Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  By August the Pulitzers were back in New York. They stayed only briefly, though long enough for Pulitzer to consider yet another proposal to buy a paper. He had given up on acquiring a London newspaper, but he listened attentively to a pitch from William Henry Smith, the AP’s director, to acquire the Chicago Times. After all, Smith had been one of the men who had guided him to buy the World. But reason again prevailed, and Pulitzer declined the opportunity.

  Abandoning business and the heat, the Pulitzers spent the remainder of the summer in Lenox, where they rented one of the town’s many mansions, referred to by the wealthy as “cottages.” Despite the fresh country air, their daughter Lucille fell gravely ill. Three years after losing one daughter, Joseph and Kate faced the horrible possibility again. Joseph was convinced that the plumbing was the culprit, as he had been at their Fifth Avenue house. This time, he may not have been wrong. After Lucille recovered, two doctors discovered that the pipes leading to the cesspool were not properly installed and permitted gases to work their way into the bathroom Lucille had used.

  The Pulitzers returned to New York, in time for Joseph to witness, from the officiating yacht, the final race of the 1887 defense of America’s Cup. The race had become immensely popular. In fact, during the prior year’s race, the World had mounted movable miniature yachts on a track across the first floor of its building. As dispatches arrived by telegram every ten minutes, the yachts were drawn across the painted scene by hidden strings. The display attracted crowds so immense that all traffic was blocked from Park Row from morning until night.

  Pulitzer finally ended his family’s migration from rented house to rented house. He purchased a mansion at 10 East Fifty-Fifth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, from the banker Charles Barney, brother-in-law of Pulitzer’s friend Whitney. The house was almost new and had been designed by McKim, Mead, and White, architects to the rich and famous such as the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and other plutocrats who were madly building châteaus on Fifth Avenue. The targets of the World’s editorial venom would now be Pulitzer’s neighbors.

  It was, indeed, quite a neighborhood. A few blocks to the south, William Henry Vanderbilt had bought an entire block and built enormous brownstone houses for his family and two married daughters. His sons soon built their own mansions nearby. Henry Villard, who had taken Pulitzer across the country four years earlier to witness the completion of his cross-country railroad, erected an even more enormous palace comprising six linked brownstones with a courtyard in the center. Also designed by McKim, Mead, and White, the palazzo-like structure consumed a ton of coal a day for heating.

  Only in comparison with his neighbors’ houses did Pulitzer’s $200,000 manor seem modest. Broad stairs led up from the street to a carved stone entrance that opened into a large hall with a winding staircase. Four stories tall, constructed of stone and brick, the house had large, high-ceilinged rooms for entertainment on the first floor, including a magnificent oak-paneled dining room; bedrooms on the second and third floors; and servants’ quarters on the fourth floor. In the rear was an attached conservatory.

  While negotiating for the house, Pulitzer asked his lawyers to persuade the mortgage holders to let him own it outright. Money was no longer an issue. In addition to the political power and the prominence the World gave him, the paper was making Pulitzer very rich. His annual income alone now dwarfed the entire fortune he had gambled on acquiring the World four years earlier.

  He invested in stocks, paid $185,000 in cash for additional buildings for the paper, and indulged in any luxury he fancied. He toyed with the idea of acquiring a $75,000 yacht, purchased paintings from Parisian and New York art dealers, and ordered 2,000 bottles of French claret from a wine merchant for $25,000. Pulitzer’s taste in cigars and wine grew with his income. He stocked his house with Havana cigars and his wine cellar with Château d’Yquem and Château le Crock, among other vintages. His willingness to spend encouraged Tiffany’s to put him on a list that offered buyers an early peek at its new line of jewels; and Goupil’s Picture Gallery brought paintings to his house for his consideration.

  Pulitzer developed a preference for working at home. He had a telephone with a direct line to the office installed so that he could summon editors and business managers for meetings. He rarely left for the office before noon. Reaching the World, he would make his way through each department before settling in at his editorial offices. By six, he would be on his way home. On nights when there was a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House, Joseph and Kate could be found in their box, one of the best in the house. Going to the opera, particularly to hear German works, ranked as Joseph’s favorite pastime. He rarely missed a performance, and he would whistle operatic airs after hearing them but once. The evening invariably closed with a protracted telephone consultation with the night editors at the paper.

  Money bought the Pulitzers more than acquisitions and leisure pursuits. It gave them access to New York’s elite society. By day, Joseph may have sparred with the city’s rich, but by night he dined with them. New York society began to see a lot of the Pulitzers. Sometimes they were accompanied by the socially well-connected editor Ballard Smith and his wife. The Pulitzers even received an invitation to the prestigious Patriarch Ball in December 1885. This dance was organized by Ward McAllister, a social arbiter who was famous for his list of New York’s 400 most elite families. He had also initiated the Patriarchs, a group of heads of prominent families who made a vain attempt to create a social designation that could not be bought. They saw themselves as the last stand of manners and breeding.

  The ball was held at Delmonico’s on Fifth Avenue. The ballroom was splendidly decorated with flowers and greenery from Charles Klunder, whose plants decked the tables of society. Hidden by banks of flowers, electric lights, still considered a novelty, illuminated the room. The Pulitzers arrived at eleven that evening. Mrs. Astor, the queen of New York society, presided over the soiree, and J. Pierpont Morgan was installed as a Patriarch. Punctually at midnight, two Patriarchs led the couples in the german (a cotillion) before the group retired downstairs for terrapin, canvasback duck, and pâté de foie gras.

  The Pulitzers’ rising status gave Kate a chance to charm the Fifth Avenue crowd with her graciousness. She served as a social tour guide when her distant cousin Winnie Davis—the youngest daughter of Jefferson Davis, known as the “daughter of the Confederacy”—came to New York. Dressed in a satin gown trimmed with ostrich feathers and crystal pendants, Kate caught the eye of one society columnist. “Her manner is cordial and fascinating,” the journalist wrote. “She has large black eyes fringed with long lashes, a brilliant color, perfect teeth, lovely white sloping shoulders, a head well poised and coils of dark brown hair.”

  When the Hungarian painter Mihály Munkácsy came to New York the winter before, Pulitzer had given one dinner party in the artist’s honor at Delmonico’s and a second at home. The guests at both included financial luminaries such as sugar trust attorney John E. Parsons, the businessman Cyrus W. Field, and assorted wealthy politicians and statesmen such as Chauncey Depew, William Evarts, and Levi P. Morton—the same three who were among the figures in the cartoon “Belshazzar’s Feast” that Pulitzer published during Blaine’s campaign.

  In particular, Joseph enjoyed the company of August Belmont and Leonard Jerome, who dined with the Pulitzers on both evenings. Belmont and Jerome were doyens of the city’s new rich, and they loved to compete ostentatiously with each other. After the ladies at one of Jerome’s dinner parties found gold bracelets in their napkins, Belmont folded platinum bracelets in the napkins at his dinner party. Friendship with such men was seemingly incongruous for the publisher of the nation’s leading democratic sheet, which daily proselytized for the virtues of egalitarianism. But Pulitzer did not object to wealth. In fact, he coveted it. However, the kind of wealth mattered. Inherited fortunes were a social evil for Pulitzer; but earned wealth was not, even if it was tinged by illicit gains or exploitive profits.

 
“J.P. always cherished in his heart a sincere if unacknowledged veneration for rank and family,” said the cartoonist McDougall, who spent many long hours with Pulitzer. “This was probably atavistic, coming as he did from a land where rank meant all that is desirable but, to a peasant, unattainable. He showed this feeling by an exaggerated contempt for persons of wealth and standing, yet the truth is that he was moved by quite different feelings, a strong hunger for wealth, luxury, power, predominating over all other emotions.”

  Pulitzer did not simply socialize with those he pilloried in the pages of the World; he also became their financial partner. He joined William Rockefeller, William Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, and others in creating a club on Jekyll Island* off the Georgia coast as a private preserve where the nation’s richest and most powerful men could hunt, fish, ride, and socialize in complete privacy.

  Despite distaste for his brand of journalism in many quarters of polite society, the gatekeepers could no more close the doors to Pulitzer than they could to other nouveaux riches. The time had passed when Wall Street speculators, industrial titans, and even Democratic politicians could be excluded. In New York—unlike Boston, where the Brahmins had deep roots—money was in the ascendant. But though his wealth gained him a passport to the domain of New York’s plutocracy, it did not gain him genuine acceptance. In the eyes of many he remained, as he was born, a Jew.

  Up until now, most of the anti-Semitism Pulitzer had faced from gentiles in New York had been coated with a veneer of politeness. German Jews, among whom Pulitzer would have been placed, incurred only mild ostracism. Pulitzer’s friend Belmont, a Jew who had converted and changed his name from Schönberg, traveled in all but the most exclusive of New York’s circles. But when a tidal wave of Russian Jews flooded New York, the accepting spirit among the elite faded. The Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs barred the Jewish banker Joseph Seligman; the Union Club closed its doors to Jews (even though many were among its founders); and Anna Morton began to insist that her husband, Levi, be referred to as L. P. Morton. A dormant anti-Semitism among New Yorkers awoke.

  “To decide a bet between two parties will you kindly answer the following,” one reader wrote to the World. “Was the Editor of the New York World born in the country and is he of Jewish extraction.” Pulitzer declined to answer the letter. Despite his Episcopalian wife, his baptized children, and his family’s membership in St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, Pulitzer could not shed his Jewish identity in the eyes of others any more than he could deny his foreign birth. In the public mind there was little doubt about Pulitzer’s ethnicity.

  “In all the multiplicity of Nature’s freaks, running from Albino Negroes to seven-legged calves, there is one curiosity that will always cause the observer to turn and stare. This freak is a red-headed Jew,” began a profile of Pulitzer in the trade publication The Journalist. It described “Jewseph Pulitzer” as “combing his hair with talons,” “rubbing the sores around his eyes,” and remaining in the shadows “in order to escape turning rancid in the hot sun.”

  The author of this barbarous piece was Leander Richardson, an aspiring actor with a beard and a wavy chevron mustache untrimmed at the ends so as to extend wider than his face. Richardson had worked as a gossip columnist for the World under Pulitzer until he was fired for undisclosed reasons in May 1884. He and a partner launched The Journalist, and Richardson used his new post on the widely read trade magazine to seek revenge on Pulitzer.

  “Any man can make money by publishing a newspaper which will defile its columns with dirty advertisements as those of Jewseph Pulitzer’s World are defiled,” wrote Richardson, referring to personal notices that some people believed were illicit coded messages for rendezvous with prostitutes. “A directory of assignation houses and worse, the recognized organ of prostitutes, pimps and janders,” claimed Anthony Comstock, of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. When the fuss over the advertisements faded, Richardson didn’t relax his attacks. “There was never a greater pretender in American journalism,” he said, “than this same Jewseph Pulitzer.”

  Pulitzer banned The Journalist from the office, but the anti-Semitic broadsides against him were not limited to Richardson’s personal vendetta in the trade press. In “New Jerusalem,” as the Los Angeles Times referred to New York City, others among Pulitzer’s competitors adopted Richardson’s methods. Their anger toward the upstart who was winning the circulation war found expression in attacks on Pulitzer for his Jewish origins. Even a man who had once been his mentor joined in.

  The rivalry between Charles Dana and Pulitzer, harsh and vitriolic as it had been during the 1884 election, became bitterly personal in 1887. Since Pulitzer had come to New York, the Sun’s circulation had shrunk at almost the same rate that the World’s had soared. In October, Pulitzer launched the Evening World to compete with the Evening Sun, which Dana had begun publishing in the spring. In his typical fashion, Pulitzer stole one of Dana’s editors, Solomon S. Carvalho, to run the new paper. Carvalho, who had a goatee and was always impeccably dressed, had made a reputation as a reporter with a flair for covering murders and suicides when he had first joined the Sun nine years earlier. He instantly made the one-cent Evening World into an audacious purveyor of titillating and sensational news. Within a few weeks it surpassed the Evening Sun’s circulation.

  The economic insult to Dana was compounded by a political dispute between him and Pulitzer. In the election for district attorney, Pulitzer was backing De Lancey Nicoll, who had prosecuted the corrupt alderman in the trial that produced the death threat against Pulitzer. Tammany Hall, however, would have nothing to do with a man seemingly hell-bent on putting corrupt politicians in jail. So Nicoll deserted the Democratic Party and won the Republican nomination. In the offing was the kind of political fight Pulitzer relished. By not abandoning Nicoll, he could prove his paper’s independence. On the other hand, Dana, who had backed Nicoll, withheld his support now that Nicoll was running as a Republican. Pulitzer, in bellicose prose, demanded an explanation from Dana. He got one.

  “We have withdrawn from our support of Mr. Nicoll because we distrust the World and its motives,” wrote Dana, “and because more than suspicions exist to indicate what these motives are.” The Sun then rehashed the tale of Cockerill’s shooting of Slayback and claimed that Cockerill had avoided a murder charge because the district attorney in St. Louis had been in Pulitzer’s pocket.

  By bringing up this embarrassment, Dana initiated a verbal brawl between the two publishers that rapidly descended into the gutter. Pulitzer called the Sun’s editor “Charles Ananias Dana” and Dana retorted with “Boss Judas Pulitzer” and “Dunghill Cock.” As Nicoll campaigned, probably bewildered by the conduct of the two publishers, the editorial volleys worsened. Pulitzer called Dana a “mendacious blackguard” and Dana said Pulitzer was a “renegade Jew who has denied his breed” and “exudes the venom of a snake and wields the bludgeon of a bully.

  “The Jews of New York have no reason to be ashamed of Judas Pulitzer if he has denied his race and religion,” said Dana. “The insuperable obstacle in the way of his social progress is not the fact that he is a Jew, but in certain offensive personal qualities.” So that no reader was left uncertain, Dana listed them. “His face is repulsive, not because the physiography is Hebraic, but because it is Pulitzeresque…. Cunning, malice, falsehood, treachery, dishonesty, greed, and venal self-abasement have stamped their unmistakable traits.”

  Dana’s words hit their mark, tormenting Pulitzer. “The stings of that human wasp, Dana of the Sun, drove him frantic,” the cartoonist McDougall recalled. Depressed and feeling harassed, Pulitzer would sometimes come to McDougall’s office and lie on an old sofa. In the room was a desk that had been used by Manton Marable when he was editor of the World; it contained bundles of old letters hidden in a cavity. “I used to amuse J.P. by reading some of them to him, and he would in return tell me his troubles and narrate his adventures. I early gathered that he hadn’t the courage of Cock
erill, but as a writer he was as rashly bold as a rhinoceros. He once told me that the fact that Cockerill had killed Slayback had the effect of kindling his sincere admiration and respect at one time and filling him with a chilled repulsion at another.”

  The voters soon had their say. Dana and Pulitzer acted as if their names had been on the ballot. Both of them had also spoken at rallies on behalf of their candidates. Nicoll lost, by a large margin. “And now, Pulitzer, a word with you!” wrote a triumphant Dana. Like a judge reading from a defendant’s criminal record before imposing a sentence, Dana listed scandal, blackmail, and murder among Pulitzer deeds prior to coming to New York. “We wish, Pulitzer, that you had never come.”

  An unpleasant future awaited, Dana promised. “Perhaps your lot will be like that of the mythical unfortunate of the same race you belong to and deny, that weird creation of medieval legend, a creation, by the way, far more prepossessing than you are—we mean, The Wandering Jew!

  “Move on, Pulitzer,” said Dana, “move on!”

  A few days after this bitter defeat at the polls, Pulitzer went to the office to look over the next morning’s editorials. Unlike Dana, he had little to gloat about. In addition to the painful brawl with Dana, the election results had subjected him to personal ridicule. After taking credit for electing a president, a governor, and a mayor, he had failed to get his man elected to the minor post of district attorney.