Pulitzer
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Of all of Hearst’s enemies, Pulitzer was the one who remained fair. He issued strict instructions to his staff that his view of Hearst should not color the paper’s coverage of the candidate. “Treat Hearst without a particle of feeling of prejudice, if this is possible,” he wrote. Two years earlier, when Hearst had run for president, Pulitzer had similarly restrained his editorial staff. “Never for a moment fail to admit that Hearst is a very clever politician, and able man,” Pulitzer wrote, ordering that he “should be treated with, at least, that respect which is due to his following.” While continuing to oppose Hearst, Pulitzer privately admitted admiration for his rival’s allegiance to his principles.
Hearst, however, knew none of this. During his campaign, he made Pulitzer a frequent target. Over the course of seven speeches in New York and Brooklyn, Hearst damned the man he had once admired. “When Mr. Pulitzer was building up his paper he had principles, or at least he professed principles,” Hearst said. “When he was appealing for the pennies of the people he proclaimed himself the champion of the people. In his old age, when he has amassed his fortune and has invested it in gas stocks and railroad stocks and other Wall Street securities, he repudiates the principles that made him and betrays the people that supported him.
“False to his principles, false to his own people, he fawns and truckles to a class that uses him while it despises him.
In the end, Hearst lost the election to the Republican, Charles Evans Hughes, though by only a slim margin. Exhausted, Hearst and his family left New York for a vacation in Mexico. Stopping in St. Louis, the defeated candidate went to the Post-Dispatch building in order to use the Associated Press facilities to send some business messages. As he entered the building, Joe Pulitzer, who was in exile at the Post-Dispatch, saw Hearst and followed him up to the AP office.
“I want to know if you realize what you said in your speeches about my father and I want to know if you believe it,” Joe said in a low tone when he caught up with Hearst.
“Many things are said in a political campaign that are regrettable,” replied Hearst.
“That won’t do,” said Joe, interrupting Hearst. “I intend that you shall say whether you believe it or not.”
“I usually mean what I say,” Hearst said. Then, noticing the young man’s rising temper, he crossed his arms in front of his chest, a defensive boxing stance that Joe would have recognized as the “Harvard guard.” It was done just in time. Joe struck at Hearst, who warded off the blow. The young Pulitzer tried again, but others in the office held him back while Hearst’s wife, who had been seated nearby, grabbed her husband by the arm. Hearst escaped unscathed.
Three decades after his father had shot at a lobbyist and brawled with an editor, St. Louis had another fighting Pulitzer on its hands. “Alas, the punch didn’t land,” Joe admitted nearly fifty years later, adding, “that’s always been one of my regrets.”
Kate was proud of Joe and told her husband, “You should feel happy at Joe’s feelings for you.” Joseph, however, was in no mood to hear about his pugilistic son standing up for him. He had just disembarked from a grim Mediterranean cruise. Hosmer had been ill the entire voyage and had thus deprived Joseph of conversation; and the backup, a loyal secretary, was seasick. Kate tried to comfort Joseph and offered to come to Cap Martin, where he was settling in for the winter. “Whenever I hear that you are lonely and miserable and forlorn, I always want to help and shelter you.” But he refused her entreaties, telling her to stay away. “If it is any comfort to you,” she wrote back, “I should like you to know I think of you constantly and feel most sorry for you.”
Reaching age seventy-five, Hosmer decided that his health would no longer permit him to be in Pulitzer’s company. After sixteen years of providing companionship to the publisher, Hosmer told Butes, “I am going home for a rest as I am too much used up by recent illness to be of any good here.” He reached New York a few days before Christmas. After completing some errands for Pulitzer, he went uptown to see Kate. When he reached the house, he found Edith and Constance at the lunch table with Kate’s personal companion Macarow and another guest. Kate was eating alone in her room.
At length, Hosmer explained that Joseph was depressed, filled with melancholy, lonely, and without any companionship “or any sense just at the present of intimate or pleasant association with any human creature.” Kate wanted to leave immediately for France. In 1890, she and Hosmer had rushed across the ocean to rescue Joseph from a similar descent into darkness. This time, though, the two decided that it might make matters worse if Kate went without her husband’s consent.
She stayed in New York. “I wish I could give you happiness or least contentment,” she wrote to Joseph on Christmas Eve. “As one grows older, peace almost seems happiness. I wonder if that restless spirit of yours will ever accept peace as a substitute for active happiness?” On board the Honor, a yacht he had leased to take him to Greece, Pulitzer asked Thwaites to send a note to Butes in New York. “I shall eat my Christmas dinner in solitary grandeur, I suppose.”
Shortly after New Year’s Day, 1907, Kate’s trunks stood packed in her bedroom in New York. Joseph had admitted that he could use her company, and Kate had booked passage to France. But then a telegram arrived. It announced that he was out of his depression and had no need for her care. Although she was pleased that he was better, Kate’s anger flared. “There is one thing you must never in your life do again,” Kate told him, “that is complain that your family has neglected and deserted you. For I have kept copies of my telegrams urging and telling you to let me join you and also urging you to let the children join you, both of whom were only too willing to go. So you must get that morbidly false idea out of your mind.” It was advice he would continue to ignore.
“You would be so much happier, dear,” Kate insisted, having regained her composure, “if you would only give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume they must necessarily be always in the wrong and that they intend either way to hurt or to injure you.”
To her pleasure, the World’s bureau chief in Paris, Stephen MacKenna, persuaded Rodin to travel to Menton in southern France, where Joseph was staying, to execute a bust for the princely sum of 35,000 francs. Joseph, who had taken to the idea, wanted the finished work to be displayed in the Pulitzer Building in New York. But he remained his prickly self as the day neared for the sculptor’s arrival. “I can’t adapt myself to his pleasure, he must adapt himself to mine, come with me on my ride, not touch me in the afternoon,” Pulitzer demanded. “Also, he should definitely have some idea of my character and moods and should make allowances for them. I don’t care a damn how ugly he makes me, but he shouldn’t misrepresent me. There are elements of romance and tragedy.
“As to the sittings,” Pulitzer informed MacKenna, “I cannot possibly give him more than one sitting a day as I am an invalid suffering from insomnia, usually tired.” When Rodin arrived in mid-March, Pulitzer found him charming—until the artist asked him to remove his shirt, as he did with every male subject. Pulitzer, who possessed an exaggerated Victorian prudishness, refused. Rodin threatened to leave. He said he could not even begin to do a bust without studying the neck and torso of a subject. With the room cleared of everyone save Rodin’s assistant, the sitting began with a shirtless Pulitzer.
Pulitzer’s French had grown rusty and Rodin spoke no English, so the two conversed through an interpreter. “But his great personality was easily seen,” said Rodin. “His head was that of a master of destiny who by sheer will had risen from a humble beginning to the level of more fortunate fellowmen; then by same force had [reached] one still higher beyond them, where they could not follow because they lacked his character.”
Pulitzer asked Rodin to show him as a sighted person. “What I see in your face I will show, and not what you see,” Rodin curtly replied. “Blind though he was,” the sculptor recalled years later, “he was a great dominant force, and this characteristic I tried to express in my bust of him.” Rodin retu
rned to Paris, after three weeks in Menton, convinced that Pulitzer did not have long to live. He told his atelier to lose no time in making the marble bust and the bronze casts.
The sittings with Rodin were the final personal service that MacKenna, who had run the Paris bureau since 1903, rendered for his boss. Unlike Tuohy in London, MacKenna resented doing errands for Pulitzer. Back in Paris, he received a telegram from Pulitzer ordering him to buy six chickens and six ducklings and deliver them to the Gare de Lyon for shipment to Menton. “Refuse de vous acheter six poulets et six canetons; ceci est ma demission,” MacKenna wired back. “Refuse to buy you six chickens and six ducklings; this is my resignation.”
On April 10, 1907, Pulitzer turned sixty. From southern France, he sent orders for his staff in New York and St. Louis to celebrate the occasion. Sixty editors from the World and sixty from the Post-Dispatch came together for sumptuous meals at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York and at Planter’s Hotel in St. Louis, respectively. At an appointed hour, a long-distance telephone line was opened, connecting the two celebrations. Toasts were made late into the night and duly wired to Pulitzer. During the meals, a cable from Joseph, filled with lofty declarations of principle—like those usually chiseled on walls—announced that Ralph would become president of the Pulitzer Publishing Company. Joseph’s cable also included a declaration of his retirement, a sequel to the one announced in 1890. But those who worked for him discounted it. Pointedly, no mention was made of any new responsibilities for Joe, who was hosting the dinner in St. Louis.
There still was no truce between the father and his son in exile, despite Joe’s endless apologies for any unintended slights. The exile would continue. “There is not one scintilla of a shadow of a shadow, or one shade of a scintilla of a shadow of reason for the thought that I even contemplated your coming to New York last year, this year or next year,” Joseph wrote Joe a month after the dinner.
“I do not expect perfection and Lord knows I am indulgent enough and affectionate enough and weak enough in my children,” he continued. “But I leave you under no delusion; I must say that if you should work ten times as hard with a hundred times the talent you possess, it would still be no equivalent or recompense for the constant pain and suffering and distress, mental, moral and consequently physical, by day and by night, and almost every waking hour of the night and day, you have caused me this winter before and certainly one winter before that.”
Joseph’s somber mood had worsened by the time he reached Maine in July. After giving thirteen years of selfless service to an impossible boss, Alfred Butes told Pulitzer he had accepted an offer to work for the British newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth, who recently had been given the title Baron Northcliffe. Pulitzer had known the British publisher since first renting houses in England in the 1890s. The two had much in common. Northcliffe, like Pulitzer, had begun his working life as a reporter. By his thirties, he had become his nation’s preeminent newspaper publisher. Also, they both discovered that gaining power took a toll on friendships. “I am the loneliest man in the world,” Pulitzer once told Northcliffe. “I cannot afford to have friends. People who dine at my table one night find themselves arraigned in my newspaper the next morning.”
That Butes went to work for Northcliffe made the desertion all the more painful. Pulitzer had assumed Butes would always remain with him, but signs of trouble had been long evident and might have been noticed by a boss who was sensitive to the feelings of those surrounding him. Butes, who was English, had a wife and child he hardly ever saw. Instead, he accompanied Pulitzer to Europe in the spring, Chatwold in the summer, Jekyll Island in the winter, and New York for occasional stays. “I am a miserable alien,” he had told Seitz several years before.
The break cost Butes an inheritance his boss had intended for him, and it destroyed Northcliffe’s friendship with Pulitzer. Norman Thwaites was given the unfortunate task of consoling Pulitzer. The two went for a horseback ride in the woods at Bar Harbor. “I sought to keep his mind engaged by bits of news from the day’s papers,” Thwaites said. But Pulitzer didn’t respond, so Thwaites became silent.
“Well, why don’t you talk?” Pulitzer suddenly said, swinging at Thwaites with his riding crop. “Is there no news in the paper? Dammit, man, talk, talk!”
When Thwaites explained that he had been talking for an hour, Pulitzer “relented at once and, after apologizing, he bade me to tell him why he was treated so cruelly.”
In the fall, Harold Stanley Pollard, who had joined Pulitzer’s cadre of assistants in 1905 after a brief tenure at the New York Times, went to Paris on a mission to determine what progress Rodin had made on the bust. At first he was turned away from the studio because Rodin was not there, but Pollard persuaded the concierge to let him have a peek at the work. Inside the studio, the man lifted the cloth off the bust. Pollard was struck at once by the resemblance that Rodin had achieved. “My mind flashed over the pictures by Bonnat, Sargent, and even the old-time photographs,” he reported to Pulitzer. “He has seen in you the thoughtful mature man. He has depicted in his marble, an expression of mental introspection, a face outward quiet, immobile, gentle, and almost sad in his smooth soft lines, not a feature is harsh, aggressive or combative, but over all there is a wonderful glow of thought, of a brain studying, thinking, planning, pondering, deeply, earnestly, constantly.
“He had neither made the eyes perfect nor sightless. He has given one the slight dropping difference we notice in comparison with the other,” Pollard said. The concierge slowly turned the white marble bust. “I caught a sudden view, half profile, half full front. It was you as I have seen you in the quiet of the study when everything around you was quiet and peaceful, when you were thinking and planning those things that have made both history and success.”
At last, the attendant threw the cover back over the bust.
“Is it finished?” asked Pollard.
“Yes, it is finished,” he replied.
Pollard was not the only man on a mission for Pulitzer. In early December, the London bureau chief James Tuohy and his family traveled to Leith—in Scotland, north of Edinburgh—to join Arthur Billings for the launch of Pulitzer’s new yacht. For more than a year, Billings, who had taken leave from his post at the World, had supervised the building of the yacht at the famous Ramage and Ferguson shipyard. Painted white, and christened the Liberty, the 300-hundred-foot yacht lacked only its engines, funnels, and mast. With a bottle of champagne, Tuohy’s daughter Jane launched the ship down the ramp of its dry dock and into the water.
The $1.5 million Liberty was the culmination of a long search for a suitable oceangoing vessel. Pulitzer had wanted to own a yacht ever since his days on Jay Gould’s in 1883. After he became blind and infirm, Kate had pressed him to find one. His earlier discouraging episode as a yacht owner almost cured him of his desire. But in 1905, at Kate’s urging, he began the search in earnest. He considered half a dozen yachts but none seemed suitable. “The great difficulty is that a vessel which would seem very silent to others may be very noisy to me—because of my excessive sensibility to noise,” Pulitzer wrote to one seller.
As a result, the Liberty had been specially designed to minimize noise, from its bulkhead to its every door and porthole. Once it passed its sea trials, Pulitzer anticipated being able to travel around the globe in a cocoon of silence, served by a forty-five-man crew and a twelve-man staff of personal assistants to read aloud, play music, or provide conversation. “I certainly expect to spend a large part of life-remains I have on the sea,” Pulitzer wrote to Hosmer, who had logged more miserable nautical miles traveling with him than any other man. “You know Pulitzer’s sea-ways are very far from safe,” he joked about himself.
On a Sunday morning in July 1908, the New York World’s editor Arthur Clarke was silently sorting papers at his desk on the dais in the twelfth-floor newsroom when the telegraph editor came running in.
“Arthur, Joseph Pulitzer is in the reception room!” he exclaimed.
“Arthur, I’m not kidding you,” the editor begged. “Joseph Pulitzer is outside. I saw him when I got off the elevator. He’s resting on the couch. Seitz, Lyman, Arthur Billings, and a swarm of secretaries are with him. In one minute the whole crowd will be in here.”
Clarke remained unmoved, ignoring the frantic excitement of the editor. Then he heard Pulitzer’s unmistakable voice. “I’ll go to Van Hamm’s office, if you say so, but I won’t go any damned roundabout way.”
He looked up and in came Pulitzer, inappropriately dressed for the summer in a tightly buttoned dark suit and with his eyes hidden by his usual goggle-like dark lenses. The publisher was crossing the cavernous newsroom, a maze of desks normally filled with reporters, editors, and copy boys running between them. Being guided by a secretary just barely prevented Pulitzer from striking a phone booth but caused the secretary a bruise as he, instead of his boss, smacked into it. “Clumsy!” said Pulitzer when he heard the impact.
The group reached the empty office of Caleb Van Hamm, the managing editor. Sitting in Van Hamm’s desk chair, Pulitzer asked Seitz how many windows there were in the room. “Three,” Seitz replied. Then the party moved to the office of Robert Lyman, the night editor. Pulitzer now asked how far it was from the copy desk. When he was told that fifty feet separated the two, he became agitated. “Idiotic,” he said. “Why not put it over in City Hall Park? The night editor must be near the copy desk. No nonsense about it. Swear you will change it!” All took an oath, but as with most of Pulitzer’s instructions of this sort, they ignored the directive later, when he was gone.