Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [96]
On June 11, 1879, Kate gave birth to their first son. They named him Ralph. With a child at home and with the paper becoming more successful, Pulitzer carved out more time for his family. He spent Sundays with Kate and baby. All summer he came home early enough to sit on the front stoop with Kate and visit with neighbors, at least those who did not hold the conduct of his paper against him. Those who did referred to the couple as “beauty and the beast.”
Usually Kate, with Ralph in her arms, fetched her husband from work by carriage. Joseph would greet her and Ralph with joyous enthusiasm, as if they had been separated by a long journey. “In such an atmosphere, those were happy days for everyone,” one of Joseph’s reporters recalled. Indeed, even his old friend Johnson noted Joseph’s happiness in his diary. Joseph had resumed horseback riding, often taking rides in Forest Park with a friend. On evenings when he did not return to the paper for late work, Joseph gathered friends for cards in his home.
As the summer of 1879 drew to a close, Joseph had found all the things that he had been lacking when he confessed to Kate, on the eve of their wedding a year earlier, his need for a new life. He was now married to an enviably attractive woman, he was the father of a son, and he was no longer fretting about an impending return to poverty. The only thing that was not yet fully in his domain was the paper, which he still had to share with a partner.
In the fall, it became increasingly clear to Dillon and Pulitzer that their partnership would not work. McCullagh, who predicted that the partnership would not last, attributed the breakup to “incompatibility of temper, superinduced, perhaps, by an excess of talent.” The truth of the matter was that one did not work with Pulitzer. For him, surely. Against him, often. But not with him. Carl Schurz and Preetorius had learned this in 1872. Now, it was Dillon’s turn.
Dillon agreed to sell Pulitzer his half of the enterprise. It had been only a year since Pulitzer had sat late into the night with his friend Houser, counting how many months of operating expenses his few thousand dollars in savings would buy him. Now he could meet Dillon’s asking price solely from his share of the paper’s first-year profits. On November 29, 1879, the Post-Dispatch announced Dillon’s departure. Pulitzer was the paper’s sole proprietor.
Joseph reorganized the paper’s corporate structure. He made Kate vice president, putting one share in her name, and filled the rest of the board with loyal friends such as William Patrick. Next, with his hands unfettered, Pulitzer made wholesale changes to the editorial staff. He didn’t want another partner, but he needed someone who could act as one. Within days of Dillon’s departure, Pulitzer sent a wire to John Cockerill, whom he had first met at the Liberal Republican convention, offering him the post of managing editor.
That night, Cockerill found the telegram waiting for him when he picked up his room key at Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore. Since his successful run with Hutchins at the Washington Post, he had moved on to become editor of the Baltimore Gazette. Hutchins still sang his praises. “The really notable newspaper men in the United States can be numbered upon the fingers of one’s hands, and Mr. Cockerill’s name would be called before the second hand was reached,” he wrote. Pulitzer’s offer was irresistible. The two men had similar political views, and their enthusiasm for the new journalism of the era was so great that they were like apostles of a faith.
The challenge that came with the job was daunting. Although Cockerill knew of Pulitzer’s early successes, the Post-Dispatch was still more a promise than an accomplishment. It was nowhere close to challenging the behemoth of St. Louis edited by Cockerill’s early boss and friend McCullagh. The city belonged to the Globe Democrat. Only the Boston Herald, the New York Herald,