Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Trying to hide his Jewish heritage would have been futile. Although he had stayed clear of synagogues and Jewish life in the United States, he was always immediately identified as a Jew by his friends and publicly in the press. And any illusion that he was something other would have been shattered on the wedding night, as at that time virtually only Jewish males were circumcised. Pulitzer promulgated a tale that his mother had not been Jewish but rather was Catholic. Because Judaism is a maternal religion, this claim explained his Jewish appearance but freed him from its detrimental status, particularly for a family such as the Davises.

  Davis was not the only woman in Pulitzer’s life that spring. Nannie Tunstall, a beguiling, intense, literary twenty-four-year-old Virginian who was visiting Washington, swept him off his feet. They met while moving in similar Washington social circles. In fact, Tunstall was a friend of Brachvogel’s bride and went to the wedding that Pulitzer attended in the company of Davis.

  Born in a small town in Virginia, Tunstall was the daughter of a wealthy attorney who had been a state legislator and a railroad executive. The last of six children, all born on a plantation that had been in the family since the 1790s and was farmed by slaves, Tunstall was, like Pulitzer, a child of loss. Four of her siblings and her father had died when she was young, and she had been raised by her mother.

  William Corcoran, one of the city’s wealthiest men, was a friend of Tunstall’s mother, and he invited Nannie to stay with him in Washington. Widowed since he was young, he liked to have company with him at all times. “No one,” noted the Washington Post, “was more delighted with the society of intelligent and agreeable women than Mr. Corcoran.” Tunstall accepted his invitation and soon became a fixture in what she called his “enchanted castle of indolence.”

  Tunstall certainly filled the bill. Men were drawn to her. “She excites admiration from all,” said Corcoran’s arts curator, who was among those smitten by Tunstall. She had melancholy eyes, set in a soft, roundish face; a slightly Roman nose; and thick, long, wavy hair. The sculptor Moses Ezekiel was so taken with her that he used her profile for a bas-relief, a bronze copy of which Corcoran purchased.

  Tunstall was well-educated, though, like Pulitzer, she had spent little time in school. She read widely and was sufficiently fluent in German to translate poetry; she could also quote French aphorisms in her correspondence, and write poetry and fiction, eventually publishing a novel. She displayed a dramatic excitement over life, literature, and art that seemed daring among the more demure members of Washington’s high society. “I have lived fast—emotionally, I have burned the candle at both ends,” she confessed late in life.

  In February, while he was courting Davis, Pulitzer also pursued Tunstall. “Of course, I have thought of you and would like to see you,” he wrote to her when she was visiting relatives in Baltimore. “Of course, you want me to come over to Baltimore. Of course, you are consumed by that tender passion which I return with such powerful profundity and earnestness.”

  Tunstall demurely left his notes unanswered. An anxious Pulitzer wrote again. “What day, pray? Whenever I receive the signal, Baltimore shall be invaded.” Like a nervous suitor, he felt compelled to say more. “Here I should stop. But I cannot,” he continued. “Brevity may be the soul of wit and it cannot be the wit of sympathetic souls. So I must go on and at least fill this sheet. And say—what? Well, I scarcely know myself. That I have thought of you much? I see the shake of your classic head? That I have, in cold blood, determined to admire you? I see another shake of incredulity that I hope there will be a due appreciation of that admiration by your ladyship? I hope you now change your gentle shake from the skeptical to the assenting.”

  As if at the edge of a precipice, Pulitzer showed tentativeness, almost like second thoughts, referring to previous loves. “Is it well that we should fan the embers of congeniality into lurid flames of attachment?” he asked in one letter. “I really do not like the glare, fear the fire. I have been burned and too often before both actually and metaphorically speaking, both internally and externally.” Another closed with similar reluctance. “What! This is going a little too fast, is it not?”

  In May, Tunstall put an end to Pulitzer’s pursuit. Pulitzer called her letter cruel. “It has not only unnerved my soul but blasted my hopes,” he wrote. “Your terrible revelation has put an awful chasm between us.

  “Is there no hope? Will you not mend? Will you not begin to appreciate the rare qualities of the humble subscriber—in admiring you? Cold beauty, thy lines are colder yet. The season is rapidly advancing, all nature laughs and blooms, the very air has sentiment, and poetry grains are free and sail. In your letters alone there is no spring, in your words alone still lingers cold winter. How is this for a man who is not in love?” Pulitzer’s ardor suffocated Tunstall, who planned to travel unescorted in Europe—a shocking idea in her era. He was hardly the match for such a soul.

  On a spring day, Samuel Bowles, the son of the late publisher of the Springfield Republican, paused for lunch while visiting Washington. As he looked around the restaurant, he saw Pulitzer lunching with the prominent suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker. She was in the capital in hopes of advancing the passage of a constitutional amendment. Sitting at a table near the door of the restaurant, Pulitzer and Hooker attracted attention. “The two,” said Bowles, “were engaged in animated conversation, no doubt discussing the merits of the Sixteenth Amendment, and the intellectual sparks were pretty surely flying, for they do not agree.”

  Indeed, Pulitzer was not a supporter of women’s suffrage. When he first confronted the issue as a state legislator in 1870, he seemed somewhat sympathetic. The lawmakers were considering putting a women’s suffrage amendment on a statewide ballot. Before the measure failed, Pulitzer urged that women of all races over twenty-one years old be permitted to cast ballots that would be tallied separately and would not affect the outcome of the vote. But four years later, at the constitutional convention, Pulitzer lined up with opponents of women’s suffrage. In fact, he was quite dismissive, suggesting that those who supported it did so only “out of sheer gallantry and courtesy.” He even opposed permitting widows and unmarried women over twenty-one who paid school taxes to vote in school elections.

  Tunstall’s Dear John letter left Pulitzer with only one option, which he pursued with vigor. “If you knew,” Pulitzer wrote to Kate Davis, “how much I thought of you these last days and how the thought of you creeps in and connects with every contemplation and plan about the present and future, you would believe it.

  “I cannot help saying that I am not worthy of such love, I am too cold and selfish, I know,” he continued describing himself truthfully in words that might eventually haunt Davis. By his own admission, Pulitzer was driven by speculative impulses. Until now, his life had unfolded as an undirected but singular pursuit of his own goals, with no care for others. “Still I am not without honor, and that alone would compel me to strive to become worthy of you, worthy of your faith and love, worthy of a better and finer future.

  “There now,” he wrote, “you have my first love letter.”

  Pulitzer longed not just for stability, professionally and otherwise, but also for affection and companionship. The deaths in his family led him to think of himself as an orphan, and his competitive relationship with Albert, his only surviving sibling, kept the two apart. Pulitzer frankly described his life to Davis in melancholy terms, a life void of purpose, love, and a home. “I am impatient to turn over a new leaf and start a new life—one of which home must be the foundation, affection, ambition and occupation the corner stones, and you, my dear, my inseparable companion.”

  They planned a June wedding in Washington. As the date neared, Pulitzer gave Davis many reasons to reconsider. He vacillated on their plans for a honeymoon in Europe. One moment he wanted to rearrange the departure date so as to travel with his actor friend John McCullough, who was appearing at the National Theater. Next, when Pulitzer heard of a newspaper for sale, he b
roached the idea that they shouldn’t go overseas after all.

  “You can now see yourself what an utterly inconsistent, uncertain and inconsistent chap I am,” he wrote to Davis. He said he could not make up his mind even as to where they would settle. “Funny situation, isn’t it? As if to give you a foretaste of the future, you are met by difficulties even before you start on that lifelong journey which philosophers call so perilous; whatever may be thought of your indiscretion, my child, your pluck is really splendid.”

  A week before the wedding Pulitzer dashed off to New York, again in pursuit of a newspaper. “Prospects look quite favorable for a consummation of a bargain,” he wrote, without identifying the prospect—probably the New York Mail, which was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. He admitted that he knew his fiancée was upset by his absence on the eve of their wedding. “It is an important opportunity, perhaps a fortune, and you ought not to expect me to neglect it.

  “I must have business to occupy my mind and heart,” Pulitzer continued, “you do the latter. Occupation will do the former,” in an accurate forecast of the years that lay ahead. “Make all arrangements, complete every preparation upon the assumption that I will be with you on Monday for that important ceremony, thereafter to stay with you forever.”

  The ceremony actually didn’t take place until Wednesday, June 19, 1878. At eight o’clock in the evening, Pulitzer and Davis stood at an altar before a congregation of 100 in the Church of the Epiphany, on G Street in Washington, the church to which the Davis family had belonged almost since its inception in 1842. Theirs was a parish of the powerful and wealthy. In the 1870s, the capital’s elite had a choice of four Episcopal churches. The Church of the Epiphany and St. John’s were the only two in the mostly residential portions of downtown surrounding the White House. But while the latter served as a house of worship for presidents, the former was larger, more elegant, and more desirable.

  Prior to the Civil War, the congregants of the Church of the Epiphany had strong sympathies toward the South. Among their ranks was Kate Davis’s distant cousin Jefferson Davis. Those members of the lost cause who had returned to Washington since the war also came back to the church. Sitting on the bride’s side of the aisle were Senator Lamar of Mississippi, who knew Pulitzer from Hutchins’s salon; Senator John Brown Gordon of Georgia, a lieutenant general in the Confederate army; and Representative John Ezekiel Ellis of Louisiana, a Confederate veteran who had been a prisoner of war.

  There were former Confederates on the groom’s side also: two Missouri Democrats now in Congress. They were joined by other politicians with whom Pulitzer had become friends in a decade of electoral work. In all, one-third of Missouri’s congressional delegation was in attendance, along with friends such as Hutchins and the bridge builder James Eads.

  The newlyweds, whose union the politicians, publishers, judges, and notables had come to celebrate, were a study in contrast. The bride was refined, delicate, and graceful. “A more gentle or lovely bride was never led to the altar than she,” wrote Hutchins for the front page of the Washington Post the next morning. Her betrothed towered over her with angular awkwardness. When they knelt before the altar, Pulitzer was gripped with anxiety about his shoes. His feet were larger than normal, and the soles of his shoes had been chalked with his room number by the hotel staff, who polished them overnight. “I thought with dismay that the people in the back of me would think that I wore No. 17 shoes.”

  The Reverend John H. Chew pronounced the couple man and wife, and the Hungarian Jew entered the ranks of one of Washington’s most established Episcopal congregations. A union with Davis, unlike one with Tunstall, offered considerable benefits. Her family, her pedigree, and her religion completed Pulitzer’s metamorphosis. Success, power, and wealth in the United States had only one place of worship, the Episcopal church. Appropriately, the three-paneled stained-glass window above the altar depicted Epiphany, the moment when Jews and Gentiles came together before Christ.

  In the fourteen years since his arrival on the shores of the United States, Pulitzer had been a carriage driver, waiter, steamador, journalist, politician, and lawyer. He had shed most traces of his immigrant origins. He had money and a beautiful bride. Still, for all that, Pulitzer remained rudderless. As he walked down the aisle with Kate, he saw the pews filled with his closest friends, each with a successful career, the one thing he still lacked.

  Part II

  1878–1888

  Chapter Twelve

  A PAPER OF HIS OWN

  In the early morning of July 6, 1878, a carriage ferrying Joseph and Kate Pulitzer made its way across Manhattan and joined a procession of others heading for Pier 52, between West Twelfth and West Fourteenth streets, where the Britannic awaited the last of its Liverpool-bound passengers. The newlyweds were among a select group of 175 persons who paid between $160 and $200 in gold for first-class cabins on the White Star Line steamship. The fare was four times what the 1,500 men, women, and children jammed below in steerage paid. The Pulitzers were given staterooms in the middle of the ship, insulated from engine noise and less susceptible to the motion of the waves. By ten o’clock that morning, the Britannic set sail and soon cleared Sandy Hook, reaching open water and refreshing ocean breezes.

  Ostensibly, Kate and Joseph were off on a two-month honeymoon. But Kate soon learned, or may already have deduced from Joseph’s frenetic business pursuits on the eve of their wedding, that her husband’s attention would never be hers alone, even on a honeymoon. His mind constantly churned with political and business schemes. As soon as they reached England, Joseph dived into the newspapers, making careful note of everything he read, and buttonholed all he met to ask endless questions.

  Having spent all his adult life in the United States, Pulitzer now looked at European life from an American perspective. Landing in England, he was struck by the rigidity of class. The British, he concluded, deluded themselves into thinking that their democracy and court system were open and fair. “A people with such inequalities, such artificial and unnatural arrangements and laws, are like a woman who uses French heels, tight lacing, and paints,” Pulitzer wrote. “While they look well, they are like the red decayed apple. As the continuous tight lacing will ruin the woman’s lungs and vital organs, and retard the free pulsation of the blood, so will the artificial and unjust arrangements of government eventually ruin the body politic.”

  When Joseph and Kate reached Germany, he was outraged by the destruction of political freedom caused by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s drive to suppress an emerging socialist movement. “There was not a single day,” Pulitzer wrote, “in which I did not hear, either through the press, or conversation, of cases so arbitrary and unjust, so cruel and despotic, that they would be appalling to any American.” What he witnessed fueled his nascent fear of leaders who traded on the passions and prejudices of the masses. “People without liberty have despots. People with too much liberty have demagogues. Both agree in abusing liberty,” wrote Pulitzer. “The despot thinks there is too much of it. The demagogue thinks there is not enough. The despot rules from fear of demagogues; the demagogue from fear of despots.” This fear of demagoguery remained with Pulitzer all his life. Years later, it would cause him to be one of the only progressive-minded leaders to be on the outs when William Jennings Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt took hold of the American imagination.

  To Kate’s relief, politics did not consume the entire honeymoon. In Paris the Pulitzers toured the dazzling Exposition Universelle. The exhibits came from all across the globe and included such American technological marvels as Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and Thomas Edison’s phonograph. Also on display was the completed head of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty. Several years earlier, the French sculptor had begun designing and casting the 150-foot statue, to be presented to the United States on its centenary in 1876. The plan called for French citizens to pay for the statue and for American citizens to pay for the pedestal and foundation. The French were meet
ing their end of the deal, but the Americans were not.

  In Paris, Kate visited the city’s fabled couturiers and Joseph indulged her expensive tastes. She also experienced, perhaps for the first time, Joseph’s quick anger. As a joke she told him she had purchased a cook-stove. He believed her and erupted in anger at her presumed foolishness. But his temper was also short-lived. Kate left Paris pregnant.

  The two-month honeymoon came to a close on September 4, when the Pulitzers returned to New York on board the Russia, a modest, aging ship of the Cunard Line. The passage presented one of those singular moments in history when two figures whose names will become closely linked pass by each other unknowingly. In New York, among the passengers preparing to board the ship for its return to Europe was fifteen-year-old William Randolph Hearst, accompanied by his mother.

  The Pulitzers’ European sojourn became a little more costly when customs officials peered into Kate’s two trunks. Her Paris dresses caught their attention. One appeared not to have been worn. In the past, clothing bought overseas that had “actual use” was exempt from import duties. But stricter instructions now required that agents assess duty on almost any garment bought overseas unless the passenger was actually wearing it when disembarking. The agents were just about to let Kate’s dress pass when one of them spotted a Treasury inspector looking their way. They stopped the Pulitzers and told Joseph he would have to pay a duty on the dress. He protested, and a superior was summoned who, in turn, called an appraiser over to join the debate. After an hour of listening to Pulitzer’s pleas, the officials who had gathered around the trunks remained unmoved. Unless he paid the $60 duty in gold coins, they said, his luggage would be confiscated. Pulitzer paid.

  Because Pulitzer hated President Hayes, he viewed the episode as a personal affront and an example of the administration’s corruption. He dispatched a tempestuous letter to Charles Dana’s New York Sun, which had already reported the incident (though misidentifying Pulitzer as a former lieutenant governor). “Immediately next to me were two parties, each with probably five times the number of trunks and boxes,” Pulitzer wrote. “Not one of those was opened at all—everything was passed smoothly and quickly. Why? Perhaps because at least one of the parties slipped a piece of paper into the hand of his inspector, which probably partook the character of legal tender.”