Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Writing to Joseph from Aix-les-Bains, Kate marked the moment. “Twenty-five years married, how strange it seems,” she said. “When we think that, a hundred years hence, not one of us now living will be alive to care or to know, to enjoy or to suffer, what does it all amount to? To a puff of smoke which makes a few rings and then disappears into nothingness and yet we make tragedies of our lives, most of us not even making them serious comedies.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  CAPTURED FOR THE AGES

  In early 1904, the New York World’s writer Samuel L. Williams stepped down from a train in Detroit, Michigan. Williams, who had been afforded a rare honor for a staffer—riding and swimming with Pulitzer at Chatwold—was on a secret scouting mission. William Merrill, the dean of the World’s editorial page, was getting old, and his editorials were getting stale. Pulitzer wanted a young man in the shop who could write with a passion and verve equal to those of Phillips before he abandoned his editorial cubbyhole for fiction.

  “I knew pretty well what JP wanted,” Williams recalled. “His young men had to know history, biography, have keen perception, and a concise, direct, simple, forceful style. In editorials he especially wanted clarity, brevity, and a punch in the last paragraph.” To find the right man, Williams had traveled from city to city, reading yards and yards of ponderous editorials. “Finally,” he said, “I discovered some editorials in the Detroit Free Press which seemed to meet Pulitzer’s specifications.” He read and reread these, and culled those he thought had been written by the same person. An old friend, a newspaperman in Detroit, identified the author as Frank Cobb and arranged for Williams to meet him at dinner.

  Williams took an immediate liking to the tall, broad-shouldered thirty-four-year-old Cobb. He had a mop of hair that hung down his forehead, sparkling eyes, and powerful hands and arms from working for years in a sawmill. “At the table, Cobb proved himself a brilliant conversationalist, an omnivorous reader, a shrewd observer, a forceful talker, and a keen analyzer of men and affairs. He had vitality of brain and body, yet was so simple in manner, so modest, so lovable, that I knew immediately I had found the Ideal Editor.”

  After dinner, Williams telegraphed Pulitzer. In the morning, he received his instructions from the publisher. He was to learn everything he could about Cobb and to provide a complete account, including the color of Cobb’s eyes, shape of his forehead, and his table manners. Williams grilled Cobb, who by now realized he was being considered for some post. He had read the right books, he opposed Bryan and free silver, and liked Roosevelt but had attacked him editorially, Williams reported. “As to personal appearance, cheerfulness, tone of voice and table manners—highly commendable! He ate soup without a gurgle.”

  Cobb was not entirely sure he wanted to leave his job at the Detroit Free Press. But after a visit with Pulitzer on Jekyll Island, he was persuaded to join the World. In the spring, he reported to Merrill. In no time his crisp writing and his persistent requests for information from others drew the attention of the editorial staff. “He would end each inquiry with a sort of grunt that sounded like ubn but was really a question mark,” Williams said.

  Once again Pulitzer had a young man to mold, and this time one who would not leave him or betray him. Over time, the relationship between the older publisher and the young writer grew into the kind of collaborative, though tumultuous, partnership Pulitzer had long sought. Cobb became the most trusted, most loyal, most effective, and longest-serving among Pulitzer’s editorial lieutenants. His tenure was exceeded only by that of John Cockerill, Pulitzer’s first adjutant for twelve years.

  For Kate, the winter of 1903–1904 had been especially depressing. She was sick for most of January, and many of their friends had died during the cold months. She felt that all she had done was send notes and cards of condolence. Though she despised Jekyll Island and had not been there in eight years, she tentatively asked Joseph if she could come for a visit. “I shall not be the least offended,” she wrote, “if you think you have not room enough.”

  Her plea reflected a change of heart. Though the pair continued to squabble over money, Kate increasingly took pity on her husband. She had grown to accept his ailments, phobias, and eccentricities as permanent attributes. The Joseph she had fallen in love with was gone. She occasionally spoke wistfully about the early years of their marriage. Gazing at a photo from many, many years ago, she remarked to a visitor about the sweet expression her husband had in the picture.

  “Shall be engrossed with work and the quarters are not comfortable but I shall be glad to see you if you come,” Joseph replied. As if this were a courtship and she had won her prey too quickly, Kate held back. “Am very sorry but think it best not to go Jekyll,” she wired, “as sure should be in your way you being engrossed in work would be an irritation to you feeling you must give me time. I quite understand and appreciate condition.” Her message forced Joseph to be more emphatic in asking her to come. As soon as he was, Kate replied with alacrity that she consented. “Expect you to welcome me with joy or will leave on first raft,” she teased.

  Remaining in New York was nineteen-year-old Joe. “The house seems very empty just at present,” he wrote to his father. Since being thrown out of St. Mark’s School for his nighttime escapade, he had worked at the Post-Dispatch and the World while being tutored. Unbeknownst to Joe, his father instructed Butes to check quietly to see if Harvard would take him. “Keep secret from Joe as don’t want him to know,” wrote Pulitzer.

  Harvard decided that if Joe passed a set of entrance exams, it would accept him. He was ecstatic upon getting the news and pledged to redouble his efforts with his tutor. The gift, however, did not come without strings attached. His father stipulated that Joe would have to promise to study hard in order to win admission without conditions, to work hard in college, to be satisfied with an allowance that was small by Pulitzer’s standards, and not to come to New York except during vacations.

  After her time with Joseph on Jekyll Island, a rare interlude of comity between them, Kate returned to New York to cope with the finishing touches at their new house on East Seventy-Third Street. Joseph left for Aix-les-Bains. “I wish there was more sunshine in your life—worry and wearisome work are dull companions,” Kate wrote to him when he was settled in Aix. “If you could only take pleasures in things outside your work it would be a Godsend.” In his absence, the World marked the anniversary of his ownership quietly. Kate, however, couldn’t let it go unnoticed. She wrote to Joseph, “We will pass over what it has been to me, and my heart was so full of the conflicting elements of pride and pain that I could not speak of it.”

  In May 1904, George Harvey, Pulitzer’s former managing editor, who was now president of Harper & Brothers, brought out a work dictated by Pulitzer describing his plans for the journalism college, as the main article in the company’s North American Review, a highly regarded magazine. At length, Pulitzer explained the need for professional training and what kind of training he envisioned. But he laid out a grander vision for the school’s purpose than simply churning out well-trained reporters and editors.

  “In all my planning the chief end I had in view was the welfare of the Republic,” he wrote. Better-trained journalists would make for better newspapers that would better serve the public good. “Our republic and its press will rise or fall together,” he continued, in words that would later be mounted on the walls of his school. “An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and the courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a shame and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.”

  However, in the year since inking the agreement to create the journalism school, Columbia University’s officials had been exposed to Pulitzer’s less lofty side and had suffered from his irascibility. At first, he insisted that Columbia take the lead on the project, only to subsequently threaten to kill it if his choices—inclu
ding the presidents of Cornell and Harvard—were not appointed to the advisory board. When Columbia’s president, Butler, objected to the appointment of presidents from rival institutions, he was rebuked. “Understand jealousy,” Pulitzer wired from St. Moritz to Bradford Merrill, into whose hands Pulitzer had entrusted the final arrangements. “Telegraph Butler my insistence. Unalterable. Final.”

  Butler consented but counseled that the public announcement of the gift be delayed until the entire advisory board had been selected and approved by the trustees. He also believed that a board comprising illustrious men would defuse charges that Pulitzer was building a monument to himself. Pulitzer would have none of it. He ordered that the World break the news. Merrill, however, defied his boss and acquiesced to Butler’s wishes. It took him less than twenty-four hours to learn what his boss thought of that decision. Pulitzer ordered Merrill off the project, forbade any further meetings with Butler, and demanded once again that the news be published. “We are certainly dealing with a wild man,” Butler told an associate.

  Realizing that the story would soon break, Butler had his staff cobble together an announcement. In late August 1903 Pulitzer’s plan finally became public. Every major newspaper in the nation gave it great prominence. Even his rivals in the press praised the idea. “By this benefaction,” noted Ochs at the New York Times, “Mr. Pulitzer wins a new distinction in the history of the art he has himself so successfully practiced.” Pulitzer’s political opponent Theodore Roosevelt was not among the cheering crowd, telling a friend, “I share your indignation at Columbia College having accepted such money for such a purpose from such a knave.”

  None of the public praise assuaged Pulitzer. The day after the announcement, he forbade Seitz to send him any more telegrams concerning Butler. He didn’t want to hear anything more about the project until he returned to the United States in the fall. Pulitzer further ordered Seitz to inform Columbia’s president that unless Butler complied with all his wishes, he would expect Columbia’s trustees to have a sense of honor and return the donation. “Again: All disagreeable cables forbidden.” Like Merrill, Seitz disobeyed Pulitzer, but unlike Merrill, he got away with it. “He later took me to task for not delivering his ultimatum,” said Seitz. “My reply was that I did not want to spoil all the applause.”

  In Aix-les-Bains, having just concluded his last tantrum about the journalism school, Joseph spiraled down into one of his periodic episodes of depression. The weather was insufferably hot and humid after a week of rain, and he had not slept well in ten days. Kate let Joseph know that two of the girls were back at their boarding school in Connecticut, and this news gave him a chance to pick up his favorite theme of abandonment. “I am sorry the children are at Ridgefield again in the hands of—well, whatever these women are,” he said. “You know my views about the way children should be brought up, and they certainly have not had a mother in any sense in which I have been used to understand and value that idea,” he continued. “I wish you could have made it possible to go with them or be with them, and almost deplore my so-called success or prosperity, which alone enable you not to do so.”

  Joseph didn’t rest after launching this volley. He continued his assault on Kate by taking up the issue of her mothering with their seven-year-old, Herbert. “Now be a good boy,” Pulitzer wrote, “love your father and tell your Mother and Edith that I think it is a perfect shame having turned you away from them, that one of them ought to be with you all the time, that you ought to have a Mother or a sister to take care of you constantly as your father would so much like to do himself.”

  When Pulitzer’s mood was this somber, none of the family escaped his vengeful wrath. His son Joe, who had stoically endured a drought of letters from his father, found himself summarily judged guilty of filial disrespect. “Thirty-five days since I sailed and not one word from you,” Joseph wrote to him. “Thirty-five times I have told you with pain how much pain you give me when you don’t write simply as evidence of neglect—and that you do not think of.”

  None of Pulitzer’s secretaries, with the possible exception of Butes, could temper these outbursts. They recorded, typed, and mailed the venom he spewed. The most common refrain in his complaints was that his family had abandoned him and that he never received any words of appreciation. “Instead of getting them I have received only blows, and hurts and injuries,” he wrote to Kate on one occasion when he threatened to withhold payment for an expense they had agreed on. “Promises of affection and kindness not appreciated are not obligatory, the consideration failing,” he said.

  His cruelty stung a bewildered Kate, exacerbating her precarious struggle with her own mysterious ailments. When she reached Paris, her doctor convinced her that she had arrived in the nick of time. If she had a breakdown now, it would be harder for her to recover from this one than the last one, he told her. She repacked her bags and left immediately for the French baths.

  The elections of 1904 woke Pulitzer from his political slumber. One of his three archenemies—Hearst, Bryan, and Roosevelt—could end up occupying the White House for the next four years unless he did something about it. The year was only a few hours old when Pulitzer, in bed with a cold in New York, began to resume political command of the World, dictating memos laying out the kind of coverage he wanted and even assigning specific stories. Merrill, Cobb, and others on the editorial page of the paper awaited their instructions from the reinvigorated Pulitzer.

  President Roosevelt also wanted to know what was on Pulitzer’s mind. Nine years after Hearst’s assault on its dominance and six years after its disgrace in the Spanish-American War, the World still remained the most politically powerful newspaper. The president sent his inquiry by circuitous means. One night in January, Ralph Pulitzer, twenty-four years old and acting like an heir apparent, went out with George Harvey, Katherine Mackay (the subject of Zona Gale’s article that upset Pulitzer), and Grace Vanderbilt (wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt III). After seeing the two women to their carriages, Harvey asked Ralph to take a drink with him at the Waldorf Hotel.

  Ralph dutifully reported to his father that Harvey drank “a monstrous Scotch and Soda” while he stuck to a “modest glass of sherry.” Harvey had come from seeing the president at the White House. “Roosevelt had said he was very anxious to meet you,” Ralph wrote to his father on Jekyll Island, “and had asked Harvey to ask you if you would not come and see him at anytime to suit your convenience, either lunch or dinner.” Peeved at Roosevelt’s indirect manner, Joseph wired back, “Tell Harvey impossible for me to answer Roosevelt’s invitation received in such a roundabout accidental way.” He then added disingenuously, “My health forbids Washington as you know.” In fact, the train that would carry him north in a few weeks ran through the nation’s capital.

  Roosevelt extended his invitation to the White House because there had been a fragile cease-fire between the two men for several years. It began in 1899, when Roosevelt was sworn in as governor of New York. One day, early in his term, Roosevelt took aside one of the World’s reporters. “Say to Mr. Pulitzer for me,” he said, “that I appreciate very highly the fairness with which the World has treated me. When I was Police Commissioner I felt I was unjustly treated and resented it, but I have noticed lately a much more conservative policy, and personally, I am grateful for the attitude of the paper toward me.”

  After Roosevelt assumed the presidency on the death of McKinley, the World had continued its self-restraint and at times had even complimented the president for his judicial appointments, his handling of a coal strike, and his enforcement of antimonopoly laws. The paper’s new attitude, however, was deceptive. It had more to do with its publisher’s diminished interest in politics, his work on his journalism school, and his obsessive preoccupation with building his new house in Manhattan than with any real change of heart, as Roosevelt soon learned.

  Even if his paper remained quiet, Pulitzer had shed none of his misgivings about Roosevelt. But he saw no prospect of preventing Roosevelt fro
m winning a term of office on his own. Although Bryan remained popular among Democrats, he couldn’t win. More frightening to Pulitzer was the prospect of Hearst’s candidacy. Hearst had been elected a U.S. representative and, unlike Pulitzer, had served out his term; he was also the owner of eight newspapers and was spending millions to win the nomination. To block these two men, Pulitzer put his hopes on Alton B. Parker, a New York judge who was a protégé of New York’s governor, David Hill.

  Pulitzer sent Williams to Nebraska to determine Bryan’s intentions. If he had expected a cordial reception for his emissary, Pulitzer was in for a surprise. Bryan had waited years for a chance to vent his disappointment in Pulitzer. He gave Williams an earful. “Tell Mr. Pulitzer that the trouble with him is that he has too much money,” he said. “He used to be a socialist when he was poor but now that he has acquired wealth he is just like the rest of the capitalists.

  “I have discovered the secret of Mr. Pulitzer’s opposition to me,” Bryan continued. It had become clear to him when he watched how Pulitzer forced President Cleveland to accept the public sale of bonds. “That is the secret. Mr. Pulitzer and the World can rule Cleveland. They can make him do as they want. But they cannot rule Bryan. They cannot make me bow to their will.” He said he would not be a candidate and would turn down the nomination, clearing one hurdle for Pulitzer’s chosen man, Parker. But he raised another by promising to “resist any attempt to hand the Democratic Party over to the corporations and capitalists as the re-organizers are trying to do.

  “I want to be a Cincinnatus, I do not want the cares of millions of dollars,” he said, ending his hours-long meeting with Williams. “Tell Mr. Pulitzer to come out to my farm and I will make a farmer of him. I will show him how to be free from cares and worries about investments, stocks, bonds and guarding accumulations of wealth.”