History of Journalism in the United States/Chapter 27
CHAPTER XXVII
THE MELODRAMA IN THE NEWS
What was said of Pulitzer has been said of many other editors by their political opponents. Political adversaries are not inclined to admit that rivals may be moved by equally high motives, as in politics an admission of merit in an opponent is frequently considered a strategical mistake. That Pulitzer was out to sell as many papers as he could, no matter by what means, was all that his critics could see; it was not until his death that some of his conservative critics appreciated that he was able to turn his initiative and genius into the fields of culture that they had held particularly their own.
Had the idea of an academic training for journalists come from a college man or from one of the conservative journalists, it would doubtless have been just as successful, but it would have been less characteristic of the history of journalism; a history which abounds in curious human developments, in revelations of beauty of character, like those the wilderness traveler finds in unbeaten paths and deep woodland pools.
Having traced the developments of American journalism from its very beginning, it is not a difficult task that confronts us when we come to analyze what was called the "modern journalism "of Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer did only what was inevitable. In his desire to achieve the greatest influence for the paper that he controlled, he reached for closer contact, between the papers and the people, than had existed up to his time; it was his genius that discovered the way in which that might be done. It was not surprising, viewed in the past history of journalism, that in so doing he aroused the adverse criticism of the conservatives.
Great as was the impression that he left on his time, he was no more an innovator than was Greeley with his passion for reform or Bennett with his sense of news; no more so than were Freneau and Duane, with their recklessness of attack on the very head of the government, and other men—some forgotten—who, in their turn, advanced journalism one step more, and thus made possible, if not a reputation for themselves, at least power and influence for those who were to come after.
The career of Pulitzer, a poor half-educated idealist, was much like that of Greeley. Born in Hungary, he was absolutely friendless when he arrived in New York, and had to sleep in City Hall Park, though later a fireman allowed him to sleep in a furnished room at French's Hotel in Park Row. Twenty years later he bought this same hotel for $680,000 and tore it down to put up the present World Building. In 1864 he enlisted as a private dragoon in the First New York Cavalry, served with the Army of the Shenandoah until peace was declared, and was then honorably discharged. He worked at menial occupations in order to escape starvation, but never lost faith or courage and never wasted an opportunity to read and study. He drifted West, obtained a position on the St. Louis Post,—then edited by Carl Schurz—showed ability as a speaker and, in 1869, was elected a member of the legislature of Missouri. In Jefferson City serving in the Legislature, he was attacked by a political grafter, and shot the man. He put his savings into the Post, and in 1871 he became managing editor of the paper. He was one of the organizers of the Liberal Republican movement in Missouri, and it was through his strategy that Carl Schurz was made Chairman of the Cincinnati Convention, which met May i, 1872, and nominated Horace Greeley for president.
Schurz refused to support Greeley, but Pulitzer stumped the West for him and made many speeches in his behalf. The political differences between himself and Schurz caused him, in 1875, to sell his interest in the Post; following this he acted as Washington correspondent for the New York Sun, returning to St. Louis in 1878 and buying the Evening Dispatch and Evening Post, which he issued as one paper.
His success with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was such that his income reached $200,000 a year. He was but thirty-six years of age, yet had a national reputation as a public speaker and editor. He was about to go abroad when the possibility of purchasing the New York World was presented to him.
In the days of his association with Carl Schurz he had been a radical and a socialist. Later he had grown more conservative, but he was still in a frame of mind to be stirred by the newspaper condition in New York, a condition epitomized by John Bigelow, one of the editors of the New York Evening Post, when he declared that there were too many newspapers for the educated class.[1]
Pulitzer had this in mind when, in 1883, he bought the New York World, and instituted what his contemporaries and his biographer have called "a totally new system of newspaper conduct." As we have seen however, there was nothing extraordinary in the system that Pulitzer inaugurated. The papers which, in the early thirties, had been founded for the purpose of catering to the laboring classes had grown staid and conservative. A new generation of laboring people had come up, several of them in fact, and the papers that were supposed to appeal to them, appealed rather to the preceding generation. The Pulitzer journalism was, therefore, not so much the inauguration of a new system as the re-birth of an old one.
The appeal to the laboring or semi-educated classes was, as it had been in the thirties, immediately successful; as had been the case with the first penny papers, it was demonstrated that, while the World gained in circulation by hundreds of thousands, no other morning paper lost. The conservative morning papers that looked with so much horror on Pulitzer's innovations gradually found, as their predecessors had found in the case of the penny papers and the news system inaugurated by Bennett, that by adopting some of his methods they were able to increase their constituency.
It was the discovery that in New York,—or, for that matter, in every city in the country—there was a large uneducated or semi-educated population who were not reading newspapers, that led William M. Laffan, then a subordinate on the Sun and later the proprietor and editor of that paper, to bring out, on March 17, 1887, the Evening Sun, an afternoon paper that was to address itself, not to the educated class but to those less fortunately conditioned. Its success led to the Evening World, and to an entire change in the character of the evening papers of the country; so much so that the New York Evening Post, with its great traditions, is even to-day making, through large type and black headlines, the same appeal for the patronage of the uneducated that the Sun and the Evening World made thirty years ago.
We gather some of the strength of the Pulitzer journalism, and we begin to understand why it was successful, when we read some of his instructions to his editorial writers. A famous case in the history of the New York judiciary was that of Judge Maynard, who, after questionable conduct in a certain election proceeding, came up for re-election on the Democratic ticket. Mr. Pulitzer, it is to be remembered, was a Democrat. Calling in his chief editorial writer, George Gary Eggleston, he said to him:
"I want you to go into the Maynard case with an absolutely unprejudiced mind. We hold no briefs for or against him, as you know. I want you to get together all the documents in the case. I want you to take them home and study them as minutely as if you were preparing yourself for an examination. I want you to regard yourself as a judicial officer, oath-bound to justice, and when you shall have mastered the facts and the law in the case, I want you to set them forth in a four column editorial that every reader of the World can easily understand."
There were model instructions. They are the praecepta of journalism as the defender and upholder of democracy.
Another illustration of his large, democratic and unusual view of the mission of journalism, was his handling of the 1896 bond issue. The government was about to sell two hundred million dollars of bonds to a Wall Street syndicate at 104¾, when it was demonstrated that the bonds were bringing in the market as high as 122. Pulitzer sent for the heads of his departments and the head of the editorial page and gave them rapid-fire instructions, in which, in a few hundred words, the entire national campaign was outlined.
"We have made our case in this matter of the bond issue. We have presented the facts clearly, convincingly, conclusively, but the Administration refuses to heed them. We are now going to compel it to heed them on pain of facing a scandal that no administration could survive.
"What we demand is that these bonds shall be sold to the public at something like their actual value and not to a Wall Street syndicate for many millions less. You understand all that. You are to write a double-leaded article to occupy the whole editorial space to-morrow morning. You are not to print a line of editorial on any other subject. You are to set forth, in compact form and in the most effective way possible, the facts of the case and the considerations that demand a popular or at least a public loan instead of this deal with a syndicate, suggestive as it is of the patent falsehood that the United States Treasury's credit needs 'financing.' You are to declare, with all possible emphasis, that the banks, bankers, and people of the United States stand ready and eager to lend their government all the money it wants at three per cent, interest, and to buy its four per cent, bonds at a premium that will amount to that. . . .
"Then as a guarantee of the sincerity of our conviction you are to say that the World offers in advance to take one million dollars of the new bonds at the highest market price, if they are offered to the public in open market.
"In the meanwhile, Chamberlin has a staff of men sending out dispatches to every bank and banker in the land, setting forth our demand for a public loan instead of a syndicate dicker, and asking each for what amount of the new bonds it or he will subscribe on a three per cent, basis. To-morrow morning's papers will carry with your editorial its complete confirmation in their replies, and the proposed loan will be over-subscribed on a three per cent, basis. Even Mr. Cleveland's phenomenal self-confidence and Mr. Carlisle's purblind belief in Wall Street methods will not be able to withstand such a demonstration as that. It will compel a public loan. If it is true that the contract with the syndicate has already been made, they must cancel it. The voice of the country will be heard in the subscription list we shall print tomorrow morning, and the voice of the country has compelling power, even under this excessively self-confident administration."[2]
With his idealism and his own knowledge of the suffering and poverty of the submerged world about him, Joseph Pulitzer could never have been content with the mere exploitation of the news, even if that exploitation had been, financially, twice as successful as it proved to be. What esentially appealed to him in journalism was its opportunity to touch the heart; because he was a sentimentalist he was successful in arousing public interest and establishing his papers as great, powerful, popular organs.
He could not see things calmly and philosophically as could Godkin, but he could express in his own way his feelings about the same crimes. So, while he stood for honest government, the reforms that he advocated most successfully were those that dealt with liberty and freedom; with the abolition of cruelty in the prisons, with the stopping of oppression by petty officers of the law, and with the ending of graft, the graft that hit mainly those who were trying to earn a mere living.
The critics who were unable to understand the Pulitzers, or Bennetts, or Greeleys, were generally those who failed to appreciate the value of sentiment—direct sentiment as it were. Otto H. Kahn tells of a famous financier who was unable to endure listening to a violinist play Chopin's "Funeral March," because it always moved him to tears; there are many who are sensitive to beauty in the same way, yet the knowledge that the violinist was starving would move them little. Yet it is such men, keen for subtle beauties, who, in democratic leaders, see mere exponents of demagogy.
Pulitzer was distinguished from most of his predecessors in journalism, not so much for his financial success, or for his sentimental treatment of the news, but by the fact that he saw that the Fourth Estate was so great a power in the country that the men who were to be its votaries should be trained, as well and as thoroughly as those who entered any of the other professions. It was this knowledge of the responsibility that is placed on every man in the profession that led him to suggest the school of journalism at Columbia University. Like most of the great editors of the country he had been obliged to work for his own education—and a great education it had proved to be—but he desired that there should be some better system; so that those who were to take up a career fraught, when that career was a downward one, with so much of peril to the public, should be trained under auspices that would tend to develop character.
Pulitzer has been called an adventurer in journalism, but such characterization takes little account of the depth and genius of the man. When we find that the journalism with which his name is associated had the qualities of romance and sentiment of drama, we must remember that such was the man. He had lived a most melodramatic life. Was it possible that the journalism that bore the stamp of his personality could be otherwise than melodramatic?
When we find that criticism against journalism that is at all democratic has always, from the very beginning up to to-day, proceeded from the educated or superior class, it is most logical to assume that there is, and that there will continue to be, natural opposition. The journals of the educated class will never be able to see those of the uneducated class in anything but the most critical light. To a certain extent this is wise, because healthy, sound, vigorous criticism is as necessary for radicalism as reform is necessary for conservatism.
The idea of the School of Journalism came, curiously enough, from a man of the people,—from one of their champions. We have seen how, for almost two hundred years, the attitude of many of the educated and cultured was that this new vocation was not a profession. We have seen them even deny its power, the power that was deciding the questions of the day,—self-evident as that power was.
Pulitzer was the first to recognize the new profession was drawing to it young men of brains and ability who had been trained for some other profession. Aside from the idealism which led to his suggestion and to his bequests founding the new school, there was the desire to eliminate the great waste of time that came through training men to be journalists, who had started out to be something else.
"What is everybody's business," he said once, "is nobody's business—except the journalist's. It is his by adoption. But for his care almost every reform would be stillborn. He holds officials to their duty. He exposes secret schemes of plunder. He promotes every hopeful plan of progress. Without him public opinion
would be shapeless and dumb. Our republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, publicspirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery."[3]