Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [151]
The family reached New York as the World celebrated its fifth anniversary under Pulitzer’s regime. On the front page, editors reprinted his original statement of principles, published in the first issue; they also listed the newspaper’s achievements in its war on monopolists and conspirators, in its efforts to protect immigrants, and in its work on behalf of the poor. “The keystone of The World’s arch of triumph is public service,” they said. Daily circulation now hovered around 300,000 copies.
Home again, Pulitzer confronted an unchanged prognosis by his doctors. They still insisted on prescribing rest. Stubbornly, he tried to read the World and further strained his eyes. At best, all he could now see out his good left eye was a confusion of black spots and occasional flashes of light. His primary physician, Dr. McLane, persuaded him to sail for Europe, where they could together consult renowned medical authorities. On June 9, they boarded the Etruria, bound for England. Kate and the children, joined by Winnie Davis, stayed behind and headed north to a rented house in Maine’s increasingly fashionable Mount Desert Island.
Once across the ocean, Pulitzer shuttled from one examining room to another in London and Paris. After a summer spent consulting the world’s most celebrated physicians, Pulitzer learned nothing he had not already heard from the less famous specialists in New York. He was entirely blind in one eye, and the other was threatened with the same fate. There was no cure, procedure, or therapy. Rest might extend what vision he had left. He ceased to ride horses and take walks. Confined to dim rooms, he grew weaker.
The doctors forbade travel. The order couldn’t have come at a worse time. It was September of an election year. For Pulitzer, being confined to Europe was like being a captain watching his ship set sail without him. The presidential contest was in full swing, but for Pulitzer there were no editorial meetings, no strategy sessions with party operatives, no election maps to study, no supplicants seeking the World’s editorial benediction. Unnatural silence surrounded him.
In the election, President Cleveland’s plan to cut import tariffs became the central issue. He believed that the tariff was an indirect subsidy to businesses, and that it raised prices and hurt labor and farmers. In turn, the Republicans, who nominated Benjamin Harrison, claimed that the high tariff protected American industry and workers from foreign competition.
Still smarting from the president’s ungracious attitude toward the World and its owner following his election to the White House, Pulitzer cared little if Cleveland went down in defeat. The paper acted as if the only elections of significance that year were those for New York State’s governor and New York City’s mayor. The World’s silence on the presidential race was a frigid rejection of Cleveland, whom it had championed as a political messiah four years earlier. “Temperamentally, no two men could have been farther apart than the President and his foremost supporter,” observed one insider at the World. “That sturdy statesman was steady and persistent; Mr. Pulitzer fiery and insistent.”
Resigned to his exile, Pulitzer telegraphed Kate and asked her to come to Europe with the children. He left London, engaged rooms at the Hotel Bristol in Paris, then traveled to Le Havre on the northwest coast of France to await her ship. For Joseph, this was a rare gesture that reflected his anguish. Kate and the children arrived on September 16, 1888. Kate was now visibly pregnant with their sixth child, conceived during their wanderings in California. Reunited as a family, they settled into a rented house near Paris’s graceful Parc Monceau for the fall and winter.
Constance Helen Pulitzer was born on December 13, 1888, and her birth was