Pulitzer supervised the children’s tutoring, training, and care—especially with Ralph, whose precarious health had required long stays in places like St. Moritz. Herbert, born late in the marriage, was still too young to be molded. To Pulitzer’s immense frustration, both Ralph and Joe failed to show promise. The eldest was most willing to please his father, but was frail and more interested in the social world than the newspaper one. “I hardly know how to treat him, his ignorance is so terrible and my disappointment so great that I fear I discourage him,” Pulitzer told Seitz when he sent Ralph to him for training at the World after graduation.
Pulitzer had even less hope for Joe, although Joe was robust and healthy. He was willing to stand up to his father, had little interest in his studies, and had a predilection for getting into trouble. His career at St. Mark’s came to an abrupt end in 1901, when he and some friends sneaked into town to buy beer. Finding the school locked on their return, Joe led them up the ivy-covered walls and through an open window. Unfortunately, it led into the bedroom of the headmaster and his wife. “He has committed a crime against his father, his mother, his sisters and his own good name and future. This should be rubbed into him,” Joseph wrote to Kate, blaming her for having spoiled the child.
Pulitzer took less interest in Constance and Edith. They spent far less time with him than the boys, including Herbert. This did not mean, however, that they were exempt from his supervision at a distance. Examining bills, he noticed some books by the French writer Alphonse Daudet that fourteen-year-old Edith had purchased. “I would as soon give her strychnine as let her read the average French novel at her formative impressionable age,” Joseph told Kate. “You should watch this very sharply and tell the governess to do the same. I still cling to the hope that it must be a mistake.”
With the sole exception of his departed Lucille, Joseph endlessly expressed his disappointment in his children to his secretaries, editors, and managers; to Davidson; and especially to Kate. Once, when his mail contained only a letter from Constance, he told Kate, “To all the rest of the children you can say I do not love them and they ought to be ashamed of themselves for not writing.” Most who witnessed these harangues were cowed and lacked the courage to contradict him when he tore into his children. Only his distant cousin Adam Politzer, a distinguished professor of otology in Vienna, offered rare counsel.
“Do not forget, that they were born and brought up under quite different circumstances than we,” Politzer wrote. “Self-made men like you and myself only come to maturity in that battle for existence—and who knows should we have been the sons of wealthy parents, if we were what we are now? Your children do not form any exception from those children who have grown up in similarly favorable conditions.”
As her time in Aix-les-Bains drew to a close in June 1900, Kate assumed that she would rejoin her husband in London where he had rented a house, a coachhouse, and stables for the horses he brought from the United States. But without a word, Joseph boarded the Oceanic and sailed home, leaving young Herbert behind in London with a nanny. His rapid exit was not the first. Pulitzer increasingly refused to remain in one place. As soon as he reached a destination, he was ready to leave. He might sail across the ocean only to return by the next ship. “You always remind me of the gentleman in one of Horace’s fables who ran and rode and sailed, thinking to flee from his cave and finally discovered that he was fleeing from his own shadow,” Phillips told him. Phillips was one of the few in his employ who had the courage to be frank with Pulitzer.
When one of the governesses informed her of Joseph’s sudden departure, Kate was furious. “You have surprised even me accustomed as I am to vertiginous movements,” she wrote. “It looks queer to strangers that I should be ignorant of the sailing of my family.” For several weeks there ensued a transatlantic battle between the two. Kate had run through her monthly $6,000 allowance and had no means of getting home. If Joseph did not wire her the money, she threatened to borrow it from the U.S. ambassador Joseph Choate in London. Pulitzer remained obstinate and refused. “Pray reconsider decision concerning passage else compelled to appeal to Ambassador,” Kate wired from Paris, where she was staying in the luxurious Hotel Vendôme. After two days of back-and-forth telegrams, Joseph relented.
“Steamer tickets and $250,” he said.
“Steamer tickets and $350 absolutely necessary to leave,” she replied.
He caved in. “Very much obliged,” she wired back.
On August 1, Kate and Herbert reached New York. Shaw paid her customs duties of $152.29 and anxiously wired Joseph in Maine to see if he should charge the amount to her personal account. Once again Shaw found himself in the midst of a spat between the two.
It was not a good time to arouse Joseph’s ire. On September 14, 1900, his old friend and mentor Thomas Davidson died. Aside from Udo Brachvogel, who occasionally wrote (usually in hopes of getting money for his son’s education), Davidson had been the one friend who had known Pulitzer since he was a teenager. About a year before his death, Davidson had come to Maine to visit Pulitzer. It had not been a good reunion. “He is extremely morbid about himself,” Joseph complained to Kate, “talks about nothing except his unspeakable troubles, sighs and moans and probably undergoes some physical suffering with vastly more of a mental nervous kind.” For Pulitzer, any competition with regard to woes was hard to bear.
After Davidson’s death, the cause of his pain became known. When doctors operated on him, during the last months of his life, they discovered a huge bladder stone and a cancerous growth. It “must have been the main cause,” wrote a friend, “of the frightful anguish our friend had been suffering for a long time.” Despite his lifelong closeness to Davidson, Pulitzer could not overcome his aversion to funerals. Instead, he sent a $30 wreath of galax and orchids to Glenmore in the Adirondacks, where Davidson had chosen to be buried near a small house he owned.
In the fall of 1900, another presidential election loomed. Since the last one, the United States had become a colonial power. Although he had supported the Spanish-American War, Pulitzer remained opposed to imperialism. The fact that the imperialist power was the United States made no difference. After a brief flirtation with the potential candidacy of Admiral George Dewey, Pulitzer threw his lot in with William Jennings Bryan. Pulitzer’s strong opposition to imperialism put him at odds with many of his old political allies. “Mr. Pulitzer is the keenest political observer I ever knew,” said his friend William Whitney. “For once his judgment is at fault.”
Backing Bryan put Pulitzer once again in the camp opposing Theodore Roosevelt, because Bryan’s opponent, McKinley, selected the young New York governor for the vice-presidential nomination. Roosevelt traveled around the country, verbally assailing Bryan, while McKinley remained above the fray. According to Roosevelt, Bryan was espousing “communistic and socialist doctrine” and supporting him were “all the lunatics, all the idiots, all the knaves, all the cowards, and all the honest people who are slow-witted.” Pulitzer had no interest in sticking around for the results at the polls. The election was a rerun of 1896, with the Republicans bound to make even more gains. For the first time ever, Pulitzer made sure he was a long way off by Election Day.
In the early morning of October 9, Pulitzer was asleep in his cabin on the Oceanic, bound for England and then to Wiesbaden to take baths and consult doctors. As the ship neared the coast of Ireland, it slowed its pace, feeling its way through a rain squall. At about four o’clock, when the ship was almost at a stop so as to take a sounding, the watch crew found themselves staring at looming Irish cliffs. The engines were thrown into reverse, shaking the ship and waking all the passengers. Before its progress could be halted, the hull struck part of the outcropping rock ledge, making a grinding, grating noise.
“In the few moments of doubt the watertight compartments had been closed and the life boats made ready,” said Hosmer, who was in the cabin adjacent to Pulitzer’s. Thinking that the ship’s lurching indicated its arrival in
port, Pulitzer had risen and dressed himself. “He came out in a state of perfect calm and self-possession,” noted Hosmer. The two walked on the deck for an hour and then returned to bed. The ship continued safely to port in England.
This was not the last mishap before the end of their journey. A train wreck blocked the rails leading to Cologne, Germany. In the middle of the night, Pulitzer and his companions had to leave their train and walk through a field to board another one on the other side of the accident. It took thirty hours to finally reach Wiesbaden. Pulitzer, who had caught a cold in London, remained in bed for twenty-four of those hours. “Inevitably,” Hosmer reported to Kate, “everything was wrong all the time and the world was full of damn fools.”
The new century opened with greater promise for Pulitzer. More than half of the $524,600 he lent the World to keep it afloat in 1898 had been repaid as the paper regained profitability. The plan for a secret combination with Hearst, which had stalled in negotiations, lost its appeal now that money was to be made again. In fact, the paper’s health was such that it withstood an advertising boycott by Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, and other New York retailers who, thinking that the World was financially weak, had banded together to try to obtain a reduction in advertising rates. They miscalculated and found their sales plummeting when their large display advertisements were not printed.
An upturn in the economy also gave Pulitzer immense gains in the stock market. In fact, until the end of his life, his investment earnings frequently exceeded those from his two newspapers. He relied heavily on the banker Dumont Clarke to manage his investments; but, as with his newspaper managers and editors, Pulitzer rarely left Clarke alone to do his work. Instead, he regularly sent investment instructions based on inside information, sometimes obtained by his editors from their personal contacts.
Pulitzer invested in railroads, steel, and utilities, which were then the dominant industries in the stock market. Owning shares in these companies breached Pulitzer’s political and moral views. He was putting his own personal wealth into companies he had long disdained because of their treatment of workers. Many were trusts and monopolies, as well. All were targets of the World’s editorials. Pulitzer fretted about this and on rare occasions asked Clarke to divest him of the most odious. Still, he wanted to safeguard his wealth, and he convinced himself that there were no other means. “I do not buy to sell,” he told Clarke, “but to lock up assets for my children.”
All the income from his newspapers and investments was put to use. Pulitzer was now spending almost $250,000 a year for household expenses and travel. This was more than 1,000 times what the average American earned. Though his newspaper made money by attacking wealth and privilege, Pulitzer’s lifestyle had become indistinct from that of his neighbors on Fifth Avenue, in Bar Harbor, or at Jekyll Island who earned their fortunes on the backs of workers. When Pulitzer smoked cigars, they were Travita, among the finest made in Havana; when he drank, it was Perrier-Jouët Brut or Rüdesheimer Berg Orlean, which he imported by the hundreds of bottles; and when he ate, it was quail, duck, or goose.
The new mansion on the Upper East Side was taking shape on the drawing boards of McKim, Mead, and White and was the equal of those the firm had designed for its other wealthy clients. It included an indoor swimming pool and even the previously prohibited ballroom. It is doubtful, though, that the firm ever had a more demanding or difficult client. The partners made their artist work on Sundays, and then another artist would redraw the plans with large black lines, in hopes that Pulitzer could discern the shape. Additionally, scale models were built so he could feel the contours of the house. Frequently the work had to be rushed so as to catch a ship bound for Germany or England or wherever else Pulitzer might be at the time.
Just when matters seemed settled, Pulitzer would drive the architects to the end of their patience. “I was in despair when I got your letter,” said Stanford White, in a typical moment of exasperation after receiving yet more alterations when construction was under way. “I will do whatever I can, but I do not see how it will be possible to have all you want done by Saturday,” he warned. “I know one thing, and that is we have certainly made twice as many studies, and done twice as much work on this as we have ever done on any interior work before, and it is pretty hard where so many contrary orders are given, and so many changes made to know where we stand or what to do.”
On September 6, 1901, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot two bullets into President William McKinley, who had been touring the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. For six days McKinley lingered close to death as Americans feared that an assassin had taken a president’s life for the third time in less than four decades. Pulitzer was so anxious that even though the World had reporters on the scene, he sent Hosmer, who was a medical doctor, to Buffalo to provide him with up-to-date reports. Hosmer’s telegrams back to Chatwold forecast the worst. Indeed, on September 14, McKinley died, and Pulitzer’s archenemy Theodore Roosevelt became president.
In the circulation war between the World and the Journal, McKinley’s death provided an unexpected boon for Pulitzer’s paper. Among the raft of anti-McKinley articles that had appeared in the Journal, there had been two unfortunate ones that appeared to suggest an assassination was in order. An outcry erupted against Hearst. He was hanged in effigy in a number of cities, and boycotts of the Journal were undertaken. “Large piles remain unsold on the stands and it is being execrated popularly,” Seitz told Pulitzer a few days after McKinley’s death. “You hear little groups discussing it and offensive remarks being made in cars about people who have it in their possession.”
For the first time since his arrival in New York, Pulitzer’s competitor was on the ropes. Hearst changed the name of his paper to the American and Journal, later dropping “Journal,” and lay low. His circulation dropped calamitously and fell 75,000 behind that of the World. Pulitzer’s editors wanted to join the lynch mob. “For the first time in five years, we now have the chance to part company with the Journal in the public mind,” Seitz told Pulitzer. But Pulitzer declined the opportunity. He ordered that Hearst be ignored in the pages of the World except when events occurred that were newsworthy, such as the burnings in effigy, or prominent figures mentioning him in speeches. Even then, he added, Hearst’s name should come up only “if facts absolutely correct, true, and the thing is not displayed maliciously.”
In his earliest days as a publisher, Pulitzer had once been offered a similar opportunity. Edward Augustine, the lobbyist with whom he had done battle in Jefferson City, who committed suicide after a financial failure. Other newspaper editors in St. Louis played up the ignominy of his end, but not Pulitzer. He resisted the chance to get even and treated Augustine’s death with decorum. He was not going to alter his sense of gentlemanly restraint now just because it was Hearst’s turn at bad luck.
On the other hand, there was no need for spite. “This McKinley business has rebounded hard against the Journal,” one of Pulitzer’s editors reported in a confidential memo. “It is a notable fact that in the storm of criticism directed against the Journal since the shooting, the World has scarcely once been coupled with it, although the main object of the attack throughout has been so-called ‘Yellow Journalism.’”
The combination of the editorial reforms at the World and Hearst’s perceived complicity in McKinley’s death in the public’s mind accomplished what Pulitzer had sought since the Spanish-American War. Words he had longed to hear came in the confidential memo: “The result is that people do not THINK of the World and Journal together as they did, and were perhaps justified in doing some time back.”
The calm that Pulitzer sought at Jekyll Island was missing during the early months of 1902. He was infuriated by the rising cost of his house in New York. Instead of the $250,000 he had agreed to pay, the price was now $644,000. And on top of this, he had authorized $165,000 in renovations at Chatwold. When he wasn’t worrying about the money, he was lamenting the decisions that he believed he ha
d to make about decorating, never mind that Kate remained in New York, bearing the brunt of the work.
In choosing art, Joseph became so frustrated that he considered simply buying an entire collection from someone who had taste. George Ledlie, his advance man, discouraged this idea. “You may say you have no-one to advise you,” wrote Ledlie. “On the contrary, and I say this, not because Mrs. Pulitzer is Mrs. Pulitzer, but from knowledge I have obtained in various shopping expeditions with her, that I fully believe you can without hesitation, leave the final decision in any matter requiring artistic senses to her.”
Kate was willing in mind and spirit but not in body. She became increasingly weak and ill that spring. Pulitzer, whose list of ailments could fill a page, was not sympathetic. On board the Majestic as it approached the coast of England, he wrote to Kate that his doctor was positive there was nothing wrong with her that a little rest couldn’t cure. “I am perfectly confident that all you need is a little self-restraint and philosophy. Never mind about carpets or furniture or hangings. You will get them all quickly enough when you are well.” He added that he had slept better on this voyage than on any before.
Kate, however, did not improve with rest. Her condition worsened after Joseph had sailed. Her doctors decided she needed to leave the city, and they gave her their usual prescription: a cure at Aix-les-Bains. With this in mind, she began to feel better, until she received a letter from Joseph, who had already traveled from England to southern France, forbidding her to bring Herbert. “The result,” said Ledlie, “was that she had a bad crying spell, followed by a fainting time, declared if the baby did not go, she would not go, and we had a very bad time of it.” Since the doctors had instructed the staff to humor Kate, Ledlie and the others decided to tell her that she could take the child along. Ledlie then craftily explained the situation in a private letter to Butes, who was with Joseph. They both agreed Joseph would not be informed until the morning of her arrival.
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