SOURCE: "Pulitzer: Past-Master," in Newspaper Crusaders: A Neglected Story, Whittlesey House, 1939, pp. 20-42.

Premier among the journalistic crusaders of this country was the elder Joseph Pulitzer. He was convinced that a newspaper should "never be satisfied with merely printing news." He stood for political independence, fearless attacks upon demagoguery, injustice, corruption, and "predatory plutocracy." If told fully, his achievements in that field alone might well fill a volume; I shall attempt no more here than to indicate their scope and the methods he employed, disregarding chronological sequence.

Two of the earlier campaigns of the New York World, which serve to illustrate its methods, its courage, and its power, were completed within less than a month, one upon the heels of the other. The first concerned the disputed line between Venezuela and British Guiana. Drawn by a surveyor in the employ of the British government, this boundary had never been accepted by Venezuela, and when an attempt was made to map it the President of Venezuela appealed to the United States for help. His Minister in Washington cited the Monroe Doctrine, and newspapers opposed to Grover Cleveland were aroused to ridicule his delay in acting.

Then, on December 18, 1895, President Cleveland gave out a special message, declaring that the attitude of Britain menaced our "peace and safety," and saying that if Britain did not renounce her claims an American commission would be appointed "to determine the true divisional line."

Now, the World had virtually forced the nomination of Cleveland and had been the chief instrument in electing him. Yet its owner at once prepared an editorial in which he said:

Are our peace and safety as a nation, the integrity of our free institutions, and the tranquil maintenance of our distinctive form of government threatened by an extension, however unwarranted and arbitrary, of the British possessions in Venezuela? The assumption is absurd. And with it falls the structure of ponderously patriotic rhetoric reared upon it by the President.

In spite of a succession of editorials in that vein, showing for one thing that the Monroe Doctrine was in no way affected, there was an outburst of jingoism, and under its pressure both Houses of Congress adopted resolutions providing for a commission to fix the boundary and appropriating money for the task. The President's message was read in schoolrooms, former soldiers volunteered their services, and many newspapers joined the outcry. The New York Sun, as John L. Heaton tells us in "The Story of a Page," denounced as "an alien or a traitor" any American citizen who did not uphold the President. It demanded that the State Department reach an understanding at once with France and Russia, in order that their navies might assist by making war in the English Channel and the Irish Sea. Commenting on efforts in behalf of peace downtown, the New York Times said:

Under the teachings of these bloodless Philistines, these patriots of the ticker, if they were heeded, American civilization would degenerate to the level of the Digger Indians, who eat dirt all their lives and appear to like it. We should become a nation of hucksters, flabby in spirit, flabby in muscle, flabby in principle, and devoid of honor, for it is always a characteristic of the weak and cowardly to make up by craft and trickery for their defect of noble qualities.

Said the Tribune:

The message will not be welcome to the peace-atany-price cuckoos who have been clamoring that the Monroe Doctrine is a myth, and that we have no business to meddle with affairs between Great Britain and Venezuela.

The World appealed by cable and telegraph to the reigning house in England and to church dignitaries there, as well as to leaders in this country. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII; the Duke of York, who was to be George V; William E. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, Arch-bishops and Cardinals replied with earnest expressions of their horror at the thought of a war with this country. Clergymen and other leaders in the United States lent their aid. The upshot was that war was averted, this country acted for Venezuela in negotiations, and an international commission laid down a modified boundary satis-factory to both sides.

High tribute was paid to the World and its owner. Peace societies of Great Britain arranged a meeting at which they presented a memorial of thanks, and Ralph Pulitzer read for his father an address, "The Reign of Reason vs. the Reign of Force," which concluded:

However we may differ on many questions, we have common sympathies for liberty and humanity, just as we have a common language.

We speak, we read, we think, we feel, we hope, we love, we pray—aye, we dream—in the same language. The twentieth century is dawning. Let us dream that it will realize our ideals and the higher destiny of mankind.

Let us dream not of hideous war and butchery, of barbarism and darkness, but of enlightenment, progress, and peace.

Sir Robert Head Cook, then editor of the London Daily News, emphasized the service the World had rendered to journalism as a profession.

In provoking that crusade, Richard Olney, Secretary of State, wrote the blundering Venezuela message; in the second of these concurrent campaigns John G. Carlisle, Secretary of the Treasury, was primarily to blame. In each the World rebuked President Cleveland, who was responsible, obviously, for the acts of his Cabinet members.

In February of 1895 the Treasury, to replenish its gold stock, issued $64,000,000 bonds at 104½ to J. P. Morgan and Company as head of a syndicate. In a short while the bonds were selling at 120. In the following August the chief of the World's Washington bureau said that another and larger issue was impending, under the same terms. At once the newspaper gave sharp warning that the Treasury must not permit itself to be "cornered" again. Nevertheless, word arrived that a contract had been signed with the Morgan firm.

George Cary Eggleston tells us, in "Recollections of a Varied Life," how Pulitzer took hold of such a situation and outlined explicitly to his department heads a course of action. His instructions are set down:

We have made our case in this matter of the bond issue. We have presented the facts clearly, convincingly, conclusively, but the Administration refuses to heed them. We are now going to compel it to heed them on pain of facing a scandal that no administration could survive.

What we demand is that these bonds shall be sold to the public at something like their actual value and not to a Wall Street Syndicate for many millions less. You understand all that. You are to write a double-leaded article to occupy the whole editorial space tomorrow morning. You are not to print a line of editorial on any other subject. You are to set forth … the patent falsehood that the United States Treasury's credit needs "financing." You are to declare, with all possible emphasis, that the banks, bankers, and people of the United States stand ready and eager to lend their government all the money it wants at three per cent interest, and to buy its four per cent bonds at a premium that will amount to that …

Then as a guarantee of the sincerity of our conviction you are to say that the World offers in advance to take one million dollars of the new bonds at the highest market price, if they are offered to the public in the open market.

In the meanwhile, [E. O.] Chamberlin has a staff of men sending out dispatches to every bank and banker in the land, setting forth our demand for a public loan instead of a syndicate dicker, and asking each for what amount of the new bonds it or he will subscribe on a three per cent basis. Tomorrow morning's papers will carry with your editorial its complete confirmation in their replies, and the proposed loan will be oversubscribed … Even Mr. Cleveland's phenomenal self-confidence and Mr. Carlisle's purblind belief in Wall Street methods will not be able to withstand such a demonstration as that … If it is true that the contract with the syndicate has already been made, they must cancel it.

In reply to the World's queries, a mass of telegrams pledging capital for the purchase of the bonds was received. Then an editorial was printed telling specifically of Wall Street bankers and the amounts of gold they had accumulated to "invest in the speculation." It was not in fact so much a speculation as a sure-thing gambler's chicanery; but the newspaper's protest was against the "waste of ten or fifteen millions" in the transaction, and it made an appeal to the President "to save the country from the mischief, the wrong, and the scandal of the pending bond deal."

Two New York banks, in the face of these revelations, withdrew from the bond syndicate. The President yielded, and his Secretary of the Treasury, with bad grace, offered the issue to the public, although the Morgans offered six millions more than their original bid. The $100,000,000 bonds were oversubscribed more than six times. The Morgan syndicate had the small consolation of getting five millions at a fraction less than 111 while another bidder was offering 114, but that was under a special ruling by Secretary Carlisle.

No such distinguished success attended every campaign undertaken by the World. Its effort, for example, to break the financial and political power of E. H. Harriman was a failure. The campaign was an outcome of its long fight against Theodore Roosevelt and its exposure of contributions to his campaign fund by J. P. Morgan and Company, the Standard Oil, George W. Perkins, George J. Gould, C. S. Mellen, C. H. Mackay, E. T. Stotesbury, Chauncey M. Depew, Harriman, and others, embracing representatives of the Steel Trust, the insurance companies, International Harvester, the Coal Trust, bankers, and so on.

A letter from Harriman to Sydney Webster, a New York lawyer who was active in politics, was published in the World of April 2, 1907, which showed that Harriman had raised $260,000 for Roosevelt's 1904 campaign. He told Webster that this was with the understanding that Depew was to be made an ambassador, that Frank Black was to succeed him as senator, and that Harriman was to be consulted by Roosevelt about railroad recommendations in the President's message to Congress. None of these things had been done, and Harriman wanted to know where he stood.

No proof was forthcoming that Roosevelt had asked Harriman to raise the fund. The World said that the President had asked the financier to the White House for a talk, and Roosevelt denied it, whereupon the World printed the invitation to Harriman; it printed also the President's letter to him, saying "you and I are practical men." It exposed Harriman's manipulations of railroad stock. Finally Pulitzer instructed his staff:

Put utmost vigor without violence into "Harriman must go" series—say one editorial addressed to each director, stating his character, career, moral, social, religious position, pretensions, responsibilities, etc., every second or third day. Directors alone responsible. Whole country's reputation involved. Harriman vindicates Hearst and almost justifies Bryan's State ownership; certainly helps both and even worse socialist attacks, as practical, horrible example to be pointed at railroad corruption generally. Harriman should go as railroad's worst enemy.

Later, he instructed C. M. Van Hamm, managing editor, to get biographical material on each director of the Union Pacific, one of the Harriman roads, "how he rose, what he did in a public-spirited way … and yet how they allow this man to be their representative, their Grand Elector, their Chosen. They are responsible, not Harriman." Yet Harriman remained. Perhaps his associates thought the more highly of him for the drubbing he got. At any rate, he was too well established to be ousted, although the crusade was waged with full Pulitzer persistence and vigor.

Although the crusade to oust Harriman failed of its ultimate objective, doubtless it impaired his power to dicker with Presidents and dictate to lesser political luminaries. It arose from Pulitzer's conviction that great wealth must not be permitted to impair democratic processes. From that conviction came the World's exposure of insurance corruption, in which also Harriman figured. Like the other crusades I have described, this was a single-handed fight.

A quarrel between James Waddell Alexander, president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, and James Hazen Hyde, heir to the majority stock (which under his father's will Alexander controlled), revealed conditions so questionable that the World began a series of two hundred editorials, "Equitable Corruption." In the first of these it said that the "most astounding, farreaching financial scandal known to the history of the United States" was approaching a climax, told of stock jobbing by Jacob H. Schifi and Harriman with the insurance company, in which they were directors, and demanded a legislative investigation.

Against an investigation were arrayed powerful business interests in the City of New York, the legislature, Governor Francis W. Higgins, and the State superintendents of insurance and banking. In response to public feeling, a committee of directors was appointed and made certain recommendations, which the board rejected. The World continued its hammering and brought out more damaging facts. Reluctantly Governor Higgins directed the superintendent of insurance to look into the matter, and he made a report the most of which was suppressed for a time. Day after day the newspaper trained its guns on Albany until finally the Governor capitulated and advised the appointment of a legislative committee. As counsel, at the suggestion of Don C. Seitz, the committee chose Charles Evans Hughes, who became, by reason of his patience, perseverance, and skill in this investigation, a national figure.

It was shown that the big insurance companies in New York maintained what the World properly named corruption funds, and contributed generously to campaign chests. This resulted soon in a charge of larceny against George W. Perkins of the New York Life Insurance Company, in contributing $48,702.50 to Theodore Roosevelt's campaign and then receiving that sum from the funds of the corporation. The Court of Appeals, to which the case was carried, absolved Perkins on the ground of motive, but the Chief Justice, dissenting, said that when Perkins reimbursed himself he was as guilty of larceny as though he had taken insurance money to buy a necklace for a woman. The crusade divulged a mass of malodorous facts.

The investigating committee drew two bills to reform insurance company practices. The day after the Governor had signed the second, the World said:

The law now calls it a crime for any corporation, excepting such as are organized for political purposes, to contribute to any campaign fund. No railroad, bank, trust company or manufacturing or mining corporation may hereafter lawfully give one cent to politics. Neither may any corporation maintain in Albany a secret lobby …

But the greatest of all in its service to the community is the blow the Armstrong laws strike at the system of high finance which uses the savings of the people to convert public franchises into instruments of oppression. The prohibition of any participation by any life insurance company in syndicates, flotations, or stock speculations cuts off the great source which Wall Street promoters draw upon for speculative funds.

Conditions had been improved but not perfected. James Hazen Hyde, for example, sold his Equitable stock, which had a par value of $51,000, to Thomas Fortune Ryan, a notorious figure of the day, for $2,500,000. The elder J. P. Morgan "persuaded" Ryan, so subsequently he told a Congressional committee, to transfer the stock to him, and paid him some three millions for it. Since that day insurance companies generally have been under suspicion, and dubious practices among them have come to light. But the World and its owner had confidence that these conditions would be set right in time.

The public conscience is sound [it said] … The force of moral ideas in the community is omnipotent. What it has done to insurance corruption it can do wherever and whenever the public safety is menaced.

Pulitzer was ill in Paris when strikers locked out of the steel mills of the Carnegie company at Homestead, Pennsylvania, were being killed by Pinkerton thugs and the Coal and Iron Police, a private force hired by the employers, and he was deeply agitated when the news began to reach him. Without his guidance, the World said editorially on July 1, 1892:

Under the McKinley [tariff] Act the people are paying taxes of nearly $20,000,000 and a much larger sum in bounties to Carnegie, Phipps & Co., and their fellows, for the alleged purpose of benefiting the wage-earners. And yet there is war at the Homestead works, and the employers have enlisted Pinkerton Hessians and fortified their property that they may pour scalding water on their discharged workmen if an attack is made upon them.

Strong in his sympathy with the underdog, Pulitzer was thrown into one of the serious crises of his illness by the news and the editorials. A member of the World staff who was with him tried to reassure him by saying that the accounts might be exaggerated. "There have been as many men killed in this labor war," his chief retorted, "as in many a South American revolution." In that day the rights of labor were obscure, and the feudal conditions which prevailed in American industry had received little attention. The World continued its editorial campaign by demanding:

Is it right that a private detective agency shall maintain a standing army, a thing forbidden even to the several States of the Union? Is it well that a body of armed mercenaries shall be held thus at the service of whomsoever has money with which to hire them?

Other newspapers, shocked at this impertinence to a big corporation, sharply critized the news editors of the World for the sensationalism of the stories they were printing from the war zone, and these comments were sent to the owner in Paris. Meanwhile the editorials continued:

If force must be used to sustain the beneficiaries of protection in reducing wages and breaking down labor organizations it is better that it should be the citizen soldiery of the State, for the workmen will not resist them.

On the next day, in response to cables from Paris, the newspaper spoke in a different tone:

There is but one thing for the locked-out men to do. They must submit to the law. They must keep the peace. Their quarrel is with their employers. They must not make it a quarrel with organized society. It is a protest against wage reduction. It must not be made a revolt against law and order. They must not resist the authority of the State. They must not make war upon the community.

That moderation of the editorial note was due to direction of the owner, but he so much preferred an editor who would take a courageous course to one who was irreso-lute and weak that he bore no resentment. As a fact, and as subsequent developments bore out, the editorials told nothing but the truth and actually were not incendiary. The World continued, indeed, to denounce Henry Clay Frick and his associates for their "appeal to Pinkerton rather than to the lawful officers of the State."

After Martin Tabert was fatally lashed by a "whipping boss" in a Florida convict camp, a score of newspapers to which telegrams were sent asking that they give publicity to the facts, ignored the request. Tabert was an underdog, he had died nearly a year earlier, and he hailed from North Dakota, which had been unable to get action. The World, however, immediately sent a staff man to Florida, and presently thirty-eight other newspapers were buying his syndicated articles, so that the news associations were compelled to take up the story. As a result, Florida abolished the prevailing penal system within six weeks, and forbade the use of the lash on convicts. The judge and the sheriff in the Tabert case were removed from office and the man who had beaten him was charged with murder. Once aroused by the World and the newspapers which followed the trail it blazed, public opinion forced action with exceptional speed, notwithstanding the influence of corporations which had profited from the leasing system and which had induced politicians to maintain it.

Corrupt business, national politics, and foreign affairs, however, were by no means the sole interest of the World in crusading. It forced an investigation of the gas monopoly in New York City and brought about lower rates. It was an untiring enemy of Tammany Hall, although a Democratic newspaper. Its reporters investigated hundreds of bakeshops in the city, found that many were violating the sanitary code, and forced municipal inspectors to clean them up. It exposed both the milk trust and the poultry trust, and caused scores of indictments. It revealed that rotten eggs were being sold widely for the manufacture of foodstuffs, and that the refrigerator system was utilized to control or affect prices. If it did not cure these conditions permanently, it put the public on its guard and made city officials more scrupulous and more wary. That a great deal remains to be done, with little newspaper inclination in the metropolis to take a hand, has become apparent repeatedly. It is not always true that a crusade, at least temporarily successful, creates a vacuum at that point. The World is dead, and it left no New York heir.

Not until 1883 did Joseph Pulitzer buy the New York World. He had come to this country near the middle of the century, friendless and penniless, had slept in a public park, had done the most menial work to fend off starvation, had served as a volunteer in the Civil War, and then had moved on to St. Louis, where he worked for a time for the Westliche Post, then edited by Carl Schurz. He was elected a member of the Missouri Legislature, and afterward helped organize the Liberal Republican Party in 1872, which nominated Horace Greeley for the presidency. Schurz refused to support the ticket, and Pulitzer, who had bought an interest in the Westliche Post, sold it back; then he stumped the midwest for Greeley, who was defeated. After working for a time as a Washington correspondent, he returned to St. Louis in 1878, and bought for a song successively the Post and the Evening Dispatch, which he merged. Semiliterate as an immigrant, he had spent all his spare time in reading and had educated himself; and although his accent lingered, he was a good speaker.

For a week or so the new paper was called the Post and Dispatch, then the Post-Dispatch; at the outset it stated a creed:

The Post and Dispatch will serve no party but the people; it will be no organ of Republicanism, but the organ of truth; it will follow no causes but its conclusions; will not support the "Administration," but criticize it; will oppose all frauds and shams wherever and whatever they are; will advocate principles and ideas rather than prejudices and partisanship. These ideas and principles are precisely the same as those upon which our Government was originally founded, and to which we owe our country's marvellous growth and development. They are the same that made a Republic possible, and without which a real Republic is impossible. They are the ideas of a true, genuine, real Democracy.

That pronouncement struck a new note in the journalism of the midwest. Moreover, the newspaper undertook to live up to it. Never a hidebound partisan organ, it undertook to expose frauds and shams regardless of political consequences, and made powerful enemies thereby, but established itself powerfully in the affection of its public. One of its first campaigns was against rich tax dodgers. The files of the assessor's office showed understatement of property values and false inventories on the part of the wealthy, while those not so blessed in worldly goods were blessed at least with more honesty. The Post-Dispatch printed side by side the returns filed by the wellto-do and the poor. By this simple device it subjected civic slackers to reproach more severe than editorial comment, and the practice was corrected.

When less than a year old the Post-Dispatch began a crusade against protected gambling. The chief of the industry was Alanson B. Wakefield, a political luminary; the Board of Police Commissioners was politically appointed. Wakefield was indicted for perjury and sent to the penitentiary, fifty of his employees were fined, and a lottery was put out of commission. The paper fought for two years, however, before gambling was made a felony in Missouri. Meanwhile it did not neglect less sensational matters; through its influence the municipality began the purchase of lands for a beautiful park system, cleaned and repaired its streets, and erected a permanent exposition building. Twice the owner of the paper was physically attacked, but his courage was undiminished.

In 1880, while T. J. Pendergast's elder brother began building in Kansas City a political machine which was to achieve an unenviable fame (to which I shall refer presently), the owner of the Post-Dispatch heard that the Republicans were planning to buy Indiana in the presidential campaign. In Indianapolis we hear him, on October 9, speaking in a strain which the Pulitzer newspapers were to make familiar to the nation. Protesting against the "power of the millionaires" in elections, he reviewed the influence in Indiana of the banks, railroads, and protected industries, and added:

We want prosperity, but not at the expense of liberty. Poverty is not as great a danger to liberty as wealth, with its corrupting, demoralizing influences. Suppose all the influences I have just reviewed were to take their hands off instead of supporting the Republican Party, would it have a ghost of a chance of success?

Let us have prosperity, but never at the expense of liberty, never at the expense of real self-government, and let us never have a government at Washington owing its retention to the power of the millionaires rather than to the will of the millions.

Indiana had been a Democratic State, but the "power of the millionaires" lifted it over into the Republican column that year. At a banquet in New York in honor of S. W. Dorsey, who had charge of the Indiana campaign, it was said that Dorsey had been "able to save not merely Indiana, and through it the State of New York, but the nation." He admitted subsequently that some five thousand persons aided him in buying Indiana. "Each of these men," he explained, "reported what they could do … and how much it would take to influence people to a change of thought. We paid $20 to some, as high as $75 to others, but we took care that the three men from every town-ship should know just what each got. There was no chance of 'nigging'."

Whenever that idealist who had spoken unsuccessfully at Indianapolis encountered the "power of the millionaires" in corrupt operation, he set himself to combat it; whenever he suspected that the ballot was being undermined, he sought to put it on an honest basis, and he handed down a tradition in the office of the Post-Dispatch which resulted long after his death in a political house cleaning, and in a challenge, across the State, to the power of Boss "Tom" Pendergast. The long-drawn crusade whereby St. Louis was taken out of political red ink and put on the credit side of the electoral ledger merits examination at some length because it illustrates, as the other campaigns I have discussed do not, untiring pursuit of a purpose and unwearied attention to minute detail. For the facts of this crusade I am indebted to Carlos F. Hurd, an especially gifted member of the Post-Dispatch staff; for the consequences in Kansas City I have drawn upon other sources of information.

Although Kansas City was but half the size of St. Louis, Pendergast bossed the State democracy as well as his local machine, and almost always named the candidate for Governor. In St. Louis, as in Kansas City, there was ballot-stuffing with a complaisant election board; and when a ward boss, making war on his overlord, added more than three thousand votes to his ward list, while the other added nearly five thousand, the unexampled inflation offered an opportunity to the Post-Dispatch to rivet the attention of its readers on the frauds. On July 22, 1936, it began a series of first-page broadsides which ultimately cleaned out the voting lists, gave the city honest elections, and compelled the Governor to oust the election board.

Work began with two overswollen wards. Reporters found empty brick shells with scores of ghostly voters, hotels with half a dozen names on the register and dozens on the registration lists, saloons with more votable names than there were bottles behind the bar. Their photographers pictured the walls on which were chalked the numbers of phantom citizens. The first story was enough to convince the average citizen of St. Louis; it was not enough to convince James A. Waechter, the backslapping chairman of the election board, who, when he saw a copy of the first edition containing the exposé , nodded that he had heard that sort of thing before. If anything was wrong with the registration he would take it up, of course, but just then he was busy with a case in court.

The newspaper did not wait until the chairman of the election board got through with his case in court. A special staff worked daily, in sweltering heat, studying voting lists, ringing doorbells, taking affidavits—for beside each reporter was a notary public—and turning out copy by the column. The sworn statements of election judges and clerks corroborated their findings in many instances. The investigators moved on from the river wards, where corruption was taken rather as a matter of course by the public, into staid residential districts. In a north-side area of homes, where a street had been widened, rows of dwellings had been wrecked, and the tenants had registered from the new homes to which they had moved, but their names remained on the lists at the old addresses. South and west the reporters moved relentlessly. The solid element of the city was thoroughly aroused when it found that from ten to thirty per cent of the voters in their own neighborhoods were duplicates or phantoms. There were mass meetings. Telegrams and letters poured in on the Governor.

When Chairman Waechter tried to evade a thorough examination of the rolls the Post-Dispatch demanded a recanvass of each of more than seven hundred precincts in the city. The election board capitulated and reported that some 46,000 registrants were "not found." But there was no time, so Waechter said, to strike those names off before an impending primary, and in most precincts judges and clerks voted them.

More broadsides in the news columns followed. A canvass was made by Post-Dispatch reporters of the vote on a bond issue a short time before, and the figures ran laboriously into pages of copy. Even the politicians who profited from the corruption began to perceive that the election board must go; and three days before a general election the Governor, under their pressure, announced that it had been removed "for the betterment of the public service" and because there had not been enough "diligence in supervision." In place of the members removed he appointed a new board satisfactory to the paper, and a purge of office clerks, precinct judges, and clerks, began. In their places new man power was recruited from banks, factory offices, and commerce.

It was a day-and-night job, both for members of the board and their underlings and for members of the Post-Dispatch staff. The outcome was the largest registration St. Louis had ever witnessed, but nobody made charges that the lists were padded. A grand jury, which indicted eleven six-man groups of election officials, and admonished the courts not to dismiss the charges on "immaterial technicalities," said in its report:

We think it worthy of comment that, acting under exactly the same laws as previous election boards, with a minimum of time at their disposal to prepare for the election, the present board carried through successfully an election at which the greatest number in the history of the city voted, and this without any evidence of fraud. The reason for this was simply that these gentlemen were possessed of what might be termed honesty of purpose, and handled a most difficult situation with no other thought than the carrying out to the fullest extent of their sworn duty. These gentlemen deserve the commendation of all honest citizens.

One may fancy that Tom Pendergast observed from afar with some perturbation the pertinacity, patience, and skill of that horde of Post-Dispatch reporters and photographers, with their notary-public accompanyists. His local machine had proved invulnerable to similar exposures, but had never been subjected to a test so thoroughgoing. Now the Kansas City Star adopted on a smaller scale the methods of its greater neighbor. Two reporters began an inspection of the registration lists, and found 270,000 names, in a city with some 400,000 population; they found a funeral "parlor" with one occupant and seventeen voters; they found other registrations from vacant lots and untenanted warehouses, others who had been dead for years. They found, in brief, as far as they went, what the Post-Dispatch reporters had found in St. Louis. A Citizens' League was formed, to demand a grand-jury investigation.

This investigation brought 199 indictments; in the first eighty cases tried, there were fifty-six convictions, one plea of guilty, and twenty defendants threw themselves on the mercy of the court. As time went on, the sentences to the penitentiary, ranging from a month to five years, multiplied. It looked gloomy for Tom Pendergast; but it did not defeat his slate in the 1938 election. Orators for the coalition opposition charged that the town's good name was being besmirched because of stories about wide-open gambling, unregulated prostitution, and vote frauds. The outcome was merely a reduction by about one-third in the Pendergast plurality. The machine was still running, but was not in good working order.

After the election, Governor Lloyd C. Stark of Missouri declared that his administration was pledged to "eradicate the blight of crime and corruption from Kansas City," and instructed his Attorney General to oust officials who refused to assist court and grand jury proceedings. "Information from reliable sources," said the Governor, "shows that the gambling racket is carried on openly and in defiance of law and without protest from any official heads of the city's government; that houses of prostitution flourish within the very shadows of the Court House and the City Hall and the inmates solicit openly, unashamed and unafraid of official authority; that gangsters and racketeers, unmolested by official authority, ply their trade and prey, through violence and intimidation, upon citizens and business men alike."

That was but another repercussion of the Post-Dispatch crusade, in which the practices of the Pendergast machine had been held up as a vicious example of electoral corruption.

In long-term consequences the restoration of honest elections to St. Louis may prove to have been the most valuable of the numerous Post-Dispatch crusades; it was an evidence that the newspaper was still carrying on in the Pulitzer tradition, after the owner's death.

It was no easy tradition to live up to. One of the noteworthy exploits of the paper, for example, had been the exposure in 1898 of the Central Traction (street railway) bribery of municipal representatives. No action could be forced in that case, however, until 1902, when Joseph Jolk was Governor. Then the key man of the House of Delegates "combine" slipped away to Mexico. The Post-Dispatch sent a staff man to find him and persuade him to return. He gave State's evidence, and nine boodlers were sent to prison.

Instances of that sort had helped make the newspaper an immensely profitable enterprise. Within a few years after it was started it was netting its owner $200,000 a year. Pulitzer's success was won, I believe, through a certain art of getting close to the heart of a vast audience and through his fight for the underdog; his crusade against wealthy corruptionists was the brushwork of that art. Not long before his death, which occurred October 29, 1911, he wrote for the Review of Reviews an article in which he said:

What is everybody's business is nobody's business—except the journalist's. It is his by adoption. But for his care almost every reform would be stillborn. He holds officials to their duty. He exposes secret schemes of plunder. He promotes every hopeful plan of progress. Without him public opinion would be shapeless and dumb. Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.

To but one of his sons did the elder transmit the strong sense of social justice and civic responsibility, the courage, and the high order of intelligence essential to a crusader of the first water. This was Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., to whom fell the management of the Post-Dispatch. It was under his hand that honest elections were restored finally to the city. In this and other reforms, until the middle of 1938, he had the assistance of Oliver K. Bovard, a superb executive and a crusader who had won his spurs under the elder Pulitzer. Together they made the Teapot Dome scandal so apparent that a Senate committee was compelled to investigate it, forced a corrupt Federal judge in the East St. Louis district off the bench, and brought kidnappers to justice. But it was Joseph Pulitzer's son and namesake who had the final say-so when the Post-Dispatch assailed the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA), of which he was a member, for undermining public confidence by its mercenary attitude.

This was just before the 1937 annual meeting of the association. Editorially the newspaper said:

The ANPA is to be likened to the National Association of Manufacturers or the American Petroleum Institute or any other coalition of business men for the purpose of advancing the fortunes of themselves and their companies. This comparison is borne out by the by-laws of ANPA, showing it was created to foster the business interests of members, to procure uniformity of usage, to settle differences, to protect members from irresponsible customers, and so on.

This is the language of business; it is not the language of the newspaper profession. It is the language of men engaged in manufacturing a product; it is not the language of men engaged in the high and responsible calling of writing, editing, and interpreting the news.

The editorial continued by saying that the association had gone far afield to engage in pronouncements giving the impression that it was "grinding its own ax at public expense," and set forth a formidable list, including its condemnation of the Wagner Act setting up a national labor board and its opposai of the Copeland pure food and drugs bill. In the latter case the position "represents pressure of advertisers." It added:

How can the public be expected to separate these activities of the men who own and manage news-papers from the responsibility to the public interest borne by writers and editors? The fact is they are inextricably joined in the public mind. Such activities cast a reflection on the whole press. They impair public trust in the disinterestedness of newspapers.

In that case the younger Pulitzer turned his batteries upon an organization of which he was a member, and held aloft the torch his father had raised more than once, that newspapers must not permit selfish interest to impair their public service. His services to the press have been marked, as well as his services to his city and his State. Among the officials of St. Louis and to a great extent throughout Missouri there has prevailed a sense that malfeasance in posts of public trust was not to be risked, with so powerful and vigilant a watchdog on guard. The newspaper has been a benison on occasion, when civic causes called, a builder as well as a scourge and a discipline. It remains a monument to the self-taught genius who made it his proving ground and the agency of his earliest triumphs over wrongs.