BUT the next day, and the next, and the next brought me no solution to
the problem. The weather had turned cold and for a time there was a
slushy snow on the ground, which made the matter of job-hunting all the
worse. Those fierce youths in the anterooms were no more kindly on the
second and fifth days than they had been on the first. But by now, in
addition to becoming decidedly dour, I was becoming a little angry. It
seemed to me to be the height of discourtesy, not to say rank brutality,
for newspapers, and especially those which boasted a social and
humanitarian leadership of their fellows in American life, to place such
unsophisticated and blatant and ill-trained upstarts between themselves
and the general public, men and women of all shades and degrees of
intelligence who might have to come in contact with them. H. L. Mencken
has written: “The average American newspaper, especially the so-called
better sort, has the intelligence of a Baptist evangelist, the courage
of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-bumper, the information
of a high-school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid
valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.” Judging by some
of my experiences and observations, I would be willing to subscribe to
this. The unwarranted and unnecessary airs! The grand assumption of
wisdom! The heartless and brutal nature of their internal economies,
their pandering to the cheapest of all public instincts and tendencies
in search of circulation!
After several days I made up my mind to see the city editor of these
papers, regardless of hall boys. And so, going one day at one o’clock to
the _World_, I started to walk right in, but, being intercepted as
usual, lost my courage and retreated. However, as I have since thought,
perhaps this was fortunate, for going downstairs I meditated most
grievously as to my failure, my lack of skill and courage in carrying
out my intention. So thoroughly did I castigate myself that I recovered
my nerve and returned. I reëntered the small office, and finding two of
the youths still on hand and waiting to intercept me, brushed them both
aside as one might flies, opened the much-guarded door and walked in.
To my satisfaction, while they followed me and by threats and force
attempted to persuade me to retreat, I gazed upon one of the most
interesting city reportorial and editorial rooms that I have ever
beheld. It was forty or fifty feet wide by a hundred or more deep, and
lighted, even by day in this gray weather, by a blaze of lights. The
entire space from front to back was filled with desks. A varied company
of newspaper men, most of them in shirt-sleeves, were hard at work. In
the forward part of the room, near the door by which I had entered, and
upon a platform, were several desks, at which three or four men were
seated—the throne, as I quickly learned, of the city editor and his
assistants. Two of these, as I could see, were engaged in reading and
marking papers. A third, who looked as though he might be the city
editor, was consulting with several men at his desk. Copy boys were
ambling to and fro. From somewhere came the constant click-click-click
of telegraph instruments and the howl of “Coppee!” I think I should have
been forced to retire had it not been for the fact that as I was
standing there, threatened and pleaded with by my two adversaries, a
young man (since distinguished in the journalistic world, Arthur
Brisbane) who was passing through the room looked at me curiously and
inquired courteously:
“What is it you want?”
“I want,” I said, half-angered by the spectacle I was making and that
was being made of me, “a job.”
“Where do you come from?”
“The West.”
“Wait a moment,” he said, and the youths, seeing that I had attracted
his attention, immediately withdrew. He went toward the man at the desk
whom I had singled out as the city editor, and turned and pointed to me.
“This young man wants a job. I wish you would give him one.”
The man nodded, and my remarkable interrogator, turning to me, said,
“Just wait here,” and disappeared.
I did not know quite what to think, so astonished was I, but with each
succeeding moment my spirits rose, and by the time the city editor chose
to motion me to him I was in a very exalted state indeed. So much for
courage, I told myself. Surely I was fortunate, for had I not been
dreaming for months—years—of coming to New York and after great
deprivation and difficulty perhaps securing a position? And now of a
sudden here I was thus swiftly vaulted into the very position which of
all others I had most craved. Surely this must be the influence of a
star of fortune. Surely now if I had the least trace of ability, I
should be in a better position than I had ever been in before. I looked
about the great room, as I waited patiently and delightedly, and saw
pasted on the walls at intervals printed cards which read: _Accuracy,
Accuracy, Accuracy! Who? What? Where? When? How? The Facts—The Color—The
Facts!_ I knew what those signs meant: the proper order for beginning a
newspaper story. Another sign insisted upon _Promptness, Courtesy,
Geniality!_ Most excellent traits, I thought, but not as easy to put
into execution as comfortable publishers and managing editors might
suppose.
Presently I was called over and told to take a seat, after being told:
“I’ll have an assignment for you after a while.” That statement meant
work, an opportunity, a salary. I felt myself growing apace, only the
eye and the glance of my immediate superior was by no means cheering or
genial. This man was holding a difficult position, one of the most
difficult in newspaperdom in America at the time, and under one of the
most eccentric and difficult of publishers, Joseph Pulitzer.
This same Pulitzer, whom Alleyne Ireland subsequently characterized in
so brilliant a fashion as to make this brief sketch trivial and
unimportant save for its service here as a link in this tale, was a
brilliant and eccentric Magyar Jew, long since famous for his
journalistic genius. At that time he must have been between fifty-five
and sixty years of age, semi-dyspeptic and half-blind, having almost
wrecked himself physically, or so I understood, in a long and grueling
struggle to ascend to preeminence in the American newspaper world. He
was the chief owner, as I understood, of not only the New York _World_
but the St. Louis _Post-Dispatch_, the then afternoon paper of largest
circulation and influence in that city. While I was in St. Louis the air
of that newspaper world was surcharged or still rife with this
remarkable publisher’s past exploits—how once, when he was starting in
the newspaper world as a publisher, he had been horsewhipped by some
irate citizen for having published some derogatory item, and, having
tamely submitted to the castigation, had then rushed into his sanctum
and given orders that an extra should be issued detailing the attack in
order that the news value might not be lost to the counting-room.
Similarly, one of his St. Louis city or managing editors (one Colonel
Cockerill by name, who at this very time or a very little later was
still one of the managing editors of the New York _World_) had, after
conducting some campaign of exposure against a local citizen by order of
his chief, and being confronted in his office by the same, evidently
come to punish him, drawn a revolver and killed him.
That was a part of what might have been called the makings of this great
newspaper figure. Here in New York, after his arrival on the scene in
1884, at which time he had taken over a moribund journal called the
_World_, he had literally succeeded in turning things upside down, much
as did William Randolph Hearst after him, and as had Charles A. Dana and
others before him. Like all aggressive newspaper men worthy the name, he
had seized upon every possible vital issue and attacked, attacked,
attacked—Tammany Hall, Wall Street (then defended by the _Sun_ and the
_Herald_), the house of Morgan, some phases of society, and many other
features and conditions of the great city. For one thing, he had cut the
price of his paper to one cent, a move which was reported to have
infuriated his conservative and quiescent rivals, who were getting two,
three and five and who did not wish to be disturbed in their peaceful
pursuits. The _Sun_ in particular, which had been _made_ by the
brilliant and daring eccentricity of Dana and his earlier radicalism,
and the _Herald_, which originally owed its growth and fame to the
monopoly-fighting skill of Bennett, were now both grown conservative and
mutually attacked him as low, vulgar, indecent and the like, an upstart
Jew whose nose was in every putrescent dunghill, ratting out filth for
the consumption of the dregs of society. But is it not always so when
any one arises who wishes to break through from submersion or
nothingness into the white light of power and influence? Do not the
resultant quakes always infuriate those who have ceased growing or are
at least comfortably quiescent and who do not wish to be disturbed?
Just the same, this man, because of his vital, aggressive, restless,
working mood, and his vaulting ambition to be all that there was to be
of journalistic force in America, was making a veritable hell of his
paper and the lives of those who worked for him. And although he himself
was not present at the time but was sailing around the world on a yacht,
or living in a villa on the Riviera, or at Bar Harbor, or in his town
house in New York or London, you could feel the feverish and disturbing
and distressing ionic tang of his presence in this room as definitely as
though he were there in the flesh. Air fairly sizzled with the ionic
rays of this black star. Of secretaries to this editor-publisher and
traveling with him at the time but coming back betimes to nose about the
paper and cause woe to others, there were five. Of sons, by no means in
active charge but growing toward eventual control, two. Of managing
editors, all slipping about and, as the newspaper men seemed to think,
spying on each other, at one time as many as seven. He had so little
faith in his fellow-man, and especially such of his fellow-men as were
so unfortunate as to have to work for him, that he played off one
against another as might have the council of the Secret Ten in Venice,
or as did the devils who ruled in the Vatican in the Middle Ages. Every
man’s hand, as I came to know in the course of time, was turned against
that of every other. All were thoroughly distrustful of each other and
feared the incessant spying that was going on. Each, as I was told and
as to a certain extent one could feel, was made to believe that he was
the important one, or might be, presuming that he could prove that the
others were failures or in error. Proposed editorials, suggestions for
news features, directions as to policy and what not, were coming in from
him every hour via cable or telegraph. Nearly every issue of any
importance was being submitted to him by the same means. He was, as
described by this same Alleyne Ireland, undoubtedly semi-neurasthenic, a
disease-demonized soul, who could scarcely control himself in anything,
a man who was fighting an almost insane battle with life itself, trying
to be omnipotent and what not else, and never to die.
But in regard to the men working here how sharp a sword of disaster
seemed suspended above them by a thread, the sword of dismissal or of
bitter reprimand or contempt. They had a kind of nervous, resentful
terror in their eyes as have animals when they are tortured. All were
either scribbling busily or hurrying in or out. Every man was for
himself. If you had asked a man a question, as I ventured to do while
sitting here, not knowing anything of how things were done here, he
looked at you as though you were a fool, or as though you were trying to
take something away from him or cause him trouble of some kind. In the
main they hustled by or went on with their work without troubling to pay
the slightest attention to you. I had never encountered anything like it
before, and only twice afterwards in my life did I find anything which
even partially approximated it, and both times in New York. After the
peace and ease of Pittsburgh—God! But it was immense, just the
same—terrific.
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