Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [1]
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.