Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Unlike many of the elite, however, Pulitzer was not merely defending wealth. His dread of free silver was entwined with his long-held fear of demagoguery. Even before he was operating his first newspaper or writing his first editorials, Pulitzer had worried that democracy was a breeding ground for ambitious politicians willing to tap popular desires and prejudices to gain power. This was the lesson of Germany under Chancellor Otto van Bismarck—a lesson that Pulitzer had shared in a series of articles on European politics he wrote for Dana’s Sun a decade before. Nothing in the ensuing years, including his time in elected office, had diminished this fear. “I am a radical myself, progressive, liberal to the core,” he told one of his editorial writers years later. “But I do not want to be thrown over by a lot of demagogues, nincompoops, and shallow shouters.”

  As 1891 closed, Pulitzer’s near-blindness, compounded by insomnia, asthma, indigestion, and various vague bodily aches, increased his sense that his working life was at an end. “It seemed as if he might be compelled, as he feared, to give up altogether,” noted Hosmer. “He wanted to devote a few months to putting things in good shape out of regard to those that were to follow.”

  Again, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was brought in. Since Pulitzer had disobeyed most of his instructions, Mitchell was not in a charitable mood. “I want to say to you for the hundredth time what I think in regard to your present condition,” Mitchell told Pulitzer. “I want to say that your present course must inevitably result in the total destruction of what remains of your eyesight; also that it is quite impossible for you to carry on your paper under present condition without total sacrifice of your general health.” Mitchell even enlisted Pulitzer’s friend George Childs, the Philadelphia publisher. “He agrees with me,” Mitchell said, “in thinking that the course in which you are engaged is one of physical and moral disaster.”

  Pulitzer selected a middle course. He would monitor the World, but at a distance. He spent Christmas with his family in New York, and then he, Kate, the children, and their bevy of maids, governesses, as well as valets, headed south to Jekyll Island, stopping in Washington to stay with Kate’s mother. While they were in the capital, Joseph continued to mull over his choice for president. Governor Hill had been elected to the Senate, and Pulitzer was still torn between supporting his protégé or resuming his off-and-on alliance with Cleveland.

  One of the men in the World’s Washington bureau acted as a go-between. Pulitzer offered Hill the World’s support if Hill would appoint him American minister to France, a post that Pulitzer’s friend the newspaper publisher Whitelaw Reid was soon to vacate. Pulitzer had watched Reid up close during his own extended stays in Paris, and this seemed like the ideal arrangement for his plan of running the World by long distance.

  Hill declined the deal. Unbeknownst to Pulitzer, Hill had already decided to throw in his lot with Dana’s Sun. He knew he would have to choose one paper over the other, and he felt the Sun was closer to his wing of the party. By default, Cleveland was once again in the World’s good graces.

  In February, the Pulitzers reached Brunswick, Georgia, their last stop before taking a steamer across a narrow strait to the Jekyll Island club. The townspeople of Brunswick were still not used to the parade of millionaires descending from private railcars in their hamlet to reach this new private island enclave. But the city did have a new hotel, where the Pulitzers stayed while awaiting transit to the island and to which they sometimes returned for dinner. When Kate made her appearance one evening, several weeks later, she caught everyone’s attention. “Mrs. Pulitzer is a very handsome brunette, medium height and beautifully formed,” wrote a smitten observer. “On her hand she wore two large magnificent diamond rings, while her neck was adorned with a lovely pearl necklace. Her beauty and jewels were the cause of much favorable comment among the guests.”

  It was Pulitzer’s first visit to Jekyll since he had invested in the retreat six years earlier. Unwanted livestock had been chased from the island and replaced with game for hunting. Roads for carriage rides had been built, bridle paths cleared, and docks built. An elegant clubhouse stood ready to receive members. “From a distance,” wrote one reporter, “it looks like some English castle with its square-shaped windows and its lofty tower.” For Pulitzer it was an ideal refuge. He spent his days in repose, taking walks, being read to, dictating memos to his staff of editorial writers, and adjusting to his sightless life.

  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.”

  It was no wonder that Merrill felt comfortable bringing the World to the side of the striking Homestead workers as the conflict continued to escalate. The Pinkerton guards arrived by boat, and they and the strikers engaged in a pitched battle that resulted in deaths on both sides. But the strikers prevailed, and they paraded the captured guards through town like prisoners of war. Frick called on the governor, who sent in 8,000 state militiamen, placed the town under martial law, and reclaimed the mill for the company. The message to labor was clear. When and if workers gained the upper hand, American industry could call upon the power of the state. Merrill was outraged, calling the use of the troops “obnoxious” and “inexcusable.”

  Pulitzer—who now tra
veled in floating palaces himself, vacationed with the barons of capitalism at Jekyll Island, and lived like royalty in Paris—learned about the battle of Homestead from French newspapers. He immediately told Ponsonby to cable to New York and obtain a full report on the conduct of the World. When he learned that the paper had sided with the workers, he was furious. He cabled Merrill, rebuking him and accusing him of sensationalism and of having disregarded law and order. “There is but one thing for the locked-out men to do. They must submit to the law,” Pulitzer said. “They must not resist the authority of the State. They must not make war upon the community.”

  The Pulitzer who had built up the Post-Dispatch and the World as voices for the disinherited was gone. The bitter darkness into which he had fallen and the cocoon of wealth that surrounded him had destroyed Pulitzer’s empathy. When it came to supporting reform and political and social change, property was now the trump card in Pulitzer’s deck.

  Angry about his paper’s conduct, complaining about all his ailments, and dispirited, Pulitzer found no solace in Paris. He returned to Wiesbaden to see Dr. Hermann Pagenstecher, one of the many doctors with whom he had consulted when the decline in his vision began. Pagenstecher ran the largest eye hospital in Germany and treated famous patients from all over the world. He examined Pulitzer in his private clinic, a large white house with purple-blossomed creepers clinging to its columns and running along its windowsills. Peering into Pulitzer’s eyes, he dictated his observations to his assistant, who dutifully recorded them. The doctor offered encouraging words to his patient even though he knew that the prognosis was bleak.

  Pagenstecher was more honest with Kate. “As regards to Mr. Pulitzer,” he wrote to her, “I should not advise to tell him the real character of the disease of the left eye because it would take away every hope from him and would have a great and unfavorable impression on his total nervous system.”

  Pulitzer rejoined his family in Baden-Baden, another town known for its baths, located in the western foothills of the Black Forest. The reunion was grim. The daughter of an old friend who joined them wrote to her parents that Joseph was “so melancholy of late that they did not know what to do.”

  With the coming of fall, Pulitzer returned to Paris. Dissatisfied with the conduct of the World, he set off, by telegram, yet another round of editorial and management changes back in New York. Ballard Smith figured he had been given his walking papers when he learned of a farewell dinner at Delmonico’s. “Grateful memories for loyal services,” wired Pulitzer, “sorry for parting and confident hopes for happy career.”

  As Pulitzer, from a distance, played musical chairs with his editors, the World lumbered on. It survived the managerial gyrations because it held an unchallenged position in New York. That luxury, however, would not last any more than calm waters on the ocean that Pulitzer continually crossed.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  CAGED EAGLE

  It took the tenth-anniversary celebration of his ownership of the World to bring Pulitzer back to New York from Europe in May 1893, after an absence of more than a year. This was a sea change from the man who years before—when attacking the rich was his stock in trade—had asked his readers, “Why do Millionaires go to Europe to spend so much money? What has Europe to offer that America has not?”

  The Majestic, one of White Star’s luxurious steamships, took Pulitzer across the Atlantic in a stateroom that had been specially altered for him so as to diminish sounds from the hallways and decks. Sailing on his yacht, Romola, was out of the question. He had put it up for sale after spending one sleepless night aboard it, off the coast of Italy.

  Another publisher in exile, the New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennett, was also on board. Bennett admired Pulitzer but also he begrudged him the World’s success, which had reduced the Herald’s circulation to below 100,000. Almost as if Bennett didn’t want his employees to be reminded of Pulitzer’s dominance of Park Row, he was on his way to New York to supervise the building of new headquarters far uptown, on a triangular block at Thirty-Fifth Street, where Broadway and Sixth Avenue intersected.

  The building made no attempt to rival Pulitzer’s stab at the sky. Rather, it was only two stories high. But in keeping with Bennett’s European tastes, it was an opulent design conceived by Stanford White to look like a Veronese palazzo. Unlike Pulitzer, Bennett had leased the land on which he was building. “I could not sleep nights if I thought another owned the ground upon which my building stood,” Pulitzer told Bennett in Paris. “I shall not be here to worry about it,” the fifty-two-year-old Bennett replied.

  The publishers disembarked in New York early in the morning of May 10 and went their separate ways. Awaiting Pulitzer was a 100-page tenth-anniversary edition of the World that had been published on Sunday and had sold 400,000 copies. That evening, Pulitzer took twenty of his top editors and managers to dinner at Delmonico’s. Bradford Merrill, his editorialist, was seated to his right and Solomon Carvalho, who managed the money, to his left. His old partner John Dillon and his young managing editor George Harvey raised a continual series of toasts late into the night.

  Despite the good cheer, Harvey was having second thoughts about working for Pulitzer. A promise from Pulitzer that he would be relieved of night work had not been kept. Harvey had slept most nights at the Pulitzer Building, in the bedroom off the city room. He had little choice. He worked for a boss who insisted that he spend six hours a day reading the papers and two hours a day reading books, while at the same time overseeing the work of the largest newspaper staff on earth.

  Pulitzer, for his part, had lost interest in Harvey. He had marked another member of his staff for personal grooming. That spring, David Graham Phillips, a six-foot-three Hoosier-born graduate of Princeton University who turned the heads of the women in the stenographers’ pool, had joined the World after three years with Dana’s Sun. He was as ambitious in character as he was striking in physique. Upon arriving in New York, in search of a reporting job, he had written to his father, “Here I am in this great city, and no man, woman or child cares whether I am dead or alive, but I will make them care before I am done with them.”

  Phillips received an invitation to dine at Pulitzer’s house—a considerable honor since the publisher was in New York for only seventy-two hours, and many of the World’s staffers wanted time with him. After the meal, the two men retired to the drawing room to discuss politics, poetry, and philosophy. The sartorially splendid Phillips lived up to his advance billing as a charming conversationalist. Pulitzer invited him on the spot to return to Europe with him and become the World’s correspondent in London.

  Within forty-eight hours, Phillips had packed, put his affairs in order, and caught up with Hosmer, Ponsonby, and Pulitzer on a ship bound for England. His presence greatly enlivened Pulitzer’s traveling party. While Ponsonby and Hosmer tended to the publisher’s many needs, Phillips provided the kind of lively intellectual conversation that Pulitzer cherished. More important, Pulitzer saw in Phillips a potential journalistic heir apparent. It seemed unlikely to him that his asthmatic eldest son would ever be able to take over the reins of the paper. Convinced that any one of his maladies could end his own life, Pulitzer worried that the World would die with him.

  Pulitzer was so completely taken with Phillips that, in a moment of weakness, he consented to give his young traveling companion something he had thus far denied to all his correspondents at the World. He would permit Phillips to publish the London dispatches with a byline.

  By June, Pulitzer was already back again. He now had two U.S. homes that provided privacy away from New York. He was eager to spend time at his newest one, a beautiful estate that he had leased. It was named Chatwold, and it overlooked the ocean in Bar Harbor, Maine. Despite the distance from New York, this small community was drawing the likes of the Vanderbilts, eclipsing Lenox, Massachusetts, and rivaling Newport, Rhode Island, as a summer haven for the wealthy.

  Geographically nearer to the World and closer to its d
ay-to-day operations than he had been in more than a year, Pulitzer couldn’t resist meddling with its management. Whereas he left the Post-Dispatch entirely to itself, he could not keep his hands off the World. Actually, at this moment, the paper needed help. Its affairs were in disarray and two of its top managers weren’t speaking to each other, communicating only by memo. Pulitzer slashed the salary and powers of one of the two; but, unsurprisingly, that did little to restore harmony.

  The problem was larger than an office squabble. Since Pulitzer had sent Cockerill packing, he had never found an editor who was Cockerill’s equal. George Harvey worked himself into exhaustion and pneumonia trying to be the next Cockerill, to no avail. The only person who ever met Pulitzer’s expectations was Pulitzer himself.

  He believed the solution to his troubles was a brash editor working for a competitor in St. Louis. Pulitzer knew that Colonel Charles H. Jones, who had replaced William Hyde at the Missouri Republican, had boosted the paper’s circulation with an aggressive style of journalism not seen in St. Louis since Pulitzer had left a decade ago. Aside from his undesirable sympathy for the populist free-silver movement, Jones seemed to possess the determination and drive Pulitzer wanted at the helm of the World. He sent Jones an invitation to Chatwold, and the editor came and stayed for a week.