Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [2]
Wherever he went, it was in the company of an all-male retinue of secretaries, readers, pianists, and valets. In every practical sense, they had replaced his wife and children. From morning to night, these men tended to his every whim and kept the world at bay. By long practice, they had mastered handling his correspondence, discerned the most soothing manner by which to read books aloud from his well-stocked traveling library, and found ways to entertain at meals.
However, during his long exile Pulitzer never relaxed his grip on the World, his influential New York newspaper that had ushered in the modern era of mass communications. An almost unbroken stream of telegrams, all written in code, flowed from ports and distant destinations to New York, directing every part of the paper’s operation. The messages even included such details as the typeface used in an advertisement and the vacation schedule of editors. Managers shipped back reams of financial data, editorial reports, and espionage-style accounts of one another’s work. Although he had set foot in his skyscraper headquarters on Park Row only three times, whenever anyone talked about the newspaper it was always “Pulitzer’s World.”
And it was talked about. Since Pulitzer took over the moribund newspaper in 1883 and introduced his brand of journalism to New York, the World had grown at meteoric speed, becoming, at one point, the largest circulating newspaper on the globe. Six acres of spruce trees were felled a day to keep up with its demand for paper, and almost every day enough lead was melted into type to set an entire Bible into print.
Variously credited with having elected presidents, governors, and mayors; sending politicians to jail; and dictating the public agenda, the World was a potent instrument of change. As a young man in a hurry, Pulitzer had unabashedly used the paper as a handmaiden of reform, to raise social consciousness and promote a progressive—almost radical—political agenda. The changes he had called for, like the outlandish ideas of taxing inheritances, income, and corporations, had become widely accepted.
“The World should be more powerful than the President,” Pulitzer once said. “He is fettered by partisanship and politicians and has only a four-year term. The paper goes on year after year and is absolutely free to tell the truth and perform every service that should be performed in the public interest.”
Like Pulitzer himself, however, the World was aging. Its politics had grown conservative, its novelty had spawned dozens of imitators, and its great achievements lay in the past. Most readers couldn’t remember a time before newspapers, thick as magazines, circulated in the millions, sold for as little as a penny, and were filled with dramatically written news, riveting sports coverage, comics, marital advice, recipes, fiction, and even sheet music.
On this day, a reminder of the paper’s fabled past stood nearby. Rising from the waters of Havana Bay like a cadaver’s finger was the top portion of a mast. It was the only visible remains of the USS Maine, which blew up a decade before, killing most of its crew. The disaster, coming at a time of rising tension between Spain and America, became incendiary kindling in the hands of battling newspaper editors in New York.
William Randolph Hearst, a young upstart imitator from California armed with an immense family fortune, had done the unthinkable. In 1898 his paper, the New York Journal, was closing in on the World’s dominance of Park Row. Fighting down to the last possible reader, each seeking to