Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [186]
By midsummer, Pulitzer was at Chatwold, readying himself for the fall’s political battles. The Democrats were preparing for their convention in Chicago and the Republicans for theirs in St. Louis. Pulitzer faced a daunting political problem. Choosing whom to support in a national election remained both a political and an economic decision. Readers still regarded their selection of a newspaper as a political act. The wrong presidential choice could seriously damage the World, especially with Hearst’s Journal nipping at its heels. When Pulitzer had made his bid for supremacy in New York in 1884, he had triumphed over Dana in great part because the Sun had abandoned the Democratic Party. The choice he made in the 1896 election posed similar risks for Pulitzer.
The strength of the silver movement caught the old guard of the Democratic Party, including Pulitzer, by surprise. “There is not the remotest shadow of a chance that free silver can ever become a reality in the United States,” Pulitzer told a reporter in June. But when William Jennings Bryan spoke to the convention he lit a political prairie fire. Bellowing to the cheering delegates whose excitement rose with each phrase of inspired rhetoric, Bryan proclaimed the movement’s answer to the defenders of the gold standard. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Then, he stepped back, held his arms out and stood Christ-like before the hall. “The floor of the convention seemed to heave up,” reported the World. “Everybody seemed to go mad at once.”
Pulitzer summoned the World’s editorial writer George Eggleston to Bar Harbor. He had correctly predicted Bryan’s nomination, unlike the other men covering the convention for the World. While Pulitzer and Eggleston conferred, an emissary from Bryan’s campaign arrived. Since only one Democrat had been elected to the White House in forty years, and then with the support of the World, such a political pilgrimage was mandatory.
Pulitzer instructed Eggleston to meet the representative. The man informed Eggleston that Bryan would win by a large majority with or without the support of the World. “For the sake of the press, and especially of so great a newspaper as the World, therefore, Mr. Bryan asked Mr. Pulitzer’s attention to this danger to prestige.” Nothing that could have been said was more likely to have a worse effect on Pulitzer.
When Eggleston delivered the message, Pulitzer laughed. As the two men sat on the small porch, Pulitzer asked him to jot down figures. The publisher rapidly named the states and the number of electoral votes that would go to Bryan. “I don’t often predict—never unless I know,” he said. His calculations predicted defeat. “Let that be our answer to Mr. Bryan’s audacious message.” Pulitzer’s electoral math was uncannily correct. “Mr. Pulitzer correctly named every state that would give its electoral vote to each candidate, and the returns of the election—four months later—varies from his prediction by only two electoral votes out of four hundred and forty-seven.”
But, in a larger sense, Pulitzer had misread the political tea leaves, for the first time in his life. He failed to grasp that free silver was not a public policy debate but a cry for help from the very people for whom he had built his paper.
Eggleston and Pulitzer crafted an unusually long editorial as the campaign season opened. The World, it said, sympathized with any candidate who stood against Wall Street’s domination and for the creation of an income tax. But before the paper could throw its support to Bryan, it raised twenty ponderous objections to the more extreme elements in the party’s platform—primarily those dealing with free silver. These policies, Pulitzer claimed, could destroy the economy. If Bryan disowned these planks, then he could win over the undecided voters.
“You can, if you will, decide a majority of them to vote their party’s ticket,” the editorial promised, “as they would very much prefer to do