“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?