Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Pulitzer had reached the limits of his physical and psychological endurance. “It was a period of terrible strain for me,” he said years later. His friend Childs in Philadelphia was worried. “I told a leading newspaper man today,” Childs wrote to Pulitzer, “that if your health holds out, you were bound to make the best success of the age, and you can do it, I mean that you can hold it.” But despite his persistent insomnia and disregarding pleas from his friends and family, Pulitzer insisted on going to the office. Reading every line of copy before it was published remained a mania with him, even though Merrill and others were among the best editorialists one could hire.

  “When I picked up the sheets,” said Pulitzer, “I was astonished to find that I could hardly see the writing, let alone read it.” It was if a dark curtain had been pulled entirely across his right eye and partially across the left. Having long suffered from bad eyesight, frequently aggravated by reading late into the night under harsh gaslight, Pulitzer decided that this was simply a temporary affliction. He left the building without saying a word about it. The next morning, his vision still not improved, Pulitzer stopped in to consult a doctor on his way to work.

  In 1887, optometrists, a term then only a year old, had the use of an ophthalmoscope, which permitted a clear view of the retina and the vitreous body separating it from the lens. When the doctor peered into Pulitzer’s eyes it was clear in an instant what had gone wrong. The retina in the right eye had become detached, and the left retina was in danger of detaching. The prognosis was grim. “In a great majority of cases the natural course of the disease is slowly but surely progressive, leading finally to total blindness,” wrote one expert at the time. The chief remedies at the time were the application of artificial leeches, a tool that drew blood or other fluids from the patient; mercury drops; or extended bed rest. Pulitzer was ordered home to remain in a darkened room for six weeks.

  Pulitzer’s doctors were summoned. His primary physician, James W. McLane, was worried that the vision failure was only one manifestation of Pulitzer’s health problems, which he listed as insomnia, asthmatic lungs, and almost continuous indigestion. It was as if Pulitzer was having a breakdown.

  “I am absolutely and totally unable to read or write, or have any use of my sight,” Pulitzer said plaintively, dictating a letter. “I am in the hands of the oculist, who has put me to bed, stripped me of all occupation, and enforces a course of treatment which he says, with care on my part, may give me back my sight in about six weeks. If I am not careful, he also says, I am quite apt to lose my sight altogether.”

  For six weeks, Cockerill, Merrill, and Smith ran the World, coming occasionally to the dark confines of Pulitzer’s room for advice. The children were kept at bay, and when Kate’s father died, she attended the funeral in Washington alone. Almost as if he were engaged in mortal combat, Dana did not even have the good manners to lessen his attacks. Instead, he continuously reprinted the editorial about the “Jew who does want to be a Jew” under the headline, MOVE ON, PULITZER!—REPUDIATED BY HIS RACE.

  At the end of the bed rest, Pulitzer’s sight was no better. McLane prescribed a new course of treatment: Pulitzer was to cease all work and go to California for a six-month rest. On January 14, 1888, Joseph, Kate, and Ralph, along with a personal staff, boarded a private railcar in Jersey City. Lucille, Joseph Jr., and Edith were left in the care of nannies.

  Congressman Walter Phelps came to see them off. Pulitzer was pessimistic about the plan and prophesied that the climate of California and the fresh air would do him no good. While he was becoming a Croesus, he told Phelps, he would eventually be a blind one.

  “That,” said Pulitzer, “was the beginning of the end.”

  Part III

  1888–1911

  Chapter Twenty

  SAMSON AGONISTES

  On a moonlit evening in late February 1888, Pulitzer stood on the veranda of San Diego’s legendary Hotel del Coronado. Puffing on a cigar, he gazed out at the beach. In the pale soft light, he could discern the contours of the beach and the crashing waves tipped with white foam. “That is beautiful,” Pulitzer said to a young reporter who had accompanied him out into the night air.

  “I am not blind by any means,” he continued, as they went inside. “I can see well enough to enjoy the beauties of the country. Your harbor is wonderfully beautiful, as we saw it in the moonlight this evening.”

  The rest of the world, however, was fading from his sight. Under the harsh electric lights of the hotel’s interior, he could scarcely make out the headlines on display at the newsstand, announcing that St. Louis would be the site of the next Democratic convention. “I am half blind, and have lost the use of one eye,” he conceded. “The other eye is of partial use, but I have not read a newspaper for three months.”

  Pulitzer’s doctors in New York had prescribed repose in California. It was like being sent into exile. When the Pulitzers had boarded the train in New York, Kate was handed a note from a onetime World editor and Democratic stalwart. “May I beg you to read the next page of this note to Samson Agonistes,” it said. “My God, what a calamity for the party that you are ill now.”

  The journey drained Joseph, even though they crossed the country in the comfort of a private railcar, the nineteenth-century counterpart of the corporate jet. Contributing to his exhaustion was a detour they took to Beauvoir, a crumbling mansion not far from New Orleans in Biloxi, Mississippi. There Kate’s distant cousins Jefferson and Varina Davis, the former president and first lady of the Confederacy, lived in quiet solitude.

  The Pulitzers had come to know the Davises during the past eight years and had grown attached to their twenty-two-year-old daughter, whom they asked to be a godmother to one of their children. Winnie, called the “daughter of the Confederacy,” was almost as symbolic of the lost cause as were her parents. During the visit to Beauvoir, the Pulitzers tried to talk Winnie into accompanying them on their trip. “A private car offers the two-fold temptation of comfort and economy in seeing a new and interesting country,” Jefferson Davis wrote to a family member. “She says, no.”

  The Pulitzers pushed on, stopping in Texas, where Joseph told reporters that the Confederacy’s former leader, though aging, had a mind as clear as that of a thirty-year-old. A few days later, the party reached Los Angeles, where their arrival was front-page news. Joseph declined an interview, saying he had been fatigued by the journey. The group soon repaired to the Raymond Hotel in Pasadena, a popular winter residence for wealthy easterners.

  For the next several weeks, Pulitzer and his entourage wandered from one coastal resort to another. In Santa Barbara, the doctors he consulted had only discouraging words and suggested that he consider a sea voyage to the Sandwich Islands (later known as Hawaii), Japan, and China. It was hardly advice he wanted or was willing to follow. He was anxious about not being in charge of the World back in New York. Though he trusted Cockerill, circulation had fallen for the first time since Pulitzer bought the paper. Even worse, Pulitzer could play no part in orchestrating the paper’s coverage of a terrible snowstorm hammering New York: food and medicine were in short supply, trains stood still, and few telegrams got through.

  During the blizzard, Pulitzer’s lawyer and crony Roscoe Conkling developed an ear infection after walking from his office on Wall Street to his club at Madison Square. Though it was persistent and nagging, Conkling regarded the infection as only a nuisance. “Would gladly face greater storms to make your eyes strong enough to be squandered reading newspapers,” he wired back after receiving Pulitzer’s worried inquiries. But the infection created a dangerous abscess that pressed on Conkling’s brain. For weeks he lay close to death, finally succumbing on April 17, 1888. All Pulitzer could do was send flowers and a telegram of condolence, and order the World to give Conkling a statesmanlike send-off.

  Balmy California seemed like a purgatory to him.

  Pulitzer nixed the idea of a Pacific voyage. By May he and his family were on a train heading back east. They s
topped in St. Louis for two days so that Joseph could confer with his editors at the Post-Dispatch and again consider offers to buy his paper. He had been back to St. Louis only twice in the ten years since he had left. The place no longer had any hold on him. This would be his last visit ever. He decided, however, to hold on to the Post-Dispatch.

  The family reached New York as the World celebrated its fifth anniversary under Pulitzer’s regime. On the front page, editors reprinted his original statement of principles, published in the first issue; they also listed the newspaper’s achievements in its war on monopolists and conspirators, in its efforts to protect immigrants, and in its work on behalf of the poor. “The keystone of The World’s arch of triumph is public service,” they said. Daily circulation now hovered around 300,000 copies.

  Home again, Pulitzer confronted an unchanged prognosis by his doctors. They still insisted on prescribing rest. Stubbornly, he tried to read the World and further strained his eyes. At best, all he could now see out his good left eye was a confusion of black spots and occasional flashes of light. His primary physician, Dr. McLane, persuaded him to sail for Europe, where they could together consult renowned medical authorities. On June 9, they boarded the Etruria, bound for England. Kate and the children, joined by Winnie Davis, stayed behind and headed north to a rented house in Maine’s increasingly fashionable Mount Desert Island.

  Once across the ocean, Pulitzer shuttled from one examining room to another in London and Paris. After a summer spent consulting the world’s most celebrated physicians, Pulitzer learned nothing he had not already heard from the less famous specialists in New York. He was entirely blind in one eye, and the other was threatened with the same fate. There was no cure, procedure, or therapy. Rest might extend what vision he had left. He ceased to ride horses and take walks. Confined to dim rooms, he grew weaker.

  The doctors forbade travel. The order couldn’t have come at a worse time. It was September of an election year. For Pulitzer, being confined to Europe was like being a captain watching his ship set sail without him. The presidential contest was in full swing, but for Pulitzer there were no editorial meetings, no strategy sessions with party operatives, no election maps to study, no supplicants seeking the World’s editorial benediction. Unnatural silence surrounded him.

  In the election, President Cleveland’s plan to cut import tariffs became the central issue. He believed that the tariff was an indirect subsidy to businesses, and that it raised prices and hurt labor and farmers. In turn, the Republicans, who nominated Benjamin Harrison, claimed that the high tariff protected American industry and workers from foreign competition.

  Still smarting from the president’s ungracious attitude toward the World and its owner following his election to the White House, Pulitzer cared little if Cleveland went down in defeat. The paper acted as if the only elections of significance that year were those for New York State’s governor and New York City’s mayor. The World’s silence on the presidential race was a frigid rejection of Cleveland, whom it had championed as a political messiah four years earlier. “Temperamentally, no two men could have been farther apart than the President and his foremost supporter,” observed one insider at the World. “That sturdy statesman was steady and persistent; Mr. Pulitzer fiery and insistent.”

  Resigned to his exile, Pulitzer telegraphed Kate and asked her to come to Europe with the children. He left London, engaged rooms at the Hotel Bristol in Paris, then traveled to Le Havre on the northwest coast of France to await her ship. For Joseph, this was a rare gesture that reflected his anguish. Kate and the children arrived on September 16, 1888. Kate was now visibly pregnant with their sixth child, conceived during their wanderings in California. Reunited as a family, they settled into a rented house near Paris’s graceful Parc Monceau for the fall and winter.

  Constance Helen Pulitzer was born on December 13, 1888, and her birth was recorded by the U.S. consul in Paris, who had been appointed by Cleveland. Although Pulitzer could sign the birth certificate, he was incapable of reading or other writing. To cope with his increasing infirmity, he hired thirty-year-old Claude Ponsonby, an Englishman who had some noble relatives. Ponsonby would be the first in a long succession of young men who would handle Pulitzer’s correspondence, read aloud to him, play the piano, and provide companionship as the world darkened around him.

  Photographic Insert

  Migrating Jewish families found economic opportunity in Makó, the Hungarian farming village where Joseph Pulitzer was born in 1847. Landowners, eager for the services of merchants and tradesmen, enlisted the newcomers to market the products of their estates. Members of the Paskesz family, whose business may be seen on the right-hand side of this nineteenth-century photo, later migrated to the United States and opened a Kosher confectionery in Brooklyn.

  Pulitzer was devoted to his mother, Elize, seen here with his sister Anna, who died not long after the photograph was taken. In fact, all but one of his eight siblings died before Pulitzer reached his teenage years.

  Merchant shops of Makó. (Courtesy of the Muriel Pulitzer Estate.) Pulitzer’s mother and sister. (Courtesy of the Muriel Pulitzer Estate.)

  Joseph Pulitzer’s four-year-younger brother, Albert, was a consummate reader, idealistic, and ambitious. In 1867, with a twenty-dollar coin tucked under his shirt in a tiny cotton bag hung around his neck, Albert sailed for the United States and joined his brother in St. Louis.

  This rare moment of brotherly togetherness was probably captured by a New York photographer in the spring of 1873. Joseph visited Albert on his way to Europe after selling his shares in the Westliche Post. Albert had just started working at the New York Herald.

  Albert Pulitzer standing with books. (Courtesy of the Muriel Pulitzer Estate.) Joseph and Albert in 1873. (Courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Joseph Pulitzer Family.)

  German immigrant and American politician Carl Schurz was a role model for Pulitzer in St. Louis.

  Pulitzer followed Schurz into the Liberal Republican movement. When the rebellion was defeated, Schurz returned to the Republican Party, but Pulitzer became a Democrat.

  Carl Schurz. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.) Pulitzer Liberal Republican cartoon. (Author’s collection.)

  With his success as a reporter and the additional income he earned as a state legislator, Pulitzer improved his dress by 1869 when this photograph was taken.

  During his term as a state legislator, Pulitzer’s notorious temper got the best of him and he tried to shoot a lobbyist. The scene was captured by well-known cartoonist Joseph Keppler.

  Pulitzer profile 1869. (Courtesy of the Muriel Pulitzer Estate.) Cartoon of Pulitzer in fight with lobbyist that appeared in the February 5, 1870 edition of Die Vehme. (Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum.)

  (Above 1st)By the mid-1870s, Pulitzer added facial hair to his look. In 1878, he courted two women while living in Washington, D.C. Kate Davis(above 2nd) and Nannie Tunstall(above). In the end, Tunstall spurned Pulitzer’s affections, and he married Davis. The drawing of Tunstall was done by sculptor Moses J. Ezekiel.

  Joseph Pulitzer and Kate Davis. (Courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Joseph Pulitzer Family.) Nannie Tunstall. (Courtesy of the Virginia Military Institute Archives.)

  In December 1878, Pulitzer purchased the St. Louis Dispatch at a bankruptcy sale on the steps of the courthouse. In this cartoon Pulitzer is seen packing up his new paper a few days later to merge it with the St. Louis Post, a move alluded to in the comment “set the whole up on a sound Post,” at the center of the drawing. The cartoon appeared in the German-language Die Laterne.

  Within a year of creating the Post-Dispatch, Pulitzer persuaded John Cockerill to come to St. Louis to take charge of the news operation of the paper. The two men met at the 1872 Liberal Republican convention. In the years since, Cockerill had worked as an editor at several newspapers, including the newly launched Washington Post. With their innovative style and aggressive reporting, Pulitzer and Cockerill changed t
he face of journalism.

  Cartoon of Pulitzer purchasing the Dispatch. (Author’s collection.) Illustration of John Cockerill. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.)

  When Pulitzer purchased the New York World from Jay Gould in 1883, he also agreed to lease for a decade Gould’s Park Row building that housed the paper. But within six years, Pulitzer had made such a success of the World that he built the tallest building on the globe(above), without incurring a cent of debt. The thirteen-story building, topped with a gilded dome that reflected light forty miles out to sea, became an important symbol of Pulitzer’s financial success and how he changed the landscape of journalism. The first sight of the New World for immigrants entering New York’s harbor was not a building of commerce, banking, or industry. Rather, it was a temple of America’s new mass media.

  New York World building owned by Jay Gould. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.) Pulitzer building (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

  Don Carlos Seitz was Pulitzer’s longest-serving business manager. He was one of the few working for Pulitzer who found a way to survive under his management style. Thirteen years after Pulitzer’s death, Seitz became his first biographer.

  Arthur Brisbane, one of Joseph Pulitzer’s most brilliant news editors, was Kate Pulitzer’s lover for several years. In 1897, after Kate called off the relationship, he left the World to work for Hearst, where he remained for thirty-nine years and became the nation’s highest-paid editor and one of its best-read columnists.