If the two publishers were to create a secret, illegal combination, Pulitzer was correct that the penalty clause would be the most important part of the deal. Without a private remedy, the contract would be worthless, since it could not be enforced in court. Pulitzer, who had steadily railed against monopolies and trusts for almost thirty years and whose World had championed the passage of the Sherman act, voiced no qualms. He was tired and beleaguered by the trouble besetting the World since Hearst had come to town. He was willing to make a pact with the devil if he had to.
As with crushing the newsies’ strike, social and economic justice had become an abstract notion for Pulitzer, suitable for others but not for him. All he wanted, Pulitzer confessed to Seitz, was a truce. “That arrangement which will enable me to make the best possible paper in point of reputation and character, indulge my own inherent editorial and political tastes, and have no bother with business or other distractions. That is, peace.”
The negotiations dragged on into the fall, stopping and starting as each publisher altered the work of his negotiators. Hearst frankly told Seitz, “In short, we are willing to adopt Mr. Pulitzer’s phrase and substitute ‘Combination for Competition.’” But in the end, neither side could figure out how to do it.
While the two sides negotiated, Pulitzer dispatched Phillips on a special assignment. The journalist put aside his novel and set off on a cross-country tour of numerous cities to assess the political strength of President McKinley and his probable opponent, the silver-tongued orator William Jennings Bryan. Though Pulitzer remained leery, Bryan had risen in his estimation by becoming a strong foe of American imperialism. The United States’ victory in the Spanish-American War had given it authority over Cuba—and over the Philippines, where U.S. troops were trying to put down an insurrection using inhumane tactics like those of Spain.
“I cannot get over the fact that this man is rendering the most conspicuous service to the country, in his brilliant bold crusade against Imperialism,” said Pulitzer, dictating detailed instructions to Phillips. “I think the work he has done in this cause is inestimable, simply in arousing and aligning the entire Democratic party against what is, after all, the burning danger and evil, the first step on the path to ruin.”
Phillips was to end his reporting tour by visiting Bryan in Nebraska. “I want you to write up Bryan at home, the real man; his real force, his character, influence et cetera. At the same time I want you to be kind to him, tell all the truth possible, strictly and exactly, but from a kindly rather than antipathetic point of view.” Phillips was already a Bryan man, and Pulitzer was becoming one.
With the arrival of winter and his travels at an end, Phillips resumed work on his novel The Great God Success. His protagonist Howard was rising to power and fame as an editor and then as a publisher, following the same principles Pulitzer had used; as Howard put it, “Catch the crowd, to interest it, to compel it to read, and so to lead it to think.” Phillips based Howard’s days as a reporter on his own life, but he modeled the character’s time as a publisher on Pulitzer’s. If there was anyone in Pulitzer’s entourage who had been close enough to him to see the transformation in the onetime idealistic reformer, it was Phillips. Pulitzer—blind, in misery with real and imagined ailments, and incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others—had become entirely self-absorbed. His cause was himself. Phillips recognized the angst in Pulitzer and gave it to his fictional character.
“He could not deceive himself, nor can any man with the clearness of judgement necessary to great achievement,” wrote Phillips about Howard. “He was well aware that he had shifted from the ideal of use to his fellow-beings to the ideal of use of his fellow-beings, from the ideal of character to the ideal of reputation. And he knew that the two ideals cannot be combined and that he not only was not attempting to combine them but had no desire so to do. He despised his former ideals; but also he despised himself for despising them.”
Over time, Howard sells out—first to a coal trust and then for a political appointment. As the book draws to a close, melancholy envelops him. “And he fell to despising himself for the kind of exultation that filled him, its selfishness, its sordidness, the absence of all high enthusiasm,” wrote Phillips. “Why was he denied the happiness of self-deception? Why could he not forget the means, blot it out, now that the end was attained?
“The answer came—because in those days, in the days of his youth, he had had beliefs, high principles; he had been incapable of slavery to appearances, to vain show, incapable of this passion for reputation regardless of character. His weaknesses were then weaknesses only, and not, as now, the laws of his being controlling his every act.
“He smiled cynically at the self of such a few years ago—yet he could not meet those honest, fearless eyes that looked out at him from the mirror of memory.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
FLEEING HIS SHADOW
Muffled sounds of screaming woke Kate in the late-night hours of January 8, 1900. They came from directly underneath the window of her second-floor bedroom in the house on East Fifty-Fifth Street in New York. Through glass and heavy draperies, she made out the terrifying word “Fire!” One of their nearly two dozen household servants had seen flames at the rear of the house and was yelling for everyone to get out of the building.
Kate jumped from her bed and ran into the adjacent bedrooms, where eleven-year-old Constance and thirteen-year-old Edith were sleeping. Draping them with blankets, she led the children down the smoke-filled stairs to safety on the street, where she consigned them to a neighbor.
Joseph was in Lakewood, New Jersey, where he had gone shortly after the new year with his son Joe. Ralph was back at Harvard. But three-year-old Herbert, the baby of the family, was still inside. Barefooted and clad only in her sleeping garment, Kate ran back into the burning house. Through the thickening smoke from flaming curtains, wall hangings, and paintings, she inched her way up the stairs to the third floor. There she found Herbert in the arms of his panicked nurse, who was standing on the windowsill preparing to jump. Kate held her back. Then, by alternately pushing and pulling them through blinding smoke down the hall and stairs, she guided them to safety on the first floor. The footman, who had sounded the alarm, tore a curtain off a rod and draped it over Kate’s shoulders. With Herbert in her arms, she rejoined her two girls, who were safe in the house next door.
It took the firemen a full hour to contain the flames. The enclosed outside staircase, which Pulitzer had built at the suggestion of the fire marshal, had worked like a chimney in spreading the fire. As Kate and the children huddled in a neighboring house, the servants frantically tried to determine whether anyone was missing. Many of the staff members had fled from their top-floor bedrooms by climbing onto the roof and crossing over to adjacent houses.
One of the men said he had seen Morgan Jellett, Kate’s personal secretary, turn back when she reached the roof, to retrieve from her room a satchel containing her Christmas presents. When firemen entered the house, they found Jellett’s body on the third floor, the satchel in her hand. Near her lay the body of Elizabeth Montgomery, one of the governesses, dressed in her bathrobe and slippers. Also presumed dead was Rickey, a King Charles spaniel that had been a favorite of Lucille’s.
A telephone call was placed to Lakewood. Pulitzer was told of the fire and that his family was safe. News of the deaths was initially kept from him, out of fear that it might upset him. When he learned of it, he paid for the funeral expenses and sent donations to the fire and police departments. The flames destroyed three portraits of Kate, one of Joseph, and a vast collection of other paintings, as well as bronzes—including a Buddha brought back from the Orient by James Creelman when he covered the Chinese-Japanese War—and four large antique Gobelin tapestries. Kate’s diamond necklace from the French crown jewel collection and her famous $150,000 pearl necklace were never found. In all, the losses amounted to more than $500,000.
Kate and the children took rooms at the Hote
l Netherland, while the servants were put up in a nearby rooming house. In the afternoon, Kate dispatched someone to obtain the measurements of all the servants so as to order new clothes for them. From Lakewood, Joseph arranged to rent the Henry T. Sloane mansion on East Seventy-Second Street for $17,500 a year. Built in French Renaissance style with a light granite exterior and white marble trim, it was, according to one newspaper, “considered to be one of the handsomest of all the newer New York residences.”
As Pulitzer’s fifty-third birthday neared, on April 10, 1900, he was hardly in a celebratory mood. He was bogged down in protracted negotiations with McKim, Mead, and White, the architectural firm he hired to design his new house on East Seventy-Third Street, where he had purchased a lot for $240,000. Like his neighbors, he wanted a mansion, but “an American home for comfort and use not for show or entertainment.” It was to be without a ballroom, music room, or picture gallery, and he especially wanted it to be free of French design and furniture. He also set a limit of $250,000, including decorations, a low figure that no one around him took seriously.
Kate had not yet been consulted about the plans for the house. She was still recovering from the trauma of the fire. Her doctor urged her to go for a cure at Aix-les-Bains in southern France. “She is feeling the strain of all she went through at the time of the fire and needs very much to rest and the treatment at Aix,” he wrote to Joseph. Persuaded, her husband authorized his financial officer, Angus Shaw, to give Kate $750 to pay for her passage to Europe. She in turn persuaded Shaw to give her $830 to cover the cost of her maid and taxes, and Shaw feared that Joseph might make him deduct the additional $80 from a future payment.
At the World, matters were no more settled than at home. Pulitzer continued to fret about the paper’s sloppiness. In one story, a reporter erred in stating Standard Oil’s stock value. “Accuracy! Accuracy!! Accuracy!!!” Pulitzer angrily telegraphed. Of greater concern was the restlessness among many of his key editors and managers.
Since January, the business manager, John Norris, had been hinting that he was preparing to leave. On April 2, he made his plans known. “Temperamentally, I am not equipped to get along with you,” Norris wrote. To be sure that Pulitzer would not try to stop him, he added that nothing could be done to keep him on the paper. Pulitzer accepted his departure, and Norris went to work for Ochs at the New York Times. Even John Dillon, Pulitzer’s original partner at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, took another job. He joined the Chicago Tribune after laboring quietly in the World’s editorial shop for years.
Phillips was also feeling some wanderlust. Earlier in the winter, he had complained about his nerves and had requested a leave of absence. Pulitzer wanted to keep Phillips at all costs. He still believed the young writer might eventually take the helm of the paper. During a carriage ride around Lakewood, Pulitzer told Phillips he could have a two-month, all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. In late April, the young writer accepted the offer, picked up an advance on nine weeks of his salary, and left.
After more than a decade of on-and-off absentee ownership, Pulitzer could still not find a suitable way to run the World to his satisfaction. Earlier, when Cockerill and Smith had been in charge, he felt that he had responsive alter egos at the helm. Now he had to beg his editors to follow his instructions. As he told them that year, “My being disabled from performing this duty, involves the necessity of your thinking, as nearly as possible, what you think I think.”
To run his paper by remote control, Pulitzer contrived an intricate, even labyrinthine, means of communication. He kept his secretaries busy at all hours by dictating to his editors and managers a stream of telegrams filled with complaints about even the smallest mistakes in the paper—chastisement, praise (though rare), and incessant demands for every possible kind of up-to-date information about circulation and finances. The cable offices at Wiesbaden, Germany; Cap Martin, France; London, England; Bar Harbor; and Jekyll Island always knew when Pulitzer was in town.
The telegrams tested the patience of Pulitzer’s personal staff. Once, on Jekyll Island, the duty of taking down and sending a telegram fell to Hosmer because Pulitzer’s secretary, Butes, had remained in New York. After spending thirty minutes with Pulitzer as the latter composed a 300-word telegram, Hosmer retreated to his room and neatly transcribed the message so that the club’s clerk could telephone it to Western Union. “But just as he is shirking off by the back door to place it beyond hope of recall,” Billings wrote to Butes, “a messenger reaches him with instructions not to send it until Mr. P. has read it again and the circus begins afresh.”
The public nature of the telegraph—one of the wonders of the nineteenth century—created a further challenge. Telegraph operators were privy to the content of any message and secrets were not safe. Furthermore, like in the children’s game of “whisper down the lawn,”* repeated transmissions of a message could easily garble carefully worded instructions.
People in competitive businesses purchased secret codebooks designed for composing telegrams. The Acme Commodity and Phrase Code, for example, was a 902-page compendium of 100,000 five-letter codes. Pulitzer sent coded messages enthusiastically, but instead of using a commercially available codebook, he developed his own.
The 5,000-entry book shed light on the concerns, interests, and obsessions of its creator. Pulitzer developed a nomenclature for all the elements of his world. He had codes for politicians, rivals, business terms, dates, amounts of money, family members, and even the weather. William Jennings Bryan became “Guilder,” Theodore Roosevelt “Glutinous,” and Hearst “Gush.” The amount of business completed was “merciful,” a gain was “piggery,” and a discount—which Pulitzer loathed to grant—was “menodus.” Almost every telegram asked about “potash,” the term for advertising, including display ads, known as “memorials.”
In constructing his coded world, Pulitzer went beyond hiding corporate and political communication from prying eyes. He devised codes for his family and his fixation on sickness. The health of the children and family alone merited thirty-seven terms. The weather on his voyages was hardly an important secret, yet there were forty-eight codes for fog, clouds, sun, and temperatures.
To stay out of trouble, staffers had to include the critically important word “semaphore” in their reply. A veteran editor instructed those who received a codebook to underline the word in the “reddest ink” and understand its meaning: “I have read twice and fully, clearly, surely understand and acknowledge your cable. I will do my best after consideration and would certainly cable back and ask a question if I did not understand or felt uncertain.”
Each of Pulitzer’s lieutenants possessed one of the six-by-nine-inch books, about 300 pages long, with two alphabetically tabbed sections. Owning one was an important mark of power at the World, as the code was the sacred language of the inner court. Like high priests translating a religious text, the men sat each day at their desks under the gold dome with their own annotated codebooks, carefully deciphering a new stack of telegraphs and memos. Each man had his own code name. Don Seitz was “Gulch” Pulitzer’s old partner Dillon was “Guess” the editorial writer and Pulitzer’s protégé, Phillips, was “Gumboil” the business manager, Norris, was “Anfrancto” and the financial adviser, Clarke, was “Coin.”
For himself, Pulitzer reserved the lofty name “Andes,” after the highest mountain range in the Americas. It became so frequently used by editors and reporters that the moniker no longer hid his identity. In fact, aside from JP, “Andes” became the most common nickname for Pulitzer at the World and at rival newspapers.
In late June 1900 the first of the Pulitzer children graduated from college. But when Ralph accepted his Harvard degree from President Charles Eliot, his parents were nowhere to be seen. They had not considered the event sufficiently important to alter their travel plans. Ralph’s father was on the ocean, returning from a month spent in England, and his mother was undergoing a cure in Aix-les-Bains. Joseph did find time to bestow a
graduation check large enough for Ralph to seek investment advice from his father’s banker.
Like most of his 982 classmates, sons of America’s wealthiest families, Ralph had passed his four years at Harvard in considerable luxury. Each month Shaw sent him $500 for living expenses, such as $30 for beer, $30 for theater tickets, $75 for meals at La Touraine restaurant, $25 for his boxing instructor, and $50 for clothes and presents. The amount had been increased by $60 in his last year, after his father suggested that Ralph should pay for the services of his manservant and a maid himself. “Not on your life!!!” Ralph had written to Butes. “When he said in London that he thought I must have a competent man to look after me, I am sure he had no notion of making me pay the man’s wages.”
Ralph’s fifteen-year-old brother, Joe, who attended St. Mark’s School, an exclusive boarding school west of Boston, possessed similar expectations. In the spring, he had asked his father to spend $1,300 for a sailboat. “I am afraid you will think that pretty steep but boats are pretty expensive things, as you know,” he said. He also hoped his father would hire someone to take care of the boat, should it be purchased.
Neither Ralph nor Joe had much contact with the world beyond that of mansions in New York, manors in London, houses in a fashionable arrondissement of Paris, or summer cottages in Maine and Georgia. From their earliest years they had been cared for by nannies and educated by tutors until consigned to boarding schools for the finishing touches when they were as young as eight years old.
It was not until Joe was a teenager that he learned of his father’s Jewish ancestry. In his first year at St. Mark’s, which was Episcopalian, he heard boys making a hissing sound or calling him “sheeny” when he walked by. Joe confronted his Episcopalian mother about his heritage. She told him that he had nothing to be ashamed of, that the Jews were a great people, and she proceeded to list the names of prominent Jewish New Yorkers.
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