The Canal Zone was a beehive of activity and teeming with thousands of Americans. In the five years since the United States had resumed work on the canal, a large trench had begun to take shape. Despite the region’s heavy rainy season, landslides, and malaria, workers were excavating 3 million cubic yards of dirt a month, creating a ditch large enough to lay down two Empire State Buildings on their sides, end to end. But it would be still five more years before the first ship would pass through the canal.
Harding caught up with Pulitzer’s attorney, who was quite surprised to find him in Panama. Harding determined that, as he had feared, Cromwell’s men and Panamanian conspirators were obstructing the legal investigation, preventing the investigation from getting to the bottom of the story. In fact, the attorney had already been convinced that there had been no corruption. “The World has been misled,” he told Harding. “We haven’t a leg to stand on.”
Harding decided that if Panama would not yield the secrets, then they could be found in the capital of the country which once ruled Panama. Before leaving for the Colombian capital of Bogotá, he hired Edwin Warren Guyol, a native of New Orleans who spoke Spanish and had worked as a reporter in Cuba. Nicknamed “M’sié Manqueau” for having lost his arm in an accident, Guyol had a rough-and-tumble reputation. But he proved loyal to the end. When men tied to Cromwell attempted to bribe him, he told Harding. They, Guyol said, wanted him to spy on Harding and impede the research. In particular, he was to work closely with Marquis Alexander de St. Croix, a French wine salesman who was leaving for Bogotá ahead of them. The pair decided to play along as if Guyol had agreed to double-cross Harding.
When Harding and Guyol reached Bogotá in August, they made their arrival conspicuous. They published an open letter in the main newspaper asking for help from Colombians, who were still smarting after the forced separation of Panama from their own territory. Officials at the U.S. legation warily watched Guyol and Harding. As it turned out, they had reason to.
Harding concluded that it was time to resort to extreme means to find the documents they were looking for. “In short,” he said, “it was a case, as far as we were concerned, of fighting the devil with his own tools.” They selected St. Croix, the wine merchant whom they believed to be a spy for Cromwell, as their first target. Continuing to pretend that he himself had been bribed, Guyol tried to get St. Croix to let him know what Cromwell was covering up. After this effort failed to produce any results, Guyol obtained Harding’s permission to spike St. Croix’s brandy with chloral hydrate (a hypnotic and sedative) in order to search his luggage. To ward off any effect on himself when he drank brandy with St. Croix, Guyol drank a cup of olive oil beforehand. The luggage contained nothing incriminating.
Next they turned to the U.S. legation. Harding was convinced that it held documents dating from when the United States engineered Panama’s revolution, and that these would be the proof he sought. A U.S. official, who regularly indulged a passion for drink and gambling, particularly high-stakes stud poker, gave them their first opportunity. Using the World’s money to pay his gambling debts at a club in Bogotá, Guyol befriended this official. One night, when the man napped on a sofa at the club, Guyol stole his keys and then unlocked and propped open a door to the legation. Twice, he repeated the maneuver, once almost getting caught and being forced to hide in the saddle room for two hours. By the end, Guyol had managed to read all the official correspondence for 1902, but he failed to find any proof of wrongdoing.
Harding took matters in his own hands. On October 23, he made his own nighttime trip into the U.S. legation while the minister was dining at the presidential palace. A young clerk, who claimed he knew where an incriminating letter by John Hay was, agreed to take Harding to the file room. As they began opening document folders, the minister’s son discovered them and sounded the alarm. Luckily for Harding, he was not prosecuted. The Colombians were unlikely to care, and putting Harding into custody to return him to the United States would be nearly impossible. Instead, the clerk was fired, Harding and Guyol were declared persona non grata, and a letter of complaint was sent to the World.
Not one to give up, Guyol made one last attempt to discover their Holy Grail. He spotted the official whose keys he had borrowed leaving the legation with a valise in the company of St. Croix. He followed them across Colombia, plotting all the way how to steal the valise, convinced it held the wanted documents. His first plan was to grab it when they boarded a riverboat and then jump into the river and make for shore, but since he had only one arm, this plan seemed doomed from the start. Luckily, he had a better opportunity when the locked leather duffel bag was unloaded from a train. Finally alone with the bag, he broke it open, to discover that it held nothing of value. All he brought back with him to Harding were broken ribs from falling off a horse during his pursuit of the two men.
With that, the far-flung search for evidence of corruption involving the canal came up empty-handed. Keeping their boss from prison would now rest solely on the legal skills of his lawyers.
Chapter Thirty
A SHORT REMAINING SPAN
In late September 1909, Pulitzer and his personal staff of sixteen settled for the autumn in one of the fashionable districts of Berlin, near the famous Tiergarten park and the city’s elegant opera house. As usual, the landlord had been required to make numerous alterations to please his tenant. Thick plate glass was added to the bedroom windows, heavy carpets were laid down, and all the windows and door hinges were well oiled.
After disagreeable stays in Paris and London over many years, Pulitzer found Berlin to be just right. For once he managed to shed his woes, attend concerts and operas, and eat out with friends. He was the most content he had been in a long time. “With due reserve,” Thwaites wrote to Seitz in New York, “I may say that Berlin is a great success and serenity of our daily tenor is positively uncanny.” Over the past three years, Europe had become Pulitzer’s new home. If he was not at sea, he was in Aix-les-Bains, Cap Martin, London, or, now, Berlin.
Europe had also become the home of Joseph’s brother Albert. Since his departure from New York fourteen years earlier, Albert had wandered around the continent, staying in fashionable hotels, occasionally returning to the United States, and living from the proceeds of the sale of his Morning Journal. He and Joseph had not spoken or written to each other since their confrontation over Albert’s refusal to merge his newspaper with Joseph’s. In a way, Albert had been revenged. Each day, as Joseph waged a life-and-death struggle with Hearst, he had been competing with the newspaper that Albert created.
Albert had also cut his ties with his former wife, Fanny, years before her death that summer, and his son Walter, who was trying to make a living as a writer in New York. At the World, Walter was persona non grata because of his father. “There were strict orders that under no circumstances was he to be identified as related to or connected with the Joseph Pulitzer family in any way, shape or manner,” recalled one editor.
During the years after he gave up journalism, Albert wrote a romantic novel about a Napoleonic prince, Eugène de Beauharnais; toyed briefly with starting another newspaper in New York; and eventually settled down in Vienna, taking as a companion a young woman with whom he had a son. Like his brother, Albert suffered intensively from insomnia and depression—which doctors treating the wealthy called “neurasthenia”—and from other, undiagnosed ailments. For Joseph, it was sound that caused him great suffering. For Albert, it was changes in temperature and light.
Over time, Albert’s behavior grew increasingly odd and unpredictable. Earlier in the year, he had abruptly left Vienna and taken up residence in San Francisco, at the Fairmont Hotel. His demands on its staff and his unusual eating habits were the talk of the town. A newspaper in San Francisco published on its front page a one-day sample of what the Fairmont’s kitchen fed its eccentric guest. Rising before dawn, the corpulent gourmand consumed shredded wheat and two to eight baked apples with cream. A midday plate of Corinth raisins and
vegetables would hold him over until a five-o’clock glass of lemon squash, effervescent with bicarbonate of soda. At seven, he sat down for a dinner of San Francisco oysters, clam chowder, veal, chicken, and sweet russet pears, all washed down with a bottle of Moselle wine.
While he was in San Francisco, Albert worked feverishly on his memoirs. He left the Fairmont and hid himself away in the remote Tavern Resort on the top of nearby Mount Tamalpais. There he drew the ire of other guests by rising before the sun to begin typing, knocking over chairs in his room, and requesting special trains when the scheduled ones had ceased running up the mountain. The novelist Gertrude Atherton claimed that at one point he burst uninvited into her rooms while showing friends around.
By fall, his memoir complete, Albert returned to Vienna. He was despondent. He called on Dr. Max Neuda, his physician and friend. The two discussed the works of Baruch Spinoza, Albert’s favorite philosopher. On the morning of October 4, as was his practice, his companion read to Albert from the morning newspapers. Among the stories was one of a man afflicted with insomnia who had committed suicide. “Wenn ich nur Mut dazu hätte,” Albert said. “If only I had the courage.” He asked his companion to leave him alone. When she departed, he went to the druggist and purchased a poisonous substance, probably a diluted form of prussic acid then used for the treatment of neuralgia.
There are two kinds of suicides: one in which the person is crying for help; the other in which death is sought. Albert wanted the latter. After drinking the potion, he took up his revolver, pressed the barrel to his right temple, and pulled the trigger.
Joseph learned of his brother’s death from a reporter who called on him at his house in Berlin. Though only a 325-mile train ride separated him from where his brother lay in a morgue in Vienna, Joseph did not go. Instead he sent Thwaites, with several thousand German marks.
Reaching Vienna, Thwaites drove out to the Zentralfriedhof, the final resting place for many of the city’s most famous residents. There, in the mortuary of the Old Jewish section, he found Albert, covered with a white cloth, in a cheap wooden box. “No money having been traced, the millionaire was about to be buried as a pauper,” Thwaites said. “The face was quite unmarred. The bullet had ranged upward through the temple, making the exit at the back of the head on the left side. A terrible wound.”
Using Joseph’s money, Thwaites purchased a better casket and paid for flowers. The following day, led in song by a Jewish male chorus, a small group accompanied the casket in a long procession to the burial plot that Neuda had purchased for Albert. At the graveside, it was left to the doctor to provide a eulogy. Recalling Albert’s visit to him and their philosophical chat a few days prior, he said, “It little occurred to me then, that this visit and this discussion were prompted by your decision to take leave of this earthly life, and so to say a word of farewell to me.”
Several days later, Joseph’s cousin Adam Politzer, who lived in Vienna, met with Neuda. As executor of the estate, Neuda had carefully examined all the items in Albert’s possession. “Alongside numerous love letters of extremely diverse provenance, which Neuda destroyed immediately, only credit letters and other insignificant papers were found,” Politzer told Joseph. “A letter for you was not present. Nor was any other note that referenced you.”
Of the nine children born to Fülöp and Elize Pulitzer, only Joseph remained alive.
As winter set in, Pulitzer abandoned Berlin for the warmth of Cap Martin. He was slowing down. Even those around him who discounted his continual health crises detected a change. One evening, while Pulitzer was cruising in Mediterranean waters on the Liberty, Harold Pollard brought him out on deck to see a full moon. After looking up into the night sky for a while, Pulitzer gave up. “It’s no use, my dear boy,” he said, “I cannot even get a glimmer of its light.”
Seitz, who came from New York for his usual business consultations with Pulitzer, encountered a calmer, reflective, more philosophical boss. On a car ride through the countryside, Seitz and Pulitzer were left alone for a while when the engine stalled and Pollard went for help. “You see how quiet I am,” Pulitzer said. “Real troubles never bother me. It’s only the small annoyances that upset me.” In the silence of the parked automobile, Seitz described the view of Cap Martin below them. “You know I was here thirty-five years ago for the first time and the sight is always with me,” Pulitzer remarked.
Suddenly, Pulitzer changed the subject. “We will not have many rows,” he told a disbelieving Seitz, who had been buffeted by Pulitzer’s infamous temper for eighteen years. “No, I am serious,” he continued. “I am not going to live long. I have had warnings. Besides I am no longer equal to thinking or deciding. You will have to get along without me more and more from now on and see less and less of me.”
Contributing to Pulitzer’s melancholy was his increasing loneliness. He had entered into a time of life marked by frequent deaths. Two days after Christmas 1909, Angus Shaw “sorrowfully and faithfully” telegraphed the news that Dumont Clarke, Pulitzer’s sixty-nine-year-old banker and trusted adviser, had died of pneumonia. The flags on the Pulitzer Building were lowered to half-mast. “Coin,” as he was known in the codebook, had been at Pulitzer’s side since the World began making him rich. The two had, in Pulitzer’s words, “implicitly trustful, irregular relations in money matters.” Every dollar of Pulitzer’s income was funneled to Clarke’s bank. Without any paperwork or signatures, Clarke had invested, transferred, or wired money as Pulitzer saw fit. He had also provided wise counsel on everything from personnel issues at the World to coping with children at home. Although Clarke’s son promised to provide Pulitzer with the same service, he could not replace his father.
Pulitzer’s loneliness was also an unescapable consequence of the years when he had spurned Kate’s tenderness and alienated his children. The unreliability of Pulitzer’s affection and his unpredictable cruelty left them little choice. Though they held him in great affection, they had defensively created lives apart, accentuating his isolation. “I want some love and affection from my children in the closing short span of life that still remains,” he wrote to Joe after receiving a complaining note from his son, still chafing under Pulitzer’s strictures. “If I cannot have that love and affection, I may at least expect to be spared willful, deliberate disrespect disobedience, and insult.”
Kate did her best to try to end her husband’s self-imposed exile from the family. “Pray realize that you would be so much happier yourself if you have light hearts and happy faces around you,” she had written several years earlier. “Love served is always so much better than that which is bought. You cannot either buy or beat love from anyone, you can only earn it and you can, for no one can be more tender or charming than you when you wish to be.”
His twenty-nine-year-old son, Ralph, who came to visit in January, limited most communications with his father to matters of business relating to the World, of which he was now ostensibly the president. Twenty-four-year-old Joe was trying to build a life for himself in St. Louis, working at the Post-Dispatch. He felt certain that nothing he did could measure up to his father’s expectations, and he understood his place among the sons. “I realize what a loss Mr. Clarke’s death had been for you and how necessary it is for you to see Ralph,” Joe wrote to his father while his older brother was in Cap Martin. “It has given me a good deal of pleasure to feel you attach at least enough importance to me and have enough confidence in me to want me here in New York when Ralph is away.”
Pulitzer’s two daughters—twenty-three-year-old Edith and the twenty-one-year-old Constance, saw more of New York high society than of their father. Kate spent almost as much time in Europe as Joseph, but only in the rarest of circumstances were they in the same place at the same time. Little Herbert was, at thirteen, still too young to have given offense.
Once again, Pulitzer revised his will. He had written his first one in 1892 and had altered it substantially in 1904 to provide instructions for the creation of the journ
alism school and prizes. As he cruised on the Liberty, he fretted over who would best carry out his wishes. He replaced Clarke with Governor Charles Hughes of New York as one of the trustees. The lugubrious voyage, complete with rough seas, gave Pollard cause to rename Pulitzer’s entourage the “sea-sickophants.”
In the United States, Roosevelt’s prosecutions were still working their way through the courts. In October, Pulitzer had his first victory. It came when his lawyers appeared before a federal judge in Indiana in whose courtroom the Indianapolis portion of the case had landed. Calling the case “political,” the judge questioned the U.S. attorney’s right to try it in Washington, suggesting that this venue would set a precedent subjecting newspapers to hundreds of libel trials. The following day he dismissed the case.
“I am of the opinion,” said the judge, “that the fact that certain persons were called ‘thieves’ and ‘swindlers’ does not constitute libel per se,” he said. Citing a newspaper’s duty to report the facts and draw inferences for its readers, the judge said the issue of the canal could use some public scrutiny. “The revolution in Panama, the circumstances concerning it, were unusual and peculiar.”
The ruling effectively killed the indictments in Washington. Pulitzer no longer faced any prospect of prison. But the pleasure of the victory was muted by the knowledge that the stronger legal case, the one in New York assembled by Stimson against the World before he left office, remained to be tried.
On January 25, 1910, Pulitzer’s attorney De Lancey Nicoll arrived at the U.S. district court in Manhattan. The day before that, a jury had been seated to hear, at long last, the criminal libel charges brought against the World and its editor Van Hamm. The case, built by Stimson, was the only remaining legal bullet from the chamber loaded by Roosevelt while he was still president.
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