I have known nothing in the way of exact political prescience, long in advance of the event, that equaled this or approached it. I record it as phenomenal.
LXVII
A Napoleonic Conception
Ever since the time when he bought two St. Louis newspapers, both of which were losing money, combined them, and made of them one of the most profitable newspaper properties in the country, Mr. Pulitzer's methods have been Napoleonic both in the brilliancy of their conception and in the daring of their execution. I may here record as a personal recollection the story of one of his newspaper achievements. The fact of it is well enough known; the details of its dramatic execution have never been told, I think.
In February, 1895, the government of the United States found it necessary to issue $62,300,000 in four per cent., thirty-year bonds, to make good the depletion of the gold reserve in the treasury. The bonds were sold to a syndicate at the rate of 104-¾. Once on the market, they quickly advanced in price until they were sold by the end of that year at 118, and, if any bank or investor wanted them in considerable quantities, the price paid was 122 or more.
At the beginning of the next year it was announced that the treasury would sell $200,000,000 more of precisely the same bonds, printed from the same plates, payable at the same time, and in all respects undistinguishable from those of the year before—at that time in eager popular demand at 118 to 122. It was also announced that the treasury had arranged to sell these bonds—worth 118 or more in the open market—to the same old Morgan syndicate "at about the same price" (104-¾), at which the preceding issue had been sold.
Mr. Pulitzer justly regarded this as a scandalous proposal to give the syndicate more than twenty-six millions of dollars of the people's money in return for no service whatever. The banks and the people of the country wanted these bonds at 118 or more, and banks and bankers in other countries were equally eager to get them at the same rate. It seemed to him, as it seemed to every other well-informed person, that this was a reckless waste of the people's money, the scandalous favoring of a syndicate of speculators, and a damaging blow to the national credit. But, unlike most other well-informed persons, Mr. Pulitzer refused to regard the situation as one beyond saving, although it was given out from Washington that the bargain with the syndicate was already irrevocably made.
Mr. Pulitzer set his editorial writers at work to make the facts of the case clear to every intelligent mind; to show forth the needlessness of the proposed squandering; to emphasize the scandal of this dealing in the dark with a gang of Wall Street bettors upon a certainty; and to demonstrate the people's readiness and even eagerness to subscribe for the bonds at a much higher rate than the discrediting one at which the Treasury had secretly agreed to sell them to the syndicate.