I relate these things by way of showing forth one side of the character of a man who has wrought a revolution in the world. I have other things to relate that show forth another side of that interestingly complex nature.
The Maynard Case
In his anxiety to secure terseness of editorial utterance he at one time limited all editorials to fifty lines each. As I had final charge of the editorial page on four nights of the week, I found myself obliged, by the rule, to spoil many compact articles written by other men, by cutting out a line or two from things already compacted "to the limit."
I said this to Mr. Pulitzer one day, and he replied:
"Well, just to show you that I have no regard for cast-iron rules, I am going to ask you now to write four columns on a subject of public importance."
The subject was the nomination of Judge Maynard for Justice of the Court of Appeals. Judge Maynard stood accused of—let us say questionable—conduct in judicial office in relation to certain election proceedings. The details have no place here. Judge Maynard had never been impeached, and his friends indignantly repudiated every suggestion that his judicial conduct had been in any wise influenced by partisan considerations. His enemies—and they were many, including men of high repute in his own party—contended that his judicial course in that election matter unfitted him for election to the higher office.
I have every reason to believe—every reason that eleven years of editorial association can give—that in every case involving the public welfare, or public morality, or official fitness, Mr. Pulitzer sincerely desires to ascertain the facts and to govern his editorial course accordingly. I have never been able to regard him as a Democrat or a Republican in politics. He has impressed me always as an opportunist, caring far more for practical results than for doctrinaire dogmas.
In this Maynard case the contentions were conflicting, the assertions contradictory, and the facts uncertain so far at least as the World knew them.
"I want you to go into the Maynard case," said Mr. Pulitzer to me, "with an absolutely unprejudiced mind. We hold no brief 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."
This was only one of many cases in which he set me or some other lieutenant to find out facts and determine what justice demanded, in order that justice might be done.