Pulitzer Read online

  Pulitzer

  A Life in Politics, Print, and Power

  James McGrath Morris

  To Dean M. Sagar

  Don’t tell stories about me.

  Keep them until I am dead.

  JOSEPH PULITZER (1847–1911)

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: Havana 1909

  Part I: 1847–1878

  1. Hungary

  2. Boots and Saddles

  3. The Promised Land

  4. Politics and Journalism

  5. Politics and Gunpowder

  6. Left Behind

  7. Politics and Rebellion

  8. Politics and Principle

  9. Founding Father

  10. Fraud and His Fraudulency

  11. Nannie and Kate

  Part II: 1878–1888

  12. A Paper of His Own

  13. Success

  14. Dark Lantern

  15. St. Louis Grows Small

  16. The Great Theater

  17. Kingmaker

  18. Raising Liberty

  19. A Blind Croesus

  Part III: 1888–1911

  20. Samson Agonistes

  Photographic Insert

  21. Darkness

  22. Caged Eagle

  23. Trouble from the West

  24. Yellow

  25. The Great God Success

  26. Fleeing His Shadow

  27. Captured for the Ages

  28. Forever Unsatisfied

  29. Clash of Titans

  30. A Short Remaining Span

  31. Softly, Very Softly

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Frontispiece illustration by William A. Rogers was originally published in Harper’s Weekly, December 29, 1901.

  Author’s Note

  Like Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than for his contribution to history. This is a shame. In the nineteenth century, when America became an industrial nation and Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Joseph Pulitzer was the midwife to the birth of the modern mass media. What he accomplished was as significant in his time as the creation of television would be in the twentieth century, and it remains deeply relevant in today’s information age.

  Pulitzer’s lasting achievement was to transform American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence. He accomplished this by being the first media lord to recognize the vast social changes that the industrial revolution triggered, and by harnessing all the converging elements of entertainment, technology, business, and demographics. This accomplishment alone would make him worthy of a biography.

  His fascinating life, however, makes him an irresistible subject. Ted Turner-like in his innovative abilities, Teddy Roosevelt-like in his power to transform history, and Howard Hughes-like in the reclusive second half of his life as a blind man tormented by sound, Pulitzer’s tale provides all the elements of a life story that is important, timely, and compelling.

  This book benefits from several fortunate and remarkable discoveries of items previously unavailable to other biographers.

  Nearly a century ago, it was reported in newspapers that Pulitzer’s only living brother had written a memoir shortly before committing suicide in 1909. In 2005, I located the manuscript in the custody of his granddaughter in Paris. An extraordinarily talented sculptor of religious figures, the late Muriel Pulitzer had guarded the work all her life after her father failed to get it published as he had hoped. The memoir sheds new light on the Pulitzers’ childhood in Hungary, their separate journeys to the United States, their rise as American newspaper publishers, and the prickly relationship between them.

  Another important source of material was rescued from a trash bin in St. Louis. More than twenty years ago, the contractor Pat Fogarty spotted some wooden cigar boxes in a Dumpster near a building undergoing renovation. He thought they were too nice to be thrown out, so he took them home. When he opened them he discovered they were filled with documents from the 1800s that had once belonged to Joseph Pulitzer’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He put the boxes in his basement for safekeeping, thinking someday he might be able to sell the items.

  In 2008, Pat and Leslie Fogarty generously shared the contents with me. The papers turned out to be historically significant. They included the original receipts for Pulitzer’s purchase of the Dispatch at auction in 1878, the original merger agreement several days later between the Dispatch and the Post, hundreds of canceled checks signed by Pulitzer, and a loan agreement revealing who provided Pulitzer with the money to operate his first newspaper.

  Two other noteworthy sets of documents surfaced in St. Louis during my research. Eric P. Newman provided a copy of a financial note signed by Pulitzer that was instrumental in piecing together his partial ownership of the Westliche Post. The St. Louis Police Department Library gave me access to the 1872 Minutes of the St. Louis Police Commission contained in books that had been found abandoned in a closet.

  In Washington, D.C., I pursued at length a large cache of documents relating to President Theodore Roosevelt’s attempt to imprison Pulitzer for criminal libel. After years of claims by archivists that there were no such files, a threat of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act from a prominent Washington law firm sped their discovery. The files provide for the first time an inside look at this important episode in abuse of presidential power.

  Last, a small file folder at the Lake County Historical Society in Ohio contained a set of intriguing love letters to Kate Pulitzer while she was married to Joseph. They were signed only with an initial. But another set of documents, donated to Syracuse University in 2001, helped me identify her lover.

  These were just several of the sources that had not been available to previous researchers and have greatly enhanced the story of Pulitzer’s life. At the same time, these findings and others also contradict a number of frequently repeated tales about him. These range from the claim that his mother was Catholic to the myth that he purchased the New York World while on his way to a vacation in Europe with his family. Rather than bog down the narrative of this book, I have placed any disagreements with previous accounts in my endnotes.

  JAMES MCGRATH MORRIS

  TESUQUE, NEW MEXICO

  Prologue

  HAVANA 1909

  On the afternoon of February 17, 1909, a small boat pushed off from a dock in Havana’s harbor, cut through the pearl-green waters hugging the shoreline, and slid into the ultramarine-blue bay. Out ahead of it, one of the most luxurious private yachts in the world lay at anchor.

  The length of a football field, the Liberty was rivaled in size and extravagance only by J. P. Morgan’s Corsair, which had set the standard of seagoing opulence for a decade. With two raked masts front and aft of a large smokestack, the white-hulled Liberty was like the beautiful schooners that had plied the oceans years earlier. “I have never seen a vessel of more beautiful lines,” said one man on board, who had served on a yacht belonging to the second white raja of Sarawak. Inside, the spacious vessel contained a gymnasium, a library, drawing and smoking rooms, an oak-paneled dining room that could easily seat a dozen people, quarters for its forty-five-man crew, and twelve staterooms fitted by a decorator who had designed furnishings for London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

  At this hour, on board all was still. The engines were silent, the bulkhead doors remained closed, and the upper deck gangways were roped off. The Liberty’s owner, Joseph Pulitzer, had just
gone down for his after-lunch nap, and severe consequences would befall anyone who disturbed the repose of America’s most powerful newspaper publisher.

  Since becoming blind at the apex of his rise to the top, the sixty-one-year-old Pulitzer suffered from insomnia as well as numerous other real and imagined ailments, and was tormented by even the smallest sound. Every consideration possible was made to eliminate noise on board. Engraved brass plaques in the forward part of the ship warned, “This door shall not be opened until Mr. Pulitzer is awake.” At sea, the ship’s twin steam engines drove propellers set at different pitches and running at varying speeds in order to minimize vibrations carried through the hull. The Liberty was a temple of silence.

  It was also Pulitzer’s cocoon. The demons that beset him never rested. For two decades, he had roamed the globe. At any moment, he might be found consulting doctors in Germany, taking baths in southern France, resting on the Riviera, walking in a private garden in London, riding on Jekyll Island, hiding in his tower of silence in Maine, or at sea. Since his yacht was launched the year before, water had become his constant habitat. In fact, the Liberty carried sufficient coal to cross and re-cross the Atlantic without refueling.

  Wherever he went, it was in the company of an all-male retinue of secretaries, readers, pianists, and valets. In every practical sense, they had replaced his wife and children. From morning to night, these men tended to his every whim and kept the world at bay. By long practice, they had mastered handling his correspondence, discerned the most soothing manner by which to read books aloud from his well-stocked traveling library, and found ways to entertain at meals.

  However, during his long exile Pulitzer never relaxed his grip on the World, his influential New York newspaper that had ushered in the modern era of mass communications. An almost unbroken stream of telegrams, all written in code, flowed from ports and distant destinations to New York, directing every part of the paper’s operation. The messages even included such details as the typeface used in an advertisement and the vacation schedule of editors. Managers shipped back reams of financial data, editorial reports, and espionage-style accounts of one another’s work. Although he had set foot in his skyscraper headquarters on Park Row only three times, whenever anyone talked about the newspaper it was always “Pulitzer’s World.”

  And it was talked about. Since Pulitzer took over the moribund newspaper in 1883 and introduced his brand of journalism to New York, the World had grown at meteoric speed, becoming, at one point, the largest circulating newspaper on the globe. Six acres of spruce trees were felled a day to keep up with its demand for paper, and almost every day enough lead was melted into type to set an entire Bible into print.

  Variously credited with having elected presidents, governors, and mayors; sending politicians to jail; and dictating the public agenda, the World was a potent instrument of change. As a young man in a hurry, Pulitzer had unabashedly used the paper as a handmaiden of reform, to raise social consciousness and promote a progressive—almost radical—political agenda. The changes he had called for, like the outlandish ideas of taxing inheritances, income, and corporations, had become widely accepted.

  “The World should be more powerful than the President,” Pulitzer once said. “He is fettered by partisanship and politicians and has only a four-year term. The paper goes on year after year and is absolutely free to tell the truth and perform every service that should be performed in the public interest.”

  Like Pulitzer himself, however, the World was aging. Its politics had grown conservative, its novelty had spawned dozens of imitators, and its great achievements lay in the past. Most readers couldn’t remember a time before newspapers, thick as magazines, circulated in the millions, sold for as little as a penny, and were filled with dramatically written news, riveting sports coverage, comics, marital advice, recipes, fiction, and even sheet music.

  On this day, a reminder of the paper’s fabled past stood nearby. Rising from the waters of Havana Bay like a cadaver’s finger was the top portion of a mast. It was the only visible remains of the USS Maine, which blew up a decade before, killing most of its crew. The disaster, coming at a time of rising tension between Spain and America, became incendiary kindling in the hands of battling newspaper editors in New York.

  William Randolph Hearst, a young upstart imitator from California armed with an immense family fortune, had done the unthinkable. In 1898 his paper, the New York Journal, was closing in on the World’s dominance of Park Row. Fighting down to the last possible reader, each seeking to outdo the other in its eagerness to lead the nation into war, the two journalistic behemoths fueled an outburst of jingoistic fever. And when the war came, they continued their cutthroat competition by marshaling armies of reporters, illustrators, and photographers to cover every detail of its promised glory.

  The no-holds-barred attitude of the World and Journal put the newspapers into a spiraling descent of sensationalism, outright fabrications, and profligate spending. If left unchecked, it threatened to bankrupt both their credibility and their businesses. Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, they fought it out at the edge of a precipice that could mean death to both combatants.

  In the end, the two survived this short but intense circulation war. But their rivalry became almost as famous as the Spanish-American War itself. Pulitzer was indissolubly linked with Hearst as a purveyor of vile Yellow Journalism. In fact, some critics suspected that Pulitzer’s current plans to endow a journalism school at Columbia University and create a national prize for journalists were thinly veiled attempts to cleanse his legacy before his approaching death.

  In addition to forever sullying his name, remembrance of the war pained the publisher for another reason. Pulitzer’s most formidable political foe had come home a hero. Worse, Pulitzer had contributed to this enemy’s glory. When Theodore Roosevelt led his famous Rough Riders to victory on Cuba’s San Juan Hill, he had brought the press along. After unleashing and glorifying the power of the press, Pulitzer watched his nemisis Roosevelt harness it as the most potent tool of political leadership in the modern age.

  For a quarter of a century, the Republican Roosevelt and the Democratic Pulitzer had battled for the soul of America’s reform movement. It had been an epic clash. On one side was an egotistical, hard-boiled politician, convinced that Pulitzer was an impediment to the resplendent future his own leadership offered the nation. On the other side was a sanctimonious publisher who believed he was saving the republic from a demagogue. “I think God Almighty made it for the benefit of the World when he made me blind,” Pulitzer had confided to one of his editorial writers a few months before. “Because I don’t meet anybody, I am a recluse. Like a Blind Goddess of Justice, I sit aloof and uninfluenced. I have no friends; the World is therefore absolutely free.”

  Now, as twilight descended on his presidency, Roosevelt hoped to take revenge for all the years of abuse. The immigrant son of Hungarian Jews—blind, tempestuous, and neurotic—had become the bête noir of the brawny, bellicose scion of the American aristocracy. Triggering the president’s wrath was the temerity of Pulitzer’s World in raising the possibility that the Panama Canal, Roosevelt’s most sacred accomplishment, had been tainted by corruption. Under presidential orders the Justice Department was madly combing through dusty century-old law books hoping to find some means to punish Pulitzer for his most recent affront. Grand juries were convened in Washington and New York. If Roosevelt had his way, Pulitzer would spend his last years alive locked up in prison.

  At last the small boat from the harbor reached the Liberty. It pulled alongside and a handwritten copy of a cable from New York was passed up to Pulitzer’s loyal valet and confidant, Jabez Dunningham. When he read it, Dunningham rushed to the ship’s bridge and gave orders to the captain to put out to sea.

  Roosevelt’s grand jury in Washington had announced its decision.

  Part I

  1847–1878

  Chapter One

  HUNGARY

&nb
sp; On a Sabbath in the spring of 1847, Fülöp and Elize Pulitzer anxiously awaited the birth of their fourth child. Their trepidation was well founded. Two of the last three children born to them in their nine years of marriage had died. Infant mortality was then common, but the siege of death surrounding the Pulitzers was not. By sundown, the news was promising. Elize’s labor ended safely with the birth of a son. This one would live. Yet before he reached his teenage years, he would lose a parent and all but one of his eight siblings. For the newborn Joseph Pulitzer, death would be the most constant element of family life.

  The prospect of mortality attending the birth of Fülöp and Elize’s children robbed them of the pleasures they should have enjoyed as the last in a line of successful Jewish merchants in the small farming town of Makó on the fringes of the Habsburg Empire. Nestled in a crook of the tranquil Maros River, the agrarian outpost was a lonely spot in the midst of the Great Alföld, a flat expanse the size of Holland running east and west across the country. Makó was like an island, surrounded in the winter by a sea of furrowed black soil stretching outward as far as the eye could see, and in the spring and summer by an undulating tapestry of green.