Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [260]
“I dislike the word ‘sensational’ and never use it, but I want striking things to appear on the editorial page. Of course, it cannot compete with the news columns in effects of novelty, but can approach them.”
Pulitzer concluded his lesson with a reminder to use humor. “He urged me to exploit all my latent possibilities in the line of sarcasm and satire,” Firestone said. Before they parted, Pulitzer promised that he would never ask Firestone to write an editorial on a position he opposed. Better that certain opinions of his own not be published, Pulitzer added, than that they might appear through the medium of a writer who did not honestly share them.
After a full summer in Chatwold, Pulitzer was no better than he had been when he sailed back from Europe in June. “I have dreadful headaches, dyspepsia, nearly everything bad, sleep horribly and on brink of collapse,” he wired to Ralph in September. As the leaves turned and the fall winds heralded the oncoming winter, Pulitzer abandoned his much-loved Maine retreat for New York. That made matters worse. In the eight years since the house on East Seventy-Third Street was built, it had defied all the work by architects and experts, and all the money spent, to make it soundproof. The failure was not for lack of effort. When the house was first built, Pulitzer’s personal staff took turns sleeping in his bedroom. George Ledlie reached a point where he wasn’t sure if he might be imaging sounds.
Wallace C. Sabine, a renowned professor of acoustical engineering at Harvard, was enlisted. It was decided to build a new, almost windowless bedroom off the back of the house, using the firm of Foster, Gade, and Graham. When this room was completed, the contractor and Pulitzer’s aide Arthur Billings closed themselves off in it while half a dozen assistants banged on pipes in the basement and around the swimming pool as well as on rooftop vents while others ran the elevators up and down. “Foster is satisfied and so am I,” Billings reported to Pulitzer, “although the final success can only be assured after your acute hearing has put the room to a test.” It failed.
The house’s proximity to the World also permitted Pulitzer’s managers and editors to pester him with their business and editorial plans. It was a curse he had brought on himself by refusing to renounce power and turn decision making over to Ralph. Foremost on Seitz’s mind was moving ahead with a plan to purchase a paper mill so as to wean the World from the paper trusts, which were increasing their prices by a rate 30 to 40 percent a year. Pulitzer said he almost fainted when he heard that Ralph was going to leave on vacation without concluding the deal. The time spent with Joe, who came to visit, was no better. Joseph now wanted his son to be in New York and said he had consented to let him remain in St. Louis up till now only because of his wife’s family. The conversation ended when Joseph said that returning to New York was against his wishes.
If his employees and his children were not making demands on him, the politicians were. The reform-minded mayor William J. Gaynor, who had just survived an assassination attempt captured in an iconic photograph in the World, told Pulitzer he was frustrated with the paper. After supporting his election, Gaynor claimed, it was now siding with Hearst in attacking him on a proposal for building a subway. “You can hear it everywhere that the World that used to be a great power is now merely an echo of Hearst. Whatever Hearst wants or stands for, the World trails along afterwards as meekly as if it had no principles,” Gaynor said. “The World has done more to promote the political schemes of Hearst than all his own newspapers. Without the World, Hearst would not amount to anything.”
In his twenty-eight years at the helm of the nation’s most important newspaper, Pulitzer had built up immunity to the complaints of his allies and to vilification by enemies. His