Pulitzer by James McGrath Morris

Author:James McGrath Morris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780060798697
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-07-17T10:00:00+00:00

By June 1892, Pulitzer had alighted in Paris. Like that of a migratory bird, his path was developing regularity. But while he enjoyed his luxurious Parisian summer, workers at the Homestead Mill in western Pennsylvania were locked in battle with Henry Clay Frick, who managed Andrew Carnegie’s steelworks. Frick decided to cease recognizing the union, give up bargaining, and lock the workers out of the plant. The men blocked access to the mills, with the help of the nearly 12,000 residents of Homestead. Frick vowed to reopen the plant with nonunion workers.

To get his way, Frick sent for 300 guards from the Pinkerton company, a famous detective agency that had become a source of mercenaries to fight organized labor. The standoff grew into an electrifying news story. At the World, Ballard Smith dispatched his best men to Pennsylvania to report on what the paper called “the iron king’s war.” At length, the World exposed how despite the increasing profitability of the mills, protected by the McKinley Tariff Act, falling wages had driven workers into destitution.

Merrill used the editorial page to support the strikers and linked their suffering to the McKinley Act. “The only beneficiary of the tariff is the capitalist, Carnegie, who lives in a baronial castle in Scotland, his native land.” After six years of writing editorials for Pulitzer, Merrill undoubtedly felt that his words would have been those of his absent boss. So did Walt McDougall, who lampooned Carnegie in his cartoons.

Their assumption made sense. Since coming to New York, Pulitzer had expanded his advocacy of labor from the modest support he had offered in St. Louis, where he catered to a more middle-class professional readership. Under Pulitzer, the World had exposed sweatshops and supported efforts to limit working hours, protect women and children from abuse in the workplace, and increase the number of schools for laborers’ children. In one pro-labor campaign, Pulitzer had come to verbal blows with his antagonist Theodore Roosevelt, who was then a state legislator. Roosevelt had described a bill reducing the working hours for car drivers as communistic. “If it be Communism, nice, dainty, cultured Mr. Roosevelt to say to these favored corporations, ‘Twelve hours shall be a legal day’s work,’” Pulitzer wrote, “pray what is when the corporations say to their employees, ‘You shall slave for sixteen hours a day or starve.’”

In St. Louis, his own workers remained mostly nonunion, but Pulitzer recognized the unions in his New York shop and supported workers in several major strikes, even raising money from his readers for a strike fund. He had also rallied to the side of striking workers at the Missouri Pacific Railroad. “This is the case in a nutshell,” he wrote. “Dividends paid on watered stock which was done to add to the hoards of millionaires who are sailing in their floating palaces among the soft breezes of the Antilles. Wages cut down to a miserable pittance of $1 to $1.18 a day, out of which the workman on the Western roads, if a married man, must feed and clothe a family.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.