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stir up the political cauldron. But monetary policy was widely and contentiously debated because the nation’s economic life was regularly punctuated by severe depressions. Many citizens believed that the federal government controlled the value of money and that bad times were largely due to poor exercise of this power. A growing number of Americans became persuaded that the government ought to decrease the value of money to combat a deflation that was wreaking havoc in farm states. Falling prices struck farmers with a one-two punch by simultaneously reducing their income and driving up the costs of their mortgages.

The debate over free silver and the gold standard grew to be more than an economic argument. The banner of free silver united the nation’s disaffected citizens, farmers, and some elements of labor. They saw silver as the salvation for all the ills they faced and considered the gold standard to be an exploitive tool of banks. It was a prairie fire that soon alarmed the eastern establishment.

Pulitzer shared most goals of the populists and progressives, but he could not bring himself to advocate abandoning the gold standard. Earlier in his life, he had run the Post-Dispatch on a shoestring, and as the owner of the World had been in debt to one of the most notorious barons of the Gilded Age; but now he was among the fifty richest Americans. In the last couple of years, the annual profit from the World alone had exceeded $1 million. To oversee his money, Pulitzer had engaged Dumont Clarke, a fifty-year-old investment manager who descended from a line of six bank presidents. Unlike the ever-changing guard at the paper, Clarke won Pulitzer’s lasting trust by protecting his growing wealth with railroad stocks, one of the few investment options available then aside from bonds. If industrialists and financiers considered the gold standard as the bulwark protecting their fortunes, Pulitzer now had a fortune of his own to safeguard.

Unlike many of the elite, however, Pulitzer was not merely defending wealth. His dread of free silver was entwined with his long-held fear of demagoguery. Even before he was operating his first newspaper or writing his first editorials, Pulitzer had worried that democracy was a breeding ground for ambitious politicians willing to tap popular desires and prejudices to gain power. This was the lesson of Germany under Chancellor Otto van Bismarck—a lesson that Pulitzer had shared in a series of articles on European politics he wrote for Dana’s Sun a decade before. Nothing in the ensuing years, including his time in elected office, had diminished this fear. “I am a radical myself, progressive, liberal to the core,” he told one of his editorial writers years later. “But I do not want to be thrown over by a lot of demagogues, nincompoops, and shallow shouters.”

As 1891 closed, Pulitzer’s near-blindness, compounded by insomnia, asthma, indigestion, and various vague bodily aches, increased his sense that his working life was at an end. “It seemed as if he might be compelled, as he feared, to give up altogether,” noted Hosmer. “He wanted to devote a few months to putting things in good shape out of regard to those that were to follow.”

Again, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was brought in. Since Pulitzer had disobeyed most of his instructions, Mitchell was not in a charitable mood. “I want to say to you for the hundredth time what I think in regard to your present condition,” Mitchell told Pulitzer. “I want to say that your present course must inevitably result in the total destruction of what remains of your eyesight; also that it is quite impossible for you to carry on your paper under present condition without total sacrifice of your general health.” Mitchell even enlisted Pulitzer’s friend George Childs, the Philadelphia publisher. “He agrees with me,” Mitchell said, “in thinking that the course in which you are engaged is one of physical and moral disaster.”

Pulitzer selected a middle course. He would monitor the World, but at a distance. He spent Christmas with his family in New York, and then he,