• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Pagenstecher was more honest with Kate. “As regards to Mr. Pulitzer,” he wrote to her, “I should not advise to tell him the real character of the disease of the left eye because it would take away every hope from him and would have a great and unfavorable impression on his total nervous system.”

Pulitzer rejoined his family in Baden-Baden, another town known for its baths, located in the western foothills of the Black Forest. The reunion was grim. The daughter of an old friend who joined them wrote to her parents that Joseph was “so melancholy of late that they did not know what to do.”

With the coming of fall, Pulitzer returned to Paris. Dissatisfied with the conduct of the World, he set off, by telegram, yet another round of editorial and management changes back in New York. Ballard Smith figured he had been given his walking papers when he learned of a farewell dinner at Delmonico’s. “Grateful memories for loyal services,” wired Pulitzer, “sorry for parting and confident hopes for happy career.”

As Pulitzer, from a distance, played musical chairs with his editors, the World lumbered on. It survived the managerial gyrations because it held an unchallenged position in New York. That luxury, however, would not last any more than calm waters on the ocean that Pulitzer continually crossed.

Chapter Twenty-Two

CAGED EAGLE

It took the tenth-anniversary celebration of his ownership of the World to bring Pulitzer back to New York from Europe in May 1893, after an absence of more than a year. This was a sea change from the man who years before—when attacking the rich was his stock in trade—had asked his readers, “Why do Millionaires go to Europe to spend so much money? What has Europe to offer that America has not?”

The Majestic, one of White Star’s luxurious steamships, took Pulitzer across the Atlantic in a stateroom that had been specially altered for him so as to diminish sounds from the hallways and decks. Sailing on his yacht, Romola, was out of the question. He had put it up for sale after spending one sleepless night aboard it, off the coast of Italy.

Another publisher in exile, the New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennett, was also on board. Bennett admired Pulitzer but also he begrudged him the World’s success, which had reduced the Herald’s circulation to below 100,000. Almost as if Bennett didn’t want his employees to be reminded of Pulitzer’s dominance of Park Row, he was on his way to New York to supervise the building of new headquarters far uptown, on a triangular block at Thirty-Fifth Street, where Broadway and Sixth Avenue intersected.

The building made no attempt to rival Pulitzer’s stab at the sky. Rather, it was only two stories high. But in keeping with Bennett’s European tastes, it was an opulent design conceived by Stanford White to look like a Veronese palazzo. Unlike Pulitzer, Bennett had leased the land on which he was building. “I could not sleep nights if I thought another owned the ground upon which my building stood,” Pulitzer told Bennett in Paris. “I shall not be here to worry about it,” the fifty-two-year-old Bennett replied.

The publishers disembarked in New York early in the morning of May 10 and went their separate ways. Awaiting Pulitzer was a 100-page tenth-anniversary edition of the World that had been published on Sunday and had sold 400,000 copies. That evening, Pulitzer took twenty of his top editors and managers to dinner at Delmonico’s. Bradford Merrill, his editorialist, was seated to his right and Solomon Carvalho, who managed the money, to his left. His old partner John Dillon and his young managing editor George Harvey raised a continual series of toasts late into the night.

Despite the good cheer, Harvey was having second thoughts about working for Pulitzer. A promise from Pulitzer that he would be relieved of night work had not been kept. Harvey had slept most nights at the Pulitzer Building, in the bedroom off the city room. He had little choice. He worked for a boss who insisted that he spend six hours a day reading the papers