his paper’s conduct, complaining about all his ailments, and dispirited, Pulitzer found no solace in Paris. He returned to Wiesbaden to see Dr. Hermann Pagenstecher, one of the many doctors with whom he had consulted when the decline in his vision began. Pagenstecher ran the largest eye hospital in Germany and treated famous patients from all over the world. He examined Pulitzer in his private clinic, a large white house with purple-blossomed creepers clinging to its columns and running along its windowsills. Peering into Pulitzer’s eyes, he dictated his observations to his assistant, who dutifully recorded them. The doctor offered encouraging words to his patient even though