Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [202]
Pulitzer, however, was unaware that Phillips had a different future in mind. Over drinks, Phillips told his friends that he would remain in journalism only as long as it taught him about writing and life. In the meantime, it was providing him with the material for his first novel. In his off-hours, holed up in his room at a Washington Square boarding house between Sullivan and MacDougal streets, Phillips was crafting a novel whose central character was an amalgam of Phillips’s own experiences in journalism and his observations of Pulitzer. “I had a chance to see the truth, even if the editorials didn’t permit me to tell it,” Phillips said. “I was impressed with the awful failures among men who were avowed great worldly successes. How unhappy they were, how puerile in their motives, how unattainable happiness or contentment was to them.”
In Phillips’s novel, The Great God Success, a young man much like himself takes a job on a New York daily. The tone of the novel is set early. “Journalism is not a career,” a seasoned reporter tells the central character, who is named Howard. “It is either a school or a cemetery. A man may use it as a stepping-stone to something else. But if he sticks to it, he finds himself an old man, dead and done for to all intents and purposes years before he’s buried.”
To avoid this fate, Phillips continued to work secretly on his book.
Following the settlement of the newsies’ strike, complaints from distributors about the wholesale price of the papers brought Seitz and Carvalho back together. Carvalho told Seitz that the lesson from the past month was clear. “When I saw the advantage we had gained by co-operation during the newsboys strike,” he said, “I went to Hearst and said that it seemed to me now was a good time to undertake an arrangement with the World.”
The two managers first began working on a détente in 1897, when Hearst proposed that the Journal and the World might find it more profitable to divide the market rather than compete endlessly. The idea was compelling enough for the publishers to meet face-to-face for the first, and only, time in their lives. At the meeting, kept secret from the press, Hearst told Pulitzer that if they could come to an agreement he was willing to diminish the scope of his paper, freeing Pulitzer to raise the price of the World. “That is to say,” said Seitz, who had been part of the negotiations, “Hearst was then willing to return to his original one-cent plan of a real one-cent paper, while the World could return to its class as a two-cent paper.”
Proposals for a peace treaty ran into rough water as soon as the men tried to specify the details. One stumbling block was Pulitzer’s continued effort to keep Hearst from using Associated Press wire copy. Ever since his days in St. Louis, Pulitzer had placed an inordinate value on such memberships. A few months before he and Hearst held their summit, a competitor of the AP’s, United Press (unrelated to the present-day UPI), went out of business. Its subscribers in New York scrambled to apply for AP membership. The Herald, Times, and Tribune all were accepted, but Pulitzer used his position on the AP board to veto Hearst’s application. Without any wire service, Hearst would be at an enormous competitive disadvantage. But he resorted to a trick Pulitzer had used in St. Louis. Hearst bought the New York Morning Advertiser, folded it into his own paper, and gained its AP membership for his morning edition.
Keenly aware of the early