Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [194]
The staff struggled to match the Journal, but lacked the resources to compete effectively with Hearst. Unhappy at the prospect of subsidizing his money-losing papers, Pulitzer had ordered widespread budget cuts before the excitement over the Maine. To pay for the World’s new Hoe color presses, Pulitzer had to sell stock. He even ordered an audit of Kate’s spending. It found only a $20 discrepancy among the 2,472 checks written the prior year to cover her $77,000 in expenses.
The epic battle did not pit Hearst against Pulitzer. Rather, it was Hearst against Pulitzer’s leaderless troops in a helter-skelter twenty-four-hour-a-day competition. “An epoch of delirious journalism began the like of which newspaper readers had never known,” said Charles Chapin, who was beginning his tenure as one of Pulitzer’s most famous city editors. Unable to match Hearst’s corps of correspondents in Cuba, the World took to pilfering stories from the Journal to fill out its coverage, a sin with which the Journal was not entirely unacquainted.
No more stinging trap could have been laid than the one the Journal concocted for its rival. It was the same ruse Pulitzer had used to trick the Star when he was in St. Louis. The Journal printed a phony report about the heroics of a “Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz,” who was fatally wounded. After the World published its account of the good colonel’s deeds, lifted entirely from the Journal, Hearst’s headquarters gleefully announced that the colonel’s name was an anagram that spelled “We pilfer the news.”
In April, when Pulitzer returned to New York, he surveyed a wreck. The World was losing its battle with Hearst, and losing badly. The newspaper that had once set the news agenda for the city, and sometimes for the nation, was engaged in a futile game of catch-up. “It has been beaten on its own dunghill by the Journal, which has bigger type, bigger pictures, bigger war scares, and a bigger bluff,” Town Topics gleefully reported. “If Mr. Pulitzer had his eyesight he would not be content to play second fiddle to the Journal and allow Mr. Hearst to set the tone.”
From the command post of his house, Joseph again tried to fix what ailed the World. Ralph was also back in the city, having jumped on the first available ship in Cairo after receiving his father’s recall order. He was bewildered and filled with anxiety about his father’s command, but Joseph hardly noticed his arrival. “Mr. P. is solidly absorbed in the paper and the war times just now,” Pulitzer’s man George Ledlie reported to Kate, “and though I am forbidden to say so—looks and seems very well.”
Trying once more to rearrange the hierarchy in his paper, Pulitzer decided that the triumvirate, which he called “the sacred college,” was a failure. The World needed a captain, one among the men who would have more power than the others. He turned to Bradford Merrill, whom he had recruited from the New York Press two years earlier. Merrill was summoned to the house.
“You are to have general supervision over all editions of the World, subject only to my own instructions and that of the board of managers, of which you are a member,” Pulitzer told him. “I want things done, and I don’t want time wasted on consultations. I want men in charge to act, not wait for someone else.”
Pulitzer was eager to put the brakes on the paper’s outlandish journalistic practices. Under Merrill, each edition was to have one editor in charge. “But,” said Pulitzer firmly, “this does not relieve you of your duty of reading the papers every day, criticizing, complaining, stopping bad tendencies, killing bad schemes, vetoing sensationalism, suggesting, proposing, curbing, stimulating.”
Confident that Merrill would keep the staff in check, Pulitzer turned to the question of the day: should the United States go to war? There was no doubt