Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [224]
From Bar Harbor, Pulitzer ordered Merrill to go after George Cortelyou, Roosevelt’s former secretary of commerce and labor. As chairman of the Republican Party, Cortelyou supervised the collection of funds from corporate leaders and financiers for the president’s election campaign. Pulitzer told Merrill to compare the party chief to the nefarious Boss Tweed, and to demand that Republicans open their books so that the public could see how much money was coming into the president’s coffers from trust, monopolies, and corporations facing possible federal prosecution.
Pulitzer had long sought to end corporate campaign donations, but the government was still three years away from imposing a ban. “Roosevelt is very culpable, or at least, under suspicion for not having put through bills to prevent it in Washington. All the more because he consented to the amazing impropriety of making his Secretary of Commerce, collector of these very contributions and making him afterwards Postmaster General.”
Merrill did his best as the fall campaign got under way, but his efforts paled in comparison with Pulitzer’s own editorial, which appeared on October 1, 1904. Written as an open letter to the president, it was vintage Pulitzer, of the kind readers had not seen in years. Pulitzer castigated Roosevelt for failing to keep his pledge to remove the veil of secrecy from the affairs of corporations.
Stretching across two pages, the editorial sustained its intensity to the end. Pulitzer reminded readers that Roosevelt had created a special government agency to “get the facts” on corporations but had done nothing with it. “The Bureau of Corporations was organized February 26, 1903—more than 19 months, more than 80 weeks—exactly 583 days ago—yes, exactly 583 days ago,” wrote Pulitzer. Line after line, Pulitzer pointed out that the agency had obtained no documents, subpoenaed no witness, and exposed no restraint of trade or corporate misdoing, repeating the refrain “after these 583 days” with each accusation.
Returning to his bête noire, Pulitzer charged that Cortelyou was collecting tribute from corporations in return for a promise of protection. Then, he posed ten repetitive questions, set in boldface type. They began with “How much has the beef trust contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?” and continued through each important trust—paper, coal, oil, steel, etc.—until the last one: “How much have the six great railroads contributed to Mr. Cortelyou?”
The ten questions became an instant hit with Democrats, who were desperate for a weapon to use against their foe. It wasn’t long before Democratic speakers began to lead their audiences into chants of “How much? How much? How much?” The actual answer was far less than Pulitzer surmised, especially as corporate leaders had little doubt that Roosevelt would win. Cortleyou declined to respond publicly, but sent a private message to Pulitzer. He took one of the World’s reporters by the arm in a hotel lobby in Washington. “As God is my witness,” he said, “I am conducting an absolutely clean campaign. I have not coerced a penny out of anyone, and my order from the start has been to accept no money on a pledge of any sort whatsoever.” The message fell on deaf ears. Pulitzer continued his attacks.
Roosevelt considered the attacks an attempt to divert attention from the Democrats’ equally odious money-raising tactics. In the end, he easily dispatched Parker, who took a drubbing even in his home state. The results did little to change Pulitzer’s antipathy toward Roosevelt. He promised that the World would remain a thorn in Roosevelt’s side as he began his first full term as president. “The World,” Pulitzer wrote, “thinks no more of his military megalomania and his swashbuckler tendencies than it did before; but the returns prove that an overwhelming majority of voters had no such misgiving.”
As 1905 began, Pulitzer once again considered an offer by Charles Knapp, the publisher of the St. Louis Republic, to buy the Post-Dispatch.