Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  Fortunately, Kate and the baby hardly weighed on Joseph’s mind when they finally came together. Rather, he was recovering from listening to a reading of Phillips’s novel, which had been published under the pseudonym John Graham. Phillips had to use another name because in bringing out the book, he had violated one of the World’s cardinal rules, included in his contract: that publishing any work outside the paper was prohibited. The breaking of this rule, however, paled in comparison with the accusation in the novel that Pulitzer had sold out his ideals.

  “I not only read it but enjoyed it very much with one single reservation,” Pulitzer told Phillips, without further elaboration. “The book showed undoubted talent, imagination, and skill in constructing dialogue.” To Pulitzer’s mind, it also showed treachery. “Mr. Pulitzer was keenly hurt when he discovered that the author of the novel was Mr. Phillips,” said Seitz. He had trusted Phillips and treated him at times like a son. Pulitzer asked if Phillips had read Crime and Punishment. “If not, don’t let twenty-four hours pass before you do so.”

  In selecting Dostoyevsky’s novel from the countless ones he had read, Pulitzer chose a work in which a murderer is racked by guilt. His implication would not be lost on Phillips. The Great God Success did not end their friendship, but it would never be the same again. Not long after the book’s publication, Phillips resigned from the World.

  Joseph left Kate and the children in Aix-les-Bains and went to spend the summer of 1902 at Chatwold. Kate’s French doctor warned him to send her as few letters or telegrams as possible and said that those he did send must be bright and cheery. “She is suffering from one great nervous depression which causes gastric trouble and loss of weight,” reported the doctor. “It is necessary for her cure to take a very severe treatment for two months.” By late summer Kate’s health improved. “I am better but it takes very little to throw me back again,” she wrote. “I am not yet permitted to take the douches, and the doctor does not tell me when I can do so. He says that in my condition they would be dangerous.”

  Alone in Maine, except for his staff, Joseph mostly obeyed the doctor’s orders regarding correspondence with Kate. Yet he was, once again, furious over Kate’s spending. Since he could not complain to her, Joseph decided to turn over her allowance to Ledlie and have him pay the bills. This put Ledlie, who was close to Kate, in an impossible position. If Kate were to order him not to pay a bill because she felt it was Joseph’s responsibility, then Ledlie would have to do battle with his boss. He and Butes, Pulitzer’s main personal secretary, quickly consulted with each other behind their boss’s back and decided they were both in a hopeless position as long as Joseph and Kate continued their fiscal war.

  In September, John Dillon, who was now fifty-nine, came to Maine for an overdue reunion with Pulitzer. After quitting the World in 1900, he had soon regretted his decision and had come back to work for his old partner. As was customary when one visited Pulitzer, the two men went out for a horseback ride, accompanied by at least one of Pulitzer’s companions, who minded the horse for him. During the ride, Dillon was thrown from his mount. When they managed to get him back to the house, doctors said that he had suffered two broken ribs and some undetermined internal injuries.

  Telegrams to Dillon’s family assured them there was no cause for alarm. “Excellent care by two nurses. Takes nourishment. Must wait healing and subsidence of inflammatory condition resulting from fall.” The healing did not come. Rather, pneumonia set in, and Dillon’s heart grew weak. Pulitzer called to the house the noted doctors S. Weir Mitchell and William Sydner Thayer, both of whom had treated Joseph and Kate. There was little they could do, and once again Chatwold became the scene of a deathwatch. On October 15, Dillon died with his wife and two of his children by his side. The family returned to New York with the body, and several days later Dillon was buried in St. Louis.

  “Am all broken up by Dillon,” Pulitzer telegraphed to Florence White, who had begun his working life as a cub reporter for Dillon and Pulitzer years earlier. “Wish you would attend service…specially representing me and papers.” Instead of heading west for the funeral, Pulitzer gathered up his entourage of seven employees and two servants and boarded the eastbound Celtic, leaving New York on October 31.

  For an additional $394.29 above the price of a first-class ticket, the White Star line had made the usual preparations for its notoriously noise-sensitive customer. Piano playing in the bars ceased at ten o’clock in the evening rather than at eleven. A custom-made green baize door was installed to close off the hall leading to Pulitzer’s quarters. “The slamming of a door is most penetrating, it can be heard a half-mile off, especially along a straight corridor,” Pulitzer warned the ship’s owners. Portions of the deck above his room were cordoned off to redirect promenading passengers, and those who had to cross the area walked on heavy mats. “It is not a question of pleasure, luxury,” Pulitzer explained when making his demands. “It is an absolute, indispensable necessity.”

  Leaving New York for Jekyll Island in January 1903, Pulitzer instructed Seitz to ride the train with him as far as Washington. When the train pulled out of the Jersey City station, Hosmer handed Seitz a sheath of papers and told him to be prepared soon to render an opinion on its contents. Settling into an isolated compartment, Seitz dived into the file. It revealed, in a sharply condensed form, an idea Pulitzer had been mulling over for years. He wanted to use his wealth, upon his death, to create a school to train journalists and endow a prize to reward excellence among working journalists.

  Years before, while running the Post-Dispatch, Pulitzer had poked fun at publishers meeting in Columbia, Missouri, for wanting to create a professorship of journalism. “It is as absurd to talk of it as to talk of a professorship of matrimony, it being one of those things of which nothing can be learned by those who have never tried it.” A decade later, Pulitzer began to change his mind. He conceded that a professor of journalism might be able to teach some of the technical aspects of the trade. “Of course,” Pulitzer added, “the highest order of talent or capacity could no more be taught by a professor of journalism than could the military genius of a Hannibal, Caesar, or Bonaparte be taught in military academies.”

  By the 1890s, the idea had become a central part of Pulitzer’s plan on how to use his wealth. Next to power, Pulitzer most sought respectability. Much of the public thought his profession lacked dignity. The competition with Hearst had, at least for a while, bound the two men together as purveyors of the crass, sensational, and prurient fare of Yellow Journalism. Two years earlier, for instance, Life magazine had published a drawing of Pulitzer as a bird on a perch labeled Pulitzus Nundanus, listing its characteristics as “Scavenger. Eats anything, and grows fat on filth. Vindictive and noisy, but harmless.” A school and the respect that might come with it would go a long way toward ennobling the profession and its most famous member.

  While he was at rest in Europe, Pulitzer shared his thoughts with others. One in particular was his friend Seth Low, president of what was then called Columbia College in New York. In 1892, Pulitzer’s scheme was considered by Columbia’s trustees. They rejected the idea. Now, a decade later, Pulitzer resurrected the plan as he contemplated the end of his life while summering at Chatwold. He revised his will and, at last, laid out his thinking about his legacy in a memo for George Hosmer, his faithful companion of many years, marking it “strictly confidential.”

  “My idea is to recognize that journalism is, or ought to be, one of the great and intellectual professions,” he said. To that end, Pulitzer proposed that journalists receive training on a par with that given to lawyers and doctors. He decided he was prepared to give Columbia University as much as $2 million—a gift almost three times the size of the institution’s annual operating budget—if it was willing to create and run a journalism school. Pulitzer then added that his gift should also be used to award annual prizes to working journalists, newspapers, or writers, for achievement, excellence, and public service. This money would
eventually create what became known as the Pulitzer prizes, perhaps the most highly recognized and coveted award except for those created by Alfred Nobel the previous year.

  Although his idea for journalism prizes may have seemed like an afterthought to the officials at Columbia, Pulitzer had long used the technique to motivate his own reporters. As early as 1887, reporters on the World competed for annual monetary awards in a number of categories such as best news story and best writing. Editors were not excluded. Pulitzer held competitions for best headline and best copyediting, as well.

  Pulitzer selected Columbia for his munificence because of its location in the capital of newspaper publishing and because it already had a School of Mines. (“Why not also have a School of Journalism,” he said.) But if Columbia seemed uninterested, Pulitzer said he would try Yale.

  “My own ideas are positive enough about the general scheme, the general provisions and the general object, but when it comes to the vital details of a working plan I am quite at sea,” he continued. “I cannot help thinking that there is no profession in which every student of the United States has a more direct interest, or which represents, for good or for evil, the moral forces and moral sense of a nation.”

  Pulitzer assigned Hosmer to work secretly on the plan. He wanted it ready by his fifty-sixth birthday on April 10, 1903. For the first time since making a success of the World, Pulitzer felt the thrill of engaging in work that could outlast him. The journalism school, with its accompanying prizes for journalists from all over the country, represented an immense hope. “I don’t believe I have ever done anything that will give the children and their children a better name, and that—after all—is something,” he later wrote to Kate.

  On the train heading south on this January day, Seitz held the finished proposal in his hands. It stipulated that Pulitzer would provide Columbia with the $2 million in three installments. In return, the university would construct a building, invest the money, and use the income to pay salaries for the instructors and award the annual prizes. Before Seitz had a chance to take it all in, Pulitzer had groped his way down the hall of the train and was at his door.

  “You don’t think much of it,” he said.

  “I do not,” replied Seitz.

  “Well, what should I do? I want to do something.”

  “Endow the World. Make it foolproof.”

  “I am going to do something for it, in giving it a new building.”

  Ignoring Seitz’s opinion after asking for it, as he often did, Pulitzer instructed Hosmer to approach Columbia and Harvard universities with the idea, without revealing who was backing it. At Columbia, President Nicholas Murray Butler, who had taken over from Low, certainly knew whose money was being offered. By summer, he had won the trustees’ approval. When the agreement was signed, it was backdated to April 10, Pulitzer’s birthday.

  On Jekyll Island the following winter, Pulitzer devoted a part of each day to listening while one of his secretaries read aloud from the World. This was, by now, a well-rehearsed ritual. Pulitzer was extraordinarily attentive. A seasoned secretary knew enough to carefully read the World, as well as other newspapers, before the appointed time and to be prepared to describe the layout, size of type, and illustrations used in each story. What Pulitzer heard during one of these readings made him erupt in anger.

  On Sunday, February 22, the World published an article about Katherine Mackay, a socially prominent New Yorker. It made mention of the decorations in a nursery that had been prepared for the birth of Mrs. Mackay’s child. Although the article did not use the word “pregnant,” it offended Pulitzer’s Victorian sentiments to the core. Pregnancy was a reminder of a taboo subject: sex. Upper-class women did all they could to hide their condition during pregnancy, including remaining indoors during the final months.

  Pulitzer let loose a barrage of invective that was immediately telegraphed to New York. “I own the paper and am responsible for its honor and consider lies, falsehoods, gross exaggeration, puffery, yellow plushism, flunkeyism as a crime inexcusable by any direction or any circulation,” he said. “Telegraph me who wrote it. See he quits office today.” The editors were flabbergasted. The photographs used had been supplied by Katherine Mackay herself and no one, including the Mackay family, had objected to the article. One editor said even his sixteen-year-old daughter liked it. Another said he had heard many expectant women discussing their condition in the presence of both sexes without any objection.

  Pulitzer replied that it was entirely possible that the Mackays, who were his friends, were not shocked. Nonetheless, he would not tolerate this kind of story, because it represented a drift in an abhorrent direction pioneered by the Journal, which featured “well-known ladies in an interesting condition,” he said, still avoiding the word “pregnant.” “If that is not disgusting and sickening,” he continued, “I don’t know what is.”

  Seitz identified the reporter who had written the piece. It was not a man but a woman, Zona Gale, and he promised Pulitzer she would be dropped. Gale was then a struggling freelance writer working mostly for the Evening World while creating novels in her spare time. Years later, she would win a Pulitzer prize as a playwright.

  On May 10, 1903, the World celebrated its twentieth anniversary under Pulitzer’s ownership with a 136-page issue, the largest newspaper ever printed. A few days later, Pulitzer’s daughter Edith, who attended Miss Vinton’s School for Girls in Connecticut, was summoned to her headmistress’s study. Such invitations usually were reserved for reprimands, so Edith was panic-stricken.

  When Edith arrived, Miss Vinton began reading aloud from the New York Times, the only newspaper permitted in the school. In it was an editorial written by Adolph Ochs on the anniversary of the World. In most flattering terms, it spoke about Edith’s father and the accomplishments of his paper. “Whatever may be said of the ways of the World,” Ochs had written, “it will be universally admitted that it has ‘done the State some service,’ and has fought with notable vigor and unflagging zeal for the triumph of many good causes.”

  Pulitzer took great joy in hearing Edith’s story. He was in Bad Homburg, Germany, where he had gone to try its baths, having tested the curative powers of those in Carlsbad, Wiesbaden, and Baden-Baden. But his rest was disturbed when one of his male personal assistants was caught soliciting sex from a man. The ax fell quickly. “Mr. Pulitzer wishes me to tell you that this incident has given him great pain and that he is much distressed with the duty and sorrow at the necessity of terminating your recent personal relation with him,” one of the other secretaries wrote to the man. Perhaps because of his own intimate friendship as a teenager with Davidson, though, Pulitzer was unwilling to be as cruel as others might have been at the time toward a homosexual man. He arranged for him to have a job helping in the London office of the World.

  The forty-three-year-old, Irish-born James Tuohy, who served as the London bureau chief, was well used to doing personal services for Pulitzer. In fact, for years he had orchestrated the search for British companions, which Pulitzer preferred over Americans. This new assignment, however, seemed unlikely to succeed because London was as intolerant toward homosexuals as most other places. He warned his boss: “I note your instructions…. The difficulty is how am I to know what he is doing? If I tell him that a repetition of anything like the Homburg incident means a termination of his engagement, he simply won’t tell me.”

  In fact, not long after arriving in London, the man was propositioned in a Piccadilly restaurant by Grenadier Guardsmen who, according to Tuohy, “have a reputation, by the way, of augmenting their pay considerably by this avocation.” It seemed unlikely that Pulitzer’s solution for the man would work. “I am afraid that———’s fatal attraction will get him into trouble, in spite of himself, before long.”

  From Bad Homburg, Pulitzer migrated to Étretat on the northern coast of France, and then to London for the fall. He had little interest in the mayoral race back in New York. In fact, his passion for politics was
diminishing. The change was evident to careful readers of the editorial page.

  One reader in particular was Pulitzer’s editor James W. Clarke. In preparation for the paper’s twentieth anniversary earlier in the year, he had examined the state of the editorial page. Clarke’s report read like a nonfiction version of Phillips’s novel. He found that over the years since Pulitzer had ceased being present at the paper, the page had lost its soul and the fires of reform had dimmed to a flicker. In its first years, when Pulitzer himself wrote the editorials, “politics, politics, politics dominated the page,” Clarke said. “They were hot, partisan politics, too. The tone was radical and at times violent. The masses were steadily championed, the millionaires and money power constantly denounced.

  “There was no mincing of words in denouncing Republican Presidents and statesmen,” Clarke continued. “The page was sprinkled liberally with attacks upon other papers and upon men…. Plenty of epithets and personalities. Plenty of first-class invectives, some good satire—but humor very light. It was mostly hard pounding and expounding.”

  This was a grim verdict for Pulitzer. His cherished editorial page had become like him, old and stodgy. He was bereft of friends, and the companions with whom he spent his days were paid to be with him. His most important connections to his beginnings in St. Louis—Davidson and Dillon—were dead. He was estranged from his only living sibling, who was also his last tie to his childhood in Hungary. Since their fights in 1883, Albert had gone to Europe, and neither man had written to the other after that. Joseph’s children were a disappointment and his family provided no comfort, broken up as it was on two continents. His stoic wife, Kate, remained willing at all times to fill the void, but Joseph had spurned her offers of companionship so frequently that she ceased to ask.