Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [3]
The no-holds-barred attitude of the World and Journal put the newspapers into a spiraling descent of sensationalism, outright fabrications, and profligate spending. If left unchecked, it threatened to bankrupt both their credibility and their businesses. Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, they fought it out at the edge of a precipice that could mean death to both combatants.
In the end, the two survived this short but intense circulation war. But their rivalry became almost as famous as the Spanish-American War itself. Pulitzer was indissolubly linked with Hearst as a purveyor of vile Yellow Journalism. In fact, some critics suspected that Pulitzer’s current plans to endow a journalism school at Columbia University and create a national prize for journalists were thinly veiled attempts to cleanse his legacy before his approaching death.
In addition to forever sullying his name, remembrance of the war pained the publisher for another reason. Pulitzer’s most formidable political foe had come home a hero. Worse, Pulitzer had contributed to this enemy’s glory. When Theodore Roosevelt led his famous Rough Riders to victory on Cuba’s San Juan Hill, he had brought the press along. After unleashing and glorifying the power of the press, Pulitzer watched his nemisis Roosevelt harness it as the most potent tool of political leadership in the modern age.
For a quarter of a century, the Republican Roosevelt and the Democratic Pulitzer had battled for the soul of America’s reform movement. It had been an epic clash. On one side was an egotistical, hard-boiled politician, convinced that Pulitzer was an impediment to the resplendent future his own leadership offered the nation. On the other side was a sanctimonious publisher who believed he was saving the republic from a demagogue. “I think God Almighty made it for the benefit of the World when he made me blind,” Pulitzer had confided to one of his editorial writers a few months before. “Because I don’t meet anybody, I am a recluse. Like a Blind Goddess of Justice, I sit aloof and uninfluenced. I have no friends; the World is therefore absolutely free.”
Now, as twilight descended on his presidency, Roosevelt hoped to take revenge for all the years of abuse. The immigrant son of Hungarian Jews—blind, tempestuous, and neurotic—had become the bête noir of the brawny, bellicose scion of the American aristocracy. Triggering the president’s wrath was the temerity of Pulitzer’s World in raising the possibility that the Panama Canal, Roosevelt’s most sacred accomplishment, had been tainted by corruption. Under presidential orders the Justice Department was madly combing through dusty century-old law books hoping to find some means to punish Pulitzer for his most recent affront. Grand juries were convened in Washington and New York. If Roosevelt had his way, Pulitzer would spend his last years alive locked up in prison.
At last the small boat from the harbor reached the Liberty. It pulled alongside and a handwritten copy of a cable from New York was passed up to Pulitzer’s loyal valet and confidant, Jabez Dunningham. When he read it, Dunningham rushed to the ship’s bridge and gave orders to the captain to put out to sea.
Roosevelt’s grand jury in Washington had announced its decision.
Part I
1847–1878
Chapter One
HUNGARY
On a Sabbath in the spring of 1847, Fülöp and Elize Pulitzer anxiously awaited the birth of their fourth child. Their trepidation was well founded. Two of the last three children born to them in their nine years of marriage had died. Infant mortality was then common, but the siege of death surrounding the Pulitzers was not. By sundown, the news was promising. Elize’s labor ended safely with the birth of a son. This one would live. Yet