Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [196]
Also coming to Narragansett were Winnie Davis, now thirty-three years old, and her mother, Varina, who took up quarters in its fashionable resort hotel. Since returning from her trip to Egypt with Kate, Winnie had basked in her new fame as a writer. Her new novel, set in a summer house at Bar Harbor, was earning praise, and she remained the darling of the South. Only a few days before arriving in Rhode Island, Confederate veterans attending their annual reunion in Atlanta had thrown their hats into the air when she entered the hall to a general’s proclamation of “Comrades, behold our daughter!”
The trip through the South, however, was too taxing for Winnie, whose health was fragile. After riding in an open carriage through a heavy summertime Atlanta rain, she fell ill. Upon reaching Narragansett, she was confined to her hotel room. At first the gastritis from which the doctors concluded she suffered seemed like a surmountable problem, but as the days wore on she continued to decline. In early September, the Rockingham Hotel closed for the season but permitted her to remain in her room. A short time later, the Pulitzer home once again was in turmoil as a young woman died.
On September 21, 1898, dressed in white muslin with white satin trim, Davis lay in a casket in the hotel lobby. The following day an escort of Union veterans escorted the coffin carrying the “daughter of the confederacy” to the train station, where Kate Pulitzer and others joined it for the journey to Richmond. Thousands waited there for the funeral. Pulitzer, who still avoided funerals whenever he could, left for Europe, taking with him David Graham Phillips, his favorite at the paper, who was now working as an editorial writer and whom he continued to groom for bigger things. Their stay in London and Paris was short, and by the end of the month they were back in New York.
The World was desperate for Pulitzer’s attention. It clung to a tenuous lead over the Journal. Before the war, the average combined daily and Sunday circulation of the World had been 419,000, to the Journal’s 270,000. Since then, the World had lost more than 78,000 readers while the Journal had gained 46,000. “The circulation comparisons are menacing,” Norris wrote to Pulitzer in a lengthy appraisal of the competitors’ positions. On the advertising side, the situation was equally dire.
Norris, along with Seitz, worked assiduously to deduce Hearst’s income. They estimated that Hearst had spent $4 million in his first three years and that he had access to another $5 million. The Journal’s circulation revenue was easy to compute. But it took rulers to measure the advertising space and rate cards to calculate the revenue from advertising. They determined that the Journal was earning less than half of what the World took in. But the Journal was coming on strong. A buoyant Hearst predicted that his paper would be profitable in 1899. More ominous for Pulitzer was that Hearst’s success could not entirely account for the decline of his own paper. The World’s decreases in circulation and advertising revenue exceeded the Journal’s gains. As Seitz succinctly put it to Pulitzer, “The World has lost more than the Journal has taken from it.”
Fighting the Journal for readers on its terms had proved financially disastrous. The World was outmatched in every attempt to be more yellow than Hearst’s editors and reporters. In the end, the effort left Pulitzer’s reputation in tatters and his name inextricably linked to Hearst’s. With the war—the main excuse for the excesses—at an end, Pulitzer decided that the time had come to try to restore some sanity to the World.
At eleven in the morning on November 28, 1898, the World’s reporters from all shifts and beats gathered in the city room under the gold dome. From the windows, they could look beyond the East River, across to Brooklyn, and out to sea. All of Manhattan was at their feet, giving reporters who watched over the city day and