• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 540 0

Pulitzer's death in 1911, and the profits were distributed among his sons and the other beneficiaries of the estate. By 1931, these included fifteen Pulitzer grandchildren. Pulitzer, perhaps in the belief that the papers would make money every year, had neglected to provide for a reserve fund. Money flowed from the newspapers into the estate, but there was no way of getting it back from the estate again. When, after a succession of business mistakes, the Press Publishing Company lost the relatively small sum of $474,000 in 1928, Herbert Pulitzer and his brother Ralph, who was editor of the World, became alarmed. Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., was giving all his energy to another Pulitzer paper, the St. Louis PostDispatch. Ralph retired as editor of the World in 1930, and Herbert took charge. When the company's balance sheet for 1929 showed a somewhat larger deficit, Herbert began looking for exits. At the World papers' lowest ebb, the World had a circulation of 320,000, the Evening World had 285,000, the Sunday World had 500,000, and their joint annual revenues were in excess of twelve million dollars. However, Herbert Pulitzer was neither a gambler nor a newspaper enthusiast. Howard was behind seven million dollars in his operation of the Telegram and in the position of a poker player so far in the hole that his best chance of pulling out was to double the stakes. He had a dream of acquiring the competing Evening World, the Sunday World, and the World, and of then scrapping the last two and absorbing the first into the Telegram.

Howard had met Ralph Pulitzer aboard the Paris on a transatlantic crossing in the summer of 1928. The publishers had talked half jokingly of swapping the World for the Telegram and then merging the Telegram and Evening World. A year later, in New York, Herbert Pulitzer had promised Howard not so jokingly that if the brothers ever wanted to sell out they would tell him before anybody else. Pulitzer kept his word in January 1931, and on January 31 a contract of sale with Howard was signed. Howard promised nothing more definite than that he would continue the World papers “in spirit.” It is not certain that Herbert Pulitzer gave a hoot. The deal became public only on February 24, when, as trustees of the Pulitzer estate, the brothers asked permission of the Surrogate's Court to go through with the sale. On such short notice it was almost impossible for other potential buyers to prepare competitive offers for the property, but the 2867 employees of the World papers, their jobs threatened, banded together to make a cooperative offer for it. They held a mass meeting at the Astor, a few pledging their savings and all promising to turn back a portion of each week's salary to the paper if the cooperative plan went through. At a hearing before Surrogate Foley, Howard argued that any delay would have a bad effect on the World staff's morale and that the paper's goodwill asset would depreciate. Wearing a waspwaisted, doublebreasted brown suit, the publisher appeared at his most incisive. Upholding the Pulitzers' right to sell, the surrogate blandly ruled that, notwithstanding Joseph Pulitzer's own lucid words, “the dominant purpose of Mr. Pulitzer must have been the maintenance of a fair income for his children and the ultimate reception of the unimpaired corpus by the remaindermen, permanence of the trust and ultimate enjoyment by his grandchildren, as intended.” This, naturally, would have been obvious to any surrogate. Foley added that he had no right to instruct the Pulitzers whether or not to accept the Howard offer, because in selling the Press Publishing Company they were acting not as trustees but as directors of the Press Publishing Company selling its assets. This would have been equally obvious to any good legal mind. Howard's offer was a definite three million dollars and the possibility of an additional two million. The money was to be paid a half million down, a half million in ninety days, and two million in eight payments of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to begin in 1934. The final two millions