The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst by Kenneth Whyte Read Free Book Online

of leading insurance and bank executives. Many World hacks were earning $50 to $80 a week. This was double the going rate at the Herald, where Bennett boasted that he could hire “all the brains I want . . . at twenty-five dollars per week” (wages for skilled labor hovered around $5 to $10 a week). 42 Pulitzer paid the artist Walt McDougall $50 a week simply to draw cartoons, a salary that raised eyebrows even in the World ’s offices. But Pulitzer’s reasoning was sound: McDougall also drew readers.
     
    The mid-eighties were the best years of Pulitzer’s career. He now employed a staff of 1,200, about twice that of any other paper. He so routinely exposed graft and malfeasance in public office as to set a new standard for social responsibility and investigative journalism. A reporter named Elizabeth Cochrane, who joined the World in 1887 at the age of twenty-three, faked insanity to gain entry to the asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Her shocking account of the execrable conditions there, published under the nom de plume Nellie Bly, resulted in a grand jury investigation and an overhaul of the asylum.
     
    At its grandest, the World produced awe-inspiring crusades. When Congress refused to vote the $100,000 necessary for a pedestal on which to stand Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, commissioned by the people of France, the World leapt to action, organizing a public subscription. One and two dollars at a time, the statue was erected, and Pulitzer was able to dominate coverage of yet another impressive addition to the metropolitan skyline. 43
     
    Although paying the highest salaries on Park Row, Pulitzer continued to lead every aspect of the World ’s operations. “He was forever unsatisfied,” wrote his friend and colleague Don Seitz, “not so much with the results as with the thought that if a further effort had been made, a sterner command, or greater encouragement given, as the case might be, more could have been accomplished.” 44 The publisher’s wife, Kate, worried that the constant striving and the competitive pressures were too much for him: “He is pushing his body in a manner no human being can stand,” she wrote friends, and she was right to worry. 45 Her husband’s bad nerves and insomnia returned within a few years of his arrival in New York. Rather than buy another paper, Pulitzer this time addressed his ill health by taking the cure at Aix-les-Bains. He also salved himself with money: the World was making him rich. His income rivaled that of J.P. Morgan, who lived a block from Pulitzer’s new brownstone mansion on East 36th Street. 46 Pulitzer built a library of first editions and collected Gobelin tapestries, diamonds, gems, and old masters. He snapped up two shares in a private resort for millionaires at Jekyll Island, Georgia, where his neighbors were Morgans, Rockefeller and Astors. Pulitzer, scourge of the purse potentates, was now solidly of their number.
     
     
     
    NO ONE WATCHED Pulitzer’s bounding good fortune and increasing prominence in national affairs with more distaste than Charles A. Dana. Whatever goodwill the two had shared in earlier days was gone. The Sun had begun to snipe at Pulitzer’s unimpressive military record and his absenteeism from Congress (he resigned his seat early in his term, pleading the demands of running newspapers). Dana spread a rumor that his rival had hired the socially prominent Ballard Smith to ease his way into New York’s better drawing rooms. The Sun even chided Pulitzer, nominally Episcopalian and slippery about his Jewishness, for failing to attend synagogue. It called him the “Jew who does not want to be a Jew,” or “Judas Pulitzer.” 47
     
    Bile and jealousy led Dana’s pen. Fear, too. His folly during the 1884 campaign had prompted speculation on Park Row that the Sun ’s stock-holders might show him the door. Dana was the paper’s largest investor but owned only a third of its shares. He now borrowed to