Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  No one on the staff in New York knew anything about Pulitzer’s intentions until one day in July when Jones walked into the Pulitzer Building and presented himself to Carvalho and Don Carlos Seitz, a rising business manager. The well-dressed man with oversize sideburns and a portentous manner handed them a blue envelope of the kind that usually held Pulitzer’s correspondence. When Carvalho and Seitz opened it, they were incredulous. Jones was to have complete dominion over the paper.

  “The astonishment of the shop was not at the colonel,” Seitz said, “but at the wide scope seemingly given a man with no knowledge of the field, and Mr. Pulitzer’s disregard of those who had done much to hold the paper together successfully.” Carvalho, in particular, was bewildered. Until this moment he had considered himself Pulitzer’s top lieutenant. He learned, as Cockerill and Turner had before him, that while Pulitzer’s personal loyalty ran deep, it counted for little in his business affairs.

  “It was soon manifest that the new man would not do,” Seitz said. The disempowered Carvalho wanted to leave but did not want to go to a lesser paper than the World, which still had no equal in New York. Harvey, who had recovered from his pneumonia, went to Bar Harbor and submitted his resignation. Pulitzer was puzzled. He could not understand why anyone would want to leave the World. “It seems to me strange, indeed, considering all that I have tried to do, that you should not be on the paper; and most strange that you should have no feelings of regret at the termination of relations, which to me at least, were extremely sympathetic and interesting,” he wrote to Harvey.

  Amid the managerial confusion under the dome in New York, Pulitzer’s promise that Phillips’s articles would carry a byline had not been kept. The London correspondent was annoyed that his hard work, including a major scoop in which he had beaten British newspapers, was unnoticed. Without a byline, he complained to Pulitzer, a correspondent’s work is lost in the pages of varied and confusing foreign items. “He may have had an excellent reputation as a newspaper man before he left New York but he is soon forgotten.”

  Pulitzer was unconvinced. He sent Phillips a polite note suggesting that his work might not yet be up to a standard that merited a byline. “The management of the Sun and the Herald have formed a rather more favorable opinion,” Phillips snapped back. “And you will permit me the hope that perhaps you would have shared that better opinion had you had the time to spare to read it.” Phillips then grabbed another sheet of paper, wrote out his resignation, and posted it to Jones in New York.

  Phillips consented to remain in London until his replacement arrived. Ballard Smith, who thought he was no longer working for the World and was idly vacationing, suddenly received orders from Pulitzer to head for London as the World’s new correspondent. “Well, I suppose it’s the same old story,” said Smith to Phillips upon disembarking.

  “What story?” asked Phillips

  “Bad faith and broken promises.”

  But when he returned to the United States, Phillips accepted Pulitzer’s offer to stay on the World. This proved a wise decision on his part. In New York, he won his long-sought byline and gained considerable attention for his work, as well as praise from Pulitzer. He also gathered material for a novel that he was writing at night. The World, and especially Pulitzer, provided an abundance of raw material.

  Leaving the paper under Jones’s shaky rule, Pulitzer returned to Europe. His travels had become a permanent feature of his life. He could easily afford the best accommodations. He was now listed as the twenty-fourth-richest American alive. But hotels, even the best, no longer sufficed. His sensitivity to noise had grown so severe that his wrath would descend on any staffer who made the mistake of taking lodging on a cobblestone street. “The entourage came at times to be skeptical about Mr. Pulitzer’s sensitiveness to noise but rarely dared to experiment,” Seitz said. “This desire for silence became almost a mania.”

  Because blind people depend more on their other senses, they tend to listen with greater discrimination. But, contrary to common belief, they do not necessarily develop more acute hearing to compensate for their infirmity, with the possible exception of those who go blind at a very young age. The source of Pulitzer’s acousticophobia, and his later sensitivity to odors, was a symptom of a much larger problem. He was so beset with anxiety that it was taking a physical toll.

  Pulitzer suffered from what later experts would call hyperesthesia, which in his case, was brought on by generalized anxiety disorder, a psychological condition in which a person is haunted by long-lasting anxieties that are not focused on any particular thing. This was a genuine distress for Pulitzer, not hypochondriacal. No one knows the cause. Some people believe it relates to naturally occurring chemicals in the brain; others think it may stem from life situations; and yet others subscribe to a theory that an event in combination with certain natural and environmental conditions may trigger the disorder. In Pulitzer’s case it was likely that the trauma of becoming blind brought on the extreme anxieties and accompanying phobias. In fact, his symptoms manifested themselves only after he began to lose his vision. His condition, in any case, complicated the search for suitable accommodations when he was traveling. “Three or four rooms will never do,” Pulitzer said. “I must have all the rooms above me or below me vacant, and as I usually have three to four gentlemen with me, a house with a dozen rooms would be more desirable.” He needed a full-time advance man.

  “It is all very well to think about paying a salary to a man who will find a quiet hotel or rooms,” one Pulitzer man wrote to another, “but no-one who is not intimately acquainted personally with Mr. Pulitzer’s wants could not possibly set out on such an expedition with the slightest hope of success.” In the end, the man best suited for the job was close by. John Dillon’s personal assistant turned out to be perfect. About thirty, and educated at Phillips Exeter and Harvard, George H. Ledlie possessed all the skills, social training, and taste to be the scent hound for the wandering Pulitzer party. He began what would be a decades-long search for the Holy Grail—a place where his boss could find rest and repose.

  As if his own health weren’t enough of a distraction, Pulitzer also fretted about that of his children. In particular, Ralph remained a constant worry. Ever since he was a baby, his asthma had been a source of concern. Like father, like son—Ralph also developed other woes. Pulitzer sent the boy off to Birmingham General Hospital in England for a complete examination. The British doctors reported that Ralph, who was then fourteen, had a weak lung and was prone to tuberculosis. They prescribed rest at high altitude, and Ralph was promptly sent off to St. Moritz.

  The older Pulitzer children, accustomed to long stretches of separation, began corresponding with each other, creating a family among themselves in the absence of their parents. Ralph, alone in St. Moritz, wrote to Lucille, who was a year younger. He described one of the rare joys in his solitary life in the Swiss Alps. He had been allowed to begin studying Greek and abandon his pursuit of Latin, which he hated. “I never imagined a language capable of such filthy, beastly rules and contradictions,” he told Lucille. “If it is really a dead language, it must be baking freely in purgatory for its sins in the way of murder of youths.”

  All winter Joseph drifted around Europe. He visited Ralph in St. Moritz and told Kate that he had found the boy much improved. “The outdoor and sporting life of St. Moritz had done that.” But he kept from Kate that he was sending Hosmer all the way to Colorado to look for another place for Ralph. Joseph’s mood was turning sour again. It corresponded “with the dark cloudy raining dismal weather outside,” he wrote to Kate from Pfäfers-Bad in Ragatz.

  In New York, the World continued to suffer under Jones’s incompetent rule. Not only were long-serving editors chafing under him, but he was sacrilegiously seeking to use the paper to support free silver, in contradiction to Pulitzer’s well-established opposition. Distracted by his own problems, Pulitzer did nothing. Only when his friend Chauncey Depew was ill-treated in the paper did he interfere. “I
have knocked the perpetrators down with a little cable club,” Pulitzer wrote to Depew, “and hope there will be no further lunacies in this line.”

  But there were to be others.

  Jones’s ineptitude at the World had consequences beyond the bruised feelings of some staffers. He had begun ruining the editorial page, Pulitzer’s prized domain, with incoherent and, worse, populist screeds on the financial panic of 1893. Pulitzer’s mistake in selecting Jones grew into a public embarrassment noted as far away as Atlanta. “The World was published before Mr. Pulitzer lifted Jones out of the hole into which the St. Louis Republic dropped him,” said the Atlanta Constitution. “It was not only published, but had an editorial page—and a much better one than Jones has been able to give it…. Soon there will be nothing left of the World’s editorial page but an effulgent circulation statement and Jones’s whiskers.”

  With the problem of Jones weighing heavily on his mind, Pulitzer returned to New York at the beginning of the summer in 1894 in the company of Arthur Brisbane, the son of a wealthy, noted reformer, socialist, and advocate of communal living. The younger Brisbane had turned to newspaper work when he was eighteen, landing a job on Dana’s Sun. In 1890, at the age of twenty-six, he came to work at the World. Erudite and accomplished—he had already been a London correspondent—Brisbane possessed maturity and sophistication beyond his years. As he had done with other men of promise, Pulitzer sought to personally groom Brisbane and had brought him to Europe for the past winter.

  Unlike the coterie of pliant secretaries who surrounded Pulitzer, Brisbane stood up to him and even teased him. Staying with Pulitzer in Paris, Brisbane had persuaded him to remove the mattresses that blocked the bedroom window, to take longer drives, to resume horseback riding, and to alter some of his eating habits. The two rode horses, read, and played chess and—sometimes for money—cards. Pulitzer had little interest in gambling, but he enjoyed cards and the accompanying conversation. Because of his almost complete lack of sight, the men played with specially designed cards twice the size of those in an ordinary deck. One time, this gave Brisbane an opportunity to get a leg up on his boss. Pulitzer required that many lamps be placed behind him so that he could make out the cards, and Brisbane found that he could see through the cards in Pulitzer’s hand. He then pretended that he had discerned the strength of Pulitzer’s hand through the tone of his voice, completely confounding him.

  Upon arriving in New York, Brisbane returned to the paper, and Pulitzer immediately repaired to Chatwold, which he had recently purchased after renting it for two years. Kate and the children arrived soon afterward. The family remained in Bar Harbor until early fall. It was an election year, so a continuous stream of editors came to confer with Pulitzer, and politicians arrived in hopes of having his blessings conferred upon them.

  Senator David Hill of New York, who had been nominated to run for governor again, wanted the World’s backing despite having allied himself with Dana’s Sun in the presidential contest two years earlier. He summoned George McClellan, who was the son of the controversial General Brinton McClellan and who would later become mayor of New York. “George, I want you to take the first train to Bar Harbor,” said Hill. “When you get there, see Pulitzer and tell him that if he will agree to support me, I will agree to remove Brockway as soon as I am inaugurated.” The prize Hill was offering, Zebulon Reed Brockway, managed the state reformatory in Elmira and was the target of an investigation by the World for alleged abuse of the inmates.

  The following morning McClellan presented himself at Chatwold. He told Ponsonby he had come with a message from Senator Hill. A few minutes elapsed and Pulitzer entered the room, leaning on Ponsonby’s arm. Though McClellan had once worked at the World, this was the first time he had ever seen Pulitzer. “In appearance he was very like the newspaper caricatures of him,” he thought.

  Pulitzer asked Ponsonby to get some cigars and cursed him when he returned with the wrong ones—a treatment which Ponsonby had become used to. At last, McClellan was given a chance to deliver Hill’s message as instructed. Even if he lost the election, McClellan continued, Hill would make sure the new governor would carry out his pledge to fire Brockway.

  “I am surprised that Hill should make me such a proposition,” said Pulitzer. “He knows that I am not for sale, nor is the World for sale.” McClellan protested that Hill had nothing like that in mind. Rather, it was only suggested as a “friendly little arrangement.” Pulitzer admitted he was eager to be rid of Brockway and conceded that he had always liked Hill. “You can tell him that I never make a political bargain. At the same time, if he agrees that Brockway shall go, I agree to support the Democratic ticket,” said Pulitzer, adding with a grin, “Understand this is not a bargain, just a friendly little arrangement.”

  Auspiciously, that summer, a horse named Pulitzer was paying off handsomely at racetracks in New York. But in the 1894 political races, the publisher Pulitzer was not as fortunate. Another financial downturn spurring foreclosures, the embarrassment of begging New York bankers for loans to maintain the government’s gold reserves, and the growing free-silver movement sapped the Democrats’ strength. In November, the Democratic Party went down to defeat nationally as well as in New York, despite the World’s efforts. Brockway kept his job.

  As the weather turned cold in Maine, the Pulitzers decamped and moved into a mansion on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, for a month, before returning to New York City.

  The election over, Pulitzer finally turned to the problem of Jones at the paper. It would not be easy to fix. Normally, Pulitzer moved his editors around like pieces on a chessboard and considered them as expendable as pawns. But in his desperate quest for managerial peace, he had foolishly given Jones an ironclad contract specifying both his remuneration and his powers. The cure had proved worse than the ailment.

  On his return, Pulitzer met with Jones at the house on Fifty-Fifth Street. Jones may have been ill-suited to run the World, but he was no fool. He knew he had the upper hand. He told Pulitzer he would quit the paper on two conditions: he must be given absolute control of the Post-Dispatch, and must be allowed to purchase a majority stake in it. Seeing no other way to be rid of Jones in New York, Pulitzer agreed and ordered that a contract be drawn up and sent to Jekyll Island, where he was heading. Fourteen servants worked feverishly to ready a two-story stone “cottage” on Jekyll Island. In an act of kindness, Kate consented to accompany him despite her dislike of the island’s isolation, heat, and sand flies. By New Year’s Day 1895, the couple, several of their children, and a carload of guns, fishing rods, and traps reached the island.

  Jones’s contract followed Pulitzer to Jekyll Island. The first draft was absurd. Under its terms, Pulitzer would pay for Jones’s shares of the Post-Dispatch. Pulitzer was desperate but not mad. For several weeks, the contract traveled back and forth between Jekyll Island and New York until it was finally agreed that Jones would be president, editor, and manager and could own as much stock as he could afford. With a signed contract in his pocket, Jones headed to St. Louis, and Pulitzer, as well as the World’s staff, thought he was rid of a nightmare.

  For Pulitzer, Jekyll Island’s main attraction was complete privacy. When a reporter from Atlanta asked at the clubhouse if he could see Pulitzer, the manager replied, “That is impossible. Mr. Pulitzer has left instructions that no one save the members of his newspaper family is to be allowed near him.” Just as the reporter prepared to beat a retreat, Pulitzer entered the room on the arm of one of his secretaries, heading out for a walk. “Oh yes, I am always glad to see newspaper men,” Pulitzer said. “That brotherhood which is formed between those who have had to run an item down is as strong as any formed in any other calling.”

  The three men went out to the steps of the clubhouse, where Pulitzer submitted to a short interview, enjoying a chance to express his frustration with President Cleveland. “Men of all political views voted for him, believing that above all issues would stand the one great and o
verpowering fact of good government,” said Pulitzer. “He has disappointed their expectations and failed in every hope.”

  Good government, Pulitzer predicted, would be the decisive issue in the 1896 election. “The great issue before the people at all times is not silver, or gold, or the tariff, though they are all important relatively.” He was wrong. As he talked with the reporter, William Jennings Bryan, an unknown U.S. representative leaving office and barely old enough to run for president, was beginning a national speaking tour on behalf of free silver. In sixteen months, Bryan would remake the American political landscape.

  Even when he was at his best, Joseph made their marriage an ordeal for Kate. If he was not consumed by work, he was haunted by sickness, real and imagined. As his worries about work and his fears for his health mounted, so did his notorious temper and impatience. From a practical point of view, the connubial disharmony had been resolved by an almost continuous separation since the onset of his blindness. Joseph wandered the globe in the company of secretaries, doctors, and valets, while Kate led a busy social life in Paris, London, and New York.

  One of the few witnesses to their turbulent domestic life was Felix Webber, a Briton who had a short, unhappy tenure as Pulitzer’s secretary. He found Pulitzer an insufferable boss. “He is such an ill-mannered surly brute and keeps throwing in one’s teeth that he is paying one for all one does for him—and he is evidently quite determined to get his money’s worth out of one,” Webber wrote to his sister after taking the post. Bitter and angry, he became the only secretary willing to break the code of silence adhered to by the other men who served as personal aides to Pulitzer.

  In December 1894, the Pulitzers’ eldest daughter, Lucille, who was then fourteen, required a small, modest operation on her throat. Unfortunately, the wound did not heal properly, and more work had to be done. Kate was distraught and remained by Lucille’s side throughout the ordeal. Although he was in New York, Joseph did not even consent to visit Lucille while she was recuperating in her room. One night at dinner, Kate asked why he was shunning his daughter. Did he not pity her?