The Alchemy of Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

me, “It’s not how many times you get knocked down, its how many times you get back up.”
    I borrowed streetcar fare from the landlady who was running the brownstone boarding house on Lexington Avenue where we were staying and mustered up the last of my courage for another assault on the World .
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    B EFORE I APPROACHED Mr. Pulitzer for a job I decided to take my mother’s advice—society would not be ready for a woman warrior like me; I would have to work twice as hard as a man and knowledge would be my strongest power. So, I stopped at a library to learn all I could about Mr. Pulitzer.
    Other newspapers claimed that the World was lurid and offensive in its reporting, but they just didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to expose political corruption and do hard-hitting stories the way Mr. Pulitzer did. He was a reformer and had a flair for news that no other newspapermen had.
    He believed the paper was a watchdog against privilege, a friend of the people. As long as society was kept ignorant of what was really happening, change would never happen. And he had a strong belief in crusades against wrongs. When he began to receive threats on his life, it didn’t stop him; he just started carrying a pistol. To him, the threats only proved he was hitting home.
    When I discovered how he had obtained his first job as a newspaperman, I knew I was destined to work for this man.
    Mr. Pulitzer, at the age of seventeen, was rejected from the Austrian, French, and British armies because of his poor eyesight and fragile physique. At six feet two and one and a half inches tall he looked like an emaciated scarecrow. But these obstacles didn’t stop him. He went to Hamburg and signed up with bounties looking for people to enlist in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.
    Once the war was over he headed to St. Louis to obtain a job, only to run into another obstacle. In order to get to St. Louis he had to cross the broad Mississippi River. Even though he was penniless and hungry, he approached the operator of the Wiggins Ferry, who also spoke German, and worked out a deal where he paid his fare by firing the boiler.
    After working jobs as a mule hostler, deckhand on a packet to Memphis, construction laborer, and a waiter, Mr. Pulitzer, along with several dozen other men, paid five dollars each to a fast-talking promoter who promised them well-paying jobs on a Louisiana sugar plantation. To get there, they had to board a small steamboat. Some thirty miles south of the city they were let off through a ruse. When the boat churned away without them, they knew they had been swindled and had no other choice but to walk back to St. Louis.
    Infuriated by the fact that this person could so easily rob a group of honest, hard-working men and get away with it, Mr. Pulitzer wrote an account of the fraud and submitted it to the Westliche Post . Not only did they print it, they gave him his first job on a newspaper.
    Mr. Pulitzer stood up for men; I stood up for women.
    Soon he was running newspapers. When he gained control of the St. Louis Dispatch and the Post and merged them as the Post-Dispatch they soon dominated the city’s evening newspaper. After purchasing the New York World , a morning paper that was failing, within three months the circulation doubled.
    He wasn’t afraid to be innovative—like covering sports and women’s fashion with illustrations. He believed a paper shouldn’t just be informative, but entertaining. Not everyone agreed. A reporter for the New York Times said, “How can anyone take the World seriously when it prints such silly things like comics?”
    Obviously, the public did.
    I also found it interesting he considered ten his lucky number. He made it a point to purchase the World on May 10, 1883. Maybe I could use this to my advantage. I didn’t know how, but it was good information to have.
    The World was the leading journalistic voice in America and I was going to be a part of it, come hell or high