Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [238]
At midnight, everyone who could find space crowded into the cavernous underground press room to watch the largest Hoe presses on earth, the size of locomotives, stir to life, rhythmically stamping out a 200-page anniversary issue with eight sections in color.
In August, Pulitzer sailed back across the Atlantic and summoned Seitz to his yacht to discuss coverage of the presidential election. Pulitzer’s old Democratic antagonist was back. At the beginning of the year, Pulitzer had done everything in his power to discourage Democrats from turning to William Jennings Bryan for a third time. The World even printed, and distributed widely, a pamphlet called “The Map of Bryanism: Twelve Years of Demagogy and Defeat—An Appeal to Independent Democratic Thought, by the New York World.” It hit its mark. “Mr. Bryan has formally and officially cussed the pamphlet from hell to Harlem,” Frank Cobb told Pulitzer.
In fact, Bryan’s day had come and gone. Cobb, who had not heard the politician speak since he gave his famous “cross of gold” speech at the convention in 1896, was saddened after attending a New York rally. “He is fat and heavy and bald,” Cobb told Pulitzer. “He looks like a traveling evangelist, who had failed as an actor, and then got religion. He speaks slowly and deliberately. He has lost all the sacred fire that made him the greatest orator I ever heard.”
Pulitzer instructed Cobb to promote alternative candidates. Cobb was impressed by the president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, and Pulitzer urged him to draft an editorial promoting Wilson as an alternative to Bryan. “What better candidate could they present who would have a better chance to carry New York and New Jersey than anybody I can think of now,” the publisher wrote.
Pulitzer’s efforts were of no use. Bryan easily won the nomination. Although he was convinced that Bryan would lose to Roosevelt’s handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, Pulitzer ordered Cobb to support the Democratic nominee. “Bryan is as dead as a door nail,” Pulitzer told Cobb when they met on the Liberty. “A vote for Bryan is not a practical living vote, but a protest; a protest against the tendencies of the party in power; a check and rebuke to stop those tendencies; an exceedingly important rebuke and check if the vote is large enough to keep the party in power after elections on the anxious seat.”
Without knowing Pulitzer’s motives, Bryan was grateful for the World’s support. In 1904 he had privately denounced Pulitzer as a slave to wealth, but now he sent a message of thanks. Pulitzer passed it on to Cobb. “It is a sign of forgiveness which might amuse you,” he wrote in an accompanying note.
Pulitzer believed that the World could increase its credibility and power if it mounted a campaign to resist Roosevelt’s plans to create a legacy for himself as a great president. “The country has gone crazy under Roosevelt’s leadership in extravagance for the war idea,” Pulitzer said. “All my life I have been opposed to that so-called militarism. I may be crazy in thinking the country crazy, but the fact remains we have increased our war expenditures over one hundred millions a year.” As far as Pulitzer was concerned, Roosevelt had set the nation on a course of unbridled, unneeded, and unwise military growth. “The logic of jingoism, Rooseveltism, seems to be that the greater we are in population and strength, the more afraid we must be of foreign attack and war.”
Roosevelt might be a lame duck, but Rooseveltism was an enemy yet to be vanquished.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
CLASH OF TITANS
On the evening of October 2, 1908, William Speer, the editor whom Pulitzer had detailed to work for the Democratic presidential nominee in 1904, was at his desk in the