Joseph Pulitzer hoped that David Graham Phillips might be trained to lead the World after his death. Unfortunately, Phillips had literary aspirations and left the paper to write novels and muckraking articles for leading magazines. Pulitzer was wounded when he discovered that the corrupt publisher portrayed in Phillips’s first novel was based, in great part, on himself.
Don Carlos Seitz. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.) Arthur Brisbane. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.) David Graham Phillips. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
Two publishers and two politicians challenged Pulitzer’s power. Charles Dana(above 1st), who twice hired Pulitzer to write for his New York Sun, grew bitter when the World stole his circulation, and he wrote a series of anti-Semitic editorials attacking Pulitzer. William Randolph Hearst(above 2nd) bought the paper that Albert Pulitzer had started and engaged in a crippling circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer’s World that almost bankrupted both newspapers. Theodore Roosevelt(above 3rd) feuded with Pulitzer for almost a quarter of century and sought to use the power of the presidency to put Pulitzer in prison. William Jennings Bryan(above) turned bitter when Pulitzer refused to support his early presidential bids and told the publisher “that the trouble with him is that he has too much money.”
Charles Dana, William Randolph Hearst, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Jennings Bryant. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
When the Pulitzer building was torn down in 1955, the cornerstone was recovered. It contained copies of the World and other newspapers, a wax-cylinder voice recording, and photographs of Pulitzer and his family, several of which are reproduced here for the first time since they were encased in the building.
One of the last photographs taken of Joseph Pulitzer before he began to lose his vision. His increasing blindness and tormenting mental and health problems would test Kate Pulitzer’s patience and love.
Opening the cornerstone. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.) Joseph and Kate Pulitzer. (Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.)
Ralph(above 1st), the oldest, poses with a rifle at age ten. Joe and his sister Edith(above 2nd) wear clothes often favored by wealthy parents. Constance(above 3rd) was the only child of the Pulitzers born outside the country; she was born in Paris. Lucille(above), Joseph Pulitzer’s favorite, died of typhoid in 1897, eight years after this photograph was taken. Kate Pulitzer had two other children. Katherine, born in 1882, who died at age two, and Herbert, who would be born in 1895, six years after these photographs were taken.
Pulitzer children. (Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.)
(Above 1st)After becoming almost completely blind, Joseph Pulitzer avoided public appearances and became a recluse. It often fell to his oldest son Ralph to fill in for his ailing father or to accompany him on the rare times he was in New York. Usually Pulitzer(above 2nd) wore goggles to protect his eyes from light and to hide the deterioration visible to others. He increasingly became obsessed with his health and traveled to visit Europe’s best doctors and spas accompanied by a large retinue of personal aides.
Joseph Pulitzer walking with son Ralph, Pulitzer wearing goggles, and Pulitzer seated outside with blanket. (Courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Joseph Pulitzer Family.)
Joseph Pulitzer’s brother Albert sold his New York Journal in 1895 for nearly $1 million and spent the remainder of his life mostly in Europe. He committed suicide in 1909, only a few years after this photograph was taken. Although Joseph was only a short train ride away, he chose not to come to the funeral. Albert is buried in the Jewish section of Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof cemetery.
In 1911, Pulitzer spent part of his last spring alive in Southern France. This photograph of Pulitzer walking in Monte Carlo with his daughter Edith and his aide Harold Pollard was taken less than seven months from his death. He complained extensively about his health and began that June to take Veronal, a new sedative with dangerous side effects that were not yet known; its use may have lead to Pulitzer’s death in October.
Albert Pulitzer walking by canal. (Courtesy of the Muriel Pulitzer Estate.) Joseph Pulitzer walking in Monte Carlo. (Courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Joseph Pulitzer Family.)
Pulitzer used his wealth to build expensive houses in hopes of finding within their walls an escape from business pressures and a shelter from noise. With the decline of his vision, Pulitzer became tormented by sounds of all sorts. For his New York mansion on East Seventy-third Street(above 1st), he hired a Harvard acoustical expert to help create a bedroom insulated from all outside sound. At his palatial estate, Chatwold, on Mt. Desert Island, Maine(above), Pulitzer constructed a special wing of stone that aides nicknamed the “Tower of Silence.” Pulitzer was never satisfied by the measures taken to guard him from noise.
Pulitzer’s East Seventy-Third Street house and Chatwold. (Courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Joseph Pulitzer Family.)
(Above 1st)Ultimately, Pulitzer came closest to finding a refuge on his yacht, The Liberty. The length of a football field, it contained a gymnasium, a library, drawing and smoking rooms, an oak-paneled dining room quarters for its forty-five-man crew, and twelve elegant staterooms. The ship carried sufficient coal to cross and recross the Atlantic Ocean without refueling. Pulitzer also favored wintering in his house on Jekyll Island(above), a private island off the coast of Georgia where the Gilded Age’s wealthiest industrialists and financiers vacationed.
Liberty. (Courtesy of the St. Louis-Post Dispatch and the Joseph Pulitzer Family.) The Jekyll Island House. (Courtesy of the Jekyll Island Museum Archives.)
When he died, Pulitzer used his wealth to create two institutions that have ensured his name would live on. A century later, his Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, the literary arts, and music are announced each spring at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which he endowed. Many felt the creation of the school and the prizes were late-in-life attempts to improve his legacy after years of reckless so-called “Yellow Journalism.” For his part, Pulitzer said his goal was to help professionalize his trade. His last will and testament offered his personal motivation, words that remain engraved in the front hall of his school.
Columbia Journalism School. (Courtesy of Columbia University Archive.) Floor engraving. (Courtesy of the author.)
Infirm but not incapacitated, Pulitzer sought to remain in command of his journalism empire. The World alone now had more than 600 editors, reporters, compositors, pressmen, salesmen, and business managers on its payroll. As his absence from New York became prolonged, he appointed three men to run the paper: Cockerill would manage editorial matters, George Turner would manage the business side, and Kate’s brother William Davis would act as Pulitzer’s personal representative when the triumvirate met. To communicate with their absent boss, Turner devised a simple cipher scheme so that telegrams could be coded to save words and keep others from understanding them.
Of his newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch held the least interest for Pulitzer. It ran itself, produced a handsome income, and gave him no headaches. His heart was in New York, specifically with the affairs of the morning World, referred to as “Senior” in the coded messages of the heavy transatlantic cable traffic. Pulitzer regarded “Junior,” the Evening World, with a mix of disdain and acceptance. With its base, coarse style, it thrived in the hurly-burly domain of sidewalk sales, where a good headline could sell its entire run of 100,000 copies. Pulitzer knew there was a large and growing appetite for afternoon newspapers, with their fresh news, punchy headlines, and scandalous tales. After all, he had started out as a publisher of an evening paper. Still, although it churned out profits, the Evening World was not a maker of presidents. If this were only a matter of money, Pulitzer could have disposed of the whole lot and spent the remainder of his life a wealthy man. Instead, he wanted to keep the rein
s of the World in his hands because it gave him what he coveted most—power.
Aside from creating his triumvirate, Pulitzer embarked on a scheme of retaining control over the hiring of editors and managers. No matter how sick or how far away he might be, he would be the one to fill the key posts. Editors and managers who performed well would be rewarded by bonuses, conveyed by telegraphed instructions to the cashier. Those who didn’t would face a Pulitzerian wrath in telegraphic form. Sometimes the telegram or letter would even be read aloud to the recipient by one of the members of the triumvirate. An editor knew he worked for Pulitzer, not for the World. Misdirecting his loyalty could mean the end of his employment.
For years, Pulitzer had sought to lure Julius Chambers, whom he had known since 1872, away from the New York Herald. That winter Chambers was chafing under the idiosyncratic rule of his publisher, James Bennett—who, coincidently, was running the Herald from Paris, giving Pulitzer hope that he might do the same. One day Chambers joined Cockerill for lunch in the famous Room 1 of New York’s Astor House. Comparing their experiences in working for absent publishers, Cockerill quickly fathomed Chambers’s unhappiness and handed him a telegram he had received from Pulitzer. “See Chambers again,” it read, “renew offer of $250 per week and three year contract.” Chambers took the job.
By similar means, Pulitzer gained a new editorial writer, hiring George Eggleston from the New York Commercial Advertiser. The new hires quickly learned that Pulitzer intended to manage them as if he were in the office rather than simply the source of telegrams piled thick on their desks. “Never fear of troubling me with any suggestion concerning either the welfare of the paper or your own,” Pulitzer told Chambers. “Nothing, looking to the elevation and improvement of the paper, is too small to mention.”
Although Pulitzer’s editors and staff could run the World satisfactorily in his absence, they could hardly find room to do their work in the cramped Park Row building he continued to rent from Jay Gould. The World needed a new building. Pulitzer owned a lot on Park Row, but it was too small for an edifice like the one he had in mind. He wanted a symbol of his power and success, something that would loom physically over the other Park Row newspapers as his paper had towered over them in circulation.
While Pulitzer was in California the previous year, French’s Hotel, which sat on a Park Row block at the entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge, had been put up for sale. Twenty-three years earlier, as an unemployed Civil War veteran, Pulitzer had been thrown out of the hotel’s lobby because its guests objected to seeing tattered former soldiers milling about. Since then the hotel had fallen into financial trouble. Pulitzer seized the opportunity and with a $100,000 deposit agreed to pay $630,000 in cash for the site. The former derelict in the lobby now owned the place.
The architect George Brown Post, a student of Richard Morris Hunt, heard about Pulitzer’s purchase and wrote to a friend at the World asking to be recommended to his boss. Post had just completed a design for a new Park Row building for the New York Times. “It would be an interesting problem to construct two buildings in sight of each other for rival papers, and to make the buildings as different as the politics of the papers,” he wrote to his friend. Pulitzer decided to hold a design competition. Post entered and won.
From Paris, Pulitzer laid down his conditions. The building had to rise a full fourteen stories, making it the tallest on the globe. The cost could not exceed $950,000, and it had to be completed by October 1, 1890. If he succeeded, Post would receive a $50,000 commission and a $10,000 bonus. If he failed, he would repay $20,000 of the commission. Finally, all design elements had to be approved by Pulitzer before any contracts for the work were awarded. And, added Pulitzer, the final building had to be “at least as good at the Times building which is now in the process of construction.”
Over the winter Post worked on the design. As the months passed, Pulitzer grew increasingly frustrated. It had been his intention to hire an architect as one hires a portraitist, for his artistry, his vision, and his interpretation. That is not what he got from Post. In March, the architect came to Paris to go over the plans with Pulitzer. The meeting was not a great success. “In confidence of the strictest nature, I am bound to say that I am not encouraged to greater faith in our architect by this visit,” Pulitzer wrote to Turner, his business manager in New York. “He may be a great architect in carrying out other people’s ideas, but he certainly is not, in this case, carrying out many of his own.”
Money, of course, was also a point of contention between the two. Post was unable to remain within the budget. He persuaded Pulitzer to spend another $60,000, raising the maximum allowed above $1 million. “I will not allow another cent,” Pulitzer immediately informed Turner in New York. But since Pulitzer continued to insist that he be shown final drawings before any work was started at the site, the mandatory transatlantic consultations were bound to imperil the construction schedule and drive up the costs.
Post returned to New York, and the two continued their struggle by mail.
Pulitzer still considered his exile from New York a temporary affair. “I am glad to say that I am better in point of health, able to walk again,” he wrote to Turner, his business manager. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me generally except that my physical machinery is decidedly out of order and in need of repairs; but it is more a question of annoyance than serious danger I suppose—Anyway, the doctors tell me (and, I have enough of them the Lord knows!) that the big vital parts of the machinery are all right except the eyes, and that I really think is improving though awfully slowly.”
After Post’s visit, Pulitzer headed south to the Riviera and, feeling stronger, embarked on a planned trip to New York in late April with Ponsonby, leaving Kate and the children in Paris. Arriving in New York, he reviewed Post’s plans, and the two were soon at loggerheads again. Although it was true that cheaper materials might not meet the requirements for a “first class” building, Post complained that Pulitzer’s refusal to approve less expensive choices made it impossible to cut costs. When Post, in frustration, began to demand arbitration, Pulitzer backed down. The World’s need for more space was desperate, and Pulitzer was finally willing to compromise.
Pulitzer took time to see his politically-minded friends. Cleveland had lost the election, though he had won the popular vote. President Benjamin Harrison had been in office for a couple of months, and Pulitzer, whose lukewarm support for Cleveland was partially responsible for this state of affairs, suffered graciously by accepting a dinner invitation from his good Republican friend the railroad lawyer Chauncey Depew. At Depew’s mansion on Fifty-Fourth Street, Pulitzer sat for a meal with a group of enemies and friends including Theodore Roosevelt, angling for a post in the new administration; the Tribune’s editor Whitelaw Reid, who had just been appointed ambassador to France; Pulitzer’s own rival Charles Dana; the U.S. senator William Evarts, who had led the fund-raising efforts for the Statue of Liberty; and Ward McAllister.
An editor from a rival newspaper ran into Pulitzer during his stay in New York and was surprised at how well he looked. “Physically, he seems to be in perfect health, and the only thing that mars his condition at all is the loss of one eye. I never saw him in better spirits, and his remaining eye seems to be strong, clear and exceedingly alert,” he said.
On May 15, 1889, Pulitzer and Ponsonby departed from New York on the Eider for Bremen, Germany. Rather than rejoin Kate in Paris, Pulitzer went to Wiesbaden, also in Germany. This city had been attracting the sick and infirm since its thermal baths were first mentioned by Pliny the Elder. In the late nineteenth century it had become one of the leading destinations for those with ample means, including the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Pulitzer’s favorite composer, Richard Wagner.
Pulitzer did his resolute best to ignore work. In a complete break with his usual practice, he instructed that no newspapers be sent to him. “I want to experiment being without them for a fortnight,” he wrote. He diligently underto
ok a regimen of drinking and bathing in the famous mineral and thermal waters in the mornings and taking long carriage rides in the afternoons. He stayed in the elegant Hotel DuRose and dined there in the open air near the city’s main imperial building, listening to snatches of music drifting into the night air from the concerts indoors.
After several days Pulitzer asked Ponsonby to send word to Kate in Paris that he was feeling better. His spirits were on the rise and he was hopeful that Wiesbaden’s curative powers were having an effect. “But remember again,” Pulitzer dictated to his assistant, “all my statements of improvement are comparative.”
Pulitzer’s better mood restrained his trigger-finger temper when he submitted to a well-known doctor’s care. “I have to wait sometimes in the hot anteroom with ten other people before I am received for my massage, which never takes more than one or two minutes and never gives me an opportunity to have a real talk, to which he seems opposed,” Pulitzer told Kate.
“Well,” he added, “he is the first majesty who has made me bow down and dance attendance in the anteroom.” The dictation concluded, Pulitzer took the letter from Ponsonby. Then in his own hand, he addressed it “My Dearest” and signed it “sincere love, ever your devoted husband, JP in haste.” There would be only a few remaining letters to which he could sign his name. But Pulitzer was optimistic. “My spirit,” Joseph told Kate, “is beginning to improve and is again hopeful.” Joseph and Kate spent the summer of 1889 together in St. Moritz, the Swiss alpine resort whose 300 days of sunshine each year made it a favorite among the wealthy.
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