Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [184]
Pulitzer couldn’t decide. A dozen years earlier he had been the one to force other publishers to cut their prices. Not being able to call the shots was a new and uncomfortable position for him. As Pulitzer prepared to head back to Jekyll Island, he had still not made up his mind, so Carvalho and Norris boarded the train with him. By the time they reached Philadelphia, Pulitzer told them his decision. He would cut the price. The pair left the train and returned to New York.
“The news of the World’s reduction came like a thunder clap to the great newspaper offices in Park Row,” reported the Chicago Tribune. An editorial in the World announced the change.
“The reason for this reduction is a secret that we are ready to share with all the people. We prefer power to profits.”
“The immediate effect was electric, but not as its owner had anticipated,” Seitz said. Circulation did go up, by 88,000, but only the smaller competing papers suffered circulation losses. The Journal continued to gain. By stooping to compete with Hearst, Pulitzer had brought more attention to the Journal and had actually encouraged his rival. “The World in reducing to one cent must have recognized the fact that the Journal has come to stay,” Adolph Ochs, a publisher in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with hopes of someday joining the Park Row fraternity, told Pulitzer.
Both newspapers gained in circulation, but lost money with every copy. “Mr. Hearst felt that he had his antagonist staggering and began a furious assault,” said Seitz. “He spent money as it had never been spent before on newspapers in any field.” Pulitzer had the resources to match Hearst, but he no longer had the daring of a young man, especially one with inherited wealth.
Hearst’s entry into New York gave editors and reporters who could no longer tolerate Pulitzer’s eccentric management style a practical exit, even a lucrative one. To Carvalho, who had acted as the publisher of the World in all but name, the option looked attractive. He felt as if he were at the end of a yo-yo jerked by Pulitzer’s constant changing of orders and reshuffling of authority. In late March 1896, he telephoned Pulitzer on Jekyll Island, a daring act in and of itself, and said that unless his powers were restored by the end of the day—five o’clock in the afternoon, to be precise—he would quit. At five-thirty, Carvalho called Seitz into his office and said he was done, after nine years of managing the World. A few days later, he was on the Journal’s payroll, where he would remain as Hearst’s right-hand man for thirty years. Pulitzer’s detractors watched the desertions with glee. The anti-Semitic gossip sheet Town Topics asked, “How is Mr. Pulitzer going to get unleavened bread when the young Egyptian from San Francisco is getting all the dough?”
With his newspaper’s supremacy threatened and managerial trouble afoot, Pulitzer found Jekyll Island insufferable. To make matters worse, a government-contracted dredge entered the waters near his cottage, its steam engine clanging as it hoisted buckets of muck to the surface. Pulitzer sent his secretary out to pay the foreman $100 a day to hold off on the work until his stay on the island was over.
On Jekyll Island, word reached Pulitzer that John Cockerill, the editor who served him loyally during his rise at the Post-Dispatch and followed him to the World, had died in Cairo, Egypt. Since the two had parted company in 1891, Cockerill had run his own newspaper and then become a foreign correspondent for the New York