Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [135]
Grace sought $50,000 in damages. Seeing that the documents were in order, the judge dispatched a deputy sheriff to arrest Pulitzer, as was then the custom in lawsuits. The deputy reached the World building and after some delay was admitted into Pulitzer’s office. He explained the charges and said bail would be set at $5,000.
“Do you want the money?” asked Pulitzer
“I prefer two bondsmen,” replied the deputy.
“All right, but it would be much more convenient to pay the money,” Pulitzer said wearily, well used to this legal dance. Since taking over the World, Pulitzer’s lawyer Roscoe Conkling had been called on to litigate twenty-one libel cases, more than one a month. He was able to successfully defend the paper on ten of them and, with his legal skills, put the eleven others into judicial limbo. Conkling would eventually manage to make Grace’s lawsuit disappear as well. But the battle cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and incalculable frayed nerves. Pulitzer, recalled one staff member, “was so obsessed by the fear of libel suits that he nightly read almost every paragraph in the paper.” A few days later Pulitzer escaped New York and its legal harassments, though not the crush of work. The Congress elected in 1884 was finally convening, and he headed to Washington.
Pulitzer and the House of Representatives were a bad match from the start. In New York he had power and could make his own decisions. Here he was one of 325 men and nothing happened without collaboration. Even worse, as a freshman he was on the bottom rung. He drew a lot that gave him an unwanted seat in the back of the House chamber, and his assignments to the civil service and commerce committees had so little seniority that they were of little value. He would be a committee chair, he quipped, if six Democrats on one committee and seven on the other didn’t show up.
Pulitzer had no time for endless committee meetings, long floor debates, and late-night political socializing. As it was, his pace was already frenetic. He would hold a morning editorial meeting on Park Row, attend a Democratic caucus meeting in the evening in Washington, then breakfast with a Congressional leader the next morning before returning north for dinner with, say, the New York socialite Ward McAllister.
To maintain this schedule was arduous. The tunnel under the Hudson River was still not complete, so Pulitzer had to take a ferry from Fourteenth or Twenty-Third Street to the New Jersey shore and then board a train south. Making this travel even more distasteful to Pulitzer was that he had no interest in the work of a congressman. Once, when he was supposed to be preparing a committee report, Pulitzer was instead attending an art auction in New York. “Day was turned into night and night into day,” observed a reporter. “He flew from Washington to New York and from New York to Washington like a cock pigeon with a mate and nest in both places.”
Pulitzer found Washington politics clubby and its politicians unappreciative of his brand of journalism. One morning, he and his personal secretary were met at the Washington train station by the World’s Washington correspondent. To Pulitzer’s great pleasure, the reporter had discovered that the attorney general and several members of the House held stock in the Pan-Electric Telegraph Company, which stood to benefit from some forthcoming legal rulings. “The talk was all about the investigation, which was creating something of a sensation,” recalled Pulitzer’s personal secretary. The World trumpeted the charges, and Pulitzer used his new position as a member of the House to call for an investigation.
Many of Pulitzer’s colleagues, who had deep and long-standing political alliances, were unhappy about his attacks on a member of the administration. Unlike his readers, they were not limited to writing angry letters to the editor. A fellow Democrat, Representative Eustace Gibson of West Virginia, rose on the