Part Three
When Joseph Pulitzer purchased the New York World in May 1883, a typical front page consisted of a half dozen columns of densely packed type, unrelieved by illustrations or eye-catching headlines. Viewed from a slight distance, the page resembled a solid block of gray print, so dreary in appearance that the layout was referred to as a “tombstone.”1
The content was equally numbing. On May 10, 1883—its last day under the ownership of the financier Jay Gould—the World ran page-one stories on the recent nominations submitted to the Board of Aldermen, the forthcoming dedication of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the election of the executive committee of the American Cocker Spaniel Club. Little wonder that the paper had a daily circulation of fewer than twelve-thousand copies and was losing $40,000 a year.2
All that changed the moment Joseph Pulitzer got hold of it. An immigrant, Pulitzer saw himself as a champion of the weak and oppressed. The World, as he conceived it, would be a paper “dedicated to the cause of the people rather than to that of the purse potentates.” In an early editorial, he laid out his goals, a ten-point program that included “punishing corrupt office holders,” along with levying taxes on luxuries, inheritances, large incomes, monopolies, and “privileged corporations.”3
His method of achieving these lofty aims was to appeal to his readers’ lowest instincts. After all, he reasoned, the best a publisher could do was to “go for a million circulation, and when you have got it, turn the minds and the votes of your readers one way or the other at critical moments.”4And the most effective way to reach that million circulation was by printing the kind of wildly sensationalistic stories that ordinary people have always gobbled up.
He lost no time in putting his plan into action. The very first issue of the World edited by Pulitzer featured front-page stories on a New Jersey fire that claimed the lives of a half dozen people; the last hours of a convicted killer who had beaten his wife to death in a drunken rage; the public execution of another murderer, a hard case named M’Conkey who went to his death cursing his jailers; a deadly lightning bolt that killed a man on Long Island; and a dynamite attack by Haitian rebels that left four hundred victims dead or wounded.5
The following days brought more of the same: headline stories about human sacrifices performed by religious fanatics; a little boy killed when his pony stumbled and fell on top of him; a smallpox scare in Hoboken; a killer tornado in Kansas; plus assorted homicides, suicides, holdups, beatings, and even a grave robbery.6 By the following March, a typical week brought such attention-grabbing headlines as A CHILD FLAYED ALIVE; A BRUTAL NEGRO WHIPS HIS NEPHEW TO DEATH IN SOUTH CAROLINA; STRANGLED BY ROBBERS; DIED A DESPERADO’S DEATH; A LADY GAGGED IN A FLAT; andQUINTUPLE TRAGEDY—AN ENTIRE FAMILY ANNIHILATED BY ITS HEAD.7
The very look of the paper underwent a radical alteration. Headlines now stretched over several columns or were splashed across the entire top of the page. And there were cartoons, caricatures, lurid illustrations, and other voyeuristic visual aids. Not only were grisly murders reported in graphic detail; they were diagrammed so that readers could picture the horrors more clearly. When, for example, a New York City clergyman named Klemo slashed his wife to death in their fourth-floor apartment, then cut his own throat and hurled himself from the window, the story was accompanied by a drawing of the crime scene with a helpful alphabetical key:
A—Door stained with blood; B—Window stained with blood from which Klemo leaped; C—Bed covered with blood; D—Table set and covered with blood; E—Chair in which Mrs. Klemo sat; F—Sink in which knife was found; G—Pool of blood.8
Soon, Pulitzer had added a Sunday supplement, providing readers with such uplifting Sabbath fare as “a long treatise on weapons used to commit murder in recent years, including a nail, a coffin lid, a red-hot horseshoe, an umbrella, a matchbox, a window brush, and a tea kettle” “an account of the careers of two Vienna cutthroats who had specialized in courting lonely women and then murdering them” “a description of life in the death house at Sing Sing” a “thrilling narrative of cannibalism at sea” and the supposedly true-life tale of an English explorer thrown into a pit of vipers by “fiendish” African tribesman.9
Pulitzer’s sensationalistic strategy succeeded beyond all expectation. By March 1885, the World had a daily circulation of more than 150,000 copies—an astonishing tenfold increase in less than two years. That figure would double again before the end of the decade.
The age of yellow journalism had arrived.
Before his expulsion from Harvard in 1886, William Randolph Hearst—pampered heir to a mining fortune—had served as the business manager for the college humor magazine the Lampoon. The experience had awakened in the aimless young man a keen interest in journalism. Studying the various dailies from New York and Boston, he found himself enthralled by Pulitzer’s newly reinvigorated World. Everything about it—from its crusading zeal to its shameless sensationalism—filled him with admiration. “If a man can be in love with a newspaper,” declares his best-known biographer, “Hearst was downright passionate about the World.”10
As it happened, Hearst’s father, George, owned a paper himself. In 1880, the elder Hearst—a shaggy-bearded ex-prospector who had struck it rich in gold, silver, and copper—had purchased the San Francisco Examiner as a propaganda tool to advance his political ambitions. Though George would eventually get elected to the United States Senate, the paper was a financial disaster, losing more than a quarter-million dollars during the years he controlled it.11
George’s boy, Willie, thought he could do better. While still in college, he wrote a letter to his father, insisting that the Examiner could turn a profit by imitating publications like the World—“that class [of newspaper] which appeals to the people and which depends for its success upon enterprise, energy, and a certain startling originality.” Illustrations were important, too, since they “attract the eye and stimulate the imagination of the lower classes.”12
Twenty-four-year-old William got a chance to put his theories into practice in March 1887 when—after spending a year as a reporter for the World—he persuaded his father to give him the Examiner. Emulating Pulitzer, he set about creating a paper that, as one of his first employees put it, would fill readers with the “gee-whiz emotion.”13 Like Hearst’s later publications, the Examiner was less a traditional newspaper than a “printed entertainment—the equivalent in newsprint of bombs exploding, bands blaring, firecrackers popping, victims screaming, flags waving, cannons roaring, houris dancing, and smoke rising from the singed flesh of executed criminals.”14
Within a week of taking it over, Hearst was already trumpeting the Examiner in half-page advertisements such as THE MONARCH OF THE DAILIES! with THE MOST ELABORATE LOCAL NEWS, THE FRESHEST SOCIAL NEWS, THE LATEST AND MOST ORIGINAL SENSATIONS!15Determined to “startle, amaze, or stupefy” readers on a daily basis, he served up the subjects that have always thrilled and titillated the public: scandal, sentimentality, sex, gossip, disaster, adventure.
And always, of course, crime, depravity, and murder—the more shocking the better.