Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Nicoll was fully prepared to present the evidence gathered by Pulitzer’s team of investigators and reporters to prove the truth of the corruption charges made against Cromwell and Roosevelt. But to go that route was to concede the federal government’s power to prosecute. Instead, Pulitzer wanted Roosevelt’s right to prosecute to be on trial. Thus, on the first day, Nicoll made a motion to quash the indictment on constitutional grounds. Judge Charles Hough, who owed his job to Roosevelt, surprised Nicoll by agreeing to hear him out the next day.

  As Nicoll began his argument, it sounded like a lecture in law school. He traced the history of libel laws in English law and demonstrated that the United States’ brief experience with the Alien and Sedition Acts had given the nation an aversion to laws permitting the national government to prosecute libel. Then, turning to the old federal law being used by the prosecution, Nicoll made his case.

  The law was intended to punish assault and murder on the high seas, which were beyond the reach of state laws, and was never intended to be used to prosecute an offense that could easily be tried in a state court. “The curious and ingenious mind, which for the first time in eighty-five years, twisted the statute to meet the ends of this prosecution has retired, and this case has been left to the present Attorney General to press as a matter of department routine,” Nicoll told Judge Hough. “You might as well revive the sedition laws, or pass another one like it. They would be a better law than this one.”

  The U.S. attorney Henry Wise, who had taken over for Stimson, rose to challenge Nicoll’s interpretation and argued that the law as amended covered libel as well. But Judge Hough had little patience with this view. “I am clear,” he said interrupting the two bickering lawyers, “that the construction of the act of 1808 proposed by the prosecution in this case is contrary to the spirit which actuated the members of Congress in passing this law.” Hough granted Nicoll’s motion to quash the indictment and suggested strongly that the jurisdictional issue be settled not by him but by the Supreme Court.

  “I am naturally somewhat surprised,” said Wise when reporters surrounded him outside the courtroom. “If any further action is to be taken it will rest with the Attorney General of the United States.”

  The only party on the winning side still unhappy was Pulitzer. Anxious until the day of the trial, he now wanted to win his argument before the Supreme Court. “If there still remains the likelihood that someday another Roosevelt will prostitute his power by invoking the act to protect harbor defenses in order to prosecute newspapers that have offended him, the sooner there is a final decision of the Supreme Court of the United States the better,” Frank Cobb wrote in the World the morning after the decision. As the victor, however, Pulitzer could not appeal. Only the administration could. One day before the time for an appeal would have run out, Taft’s cabinet decided to take the case to the Supreme Court.

  In March, Joe came to Cap Martin on an important mission. In January he had pleaded with his father to grant his long-standing wish to marry Elinor Wickham, a fetching dark-haired daughter of an old family in St. Louis. “We are anxious to end the demoralizing suspense of this long three years of waiting this spring,” he said, “and I beg to you to end it by giving your consent.”

  Even Wickham had written to Joseph in hopes of softening his heart. Her letter only gave him a chance to vent. “Try your moral sense and get him to tell you the truth what his conduct toward me has been for the last ten years,” Joseph wrote back, “and see whether you cannot influence him toward a father who is already old and broken, totally blind, cannot sleep, has an infinite variety of infirmities with one foot and half in the grave, and expects nothing from his children except a little less intense selfishness and some sympathy.”

  In person, Joseph was rarely the ogre who dictated the letters. When Joe arrived, Joseph gave him a gift of $1,000 for his twenty-fifth birthday and consented to the marriage. His father’s kindness, once again, had the effect of inducing guilt in Joe. As the train left, he looked back at Cap Martin and saw his father’s villa. “It made me realize more keenly than I have realized in all my life under what deep obligation I am to you and how very much at fault I have been in the past in not feeling this obligation,” Joe wrote to his father. “In a way I hated to leave you back there, even now, with the happy prospect that I have before me I feel very selfish in going away.”

  The children gone, Pulitzer once again fiddled with his will. He decided to include a warning along with the ample funds he was planning to leave them. “They should never forget the dangers which unfortunately attend the inheritance of large fortunes, even though the money came from the painstaking affections of a father,” he wrote. “I beg them to remember that such danger lies not only in the obvious temptation to enervating luxury but in the inducement which a fortune coming from another carries to the recipients to withdraw from the wholesome duty of vigorous, serious, useful work.”

  After several more cruises in the Mediterranean, Pulitzer spent the summer in Chatwold and returned to roam Europe in the fall. Roosevelt’s prosecution of the World played its last inning on October 24, 1910, when the government asked the Supreme Court, a majority of whose members had been appointed by Roosevelt and Taft, to overturn the lower court’s decision throwing out the case. James McReynolds, appearing on behalf of the Justice Department, said the government only sought to protect those that were in the federal enclaves where the World had circulated. It didn’t matter, he said, where the paper was printed. Rather, the crime of libel could occur where the paper was read, as well. Justice Holmes and others questioned him at length and pointedly asked if New York’s laws had not been sufficient.

  Pulitzer’s attorney once again presented his elaborate, theatrical history of libel, which now included a long excerpt from Roosevelt’s message to Congress holding it to be a “high national duty” to prosecute Pulitzer. This time Nicoll hammered away at the pernicious nature of Roosevelt’s action. With more than 2,000 federal enclaves, a president could bring simultaneous grand jury proceedings in all parts of the country, financially crippling most newspapers, Nicoll said. “Whenever the President of the United States wished to destroy a newspaper that had offended him by political criticism he would have had only to compel it to match its scanty resources against the vast resources of the United States government.

  “This was the real issue involved in the Roosevelt proceedings,” Nicoll continued, “and in resisting the claim of Federal jurisdiction the World was fighting to preserve not only its own constitutional rights but the constitutional rights of every newspaper published in the United States.”

  Ten weeks later, on January 3, 1911, the court ruled unanimously in favor of the World. It concluded that the federal government had no right to prosecute the case. Reading the decision from the bench, Chief Justice White said the federal government could not claim that just because a newspaper circulated on its property it could pursue a federal libel case, especially when ample state remedies existed. He placed the decision on the desk before him. “It would be impossible to sustain this prosecution without overthrowing the very State law by the authority of which the prosecution can be alone maintained,” White said.

  In short, Roosevelt’s stubborn refusal to listen to Stimson and his insistence on pursuing Pulitzer using federal powers had fatally flawed his effort from the start. By challenging a well-accepted division of prosecutorial power between the states and the national government, Roosevelt missed his mark.

  Pulitzer got word of the Supreme Court’s decision in Cap Martin. It was one of the sweetest victories of his life. Though the Supreme Court’s ruling was narrow, covering only a jurisdictional issue, Pulitzer believed he had rebuffed a wider assault on the nation’s independent press. He left it to Frank Cobb to put this into words. The Court’s action, Cobb wrote, meant that “freedom of the press does not exist at the whim or pleasure of the United States. It is the most sweeping victory won for freedom of speech and of the press in this coun
try since the American people destroyed the Federalist Party more than a century ago for enacting the infamous sedition law.” Pulitzer’s vanquished foe was speechless. “I have nothing to say,” Roosevelt told a reporter for the World who took a train out to Oyster Bay.

  The pleasure of the victory, however, was muted by other news from New York. On January 23, 1911, Pulitzer’s onetime journalistic heir apparent, David Graham Phillips, was walking toward the Princeton Club in New York City to pick up his mail. Almost a decade had elapsed since he had worked for Pulitzer. In the intervening years he had established himself both as a successful author of socially conscious fiction and as a leading muckraking journalist. In fact, when Theodore Roosevelt in a speech coined the term “muckraking” to disparage the work of reform-minded writers, he had Phillips in mind. As Phillips neared the club, a well-dressed young man approached him.

  “There you go,” said the man, as he pulled out a .32 caliber automatic pistol and opened fire, sending six bullets into Phillips.

  “Here I go,” he said, firing a final round into his own head. The deranged assailant, the son of a prominent family in Washington, D.C., believed that his family, and especially his sister, had been defamed in Phillips’s books. A policeman rushed over from the park and three of Phillips friends came bounding out from the club.

  “Graham, what happened?” asked the first friend to reach Phillips.

  “He shot me in the bowels,” Phillips replied, referring to the dead assailant lying on the pavement. “Don’t bother with him. For God’s sakes get a doctor.”

  An ambulance rushed Phillips to the hospital. At first the doctors believed he would recover from his wounds, but the hemorrhaging could not be stopped. The following evening, Phillips declined rapidly. “I could have won against two bullets, but not against six,” Phillips murmured a few minutes before dying at eleven-thirty that night.

  Funeral services were held two days later at St. George’s Episcopal Church, at East Seventeenth Street and Stuyvesant Place. Many of Phillips’s former colleagues from the World packed into the church, along with admirers of the writer. Even if it had not been for Pulitzer’s aversion to funerals, this was one for which distance was a legitimate excuse—not to mention that Pulitzer was beset by an increasing number of ailments. “I have been extraordinarily tired, fatigued and exhausted ever since you left,” he wrote to Ralph in early March. “I am not fit for business, cannot attend to it in a perpetual state of headaches and pains.” A cure in Wiesbaden brought no relief. In May, Pulitzer’s men told Kate that though Joseph’s blood sugar was down from a dangerous level, his nerves were shot and he was plagued with continual indigestion.

  One of Pulitzer’s many doctors reviewed medications with him. He urged his patient to take Veronal, a relatively new sedative. “It induces a thoroughly normal sleep and, for most people, causes absolutely no side effects,” he told Pulitzer. “Even over the course of multiple years, Veronal taken in doses of 8–12 grains is totally harmless, and the fear of Veronal poisoning wholly unfounded.” However, patients built up tolerance to this drug and required increasingly higher dosages. Several years later, experts would warn patients of its dangerous side effects. “Veronal must be ranked among the treacherous somnifacients,” reported one of the main medical manuals. “The number of serious and fatal cases of poisoning is so large that great care should be employed in its use.” Neither Pulitzer nor his doctor knew this when he began taking the drug.

  In the summer of 1911, Republicans nervously faced the prospect that Theodore Roosevelt would challenge President Taft’s renomination, and Democrats were stirred by the belief that Taft could be defeated. Presidential elections could still ignite Pulitzer’s passion, and he sailed home to confer with his editorial page writers. Pulitzer’s interest in “the Page,” as it was called, remained strong, although he was becoming uninterested in the operation of the paper. As he told one correspondent that spring, “My whole aim and end in life is to know nothing of the affairs of the World.”

  Pulitzer and Cobb met on board the Liberty off the shore of New York at the end of June. Pulitzer wanted the World to promote Woodrow Wilson for the presidency. With the backing of the World, Wilson had become governor of New Jersey after serving as president of Princeton University. But Pulitzer worried that Wilson’s attacks on the money trust were a revival of Bryanism, which Pulitzer feared could doom his chances. Cobb disagreed but consented to follow Pulitzer’s instructions to publicly chastise Wilson. “Remember I have the highest respect and regard for him,” Pulitzer told Cobb. “This man is a great artist, a great genius, but he is leading himself astray and should be brought back to his senses. This should be done kindly and sympathetically and as a friend and admirer.”

  Concluding his meeting with Cobb, Pulitzer picked up his family in New York—all except Joe and Elinor, who were traveling by train from St. Louis—and sailed north to spend the summer in Bar Harbor. Chatwold was at its best. After years of remodeling, the summer mansion at last provided the quiet refuge for which Pulitzer yearned. He slept in the upper floors of his unconventional, eccentric “tower of silence.” He could swim in a pool of heated seawater in the basement and spend his days on a large veranda facing the ocean. Whereas Joseph craved solitude, Kate and their daughters thrived on the summer social whirl, which as the New York Times predicted, “will decidedly outshine that of 1910 in every way.”

  Joseph spent time with his family at intervals. On most days he ate lunch or dinner with Kate, one of their daughters, or Herbert, and a secretary, at a table set for four in the magnificent main floor library. Visits with Ralph and Joe were mostly confined to boat rides. Joseph was exhausted by the contact with the family. “The intensity of his family emotions was such,” noted Alleyne Ireland, Pulitzer’s newest secretary, “that they could only be given rein at the price of sleepless nights, savage pain, and desperate weariness.” Nonetheless, he remained intensely curious about his children. “Everybody had to be described over and over again, but especially young Master Ralph, a bright and handsome child, born long after his grandfather had become totally blind,” Ireland said.

  Joseph’s favorite indulgence was a ride on his large electric launch boat. He would sit in an armchair at the center of the vessel, with two companions nearby, as the boat navigated the calm waters of Frenchman Bay. In early August, Clark B. Firestone, recently hired at the World, joined Pulitzer for one of the rides, and for his requisite education as an editorial writer at the hands of the master. As the men rode about, Pulitzer began, as always, with his belief that independence was a paper’s most valuable attribute. No political, financial, social, or personal influence could be brought to bear on the World’s editorial positions. He warned Firestone, who only recently had been hired away from the Evening Mail, that he should not let any friendship influence his editorials, now that he was a writer for the World. “I wish,” Pulitzer said, “that these writers would realize far more fully than they do the immense asset of their independence and exercise to the full their right to say anything they please, fearless of naught save overstatement and untruth.”

  Next to independence, the most important criterion was that the editorials should be readable, Pulitzer said. To succeed in this regard, they should be on a theme of popular interest, be free of unfamiliar terms and phrases, and be trimmed to the tightest possible construction. Pulitzer recalled that when Cobb came to the paper after working in Detroit, he believed that the leading editorial should run as long as half a column. Pulitzer rapidly disabused him of that idea. In order to win Cobb over to a more terse style, Pulitzer told Firestone, he summoned as “gems of compact and telling expressions” the ten- to twelve-line editorials the Sun used to publish.

  The point, Pulitzer said, was to make an impression on the readers that they could not shake off. “Every day The World should contain some striking utterance, something out of the ordinary, something so independent that no other newspaper could print it; something unexpected an
d yet of the sort to capture the reader’s conviction.

  “I dislike the word ‘sensational’ and never use it, but I want striking things to appear on the editorial page. Of course, it cannot compete with the news columns in effects of novelty, but can approach them.”

  Pulitzer concluded his lesson with a reminder to use humor. “He urged me to exploit all my latent possibilities in the line of sarcasm and satire,” Firestone said. Before they parted, Pulitzer promised that he would never ask Firestone to write an editorial on a position he opposed. Better that certain opinions of his own not be published, Pulitzer added, than that they might appear through the medium of a writer who did not honestly share them.

  After a full summer in Chatwold, Pulitzer was no better than he had been when he sailed back from Europe in June. “I have dreadful headaches, dyspepsia, nearly everything bad, sleep horribly and on brink of collapse,” he wired to Ralph in September. As the leaves turned and the fall winds heralded the oncoming winter, Pulitzer abandoned his much-loved Maine retreat for New York. That made matters worse. In the eight years since the house on East Seventy-Third Street was built, it had defied all the work by architects and experts, and all the money spent, to make it soundproof. The failure was not for lack of effort. When the house was first built, Pulitzer’s personal staff took turns sleeping in his bedroom. George Ledlie reached a point where he wasn’t sure if he might be imaging sounds.

  Wallace C. Sabine, a renowned professor of acoustical engineering at Harvard, was enlisted. It was decided to build a new, almost windowless bedroom off the back of the house, using the firm of Foster, Gade, and Graham. When this room was completed, the contractor and Pulitzer’s aide Arthur Billings closed themselves off in it while half a dozen assistants banged on pipes in the basement and around the swimming pool as well as on rooftop vents while others ran the elevators up and down. “Foster is satisfied and so am I,” Billings reported to Pulitzer, “although the final success can only be assured after your acute hearing has put the room to a test.” It failed.