Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [168]
One of the men in the World’s Washington bureau acted as a go-between. Pulitzer offered Hill the World’s support if Hill would appoint him American minister to France, a post that Pulitzer’s friend the newspaper publisher Whitelaw Reid was soon to vacate. Pulitzer had watched Reid up close during his own extended stays in Paris, and this seemed like the ideal arrangement for his plan of running the World by long distance.
Hill declined the deal. Unbeknownst to Pulitzer, Hill had already decided to throw in his lot with Dana’s Sun. He knew he would have to choose one paper over the other, and he felt the Sun was closer to his wing of the party. By default, Cleveland was once again in the World’s good graces.
In February, the Pulitzers reached Brunswick, Georgia, their last stop before taking a steamer across a narrow strait to the Jekyll Island club. The townspeople of Brunswick were still not used to the parade of millionaires descending from private railcars in their hamlet to reach this new private island enclave. But the city did have a new hotel, where the Pulitzers stayed while awaiting transit to the island and to which they sometimes returned for dinner. When Kate made her appearance one evening, several weeks later, she caught everyone’s attention. “Mrs. Pulitzer is a very handsome brunette, medium height and beautifully formed,” wrote a smitten observer. “On her hand she wore two large magnificent diamond rings, while her neck was adorned with a lovely pearl necklace. Her beauty and jewels were the cause of much favorable comment among the guests.”
It was Pulitzer’s first visit to Jekyll since he had invested in the retreat six years earlier. Unwanted livestock had been chased from the island and replaced with game for hunting. Roads for carriage rides had been built, bridle paths cleared, and docks built. An elegant clubhouse stood ready to receive members. “From a distance,” wrote one reporter, “it looks like some English castle with its square-shaped windows and its lofty tower.” For Pulitzer it was an ideal refuge. He spent his days in repose, taking walks, being read to, dictating memos to his staff of editorial writers, and adjusting to his sightless life.
By June 1892, Pulitzer had alighted in Paris. Like that of a migratory bird, his path was developing regularity. But while he enjoyed his luxurious Parisian summer, workers at the Homestead Mill in western Pennsylvania were locked in battle with Henry Clay Frick, who managed Andrew Carnegie’s steelworks. Frick decided to cease recognizing the union, give up bargaining, and lock the workers out of the plant. The men blocked access to the mills, with the help of the nearly 12,000 residents of Homestead. Frick vowed to reopen the plant with nonunion workers.
To get his way, Frick sent for 300 guards from the Pinkerton company, a famous detective agency that had become a source of mercenaries to fight organized labor. The standoff grew into an electrifying news story. At the World, Ballard Smith dispatched his best men to Pennsylvania to report on what the paper called “the iron king’s war.” At length, the World exposed how despite the increasing profitability of the mills, protected by the McKinley Tariff Act, falling wages had driven workers into destitution.
Merrill used the editorial page to support the strikers and linked their suffering to the McKinley Act. “The only beneficiary of the tariff is the capitalist, Carnegie, who lives in a baronial castle in Scotland, his native land.” After six years of writing editorials for Pulitzer, Merrill undoubtedly felt that his words would have been those of his absent boss. So did Walt McDougall, who lampooned