Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [146]
When the Hungarian painter Mihály Munkácsy came to New York the winter before, Pulitzer had given one dinner party in the artist’s honor at Delmonico’s and a second at home. The guests at both included financial luminaries such as sugar trust attorney John E. Parsons, the businessman Cyrus W. Field, and assorted wealthy politicians and statesmen such as Chauncey Depew, William Evarts, and Levi P. Morton—the same three who were among the figures in the cartoon “Belshazzar’s Feast” that Pulitzer published during Blaine’s campaign.
In particular, Joseph enjoyed the company of August Belmont and Leonard Jerome, who dined with the Pulitzers on both evenings. Belmont and Jerome were doyens of the city’s new rich, and they loved to compete ostentatiously with each other. After the ladies at one of Jerome’s dinner parties found gold bracelets in their napkins, Belmont folded platinum bracelets in the napkins at his dinner party. Friendship with such men was seemingly incongruous for the publisher of the nation’s leading democratic sheet, which daily proselytized for the virtues of egalitarianism. But Pulitzer did not object to wealth. In fact, he coveted it. However, the kind of wealth mattered. Inherited fortunes were a social evil for Pulitzer; but earned wealth was not, even if it was tinged by illicit gains or exploitive profits.
“J.P. always cherished in his heart a sincere if unacknowledged veneration for rank and family,” said the cartoonist McDougall, who spent many long hours with Pulitzer. “This was probably atavistic, coming as he did from a land where rank meant all that is desirable but, to a peasant, unattainable. He showed this feeling by an exaggerated contempt for persons of wealth and standing, yet the truth is that he was moved by quite different feelings, a strong hunger for wealth, luxury, power, predominating over all other emotions.”
Pulitzer did not simply socialize with those he pilloried in the pages of the World; he also became their financial partner. He joined William Rockefeller, William Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, and others in creating a club on Jekyll Island* off the Georgia coast as a private preserve where the nation’s richest and most powerful men could hunt, fish, ride, and socialize in complete privacy.
Despite distaste for his brand of journalism in many quarters of polite society, the gatekeepers could no more close the doors to Pulitzer than they could to other nouveaux riches. The time had passed when Wall Street speculators, industrial titans, and even Democratic politicians could be excluded. In New York—unlike Boston, where the Brahmins had deep roots—money was in the ascendant. But though his wealth gained him a passport to the domain of New York’s plutocracy, it did not gain him genuine acceptance. In the eyes of many he remained, as he was born, a Jew.
Up until now, most of the anti-Semitism Pulitzer had faced from gentiles in New York had been coated with a veneer of politeness. German Jews, among whom Pulitzer would have been placed, incurred only mild ostracism. Pulitzer’s friend Belmont, a Jew who had converted and changed his name from Schönberg, traveled in all but the most exclusive of New York’s circles. But when a tidal wave of Russian Jews flooded New York, the accepting spirit among the elite faded. The Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs barred the Jewish banker Joseph Seligman; the Union Club closed its doors to Jews (even though many were among its founders); and Anna Morton began to insist that her husband, Levi, be referred to as L. P. Morton. A dormant