BOOKS
Containing Multitudes

BY RICHARD NORTON SMITH

In 1900, Pulitzer's World showed readers how New York would look "a century hence."

Few careers better illustrate the Janus face of modern journalism, its ability to inform or inflame, educate or pander, than that of Joseph Pulitzer. Long before the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor on the evening of February 15, 1898, Pulitzer and his New York World were embroiled in their own war against the bombastic New York Journal and its unscrupulous owner, William Randolph Hearst. Enough information about the disaster appeared in the Journal to prompt the Maine's captain to suspect links between Hearst and the saboteurs of his ship. Not to be outdone, Pulitzer dispatched a tugboat to the waters around Havana and attempted, unsuccessfully, to have World divers confirm his hasty judgment that the ship was a victim of Spanish treachery. Within days of the tragedy, the World gloried in sales of five million copies -- "the largest circulation of any newspaper printed in any language in any country."

To Denis Brian, Pulitzer's latest biographer, the blatant jingoism surrounding the Spanish-American War was an aberrant chapter in the otherwise commendable story of one whose name, thanks to the Pulitzer Prizes, is today synonymous with journalistic excellence. Brian, whose previous works include a highly regarded oral history of Ernest Hemingway, is too good a reporter himself to obscure Pulitzer's shortcomings, which were on a scale with his protean achievements. Consequently, this first full-scale biography in more than thirty years recalls nothing so much as its subject's desire to appeal simultaneously to the best and the worst in his readers.

A century after Pulitzer, it is fashionable to decry present day news coverage as blandly interchangeable. One could just as easily argue that American journalism reflects the niche identity of so much of our consumer culture. From Jim Lehrer to Bill O'Reilly, The New York Times to The National Enquirer, there is no lack of choice or differentiation. Pulitzer's audacity, and his historical accomplishment, lay in trying to supply it all -- high-minded editorials and socially conscious crusades alongside a gritty procession of headless corpses, adulterous clergy, and circulation-boosting stunts. He offered readers a journalistic supermarket, not a Holiday Inn.

Pulitzer's capacity for moral indignation was matched by his unerring instinct for lurid profitability. "The daily journal is like the mirror," he loftily asserted. "Let those who are startled by it blame the people who are before the mirror, not the mirror, which only reflects their features and actions." Coming from the man who almost singlehandedly shamed his countrymen into building a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty; who sent Nellie Bly into a Dickensian asylum to expose the mistreatment of mental patients; and who boasted to a friend, "I can never be president because I am a foreigner, but some day I am going to elect a president," this bore scarcely more relation to the truth than the reputed race of long-tailed savages ("man-monkeys") imaginatively drawn for the benefit of the World's Sunday readers.

If he is no apologist, Brian is an unabashed admirer of "the Einstein, Shakespeare, Churchill of journalists," who practiced tabloidism before the tabloid. No stranger to hyperbole, Pulitzer, like Walt Whitman, contained multitudes. Detesting railroad tycoons and parasitical aristocrats, the populist tribune nevertheless complimented William Henry Vanderbilt on the ground that "we never saw Mrs. Vanderbilt nursing a poodle." The victim of religious slurs (dubbed "Jewseph" Pulitzer by anti-Semitic rivals), Pulitzer regularly abused Mexicans, Greeks, and Italians, among others, in the pages of his journals. A scourge of the wealthy, Pulitzer, who called New York's Millionaire's Row home, was both an eloquent champion of worker rights and the hardhearted villain of a turn-of-the-century strike by New York's paper-carrying "newsies." He heaped scorn impartially on J.P. Morgan's gold lust and William Jennings Bryan's infatuation over silver.

His zest for combat was implanted early. Rejected for military service by the Austrian army and French Foreign Legion, in 1864 the Hungarian-born Pulitzer emigrated to an anything-but-united States. Enlisting in the Union army, the gangling seventeen-year-old struck a blue-coated sergeant who presumed to mangle his name (Pull-it-sir) while grabbing his outsized nose. Narrowly avoiding court-martial, after the war a penniless Pulitzer made his way to St. Louis. Putting in sixteen-hour workdays as a deckhand and stevedore -- he lacked the physical coordination to balance a waiter's tray -- Pulitzer found time to master English through study in the local library. Scammed by a smooth-talking confidence man into shipping off to a mythical Louisiana sugar plantation, Pulitzer wrote an account of his fleecing for one of the city's German-language papers. His career was made. A born reporter, Pulitzer outhustled competitors, including Henry M. Stanley, immortalized for his dogged pursuit of Livingstone in Africa.

In December 1869 Republicans seeking a sacrificial lamb jokingly nominated the ungainly scribe with the guttural accent to run for a safe Democratic seat in the state senate. Astonishingly, Pulitzer won. In Jefferson City he declared war on more conventional politicians, who mocked him as "Joey the Jew," but were unable to silence or intimidate the pugnacious newcomer. To the contrary: when a crooked lobbyist insulted him publicly, Pulitzer went to his hotel room, grabbed a gun, and alerted a friendly reporter, "If you'll wait a little while, you'll have an item." A man of his word, Pulitzer fired two bullets at his adversary, inflicting a single wound just below his knee. He got off with a slap on the wrist. "It was the first hit I ever made," he bragged.

Disillusioned with the corruption pervading Ulysses Grant's White House, Pulitzer helped create the People's Party to combat Grantism in Missouri. When his own creation nominated a candidate not to his liking, the rebel rebelled. Thereafter he remained a decidedly irregular Democrat. In truth, Pulitzer was a party of one. Following the disputed presidential election of 1876, he urged an overwrought crowd of Democratic partisans assembled at Washington's Ford's Theater to resist, by force if necessary, the alleged theft of the White House by Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. That he could advocate civil war, eleven years after Appomattox, and in the very hall where Lincoln had been martyred, suggests a zealotry bordering on the fanatical.

Ironically, his take-no-prisoners approach would bring Pulitzer unparalleled influence in an era when personal journalism was notable for its eye-gouging ferocity. In December 1878 he purchased a moribund St. Louis Dispatch at auction for $2500. Merging his acquisition with the rival Evening Post, Pulitzer fired most of the Dispatch staff. Then he unfurled his declaration of principles: "Money is the great power today. Men sell their souls for it. Women sell their bodies for it. Others worship it. The money power has grown so great that the issue of all issues is whether the corporation shall rule this country or the country shall again rule the corporations."

Displaying a genius for making the right kind of enemies, Pulitzer printed the tax returns of St. Louis's most prominent citizens, with embarrassing results for wealthy miscreants. To blow the whistle on secret hearings into gambling rings, he placed an eavesdropping reporter in a neighboring doctor's office. Latent in the younger Pulitzer was the foul-mouthed martinet who ruthlessly played subordinates against one another, driving editors to drink or madness. Recalled a youthful St. Louis associate, "Mr. Pulitzer was the damndest best man in the world to have in a newspaper office for one hour in the morning. For the remainder of the day he was a damned nuisance." No one questioned Pulitzer's courage, only his judgment -- and his taste. After outlaw Jesse James was gunned down in 1882, Pulitzer criticized the rough justice inflicted by legal authorities. In the ensuing controversy, the Post-Dispatch's circulation rose 30 percent.

Soon New York beckoned, its allure heightened by the suspicious death of a local politician in the office of Pulitzer's managing editor. In May 1883 Pulitzer bought the failing New York World from financier Jay Gould. "You have all been living in the parlor and taking baths everyday," he notified a complacent staff. "Now you are all walking down the Bowery." It was a rare instance of understatement. Henceforth sensation and sentiment were to be the hallmarks of Pulitzer's World, "a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly democratic." The last pre-Pulitzer issue of the World had led with a story headlined election of an executive committee of the american cocker spaniel club; Pulitzer's first edition, by contrast, bannered the deadly lightning!, above a scarifying description of a New Jersey thunderstorm. The same page introduced readers to the travails of a bankrupt California millionaire; to a bloody revolt in Haiti, wherein four hundred victims allegedly were dynamited; and to the gruesome execution -- one of two prominently featured in that morning's World -- of a Sing Sing inmate who, having refused to see a priest, went to his death shouting, "I'm not a Catholic! I'm a Democrat!"
"I would rather sweep the dirtiest [street] crossing in London," sniffed Henry James, than write for "the vulgarest conceivable newspaper." Less refined New Yorkers felt differently. Within a year the World's circulation quintupled; within a decade Pulitzer presided over America's first true mass circulation newspaper, with daily sales of 1.5 million copies. Newly arrived immigrants were drawn to the World for its attacks on slumlords and exploitative developers. Men enjoyed New York's first separate sports department; women relished advice and gossip columns, supplemented by romantic fiction on Sunday. Sledgehammer attacks on Tammany hacks shared newsprint with wrenching depictions of life in the city's pestilential tenements. Horror stories of contaminated food, typhus-carrying sewers, and alleyways swarming with rats were quickly confirmed by the Sanitary Aid Society. The paper's illustrated maps ("X marks the spot") became a trademark feature of crime reporting. So did jaw dropping headlines -- how babies are baked grew out of a prolonged heat wave -- worthy of today's New York Post at its most extravagant.

Reveling in his success, Pulitzer cited the World's popularity as proof positive "that the Eastern public appreciates a style of journalism that is just a bit breezy from being honest, earnest, and sincere." One man's breeze, needless to say, was another's ill wind. The 1884 presidential race was enlivened by charges linking Democrat Grover Cleveland to an illegitimate child. With his campaign seeming on the ropes, Pulitzer, predictably, took the offensive. Unearthing a similar complaint against Cleveland's Republican opponent, James G. Blaine, Pulitzer went so far as to suggest that Blaine himself had chiseled out the birthdate on his dead son's gravestone. For good measure, declared the World without benefit of supporting evidence, Blaine was fatally ill with Bright's disease.

Pulitzer's own health was all but shattered through overwork. In 1890 doctors ordered him to sever any connection with his newspapers. But an inactive Pulitzer, observes Brian, was an oxymoron. Before the year was out, the World opened its sixteen-story headquarters, tallest structure in the land. Beneath a garish golden dome the publisher's office offered spectacular views of Brooklyn and Long Island -- scenic images denied to Pulitzer. Sightless for the last twenty-two years of his life, the asthmatic, diabetic, sometimes hysterical insomniac would run his newspaper by remote control, relaying instructions to his staff through a platoon of secretaries while he restlessly flitted from Monte Carlo to Baden Baden and a Bar Harbor retreat dubbed The Tower of Silence. Pulitzer's aversion to noise caused him to spend much of his time on board a soundproof yacht manned by a crew of sixty. His chosen successor, Frank Cobb ("I liked that young man," said Pulitzer of his protégé. "I liked the way he swore."), was hired in part because he didn't slurp his soup, a hanging offense around one of Pulitzer's hypersensitivity.

Initially he relied on Sunday editor Morrill Goddard, an enterprising sort not above crashing the funeral of Ulysses Grant, scooping the competition by inserting himself next to the grieving widow. Imitation being the most insincere form of flattery, Pulitzer soon faced a new, cruder generation of rivals. Having copied Pulitzer's methods, William Randolph Hearst stole Pulitzer's men, Goddard among them, for his upstart New York Journal. Concerned about the mounting costs of his globetrotting, not to mention a spendthrift wife and children, Pulitzer economized even as Hearst emptied his deep pockets. Outspent and outhustled, Pulitzer authorized the expenditure of $25 a week as a "luncheon fund" to encourage defections from the Journal. He lost Goddard's replacement, Arthur Brisbane, to Hearst over the publisher's refusal to let Brisbane write signed editorials. So secretive that he had kept his own religious antecedents from his bride, Pulitzer now devised a code in hopes of defying Hearst's suspected spies. Hearst was GUSH, Pulitzer ANDES, and the Republican party MALARIA.

roosevelt attacks the world referred not to geopolitics but to the infinitely more savage rivalry between New York City's self-dramatizing police commissioner and the World's self-regarding publisher. In the midst of America's "splendid little war" over Cuba, the Journal set a trap for its archenemy, concocting a fake dispatch from one "Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz, an Austrian tourist of European renown." When the World printed the item, with a minimum of rewriting, Hearst sprung his trap: the mythical Colonel's name was a rough anagram for "we pilfer the news." Pulitzer's campaign to make Admiral Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, president in 1900 produced a popular chewing gum (Dewey's Chewys), but foundered on the admiral's political naivete.

Over time, Pulitzer came to regret his warmongering, not least of all because the cost of military reporting outstripped increased revenues. Fresh economies were instituted. Three-column illustrations of electrocutions were vetoed unless they were "both exceptional and newsworthy." Forever unsatisfied, Pulitzer made certain that his staff was in constant turmoil. "When I was there, someone always got drunk, and we made a great paper. Find a man who gets drunk and hire him," Pulitzer ordered one subordinate. Returning to his roots, Pulitzer competed with Teddy Roosevelt as a trust-buster, unmasked fraud among insurance companies, championed Alfred Dreyfus, and railed against John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. In a spectacular coup, the World exposed Rockefeller's shadowy father as a bigamist and purveyor of quack medical cures.
As if in penance for his wartime excesses, Pulitzer endowed the Columbia School of Journalism with $2 million in memory of his daughter Lucille. His marriage was a complicated one, thriving on physical separation. Although Kate Pulitzer complained that her elusive husband was as hard to locate as "a criminal hiding from justice," she endured his tantrums as the unavoidable price of her own lavish life-style. She found consolation in knowing that while the irascible publisher required no fewer than six secretary companions to keep him entertained, he made do with one wife.

At the end of 1908 Pulitzer launched a new broadside against the outgoing Roosevelt administration. Alleging a corrupt bargain whereby a bankrupt French company sold rights to construct the Panama Canal, the paper quoted a Panamanian official who had suborned sticky-fingered Colombian officers with American dollars. An angry president swore legal retribution. On hearing this, Pulitzer leapt from his bed. For once he disregarded his strictures against raised voices, shouting, "The World Cannot be Muzzled! The World Cannot Be Muzzled! That's the headline!" When Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, refused to drop the libel prosecution, Pulitzer set sail for Europe, but not before ordering Cobb to editorially denounce Taft over his reluctance to appoint southern blacks to federal office.

Early in 1910, Pulitzer learned that TR's suit had failed, thus putting to rest his fears of ending his days in jail. Shortly before his death in October 1911 Pulitzer reminded Cobb "The World should be more powerful than the president. He is fettered by partisanship and politics and has only a four years term. The paper goes on year after year and is absolutely free to tell the truth and perform every service that should be performed in the public interest." Pulitzer's passions were on a scale with his principles. Together they confirmed Willa Cather's dictum that there is such a thing as constructive hate.

Aside from a passing reference to possible manic depression, and the suicide of Pulitzer's neurasthenic brother, Albert, Brian is more content to describe than to explain his subject's eccentricities. By focusing so intensively on his admittedly riveting subject, Denis occasionally sacrifices historical and journalistic context. Pulitzer's genius was undoubtedly magnified by the Mergenthaler linotype and Hoe rotary press, not to mention improvements in telephone, telegraph, and cable communications. He and his editorial contemporaries benefited from the explosive growth of a literate population, their interest in newspapers stoked by the Civil War. Nor did his brand of purposeful sensationalism exist in splendid (or squalid) isolation. Before Pulitzer there had been the New York Herald's James Gordon Bennett, a mercurial keyhole journalist who proclaimed, "The newspaper's function is not to instruct but to startle." Finally, as the only leading New York paper to proclaim its Democratic sympathies in 1884, Pulitzer's World arguably gained more from Grover Cleveland than Cleveland did from the World.

Still, Brian has given us a biography enriched by Pulitzer's better qualities, even if it suffers from his penchant for overstatement. In calling Joseph Pulitzer the greatest newspaper editor in the English language Brian illustrates why biographers should leave crusading to journalists. That Pulitzer is among the most important of American newspapermen, a towering figure incapable of indifference or fencestraddling, is beyond dispute. By introducing Pulitzer to a new century's readers, this entertaining volume will break a silence not even Pulitzer could have tolerated.

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Richard Norton Smith is a presidential historian currently working on a biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller.