“Money is such a contemptible thing to so constantly fight about,” Kate told Butes, whom she had come to treat as a confidant. “I do not ask it for myself for I can do without money, the things I should love to do—the charities, the enumerable helpful things I could do for the openly poor and for the poor too proud and too well born to make their wants known. This is one of my crosses.”
In August 1897, Kate and Joseph were with their children at Chatwold in Maine. It was a rare moment of togetherness for the family, which had spread itself across two continents. Though Joseph and Kate often bickered about money, Kate had reconciled herself to her marriage. She had terminated her amorous relationship with Brisbane the previous year. “Separate you from me, if you think you must for your own peace of mind,” Brisbane wrote upon receiving Kate’s Dear John letter. “I am what I am, and I think you have seen and known the best of me.
“You know that I admire you, and you know my other feelings. I do not write freely about such things, even on an anonymous machine,” Brisbane typed. Yet, he offered a frank assessment of their differences. “I know first of all that no living man could ever satisfy you—and no dead one for that matter,” he wrote. “As regards my feeling—change in my regard for you, etc.—you are entirely wrong. When you have urged me to make promises as to what I would or would not do, I have always told you that I could not make promises, and I think I have been more frank and truthful than many men would be—if they felt the anxiety I feel to have your good opinion.”
In the fall of 1897, Brisbane and Joseph broke up also. Brisbane yearned to write a column, with a byline, in the Evening World, over which Pulitzer had given him dominion. However, Pulitzer was unbending in his prohibition of signed editorial columns. Brisbane went ahead with his plan anyway. An angry Pulitzer suspended him. It was hardly a punishing move, now that the Journal’s doors were open to any disgruntled editor from the World.
Hearst offered to put Brisbane in charge of the Evening Journal and to give him a high enough salary to repay the $8,000 in advances he had taken from Pulitzer, with the promise of a bonus for a circulation increase. Brisbane would remain with Hearst for thirty-nine years and would become the nation’s highest-paid editor and one of its best-read columnists.
The social season at Bar Harbor was in full swing. “August follows in the wake of July with an array of brilliant events that must almost turn the summer girl’s head,” said one giddy society columnist. The Pulitzers joined in by giving Lucille a lavish coming-out party. Joseph, who continually complained about Kate’s extravagances, agreed to spend $10,000 on the event. Chatwold “was transformed into a fairyland,” according to one newspaper in Maine. More than 120 guests attended, most leaving with party favors—canaries in cages.
Lucille made a classic debutante. She had Kate’s abundant brown hair, sought-after porcelain skin, and her father’s deep-set eyes, which conveyed an air of melancholy. “She was a most beautiful young girl, spiritual of face and distinguished in manner and with talents seldom equaled by a society girl of the Bar Harbor colony,” said one observer. Of all his children, Lucille was the one who had not disappointed Joseph. She was most like him and the most willing to follow his social proscriptions and educational prescriptions. In comparison with her sisters, she took little interest in society and instead applied herself to her studies, learning to speak half a dozen languages, play musical instruments, and draw.
Not long after the lavish soiree, Lucille developed a fever and complained of other ailments. Doctors diagnosed typhoid fever, which she had probably contracted from contaminated food or water. Cables summoned more doctors, including many of the physicians who had attended Pulitzer in New York and Europe. Nurses were assigned to Lucille’s care twenty-four hours a day. Using steam and electricity, the house was heated and moistened like a tropical greenhouse. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the disease took its brutal course.
In October there was some improvement in the girl’s health. “Thank God,” Pulitzer wrote to his friend Tom Davidson, “Lucille is better and we are again hopeful of her convalescence.” Merrill told Brisbane the good news. “I am sure you know that I am very glad of that,” Brisbane wrote to Kate, “very glad for Lucille’s own sake and very glad to think that you are free from worry.” It was a false hope. The patient’s condition worsened again, and by December there was little optimism in the house. “Poor Lucille is still very ill and I need not tell you that I have been worried almost to death,” Pulitzer wrote to Davidson. “I have a frightful headache and am sick at heart and all broken up by Lucille’s grave condition.”
As the winter holidays neared, Lucille rallied. She had made sure that each family member had a present. The Pulitzers spent Christmas Day together in her bedroom, joined by some of the household help to whom she was attached. Joseph, feeling more confident about Lucille’s condition, made plans to move on to Jekyll Island after New Year’s and sent his horse and a dozen servants ahead. Lucille’s improvement, however, was a final, cruel deception. With both parents, and her brothers and sisters, by her side, Lucille died six days later, at four o’clock on New Year’s Eve.
It was left to Butes to inform the World. “Grieved to tell you poor Lucille just died,” he telegraphed Norris. “Chief much broken. Send him no business.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
YELLOW
In the early morning of January 2, 1898, a private train lumbered from the railyard in Bangor, Maine, and headed south to pick up the Pulitzers at the Mount Desert ferry. The family had already held Lucille’s funeral service at Chatwold, and all that remained now was to accompany her body home to New York. Two days later, on a cold morning, they gathered before a plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx that had been purchased fourteen years earlier for Lucille’s baby sister Katherine. Reverend William Stephen Rainsford, the rector of the tony St. George’s Church, read from the Book of Common Prayer as fine snow swirled in the breezes and thousands celebrated the early opening of the skating season in the adjacent Van Cortlandt Park.
This was the second time the Pulitzers had buried a child. For Joseph, the ritual was a sorrowful return to his own childhood, when he saw all but one of his eight siblings go to the grave. Now, he was staggered by the loss of Lucille. For years afterward, Pulitzer looked for ways to commemorate her life. At first, he settled on establishing a perpetual Lucille Pulitzer Scholarship at Barnard College. In the end, he quietly dedicated one of his two most famous legacies to her. Only the inscription in the floor of the marble foyer of the Columbia University Journalism College reveals that the famous school was built in the “memory of my daughter Lucille.”
In death as in sickness, Lucille had brought Joseph, Kate, and the children together in a single place at a single time.
The moment didn’t last long. Joseph left immediately for Jekyll Island with two of the children. Kate returned to the house on Fifty-Fifth Street and to the care of her physician. She remained indoors for a month until her doctor convinced her that a trip would be beneficial. She enlisted her much-favored cousin Winnie Davis, who, never having married her Yankee beau, had come to spend increasing time in Kate’s company. Together, with Ralph, on leave from Harvard, they departed for a sightseeing journey in Egypt.
Meanwhile, Joseph remained in deep seclusion on Jekyll Island, with his faithful Dr. Hosmer, Butes, and a few aides for company. In a tender moment, he sent Kate an unusually warm message that included no reproaches. “Darling,” she wrote back, “your telegram gave me great pleasure as any word of tenderness from you always does.” Knowing that her communication would be read aloud, she continued, “Dr. Hosmer must hide his blushes now—I slept with it under my pillow. I think I forget I am an old married woman with five great children.”
The warmth between the two dissipated as Joseph’s mood once again turned dark and frantic. He wanted Ralph to be working at the paper in New York rather than traipsing through Egypt with Kate. He became obsessed with this idea and didn’t
trust his secretaries to forward his orders. “He took the cable to the office himself as he evidently suspected Butes might not send it,” Hosmer wrote to Kate. “The sudden change followed an attack of indigestion after two hours of work in his usual overwhelming style.”
Five hundred miles due south from Jekyll Island, on the moonless night of February 15, 1898, Lieutenant John Hood took a seat on the port side of the battleship Maine, anchored in Havana Bay. As chief watch officer, Hood had the duty of keeping vigil. His charge, the largest ship in the harbor, was the white-hulled Maine.* President McKinley had directed it to Havana two weeks earlier in a high-wire act of diplomatic and symbolic gestures aimed at placating the growing ranks of American supporters of Cuban independence while at the same time averting war with Spain.
Hood hoisted his feet onto the rail and looked across the harbor at the lights of the city twinkling on the calm water’s surface. In a flash, his reverie was shattered by an explosion coming from the front of the vessel. The massive ship lurched upward and was engulfed in flames. The harbor was illuminated by a brilliant white light. The repercussion burst windows and caused late-night strollers to dash for cover. Two of the World’s correspondents ran to the harbor. Gazing across the water, they saw the Maine burning, its sinking hull lit by an exploding shell from the battleship’s magazine. As it went off in the sky above, two ships circled below in search of survivors. There were fewer than ninety. Two-hundred-sixty-six men had died.
Later that night, the Associated Press bulletin of the disaster broke the predawn calm in the World’s city room in New York, where editors had just put the early editions to bed. The AP dispatch was soon followed by that of the paper’s correspondents on the scene in Havana. Among those who got the news from the early edition of the World as it hit the streets was Arthur Brisbane, who by then had joined Carvalho and other World refugees at the Journal.
His boss already knew. An early-morning telephone call from the office had awakened Hearst.
“Have you put anything else on the front page?” Hearst asked the editor who called.
“Only the other big news,” he replied.
“There is not any other big news. Please spread the story all over the page. This means war.”
Within twenty-four hours, the Journal was blaming the Spaniards for the destruction of the Maine and the loss of life. DESTRUCTION OF THE WAR SHIP MAINE WAS THE WORK OF AN ENEMY…NAVAL OFFICIALS THINK MAINE WAS DESTROYED BY A SPANISH MINE, screamed its front page, above a drawing showing a Spanish mine. The World began its coverage in a more circumspect fashion. MAINE EXPLOSION CAUSED BY BOMB OR TORPEDO? asked its headline, above its illustration of the ship exploding. But soon, its editors sounded as shrill as Hearst’s: WORLD’S LATEST DISCOVERIES INDICATE MAINE WAS BLOWN UP BY SUBMARINE MINE.
President McKinley begged the public to be patient while experts worked to determine the cause of the explosion. In the din, no one heard his pleas, especially on Park Row where the disaster released a pent-up war fever. The Cuban struggle, a dramatic and poignant fight for liberty so close to the American coast, was a story made for the newspapers. During the past two years, the World and the Journal had exploited every angle of the rebellion. It made for great reading, especially as the papers enlisted such writers as Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis. At times, the newspapers made their own news. The Journal, for instance, helped engineer the escape of an eighteen-year-old Spanish prisoner, described as Cuba’s Joan of Arc, and brought her to New York.
All journalistic conventions were thrown aside. It was almost as if the pages were not wide enough to accommodate either the headlines or the incendiary drawings. From the start, Hearst rode at the head of the pack clamoring for war. He led his reporters like troops into battle, dispatching artists and reporters by the dozen to Cuba, engaging yachts to ferry politicians to the island, offering rewards to anyone who could prove how the Spanish had blown up the Maine, and hammering the president for resisting the call to war. Every day the Journal outdid the World in size, scope, and drama, and often in readers. The Journal became the first American newspaper to circulate more than 1 million copies of its morning and evening editions, a goal Pulitzer had long sought for the World.
There was an atmosphere of desperation under the gold dome of the Pulitzer Building as the publisher remained secluded on Jekyll Island, grieving over Lucille’s death. The staff, from the editors at the top to the reporters on the beat, consisted of men and women whose loyalty ran so deep they had chosen to cast their lot with Pulitzer rather than Hearst. They were willing to do anything for their absent general, and not out of loyalty alone. Everyone knew that Pulitzer was pouring his own money into the paper to make up for the losses induced by Hearst. For those who remained at the World, losing to Hearst could mean the end to their careers.
The staff struggled to match the Journal, but lacked the resources to compete effectively with Hearst. Unhappy at the prospect of subsidizing his money-losing papers, Pulitzer had ordered widespread budget cuts before the excitement over the Maine. To pay for the World’s new Hoe color presses, Pulitzer had to sell stock. He even ordered an audit of Kate’s spending. It found only a $20 discrepancy among the 2,472 checks written the prior year to cover her $77,000 in expenses.
The epic battle did not pit Hearst against Pulitzer. Rather, it was Hearst against Pulitzer’s leaderless troops in a helter-skelter twenty-four-hour-a-day competition. “An epoch of delirious journalism began the like of which newspaper readers had never known,” said Charles Chapin, who was beginning his tenure as one of Pulitzer’s most famous city editors. Unable to match Hearst’s corps of correspondents in Cuba, the World took to pilfering stories from the Journal to fill out its coverage, a sin with which the Journal was not entirely unacquainted.
No more stinging trap could have been laid than the one the Journal concocted for its rival. It was the same ruse Pulitzer had used to trick the Star when he was in St. Louis. The Journal printed a phony report about the heroics of a “Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz,” who was fatally wounded. After the World published its account of the good colonel’s deeds, lifted entirely from the Journal, Hearst’s headquarters gleefully announced that the colonel’s name was an anagram that spelled “We pilfer the news.”
In April, when Pulitzer returned to New York, he surveyed a wreck. The World was losing its battle with Hearst, and losing badly. The newspaper that had once set the news agenda for the city, and sometimes for the nation, was engaged in a futile game of catch-up. “It has been beaten on its own dunghill by the Journal, which has bigger type, bigger pictures, bigger war scares, and a bigger bluff,” Town Topics gleefully reported. “If Mr. Pulitzer had his eyesight he would not be content to play second fiddle to the Journal and allow Mr. Hearst to set the tone.”
From the command post of his house, Joseph again tried to fix what ailed the World. Ralph was also back in the city, having jumped on the first available ship in Cairo after receiving his father’s recall order. He was bewildered and filled with anxiety about his father’s command, but Joseph hardly noticed his arrival. “Mr. P. is solidly absorbed in the paper and the war times just now,” Pulitzer’s man George Ledlie reported to Kate, “and though I am forbidden to say so—looks and seems very well.”
Trying once more to rearrange the hierarchy in his paper, Pulitzer decided that the triumvirate, which he called “the sacred college,” was a failure. The World needed a captain, one among the men who would have more power than the others. He turned to Bradford Merrill, whom he had recruited from the New York Press two years earlier. Merrill was summoned to the house.
“You are to have general supervision over all editions of the World, subject only to my own instructions and that of the board of managers, of which you are a member,” Pulitzer told him. “I want things done, and I don’t want time wasted on consultations. I want men in charge to act, not wait for someone else.”
Pulitzer was eager to put the brakes on the paper’s outlandish journali
stic practices. Under Merrill, each edition was to have one editor in charge. “But,” said Pulitzer firmly, “this does not relieve you of your duty of reading the papers every day, criticizing, complaining, stopping bad tendencies, killing bad schemes, vetoing sensationalism, suggesting, proposing, curbing, stimulating.”
Confident that Merrill would keep the staff in check, Pulitzer turned to the question of the day: should the United States go to war? There was no doubt that the Journal was champing at the bit for war. The Sun said war could not come soon enough. Almost every major metropolitan newspaper favored either war or the threat of one if Spain did not comply with American demands.
Pulitzer joined the chorus. But to do so he had to support war only as a last resort, in order not to contradict his support of international arbitration three years earlier during the Venezuelan crisis. He had not renounced the idea. Only the year before, he had instructed Seitz to publish a pamphlet on arbitration and send it to every member of the Senate “with compliments of the World.”
“If we are on the brink of a conflict it is due to the deliberate policy of Spain—not to a desire for war by our people, by our President, or by our Congress. If Spain were to yield, even now, peace would be assured,” Pulitzer began his signed editorial that appeared on his fifty-first birthday. “God forbid that the World should ever advocate an unnecessary war!” But, listing instigations ranging from the years of Spanish oppression in Cuba to the destruction of the Maine, he said the time had come for military intervention. “No lover of peace, no lover of justice, no lover of his country ought to hesitate in urging the government to strike one swift and decisive blow, now that the conflict is made inevitable by the mad folly of Spain.”
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