Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [150]
The rest of the world, however, was fading from his sight. Under the harsh electric lights of the hotel’s interior, he could scarcely make out the headlines on display at the newsstand, announcing that St. Louis would be the site of the next Democratic convention. “I am half blind, and have lost the use of one eye,” he conceded. “The other eye is of partial use, but I have not read a newspaper for three months.”
Pulitzer’s doctors in New York had prescribed repose in California. It was like being sent into exile. When the Pulitzers had boarded the train in New York, Kate was handed a note from a onetime World editor and Democratic stalwart. “May I beg you to read the next page of this note to Samson Agonistes,” it said. “My God, what a calamity for the party that you are ill now.”
The journey drained Joseph, even though they crossed the country in the comfort of a private railcar, the nineteenth-century counterpart of the corporate jet. Contributing to his exhaustion was a detour they took to Beauvoir, a crumbling mansion not far from New Orleans in Biloxi, Mississippi. There Kate’s distant cousins Jefferson and Varina Davis, the former president and first lady of the Confederacy, lived in quiet solitude.
The Pulitzers had come to know the Davises during the past eight years and had grown attached to their twenty-two-year-old daughter, whom they asked to be a godmother to one of their children. Winnie, called the “daughter of the Confederacy,” was almost as symbolic of the lost cause as were her parents. During the visit to Beauvoir, the Pulitzers tried to talk Winnie into accompanying them on their trip. “A private car offers the two-fold temptation of comfort and economy in seeing a new and interesting country,” Jefferson Davis wrote to a family member. “She says, no.”
The Pulitzers pushed on, stopping in Texas, where Joseph told reporters that the Confederacy’s former leader, though aging, had a mind as clear as that of a thirty-year-old. A few days later, the party reached Los Angeles, where their arrival was front-page news. Joseph declined an interview, saying he had been fatigued by the journey. The group soon repaired to the Raymond Hotel in Pasadena, a popular winter residence for wealthy easterners.
For the next several weeks, Pulitzer and his entourage wandered from one coastal resort to another. In Santa Barbara, the doctors he consulted had only discouraging words and suggested that he consider a sea voyage to the Sandwich Islands (later known as Hawaii), Japan, and China. It was hardly advice he wanted or was willing to follow. He was anxious about not being in charge of the World back in New York. Though he trusted Cockerill, circulation had fallen for the first time since Pulitzer bought the paper. Even worse, Pulitzer could play no part in orchestrating the paper’s coverage of a terrible snowstorm hammering New York: food and medicine were in short supply, trains stood still, and few telegrams got through.
During the blizzard, Pulitzer’s lawyer and crony Roscoe Conkling developed an ear infection after walking from his office on Wall Street to his club at Madison Square. Though it was persistent and nagging, Conkling regarded the infection as only a nuisance. “Would gladly face greater storms to make your eyes strong enough to be squandered reading newspapers,” he wired back after receiving Pulitzer’s worried inquiries. But the infection created a dangerous abscess that pressed on Conkling’s brain. For weeks he lay close to death, finally succumbing on April 17, 1888. All Pulitzer could do was send flowers and a telegram of condolence, and order the World to give Conkling a statesmanlike send-off.
Balmy California seemed like a purgatory to him.
Pulitzer nixed the idea of a Pacific voyage. By May he and his family were on a train heading back east. They stopped in St. Louis for two days so that Joseph could confer with his editors at the Post-Dispatch