Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [134]
The European sojourn was a failure. Joseph returned home no better rested than when he had left. (Kate, however, was pregnant with their fifth child in seven years of marriage.) Insomnia still gripped him, and he was in a state of nervous exhaustion. His editors suffered. He found fault in everything they did and escalated his demands for time-consuming reports on all aspects of the operation. Men were assigned to tediously count the want-ad lineage in competing papers in order to calculate the World’s share of the market. To keep Pulitzer happy the results had to be broken down into categories and boiled down to their essence. “Put the thing in the nutshell,” he would say over and over again. “He was the damnedest best man in the world to have in a newspaper office for one hour in the morning,” said Cockerill. “For the remainder of the day he was a damned nuisance.”
At home it was no better. His family lived in fear. Joseph exploded over even the smallest things and Kate took the brunt of his attacks. “He said that he was uncomfortable, that I did not understand the proper relations between husband and wife,” she wrote in her diary that fall. The particulars of his indictment were that she failed in what he called “the duties of a wife” and neglected to make him comfortable at home. “There was not a servant in this house who had worked harder than I had,” Kate snapped back at him, losing her temper. “I had made a slave of myself,” she continued, telling him that “he was entirely spoilt, that with his disposition he must have something to criticize.” Her uncharacteristic outburst caused Joseph to order her from the room, telling her that he would never forgive her. “When will these scenes end or when will I be at rest?” Kate asked that night in her diary.
One friend understood the depth of Joseph’s troubles. Writing from St. Louis, his former partner John Dillon spoke lovingly of his admiration for Pulitzer but included a warning. “Overwork in business or in routine work will break a man down but in your case the injury is greater because you have been overworking those powers and faculty which in the main is the type of higher or divine creative power,” Dillon wrote. “Not one man in ten thousand has it at all.
“You have overstretched it,” he continued. “You have called on it to do more than it should have done, you have put it under the services of your will, you have made it work when it should have rested, you have compelled it to furnish ideas—and you have overworked it.” Dillon urged Pulitzer to leave work for six months of rest. In the end, Dillon said, his friend faced a decision. “If you wish you can do the work of a lifetime and break down; or you can do the work of a century in a lifetime, and live while you do it, which is much better.” It was the frankest Dillon had ever been with Pulitzer and he asked that the letter be burned.
On the morning of December 3, 1885, a New York City judge was startled to see the names of the mayor and the city’s most prominent newspaper publisher in a bundle of documents handed to him. Before him was “William R. Grace, plaintiff, v. Joseph Pulitzer, defendant,” prepared by one of the best law firms in the city. The lawsuit alleged that the World’s editorial page had damaged Mayor Grace’s good name by wrongly linking him to a financial scandal surrounding the demise of the investment firm Grant & Ward and the wreck of the Marine Bank. The collapse had wiped out most of former president Grant’s fortune, sent a few men to prison, and set off a