Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  “Pity Lucille!” Joseph shouted back, according to Webber, who recorded the moment. “No! I’m the one to pity—has no one any pity for me! Does no one realize what I suffer! My own house turned into a hospital! Doctors coming at all hours! You rushing upstairs in the middle of meals, without a word of conversation for me—no one pities me, and you ask me to pity Lucille!”

  Kate could not bring herself to speak. She was well used to silences, especially at the beginning of the month, when she and Joseph fought over money. This time, however, she gave Webber orders that Joseph not be allowed upstairs. Contrite the following day, Joseph visited Lucille and sent Webber out to buy flowers for his daughter.

  When Joseph had left for Jekyll Island a few weeks later, the household breathed a sigh of relief. “Especially Mrs. P. who got up out of bed as soon as he was gone and received lying in a chaise longue in her boudoir in a vieux rose peignoir and a chinchilla fur rug also lined with vieux rose over her legs and plenty of white frou frou all about her,” Webber said. “She was sighing over a a portrait of J.P. which has just come from Paris painted by [Léon] Bonnat two years ago.”

  “I suppose I ought to hang it in my boudoir, but I won’t,” she told Webber. “Don’t you think that a large photograph is enough for me to have in my boudoir?”

  Kate had certainly tried her best to tolerate Joseph’s outbursts, to tend to his health, and to be with him when he permitted it, aside from the one time when she declined the Mediterranean cruise. But it was a Sisyphean task to please him. Only the year before, Kate, preoccupied with managing the house and children, had let a stretch of time go by without writing to her absent Joseph. “For two weeks you did not write me one word even inquiring whether I was dead or alive,” Joseph wrote to her. “Do you think that was right? You know you have the power to keep me awake, that I chafe and worry and brood over the conduct of yours.

  “Again,” he continued, “after all it is supposed to be the first business of a wife to be interested in the comfort and condition of her husband who is absolutely without family and as helpless as I am.” Then, resurrecting his old complaint, he told Kate she never did what he asked. “You like to emphasize the word ‘order,’ my order, or your order, when you refer to my wishes or when I refer to them, especially a wish that is habitually trampled upon and disregarded. I wish you would not do that because it reminds me how utterly ignored my wishes are.”

  By March, Kate had enough of Jekyll Island—and Joseph—and returned to New York. She may also have had an ulterior motive for leaving. She was having an affair. Pulitzer’s new man, Arthur Brisbane, offered Kate the adoration she could not get from her husband, who was embroiled in his battles with real and doubtful demons of ill health. Only just in her forties, Kate remained an immensely attractive, outgoing, and gregarious woman. She loved parties, culture, and life, while her husband was becoming a recluse.

  Her separation from Joseph made it easier for Kate to take a lover, but discretion remained a necessity. “I do not discuss my actual work, much as I should like to, in these letters, because such discussion would give too clear a key to the authorship of these writings should one of them go wrong,” Brisbane wrote to Kate in 1895, in a letter that he signed only with the initial “H.” Brisbane’s ardor was unmistakable. When they planned a rendezvous between Boston and Bar Harbor, he wrote, “That will be one of the most eagerly anticipated journeys I have ever made.”

  “I could go on writing you for hours, for you are in my mind, and I like even the imitation of talking to you,” he wrote in another letter. “The longer you are away from me, the more I want to see you, and the more real and necessary you seem.

  “What a shame it is that we have not the power of telegraphing ourselves from place to place. We shall have that power sometime. If we had it now, I should send myself by wire instead of sending this letter by mail, et alors, tu sais ce qui t’arriverait.”

  In April or early May, Kate discovered that she was pregnant. But whose child was it? It had been seven years since her last pregnancy and the birth of her sixth child since marrying Joseph. It seemed possible that Joseph was the father now, as Kate might have been on Jekyll Island at the time of conception. However, considering Joseph’s condition and mood, it was unlikely.

  Brisbane allegedly told David Graham Phillips that the child was his. In his clandestine correspondence with Kate, he expressed worries about her health. “Had you taken care of yourself, you would be in good condition now,” he wrote. “You are not good to yourself. I wish you would care as much about your own health and future as you do about mine. It would be a good thing for you and for me.

  “Do be a good sensible girl and take care of yourself. Some of these days we shall have some fun. Keep your health for that.”

  Joseph never doubted that the child was his.

  In May, Pulitzer went for a brief stay in a luxurious manor at Kensington, near London’s Hyde Park. But peacocks summering in the adjacent park made such a racket with their nighttime mating screeches that Pulitzer was soon on his way back to the United States. It was as if everything conspired to wreck his life just as he reached his zenith. On board the Teutonic, Pulitzer wrote to Thomas Davidson, with whom he had fallen out of touch since 1887. “I did suffer more during those eight years by loss of sight, sleep, health and activity than in all my previous existence.”

  That summer the remodeled Chatwold stood ready to receive Pulitzer and his guests. More than 100 men had worked through the winter rebuilding the country mansion to Pulitzer’s specifications. The most difficult task had been an excavation down through fifty feet of rock to sea level, where a steam-heated underground room had been carved out for a plunge bath. Aboveground, the house had been extensively rebuilt, with the addition of a granite tower specially constructed to prevent sound from entering. Inside it, according to one reporter, “the great chief can hide away from the sordid cares of the world and be at peace with his soul—or at war with it—and no one will be the wiser.”

  The “tower of silence,” as his secretaries called it, also revealed that Pulitzer’s retreat from the paper was no longer a search for a cure but rather a permanent condition. “So Mr. Pulitzer,” noted one of his men, “dictated the destinies of his manifold interests at long distances in intervals between seizures when his infirmities utterly incapacitated him—a giant intelligence eternally condemned to the darkest of dungeons, a caged eagle furiously belaboring the bars.”

  Pulitzer’s talons, however, remained sharp, especially with regard to Theodore Roosevelt. The politician had recently become New York City’s police commissioner and was cleaning up its notoriously corrupt police force. This cheered New Yorkers until he also decided to enforce blue laws that forbade saloons—but not private clubs—to serve alcohol on the Sabbath. Roosevelt agreed that the law was pigheaded and led to corruption, but said that he had no choice except to enforce it. Pulitzer, who had long opposed any form of temperance, directed Bradford Merrill to bring up the World’s editorial guns.

  Roosevelt’s claim that his enforcement might actually inspire a lifting of the ban was disingenuous, said the World. “You know that those who have such power are in no way annoyed by your nagging and exasperating activity in preventing the hard-working laborer from getting a pitcher of beer for his Sunday dinner,” the editorial continued, addressing Roosevelt directly, as the World always did when he was the subject of Pulitzer’s condemnation. “Does it commend ‘reform’ to have the innocent annoyed in its name while crime runs riot and criminals go free?”

  Reading the editorial, Roosevelt told his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that the World was among the New York papers “shrieking with rage.” He told another friend that the World and Herald “are doing everything in their power to make me swerve from my course; but they will fail signally; I shall not flinch one handbreadth.” But being despised by drinkers and the New York press had no ill effect on Roosevelt’s national popularity. In fact, it increased. One paper as
ked, “Will he succeed Col. Strong as Mayor; or Levi P. Morton as Governor; or Grover Cleveland as President?”

  Indeed, Roosevelt’s ambitions far exceeded cleaning up a city’s police department. He was certain that his combativeness and manliness were appealing. He was convinced that the entire nation, not just Manhattan, lacked virility. “There is an unhappy tendency among certain of our cultivated people to lose the great manly virtues, the power to strive and fight and conquer, not only in a time of peace, but on the field of battle,” he told one audience. He thought the time had come for the United States to flex its military muscle outside its borders, and he saw an opportunity in a crisis brewing in Venezuela.

  Roosevelt, who had never seen a battlefield, wanted war. Pulitzer, who had, wanted nothing of it.

  For years Venezuela had been bickering with Great Britain about its border with British Guiana. After the discovery of gold, the quarrel intensified. The United States took Venezuela’s side, broke off diplomatic relations with England in late 1895, and demanded arbitration. The British, who ruled the seas, considered this an insult and refused.

  The rebuff drew an angry message from the president to Congress. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, Cleveland promised that if England dared to take any land the United States deemed as belonging to Venezuela, the United States would “resist by every means in its power.” Congress rushed to the president’s side, and the saber rattling put the little-noticed dispute on the front pages. WAR ON EVERY LIP was the Chicago Tribune’s headline. WAR CLOUDS proclaimed the Atlanta Constitution. The editorial pages clamored for a fight. “Any American citizen who hesitates to uphold the President of the United States is either an alien or a traitor,” said the Sun.

  Pulitzer refused to let the World join in. He thought Cleveland had gone too far. Put the headline A GRAVE BLUNDER on the lead editorial, Pulitzer told one of his writers over the telephone from his rented house in Lakewood, New Jersey. Weighing each word carefully, he composed a four-paragraph assault on the president’s logic. Great Britain’s actions in Venezuela posed no danger to the United States, he said. “It is a grave blunder to put this government in its attitude of threatening war unless we mean it and are prepared for it and can hopefully appeal to the sympathizers of the civilized world in making it.”

  Pulitzer had long feared militarism. Seventeen years earlier, he had seen firsthand how Bismarck used the threat of French territorial claims to maintain a large standing army and impose oppressive taxes to pay for it. The ruler’s actions created a warlike state, though without battle, much as Thomas Hobbes famously described it in Leviathan. “This they call peace!” the young Pulitzer had written. “Next to war itself I cannot imagine anything more terrible to a great nation than such a peace.”

  Pulitzer now expanded his efforts to douse the war fever. Over his signature, his staff sent telegrams to leading statesmen, clergymen, politicians, editors, leaders of Parliament, and the royal family in Great Britain, urging them to publicly express their opposition to war. Within days, the World published replies from the prince of Wales, Gladstone (out of office again), the bishop of London, the archbishop of Westminster, and dozens of other leaders. Each telegram professed England’s peaceful intentions and strove to lower the transatlantic rhetoric. “They earnestly trust and cannot but believe the present crisis will be arranged in a manner satisfactory to both countries,” read the message from the British throne. “No feelings here but peaceful and brotherly,” wired the bishop of Liverpool. “God Speed you in your patriotic endeavor,” added the bishop of Chester.

  The World’s issue for Christmas Day 1895 reproduced the telegrams from the prince of Wales and one from the duke of York under the headline PEACE AND GOOD WILL. Soon, said another of Pulitzer’s editorials, the holly and mistletoe would be gone, as would the voices of children singing carols. “But we shall retain our hopes. The white doves, unseen, will be fluttering somewhere.”

  In England, the telegrams sent by the prince and the duke generated considerable support and were on the front page of most newspapers, reported an excited Ballard Smith. The reaction in the United States was quite different. Roosevelt, who had already written a letter of congratulation to Cleveland for his belligerent threats, told Lodge that Americans were weakening in their resolve for war. “Personally, I rather hope the fight will come soon. The clamor of the peace faction has convinced me that this country needs a war.” He was furious at Pulitzer and Edwin Godkin at the New York Post, who had joined in urging restraint. “As for the editors of the Evening Post and World,” Roosevelt said, “it would give me great pleasure to have them put in prison the minute hostilities began.”

  Pulitzer’s intervention could not have come at a worse moment for the Cleveland administration. Its gold reserves had fallen to critically low levels again. Since the panic of 1893, the government had dealt with close calls by borrowing and buying gold in Europe. Now that Cleveland faced a new borrowing crisis, Pulitzer’s peace campaign had made matters worse by eliciting a proclamation from the Rothschild banking family that Europeans should not buy American bonds.

  With the free-silver forces gaining strength, the economy still in the doldrums, and Pulitzer causing trouble, Cleveland met secretly with J. P. Morgan. A year earlier, when two U.S. public bond offerings had failed, Morgan had persuaded the president to permit his private syndicate to handle a bond sale like the one the president again had in mind. The first one had saved the government from defaulting on its obligations, but Morgan’s alleged profits had further fueled the free-silver movement. Pulitzer had bitterly denounced the deal. He wanted to protect the gold standard, but not at the cost of enriching Morgan. He was also convinced that Morgan’s plan could give the “silverites” the White House in 1896. He was dead set on preventing another such deal.

  Under such headlines as SMASH THE RING, the World claimed that the administration was once again entering into a secret compact with financiers. As Pulitzer had done in the ongoing crisis over Venezuela, he ordered his staff to use the telegraph wires. More than 10,000 telegrams were sent to banks and investment houses asking if they would support a public bond offering, and more than half replied, setting a one-day record for Western Union. Pulitzer then called several of his editors to Lakewood. They took the last New Jersey–bound train out of the city.

  “When I got there night had already fallen, and as I was without even so much as a handbag, I anticipated a night of makeshift at the hotel,” said George Eggleston, one of the summoned editors.

  “Come in quickly. We must talk rapidly and to the point. You think you’re to stay here all night, but you’re mistaken,” Pulitzer told the men as they entered his house. “I’ve ordered a special train to take you back. It will start at eight o’clock and run through in eighty minutes. Meanwhile, we have much to arrange, so we must get to work.

  “What we demand is that these bonds shall be sold to the public at something like their actual value and not to a Wall Street syndicate for many millions less,” he said. “You are to write a double-leaded article to occupy the whole editorial page tomorrow morning. You are not to print a line of editorial on any other subject.”

  Eggleston was to assail the idea of using Morgan as a middleman and argue that the government should sell the bonds directly to the people. “Then,” Pulitzer added, “as a guarantee of the sincerity of our convictions you are to say that the World offers in advance to take one million dollars of the new bonds at the highest market price, if they are offered to the public in open markets.”

  Pulitzer dismissed his men. The following morning, the World reported that hundreds of banks and bankers had replied to its telegraphed inquiries with pledges to buy the bonds. “To you, Mr. Cleveland, the World appeals,” read Eggleston’s editorial. It pleaded with the president to turn Morgan down and to turn instead to the people. “If you make your appeal to the people they will quickly respond. So sure are we of this that the World now offers to head the list with a subscription of one
million dollars on its own account.”

  Pulitzer won. Both Morgan and Cleveland realized that another private sale was now out of the question. On January 6, 1896, the administration announced a public sale of bonds. Cleveland, facing the end of his second term, had grown tired of Pulitzer’s outbursts. His secretary of state dug up an old federal statute that made it a crime punishable by imprisonment to communicate with foreign leaders to influence American policy. Roosevelt’s friend Senator Lodge brought the matter up in the Senate. He asked his colleagues if they did not think that Pulitzer’s telegrams to the prince of Wales and others did not constitute an offense under the law. A Republican senator rose to say he thought they did. “If the President and the Attorney General do their duty,” said the senator, “Mr. Pulitzer, if he ever sets foot upon the soil of America as I understand he occasionally does, ought to be prosecuted according to law.”

  Pulitzer mounted his own defense. The World urged that the government use the “aged, obsolete, moldy, moth-eaten, dust-covered” law to prosecute the paper. “It is really time to make an example of the presumptuous editors who dare to interfere to break the force and repair the damage of an imitation jingo policy with its disturbing threat of war.”

  Tempers cooled. The dispute between England and Venezuela moved to the back pages as the two nations agreed to arbitration. The public bond sale proceeded and was a success. Pulitzer’s banker Dumont Clarke placed a bid for $1 million of bonds, as the World had promised. When the bid was received at the auction, the secretary of the treasury moved uncomfortably in his seat, and a shadow fell over Morgan’s face, reported the World, which devoted an entire page to the opening of the bids. “The name of the World was not a pleasant sound and it was a bitter thing to be reminded of the past.”