Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  In a decade, Pulitzer had gone from hiding his last savings of $300 in a trunk to earning more than that amount every hour. With money, the Pulitzers had slipped easily into the society of wealthy American expatriates in Europe. They moved about, from Paris to London to St. Moritz, with an entourage of personal servants and nannies. Kate attended weddings with royalty and wore diamonds said to have once belonged to Marie Antoinette. “And Mrs. Pulitzer has the right to wear them,” said one newspaper. “Thirty years ago her husband was shoveling coal and driving drays, but his indomitable energy and active brain have placed him where he can afford to buy out half a dozen royal families.”

  Pulitzer also increased his philanthropy. In May, he anonymously established a scholarship to send twelve New York City high school students, particularly immigrant children, to college. “My special object is to help the poor—the rich can help themselves,” he told the city’s school superintendent. But Pulitzer did not want the money to simply increase the earning power of its recipients. “College education is not needed for that,” he said. “There are nobler purposes in life, and my hope is not that these scholarships will make better butchers, bakers, brokers, and bank cashiers, but that they will help to make teachers, scholars, physicians, authors, journalists, judges, lawyers, and statesmen.” On the other hand, his friend Chauncey Depew predicted that the recipients would end up still being paupers.

  In the fall, the Pulitzers returned to Paris, where Joe and Edith, who had spent the summer in the care of Kate’s mother and sister in New London, Connecticut, arrived for a short visit. The children found their father preoccupied with the new building for the World. Work had been under way for four months, and in October the cornerstone was scheduled to be laid in an elaborate ceremony. Pulitzer had already spent $630,000 for the land and was now paying out another $1 million for the construction. Not a dime was borrowed.

  Nothing about the project escaped his attention. He examined sketches and descriptions of the sculptures being made for the exterior and lists of all interior furnishings. With his poor eyesight he could discern only the larger drawings, but details were described verbally by Ponsonby. “I want to be sure that no false economy or niggardliness will mar the building inside,” he wrote to Kate’s brother William Davis, who increasingly acted as his emissary. Pulitzer wanted to know if anyone had seen the inside of the new Times building. “You remember the Post contract requires it to be at least as good as that of the Times.”

  On October 10, 1889, onlookers jammed the north end of Park Row as crews prepared to lay the cornerstone of the new Pulitzer building. A platform for the ceremony stood at one corner of the construction site. The intersection in front was covered by a large canopy, under which invited dignitaries gathered, including many admiring colleagues such as George Childes of the Philadelphia Ledger and Charles Taylor of the Boston Globe. Noticeably absent was the publisher himself. Pulitzer remained at the baths in Wiesbaden.

  The first to emerge from the canopy was Thomas Edison, whose electric dynamo, capable of lighting 8,500 incandescent bulbs, was being installed thirty-five feet under the sidewalk. Next, Governor David Hill made his way through the crowd, pausing to shake the hands of workers, some of whom he called by name. Soon the platform was filled with well-known politicians, businessmen, religious leaders, and publishers.

  After a blessing from the Missouri Episcopalian bishop, John Cockerill rose. “I am authorized to pledge a faithful adherence to the principles which have won public confidence for this journal,” he began, listing many of Pulitzer’s principles. “This shall be indeed a temple where the right shall always secure an advocate: where liberty abides, and where justice may find all seasons summer.”

  Chauncey Depew took the stage next, followed by Governor Hill and the aging Samuel Tilden, for whom Pulitzer had campaigned in 1876. They all heaped praise on the World and on Pulitzer’s accomplishments. With the speeches at an end, Cockerill returned to the podium. He told the audience he had a cable from Pulitzer. The crowd quieted and Cockerill began to read from it. “God grant that this structure be the enduring home of a newspaper forever unsatisfied with merely printing news, forever fighting forms of wrong, forever independent—forever advancing in enlightenment and progress, forever wedded to truly democratic ideas, forever aspiring to be a moral force, forever rising to a higher plan of perfection as a public institution.”

  For several minutes Cockerill’s voice carried the words of the absent Pulitzer over the construction site and the audience. When done, the crowd exploded into applause and redoubled its clapping when Cockerill announced that the text had been transcribed onto a parchment and would be placed in the cornerstone.

  Then the crowd’s attention turned to a set of stairs leading up to a platform along a brick wall. In place of Pulitzer, four-year-old Joe, dressed in a sailor suit, began to scale the stairs. His legs were almost too short to reach the steps, but holding his uncle William Davis’s hand, he made his way to the top. Once there, he grasped a silver trowel and, using both hands, smoothed the bed of cement that workers had spread on the wall. He backed away, and the cornerstone was moved into place. Little Joe came forward again, tapped the stone twice with his trowel, and declared, “It is well done.”

  Inside the cornerstone was a copper box made especially for the event. In it, along with the parchment containing Pulitzer’s remarks, the men had placed photographs, copies of newspapers, a directory of the World’s employees, and a recording made on Edison’s newest invention, the wax-cylinder voice recorder. It held the voices of three of the World’s newspapermen discussing the news events of the year, such as the Johnstown flood and the successes of New York City’s baseball club.

  Many of the nation’s newspapers put news of the cornerstone-laying ceremony on their front pages. The New York Times did not—it gave a short write-up on page two—but it was one of the few papers that noticed Pulitzer’s architectural revenge. “The room of Mr. Charles A. Dana in the Sun building overlooks the foundations of the Pulitzer building,” said the Times. “This will not be the case, however, in a few months. Then, like a certain other eminent gentleman, he, too, will sit in the shade.”

  Back again in Paris in November, at the house near Parc Monceau, Pulitzer may have regretted his decision to leave Wiesbaden. The house was in turmoil. Ralph and Lucille were being packed off to St. Moritz with tutors and nannies. Little Joseph, back from his trip to New York, Edith, and Constance were noisily playing. The Confederacy’s daughter, Winnie Davis, had just arrived, and her ill health added to the convalescent atmosphere. Like Pulitzer, she suffered from vision problems and other hard-to-diagnose ailments. Doctors hoped a six months’ stay on the Riviera and in German health resorts would help her. Further complicating matters was Winnie’s secret engagement, after a five-year romance, to a Yankee, the disclosure of which was bound to set off a political storm.

  Every day the sad group would sit down punctually for lunch at one o’clock and for dinner at seven-thirty. On some days, the World’s new editorial writer George Eggleston, whom Joseph had brought over to Paris on an all-expenses-paid trip, would join them. Kate did her best to function under the circumstances. She took Winnie and ten-year-old Ralph to the Paris Opera. “You should have seen the grandeur of that little fellow in his miniature beaver and dress suit!” Winnie wrote to her father. “He opened the box with an air, and altogether behaved like the fine little gentleman he is.” But a few hours after she wrote the letter, her father died. Unable to withstand a sea voyage, Winnie remained with the Pulitzers.

  It looked increasingly likely that Paris might become a long-term home for the family. Already, the two other publishers of major American newspapers were living there. Whitelaw Reid had arrived to begin his service as ambassador, and James Bennett was established in his home on the Champs-Élysées. Kate began looking for a suitable house but had little luck. “She has climbed up stairs, gone poking around stables to no purpose, however, as just as she think
s she has a house tight and fast away, it goes again,” Winnie said.

  Joseph decided to get as far away as possible from the bedlam by planning a trip around the globe. Before losing his vision, he had never remained still. The thought of traveling now, however, made him aware of his growing infirmity and his dependence on others. He needed help to travel by train, stay in hotels, and simply get about. A ship, however, offered him a completely self-contained world on the move.

  He sent detailed and complicated instructions to Davis in New York about which steamers would most effectively carry mail to him on his journey through India, China, and Japan. He also made it clear what he wanted to receive. “You may judge from this simple rule. As many pleasant and agreeable reports as possible. No unnecessary questions for my decisions. Nothing disagreeable or annoying unless of REAL IMPORTANCE.”

  He complained that the “regency” he left in charge of the paper had failed and explained that “you three gentlemen have ample power and discretion to settle any of the ordinary questions that may arise during my absence, and I do not want to have my trip spoilt by ordinary bothers, nor to pay a dollar or two per word for such things.”

  In her role as Florence Nightingale, Kate took Joseph and Winnie to Naples. They were soon joined by Winnie’s American suitor, who arrived in the hope of convincing her that, with her father dead, the time had come to make their engagement public. Ponsonby and others busied themselves with the final arrangements for Joseph’s world tour.

  The planned journey would be a slow-paced imitation of another global circumnavigation under way at the time. The World’s intrepid reporter Nellie Bly had left New York the month before, in an attempt to better the achievement of Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg of Around the World in Eighty Days. Her undertaking, which would soon succeed, was generating immense publicity for the paper.

  In early December, Pulitzer and Ponsonby, along with servants, boarded the Peninsular. In a short time, it crossed the Mediterranean, called at Port Said, then descended the Suez Canal and entered the Red Sea. The protected waters were immensely peaceful. In the hot climate, the men ate their meals often in the company of the financier Charles Fearing under punkahs, swaying ceiling fans of palm fronds or cloth pulled back and forth by a servant.

  Just before Christmas, the ship came into the Gulf of Aden. Under a bright electric light, Pulitzer undertook to write a letter to Kate in his own hand. “Fearing and Ponsonby have written to you all about me,” he said in the letter, which he wrote hurriedly so it could be posted from the port of Aden. “As it suits their fancy to think I am much better or at least to say so be it so. I am certainly no worse than when I came on ship.”

  “He is certainly better,” said Ponsonby in an accompanying letter, “but he is inclined to take a despondent view of his health and pitches to Charles and myself when we try to cheer him up by making light of his complaints and that he has already improved.”

  Crossing the Arabian Sea, the ship encountered even more intense heat. It was New Year’s Day, and Pulitzer was miserable. He couldn’t sleep or shake off the cough he had when he boarded the ship, and he was bothered by what he called his rheumatism. After several more sleepless nights he decided to give up the idea of traveling across India by land and remained aboard the ship, bound for Calcutta. “Of course Fearing is terribly broken up but I am sure that the long RR journey and miserably noisy hotels throughout India would not have been good for me,” he dictated in a letter to Kate. “It was the dream of my boyhood to see India and now when I am actually here, I must give up my dream no matter how great the temptation.”

  His misery was intense. “The year closed, with the one before, represent more suffering than all the rest of my life brought me—ten times as much—I honestly think fifty times as much. And the year which opens with this day—I cannot finish the sentence.” Alone, at sea, he poured out his fear that he would never again regain his health. “Travel will not cure me—no more than Metzger [his German doctor]. I am miserable, I cannot trust myself to write more whatever I feel, however, you are still the only being in this world who fills my heart and mind and hope and receives my love and tenderness and affections.”

  Under the new plan, the men would remain on the ship until Calcutta. There they would change to a series of other vessels that would eventually bring them to Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Japan, and then across the Pacific to San Francisco. But it was not to be. Shortly after mailing his despondent letter to Kate, Pulitzer stood on the deck of the ship with Ponsonby. The bright Indian sun beat down on the two men as they looked out over the water. “How dark it is getting,” remarked Pulitzer.

  His remaining functioning retina had become detached. The darkness had set in.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  DARKNESS

  Although he had plenty of newspaper experience, fifty-nine-year-old George W. Hosmer had never gotten an assignment quite like the one he drew in the summer of 1890. A doctor who never practiced medicine and an attorney who never practiced law, Hosmer had put in almost thirty years with Bennett’s New York Herald before joining the World. None of this, however, prepared him for the task he faced. He was to accompany Kate Pulitzer to Europe and return with her nearly blind, bedridden husband.

  That spring, the stacks of telegrams from Pulitzer that usually greeted editors at their desks ceased. For months the paper had drifted along, cautiously guided by Cockerill, Davis, and Turner. The few telegrams that did come provided little or no direction. “Silence gives consent and when you do not hear from me assume that I am satisfied,” Pulitzer wrote.

  Earlier in the year, when the retina in Pulitzer’s remaining good eye detached while he was on board a ship bound for India, he and Ponsonby had returned to Europe, where doctors recommended more time in dark rooms. The two men drifted to Paris and eventually to St. Moritz. Pulitzer was entirely in Ponsonby’s care, since Kate was no longer in Europe. She and the children had left for the United States shortly after the men had embarked on the ill-fated cruise. She did not rush back across the Atlantic. Kate had learned that the consequences of showing up uninvited could be severe.

  But over the succeeding weeks discouraging reports reached Kate. Ponsonby telegraphed that Joseph had contracted acute bronchitis, a dangerous problem in the era before antibiotics, and was growing weak. Kate decided to launch a rescue mission, and departed with Hosmer in late July. By the time the two reached Joseph, he had been moved to a sanatorium in the Swiss city of Lucerne. They found him so weak that he was spending entire days on the sofa. “He was very ill—in a state so feeble that he could scarcely get around on foot,” Hosmer said. “Physical collapse had assumed the form of nervous prostration.”

  For two weeks, Hosmer and Kate tended him until he was well enough to travel. They went to Paris; after a few more weeks the group moved to a vacation house in Trouville, a summer resort in Normandy. “In the pleasant atmosphere of the seaside,” Hosmer said, “a place which was very quiet—for the gay world was already gone—he recovered from bronchitis and to some degree from his great physical debility.” Joseph regained sufficient strength to listen again to Ponsonby reading telegrams from New York. His new building neared completion, the fall elections loomed, and the Democrats seemed poised for a rebound.

  On October 2, 1890, Kate, Hosmer, and Ponsonby escorted the recovering Joseph onto the Teutonic in Queenstown, England, and headed home. Wearing goggle-like dark-blue glasses, Joseph walked on American soil for the first time in eighteen months.

  Joseph settled into the familiar surroundings of the Fifty-Fifth Street house, which grew more luxurious with each passing month. The architect Stanford White was busily spending thousands of Pulitzer’s dollars employing painters and wall paperers. Silk was hung on the walls in Kate’s room, and a wine cellar was being planned. Joseph also acquainted himself with the unfamiliar. He had not spent any time with his daughter Constance since she was a few months old. Kate resumed her place in New York societ
y, attending the opera and putting on dinners such as one for Varina Davis, who was in New York revising her late husband’s memoirs.

  Soon Pulitzer’s days were filled with meetings, with a steady stream of executives and editors making their way uptown. The men’s appraisal of the coming congressional elections offered encouraging news. The electorate’s faith in President Harrison had been shaken by another economic panic. Support for his Republican Party was also damaged by the profligate spending of the aptly nicknamed “billion-dollar Congress,” and by the passage of the McKinley Tariff Act, which increased the cost of goods but kept workers’ wages stagnant.

  In such circumstances the World would have normally opened a floodgate of editorial abuse of Republicans and praise for Democrats. But for the first time, Pulitzer sought to restrain his paper’s partisan ardor. Its ferocity was not weakened, but the frequency of its attacks was diminished. “Remember every day in the year that though politicians read the editorial page they are probably only 5 percent of our readers,” Pulitzer told his main editorial writer. “A larger portion of the remaining 95 percent not being interested in politics at all.”

  After seven years of unequaled journalistic success and immense financial reward, the political fires burned less strongly in Pulitzer. Like its master, the World was also no longer a startling new phenomenon overturning the rule of establishment newspapers and shaking up the political order. Rather, it was now the undisputed monarch of Park Row, and its reign was made even clearer when the scaffolding was peeled away and New Yorkers had their first complete view of Pulitzer’s new building. Like the newspaper itself, the scale, audacity, and ornamentation of George Post’s creation were impossible to ignore. A monument to Pulitzer’s brand of journalism, the edifice transformed the landscape of Park Row.