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

purchase majority control and in 1886 also mortgaged his building to raise capital for better presses and printing equipment. He abandoned his four-page format and began printing eight or more pages a day. More daringly, he launched a four-page evening edition in March 1887. It sold for a penny and quickly produced a respectable sale of 40,000. When Pulitzer established an identically sized and priced Evening World, the animosity between the two men exploded.
     
    A fall election for New York district attorney became a proxy war for the newspaper titans. The incumbent, De Lancey Nicoll, a Democrat whose dedication to reform had cost him the allegiance of corrupt old Tammany Hall, was now running as the nominee of Republicans and Independents. Pulitzer and Dana both backed Nicoll until a week after the launch of the Evening World. Dana then bolted to John Fellows, the Democrat, regardless of the fact that Fellows enjoyed the support of Grover Cleveland. Dana next tried to smear both Pulitzer and Nicoll by dragging out the decade-old Cockerill shooting story. Pulitzer saluted Dana as “a mendacious blackguard”and Dana fired back that Pulitzer exuded “the venom of a snake” and wielded “the bludgeon of a bully.” The Jews of New York, he wrote, “have no reason to be ashamed of Judas Pulitzer if he has denied his race and religion. . . . [T]he shame rests exclusively upon himself. The insuperable obstacle in the way of his social progress is not the fact that he is a Jew, but in certain offensive personal qualities. . . . His face is repulsive, not because the physiognomy is Hebraic, but because it is Pulitzeresque. . . . Cunning, malice, falsehood, treachery, dishonesty, greed and venal self-abasement have stamped their unmistakable traits. . . . No art can eradicate them.” 48
     
    With the pride of each newspaper now riding on the quality of its editor’s vitriol, Pulitzer gamely pursued Dana into the rhetorical wasteland of ethnic slur: “To what race of human beings does Charles Anderson Dana belong? . . . The Danas, although a New England family of considerable Puritan and literary pretensions, have unquestionably a Greek derivation. The modern Greek is a treacherous, drunken creature. . . . Mr. Charles Ananias Dana may be descended from a Greek corsair. If so, his career of treachery, hypocrisy, deceit and lying could easily be accounted for.” 49 The World also alleged, without corroboration, that Dana had once fought a young woman for a life preserver on a sinking ship.
     
    When Fellows won the election, the Sun ’s headline gloated that his man had beaten “Pulitzer’s Dude” by a 20,000 plurality. The people had rebuked “the liars” and Dana had yet another occasion to lambaste his rival as a “treacherous venomous greedy junk dealer,” with all the usual racist and hysterical flourishes. However disappointed at the election result, Pulitzer was able to boast a post-election press run of 317,940, which he claimed was the largest ever printed by any newspaper in the world. He then rallied himself for what he hoped would be the last word in his dogfight with Dana, driving home that the people of New York preferred his paper to his rival’s because, “The World has never advocated a bad cause nor proved recreant to a good one. It will continue to war against corruptionists with renewed vigor. It rests upon a solid foundation of Honesty and Public Service and against it the disappointed, malice-cankered envious sons of darkness cannot prevail.” 50
     
    In an odd turn of fate, darkness did prevail, for both men. Pulitzer matched, insult for insult, an acknowledged master of verbal abuse, yet he suffered a great deal in the exchange. Each blow from Dana bruised his fragile psyche. He had never learned to laugh away personal attacks, however many he endured. Two weeks after his last rejoinder, Pulitzer picked up the day’s editorial page and was astonished to discover he could “hardly see the